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Why I barely read SF these days

Being a guy who writes science fiction, people expect me to be well-informed about the current state of the field—as if I'm a book reviewer who reads everything published in my own approximate area.

(This is a little like expecting a bus driver to have an informed opinion on every other form of four-wheeled road-going transport.)

Similarly, marketing folks keep sending me SF novels in the hope I'll read them and volunteer a cover quote. But over the past decade I've found myself increasingly reluctant to read the stuff they send me: I have a vague sense of dyspepsia, as if I've just eaten a seven course banquet and the waiter is approaching me with a wafer-thin mint.

This isn't to say that I haven't read a lot of SF over the past several decades. While I'm an autodidact—there are holes in my background—I've read most of the classics of the field, at least prior to the 1990s. But about a decade ago I stopped reading SF short stories, and this past decade I've found very few SF novels that I didn't feel the urge to bail on within pages (or a chapter or two at most). Including works that I knew were going to be huge runaway successes, both popular and commercially successful—but that I simply couldn't stomach.

It's not you, science fiction, it's me.

Like everyone else, I'm a work in progress. I've changed over the years as I've lived through changing times, and what I focus on in a work of fiction has gradually shifted. Meanwhile, the world in which I interpret a work of fiction has changed. And in the here and now, I find it really difficult to suspend my disbelief in the sorts of worlds other science fiction writers are depicting.

About a decade ago, M. John Harrison (whose stories and novels you should totally read, if you haven't already) wrote on his blog:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader's ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there.

I recognize the point he's putting in play here: but I (conditionally) disagree. The implicit construction of an artificial but plausible world is what distinguishes a work of science fiction from any other form of literature. It's an alternative type of underpinning to actually-existing reality, which is generally more substantial (and less plausible—reality is under no compulsion to make sense). Note the emphasis on implicit, though. Worldbuilding is like underwear: it needs to be there, but it shouldn't be on display, unless you're performing burlesque. Worldbuilding is the scaffolding that supports the costume to which our attention is directed. Without worldbuilding, the galactic emperor has no underpants to wear with his new suit, and runs the risk of leaving skidmarks on his story.

Storytelling is about humanity and its endless introspective quest to understand its own existence and meaning. But humans are social animals. We exist in a context provided by our culture and history and relationships, and if we're going to write a fiction about people who live in circumstances other than our own, we need to understand our protagonists' social context—otherwise, we're looking at perspective-free cardboard cut-outs. And technology and environment inextricably dictate large parts of that context.

You can't write a novel of contemporary life in the UK today without acknowledging that almost everybody is clutching a softly-glowing fondleslab that grants instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, provides an easy avenue for school bullies to get at their victims out-of-hours, tracks and quantifies their relationships (badly), and taunts them constantly with the prospect of the abolition of privacy in return for endless emotionally inappropriate cat videos. We're living in a world where invisible flying killer robots murder wedding parties in Kandahar, a billionaire is about to send a sports car out past Mars, and loneliness is a contagious epidemic. We live with constant low-level anxiety and trauma induced by our current media climate, tracking bizarre manufactured crises that distract and dismay us and keep us constantly emotionally off-balance. These things are the worms in the heart of the mainstream novel of the 21st century. You don't have to extract them and put them on public display, but if they aren't lurking in the implied spaces of your story your protagonists will strike a false note, alienated from the very society they are supposed to illuminate.

Now for a personal perspective. I don't find other peoples' motivations intuitively obvious: I have to apply conscious reasoning to put myself in a different head-space. I am quite frequently alienated by my fellow humans' attitudes and outlook. (I strongly suspect I have mild ASD.) For me, world-building provides a set of behavioural constraints that make it easier to understand the character of my fictional protagonists. (For example, if writing a 2018 story: new media channels lead to a constant barrage of false news generated by state actors trying to produce political change, delivered via advertising networks? And this is why my characters constantly feel uneasy and defensive, dominated by a low-level sense of alienation and angst.) The purpose of world-building is to provide the social context within which our characters feel, think, and act. I don't think you can write fiction without it.

Now, what's my problem with contemporary science fiction?

Simply put, plausible world-building in the twenty-first century is incredibly hard work. (One synonym for "plausible" in this sense is "internally consistent".) A lot of authors seem to have responded to this by jetisoning consistency and abandoning any pretense at plausibility: it's just too hard, and they want to focus on the characters or the exciting plot elements and get to the explosions without bothering to nerdishly wonder if the explosives are survivable by their protagonists at this particular range. To a generation raised on movie and TV special effects, plausible internal consistency is generally less of a priority than spectacle.

When George Lucas was choreographing the dogfights in "Star Wars", he took his visual references from film of first world war dogfights over the trenches in western Europe. With aircraft flying at 100-200 km/h in large formations, the cinema screen could frame multiple aircraft maneuvering in proximity, close enough to be visually distinguishable. The second world war wasn't cinematic: with aircraft engaging at speeds of 400-800 km/h, the cinematographer would have had a choice between framing dots dancing in the distance, or zooming in on one or two aircraft. (While some movies depict second world war air engagements, they're not visually captivating: either you see multiple aircraft cruising in close formation, or a sudden flash of disruptive motion—see for example the bomber formation in Memphis Belle, or the final attack on the U-boat pen in Das Boot.) Trying to accurately depict an engagement between modern jet fighters, with missiles launched from beyond visual range and a knife-fight with guns takes place in a fraction of a second at a range of multiple kilometres, is cinematically futile: the required visual context of a battle between massed forces evaporates in front of the camera ... which is why in Independence Day we see vast formations of F/A-18s (a supersonic jet) maneuvering as if they're Sopwith Camels. (You can take that movie as a perfect example of the triumph of spectacle over plausibility at just about every level.)

... So for a couple of generations now, the generic vision of a space battle is modelled on an air battle, and not just any air battle, but one plucked from a very specific period that was compatible with a film director's desire to show massed fighter-on-fighter action at close enough range that the audience could identify the good guys and bad guys by eye.

Let me have another go at George Lucas (I'm sure if he feels picked on he can sob himself to sleep on a mattress stuffed with $500 bills). Take the asteroid field scene from The Empire Strikes Back: here in the real world, we know that the average distance between asteroids over 1km in diameter in the asteroid belt is on the order of 3 million kilometers, or about eight times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This is of course utterly useless to a storyteller who wants an exciting game of hide-and-seek: so Lucas ignored it to give us an exciting game of ...

Unfortunately, we get this regurgitated in one goddamned space opera after another: spectacle in place of insight, decolorized and pixellated by authors who haven't bothered to re-think their assumptions and instead simply cut and paste Lucas's cinematic vision. Let me say it here: when you fuck with the underlying consistency of your universe, you are cheating your readers. You may think that this isn't actually central to your work: you're trying to tell a story about human relationships, why get worked up about the average spacing of asteroids when the real purpose of the asteroid belt is to give your protagonists a tense situation to survive and a shared experience to bond over? But the effects of internal inconsistency are insidious. If you play fast and loose with distance and time scale factors, then you undermine travel times. If your travel times are rubberized, you implicitly kneecapped the economics of trade in your futurescape. Which in turn affects your protagonist's lifestyle, caste, trade, job, and social context. And, thereby, their human, emotional relationships. The people you're writing the story of live in a (metaphorical) house the size of a galaxy. Undermine part of the foundations and the rest of the house of cards is liable to crumble, crushing your characters under a burden of inconsistencies. (And if you wanted that goddamn Lucasian asteroid belt experience why not set your story aboard a sailing ship trying to avoid running aground in a storm? Where the scale factor fits.)

Similar to the sad baggage surrounding space battles and asteroid belts, we carry real world baggage with us into SF. It happens whenever we fail to question our assumptions. Next time you read a a work of SF ask yourself whether the protagonists have a healthy work/life balance. No, really: what is this thing called a job, and what is it doing in my post-scarcity interplanetary future? Why is this side-effect of carbon energy economics clogging up my post-climate-change world? Where does the concept of a paid occupation whereby individuals auction some portion of their lifespan to third parties as labour in return for money come from historically? What is the social structure of a posthuman lifespan? What are the medical and demographic constraints upon what we do at different ages if our average life expectancy is 200? Why is gender? Where is the world of childhood?

Some of these things may feel like constants, but they're really not. Humans are social organisms, our technologies are part of our cultures, and the way we live is largely determined by this stuff. Alienated labour as we know it today, distinct from identity, didn't exist in its current form before the industrial revolution. Look back two centuries, to before the germ theory of disease brought vaccination and medical hygeine: about 50% of children died before reaching maturity and up to 10% of pregnancies ended in maternal death—childbearing killed a significant minority of women and consumed huge amounts of labour, just to maintain a stable population, at gigantic and horrible social cost. Energy economics depended on static power sources (windmills and water wheels: sails on boats), or on muscle power. To an English writer of the 18th century, these must have looked like inevitable constraints on the shape of any conceivable future—but they weren't.

Similarly, if I was to choose a candidate for the great clomping foot of nerdism afflicting fiction today, I'd pick late-period capitalism, the piss-polluted sea we fish are doomed to swim in. It seems inevitable but it's a relatively recent development in historic terms, and it's clearly not sustainable in the long term. However, trying to visualize a world without it is surprisingly difficult. Take a random grab-bag of concepts and try to imagine the following without capitalism: "advertising", "trophy wife", "health insurance", "jaywalking", "passport", "police", "teen-ager", "television".

SF should—in my view—be draining the ocean and trying to see at a glance which of the gasping, flopping creatures on the sea bed might be lungfish. But too much SF shrugs at the state of our seas and settles for draining the local acquarium, or even just the bathtub, instead. In pathological cases it settles for gazing into the depths of a brightly coloured computer-generated fishtank screensaver. If you're writing a story that posits giant all-embracing interstellar space corporations, or a space mafia, or space battleships, never mind universalizing contemporary norms of gender, race, and power hierarchies, let alone fashions in clothing as social class signifiers, or religions ... then you need to think long and hard about whether you've mistaken your screensaver for the ocean.

And I'm sick and tired of watching the goldfish.

1406 Comments

1:

I think you have a point here that SF has difficulty reaching its ultimate potential, falling short in the execution by lack of vision, by its difficulty, and just being satisfied with "Enough".

And we've always been missing stuff, but in an interconnected world with so much knowledge at our fingertips, its more evident what we are missing. 1960's readers picking up a PKD story wouldn't question the basic assumptions of Martian Time Slip, but they stand out like a sore thumb to me, as a reader, now. But now today, contemporary science fiction is in real time similarly seen to be a not very good trumpe o'leil. It's harder to get that illusion and make it immersive. I still think its possible, and I try to find the SF that does it.

2:

You should read Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books if you want that kind of worldbuilding

3:

"when you fuck with the underlying consistency of your universe, you are cheating your readers."

Where does this leave writers like Dick or Vonnegut or Burroughs or Bester who could hardly have cared less about this stuff, and who will endure on our shelves far longer than any of their more meticulous peers?

4:

Some of this stuff is why I rather bounced off the Expanse books. Sheer momentum kept me going to the end of volume 6, but I don't think I'll persist. There's a veneer of scale, but the writers mess about with it however they please (worst in "Abaddon's Gate" but true in all of them). The societies are not all the same, but the differences seem rather thin. And all the characters are very 21st century (complete with "hand terminals" which strongly resemble iPhone circa 2010).

5:
Where does this leave writers like Dick or Vonnegut or Burroughs or Bester ...

For my money, I'd say worldbuilding is a bit like jazz. You need to understand and honor the rules, and be really good at the story in question, before fucking with them is a good idea.

6:

I'm going to advise against ever watching Star Trek: Discovery then. The world-building makes no twatting sense whatsoever.

Starbase One is 100AUs from Earth but appears to be orbiting a planet that is presumably Earth, Starbase One is apparently a light-year from your current position but it'll take a day or so to get there at high warp yet you're able to quickly get to Q'onos all whilst taking a detour to a distant moon that you can insta-terrafom? That's just some of the idiocy from the latest episode to drop on Netflix...

The only way I can tolerate ST:D is by assuming it's a phantastical grim-dark pastiche on Star Trek.

7:

A minor nitpick:

When George Lucas was choreographing the dogfights in "Star Wars", he took his visual references from film of first world war dogfights over the trenches in western Europe.

Lucas and the other people involved in the original Star Wars have been very clear that the inspiration was dogfighting and aerial warfare as depicted in World War Two movies, not First World War dogfighting. E.g. from this bit of reminiscing:

“I loved Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers serials when I was a kid, but I thought I could create an experience closer to watching a dogfight in a World War II film — with incredible ships diving and banking in a realistic [sic] manner.”
“Every time there was a war movie on television, like The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), I would watch it — and if there was a dogfight sequence, I would videotape it. Then we would transfer that to 16mm film, and I’d just edit it according to my story of Star Wars. It was really my way of getting a sense of the movement of the spaceships.”

There are some good quotes in that piece from other people who worked on the film that illustrate the overwhelming WW2 inspiration. (E.g. "Joe would show me a shot of a Japanese Zero flying left to right in front of a conning tower of an aircraft carrier and say, ‘The aircraft carrier is the Death Star, the Zero is an X-wing. Do a board like that.”". And: "At the time, very few optical shots were completed from the end battle, but they had a work print based on old World War II movies. So I cut the spaceship sounds and lasers to that. We had Spitfires going by that sounded like spaceships; we had lasers being fired from Messerschmitts. It was relatively insane.")

(Note, by the way, that The Bridges at Toko-Ri was actually a Korean War movie featuring early jet fighters!)

Your general point is a good one, of course, though I will point out that Independence Day is hardly the only example of late-20th-Century supersonic jet fighters in action movies. An obvious counterexample is Top Gun, which isn't about vast formation flying at all.

8:

Apropos of the last point I remember an author (spoiler: it was probably Lawrence Miles) opining about how modern animation movies take things that should be magical and make them into jobs: toys, monsters, superheroes, even emotions, all structured like a workplace. It may be a symptom of late-stage capitalism that I'm unsure about how sinister this is. (Of course, there was that later story that had this as a type of culture hacking by a time-travelling empire to remove any creative, outward-looking impulses from media-dependent cultures.)

9:

I feel much the same way, but it's not [S]F that induces the feeling, it's the real world. Which is more difficult to avoid. Fiction, even if dystopic in theme and crappy in execution, with jungly asteroid belts and travel at the speed of plot and all, at least has the saving grace of being not real, and so still works as a place to go and hide.

10:

I disagree with the idea that PKD, Vonnegut, and particularly Bester "didn't care" about internal consistency. Their divergences from internal consistency seemed largely intentional.

Also, this doesn't merely manifest in hard SF in the sense of doing the physics. Those three authors were writing speculative sociology and speculative economics, with speculative physics taking an extremely small role. With the exception of the problem of distances within the solar system being pretty large (something that everybody in the 60s hand-waved away because you couldn't call it SF if it didn't have a rocket ship on the cover), I feel like the worlds they constructed were done pretty well -- and, of course, the interplanetary distances and other occasional poorly-considered assumptions (like, in The Stars My Destination, the language of the lower classes being a poor Humphrey Bogart impression) stick out like a sore thumb for present-day readers and must be pointedly ignored the same way people must pointedly ignore the stylistic conceits used in Frankenstein to get much enjoyment out of it.

The Stars My Destination is actually a pretty good example of well-constructed SF: take something very much like our world, inject a seemingly straightforward change (teleportation, with a very specific set of rules), add a time delay for consequences to unfold, and watch how everything from economics to social hierarchy to public services change to support the new element. It's very traditional in that way: it begins in a world changed by a particular technology (the cognitive technology of jaunting) and chronicles the events leading up to the development of a second (time-jaunting).

Dick's books don't really correspond to this pattern. They take place in worlds unlike our own, and those worlds are sometimes very vividly drawn (consider the social, political, and religious situation in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep vs that in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich), but very often that's not really the draw. (Consider Ubik, which has a vividly drawn future society, totally abandoned after a single chapter, to focus on the idea of the subjective experience of the near-dead, or We Can Build You, which aside from nobody really caring about whether or not robots are conscious is set in basically 1960s America.) Dick clearly could consider economic, policial, and social ramifications of tech, and when he didn't make those his focus, it was clearly because they were better left vague as he focused on something else.

(Of Vonnegut, I've only read Cat's Cradle & Slaughterhouse Five, so I can't spend a lot of time defending Sirens of Titan or any of the other works that are potentially subject to the concerns of this essay. After all, Slaughterhouse Five can easily be interpreted as having no science fiction elements at all, and Cat's Cradle kills off almost everybody in the world fairly quickly and sets its sights on an isolated society on a small island with customs that aren't fundamentally less coherent than those of many isolated communities.)

11:

Tried; bounced very hard a few chapters into TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING because it blew all my world-building fuses. Seriously, one form of default social organization across cultures? One corporation behind flying cars as a universal form of transportation? Global consensus on gender and religious belief? Next you'll be trying to sell me on a planet with one ecosystem and one crop and one predatory species.

Maybe I should have given it more of a chance, but really? Didn't work for me, even though the up-front promise of a philosophical exploration was really good.

12:

Star Trek ended for me when they began making movies, never mind the horrifying travesty that was "The Next Generation" (I bailed halfway through the pilot ep; everything I've picked up through skin contact since then tells me that was a good decision to make.)

13:

I am willing to overlook inconsistencies.

I don't want to let "actually, I think you'll find" stop my enjoyment of a story. For me, a big part of SF is the "what if" aspect - what if you could travel faster than light? What if the moon explodes? What if global warming turns New York into a replica of Venice? I want the consequences of that "what if" to be interesting and entertaining, and I want the story to flow.

This means if an author decides that we still have "jobs" in this FTL future, it's okay with me if it's an incidental aspect of the story - I don't want to read 3 pages of economic theory explaining why mining is still a thing when our hero meets someone identified as a "miner". Unless the economic model is a big part of the story line, I am happy to assume we're all being paid "credits" or whatever in this FTL society - I really want to read about how our hero defeats the baddies, or saves the universe or whatever, not a Marxist analysis of the role of money.

I also don't mind if the basic "what if" doesn't fit with reality as we know it - that's the point of "speculative".

But there is a limit to this. At some point, the story isn't believable anymore - I guess my willingness to suspend my disbelief is greater than OGH.

I stopped reading a space opera that was just a classic war story with lasers and rockets. I stopped reading a cyberpunk book where "the computer" magically knew everything (but not the central plot question).

14:

It may be a symptom of late-stage capitalism that I'm unsure about how sinister this is.

Yep.

As an aside: a couple of weeks ago my wife and I were in a local department store and found ourselves making our way through the toy section.

There were three striking things about the toy department:

  • The incredibly regimented binary gendering (boys: black and purple warbots on aisle A; girls: pink fluffy princesses and unicorns on aisle B)

  • 80% of the toys were media tie-ins (superheroes and Disney princesses, plus MLP)

  • The 20% of the toys that weren't media tie-ins were either educational/classics (Lego, for example), or the low-cost (under £5) tchotchkes by the cash desk where toddlers can grab them.

  • Okay, this wasn't a full-on toy store, just a corner of the floor in a small department store — but what it says about the way we're raising children these days is nothing good.

    15:

    If I understand correctly, you are put off by run-of-the-mill SF because it does not put any effort into worldbuilding, relying instead on echoing current pop-culture to build a picture with a few strokes as possible...

    but the hardcore worldbuilders lack writing skills in the first place, but are so full of themselves and their work that they'd make a mess of things even if they committed pen to paper?

    16:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICE

    It's with deep sadness that I learned today that Hugh Hancock, a close friend and regular guest blogger here, died yesterday. (This was completely unexpected.)

    I probably won't be replying to questions/comments for the rest of the day.

    17:

    Lucas and the other people involved in the original Star Wars have been very clear that the inspiration was dogfighting and aerial warfare as depicted in World War Two movies

    But were WWII movies based on WWII combat, or did they have distances etc altered to fit the screen?

    An old military acquaintance bitches a lot about infantry movies, because they almost invariably get distances wrong. Even WWII movies will have him screaming "spread out!" at the screen…

    18:

    I think I should invoke Sturgeon's Law, here. (90% of everything is crud.)

    Capitalism, in its current state is hobbled by some bad economic theory (the efficient market hypothesis which, as it turns out, is provably false). And we need to recover from that wound.

    That said, we're going to have systems of exchange, no matter what. You can't have civilization without it. And, ok, sure, the Code of Hammurabi is a relatively recent thing - if you're thinking in terms of the age of the sun - but that does not mean that you get billions of people able to be alive without some sorts of systems of exchange (along with other mechanisms to help us cope with each other's miseries and other flaws).

    Which leads to this whole "post scarcity" thing - post scarcity of what? Some things require lots of miserable work to maintain an adequate supply of good quality of that thing. We have used concepts like "entropy" to describe this state of affairs. And some of those thing (food comes to mind) are the sort of thing where if people do badly enough at it, lots of us die. Plumbing is another thing that I think a lot of us might be rather more dependent on than we really think about. I'm sure you can think of other issues with similar character.

    Anyways, you have to have at least some specialization for this many people to stay alive, and that, in turn, requires systems of exchange. Which, in turn, leads us to specializations like economics [which still has some validity even though the efficient market hypothesis cannot hold for the general case].

    Whether you call the result "capitalism" or not isn't something I really have any good ideas about. You obviously can't rely entirely on any systems of exchange, but at the same time you need to prepare for the inevitable (but only vaguely predictable) failure modes, and that's going to mean jobs for at least some people - and everyone else's lives are going to depend on those people which in turn is going to lead into status issues.

    So if you want to also cope with our social nature, and if you want a robust system, you're also going to want redundant jobs and multiple fallbacks and you're going to want some stresses on your system so that at least the more glaring problems have some visibility.

    Or... that is how I see it.

    And then we get into habits and history and hostilities and all that fun stuff...

    19:

    I think the reason those movies feature fantastical creatures with jobs is an attempt to give something for the adults in the theater to relate to. It strikes me as being something that goes back at least to the Flintstones and it's prime time cartoon programming- arguably The Muppets as well, depending on if you think running a theater is sufficiently grounded to count.

    20:

    Ah, crap... I'm sorry about Hugh... (and I wish I could have edited my post rather than having to make a new one to even mention that. Any chance you could find a blog mechanism which leaves the original post editable during at least a part of the period between when it goes up and when a new post is allowed? ... maybe I need to build that myself ... :/ )

    21:

    Shit. Really quite shocked to hear that. And sorry.

    22:

    It's neither the worldbuilding inconsistencies (which are, indeed, a serious problem... and not just with archly speculative fiction, they're endemic in politically oriented books and even in many "hard core" mysteries, and the less said about worldbuilding problems in litfic the better) nor what Mr Harrison calls "the triumph of writing over worldbuilding" that is at issue. It's the (lack of) integration of the two into anything coherent.

    Our Gracious Host's disdain expressed for ST:TNG — especially based on its initial episode(s) — is a good example. And it wasn't just putting a Frenchman in command of the Enterprise. Bluntly, the writers had no bloody concept of how any of the science or technology would change writing or characters, let alone plot. Obvious example: If you're going to demonstrate the separability of the so-called "engineering section" from the rest of your vessel in the bloody pilot, why isn't that both a routine discussion issue in the rest of the episodes and something that potential adversaries will take into account? Instead, it's reduced to a kewl quasiisolation thingy to make it easier for lazy scriptwriters and directors to substitute kewl special effects for, I don't know, characters demonstrating everyday competence, and the confidence of their cohorts, at their assigned jobs or something. (And the first three seasons went downhill from there.)

    The real problem is that a work of fiction is not an easy high-school algebra problem in which one can still be successful by isolating and solving for one variable at a time. That way lies the worst excesses of the "nothing happening here" litfic short story/novel — and of the neofascist space opera. The writing and the worldbuilding have to work together, and too often (epitomized by, but far from unique to or necessarily mandated in, media properties and long-running series) are at best in isolation and more frequently antagonistic.

    23:

    "...the hardcore worldbuilders lack writing skills in the first place... they'd make a mess of things even if they committed pen to paper?"

    Do I dare, this early in the thread, mention the Big T? Good enough at putting pen to paper (we can overlook the occasional lapse into Vogon poetry) to achieve a thoroughly legendary appeal; even more legendary at worldbuilding such that while millions of people pick nits (which is inevitable anyway), nobody has torn holes. Certainly you can be good at both; and I would contend that since both are exercises in coherent imagination, having a good imagination for one means you have at least a good head start in the other.

    24:

    Do I dare, this early in the thread, mention the Big T?

    Big T? Cryptic too much.

    Really sorry about Hugh. Nice guy.

    25:

    This is a bit like "why I've stopped reading high fantasy"; because it started feeling like I could change one series into another given plain text of the first novel and a suitable vi script.

    26:

    “Okay, this wasn't a full-on toy store, just a corner of the floor in a small department store — but what it says about the way we're raising children these days is nothing good.”

    Thanks to the commercialization of Christmas by Coca-Cola through Santa Clause in 1931, with gender specific toys based on traditional Christian values.

    Disney not only owns the princesses, it also owns half the superheroes (Marvel and Star Wars). In fact Disney owns nearly half the media world, they own ABC Studios, and have recently acquired 21st Century Fox from Rupert Murdoch.

    https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/14/16764472/disney-fox-deal-merger

    27:

    I am sorry to hear of your loss. Best wishes to you & his friends and family.

    28:

    Disney not only owns the princesses... and have recently acquired 21st Century Fox from Rupert Murdoch.

    Someone suggested this this made the Alien Queen a Disney Princess.

    29:

    You are certainly right that most authors fail in creating consistent and believable worlds that can survive closer introspection and that there is a close relationship between the environment and behavior/mental state/actions of characters. But the question is: how important it really is?

    I think that most books have few, maybe ~3-5 key themes, things the author wanted to express and pass to the reader, usually some sort of philosophy, patterns of human behavior, experience, emotions and of course some ideas about what future technologies could be like etc (simply because one cannot do something perfectly in every single dimension, mostly because he is not even aware of all the dimensions + it would take ages to write a single book + this issue is fractal in its nature). And if the author really succeeded and managed to write a good book about these 3-5 (or maybe just 2, or even 1) things and avoided some real nonsense and mistakes that ruin the reading experience, then the result can be an enjoyable book. And my guess would be that you just count world-related stuff as important (maybe because of your Aspergers - less empathy, more focus on order of things etc.), but I am quite sure that other authors would feel the same about other aspects and they would find your books lacking in them (and consider it much more important then world-related stuff). For example I always had an issue with character development and my interest in your characters in your books - which could again relate to Aspergers and lower insight into human emotions and mental states).

    Also most people probably cannot realize many of those issues, because of lack of education in science, economy, history + lack of imagination, which is why these books can have success. But honestly even if I see it clearly, its easier to say ignore something like 'what the hell is democracy doing in 23th century???', I literally told myself many times 'well, I guess he focused on other things and just re-used current state of this matter', but it is REALLY hard to ignore bad characters, boring story, dumb plot, lack of interesting ideas etc.

    30:

    Nick, it's interesting that you bounced of The Expanse novels, because I was going to mention The Expanse TV series as an example that got some sense of scale, even within our own solar system. It's true that people still have jobs, but that makes sense because it's not a post-scarcity future.

    31:

    The thing is, good world building has always been extremely rare. One of the classic examples, Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" has lots of ways in which it doesn't really work.

    That said, Science Fiction, properly, is the exploration of how people might reasonably react in a given situation. The given situation is not required to be the one that the names applied fit. It's often a disguise so that unpalatable things can be said while pretending that it's unrelated to anything that's really happening.

    OTOH, consistency is necessary for this to work...but it's not a surface level consistency, it the consistency of human reactions. it's nice, and it improves the work when it can be managed (rarely!) that the described situation fits known reality without disrupting the story. A good example of this is Jack Williamson's "Humanoids", and John W. Campbell's reaction. The "humanoids" were essentially perfect robots that were given a slightly imperfect motivation, so they were constrained to protect people whether or not the people wanted to be protected. Whoops! But Williamson couldn't come up with any good resolution. When Campbell demanded that he do so, Williamson wrote a sequel where he was forced to resort to magic. Neither story actually fit the known facts of science. (FTL drives, etc., without any plausible explanation.) Both were very good stories. (I'm not sure whether they were combined in the published book, but originally they were two separate serials.) The people acted in ways that were believable given the stated situation, even though the situation wasn't believable.

    FWIW, human reactions in modern science fiction seem to me to average more believable than they did in the early 1950's. And in neither do I often find the stated situation believable. When I do it's in a story making an off-beat point, like ... I think it was called "Masters of the Metropolis" (I forget the author). This was a sort of an abridged retelling of "Ralph 124C41+" set in late 20th century New York (i.e. the present at the time of writing). (And I've probably got the title wrong, because Google can't find it.)

    32:

    Take a random grab-bag of concepts and try to imagine the following without capitalism: [...] "trophy wife",

    That one is fairly easy actually. Plenty of status marriages before capitalism

    "She has HUGE... tracks of land" and all.

    33:

    It's true that people still have jobs, but that makes sense because it's not a post-scarcity future.

    Well, in the Expanse universe, at least in the beginning of the story, most people on Earth don't have jobs, and that's kind of a sore point for them. They seem to have constructed quite a dystopian basic income scheme, and many of them seem to be wanting to have a job, but most of them don't.

    The other planets don't have that, but they seem to have much less people and much more work to do.

    34:

    I love/hate the first book, and thats the reason I have not been buying the rest ... yet. Not sure if I'm going to move into love/love or hate/hate them.

    The worldbuilding is a times incredibly interesting and at times incredibly frustrating, and there are things that I may be wrong, but doesnt make sense at all. I may be dumb and not seeing something, but to this date I have no idea how that world can have Catholics unless you redefine the word to mean something else completly.

    35:

    It's not so bad - I think I have another Neal Book that I haven't read yet, and that might just be long enough to bridge the time until Ghost Engine comes out... and since the Merchant Princes series is technically also SciFi now, there's also Dark State on the list :) (although I'm really torn if I should start that now, or wait until next year - I finished the second one of the first trilogy at 3am, went "whaaaat???", woke up my girlfriend, and ended up buying the third one on Kindle immediately. Not a cliff hanger I took lightly, and I hear the 2nd in the new trilogy repeats this trick...)

    More seriously, I read a lot of scifi when I was at high school, and pretty much stopped for many years. It was actually discovering the existence of OGH, and also Stephenson, that got me back into it, and I wish there were more of it. What I found interesting while reading some "further out there" scifi how some work and some don't - no problem with sentient potplants, gods and multi-dog beings in "Fire upon the deep", enjoyed it a lot, while I had some trouble with the Three body problem trilogy (particularly the physics of it), and Permutation City (Egan) that's supposed to be hard scifi. Sometimes it's just small things or omissions I guess, that you can either buy and get along with, or not (results may vary, I guess).

    36:

    Try Greg Egan's books. It's about as hard SF as you can get, which is really refreshing.

    37:

    I actually did, recently (permutation city), but it didn't work for me at all. I didn't get/buy how the virtual world keeps going after being shut down. What is it supposed to be running on? I was holding out to the end for some sort of hint or explanation which never came. Maybe it's for mathematicians who don't need real-world embodiment :) Can you recommend another of his books? You are not the first one recommending it to me, so I'm willing to give it another shot. Can't be too choosy, the selection is getting quite slim when looking for meticulously researched, but still entertaining books... Actually, a German author I enjoyed who does pretty well with accuracy is Frank Schaetzing (The Swarm). I think there are english translations. And also, Peter Watts (although some parts of his books are a bit disturbing...)

    38:

    This is a good rant. Thank you.

    I feel like I want to spend a half a day writing a complex response on my own blog. But right now I am sitting with my phone waiting for breakfast. Not the place for that.

    I’ve been spending the past year or two doing world building for a series that was originally an animated show pitch and is now a comics thing. There’s an inherent tension between “making exciting visuals” and “even vaguely sensible worldbuilding” that I’m definitely aware of; I grew up on Star Wars and damnit I want the occasional cool space battle with lasers and explosions!!!1!

    And holy fuck trying to come up with not one but TWO postscarcity cultures sure is work. Why am I doing this to myself and my writing partner.

    Anyway. This is mostly just to say, good rant, I’ll have to think about it a while.

    39:

    Where it leaves PKD is as someone writing about the 1960s, not about a hypothetical future. The quality of the art is indisputable, of course, but the content is pure 1960s. Putting rocket fins on a Cadillac didn't turn it into a spaceship, and nor did putting rockets in his stories make PKD's work any less about his present-day environment.

    That's not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to write an allegory, you're there. Where HG Wells aims for the future (e.g. "The sleeper awakes") it's consciously as a warning about present-day conditions, in the same way as Orwell with "1984" or Huxley with "Brave new world".

    But if you want to get all the way away from current rules, you need to figure out what the new rules are. Bester was brilliant at this; I haven't read enough Vonnegut to generalise there. For Burroughs though - which one? If you mean Edgar Rice, his world-building left skidmarks like an incontinent bull hippopotamus.

    40:

    C and I had a rather different experience of changing cultural assumptions the other day. We're watching original Star Trek, in the original sequence (she never saw all the episodes, as her parents didn't care for SF in any form), and we just saw "Miri." I can remember finding Kirk's interactions with threshold-of-puberty Miri charming, long ago; now C and I kept looking at each other and saying, "Wow, that sounds really inappropriate!" We've been sensitized to issues of sexual exploitation over the intervening decades in ways we weren't consciously aware of.

    41:

    I've read the first two volumes. But I'm afraid that in the first volume, when I came on the figures on how fast their vehicles travelled, and how much time the average human being spent travelling, and did the arithmetic, my suspension of disbelief just catastrophically failed. Palmer does an interesting job of evoking the culture of the French Enlightenment in a future milieu, but I want SF writers to work out the implications of their quantitative statements.

    42:

    Please pass on my deepest condolences to the family of your friend and guest blogger Hugh Hancock of Strange Company (machinima pioneer and guest blogger).

    Grim times.

    I found his contributions here fascinating.

    43:

    I'm sorry to hear about Hugh, condolences to all who knew him.

    I recall William Gibson saying in an interview that he didn'T do much world building - meaning he did not have worked out idea how the sprawl works. Instead of a clock work like model of the world his characters inhabit, he described his style as adding lots of details - granularity was the word - until it feels coherent.

    I think with all writing rules, the question is how many sins & inconsistencies you can make up for with great writing, and what the reader expects.

    What do people make of Kim Stanly Robinsons worldbuilding? I dtrugglerd to understand the economy in 2312, allthough it is explained somewhat - I got the feeling KSR himself was fuzzy on that: It's described as mostly planned economies off earth, with capitalism a somewhat marginal, dangerous hobby for some. Ok, how exactly is that meant to work? With no separation of producer and means of producion, what is this capitalism? etc. Novel still mostly worked for me though!

    Personally, I can often live with worldbuilding that's kinda unbelievabke - I have to because I find faults with most fictional societies - as long as it the right questions are asked, and answered in a consistent manner.

    I'll later comb this thread for recommendations, I think ... been a while since I read SF and it is an itch right now. Though next thing I'll catch up on more Ursula K. LeGuin. (Whose relationship to worldbuilding would be worthy of investigating)

    44:

    Big T?

    Please?

    I have no idea what the reference is.

    45:

    I suspect they mean Professor Tolkien, the patron saint of worldbuilding.

    46:

    I assume Charlie's seen this: "Halting State" China style

    Nothing at the moment to add to the current discussion. Much sympathy to Hugh's family and friends. Been there, grateful for the Falcon Heavy distraction.

    47:

    Very sad to hear about the death of Hugh. His posts (and threads) here were provocative; did not agree much of the time but he was fun.

    But about a decade ago I stopped reading SF short stories,... This, I do not understand (relative to novels). Care to explain? I finish 70-90% of SF (or any genre, really) short story collections more often than finishing novels. (Bailing on the remainder in a page or three.) (In the last two decades,and excepting your novels and INB's novels.)

    E.g. this list looks like a candy store to me: (Goodreads) Science Fiction Short Story Collections, or at least those I haven't already read and enjoyed.

    48:

    Sorry to hear about the death of Hugh. Damn.

    49:

    I signed in to say THANK YOU CHARLIE for the rant in favor of coherent worldbuilding. And then, dammit, the news of Hugh Hancock's passing.

    We're losing, untimely, too many worthy people these days.

    50:

    I really like the type of sci-fi Charlie describes and I think it’s among some of the best fiction, however it’s not the only type I enjoy

    I think there are also types they are more fantasy-in-sci-fi clothing and some are more society-builders then world builders

    And then you have Greg Egan who builds physics systems the same way normal sci-fi writers build worlds

    @sfx the reason the virtual world “kept going” is essentially the premise of the book. The concept is called “dust theory”

    http://sciencefiction.com/2011/05/23/science-feature-dust-theory/

    51:

    For me, the biggest thing is that there's relatively little science fiction compared to fantasy these days when it used to be the reverse. That's probably a subject for another rant, though.

    Both require world-building of some sort.

    I'm not as sensitive as Charlie is to defective world-building, but I think a huge advantage of world-building for the author is (one hopes) pushing the author away from cliches.

    I hated Toy Story-- the toys love the child, and the child can never know.

    52:

    The concept is called “dust theory”

    Which suffers from the boundary problem, only more so. When you simulate a system you need to define where the system ends, and how it communicates with things outside the simulation. For simple things like coin flips that's easy, there's one input "flip now", and one output "coin state". But for a person we come back to previous discussions here about what you simulate, to what detail, and the question if interaction becomes acute.

    In many ways it's "mommy has died and gone to heaven"... sure she has, but since I can't interact with her the statement would be better "mommy has died" because that way I wouldn't think the speaker is deluded or lying (or both).

    And as with the Christian defense "I didn't kill her, she lives with God now", no court should ever be willing to accept "dust theory" as evidence of anything except insanity.

    53:

    The definition of science fiction is debatable but certainly it's a broad field. A few science fiction stories are about what it might be like to live in a world with extrapolated technological advances. I suspect there's as many stories like that now as there ever were, but they may be harder to find because of the vast numbers of space operas etc.

    Is it possible to tell an interesting story in a setting with implausible elements? I think so, and sub-genres like steampunk glory in the assumption. Yes, they're lacking something that coherent world building gives us, but every story is lacking something that's common elsewhere.

    The kind of world building you're talking about has a high price tag in effort to understand the setting. Lots of potential readers may not be able to understand it. There's a reason Egan was never very popular. If we insist on plausible extrapolation world building we reduce the genre's accessibility and that's unfortunate.

    I think we should see world building as a positive that adds value, not as a requirement with which we need to comply.

    Minor points:

    • "... this is why my characters constantly feel uneasy and defensive, dominated by a low-level sense of alienation and angst." Damn, that's horrible. I don't feel that way. Go bury your head in a flower bed and sniff, or whatever makes you feel better.

    • I'm surprised you'd think it was hard to imagine e.g. passports without capitalism. Plenty of command economies have existed and used passports, they're pretty much orthogonal concepts. Same applies to several of your examples. It might make more sense to ask what passports would be like in a world with greatly reduced xenophobia.

    • I think one reason capitalism tends to be ubiquitous in stories is that it's a natural consequence of economic freedom. Some people will want to start a business, deferring consumption in order to derive greater profit down the line, and that's capitalism. There are ways to prevent it: the Soviet method of making it illegal; the Somali method of stealing whatever they make; the Google/Star Trek method of providing for free everything you would like to charge for; the Culture method of requiring anything scarce to be given sapience and self-determination; maybe others. But they're all active social features. Any story with these features in it is likely to be interpreted as a polemic for or against capitalism.

    • So far there's not much evidence of a post-scarcity regime. Instead, at the bottom people are working almost as hard and getting paid no more because they're staring down the barrel of economic irrelevance, and at the top people are working just as hard and using the extra income by redefining luxuries as essentials and inventing new luxuries. To get to a real post-scarcity world we might have to get a lot richer.

    • The Death Star attack was also inspired by The Dambusters: bigger, slower planes.

    54:

    Charlie, Jeez, I'm sorry. My sympathies to you and all of Hugh's friends. I know I'll miss him and I always enjoyed when he posted here.

    55:

    Joe Crow @44: The problem is, Tolkien wasn't a brilliant world-builder. He pretty much pioneered the multi-volume fantasy epic with the map in the front showing where everything was and so on, but he didn't build a flawless world. There are a lot of gaps in the world-building for Middle Earth, and they show more and more as you dig further and further into it. Heck, the flaws in Tolkien's world-building (and the subsequent meticulous re-creation of these same flaws by subsequent fantasy epic authors) are what gave us "The Rough Guide to Fantasy-Land" in the first place.

    Once you start digging into Middle Earth, you notice that firstly, it's heavily under-populated for the sort of social and cultural infrastructure levels being posited. Secondly, the economy doesn't really work - it's a bunch of small, centralised locations which are apparently largely self-sufficient, with occasional trade between one area and another (which apparently happens via magic, since we never encounter a roaming band of traders, and there's no mention of them at any time). Heck, the only merchant you encounter in the whole three books of "The Lord of the Rings" is Barliman Butterburr, the innkeeper in Bree. So where does he get his supplies from, and how does he pay for them? We don't know. How does his one little capitalist oasis survive in the middle of an economic landscape which is so wholly feudal as to barely require currency? Thirdly, the political structures only start to make sense when you start reading through the lore (or writer's notes) his son started publishing - prior to that, you're just expected to accept that for some reason, Aragorn can reveal himself as the long-lost One True Heir to the kingdom of Gondor, and everyone will just accept that and fall into line without a blink (and if they don't, it's proof they're Evil and can therefore be eradicated without a blink. I'll grant you, it's a proper mediaeval attitude, but it still doesn't make much sense). But even there, you have the problem of fairly solid areas of territory which are apparently "unclaimed" (or where a previous claim might have existed, but it's lapsed for whatever reason) - such as the stretch from Bree on downward toward Isengard - who was the feudal overlord for that area? And so on, and so on.

    Tolkien's world-building was epic in scale. But it wasn't flawless. As you start zooming in closer, you start seeing more and more of the areas where it's held together by the power of authorial handwaving and "ignore the man behind the curtain" and such.

    56:

    I rather enjoyed the Star Carrier series. It was an intriguing world building using various races whom had drastically different mindsets and approaches, though the underlying emphasis of dispelling away magic as nothing more then advanced techno woo woo was a bit overly emphasised to the point of being overtly inserted. Other then that it was a great series. I really rather enjoy the Rifts Rpg series in terms of overall world building as it combines high technology with high magic high psychic etc etc offering an entire megaverse/multiverse of Interaction exploration and so that "work" as a definition applies to how an individual or a society approaches it. To the point where if magic where an individuals choice they would engage and find magic people and visa versa to the point where collaboration was in itself a highly intriguing new avenue.

    Yada yada. I honestly wish it was as popular as DND was and considering how scarily accurate it is to reality as a whole would be most likely the reason why it never became mainstream. Conceptually it was well ahead of its time.

    57:

    Some of this is legit criticism but some isn’t

    It’s prettu clear that middle earth is very much a world in decline, populations falling, vast swathes abandoned. Much of the social, cultural and even physical infrastructure is left over from previous eras of higher prosperity

    The Shire (which Bree is pretty much part of ) is very much not feudal. It’s a clan based society that’s almost an anarchy

    Aragorn cannot just reveal himself. If you read very carefully you will see Gandalf very carefully placing him on that throne, and showing a lot of political acumen in so doing

    The trade and economy points are solid though it’s pretty unclear how the economy actually could function

    58:

    I am very sorry to hear it, Charlie.

    59:

    Interestingly, I was reading mostly fantasy for a long time because so much of the lauded science fiction just had horrible horrible characters.

    My main gripe with world-building (and Charlie's certainly heard me kvetch often enough) is internal inconsistency. This is a bigger problem for series, because there is so much time spent in a world that it's hard to not trip over something stated or implied in an earlier book.

    (The book I loved the most because of its world was Sunshine, by Robin McKinley.)

    60:

    Probably not news—on that pink/blue gendering nonsense: When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

    61:

    I think world building is overrated. Most people care more about story building. Science fiction isn't really about the future. It's about the present. I think Joseph Fink at The Bargain Bin nailed this. It's about our society's current hopes and stresses and anxieties and obsessions. It's also about telling good old fashioned adventure stories, romances, mysteries, tales of revelation and so on. I don't know if it is possible to write science fiction without mixing in some other genre, and I include literature and poetry as genres.

    The problem is that stories require some kind of conflict or challenge that needs resolution. There have to be triumphs and setbacks, change and learning. If you build a world where everyone knows everything and never makes a mistake, you have cut yourself off from a lot of story structure and most likely any audience. That might serve for a few setup chapters, but then you have to get the story rolling.

    One of the nice things about Star Wars was that there was no know-it-all pointing out that X-wing fighters have wings for stability in gravitational fields. Instead, X-wing fighters were just there, and they were Spitfires. The movie stuffed in dozens of great World War II air combat cliches including the final destruction of the Death Star which was cribbed verbatim from The Dam Busters.

    It pays to look at stories that have worked for thousands of years and assume that they will work a few thousand years mmore. Are we really at the threshold of a post-political future? Will humans forgo status relations? Will we give up sex and love? Will all our human comedy, tragedy and foibles be genetically neutered? Even without capitalism, people are still going to be status conscious, require medical care, seek entertainment and attention, mature as human beings and be required to deal with some level of societal organization and confront its rules. They were before capitalism, and will be after capitalism.

    Science fiction is about today. I think the current emphasis on world building is like the late 19th century focus on utopias. Our productive capacity and scientific knowledge have soared past our political and economic institutions. Authors are trying to imagine a world in which everyone has a decent place to live, a chance to be part of society, enough to eat, medical care when they need it and so on. We have made immense strides since the late 19th century, even if it doesn't seem like it lately. A new world definitely needs to be built, but please don't give me another Looking Backward.

    World building can be fun, but it leads to problems. We can imagine that everyone has a decent place to live or gets to fly to other planets for a vacation, but that doesn't mean we have to be able to design the home of the future, the star ship engine, or the extra-solar resort. It's too easy for a writer to get stuck in the weeds if he or she is worried about the details of star ship maintenance or post-monetary bookkeeping. Some detail may be needed for the plot, and some additional detail can lend depth to the depiction, but at some point it becomes ponderous. (Tolkien, anyone?)

    Mathematicians proved that you can't prove everything, at least not if you want things to be consistent. Pick your story's geometry and ride with it. Build the world you need to make the story work. If you actually can solve the world's problems or build a working star ship, great, but then don't waste your time writing silly stories. You have more important work to do.

    62:

    Tastes differ. Tolkien wrote my single favorite of all the novels I've read. My favorite science fiction novel is Kingsbury's Courtship Rite, set on a really exotic world with an elaborately worked out culture. I do want a good story and characters I feel involved with, but it's even better if they emerge from a world that's richly detailed and interestingly different.

    I'll note that I don't consider this sort of worldbuilding to be a basis for solving the world's problems. Auguste Comte did that in some of his sociological writings nearly 200 years ago, but I don't think his solutions were especially desirable ones, and they certainly didn't give rise to fiction. What I want in a created world is that it confronts its people with interesting problems and conflicts to struggle with.

    63:

    Back to the original post: well said. I'd phrase it as the victory of tropes over process.

    Don't get me wrong, I love reading tvtropes, because it lets me understand where people's heads are.

    However, too many writers (I think for good reason) use tropes as the building blocks for their stories. This isn't a new process: the stories of the old Celtic Bards learning a few new themes each year is an analogous process. It's a good way to make stories, but not a good way to write even semi-original fiction based on ideas. In any genre.

    The problem is that the world doesn't run on tropes, it's a horribly complex, writhing bundle of hagfish-like processes feeding on each other. Gender can be shallowly taken to be a family of tropes, or it can be seen as the result of historical processes around things like (as noted above) women's health care, contraception, and so on. Reinventing these processes to see how they influence gender concepts is hard. Playing with tropes so that your story passes the Bechdel Test and hopefully finds a bigger audience is cheaper.

    Anyway, too many writers manipulate standard tropes to create stories. They're derivative, but if they let the writer make a living, is that a bad thing? (well, yes, but I'm like Charlie. I rarely read stories any more). Doing the process work of working from ideas to construct a society is hard, and it's disparaged by too many people who couldn't do it if they tried. Worse, writing fiction based on ideas leads to odd stories that might be difficult to pigeonhole and therefore sell. Worst of all, it takes more and broader knowledge than a MFA in trope manipulation and workshop survivalism would give the average fledgling novelist. Is it any wonder so few of them want to try? After all, if they got scared out of the sciences by basic biology, why shouldn't we expect their SF planets to be molded from dust from the back shelves of ILM storerooms?

    64:

    Putting rocket fins on a Cadillac didn't turn it into a spaceship, and nor did putting rockets in his stories make PKD's work any less about his present-day environment.

    Alas, I am finding this about a lot of SF I loved in my younger days. From Asimov to Zelazney, the character all seem a bit - well - "mid-20th-century". Whether it's small things like attitudes to smoking or guns, or big things like gender-roles, their works have gone from being "a bit old-fashioned" to "historic period piece". And maybe 2117 is as likely to be like 1967 as like 2017 in those things - but I still find they take me out of the story and hard not to notice that this SF for my grand-dad's generation.

    65:

    Regards SF and world-building:

    This is where I'm enjoying modern SF more than I was ten years ago.

    I'm find the world-building seen via characters in books like "A Closed and Common Orbit", "NineFox Gambit" and "Ancillary Justice" extremely good.

    Those are 3 very different examples of ways to approach world-building, without forsaking characters or plot. All very successful, I think.

    66:

    My condolences on Hugh's passing, he always seemed to me to be hard at work living in the future; bittersweet thoughts on Starman starting his long trip.

    Regarding world-building, I feel a strong disconnect from most SF given the current state of events. Perhaps the two that more strongly feel like they belong on today's world are Gibson's The Peripheral, and Stephenson's Anathem (internet being infested by state-level trolls...)

    67:

    Wow. On one hand I think you're absolutely right, at least in spirit, if not in details. (One could easily substitute "religion", "marriage", "family", etc. for "advertising", "trophy wife", and "health insurance" without violating the spirit of what you wrote.) Worldbuilding is the element which cannot be avoided in science fiction and fantasy, and if the author doesn't get it right the rest of the story; plot, characterization, atmosphere, etc., all fall apart. Without world building, it's just not science-fiction.

    On the other hand my parenthesis above discussing "religion", "marriage", "family" are exactly the changes being rung for the worldbuilding of Grayson in David Weber's Honor of the Queen, which you may not regard as something to read for pleasure... except that there's something else that needs to be discussed here, which is "How do I write fiction that doesn't suck?" and the formula I'd chose is "at least one quality of the story needs to be excellent, and the rest needs to be at least average; good enough to allow the reader to suspend disbelief."

    David Weber writes (wrote?) brilliant fight scenes. That the part he does excellently. On the other hand, Weber's world-building isn't really that great. Grayson is passable as science fiction world-building - there's certainly nothing about it which makes me want to throw the book across the room - but compared to Ringworld or Middle Earth... Grayson is a minor league effort which exists mainly to support three amazing fights.

    The point here is that both Honor of the Queen and Accelerando reward multiple readings. But Accelerando is science fiction, while Honor of the Queen seems more science-fictional... it doesn't trigger that "gosh-wow-future!" response for me. (On the other hand, how often do we see a big freighter on Star Trek? In Gene Roddenberry's future, nobody ships anything from one place to another. How does that work? Weber fills space with freighters, which is actually a lot more believable, at least until the replicator systems are up and running in Next Generation. There's also a place for expertise, and it's obvious that no Star Trek writer ever wondered, "How did my oven get here from China?" Weber at least thinks about shipping and economics.)

    Meanwhile, neither Bujold's world building nor her fight scenes are very exciting, but her characterization and prose are superb, so good, in fact, that you don't notice that her world building is kind of weak until you really think about it - and she does sometimes give me that "gosh-wow-future" feeling.

    On the gripping hand, I'm not sure that world building is the real problem here. There are a lot of new authors (and older authors, for that matter) being published who have some quality - world building, plot, characterization, not making basic writing errors... whatever it might be, that are far enough below average that I get thrown out of the story. Maybe it's simply a more mature perspective on fiction, but it seems like editors are much more tolerant of mistakes than they used to be. Or maybe the book production process makes it harder to get rid of mistakes than it once did. (I'm going to commit fan-fiction-as-criticism on this issue soon.)

    68:

    You have a point about capitalism, but none of your examples have anything to do with capitalism

    "advertising", "trophy wife", "health insurance", "jaywalking", "passport", "police", "teen-ager", "television".

    Advertising: Have you been to Pompeii or any well-preserved Roman ruin? Most of the decorations on places of businesses were actually advertising. Unless you're willing to claim that the Roman Empire was capitalist, this is ahistorical. https://www.purplemotes.net/2009/09/20/mass-media-in-ancient-rome/

    I wouldn't be surprised if Ancient Egypt, Greece, or Assyria didn't have some forms of advertisement which hasn't survived?

    Trophy wife: I'm assuming you mean a lower class woman attracted to an upper class man for his money and him for her looks? I believe mistresses and concubines have been a feature of human civilization since before Mesopotamia

    Passport: Ignoring the fact that several ancient civilizations had a similar document that functions as a passport, a passport is a sign of industrialization and a powerful centralized state. In the US, a passport was introduced to keep the "undesirables" out (back then, that meant Chinese, Catholics, and Eastern Europeans). Do you think a feudal US that had industrialized would not issue a similar document once the state could reasonably control its borders?

    Television: See how the Roman gladiatorial games were paid for if you want a non-capitalistic example.

    Police: A sign of the centralization of power within the state; it has little to do with capitalism.

    Teenager: That's also a product of industrialization. Namely, the need for increased education after hitting puberty. I think that an industrialized civilization would have a similar concept?

    Jaywalking: If Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Rome, or feudal Europe somehow industrialized AND urbanized enough to develop a car, they would have laws giving drivers advantage over pedestrians. That is because the higher social strata would own cars.

    Health insurance: Did feudal societies not have insurance? Can a society even industrialize without some form of insurance?

    69:

    I should probably add one more thing. Charlie, obviously you react to world building errors. I tend to react to issues of plot and plot-logic. But I suspect that the weaknesses we're both detecting are something which is symptomatic of the writing/publishing process, because most of what I react to is of the "Why didn't the editor notice that issue" class of problems.

    70:

    Sorry to hear about Hugh. Please accept my condolences.

    71:

    The point that I'm trying to make above Charlie is that many of the ills blamed on capitalism can be divided into two parts

  • Things which have held constant across several economic systems (unless you're willing to argue that Ancient Egypt, Rome, and Feudal Europe basically held the same economic systems)? If economic systems keep changing while these characteristics remain mostly constant, is it not a reasonable conclusion that they are tied to human nature and not economic system? In other words, it is safe to assume that these won't change much regardless of the world they're in

  • Things which are a product of industrialization. Here I'm at a disadvantage. We only have one example of industrialization to go by. However, it is questionable whether an industrial revolution would have happened without the following characteristics: a method to spread risk for high capital projects and a high population growth due to demographic transitions (the root of the modern police and passport)? Likewise, I don't know if a society could advance beyond an industrial revolution if it didn't extend education beyond puberty?

  • 72:

    Middle Earth is depopulated because it has existed in a state of ugly military crisis for centuries. (Why isn't this obvious?)

    73:

    Okay, because I am a huge fan of Tolkien lore, I have to get into this in a deeply nerdy way.

    You are correct that he didn't build a flawless world. However, the flaws you point out are either not actually existent, or they are much smaller than you're making them out to be.

    Once you start digging into Middle Earth, you notice that firstly, it's heavily under-populated for the sort of social and cultural infrastructure levels being posited.

    This is because Middle-Earth at the time we're seeing it is coming off of 1500 years or so of multiple gigantic calamities. We're talking massive climate disasters, a Black Death equivalent, many wars conducted with genocidal intent and thoroughness, the invasion of foreign peoples looking to either conquer the Numenorean successor states or get revenge for Numenorean colonialism, and a couple attacks from bioengineered WMDs (Smaug) and literal, actual-factual murder gods (the Balrog.)

    This world would be underpopulated as well if subjected to all that.

    Secondly, the economy doesn't really work - it's a bunch of small, centralised locations which are apparently largely self-sufficient, with occasional trade between one area and another (which apparently happens via magic, since we never encounter a roaming band of traders, and there's no mention of them at any time).

    This isn't quite true.

    The Shire and Bree-land are located very near to the dwarf-holds of the Blue Mountains, which provide a convenient source of materiel and industry they might not have themselves. The Shire itself is very large and immensely productive; it cannot practice autarky but it can do pretty well for itself. We meet dwarf-merchants traveling through the Shire in Fellowship of the Ring, although they're not onscreen too long.

    In the east, the Wood-Elves, the Wood-Men, and the Men of Dale and Esgaroth, combined with the Dwarves of the Iron Hills and Erebor and their access by river to Rhun, form another entirely plausible economic trading community.

    And in the south you have the actual recognizable nation-states of Gondor and Rohan, both of which are enormous and productive and presumably have perfectly functional feudal economies even after the devastation that's been inflicted upon them.

    You are right that the economies don't quite make sense. But they don't make sense in other ways than the ones you've explicated.

    Thirdly, the political structures only start to make sense when you start reading through the lore (or writer's notes) his son started publishing

    That's not true. The Silmarillion actually explains fuck-all about the modern political structures of Middle-Earth. The Tale of Years in the back of Return of the King is where all that juicy lore is.

    - prior to that, you're just expected to accept that for some reason, Aragorn can reveal himself as the long-lost One True Heir to the kingdom of Gondor,

    Aragorn's ability to do this is explained with crystal clarity in the text; he is a legitimate descendant of the founder of the kingdom. All other lines of descent from Isildur have failed, are untraceable, or cannot build a political consensus sufficient to get the Gondorian political establishment to recognize them. This gives him a solid claim to the throne of Gondor; it has to be accepted by the person who holds that throne in stewardship and other important Gondorian lords, but its a solid claim.

    and everyone will just accept that and fall into line without a blink (and if they don't, it's proof they're Evil and can therefore be eradicated without a blink. I'll grant you, it's a proper mediaeval attitude, but it still doesn't make much sense).

    ... huh? When do Aragorn or his allies propose murdering anyone who doesn't accept his claim, using the fact that they don't accept his claim as proof that they're evil?

    I mean, it never comes up, because the prevailing authorities in Gondor accept his claim pretty readily. But they do that because Aragorn literally showed up with an army and saved the kingdom. That's a good reason to recognize a claim! If Aragorn had tried to press a claim without doing that (and he served, incognito, as a Gondorian soldier for decades; he and Denethor knew each other intimately, in fact, and worked closely) it would have been rejected. That happened to one of Aragorn's ancestors.

    But even there, you have the problem of fairly solid areas of territory which are apparently "unclaimed" (or where a previous claim might have existed, but it's lapsed for whatever reason) - such as the stretch from Bree on downward toward Isengard - who was the feudal overlord for that area?

    The Greenway was built and maintained by the Kingdom of Arnor. That kingdom was obliterated in a genocidal war of extermination nearly a millennium ago, and it was kept obliterated by repeated climatological catastrophe and repeated orc menaces. The last remnant of it was the city-state of Tharbad, which itself was obliterated in a flood about fifty years before the events of The Hobbit.

    If you really want to talk about ways Middle-Earth doesn't make sense?

    Dwarven reproduction is janked. Women only make up one-third of the population at any given time, which means they're only one-third of all births. And it is explicitly stated that not all dwarf-women marry, and that dwarven relationships are expected to be monogamous.

    Try and make that work in your head. Your brain will break.

    The climate doesn't make a ton of sense. The Misty Mountains should have an enormous rain shadow; instead the leeward side of them is some of the wettest country in the world and home to Middle-Earths longest, deepest, widest river and enormous swathes of primeval forest. The windward side of them is much harsher scrubland.

    There shouldn't be a Common Speech. There should not be. What the fuck, Tolkien?

    74:

    From any rational standpoint, the world building in Ninefox Gambit is completely unbelievable. It's also utterly amazing and wonderful! It's like a bizarre blend of magic and science, combined with the stylings of nightmare. I love it.

    Even though, from any rational POV on what world building should be be, it sucks... (And I am so glad I don't live in that world!)

    75:

    Something like under a dozen people together have as much wealth as the poorest ½ of the entire Earth. I am too tired of looking up the current exact number but Oxfam would have the latest number. In the United States luxuries include housing, health care, and food. The reason unemployment, President Trump, and even crappy toys, and maybe partly for bad world building is the extreme concentration of wealth sucking up all the available resources and of financialized Free Market Capitalism being turned into a religion that contradicts any major religion, philosophy, or ethical system that I know of. Unless you count some form of Social Darwinism.

    So just like the Democrats’ screaming about Russia is used to obfuscate their and system’s failings, the current massive corruption/concentration makes it harder to understand what our world could or should be like. Even the current automation craze seems more of a fad and effort to accumulate wealth by getting rid of paid workers with poorly performing, or at least more vulnerable, but unpaid machines. Poor quality that does just well enough.

    Hopefully I made some sense. :-)

    76:

    Star Wars might not have wage labor as we know it, at least in the films. Do we ever see anyone who could be described as an employee who wasn't a soldier or bureaucrat (or one of Jabba's thugs)? Most non-government folks seem to be self-employed (Luke's uncle is a farmer who owns droids, the cafe owner in Attack of the Clones, Watto's junk shop, etc). Maybe it's implying that most such labor is done by droids.

    But in general, Star Wars is like Dune, where the creator and later Lucasbooks contrived a bunch of in-universe reasons for why everything is the way it is. The dogfighting is all close up because the ships are capable of traveling at a significant fraction of light speed even while going faster than light, and shooting from a distance means you'd never. The Death Star's huge tunnels make more sense - imagine how much easier they make moving big machinery around for repairs and parts replacement.

    @72 Murchushio

    Dwarven reproduction works for me. It's explicitly said that they breed slowly as a result of it, but it's compensated for in part because they also live longer than Men (implied 200-300 years). All the wars and dislocations have seriously reduced their numbers by the Third Age.

    I agree on the climate problems. The Blue Mountains should be casting a rain shadow as well over Eriador, meaning most of Eriador should be drier than it is now (unless they're getting a lot of winter storms off of the Bay of Forochel), and the area east of the Misty Mountains should be steppe or desert (Rhun is implied to be steppe). Maybe Tolkien was going off of Eurasia as a model, which has steppe turning to temperate forest turning to taiga the further you go north.

    @Charlie Stross

    No, really: what is this thing called a job, and what is it doing in my post-scarcity interplanetary future?

    Given how often SF and Space Fantasy loves its Space Aristocrats, you'd think they'd be more inclined to look at the behavior of aristocrats as a model for luxury robot socialism societies where nobody has to work. That's how I've always assumed we'd behave in such a situation, assuming we're still Human As We Them (meaning no extensive augmentation or transhumanism). We'd spend our days enjoying luxury and entertainment, getting in petty squabbles, and competing in all kinds of games and status stuff in a hierarchy.

    77:

    Actually I'm willing to give Independence Day some slack when it comes to the battles. The thing is, we don't actually know how air battles between equivalent air forces would occur in the modern era? The US hasn't had any since the Vietnam War (I would discount the Gulf War since I think the Iraqi military performed far more poorly than their equipment would have allowed them to). To me, saying that close-in air fights have become obsolete is similar to how military theorists were saying that tanks and automatic weapons had made trench warfare obsolete. Needless to say, the Iran-Iraq War proved them wrong.

    The battles in Independence Day were battles where long-distance weapons couldn't be used. I could argue during the first battle that the aliens were so arrogant and assured of victory that they purposefully avoided using long range weapons for fun. The human side did use long-range weapons, but they were quickly depleted or proved useless. Afterwards, the aliens maintained close combat for their own reasons. Under those conditions, the supersonic capabilities of the F/A-18 were irrelevant. Human planes were dropping like flies.

    In the second battle, the aliens utterly ignored the humans until the humans demonstrated that they could "penetrate" the shields. Only then did the aliens respond. At that point, both sides had to remain close to the city ship, for various reasons. That meant that both sides "had to fight like Sopwith Camels". The humans remained close to the city destroyers to

  • Search for weak spots in the structure they could exploit
  • Restrain the aliens from fully using their firepower out of fear of hitting their own ship
  • and because President Whitmore had a criminally-negligent aversion to using nuclear weapons.
  • By the time the aliens realized that humans could "penetrate" their shields, it was too late for them to fully use long range weapons. At that point,

  • To use long range weapons, the aliens would have had to surrender the immediate airspace around their ships to human fighters
  • Their pilots were probably better trained for close-quarter combat
  • The hive-mind nature of the aliens probably gave them the advantage in close quarter combat?
  • In a lot of ways, the battle of Endor was similar to the second battle.

    78:

    I found N.K Jemisin's Stone Sky trilogy one of the best SF/fantasy book series ever written, in terms of worldbuilding, writing and story itself. I can't recommend them enough. I think writing this kind of books was never easy, but it's not harder now. I was a bit jaded before I read this just last month, but it gave me new hope.

    79:

    Toys, children etc. I always wondered about "small people" in the Culture novels, because the "Normal" social structures of even one section of the Culture's many societies was ever looked at, even in momentary passing. One presumes that the "humans are breeding & living - it's even very broefly described a couple of times - but it seems horribly EMPTY, you know? P.S. Just saw the piece about H H - oh dear - sudden heart attack or similar? He wasn't that old, IIRC

    80:

    U K le G did exactly that to a "deryni" story, changing, I think 6 or 8 words & turning it into a contemporary US-political novel. It's in her series of essays: "The Language of the Night" A superb piece of skewering!

    81:

    Ah, a backwards version of: L'enfant et les sortilèges

    82:

    Actually the Death Star attack was inspired by the run-up-the-fjord in 633 Squadron - the latter has even been re-spooled with the Star Wars script & it fits almost perfectly. TRY THIS (!)

    83:

    And ... the really screaming mis-fit is that as to which segment of Middle-Earth at the opening of LoTR has the highest technology? NOT Gondor - which certainly had 1950's-60's technology at the fall of Numenor & is supposed to have retained some of that ... but: The Shire, which is operating at a compfortable late 18th C level of reformed English Agriculture, with all the semi-industrial technology underlying that ... Um, err .....

    84:

    Putting rocket fins on a Cadillac didn't turn it into a spaceship But apparently putting rockets on a roadster did... Not a very practical one though. (Sorry, got distracted by that whole "billionaire is about to send a sports car out past Mars" thing...)

    @unholyguy: Re. Permutation City/Dust Theory: the reason the virtual world “kept going” is essentially the premise of the book. The concept is called “dust theory”

    Yeah, I got that it's the central premise, and that's where he lost me completely. (caution, spoilers follow) I followed throughout all the experiments and that makes sense, but the jump to "why do we need computers at all?" was in my reading of it not explained or justified at all. I was waiting for at least a paragraph that would have gone into some faux quantum physics, or that the universe is also a simulation already and what happened was essentially a breach of the security layer like what happened later in the virtual world, etc. but it didn't come (or I missed it). To me it was just a "and then magic happens", but without pointing to a nearby known compliant witch, or otherwise postulating that magic is a branch of computer science now.

    I think it could have been explained in some ways, like that all matter performs computation already, but there still would have to be some more detail for the core premise of the book, and if we stay in a physical universe (not a simulation), things like speed of light and uneven distribution of matter are a thing (see the end of Accelerando - bandwidth and light cones matter). Or just make it the big reveal that we were living in a simulation all along, and it's simulations all the way down (or up).

    Anyway, maybe it was just this one Egan book that wasn't for me, so if anyone wants to give a recommendation I'm willing to give him another shot (and I won't be upset at you if I also don't like that one, tastes differ after all).

    85:

    I now have to reconsider my position on "my favourite Disney Princess": Is it still Merida, or is it now the Alien Queen? ;-)

    86:

    Contrarywise- The Prancing Pony appears as the location of an important scene in the story. BB is a supporting character in that scene.

    "Bree Stores" doesn't appear because we don't need to read a 15 page discussion of how much bacon, flour, oats... they bought there.

    87:

    Well, IMO David Weber is best known for "military SF". For that to be "internally consistent" I'll normally ask that the speculative physics of FTL and weaponry in that universe are internally self-consistent, that "military discipline" is consistent, and that I find the PoV character(s) engaging. Things like the "economics of interstellar warfare" not so much.

    88:

    As long as we define merchantilism and feudalism as subsets of capitalism, I'd say that the Roman Empire was capitalist.

    89:

    An additional thought regarding world building in general: I think to build up the "grit" that makes the world look real requires that the author has a very good understanding of how this fictional world works on all levels, but it doesn't have to make it into the book if it gets in the way of story. And this requires understanding the real world first, which is why I get a lot of my news analysis from twitter feeds of scifi writers, and why WorldCon is really interesting to go to.

    I was reminded of Adam Savage (ex Mythbuster, but used to work at Industrial Light and Magic as a model builder) talks about "weathering" in his videos on Tested. Weathering is essentially scratching, sanding, chipping a prop, and then just slathering on layers and layers of dark paints, dust, dirt, coffee grounds, etc. and wiping it off again repeatedly to build up the grime and dirt in the cracks that you'd expect from anything that isn't brand new. However, he stated many times that there's a lot more to it - for all the chips and scratches and pieces of grime, he imagines a story how that got there - we never find out, but that's what sells it in the end. It might be a simple "story" like "dirt tends to accumulate in small cracks and corners where it can't be cleaned away easily" or "each dent in this piece of armour is from the battles this character had, and here is where a sword hit it" to "there's massive scorching on this spaceship around the left engine due to the plot line in the beginning of the movie". It needs to be consistent with expectations, and viewers notice subconsciously when things don't make sense. In one of his videos he toured the set of the last Alien movie, and pulled out some scrolls of paper from a shelf in the background to show that they all had different drawings on them (they are never shown in the movie, but the detail is there, and maybe some camera angles will show fragments of it).

    So in books, I think it doesn't need "info dumps" every second page (maybe they are sometimes needed for major plot points that rely on full understanding, but it's probably always better if it can be smoothly woven into the story). But it's things like what people pointed out above - why do we never encounter any traders? How do people eat, travel, communicate, use technology? If done well in plausible and consistent ways, this is what I really enjoy while reading scifi, particularly if the insights are non-obvious first, but actually totally obvious and mind-blowing once you read it, in the "ah yeah, did not expect this but I could totally see that" sense. I sometimes call it "idea density" for lack of a better word. But it needs to work, and needs to be done well, not just a heap of ideas thrown around with hand-wavy "wow this is so mind-blowing" (my thoughts on some of the particle physics in three body problem - didn't work for me). This is what draws me to Charlie's, Neal's and Vernor Vinge's books. For example, as a small detail, I liked the idea that if wormhole technology is about as common as smart phones now, people would totally use it as wardrobes without even thinking about it. Or the dystopian way buses work in future Scotland - I hope tech companies don't use this as inspiration (but they probably will...)

    90:

    Where does the extended LotR mention a prevailing wind from West to East, as your wind shadow argument requires?

    91:

    Oh yes; that's been well documented from back in 1978/9, including accounts by George Lucas himself.

    92:

    As long as we define merchantilism and feudalism as subsets of capitalism, I'd say that the Roman Empire was capitalist.

    That an impressively high density of wrongness packed into a single sentence.

    (I don't know if you're trolling us, but if so: well done!)

    93:

    Please accept my condolences on the death of your friend, Hugh Hancock. I would agree that bumping up against world building has knocked me out of many sci-fi in the last number of years. A reason that I turned to fantasy but that runs in to the problem of the same old sameo.

    I am aware of the flaws of Tolkien but usually can ignore it. The story sweeps you along.

    Like some others I do not agree that the concepts thrown out need the concept of capitalism to have meaning. That said I think I have a greater tolerance for world building flaws than OGH.

    So "advertising" - I suspect that there will always be services or something that some can offer that has value and the purveyor will need to advertise the fact. On the other hand the aggressive marketing of tat you do not really need may not exist in all possible future societies.

    Trophy Wife - pretty much always there. Though status may not be defined in material wealth in the future. I am pretty much sure there will be a hierarchy of some kind and the "wife" may not always be a woman.

    "health insurance" I will grant is pretty capitalistic but I could imagine a society that had pretty generous universal healthcare but a strong Nannying bent refusing to treat disorders deemed to come from risky behaviour. Like smoking, drinking, sub-orbital sky diving.

    "Jaywalking" has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with motorcars and is not universal. In Ireland a pedestrian has every right to cross the road and the motorist is expected not to hit them. Ok, I just checked that and in Ireland, it is against the law to cross the road within 50 feet of a designated crossing. However, as a motorist I suspect that if I hit someone in that area crossing the road I would still be partly liable.

    "Passports" in some form will likely be required by any polity that wants to control whoever crosses their borders and even in the case of polities that don't care the use of diplomatic passports may continue to indicate that the bearers are legitimate representatives of the polity in question.

    "Television" ???? do streaming services count? YouTube? I know some young people that watch no actual TV broadcasts but watch some of the content on streaming services and a lot of content on YouTube and similar services. As much and more that the amount of TV I consumed at their age.

    94:

    I like world building, I like plot, character development, and all the rest of the stuff that goes to make up good old fashioned storytelling. If either is done well enough it’ll probably draw me in sufficiently that I’ll happily accept/overlook/forgive quite large issues in the other one.

    What I don’t like (and can seldom read past) is internal inconsistency. I’ll buy into all sorts of bonkers physics, biology, geology, geography, magic, economics, etc, etc as long as a writer can hang a good story and likeable (or at least interesting characters) onto it, but it had damn well better hang together internally...

    95:

    "Did feudal societies not have insurance?"

    The term "feudal" is so broadly used that it probably doesn't admit of a siingle answer. But if the intent is "medieval," then at least in the post-1000 medieval ages, guilds provided that function, among others, for a minority of comparatively well off town dwellers. You joined a guild, and paid dues, and one thing they did was to help you out if you got sick, or help your widow and orphans out if you died, at least with funeral expenses. That was still around at the end of the 19th century; one of Kipling's earlier poems has the line "till the 'sociation has footed my buryin' bill."

    In villages, I think the "insurance" function was mainly performed by siblings and in-laws. A pool of half a dozen femilies had less statistical variance in its fortunes than a single family. This was supplemented by godparents, who tended to be of slightly higher standing.

    Of course, hardly any of it was handled through commercial contracts. But such societies didn't run on commercial contracts anyway. There isn't technically "insurance" in a socialist setup either; having the state guarantee you a pension in old age, or health care, or the like doesn't work by actuarial logic or rates of return on investments or anything of the sort. But there are other ways of reducing variance in people's outcomes.

    96:

    Just as a footnote, when I ran my alternate Middle-Earth campaign, about the resistance movement in a world where Sauron won, I thought of Tolkien's line about the "great slave-worked fields" in southern Mordor (all that soil enriched by volcanic ash!), and figured that the Shire would be the Ukraine of the northern lands, with rich soil and a dense population of skilled workers to cultivate it. Really there was no place else that couild support large armies, and he could hardly have shipped food north.

    I've read Bujold's Sharing Knife two or three times, and I'm repeatedly struck by the idea that her Lakewalkers are an anthropologically and economically more realistic look at the Dunedain as a people, living outside the communities of "farmers" who might as well be hobbits. There's some serious thinking going on behind the romance novel surface of the narrative. Though to be sure Tolkien would have blanched at some of the Lakewalker customs.

    97:

    The thing is, we don't actually know how air battles between equivalent air forces would occur in the modern era?

    The air forces do, pretty much - see Exercises RED FLAG and what used to be COPE THUNDER.

    Here's an example from a professional participant... (he spends most of his time on the Army Rumour Service explaining air realities to a largely-ignorant ground audience)

    98:

    never mind universalizing contemporary norms of gender, race, and power hierarchies

    Personally, I find that a focus on subverting norms of gender, race, and power hierarchies is the surest sign that a fictional work is thoroughly suffused with contemporary Western culture.

    Part of it is that I read a lot of Korean and Japanese stuff. Their fiction, and their societies, are generally a lot less concerned with such things. Sometimes horribly so, to be honest (some Japanese fantasy works have a disturbing fascination with slavery).

    Why is gender?

    Because single humans want to signal their quality to potential mates, and mated humans have common conflicts of interest which their cultures give them templates for resolving.

    what is this thing called a job

    A culture is people who cooperate. Your role in it is your job. You might be an employee, but you could be a vassal, a slave, an elected official, or something else.

    99:

    It is true that David Weber is mostly concerned at the start of the series with concocting a reason to have Napoleonic naval battles in space (and then later carrier battles).

    However, he did carefully construct his setup of the initial antagonists, Haven, to support his opinion that the dole is Evil and leads to the ruin of any society that pays it. It helps to be god when you want to make points like that.

    What I find amusing is his portrayal of the Manticorean monarchy is a good argument as to why monarchs with actual political power are a very bad idea. I suspect this was not the intent.

    I also am amused by the way that Manticorean R&D projects seem to work right first time as a rule, and the opposition's stuff works, sometimes. Also, he is the only write I know of to have managed to write missile barrage statistics porn.

    100:

    I find this highly amusing - but I know some people won't .....

    101:

    I'm sorry about Hugh.

    102:

    Manty R&D works first time every time (or at least only gets written about when it works). IRL I have a job that means I know that at least some stuff does actually work first time when trialed.

    OTOH DW is not the only writer to have done "Death by PowerPoint" scenes.

    103:

    Yes. What a lot of people miss is that most science fiction has always been like that - even in the 1920s, most educated people knew enough physics to pick vast holes in even the hardest of SF - and let's not get on to pre-1900 SF! It's reasonable, provided that either (a) the discrepancy is coherent and the basis for the story or (b) the discrepancies are sufficiently peripheral to be glossed over.

    My objection is that far too many authors just mix up multiple existing tropes, including implausibly speculative physics, often taking them to extremes. And, as some people have said, being completely insane about things like economics, pollution and the consequences of accidents. And, as you implied and has been said many times before, you do NOT get good SF by taking real-world based stories and putting them into space.

    I find modern fantasy is generally better constructed.

    104:

    Oops. I see that Heteromeles said my second paragraph earlier - I missed that.

    105:

    missile barrage statistics porn.

    A close acquaintance of David Weber described it as "spreadsheet carnography" -- David at one time used Excel to calculate a lot of stuff about missile barrages and their statistical effects on the various fleets involved.

    106:

    Ahem: capitalism — in its modern sense — is a creature of the Enlightenment, and coevolved with the industrial revolution (as did Marxist economic analysis and socialism).

    You're missing the point where, earlier, you pointed to earlier cultural precursors of stuff like advertising and television: these industries in their modern form can barely exist without capitalism. Writing a shop's name on the storefront in a Roman town is not Saatchi & Saatchi. A state-run broadcaster's single channel news and education programming is not Netflix or the intermission advertising at the Superbowl.Modern police are a classic example of guard labour deployed in the protection of property (see also: capital accumulation); passports are a component of the gatekeeper mechanism that prevents free migration of labour to higher-wage territories, in turn an essential precondition for economic imperialism (in the Marxian analysis — capital can migrate to where production costs less, and export goods for sale to locales where prices are highest, deriving profit from arbitrage). And so on.

    Yes, passports and advertising and mass entertainment pre-existed capitalism. Just as rockets pre-existed the space program. This is irrelevant to the point I'm making, which is that these things would not exist in their current form without capitalism.

    107:

    David Weber is best known for "military SF".

    Or, less charitably, Napoleonic Navies in Spaaaaaace.

    (See "Singularity Sky" for my take on that subgenre: it's all fun and games until Admiral Hornblower runs into a cold-war hunter-killer SSN ...)

    108:

    Well, sort-of. Yes, THOSE aspects of modern capitalism are new, but lots of other aspects of it are ancient. Banks, insurance, loan sharks, commercial lawyers, gilts, formal exchange rates, taxes on value, etc. etc.

    109:

    (See "Singularity Sky" for my take on that subgenre: it's all fun and games until Admiral Hornblower runs into a cold-war hunter-killer SSN ...) oooh, loved that bit - although once looked at this way, ruined most space battles for me after reading this (but was never really into trope-y space operas anyway). The Expanse TV series at least did a somewhat better job than most I thought (haven't read the books) - encounters generally last seconds, and they put on space suits and have vacuum inside the ship, as it's going to get perforated anyway - no point losing precious oxygen over it.

    110:

    Alas, I am finding this about a lot of SF I loved in my younger days. From Asimov to Zelazney, the character all seem a bit - well - "mid-20th-century".

    At least they mostly tried though. Of course their cultural values were marooned in their origins (gratuitous sexism, and good luck finding anyone non-het), but their adjacent-possible didn't go that far towards equality. There are also lovely details in there which bake in obsolete technologies - everything uses valves, for instance.

    There are oddities though. Why do Asimov's characters type, or print out text on paper tape, when they've got ubiquitous robots capable of remembering everything? This is something the otherwise-iffy "Caliban" trilogy (Roger Macbride Allen guest-writing in the Robots-verse) got right, which is to present people in a society of ubiquitous robots actually using robots ubiquitously without thinking about their presence, and how that affects the people and the robots.

    But then Asimov's robots were generally not about robots. They were about racism, or sexism, or what defining characteristics make a human being, which were (and are) issues relevant to the present day. Robots were simply the context for the thought experiments. It didn't matter that the details fell apart on closer inspection, because we were expected to be left thinking about the philosophical questions, not wondering "why are they still using screwdrivers?"

    111:

    I agree your point, with the note that they've gone from ~Trafalgar to ~Midway in 30 years or so (book time).

    112:

    "...military theorists were saying that tanks and automatic weapons had made trench warfare obsolete.

    Grumps That was disproved in World War I.

    113:

    Yeah, pretty much agreed. On the other hand, the tech works consistently from book-to-book and there's very little "teching the tech."

    The big problem here is that he became too big a name to be edited. One of the reasons Honor of the Queen works so well is because the book is very tightly written (and probably very tightly edited as well.) Later Weber books don't have that laser-sharp focus and careful removal of extraneous elements. (Or careful never-putting-in of extraneous elements.) It's not even a matter of the books being too long... there are entire unnecessary books in the series!

    I didn't bother with most of his recent books for the above reasons, plus his characterization issues are either getting worse, or my eye for character is getting better.

    114:

    Meanwhile, Mr Musk's launch seems to have worked, though putting a car into semi-orbit, somewhere beyond Mars ( apparently there was an extra thrust somewhere .... ) is so reminiscent of the Banks' story ( "State of the Art" ? ) that I wonder if fiction is imitating life, or what .... [ Yes, I know about the Culture names for Musk's vehicles ]

    115:

    Actually I thi k they were both riffing on the “Soft Landing” sequence at the beginning of the Heavy Metal animated movie, which featured a space-suited astronaut exiting a space shuttle in a 1959 Corvette, re-entering the atmosphere, landing on a desert road, and roaring off into the distance... :-)

    116:

    One of the failure states of military (science)fiction is that winning a war ultimately comes down to logistics and statistics. Given enough time (like a whole series) an average general with better logistics will beat the brilliant general with lesser logistics.

    The corollary is that if you set out to write military fiction you must set things up so that the end game happens early enough that an average general with great logistics can't run away with your story.

    117:

    Up at #101 I talk about "Death by PowerPoint" scenes; these are one of the aspects of what you're referring to yes?

    118:

    "Singularity Sky" was the first novel of yours which I read, and I definitely picked up that you were having some fun with Weber! Well played, if I haven't said so before.

    I should also note that the timing on publishing Singularity Sky was perfect - it came out just as Weber was entering the "overly-large bestseller, complete with gigantic infodumps" phase of his Honorverse books.

    119:

    Yeah. See my comments on the failure modes of military fiction at 115 - obviously big fleet actions are all about statistics, right? But how do you make that interesting for the reader? Compressing your spreadsheet results into a couple paragraphs.... no. Just no.

    120:

    The big problem here is that he became too big a name to be edited

    My understanding is that he was facing a tight deadline when he took a header off his back porch and broke both wrists. His last minute deadline save was a copy of Dragon Dictate, but it did weird things to his style (notably, that's roughly when his books all hulked out by 50% and acquired extra infodumpiness).

    121:

    Permutation City's "dust theory" is not really compelling, and Egan doesn't really take it seriously, but something similar falls out of the infinite universe multiverse theory the same way Boltzmann Brains do. If something can exist then it must exist somewhere in the universe. Sean Carrol seems to take that kind of thing seriously and he's a real physicist.

    The boundary condition problem doesn't exist because we never see Permutation City from the outside, it's only perceptible to its inhabitants and their reality is the one that matters to them.

    122:

    Check Greg Egan's web page for some shorter works.

    For novels I would recommend Diaspora and Schild's Ladder.

    123:

    Re: "We'd spend our days enjoying luxury and entertainment, getting in petty squabbles, and competing in all kinds of games and status stuff in a hierarchy."

    Like Iain Banks' Culture? Particularly visible in Player of Games.

    124:

    I recently heard a lecture by Kim Stanley Robinson, about the future of capitalism and what it would need to turn into for civilization to survive. He admits he doesn't know, and his talk made that fairly clear too.

    This doesn't mean he's stupid, nor well read, nor suffering from a cognitive decline. The problem is (and I agree with him on this) that if you're an old-line progressive and you want technological progress to save the day, and for people to get into space without FTL/magic, then economics has to do some deeply weird stuff.

    For one thing, you've got to take a system that puts value on stuff that's extracted from its natural context and brought into civilization, and totally reverse that so that there's value put on shoring up the biosphere, which generally means taking stuff out of civilization (such as money and resources) and putting them where humans can't use them (such as growing forests that aren't tree farms, putting trillions into sequestering carbon deep underground, and so forth). Note that this is my take, not KSRs, but he was trying to find a different way to say this without invoking things like massive deflation.

    More generally (and this is my ideas, not those of KSR), making an independent colony on another planet (much less another star) is analogous to an economy having a child. The point of the child is that you spend a huge amount of resources, and then the kid becomes independent. With luck and care, the child remains close and helps you when you're in trouble. But then, look at modern capitalism, where that function is regarded as primitive, and people are supposed to care for themselves while their children make their own lives. Making independent daughter economies is not something that improves the bottom line. Indeed, it's a massive waste of resources, especially if we're talking about an extrasolar economy that takes thousands of years to reach.

    I know OGH wrote a book on this, but it gives you an idea of the problem economics might have with things like a space-faring culture. Under modern economic theories, there's no way to represent an extrasolar colony as anything other than a massive waste, and that's probably true of even a colony on another planet.

    Closer to home, most of the damage we've done to our biosphere has been externalized (a fancy way of saying it's ignored on balance sheets). While there are balance sheet estimates for the benefits the biosphere gives to the economy, they get fairly silly, along the lines of using the cost of oxygen in a tank to estimate how the value plants contribute to maintaining a breathable atmosphere through photosynthesis. Economics tends to ignore both the benefits brought in by everything from non-paid labor to the biosphere maintaining itself to the damage pollution causes to all of the above. Forcing economics to incorporate the entire biosphere can suddenly start popping up infinities everywhere, making the known economy seem incredibly damaging, arbitrary, even silly (the reason for infinities is that without air, water, gravity, radiation shielding, food, medicines, recycling, ad infinitum, no economy would exist. What's the value of all these essentials, each of which individually keeps the economy from disappearing, perhaps instantaneously?). The inevitable way around that is that subjective valuations are created for natural resources until "the economics feel right," as KSR noted, but that subjective valuation causes its own huge problems, making it hard to see how to fix them.

    Maybe, if the cosmology crew ever comes up with a theory of quantum gravity that doesn't explode infinities everywhere, they can tell the economists how to do it, so that the economists, frustrated physicists that they are, can figure out how to make the biosphere matter enough on their spreadsheets that the civilization they model doesn't shatter. I'm dubious either is possible, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

    125:

    Charlie, I agree with you.

    There's a lot of books out there that I ought to like according to Amazon's algorithms, but find I don't because, well, they're boring. Stack that with the eight deadly words, and it's not worth the time.

    Why are they boring? Poor worldbuilding, characters that are shallower than cardboard (and uniformly WEIRD), a longing for authoritarianism and overuse of existing tropes others have done first and better.

    Interesting, well thought out worldbuilding is a huge plus. I'll even forgive bad worldbuilding if the concept is interesting (hint: most aren't) and characters I care about. The problem is, most worldbuilding defaults to WEIRD (Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic) with an odd longing for an authoritarianism. Been there, seen that, enjoyed it in my 20's and not so much now (and Allen Cole and Chris Bunch at least did it in an entertaining way and then ripped the shit out of it). There are also many, many blind spots on how technology impacts society - the goal seems to be something that looks like late 20th century America with nifty technology and allowing the author to grind an axe. And maybe those different irritating people edited out for whatever apocalyptic reason or poor editorial advice.

    The concepts also usually aren't that interesting - many of them seem to directly regurgitate alien invasions/conspiracies by the nobility/military actions ripped off from history/latest block buster/post-apocalyptic/zombie plots - mixed and matched to suit the author's wants or easy marketing categories. Tropes are there to be aware of them - not slavishly imitate. I swear someone here introduced me to the idea of a first mover effect in writing - one author does it first and after success, a 2nd generation imitates with some exposure to what inspired the first author, then a third or greater one comes along and just does it because it's the accepted thing without ever wondering why the first one did this. I see this so much in SF and fantasy it hurts. And it's boring.

    The characters are also a problem - not only is the worldbuilding WEIRD, so are the characters. And heterosexual male. A few years back I began to realize I liked fiction with characters that are like the people I work and live with - not always white, or male, or straight or abled. And most of the stuff that get's flung at me assumes I only want to read about people like me. Or women like me.

    My solution? Lately it's been to re-read stuff I loved. It's also to go out of the way to look for authors similar to Charlie - ones that love something, but aren't afraid to rip it up one side and down the other - or willing to do something new. Gladstone, Rajaniemi, Bear, WJW (when he's in the mood) are all examples that I can think of.

    126:

    I'm very sorry to hear. He had a lot of interest to contribute and (... selfishly-speaking...) I looked forward to reading more.

    127:

    Charlie,

    Three of your words I can see in the future: passport, police, and teenager. The latter... it takes longer and longer to learn enough to effectively and safely navigate life (and there's too damn many who don't achieve that, which is why Trump and Brexit).

    Police, sorry, but I want someone trained with authority to deal with the violent drunk, or the guys attacking the woman.

    And passport... I have trouble seeing, in the 100-200 year timeframe, the US, Europe, Russia and China allowing citizens to enter without....

    Careful, though, about what you want to read - I'm still trying to find an agent to handle a novel set on an interstellar colony 300-400 years from now, fighting an invasion (which was partly broken, so it's years long) and the hero is not, in fact, a warewolf (and yes, there are very unpleasant reasons that happens). No one who's read it has complained about plot holes, or lack of consistancy, or even bad writing... but it's a first novel, and you know how that goes.

    128:

    Oh, and cheap worldbuilding: I tried two or three times to watch the new Cattlecar Galaxative, um, nope. It's another civilization, far across the galaxy, and they're wearing glasses, and skirts, and jackets and ties? The suspenders of disbelief snapped, painfully. And what I heard/read later, what's the point of the war, if you need exotics methods of identifying a robot, er, Cylon? And why on (or off) Earth would a spacefaring group of robots bother with humans, and their nasty oxidizing gravity wells?

    129:

    Thanks for your comments and recommendations re. Egan. I heard his name pop up a lot when asking about hard sci-fi, and this was the first I read, so I was a bit disappointed - it just seemed to leave out a few steps right in the middle of the main plot point. I was actually going through options in my head while reading it how it could be explained, but unless I missed it the book doesn't really go there. Maybe its unobservable by the characters, but they don't even speculate about it much and just accept it (unless I missed something). I guess the "if it can exist it must exist" is in my view difficult to turn into good stories, at least if consistency and internal logic are a concern - even fantasy with magic usually has strict implicit rules what magic can and cannot do.

    I was just wondering now, given that OGH has mentioned flaws in the Singularity Sky universe in the past, if the existence of post-singularity tech like cornucopia machines is one of them? I personally didn't really notice major issues and enjoyed the books. But I could imagine that if "anything can happen"-machines exist, the story very quickly becomes unpredictable and absurd. Of course one can have fun with that for a while, but it probably gets out of hand fairly quickly. My guess is that the existence of the Eschaton to deal with the problems around causality violation is to establish some rules again to avoid the "anything is possible any time" conundrum.

    130:

    The Culture is definitely a model for that, although perhaps more benign (admittedly I've only read Consider Phlebas). Human beings that don't have to work for a living are very good at filling the time with stuff, especially competitive status-seeking stuff and performative behavior.

    RE: Heteromeles

    I really liked how KSR had the economic system in 2312 be a messy melange of things reflecting political and cultural evolution. There's elements of capitalism, elements of a market economy that's in the "gray market" area, and a cooperative par-econ set-up with advanced computers. Barring violent revolution, that's how I'd expect an evolution away from capitalism to kind of look like.

    SF and Space Fantasy tend to have too "neat", uniform political systems that don't reflect a complicated history of political evolution. I wouldn't expect stuff like that unless there's been a sweeping revolution or several that broadly carved out lots of older rules and homogenized the new ones.

    131:

    The point I was making is "which is that these things would not exist in their current form without capitalism." is incorrect. These things would not exist in their current form without technology, but would exist in something close current form without capitalism. Without capitalism, they would exist in a form that is 99 percent similar to what we have now. How do I know that? It's because they existed in 90 percent similar to their current form during the Roman Empire. The ten percent difference is solely due to technology and not economic system.

    132:

    Heh. I'd love to see more like this - taking a prevalent trope and then either turning it on it's head, or having it run straight into the band saw.

    133:

    I haven't read 2312, so I can't comment. In general, though, the problem with any future economic model in SF is that if it was easy for a writer to describe it in a 30 minute lecture, or even a novel, we most likely wouldn't be faced with all the economic problems we're facing now.

    This is just another version of the wicked problems issue that makes it hard for any one person to figure out how we get through the 21st Century without global civilization shattering and the global human population falling by >>90%. There are a lot of possible solutions out there, but there is no simple, global solution that everyone could buy into.

    This isn't to say that these problems are insoluble: rather, it's that they're bigger than one brain can hold.

    Oddly, this is one underappreciated reason that it's easier to write fantasy. Get rid of technological progress and focus on much smaller populations, rather than billions of people, and the issues are much more comprehensible, even if they still are wicked.

    134:

    I'll take the cheap shot, at the concept of trophy wife - The wife is a trophy because the prevailing assumption in modern western societies is that marraige is entered freely, out of love and not material concerns. Not that anyone buys this entirely, but it is the myth. Because of this, the modern trophy wife signals that the husband is a charming, good looking, virile fellow, no woman is "out of his leak" - this is different from a society that basically allows one to buy a concubine like on would a donkey, or where marriages are universally understood to reflect dynastic or economic neccessities. Don't look at ancient Rome, read Pride and Prejudice! The difference in attitudes even to today is stark enough!

    135:

    As I tried to say above, KSR told about the messy economy in 2312, he didn't show it. Maybe I shouldn't be harsh on him, it is a wicked problem and exploring this in detail would have told another story. Also, the one time KSR spent more ink on explaining his economy (the nitrogen potlatch thing in the Mars trilogy), I didn't understand it and read right past it, story somehow still worked.

    136:

    SHIT.

    I've exchanged posts here in the past with him, and I'm sorry we've lost him. Condolences, Charlie, and please pass same on to his family.

    137:

    Capitalism is a creature of the last few hundred years... and corporations, explicitly, came in during the mid-to-late 1800's, at least in the US.

    Capitalism is inherently a greedy algorithm. I mean, unless you want to argue with the Gilded Age, and right now. It inherently aims for monopoly, and then, mmmm, can't eat just one.

    Without serious social control of capital, you, I, and all the rest of us here are screwed, and I, for one, do not intend to die in my vehicle under a bridge.

    138:

    Gift economics is one of those fun areas where KSR read a book (likely Lewis Hyde's The Gift) and decided to throw gift economics into his Martian mix. This all sounds fun and frivolous, until you realize how much of the unpaid economy runs on gifts, and how much gifts are under attack by a market economics that wants to analyze them in a crude profit-loss calculus that is actually too simple to capture what's going on (if you believe Hyde).

    Anyway, it's always fun to take books and ask what-ifs about how they could be used to build a SF world. For example, if I get a chance to start writing again (after the current unpleasantness is over, so perhaps 2019 or after the next big recession hits), I'll almost certainly try to scale up permaculture on the silly thought that perhaps you could run civilization off of it. In actuality, permaculture books* explicitly only scale up to community size. The originators of permaculture see civilization as evil and back-to-the-land villages as good, so scaling permaculture beyond community level, if it could even work to run countries, is an exercise akin to creating a just-war theory based on Christ's or Buddha's teachings on non-violence.

    But it might sell in an SF book or even a series. After all, KSR's Mars books ran partially on gift economics. One could argue that he's correct, in that planets can only be colonized by gift, rather than market, economies.

    *I've got a shelf of the damned things because they're fun to read, and I'd like to monetize that shelf by using permaculture to build a world I could sell)

    139:

    As I've said here before, I have a hard time finding sf anymore, and I really want my fix.

    I'm sure I've said this here before: through the 20th Century, there were 10 yr cycles: for 10 years, more sf, then the next 10, more fantasy was published. That seems to have broken around 2001. Now, my personal take is that had a lot to do with Columbia, and the Shrub and his wars, and people just wanted a good escape.

    Too much of everything has become far too formulaic. It's the rare urban fantasy that even attracts me anymore.

    140:

    The Humanoids - that was taking Asimov's Laws, and carrying them far out there....

    141:

    Capitalism as a ... hobby.

    Well, consider this: we have our genuinely unthinking robot slaves, and a negative income tax, aka basic income. For some, that's enough; for others, build a business to add more, if you can't find a job.

    142:

    The funny thing about Ancient Rome is that culturally it's probably a lot closer to today than any of the periods since then. The Medieval world had some very odd (by our standards) ideas about things like business and moneylending, tied in with a theological state that makes modern Iran look tame (yes I know, Venice!=Constantinople!=London, I'm simplifying huge period and part of the world, and completely ignoring China, India, etc) and the knowledge that of course the end of the world was happening any time soon; Ancient Rome at it's height had things that look like modern banking, corporations, monetary policy, etc if you squint at them. Heck, the Romans even had fast food. Not totally related, but for those who haven't read Tony Perrottet's "Pagan Holiday" (or "Route 66 Ad" depending on which part of the English-speaking world you live), it's awesome. It looks at ancient Roman tourism through our modern lens and is awesome.

    143:

    Disclaimer: I have not seen Battlestar Galactica (in either TV incarnation) — read a spinoff novelization once, is all.

    My understanding is that, much as Lord of the Rings was Tolkien creating a myth around the Matter of England, BSG is myth-making around the origin story of the Church of Latter-Day Saints; that is, it takes a distinctively Mormon view of the universe and its protagonists' embattled place in it.

    (Is this correct? Correct-ish?)

    144:

    That's you. In this case, my favorite Disney princess is Ripley....

    145:

    Sung and Ming China are even better analogies to the modern world.

    The thing to remember is that stuff changes when you go from millions of people to billions. The Roman empire got up to, what 50 million across Europe? And the barbarian hordes were in the hundreds of thousands. There are issues with population density and communication speed that probably don't scale as well as one might hope. Despite everybody wanting to turn Earth into their private Imperium where they can play Caesar, I doubt it's possible to run even the US the way the Roman empire was run. At best it's an analogy, and an imperfect one.

    Worse, we don't really understand why the Roman Empire shrunk and mutated (it didn't collapse until Byzantium fell over 1000 years later), so if we're experiencing the same problems, we don't necessarily know how to identify or deal with them.

    146:

    "Police, sorry, but I want someone trained with authority to deal with the violent drunk, or the guys attacking the woman."

    I agree - I see all kinds of people expressing some variant on "let's get rid of the police" and it always comes over as hopelessly naive. However utopian and lacking in motives for crime your society may be, there will still be a few people who are just plain cunts, because that's how humans are. So there is still a need for police to defend people against them. And the reasons why people want to get rid of the police very often turn out to be akin to "shooting the messenger", in that the problems they are trying to solve arise from the way the police are overseen or the laws they have to enforce, not the existence of the police themselves.

    I have difficulty with many of the other words too. "Trophy wife" in particular is as old as humanity, for much the same reasons as rape is, since it's basically the same thing but less violent. Adolescence is simply part of life, and the phenomenon of the teenage knobhead is not limited to the human species. Passports, AIUI, didn't become important until WW1 left everyone feeling a bit paranoid; certainly they existed before then, but no-one really bothered and Schengen would have been seen as restrictive rather than liberating.

    "Jaywalking" - I have no idea why that's in the list. Anywhere you have humans mingling with mobile entities with different speed/acceleration/braking/manoeuvrability/mass/impact response characteristics you're going to have some kind of convention to reduce the likelihood of collisions. How the US deals with the case where the mobile entities are cars is deeply weird from a British perspective, but so is how some South East Asian countries deal with the case where the mobile entity is a train. The difference isn't whether or not they're capitalist, but what their cultural attitudes normalise where that kind of risk is concerned.

    "Television" gave me a similar reaction - "wtf?" and the urge to post a picture of a Soviet TV set - until Charlie explained that he didn't actually mean "television", but "commercial broadcasting", at which point it became more of a "well, duh".

    Only "advertising" and "health insurance" were "well, duh" from the moment of reading. But then I understand "advertising" to mean "broadcast psychological manipulation" of the kind which (AIUI) first really took off in 19th-century America and then spread, while others who understand it to include putting your name over your shop disagreed. I wonder how much of the disagreement both I and others have expressed over that list arises from similar differences in interpretation.

    147:

    The original series was, the remake took the genocide premise and went in a very different direction.

    It was a bit weird, in that the "aircraft carrier in space" ane "enemy within" elements were mostly played straight early on but there was an element of woo that got completely out of hand toward the end and the whole thing went off the rails.

    I agree with the point about the suits and ties but can't get worked up about moderately more advanced humans wearing glasses. They are cheap and they work.

    148:

    You think Hollywood's the only one who does that? I see several articles a year on that in Model Railroader, and have done it myself for my layout. (Did he mention an alcohol/India ink wash?)

    149:

    You forgot other things that don't appear on the bottom line: whether the employees can afford a roof over their heads, or whether they need three jobs just to afford to live in something other than their cars. Wage slavery is still that, but cheaper, since you don't have to worry about housing, clothing or feeding, and depreciation of your slave property, since there's always more of that rabble out there....

    150:

    It's not you, Charlie, it is modern SF that is at fault.

    From about 1880 to about 1940 all the great, creative, imaginative, never before told stories were written. Even HG Wells wrote stories that were creative, imaginative, and have never been matched since. Kids like Asimov and Heinlein grew up reading those stories and riffing off them. The writers that followed them, riffed off of those riffs, until everything collapsed in the 90s.

    In the 90s, I would go every Saturday to the local Indy bookstore. I would buy six books each week. Every quarter there would be enough to fill a hand basket right there(20 or 30 books). The books would fly off the shelves into my hands, not a dud among them. Then about 1998 everything collapsed and the books on the shelf were rind. (I look at it as sweet watermelon, with only the rind left after 98.)

    For ten years I would only find three or four books every quarter, and they were all British reprints. American authors worth reading vanished from the shelves. It wasn't until 2005 that American books started to appear again that were worth reading. I went from buying over 400 books a year to maybe a dozen a year, since 2005 climbing slowly to numbers now below thirty a year.

    Because of Amazon, I spent the past ten years finding all of the books that were pre-1998 that I had missed. I've bought the complete work of authors that were not on the local shelves at the time. I've filled whole storage boxes with mass market paperbacks by single authors.

    I still love the books I own, pre-98. I read the stuff that I read as a kid and they still rip me to shreds, the new stuff that I've sampled is all rind, no sweet meat.

    The industry today is held hostage by shrill Fandom and clueless Space Cadets. Authors are writing based on the blog postings of those Space Cadets knowing that it will sell. All feeding back in a toxic feedback loop -- bad feeding back into bad.

    Only David Brin has been able to take the incoherent babbling of Space Cadets and turn it into coherent narrative. Each of his books are astonishing. I will read a book like Existence and say, "You can't do that", yet he does!

    What we have to work with now is a vast language of Imagination from a century ago to build stories from. There is nothing new. People don't want to read new. They want their beloved stories retold again and again, with different players telling the old familiar tales.

    We saw what happened in the New Wave SF when writers tried for "new and unique" only to produce incoherent babble, in some language that we still do not understand.

    So it's not you, Charlie, it is modern SF -- authors trapped in the echo chamber of babbling Space Cadets that is at fault.

    Take the language of Imagination, and run. Don't stop, run.

    151:

    Gift economics .. under attack by a market economics

    Once you see that it's quite scary. There's so much outright "but that's stupid, they're not giving you anything back (right now)" and similar propaganda. To many of the speakers it's just "stating the obvious" or a genuine expression of incomprehension, but there's always a judgement involved as well. Class empire stuff "I don't understand this, therefore it is stupid and not worth understanding".

    Jacinta Arden just spent five days at Waitangi, partly to demonstrate that she does understand the importance of the gift economy. Some people are objecting that the other party paid more money in reparations and that's more important.

    But... we can have both. Which is another thing that's over-emphasised in our current social system: ranking, and specifically the whole "winning is everything, second might as well not exist". I wonder why monopolists might want to convince us that that is true?

    152:

    Several more things, from multiple threads.

    Tolkien: there was trade. Remember Sauruman importing pipeweed?

    And, actually, I think a more perfect analogy of The Shire is the Pennsylvania Dutch, whose farms I've read are amazingly productive.

    Also, Tolkien built his world straight from not just medieval, but dark age myth. And, since you're mostly hearing from nobility, you barely notice the serfs, and they're not important, so why write much about them? (Damn right us peasants are revolting!)

    Cardboard characters, yeah. Too many. My late wife and I really disliked them. Hell, in one novel we were working on, we had developed most of the life story of a minor character, who only appears in a couple of scenes. The result is that's it's a world lived in by real people, not straw puppets.

    Weber: by the sixth book in the Honorverse, she, and all the follow-on characters, were Mary Sues. And I got really annoyed at his anti-French Revolution hobbyhorse, and they were all Bad Guys (see above, about cardboard characters). And, as an heir of the first completely successful democratic revolutions, I do not see a stellar empire based on feudal nobility....

    Finally, what my late wife and were working on, and I am now working on, was NOT MILITARY SF. Dammit, I want sensawonda, not stupid Battles In Spaaaaaace.

    153:

    I agree - I see all kinds of people expressing some variant on "let's get rid of the police" and it always comes over as hopelessly naive. However utopian and lacking in motives for crime your society may be, there will still be a few people who are just plain cunts, because that's how humans are. So there is still a need for police to defend people against them. And the reasons why people want to get rid of the police very often turn out to be akin to "shooting the messenger", in that the problems they are trying to solve arise from the way the police are overseen or the laws they have to enforce, not the existence of the police themselves.

    yeah, I don't think you are really getting what activists are asking for when they say "abolish the police"

    It isn't some utopian/Demolition Man fantasy where no one harms anyone.

    It is wanting a radical restructuring of society to the point of the role of police as presently utilized is erased. For most of it, it is realizing the roots of crime and addressing those, so that you don't need someone to police anything because it doesn't happen in the first place, changing the way the remainder is viewed (rehabilitation, rather than punishment), and completely jettisoning the actual existing police's #1 job of "enforce the existing hierarchy"

    154:
    The industry today is held hostage by shrill Fandom and clueless Space Cadets. Authors are writing based on the blog postings of those Space Cadets knowing that it will sell. All feeding back in a toxic feedback loop -- bad feeding back into bad. Only David Brin has been able to take the incoherent babbling of Space Cadets and turn it into coherent narrative. Each of his books are astonishing. I will read a book like Existence and say, "You can't do that", yet he does! What we have to work with now is a vast language of Imagination from a century ago to build stories from. There is nothing new. People don't want to read new. They want their beloved stories retold again and again, with different players telling the old familiar tales.

    This.

    Much more eloquently expressed than I'd have put it, but this. The publishers publish what sells, and readers want the same old, same old, but different!

    155:

    I also find I read less SF these days, but not because of problems of worldbuilding.

    Douglas Adams once said that he had given up litfic because there was nothing new to read about.

    I read SF mostly to be immersed in a "sense of wonder". I prefer "hard-SF" as I don't like things that happen without reasons. A fully fractal complete world isn't necessary, but a good story that requires the technology/world is, so no westerns with space costumes.

    But the rapid pace of science and technology development, better access to journal papers and a flowering of books on scitech means that I can get my fix of "sense of wonder" without the attached story. Follow a technology like CRISPR over a few years and you get a lot of "what if situations?" that lead the imagination.

    Which means for me that SF stories need to be better written from a story POV, and that story had better be worth my time if the world wrapped around it is barely keeping up with real-world scitech developments.

    156:

    People don't want to read new. People are... funny. (Tim Minchin)

    But are the complaints about scifi in this post really about scifi these days, or just plainly about bad books? Lazy worldbuilding and unrealistic tropes also exist in other genres that play in the real world, where there is really no excuse (police procedurals, action, romance, ...) I'd say there are certainly still very good scifi books being published, just not very many. And maybe it's because the sort of world-building and level of detail that makes what we think of as a great book is probably a lot of very hard work, that not all authors are prepared to do. Unfortunately I'm almost through the entire back catalog of the few authors that I consistently like, so I need to start finding new stuff... It's not just about books though - the same could be said about music (I mostly listen to stuff that was recorded before I was born, and maybe 2-3 "new" artists that are still recording), and movies. Some part of this feeling that the new stuff all sucks is also due to survivor bias - for every great classic there is metric tons of forgotten crap. But maybe times have changed, and great new stuff is much rarer these days. If that is so, I would to some extent blame the herd mentality and risk aversity of investors (publishers/studios/...) - money is thrown at things that appear similar enough to things that have recently worked well, be it the 10th sequel of superhero movie, the 1000th autotuned variety of pop, or whatever teen-angsty dystopia that hits the mood of the year. Or in tech, any startup that claims to Deep-Learn the Blockchain of Social IoT... What is strange though is that novel concepts and stories often tend to do quite well (maybe not quite as well as the big hits, but certainly profitable), and yet investors are still often hesitant to back new, creative things off the mainstream (see the botched release of the Annihilation movie recently, despite the success of Arrival and Ex Machina). At least with books, authors without backers have options these days to get their book out anyway, and some have success via this route (like Howie and Weir).

    157:

    I also like good worldbuilding, but it's risky. I get the impression that 90% of most audiences just doesn't care, and the remaining 10% is very hard to please.

    GRRM is generally considered to be very good at worldbuilding. Even so, I find it hard to read his stuff without asking questions like "Why doesn't the king (pick one) just rob the Iron Bank" and "Why don't they seem to be concerned that they aren't going to have another harvest for years? They're all going to starve, aren't they?"

    Re: Whitroth@136 - Capitalism is inherently a greedy algorithm. It's way worse than you think. Evolution is inherently a greedy algorithm. We've been very lucky to live at a time when the carrying capacity of this planet was expanding (mostly due to fossil-fuel based technology), but we're reaching the limit of available resources. This golden age will soon end, and will not come again.

    158:

    As someone who used to read his work fairly carefully, I have my doubts, both due to content issues, and because he's had a long time to regain control of his authorial "voice," and that hasn't happened. (I also suspect he's tired of the Honorverse, and that clearly shows.*)

    I suspect that Dragon has added to his difficulties, but not created them - I know I would have tremendous troubles going to a dictation model for everything I write!

    • There is something to be said for setting up your series with a clearly defined set of bail-out points, which you can use as needed! (This ignores certain commercial realities, of course, but take two "It's fine to bail after Bob kills Azathoths" and call me in the morning.)
    159:

    BTW, I'm still having fun with the series, but if you feel like you're chained to the oar I'm sure I'll enjoy whatever you write instead!

    160:

    "realizing the roots of crime and addressing those, so that you don't need someone to police anything because it doesn't happen in the first place"

    Re-read the bit you quoted. It is exactly that which I consider to be hopelessly naive.

    161:

    Weber: by the sixth book in the Honorverse, she, and all the follow-on characters, were Mary Sues. And I got really annoyed at his anti-French Revolution hobbyhorse, and they were all Bad Guys (see above, about cardboard characters). And, as an heir of the first completely successful democratic revolutions, I do not see a stellar empire based on feudal nobility....

    I brought Weber up (specifically Honor of the Queen) because it's a great book with average world-building... I don't think he's really "blaming the French" as much as using Haven as a metaphor for what he doesn't like about the "damn American Liberals." I brought it up because it ties strongly into the question of "What makes a readable book?" An author who's excellent at one thing, and at least average in all the rest. And is modern publishing letting more crap get into the bookstores - someone who got a D- in "plot" - than it used to? Didn't really want (Weber) to have the (Weber) rest of the conversation (Weber.)

    Finally, what my late wife and were working on, and I am now working on, was NOT MILITARY SF. Dammit, I want sensawonda, not stupid Battles In Spaaaaaace.

    The annoying thing about the Baen model's current pre-eminence is that you can actually have both. Forty years later the best science-fiction battle scene ever is still Brennan vs. the Protectors toward the end of Niven's original Protector. Lots of sensawunda, lots of fight. (He's also one of two authors I can think of who's really gotten "smarter than a human" right. The other is OGH.)

    162:

    From what you write I suspect you’d enjoy the work of (sometime contributed here) Joan Slonczewski. I’d recommend starting with “Door Into Ocean.”

    163:

    Bad books. Yeah. What's going on in the publishing houses? I keep seeing stuff that any good editor should have noticed, even in the books of high-midlist authors from better houses... throw the book across the room stuff! I happen to notice plot inconsistencies, OGH notices worldbuilding issues, someone above complained about Mary Sues; both of these should be non-starters!

    164:

    “taking a prevalent trope and then either turning it on it's head, or having it run straight into the band saw.” Didn’t someone do that with “Orphan girl discovers she’s a princess?”

    165:

    "I read the stuff that I read as a kid and they still rip me to shreds, the new stuff that I've sampled is all rind, no sweet meat."

    But how much of that is just the childhood-experience thing? I enjoyed HG Wells as a kid; the internet has enabled me to read a lot more of his stuff that I never saw as a kid, but it's still the ones that I did read as a kid that I have the most vivid and moving memories of. Same with much of Kipling (except Jungle Book and Just So which I never liked much). I find that I feel the same about books in general, but the point about these instances is that the comparison is between books by the same author, which tends to indicate that it's me rather than the books.

    166:

    It could be argued that the TV Tropes website ought to have a "Revert mind state" function for use after you've been reading it. It starts off with an addictive repetition of "yeah, I've noticed that... yeah, funny that, isn't it... gah, I hate the way they always do that..." etc. which draws you ever deeper into it, until before you realise it you're not empathising over things you've noticed so much as learning about new things that you hadn't noticed, and squirrelling them away in the back of your mind to return to your consciousness in the form of nit-picking the next time you read something. Or if you're a writer, to tempt you into producing something that reads like the Exim configuration language. Such knowledge certainly has its uses, but it's dangerous and it's difficult to switch it off.

    167:

    squirrelling them away in the back of your mind to return to your consciousness in the form of nit-picking the next time you read something

    Part of doing anything well, though, is learning to turn off the critical function. Perhaps more obvious in theatre, where people regularly go from shredding and being shredded in rehearsal to watching a performance for pleasure later in the day.

    It took me a wee while to be able to watch really amateur stuff again, because almost by definition they do everything badly. The switch from spending most of a day trying to get the darn lighting perfectly even across the stage to "ooh, look, some lights are pointing at the stage" is a bit of a jump.

    168:

    What do you -- everyone here, not just allynh, -- think about Alastair Reynolds' worldbuilding? Particularly his "Inhibitors" series?

    169:

    I threw his last book across the room. The climactic scene was based on "there's no way our super-duper high-powered starship can contrive to miss that planet even though we're a million miles away."

    His world-building is OK, but his characters aren't very good (he is slowly getting better.) I've never reread any of his books, which speaks for itself.

    170:

    Which book is that?

    171:

    Also, I read your quotes phrase several times, and I have no idea what it means.

    172:

    "Tolkien: there was trade. Remember Sauruman importing pipeweed?"

    I think Tolkien's fame/popularity has caused some people to become overcritical and lose their datum, and this has spread to become something of a genre-specific hazard.

    There are innumerable stories with English pre-mechanisation agricultural settings of the kind the Shire is based on, some written at the time and some as historical fiction. Social stratification in the case of the contemporary ones, and simple passage of time for the modern ones, means there is very little effective difference between how unfamiliar actually living in that kind of society would be for the reader and how unfamiliar living in the Shire would be. But you do not find treatises on 19th-century agricultural economics and trade inserted into the narrative to tell the reader how it all works. You just get occasional offhand mentions of the farmers going to market or good vs. bad crop years or how you can't get good baccy these days because that rich ponce in Birmingham is buying it all, as part of the background colour, while the main information content is all about what's actually happening in the story, ie. the important stuff. The author concentrates on the foreground, and paints the background of the story in kind of the same way as Turner does a painting, in a kind of psychedelic blur with just a few hard details scattered around, leaving it up to the reader to fill in as much of the background detail as they feel like based on the expectations raised by the broad picture they are given.

    This is what Tolkien has done - he paints a picture sufficiently suggestive of bucolic England/Saxon England/Egypt that the reader whose mind wanders to "well how did they do X then?" is naturally inclined to answer it by reference to how they did X in those real societies, and arrive at a reasonable answer. At least, that's the idea. Some people don't get it. He didn't have Charlie's advantage of being able to remind people that the New American Commonwealth is based on the Iranian revolution and not the Soviet (which I didn't get).

    The importance of worldbuilding is not to make your story all about how you worked it out, but to make the above process work without inadvertently leaving punji traps for the reader all over the place. It takes the same place as historical research for a story with a real-world setting. But it is a stronger test of the writer's gumption because it's a lot more straightforward to look stuff up in the library than it is to make the whole caboodle up yourself and keep it consistent.

    173:

    I think it was called Posidon's Wake.

    My phrase in quotes has to do with a plot point. The characters are driving around in a really special, amazingly high-powered space ship. And they somehow can't avoid going into orbit around this planet, which they are a million miles away from, because of reasons, all of which come down to "the author wanted it this way," and none of which relate to the actual physics of a spacecraft which can travel at 3 Gs more-or-less continuously, and thrust at much higher velocities when it is required. The ship only has to deviate from it's course by perhaps 10,000 miles over the course of a million miles, but it can't. Because the characters need to be on the planet. And stuff.

    Hours become parsecs. Hard SF becomes twaddle. Brain stops. Book gets launched.

    174:
    “taking a prevalent trope and then either turning it on it's head, or having it run straight into the band saw.” Didn’t someone do that with “Orphan girl discovers she’s a princess?”

    Touché! That reminds me, I've got a book or two I should be reading.

    175:

    Thanks Robert! And with that I'm off to the library website to place a hold.

    I read the summary now and it sounds interesting. I also know though I read the backmatter in my teens/early 20's and was totally unimpressed. Amazing how 30 odd years of life experience changes a person...

    176:

    I see. I never read "Poseidon's Wake" because I was not terribly impressed by the previous book, "On the Steel Breeze".

    That's part of the reason I asked specifically about the Inhibitors universe, which is much more developed than "Poseidon's Children" universe.

    177:
    What do you -- everyone here, not just allynh, -- think about Alastair Reynolds' worldbuilding? Particularly his "Inhibitors" series?

    I liked Revelation Space, Chasm City, The Prefect and the short fiction set in that universe. Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap left me cold. Why? In the ones I liked, he had interesting concepts and presented them well enough to make me overlook the space magic. He also builds interesting societies. And he does it just well enough that it's best done in small doses.

    The ones I didn't like, well, he began to get boring.

    Among the others I liked: Pushing Ice (mad brilliant ideas, decent characterization). Anything involving the Merlin setting.

    Ones I didn't: Terminal World, Blue Remembered Earth, Revenger, The Medusa Chronicles.

    Don't get me wrong - I'll at least try anything Reynolds writes, but I'm kind of choosy about what of his stuff I'll buy.

    178:

    The conceit behind Lord of the Rings is that it is the secret, lost history of our own world and actually takes place in the distant past of Earth. Therefore one would expect Middle-Earth's northern hemisphere, OUR northern hemisphere, to have the same prevailing winds once the world was englobed at the end of the Second Age.

    179:

    ilya187 @167 said: What do you -- everyone here, not just allynh, -- think about Alastair Reynolds' worldbuilding? Particularly his "Inhibitors" series?

    I agree with Bravo Lima Poppa 3 @176. Reynolds is a mix of readable and writing to the echo chamber, yet I will buy all his stuff.

    I love the concept of the Inhibitors. They are completely twisted entities, not realizing that they are solving the wrong problem. His story 'Diamond Dogs' is archetypal, and deeply disturbing.

    I haven't finished the trilogy starting with 'Blue Remembered Earth' and 'On the Steel Breeze'. I have 'Poseidon's Wake', but haven't read it since it came out. That trilogy is an example of writing to the echo chamber.

    180:

    Rome was around 250 million at its height

    Some of the barbarism migrations were in the millions more then likely

    181:

    Sorry I remembered that wrong , was more likely between 70-100 million

    182:

    Charlie, I was thinking about your original post today, and it occurred to me that the issues of world-building were very deeply tied to the issue of what kind of narrative conflict someone is writing about. Just to refresh:

    Man/Woman vs. Self Man/Woman vs. Man/Woman Man/Woman vs. Society Man/Woman vs. Nature Man/Woman vs. Fate/Good Man/Woman vs. The Supernatural Man/Woman vs. Technology

    Each one demands a different kind of worldbuilding, and each one demands a different level of worldbuilding. Honor of the Queen survives as a readable book because the main narrative conflict is Man/Woman vs. Man/Woman, which does not require intricate worldbuilding. If Honor of the Queen was a book about vs. Nature or vs. Society the level of worldbuilding wouldn't be sufficient to make the book readable.

    Accelerando was narrative of Man. vs. Technology, and the worldbuilding (or maybe the machine-building) had to be very, very tight for the story to succeed. If Manfred didn't have a believable technology to react to, the story would have died very quickly.

    On the gripping hand... Man/Woman vs. Self? vs. God/Fate? How much worldbuilding do you need? Or can you do without worldbuilding entirely and construct a symbol system which the protagonist must navigate to win through in the end. (Some of Zelazny's books work this way, particularly Creatures of Light and Darkness and The Chronicles of Amber.)

    And for really, really brilliant worldbuilding... Varley anyone? The sequel to Golden Globe is coming out this year!

    183:

    You should explain the difference between "Science Fiction" that you write, and "Alternate History" that Harry Turtledove writes. They are both World Building, I can tell the difference, but I cannot quantize it. All I really know is that I no longer read Turtledove, I am tired of stories of endless variations on WWII.

    184:

    I tend to be bothered by linguistic slips.

    In S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire, there's a scene where an engineer is building a trebuchet to repel the attack of the bad guys. He discusses it with his helpers, and one of them asks, "Tree bucket?" Now, that might make sense if the word were written down, say on a blueprint, but there's no suggestion of this; the engineer is giving spoken orders. It would have made more sense if the aide had asked, "Tray booshay?" and the engineer had spelled it out.

    It seems to me that Stirling wanted to be able to hint to the reader how to pronounce the word, looked at the sentence on his computer, and imagined someone trying to sound it out (without knowing its French origin)—and didn't think of what had gone before as spoken dialogue. And then the copy editor didn't catch the slip! That sort of thing bothers me. I still can read Stirling with pleasure, but slips like that hold me up.

    185:

    Ageing and appearance of materials in a movie or TV show is different to ageing and weathering in models that are seen in reality and in different lighting circumstances. Movies and TV shows cheat a lot. One example I've actually seen being done is wood panelling and carving -- a lot of the stuff on TV is made from balsa wood and then it's stained to look like oak or whatever, aged the same way but it's a lot easier to carve balsa wood than it is to carve oak.

    186:

    I think the spaceship dogfight is usually done far closer to naval-in-the-water battles, than even WW1 fighter planes...

    You can get kinematic action even with WW2 speeds, as all the aiming is done manually and planes have to be identified by sight, but it would require a certain level of restraint - the plane is flying high up in the air, spots an enemy below, manoeuvrers to intercept, rolls upside down and pitches around, speeding up to nearly twice the normal flying speed... and all that leading up to a second or two of firing, all while in the movies the shooting lasts for minutes.

    187:

    Maybe he was trying to hint to the reader how the engineer pronounced the word. He might have learnt the word from books and never used it in conversation, or he might have been taught it wrong (I'm pretty sure "racemic" isn't pronounced "race mick" but that's what we were taught), or he might just have a Colonesque approach to pronouncing foreign words. Or he might have a fixation that the word really is that (I know someone who thinks a vehicle for transporting occupied coffins is a "hurst", and if you say "hearse" to him he looks puzzled for a bit and then says "...do you mean a hurst?"). Maybe there's some other pronunciation-related morsel elsewhere in the book that you won't get unless you realise the engineer mispronounces foreign words, or it's a clue as to some aspect of his background or habits.

    Or maybe any of the above possibilities apply to Stirling himself :)

    188:

    Model railways use just the same kind of cheating. Almost nothing is the material it "should" be, both for balsa-vs-oak-type practicality reasons and because the "right" material often looks wrong in a scale model because it still has its unscaled texture. You just use whatever's easiest to make look right; and you have some additional freedoms, such as structural strength often being something you just don't need to think about whatever material you use.

    189:

    "and all that leading up to a second or two of firing, all while in the movies the shooting lasts for minutes."

    I consider that a good example of learnable sources of dissatisfaction. It used to make perfect sense - if aiming is difficult but you've got a machine gun, then just keep on squirting until you get the aim right. Then I learned that they carried bugger all ammo and had guns that would jam if you used them longer than not very long, and now it makes me grind my teeth.

    190:

    In S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire, there's a scene where an engineer is building a trebuchet to repel the attack of the bad guys. He discusses it with his helpers, and one of them asks, "Tree bucket?" Now, that might make sense if the word were written down, say on a blueprint, but there's no suggestion of this; the engineer is giving spoken orders. It would have made more sense if the aide had asked, "Tray booshay?" and the engineer had spelled it out.

    I get annoyed by this, sometimes, but not always.

    I learned English mostly by reading, not listening to it. I still find it easier to write than speak. This has the effect of being able to spell many words correctly, but not pronounce them correctly. In many cases I have read a word many, many times, but never heard it spoken, so it's difficult to know the sounds for it. I still think there could be a culture which had encountered a trebuchet only in writing and pronounced it "wrong".

    We get less of this in Finnish, because our writing is closer to the spoken language. This prohibits some forms of puns, though.

    I think the schools in the English-speaking world could do well by teaching the international phonetic alphabet. It'd make easier to communicate how to pronounce the words - though I have understood that how you speak is somewhat of a bigger matter in Britain than in for example Finland.

    191:

    There's ana awful lot of strong hints concerning climate change & possibly-associated disease spreads doing it in. [ And, very likely also being a driving force for those "barbarian Hordes" - who were themseleves refugees of a sort. ] - "two years of dry fog" comes to mind from somewhere ... but it's all very poorly documented. Back to Brian Fagan & The Long Summer & similar works. More information welcomed on this sub-thread, please?

    192:

    U K le G She didn't call her masterly collection of SF criticism "The Language of the Night" for nothing. AIUI, there was a very recent collection of hers out in the past year, that I must get, if only for completion .... Come to that, sit down & re-read much of the older stuff .....

    193:

    Is this: "Getting rid of the police" meme a particularly US thing? Given what we all know (NOW) about the local-politicisation of US policing, their absurd & scary powers & the complete lack of what we call "Peelian Principles" ... as opposed to what we are supposed to have "over here". Please note the "supposed" - plenty of police here overstep the mark, & sometimes get away with it, but at least our supposed guidelines are different to those pertaining in the US, where the "cops" are much more a para-military organisation. [ We tried that once, & it was an utter disaster - police/milita is a REALLY BAD idea ]

    194:

    Is this: "Getting rid of the police" meme a particularly US thing?

    Not really, it's an anarchist and utopian thing, see for example many of Ursala Le Guin's works. The libertarians kind of kept it, kind of worship the police, but it's in some ways one of the tensions between the utopian libertarians "every man a strong and manly man who stands alone" and the slightly saner libertarians "a police force to enforce property rights" (because they know deep down that feudalism involves a certain amount of risk for the propertied class).

    195:

    English-speaking world could do well by teaching the international phonetic alphabet.

    IIRC significant parts of the spelling difference between English and American result from an attempt at spelling reform. Given how well that went you might have more luck suggesting Esperanto. That would solve a whole bunch of problems, at the cost of reducing the opportunities for translators to smooth over difficulties.

    196:

    I don't think the spelling differences are the biggest problem.

    Now that I think of that IPA idea, it still would have problems generally: English is not a language with a unified pronunciation. While this is probably obvious to native speakers, Finnish is a much smaller language (with its variation) and mostly everybody agrees on the "common Finnish language". We have dialects and accents, yes, but the "official Finnish" is pretty much the same everywhere. Especially pronunciation varies little.

    This is why I think I have trouble remembering that English has a lot more variation on even pronunciation in addition to spelling, and not one of these could be considered the correct one.

    197:

    Police, sorry, but I want someone trained with authority to deal with the violent drunk, or the guys attacking the woman.

    There are, and have been, many societies without a police force. Police are a thing of our time in history. Fairly recent history, at that.

    To give some trivial examples:

    The Culture doesn't have a police force.

    The Shire doesn't have a police force.

    It's pretty trivial to imagine a panopticon technological state in which violent crime is always caught and therapy imposed upon the aggressor. With guaranteed post-facto approval of the therapy by the aggressor, and minimal recidivism (though mental acuity may decline post-therapy). I really don't think Bujold's Beta Colony has much of a police force, though they probably have mental health nurses with stunners. (Beta Colony: so utopian, except when it isn't)

    198:

    Didn't the Shire have the "Shirriffs" ... Who were very much a low-level Dixon of Dock Green care in the community loose organisation ... Until Saruman arrived & promptly turned them into a militia ......

    [ To the point where already existing Shirriff's who wanted nothing to do with the new organisation were "Not allowed" to resign - discussion in "The Scouring of the Shire", IIRC. It's been pointed out that Saruman's putsch in The Shire was a classic fascist take-over, with what little governmental forms existed hugely amplified & mass threats instituted, a bit at a time. ]

    199:

    Well, at that rate I'm fairly certain that you've just said "The North American Great Lakes and Mississippi-Missouri river complex can't exist because Rocky Mountains" not once but twice.

    200:

    There is something to be said for setting up your series with a clearly defined set of bail-out points, which you can use as needed!

    It's really hard to kill off a series that covers your day-to-day living expenses and has stealthily rendered you unemployable in any conventional job.

    Having said that, it's a bad idea to force a series to continue past its natural lifespan.

    But there are a couple of options for both beginnings and ends. Beginnings: one option is to include new entrypoints every few books, so that new readers can start with book n without having to read books 1 .. n-1 first. (The Laundry Files does this in "The Rhesus Chart" and "The Nightmare Stacks" — and maybe will again in book 10, when it comes to me. The Merchant Princes does this in "Empire Games" — same universe, many retained protagonists, new series.)

    Endings: you can bring the series to a natural climax. This happens just about every time in book 3 of a trilogy — it's a lot harder to handle story arcs that cover more and more books, though, because the pay-off for a million word build-up has got to be big. "Empire Games" can get away with a regular trilogy-sized payoff in book 3, as long as I don't plan to totally destroy the universe. But the Laundry Files is going to be a lot harder to pull off, because the build-up is so much bigger (and readers will murder me if I don't give them some sort of closure flourish for all the viewpoint characters but especially Bob). The natural climax for the Laundry Files is probably going to be a 2-3 book story arc at the end of which the universe is no longer the same. But there's no prospect of the Laundry Files continuing much beyond 11-12 books unless I start writing standalone side-quest novels (e.g. same universe but set during the second world war, or the late Victorian period, or ...).

    As an alternative, you can close off existing plot threads but not nuke the entire setting: instead leave just enough intact to write subsequent stand-alone novels or follow-on series. That's likely the fate of the Merchant Princes setting. "Invisible Sun" is the end of the "Empire Games" trilogy and there are no definite follow-on plans ... but there could easily be a stand-alone near-future SF novel in that setting, say circa 2040-2060. I just don't know yet.

    What I think is generally a mistake is the Jim Butcher/Dresden Files error of allowing plot strands to recomplicate for ten books or so, then announcing you've designed a giant 17-18 book story arc that resolves everything ... and getting distracted by other projects, thereby annoying the core readers by denying them closure. Much better to periodically massacre a bunch of characters and trash secondary plot threads to keep things from getting too complicated. (Anyone notice me doing that, in "The Rhesus Chart", "The Delirium Brief", and "The Trade of Queens"? No? Heh.)

    201:

    The sequel to Golden Globe is coming out this year!

    Thank you for reminding me! I don't preorder many books six months out at full price, but this one's been on my buy-on-sight list since roughly 2005.

    In fact, the reason Glasshouse got written was that I was bored waiting for Irontown Blues and Varley seemed to have abandoned his eight worlds setting in favour of Mammoths in Spaaace or (worse, from my point of view) sub-Heinleinian Libertarians on Mars.

    202:

    I learned English mostly by reading, not listening to it. I still find it easier to write than speak. This has the effect of being able to spell many words correctly, but not pronounce them correctly. In many cases I have read a word many, many times, but never heard it spoken, so it's difficult to know the sounds for it. I still think there could be a culture which had encountered a trebuchet only in writing and pronounced it "wrong".

    That would apply to many or most native English speakers; trebuchet is not commonly used in speech. I commonly mispronounce some of the less common or more specialised words because I learnt them entirely from reading. Also, many French words have Anglicised pronounciation, not always in ways you might expect. The main implausibility with 'tree-bucket' is that prefixes like 'tre' (and 'tre' itself) normally have a short 'e'. And, according to the OED, trebuchet can be pronounced trebushet (with a short 'u') as well as the way described above.

    203:

    That would apply to many or most native English speakers; trebuchet is not commonly used in speech.

    Well, yeah, my English-speaking friends are probably quite biased and many of them probably have used the word 'trebuchet' in speech. It's probably not that common a word on average...

    204:

    Yes. It's a rare author that can keep a theme going for more than a trilogy of standard-level novels, and most can't do even that. As you know, it's possible to go on longer with different themes in a common 'world', but even that has its limits. I generally give up on long series, even when I am very fond of the first books - though you have kept me on board the Laundry so far :-) But, the world being what it is, there are enough people who will buy the next in a series, regardless, to make indefinite perpetuation profitable. It's not exactly a new dilemma :-)

    205:

    unless I start writing standalone side-quest novels (e.g. same universe but set during the second world war, or the late Victorian period, or ... Which is, apparently exactly what J K Rowling has just done with the "Potterverse" isn't it?

    206:

    As a non-native English speaker, I fully agree - pronouncing english words is mostly a guessing game. There's a nice poem summarising it perfectly, which you might already know:

    I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble but not you On hiccough, thorough, slough and through. Well done! And now you wish perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps?

    Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dead, is said like bed, not bead - for goodness' sake don't call it 'deed'! Watch out for meat and great and threat (they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

    A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, or broth in brother, And here is not a match for there, Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, And then there's doze and rose and lose - Just look them up - and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward And font and front and word and sword, And do and go and thwart and cart - Come, I've hardly made a start!

    A dreadful language? Man alive! I learned to speak it when I was five! And yet to write it, the more I sigh, I'll not learn how 'til the day I die.

    207:

    Which is, apparently exactly what J K Rowling has just done with the "Potterverse" isn't it?

    I wouldn't know: I took a dislike to the whole Harry Potter thing midway through book 3 and stuck my fingers in my ears thereafter. (It reminded me too much of everything I hated about school.)

    208:

    Police, sorry, but I want someone trained with authority to deal with the violent drunk, or the guys attacking the woman.

    There are, and have been, many societies without a police force. Police are a thing of our time in history. Fairly recent history, at that.

    Yes - policing requires an awful lot of assumptions.

    In traditional societies, everyone was responsible for their friend who got drunk. If it came to arbitration, the village elders would decide what happened. This doesn't necessarily lead to good decisions, of course - think of the many cases of revenge rape, torture or murder ordered by village elders in the more distant corners of India, some of which make it to the news.

    It became more complicated in feudal societies, when we needed constables/sheriffs to administer a country-wide system of laws to some degree. Essentially though they just replaced or added to the village-elder system, except that now there was a political element in decisions as well.

    And as towns got bigger, it became impractical to leave this to enthusiastic amateurs. The profession of thief-taker came about, except that again this was politicised, in the same way as the profession of executioner. The thief-taker didn't care whether the person they were sent to catch was guilty or not, only that they got the reward for catching them. The watchman as well was responsible for making sure the streets were quiet - which (as Pratchett has frequently pointed out) is not the same as enforcing laws.

    It wasn't until much later that the idea of an independent police force to impartially uphold the law really took hold, with Robert Peel. It needed the traction of a formalised system of laws, little enough power from an entrenched hierarchy used to absolute power, and a powerful, vocal and well-educated middle class.

    209:

    Much better to periodically massacre a bunch of characters and trash secondary plot threads to keep things from getting too complicated.

    I thought doing that in "Rhesus Chart" was your "Spooks" moment - the point where the audience realises the characters they've invested in are actually mortal and can die, perhaps for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ("Spooks" is probably the TV series which most famously did this, but Tad Williams made a habit of it in his books too.)

    210:

    I think you're not actually responding to the point I was making. It's not that I'm suggesting that an English speaker, encountering the written word "trebuchet," could not make the mistake of pronouncing it as "tree bucket"; I've mispronounced words myself, especially words of foreign etymology, and there are still words I've read many times but not actually looked up the pronunciation of. What I'm saying is that it's not plausible that an English speaker, HEARING the word "trebuchet" pronounced by someone familiar with the concept, would misinterpret the pronunciation (whether authentically French, with a uvular r and a rounded front vowel and so on, or the typical American English pronunciation) as "tree bucket." And Stirling seems to have mentally framed the situation as "person reading the word and mispronouncing it" even though his own narrative indicated that it was "person hearing the word for the first time and trying to repeat it."

    I could give other examples of linguistic infelicities; that's just one that comes to mind readily.

    211:

    One of the little details in the "fan-fic as criticism" I discussed above is that there is a party called the "Libertarian Realists.

    212:

    "Trebushet" sounds like a plausible UK pronunciation. But I don't think it's a likely US one. A comparable case would be "valet," which can have a t at the end in UK English, but is "vallay" in US English. And all the characters in that scene are Americans.

    213:

    The concept of the teenager and adolescence, and with it commodifiable youth culture and sub-culture didn't emerge until the 19th century.

    Prior to that, in most(?) cultures, there was just a transition from childhood, best seen and not heard, to adulthood, and the rights and responsibilities which come with it. It was assumed that a young adult would want to dress, act, speak etc. as any adult would. Of course there were rites of passage, paens to youth and an understanding that wildness, impulsiveness, etc needed to be managed, especially for young unmarried women, but the teenager wasn't a category of interest to marketers, or a source of identity as it is in late capitalism.

    See eg. Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945 by Jon Savage

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/14/society

    214:

    Not only Arthur Conan Doyle, but L. Frank Baum (in The Emerald City of Oz) and Hugh Lofting (in Dr. Doolittle in the Moon) tried to escape from popular series and were dragged back to them by reader and publisher demand.

    215:

    I don't suppose you know why he decided to go the "Mammoths in Space" and "Libertarians in Space" route. That's a big change for the guy who invented the Eight Worlds and the Gaia trilogy.

    Speaking of John Varley, someone made this amazing, 30-second flythrough of Titan, which is worth a look.

    216:

    A 'coupe' in America contains chickens and there is no "t" sound in the British English pronunciation of 'niche', and don't get me started on 'solder'.

    217:

    Winds can come from any direction. Winds from dry land are dry. Most of the moisture comes on winds from bodies of water. Therefore when a mountain range parallels a sea, it has a rain shadow.

    The Rockies do not parallel a sea. They are in the center of the continent, with the Great Plains to the east and the Great Basin to the west. The Great Plains are flat with Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. There is nothing to stop an arctic blizzard from blowing down to Texas, or a tropical thunderstorm rolling up from the Gulf to Tornado Alley. This is where the water comes from for the rivers and the Great Lakes.

    The Great Basin is in the rain shadow of both the Sierras and the Rockies. It's very dry. Weather-wise it is the American equivalent of Mordor.

    218:

    Whitroth: Police, sorry, but I want someone trained with authority to deal with the violent drunk, or the guys attacking the woman.

    Icehawk: There are, and have been, many societies without a police force. Police are a thing of our time in history. Fairly recent history, at that.

    I don't see these as contradictory statements. There

    The key issue is whether you would want to live in them. And I tend to agree with whitroth here — I'd rather have police than not. And I'd rather have them follow Greg's Peelian Principles, which our's are supposed to do but unfortunately they are steadily getting more Americanized.

    219:

    I too learnt much of my vocabulary from books as a kid, and mispronounced much of it, but I was also pretty lazy about looking up the definitions. Most of the time I'd get it from context, but occasionally I'd be very wrong.

    I alarmed and amused my parents when, aged 9, after a long day, I announced I was "completely emasculated."

    220:

    I don't suppose you know why he decided to go the "Mammoths in Space" and "Libertarians in Space" route. That's a big change for the guy who invented the Eight Worlds and the Gaia trilogy.

    That's easy!

    He wrote the first iteration of Eight Worlds stories from roughly 1972-1979. Then re-jigged his universe and wrote more from roughly 1980-1995, with a decade out for screenwriting (the film of "Air Raid" that surfaced as Millennium) and a totes different trilogy (the Gaea trilogy) on the side, heavily infused with his Hollywood cynicism.

    But after 25 years he just wasn't the same guy and he wanted to do different things. Much the same reason why GRRM isn't writing more sequels to "Dying of the Light" and "Tuf Voyaging" these days. Or why I'm not writing more Eschaton novels or continuing Accelerando — except I'm a lot younger/have only a 15-20 year career and some of my hobby horses remain fresh enough I can continue to work with them.

    221:

    Sorry, I disagree. I really like most of the New Wave. Gee, I think that even includes Zelazny (and I'm not thinking that much of Amber, other than the first three books, I'm thinking of Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness).

    Gibson, and WJW's worlds are certainly new, if dystopian.

    And "shrill fandom"? Gee, I guess you mean me, personally. I'm an active fan, in two clubs, do most US Worldcons and a three or four others every year. And I'm opinionated (oh, that's right, ALL fen are).

    And I'm certainly not calling for the 14th book of someone's trilogy. In fact, where's my 10 years of SF that's NOT specifically military sf? Here, I'm yelling, shrilly: MORE SF!!!!!

    Goddess, the Launch. I will be there, on US 1 in FL, when the US returns to flying humans again, instead of begging Russia to do it.

    222:

    Winds can come from any direction.

    Technically correct but actually misleading: look at the direction of the Earth's rotation and consider the effect of Coriolis effect and differential insolation on prevailing air circulation. Bear in mind that at the equator the Earth's surface (and the troposphere) are moving with an angular velocity of 1000 nautical miles/hour, and more or less stationary at the poles; and similarly at the equator you've got more solar radiation hitting the ground (and less being absorbed/scattered in the upper atmosphere) than at the poles.

    Upshot: there's a reason cyclones and hurricanes tend to track in one general direction, or why trade winds and jet streams blow ...

    223:

    I will note that the late David Hartwell, my previous editor at Tor in the US, once struck terror into my heart by musing that he wanted to see if he could make the Merchant Princes break his then-current record for the longest series he'd edited—the Recluse series by Lee Modesitt (then at 14 books). This was around the time I was burned out as fuck and struggling with book 5.

    224:

    It's not exactly greedy. It's more like work - y'know, it expands to fill all available time. Going over, for any period other than short, tends to fail, sometimes catastrophically. Example: the buffalo on the Great Plains, before white men with guns came: they'd been there for thousands of years, but hadn't expanded such that they turned the Great Plains to a desert, not did the Native Americans kill all of them, either.

    When I took a course in Fortran, lo, in the youth of the world, my instructor always had the class do one problem (which I know, since I worked there, also): simulate fleas on a dog. At what point do the fleas scratch the dog, at what point does the dog scratch the fleas, and at what point do they come to an uncomfortable equilibrium.

    On the other hand, I've mentioned before that by my estimate, the Earth has about seven times too many humans just now, based on early human and proto-human bands, and psychological space.

    On the other hand, capitalism: the thing I seriously hate the ultra-wealthy, and the GOP (their paid-for tools) is that they're trying to make people internalize the concept that if you can't monetize it, and it doesn't make you money, it's not worth wanting. So, friendship, and love, and community, and dreams, aren't worth anything, and you should give them up and buy my crap.

    Def: consumer: someone who doesn't work, is a huge mouth, with a wallet directly connected to someone's payment system.

    225:

    Rationalizing English, um, yeah... https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-the-english-language/

    Which I find odd, esp. since there seems to be debate over whether Twain actually wrote it, or whether it's incorrectly attributed to him....

    226:

    I just would have expected something from Varley that was on a similar level of creativity and brilliance as "Gaia" or "Eight Worlds," and the Mammoths and Space Libertarians felt like he was "writing down" if that makes any sense. (I won't mention the book where "all the _ __ due to a genetically altered bacteria down in the _" - there's no need to utterly humiliate the poor man!)

    What do ya do when the well runs dry? Or maybe he needed to pay some bills?

    227:

    I've mentioned my (and my late wife's) answer: do your trilogy, then jump to elsewhere in your universe - the original characters don't have to even be mentioned, but it's obvious that it's the same universe... and explore other parts of it with other people.

    Let's see, instantiate another instance of MyUniverse....

    228:

    Just out of curiosity, which set of books pays better, Laundry Files or Merchant Princes? (No pressure to answer if you'd prefer to keep the details private, it's very much a matter of trivial curiosity.)

    229:

    Sorry, Nojay, it's also for a car. I suggest you listen to the ancient Chuck Berry singing Coupe de Ville.

    230:

    friendship, and love, and community, and dreams, aren't worth anything

    Back in the 80s, at a party, I really pissed off a young MBA who was asserting that things were worth precisely what someone was willing to pay for them (with the corollary that if no one was willing to pay, they were worthless)*. Asked him how much he paid his wife for sex.

    Not very polite, and I didn't even have his excuse of too much alcohol, but I like to think I had a valid point :-)

    *Applied to protecting the commons (like clean air and water), this approach has a lot in common with the chap in a sharp suit who mutters "nice shop, pity if something were to 'happen to it").

    231:

    What do ya do when the well runs dry? Or maybe he needed to pay some bills?

    I read somewhere that Turtledove kept on with the endless WWII rewrites because he had daughters to put through college, and they were fast to write and reliable earners.

    232:

    I suppose he could have said "I buy my wife lots of things". To which you could have replied: "But how did you determine the price for each thing she does for you, besides the sex?".

    MBAs with brains understand that you don't apply business/economic logic to everything. The useful domain is limited.

    233:

    Winds can come from any direction.

    Of questionable relevance, but pretty neat, see

    https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/

    You can zoom and rotate the view to check out any location on the globe.

    234:

    I have some speculation about middle-aged male SF authors and side-effects of common medication for a common condition, but I'm going to keep it to myself. Let's just say: I have strong suspicions about Larry Niven and John Varley, know for a fact about John Brunner, and if I'm correct I dodged the bullet simply by knowing what the heck was happening to me and how to argue prescribing policies with doctors.

    235:

    That question is unanswerable (because reasons too long and tedious to get into, but including: one series jumped publisher, one series failed to launch in a major market until a reboot happened, one got translated into French but not German, one got translated into German but not French, and so on).

    236:

    "Why don't they seem to be concerned that they aren't going to have another harvest for years? They're all going to starve, aren't they?"

    My understanding is that in Westeros storing excess food for the Long Winter is such standard practice, it is rarely mentioned. An example where it is mentioned:

    Littlefinger: We have enough grain to feed the peasants for five years. If the winter lasts longer than that... we'll have fewer peasants.

    237:

    I have a very similar reaction, but mine is less "Why capitalism?" than "Why the Enlightenment". The Enlightenment was a very specific intellectual movement among particular cliques of Philadelphian and Parisian wig-wearers who were reasoning from premises that were specifically Christian and substantially Deist. I find it very odd to see their idea of human rights based in natural ethical law show up in culturally-remote contexts. If your characters don't believe that mankind was created but do believe that mankind was created equal, I tend to boggle (except in modern-day settings where it's a known historical legacy).

    That's not to say that characters should be baby-eating savages, just that culturally foreign characters should have foreign values that relate to their own setting. The Star Trek "blue states in space" approach doesn't work for me.

    The recent fantasy novel "The City and the Dungeon" did a pretty good job of worldbuilding by my lights; the culture felt like the creation of wildly unequal superhumans oriented toward a common cause (but don't get me started on the exchange rates).

    238:
    Even so, I find it hard to read his stuff without asking questions like "Why doesn't the king (pick one) just rob the Iron Bank"

    Same reason the Nazis never conquered Switzerland I should think.

    239:

    Grain doesn't store very well, it's not just vermin like weevils and mice but also fungus, sprouting and general rot from dampness. Turn it into alcohol and it'll last a lot longer of course (properly aged in sherry casks or the like...)

    Most food preservation techniques in the past before canning and freezing involved turning temporary surpluses into body fat. Westeros, at least the northern latitudes has the capability to freeze animal carcasses naturally for long-term storage but given the environment there's not a lot of (animal) carcasses to be had that far north considering the poor grazing.

    240:

    Regarding kings trying to rob Iron Bank: Think of the other unique institution in City of Braavos. No doubt Iron Bank has some special arrangement with the Faceless Men, for just such eventuality.

    241:

    Regarding kings trying to rob Iron Bank: Think of the other unique institution in City of Braavos. No doubt Iron Bank has some special arrangement with the Faceless Men, for just such eventuality.

    Well, also there was a real life organization that ran a multinational bank in analogous medieval Europe - the Knights Templar. That one king finally did basically rob the bank was so outside the norm and culturally shocking that "Friday the 13th" is still a cultural touchpoint for misfortune and horror 710 years later

    242:

    Or alcohol.

    It's also worth looking at what non-European groups did. My personal favorite is the Andes, where high, often dry mountains combined with a LOT of storehouses meant that they could store freeze-dried potatoes and llama jerky for years (I believe jerky was originally the Quechua charqui). This was a good thing, because localized crop failures were and are normal in the Andes, as is the necessity for long fallows between crops in many fields. The Inkan empire and their predecessors ran on a combination of good storage and good logistics: moving resources to people, people to resources, and storing any surplus they could get their hands on. Mind you, they were rapacious conquerors who were roundly hated by other groups (the real reason they fell: their rivals united with Pizarro, then got offed by the Spanish). However, the Inkans were pretty amazing at the logistics of keeping lots of people alive in a pretty unforgiving environment.

    That's something that should be used in fantasy more than it is. Obviously there's a white ethnocentric bias in SFF, but still: you can plunk down a huge mountain range in a Europoid fantasy setting and use the Inkan solution, with hard tack or bulgur instead of potatoes.

    Or you could follow the medieval Japanese model, and have the owners of the sake warehouses being the de facto banks, because that's how the rice surplus got stored...

    243:

    And at the time we get to see the Misty Mountains/Anduin/Mirkwood, the planet has been refreaked into more or less the standard-physics sphere plus distant sun configuration (the energy source for the sun isn't standard physics, but that's a minor detail), so weather patterns of the kind consequent upon that arrangement are what one would expect.

    It's also pretty clear that the original configuration was pretty much Discworld - definitely not standard physics, but magically curated in such a way that it behaves as if it was.

    I'm pretty sure it was one of your links that took me to an article making the point "Tolkien's geography is completely bent", with accompanying comment thread in which people pointed out that (a) his maps are not the Ordnance Survey, they're a pictorial equivalent of saying "North America goes Sea - Mountains - Desert - More mountains - Big river - Easily colonised bit - Sea"; and (b) for every feature selected by the article author as being something that can't possibly happen, you can point to an ordinary world map and say "oh yes it can". North-south mountain ranges with big rivers on the east side fed by tributaries rising on the mountains certainly do exist: Rockies/Mississippi for an instance where the sea is a long way away, Andes/Amazon for an instance where it's right there (and there's a great big forest, too).

    As for the climate of the Shire, it is spot on. A low-lying, undulating region of natural farming country, with a mountainous region to the west between it and the sea - that's Worcestershire and Wales, and it's really no surprise that it's a perfect fit.

    244:

    Techniques based on denying decay organisms an adequate supply of water are also important. As Heteromeles points out, up the Andes freeze-drying stuff works really well and AFAIK they're still doing it. Then there are the osmotic death techniques: adding craploads of salt (or sugar, if you can get it) to make it too concentrated for anything to survive. Alternative solutes include acetic acid or ethanol... or even caustic soda, if you're Scandinavian (blech). Hard tack is essentially the same principle but with no liquid at all.

    Another method is to keep decay organisms at bay by means of a functioning immune system fuelled by grass or other substance inedible to humans.

    Any society that has managed to get into blue water navigation has to know about these tricks - and stuff can go manky really fast at sea, especially in the tropics.

    245:

    In Britain that car is a koo-pay.

    246:

    whitroth @227 said: Let's see, instantiate another instance of MyUniverse....

    I've seen too many authors get trapped in linear thinking. They write a series that gets taller and taller, before it collapses under its own weight. Then they abandon a perfectly good universe that they think has been mined out, yet only a few stories have been told.

    That's like writing Gone With The Wind and thinking "that's it" for Civil War fiction. There are huge numbers of books set in and around the Civil War, and they will keep coming.

    • Think of all those books plotted out using timelines on a physical world-map, and you would see a vast mesh of Storylines crisscrossing the globe.

    What I've done is take the London Underground Map and use it as inspiration, a visual guide.

    • You have 270 stations and 11 lines. Think of that as 270 episodes/chapters and 11 Storylines.

    • Say you use ten episodes/chapters per book, that can generate 27 books for that Verse.

    By seeing that there is a continuum, not a single linear path, I know that there are more future stories to write. I am free to develop a Storyline, then go back and write those stories that intersect, to basically fill in that LU Map.

    • Each Verse, with its own set of physical rules and laws, has its own LU Map.

    I took the "continuum" concept even further by taking a line and using every "even" station for one Storyline, then every "odd" station for another Storyline, thus creating different Series that were overlapping parallel Storylines, with different characters.

    Then to further break linear thinking, those episodes/chapters may not represent linear time. I have jumped back in the timeline as I move down the Storyline.

    Then the LU Map cries out to have some Storylines have the "end" connect back to the "beginning" of the same line. (Think Paul J. McAuley's Confluence series.)

    It was a trivial matter to take a 3-by-2 foot jpg of the LU Map, set it up in Draw(LibreOffice) put a 50% white rectangle over the LU Map -- so the LU Map is a ghost below the work layer -- then start drawing Storylines and episodes/chapter text-boxes to lay everything out.

    Wiki - London Underground

    Wiki - Tube map

    Whoa! I need to go lie down now and take a nap for a bit. HA!

    247:

    Something for the Laundry's faculty break room (if they have one*): FAQ: Your New Cursed Instant Pot

    *if so, I really don't want to know what's in the fridge.

    248:

    Using IPA (no, not that stuff) (nor that stuff) to teach reading in schools did get tried, a bit. It got canned because it is too confusing to learn that and then have to re-learn everything in the standard alphabet, standard spelling, standard capitalisation etc. ("rug is a bær" -> "Rug is a bear".)

    IPA is confusing from an English point of view. If you don't know it, you'll get things more wrong than right, because the sounds you'd naturally guess the characters are supposed to represent are very different from the sounds they actually do represent.

    249:

    "Then the LU Map cries out to have some Storylines have the "end" connect back to the "beginning" of the same line."

    Have you come up with a storyline that connects the GN/GE Moorgate line with the W&C? :D

    250:

    BTW, unused stations are a "feature" not a "flaw".

    Look at Accelerando. It is nine episodes that would be scattered through those unused stations, making it a story-arc running through the main Storylines. Think about that. Accelerando is clearly not the main and only Storyline when seen in that context. HA!

    251:

    When I met Larry Niven in the early eighties he was obviously over fifty, by now he must be in his eighties (at least.) As for the others, I don't know what to say, except that you might send out a private letter. (If you do, make sure to include David Gerrold; we might finally see the end of the Chtorr novels!)

    The question of Niven's age brings forth some quite cynical speculation. "Nuf said, I think.

    252:

    Pigeon @249 said: Have you come up with a storyline that connects the GN/GE Moorgate line with the W&C?

    W&C seems to be Waterloo & City, which is a light green solid line, that only seems to connect two stations, Waterloo and Bank.

    GN/GE Moorgate line seems to be Great Northern.

    Wiki - Moorgate station

    I can't find Moorgate on the map I have, so I'm stumped.

    I definitely need that nap. HA!

    253:

    There is no more overt example of that than Cjerryh's Alliance Union universe. Most of the fundamemtal presimes are based on 'what if Edgware Road isn't needed between Paddington and Baker Street anymore'.

    254:

    "It's pretty trivial to imagine a panopticon technological state in which violent crime is always caught and therapy imposed upon the aggressor."

    You seem to be implying that that would be an alternative to having police. But it isn't at all - who does the catching and the imposing? The police. Because that's what people (or robots, or...) who do those things are. Certainly police in their present form are a fairly recent innovation. But police in the sense of "those who enforce the law" are a concept as old as that of law itself - of necessity, because law without enforcement is meaningless. It doesn't matter if they're not called "police", or if they perform other functions as well, or even if we're in a situation so sub-Dunbar that everyone participates in the function.

    When I say that I would prefer to live in a society that has police over one that does not, I am expressing essentially the same sentiment as "I want the teachers to stop the big boys hitting me". The alternative is a society where the thugs end up running the show, and I don't suppose anyone here wants that.

    Corrupt government transforming the police-called-police into thugs to help them run the show is a different problem. Responding to that with "get rid of the police" is attacking the symptoms rather than the cause; even if it somehow succeeded, you'd just end up with a set of thugs called something different. What you really need to get rid of is the corruption.

    255:

    The Enlightenment was a very specific intellectual movement among particular cliques of Philadelphian and Parisian wig-wearers

    You totally missed the Scottish enlightenment. Equally (if not more) important insofar as it's where we got thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, James Boswell, and numerous others. (As of 1707, Scotland had five universities to England's two, despite having a fraction the wealth and population of the bigger nation.) Also brought us a whole bunch of medical and scientific insights along the way. Can't really be considered part of the same religious culture as Philadelphia and Paris, however.

    256:

    Fair enough. I'll also give a pass to any setting culturally adjacent to 18th century Scotland.

    257:

    The Littlefinger quote specifically says "grain". Even baking it into hardtack will only get it to last a couple of years before bug infestation gets to it (see weevils) and quality hardtack is expensive to make -- it's a biscotti, baked twice preferably using charcoal. Baking it and then freezing it near the Wall's perpetual cold might work but that puts your food store at risk of the White Walkers and other beyond-the-Wall threats plus requiring something like a freight train line to move hundreds or even thousands of tonnes of food each day down to the more populous regions during a winter that lasts several years our time.

    Potatoes and other root vegetables might work as a preservable food source but the cold-store system would still need the transportation system I described above. Frankly they'd be better setting up big greenhouses heated by balefire to grow food during the wintertime.

    I don't recall GRRM making any mention of sea fishing, the usual fallback for high-latitude food sources including sea mammals like seals and whales. This sort of harvesting can be carried out during an extended winter in lower latitudes too. There might also be edible seaweeds and the like.

    258:

    What happens when you get past Barking?

    259:

    Sorry, that was not quite fair of me :) See this map - which includes the proposed but never built Lothbury extension:

    http://filehost.serveftp.net/things/gnwc.png

    It looks like one of these really obvious good ideas to revive the proposal in an extended form to meet the W&C at Bank, and run through services between Waterloo and the northern suburbs. In reality the tunnels are of different sizes, at different levels, and separated underground by the whole of Bank station, the vaults of the Bank of England, and the newly-constructed Crossrail tunnels (not on the map). So far from the mere few hundred feet of tunnelling it appears to be, you'd have to reconstruct the whole of one line and half the other and it'd be a lot easier just to build a whole new line for the whole distance. Which would be an effort totally disproportionate to any benefit gained.

    The joke is that the disparity between the apparent triviality and actual utter impracticality of the idea means that people keep suggesting it and other people get fed up with explaining to them why it won't work, so even mentioning it is a bit of a red rag in certain quarters.

    260:

    A LiveJournal group I belong to had a proposal to revise English spelling to be phonetic. Unfortunately, from my viewpoint, the proposal came from someone who had been taught UK English. I speak California English, which is a form of General American, and is rhotic. Phonetic spellings for standard UK English leave out the distinction between rhotic and nonrhotic vowels and therefore completely fail to represent "English" for me.

    Raise that to the Nth power and you have "phonetic spelling."

    261:

    Niven was born in 1938; he is not quite 80 yet.

    262:

    I recall only one mention of whaling in all of Song of Ice and Fire books, and the whaler was from Ibben -- an island north of Essos. But they cannot be all that rare because Tyrion mentions "an Ibbenese whaler" without confusing anybody.

    263:

    Pigeon @259, said: See this map - which includes the proposed but never built Lothbury extension:

    Huh, the map I'm looking at has different zigs and zags. Nice to see variations. Thanks...

    It is so easy to get wrapped up in all of the fun station names. The thing that I always have to remember, is that I'm repurposing the LU Map to use it for stories. Simply covering the existing stations with text-boxes and writing in episode names, so I don't see the names anymore.

    What made me think of using the LU Map was Roger von Oech, his book "A Whack on the Side of the Head". He talks about a medicine man creating hunting maps for his tribe. He would take a piece of leather, crumple it up, then spread it flat. He would tell the hunters to follow the lines looking for game. Since each map made that way was different, it encouraged them to look in places they had not gone before, thus find game in the unhunted areas.

    The nice thing about Draw, is that I can create a different layer for each Series, making them visible/invisible as needed. Thus I can look at one Storyline, or all of them together. I need to see if I can animate that view, so that I can see the stories evolve and change.

    264:

    Interesting thread and initial thesis by Charlie. I read a lot less these days, I am 51 and while I can’t claim to have read everything pre 90’s SFF, I certainly read a shedload. There was a time when I would search out books to infill my gaps, that time has passed. I can’t think of a classic SFF novel I missed that searching down and reading now that wouldn’t feel like an exercise in English literature. There is definitely a disconnect (unevenly distributed of course) within the genre, you can date it to the new wave, which is so charmingly dated now (the roof garden at the former Derry and Toms is finally shut down) or to Gibson and Sterling, in my opinion. There are contemporary novels written or nearly so when Neuromancer came out (revisit Circus World by Barry Longyear in 1981 that is basically set in the fifties). Nonetheless, I am reading less because the internet, but also because it is as our host notes unbelievably difficult to write SFF nowadays.

    Egan, first person who explored what it would be like to be a copy, and I like all his early stuff (he may not be the first person to explore any of the ideas in his early books but he does do if this then rather well, not a prose stylist sadly)

    Jim Butcher, yes I am little pissed off with the lack of a new book too.

    As far as our host goes, I will keep reading the laundryverse, too committed, but if Charlie follows through with the logical conclusions (can’t believe he won’t at this point) it will not be the most cheerful read, though sometimes hope comes in the most impossible situations The Miriam universe, need to purchase the redo of the original series, and then read the new ones, only going to happen when I next get laid off One knows bills must be paid, but hoping to see some one off novels at some point

    265:

    Yes! Usually we get prevailing winds. It's great! They bring moisture from the ocean and cool us off. But there are exceptions. When a high pressure zone develops in the hot, dry interior and turns a canyon into a flamethrower shooting a jet of fire at sixty miles an hour, burning everything in its path for over a mile, you tend to notice it.

    266:

    Sometimes context is the only guide to pronunciation - how about "wind" - as in "wind a clock" vs "the north wind".

    267:

    But police in the sense of "those who enforce the law" are a concept as old as that of law itself

    I won't bite. Because that definition's of "police" is just wrong.

    We have an arm of the govt that consists of professionals devoted to investigation of crimes, and apprehension of those who break the law and gathering of evidence so that they can be brought to trial.

    Many societies in history didn't really have that.

    "Enforcing the law" was mostly something neighbours did for each other, and nobles had the military to help them with it. Or do you think there were police in the Athenian democracy? And in medieval Iceland? If so, who do you think these "police" were?

    Oh, and don't confuse a judiciary with a police force. Though both are "those who enforce the law".

    I'm not arguing we should get rid of the police force. Our society implies - requires - a police force. My point is that some societies don't require such - which gets back to Charlie's point about SF world-building.

    268:

    UPNEY ( One stop past Barking ) If you go far enough - Upminster - or worse, the carriage sidings! In between you will pass through Upminster Bridge station, with its giant Swastika set into the floor-tiling [ Yes, really ]

    269:

    I wish GRRM WOULD write more "Tuf Voyagaing" stories. Complete with MORE CATS

    270:

    MBAs with brains THESE EXIST?

    271:

    Ah the "vanishing lines" problem, to do with ticketing, revenue abstraction & TfL/the TOC's being childish & greedy. Finsbury Park - Moorgate, formerly the "Great Northern & City Railway" was re-taken over by National Rail services a few years back & doesn't appear on the tube map, even though it's a deep-level main-line loading gauge line. Ditto the Thameslink line, runnning ( for central-London purposes ) between W Hampstead & Elephant & castle, via Kentish Town, Kings Cross St Pancras, Farringdon & Blackfriars ) - also doesn't show .... You need the "London Connections map, actually: HERE Now that shows everything

    272:

    Or completely irreligious culture, especially when one comes to David Hume, skeptic, agnostic if not atheist & all-round "Good Guy" One wonders how much of that was delayed reaction to the religious "fervour" & fanaticism that had bloodily swept Scotland only 50 years earlier ... (?)

    273:

    It's a permanently banned subject over at "London Reconnections" for instance ...... Apart from the annual Yule/Christmas quiz, where there's usually a question on either/or/both the W&C & the Post Office Railway!

    274:

    It'd be really interesting to get OGH, Ken MacLeod, and Elon Musk together for a discussion about Banks and The Culture.

    275:

    Para 1 - "Rug is a beer"? ;-) Oh, we're back to IPA again, aren't we?

    Para 2 - Very true indeed. Several year 1s at my school (self included) taught ourselves to read pre-school, then had to learn IPA, then had to learn to read properly again. (comment on inflexibility of teaching staff more than anything else)

    276:

    No, you can't do that. It definitely puts you in Knip, and I think leaves you Tunnelled as well, at least if you're North-bound.

    277:

    make sure to include David Gerrold; we might finally see the end of the Chtorr novels!

    Ahem: as of two years ago he'd written them and they were in the process of being edited. They'd expanded somewhat with time and depth, so there are quite a lot of words to come ...

    278:

    One wonders how much of that was delayed reaction to the religious "fervour" & fanaticism that had bloodily swept Scotland only 50 years earlier ... (?)

    Not even much of a delay — the last execution for the crime of atheism happened in 1704, if I remember correctly — and yes, it was a huge backlash against the theocracy, aspects of which persist to this day (Scotland is now majority atheist/no religion) despite the god-botherers fighting back (we still have restrictions on Sunday trading).

    279:

    It'd be really interesting to get OGH, Ken MacLeod, and Elon Musk together for a discussion about Banks and The Culture.

    Disagree. I think Musk is probably an SF fan, in that part of his time that isn't eaten up by live action Tony Stark roleplay. I suspect (based on a whole bunch of anecdotes about his business culture) that he's an obsessive, driven asshole with some damaging, unexamined political beliefs he mistakes for rules of nature. On the plus side, he's an asshole who worries about humanity's future: from where he was in 2001 when he exited Paypal, it'd have been utterly unexceptional for him to have turned into another boring silicon valley VC, investing in more addictive smartphone games instead of building electric vehicle infrastructure and rooftop solar panels and reuseable rockets.

    But I wouldn't expect any deep insights about what happens after capitalism from guy who sincerely believes in private enterprise colonizing Mars.

    280:

    Not only an SF fan, but a Banks Culture fan, as evidenced in the naming of the Space-X drone ships.

    (I now really appreciate why they are drone ships, having seen YouTube film of the two boosters doing synchronised landings this week. The twin sonic booms as they arrived was something I hadn't expected, assuming they were descending at a more leisurely rate.)

    281:

    The concept of 'police' is also not as definite originally as people think it was. There was a societal / cultural difference between England and Scotland, the latter seeing the job of the police as not just catching people accused of crimes but also concerned with the social good such as functioning lampposts, street cleaning and suchlike. Over time the functions of the police became more limited, but in the early 19th century they were much broader.

    282:

    We have an arm of the govt that consists of professionals devoted to investigation of crimes, and apprehension of those who break the law and gathering of evidence so that they can be brought to trial.

    I suspect the concept of "government" here is related to the reason why the world that libertarians live in is smaller than the one the rest of us live in, and why we generally look down at libertarians and libertarianism.

    283:

    Thomas Aikenhead was murdered in 1697 - at the insistence of the church - the politicians wanted to let him go, after giving him a suitably good scare ...... Last murder of a woman for witchcraft was 1727 - Janet Horne - admittedly in remote Dornoch - burnt alive.

    284:

    I think, Greg, that you have a slightly overly specific idea of what murder for even just these specific concepts would look like.

    285:

    Societies are always reacting to the excesses of their recent pasts. The Victorian obsession with respectability was a reaction to the French Revolution; the Victorians were very well aware of what happens when the upper classes lose the respect of the lower classes. Eventually we had a reaction to that reaction, and a reaction to the one after.

    Much of our current culture is a reaction to the Holocaust, but we're already starting to see reactions to those reactions. Time marches on. The past is a foreign country, and the present becomes foreign to the future. I find it difficult to believe in a setting where umpteen years have passed and the material circumstances of life have changed, but culture and values stay constant.

    Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is another sort of example of the sort of worldbuilding that resonates with me. His Qeng Ho and Emergent cultures were foreign to us and to each other, but each had a point of view that made sense within its own history and circumstances.

    286:

    How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster has a few more examples of why it's a good idea not to be too close when the rocket is landing.

    288:

    King Philip IV of France ran up big debts with the Templars, then connived to have the order disbanded as a means of getting away with default. It wasn't a robbery as such (I don't know whether he seized significant Templar assets in France. Most of the Templar's stuff wound up being taken over by the Hospitallers.)

    But this raises an interesting point. For a bank operating on a fractional reserve model, it's possible to borrow more from the bank than it has in reserves (gold in a vault, or electronic funds on deposit with a central bank). All the very best crooks know this, and grab their loot in the form of a letter of credit, rather than a sack full of cash and exploding dye packs.

    A bank would have to be wildly reckless to lend more than its sum of reserves to a single borrower, but it does happen. Tricontinental in Australia did so several times over to most of the country's biggest corporate crooks of the 1980s. Those crooks each stole more from the bank than the bank was ever worth.

    289:

    "fondleslab." -- Thank you for this awesome coinage.

    290:

    Sorry to be late for the discussion (created an account just for this post), but is OGH familiar with the work of Mr. Cixin Liu? His stories seen to be centered exactly around the societal changes brought about by SF happenings. If you aren't willing to commit time to a trilogy (The three body problem), you can do worse than reading a few of his short tales, maybe "The wandering Earth". Apologies if it's bad form to reccomend a translation or it's a too-beaten horse, but I haven't seen any mention of his name around here.

    291:

    If a bank is highly illiquid, the sovereign won't rob the bank; he'll steal/conquer/tax the assets. If a bank is sufficiently liquid to be of interest to the sovereign, he can simply take the liquid assets. There may be some nod to the idea that the sovereign intends to repay (he doesn't).

    Absent secure property rights (a historical rarity), power seizes wealth far more easily than wealth buys power.

    292:

    I think you mean "Chicken coop". My parents kept chickens as a hobby and I spent entirely too much time in it feeding, cleaning up after and gathering eggs. BTW, when chickens get to supplement their diet with grass and small creatures, the eggs taste better.

    293:

    I meant, what happens in story terms when the map goes past "Barking." And I'd totally buy more "Tuf Voyaging" books! The first one was awesome!

    294:

    "Philip le Bel" grabbed as much as he could within his own dominions - & he tried, without success to get others to hand over loot to him, but was unsuccessful Outside France, very few Templars were even arrested & most either "retired" into the Hospitallers or became "ordinary" knights etc. Of course there's a huge post-Templar fantasy literature ( Ignoring Dan Browne ) & a strong connection with one of the wierdest pieces of architecture in Scotland - Roslin Chapel. And the Saint-Clair or Sinclair family.

    295:

    I've been following the Chtorr novels very carefully for many, many years, and even made a charitable contribution (to an AIDS charity? It was a long time ago) so Gerrold would tuckerize my wife. The new books have been "real soon now" since the late nineties, so "...as of two years ago he'd written them" does not fill me with faith! (You're probably tied in enough to know for sure what's happening, but the rest of us have to deal with twenty years of broken promises. GRUMP!)

    On the other hand, at the time they were some of the very best science fiction I'd ever read - no problems with world building there - and they are very likely to be serious, major classics when he's done with them. So I'm willing to be patient, but I'd like to finish the series before I become senile!

    296:
    Well, at that rate I'm fairly certain that you've just said "The North American Great Lakes and Mississippi-Missouri river complex can't exist because Rocky Mountains" not once but twice.

    Both of those things are located well outside of the Rocky Mountains rain shadow, which does exist and has a major impact on the climate of the areas to its immediate east. It's why those parts of North America are actually pretty dry, comparatively.

    Mirkwood and the Anduin, on the other hand, are located within about 300 miles or so of the Misty Mountains leeward side. And it's even worse when you consider that there's another mountain range to their immediate north, the Grey Mountains, which run directly into the Misty Mountains and form a kind of triangle, which means weather systems that move down from the north should also be dumping their moisture there too. So they're actually in TWO rain shadows.

    That whole area should be really, really dry, not super lush and wet.

    297:
    MBAs with brains

    THESE EXIST?

    Hey! I resemble one of those!

    I'm also realize I was given a toolset by that program, not a way of life or philosophy. I also grew up twisting a wrench, threading pipe and toting tool boxes under houses, into attics or up ladders onto roofs, so my mindset was significantly different from many of my fellow students. They wondered why I sympathized with unions.

    And why I tormented one of my professors by routinely asking for documented historical actions against labor be included as options in simulations. With consequences.

    I also thought Ropes to Skip and Ropes to Know was the best management book ever.

    298:

    Apart from the natural issue of becoming jaded through exposure, SF is a genre in a conversation with itself, working variations on the good ideas and discarding the bad ones. The first time a reader encounters a particular sf notion it will have the full sensawunda which is never repeated on subsequent encounters. Since the number and rate of invention of really original sf ideas is low compared to the amount of sf produced a reader will soon find themselves reading more variations on things already read than new things. Sometimes a writer takes an idea out for a real workout that renders all previous versions obsolete. Robert Heinlein's All you Zombies and By His Bootstraps did it for time travel stories until David Gerrold did it again with The Man Who Folded Himself. The Groundhog Day idea of reliving a life repeatedly reached apotheosis in Ken Grimwood's Replay until that was finally topped by Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

    My (mostly sf) library has an average publication date of 1988 and a mode of decade 1970-1979 according to LibraryThing.

    299:

    If I understand what you're saying, I agree. You're not calling for spending a lot of time in the prose world building. Just that the author should have a framework that they adhere to. And when opportunity presents itself, provide some insight into that framework.

    300:

    About the Maya... my late friend Sue Blom wrote Inka, an alternate history, which was really good. Friends tell me her sequel will get published one of these days (the original wasn't a "big enough" seller).

    301:

    Oh, come on, would you believe them? I mean, necromancers don't deal with deities, if they were for real, they'd mention sorcerers.

    humph

    And I like my pressure cookers very much, thank you.

    302:

    Well, that was ridiculous of him. He clearly didn't learn anything from his fellow monarchs, who borrowed from the Jews, and when the debt got to be too much, they expelled them from the country and seized what they couldn't carry away....

    Oh, and while we're at it, screw Isabella and Ferdinand, and their Spanish Inquisition....

    303:

    So, what was your undergrad degree? I esp. do not believe in MBAs with a business degree having brains.

    Lessee, Bro. Guy used to teach at various Catholic colleges around the US, and one of the courses he taught was "science for non-science majors". About 10-12 years ago, he rand down the food chain of the majors that took that course. The next to the bottom were the business majors, who "didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them". (The bottom of the food chain, those that didn't get it, and didn't know that they didn't get it, were the communications majors, y'know, folks who go into "journalism", and PR, and HR... and explains an awful lot.)

    Meanwhile, our pro-business folks in the US Congress and Senate, and the WH.....

    304:

    I'm not getting anything in the first few pages of search results for that book. Do you have a link?

    305:

    I assume you mean the ropes book. Just put the title into bookfinder.com and up it comes. By a Richard Ritti.

    306:

    Heh. Tell the Polynesians. The best they could do was drying pandanus, and they still managed to conquer a good chunk of the tropical Pacific.

    Of course alcohol may be important for other reasons.

    307:

    Roslin isn't weird; the weird thing is that it managed to survive whilst so much else was lost. It's definitely unusual, basically a rich mans piece of fantastic architecture.

    308:

    Whitroth

    So, what was your undergrad degree? I esp. do not believe in MBAs with a business degree having brains.

    Chemistry. Minor in bio. No, I didn't want to be a doctor - I wanted out with a degree after I discovered I hated dissection courses.

    I currently work in IT and used to be a data/reporting analyst in telecommunications.

    309:

    Oh, yes, I knew there was something I wanted to say: of course all educated people in Middle Earth spoke Latin, er, the "common tongue".

    310:

    Robert Prior and Guthrie,

    It is the Ritti book - The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know.

    https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ropes_to_Skip_and_the_Ropes_to_Know.html?id=RtchtJWOAjIC

    311:

    Charlie, a minor quibble in Deep State: the evening after Rita's first dinner, Ras is there with his fortified wine, and Miriam comes in. It says "with an empty tumbler", I think, but a page or two later (ebook) she takes a drink from it, then goes for some wine.

    312:

    No, the Inka book by Sue Bloom that whitroth mentioned. Getting lots of hits for Sue Blooms, and books about history, but nothing about the novel (even when I added "novel" to the google search term).

    DuckDuckGo also had no luck finding it.

    313:

    Blom, Suzanne Alles

    Inca - the Scarlet Fringe

    Frank.

    314:

    Isabella - & even there, she had to be thoroughly blackmailed by the church heirachy ... Quoting dfrom wiki: " In 1499, the Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros began a campaign in the city of Granada to force religious compliance with Christianity with torture and imprisonment; this triggered a Muslim rebellion. " Said cardinal, apprently threw a public hissy-fit, throwing down a crucifix before Isabella, with a crowd present - in other words a deliberate set-up. Aragon ( ferdinand's territory ) - was the last to go, because the catholic heirachy had been steadily biting bits off the cherry until there was none else left.

    315:

    I prefer "Up the Organisation" & "Further Up the Organisation" As to how MBA's etc are royally good for screwing-over companies - by Robert Townsend LINKIE

    316:

    Greg,

    Dead link. I did find Townsend's books.

    And another trip to the library will be in order. You know, it's because of this site, File770 and James Davis Nicoll that I'm becoming the Houston ILL department's most regular customer.

    And I agree most of the expensive MBAs are WOMBATs. You know - Harvard, Wharton, Stanford.

    317:

    Star Trek ended for me when they began making movies, never mind the horrifying travesty that was "The Next Generation" (I bailed halfway through the pilot ep; everything I've picked up through skin contact since then tells me that was a good decision to make.)

    I didn't even make it through the original series.

    The captain of a capital ship doesn't put himself in personal danger the way Kirk did every week. When he does that he fails his responsibility to the ship & the crew.

    There's a reason warships carry Marine detachments.

    318:

    Greg Tingey @271 said: You need the "London Connections map, actually

    Wow! That adds more lines to play with. I need to load that into Draw and expand what I have. Thanks...

    319:

    But were WWII movies based on WWII combat, or did they have distances etc altered to fit the screen?

    With the exception of adding a bit of gun camera footage from WW2 dogfights, I'm pretty sure almost all arial combat in films is just a reimagining of the arial scenes from William Wellman's 1927 film Wings and Howard Hughs 1930 film Hell's Angels.

    An old military acquaintance bitches a lot about infantry movies, because they almost invariably get distances wrong. Even WWII movies will have him screaming "spread out!" at the screen…

    It's hard to make a realistic war movie from the infantry man's POV with the camera never getting more than 3 inches off the ground.

    320:

    A close acquaintance of David Weber described it as "spreadsheet carnography" -- David at one time used Excel to calculate a lot of stuff about missile barrages and their statistical effects on the various fleets involved.

    Didn't a lot of that also come from Role Playing Games where they roll various dice to determine how effective an attack/defense is? The spread sheets helped keep track of the results from rolling for multiple variables.

    321:

    Given the number of people he lost, I decided, long ago, that no navy in their right minds would give him a multigigabuck starship and 300 lives. Hell, we never saw a fraction of that number. I figure he was actually the captain of a spacefaring PT boat....

    And, of course, "Quick, Scotty, Spock! It's 20 min. of the hour, and i haven't gotten laid, or violated the Prime Directive yet!"

    On the other hand, as someone who saw it on first run, it was fabulous.

    322:

    "Trebushet" sounds like a plausible UK pronunciation. But I don't think it's a likely US one. A comparable case would be "valet," which can have a t at the end in UK English, but is "vallay" in US English. And all the characters in that scene are Americans.

    It's been mentioned in a half-dozen or more replies already, and it just now occurred to me that if they're pronouncing it the way it's being spelled, it's still wrong. I think.

    Isn't it properly pronounced Trey-boo-shay?

    323:

    I have some speculation about middle-aged male SF authors and side-effects of common medication for a common condition, but I'm going to keep it to myself. Let's just say: I have strong suspicions about Larry Niven and John Varley, know for a fact about John Brunner, and if I'm correct I dodged the bullet simply by knowing what the heck was happening to me and how to argue prescribing policies with doctors.

    I've speculated for a number of years that the lack of those same medications explains a lot about how obsessed Heinlein became with certain ideas in his later writings.

    324:
    Didn't a lot of that also come from Role Playing Games where they roll various dice to determine how effective an attack/defense is? The spread sheets helped keep track of the results from rolling for multiple variables.

    Dunno, but I've used a similar technique to point out assumptions in playtests have problems. Particularly how long it would take for a PC to get to a certain set of abilities assuming the standard amount of XP at one session a week. And when advancement involves a certain amount of risk, what the odds are that the PC will die or go insane before reaching that ability.

    It was illuminating.

    325:

    rhotic

    That's a new word for me. So I looked it up. Now I know what it means, but I'm still not sure I understand it. Something to do with the way you pronounce the letter 'r'?

    There are too many gaps in my education because I read too much science fiction.

    326:

    Sometimes context is the only guide to pronunciation - how about "wind" - as in "wind a clock" vs "the north wind".

    What about "wend" as in "wend your way"?

    327:

    King Philip IV of France ran up big debts with the Templars, then connived to have the order disbanded as a means of getting away with default. It wasn't a robbery as such (I don't know whether he seized significant Templar assets in France. Most of the Templar's stuff wound up being taken over by the Hospitallers.)

    So, more Goldman Sachs and AIG than John Dillinger?

    Woody Guthrie said it best.

    “When a man robs a bank they get all excited, but when a bank robs a man, they don't do nothin'.”
    328:

    I've enjoyed the non-WEIRD characters in Becky Chambers' 2 books, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and the sequel. Third one coming mid 2018...

    329:

    Yes, and that was what I suggested in my original post: That if Stirling wanted to sneak in a hint as to the pronunciation for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the word, he could have had the engineer talk about the "trebuchet," had the assistant ask, "Tray booshay?" (or maybe "treb-oo-shay?" though I think that's a less likely pronunciation for an American to guess at), and then maybe had the engineer spell it. That would make sense as "the engineer just said the word aloud, and someone who wasn't familiar with it tried to repeat it," which is what happened; Stirling's sequence would make sense as "the other person read the word off a page and didn't know how to pronounce it," and that was not what happened at all.

    I suppose you could propose that the engineer didn't know how to pronounce it either, but Stirling was making him out to be a history of technology geek, so that didn't even occur to me. I think it's more likely that neither Stirling nor his copy editor thought about the words on the page as actual spoken dialogue than that Stirling came up with that arcane a bit of characterization.

    330:

    That's a new word for me. So I looked it up. Now I know what it means, but I'm still not sure I understand it. Something to do with the way you pronounce the letter 'r'?

    Back in the sixties, I read a humorous book by a woman named Leslie Conger about her undertaking to read some of the classics. At one point she cited a footnote in a British translation of an Indian work that explained that the first "a" in Rama was fully pronounced and the second was not, so it rhymed with "farmer." She thought that was funny and joked about "the fama in the dell" (a song that was taught to schoolchildren back then).

    In General American, you see, the R's in "far" and "mer" are both pronounced, or in linguistic terms, they change the pronunciation of the preceding vowels to a form that's called "rhotic": the tongue is moved close to the alveolus (the ridge behind the upper teeth) at the end of each syllable, producing a consonantal effect (an "approximant"). In the English that Conger was encountering, the distinction between rhotic and nonrhotic vowels is much less or entirely absent, and to an American it sounds like "faahma" (where the final a represents a schwa). New England English also does this to some degree, which is why John Kennedy's pronunciation of the college's name was often represented as "Hahvuhd"; on the other hand, New Englandish sometimes rhoticizes the ends of words, so Kennedy was also shown as saying "Cuber" and "Africker," and I don't think standard UK English does that.

    331:

    More non-WEIRD tales in Nnedi Okorafor's wonderful Binti stories, and N K Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy which starts with The Fifth Season (a fairly brutal first volume, but a really good read.).

    332:

    From any rational standpoint, the world building in Ninefox Gambit is completely unbelievable.

    It requires that calendrical science works.

    Aside from that... what makes it workable is that the vast majority of people aren't in one of the factions - the hexarchy is really an unnecessary thing that sits on top of a bunch of otherwise reasonable and normal societies.

    But, okay, maybe the Shuos are unbelievable.

    333:

    Didn't a lot of that also come from Role Playing Games where they roll various dice to determine how effective an attack/defense is? The spread sheets helped keep track of the results from rolling for multiple variables.

    I'd assumed it was from table-top war gaming. Some of his stuff reads to me like they've started with a space battle game, used it to build a scenario where the plucky little fleet that could wins, and then put that into a novel.

    But I've not seen evidence that David Weber was a table-top wargamer, just that the books feel that way.

    334:

    Re passports:

    From what I've read, passports were a necessity for travellers in feudal Japan. I could be wrong though.

    335:

    Something to do with the way you pronounce the letter 'r'?

    Being rhotic is main feature of the American accent, and it's a feature of the accents from Ireland, Scotland and some bits of England* and India. It isn't so much how you pronounce 'r' as the fact you always pronounce it. In most other spoken English, the 'r' before a consonant and at the end of the word is silent.

    Apparently historically all English was rhotic, and the the mainstream of English becoming non-rhotic appears to have coincided with the Great Vowel Shift and the emergence of the "trap-bath" split (see Wikipedia articles on these). These things all seem to have happened by the end of the 18th century, with the American accent remaining truer to the older pronunciations. Which means that much as it might grate to our** ears, performances of Shakespeare with American accents probably sound closer to the way the audiences of the late 16th century spoke than productions by the RSC.

    I've noted someone as smart as Amanda Palmer getting solidly frustrated on Australian television over the "trap-bath" split (add laconic Australian vowels to make it even more confusing).

    • I think you do need a rhotic accent to carry off a line like "Around here, if you accept a girl's cake, that means you're engaged", even though all the 'r's would be pronounced in a non-rhotic accent too.

    ** That's a sweeping "our" and my apologies to those excluded.

    336:

    It means Americans don't get it when I joke about the greatest hero of British myth being only half a king.

    337:

    Most British con-going and Great-British-Beer-Festival-going fans here will know someone called 1/2r (pronounced "Arfa").

    338:

    My personal theory is that Star Trek (in all its forms and variants) is actually a role playing game devised to provide an outlet for atavistic individuals who have problems with life in a genuinely advanced society.

    Original series is the first edition of the rule books, The Motionless Picture, TNG, et-al are revisions and spin-offs... :-)

    339:

    IN Medieval Europe & even later, "Passports" used to be for diplomats & senior representatives, to ease any passage with minor officialdom & also to act as "letters of introduction" for when the traveller finally arrived at his destination. Generally speaking, for ordinary people, including merchants, they just "went" & dealt with problems along the way as they went. Remember that there were both far fewer people travelling & a minimal civil service.

    Shogunate Japan was, of course, very different - the centralised control exercised was very tight for such a non-mechanised system. One wonders how much it cost in terms of time & effort ( The Stasi problem, in effect )

    337 ( Cruttenden )
    340:

    "Our society implies - requires - a police force. My point is that some societies don't require such - which gets back to Charlie's point about SF world-building."

    I think what we have here is a confusion between a police force and the police function. The concept of a dedicated force to carry out the function in a manner appropriate to an evidence-based legal system is comparatively recent, but the function itself is a standard feature of human societies, because human nature is such as to require it.

    I'm not trying to argue that eg. ancient Athens had actual evenin'-all 'ello-'ello-'ello-what's-all-this-then coppers, but you still couldn't just go around murdering anyone you didn't like the look of and get away with it. The physical force to make you stop doing it and impose consequences upon you would still be deployed somehow: the policing function would still be performed.

    To build a world with a human society that has no policing and paint it as a utopia is a step too far for the ol' suspension of disbelief. It would be a dystopia - either you'd have thug rule, or the humans would be around as small, scattered bands existing in such marginal conditions that finding food and dodging the weather/hungry dinosaurs would preoccupy them above all other considerations.

    The Culture doesn't have a police force nor even a really noticeable amount of the function, but it is not a human society. The biological members of it who are most prominent in the stories are painted as humans, but according to Banks they are not humans - in the planet-specific sense of "most prolific Earth ape" - because said apes have not attained a level of mental development that would make their participation in the Culture feasible. (Presumably this would manifest itself as an increase of Dunbar's number by several orders of magnitude.) The Culture had come into being long before Earth even began to think about industrialising. The Culture knows about Earth, and is definite that Earth is not part of the Culture and won't be for a very long time yet.

    I find it a little odd that the stories themselves don't really make that very clear, and the definitive statement is from an interview with Banks rather than from the books. Until I read that interview I always had this background dissatisfaction with the Culture - it's full of humans, but where are all the twats and arseholes? But the simple point "they're not Earth humans, they just look like them" resolves that difficulty.

    Of course, there is still some giant biological handwave required to explain how it is that the same physical form as pertains to Earth humans has evolved all over the galaxy. I guess that doesn't bother me so much because it or something like it is practically universal in SF - even more so than the standard FTL handwave, since extraterrestrial humans show up in SF that well pre-dates SF that makes a big thing out of how people get around the place.

    341:

    "Particularly how long it would take for a PC to get to a certain set of abilities assuming the standard amount of XP at one session a week. And when advancement involves a certain amount of risk, what the odds are that the PC will die or go insane before reaching that ability."

    Insert joke about Microsoft operating systems here...

    342:

    We could do this for ages, but...

    The Misty Mountains are both less high and less wide than the Rockies, going by the descriptions of crossing them in both LOTR and The Hobbit. There is snow on the tops but the passes are below the snowline (the pass in The Hobbit is not snowbound; the pass in LOTR is not expected to be, and the storm is suggested to be something more than just a natural weather phenomenon). The pass in The Hobbit they seem to have got most of the way over by the time they are captured - they escape from the goblins' caves right onto the eastern side of the mountains; the journey through Moria takes only a few days, in the dark and at a point where the range is quite a bit wider than most of it.

    The land on the eastern side of the Rockies is still at a very high elevation; the land on the east of the Misty Mountains is no more than a few hundred feet above sea level - the Anduin is a sufficiently old river to be navigable most of the way up, so the elevation difference is limited to the small run-of-the-river drop of an old river, plus one waterfall.

    The area is a lot further north than the US Rockies. The Fellowship's journey down the west side of the Misty Mountains begins around 52 degrees North in an England-style climate, and ends somewhere equivalent to the northern half of France latitude-wise. And the sea is not all that far away; we just get the impression that it is because you have to walk there, whereas we are used to the travelling speed of a car or train that would cover the distance in a day. Yes, there are the Ered Luin, but Wales doesn't stop it raining in England. (Come to that it tends to remain pretty manky and wet at this latitude however far east you go. From where I am there is no higher ground until you get to the Urals, and we're not short of big rivers to the east of them.)

    Most of the Anduin's flow is drainage from the Misty Mountains themselves, not the land to the east. It has very few tributaries on the east side, but it has tributaries on the west side all the way up. (The drainage from the other side of the mountains is by a bunch of separate rivers, so they don't attain such a size.) Further to the east, beyond Mirkwood, we do seem to have a pretty dry area - there is an endorheic lake fed by one river originating in the Grey Mountains, and that's about it. (IIRC.) Presumably what population that area supports is concentrated close to the river.

    So it seems to me that it's just as easy to argue that it does work as that it doesn't, given the nature of the information we have to work on.

    343:

    So, more Goldman Sachs and AIG than John Dillinger?

    Not quite. Philip the King/state owed the bank money, and used his influence over his relative the Pope/regulator to wriggle out of it.

    GS used AIG as a bookie, to take big bets that sub-prime mortgage backed bonds would fail. Those bets were partly to hedge/eliminate its own huge sub-prime liabilities, and partly GS standing as a middleman, offering similar bets to hedge funds, then laying them off at lower cost with the idiots at AIG, taking the difference as a profit. That was only zero risk arbitrage to the extent that AIG's huge, AAA rated balance sheet ensured it could pay up. Otherwise, GS was on the hook for enormous losses.

    When AIG's losses were indeed so vast that it couldn't pay, Goldman used its influence with all the former Golmanites at the various regulators to bail out AIG, making AIG just a conduit for the state's taxpayer dollars to cover Goldman's losses. This was ugly, cynical, and undeserved. GS had failed to properly consider counterparty risk (the risk that your bookie will go broke), but AIG did genuinely owe GS the money.

    In medieval terms, it was an imprudent bank using it's influence over the corrupt Pope to force the imprudent King to cover the debts of an imprudent insurer, ultimately at the expense of the peasants.

    The problem, and opportunity the Kings of Westeros have is that they have no control over the Iron Bank in Bravos, not part of their Kingdom, but their debt is so vast that it should start behaving more like equity. The bank should have a strong interest in seeing the King succeed, and repay his debts. (I have no idea if this actually happens in GRRM's books, which I haven't read.) In worldbuilding terms, it's far from clear from the TV series how the Iron Bank operates.

    As Keynes put it, owe a bank $100, and you have a problem. Owe it a million, and the bank has a problem.

    Don il Dotard's bankers' found this out the hard way when they realized that the Trump brand was key to the value of their collateral, and were forced to keep him afloat, impersonating a successful billionaire.

    344:

    And I agree most of the expensive MBAs are WOMBATs. You know - Harvard, Wharton, Stanford.

    Expensive MBAs aren't so much about the course content as they are about making contacts with classmates who will end up in C-suite territory throughout corporate America, by virtue of having contacts with (repeat recursively). In other words, it's a class signifier.

    (This per a friend of mine who isn't an idiot, who acquired an MBA along the way — and is now an automotive journalist and enjoying his life a whole lot more than he enjoyed management.)

    345:

    From the OP: [Modern technologies] are the worms in the heart of the mainstream novel of the 21st century. You don't have to extract them and put them on public display, but if they aren't lurking in the implied spaces of your story your protagonists will strike a false note, alienated from the very society they are supposed to illuminate.

    David Foster Wallace recounted a disagreement he had with one of his creative writing professors, who argued (c.1980s) that literary fiction should eschew all mention of technology and pop culture as a faddish distraction from a proper focus on human nature. Wallace argued that ignoring the telephone was to ignore a fundamental aspect of modern human social life. Similarly, Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were critiqued around the same time as shallow for their use of brand names as shorthand for character, missing the point that they were describing stunted characters in a consumerist society. (In fairness I stopped reading a couple of recent novels by Ellis and McInerney which seemed like lazy parodies aimed at proving their critics right.)

    Now, the pace of change and the centrality of tech to human social interaction and atomisation, not to mention the increasingly baroque, weird, toxic intrusions of social media, consumer culture and neoliberalism seem like inescapable concerns for fiction. Pre-21st century period pieces are the only escape. If you want to write contemporary fiction, I suspect that you don't just need to acknowledge that, but you need something akin to worldbuilding skills to figure out how all of that affects your characters in a way which won't seem dated or unobservant in a few years time.

    Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy was supposedly mainstream, but it was the observant, SFnal eye which made it interesting. Gibson always said all of his novels were really about the present, that he wasn't really worldbuilding so much as depicting the unevenly distributed future visible today. Neuromancer was famously lacking mobile phones, and unconcerned with technical detail, which doesn't spoil it for me, but it is insightful regarding the nature of our deep interelationship with our machines.

    BTW, I'd be very interested in a post by OGH re. mainstream-ish, non-SFF contemporary novels he likes, and why. I get that you're busy, though, Charlie.

    346:

    The sequel to Inca is really going to be published? That sounds great - Inca was one of my favourite AH novels. When I heard that Ms. Blom had died, I thought that the sequel died with her.

    347:

    Somewhat OT, but the US National Transportation Safety Board has published Sinking of US Cargo Vessel SS El Faro, a lengthy and detailed accident report that includes discussion of the mostly human factors that led to the loss of the ship. Bridge conversations found on the voyage data recorder and emails played a large part in the investigation.

    IMO, it provides, among other things, useful background material for authors writing scenarios in which Things Go Wrong.

    https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/MAR1701.pdf

    348:

    That whole area should be really, really dry, not super lush and wet.

    For what it's worth, a few years ago a climate scientist at the University of Bristol (writing as "Radagast the Brown") ran a climate simulation for Middle Earth, using a standard General Circulation Model. The paper mentions the rain shadow effect for the Misty Mountains, but based on the annual precipitation map (Figure 3f in the paper) it doesn't seem to be very strong, and in fact the estimated vegetation coverage map shows broadleaf forest on both sides of the Misty Mountains (Figure 4).

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/jun/17/video-scientists-simulate-the-climate-of-the-hobbits-middle-earth

    At the risk of going off into the hand-waving weeds, there is the possibility that the climate east of the Misty Mountains is partly affected by magical influences -- specifically, those of the Elves in Lothlorien (and perhaps Mirkwood as well). A weakening of the rain-shadow effect would help keep Lothlorien well-forested, which is certainly something the Elves want.

    349:

    The Tokugawa Shogunate required its vassals to attend the capital half of each year, and kept their wives and children in the capital full time as hostages against rebellion. They knew that any rebellion would be preceded by guns going in and women going out, so they had rigorous system of internal passports. Women's passports included particularly detailed descriptions. The system lasted 250 years, until the Americans came.

    350:

    With the exception of adding a bit of gun camera footage from WW2 dogfights, I'm pretty sure almost all arial combat in films is just a reimagining of the arial scenes from William Wellman's 1927 film Wings and Howard Hughs 1930 film Hell's Angels.

    Nope. As I pointed out in my comment (#7) above, it's very clear that the aerial combat was specifically inspired by WW2 films, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s (or Korean War films, in the case of The Bridges at Toko-Ri). No one involved in the production of Star Wars mentions Wings or Hell's Angels; Wings has the additional problem of being a silent film, which makes it less likely people like Lucas would have seen it on TV when they were growing up (or in the 1970s, which is when Lucas was doing things like videotaping war movies from TV, then transferring them to 16mm film for editing).

    351:

    I have read that ancient Athens did have a police force. But it wasn't considered fitting work for free men, so it was made up entirely of slaves. I wonder how that actually worked. . . .

    352:

    What's your criterion for "the mainstream of English [becoming] non-rhotic"? In terms of numbers, I believe more people speak General American than the Queen's English. Is "mainstream" defined by something other than number of speakers?

    (In terms of the proposal to spell English phonetically based on UK English, I think there's a different argument: It's more helpful to put all the R's in and let the UK speakers treat them as silent than to leave them out and make the US speakers guess which words have them. Of course it's not "phonetic" either way, but that's why phonetic spelling is a problematic idea, right?)

    353:

    It's worth a bit of a shrug, really. There are forests on both sides of New Zealand, Japan, Korea, the Appalachians...

    Oceanic currents make up for a lot of the precipitation shortfall. Where you get deserts is when the currents are moving along the coasts towards the equator, as in the west coasts of the Americas and southern Africa. If warm currents are coming off the equator, there's a lot of warm water ready to evaporate and put moisture into the air.

    Anyway, there's a big fudge factor in this system, because Middle Earth was warped from flat to globular (I think there's an XKCD What-if question there: how much energy did magic move in the system to keep the whole surface of Middle Earth from going molten, and to allow life to survive the transition?). I don't think GCMs model thaumatoclimatology all that well.

    So far as Lothlorien goes, I'm interested in Lembas. It's an old forest. What are they growing for grain to make those cakes? It's not like most grasses like trees after all, and acorn meal doesn't have gluten. Inquiring minds want to know (but not much, actually).

    354:

    I'm genuinely saddened to hear of Hugh's death. He was always generous and affable in these threads, and made me rethink quite a lot of my approach storytelling. And he produced some great work in his own right.

    355:

    I'm interested in Lembas. It's an old forest. What are they growing for grain to make those cakes? It's not like most grasses like trees after all, and acorn meal doesn't have gluten. Inquiring minds want to know (but not much, actually).

    Weirdly, I happen to be looking through The Peoples of Middle-Earth, which has a brief note in it about lembas ("Chapter XV: Of Lembas"). Apparently it's made from a special grain (or "corn", Tolkien being British enough not to assume that means maize) given by the Vala Yavanna to some of the Elves back in the First Age. It grows rapidly in almost any season, with only a little (direct) sunlight. Since Lembas was only used by travelers and would keep practically forever, they probably didn't need to grow lots of the grain, and you can plausibly assume that there were a few "isolated glades" in Lorien where they grew what little they needed.

    356:

    ... performances of Shakespeare with American accents probably sound closer to the way the audiences of the late 16th century spoke than productions by the RSC.

    Are you familiar with the attempts to perform Shakespeare using a reconstruction of "Original Pronunciation"?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

    357:

    Of course, there is still some giant biological handwave required to explain how it is that the same physical form as pertains to Earth humans has evolved all over the galaxy.

    Banks answered this question, indirectly. The actual question he was asked was "Why does Culture have biological sentients at all? Logically they should all have uploaded and been done with it." Banks responded that all Culture novels (which if you recall, are separated by thousands of years) take place in time periods when biological bodies are in fashion. Most of the time almost all Culture citizens exist as simulations.

    This answers your question too: Fashion

    358:

    Avoided everything to do with Star Trek after the original series. Avoided everything to do with Harry Potter after the third book. Hmm... At terminal risk of sounding cheeky, this gives the impression of not finding SF to one's liking because one doesn't cast one's net wide enough, though I'm probably dead wrong there.

    359:

    Are you familiar with the attempts to perform Shakespeare using a reconstruction of "Original Pronunciation"?

    I have heard of projects like that and I think they are worthwhile. That isn't what the RSC does, though, and I think what the RSC and other companies like it do is worthwhile too.

    360:

    But I've not seen evidence that David Weber was a table-top wargamer, just that the books feel that way.

    I think table-top gaming is a subset of Role Playing Games. Anyway, table-top war-gaming is what I meant.

    Weber has a group of gamers (BuNine) that help him with ship designs & those battle scenarios. They have something to do with Ad Astra Games, who publish the "Saganami Island Tactical Simulator" game.

    361:
    “With the exception of adding a bit of gun camera footage from WW2 dogfights, I'm pretty sure almost all arial combat in films is just a reimagining of the arial scenes from William Wellman's 1927 film Wings and Howard Hughs 1930 film Hell's Angels.”

    Nope. As I pointed out in my comment (#7) above, it's very clear that the aerial combat was specifically inspired by WW2 films, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s (or Korean War films, in the case of The Bridges at Toko-Ri). No one involved in the production of Star Wars mentions Wings or Hell's Angels; Wings has the additional problem of being a silent film, which makes it less likely people like Lucas would have seen it on TV when they were growing up (or in the 1970s, which is when Lucas was doing things like videotaping war movies from TV, then transferring them to 16mm film for editing).

    Lucas didn't need to watch Wings or Hell's Angels. The film makers who created the WW2 and Korean War movies Lucas did watch had already done so. The film makers of the 40s, 50s & 60s used ideas of what aerial combat should look like developed for those earlier films when they made their later films.

    Just as Lucas derived his ideas of space combat from WW2/Korean War films, those WW2/Korean War films ideas of aerial combat were in turn derived from Wellman's and Hughes's earlier films.

    362:

    Are you familiar with the attempts to perform Shakespeare using a reconstruction of "Original Pronunciation"?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

    Sounds like some of my relatives down in Eastern North Carolina.

    363:

    What's your criterion

    Well, I'm Australian. It makes superficial sense to talk about how the Australian accent is different to the American accent, but you can't sensibly talk about how it diverges from it - you have to consider how both diverge from British English and how Australian English diverged later than American English. Even if a branch has grown to considerable size, perhaps dwarfing the original tree, the trunk is still a trunk, and other branches that grow from it are related to the hypertrophied branch only via the trunk.

    Is "mainstream" defined by something other than number of speakers?

    I would like to think that the Royal Shakespeare Company is always "mainstream" no matter what. But I think there's a general concept that "English is the language they speak in England" and you risk drifting into absurdity when arguing the contrary. You could describe a mainstream of "American English", and describe how Bostonians and Californians diverge from that and why. But you can't engage in a descriptive exercise seriously without something like the trunk and branch metaphor above.

    As an exercise, you could compare Cajun with Quebecois French. The latter appears to have retained contact with French spoken in France, while the former is a relic stuck in the 17th century. You could say that Australian English is more like Quebecois, and American English more like Cajun, in the sense of diverging later versus earlier, but that's probably stretching things a little far.

    This "number of speakers" argument is not straightforward, either. I think the majority of English speakers live in India and Pakistan. For many, English might not be their first language and the other language influences their accent. In many cases that accent is rhotic* but still observes the "trap-bath" split and, allowing for the other language's influence, the Great Vowel Shift. For many, of course, English is their first and possibly only language anyway. India and Pakistan certainly produce highly-regarded literature in English in significant volume. Again, this is divergent from British English and while it might make sense to talk about differences with American English, it makes no sense to talk about it being a variation of American English rather than British English.

    • I have a colleague from Kerala, his first language is Malayalam and the way he pronounces 'r' is entirely different again.
    364:

    It's a chilling example of "contemporary norms of power hierarchies" steering directly into an easily avoidable disaster. How many SF novels have I read where a spaceship has an autocratic captain? Way too many. You can't run a spaceship that way and have a reasonable chance of the captain and crew surviving. They're all dead.

    365:

    They warp entire planets and you are concerned that acorns don't have gluten? ;) It's a while since I last read lotr so I can't recall whether any other nut or such came up. Was any fruit or seed of the Lembas tree mentioned?

    366:

    US National Transportation Safety Board has published Sinking of US Cargo Vessel SS El Faro.

    That's a really fascinating document and thank you for posting the link.

    367:

    Answer at #355. Actually, it sounds a little like what The Land Institute is trying to do with creating a perennial wheat, but mostly it sounds like Tolkien, good Brit that he was, had the gardening answers more sorted out than he did the planetology.

    (h/t to Peter Erwin for that truly, erm, thorough answer).

    368:

    Both of those things are located well outside of the Rocky Mountains rain shadow...

    I'm always curious that so few writers include anything like the North American Monsoon (NAM), which from time to time, dumps 25 cm or more of rainfall in a few hours smack in that rain shadow. On average, in July and August, Phoenix has more rainfall than either Portland or Seattle. Granted, the monsoon only runs for about eight weeks in most years. Nor is it particularly consistent from year to year. But I've always been a bit puzzled why worlds that have Big Magic don't also have big dams capturing snow melt and monsoon moisture.

    369:

    I think your final point is relevant, but I'm afraid that the answer is that most writers are English majors. Most of them (with some really good exceptions) aren't looking out their windows when they write, they're just cribbing off whatever they read. You'll find, I think, that most fantasy deserts look like the Sahara too, most northern areas have fjords in them, and so forth. This is the same culture that has the star fighters roaring through the vacuum at 0.8C while shooting bullets at each other.

    370:

    Sinking of US Cargo Vessel SS El Faro, a lengthy and detailed accident report that includes discussion of the mostly human factors that led to the loss of the ship.

    Ditto the thanks for that fascinating link.

    It's worth noting that a lot of the CRM/BRM stuff is handy in general life as well. Especially if you're managing anything, the "take a moment to think about whether the people around you are paying attention, and whether they might have anything useful to say"... even in an emergency. Especially in an emergency. Do it. DO IT NOW.

    I like to summarise CRM as "I'm in charge of making sure you tell me what to do". Viz, the captains job is to make sure that the crew deliver all critical information and suggestions promptly and accurately.

    Just the generic "is anyone in charge of monitoring the supply of dishwashing liquid" stuff makes life flow more smoothly.

    371:

    I'm afraid that the answer is that most writers are English majors

    Hey - I resemble that remark!

    Well not quite... I'm not really a writer.

    372:

    Just the generic "is anyone in charge of monitoring the supply of dishwashing liquid" stuff makes life flow more smoothly.

    It's Zigzag Street by Nick Earls where a character's partner takes him to task for purchasing 6* jars of Tikka Masala curry paste, but no toilet paper. Competence in leadership means making sure that whoever's job it was to order toilet paper has got it right.

    *The number might not be 6, I'm making it up because I can hardly remember and I don't think I have a copy of the book right now to check.

    373:

    That pronunciation can (almost) be heard in rural Somerset/Dorset

    374:

    Speaking of Banks/Culture, after making my way through most of the books I kept hearing about the short story involving Earth, so I tracked it down.

    And I hated it. Mostly because it turns out that 1960s Europe is more alien of a place to me than a galaxy-spanning alien civilization. Actual 1960s events were almost too bizzarre to be true if you did't live through them (I ended up doing a lot of interesting reading up on the East/West Berlin madness as it all sounded completely rediculous).

    375:

    Mostly because it turns out that 1960s Europe is more alien of a place to me than a galaxy-spanning alien civilization.

    And now you know how many Brits feel about parts of the USA! (The cultural disconnect is only made worse by the superficial similarities, like the mostly-shared language.)

    376:

    I'm always curious that so few writers include anything like the North American Monsoon

    Oddly it's something I only learned of through fiction; Katie O'Rourke's Monsoon Season.

    377:

    "...star fighters roaring through the vacuum at 0.8C while shooting bullets at each other."

    That's only half a bad idea, of course. If your opponent is moving at 0.8C, inducing him/her to collide with a small, cheap piece of metal is probably good strategy. (Maybe 2/3 of a bad idea, because the star fighters wouldn't actually roar.)

    The really stupid part of all this is the question of how anyone fights at more than 0.5C, which would be when radar/lidar stopped being useful, though the highest speed practical for fighting would probably be considerably slower; I can't imagine a successful exchange of beams or missiles at anything higher than 0.1C.* (At such high speeds your best weapon is probably a missile which contains some very dusty compressed air - you trigger it slightly ahead of your opponent and he/she ablates to death.**)

    And did I mention the part where you can't fight anywhere near a planet, because if your missile accidentally hits a settled planet's atmosphere at 0.5C you've probably eradicated all human life on that planet? (This makes building the Death Star into a rather ridiculous proposition.)*

    • At 0.1C, slight randomizations of speed and vector will make it impossible to hit the opponent with a beam, except by coincidence. You might have more luck with a missile, simply because it would have some terminal guidance, but it would still be very easy to miss. Probably the big thing in interstellar warfare would be to deduce the seed for the enemy's random number generator. (Rhetorical question: how many different methods are there for generating random numbers?)

    ** Did someone mention shields? Don't be silly. When your fighter runs into the small cloud of dusty compressed air at any significant fraction of C your shield generator will probably melt down into a small pile of superheated, radioactive goo. The pilot will shriek in agony while being boiled alive, assuming that the deceleration of hitting a dust cloud doesn't kill them instantly. (I don't know the math for striking a dust cloud at > 0.1C, but I suspect there are lots of exponents involved, and they're multiplied together rather vigorously. Something the size of a TIE fighter probably needs a forward-facing shield with a diameter of around ten meters...) You could probably tow your shield generator behind you... maybe multiple shield generators and when they've all melted you have to somehow escape the fight? (Your shield generator starts to vaporize and you throw it at the enemy?)

    * Damn, I've just written the theoretical basis for a Baen book!

    378:

    "the star fighters wouldn't actually roar."

    Allow me to pick a nit...

    They probably would if you were inside one. Even if it was running without atmosphere and the crew in suits, you'd still get transmission of sound vibrations by contact between solids.

    And vibrations there certainly would be, because there are always some, even if you normally don't notice them; anything you think of as completely quiet begins to make a noise if you scale up its power handling enough. Any engine capable of accelerating a ship to 0.8c in a usefully short time is going to be handling elephant shitloads of energy, and it only takes a very tiny percentage of that to go into vibration for things to get very noisy indeed.

    Which basically means that relativistic space fighters are in practical terms impossible simply because they would shake themselves to pieces.

    379:

    ...relativistic space fighters are in practical terms impossible simply because they would shake themselves to pieces.

    Oooh! Nice catch. I didn't notice that one.

    Of course, if we're assuming a small-craft drive which could propel something up to 0.8C, an anti-vibration system is just one more impossibility. (In the Starfire books they end up having to downgrade the use of fighters because they are too small to handle "modern" drives which can move a warship at 0.5C)

    380:

    They probably would if you were inside one.

    Neat detail about "The Expanse":

    At the first glance it looks like yet another "space battle with sound" bad design -- explosions in vacuum which go bang, and spaceships which roar. But if you pay attention, you realize that every sound you hear is a sound which somebody in the show would hear. A missile impacting a spacecraft will be certainly heard by the people in that spacecraft -- and the viewer hears it too, although camera viewpoint might be in open space. Whereas things which no one can hear, like a missile hitting a rock, or a drone missile firing up, are silent.

    381:

    1960s Europe is more alien ... Yes, well ... Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was in VIth-form, the beginnings of anti-apartheid in England ( Our school had someone from the SA embassy/high comission down & we eviscerated him ) The very first beginnings of proper self-control of reproduction for women & the utter christian screaming "moral panic" about it ... Going to Germany with my father, and walking right up, as close as I dared, to the Zonengrenze - which colours, shall we say, my attitude to "momentum" today & any fuckwit who thinks marxism is a good idea, at the same time realising, personally ( as my father had done since June 1945 ) that Germany was simply horribly unlucky & that Nazis can happen anywhere. The deaths & injuries in "normal" working & factory conditions that would now be regarded as completely unnaceptable - someone here referenced Aberfan, which happened when I was at Uni in Manchester - and, what is not recognised now - that similar deaths/injuries & simple wastage of people was even worse on the other side of that Iron Curtain. The only saving graces were a certain innocence of the young, a lot more available railway &, of course lots of now long-destroyed breweries ..... [ And, very breifly, a strain of popular music that was actually, quite good - because, lets face it between 1920 (ish) & about 1959 was shit & at least 99.9% of everything since approx 1980 is also shit - & only about - see Sturgeon - 10% in that intervenbing period was any good at all ... ]

    382:

    Actually, several SPACE OPERA novels & sets of them accept this, wrt using "Space" weapons on Planets as being "Non-Geneva" so to speak. Doesn't Weber have some such prohibition - I think he does?

    383:

    Greg, my point isn't that someone would do a C-fractional strike on a planet on purpose, but that under the conditions of battle in any number of fictional universes, it could easily happen by accident.

    And Weber does have a prohibition.

    384:

    Any engine capable of accelerating a ship to 0.8c in a usefully short time is going to be handling elephant shitloads of energy, and it only takes a very tiny percentage of that to go into vibration for things to get very noisy indeed.

    ITYM heat. (Noise = vibrations, of course.)

    Put it another way: at roughly 87% of c, the vehicle's kinetic energy is approximately half its rest mass, which works out at 10-11 megatons of explosive juice per kilogram. If your space drive is 99.9% thermally efficient (way better than any energy efficiency we've managed to date), then to get to 87% of c you just had to deal with a Hiroshima-sized nuke's worth of energy for every kilogram of your ship.

    As for dust or gas ... an alpha particle is a stripped helium nucleus traveling typically at 0.01-0.05 c. If you manage to make it up to 1% of c, the interstellar medium (roughly one atom per cubic metre) can be approximated to a radiation bath, where you're hitting one heavy ionizing particle per square metre of frontal area 3,000,000 times per second. Speed up to 10% of c and that 3 MBq of heavy particles just leveled up to 30MBq.

    This is not a radiation environment conducive to the pilot's well-being, to put it mildly.

    385:

    This is not a radiation environment conducive to the pilot's well-being

    Which is where the shields come in, and those are already dealing with so much crud that a few bits of extra dust probably aren't going to make any difference. Of course, jettisoning a lump of anything then swerving at that speed is going to make whoever catches it very excited.

    It doesn't really matter whether they've cast "Aurass Invinciblus" or "enabling posiquark shields, captain", they've traveled beyond physics as we know it.

    386:

    "BSG is myth-making around the origin story of the Church of Latter-Day Saints; that is, it takes a distinctively Mormon view of the universe and its protagonists' embattled place in it."

    The original 1970's Galactica had a lot of Mormon themes written into the worldbuilding of the series, and there were a couple of explicitly religious episodes (with space angels and a space devil) that took those Mormon themes and ran with them. However, the production design, and the opening credits voiceover, went all in on the "ancient astronauts" theme that was trendy at the time. Everything from the card game played by the human characters to the architecture of the planet the humans originally came from to the space helmets worn by the fighter pilots were very, very heavily Egyptian-themed. The ball game played by the humans was, OTOH, Mayan-themed, which fits with the whole "all those ancient civilizations were so advanced because they had aliens helping them out" BS baked into the ancient astronaut concept.

    AFAICT, the 2000's remake ditched all the Mormonism and all the ancient astronauts stuff. It's theme, which maddened a lot of nerds who couldn't handle religious peanut butter getting into their SF chocolate, was Cyclic History meets Divine Providence in Space, with angels nudging both the polytheist humans and the monotheist cylons along towards their mutually shared destiny as the progenitors of modern humanity on Earth, with lots of side comments about how "this has all happened before, and it will all happen again."

    387:

    And now you know how many Brits feel about parts of the USA!

    There are many Americans that feel that way too. I'm tempted to think that it's a rural/urban, provincial/cosmopolitan or South/not-South thing, but what in what parts of the US do you furriners feel uncomfortable or comfortable?

    388:

    Most countries have a split between a cosmopolitan subculture that interfaces with the rest of the world (usually concentrated in the cities and the coasts) and at least one core subculture that's more parochial and only indirectly interfaces with the rest of the world. The interface subculture almost always considers the parochial subculture to be backward and unsophisticated; the core subcultures generally consider the interface subculture to be greedy and decadent.

    The only exceptions that I'm aware of are tiny places like Luxembourg that are basically pure interface.

    389:

    In case it wasn't clear, the interface subcultures are by definition more welcoming to foreigners than the core subcultures.

    390:

    Speaking of integrating technology into near-future stories, people will now have to integrate this into it:

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/05/the-guardian-view-on-google-and-toronto-smart-city-dumb-deal

    392:

    Oops, I meant this story

    Both work :) Decaying, privatised infrastructure is likely to be even more problematic than public stuff - at least your local government can't relocate to a tax haven then vanish into bankruptcy, only to have lawyers for the new owners appear from the other side of the world reappear a decade later to claim ownership and compensation for any damage done.

    For that matter, the great thing about "smart infrastructure" is that if it's not continuously maintained and updated it will be hacked and whatever you thought it was keeping private won't be. Which should provide great datasets to researchers... let's call them that. (even if it is maintained it is still likely to get hacked).

    Flying cars are awesome. A flying quadcopter with heaving things in it not so much. I wanna see their goose strike tests.

    393:

    At sealevel on Earth there are 10^25 molecules of air per cubic meter (as opposed to OGH's statistic of 1 molecule per cubic meter in interstellar space.) Dropping a cubic meter of air, (which I just googled at 1.2 kilograms of mass) in front of a one-person fighter moving at 0.1C would probably be catastrophic.

    A shotgun would be overkill.

    394:

    That reminds me of one of the first "first contact" short storys I read many, many years ago. I don't remember the author or the title

    Two starships, one from earth and one from some unknown alien civilization detect each other while surveying a new planatary system. They immediately attack each other while simultaneously launching drones to carry the news back to alert their home systems.

    Their methods of navigation appear to be based on some principle that allows them to "jump" out of and into real space, and the battle apparently has two purposes, cripple the opponent & destroy the opponents drone. The earth ship's weapon is a 5 pound steel slug and the alien ship's weapon is a couple pounds of gravel.

    The two ships manage to cripple each other, but both drones escape. The survivors from both ships manage to crash land on a planet with an earth like atmosphere. The earth crew has barely salvaged enough equipment to survive. The story ends with the survivors from the earth crew waiting to see whose drone makes it home first.

    395:

    Greg, my point isn't that someone would do a C-fractional strike on a planet on purpose, but that under the conditions of battle in any number of fictional universes, it could easily happen by accident.

    And Weber does have a prohibition.

    In Weber's "Honorverse" the prohibition is mainly against nuclear strikes launched from orbit. Accidental strikes are treated as negligence, and whoever launched the attack is just as guilty as if it was intentional.

    Kinetic weapons launched from orbit are still permitted.

    396:

    Anyone watch the Netflix series "Altered Carbon"? Any opinions on the world building in the series or the original novel the series is based on?

    397:

    At sealevel on Earth there are 10^25 molecules of air per cubic meter (as opposed to OGH's statistic of 1 molecule per cubic meter in interstellar space.) Dropping a cubic meter of air, (which I just googled at 1.2 kilograms of mass) in front of a one-person fighter moving at 0.1C would probably be catastrophic.

    Hmm. So we don't even need foo-fighters. Fart fighting would be sufficient, if the enemy ran into the cloud of flatus at sufficient delta V. Good way to weaponize the sanitation system on a ship. Or something. Gives the aiming issue a whole new...never mind. This is clearly a fertile metaphor.

    398:

    I don't want to get too far into it, but the Eridani Edict (in the Honorverse) says that you can perform kinetic strikes against a target if you control the space around the planet and there is no reasonable chance that the government of that planet can expect a relief force. At that point you are allowed to perform kinetic strikes against legitimate military targets.

    You're still not allowed to fire a missile into the planet's atmosphere at 0.5C - that would involve the mass slaughter of civilians.

    But the big point here is that many, many authors have not carefully considered the consequences of how their weapons systems behave in the real world. How many science fiction stories involve space navies which which routinely employ various forms of c-fractional missiles? What happens if you're fighting a Klingon fleet near Pluto and their c-fractional missiles hit Earth, even accidentally? Or a damaged TIE fighter collides with the inhabited planet it is defending at 0.51C (moving just fast enough that radar can't track it.)

    These are military versions of the poor world-building OGH is complaining about in his top post... what military would voluntarily use a weapon in their own solar system which, if it misfired, could potentially reduce the population of an inhabited world by a third merely because a six-ounce piece of one missile, moving at 0.8C, grazed the atmosphere.

    399:

    Exactly. I'm beginning to think that if the Zarkoids show up for battle moving at 0.3C the Katnids look at them and laugh, because the Zarkoids have done nothing more than make sure the Katnid kinetic strikes will be a thousand times as effective.

    On the other hand, how do you get that cubic meter of air to be right in front of the TIE fighter?

    Maybe our ideas of space war are "flatulence" from top to (pardon me) "bottom."

    400:

    Or we could just say that the space war is, ultimately, a pissing match, where the best-aimed plumbing wins. THere's something satisfyingly simian about that whole concept--that space war is ultimately about pissing accurately while on the high C's.

    401:

    I would suggest that maybe the multitudes (and their authors) have a good understanding of probability and a hardwired limiter that would stop direct targeting.

    If you are around the orbit of Pluto expecting the Earth to be hit is probably about as likely as someone getting hit by a bullet fired straight up in the air.

    Most militaries would have done their calculus beforehand.

    402:

    Dark State spoiler-ish.

    Also wrong thread but does the Clan/NAC realise how provactive JUGGERNAUT is?

    Something that could cause a Kessler Cascade just by lighting off its main drive in orbit above the US - yikes!

    I'm reminded of the propulsion system in OGH's A Tall Tail for some reason.

    403:

    I haven't watched the Netflix series and might not for a while. I did start re-reading the novels, back about when I mentioned here that I'd seen Richard Morgan tweet about a trailer. I'm only about halfway though Broken Angels and I'm sort of remembering that while I'm much more a fan of Chandler and Hammet and general noirish hard-boiled stuff, and much more than I'd usually be a fan of milfic, nonetheless I liked Broken Angels, which is heavily in the milfic zone, better than Altered Carbon, which is very much noirish hard-boiled. I liked Woken Furies (just as milfic) better again, but haven't got to it yet in my re-reading.

    I think the reason is the world-building. A lot of it is already there in Altered Carbon, but it is indirect because the immediate setting is a recognisable future Earth - to the point of almost being transplanted Chandler. I can sort of imagine a TV series of Woken Furies being made in the 70s in the style of Blake's 7 more so than now.

    404:

    Really the only thing that arguments about fractional c space battles convinces me of is that it’s a really bad idea. Ditto for manouevering fractional c in system. Double ditto for doing near c near a planet. A lot of this sounds like early 18th century admiralty predictions of naval technology a hundred years ahead e.g. sail power and the tyranny of distance whereas it ended up coal/oil fired ships taking shortcuts through canals (wormholes) and using telegraph (sub space radio) to get the strategic drop. Which strangely sounds a lot like a lot of modern mil.SF. :)

    BTW you’ve got a space going civilization capable of fractional c travel, tell me again why are they fighting?

    405:

    tell me again why are they fighting? Because (some) humans are stupid & often, religious believers ( "Kill the infidels!" )

    406:

    If you are around the orbit of Pluto expecting the Earth to be hit is...

    ... about as unlikely as none of the fragments from a c-speed impact on a large thing leaving the scene at anything like c. Thus isn't about "unlikely" this is about the average cost of a space battle. A kilogram at c/2 hitting a planet with a population of even 10 billion is very likely to kill someone, even if it's just a round-the-world sailor in the sub-antarctic ocean. If it's a tonne of metal it doesn't really matter where it hits, or if it's 100B people the planet is likely so heavily populated that either any impact will kill, or unlucky hits will kill billions.

    Given the scale of some of the battles the problem is not "gas molecule hits shield" it's "debris field at near-c hits debris field coming the other way at near-c" which should provide enough fragments and energy to make the solar system fun to navigate for a while. Call it a million tonnes at roughly c/2, and the requirement is that none of it hits the earth, not now not ever. The good news is that none of it will end up in orbit, unless it hits a planet and ends up embedded.

    But then, we're talking about people who will turn millions of tons of matter into kinetic energy, something we can't even begin to imagine mechanisms for, so maybe they do have some kind of magic wand to stop that happening.

    407:

    Fanboi-ish side note: I'd find a side novel of Victorian Laundry fascinating, bringing us back to Lovecraft's era...

    408:

    Also wrong thread but does the Clan/NAC realise how provactive JUGGERNAUT is?

    Do you really think I'd have put that gun on the mantlepiece in book 1 and polished it lovingly in book 2 only to refrain from pulling the trigger repeatedly in book 3?

    409:

    Yes, but it's very much an existing sub-genre (serious steampunk, with Lovecraftian overtones).

    410:

    No-one else has responded to this by mentioning Jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet" series, where there actually is a "speed limit" on fleet engagements of 0.2c (relative) caused by targeting difficulties even using computerised gunnery systems.

    411:

    It's be an interesting way to keep your readers in suspense. After all, everyone knows that all mantlepiece guns eventually get fired in a Stross series…

    412:

    Regarding Athenian police, it's important that pretty much our only contemporary sources are some remarks in Aristophanes comedies... but according to them they were indeed public slaves, called or perhaps nicknamed "Scythian archers" and obviously many if not all were foreigners, since several jokes emphatize their awful Greek. They were in charge of keeping order in public places, like markets and the Agora, could expel or arrest citizens, and the only weapons mentioned are whips...

    413:

    Yes, of course. But the radiation problem has been covered at great length and the heat problem also, so I thought I'd point out another, different, problem, that does not get mentioned much :)

    414:

    I re-read all three books in preparation for the series. And wish I hadn't.

    Don't get me wrong; it's not bad, just different enough to be irritating when certain things have been turned on their heads for no apparent reason, and - it seems, from the first few episodes - a fair chunk of sequel potential has been burned up.

    By episode seven or eight, though, I weas thinking that I do need to re-watch it, having got the brain-itch and second-guessing out of the way.

    And yes, they do point at a sequel, at the end.

    Just a word of warning, though - there is quite a bit of (even male) full-frontal nudity on show. Plus blood and gore. Just in case that's a no-go for anyone.

    415:

    Almost re-read “Altered Carbon” before watching the Netflix series, but decided I didn’t want to do that checklist thing of comparing the book to the dramatization. I read all three of Richard Morgan’s books once when each came out. I highly recommend the books, they’re great fun.

    Enough time had gone by since reading the books that I was able to come into the Netflix series with fresh eyes and thought it was well done. Really deals with the fucked up reality of sleeving.

    Currently reading “Dark State”. It think the Merchant Princes books would translate well for dramatization.

    416:

    Returning to the dismal topic of English spelling, Jungian synchronicity just caused this to drop into my inbox:

    https://www.thoughtco.com/teddy-roosevelt-simplifies-spelling-1779197

    "In 1906, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt tried to get the government to simplify the spelling of 300 common English words. However, this didn't go over well with Congress or the public."

    My aunt Laura, born in the early 19-teens, was caught up in that and was given to writing "tho", "thru" etc., so I guess the movement lasted a decade or two.

    417:

    As for dust or gas ... an alpha particle is a stripped helium nucleus traveling typically at 0.01-0.05 c. If you manage to make it up to 1% of c, the interstellar medium (roughly one atom per cubic metre) can be approximated to a radiation bath, where you're hitting one heavy ionizing particle per square metre of frontal area 3,000,000 times per second. Speed up to 10% of c and that 3 MBq of heavy particles just leveled up to 30MBq.

    Hydrogen, not helium.

    418:

    I've always blamed it on the tumor.

    And, now that I'm a lot older, the loss of Ginny.

    419:

    Should I take it that you refer to the Hero in the Matter of Britain?

    (Me? Into Arthuriana? You mean, like reading all the then-50 yr old journals in Temple U's library in the late 60s, when I was working there? Then making a stab at learning Cymraeg?)

    420:

    Why so many humanoids? I blame the Arisian galaxy-seeding program.

    421:

    Back when my late wife was in a fiction APA, using that to work on her/our novels, she had one scene where our protagonists and friends were ambushed on a dark street. I pulled out my God Kit, and ran the whole confrontation as straight, original D&D melee rounds. People we didn't expect to get hurt, did. And when it was published, the unanimous reaction was "how realistic/believable it was".

    So, there are uses....

    Oh, and if anyone ever wants to know, I can tell you far more about the results of needler guns than you might like.

    422:

    Um, yes. And, speaking as an American, I can assure you that a lot of those in the South, and Trumpland, and I do not live in the same bloody universe, and few of them are taking calls.

    423:

    I know of one shield that would work. My own, personal, idea is that, like cloaks of invisibility (techno), the force should be bent around the shielded object, to continue on.

    The one that would... a "complete stasis in the ether". And then you wait for the Bad Guys to close up, and head towards shift change, or whatever, and assume that they're not going to keep attacking for 10 or so hours... then open it up, see where they are, move and resheiled, repeat as necessary... then project the shield much larger, and chop them up.

    Thanks, Doc Smith. (Skylark Three).

    424:

    I prefer the one where they each take all their nav data, and pics, of course, clean the ship... and trade ships.

    425:

    And now, Dark State,

    spoiler

    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! CHARLIE! You bum! I haven't been this aggravated since, well, I finished Name of the Wind, and before that, when Carolyn's publisher took an axe to a Chanur novel....

    426:

    I can't remember the author for that, but it was two research, not military ships, both exploring the Crab Nebula.

    427:

    Yes, there is more hydrogen than helium in the interstellar medium, but an alpha particle is very definitely a 4He nucleus. A 1H nucleus is a proton.

    Not that it makes a whole lot of difference when you're crashing into them at a significant fraction of c. Whichever it is, the original particle is charged and massive, so it will itself be stopped after penetrating only a very tiny distance into the spaceship's hull. But the collision will be energetic enough to produce a whole shower of neutrons, gammas, and other more exotic particles, which will penetrate the hull just fine and proceed to wreak havoc upon the low-level constitution of the pilot.

    428:

    419: yes :) 420: yes, it could be that; but I think it is because human(oid)s have such a tendency to provide extensive resources of habitat and food supply for pigeons as a side effect of their normal activities. So the seeding programme of the intergalactic space pigeons often seeds humans at the same time so as to help give the planet a more suitable environment for pigeons. 423: I did like that technique, but it has to be said it only worked because the Fenachrone were really not all that bright. If they had set up an automatic monitor that would, say, initiate total mass-energy conversion of a nice big chunk of copper stuffed inside a handy space rock strapped to the outside of the shield as soon as it detected the shield going down, the result of that encounter would have been rather different.

    429:

    At c-fractional speeds, your hardwired limiter only has to fail once, maybe due to battle damage. You're correct, of course, that a hit on Earth is highly unlikely, but are you willing to bet the future of Humanity* on "highly unlikely?"

    • Or the future of a planet it hits 200 years in the future?
    430:

    Without FTL the concept of space battles doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Genocidal bushwhacking with dense, black projectiles and mutually assured destruction seem more likely.

    They could be on their way already for all we know. It's not as though planets are maneuverable.

    Upgrade to Nicoll-Dyson beams if you want to present yourself as a more resilient civilisation who likes to show off.

    431:

    For world-builders, where the worlds are a bit farther out than ours, this just showed up:

    https://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/goals-02-12-18.pdf

    which is

    Scientific Goals for Exploration of the Outer Solar System

    It contains a nice survey of what questions currently exist concerning Jupiter through Neptune and the associated satellites.

    432:

    Says the author with the unfired cat sitting on a mantelpiece in another series :)

    More seriously - looking forward to Jan 2019 even more now.

    433:

    Or the future of a planet it hits 200 years in the future?

    I call on the engineers to establish experimentally just how far c/2 debris can travel before ablating from "cataclysmic" to merely "very, very dangerous" status. Preferably using someone else's solar system as an experimental facility (the great filter version #6524: I wonder what happens when...).

    There will be a difference between deliberately hard to detect projectiles (which should be banned unconditionally) and wreckage. But one problem with wreckage is that it's an annoying combination of hard stuff that will likely penetrate atmospheres and poor structural integrity, making the "blow up a comet" problem even worse than usual.

    With that much KE involved the "cohesive chunk of wreckage" problem is that pieces don't dissipate the way a cloud of gas does, or sublimate the way a stream of pee does.

    434:

    "Redemption Ark" by Alastair Reynolds has a good example of a long slow battle between two starships. Both are moving at relativistic speed but are almost motionless with respect to each other, and are several light-hours apart. Both can see each other clearly, but since the image is hours out of date, the battle amounts to tossing missiles, zig-zagging, and guessing which way the other will zag. No kinetic energy projectiles because there is no way to actually hit your target at that distance. Just really bog nukes, and hope that enemy happens to be in the blast radius.

    435:

    In contrast, Banks' Matter (I think that's the one) has a lovingly-narrated battle (ex post facto) that takes pages... and then the ship says it actually only took a few microseconds. It made me laugh.

    436:

    Genocidal bushwhacking with dense, black projectiles and mutually assured destruction seem more likely.

    Yeah. They could be on the way... I think both Greg Bear and Charles Pellegrino wrote about that one. But yes, it's definitely a nightmare worth considering.

    I once considered a science fiction universe where nobody was considered civilized unless they at least had a ringworld...

    437:

    Oops, I meant this story about a Chinese "flying car"

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/05/watch-ehangs-passenger-drone-take-flight/

    That's cool as shit! I want one, although I know it's never going to be something I can afford in my lifetime.

    Sigh! Born too soon.

    The one thing I did think of right away is they're going to have to install some kind of blade guards to keep idiots from walking into the rotors.

    438:

    You're still not allowed to fire a missile into the planet's atmosphere at 0.5C - that would involve the mass slaughter of civilians.

    As I understand Weber's rules, that would be considered the same as using nuclear weapon against civilian targets. It doesn't matter if it's done on purpose or by accident.

    The definition of legitimate military targets against which the smaller kinetic weapons are permitted to be used does seem to be a bit flexible depending on who's doing it.

    These are military versions of the poor world-building OGH is complaining about in his top post... what military would voluntarily use a weapon in their own solar system which, if it misfired, could potentially reduce the population of an inhabited world by a third merely because a six-ounce piece of one missile, moving at 0.8C, grazed the atmosphere.

    Here I think you're overestimating the ability of governments and military organizations to think consequences through all the way to their logical conclusions.

    439:

    Don't get me wrong; it's not bad, just different enough to be irritating when certain things have been turned on their heads for no apparent reason, and - it seems, from the first few episodes - a fair chunk of sequel potential has been burned up.

    I haven't read the books, but I'm thinking about reading them now ... at least reading the first one now. I think maybe comeing at it backwards like that I won't be nitpicking the series to death.

    Just a word of warning, though - there is quite a bit of (even male) full-frontal nudity on show. Plus blood and gore. Just in case that's a no-go for anyone.

    It did get a bit intense.

    440:

    And/ or in "Excession" as well ....

    441:

    ITYM Surface Detail.

    The ship's avatar later casually remarks to a player involved with the small fleet that the ship had destroyed in microseconds that they'd jumped it and it had to "off them".

    442:

    'First Contact' by Murray Leinster. I did read it many years ago, liked it a lot, but have always thought there was a far more complex, amusing and interesting novel awaiting for someone to write it developing that idea... if only because it's highly unlikely aliens are exactly the same size as humans and share Earthian privacy concerns so that their ships include Earthian-compatible doors, stairs, bedrooms, kitchens and toilets (would that be 'heads' in navy slang?)

    443:

    Asked him how much he paid his wife for sex.

    Fun as it is to mock MBAs, especially ones with such a sophomoric view of economics, your young MBA was pretty dopey if he couldn't handle that riposte. The obvious answer is surely that he doesn't pay his wife for sex. They are bartering goods of equivalent value (unless she is not a willing participant!)

    His mistake, I think, is in using "pay" in this context, and assuming the exchange of money. In context, goods and services are not worth what money someone will pay for them, goods are worth whatever they can be exchanged for. Money, other goods, favours, political influence... And a more, ahem, fluid view of such exchanges of value is not uncommon in sci-fi.

    444:

    They are bartering goods of equivalent value (unless she is not a willing participant!)

    I think you're positing that either she is willing, in which case the transaction must be fair, or she is not in which case it's not a transaction. I think the situation doesn't fall into such a dichotomy. Certainly there's no reason to expect goods are of equal value - they might just be the best one party feels they can expect. There are more aspects to coercion than a binary lack of "willingness". The same is true for all transactions: power is far more important that anything else in most situations.

    445:

    He was drunk.

    It's been a few decades, but I also recall him saying things like clean air isn't valuable because no one pays for it and people don't really value the wilderness because they don't pay to see it. Apparently having a wilderness outfitter added value to a canoe trip because then it generated economic activity (while merely heading out on your own didn't, as you didn't spend any money).

    Externalities and intangibles didn't seem to be part of his mindset.

    (Again, from what I remember, but it was three decades ago so my memory is rather fuzzy.)

    One of my nieces (who has an MBA) left a consulting job because she realized that her firm were never hired to find solutions, but rather to justify the decision the manager who hired them had already made. It gave her an new view of "independent outside consultant" (and confirmed what I had cynically already surmised, having lived through a bit more economic turmoil than she had). I suspect that the drunken MBA at that 80s party was one who revelled in the role of hired gun, 'proving' what his masters wanted proved without actually trying to get at the truth.

    446:

    In Spanish we have a saying 'Sólo el necio confunde valor y precio' (Only the fool mixes value and price); air can be literally priceless while diamonds are quite pricey, but it takes air to live which makes it far more valuable.

    Actually, it's basic Economics that market price is not determined by value but marginal value/marginal utility. This in plain language means that you would pay anything for a water jerrycan in the desert, but you would pay very little for a second one, and pretty much nothing for a third, fourth, etc. because increasing amounts of water have almost no value for you (i.e. its marginal utility is very low) Each diamond, in contrast, is worth the same because all of them have almost the same value/utility even if after the first hundred you are a bit satiated (or so I've heard... )

    447:

    There's the old English joke about a highwayman demanding "your money or your life" and the rich man needing time to think it over…

    448:

    Re yct about the Fenachrone: yes, but... they're Old, and Powerful, and have Begun the Conquest of the Galaxy, and these two tiny ships don't even have the space drive, and they just blasted the first, and what can the second one possibly do? IIRC, they expect it to run out of fuel, and then the stasis fails, and they've got it.

    Seaton, on the other hand, was thinking outside their box, as it were.

    Btw, when I grow up, forget trivial things like President or Pope... I want to be Dick Seaton (and will be, as soon as I finish my Famous Secret Theory).

    449:

    That actually does not make sense. You're not a Ship of the Line, shooting artillery, or dropping bombs, you're shooting rockets with warheads, and you'd expect them to do course corrections as they get closer.

    450:

    "Independent outside consultant", depends on what they're doing. A good friend is just that... but he's a computer consultant, keeping a good number of small organizations going.

    The others, they old joke about lawyers, when asked "how much is 2+2", is lock the doors, pull down the blinds, and ask "How much do you want it to be".

    Which goes really well for top management (with MBAs), brought in to "fix" a company. Undersize ("downsize), screw everyone over, then sell the company, and walk with a large profit.

    Note that if I sound a) cynical, and b) pissed off, I am. My company got bought ("merged", though they ewre 2/3rds the total employees and 80% of the money), it's taken two bloody years to consolidate the financials, time reporting, email, and everything else, and that was just complete last month.

    And benefits are less; my medical, for example, is more than last year's, and the co-pays more that 1.5 times the previous....)

    Yesterday, we learned that the company's just been b sold. My take is that this was the plan all along, and upper mgmt will walk with $$$$$$$$

    451:

    Ah yes, thank you. I've only got one of the Culture books in ebook form, I should start to correct that.

    As I said, it made me laugh. Still does, when I think about it.

    452:

    I didn't know if I could RC either, so I decided to check. Turns out I can't find the copy I thought I had, but it's on Project Gutenberg, and that version has a preface which I don't recall having seen before. In it Smith talks about how he deals with potential conflicts between scientific knowledge and the requirements of storytelling, so it's quite relevant to this thread.

    http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21051/21051-h/21051-h.htm

    Of course, I can't just check the one point; I have to read it, so I haven't got to that bit yet...

    I was never as ambitious as you; I just wanted to be Michael Faraday. Or at one point Marie Curie, but her life outside the lab seems to have been quite shit.

    453:

    Since we're deep in the weeds, I'd like to ask a silly off-topic question that popped up in a conversation yesterday.

    This goes to the idea of our universe being inside a black hole formed by another universe. I realize this isn't a new idea, and apparently there are some predictions made based on one version of this idea that might not have panned out.

    My weird idea is whether the problem that dark energy is supposed to solve, that the universe is not just expanding but accelerating, might instead be due in to our black hole continuing to take in stuff (I hesitate to call it matter or mass-energy) from the parent universe.

    The question is, how might one go about testing and disproving this idea? Obviously there are the microwave background measurements that reportedly did not support the notion. But naive non-physicist that I am, I wonder, if stuff (let's call it handwavium for now) is coming into our universe via a black hole infall from a different universe, and stuff is leaving our universe via all the black holes that our universe has spawned, whether there might be some way to check relative flow rates "in" and "out" relative to the presumed effect of dark energy as a way to test the hypothesis.

    Physicists? It's up the flag pole. Fire at will.

    454:

    idea of our universe being inside a black hole formed by another universe

    Last weeks New Scientist has yet another round of theorists trying to resolve the firewall problem, which may be relevant to your suppositioning.

    My understanding is that dark energy appears in the gaps between galaxies, not at the edge of the universe. So your black hole idea would require some kind of mapping of boundaries to gaps that I'm not sure would help plausibility.

    MOND seems quite benign by comparison, as explanations for dark energy go :)

    This seems closest but it's 2013 and I can't find the news snippet from last week online. As usual... NS website is awful.

    Wow, they have a whole section on black holes: https://www.newscientist.com/article-topic/black-holes/

    455:

    There are some issues there too:

    --Is "edge" the relevant place to look for black hole infall? The only way that infall would conflate with dark energy effects is if the stuff appears everywhere. --Can we even see the edge, or has inflation already pushed that boundary expansion to superluminal speeds? (just heard that theory on the radio a few days ago).

    While we focus on the stuff the falls into a singularity, the part I don't understand is whether spacetime somehow gets taken in as well. Spacetime coming into a singularity is where I kind of think of stuff like dark energy, but again, I know nothing.

    Whatever. One could imagine a multiverse that's "black holes all the way down," where universes spawn as the result of black holes inside each other in an (infinite?) regressinon series. Although if those theorists were onto something with their theory that our 3D universe is the result of a singularity in a 4D universe, there may be some sort of hierarchy of descending dimensions among universes, where our black holes lead to flatlands, whose singularities lead to linelands, whose singularities lead to pointlands, so that all of the multiverse ultimately ends up inhabiting an infinity zero-dimensional singularities, at which point...what, thepoints blow up and it all starts all over again? Too bad I do not partake. I suspect it would help me imagine this like, totally tripped-out concept.

    456:

    My niece thought she'd be the first type, realized she was supposed to be the second, and followed her conscience by resigning.

    457:

    "Dark State spoiler-ish.

    Also wrong thread but does the Clan/NAC realise how provactive JUGGERNAUT is?

    Something that could cause a Kessler Cascade just by lighting off its main drive in orbit above the US - yikes!

    I'm reminded of the propulsion system in OGH's A Tall Tail for some reason."

    Pop that into timeline 2 for an hour where every government on Earth would see it.............

    458:

    "Do you really think I'd have put that gun on the mantlepiece in book 1 and polished it lovingly in book 2 only to refrain from pulling the trigger repeatedly in book 3?"

    ISTR a 20 megaton bomb missing from US stockpiles for decades, and set to go off in a US city.

    459:

    At the risk of derailing, Charlie - has the Clan done an diplomatic efforts with other countries in Timeline 2?

    Every government (and large organization) would dearly love access to paratime.

    460:

    Sorry, 'done any'

    461:

    Concerning fondleslabs, weirdness, and OGH's original post: XKCD has a cartoon about how the world became weird for the Unicode people.

    462:

    My understanding is that dark energy appears in the gaps between galaxies, not at the edge of the universe. So your black hole idea would require some kind of mapping of boundaries to gaps that I'm not sure would help plausibility.

    MOND seems quite benign by comparison, as explanations for dark energy go :)

    You're confusing dark energy with dark matter. (E.g., MOND is an attempt to remove the need for dark matter in galaxies, though it fails when you get to groups and clusters of galaxies, which need extra dark matter.) Also, dark matter isn't just in "gaps in between galaxies" -- it's inside galaxies, too, and is in fact denser there (that's why the galaxies formed where they did, according to the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory).

    463:

    Physicists? It's up the flag pole. Fire at will.

    O-kay... (technically, I'm an astronomer, but since I study supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, I'll assume I'm somewhat qualified...)

    "Dark energy" is something that has positive mass-energy but negative pressure. Ordinary matter (and light) has positive pressure, so "stuff" falling into black holes can never behave like dark energy, unless you start postulating really weird properties for this supposed "parent universe".

    As far as we can tell, dark energy is evenly distributed (the idea that it's some kind of vacuum energy means that it's naturally the same everywhere). So, as you pointed out, it has to appear everywhere, not just at some hypothesized "edge". To be a bit more specific, the accelerating cosmic expansion thought to be due to dark energy is happening all over the place -- that is, in between all the groups and clusters of galaxies. It's an expansion of spacetime, not an expansions of some "boundary" of an otherwise static universe.

    Also, at the moment we have a minor problem with explaining how supermassive black holes got so massive so quickly in the early universe. (There are quasars at high redshift -- when they were less than a billion years old -- with plausible black hole masses of more than a billion solar masses. It's not clear there's enough time for the first stars to form, create standard black holes, and then accrete enough gas from their surroundings to increase in mass that rapidly.) Allowing black holes to lose mass to some hypothetical child universe makes this even more of a problem. (Along with violating conservation of mass-energy...)

    464:

    ISTR a 20 megaton bomb missing from US stockpiles for decades, and set to go off in a US city.

    That's not a Chekhov's Gun; that's a deliberate blank round. (Purpose in narrative: to demonstrate that there are some really dark, brutal secrets in the background, including elements of the US government going back decades who are ruthless enough to pull something like Operation Northwoods (the most extreme variant of which, circa early Nixon era, called for nuking a US city as a false flag pretext for a strategic attack on China).

    See also the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, aka P2OG, (which I wasn't aware of at the time but which fits perfectly with the narrative in this series). (Note: P2OG is contemporary and sufficiently secret that it's fertile territory for conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, so be very wary about what you read about them on the internet.)

    465:

    At the risk of derailing, Charlie - has the Clan done an diplomatic efforts with other countries in Timeline 2?

    At 485 comments in we're way past the point of derailment, so here goes:

    The USA has ARMBAND and also DRAGON'S TEETH (the products of the Clan fertility clinic/breeding program), who can be activated using the technique trialed on Rita. The Commonwealth established a similar program using sperm donors and, much later, donated eggs (to maximize the available gene pool) but the oldest children were born no earlier than 2004, so at the dateline of EMPIRE GAMES they're just barely old enough to start training. The Clan, as existing in exile in TL3, has maybe a thousand currently available active world-walkers. Some are aging out of the useful cohort, while some children are entering, but even with a significantly higher-than-replacement TFR they haven't been in the Commonwealth long enough to expand their active world-walking force significantly.

    World-walkers can't sustain more than 2 transfers per day without meds; even with meds, trying to make 4-6 jaunts for more than a couple of weeks will have potentially damaging medical consequences (from adverse drug side effects such as cognitive impairment, through to aneurisms and stroke). Also, medical issues can render world-walkers unavailable—either through illness, or because you don't want to risk your world walkers betraying their presence by starting a local epidemic of an alien zoonosis (like a hitherto unknown strain of flu). Finally, if you're trying to breed more world walkers you probably don't want to use pregnant women as beasts of burden: drugs contraindicated in pregnancy are a no-no, and that includes some antihypertensives.

    Even with better drugs, there's a tight limit on the Commonwealth's available world-walking bandwidth. Their top priority is securing the Commonwealth, which implicitly means maximizing the take from the industrial espionage/catch-up program run by MITI. A second priority is military security and threat detection, hence the exploration program and JUGGERNAUT.

    Remember that bomb wing of B-36 analogues? They need at least two world walkers for each aircrew if they are to pose a credible deterrent to the USA. So that's maybe 10-15% of their available adult world walkers sleeping on cots in bomber base ready rooms at any time, just to retain the capability to ferry 70 airframes carrying 1-4 H-bombs each to major US targets. Which realistically means more like 25% of their active world walkers, once you take into account illness, morbidity, and pregnancy.

    My BOTE assumption is that in 2020 the Commonwealth has 500 world walkers available for general purposes, another 250 pregnant or unavailable for medical reasons, and 250 assigned to the military on hot standby. They can generate roughly 1000 jaunts per day, but because the USA's time line is two jaunts away that means maybe 250 round trips/day, max, if they drop everything else (e.g. the supply runs to JUGGERNAUT and other paratime-remote installations, the exploration program, and so on) and rope in retirees and late teen-agers at maximum operational tempo.

    In fact, the picture is even worse. If you spotted the references to conscription/a corvee/obligation? Most world walkers don't do it full-time — they're on active duty maybe 25% of their time. They have jobs, spend time training (for the undercover missions), and so on. It's not as bad as being an astronaut (where they fly aboard ISS for maybe 1-3 years out of a 30 year career, if they're lucky), but it's the same principle at work — world walkers are a scarce resource and valuable, so a lot of time and thought goes into ensuring that their jaunts are productive, which in turn makes them scarce and expensive.

    (If the novel was set in 2030, not 2020, then with a TFR around 6 — think Iran in the 1980s — the Clan exiles might have increased by 3000 new adults (6 kids each for 500 women) and another 3-5000 children on the way but too young for service. The second generation of the First Man's breeding program would also be coming along by now, adding thousands to tens of thousands more active world-walkers, the oldest in their mid-teens.

    So the Commonwealth by 2030 will have the paratime bandwidth to support diplomatic missions to other countries ... but as of 2020, it's straining the limits of their capability.

    If this sounds bonkers, consider a metaphor: the USAF has a couple of thousand fighter aircraft of all types, and numerous bases in the continental USA—but only 3-4 of those bases are able to generate a quick-reaction flight; there are usually a couple of F-16s or F-15s in the air near DC, and they can scramble a couple more within a quarter of an hour, but the idea that the USAF can get a thousand fighters in the air simultaneously (without a multi-month-long readiness campaign first) is moonshine.

    The devil is in the detail of logistics support, in other words.

    466:

    Interesting. So amateurs talk tactics, pros talk logistics. And the second order (and beyond) effect of those logistics.

    467:

    XKCD has a cartoon about how the world became weird for the Unicode people.

    You know there are people who want to use emoji in URLs. shudder

    468:

    Talking of which [ XKCD ] one of Charlie ( & everybody else's ) pet hates is featured recently ....

    469:

    "Using emoji" in a URL is something that trivially falls out of "Use Unicode in URL". That is something people are kinda keen on, to have URLs (and domain names) that support whatever language they happen to speak, that isn't English (NB, there MAY be languages that are distinct from English that don't need anything outside ASCII, but the only ones that I can think of is Esperanto, and maybe Klingon).

    I think it would be sillier to explicitly forbid using emoji, but allowing the rest of Unicode, YMMV.

    470:

    Learning from their masters at Gleiwitz, were they? I note that JFK refused to touch it with someone else's - good for him. Some of the othe details - a false-flag attack on Commonwealth territory are especially ... nice (not). What bothers me, is that when T Donald Rump is replaced by Pence (shudder) this WILL be tried out, because "Jesus wants us to do it against the godless Insert$NAMEhere"

    471:

    the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory

    As a loyal Materialistic Reductionist, I find it embarrassing that the current "concordance cosmology", ΛCDM, has reality consisting overwhelmingly of Λ and CDM, neither of which we have much of a clue about.

    http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~george/ay1/lec_pdf/Ay1_Lec20.pdf

    472:

    Actaully, it's got to the stage of multiple Epicycles, hasn't it? [ Or the "ultraviolet Ctatstrophe", even ] The "answer" is probably blindingly simple - once it's been seen at all ....

    473:

    There seems to me to be a bit of a wobble here...

    Originally the Clan had the one big advantage over the US that they could world-walk and the US couldn't. But then the US not only levelled the advantage out of existence, but turned it the other way round, first by creating a mechanical implementation of world-walking that could be produced and used in bulk, thus escaping the limits on its use, and later on top of that debugging the biological implementation so that too was free from the limits.

    The Commonwealth's security is now protected by nothing more than how little the US knows about them, and the US is busily driving at tearing that barrier down. The big lever the Commonwealth has over the US is the ability to carry out a nuclear first strike, but that ability is limited by their world-walking capacity, and the US is already able to do the same to them only better; they're just not yet sufficiently well-informed about the Commonwealth's capabilities to figure out if they can get away with it. But they are closing that gap fast and the Commonwealth now knows enough to realise it.

    Now if I was in Commonwealth security I would be VERY interested in counter-espionage against the US, and also rather unhappy that the Commonwealth's abilities in that line are so crap - a handful of world-walking agents who can barely be used because they're too easily blown. I'd be trying to get some decent assets, both human and technological, inside the US apparatus. So a handful of starting thoughts on that theme, in no particular order, might include these:

    Seeking US youths in a kind of similar position to Rita - having by chance a background with nothing to alarm the positive vetting crew, with the kind of social position that is broadly contented and pro-government, but who aren't comfortable with the US's endemic surveillance (and racism), and are at the stage of life when they are susceptible to the influence of political alternatives to the mainstream; then applying such influences to them. Similar to the KGB's doings at Cambridge. I'd probably consider roping in some ex-KGB people (cf. our own TL featuring a certain ex-KGB chap who's rather good at cyber-subversion of the US) and also using the British security establishment as a vector into the US one (also known to work in their TL). Of course, if Rita let slip about her grandad I'd probably think it was Christmas, but that sort of thing doesn't happen for planning for it.

    Seeing what happens if you take a biopsy sample of a world-walker's cellular machinery and insert it into a Columba livia zygote. They have enough payload capacity to carry a miniature recording device and enough "hidden volume" between the outline of the feathers and the outline of the body underneath to conceal it, and they naturally sit on window ledges. If people leave windows open they could also leave things behind inside. And things to breach air-gaps.

    Looking to China as a source of technology rather than the US. After all, that's where it's all made. The Chinese branch of the world-walkers would probably be useful here if any of them are still around.

    Attempting to replicate the mechanisation/debugging of the world-walking mechanism, using a combination of research and espionage.

    Attempting to get photons to world-walk. Especially if you can implement COME FROM. Nobody is ever going to notice if 1 in 106 photons hitting a fly-sized bit of wall disappear into another universe, but the eye on the other side still gets a great view.

    Such research efforts shouldn't harm the main catch-up programme any more than what they're doing already does. The prime requirement is top scientific brains, which catch-up doesn't need much of. The establishment might be something on the periphery of a small town with a population of a few tens of K where it gets overlooked because all anyone cares about is the scenery.

    I do get the feeling that in Invisible Sun we're going to find all such concerns becoming irrelevant as everyone is eaten by an enormous mutant star goat. I do hope that doesn't happen in such a way as to shut down any possibility of future novels in this universe (I know you've said you have no plans, but I can always hope you'll be struck by some random but irresistible inspiration) as there seems to be so much potential left in the setting.

    474:

    stage of multiple Epicycles

    I prefer cherubim and seraphim myself, though they're also a little hard to accomodate in materialistic reductionism. But whatevs.

    475:

    INTERESTING Someone been reading Vernor Vinge, I wonder?

    476:

    Dark matter takes the form of enormous giant space pigeons, hundreds of light-years across. They act as kind of "galactic shepherds", curating the universe for the benefit of all the various pigeon species on different planets.

    Nobody can find it mainly because nobody thinks of looking for enormous pigeons in space. But you know how at one stage the people who found the cosmic microwave background thought it might be pigeon shit? Well, it is, just not on the antenna.

    477:

    Or Greg Bear, or Neal Stephenson :)

    478:

    There MAY be languages that are distinct from English that don't need anything outside ASCII, but the only ones that I can think of is Esperanto, and maybe Klingon).

    Hmm, Swahili?

    Neither Esperanto nor Klingon - Esperanto has (famously) diacritics (Ido hasn't), and Klingon does not even use Latin script :-) (there is an ASCII only transliteration/transcription, but then, there is one also for Russian or Chinese). Anyway, it's naïve to think that English needs only ASCII (though it can “get along” quite well).

    479:

    You're quite correct about the whole Commonwealth espionage deficit.

    As far as ARMBAND and activating inactive carriers of the world-walking trait goes, the Commonwealth is working on it, but is a couple of decades behind the necessary biotech to make it work. If they can insert agents into the right bits of DHS they might be able to steal the tech and get it working in less than a decade, but that's a big ask.

    It's no spoiler (by the end of DARK STATE) to admit that the Commonwealth is funding JUGGERNAUT because it promises to be a whole lot cheaper and more effective (!) than a nuclear bomber wing that soaks up 25% of their available world walkers. Orion-type vessels actually become more efficient as you scale them up: bigger works better.

    It's also an Outside Context Problem for the USA because space tech has more or less stalled in time line 2. They're behind where we are now in reality, because nobody's interested in colonizing Mars any more: no Elon Musk figures, just boring old NASA and NRO contracts while the smart money is on colonizing uninhabite parallel earths.

    I am not planning more novels in this universe at this time (I flamed out again) but I am leaving the setting intact and there might be stand-alone novels yet to come (no more trilogies, please Cthulhu!), set two or more decades after EMPIRE GAMES. But don't ask me for an ETA on that (or for character continuity).

    480:

    Welsh Latin Flemish (going by some of the weirder spam I get)

    English only "needs" non-ASCII characters for foreign loanwords, which IMO don't count because they're, well, foreign. And most of the time people don't bother trying to write them with diacritics anyway.

    481:

    So, here's an idea: what's the possibility that supermassive black holes don't have to create a white hole, but rather are the source of vacuum energy, and radiate out that way?

    482:

    I have never quite understood how the results from WIMP completely ruled out the possibility that spacetime is shaped like a donut that rotates (or is that deforms?) ... would the word be tortionally? That is, if the donut's sitting on a table (as opposed to being on the way into your mouth), the surface rotates from the center *up, away from the center, down the outside, and back through the center? That would certainly do away with the need for dark energy or matter....

    Remembering being in my late teens, and another hippy and me chasing each other around Rittenhouse Square in Philly, her yelling Big Bang, and me yelling Continuous Creation!

    483:

    And some of them were even more over the top. I've seen/read that then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (top of all US military, just below Cabinet level) at the time "Bombs away with" Curtis LeMay was so much for going into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis that JFK had to tell him that he'd be fired if he didn't shut up about that.

    484:

    Oh, forbid emoji completely. We were taught that it wasn't even necessary to use italics or exclamation marks when writing, since skilled use of words can make any meaning clear without.

    But if you are going to allow emoji, why restrict users to a small predefined set? I've been thinking about what one might call an emoji construction kit. Imagine an app. The first stage would be to equip it with a stock of simple shapes such as ◡ and ◠ and ◜ and ◞.

    Then you'd need a virtual tabletop, around which the user could move the shapes, bring them close, and join them, like letters in a word.

    For extra credit, provide (a) some means to colour selected shapes; (b) an escape system, which enables users to outline new curves not in the original stock, probably by defining these as a dense sequence of two-dimensional co-ordinates; (c) a means of saving any combination to non-volatile memory, for later use in messages.

    If all that could be done, might it not enable users to be more creative — much more — than if forced to rely on a few predefined icons of dubious significance, such as aubergines and lobsters and tongue-outs?

    485:

    I think you've just invented a new game. Maybe we could call it Screbble (the 'e" in the middle for emojis).

    Then we could also sell the adult add-on expansion....

    486:

    "We were taught that it wasn't even necessary to use italics or exclamation marks when writing, since skilled use of words can make any meaning clear without."

    I don't know if I was ever formally taught that, but it is a proposition I (mostly) agree with and (mostly) try to follow, though not slavishly.

    The trouble is that it only works properly if you can expect people to actually read what you write, instead of merely skimming the text to see what words you used and then constructing their own meaning based mainly on the inside of their head. That problem seems particularly acute on internet fora, but it is a worrying thought that it might be just as acute elsewhere but you don't get the feedback to know about it. And the more care you take to use language to pin down your precise meaning beyond all possibility of it wriggling away, the more people see it as a reason to replace your meaning with their own.

    487:

    That was as much as I dared hope for, so thanks!

    488:

    MOND seems quite benign by comparison, as explanations for dark energy go :) ... You're confusing dark energy with dark matter.

    You're confusing poking astronomers with a pointy stick with attempting to be a serious astronomer. At the level of dark energy and MOND there's so little experimental evidence that it's barely science and is close to astrology. "we're predicting the future using the positions of the stars"...

    I'm aware that there are lots of very serious people studying this stuff but I find it hard to take the fringe bits seriously. There's too much taking 1% vaguely plausible evidence, mixing in 99% wild speculation, then declaring that obviously giant space pigeons are making it all work.

    489:

    But if you are going to allow emoji, why restrict users to a small predefined set?

    Unicode has combining characters, and I was actually thinking about those in the context of emojii the other day. At the simplest level, you could have blank-face with combining-smile to get smiley. But that would let you have bicycle with combining-smile... which probably wouldn't work. But stop-sign with combining-angry-face would. And circle-slash with combining-wink would go well with #metoo, perhaps.

    Combining accents as a rule only make sense with a tiny fraction of unicode characters but can be used with almost anything. ̇π -> pi plus combining dot above, it's Unicode but probably won't render very well, it doesn't for me.

    ঙ where 999 is the hex code from this page for example.

    It takes considerable effort to read longer pieces online, then think about who wrote it and what they might have meant. It's helpful if there are indications as early as possible suggesting tone and intent, and emojii go some way to providing that. It's very difficult* to do that with words, and there is something of an arms race going on as destructive actors race to appropriate and weaponise the words used.

    You see that most clearly with the alt-right, for example with their using the language of liberal progressives both as slurs, and as a tool to demand more privilege. "help help I'm being oppressed", said the Nazi rally organiser denied access to a university. And so on.

    • I don't recall seeing it done
    490:

    sorry, all that previewing and I still stuffed up the close tag on the URL. {cries}

    [[pats Moz on the back, and remove extraneous space from URL tag - mod]]

    491:

    But if you work on speculative ideas just beyond the realm of what can be measured you can keep writing papers until you retire without ever having to be wrong. If a group of you do it then everyones citation index goes crazy.

    Win win!

    492:

    "The Chinese branch of the world-walkers would probably be useful here if any of them are still around."

    There's a good point. What happened to them? Will they reappear?

    Regards using them to interface with TL2 China, they would never have been there as they were trading with TL3/New Britain.

    493:

    WRT physics problems and speculative ideas, one of the physics world curmudgeons just offered this, which I think is a useful discussion.

    https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/02/which-problems-make-good-research.html

    494:

    Re interfacing, I was thinking:

    • they speak Chinese. I know plenty of people in our TL do interface with China without knowing Chinese, but it must surely make it a crapload easier if you do, and all the more so when anything subtle or delicate is involved.

    • they have a recognisably Chinese cultural background. Not identically Chinese, and the politics in particular seem to be quite divergent, but still a big head start over having a Western one, again especially when anything subtle or delicate is involved.

    • they look Chinese. They don't automatically attract the attention of anyone looking for agents of a foreign power by visibly qualifying for at least the "foreign" bit.

    • they understand the problem from the inside (obviously).

    • they seem to have disappeared from the story (as someone else remarked recently) and it looks like a logical place for them to reappear.

    495:

    Charlie: "So the Commonwealth by 2030 will have the paratime bandwidth to support diplomatic missions to other countries ... but as of 2020, it's straining the limits of their capability."

    I disagree with your view on the logistics:

    Diplomatic missions don't in and of themselves require much in the way of daily world-walking. And the Clan has and has used non world-walkers (such as What's His Name, who defected). Diplomatic personnel from other countries could be brought into Timeline 3 on a long-term basis.

    In addition, other countries could help with knowledge transfer (with additional risks, of course).

    496:

    "It's no spoiler (by the end of DARK STATE) to admit that the Commonwealth is funding JUGGERNAUT because it promises to be a whole lot cheaper and more effective (!) than a nuclear bomber wing that soaks up 25% of their available world walkers. Orion-type vessels actually become more efficient as you scale them up: bigger works better."

    It's only more efficient if the US can't spot it. For MAD, quantity is a very desirable quality. If you have 50 B-36's dispersed through para-time and space, hitting 90% of them leaves the Commonwealth with the ability to put from 5-10 H-bombs on target.

    JUGGERNAUT puts a lot of eggs in one basket.

    Not that I don't love it.

    497:

    I'm also wondering about that Clan offshoot in (TL 4?).
    IIRC, they have access to TL1 - when they jump in, and it's in nuclear winter, they might wonder (of course, they don't have the ability to figure out that it's 'nuclear').

    498:

    Thanks Peter. The flag is rightfully holed. But wait, there's more! I can keep gibbering!

    Here are a couple of other problems I naively see: one is that the conservation of mass-energy seems to be only valid on local scales. My hot cup of coffee doesn't suddenly turn into two cups of coffee ice cream, for example. On the other hand, when something goes beyond an event horizon, all that's left of it's ability to interact with this universe is its gravity. There's no other interaction possible. So in the sense of full interaction, we do lose mass-energy from the universe, and it's not a bug, it's an essential feature of galaxy formation.

    Yes, I know that probably makes you rightfully and righteously annoyed. Sorry about that.

    Another consideration is that, so far as the cosmologists can tell us, we can't detect 96% of the "stuff" in the universe, and the vast majority of it causes "negative pressure" (it doesn't suck, it blows, as I learned in plant physiology in a different context). Since we can't detect either dark matter or dark energy (except indirectly through gravity), we don't know if that stuff follows the first law and is conserved. Pedantic, but dark stuff not being conserved might end up being the most parsimonious explanation for some of the observation. It gets worse if you assume that dark matter and energy fall into black holes too. Indeed, dark matter should make up the majority of each black hole mass, unless dark energy can get sucked in, in which case it's the majority. Wonder what all that stuff looks like after it's passed through a singularity? Does it cause black holes to inflate inside?

    That won't help you with too-young giant black holes, but oh well. Maybe these anomalies are the remnants of black holes that got eaten by our parent black hole, or something. If that's the case, occasionally the dubious black hole that hypothetically contains us (do we call it Azathoth,* perhaps?) should occasionally eat another black hole from whatever universe it pulls stuff in from, and the mangled remnants of that black hole will pop up "in here" on the edge of our universe, looking anomalously old because it's near the edge. But I'm just gibbering, and I certainly don't know what I'm talking about.

    Hmmm: Whackadoodle Lovecraftian cosmology: Azathoth is the black hole that contains the universe, Yog-Sothoth is the observer that makes quantum mechanics work under the Copenhagen Interpretation. I almost dread asking what Nyarlathotep might be. The Strong Anthropic Principle?

    *Personally, I think Azathoth should be the name of Sagitarrius A, because that is the endlessly consuming, idiot god that made the existence of our solar system possible. But heck, if the whole universe is inside a black hole, why not go big?

    499:

    they speak Chinese

    That's a bit like saying "they speak European". There are lots of Chinese languages (misleadingly called "dialects"). The common point is a shared writing system, but even that isn't as standardized as many people think. And choosing the wrong version of the writing system is a big "not from here" flag.

    Depending on where the divergence points are*, you could well be dropping your worldwalker into a place with strong social controls (groups are liable for actions of their members), an efficient bureaucracy, and a paranoid state of mind.

    Still better than not looking like everyone else, granted. But still not terribly safe if you're trying to avoid detection.

    *I haven't read any of the sequels and don't remember much of the lost Chinese clan, so this is speculation on no evidence.

    500:

    Actually, it does make sense. A missile attempting a course correction within a light-second or so of the target would be immediately noticed and destroyed with a laser. So yes, that long slow duel is much more like indirect artillery fire than anything else.

    501:

    Your missile will be immediately noticed either way. There is very little to hide behind in space, and current tech infrared sensors are accurate to 0.1 degrees K or better.

    502:

    Do we need to bring up MISTY again? Simple stealth using a faceted, angled nosecone would make radar bounce off (yielding the expected signal that there's nothing here to see). THe shield, if big enough, might possibly disguise some course corrections, depending on what is being used to generate the course correction (I assume magic with fractional C velocities, but there you go). Anyway, a cold shield hiding a hot drive would be pretty much par for the course.

    503:

    Following up the utility of emojii:

    read Simple communication works

    The usefulness of emoji as a communication tool has been shown in several fields of research. Emoji can accurately express emotional associations with commercial products, reflect state of mind in cancer patients and aid communication with sick young patients.

    There's links and stuff in the original.

    Mostly I'd like to be able to add basic emojii elements to existing emojii, smiling-face on bicycle for my ride to/from work, flame + planet to describe people committed to global warming, and so on.

    504:

    I was assuming that anything accelerating to fractional-c speeds would be much too hot to keep anything nearby within .1 degrees of cosmic background, but I suppose it depends on how much fairy dust you care to sprinkle around.

    505:

    Buried in all the hoopla about the Falcon Heavy is the progress on Starlink, SpaceX's constellation of internet-everywhere satellite constellation. They're launching the demonstrator on the next Falcon 9. Interesting to find numbers: apparently there are 1740 active and 2600 dead satellites in orbit. Also, Starlink will consist of 11,925 satellites!!!

    http://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-microsat-launch-global-internet-2018-2

    506:

    Well, both Welsh and Flemish do use diacritics - I do not know much about Welsh, but Flemish (AKA Dutch) is weird in the sense that not even the set of diacritic signs is "officially" determined. But nevertheless, the use of acute accents is quite standardized. And Latin has traditionally tons of diacritics, especially the medieval one (though semantically these would be considered abbreviations). It's just the modern, streamlined version that does not use it.

    BTW talking about "foreign words" and English is a pleonasm - I've counted no less than 8 foreign words in your sentence :-) (of course, it is about the degree of foreigness)

    Since I tend to pay attention to this, I noticed than in each of several English language novels I recently read (including those written by our host) used diacritics. Though it's not only about diacritics - e.g. you just cannot typeset a decent book without typographical quotes.

    Anyway, this is quite off topic for this forum :-)

    507:

    The complete utter waste of time & effort that fucking "emoji" represent, you mean? Even looking up the link(s) you posted I still haven't the faintest clue as to where to start IF I wanted to post an emoji into this text, or anywhere else for that matter. WTF is wrong with WORDS?

    Emoji represent a move away form the infonitely-variable & flexible (almost) character-set of "Roman" ( or Cyrillic or ... ) scripts to the fixed-states of ideographic characters ( Like the "Chinese" referred to above ) which is a retrograde & amazingly stupid thing to do.

    508:

    A Kessler cascade, all of its own, all at one go. Um

    509:

    Dutch (and I guess Flemish) also uses the ij-ligature, in both upper and lower case. ij and IJ

    510:

    There's a good point. What happened to them? Will they reappear?

    Confession: I forgot about them while writing EMPIRE GAMES — middle-aged memory rot, combined with keeping too many balls in the air. If I ever need to write a spin-off novella, that'd be an interesting direction to go in.

    They were never numerous, and were outnumbered roughly 10:1 by the Clan; before re-using them I need to think very hard about issues of racism in the Commonwealth and cultural appropriation (in our real world).

    511:

    WTF is wrong with WORDS?

    Are you familiar with ideographic languages? Chinese? Japanese kanji? Ideographic text is semantically denser than text using a syllabary or alphabet system. It takes a lot longer to learn an ideographic system (thousands of symbols to memorize, rather than a mere hundred or so in an alphabet system) but once learned, the reading speed is significantly higher and the density of text per unit area on a page is also higher. And a chunk of the ease-of-learning advantage of alphabet systems is offset by the need for spelling conventions because written words don't generally map consistently to spoken words. Nor do ideographic languages prevent you from representing verbs or variable states or any of the other complexities of human language. All they really fail at is being easily typed using a pushbutton keyboard with a limited number of rows and columns of keys, i.e. a typewriter — and we've had acceptable pen/finger/gestural input and ideographic character recognition for a couple of decades now.

    Emoji are a synthetic cross-language ideographic system optimized for smartphones. They really got going in Japan and China in the 90s — they got smartphones early because they needed decent bitmapped screens rather than segmented displays in order to display any useful text whatsoever.

    I will grant you that the use of emoji by Kids These Days is annoying, inconsistent, and equivalent to the babbling of 3 year olds (if you evaluate it in terms of Confucian scholarly literature) — but then, so is most human communication.

    512:

    WTF is wrong with WORDS?

    For me, the emoji are not something that should replace words. They're symbols in their own right, and that can be a good thing, too.

    Also, they are not new as an idea, even on the text-based communication channels. I used emoticons in BBSes, and have used them in all text messaging things after that. In many cases a :), a B-], or a :~( can convey things fast and easily with no WORDS needed to understand them.

    I consider the emojis to be mostly a modification and a codification of emoticons. I miss the modifiability of emoticons - me and my friends sometimes made up ridiculous emoticons for fun, but that isn't easily done with emojis. For example:

    *<B-)=

    (A bearded guy with a bobhat and a beard.) We also didn't have the eggplant emoji, but made do with ascii art. Sometimes the emoticon and the ascii art mingled, like with the TIE fighter and the X-wing:

    |-o-| >-o-<

    These worked better in plain ASCII (or iso8859-1 or whatnot) without interpretation by the display program - here I have to use &gt; and &lt; and copious amounts of preview, and the proportional font makes them look worse. However, the emojis are not a new idea even in the Western digital communication.

    513:

    In a similar context.

    I play EVE Online. If not using voice comms all inter-player communication is done via text chat. Sometimes you want to speed what you type so that you aren't focussing on that for too long and miss seeing a developing threat whilst in space.

    So that leads to things like: o7 (salute) o/ (waving) kk (acknowledge/okay) x (general acknowledgement, usually in response to a prompt such as "x up if you can join fleet") hot (I am aligned with the destination, travelling at maximum velocity & ready to initiate warp) gf (good fight)

    That last can be a sporting acknowledgement of a skilled opponent, or rubbing salt in the wound when someone has been utterly outclassed/swarmed and overwhelmed.

    514:

    ( And others on the same subject ) OK - they have theor uses ... but, let's jst suppose I want to type an emoji into here. HOW? The Unicode sheet linked to earlier didn't give me any clues at all, actually ... Is it like " U-umalut" - which is, IIRC "Alt+0252" ü - like that? I presume there is a readily available list somewhere or other .... ( I've just looked it up on "wiki" ) ... but the code, f'rinstance: U+1F608 - means I type - what? I'm guessing 1f608, whilst holding-down whatever key is represented by the "U" ???

    515:

    Telegraphers and later, radio Morse operators used and still use shorthand and codes to send greetings and exchange information when talking to each other -- YL is Young Lady, usually referring to a sweetheart or fiance. XYL is Ex-Young Lady i.e. the wife. There's a complete subset of "Q" codes to compress specific information - QRM means interference, QTH means location etc.

    American telegraphers used to send journalist copy from various places and events to the head offices of the papers before teletype took over. One American President had a habit of referring to "The Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God" a lot in his speeches, the key-rats shortened this to "BOMFOG".

    516:

    OK - they have theor uses ... but, let's jst suppose I want to type an emoji into here. HOW?

    You can't. The blog software/platform more or less predates emojis and assumes you're using ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), an 8-bit subset of unicode. Full 16-bit unicode simply isn't available unless/until I spend a lot of money, brains, and time on a massive upgrade that isn't going to happen any time soon.

    517:

    Um, you've got to be careful about the use of the word ideograms.

    It originally came from enlightenment-era Jesuit missionaries' attempts to understand Chinese characters, which are technically logograms, not ideograms. It was reinforced by people trying to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the terminological screwup hasn't subsided to this day.

    The difference: ideograms represent ideas, logograms represent words. All written languages are logographic, and their symbols represent words, not ideas. This gets important, especially for the transmission of ideas across languages, cultures, and time.

    People like Charles Bliss (creator of Blissymbolics) have tried to create ideographic scripts, symbols that can transmit concepts independently of words (love=amour=sarang, all symbolized by a heart), as a way to promote communication among strangers and to pave the way for universal peace and brotherhood. Blissymbolics has had some success in helping disabled people who couldn't communicate learn to communicate in symbols, as a bridge to helping them learn to use words. As an international ideographic language though, blissymbolics has failed, because it turns out that people translate the ideographic symbols differently (What's a vegetable, for instance?). The fights Bliss got into while trying to force people to accept only his standardized meaning for each symbol (including at least one court battle) are rather sad, and they show the limits to the system.

    People have proposed ideographic systems for things like the warning signs around nuclear waste pits, so that hazard warnings can be conveyed for 10,000 years. They've run into the same problems. Ultimately,there's no way to unambiguously convey ideas with symbols. While there are a huge number of ways to code ideas into symbols (this is the blessing and curse of protowriting), there's no universal human ideography. Even many emojis are ambiguous, and they show human faces.

    Getting back to Chinese ideograms and hieroglyphs, once the Jesuit missionaries in China began to translate Chinese characters, they realized that the characters encode spoken words, not concepts, and ditto with Egyptian hieroglyphics (and as we've found, Maya hieroglyphics. The only system there are still arguments about are the Inkan quipus, and technically, these aren't written. There are some hints that some could code language (one string per syllable), but there's also experimental evidence that they're extremely good protowriting systems. That doesn't make quipus ideograms, but it does show that there's more to storing information than we might naively think.

    Yes, Chinese characters have been pushed into all sorts of uses, since the same logogram is used for the same written word but different spoken words in different Chinese dialects, Korean, and Japanese. This was used both to promote inter-group communication (people had written conversations when they didn't speak the same language). The systems aren't universal. IIRC, Korea had at least two different methods for coding spoken Korean into written Chinese, and I don't know how much they overlapped. Ultimately, it's that knowledge came from China, and it's easier to learn to read Chinese than it is to learn to speak it in any dialect. I had a tai chi teacher who has translated a number of Chinese texts into English. He taught himself to read and write Chinese, but he can't speak it.

    518:

    Um? The Content-Type meta tag claims it's UTF-8, so I tried an experiment:

    • go to twitter (because it's a prolific source of samples)
    • copy a couple of random smileys out of some tweet (I don't call a cat "neko", I call it "cat". Same with smileys...)
    • paste them into the comment box
    • hit Preview

    And that does indeed come back with two variants on a happy face, viz: 😋😍 (in hex, f0 9f 98 8b f0 9f 98 8d). They don't work in the comment box itself because the monospace font used (by my browser) doesn't include them, but the sans-serif font used for the main text does.

    I ask forgiveness in advance if that explodes when I hit Submit, but I don't expect it to or I'd not be doing it...

    Though interestingly the blog does use HTML entities rather than UTF-8 sequences to represent those hideous abortions that Apple software insists on using where everyone else uses a plain - (0x2d).

    To Greg: AFAIK those Alt-Num codes are Windows-specific; at any rate they don't work for me. I have two cross-platform methods which so far have not failed to cover any of the (rare) instances where I want to use some bizarre character:

    • Search for some other document likely to contain the character I want, then C&P it, as above.

    • For not-all-that-bizarre characters, I use HTML entities. They are quite a bit easier to remember than numeric codes; for example your U umlaut is &uuml; which comes out as ü

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

    519:

    "...Chinese characters, which are technically logograms, not ideograms."

    That's interesting, because when trying to make sense out of mangled Chinese-English translations and understand how they got mangled in the way they did, the "ideas" model is a lot more helpful than the "words" one.

    For instance, in the classic Chinese dish "fuck the duck until exploded" the character that has been translated as "exploded" is intended to mean "crispy". Looking it up discovers a whole great list of English words that are possible translations, which mean a wide variety of quite different things, but if you kind of mentally squint sideways at the meanings you can see that there is a common thread connecting them (albeit rather tenuously in some cases), which is the concept of frazzlement by a short but intense thermal pulse.

    The character that has been translated as "fuck" apparently corresponds to a whole bunch of different words in Chinese, each of which in turn has multiple possible English translations, so you end up with a huge spread of possible meanings, but again by suitable mental squinting (on two levels, this time) it is possible to discern some underlying commonality of concept, even if it is a long way back.

    Indeed, I did think that this was how Chinese characters were supposed to work - generalisation of ideas to generate a slew of meanings, then selection of a specific meaning by reference to the immediately-relevant context. So you might have something like (I'm making this up) a character that began by referring to milking a cow, which if you squint REALLY hard and fill in lots of missing lines and stuff you can just about persuade yourself that it is a picture of a hand pulling a teat and a jet of milk. Then over time it comes to mean all kinds of other things as well, such as watering the garden with a hose, masturbating, draining the bottom layer out of a separating funnel, and the action of an inkjet printer head - things which at first sight look very different but still all hang on the same thread of controlled spurts of fluid.

    I also get the impression that understanding written Chinese might not be quite as hard as it seems, as long as you can catch the knack of twisting your brain to the right angle to pick up that kind of association.

    520:

    Good.

    However, suppose I want to post an emoji into a blog that does support them. What then - just for laughs.

    521:

    Not even close. Sorry pidge.

    English has the same problem. Let's use, say, set. Or cleave. Or record. Each of these words has multiple meanings but "set" is not an ideogram. It's a word.

    This is why puns work. They're not based on ideograms, the punishment puns inflict based on the multiple meanings words inevitably have. Moreover, as with pun and punishment, words that have similar strings of characters (because words represent spoken language, not concepts) may not share conceptual similarities or have evolved from a common root word.

    To give you an idea of how it works, the first line of the Tao Te Ching literally translates as "The tao that can be tao is not the eternal tao."

    In this case (per Jonathan Star's translation of the Tao Te Ching, which has a character-by-character translation of all the ways these characters have been translated into English), "tao" has been translated as "Tao/the Tao/way/path/paths/"That"/"The Absolute"/"Nature"/path/way/walked/trodden/be told/talked about/spoken of.

    And therein lies the pun that's the first sentence of China's most famous religious text.

    522:

    Got your piece abput Alt+ code & have noted the list ..... SO an U-umlaut, lower case is: (spaced-out) & u uml ; or compacted: ü But in hex, f0 9f 98 8b f0 9f 98 8d ok - WHAT ELSE do I need to do to encode these or similar - which prefix or extra button do I need to insert to make those emoji's work?

    Or do tall those emoji's have "names" like "amp" & "uml"?

    Is is as simple as that - spaced-out again: & U + 1 F 63 E: &U+1F63E; & CODE-string ; - no, it can't be, because there's the "U+" bit, isn't there .... Testing

    523:

    No - didn't work, did it ....

    524:

    "Chinese" There is an apparent dispute that the characters, now usually painted, when done by hand were originally ... ... Cuneiform. Naturally, officially, China is not happy with this idea, in the same way as they have been very unhappy about recent archeological discoveries along parts of the silk road(s), indicating that certain things "were not invented here".

    But China is the Central Kingdom & the long-noses are still inferior, oh dear & I understand a certain amount of tying selves in knots is occurring.

    525:

    You say "dark matter (and energy) should get sucked into a black hole. Given the little I know about them, should they not be repelled by a black hole?

    HHmmmmmm... now you've got me thinking (Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!): could they actually be anti-gravity? And if so, that would imply that gravity is curved negatively in time (back toward the beginning, as it were), and antigravity is the inverse, cured into the future?

    No, that doesn't work. It would have to be the other way around: antigravity is curved downtime, and since the universe was smaller then, there's the pressure of the universe squeezing the now like a pip.

    526:

    Of course, right after I hit post, I have one more word on that: downwards in time, there's a higher energy density, while upwards, there's a lower one.

    527:

    Just to complicate the situation, if there are Chinese world-walkers... shouldn't there be Indian ones? And India is also a heavily populated country.

    And, about all the Chinese languages besides the official one of Mandarin, let's talk about India. I shared a (tiny) cube on a short-term contract with an Indian emigree, who told me his wife worked as a translator, and translated books into 20 languages.... all of them from India.

    528:

    I think y'all are missing the point. I would assume getting up to significant percentages of c would take time, and a lot of energy... and that they don't change course that fast. Meanwhile, your missiles are being launched ->with that speed alread<- and accelerate rapidly, so we're talking perhaps another 10-20 kps. Then, a) some course adjustments are done with gas, and if the missile is aimed at the enemy, it's a very small target. And right now, lasers aren't great against shiny objects. so, pointy, and shiny, you'd have to hit it dead on with a shitload of power... and of course it is going to throw chaff during course correction. So your lasers are going to have to be aimed really rapidly on incoming.

    529:

    Why we need some really serious space stations, three of them, in geosync, and then you just fasten them onto the large grid.

    530:

    Just to give the counter-example, I've asked, and had both Indians and Chinese tell me how hard English is to learn....

    My long version: English is the result of Roman legionaries making dates with British barmaids, then Saxons making dates with Romano-British barmaids, then Norman men-at-arms making dates with Romano-British-Anglo-Saxon barmaids.

    And then pillaging every other language on the planet for words.

    531:

    If we assume dark matter, my reaction is this: must it be concentrated, or spread out. My thinking is that if it's concentrated, then is is slowing stellar motion close to galactic center, or is it required to be spread out, to speed up further out stars, like a negative drag?

    Meanwhile, on a related cosmological topic, I started to read wikipedia on MOND (which I had not heard of), then off to the shape of the universe. I am given to understand that WIMP suggested, but did not disprove the possibility of a toroidal universe. On the other hand, a lot of hits refer to a 3-torus (a donut in 3-space). I would think that the universe was toroidal, rather, as a 4-torus, toroidal in time.

    Any thoughts on this, folks?

    532:

    The vast majority of British and American "Chinese" speakers from historical immigration speak Cantonese, the language of Hong Kong, whereas the official language of China is a version of Mandarin spoken to some degree by about 70% of the population of China. These are mutually unintelligible languages.

    533:

    Until Peter comes along and straightens us out again (an increasingly thankless chore, thanks Peter!), my understanding is that dark matter is stuff that acts gravitationally just like matter, but otherwise doesn't seem to interact with bright matter. It was originally invoked to explain why galaxies spun the way they did, because the gravity of the visible mass didn't account for the way the visible mass moved, and there appeared to be a lot of stuff out there that wasn't visible. Hence, dark matter. The problem with this theory is that, so far, a bunch of proposed candidates for dark matter (starting with cold dust and getting WIMPier and more ghostly) has been ruled out experimentally, leaving us with increasingly exotic options. Still, if dark matter interacts with bright matter gravitationally, then it should fall into black holes, because gravity. And because there's observationally far more dark matter than bright matter in our universe, then there should be more of it inside black holes than there is bright matter, assuming that matter retains any identity after passing through a singularity (if mass and energy are just wrinkles in the fabric of space, then passing them through the ultimate kink-a singularity- might iron all the wrinkles smooth, leaving the resulting spacetime ready to wrinkle anew and create its own riffs on the concepts of stuff and interaction).

    Dark energy is invoked to account for the observation that distant galaxies are accelerating away from us more swiftly than galaxies near us are. That suggests there's something with "negative pressure," scattered evenly(?) throughout the universe, causing spacetime to expand. It could be Einstein's arbitrary cosmological constant (which as I understand it is an inherent property of the universe we're in), or it could be a thing (dark energy). If it's the latter, one might hypothesize that this thing ends up in black holes, whether it falls in (due to gravity) or gets pushed (due to negative pressure). Since dark energy (as a thing) is presumed to be the vast majority of things in the universe, one might postulate that, once inside a black hole, dark energy might cause the inside of the singularity to start blowing up too, in whatever spacetime dimensions that inside occupies, babble babble babble.

    You can, of course, get sillier than that. If our universe is a black hole and stuff is still falling into it on the edge, then perhaps that stuff is attracting things near the edge more than it's attracting stuff near the center, causing the appearance of dark energy. In this particular pile of BS, we just got lucky enough not be near an edge, so we're not getting pulled into the infall just yet. If that's the cause of dark energy, then it would show up as asymmetry(ies) in the way our universe expands. I suspect that, when he has nothing better to do, Peter (or some other knowledgeable person) will drive by and tell us why this explanation has a P<=0, but until then, it's just a BS guess like any other.

    To detect whether our universe is a donut or more exotic shape (cruller!), you'd have to look at the universe and see if there's evidence of differing distortion as a function of which direction you happened to look in. That might be evidence that our 3-space is warped around a 4+dimensional whatzit. Unfortunately, there's this hypothesis that the universe is expanding superluminally (e.g. spacetime is expanding faster than C, which would be cool if we could harness it, but that in turn would be bad for creating interstellar trade routes based on space drives that harness it). If so, we'll never be able to observe the real shape of the universe, because a chunk of it has already outrun our ability to see the light generated by any distortion that might give a hint of the shape its distorting around. All we're left with is the illusion of a spherical universe (e.g. an explosion of stuff in a vacuum, making us think there was a big bang) whose edges are the stars we can still see because they're in the part of space that hasn't yet gone superluminal away from us.

    [[fixed < character - mod]]

    534:

    AFAIK those Alt-Num codes are Windows-specific; at any rate they don't work for me. I have two cross-platform methods which so far have not failed to cover any of the (rare) instances where I want to use some bizarre character:

    I don't think they're Windoze specific, because some of them don't work with Windoze. They're available on Mac, but require different key combinations than Windoze does.

    http://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/mac/codemac/

    I think the Alt-Num codes work in Terminal on a Mac, but you have to use the Option key, so they're really Opt-Num. (Does Apple still include the Terminal program in OS-X?).

    They may also work in whatever the Mac equivalent of "Notepad", but I've not tried to check it out.

    535:

    Why we need some really serious space stations, three of them, in geosync, and then you just fasten them onto the large grid.

    Why stop with three? Why not six? That way if one of the three were damaged, the two adjacent ones could carry the load.

    Or twelve, or eighteen.

    OTOH, if an odd number is more advantageous, nine or fifteen.

    536:

    Regarding the Elizabeth cliffhanger in Empire Games, I'm still a bit confused about it (having read the previous thread). Charlie previously stated that the US did not know who Elizabeth was, but it seems strange then that Paulie would ask for her by name when first showing up at the safehouse, plus the message that col. Smith wants to send to Mirian (pawn takes queen) seems to point in that direction. I thought at first that maybe the main political antagonist in the Commonwealth might have betrayed them to the US, but that might be a bit far-fetched. Another more plausible explanation could be that they actually managed to plant the bug in Brilliana's house and overheard a conversation. But then again how would they not know about Elizabeth? Perhaps all the bugging was done on TL2

    537:

    😋

    OnYer🚲M8✌

    Yep. OGH doesn't have to do anything to let us use HTML entities in posts because HTML is specifically designed to be encodeable in common more-or-less 7 bit ASCII character sets (viz, the legacy teletype including Windows and Macintosh ones). I may have given you an example of that way back up in the doobley-doo.

    We are somewhat at the mercy of the viewer, and their choice of font and rendering engine. Viz, the exact smiley you see depends can vary significantly. It is even legal for a system to render that as ":-P", viz compose it out of other characters (that would be an edge case of Unicode denormalisation in action).

    I can copy and paste the combining accent pi-with-dot-above that I used before, but I can't avoid mangling it if I try to quote it without white space: " ̇π". It renders noticeably better at home (Opera on Win10 Home rather than Firefox on Win10 Pro... I have no idea why)

    If you want to play, HTML entities can be pasted off any Unicode reference using the numeric character coding system ঙ where 999 is the hex code. You can see options on pages like this

    538:

    OK, that's interesting, the dot-pi actually renders much better in the edit pane than on the display part of the page, up there it's the same at home and work. And the weird squiggle at the end is the rendering of &#x999; because I forgot to replace the & with &amp;

    539:

    Welsh has a few unusual accents which aren't present in ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) or ISO-8859-15 (Latin 9), you need to use ISO-8858-14 (Latin 8 (Celtic)).

    540:

    I have great fun reading the posts about fractional light speed combat. So many useful Story Ideas on how to do and not do space combat.

    Thanks...

    It reminds me of the table-top Traveller games where sand canisters were used as weapons. I never got to do the Trillion Credit Squadron.

    Trillion Credit Squadron

    Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own

    Trillion Credit Squadron in pdf

    Now, if you want to really burn your brain, read this article about how the Moon does not orbit around the Earth. That the Earth and Moon both orbit the Sun together.

    Does the Moon Orbit the Sun or the Earth?

    Here are some videos to show this as well.

    Does The Moon Really Orbit The Earth?

    The Moon Does Not Orbit the Earth

    They've known about this since Newton's day, but it is "a fact too far" for most people, so it's not talked about in text books. The book from 1859 discussing this is on Google books, and is available on Amazon.

    An Elementary Treatise on the Lunar Theory: With a Brief Sketch of the History of the Problem Up to the Time of Newton

    • Basically there is this big rock floating beside us -- The Moon -- and we are watching it carefully. Do not be alarmed.

    This is a clip from the BBC Horizon program. They "shoot the Moon" hundreds of times a year to measure the distance. This episode is what made me start looking for how the Moon does not orbit around the Earth, that it orbits with the Earth around the Sun as I posted above.

    Sending a Laser to the Moon - Horizon - Explore BBC

    This is an odd video from the observatory. It explains what they are doing. Watch the video a few times, and you will see that the astronomer lady seems ready to be the evil genius out to conquer the world. Or is that just me over reacting.

    Shoot the Moon, the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-Ranging Operation

    These are the wiki pages describing the observatory and experiment. Read the first a few times and see all the things that they are trying to test for.

    Wiki - Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation

    Wiki - Lunar Laser Ranging experiment

    This is a lecture about the experiment and the proposed new equipment. It is an hour long, and hard for me to watch in one sitting. It is both a mix of boring lecture with a terrifying plan to install the reflectors. You will see what I mean. HA!

    Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Lunar Laser Ranging

    I'm having way too much fun with this.

    541:

    Yes BUT How did you encode the emoji's you just posted? what were the keystrokes? That's what I'm trying to find out - & as you can see from # 522=3 not succeeding

    Supppose I want to post emoji 110 "pouting cat face" It's code is supposedly: U+1F63E OK, lets try (spaced) - & then in supposedly workable form: & 1 F 63 E ; &1F63E; TEST

    542:

    On the other hand, when something goes beyond an event horizon, all that's left of it's ability to interact with this universe is its gravity. There's no other interaction possible. So in the sense of full interaction, we do lose mass-energy from the universe ...

    Actually, no. There are three ways in which material which falls into a black hole still affects the universe. (This is the famous no-hair theorem.)

    The first is gravity: the mass-energy of what falls into the black hole adds to the black hole's mass, and therefore its gravity. That's what conservation of mass-energy implies (it has nothing to do with "full interactions", whatever that might mean).

    The second is (in principle) electrical charge: if, for example, you drop a proton into a black hole, the black hole's electrical charge increases. This isn't considered to be very important in practice, but that's only because the fact that the electromagnetic force is much stronger than gravity means an electrically charged black hole will preferentially swallow oppositely charged particles until its net charge gets back to zero and it's electrically neutral.

    The third is angular momentum ("spin"). If a black holes swallows a swirling accretion disk of gas orbiting around it, then the angular momentum of all that orbiting material is transferred to the black hole's spin. This has real consequences for how particles orbit near the event horizon, and there is fairly good evidence from observations of quasars that at least some black holes do have high spin, consistent with having built up their mass by swallowing material from an accretion disk.

    543:

    DIDN'T WORK - did it - will someone please explain?

    W T F ?

    544:

    U+1F63E becomes &#x1F63E; → 😾

    The U+ just says "unicode", the letters+digits are a hexadecimal number. In HTML that becomes an encoded character using the same hex number but with an &# at the start, then x for hexadecimal, then a ; on the end.

    https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f63e/index.htm

    Or mostly you can paste them directly in once you find an example online to copy rather than copying codes and faffing about. It's only tricky when you're trying to make equations or playing silly buggers with combining accents (order of accents can be important, and pasting doesn't always preserve that)

    545:

    😾

    I think you are missing the x in &amp#x1F63E;

    546:

    You say "dark matter (and energy) should get sucked into a black hole. Given the little I know about them, should they not be repelled by a black hole?

    Heteromeles (@ 533) has got it right: dark matter is (thought to be) just like normal matter, except that it doesn't interact electromagnetically with anything. That means that it doesn't interact with light -- either emitting it or absorbing it -- and it also doesn't interact with normal (baryonic) matter. When two atoms interact, for example, they normally do so electromagnetically (e.g., they bounce off each other because the electrons orbiting around one atom repel the electrons orbiting around the other atom). But as far as gravity is concerned, it's perfectly normal (that's why it was invented, after all: as a way of providing a simple gravitational explanation for why gas and stars are moving in galaxies they way they do, and why galaxies and hot extragalactic gas moves in galaxy groups and clusters they way they do.)

    So, yes, dark matter would have no trouble falling into a black hole, although in practice most black holes were probably formed primarily out of normal matter, simply because they form in regions of very dense normal matter (e.g., in the core of an exploding massive star), where the local density of normal matter is much higher than than the local density of dark matter.

    Dark energy is much more mysterious and ill-defined; I am vaguely aware that some theorists have considered different models of black holes accreting dark energy, though the consensus seems to be that this wouldn't have any real observable consequences in our universe.

    547:

    Actually, this brings up a problem with the explanation for a black hole having angular momentum, charge, and gravity (thanks for that explanation, incidentally).

    I'm totally unclear about how charge would be conserved across an event horizon. Charged particles at the event horizon I can understand, but if no photons can emerge from an event horizon, how does a charge inside the event horizon interact with the accretion disk outside it?

    I'm similarly puzzled with the angular momentum issue. I get that the accretion disk is spinning, and I assume it's a dissipative structure analogous to vortices on Earth. However, I don't get how something spinning inside the event horizon interacts with stuff outside the event horizon to get it to move. Is there some sort of gravitational spin going on? Or is it simply that angular momentum is conserved up to the event horizon, and then we assume it continues from there?

    As for the conservation of mass-energy, do remember that also plays out in chemistry, hence the remark about one mug of hot coffee not turning spontaneously into two cups of coffee ice cream. We assume that it's a universal rule, no matter what scale the phenomenon is. You can't do calculations in physics, chemistry, or anything that depends on either of these without this law. My point is that when you're trying to explain observations that galaxies are accelerating away from each other for no obvious reason, it's always worth double-checking the assumption that mass and energy are conserved at the scale of such observations.

    Yes, I know, this is heresy. The only reason I'm thinking about it is that lecture from Kim Stanley Robinson (see #124 above). Economics tries to quantify human interactions. The problem we've got is that when we try to apply economics to everything, values of infinity pop up all over the place. For instance, the value of the human economy without the biosphere is zero, because without the biosphere, humans wouldn't exist. Therefore the value of the biosphere is infinite. Therefore, damaging the biosphere incurs an infinite debt, therefore our extractive economy is running an infinite debt to nature, therefore...well, economists make up a number for the value of the biosphere so this problem goes away. The problem here is obvious, and it's one reason why climate change is so hard to deal with economically (want to crash the current economy by including the debt we're running up to our 10 billion successors? There's currently a US lawsuit that might do just this). It's not impossible that there are similar problems lurking in some of the laws of physics, most notably that first law of thermodynamics. It may not be valid across all scales. However, you can't do physics without it or without a more general law that includes it, so I can understand why the response will probably be either scorn or ignoring it in silence. Economists do that all the time too.

    Anyway, getting back to the original notion that our universe is inside a black hole, there are some odd outcomes to that idea: --Unless our universe/black hole is severed from its parent universe, mass and energy are still entering our universe (although I have no idea how the relative time scales would work on this...). Mass-energy would not be conserved at the universal scale inside a black hole-turned-daughter universe, but it would be conserved on a local scale within that black hole.
    --Additionally, are gravitation, charge, and angular momentum conserved across universes formed one inside another via singularities? That's a powerful set of interactions across multiverses, and one might naively think that changes in angular momentum due to infalling mass-energy would be observable in the cosmic background radiation or some such.

    548:

    You can still find a few dozen legitimate ideograms in modern Chinese, written forms carried down from the ancient oracle bone designs that resemble their meaning like a line drawing or stick figure cartoon. Examples are usually simple nouns from basic vocabulary familiar to any pre-technological peoples, words like mountain, sun, moon, man, woman, tree, eye, mouth, ear and so on. These got written together in combinations to make new characters for more abstract words like bright, which is a sun and moon together. But these kind of straightforward representations are a small minority of the whole working character set, which is usually reckoned at three thousand or so to read newspapers. By way of comparison, Shakespeare's plays contain about six thousand words. Some of the more complex characters have upwards of a dozen simpler components contained in them, but most are only a couple or a few together. Then the characters, which are without exception pronounced as single syllables, get joined to make multisyllabic words or expressions. English parallel examples would be like the combination of Latin root words and prefixes for the words extend, pretend, contend, distend, or defer,confer, refer, prefer, infer etc. The advantage of having pictorial elements embedded in the complex characters is that it serves as a mnemonic device for recalling how to write them, since it's easy to make up little stories, puns, or dirty jokes to explain how the original wordsmiths settled on those particular forms to express a concept. The hard part is then remembering the overall arrangement, but often it's just a general meaning component on the left and a phonetic pronunciation component on the right. Fun, fun, fun!

    549:

    (Preview button suggest this should work)

    I don’t know about posting emojis from a desktop but you can just do it straight from your phone keyboard.

    😁 👌🏻 🐱

    550:

    Apologies in advance if I rerail this thread with an on-topic comment.

    I think the original post is reacting to a real shift in cultural expectations about the future.

    I fondly remember the 90s, when the big debate in SF was whether technology would make us all rich, or whether it would make us all gods to whom the concept of wealth was meaningless (OGH was closely identified with the latter camp). Technology was expected to be profoundly liberating. At the minimum, the idea that a couple of guys in a dorm or garage could become overnight billionaires was taken for granted.

    The old joke is that the Golden Age of SF is “about 14”, and it's likely that current trends in SF are driven by the need to appeal to a (roughly) 14-year old's mindset. To a 14-year old, the future looks very different. There hasn't been a breakout tech company since Facebook launched (when the kid was a baby). The NSA has always been tracking him. Declining real wages for most people, high-stakes standardized testing, and the post 9/11 surveillance state are all he knows.

    SF tailored to that generation has two major themes. One is lethal competition with his peers for dubious rewards in the Hunger Games/ Battle Royale style – high stakes testing mythologized. The other is liberation through the collapse of civilization; very few teenagers have any real understanding of how far a fall that would be. And of course there's escapist fantasy (my own vice).

    Since OGH has very little connection to those experiences, I'm not surprised SF tailored to that audience doesn't resonate with him.

    551:

    I blame the fusion industry.

    That's only semi-sarcastic. Break-even for fusion generating net power still looks like it's 30 years away, just like it was back in the, erm, 1950s. Sooner or later, the broken promises start looking like cons. Dammit.

    There's are other problems here. Back when I was an environmental science major in the 80s, we all assumed that climate change had a technological fix, with hydrogen being the natural successor to petroleum. Oh, and the internet was going to make us free, or gods, or something.

    Now, we're aware that climate change is and has been a political problem since the 1970s, hydrogen is largely a bust (it needs huge infrastructure that isn't anywhere to be seen, any more than the infrastructure for deep sediment carbon sequestration is spreading exponentially), and the internet has turned into the likely site for WWIII, just as the cyberpunks predicted.

    Actually, most of the intractable problems turn out to be largely sociopolitical, and we don't have a magic wand (like cheap fusion) to take the edge off.

    It's hard in this environment for SF based on either innovation or progress solving problems to seem "realistic." We're seeing more innovation than ever, but the benefits rarely go to us anymore.

    Still, there are rebels out there. Check out solarpunk, for instance. Where cyberpunk was a rebellion against mainstream SF, solarpunk seems to be a rebellion against mainstream dystopian YA literature. It looks kind of familiar, too.

    552:

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but the "center of mass" of the Earth/Moon system orbits the sun, and both the Earth and the Moon revolve around the "center of mass." If you looked at the course of the Earth and Moon around the sun, it would be a kind of braid in which the Earth makes little shallow curves and the Moon makes bigger, deeper curves.

    553:

    Continuing that logic, we don't orbit the sun, the barycenter of the combined sun/planet system orbits the center of the Milky Way. Actually, that barycenter's in the sun, but oh well...

    Similarly, we don't orbit the center of the Milky Way, we orbit the barycenter of the galaxy as it moves...

    554:

    Yeah. It gets complicated. Are you sure there aren't space-pigeons somewhere? ;)

    555:

    What do you think bary'ed the barycenter?

    556:

    " There hasn't been a breakout tech company since Facebook launched (when the kid was a baby)."

    That line is wrong. Here are other breakthroughs that are much more recent

  • The invention of the app. That can be traced somewhere between 2007-2010 based on whether you judge when the app biosphere was invented or when it matured (you could make a good argument for other date ranges as well).

  • Alexa: still niche, but definitely a technology an increasing percentage of children are growing up with.

  • Tesla's electric car. This one sounds minor, but remember the debates we were having here among peak oil, etc.? To expand on Heteromeles point, solarpunk would not be possible without Tesla and the invention of cheaper solar panels/wind turbines.

  • SpaceX. This is limited to teenagers interested in space exploration. When I was a teenager in the 2000s, the thing space geeks were gushing over was the robotic space program. The robotic space program was seen as the new big breakthrough in space, with a fraction of space cadets seriously suggesting we discontinue the human space program in favor of "cheaper" and "more efficient" robots. I'll admit that this didn't translate into many SF stories. Now SpaceX's (and Planet Labs) exploits have become the focus of the space geek fandom, eclipsing the robotic program's popularity since MSL landed.

  • I would argue that

    a. Your view is more likely to explain how Baby Boomers and GenX see the world. b. Dystopian and alt-history stories blossomed during the depths of the recession, and have receded since. c. It's the opposite problem. Most authors are used to writing the millieu that they grew up with. In my opinion, that killed the near-future space exploration stories in the 2000s (most authors couldn't pivot to an all-robotic solar system exploration reality). We'll see what effect SpaceX has?

    I'm still trying to fit the rise and decline of Singularity SF into the theory above.

    557:

    I've got a couple of ideas about Singularity SF. One is that its rise was due to Drexler's Engines of Creation and Kurzweil's books (1990-2006, basically) pushing the idea.

    Then there was the whole Christian end times thing around 2000 that fed into it, even for people that were too-rabidly anti-Christian. As several people have pointed out, the Singularity and the peak oil crash look a lot like a knock-off of the Book of Revelations. But that didn't work out. Nanotech hasn't transformed the world into utopia, nor has the net. We're past the Hubbert Curve prediction of Peak Oil by 2000. That got weirded out by the advent of fracking, then things got further weirded out by the rapid advance of wind and solar...

    Anyway, nanotech hasn't innovated a magic wand or gray goo yet, Kurzweil hasn't put out a new book on the Singularity recently, and the end-timers have bigger problems right now, like realizing how many problems come with being the dog that actually caught the political mail truck of Washington power. There are still singulitarians around, but I don't think they'll catch on again until Koomey's Law starts getting interesting in the late 2030s. If that happens.

    558:

    About those Unicode characters: interpreting and displaying them sometimes have problems: some iOS programs crash with certain Unicode text.

    559:

    Troutwaxer @552 said: If you looked at the course of the Earth and Moon around the sun, it would be a kind of braid...

    The videos show it better, but the idea of two strands of yarn works.

    The thing about the last video, with the lecture, is that they want to use air to drill the pole holding the new reflector into the Lunar regolith. The example he shows is quite scary, especially since they want to do it in 1/6th gravity. After all, what could possibly go wrong. HA!

    The key point that upsets people is that they grew up with the simple image in science books, and TV, that the Moon circles around the Earth. When they understand that the Moon and Earth are like two cars on a highway endlessly tailgating and passing each other, they begin to realize that the Moon is a big rock floating way too close, and the Man in the Moon has obviously had a few drinks.

    560:

    Unicode display problems are way more common than that article might lead you to think. Crashing is less so, but still ... there are/were things you best not paste into Outlook and hopefully there are now fewer add-ins that crash if there's unicode in the clipboard when you activate them.

    At one stage we had a bug in a windows app. Pasting the unicode text from the bug into an email caused outlook to exit and when you restarted there was no sign of the email you'd been composing. It was somewhat annoying until we discovered that you could load it into the email from a file and it was fine.

    561:

    I remember in the beginning of the 2000's in the University of Technology (or maybe end of the 1990's) when a high official in the IT department said that there are no more problems with Scandic charsets. The Finnish phrase was "Ääkköset eivät ole enää ongelma" or something, "ääkköset" meaning the Finnish characters with diacritics. "Aakkoset" is the ABC.

    The phrase was posted on the local news (like Usenet but local) as "[{kk|set eiv{t ole en{{ ongelma." You can probably see why people didn't agree with that.

    I remember also the problems with Amigas (and probably other systems) where some part of the systems were only 7-bit and dropped the high bit, so 'ä' and 'ö' became 'd' and 'v' when handling IBM characters...

    562:

    So, anywhere that says (Spaced-out) "U +" translates as: & # x CODE-string and terminating semicolon, then?

    Let's try a different one "smiling face with horns" = U + 1F608, which should have a leading & # x and a trailing semicolon .... 😈

    BINGO!

    563:

    I must admit, I watched a replay of the Falcon-Heavy lift & R Strauss started playing in my head & I wondered if it was the 60's again .... [ Not for long, but .... ]

    564:

    I'm still trying to fit the rise and decline of Singularity SF into the theory above.

    That's easy; Christian millennarianism. Happened circa 950AD-1050AD, with occasional outbreaks before and ever since (usu. when someone coughs up a revised deadline for the second coming). This is the secular, not-god-centric remix—even though techies who grew up in a Christian-based society may have rejected the explicit religion, they still tend to recycle their existing cognitive biases, so when they run up against an exponential it's very easy for them to reinvent Christianity, with mind uploading heaven and Roko's Basilisk in place of Satan.

    It's even more obvious if you look at the Russian Cosmists (and the Cosmists were a heavy influence on the American libertarian/space colonist right). Add a dose of uncritically-assimilated capitalist fanaticism (which comes all too easily to the US mindset, it's a close relative of the Prosperity Gospel and it provides any number of me-too post-hoc justifications for culturally endemic racism) and you get Peter Thiel.

    People tend to either cleave to or explicitly contradict their natal ideology or religion. Hence the odd retro-libertarian-capitalist flavour of so much singularity-fic, even though a capitalist hard singularity would be one in which humans were about as effective market participants as chickens in a battery farm.

    565:

    Anyway, nanotech hasn't innovated a magic wand or gray goo yet

    I ran into Drexler in a beer garden in Oxford a couple of years ago. He's ... slightly embittered ... about the way "nanotechnology" was co-opted as a term of art by the chemical industry. However, a bunch of his predictions are still not ruled out and/or on course: it's just that there was a 30-50 year time frame for general purpose assemblers, and it looks like wet-phase nanotech using DNA/RNA and ribosomes is a whole lot easier (see also, synthetic biology) so we're getting that first and nobody calls it nanotechnology.

    Yudkowsky and the AI singularity folks are, I think, increasingly going to look like cranks over the next decade, as a deluge of no-shit-for-real AI starts turning up in consumer products. It's been happening subliminally for years, only nobody thinks of Facebook's automatic image tagging or Siri's ability to generate music playlists as AI, because AI is shorthand for "some magical attribute of consciousness for which we have not yet discovered an algorithm". Tagging faces in images and compiling mixtapes both used to be things humans did and machines couldn't ... until they could.

    566:

    I almost certainly am behind the curve in my perceptions of 14 year olds. I don't know any, and at 45 I'm old enough to be their grandfather (great-grandfather, barely).

    As for the rest, Tesla and SpaceX are pretty damn marginal today compared to the cultural impact of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. in the 1990s. And SpaceX is basically redeveloping capabilities that NASA had half a century ago.

    567:

    that killed the near-future space exploration stories in the 2000s (most authors couldn't pivot to an all-robotic solar system exploration reality)

    Only most? Did ANY author manage to do that?

    568:

    nobody thinks of Facebook's automatic image tagging or Siri's ability to generate music playlists as AI,

    "Nobody"?

    My Master degree is in AI (natural language processing, to be exact), and I certainly consider the above to be AI.

    569:

    Sorry about your friend.

    It depends on the purpose.

    I like entertaining books sometimes - sometimes elaborate worldbuilding without an interesting story falls flat.

    I also like books that are reasonably easy to relate to. At the moment, realistic mid+ future sci-fi all points to a post-human future*, as far as I can tell. Anything else will be more-or-less shoe-horned.

    That said, in so far as Sci-Fi is an exploration of possible futures, exploring actually possible futures is preferred. Sometimes though, maybe, some BS (eg, fast-travel) may be useful - the problem being that traveling between star systems probably isn't going to be useful to humans. I still think it'll happen, but we won't be human by then.

    Though, I'm an optimist too. Solar power + storage is looking economically attractive and should become more so - to the point where it will be difficult for political issues to do much more than slow the transition. And, yes, slow, but I'm hoping for climactic devastation that is insufficient to end civilization. And, well, computers are getting pretty good at doing boring work.

    Anyways, poor AI researchers, AI's practical definition is: something computers can't do yet. Writing lousy articles? Not AI. Automatic diagnosis? Not really AI anymore. 5 years from now...writing legal briefs? Not AI. 30 years from now?

    *Not a singularity, just a recognition that, given the chance, people will optimize their babies.

    570:

    Ioan and Ilya187

    that killed the near-future space exploration stories in the 2000s (most authors couldn't pivot to an all-robotic solar system exploration reality) Only most? Did ANY author manage to do that?

    I can think of at least one for Solar system - OGH. At least two if you include extrasolar - Charlie and Ken Macleod. There are some self-published books out there as well.

    571:

    Though, I'm an optimist too. Solar power + storage is looking economically attractive and should become more so - to the point where it will be difficult for political issues to do much more than slow the transition. And, yes, slow, but I'm hoping for climactic devastation that is insufficient to end civilization. And, well, computers are getting pretty good at doing boring work.

    I wish I was so optimistic. Problem is that I comment on land use issues for an environmental group in my area. My uncensored comments about land use planning here would probably get OGH sued, and that's all I really need to say. And we're considered advanced for the US. A case in point is that my county came up with a nonbinding climate action plan in 2011. They got sued over the nonbinding part by the Sierra Club, lost, came up with a (insert gag) suboptimal but legally defensible plan(remove gag) that they passed this week, and now we get to see what the judge says about it. If the enviros are correct, the planners will be working on CAP 3.0 soon. Since the CAP is supposedly essential to building housing (and we're desperately short of affordable housing), the county shouldn't be approving any more developments without a working CAP in place, but they're speedily processing new developments anyway (not for affordable housing, but for high end tinder boxes in high fire areas, each with a token single apartment building so that each new development can be considered to have affordable housing). Due to the crisis, the judge let them keep building, but it's possible he'll get annoyed enough to stop all development in the county until the planners comply fully with his ruling, at which point we'll have two out-of-control crises on our hands.

    If you're eyes are glazing over, the key point is this: no matter how sensible the solutions are, never forget that politics can make them difficult or impossible to achieve, for reasons that seem important only to the few old white men who happen to be rich and powerful.

    I don't think the renewable energy problem is solved, although we're getting there. There's a bleeding need for better batteries, something that's going to make Elon Musk a lot of money, since he's actually doing something about battery production. The problem is that even with amazing batteries, we can't run most of our weapons systems on them. Until we get cyberattacks causing damage equivalent to an army (for example, taking out a city electrical grid and watter supply), we're not going to be able to get rid of our petroleum infrastructure, because it's essential to our military power. That's the Mexican standoff we're in: the first major power that decarbonizes gets defeated by whoever holds onto petroleum the longest. Unless cyberwar renders petroleum-based warfare irrelevant. But again, this is primarily a problem for a few aging men, most of whom are white. It sucks, but that's the point: never disregard the ability of politics to screw things up.

    572:

    Unicode bugs often happen because the individual characters in the string you see on the screen are actually single extended grapheme clusters, sequences of one or more Unicode scalars that (when combined) produce a single human-readable character. A single visible character can have several different underlying representations of different lengths due to combining characters like accents. If a programmer mixes up array access to the underlying Unicode codes with grapheme access to the individual visible elements crashes can happen due to exceeding array bounds or inadvertantly creating invalid binary sequences.

    573:

    Consider that if we only decarbonize surface transportation and most of the electrical grid we'll be in a better place than now. Also consider how a winner takes all economy delays transition.

    574:

    I can think of at least one for Solar system - OGH

    Duh! Although "Saturn's Children" has rather different definition of the word "robotic" than extrapolation from space programs circa 2000 would imply ;)

    At least two if you include extrasolar - Charlie and Ken Macleod.

    I never read Ken Macleod. Can you recommend any particular books?

    575:
    You can't. The blog software/platform more or less predates emojis and assumes you're using ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1)

    Like slashdot. How quaint.

    576:

    Better place than now is correct, and that would have been good enough 20 years from now. Our problem is that we've kicked the can down the road on climate change for pushing 50 years (Pres. Johnson briefed congress on the problem back in 1968), and we're rapidly running out of time for incremental improvements to make enough of a difference to matter.

    577:

    I meant, I'm having trouble tying the rise and fall of singularity SF to a time range. When did it start? Why did it become popular in that particular year. When did it decline? Why?

    My theory is that it arose in popularity in 2011, became popular in 2012 - 2015, and then died in 2016.

    My current theory is that it became popular as a result of the nature of the recovery from the Great Recession, or Great Financial Crisis (GFC).

  • In a lot of ways, it was a rejection of Hunger Games Dystopias.
  • The GSince the only bright spot in the economy at that time was the STEM fields, specifically computer tech, more educated people showed interest in the future of that field
  • The GFC brought about a lot of automation in industries that people viewed as a bedrock
  • Deep learning began to mature in this era.
  • I'm probably wrong about this, but it was my understanding that the post-Vietnam 1970s was the height of far-future SF within the general public outside of the 1950s. That era was also characterized by a general malaise within Western countries. I have low confidence in the accuracy of this point, though.
  • As for why it declined: 1. A large subset of singularity fanboys pivoted to the alt-right in 2015 after Merkel's refugee actions 2. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump killed it for everyone else 3. The events of 2015-2016 showed that any transition to a "singularity" future would be chaotic and painful, not an easy transition to a better world.

    The thing is, I'm not fully sure the above is that accurate, or explains everything in a satisfactory way.

    578:

    The thing is, I'm not fully sure the above is that accurate, or explains everything in a satisfactory way.

    I think you're at least a decade too late. In the early 2010s the only popular singularity fiction I can think of is the Nexus trilogy by Ramex Naam and the Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi. Most of the trail-blazers had come out years befores; OGH's work, Ken MacLeod's, Greg Egan (though he rarely discusses superintelligence), Peter Watts and Vernor Vinge all mostly published in the 90s/early 2000s.

    If we're looking for global events that coincide with that time the 2008 recession caps it quite nicely. IF the thesis is that shit times lead to pessimistic SF that would also fit with Naam and Rajaniemi whose transhumanist works were pretty grim (not that singularity fiction before that was all rainbows and sunshine).

    579:

    >>It's even more obvious if you look at the Russian Cosmists (and the Cosmists were a heavy influence on the American libertarian/space colonist right).

    Charlie, was there an actual influence, or is it just a case of different people having the same idea?

    580:

    " And SpaceX is basically redeveloping capabilities that NASA had half a century ago."

    That statement is wrong on two fronts

  • NASA never had first stage reusability or 3D printed rocket engines.

  • That statement is like saying that Toyota in the 1980s was basically redeveloping capabilities that GM and Ford had in the 1950s. SpaceX's advantage isn't in the performance of the rocket, it's in the attempt to modernize the manufacture and launch process of the rocket itself. Their goal is to assembly-line rocket production and launches. In other words, make rockets more like airplanes. They haven't achieved it yet, but they're certainly on their way.

  • "cultural impact of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. in the 1990s."

    I also disagree with this statement,

  • Although Google and Amazon did exist in the late 1990s, they were niche companies that only began to grow after the competition was killed by the Dotcom bubble bursting.

  • Your definition of marginal is too broad if you're limited to anything that doesn't meet or exceed Google, Facebook, Amazon, the smartphone, etc. Tesla was certainly a nuke in the political space. Since Tesla is an aspirational product, this had a huge impact upon the modern vision of what is "aspirational" and "keeping up with the Jones".

  • Self driving cars are no longer viewed as far-future. Whether this is actually true remains to be seen?

  • 581:

    Beat me to it. The Orion's Arm project was early 2000s, and it's about as Singulitarian as you can get (actually, they're postulating at least 5 singularities, IIRC). It's still around too.

    I think Nexus and Quantum Thief are the tail end of the movement, not the leaders.

    Also, it's not just the Great Recession, because SF survived the Great Depression and came roaring back. One thread that I do think matters is Progressivism, the idea that Progress (capital P) will make the world better. That's woven into a lot of science fiction, either as a fundamental belief (Analog or Star Trek style) or as a critique (cyberpunk, Quantum Thief, and friends). One thing we've seen over the last decade is the breakdown of Progressive movement, as embodied by OGH's Beige Dictatorship, the US Democratic Party, and so on. It isn't that there aren't a lot of social progressives out there trying to reduce inequality and deal with conflicts in nonviolent ways, it's that the notion that technological progress will "raise all boats" is as corrupt and broken as the idea that what benefits coastal cities also benefits the inland mining towns and farms whose resources they extract. Those broken towns dealing with opioid epidemics are trying to tell us something, as urban streets filling with the homeless who can't afford to even couch surf.

    SFF needs to reinvent itself again, basically, as it has periodically for its entire reign. YA dystopianism is an obvious attempt, as is military SF. It would be great if the solarpunks could inspire their Gibsons, Sterlings, WJWs, and friends, but so far, they haven't broken into the mainstream. Any other threads I'm missing? Is afrofuturism having more than just one moment?

    582:

    Mea culpa. I didn't get into Singularity SF until 2012, and with the exception of Accelerando, I wasn't interested in reading about it. I used my memory of the frequency of blog discussions about the Singularity as a proxy for its popularity within SF circles. Until now, I was unaware of most pre-2010 singularity SF. Thanks for the tip on books to read. That is a reason I said "I'm still trying to fit the rise and decline of Singularity SF into the theory above."

    583:

    I think you're misunderstanding the concept of "value" as it's used in economics. (Or, actually, as it was used in the 19th century; economists don't talk about "value" much any more.)

    The measure of a thing's value is the most desirable thing you will give up to gain it or keep it. Human life does not have infinite value. We can't give up an infinite amount to save a human life; we don't have an infinite amount to give up. And in practice, no organization treats a human life as worth spending an unlimited amount of labor and resources to preserve; at some point people say, "We did everything possible."

    (I'd also suggest that ethically, people who treat their own lives as infinitely valuable are not thought well of. People who are admired are the ones who reach a point where they decide they care about something more than self-preservation.)

    And if your own life isn't infinitely valuable, then "I would give my life to achieve X" doesn't make X infinitely valuable either.

    "That has a very high value and it's worth spending a lot to get it" is a rationally meaningful statement; the merchant who sold everything to get one pearl of great price is a valid symbol. But introducing infinities into the argument doesn't help understand the economic issues, or lead to sound choices.

    584:

    Yes, SpaceX is using shinier new technologies in some ways. On the other hand, they aren't going to the moon the way NASA did the year I was born. At best, it's a tie. And in 1997 I was using Google regularly; I've never actually seen a Tesla on the roads as of 2018. Both companies are largely just ways for Elon Musk to amuse himself with his PayPal money.

    585:

    Yeah. We have AI and it's calculating loyalty scores for every Chinese citizen. We got the cyber; where's the punk?

    586:

    A large subset of singularity fanboys pivoted to the alt-right in 2015 after Merkel's refugee actions

    spit take

    Make Roko's Basilisk Great Again?

    Don't Christian Democrats, immigrants, and Muslims get uploaded to the computronium, too?

    Does Barron get to go first because he "understands the cyber"?

    If this is the intellectual calibre of the singularitarians sign me up for the Bronze Age.

    587:

    Got it from the library this week. My younger version would have hated it. The current one is enjoying it.

    588:

    I bounced on Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. Maybe I should try again.

    589:

    No, SpaceX is going to the moon later this year / next year. At a price point that allows a multimillionaire to buy a ticket (any bets it’s James Cameron?). So, Apollo 8 as a minimum, but without the billion-dollar price tag.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_lunar_tourism_mission

    Regarding SF, “America City” by Chris Beckett. Rather good (understatement)...

    As for other near-future SF and cyber warfare, no way that’s a military capability at a serious level. It’s a strategic-level activity, and they won’t be giving it to anyone dressed in green or blue - it’s going to be GCHQ / NSA provided, politically signed off and directed. The limit to anything directed by people in uniform is going to be a variation / extension on EW (jamming at a local level, intelligence-gathering at a regional level)

    590:

    I never read Ken Macleod. Can you recommend any particular books?

    Warning - I may go a little too enthusiastic here, so please bear with me.

    Short answer: All of his stuff.

    Longer answer: The Fall Revolution is an interestingly braided quartet of novels with a lot thought and neat ideas behind the series. The individual books are The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, The Sky Road.

    The Engines of Light trilogy I've re-read multiple times and I'm just blown away with it. No FTL travel, but interstellar trade. Deep time and not just from now forward. Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light and Engine City.

    His most recent series is the Corporation Wars (the bit with robot exploration and colonization outside the Solar system). Its interesting, neat and kind of confusing. I suspect it will bear re-reading, but not just right now (glances at Mount TBR).

    Then there's his near future fiction. The Execution Channel, The Night Sessions, The Restoration Game and Intrusion.

    I haven't read Descent, mainly because I missed it being published.

    591:

    The round the moon trip may not be happening, or at least not using a Heavy launched Dragon. In the post-launch press conference Elon said man-rating the Heavy was no longer planned, although as with every time man-rating is mentioned by anyone it is not clear what exactly they mean. NASA has a man-rating document that none of their vehicles has ever met and, other than the centre core being beefed up compared to the single stick and side booster cores, Falcon first stages are going to be the same regardless of payload.

    592:

    The Corporation Wars are a good mention because they feel like books from ten years ago (in the sense that it’s getting rarer to read singularity-type fiction, especially without some dystopic overtones). I wasn’t too into the story but it did contain some really cool scenes and ideas: like a post-scarcity capitalist economy where every corporation is an AI with bot workers and every conscious human was an equal shareholder in all of them.

    593:

    Ahem: There's a Tesla showroom up the road from me. If I was particularly curious I could arrange a test drive whenever. I see them on the street fairly regularly. (You will note, I am not in California or New York).

    SpaceX is about to launch the first two test satellites for a gigantic cluster of comsats, due to begin service in 2022, that will provide gigabit broadband internet service to the entire planet (for a fee). That should be self-funding. Lest you think they're amateurs, they're the prime contractor for launching the next-generation Iridium comsat cluster, the biggest commercial launch contract in history. And there's supposed to be a circumlunar flight flying on a Falcon Heavy any time now, once they've flight-qualified Dragon 2 for ISS crew runs (was due this year, now pushed back to early 2019 because NASA).

    Upshot: by 2020-24 this stuff is probably going to affect you personally — large numbers of reasonably affordable electric cars coming off production lines (both Tesla and the likes of GM and VW who are pivoting hastily to compete), and high speed mobile broadband-anywhere.

    594:

    Vernor Vinge really kicked it off circa 1988 with "Marooned in Realtime", and his non-fic Singularity paper in 1992. By 1995 with WIRED in print (second issue cover story: the cypherpunks) and the EXTROPY-L mailing list there was a community of people who would read this stuff and understand the implications. I began writing "Accelerando" in 1998, and my goal was to break the existing bottleneck in singularity-SF by depicting what it would look like from the inside (the 1990-2000 wisdom was that you couldn't reasonably go there).

    By 2010 the hangover had set in.

    So it was really (my take) a 1990-2010 phenomenon.

    595:

    That book is virtually the antithesis of my OP about world-building. It takes the "tech the tech" model for Star Trek technobabble to its logical conclusion.

    Characterisation and interpersonal interactions are good. Science/tech/worldbuilding? Aaargh. (This is my aspie side rolling on the floor whining "noooo ...")

    596:

    Maybe. OTOH, I've been driving a hybrid electric car for 10 years now and they seem to have gone out of fashion. Also, I remember what happened with the last generation of Iridium satellites (bankruptcy - the places that didn't already have cell phone coverage didn't have enough demand for it to justify the capital cost of 77 satellites). Sometimes it's possible to succeed where others have failed before, but that's not the way to bet it.

    597:

    I see lots and lots of hybrid cars on the road. But I'm in California, and, more, in the SF Bay Area.

    598:

    Going on 600, there's this, which might relate to future of "work", "jobs" etc., as well as just what education/vocational training might be about in the future.

    Vocational Degrees and Employment Outcomes http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2018/201801/HEFCE2018_01.pdf

    Comments from you presently UK folk as to what HEFCE is supposed to do would be of interest. But, more generally and perhaps connecting to earlier discussions here, what happens if the concept of "vocation" changes drastically, perhaps to the point of disappearing?

    599:

    My next problem with all of that is that if dark matter does not react at all with photons, neither absorb or emit... it should leave a shadow.

    Yes?

    And I'm still at a loss to see how it works. I'm told, on a mailing list, that it's spread out. So, does this slow down the inner stars in a galaxy? If not, how does it speed up the galactic orbits of the outer stars?

    600:

    You're being utterly silly. We're talking about something that could be a half-klick long, mostly just spars with attachment platforms.

    And who's going to spring the big bucks for more than three? Each one would be immensely expensive. After they're up, though, a lot cheaper, and a lot less need for tons o' crap in orbit.

    601:

    sigh

    The Earth and the Moon revolve around each other. It just so happens, due to the relative mass, that the center of gravity, IIRC, is about 1,000mi below the surface of the Earth.

    602:

    Um, nope. The "app" is short for "application", or maybe "small application". Are you arguing there haven't been apps for decades? What would you consider, say, the early PC/DOS apps for playing Star Trek, complete with a "boss" key?

    And a lot of them are nothing more than self-publishing. I suggest you look at all the not-touched-in-years projects on sourceforge (yes, one is mine, that I did about 12 years ago).

    "4. SpaceX. This is limited to teenagers interested in space exploration. "

    Yes, well, thanks for the insult. You're suggesting I'm a teenager, and 14, yes?

    Screw you. (Sorry, Charlie, but this is an insult.)

    603:

    Hey, Charlie, back to the Laundry universe: I didn't see any mention of what's his superpower, the persuader? Isn't he now PM?

    Could he have persuaded the Svartelf King to surrender? And do his powers extend to non-humans?

    604:

    Not really, and also, this is Kim Stanley Robinson's notion. His point is that there are things, like gravity, a breathable atmosphere, drinkable water, and so on, that are required for any economy to exist. Without them, the economy doesn't exist. Their value to the economy is not what someone is willing to pay, because if they are part of the economy and there is no payment to keep them in existence, the economy ceases to exist. Therefore that value is infinite, because it's not just the current value of the economy, it's the future value of the continued existence of the economy for however long it shall last.

    Your answer is what economists have done: instead of infinity, they calculate the value of all human lives and say that's what the biosphere is worth to keep running, or anything similarly pulled out of a random orifice and defended angrily. This approach is incorrect, but it's because the ultimate problem is the frame of reference of economics is only for things inside it, and it is necessarily contained in a bigger system that it can't properly evaluate.

    The normal solution, by the way, is to ignore the stuff you can't evaluate. It's called an externality, and conventionally trained economists try to externalize as many costs as possible. That's why we have so many environmental costs too. If we internalize into the economy all the damage we've externalized out of it, the estimate is that no industry is making a profit right now.

    605:

    YMMV. I should mention that I live in the Florida panhandle. If the Singularity is truly a religion, this is where bad ones go.

    606:

    I would say a qualified no. Bear in mind the Mandate seems to be in a power up curve and the Elves happened a few months after the superheros when he could be defeated by some magic eye shadow and a scary violin.

    The elf king had the magic of several thousand troops to call upon both physically and psychically. I reckon the elves would have just edged it. Assuming of course the the Mandate would have gone into a head to head rather than influence someone to nuke the elves. By the time of the events of the delirium brief I reckon there would be no contest. Although a 4 way face off between Mandate, Cassie, Bob and fem-Sleeper would have been interesting.

    I would guess his power works on non humans he made a vessel of the Sleeper explode. (Ok physically human but deffo not mentally)

    Just my 5c

    607:

    Iirc Iriduim also messed up the actual constellation. Several (more than 10%) satellites were lost very early in life, so all of a sudden they needed more capital and more hardware to reach planned coverage. It’s worth mentioning that the launch system has always been the cheap part of any space mission - the space qualified hardware and the ground operations are far more expensive.

    608:

    The Mandate isn’t just a dude with a super power (though it looked that way at first). He is a dude possessed by Nyarlathoteb with the strength of that possession seemingly having grown between appearances.

    609:

    Err ... hmm ... I don't know where to start, there is so much misunderstanding there of how economists use "value". Value in economics is based on what individuals are willing to give up to get something. There are problems with and limitations to this that economists recognise, but they don't have anything much to do with infinities etc.

    Can I just suggest that you look at a nice essay on the history of the concepts of "value", "markets" and "equilibrium", via a lovely piece on some of the contributions of the late Kenneth J Arrow:

    https://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/kenneth-arrow-part-ii-the-theory-of-general-equilibrium/

    Dead ends, indeterminacies, and a great put-down by Von Neumann (though not of Arrow) ... but not the problems you are talking about.

    And when you say "conventionally trained economists try to externalize as many costs as possible" ... do you have anything resembling, you know, like, evidence or data to support this? I teach economics for a living, and frankly this is just silly. The standard line in economics textbooks is "internalize the externality", e.g., "the polluter pays". In other words, the conventional textbooks we use to train economists say exactly the opposite of what you're claiming.

    Not your fault really. I think the problem is that people think the tripe peddled by axe-grinding pseudoeconomist pundits is somehow representative of the economics discipline. Like mistaking the motivated rubbish churned out by some less-than-independent think-tanks for serious public policy analysis. Or the output of creationist mouthpieces for serious biology. Except that economics as a discipline is not very good at messaging, so it's an easier mistake to make.

    Sorry for the harsh tone ... been a long day.

    610:

    Certainly, look at the City of San Diego Climate Action Plan. They punted most of the possible actions to decrease actual carbon emissions to "Direct Investment and Carbon Offset." The first of these is investments to weatherize homes and such, while the other is to buy carbon offsets (100 year investments in planting trees) on the assumption that whatever they buy will still be around 100 years from now. One current project proposes to offset 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions it is projected to produce by buying offsets somewhere.

    Speaking as a botanist who has looked at the actual data produced by the one local carbon offset program, I have serious questions about the data quality.

    Now it looks like they're buying carbon offsets, but when you ask the ecologists how big the pool of potential offsets they can buy into actually is and whether what they're investing in will pay off, researchers cringe. When told this, planners and decision makers blow it off (three times to date: planners, planning commission, board of supervisors).

    I'd call this externalizing the greenhouse gas production in practice. Fortunately this is about to end up in court, so we'll see what a judge says about this, after evaluating the testimony.

    In any case, I'm quite happy that you're teaching your students to internalize externalities. What I see in practice is very much the opposite. Problems are ignored routinely, and the only way to force them to be evaluated is via litigation or political action.

    Still, you teach economics, so what is the value of something that, if it ceased to exist, would instantaneously cause the entire economic system within which you are valuing it to also cease to exist?

    611:
    Something that could cause a Kessler Cascade just by lighting off its main drive in orbit above the US - yikes!

    Why would it cause a cascade? The propellant bombs on an Orion are sub-kilotonne, if I recall correctly. You scale up the thrust by increasing the amount of polypropylene surrounding the bombs, not increasing the yield. The bombs themselves are going to have minimal effect even a few miles from the detonation, since there's no medium to transfer shockwaves. Shooting an Orion through the orbital belt should have no more effect than shooting a large chemical rocket through it. JUGGERNAUT would have to hit several satellites directly to start a cascade, and that would require really poor flight-planning.

    Even EMP effects would be small — STARFISH PRIME was over a megaton in yield — and that would merely disable satellites rather than disintegrate them into lethal particle clouds.

    612:

    Also. I remember around 2011 we were all going to be driving hydrogen-powered cars, but they esperantized.

    "Esperantization" is a word I use to describe the process wherein a thing of the Future becomes a thing of the Past without ever being a thing of the Present. Happens all the time.

    613:
    My next problem with all of that is that if dark matter does not react at all with photons, neither absorb or emit... it should leave a shadow.

    No, because it doesn't interact with photons, like, at all, so no shadow. Photons just pass them by. Note, I am not a cosmologist, this is just my layman's understanding of the subject.

    So, does this slow down the inner stars in a galaxy? If not, how does it speed up the galactic orbits of the outer stars?

    The only effect of dark matter, outside very, very rare interactions with bright matter in extreme conditions, is through gravity, i.e. mass. So same as bright matter, if you've got a clump of it then matter will orbit it. More dark matter, faster orbit. Put a massive clump in the middle of a galaxy then the stars and gas clouds will orbit faster.

    But... dark matter doesn't interact with itself either, except through gravity. Meaning that it isn't "sticky" like bright matter. If two bits of bright matter collide, then there's a good chance they'll stick to each other, and then some more bright matter will hit that and stick, and after a while you get stars and planets and all that. Dark matter, on the other hand, is so un-"sticky" that it can't collide at all: two particles will just pass each other by, no matter how close they get. So dark matter doesn't clump, except by falling into orbit around large clumps of bright matter. (Or, as you mentioned above, by falling into an event horizon.)

    So the dark matter in the galaxy is in orbit around the galaxy, forming a spread-out cloud of the stuff. I don't know what the density is as you get further from the galactic core — that'll depend on the range of energies the particles have, I guess, i.e. the velocities of the particles — but if you think of it as a succession of shells, then the gravitational effect on the bright matter increases as you move farther out (because gravity within a shell is zero), so that the least gravity is experienced near the centre, and the most at the edge; like when boring through the Earth, the most gravity is at the surface and the least is at the core.

    Therefore, the stars in the core orbit only a bit more than would be expected if there were only bright matter, while out at the periphery the stars orbit much faster than expected, giving the result that the galactic disc appears to orbit at more-or-less constant speed.

    I ran some of this by an astronomer at a local Science Festival a couple of years ago, and he seemed to agree that this was more-or-less accurate, according to what he knew, which he said wasn't much because collectively we don't know a lot about dark matter. [Insert smiley emoji here.]

    614:

    I didn't mean to insult you.

    "This is limited to teenagers interested in space exploration."

    I was responding to this

    "The old joke is that the Golden Age of SF is “about 14”, and it's likely that current trends in SF are driven by the need to appeal to a (roughly) 14-year old's mindset. To a 14-year old, the future looks very different. There hasn't been a breakout tech company since Facebook launched (when the kid was a baby). The NSA has always been tracking him. Declining real wages for most people, high-stakes standardized testing, and the post 9/11 surveillance state are all he knows."

    He was talking about the viewpoints of people whose age is "about 14". If I had said that SpaceX was a game-changing technology for the youth of today, he could easily have responded that most 14-year olds these days don't care about space. I don't know if this is true or not, so I was conceding the point that SpaceX is groundbreaking mostly for teenagers who are interested in space, and a niche distraction for those who aren't interested in space. In other words, it doesn't affect teenager's day-to-day lives, but it does affect how a subset of teenagers see the future.

    In other words, no insult was intended. I apologize if it came off that way.

    615:

    Ok, Charlie. Thank you. Why do you think it declined when it did?

    616:

    I agree with most of what you wrote, but I have this quibble.

    As aggressive as US companies are about electric cars, Chinese companies are even more aggressive. That's a reason why China has placed such an ambitious target to eliminate the sale of gas cars. It's not just cars, China currently dominates the electric bus market

    http://www.businessinsider.com/almost-half-of-all-buses-will-be-electric-by-2025-2018-2

    My memory is most likely faulty here, but I think that companies like GM, Ford, and VW announced their more ambitious target after the Chinese announced their targets.

    China is doing this conversion for many reasons, but one of the reasons I've heard is that they've largely failed to create an automotive giant on par with European, US, or Japanese/Korean ones outside of China. The conversion to electric cars allows them to reset the race with their champions in a much better position to compete. Already "BYD is the largest global electric vehicle manufacturer".

    At the same time, China is also pushing hydrogen fuel cell buses

    "Hydrogen fuel cell buses will see an increasing trend as Chinese governments provide more support and subsidies."

    Just like with the electricity sector where China supports both renewable and nuclear power, China's methodology seems to be very agnostic towards particular technologies.

    617:

    There's a new generation of 14 year old SF readers every year. Some writers seem to have tried to grow up with the generation of 14 year olds they started out with. Some writers haven't.

    I'm a long way from being 14 years old, so I tend to gravitate towards those writers who appear to me to be trying to grow up.

    618:

    You're being utterly silly. We're talking about something that could be a half-klick long, mostly just spars with attachment platforms.

    And who's going to spring the big bucks for more than three? Each one would be immensely expensive. After they're up, though, a lot cheaper, and a lot less need for tons o' crap in orbit.

    Not UTTERLY silly; mildly amusing at most.

    Who's going to spring for the big bucks? Who's going to spring the big bucks for the first three? Having redundant platforms is likely to prove cheaper than the cost of an outage that takes out coverage from a third of the planet's surface.

    619:

    The use of artificial gravity in the most recent Star Wars movie bothered me a lot. Why doesn't anyone think about shutting it off to conserve energy? Why does it exist even in industrial areas where human beings don't normally hang around?

    Anyway I think it's pretty common for professional fiction writers to not read quite so much (they're pretty busy, after all), and I've also heard it claimed that older people read fiction less and non-fiction more (presuming they do read).

    On the subject of world-building, I also immediately started thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson's "2312". I read it recently, so I can comment on some aspects...

    As "world-building" goes, I thought "2312" had severe problems. A big one is in this timeline Earth is supposed to have fallen prey to global warming and many years were lost dealing with rising sea levels and resource shortage wars. The massive re-location and re-engineering needed to deal with the sea levels must have been incredible: e.g. we're shown a New York City that has become a new Venice. But then, after only 70 years of these troubles, the human race supposedly suddenly started building space elevators-- seriously?

    Then despite the fact that the earth's economy is just limping along, and still struggling with displaced populations, they don't use the space technology they've developed to reverse global warming (e.g. with a sun shield at the L1 point)-- part of the idea is that many people like the present state of the earth, e.g. they find the new canals of Manhatten very charming. They're also supposed to be very gun shy about terraforming Earth after some early screw-ups that created a little ice age. But still they're engaging in massive, expensive efforts to do things like re-build Florida so that more of it will be above water again... myself I think they'd be telling themselves they know what they're doing now, and it's time to cool the earth off a bit.

    (Note: Robinson does know about that sun shield idea, he has one deployed to terraform Venus. He probably knows about tricks like blowing sulfides into the upper atmosphere, that's probably where the new little ice age came from.)

    Multiple things strain credulity:

    An elaborate space transit infrastructure involving space elevators and O'Neill-style habitats that get used as transportation (somehow)--

    The town of Terminator on Mercury that supposedly coasts along on steel rails, powered entirely by thermal expansion...

    The landscape of equatorial Mercury which is somehow rough and craggy despite the incessant sun-blasting it receives...

    (But then, at least there's no damn artificial gravity, or for that matter faster-than-light travel.)

    But anyway, the economics, such as they are: Kim Stanley Robinson has a bunch of ideas based on a (perhaps idealized) view of the social process of science. He claims that scientists are motivated far more by peer-group approval if not out-right selfless altruism rather than the profit-motive which is presumed by our libertarian friends to be the only way to get anything done. In the 2312 timeline (not quite the "Green Mars" scenario, I think, though I could be wrong) the settlement of Mars was one of the early forays into space, and it was handled on a model much like scientific bases on Antarctica-- this set the tone for much of what was done in space afterwards, and there's an alliance of different settlements called the Mondragon Accord that does not use market-based resource allocation, but instead uses some sort of computer-AI to do the job (yes: let's put the economy under the control of a google/facebook algorithm... what could go wrong?).

    We don't see too much of how this actually works... no one seems to worry about the cost of anything, and in general there seems to be a presumption that at any time our heroes can appropriate something if it's needed for the greater good (though they mention they'll have to replace it later)... But then our heroes are definitely insiders, if not celebrities and their lives don't seem to be representative of how other people might live. And actually, fairly often they get things done with conspiratorial wheeler-dealing in a casual sort of way...

    (By the way: there was a hot shot in Operations Research named Strafford Beer who had a scheme to use networked computers to coordinate the economic production of Allende's Chile-- he wrote a book on the subject called "A Platform for Change" which was notably light on any sort of specifics-- it didn't say a single word about "incentives". In some alternate universe where the Left of the 70s was not so technophobic, you can imagine Strafford Beer's ideas becoming a blueprint for The Revolution. In our universe, he's a weird figure that no one remembers, but we might yet see a day when his ideas move from crazy to respectable and perhaps even to conventional wisdom...)

    In "2312", KSR uses a device that I more-or-less like of including interludes of excerpts from various "non-fiction" works of future history (I understand the show-don't-tell doctrine is very popular and "The door dialated" is supposed to be the bees-knees, but I still think there's something to be said for the direct approach: just tell the reader what you want them to know). Nevertheless there's a certain lack of verisimilitude in KSR's story-telling that might be improved if he didn't just skip over quite so much... there are multiple places where I was left feeling like "Okay, but now there's going to be a long, drawn-out fight... oh did the bad guy s just gave up and run?" But then a few chapters later there's a mention of a civil war that started at that point, something that you'd think would be on people's minds a little more than that.

    A few asides:

    I once saw a KSR talk on science as a model for utopian social structures. This was part of the Anarchist Book Fair, which that year was located in an old military facility (the Old Armory building, a massive brick structure once used as a munitions dump), in San Francisco, in a room I gradually realized was the arena for the "Ultimate Surrender" web site (i.e. naked female wrestling): try finding something that strange in a novel.

    (Charles Stross is an "autodidact" of Science Fiction? Well of course... don't tell me that there's someone out there who thinks you need a degree in SF before you can write SF...)

    620:

    Bearing in mind I said could not would - off the top of my head.

    EMP affecting the ability to maneuver a large number of satellites. Leading to difficulties in grave yarding and deorbiting.

    Propulsion debris.

    Radiation pressure.

    Then there's the GDP hit of taking out a good proportion of the world's commms capacity.

    There are lots of happy fun ways to use JUGGERNAUT. Looking forward to seeing what Charlie chooses.

    621:

    Eh?

    Hybrids are all over the place right now; I'm not really in the market for a new car, but if I was looking to replace my Volvo with a new one it'd be almost impossible not to buy a hybrid.

    As for Iridium, it nearly went bust circa 2000, but was rescued by a US DoD contract (they had a niche for cellphone service that worked everywhere for special forces/snake-eater types). It's now profitable enough that they're actively launching a new cluster with higher bandwidth in anticipation of more business — a lot of it carrying data for international shipping. With very little public attention, lots of airliners are sprouting radomes for high bandwidth comms so that the passengers can enjoy in-flight wifi; this is a substantial market for rival comsat clusters because there are a lot of international travellers, many of whom are happy to pay $20 for 3-12 hours of wifi to keep them amused on an intercontinental flight.

    Consider Emirates. They operate a long-haul fleet of 96 A380s on routes ranging from 850 to 14,000km. Per their current PR, in the past 9 years they've carried 80M passengers. So: just under 9M passenger flights per year — if 20% of the pax want in-flight wifi at $20 each, then that'd supply additional revenue of $350M. That's from a single long-haul airline with under 100 (big) planes. There are on the order of 50,000 commercial airliner sectors flown per day, and 30,000 of those are passenger flights, mostly with 80-300 people on board; the potential size of the inflight wifi market revenue is probably in double-digit billions of dollars.

    622:

    Ahem: you get to see a lot more of the Mandate in "The Labyrinth Index".

    Hint: he's commissioned Foster + Partners to build him a giant glass and chrome Tzompantli on the site of Marble Arch in London. (Ahem: click all the links ...)

    623:

    Not an example of what you claimed. You claimed intent: "conventionally trained economists try to externalize". This is silly. Conventional training for economists is to internalise externalities, i.e., they are taught to try to do the opposite of what you claimed. And in your San Diego example, city planners and decision makers (including some economists, I guess) aren't trying to externalise, they are (by your account, I haven't checked) either trying to internalise sensibly (supporting weatherproofing etc), or going through the motions and for political or other reasons, ending up doing the opposite.

    Not that trying to externalise doesn't happen - far from it. Making the "polluter pay" usually doesn't go down well with the polluter, and they will lobby to stop it or roll it back.

    So when you say "Problems are ignored routinely, and the only way to force them to be evaluated is via litigation or political action." ... I couldn't agree more. And you could even legitimately attack how economists are trained here, because there is a strong tradition of teaching economics as if politics and lobbying and interest groups don't come into it. This problem runs deep and goes beyond just training. But not what you were claiming.

    Will respond to the value question separately.

    624:

    "Esperantization" is a word I use to describe the process wherein a thing of the Future becomes a thing of the Past without ever being a thing of the Present. Happens all the time.

    Food pills are the classic 50's example.

    There's also a liminal variant, where something of the future becomes something of the past after a finite period of being a thing of the present. And there are many more of these, and while some of them were obviously bad ideas, some of them are badly missed:

    Examples:

    Concorde and supersonic civilian passenger services

    Nylon shirts

    Compact cassettes and/or VHS and/or Betamax (etc)

    Working antibiotics

    Tetraethyl lead additive in gasoline

    Astronauts on the Moon

    625:

    Why do you think it declined when it did?

    Because it was based on spurious numerology (around a big calendar roll-over).

    See also Norman Cohn on the Apocalypse in mediaeval Europe. It's not just Christians who do this sort of thing; the Aztecs had some very alarming ideas about how many people you needed to sacrifice when they hit a big calendrical cycle limit, just to keep the sun rising. And so on.

    626:

    I hope you may be too pessimistic, probably because you are working on land usage. There is such a vested interest on the part of currently established landusers to mess things up to create scarcity...or...this is why US cities are developed to maximize drive time.

    Anyways, when solar + storage comes in at prices under coal, it becomes hard to argue for coal usage...it is also important to remember that, in terms of global warming, China and India matter more, long term. Solar and storage is also intensely distributable...which means that individual costs are relatively low.

    627:

    "[W]hat is the value of something that, if it ceased to exist, would instantaneously cause the entire economic system within which you are valuing it to also cease to exist?"

    It's not a meaningful question in a standard economics framework. In a sentence, the value of something is what someone will give up in exchange for it.

    What I think you are worried about here is aggregation: how do we value something in aggregate given how each of us individually value it, and what are the implications of this?

    And there are indeed huge issues here in how this is handled in conventional economics. The example that springs to mind is "total surplus" (=consumer surplus+producer surplus=area above the supply curve and below the demand curve). Total surplus is often identified with "social welfare" (though it doesn't have to be). This shows up right away when teaching about environmental economics and externalities. But what is just generally ignored (not just in teaching!) is how this relates to distribution and inequality.

    Brad DeLong has a series of blog entries on this, and I will just quote from him. The paper he is referring to is Negishi (1960).

    "The market's social welfare function: take each individual's utility and sum them up. Only, first, take the inverse of their marginal utility of income, and weight their utility by that before summing. The desires of those who have the least need for goods and services therefore get the greatest weight. The market thus has a very interesting "operationalization" of the principle of "the greatest good of the greatest number"."

    http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/must-read-welfare-economics-and-existence-of-an-equilibrium-for-a-competitive-economy-negishi-2006-metroeconomi.html

    And, from a very entertaining Socratic dialogue:

    Agathon: "That means that the market system, in weighting utilities and adding them up, gives you a much lower utility than it gives Richard Cheney. In fact, if marginal utility of wealth is inversely proportional to the square of lifetime wealth, the market system gives Richard Cheney about 400 times as big a weight as it gives you."

    Glaukon: "That's sick."

    Agathon: "And it gives Bill Gates a weight about 400,000,000 times as big a weight as it gives you."

    Glaukon: "That's sicker."

    Agathon: "But it gives you about 40,000 times the weight it gives your average Bengali peasant, who thus has about 1/16,000,000,000,000 the amount of the market system's concern as Bill Gates has. Will you teach that?"

    Glaukon: "They'll call me a Communist!"

    Agathon: "But it's true!"

    Glaukon: "That I'm a Communist?"

    Agathon: "No. That that's what the market system does!"

    Glaukon: "We are value neutral economists! We don't care about distribution! We care about efficiency!"

    Agathon: "But claiming that you don't care about distribution is implicitly saying that shifts in distribution are of no account--which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth."

    Glaukon: "You're introducing politics into a value-neutral technocratic social science."

    Agathon: "Politics?! Moi? I'm simply evaluating the derivatives of a social welfare function under the assumption that the market allocation is its ArgMax. What could be more technocratic than that? I'm just trying to attain a little clarity of thought."

    http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-a-non-socratic-dialogue-on-social-welfare-functions.html

    All I can add is, "nostra culpa".

    628:

    YMMV. Around here, hybrids were maybe 15 percent of the cars on the road five years ago, and are maybe 5 percent now. These are rough, impressionistic estimates. They seem to be liminally esperantizing.

    629:

    ... This may be a tangent, but there is a concept which must have a formal name, which I am blanking on.

    Prices are set where the cost of the marginal producer meets the utility of the marginal consumer. But for a large number of products and services, the marginal consumer values that good far, far lower than the average consumer, and the costs of the marginal producer is very low, which means the average consumer gets to buy that good at far below what they would be willing to pay in a less favorable market.

    These circumstances are generally the only place capitalism makes people happy. So. What the heck is the technical term for it, and why is moving as many parts of the economy into this state as at all possible not our first priority?

    630:

    I should mention that the median household income around here is less than $40,000 (about $28K pounds), and gasoline is much cheaper in America than Europe. The extra upfront cost of a hybrid is a dealbreaker around here. A Tesla, fuggedaboutit.

    I only got mine because I happened to find one discounted, and I was making 60% more when I bought it than I do today.

    631:

    Hybrids were a bet that batteries would not get good enough. Batteries are good enough, thus, technological dodo - They are more complicated to design and manufacture than an all electric car, and the car designers can draw a line on a chalkboard of projected battery price and performance just as well as I can, so have no desire to invest years of their lives in a niche which is going to get steam-rollered.

    All-combustion designs will get steamrollered too, but the design teams for those can keep going on inertia - lots of automotive engineers who have forty years of expertise sunk into them who will keep designing new ones up until four days after they become completely unsalable.

    632:

    No, because it doesn't interact with photons, like, at all, so no shadow. Photons just pass them by.

    Yes, exactly. (It may help to consider "dark matter" as "perfectly transparent matter".)

    Dark matter, on the other hand, is so un-"sticky" that it can't collide at all: two particles will just pass each other by, no matter how close they get. So dark matter doesn't clump, except by falling into orbit around large clumps of bright matter.

    This isn't really correct. Stars don't form because atoms "stick together"; they form (at least to start with) by gravitational collapse. Dark matter forms clumps for exactly the same reason.

    The basic process is that a slight overdensity of matter -- dark matter or gas in a gas cloud -- collapses under its own gravity until it "virializes" -- that is, the particles (of dark matter or gas) are moving fast enough to resist further collapse. (Somewhat technical explanation here.)

    The difference is that in a gravitationally collapsed clump of normal matter, the particles can lose orbital energy via "dissipation", where orbital energy is converted into radiation. (E.g., two atoms collide and transfer some of their kinetic energy into internal energy of their electrons, and then radiate away that energy as photons. Result: the atoms fall a bit closer to the center of the clump, and the clump gets denser.) So a clump of normal matter can continue collapsing after it has virialized, while a clump of dark matter cannot.

    What happens in galaxy formation is that a combination of dark matter and normal matter collapses under its own gravity. One could almost say that it's mostly a matter of the dark matter collapsing into a clump, and the normal matter following along due to the dominant gravity of the dark matter.

    But the normal matter can keep collapsing further, because it's dissipative. So you end up with a dense clump of normal matter inside a less-dense clump of dark matter. In the center, there's more normal matter than dark matter; as you go further away from the center, a larger fraction of the total amount of matter (inside the sphere defined by your distance from the center) is from dark matter.

    634:

    Maybe, but I see far fewer cars that are even partially electric than I used to, and I've seen an awful lot of technological fads overpromise, get a few early adopters, and then vanish. A touch of skepticism seems warranted, especially if the technology is environmentally friendly but more expensive than the alternative. At least around here, people just don't have much money to spare.

    Hell, my apartment complex ditched the recycling bins last year.

    635:

    When I'm out walking the dog in my area I've seen a couple of Teslas, about the same frequency as Maseratis and Lamborghinis, much less common than Porsches or Jaguars. Seems about every second car is an Audi though.

    636:

    Electric car sales are on a solid upward curve for every country I could find stats on. Hybrids are down.

    Note that this curve will probably go non-linear in a very impressive way at some point, depending on manufacturing capacity of batteries.

    All electric-cars are mechanically simpler and cheaper to build. Also potentially a lot more reliable, because electric motors are just better tech than combustion engines.

    EV are more expensive overall because the batteries are expensive, and because their production runs are generally not as large, which matters. But given that batteries get cheaper and there is no reason to expect chemical limits to put a stop to that before the point where the total package becomes competitive, there will dawn a day where you would have to be completely insensitive to running costs to buy a combustion drive car, and the changeover becomes as total and abrupt as the shift to dvds from tape.

    637:

    You're correct: the batteries are most of the cost of our EV.

    We've got an EV and a gas car, and we drive the EV everywhere we can. It's more fun and more comfortable to drive, and easier to park with that ridiculously short nose (and all those cameras).

    The problems with the EV are: --big, expensive battery (and this really is the biggest problem with an electrifying the economy) --range anxiety (see size of battery, above) --small capacity (see size of battery, above).

    Otherwise, the EV's a better car, and not just because it's newer. For most of what we do (commuting and errand running) it's simply the better choice. The gas guzzler is far better for hauling large amounts of stuff long distances, and while it gets used for errands while the EV is off commuting, that's where it shines and that's why we keep it.

    If we get large, relatively inexpensive batteries with the energy density of gasoline, though, gas guzzlers are toast. Of course, then we'll worry about grid security, but that's not an excuse. We already worry about the security of the petroleum industry, to the point where the US and other developed countries spend billions, if not trillions, warping international politics to keep the stuff flowing. Keeping the grids working, even through a Carrington event, is probably cheaper.

    638:

    Electrics are vastly improved over the first ones I saw, but I won't be in a position to buy one anytime soon. I also have occasion to drive across Kansas and one recharge could easily take as long as every fuel stop for the entire round trip. If I could afford an EV, it would have sufficient range for most of the driving I do, but not all, and do consider what a "Winner take all" economy can do to monkey wrench the transition to more sensible transport.

    639:

    I've been considering what my next car should be. I like the idea of an EV — it would suit most of my driving — but I also like heading out into the countryside, and currently the range isn't enough for that.

    I also wonder a bit about winter — it takes a lot of energy to heat a car in -20 weather. In a gasoline car that's just waste heat from the engine, but in an EV that will have to come from the battery, further shortening range.

    640:

    "[W]hat is the value of something that, if it ceased to exist, would instantaneously cause the entire economic system within which you are valuing it to also cease to exist?"

    It's not a meaningful question in a standard economics framework. In a sentence, the value of something is what someone will give up in exchange for it.

    And to an ecologist like me, this is why standard economics is problematic, in many cases to the point of uselessness.

    Stuff that falls outside the standard economics framework includes producing children, donating organs, breathable air, fish in the ocean, wildlife and wildlands in general, carbon underground, and so forth. Anything that's an extractive resource (where it has an undefined value until it is brought into the economy) is part of the problem with economics.

    Basically, the planet ran well ehough without economics for over 4 billion years, and humans have spent about 99% of our 300,000 year existence as a species doing well without anything resembling a standard economy. As the Inkas and their predecessors demonstrated most recently, you can even run fairly large empires without standard economics, at least for a couple of centuries, and bronze age international trade ran without a standard economy as well (they invented money in the iron age). Since we're having trouble running our modern empires with standard economics for even a couple of centuries, I'd gently suggest that we should be thoughtful about any claims of universality from standard economics.

    What we need, really, are ways to deal with the question of valuing things that any economy needs to exist. There are quite a few frameworks for doing this. Most traditional foraging peoples, for example, knew quite well that if they didn't tend the resources they used, whether they were fields of wild plants, flocks of game, or creeks and water holes, they'd die, and so they did, taking only what they needed, regularly mucking out the springs and creeks, and making sure the rest survived for next time. You can turn this into an economic model, but why bother? The simpler solution was more useful in these cases--they survive as their resource base survives. Yes, these systems fell to modern extractive economies, but what is the price that our species will pay for extractive economies deliberately failing to care for the resources that support us? That's a question that can't be answered under standard economic theory either, but it's worth at least contemplating it.

    641:

    I remember few details about those mid-seventies EVs, but they used lead-acid golf cart batteries and had 50~60 kilometer range and a top speed I could exceed on a bicycle.

    642:

    For one thing we're hitting the limits of metaphors and could use better ones... Like exceeding the recycling capacity of our ecosystem, illustratable by the metaphor of an overflowing funnel, perhaps clearer then the purity metaphors?

    643:

    It seems to be an repeating/repetitive humans-in-groups failure mode.

    Communism is a classic millenarial religion ... It's even used as an excuse for the failure of the SovUnion etc, as not being the "real revolution" & "this ( or next ) time it's going to be different!" Which it won't be, of course, it'll just be another pile of skulls.

    644:

    Hell, my apartment complex ditched the recycling bins last year. Your'e in the USSA, somwhere ... Whereas, in all of u, recycling is continuing to increase. Says something about the social & regulatory structures of those societies, I suspect.

    645:

    ...It will be interesting to find out why, say, the French don't make the UK glow in the dark the moment they realise who's in charge over the tea-sippers now.

    646:

    "Don't Christian Democrats, immigrants, and Muslims get uploaded to the computronium, too?"

    Remember that the basic core of the right's beliefs in the USA (and probably everywhere) is that some people should be more privileged than others.

    If you think of uploading as establishing Heaven/Perfect Society, then of course certain groups will not be admitted.

    647:

    depending on manufacturing capacity of batteries. AND - the ready availability of charging points for everyone ..... Something that is often missed & a huge infrastructure investment, that really only a government can make ( I think )

    648:

    Oh dear. And I live relatively close to the edge of London & don't drive short distances, if I can help it. The Great Green Beast gets used for - hauling a big load / going a long-distance to a place with no decent public transport &/or I want to run around at the other end, or go a shorter distance to places with no public transport. Which fits your model for a "petroleum" powered vehicle. Assuming fucking arsehole Khan doesn't steal it from me in 2021, that is .....

    649:

    I would assume that they have their own problems ... We know the USA does, f'rinstance, don't we?

    650:

    Mark, since I read their documents and sat through numerous meetings listening to and talking with them, I'll be blunt: you're wrong, they're externalizing. To be very precise, per instructions from their supervisors, they externalize anything that is not in their manual (which is a political document). And for some odd reason, their work tends to favor rich people who might conceivably be big donors to their bosses. These bosses happen to be pro-business, whether they're Republican (as now) or Democrat.

    To be very blunt, we live in a political economy, not an economy. If US ran on economics, it would have universal health care, and personal AR-15s would be kept in armories at gun ranges, not sold as toys.

    In a political economy, stuff gets externalized all the time.

    Indeed, I'm learning to make sure I don't do it myself by falling into NIMBYism and similar problems. A case in point is the common environmentalist jibe (which I made myself) that San Diego could be run entirely on solar electricity if we'd just put solar panels on every roof. If you fly in, you'll notice there's a lot of empty roof space out there, and some simple calculations suggest that physically it might well work. Then, once you install your $20,000 solar panels, you start to realize that, in a city where the median income is $60,000 and most people can't afford homes until they hit middle age, forcing everybody to pony up $20,000 is a huge ask. Still, assuming "everyone else" will take care of the problem is a form of externalizing.

    Another example is carbon sequestration. Where do we put the carbon? Some place where trees will grow for the next 100 years (and in a changing climates with increasingly bad droughts, that is...?) Or we'll spread composted greenwaste on farm fields (and 1/3 of California counties are already under quarantine for pests and pathogens, some of which spread through compost. How do you keep from all that greenwaste from becoming a pathogen superhighway?). Or we'll create more wetlands (where's the water coming from? Where do you find a low spot in the landscape that doesn't already have a wetland in it?). Routinely people assume that carbon sequestration will happen, just that it will be some place they haven't studied, because every place they look has problems. I've done it, Sierra Club did (does) it, and the County Climate Action Plan enshrined that idea into regulation, so now a judge gets to decide if he'll do it. We externalize the things we have trouble dealing with.

    And then there's the question of where to put all the solar farms and windmills, if we can't pave every roof with solar panels. Out in the desert is the standard answer, because there's "nothing there," at least according to people who never visit the desert. When you get out to the desert, you find there's actually quite a lot out there, including people who don't want to have it all paved with solar panels, just to keep the people in the cities happy.

    Oh, and we do the same with prisons and many unpleasant industries. They're generally "out there somewhere." If you wonder why so many rural communities hate urbanites, it's from having a prison or a mine or a factory farm as the only industry in your town, or from having to haul your water in a truck past an aqueduct that runs hundreds of miles (with pumps!) to water the city where your crops are going, while you struggle and take a second job to feed your family. That anger gets expressed politically, not economically, and look at what happens when it gets exploited.

    651:

    Not really. Charge points are a popular talking point, but they are not a meaningful limit for actual use. You need charge points on the long-haul highways. Those are needed so that people can drive on vacation in an electric and do not need a second car or rental for that specific use case. Those points are not as convenient as a gas station, but they do not need to be, since they are used for at most 1 or 2 percent of chargings. Building them is trivial.

    For daily use, you charge your car off your own fuse-box. Because this is more convenient. Come home, park, plug in, walk away. It takes 8 hours to charge? No worries, you are not watching that pot boil, you just jump into a charged car in the morning.

    The big infrastructure need is not quick charge points, it is electrifying the parking solutions people who live in apartment blocks use. All those parking garages, lots and cellars are going to need a 220 volt lines all over the place. And enough smarts to bill the right apartment.

    652:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE

    The reason for the relative silence and lack of new blog updates this time is that I've just spent seven consecutive days steaming over edits to "The Labyrinth Index". Which is now just about ready for production. Next stage: the copyeditor (who fixes typos, consistency, and layout).

    Once I've recovered I'll blog again, then it's time to get down to work on "Invisible Sun".

    653:

    Re JUGGERNAUT side effects, about twenty years ago there was a spate of papers looking at the effects of HAND (High Altitude Nuclear Detonations). There's quite a diverse zoo of them, but the one that seems most pernicious in terms of extent and duration is the massive increase of electrons trapped in the Van Allen belts.

    https://carnicominstitute.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/Papadopoulos-presentation.pdf

    https://fas.org/spp/military/program/asat/haleos.pdf

    654:

    "Upshot: by 2020-24 this stuff is probably going to affect you personally — large numbers of reasonably affordable electric cars coming off production lines (both Tesla and the likes of GM and VW who are pivoting hastily to compete), and high speed mobile broadband-anywhere."

    I live in southeastern Michigan, which is a region dominated by the auto industry. There are a few things which they are plunging into quite eagerly, to the tune of billions of US$:

    1) Electric cars. 2) Connected cars (smart mobility). 3) Advanced analytics and AI.

    I'm in my late 50's, and have to remember that the current crop of higher-level executives in the US auto industry are not the guys who botched Detroit's lead in the 1970's. These are guys who saw that happen, and aren't fat, dumb and lazy.

    655:

    When I got my hybrid, I noticed that I got much worse fuel economy in the winter. Temperatures were about -25F (-32C) for all of February in Idaho, which meant the lithium ion battery's electrolyte was highly viscous and its power output was tiny. Still the same total energy, just much slower getting it in and out of the battery.

    In California or Florida, no problem. In Idaho or Germany, it might be a big problem if you don't have a gasoline engine as backup.

    @WilliamGoodall- We don't see Maseratis, Lamborghinis, Porches, or Jaguars here much either. Audis maybe once in a while. Lots of Fords and Nissans.

    656:

    "Note that this curve will probably go non-linear in a very impressive way at some point, depending on manufacturing capacity of batteries."

    1) Battery capacity. IMHO, when EV's have a 200+ mile (real) range, then for most purposes, charging becomes twice-weekly. Right now, it's still much more (unless you have a short commute and warm winter weather).

    2) Charging time and requirements. If EV's need overnight charging or an expensive high-voltage charger, then anything more than once/week charging is a killer.

    3) Charging infrastructure. If high-voltage chargers are commonplace, then longer trips can be taken without elaborate planning and long delays due to charging.

    657:

    Point for this particular sub-discussion to note is that nuclear explosions generate EMP by inducing separation of charges in the atmosphere. Electrons knocked off gas atoms by high energy photons are a lot more mobile than the ions they leave behind, so you get a sudden separation into regions of negative and positive charge. If everything was "perfect" this separation would be radially symmetrical and the long range effects would cancel out, but in practice there is enough asymmetry to broadcast an EMP. Nukes specifically designed to generate EMP have an asymmetrical surrounding mass of high-Z material to make the photon flux brighter and hotter on one side than the other.

    But anyway, no atmosphere, no charges to separate, no EMP.

    658:

    "...It will be interesting to find out why, say, the French don't make the UK glow in the dark the moment they realise who's in charge over the tea-sippers now."

    Because their diplomats, spies, tourist and business travelers are sending back glowing reports...........

    659:

    The only such vehicle I have ever seen is a Prius, and I hardly ever see one of them. I think people began to twig on that in terms of real-world fuel consumption there are any number of conventional small diesels that are just as good or better but without the extra cost of buying the thing.

    I think also quite a lot of them were sold as a result of some ill-conceived company car tax break deal, to be used by sales people thrashing up and down the motorway on IC power and getting rather poor fuel consumption. I don't know if this deal still exists, but if it doesn't its demise could have been a significant factor in slowing uptake. And of course another effect is to skew perceptions of fuel consumption in an unfavourable direction.

    660:

    "1) Electric cars. 2) Connected cars (smart mobility). 3) Advanced analytics and AI."

    Conclusion: any readily-available future electric car will be unusable unless one first strips it to component parts, throws away everything electrical except the actual battery and motor, gives what's left a good old blast with a big magnetron to make sure, and then rebuilds it using one's own designs to replace the bits thrown away.

    Well, actually, that's not too bad. IC cars are acquiring exactly the same problems, but making and setting up - particularly the setting up - an engine management system that can meet current emission regulations is considerably more of a pain in the arse than making a PWM controller. Heck, the PWM controller can easily be entirely analogue.

    661:

    The use of artificial gravity in the most recent Star Wars movie bothered me a lot. Why doesn't anyone think about shutting it off to conserve energy?

    I'm guessing that "artificial gravity" in Star Wars would be related to some idea of an "inertia-less" space drive. That is, in order to move at such high speeds you need to control the physical effects of acceleration such that people don't get crushed. Since you need inertia control to maneuver at such high speeds you get artificial gravity as a beneficial side-effect.

    If you turned off the artificial gravity to save energy, you'd get turned into anchovy-paste the next time your ship tried to dodge an oncoming missile.

    In short, given the background assumptions, that part doesn't bother me.

    662:

    Foster and Partners. I see they constructed a new "Reichstag" building in Berlin. Is that why you chose them?

    663:

    For daily use, you charge your car off your own fuse-box. Because this is more convenient. Come home, park, plug in, walk away. Yeah, really? What planet are you on? With the cable running out of my front door, across the pavement & into the car - & the same for everybody else up & down the road. PLEASE GET REAL. HERE is a - I would guess late last summer Google Street view - you can see the Great Green Beast - OK I need to "pump up" the batteries from that position, as do my neighbours, whose cars are also visible. Err ... NO

    664:

    "Stuff that falls outside the standard economics framework includes producing children, donating organs, breathable air, fish in the ocean, wildlife and wildlands in general, carbon underground, and so forth."

    I'm sorry but that's just not the case. All this stuff is handled within the standard economics framework. It shows up in principles textbooks and in environmental econ textbooks and is taught at the u/g level all the time. Have a look at these textbooks sometime! You may not like how it's all analysed, you may have philosophical problems with it (and even economists do), but that doesn't mean it isn't there. (NB: the CORE textbook is free and online. I think it's rather good but I know the people behind it and I helped write a bit of it, so I am biased. But even just a perusal of the table of contents or index will demonstrate the point I am making.)

    "you can even run fairly large empires without standard economics"

    Of course. And you don't need population ecology to run ecosystems. But does that mean what's in a population ecology textbook doesn't help you understand how they operate? You have a very strange notion of what economics is and what economists do and teach, at least the academic ones.

    665:

    Ah but ALL DIESELS ARE EVIL & if it was built before (approx) 2008 ( 2012?) we're going to steal it from you, ( & you can get a new, better car, oh yeah ) because of the EVVULL POLLUTION ( Which is real, just not as bad as painted ) & a lot of it comes from ... err buses & taxis in London. And if you live insode the N/S circular roads in London ( I do) you are fucked ... Though it's gorn all quiet recently & it looks as if Kahn is trying to stall implementation until after the next Mayoral election, I wonder why?

    666:

    Yeah well, one of the many reasons I got the particular model of Great Green Beast that I have is that it has: NO ELECTRONICS. Hence 95% home-maintenance & CHEAPER, etc .....But, of course, although good by the standards of 1996/7 its emissions are not up to the present-day mark

    667:

    It was a rebuild/upgrade/modernisation of the old building. A very impressive job actually. here ...

    668:

    I live on a short block with three homes on my side of the street and a florist on the other and there were only two cars parked on the block on either side when I just went out with the dog - An Audi A6 and an Audi Q7. They are very popular.

    669:

    Not my field but a quick wiki suggests it’s more complicated than that..

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#Weapon_altitude

    670:

    Where do you live?

    I'm seeing a marked increase in hybrids here in Southern California. I would have said 3-4 years ago that the most popular cars in So Cal were the Toyota Camry and Corolla, followed by the similar Hondas, but these days I see them being quickly replaced by the various Prius models. (And there are Honda and Hyundai hybrids which are becoming much more popular.)

    671:

    The thing about charging points is not so much the points themselves - which are pretty trivial - it's the infrastructure to supply them all with juice. We're talking about roughly doubling the electrical energy supplied to residential areas. That's quite a lot of capacity. And it doesn't help as much as you might think to suppose that it will be mostly needed at night during what is currently a usage minimum, because a lot of the distribution kit, having a thermal time constant of several hours, relies on the low night load period to rid itself of excess heat produced during the day.

    "And enough smarts to bill the right apartment."

    No, no, no, no, no, please, no. Screw the privacy violation needed to make that work. Screw also this fixation with insisting that everything has to work with debt and accounts and bills. The charging point has a note reader, like a supermarket automatic checkout does, and you put notes in it. It then switches on until it's delivered however many kWh you paid for. No flaming debt (spit). None of the intrusion and tracking that inevitably accompanies debt. No delayed payment that creeps up behind you and then clobbers you with a massive bill. No fucking around with bank accounts and cards and all that impossibly awkward shite. Just use the technology that already exists to make it work just the same as a supermarket or a petrol station: turn up, hand over pound notes, bugger off again, and that's all about it, over and done with.

    (Yes, this is something of a sore point for me because I've already been caught out by a petrol station doing it. The lying swine claimed to be open 24 hours so I turned up running on fumes only to find the place deserted; they weren't actually open at all (unless you had a bank card), and had to waste all the money I had on me getting a taxi to fill a jerry can from one that really was open five miles further off. And I find it all too probable that any network of charging points will start from this kind of bastard position and only get worse, not better, because anyone who can't cheerily accept huge casual debts these days is deemed to be an untermensch.)

    672:

    Sigh ... this may be so, but it still isn't what you claimed. You claimed intent, and implied this is what they are trained to do: "conventionally trained economists try to externalize". Sorry, this is silly. Internalising externalities is part of basic economics training.

    Here's an analogy. Let's take what you said but apply it to a different case: "conventionally trained scientists working for tobacco companies in the 1950s and 1960s tried to demonstrate in studies that cigarettes did not shorten life expectancies."

    Apologies if it doesn't work in detail, I am not an expert on this, but I think it's close.

    Were scientists working for the tobacco companies culpable? I don't know the detail but probably many people would say yes. Was their training at fault? Possibly, depends on how medical ethics was taught back then (I don't know). But do you blame the science disciplines they were trained in for being pseudoscience? I don't think so.

    673:

    If you are in the U.S., You should be able to get into a new Prius C for around $16-17,000, and pick up a lightly used model (30,000-ish miles) for around $12-13,000. Assume as you do your calculations that your gas bill will be cut by 50%.

    In my case, my employer pays for all employment-related travel, which is around 1000 miles/week, so I essentially get my car for free, not counting the down-payment.

    674:

    I think you are probably thinking of "consumer surplus". Related example: there is an argument that GDP does not properly capture the impact of the internet on economic growth and welfare because so much of the consumption is of goods that effectively have a zero price. Like the enjoyment I get from debating H here - and, H, I do mean it. :)

    675:

    One thing that never seems to get mentioned is that an "electric car revolution" as currently envisaged means only the rich can move.

    We are not going to see any "cheap" electric cars no matter what Ford, GM etc do, because of the battery. There are plenty of ads in the local paper for second-hand IC cars, made in Japan and with lots of life left in them, for a few hundred pounds. There will never be any such ads for second-hand electric cars because even a battery which is knackered for car use will go for a few thousand pounds for static storage.

    Genuinely cheap batteries aren't going to be around until after I'm dead. I just have to hope that petrol is around longer than I am.

    676:

    Hybrids are much more useful for people who travel a lot, or don't have a good electrical system at home (my house was built in 1927 and has very poor power.) Since I can easily drive 2-400 miles a day, an electric car was not feasible. Hopefully by the time I'm done with my Prius the electric infrastructure will be much better and I can buy an electric.

    On the other hand, a friend bought a Nissan Leaf, which he uses mainly for driving to the train station and back. He plugs the car in at the train station, charges it while he takes the train to/from work, and pays nothing for ALL his car's power needs!

    677:

    Except there’s already a partial solution for your situation.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42944523

    To be fair most councils are obviously far more concerned about their social care budgets right now.

    Bear in mind that with an EV you can effectively fill up every time your are at home so you will start at least 50% of your journeys will a full “tank” if you are a commuter.

    Nissan reckon that the number of public charging points will exceed petrol stations by 2020.

    It does require a change in driving habits -basically a 0.5 to 1hr rest stop every 3hrs /180 miles but that's something most people should do anyway - I half expect pressure to be exerted via Autopilot or similar like insurers starting to withdraw insurance if you crash after being warned about your attention span by your car.

    And that's without battery tech going non-linear in the next 10 years. Imagine if someone comes up with a process that promises a "moores law" for battery tech.

    678:

    Yes, I claim intent, because that is what I see. This is not a theoretical exercise, but what I spend far too much of my time doing.

    And I agree with you that it's a good thing that economics students are trained to bring externalities into the systems they study.

    However, economics and ecology have boundary problems. The problem faced by economics is that we live in a society dominated by social, political, and economic factors. Although they can be separated literally for purposes of analysis, to deal with the system, you have to include social and economic factors. This in turn means that planners' decisions are forced by social and political considerations, and even if their economics training tells them to bring more factors into their analysis, they have to exclude those factors to keep the jobs that let them care for their families.

    Ecologists face a similar problem, in that we're really, really bad at analyzing the impact of social and political factors on natural systems. I "joke" that we're seeing the emergence of Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere as a major part of the biosphere right now, not because of the internet, but because of the increasingly massive role ideologies play in shaping ecological processes. This isn't just about humans and crops, although the famines that Mao and Stalin caused by following Lyshenko's ideology are powerful examples. No, I'd point to all the effin' border walls at the US-Mexico border. They don't do much about illegal immigration, but that area is a biodiversity hotspot, and it's been bulldozed repeatedly because some jackasses in Washington wanted to score political points with people who are unaffected by what happens at the border. While it's easy to talk about the effects of politics on ecology (here, the impacts of border walls and border patrols on plants, animals, hydrology, and wildlife corridors), creating a quantitative analytic system that includes both ecosystems and politics is hard. In this example, I cannot tell you quantitatively how to manipulate American politics to preserve border biodiversity. Although I can make some guesses, advocate, and see what happens, that's as far as I can go.

    679:

    Do batteries need a different formulation for colder climates?

    680:

    And if Nyarlahotep is in charge of the U.K., and "Cthulwho?" is in charge of the U.S., we can bet that the French have their own problems... Which of the Great Old Ones is most likely to be summoned by the stygian, lambent horror that is accordion music?

    681:

    Actually, when you buy an EV car charger, you get to choose how long the cable is, so you can, in fact, run a cable out to the street.

    This is what the Bolt EV was apparently designed for, although the idiot's in the Chevy advertising department don't make the point. The Bolt can go at least 240 miles on one charge. If your annual daily travel is, say, 30 miles, you only have to charge your car once per week. It was designed with urbanites in mind.

    There are some big problems here, though. One is that the Bolt takes 60 kWh, so when you've discharged it, it's going to take a long time to recharge it (8 hours on my home charging station, for example). While I'm sure it's entirely possible to charge a bunch of EVs off a common system, there's some social engineering involved to make sure everybody gets their car charged when they need it.

    On the landscape scale, EVs are going to rearrange places like the US. Even if my EV SUV can go 500 miles on a charge, once it's discharged, I have to wait eight hours for it to recharge. Long road trips where we switch drivers and fill up on gas repeatedly aren't going to work, because most of the car will be battery.

    As Pigeon pointed out in #671, what this means is that there will necessarily be systems of charging stations associated with hotels a few hundred miles apart. These towns exist already, but they're dying, because the interstate with its truck stops and big gas stations bypassed them. They'll probably get reborn providing the power storage and social infrastructure for EVs to pull in every night to recharge. This in turn will affect how goods and people move. Stuff will move slower, but information will move faster. It might even encourage the use of long-distance driverless coaches. Each coach only does a route that lets it recharge every night, but the passengers can switch from coach to coach and move faster thereby.

    Where I disagree with Pigeon is on the cost of batteries, and this may be wishful thinking on my part. I totally agree that there's a (soft) floor on battery price, due to things like the cost of supplying lithium safely. However, there's a billion (trillion?) dollar prize for the inventors who can get around that floor with something like a hyper-capacitor that's made out of graphene or something less dangerous than lithium, and I picked on the hypercapacitor because they're already experimenting with the damned things. We'll see who's right, but just as I'm not sure whether digital computing is the limit or quantum computing will smash it, I'm not sure whether lithium batteries are the limit, or whether other technologies will ultimately replace them.

    As for used EV car batteries, we need those things desperately, because that's what will be used for everybody's house batteries starting in about five years. That's why it's important to buy an EV now, even if they're suboptimal for all of your car needs.

    682:

    Electric cars and cold: not a big deal, Tesla’s are super popular in Scandinavia for example. The trick is to not leave the car out in the cold over night (which would be problematic for any car)

    Electric cars are for the rich: true now, but likely will become the car of choice for the middle class soon. You’ve got China, battery tech, price of oil and ride sharing network adoption, and the fact that they are going to last forever as serious longeterm downward price pressure. Poor urban people are less likely to own a car at all as the ride sharing networks get cheaper. Poor rural people are going to be IC

    Hybrids: sales are decking due to coat of oil being low and electric car sales cannibiling

    I don’t see them in Idaho:. The future is here, it is not evenly distributed. Idaho is poor and not known for being an early adopter of new technology

    I have seen fads come and go: yes but how many have you seen come and stay? Holy shit man think how much has changed over the last twenty years before you bust out the cynicism

    683:

    I don't see the extra expense, but I bought my Camry-equivalent regular Prius "lightly used" (21,000 miles) for about $19,000.* It has electric windows, great AC, a really good radio which also gives me a bluetooth connection to my phone or tablet, comfortable seating, power steering, cruise-control, keyless entry, etc., and my drive probably averages around 175 miles/day. It gives me twice the mileage (somewhere around 49/gallon) of my '94 Camry wagon. Also, its not flashy, but it has no problems with either acceleration or control.

    That being said, where I got a 200% increase in mileage, someone already driving a more modern car - a 2005 Honda Accord, for example - would get something more like a 150% increase in mileage. The difference for a lightly-driven car would be something like 40/month and might not justify the extra expense.*

    I think the big deal in driving a hybrid over a diesel is not having to worry about diesel emissions.

    • You can get a Corolla-equivalent Prius "lightly used" for around $13,000. The mileage is a little better.

    ** I drive more in a week than most people drive in a month, so I get 300-400 in savings each month over the previous car.

    684:

    "Stuff that falls outside the standard economics framework includes producing children, donating organs, breathable air, fish in the ocean, wildlife and wildlands in general, carbon underground, and so forth."

    I'm sorry but that's just not the case. All this stuff is handled within the standard economics framework. It shows up in principles textbooks and in environmental econ textbooks and is taught at the u/g level all the time. Have a look at these textbooks sometime! You may not like how it's all analysed, you may have philosophical problems with it (and even economists do), but that doesn't mean it isn't there. (NB: the CORE textbook is free and online. I think it's rather good but I know the people behind it and I helped write a bit of it, so I am biased. But even just a perusal of the table of contents or index will demonstrate the point I am making.)

    It's analyzed, certainly. But does the analysis work? The critical question is whether there's an independent standard of value that rests on something other than "that feels right" at some point in the process? To use a simplified situation, could you use standard economic models (and nothing else) to design a Biosphere II that would work even as well as the original did? Or if you want an even simpler system, could you use economic models (and nothing else) to design something akin to Yuegong-1 that would work as well as the real one did? That's what I'm getting at. If there are places where the values assigned by economics make for an ecological system that can't support its humans, or if you have to find some metric other than value or price to make things work, then that's where economics fails, whether you call it environmental economics or not.

    And yes, precisely the same argument applies to ecology. This isn't an argument about one field being superior to the other, it's about the limits.

    "you can even run fairly large empires without standard economics"

    Of course. And you don't need population ecology to run ecosystems. But does that mean what's in a population ecology textbook doesn't help you understand how they operate? You have a very strange notion of what economics is and what economists do and teach, at least the academic ones.

    Just to be pedantic, population biology (not ecology) isn't about ecosystems. Population biology is about how populations change over times. For humans, it's called demographics. Ecosystems are about how nutrients flow through systems. Urban planning is a crude analog for human systems, but it's basically food and energy in, waste and heat out, and recycling, except nature is much better at recycling than most Americans are, because bugs have no social prejudice against eating waste.

    So yes, you're correct, population biology texts would be fairly useless in running an empire, except in a few cases having to do with baby booms and elder booms.

    However, running an empire requires redistributing stuff and people on the grand scale. That can (and has) been done without reference to price and value, most notably and recently by the Inka. The thing to be concerned about as an economist is that, if empires last a few centuries at most (and here I'm conflating imperial dynasties with empires, which is debatable), regardless of what system they use to analyze their redistribution systems, and regardless of whether they have the ability to analyze their redistribution systems, then the unsettling question is whether such analysis is ultimately good for anything at all. And yes, the same question applies to very much to ecology.

    As for academic economics, you're correct that I don't care about academic economics. Hopefully you're also seeing the problems with the purely academic approach. I'd add that much of what I learned getting my PhD in ecology turns out to be problematic at best in the "real world" that I now work in. That's not good news when the people making the decisions are depending either on their academic training or their bosses' ideas to make decisions in horribly complicated systems.

    685:

    Just on the hybrid vehicles point:

    I live in London, I don't drive, and I travel a lot. At least one close friend now has an e-bike that runs on Bosch drill batteries, so I spent a small sum of money on a charger they can use when they are at mine.

    Meanwhile, almost every minicab I have been in in the last few years was a hybrid. (I don't do uber - avoid anything with blatant fascist branding is my line)

    One thing I have noticed is that in civilised cities the local busses all have free wifi and usb charging points. London's the only city that doesn't!

    686:

    This seems to me to go back to the basics of SF: for a story to be legitimately SF it requires the speculative science content to be so essential to the story that the story couldn't happen without it. It also reminds me of Alexei Panshin's complaint in the late 1970s that with all the space and time to choose from, SF writers were choosing to huddle in the near-future.

    That said, I can recommend for your consideration Dexter Palmer's VERSION CONTROL. (My review at ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/article/version-control-book-review-who-knows-where-the-time-goes/)

    wg

    687:

    To some extent, American politics is, in my opinion, simple. We're a country founded on slavery. The North/South divide remains. I don't even blame the conservative. It is just that, if you take up a small government stance, you sweep up a ton of people who hate the ERA. It doesn't explain everything, but it works well enough.

    If you just assume that 30% of our population are functionally white supremacists, you explain 60% of it.

    If you assume that more capable people migrate to urban areas and view the rural populace with mild contempt - and that the rural populace knows this, you can explain another 30%.

    Economics is a useful way to model, um, economic activity. It's also pseudoscience that's heavily biased by people's prejudices and entrenched economic interests. Still, some models are kind of predictive. OTOH, to some extent, it isn't so much worse that drug development. But, even if it was a science, decision-making will be heavily influenced by values - whatever outcome you're optimizing for. GDP is not the right criteria. Neither is utility. I'd argue for optimizing for the future that is most difficult to predict.

    688:

    "...so you can, in fact, run a cable out to the street."

    Of course, but what Greg's pointing out is that to get it to the car you have to trail it across the pedestrian bit that comes between the houses and the bit cars drive on, for everyone to fall over.

    There is a heck of a lot of urban housing in the UK that was built before cars were common. You have houses built in a continuous block all the way down the street, with no exterior walls or gaps between them. The width of each house is not that much greater than the length of a car. The houses either have no front yard at all or only a rudimentary one about a metre wide, so the cars are parked down the edge of the street; there's nowhere else for them to go. They are nose to tail, with no gaps as large as two metres, all the way down both sides of the street.

    If they were all on charge, anyone walking down the pedestrian strip between the houses and the car bit of the street (and there are quite a lot of people doing this all the time) is going to be dodging cables every few paces. To make matters worse, there are very often a couple of steps down from the house door to the pedestrian strip, so part of the cable will be suspended clear of the ground. People will be falling over the things left right and centre. The cables can be armoured against the resulting damage, but the people can't.

    A partial solution might be to use some sort of gantry to carry the cable to the car above head height, but it would very often not work, because there is no guarantee that you will be able to park outside your own house anyway. What with people having more than one car, visitors' cars, and everything else, there are always more cars wanting to park in the street than there is room for. Late arrivals have to grab a space outside someone else's house or find somewhere else to park altogether. People whose daily routine means they usually do arrive late have to do this all the time.

    There is no legal right to be able to park outside your own house, because the street itself is public property; you don't own the bit outside your house, and anyone is allowed to park there if they want. Nevertheless, a lot of people act as if they did have a right to park outside their own house and get all narked if someone else parks there, not infrequently to the extent of inflicting petty damage on the car such as letting the tyres down or keying the paint. You get neighbours at war over it. This despite the fact that as things are at present they don't actually need to park outside their own house. If the charging requirement meant they did need to, the quarrelling would increase dramatically.

    689:

    Used EVs are easy to find, you just have to live in a place where people have been buying new EVs for a while. Or look online. Generally the batteries are not knackered. People trade in their old EVs because they are upgrading or their driving needs changed. Right now, used EVs are excellent values. They are heavily depreciated, often cheaper than comparable ICE cars. They are also cheaper to operate and more reliable. Even if you replace the battery, the cost of a used EV and a new battery pack can be less than the cost of a used ICE car. It's still early days. I think as more people get used to the idea of used EVs, the prices will go up to better match the value, but there also will be more used EVs available.

    Personally, I drive a new EV. It's a great car. But I can imagine trading it in for an even better car five years from now. At that point the battery pack will still have three years left on the warranty.

    690:

    Bugger, forgot...

    I'm inclined to agree that lithium batteries won't be the be-all and end-all solution, but it wasn't the specific battery technology I was thinking of - it's the point you raise in your final paragraph, about old electric car batteries being re-used for static storage. Second-hand IC engines with useful life left in them are cheap because they're not much use for anything other than fixing other cars of the same type they came out of, so not many people want them. Second-hand batteries, though, will be useful to anyone who's got a house, and accordingly will not become cheap.

    What we could do is to evade the problem by the same method that operators of propane forklifts use to avoid having to deal with liquid propane: define a set of standard dimensions, fixing points and connectors for batteries, as is done for forklift propane cylinders (or hard drives, for that matter), and then exchange flat batteries for charged ones at the equivalent of today's fuel stations, instead of in-situ charging as the only option. It is true that while not many people want them, charging points can be easier to provide than depots, but I don't think that remains true beyond a certain point.

    691:

    You are overegging it slightly. In the UK a huge chunk of streets have already had a trench cut between the kerb and the property for cable. If the will existed the same could be done to provide curbside charging for every house.

    Finally also a use case for smart meters. Making sure whomever connects their car gets correctly charged.

    It could work exactly the way Fon WiFi works today. Essentially a tiny uplift on your bill enables you to use any kerbside socket.

    Engineeringwise I think the problems are solved. Just political and regulatory will to make it happen.

    692:

    Changing out batteries has its own problem, which is the size of the power cable you need to recharge all the batteries that get swapped out. If every gas station is the equivalent of a current neighborhood substation just to meet the demand for cars, that's a huge infrastructure problem. Since I've dealt with the problems for routing big power lines, I'm not thrilled about the idea of routing hundreds of the damned things. The partial work-around is if they're local area lines where there's a big, thick power cable running out of each neighborhood to carry charge to the local charging station for cars, but even then, that's tens of thousands of dollars in solar panels on every roof and someone ponying up to run cables to the charge stations. That gets expensive, and it's worse in high density areas where people live in apartments and there's not enough roof-top solar to power the charging stations.

    As for swapping out batteries, that only works if energy density in the battery is equal to or greater than the energy density of gasoline. By my calculations to make this work, a 120 lb battery would hold roughly 100 kWh. This is the weight of a 15 gallon gas tank, holding 400 miles range at 4 miles/kWh. Currently, the Bolt has a 960 lb battery that holds 60kWh, so to get to gas levels, energy densities have to increase over 50-fold (eight-fold decrease in weight from 960 to 120 lbs, 167% increase in energy capacity per battery, from 60 to 100 kWh). While I won't rule such advances out, my bet is that we're not going to quite make it, which means batteries will be built into vehicles, they won't rapidly recharge, and this will cause a building boom as we restructure to adapt to a post-petroleum world. Given that people are leaving little towns all over the US and flooding into cities, causing problem on both sides, the appearance of a lot of hotels with solar farms and storage batteries out back isn't the worse thing that could happen.

    693:

    Sorry, 13-fold increase in battery capacity. More believable, but that's still what we're looking at. So far as I can see, we've built our civilization around petroleum, and decarbonizing isn't as simple as swapping out electricity for gas. Places were built before gas got so popular actually will have it a lot easier than, say, LA or San Diego, which were built around car culture.

    694:

    13-fold increase in battery capacity. More believable,

    Assuming these batteries aren't based on nuclear fusion, antimatter or other sci-fi concepts then I'm sorry to tell you that electrochemical batteries are close to their limit of capacity.

    The figure of merit for batteries for mobile applications is usually rated in watt-hours per kilogram, (not those weird pound thingies). Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries run to about 200Wh per kg before you add anti-collision armour, fire protection and a few other things that stop them blowing up too fast when and if they fail hard to the battery pack. The Bolt battery you mentioned is about 140 Wh per kg to give you an idea, a Tesla 85kWh pack is about 155 Wh per kg. Creating a battery pack with 13 times that amount of energy storage in the same mass and similar volume using electrochemistry just isn't going to happen. Even doubling that figure of merit will be a strain despite the occasional Powerpoint presentation on nanotubes and magic lab tech that claim factor of ten improvements if you give the promoters lots of money.

    695:

    energy density is pretty irrelevant to this conversation

    No one is ever gonna move electricity around by physically shipping batteries

    There is absolutely nothing preventing us from just upgrading the electric grid as needed. Most people in the US at least are going to charge at home, overnight , like I do every night. The grid is generally pretty quiet at night. Most people only drive on the average 50 miles a day

    In the event of long trips you might see some kind of battery exchange but that will be the exception not the rule. You dshould by need to ship fresh battery packs to make it work you just need to recharge the flat ones. Which means enoUgh inventory to handle the float and enough electricity to keep ahead of demand

    697:

    This seems like an ironic situation: I made a comment to suggest that you are using a word, "value," in a different sense than that in which it was used in classical economics, and thus not understanding economic though, and you respond in a way that continues to use it in that sense, as if that were the only possible sense of the word. So let's consider a particular proposition: "The oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere of the Earth has infinite value."

    In the first place, in economic terms, value is a measure of the resources that one is prepared to spend to gain or keep a thing. (Market value, or "exchange value," is a result of effective demand, which is demand backed up by the supply of other things than the thing demanded.) So: Does it make sense to say that we should spend infinite resources on preserving the Earth's oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere? Well, we don't seem to have infinite resources. We don't have an infinite supply of human labor, which is the most basic of all resources; there are only seven billion-odd people on earth, and they can only perform so much work per day on a sustained basis. Nor do we have an infinite supply of any material good. So "we should spend infinite resources on doing this" is operationally meaningless; we don't have infinite resources, so we can't spend them.

    In the second place, does the statement work out to "preserving the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere is more important than doing anything else, and we should give up anything else to do it"? (That is, not literally, mathematically infinite, but "without upper limit"?) Well, for example, should we take all resources whatever out of producing food and expend them on the Atmosphere Project? That would kill off all human beings within, maybe, a few months when the stored food ran out; or sooner, if we don't even spend reources on distributing the food we have. But there doesn't seem to be much point to saving the atmosphere if doing so means exterminating our entire species.

    In the third place, if we set out to produce a maximum of atmospheric preservation, are we going to do so through a command economy setup, a brute force "requisition whatever resources are needed and apply them to this one problem" approach? That kind of approach may be needed in short-term emergencies. But atmospheric preservation is likely to be a long-term project, and long-term projects need a functioning economy, and command economies don't function very well; their economic output tends to be less than could be achieved by market economies, because they don't have as many ways of reassigning resources to more productive uses. There's a need to consider how to attain your environmental goals without crashing the real economic processes that let you pursue goals. And that's an economic question on which ecology doesn't give us much guidance.

    The claim that a good such as preserving the atmosphere has infinite value only makes sense if you assume that scarcity is not an issue. And if that's the case, then economics as a whole is irrelevant, because economics is only about dealing with scarcity ("post-scarcity economics" is a self-contradictory phrase—or maybe, in mathematical terms, a trivial case, the way a geometric point is a trivial circle). But scarcity isn't a purely economic concept. In fact, it's a central concept of ecology, where it's called Liebig's Law. In a non-scarce world, every species would be able to reproduce without limit, and without Darwinian selection. And that's clearly not the world we inhabit.

    698:

    The problem is travel distance. With a gas-powered car and a couple of drivers, you can get across the US (~2700 miles) in about four days of reasonable driving (700 miles/day). If your electric car is limited to 400 miles, followed by an 8 hour recharge, that's going to take you 7 days (400 miles/day), and you're going to need more places to stop.

    For comparison, the Model T had in the neighborhood of a 120 mile range. This had apparently doubled by the 1950s, and I suspect a lot of the abandoned gas stations I see in small towns off the interstate date from around this era. What I'm simply suggesting is that if we're stuck with vehicles with smaller ranges, and that's going to improve life in small towns, because people, like salesmen and truckers, are going to need more places to stop. This isn't just about electricity, it's about food, jobs, and places to sleep too.

    699:

    You're right about electrochemistry, at least so far as I know.

    Lets see how graphene supercapacitors pan out though. Supposedly (https://www.graphenea.com/pages/graphene-supercapacitors#.Woi_93yIaM8) they top out at 550 F/gm and they're currently getting 150 F/gm at least on lab benchtops. At that rate, with Farads being Ws/V^2, well, it looks like supercapacitors might get to gasoline energy density or beyond, although I don't believe my calculations enough to share them. If I did it right, though, the 60kWh, 350 V Bolt battery holds around 1763 farads.

    700:

    an e-bike that runs on Bosch drill batteries

    Those are amazing. If only Bosch made usable drills I'd convert almost purely for the bicycle accessory. But... they don't.

    One thing we really do need is a common standard for battery tools. 18V is apparently where we're at, and if you're a bodger you can connect just about any 18V battery to just about any 18V tool (some batteries and tools are too smart for that, and it's a criminal offense to make them less smart). The mounts generally look similar, and some can be "converted" with a file. If manufacturers adopted a common standard they'd each sell fewer batteries and chargers, but that would also mean less waste.

    I was annoyed when Panasonic changed their battery standard, and somewhat irritated that they have at least two LiIon types, but at least they have a universal charger (12-24V IIRC, NiCd, NiMH and LiIon, and two of the three mounts). Other brands not so much. I can kind of sympathise with Ryobi not doing a 12/18/36V charger because their 12V/1AH bettery is about 1/50th the size of a 36V/8AH battery... but it would be nice.

    701:

    MS: "You claimed intent, and implied this is what they are trained to do: "conventionally trained economists try to externalize". Sorry, this is silly. Internalising externalities is part of basic economics training."

    H: "Yes, I claim intent, because that is what I see. ... And I agree with you that it's a good thing that economics students are trained to bring externalities into the systems they study."

    I think I may have persuaded you of my main point here. The "intent" you observe doesn't follow from their economics training. They are trained to internalise externalities. It's very much part of the standard economics training canon. Why this doesn't get implemented more than it does is a different issue. But it's not because it's absent from the standard framework or training.

    H: "However, economics and ecology have boundary problems. The problem faced by economics is that we live in a society dominated by social, political, and economic factors. Although they can be separated literally for purposes of analysis, to deal with the system, you have to include social and economic factors."

    Agreed! And separating them sometimes just isn't possible, and we are kidding ourselves if we think we can. That was the point of DeLong's lovely little dialog.

    H: "It's analyzed, certainly. But does the analysis work? ... [C]ould you use standard economic models (and nothing else) to design a Biosphere II that would work even as well as the original did?"

    I'm not trying to be pedantic, but what do you mean by "work"? Does standard environmental econ let you analyse "sustainability"? Yes. But that might not be what you are getting at.

    H: "Just to be pedantic, population biology (not ecology) isn't about ecosystems. Population biology is about how populations change over times."

    Thanks, correction appreciated. I used "population biology" because I know some of the theory (I am doing some work in it currently). I used "ecology" in my first draft instead but I have no training in it and didn't want to imply I knew anything about it.

    H: "the unsettling question is whether such [economic] analysis is ultimately good for anything at all. And yes, the same question applies to very much to ecology."

    I am not so unsettled by this. Does understanding have to be useful for something? I don't have any training in cosmology but I find it fascinating and I think it's valuable in its own right, even if it isn't "good for anything". But I am an academic, so maybe I am just conforming to the stereotype.

    702:

    Second-hand batteries, though, will be useful to anyone who's got a house, and accordingly will not become cheap.

    I may have mentioned this before, but Nissan have an official house-use for old Leaf batteries and everything is ready to go except for one tiny problem: the car batteries are not losing capacity as fast as predicted, so there aren't enough "old" batteries available to meet demand.

    I'm watching the new chemistries quite a lot because there are a whole bunch of "known" battery types that don't work for one reason or another to do with material purity and similar details, where we don't have those problems any more. Sure, isotopic purity is still hard, but graphene used to be imaginary. These days anoxic, anhydrous oil is readily available as are the machines for keeping it that way (it's why big transformers don't buzz any more).

    I suspect what we will see is something like a zinc-air battery developed that is cheap to manufacture but big and heavy with a low maximum rate of discharge. Then people will build them next to/in substations and say "yes it weighs a lot but we don't move it very often" and not being able to discharge it faster than 10 hours won't be a big deal.

    Using lightweight, expensive, fragile batteries in stationary roles doesn't make a lot of sense. They're competing with pumped hydro FFS (new this week: portable pumped hydro, only 5,000 tonnes per megawatt-hour).

    703:

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/america-s-corn-belt-making-its-own-weather

    Sadly the full stop on the end of Dr H's sentence broke the URL. It's worth reading the article, even for people who already know that, for example, in Perth they moved the wheat belt closer to the city by removing a large forest (wheat grows between rainfall isoclines, so yes, what they did was halve the rainfall over a few thousand square kilometres by removing a few hundred square kilometres of forest). It was an awesome demonstration of the anthropocene, and of the power of modern economics. Sadly, it wasn't deliberate (although the idea of a bunch of politicians sitting down with some economists and a bunch of scientists and saying "how can we reduce transport costs for wheat farmers" and coming up with that is amusing).

    http://joannenova.com.au/2013/12/land-clearing-responsible-for-most-of-rainfall-decline-in-south-west-western-australia/

    704:

    I'm guessing that by the time of The Labyrinth Index most, if not all, countries in the world will have been taken over by Lovecraftian evils.

    I'm also guessing that Canada or Russia gets to have Ithaqua in charge.

    705:

    You are making no sense

    Firstly no one drives across the country and people don’t buy cars based on them driving across the country. For most people it’s very rare to drive even 200 miles in a day and even for weekend road trips 400 miles is fine. This is 90% of the market

    Anyone that regularly drives long distances is going to want an IC or hybrid

    Secondly it doesn’t take anything like 8 hours to recharge. A Tesla supercharger will get you to 75% in 30 minutes, do it while you are eating. 400 mile range is actually the sweet spot because it doesn’t change the long distance travel cycle since it’ll get you enough range to fit in with the dining schedule. Slow you down a bit maybe but given like I said in point two above most people hardly ever travel that far anyway no one will care

    706:

    You're getting the point, all right: we can't replace the atmosphere, but it's required to run the economy. Therefore, it can't be valued within the economy because it's a necessary precondition for having an economy (any more than you can prove that parallel lines do not meet at infinity). The only way we can come to value an atmosphere is if we somehow figure out how to terraform planets and figure out how much it costs a contractor to create a durable oxygen atmosphere where none exists. Until the point that terraforming becomes part of the economy, we can't value the products it produces properly, can we?

    707:

    The need for extra supply capacity happens anyway, regardless of where the batteries are charged, both in terms of long bits of copper and of what's on the other end of them. Either you have to supply depots or you have to supply neighbourhoods; depots, being more concentrated, probably make things easier by cutting down the amount of stuff needed at the distribution end (certainly in the case of gordycoale's suggestion of running new cables down every street to kerbside charging points). Depots are also more suitable for taking the output of solar panels, whereas if people are charging at home they'll be doing it at night so you need an intermediate set of batteries to store the charge in the meantime.

    I detect a certain confusion in this discussion originating in different viewpoints (US v UK) - you seem to be thinking in terms of distributed generation and solar panels, while I'm thinking in terms of central generation and nuclear power plus some wind and tidal (with luck, though I fear any rapid increase in supply would be fossil-based) - but I don't think it alters anything fundamental. I make no comment on the US population shift matters because I know nothing about them.

    I don't understand why hydrocarbon-equivalent energy density should form some kind of minimum cut-off level for enabling battery exchange - or even why any achievable energy density should. In no case is doing it by hand going to be feasible because (absent nuclear magic) no useful battery is going to be light enough to be lifted by someone not in the prime of strength; it would have to be done by something vaguely akin to a pallet truck with its own powered drive and manoeuvring capabilities such that frail old people can still easily use it (easily enough done, if prohibitively long to describe). (Petrol stations provide petrol pumps, after all...)

    ...Is this another US/UK thing? ALL UK petrol stations are self-service; if you're not up to filling your own tank you have to take someone else along to do it for you.

    Nor does the battery weight mean that it has to be built in to the car; the battery itself can't be structural, because it is too squishy, so you inevitably have distinct structural and charge-storing assemblies, and it's basically a matter of making the one fit into the other in a readily reversible manner (again, much easier to do than to describe).

    Certainly the energy storage density does need to be improved, but I don't see that it has much to do with the question. At least, not directly. It seems to me that sticking to the model of combining the energy-storage and energy-extraction functions in the same unit may well prevent either function from being optimised, and separating them - something of the nature of a flow battery / fuel cell, although more chemistry research is needed - could provide more options for improving performance. This of course does affect the question, because the storage part is equivalent to a fuel tank.

    708:

    I see lots and lots of hybrid cars on the road

    Same in suburban Sydney. There's a distressing number of hybrid SUVs as well as the usual large cars (Prius etc).

    Electric cars are still rare though. Electric bicycles are more common every year.

    709:

    Maybe it will help if I describe how this actually works in the US

    I drive my car around during the day and seldom does it fall below 70% charge

    At night I drive it in to my garage and as part of getting out of the car, I plug it in

    The car is set to begin charging at midnight which is when the power is cheapest for me

    It generally takes about an hour to charge

    Most everyone has garages around here but there are complications for people that only park curbside or live in apartment buildings. However more and more these people charge at work, at the work parking lot

    These are usually swipe kiosks and it would generally cost a couple dollars to recharge

    710:

    "people don't buy cars based on them driving across the country"

    Which country? :) ... but no, I guess they don't - because the question doesn't arise. Some cars make it a more pleasant experience than others, but any ordinary mass-produced car can do it, so it's not something you need to think about. If you ever find you do need to do it, you can; even if it is a bit uncomfortable, it still beats the bus.

    If a car can't do it, though, it becomes something you do have to think about, and nobody will view it other than negatively. People don't want to be left stranded; a car labelled "this car might strand you" will be unattractive no matter what the value of "might".

    People run out of fuel even in IC cars - apparently it's one of the most common reasons for calling a breakdown service. At least with an IC car you can just tip a spare can of fuel in and off you go again; you can even carry your own spare can. If you have to get a tow instead it would be a right arseache.

    711:

    I'm not sure what you were trying to compare, but it doesn't make much sense to say that a battery contains capacitance. Capacitance is a property of capacitors. I suppose all real batteries will have some equivalent parellel capacitance, but since we're discussing energy storage and not frequency response I don't think that is what you are referring to.

    As an aside, I'm currently taking a graduate class on electrochemistry and sustainability. I can send you the links to some papers that my professor recommended if you like.

    712:

    My recharge rate for my Bolt on my home charger is 32 miles (8 kWh) per hour. So yes, it would take eight hours to fully recharge the car, likely more, since it took 5 hours to recharge it from a 50% discharge last week.

    Incidentally, I have the car set up to email me and text my wife when it is done charging, so I do know how long it takes to recharge itself on my system.

    Tesla is faster, as are some commercial chargers, and that is the problem with charging at home.

    713:

    Highspeed charging other than for road trips is a problem that does not need solving. The problem you solve instead is making damn sure that everywhere that a car is parked overnight is also a place it can charge overnight. That means the world is going to be spouting a whole lot of outdoor power sockets, yes, but.. well, those are cheap, so counting that in to the cost of owning a car does not change the math at all.

    The kind of housing development Gordy describes can - and probably will - sprout a stanchion every 3 meters for the electric company to sell power to the driving public. You rip up the side walk, lay down cables, put up a mass produced 220 v overnight charge point, lay the sidewalk back down. If you are doing the entire street, the cost per stanchion is highly reasonable, and the electricity company will gleefully finance it. This sort of thing probably does mean a lot of local transformers will need beefing up, but that is also not a huge ask, as long as you dont need tor redo the grid as a whole,

    714:

    Maybe the issue for charging batteries is to have two batteries. One battery stays at home, slowly accumulating charge throughout the day. The second battery goes for a ride in your car. When you get home the house battery charges the car battery... That way you don't need a vastly bigger infrastructure; the home battery doesn't use much juice-per-hour to charge, but it is always there topping itself off. Maybe a capacitor would be better, but the same principle applies.

    715:

    I learned a new word today; thanks for that! (Now, as to whether it will stick....)

    Thinking aloud, I can see I'm going to have complicate my "Dark Matter for Dummies" explanation. I'm thinking now that while bright matter has three or four states — gas, liquid, solid, and maybe plasma — dark matter has only one, which is a bit like a gas except that it can't be pressurised, or it has no pressure.

    If you put bright matter gas in a box and shrink the box, the gas molecules will bounce off each other more often, producing the effects of the Combined Gas Law. Do the same (maybe with some Star Trek technology), and the dark matter "gas" particles won't bounce off each other, just off the Star Trek forcefields. In free space, bright matter will collapse gravitationally, increasing in pressure and temperature as the molecules bounce off each other, the motion of each particle getting shorter and shorter.

    Whereas the dark matter will always just follow orbital paths; if it's captured by the mass then each particle will orbit elliptically, otherwise it will just follow a hyperbola as it passes by (or not actual hyperbolae and ellipses, but modified by the lesser gravity inside the mass, whatever they're called...). The orbiting dark matter will move fastest at the centre of the mass and slower at the edges. So the dark matter stays spread out, while the bright matter in the centre of the mass is getting jostled constantly, unable to travel easily from the centre to the outer edge.

    Don't know where I'm going with this. Will probably have to sleep on it and think a bit more.

    716:

    It makes sense to me... Say you have a 1.5V 1Ah battery... that (simplistically) equates to 5.4kJ (1.5 * 1 * 3600) (I detest time units). A 4800F capacitor charged to 1.5V also holds 5.4kJ (0.5 * 4800 * 1.52). So you sort of, at least, can call it a "4800F battery", even if it is really dodgy.

    Mind, getting that 5.4kJ out of the capacitor is more difficult than getting it out of the battery, because the battery's voltage won't vary all that much from 1.5V during the discharge, whereas the capacitor's voltage will drop all the way to 0, so if you want the energy in any form other than heat you have to mess about.

    And the energy stored in a capacitor goes as the square of the voltage, so it makes a big difference what voltage your capacitor can stand. For supercapacitors 2.5V is typical, but some electrolytes/electrode materials get more.

    The trouble is that 0.5CV2 is not the whole story and plugging the working voltage and capacitance per gram of some electrolyte/electrode combination into it does not give you a useful figure for energy storage per gram. Pulling a very scrappy sample of figures for F/g and J/g off the net seems to indicate that the real figure is one to two orders of magnitude lower. So you can't use either figure to get an idea of the other, which is a pain in the arse when they only quote one.

    717:

    What happens when the only available outlet is 115V/60hz?

    718:

    Sure the fact that the Tesla can’t make it across the us without some degree of pain in the ass comes into play

    However most Americans that are buying any kind of Tesla today have another car, that is usually an IC car

    The mean number of cars per US household is 1.9

    My other car is a Range Rover, pain in the city good for long trips

    Electrics can gain a fair amount of market share by this factor alone

    719:

    Maybe saying "the atmosphere" is a poor idea. What's worth "infinity" is a working ecosystem. That includes atmosphere, soils (both "wild" and "tame,) plants (including algae,) salt and fresh water (producing fish/crops/drinking water,) atmospheric components which protect us from radiation, a range of specific temperatures,* etc. In other words, the whole ecology.

    The human race would sacrifice any/all other holdings to preserve our basic ability to eat, breathe, drink, etc. If I have to go back to hunting and gathering, that's a price worth paying if the alternative is Not Breathing.

    So our ecology is, for all practical purposes, worth infinite money. We could put an actual price on it, but our need for it is essentially worth the entire productive capacity of the human race, measured in however many zillions of dollars an economist might put on the whole thing.

    • Preferably one that doesn't drown Florida.
    720:

    The weight problem is simple: the smaller the battery is, the greater the vehicle range can be (bigger batteries) and the more it can carry. The Bolt EV is a subcompact that weighs just under 3600 pounds, while the battery weighs 960 pounds. If it had a 8 gallon gas tank (running at 30 mpg), that would weigh around 75 pounds, including the weight of the tank. If I wanted to double its mileage, I'd have to more than double the size of the battery (because it would have to lug the battery weight around too).

    If I scale up, so that, say, I want to make an electric SUV that's about double the size of the Bolt and double the range (weight-wise current SUVs are only 150% of the weight of a Bolt, due primarily to that battery), then we're talking a 4,000-odd pound SUV attached to a 3600+ lb battery .

    It gets worse when you start dealing with heavy equipment.

    That's the reason why weight matters. A gallon of gas weighs about seven pounds and holds the equivalent of 33.4 kWh of electricity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent). The more we can approach that energy density, the greater a range we can get from vehicles (because there are more kWh/pound) and the more the vehicle can carry other than the battery.

    721:

    The biggest problem is it implies that the battery actually has that capacitance. Mostly I'm just confused as to why you would try to assign an "effective energy storage capacitance to a battery when using energy storage would work just as well.

    "Mind, getting that 5.4kJ out of the capacitor is more difficult than getting it out of the battery, because the battery's voltage won't vary all that much from 1.5V during the discharge, whereas the capacitor's voltage will drop all the way to 0..."

    I sort of understand what you're trying to say. I just want to note that the standard formula for the energy stored in a capacitor takes into account the fact that voltage decays (typically exponentially) I get what you're saying about it dropping below the working voltage circuit of faster than a battery would and the need for a power supply circuit to regulate the voltage.

    I will note that dielectric break down isn't the only barrier to using higher voltages. Possibly a bigger problem is leakage. The higher your storage voltage, the higher your non avalanche/thermal breakdown current will be. To operate at say 400 V as some filter caps so you need to use the stored energy quickly or it'll all just dissipate.

    Last, it's worth noting that a lot of studies will give the effective permittivity of their cap at a given size and then note very strongly that this permittivity is likely not constant with size. Not sure if that is relevant to what you were saying.

    722:

    There is the same problem when considering how to tote around hydrogen for fuel cells (a bit off topic sorry). The DOE rule-of-thumb for high pressure storage is 6-8 wt% H2 for 300 mi range. (that's weight percent of the whole storage medium including the tank, by the by.) Using current gas tank sized storage we can only get to around 2 wt% H2. And the most efficient/safest storage method, as a big block of metal hydride, faces the same recharging time problem as LiPo batteries. It takes specialised machinery and quit a bit of time to transform a drained block of alloy back into a block of metal hydride.

    723:

    “The human race would sacrifice any/all other holdings to preserve our basic ability to eat, breathe, drink, etc.“ You’re more optimistic about humanity’s wisdom than I am. I would hope we’d make that choice, but I’m not convinced we will.

    724:

    We will make that choice. Unfortunately, we will make it much later than we should... probably around the time Florida is buried by the waves.

    725:

    A lot of the city centre housing around where I live has the street out front used as a bus-lane (absolutely no parking between morning and evening rush hours five days a week), no parking allowed most of the time with 15-minute loading bays spotted here and there. Good luck putting in kerbside charging infrastructure in that common situation never mind running cabling and capacity to supply the heavy electrical load these chargers will add to the oalready overstretched city centre grid.

    726:

    Places were built before gas got so popular actually will have it a lot easier than, say, LA or San Diego... Yes Look at the loink-phot of my street & remember what was said (by you?) about two cars - a "petrol" one for long-distances/awkward journeys & an electric/hybrid for round town? I & a lot of people here are in that situation, with only one car, because, in most of London the "local" journeys are done by train/tube/bus instead. I think Charlie is in the same situation, as Edinbuirgh has an excellent bus system, a tram-line & godd rial services to imprtant places nearby ( Glasgow etc )

    727:

    The operational economics of pumped-storage are interesting. It actually costs about the same as low-tech lead-acid battery arrays to build pumped-storage in terms of comparable capacity (about £200 million per GWh) and with modern electronic controls for charging and discharging, the batteries are actually more efficient round-trip at about 85-90% in-out compared to pumped-storage at 65% (i.e. put a megawatt-hour into a battery, get 850kWh out vs. 650kWh for pumped storage).

    The bad news is the need to replace the low-tech batteries every ten years or so for about the same cost as building the array in the first place. Pumped-storage is mostly concrete and steel and geography which can last fifty years and more for much less cost for maintenance and replacement. The working fluid is water, assumed abundant in any conceivable installation (i.e. not in a desert).

    There are different batteries that will last a lot longer than cheap lead-acid but they cost a lot more -- sodium-sulphur batteries from NGK cost about a billion per GWh, ditto for Ni-Fe (I still have never discovered why they are so expensive...). Shorter-life lithium-ion tech batteries are a bit cheaper.

    If I had some folding money to spend I'd start up a company to investigate building cheap long-life storage batteries, either new more durable versions of lead-acid or lowering the cost of Ni-Fe. I think sodium-sulphur is a dead-end due to its peculiar operating requirements but NGK is continuing to work on them and hopefully they have fixed the little "bursting into flames" problem they suffered from.

    728:

    I & a lot of people here are in that situation, with only one car, because, in most of London the "local" journeys are done by train/tube/bus instead.

    Most of Sydney is like this, with the twist that most of Sydney don't work in the CBD and that's where the trains want to take you. Buses go pretty much everywhere, but they're at best as good as a car for getting you places, and at worst they're slower than walking. I live 800m from a train station, 100m from some busy bus stops... and in a street where the average is over two cars per detached house and over one per apartment because most people here find it easier to drive than take the bus. And because housing is so expensive, most people here have adult kids living at home.

    One of the few advantages of renting in Australia is that you only have to give a month's notice if you want to leave (most rentals) so it's easy enough to move if you change jobs. I've done that before, albeit to stay at the right distance for cycling rather than for public transport commuting.

    729:

    lowering the cost of Ni-Fe.

    My vague recollection is that the more pure you can make the elements at the start, the longer the battery lasts - there are a bunch of common impurities that bind to the Ni and Fe and get in the way of the battery chemistry. NiFe is an area of active research in Oz, but the commercial stuff is mostly bromine based flow batteries AFAIK (redflow, for example). Flow batteries are mechanically more complex than a vat with lumps of metal in it, but the self-discharge is near zero and you can add storage capacity pretty easily (the design is basically "how many power units, how big are the tanks", and in redflow's case they've got a stackable one-size-fits-all setup that they containerise.

    Redflow's founder was pissed when Elon Musk shat in his breakfast with the whole giant-battery stunt because he was close to landing that deal for Redflow. He'd been grinding away in the politics for a couple of years and was very close. But it looks as though South Australia will be doing open tenders for a bunch more battery, so he should come out of it ok. It's so very Australian to first: burn off a local manufacturer in favour of imports; and second, make technical decisions by PR stunt.

    730:

    Foster and Partners. I see they constructed a new "Reichstag" building in Berlin. Is that why you chose them?

    I chose Foster + Partners because if you know anything about London and architecture in the past 40 years, you'd know about Foster + Partners. The Reichstag has nothing to do with it!

    731:

    And that's without battery tech going non-linear in the next 10 years. Imagine if someone comes up with a process that promises a "moores law" for battery tech.

    Not only is that not going to happen, that can't happen, because of the laws of electrochemistry, which are in turn dictated by quantum mechanics. Batteries based on current materials are not going to store significantly more kWh/kg.

    What might happen is a breakthrough in charging time such that your half hour to hour long wait for a 50% top-up will be cut to 3-5 minutes. Which is itself a game-changer in terms of distance travelled/time for electric vehicles.

    732:

    Actually, when you buy an EV car charger, you get to choose how long the cable is, so you can, in fact, run a cable out to the street.

    Here's a side-street where I often park my car.

    It's about as close to my front door as it's possible to park — down four flights of stairs and across a busy main road, then maybe a hundred metres down this street (if I'm lucky enough to get a space: otherwise, I have to drop the car a few blocks over, wherever I can find a resident's space that my permit is zoned for).

    Note that the buildings behind the cars are a mix of light industrial (offices, shops, restaurants) and apartments. There are also basement flats below ground level, although their entrances are obscured by the cars parked in front of them. Assume an average of 1 business and 2-4 family homes per door visible in the streetview picture.

    Here's another nearby residential street, with residential parking bays. These are four story high tenement flats; the doors alternate between main door flats (door opens onto the street — desirable!) and common stairwells serving 11 other apartments each. The frontage for each flat has room for two vehicles parked nose-in at the kerb; 12 flats get space for 4-5 vehicles, and note that the front windows above ground level belong to the front of building apartments, not the two (invisible) apartments on each floor above ground level that look out over the common garden at the back. The frontage in the photograph probably contains 20-30 family dwellings.

    NB: The dwellings in the first street were probably built in the first half of the 19th century; the buildings in the second street were built in the second half of the 19th century.

    "You get to choose how long the cable is" makes certain assumptions about the type of dwelling car owners live in ... which are pretty much invalid where I live, in an environment that makes Greg's street look like suburban near-wilderness.

    733:

    The problem is travel distance. With a gas-powered car and a couple of drivers, you can get across the US (~2700 miles) in about four days of reasonable driving (700 miles/day). If your electric car is limited to 400 miles, followed by an 8 hour recharge, that's going to take you 7 days (400 miles/day), and you're going to need more places to stop.

    They've already blown right through that.

    The new electric vehicle Cannonball Run record — following the official 2,860-mile Cannonball Run route from the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, Calif. to the Red Ball garage in New York City — was set by a Tesla Model 3 (the new, medium-price Tesla, not the luxury version) in 50 hours, 16 minutes and 23 seconds (in winter conditions, so battery capacity was depressed). This includes time taken for charging stops en route. Average speed was around 56.9 mph, reported charging costs were $100.95.

    Obviously they broke the speed limit a little(!) between charging stops, but it gives you a benchmark for a current achievable electric coast-to-coast speed in the USA — a whisker under 60mph.

    The record for a gas-burning car (a heavily modified Mercedes CL55 AMG, with extra gas tanks) set in 2013, is 28 hours, 50 minutes and 30 seconds.

    734:

    Yeah, I found it a bit Mallory Towers In space (that may reflect more on my tastes than Chambers' writing, however).

    735:

    Sagitarrius A* is the place where the Basilisk and friends hang out in Malament-Hogarth spacetime running the simulations in which we live. Send a message there - enjoy some recursion.

    736:

    Batteries do not need to get a whole lot better on density ect to revolutionize cars - Tesla demonstrates the present state of the art on density allows for a good car. They will get better, and that will help things along, but the thing that will kill gasoline is dropping battery prices.

    Because once electric cars reach anything resembling parity, let alone become cheaper - and that seems inevitable. There is no obvious floor on how much better manufacturing technique can drop the price on batteries, and their raw material costs are negligible.

    Once that has happened, all the objections people are raising will go away with a sudden vengeance, money talks, and people listen. Electrics are a better driving experience, they have lower running costs. Remove the up-front sticker-shock, and gas is dead, and suddenly it becomes a priority to accommodate charging.

    Those frontages Charlie are posting will spout little metal poles with attached cables and enough smarts to talk to your phone about payment. Sure, not everyone who lives there will be able to charge a car there but not everyone who lives there is able to own a car of any kind now, due to the fact that they have no way to park it.

    737:

    Because once electric cars reach anything resembling parity, let alone become cheaper - and that seems inevitable. There is no obvious floor on how much better manufacturing technique can drop the price on batteries, and their raw material costs are negligible.

    The price of lithium oxide (the minehead post-processing deliverable material) has doubled over the few years due to increasing demand. The last figure I saw made public recently was $12,000 per tonne. A car battery of any significant size (60-80kWh) will use the best part of a tonne of lithium oxide before manufacturing costs are added on. It doesn't help that increased battery capacity seems to require more expensive manufacturing technologies such as NANOFIBRES! and GRAPHENE! The Tesla battery Gigafactories are having problems delivering working batteries at the moment so they've called in Panasonic expertise to try and debug their process.

    Any cost-savings due to increased production efficiencies are likely to be eaten up by raw materials price increases and then some. This might change as new raw materials sources come on line due to predicted demand but right now that's the state of the market.

    In contrast minehead coal from the Powder Basin in west central America costs about $30 per tonne and crude oil is selling for about $450 per tonne.

    738:

    63 kgs of lithium in a 70kwh battery pack, at twelve dollars per kilo, 786 dollars.

    Nope, this is not a cost contributor that matters much, unless their manufacturing process is insanely wasteful of the stuff.. in which case that is entirely the sort of thing better engineering can fix.

    The bulk of the cost is that this is advanced manufacturing, but even ridiculously fine-tolerance work can become shockingly cheap if production runs are large enough.

    739:

    Furthermore, lithium is not rare in the earth's crust and seawater, and there are several possible extraction methods from very low concentrations. Yes, there is a shortage of high-grade lithium ores, but that's unlikely to be a long-term problem - unlike the rare-earth elements needed for the motor magnets.

    740:

    What I'm trying to get at is how to store more joules per kilo.

    I don't know much about electricity, but I do know the capacitors aren't normally used as batteries. However, that's what we're talking about here--using them like batteries.

    As others have noted (and I agree), we're getting near the top of what we can do with electrochemical storage in this regard. The hype around graphene supercapacitors is that they apparently hold more joules per kilo than does any electrochemical battery, meaning that they can theoretically replace batteries if they can hold a charge long enough. Since they're made out of really fancy carbon rather than mildly scarce lithium, they'll also have different manufacturing ecosystems that might prove to be useful.

    Going up a level, if we're stuck with electrochemical batteries, then absent a miracle (such as a hydrogen economy springing up overnight), we're stuck with rebuilding society to handle batteries better, but the heavy equipment we're using to do the rebuilding is all going to run on fossil fuels. That kinda sucks if the goal is to decarbonize ASAP. If supercapacitors can be used as power storage devices that work like batteries but hold more energy than electrochemical systems, then not only do we have to rebuild less (because the EVs become more like ICVs), but its easier to rebuild using nothing but electrically powered equipment.

    741:

    The weight problem is simple. Don't use 1-2 tonnes to carry one person and under 20 Kg of shopping. A very large part of the problem in the UK is the insurance cartel that makes it prohibitively expensive to run a very small runabout for local use and share/hire a larger one when needed. There are other factors in that, such as the general hostility to cycling and lightweight motorised cycles (especially the DfT's and police's), but it's a major one.

    Of course, the weight problem for goods is rather different, and that is equally important.

    742:

    Perhaps we're missing the point.

    It the main post, OGH indicated that he wasn't interested in contemporary SF because (my paraphrase) it took contemporary social structures for granted. Up in #550 I suggested that what he was really looking for is a scenario where technology results in liberation (he is famously fond of Ian Banks's Culture), and that current trends made such scenarios implausible.

    Then we spent 180+ comments on car batteries. I missed you guys.

    Can anyone think of an emerging technology which will actually feel liberating to the consumer? Parameters:

    1) It has to be mainstream. It has to be of interest to at least 10% of the population in North America and Western Europe.

    2) It has to be something that a middle-income worker, say a nurse or an accountant, could afford (when the technology matures).

    3) It has to feel liberating to the user. The target market already has electricity and cars, so solar electricity and battery-cars don't add much.

    4) No medical tech. Treatments for heart disease and diabetes may be very liberating in your 60s, but they aren't much good for pitching books to teenagers.

    5) Enhancement tech could be liberating, but keep in mind that the competitive nature of current society will quickly make many enhancements obligatory (practically if not legally, or even if illegally e.g. Adderall, anyone).

    743:

    Just a wild guess: my understanding is that wet lithium is bad in batteries. Even though Tesla located the gigfactory north of Reno, which is reasonably dry, their problem might be as simple as dehumidifying the manufacturing line enough that fewer of the batteries go bad. Also IIRC, a lot of what Tesla's doing is something like creating huge numbers of AA batteries and packaging them together into much bigger battery arrays. Thinking about my own fumbling when getting a bunch of batteries to work in series, I can only imagine the fun one has when assembling tens of thousands of cells in arrays and getting them all to behave themselves. Doing that reliably and quickly on an assembly line may only add to the joy the QA/QC workers feel. Or it might be something totally different.

    744:

    Yeah, any technology that lets consumers stop being consumers and start being human beings.

    Seriously, maybe it's my reactionary GI tract, but I have this feeling that, by 2050, consumer will be an epithet and not a category.

    745:

    The current battery pack design is fairly obviously not what is going to be the long term solve for this, just because building a 100 kwh package out of huge numbers of a base cell meant to power and fit inside electronics that go in peoples pockets is just daft. I think the most likely outcome (at uhm. 40 percent?) is that one of the companies working on it will crack solid-state lithium battery production in bulk (twice the density, cost comfortably below 100 per kwh) and once the bankrupcies clear, that becomes the standard.

    746:

    That's our plan: charge the home battery off the solar panels all week, unload it into the car once per week, and run the house on the surplus solar for the rest of the time, weather permitting.

    Unfortunately, the Bolt has a 60 kWh battery that can move electricity at 50 amps (IIRC), while the Tesla Powerwall is a 16 kWh battery that can move electricity at something like 15 amps. It would be kind of tedious to use a Powerwall (or even four powerwalls) to charge my car.

    What I and my electrician are waiting for are the next generation of wall batteries that will allow me to charge my car from my roof. Presumably these will be either EV car batteries or something just like them, configured to take up one wall of the garage. Until they show up (and ETA is hopefully 3-5 years from now), I'm selling power to my local utility and using them as my "battery."

    747:

    Between Brexit and Trump the laundry series is beginning to look like an extended metaphor, so I wasn't sure.

    748:

    That's not the answer. That's the question.

    749:

    A lot of local parking has changed from "resident/business permit only" to "car club/EV charging" over the last few years in London. The EV charging points seem to run about 50% capacity and appear frequently enough that I'm sure there's a "park your EV app" to find them.

    They look like they take cards. I haven't checked.

    Given that no-one in London ever gets to park outside their house anyway, they are probably a good bet...

    750:

    My own, very quick reaction to your post is that I'm waiting for the Libertarians to "get it," by which I mean they need to understand that corporate structures can be as oppressive as governments. A "true" Libertarian ideology would identify multiple possible sources of oppression (more or less) as follows:

    The Government Corporations Religion Ideology (It doesn't matter which one.) Ignorance and insanity Nature (That is, the environment.)

    Having accomplished this ideological change they'd have a worthwhile analysis of the problem, vote accordingly, and stop enabling the fascists. At that point we'd have a viable majority committed to good things.

    751:

    Great Ghu, WHY? 'Neo-libertarianism' is a fanatic ideology in itself, and has nothing to do with increasing liberty.

    752:

    Two techs come to mind that are here, and two more on the way

    Currently - ride sharing - the delivery economy

    In SF today I can order pretty much anything from amazon and have it at my house the same day. The only time i ever “go shopping” is completely for fun

    I can order from pretty much any resteraunt in the city and it comes to me. I can also order premade healthy meals by tops chefs since yi don’t really want to eat resteraunt food anymore. I don’t have to cook or go out to eat. I don’t have to set foot in a grocery store

    If I want to go anywhere in the city I can summon a car and go point to point. The car usually arrives in 3-5 minutes. I don’t have to worry about parking . It beats the crap out of our (pretty good by amaerican standards) public transportation system because I get there in half the time since I don’t have to bother with him and spoke transfers

    Techs that’s are upcoming - grids of electric autonomous cars that do the ride sharing thing at 1/3rd the price - augmented reality(which currently exists in early alpha)

    753:

    Lithium metal is a lot more expensive than lithium oxide, carbonate or other minehead production materials since a large part of the mass is made up from oxygen and carbon molecules, and lithium molecules are noticeably lighter than both.

    There's some debate about exactly how much is needed for batteries given different structures but I've seen figures like 2.5kg of lithium carbonate per kWh of capacity mentioned so an 80kWh battery pack might need 200kg of carbonate feedstock to make it, costing about $2400 or so at the price I quoted (a bit of Googling suggests the price is now something like $14,000 per tonne for carbonate and rising). That's before processing, manufacture, pack construction etc.

    As for the battery packs being made out of large numbers of of small cells, there's a reason for that. If a small cell of the type used in car battery packs (3.7V @ 3Ah) self-discharges it will release about 36kJ of energy in a few seconds. A larger cell, say 3.7V at 30Ah will release 360kJ in the same period of time. The battery designers have put armour and fire protection barriers in their battery packs to prevent all the cells lighting off fratricidally within a short period of time but that forces them to work with lots of smaller cells. A few large cells are more difficult to make safe in an accident or in the case of a materials failure.

    755:

    Yes, of course, but you weren't talking about deadweight vs payload, you were saying that hydrocarbon-esque energy density was necessary in order to swap battery packs instead of charging in situ. That was what I didn't understand, and your explanation being about something else entirely has left me even more at sea...

    756:

    "Liberating to the consumer" doesn't happen. As long as people are being called "consumers" it won't be "liberating", it'll be a vector for yet more threads to tie people down more and more inescapably. (As this thread has already pointed out, electric cars are being designed as that before they've even really got going.)

    Today's teenagers if they have any awareness ought to feel like Rita. The escape from that situation is in the direction of less technology, not more. Perhaps this is why alternative realities where the pinnacle of technology is forging a good sword ("fantasy") are (so it is said) more popular than the super-technological kind.

    If they don't feel like Rita, then I haven't got a clue.

    757:

    Feel free to replace the word "consumer" with "end user". The point is that the tech should liberate ordinary people.

    758:

    That's a start, but it's not a huge step up from the pizza deliveries and taxis of my childhood. Can we go bigger?

    759:

    First para, "why you would try to assign..." I, personally, wouldn't. Heteromeles seemed to find it easier to think in that way, though, and I was just trying to explain how it might be done so as to make sense.

    Third para, working voltage of the load - that's it exactly.

    Fourth para, capacitor breakdown voltage - the point here is that we're talking about "supercapacitors", ie. doobries that achieve extremely high capacitance by using double-layer effects to produce a dielectric barrier only a few atoms thick. The electrochemistry that makes that work also means that the breakdown voltage is limited to a few volts (2.5V or so is typical). When thinking of how much energy can be stored in a capacitor, you need to know what the breakdown voltage is, as that is the limit voltage-wise; with "supercapacitors" it is never more than a few volts. (Higher-voltage "supercapacitors" are made by stacking low-voltage units in series, which of course reduces the total capacitance in proportion.)

    Final para, no, not really relevant at all.

    760:

    "graphene supercapacitors... apparently hold more joules per kilo than does any electrochemical battery"

    Yeah... the trouble is, they don't. I mentioned this Up There but it's probably got lost. If you work it out on the basis of the farads per gram figures quoted for supercapacitor materials, it certainly looks as if they're bloody brilliant. But if you dig out figures that quote both F/g and actual stored joules per g for the same material (and also the breakdown voltage, so you can work it out), the real J/g figure is between one and two orders of magnitude lower than the F/g and Vmax figures suggest it ought to be. Exactly how much lower does vary with the material, but they're all horribly disappointing and graphene is just as disappointing as anything else.

    761:

    I quickly Googled that about 5.3 Kg of carbonate is equivalent to 1 Kg of Lithium and that a Tesla S (85 kWh) battery pack uses between 11Kg and 14Kg of Lithium in its construction. So that's no more than 75Kg of carbonate at $14,000 per tonne; about $1000 for a Tesla battery.

    762:

    Tesla already had a battery-swap capability which nobody used.

    763:

    Half the weight problem is just sheer bloat, and the answer is Morris Minors.

    A Morris Minor is about 750kg and I used to get 40mpg out of mine, with its 1950s-design engine and carburettor and points ignition and all. And not driving it gently, but thrashing the shit out of it everywhere all the time. (People behind me used to see daylight under the inside front wheel on bends.) When I upgraded it to a 1293cc engine with twin carbs it still got 38mpg.

    Taking a Ford Fiesta as an approximate contemporary equivalent (mainly because it's the first thing that came into my head) and having a quick bing, it seems they weigh about 1500kg and get about 30mpg (as in what people actually get driving them, not the mendacious official consumption figures).

    If I'd spent the last 40 years trying to improve the performance of the internal combustion engine I'd be pretty bloody pissed off at seeing all my effort being wasted by making the engine effectively haul a whole extra car around everywhere.

    764:

    We're liberating ourselves from the oil companies. So hell yes for batteries, solar power, wind power, grids, electric cars, and more batteries.

    765:

    Yes My 1996 L-R has a significantly lower fuel consumption than the last-models, which rolled off the line 19 2016 .....

    766:

    On an individual level, the oil companies don't really oppress us. We swipe our cards, pump our gas, maybe buy some M&Ms. Obviously there are pretty serious externalities, but I'm looking for technology that makes significant improvements in the lives of rich-country end-users.

    767:

    Why? Because I frequently describe Libertarianism as "Republicanism for smart people." Give a Libertarian a couple decent intellectual figures, and either Heinlein or Rand as their favored authors of politics-inspiring fiction, and they'll insist that they practice an intelligent political philosophy while voting in lockstep with Republicans...

    But I think someone could run a decent campaign about "obstacles to freedom" and push Libertarians into voting like Roosevelt-style Democrats. We're only talking one percent of the population here, but Libertarians punch above their weight politically and a one-percent national swing would give us another generation of election-winning rational people.

    Obviously, this would require the Democrats to make some minor changes too; obviously preferring equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes plus putting gun control types in the back seat. As I said above, this was my first reaction. so I might manage something more interesting later.

    768:

    On the discussion of car batteries: Tesla's new roadster is expected to have a 600 mile range

    https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/11/16/tesla-announces-new-roadster-with-600-mile-range/

    On the subject of new technology that will liberate the end user. That's tricky, deciphering what the "liberate" means and who the "end users/consumers" are. Still, I'll give it a shot

  • Self-driving cars. In the US, that would be a game changer for parents with children, who no longer have to drive them everywhere

  • Daily images from cubesat companies like PlanetLabs. Right now, this technology is mainly benefiting investors and researchers, but the spinoffs might be interesting? Besides, I wonder if 10 percent of people in Northern America and Europe don't already work in a field where this dataset will change their day-to-day lives? https://www.planet.com/

  • Technology like Alexa won't replace babysitters or nursing homes, but they are an important tool in both cases. In other words, technology that doesn't deal with the medical issues of being young or old, but helps with the day-to-day living. Especially since Alexa is constantly getting new features

  • Technology that automates jobs will likely meet your threshold, but I'm not sure if you would consider it "liberating"?

  • 769:

    In other news, the Pentagon has decided that the US needs a dedicated smallsat launcher

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/as-satellite-threat-looms-air-force-moves-to-buy-small-rocket-services/

    770:

    That's what I thought. When I cranked the figures on the graphene supercapacitor, I assumed I'd screwed up, because the answer in F/g was on order of a shoebox-sized battery running a car. Thing is, two orders of magnitude bigger puts you in the weight range of a current gas tank. If we can get to that stage, we're actually in really good shape. From what little I remember about capacitors, I'd next worry about the supercapacitor holding a charge for days or weeks. If it can't do that, it might be more useful as an IED than as a car battery. The other hurdle is getting precision-made graphene down to commodity prices, so that we're not talking about million dollar super-EVs.

    Still, if you want your super-battery, that's the best candidate past lithium.

    Perhaps that's the answer to Jay's question above: my next hoped-for technology involves graphene in various forms. Maybe we'll get graphene devices that slice, dice, homogenize, run cars off their USB ports, and serve as 64 qubit wireless peripherals to your home data systems.

    771:

    While they are arguments there are too many protective features in modern cars (e.g. all that extra weight), and there are even better arguments that over-protective vehicles let people drive them like tanks, where the goal is to kill anyone who gets in your way, because you won't be hurt... Still, I can see the point of not driving the old-line "convertibles," as we called them, where if they got in an accident, they converted into a coffin. Even though they were extremely efficient (remember the old Festiva?) I learned to drive in cars like that, and it profoundly shaped the way I drive. I only occasionally miss them, though.

    772:

    There are estimates of how much lithium metal used in the manufacture of Tesla battery packs (Tesla themselves don't actually say). At least one of those estimates I've seen reverse-engineers the capacity of a perfect lithium-electrochemistry battery in which all the lithium is "in use" and returns the grams/kWh figure from that process. In reality some of the lithium is lost in the electrode structures the like, sequestered from use and there are other losses and inefficiencies in both production and construction.

    http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1826

    This is dated (2010) and the PDF paper it references isn't available any more but the significant graf is this one:

    Therefore 3 kg of raw technical grade Lithium Carbonate will be required per kWh of final usable battery capacity.

    I would hope that the manufacturing technology has improved and that figure has come down somewhat but I don't really expect it to have fallen that far. It's entirely possible that improvements in capacity per kg have been achieved at the cost of using more lithium per kWh, not less.

    774:

    I'm looking for technology that makes significant improvements in the lives of rich-country end-users.

    Answering your question:

    Number one would be the ability to effectively hack the immune system. We're just beginning to get successful treatments, like the experimental immune therapy that cured Jimmy Carter's brain cancer. It's still incredibly crude. The current best treatments target all cells with a certain marker that the cancer cells have. They're not actually targeting just the cancer cells. Give it another ten years and I think we'll have truly effective cancer treatments, cancer vaccines, plus treatments that prevent diabetes, Alzheimer's, and atherosclerosis.

    Gene therapy seems to be more of a wild card. I think it's going to take multiple breakthroughs before it is safe and useful. Maybe ten to twenty years out.

    However, I strongly disagree with the premise that what I need is more consumer technology. The most significant improvements in my life as a first-world citizen will come from not having our prosperity and comfort predicated on the exploitation of others. Both of the improvements I just mentioned above could be broadly available to everyone in the world. There are no good reasons not to.

    775:

    A Morris Minor is about 750kg and I used to get 40mpg out of mine, with its 1950s-design engine and carburettor and points ignition and all.

    Er, no: 25mpg was typical, on the 1 litre engine. (Data source: a Morris Minor 1000 (1098cc version) and a Morris Traveller, the estate version.) I suspect both were not terribly well-maintained, however. 48 hp.

    (By way of comparison: my 2006 Volvo V70 has a 2.5 litre turbocharged diesel that puts out roughly 160 hp, and gets 40-45mpg.) Twice as heavy as the Morris, but nearly four times the power, vastly bigger load carrying capacity, and a lot safer, not to mention faster. Did I say faster? The Morris Minor can't go much over 66mph, and takes a lifetime to get there; because I'm a responsible adult I've never taken the V70 over 100mph but it got there frighteningly rapidly and is supposed to be good for 140mph.

    That engine is obsolescent by modern standards for an ic engine, by the way.

    776:

    The crazy scandi's are pushing the envelope on what can be carried by "bicycle". This 4 wheeler is rated for 200kg, and they offer a semitrailer model with optional hydrogen fuel cell that will carry 300kg. There's a delivery company running those and their videos don't show a great deal of work going in to the pedals (and the operator is wearing jeans)

    http://velove.se/

    That all comes down to the rules about power limits. IMO at that level you really do want some kind of regulation but it's hard to justify the full on "motorised light commercial vehicle" stuff that we currently have. In countries like Australia those things are just cars, no questions about it, so you'd never be able to operate one legally.

    But with a fit young man pedaling around a flat city centre, 300kg with pedal power isn't unreasonable. I speak from experience, although Sydney doesn't really qualify as flat. But then, you can't make a living out of a couple of hours a day at a hard sprint either. Another 200W and a flatter area would make that quite doable - Perth, even Melbourne would be fine.

    777:

    I'm with the 40mpg figure from my two 1098s and a 948. Ideal cars for buzzing round bits of Devon, but much less good for long distances. Managed one long trip at 55mpg, 300+ miles without refilling the 6.5 (proper) gallon tank, but it was a deliberate attempt and I'd tweaked before I set out.

    778:

    I'm waiting for the Libertarians to "get it," by which I mean they need to understand that corporate structures can be as oppressive as governments

    They already have people both inside and outside the movement pointing vigorously at problems like oppressive corporations. One subtext in Libertarianism is a strong reaction against (other) anarchists, so that's not going to happy easily.

    A cynical person might also say that the libertarians that attract funding and attention are the ones that don't ask questions like that, because the people who have the money and the media want to avoid those questions.

    You'll note the current fad for using language like yours as epithets. It's a way of inoculating followers against exactly the sort of analysis that you're describing. As soon as someone starts talking about oppression, privilege, structural inequality or whatever the programmed reaction is to scream SNOWFLAKE and start attacking the person for not being able to deal with criticism.

    779:

    That's what the Libertarians tell me when I say they should be caucusing with the Democrats. Nonetheless, I'm quite serious.

    780:

    You asked and you were answered

    The scenarios I outlined translate to probably ten hours of time savings a week

    “No more shopping “ is hardly a minor improvement

    The pizza and taxis of your youth do not compare, anymore then a biplane compared to a 747

    You are just being stubborn

    781:

    I'm looking for something that could inspire SF the way space travel did in the 60s and computers did in the 90s. Can we go bigger?

    782:

    Greg From the Streetview you show there are at least two solutions. You could run an armoured cable under the pavement with a switch in your garage and a lock on the outlet. OK there may be problems with your local authority but you could talk to your friendly Labour MP about making this a practicality. It's not too different from the electrical hook-ups on campsites. Vandalism may be a problem but again that's not too different from now. I worked with someone who parked his car opposite a pub and found that poor running was due to a smelly yellow coloured aqueous liquid in his petrol tank. The filler cap was at the same height as the average penis. Second possibility: you appear to have a garage and drive. The drive looks a bit small for a Land Rover but you could alter it, or more practically buy a smaller car since your Land Rover will become illegal eventually. For people like me with a drive I could just park normally and charge the car while it's on my drive. But if we are going to have electric cars the practicalities will need to be ironed out.

    783:

    No more shopping “ is hardly a minor improvement

    That depends very much on what you get instead. In Sydney we struggle to get next-day delivery, and our food options are very limited.

    Locally it's only the fat'n'sugar brigade who delivery ready-made food (pizza, fried chicken, one local SE-asian place that I've only seen one meal from and even the chickens wouldn't eat it). But 800m walk away there's everything from North-African to Thai by way of Lebanese, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and more.

    Groceries are not as bad, you can get next-day-ish delivery from the two main ogliopolists and they'll deliver their full range AFAIK - fruit and veges included. But you take your chances with quality and you know for a fact that it's not fair trade produce (why bother becoming an ogliopoly if you can't take all the profit from your suppliers). Again, 800m away there's a whole range of small not-ready-to-eat food shops, from the "other chains" right down to a row of competing greengrocers (again, everything from Pacific Islander food to African - albeit my African housemates are annoyed that it's the "wrong" African and they can't get their preferred home-country special food there, they have to go 30 minutes by train to a "proper" African shop).

    For other stuff, it's all deliverable but at a price. Obviously all the industrial stuff and anything from China and Amazon, but a lot of retailers also have online options. Everything from board games to bicycle parts... yay. But anything posted withing Australia will cost about $10 for P&P, or if sent from China will take 2-12 weeks. And you have to know exactly what you want and be prepared to get something similar to what you thought you ordered (clothes especially - China have their own clothing sizes, as well as US and AU ... but they use the same labels so you just have to know which variant a particular shop uses. I'm a XXL in Chinese Onsies, but an M in AU t-shirts for example).

    784:

    “Self-driving cars. In the US, that would be a game changer for parents with children, who no longer have to drive them everywhere.” More autonomy for children/teenagers. More autonomy for the old & disabled. Many fewer traffic stops (tense interactions between police and civilians, sometimes deadly, disproportionately affecting certain populations.)

    785:

    Many fewer traffic stops (tense interactions between police and civilians, sometimes deadly, disproportionately affecting certain populations.)

    I hadn't thought of that. Although... flip side: police just command the car to drive to the police station, it doesn't, so they shoot the driver for interfering. Turns out the battery went flat or there was some other fault and "the police didn't notice". In other words I'm confident that the USA will adapt their policing to the new technology, just as they have with body cameras.

    786:

    I think radical changes are likely to be either biohacking, when we get to the point where kids can download code to their 3D printer/school lab or whatever, and produce anything from a "temporary tattoo" style decoration to glow-in-the-dark SCOP (the latter you can get now). Imagine the fun when kids can download a program that makes them glow in the dark :) Or cure their herpes, whatever.

    I think political changes are more likely, at the one end something like Ada's Hives or at the other the sort of dystopian/Libertarian kleptocracy that we're currently suffering from, but more so.

    Looking at Trump I wonder just how hard it would be to sell Chinese-style managed democracy as a solution. Turkey and Egypt have done that, and it's looking as though India will follow Israel and Myanmar to become officially theocratic (or more happily, there will be a second Partition). Given the option, would you rather have your universal surveillance and limited democracy in the style of China or the USA?

    787:

    Concerning the extensive discussion of "Dark Matter". I, of course, have a contrary opinion.

    As some of you may know, I have great fun following Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe for a better view than what is considered "Mundane SF" in many of my planned books, so I thought I'd post this video that just came out.

    Our View of the Universe Could Change Forever | Space News

    When I retired from the Highway Department ten years ago I went looking for different answers to address certain problems I saw with cosmology. I've been looking through their stuff, and IMHO they have made their case.

    • No Big Bang
    • No Black Holes
    • No Neutron Stars
    • The Sun is not an exploding hydrogen bomb

    My own favorite, that I like to add to that list, as I mentioned up thread:

    • The Moon does not orbit around the Earth; the Earth and Moon orbit together around the Sun

    I find the following concepts very useful in world building fun stories. YMMV

    • Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe
    • Growing Earth Theory
    • Anatoly Fomenko and his New Chronology

    • The Omphalos hypothesis<-----This is the most fun concept

    The beautiful thing is, I'm able to build the stories around these concepts and never mention them. It is that classic "Blishism" -- from the way James Blish would have a throw away line, and then move on with the story.

    Look at the NESFA edition of Flights of Eagles by James Blish. Read the Introduction by Tom Shippey, and there is everything I love about Blish.

    He talked of “Blishisms”: throwaway sentences that contain multitudes. Where most writers will generate pages of exposition to describe the impossible, he states it in a sentence or two, and then gets on with the story.

    • And he also mentions the Omphalos hypothesis that is at the heart of most of my stuff.

    I went looking for an example of “Blishisms” and ended up reading a bunch of chapters in Cities in Flight before I could stop. I love that book.

    Go to Amazon:

    Cities in Flight

    Open the “Look inside” and search on the word “Brood”. The first occurrence on page 225 has an example of a “Blishism”. The paragraph begins with “He was saying to Frad:”

    • He blithely talks about how they grow more computers.

    I have read that paragraph countless times without realizing how truly dangerous the concept is. It was only after I read a bunch of Stross and then came back to Cities… that the paragraph hit me, hard. HA!

    788:

    The way I understood 2312, is that the supplier of the surplus value for the solar system was the Terran peasant, and that KSR didn't want to go there. It was noted by me that any Terran peasant who made it off-planet immediately improved his or her life, even in a Chinese-sponsored labor camp. Earth itself has clearly become the colony instead of the sponsor in 2312, and a typical extraction colony at that, in my opinion.

    789:

    Ah, Roman tourism! Am I the only one here who thinks "Don't eat the stew!" (cf SEE DELPHI AND DIE, by Lindsay Davis).

    790:

    Consider some singularity/cyberpunk then go back and reread Zelazny's "Lord of Light."

    791:

    Looking at Trump I wonder just how hard it would be to sell Chinese-style managed democracy as a solution.

    Sell to whom, exactly?

    792:

    "I suspect both were not terribly well-maintained, however."

    I suspect that is a euphemism for "fucked to the wide" :)

    Either that or you'd somehow ended up with Post Office diffs in them... 5.something:1 ratio... would also explain the low top speed. I had a Riley 1.5 diff - 3.73:1 - didn't seem to do anything to the fuel consumption, but it did (a) mean it was not revving the nuts off doing 80mph down the motorway and (b) compensated for the pre-existing speedo error so that that 80mph reading was actually correct.

    793:

    I found it odd that giants, in the Martin universe, ate lots of vegetables. Where are they growing in the lands beyond the Wall? And how to giants survive the longer winters?

    794:

    Looking at Trump I wonder just how hard it would be to sell Chinese-style managed democracy as a solution.

    Sell to whom, exactly?

    I was thinking US voters when I wrote that, but I suspect the UK would also welcome the opportunity to choose. Which way they'd go is anyone's guess.

    795:

    Festiva? Not in the UK... (searches) Ah, it was called a Mazda 121 here. Wasn't that common, but we did have our share of tinfoil cars. The Morris Minor, on the other hand, I can, erm, very confidently state that I had no quibbles at all with its crashworthiness. Though it's probably a good thing it was not a convertible in the detachable fabric roof sense.

    796:

    And were they jolly and green?

    797:

    Troutwaxer @790 said: reread Zelazny's "Lord of Light."

    Yes! I love Lord of Light. It came out before man landed on the Moon, yet it reads as if it was written tomorrow. Then there is his Isle of the Dead as well. I need to read those again.

    I have a wall filled with books like that. When I find myself getting hesitant, I look at those books to see that there are no limits, so why should I limit myself.

    798:

    I think what I'm saying is a bit more specific. Reread Neuromancer. Then reread Accelerando. Then, as soon as you close Accelerando, open Lord of Light and read it again.

    The book starts with a highly technical dude downloading someone's soul from the Cloud! How amazing is that for 1968!

    799:

    Yes! My point exactly.

    I have the books in a pile beside my chair, now. Thanks...

    I have so many books to reread that I need direction like that. As one of my characters would say, "I am a weapon. I need to be aimed." HA!

    800:

    Charlie may be interested in this:

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/16/barnes-noble-is-killing-itself/

    To my knowledge, Barnes and Noble is the last nationwide chain bookstore (unless you count Amazon's physical stores).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bookstore_chains#United_States

    The stores mentioned in the list above are confined to various regions of the US. There is no other national chain.

    801:

    Toyota is projecting no more combustion only cars by 2025. Other large car industry players are likely going to follow. (Oh, and solar panels of some kind of electrical production are only $100 or so at Harbor Freight. People who live in areas with not as reliable electricity as it could be seem to buy them. We're only one seagull flying into a transformer away from our power going out, too, judging by the past).

    802:

    Charging electric cars is not a problem if you have an outdoor outlet, the way we do. We also have very good relations with our neighbors, which means anyone who decides to mess with any car on the block will be met with the appropriate action which in my area of the country could range from video taken and uploaded to the local police, to other measures.

    803:

    I was at Barnes and Noble a couple weeks ago. They'd finally gotten Delirium Brief unpacked and out on the shelves... Sad.

    804:

    I think we may have mistaken cause and effect. Lord of Light (which I read back in, erm, the 80s...) was based on a trippy read of hinduism, with avatars and incarnating gods and such. I'd be a little surprised if the people who designed the original web didn't read it as well.

    Still, it is a fun book, once you figure out where the flashback begins and ends...

    805:

    Well, here in Finland in many places we have these outlets for car engine and indoor warmers. It's just a normal socket with a timer, usually settable for two hours, to get the car warm for the morning drive to work.

    However, these are not rated for recharging electric cars during the night. Especially when you have a bigger car park (our apartment house complex has one for about 50 cars) with the outlets, the cable coming in from the general network is usually not large enough to sustain the loading of electric cars.

    This is of course kind of a cost issue, but these need to be done in agreement with others in the housing company. Without going to the details of Finnish house and apartment ownership, to get people to pay for electric car charging stations even for a fraction of the parking spots can be pretty hard. Especially if you'd propose changing all of the outlets to be capable of recharging electric cars. I think it's the only way that this will go as we will see more and more electric cars, but not everybody even has a parking spot there (we have over 170 apartments) and park on the sides of nearby streets or in nearby parking areas.

    As for the ranges of the cars during winter, I've understood that it's less than in the summer, but often not limitingly so. At least in Norway people happily drive electrics - the Finnish car taxation is kind of harsh, so most new electrics are pretty expensive. For me, most of the trips I drive with a car are less than a hundred kilometres a day, so having a relatively short range wouldn't bother me that much. Especially if I had a parking spot with a recharging station at home.

    806:

    heE USA is NOT THE FUCKING PLANET! Just because your miltias, oops so-called "police" behave like that, it doesn't mean that eveyone else's do. It's another part of your gun problem, which I don't think will be solved until your 2nd Amendment is re-interpreted to its original meaning again. Grrrr ....

    807:

    I hate to disagree with you, especially after your insigtful comments on the decaying internal state of the USA - but: "Omphalos Hypothesis" - really? That's for brain-fucked bible-belters & NornIron Ultra-prods.

    How do you get around the 3° K background radiation, then?

    808:

    Let's not get into the "5 potions a day" territory here, shall we? Note to non-UK readers: "5 portions a day" is the supposed-recommended veg intake for "healthy living" - a portion being defined as 80g. Which means 400g of FRESH VEG per person per day. (!) As y'all know I grow my own veg - & if I eat that much veg a day, the London Sewage system wouldn't cope ... the vision of GRRM's Jolly Green Giants eating their eqivalent of "5 portions" unfortunately takes one into the realm of the really bad jokes from "the amazing Wild West Show" & not standing behind the Elephant, etc. 💩

    809:

    That reminds me of something U K le G wrote, about "not synching with Campbell" & then coming across Cordwainer Smith & realising that IT COULD BE DONE .......

    810:

    Whilst "Addressing the fertility gods by their most prominent attributes" IIRC

    811:

    One subtext in Libertarianism is a strong reaction against (other) anarchists, so that's not going to happy easily.

    Scratch a large minority/active majority of self-identified libertarians (in the US) and what you get is something very ugly.

    It starts out as "we should all stand on our own two feet", but this rapidly turns into "I've got mine, fuck you" when you start asking about whether or not they've benefited from under-the-table state subsidies or assistance (hint: favorable regulatory regimes, medicare, that sort of thing). It shades over rapidly into denying access to that same assistance to other people ... and as often as not, when you ask why they want to do that, they end up with some variation of "those people don't deserve the help that people like us should get"; viz. dog-whistle racism.

    Over the past five years a huge chunk of libertarians have openly defected to the neo-Nazi alt-right, because they're closer ideological fellow-travellers to the racists than they are to people who actually believe in free trade, minimal government regulation, etc.

    812:

    As long as people are being called "consumers" it won't be "liberating"

    In healthcare there is a lot of variation about what to call the people the care is for. You still get away with "patient" in most settings that look like a hospital, even a GP clinic. However "client" has become standard in community health and allied health settings, and in mental health it is has been "consumer" for as long as I can remember. In some settings, the preferred term is "participant" and I suspect this will become more widespread over time.

    813:

    One portion can be fruit juice. Wine is made from grape juice and cider from apple juice, so logically...

    Also chillies in sufficient quantities can be "a portion", and I have eaten 80g of pickled chillies as an "amuse buch" for a Greek meal.

    Last night's tea was a goulash, which included a 400g can of chopped tomatoes, a large onion, a red bell pepper and 120g of mushrooms (OK I froze half for another day but half is still close to 400g of veg by itself based on the ingredients).

    814:

    I theorise that:-Chocolate comes from Beans, Beans are vegetables therefore Chocolate is a vegetable and can form one of the 5 a day

    815:
    I theorise that:-Chocolate comes from Beans, Beans are vegetables therefore Chocolate is a vegetable and can form one of the 5 a day

    Close, but no cigar (which is—incidentally—itself made of leaves).

    Cocoa "beans" are the seeds of a fruit—whose flesh is also perfectly edible and sweet-tasting, by the way. It's the white stuff around the seeds inside the pod, as can be seen on the picture on that wikipedia page.

    However, as a fruit it can still form one of the five-a-day. So your actual point still stands.

    816:
    Half the weight problem is just sheer bloat, and the answer is Morris Minors. A Morris Minor is about 750kg and I used to get 40mpg out of mine, with its 1950s-design engine and carburettor and points ignition and all. And not driving it gently, but thrashing the shit out of it everywhere all the time. (People behind me used to see daylight under the inside front wheel on bends.) When I upgraded it to a 1293cc engine with twin carbs it still got 38mpg. Taking a Ford Fiesta as an approximate contemporary equivalent (mainly because it's the first thing that came into my head) and having a quick bing, it seems they weigh about 1500kg and get about 30mpg (as in what people actually get driving them, not the mendacious official consumption figures). If I'd spent the last 40 years trying to improve the performance of the internal combustion engine I'd be pretty bloody pissed off at seeing all my effort being wasted by making the engine effectively haul a whole extra car around everywhere.

    This! So much this!

    I don't know about the UK, but here in Germany we were promised the 3-litre-car roughly 20 years ago—meaning the average fuel consumption of an ordinary IC car would be below 3 l per 100 km. (I can't be bothered to convert this into miles per gallon. The onus should be on the minority who insists on using the imperial system to do the conversions to and from metric system each time, not the other way round.)

    I'm driving a Peugeot 107 that was manufactured in 2006. It weighs 865kg, has a 50kW engine and gives me a mileage between 4.5 and 5.7l/100km, depending on time of year and driving style (less in summer and with longer autobahn trips at 100km/h, more with winter tyres and heating on and shorter trips with more acceleration and braking; and as the car is getting older it's getting harder to keep its thirst down). I'm doing 7000-8000 km/year and usually need one fuel stop per month when the 35l-tank is almost empty.

    And I think that's still way too much. At some point in the next few years I will have to replace the car, and the next one will have to do considerably better. I'm not even demanding a 3-litre-car, but at least I want a car for which 4.5l/100km is the upper limit of consumption throughout the year, not the lower limit, and which should do considerably better than 4l/100km under ideal circumstances.

    My problem is: such a car is nowhere to be seen, even after 20 years. Instead there's an abundance of silly and unnecessary SUVs that drink fuel like there's no tomorrow. And whatever impetus there was in the car industry (probably not very much to begin with) for developing smaller, more fuel-efficient cars was soon sidetracked into hybrids and EVs, and general bloating.

    817:

    I don't know about the UK, but here in Germany we were promised the 3-litre-car roughly 20 years ago—meaning the average fuel consumption of an ordinary IC car would be below 3 l per 100 km.

    I don't know who promised you that but I'll have whatever they were smoking. IC engines are only capable of so much optimisation and most of the easy-to-pick fruit has already been plucked, up to and including kinetic-energy recovery and engine-off-at-lights. After that you're looking at expensive and complicated extras, special low-rolling-resistance tyres that behave abominably in anything other than perfect weather conditions etc.

    I could design a minimalist car, a single-seater[1] that makes a Smart car look like a Bentley that could achieve that sort of fuel consumption but it wouldn't be "ordinary". Anything capable of carrying four 90kg adults at reasonable open-road speeds with decent acceleration for stop-start driving is not going to manage 0.3l/km. Hypermiling competitors regularly achieve 3l/1000km, ten times your desired target but we're talking small-passenger skeletal frame vehicles with 50cc engines doing 30km/hr on a racetrack, not anything usable on a road.

    [1]Clive Sinclair beat me to it, Google for the Sinclair C5 sometime.

    818:

    Hybrids were a bet that batteries would not get good enough. Batteries are good enough, thus, technological dodo

    Nope. Not a Dodo, and not all about batteries.

    Hybrids are a hundred years old, and remain a solution to the problem of "how many gears can you put in the gearbox" - namely, that engines work most efficiently in a limited RPM range, and that a mechanical coupling between engine and road / water can be undesirable. Hybrids are also attractive in situations where you need electrical power, but lack infrastructure.

    https://oshkoshdefense.com/components/propulse/

    Adding a battery allows you to build a reserve of power that can be injected at key moments; see Formula 1 racing cars, or the Volvo hybrids that have a limited-range (~50km) motor/battery powering the back axle, and an efficient IC engine powering the front. The IC engine can be smaller, because the tasks that traditionally require a bigger engine (acceleration, low-end torque) can now be better met by a combination of the two motors.

    819:

    Greg Tingey @807 said: "Omphalos Hypothesis" - really?

    That is what is so subversive about the concept. The universe could have come into existence last Thursday, complete with everything in place, and no one could prove otherwise. When Gosse proposed it, everyone was outraged, and people have continued to be outraged for close to 150 years now. HA!

    Wiki - Russell's teapot

    He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.

    • I have people finding Russell's teapot in orbit between Earth and Mars.

    • There are space probes that are launched to Mars and "mysteriously" fail because they collide with the teapot.

    Track down Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett to see examples of the Omphalos hypothesis in novels. Also the story "Missile Gap" by Charles Stross, where whole copy worlds come into existence on the surface of an Alderson disk.

    The concept is a gift that keeps on giving. HA!

    820:

    Um, yeah.

    I've got a little physics question. A couple actually, maybe a few: how does gravity work on a flat Earth? Specifically, how thick does the flat Earth have to be so that there's a minimum of 1 G on the top surface? More particularly, what shape does the Earth have to be beneath that flat surface so that there's 1 G everywhere on that flat surface? Oh, and finally, if it was possible to make any of these shapes, would they be inherently stable if made out of Earthly stuff, or do they need some magical infrastructure to keep from deforming back into a sphere?

    821:

    Zelazny once said that he deliberately wrote the book to straddle the border between science-fiction and fantasy, both because he wanted to see how it worked, and he wanted to see whether he could do it. I think the story works on both levels; the characters who were born on "vanished Urath" all have a level of technical sophistication, while the people around them see them in very mythical terms, and the end result is a blending of the scientific and the mythical as the story gets retold through the ages.

    There's no mistaking of cause and effect; I think both Accelerando and Neuromancer would have been written without Lord of Light... what I recommended to allynh is more an exercise in how something written in 1968 ties into (and holds up to) two classics written 20 and 30 years later.

    It's not remotely hard to imagine an Indian colonizing expedition leaving the world of Neuromancer or Acellerando and settling a post-singularity planet where things have broken down, with the result, after a thousand years of "taming" that world being Lord of Light and the whole thing being expressed in some weird combination of mythological and scientific memory. Gibson was clearly headed that way at the end of Neuromancer.)

    It doesn't hurt that Zelazny could fart a better story, in his sleep, than some of the pros I'm reading these days - present company not included, of course - I suspect they'll be teaching him in literature courses a hundred years from now.

    I don't think Zelazny's reading of Hinduism was particularly "trippy," though the books were marketed that way - remember those awesome covers from the seventies!

    822:

    (I can't be bothered to convert this into miles per gallon. The onus should be on the minority who insists on using the imperial system to do the conversions to and from metric system each time, not the other way round.) just for once, I disagree ... Because it isn't a simple factor, the actual units are completely different, so you have to do each calculation individually.

    The mpg units convert very nicely to litres per km: (8/5)/(4.45) = 7.12 But then you have to invert it 0.1404 litres per km & multiply km by 100. 14.04 - really? Let's try 30 mpg ...213.6 invert ....0.00468 .... times 100 0.468 err, ummm.

    Strictly: mpg = distance / volume = L/L^3 -> L^(-2) but litres per 100 km = L^3/L*f = L^2/f

    Why the European countries decided to go for "Amount of fuel for fixed distance" - rather than "fuel consumption rate" I know not, but it's a pain.

    823:

    Strata - yes - one of the very few Pterry novels I didn't like. "Dark Side of the Sun", strictly, isn't Omphalos.

    Also ... If Omphalos true THEN Science doesn't work BUT Science does work THEREFORE Omphalos false

    824:

    I forgot the term, but there's a whole notion of explaining magic as science, and I'd say Lord of Light falls squarely into it. IIRC, there's also a bit of whitewashing, in that the colonists aren't really from the Indian subcontinent, they just spontaneously develop psychic talents that mimic those of a superficial read of Indian deities, used technology to amplify them, and controlled a technological reincarnation process to become the divine rulers of the colony world.

    If you're looking for the artistic predecessors of books like this, I'd point straight at the work of Jack Kirby, who hit his creative peak in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, considering how many billions Kirby's oeuvre has earned for Marvel and Disney so far and how ubiquitous his ideas are (Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America 2.0, etc), I'd say Kirby is by far the greater artist, although I suspect that "the Academy" will cringe at teaching his creative output as the great literature of the 20th Century.

    Yes, I saw Black Panther last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The Panther was a Kirby creation too. You could see this character as a way for white people to shamelessly exploit the black power movement, since the comic showed up the same year the Black Panther Party formed. On the other hand, you've got to give these white guys (Kirby and Stan Lee) credit for recognizing the power of the dream of an unconquered African El Dorado and running with it for decades. That's better than most SFF literature has done.

    825:

    I used to joke that there were two kinds of Libertarians; those that don't understand that Ayn Rand was writing fiction, and those that don't understand that Heinlein was writing fiction. Maybe I should work in something about Libertarians who don't get it when Heinlein writes satire... SIGHS The big weakness of Libertarian thought is that they don't prescribe anything but the most primitive means of dealing with bad actors, and I'm beginning to think that this is deliberate.

    Nonetheless, I do think that some of those who believe liberty is the most important thing our politics can preserve could be peeled off and added to the rolls of progressives.

    On another subject, did you see the reply by Cora Buhlert to your top post?

    826:

    At one point Kirby did illustrations and design for a Lord of Light movie, and you can find those on the web. They're awesome, BTW. But Zelazny had an interesting habit of grabbing non-European mythologies and turning them into stories; I'm not certain we need to invoke Jack Kirby as one of his inspirations - Zelazny clearly had the creative juice to make stuff up on his own.

    These days they'd probably call out Zelazny's best stuff as Cultural Appropriation, but they're still awesome stories, and at the time they seemed like an intelligent acknowledgement of the myths and symbolisms of other cultures.

    827:

    Heteromeles @820 said: I've got a little physics question.

    Of course you do. HA!

    • The Okie cities in Cities in Flight had the spindizzy field for gravity, and to keep the actions of motion and inertia from impacting the city inside.

    I see a number of problems with the various classic flat worlds, but they are still fun stories to read. Each shows what to do and not do.

    • The Silmarillion before Middle Earth was turned into a sphere. -- The story is clearly that of an AI(Eru Iluvatar) creating subunits(Ainur) to build their flat world with "The Music of the Ainur".

    • Ringworld -- Started out well then got a bit creaky near the end

    • Halo -- Smaller Ringworld variant, same problems

    • Discworld(Strata was the concept seed for the series) -- Disc on the back of elephants, standing on the back of a turtle

    • Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy -- The Magrathea knew what they were doing

    • Missile Gap -- Alderson disk, three of them

    There was also one short story? that played with the Discworld concept by having the world on the back of an actual space turtle's shell, gravity following the shape of the shell. I can't remember the title.

    There is another story that I can't remember the title where they used the Egyptian model of the world, where the world was flat and the Sun passed through a tunnel under the world during the night -- fun concept.

    I've not been able to find the graphic novel again, but there was one showing all of the great worlds like Discworld with a flat world on the back of many different space animals. I look at those as the result of a Singularity, and various AI have created safe worlds to protect a sample of baseline humans so that their DNA is not lost. They keep them in space away from other AI, and keep them low tech so that another Singularity does not kick off.

    The various flat worlds I'm planning for novels will have a field that keeps the world stable, avoiding the obvious problems above. Cities in Flight is still the best model.

    828:

    Greg Tingey @823 said: THEREFORE Omphalos false

    Oh, come on, Greg, lighten up. These are fun stories. You have to give that Sense of Wonder as much chance as possible to sink in. Don't be a grumpy Gus. HA!

    BTW, all of the worlds in The Dark Side of the Sun were built using the Strata machines by the Jokers. Each world was created from scratch and populated with everything including the fifty-two different sentient species. They all lived under the illusion that they "evolved" in the past five million years, when in reality they were recent creations like in Strata.

    The Jokers simply wanted someone to talk to.

    829:

    Thinking about it (probably wrongly), the underside of a circular flat Earth would have to be some sort of giant bowl, with the rim height close to the radius of a spherical Earth, while the center would be fairly thin. The reason is that the mass from the sides will pull on the center and vice versa, so with thin center, all the pulls from the edge might cancel out, leaving only a pull down on the flat part of the Earth.

    I have no idea how to calculate this, though, but you can conceptually do it by dividing the underside into a bunch of rings of different diameters, each of which have gravity going towards the ring, and set them up so that most of the pull cancels out, leaving only the vertical pull down on the surface (in other words, it's a fairly interesting calculus problem, not that I've done much calculus in the last few decades).

    However, there is a cool part: if this mathematical model works (ha!) Flat Earth's Underbelly is a giant bowl with gravity varying across the surface, lowest in the middle, highest somewhere else (the rim?). If it spins to hold air in (and probably even if it doesn't), that would be a neater place to write about than that stupid tabletop that everyone else pays attention to. Kind of like Pellucidar, but weirder.

    So screw the flat earth. Fantasize about Earth's Underbelly.

    830:

    Yup. I've used that exact argument to claim Buckfast is, essentially, fruit salad. It even has [i]extra vitamins[/i]!

    831:

    Heteromeles @829 said: So screw the flat earth. Fantasize about Earth's Underbelly.

    You are over thinking this. HA!

    A flat earth without a field of some kind to stabilize local gravity and inertia would fail.

    • A flat earth would be unstable. Put the slightest spin on the disk and all the atmosphere, water, soil would go spinning to the edge.

    • Put the slightest tumble on the disk, and the same problem occurs.

    The different classic stories are also demonstrating two dimensional thinking. They forget that gravity is pulling across the surface as well as down.

    • If you have a flat earth, no spin, no tumble, gravity would pull all of the atmosphere, water, soil, into the center of the disk. There would be a hemisphere of wet soggy mess sitting in the center of the disk, not a nice surface to live on.

    • Look at Ringworld. The ring is a million miles wide, with the atmosphere supposedly held in by the walls at the edge of the ring. The problem is, a million miles of atmosphere would not lie flat against the ring. The gravity would pull all of the atmosphere into the middle of the flat ring. The water and soil would also pull together making a wet soggy mess in the middle of the flat ring.

    This video shows what I'm talking about.

    Is Earth Actually Flat?

    You also mentioned "Pellucidar". I love that story, and all of the variations. As long as you have a field to stabilize local gravity and inertia against the inner shell, it works just fine.

    There are a number of RPG supplements supporting play in a Hollow Earth to give you an idea of what you can do.

    Wiki - Hollow Earth Expedition

    Plus, the next Iron Sky movie looks like it happens in the Hollow Earth.

    Wiki - Iron Sky: The Coming Race

    Iron Sky: The Coming Race Teaser TRAILER (2015) Nazis Dinosaurs Movie HD

    Remember: Any theory that you come up with has to match observed reality, so you have to explicitly state that there is a field that makes things stable. Then just have fun with the story.

    832:

    Old joke from Mississippi - A libertarian is a racist with a college degree.

    I think there's a lot of truth in that. And that it's coming out in the open at least.

    833:

    - If you have a flat earth, no spin, no tumble, gravity would pull all of the atmosphere, water, soil, into the center of the disk. There would be a hemisphere of wet soggy mess sitting in the center of the disk, not a nice surface to live on.

    Well, not if you had an infinite flat Earth... But yeah, with a disk of uniform thickness, this is what you'd get, and on planet scales you'd get soon a sphere, because no matter is strong enough to resist gravity when there's so much of it.

    However, I think, without checking, that you could probably have a thing with flat upper side and a lower side with a rim to get mostly uniform gravity field directly away from the upper side. The edges would be towards something else than the "down" of the flat side, just because the mass would be on one side. This can be calculated basically by integrating over the mass distribution, but it has been 20 years since I learned to do that by hand, badly, and I don't have any real math program here to do that. You would need some kind of unobtainium for that, because, again, gravity trumps the rigidity of matter on this scale. I'd probably ask Niven where the Ringworld engineers got theirs.

    834:

    On another subject, did you see the reply by Cora Buhlert to your top post?

    Yes, but I gave up reading a couple of paragraphs in, because it seemed to be turning into a personal attack.

    835:

    Note that the Alderson disks in "Missile Gap" are explicitly flagged as impossible within the rules of (known) physics — possibly indicating that MG takes place in an ancestor simulation.

    The disk, based on its dimensions and assuming it's solid and made out of rock, is roughly 10,000 solar masses. (It ought to collapse into a black hole very quickly — its outer rim is only about ten times the diameter of its Schwartzchild radius. Either something is stabilizing it, or it's as fakey as a very fake thing indeed.)

    836:

    > Look at Ringworld. The ring is a million miles wide, with the atmosphere supposedly held in by the walls at the edge of the ring. The problem is, a million miles of atmosphere would not lie flat against the ring. The gravity would pull all of the atmosphere into the middle of the flat ring.

    The ring is concave. It has to be, if the surface follows the equipotential of solar gravity+centrifugal force.

    837:

    Look at Ringworld. The ring is a million miles wide, with the atmosphere supposedly held in by the walls at the edge of the ring. The problem is, a million miles of atmosphere would not lie flat against the ring. The gravity would pull all of the atmosphere into the middle of the flat ring. The water and soil would also pull together making a wet soggy mess in the middle of the flat ring.

    Wrong.

    The ringworld is about ten metres thick (and made of an unobtanium: "scrith", near-infinite tensile strength, opaque to neutrinos(!)) so its actual mass for gravitational purposes is negligible.

    Added bonus fun stuff: those authors who've played with planets that are oblate spheroids (Niven, Clement ...) back before the IAU defined a planet as a body in solar orbit that is sufficiently massive that its gravity pulls it into a sphere.

    838:

    Hybrids were a bet that batteries would not get good enough. Batteries are good enough, thus, technological dodo

    Not entirely. AFAIK, no pure battery powered electric has the range to meet my travel needs & recharging the battery is still not as convenient as filling up at a gas station. It's not often, but there are times when I need to drive several thousand miles in a period of days (NC to Arizona & back).

    Electric cars are getting better, but there's still a niche for hybrids here in the states.

    839:

    and engine-off-at-lights

    One of which I recently drove as a rental and found extremely annoying. Also possibly dangerous if one is expecting the car to accelerate immediately when moving into traffic from a stop. Probably one would get used to it, but...

    840:

    The ringworld is about ten metres thick (and made of an unobtanium: "scrith", near-infinite tensile strength, opaque to neutrinos(!)) so its actual mass for gravitational purposes is negligible.

    And that story series also had stasis fields, which had no-fooling infinite mechanical strength of all sorts. IIRC, the fields would run on the outside of any conductor the generator thingy was attached to, so the Ringworld could have been made of dollar-store alumin[i]um foil.

    841:

    ...thinking of "kids who feel like Rita", this appeared on my twitter today:

    "I'm not sure why people are so surprised that the students are rising up - we've been feeding them a steady diet of dystopian literature showing teens leading the charge for years. We have told teen girls they are empowered. What, you thought it was fiction? It was preparation."

    http://twitter.com/JenAnsbach/status/965385962925813761

    842:

    [Stasis fields and] dollar-store aluminum foil

    P.S. and BTW, did anybody ever explore the engineering applications of such structures? I've always liked vacuum balloons (dirigibles!) made in orbit, but you could construct an aluminum foil building frame or bridge in space, stasisify it, and deorbit it. Or just make infinitely strong, no-maintenance beams and other structural components on the ground.

    843:

    Also an ignorance of Bayesian statistical theory, though I will agree that I have heard worse abused from the God Squad and extreme physicists. Provided that something is not absolutely impossible, you can make it as probably as you like by choosing your prior (i.e. assumptions) appropriately!

    844:

    I ought to sympathise with the l/100km idea because it is the same way up as the standard engineering convention of specific fuel consumption figures. Indeed, since we were comparing steam engines on the basis of pounds of coal per horsepower-hour before cars existed, I'm not sure why we suddenly decided to turn it the other way up for cars.

    But I can't deny that it is bloody confusing for everyday use when mpg is what you've been used to for yonks.

    It has to be said that imperial units are a fucking awful dog's breakfast of a mess and I do prefer to stick to SI units because you don't get tied in endless knots doing calculations on them. But calculations on fuel consumption that involve different energy sources end up a knotty mess anyway, what with different fuels having different densities, different chemical compositions, different heat values, how do you measure the heat value anyway, what seam of what mine did the coal come from, etc. etc. so it doesn't make much difference in that case. And if you're just comparing the same fuel of course it doesn't matter what units you use as long as they're all the same.

    FWIW I make the fag-packet value of 3l/100km to be 90mpg ish.

    845:

    I find myself thinking of "known" engineering problems where the principal difficulty is not having strong enough materials. Space elevators are perhaps kind of obvious, but the stasis-field idea suggests that the structures ought to be just as good at withstanding extreme temperatures as extreme mechanical stress, and therefore good for making Jupiter explorers, stellar submarines and the like.

    846:

    did anybody ever explore the engineering applications of such structures?

    There are also amusing military applications, especially if the generator is cheap to the point of disposability. Depending on the exact fine print one amusing use would be to enclose a chunk of radioactive material in one then wait. At some point give it to someone you don't like then leave the scene with great speed. Inside will be a contained nuclear explosion. Well, when you hand it over the explosion is inside...

    If you were unpleasantly inclined, a thin bit of wire stretched between two solid objects then add a stasis field would make the mythical cutting-heads-off-motorcycles a real thing. Cutting the bottom off trucks or even ships would also work, given sufficiently strong anchors. At least until someone realises that we have a ready supply of large conductive containers just waiting to have stasis fields added. Imagine an oil tanker make of tinfoil (not much of a stretch, really).

    Likewise any random numpty could make their own border wall very easily, should there be some reason to want to keep two regions isolated. The problem would be keeping the wall in place, but I suspect a row of buckets and some rain would work.

    847:

    Charlie @835 and @837,

    Your Alderson disks are fine. They are a perfect example of some field keeping things in balance. The fact that each copy world is recreated once the others have been tested to destruction shows there is complete control of the surface.

    • Missile Gap is one of the "touch stones" that I use to check myself to make sure I've modeled things right.

    I have great fun gaming the disks and seeing how one group or another would win the apparent contest. Obviously each disk is a petrie dish. One with the Bugs aware and fighting for control. One where Humans are aware and fighting for control. And the third as both unaware of the facts to see what happens. Your story simply featured the disk where the Bugs were aware and killing the Humans. We are never shown events on the other two disks. The Bug agent's thoughts clearly demonstrate your usual unreliable narrator.

    BTW, It is very strange that two people have quoted what I said, and yet missed the clear statement that The gravity would pull all of the atmosphere into the middle of the flat ring.

    The gravity of the atmosphere and water and dirt collapses into itself in a rounded strip along the center of the flat surface, the "ring" stays the same.

    Gravity is in all directions, not just down.

    848:

    imperial units are a fucking awful dog's breakfast of a mess

    What's wrong with furlongs per fortnight (speed) and barleycorns per cubic barleycorn (density) as units of measure? There such a world of fun when some nitwit says "what's that in real units", you can grab wikipedia or a google search and just say "what's 1200 mAh in imperial" and reply "oh, sorry, it's 5567/16th gross coulombs".

    I still think the empire should change their units so they always match the emperor. That seems like one of the major benefits to me, making the whole world jump when you go from an EU size 48 foot being "one foot" to a size 32 being "one foot".

    849:

    If you were unpleasantly inclined, a thin bit of wire stretched between two solid objects then add a stasis field would make the mythical cutting-heads-off-motorcycles a real thing.

    That would also come in very handy to protect low bridges from lorries driving into them.

    850:

    It has to be said that imperial units are a fucking awful dog's breakfast of a mess and I do prefer to stick to SI units because you don't get tied in endless knots doing calculations on them.

    To add to the confusion, a lot of American sources say they are using Imperial units, when they are actually using American units. The US gallon, for example, is about 4/5 of an Imperial gallon.

    851:

    If you were unpleasantly inclined, a thin bit of wire stretched between two solid objects then add a stasis field would make the mythical cutting-heads-off-motorcycles a real thing.

    Larry Niven’s variable swords worked like that, IIRC.

    852:

    Pigeon @845 said: therefore good for making Jupiter explorers, stellar submarines and the like.

    Wiki - Not Final!

    Asimov came up the force-field for space ship hulls. It has to flicker at high speeds to work. He uses it as irony in this story, and as a standard in other stories. One of the Lucky Starr episodes has the table top in a cafe use the force-field as a surface. Turn it off, then on, and the surface is clean.

    853:

    When I got my hybrid, I had some close calls in parking lots at first. It uses the electric motors for backing out, and pedestrians can't hear it.

    854:

    I drove a C5 once. Shit it certainly was, but most of the shitness was because it was crippled from the word go by conforming to the regulations which dictate that anything which passes legally as a "bicycle" is forced to be shit (cf. EC, above). If we bin that constraint on the grounds that we'll never do any good if we don't, you can make something half-decent out of it.

    It mainly needs the following:

    • A ROOF. Building a fair-weather-only vehicle for use in Britain is pretty bloody silly really.
    • A heater, see above. Easy if you have an IC engine.
    • A Volvo seat. I admit I didn't sit in its real seat for long enough to assess its comfort over long periods, but as a general principle anything that doesn't have a Volvo seat is better off for the fitting of one.
    • Proper suspension. Trivial these days because you can get mass-produced bicycle suspension parts which are nice and compact and handle an appropriate magnitude of force.
    • Proper tyres. The low-rolling-resistance tyres it did have had no grip even when it wasn't raining.

    The last two items are annoyingly dissipative, but then if you don't shoot yourself in the foot by using a kitten-power motor it hardly matters, and having a roof ought to massively improve the aerodynamics so you still win with the reduced drag.

    Mass-produced vehicles that achieve 90mpg exist in large numbers, and they achieve it despite having a much larger frontal area than a C5 and fuck-awful aerodynamics. Acceleration is entirely adequate; top speed a bit lacking, but that's principally an aerodynamics problem, so see above re. roof. So what you do is you put a Honda CG125 power train in enhanced-C5-type bodywork and you end up with something that manages a fair bit better than 90mpg and is just fine for the single-person journeys that comprise the great majority of car use. Or you could add a second seat in line behind the driver without changing very much, and use it either for a passenger or for extra luggage space.

    Certainly most people would need something bigger as well for ferrying kids etc. but they very often do these days in any case.

    855:

    ...Is this another US/UK thing? ALL UK petrol stations are self-service; if you're not up to filling your own tank you have to take someone else along to do it for you.

    Most "petrol stations" in the U.S. are self-service as well, although I believe New Jersey only recently legalized them. Up until a few months ago it was against the law to pump your own "petrol" there. (If I have the wrong state, I apologize.)

    But, even where self-service is the norm, you can get assistance if you are not able to pump it yourself. If you have a "handicap" tag or sticker, there's usually an attendant who will do it for you.

    856:

    I still think the empire should change their units so they always match the emperor. That seems like one of the major benefits to me, making the whole world jump when you go from an EU size 48 foot being "one foot" to a size 32 being "one foot".

    You got that backwards. It used to be normal for every municipality (principality, free town, whatever) to have their own systems of units. Designate this rock as the official pound, this shoe as the official foot, and so on--where units were comparable. Was cloth, perchance, measured by the pound, bolt, or wagonload, for purposes of taxing it? Might that depend on whether the cloth was locally made or imported silk? It made trade a nightmare, because tariffs were always calculated in local units. I'm also quite sure that this was intentional, both to keep local norms under local control and to skim some from the road.

    Where you got it backward is that empires are all about controlling trade, so standardizing measurements across the empire is very much an imperial function. It's an extremely useful simplification (imperial engineers can work on imperial structures anywhere, trade is governed by imperial, not local, taxes, and so on), and the insidious part is that it makes it harder for local cultures to form and easier for foreigners to fit in, by enforcing norms across the empire.

    So while in a non-imperial situation, I'd expect measurements to switch with each headman*, I wouldn't expect them to switch with each emperor.

    *Ran across a story that some boats in Oceania were built to human measure (planks the thickness of a thumb, boats the width of the length of a leg, or whatever). When building a boat, the boat builder would designate someone as the ruler whose body measurements were what the boat would be built to--and that person wasn't the boatbuilder, because he was the one taking the measurements to build the boat.

    857:

    People run out of fuel even in IC cars - apparently it's one of the most common reasons for calling a breakdown service. At least with an IC car you can just tip a spare can of fuel in and off you go again; you can even carry your own spare can. If you have to get a tow instead it would be a right arseache.

    It's not that hard to figure out how many miles you can get to the tankful. Back when I drove vehicles with carburetors, my goal was to have it use the final usable drop as I approached the pump. I could coast the last 20 feet or so.

    I understand that's not such a good thing to do with fuel injected engines, but I still regularly run it down to exactly the usable capacity of the tank. It's a 12 gallon tank, I don't want to bother having to fill it up if it's only going to take 11 gallons.

    858:

    Can anyone think of an emerging technology which will actually feel liberating to the consumer?

    CNC routers have made a difference in manufacturing guitars. You can get good, playable instruments for a whole lot less than they once were.

    Computers are revolutionizing making & sharing music. You no longer need a record deal to get your music out there.

    859:

    Nope, still illegal here in NI

    860:

    Half the weight problem is just sheer bloat, and the answer is Morris Minors.

    A Morris Minor is about 750kg and I used to get 40mpg out of mine, with its 1950s-design engine and carburettor and points ignition and all. And not driving it gently, but thrashing the shit out of it everywhere all the time. (People behind me used to see daylight under the inside front wheel on bends.) When I upgraded it to a 1293cc engine with twin carbs it still got 38mpg.

    And no one in the U.S. (at least where I live in the south) had ever heard of "English Whitworth"; hell most of us were still trying to figure out just what this metric crap was supposed to mean. Nobody could work on them, not even the dealers.

    The MGB, on the other hand, was built with the U.S. export market in mind from the very beginning. Everything on it is SAE standard.

    A Morris Minor - especially one in running condition - is a rare, exotic beast hereabouts, while there's hardly a day goes by I don't see at least one MGB out on the streets.

    861:

    Sticking with the Morris Minor theme, doing that was very easy in a Morris Minor, because you could hear the electric fuel pump clicking faster and faster as it struggled to suck up the last drops of petrol. The rate of clicking gave you a remarkably good idea of exactly how much of a spoonful you had left.

    862:

    I don't know about the UK, but here in Germany we were promised the 3-litre-car roughly 20 years ago—meaning the average fuel consumption of an ordinary IC car would be below 3 l per 100 km. (I can't be bothered to convert this into miles per gallon. The onus should be on the minority who insists on using the imperial system to do the conversions to and from metric system each time, not the other way round.)

    If I did the math correctly it works out to about 78.4 miles/gallon using U.S. measure.

    3L = 0.79251615707445 Gal

    100 km = 62.137119223733 Mi

    Divide miles by gallons

    78.404861111110139916400278616937 mpg

    863:

    So while in a non-imperial situation, I'd expect measurements to switch with each headman*, I wouldn't expect them to switch with each emperor.

    My suggestion was not intended to make the empire function better.

    Building boats and whatnot to fit the user is a very old technique and one that has become increasingly rare today. Mass manufacture really needs to get properly organised and develop a standard consumer.

    QI had an amusing anecdote a while ago about military aircraft - back WWII-ish I'm guessing someone measured 10-ish things about a few thousand pilots and came up with an "average seat"... which did not fit a single person. So they went back to adjustable ones.

    864:

    Computers are revolutionizing making & sharing music. You no longer need a record deal to get your music out there.

    There have been a few things that have made that happen, some of which are quite recent.

    High quality recording is now cheap - add a USB microphone to your laptop (or a USB extension cord and a desktop - you can't have fan noise), whack egg cartons on the walls of your bedroom and drape flanellette sheets over them... bingo, recording studio that would make a 1980's music star cry.

    Install Audacity or something on your computer (free software!) and not only can you record at whatever bitrate you want (24 bit, 192kHz even), you can store and mix the result on your $500 laptop.

    Use your phone to record a video, optionally adding stabilising bits to the phone and some LED light banks to get better looking video. There is a functon of "me playing the {instrument} in my bedroom" online, some of it scarily good.

    Then use your Facebook, Youtube and other social media channels to share your music with everyone. If you're lucky you'll find enough fans to run a crowdfunding campaign (which you will do as much for publicity as cash), and end up being able to make a living at it. A precarious living... just like 30%-70% of the rest of the workforce.

    But the startup costs are tiny compared to even 10 years ago.

    865:

    Building boats and whatnot to fit the user is a very old technique and one that has become increasingly rare today. Mass manufacture really needs to get properly organised and develop a standard consumer.

    You missed a little: Oceanic boats were often clan property and required multiple people to sail. The point of using one person to measure was to standardize the measurements. It's an interesting update on the rule of thumb: use one thumb for all critical measurements.

    866:

    My favorite mixed unit is the barn-megaparsec (3.086 cubic cm).

    867:

    Those are almost the ideal Imperial unit - they do one specific thing very, very well and everything else horribly. It reminds me of the acre-foot in that sense (great for irrigation, not great for any other bulk fluid measurement and absolutely horrible for, say, cooking).

    https://barnmegaparsec.blogspot.com.au/p/what-is-barn-megaparsec.html

    868:

    Oceanic boats were often clan property and required multiple people to sail. The point of using one person to measure was to standardize the measurements.

    The first time you said that I thought you meant Oceania-the-geographic-region, and now I'm not so sure.

    Building that way would make choosing the "standard person" a very skilled task indeed. You really need the boat to be wide enough that the two widest people can get past each other, for example. Ideally without one lying in the bilge while the other crawls across the top of them.

    But in Oceania, I don't know of any way that one person could own something as expensive as a boat as personal property. Not the bits I know anything about. Even today there are cultural disagreements about where the line between group and personal property lie (just like other cultures, as we see with stuff like tax evasion).

    869:

    Re: flat earth gravity

    How about a carpet of 'molecular black holes' that create/sustain enough gravity to allow for building a flat (or any shape) planet. With this approach, gravity could also be customized locally by adjusting the rate/concentration of such ultra small black holes. Potential problem is what raw material do you switch to when you run out of electrons.

    Got this idea after reading: 'SLAC x-ray-laser-beam-creates-molecular-black-hole'.

    Hey, why not - no less believable than FTL.

    870:

    Re: 'Provided that something is not absolutely impossible, you can make it as probably as you like by choosing your prior (i.e. assumptions) appropriately!'

    Interesting. Haven't read all of the posts that led to your comment above. Given the glut of dystopic SF, would enjoy an SF story that started with a happy conclusion (world) and then worked backward to explain how this was achieved. The ending could still be a surprise: 'First, we set our AIs to watch what the bankers were doing. Why? Because we needed to identify the best way of creating new capital out of nothing. Speculation came out best because all returns could be positive over a long enough time span. And, because speculation calls for 'capital' to be constantly moving, its measurement was completely idiosyncratic even though (if needed) we could 'measure' its results at certain points. Yes, that's when Schrodinger Capitalism was born.'

    871:

    I was. What's the proper adjective for Oceania. The only two reasons I'm not using a more specific adjective is that I can't remember if the anecdote was Micronesian or Polynesia, and it turns out those are kind of white colonizer categories anyway (this isn't mere political correctness: the standard regions of Melanesia and Micronesia contain a bunch of islands colonized by Polynesian "outliers," and Micronesia even has a "Melanesian" outlier). People with boats travel, after all.

    In any case, building a boat out of atoll woods is one of those deceptively tricky tasks that doesn't get nearly as much admiration as it should. At least in my opinion.

    872:

    I think the "why not" involves Hawking Radiation, which I won't claim to understand. However, to cite the relevant Wikipedia article at a (non)random point, "So, for instance, a 1-second-life black hole has a mass of 2.28×10^5 kg, equivalent to an energy of 2.05×10^22 J that could be released by 5×10^6 megatons of TNT. The initial power is 6.84×10^21 W"

    A large mass of tiny black holes would certainly be a hot attraction. From what little I understood in that entry, the best we could hope for would be that all the holes swiftly coalesce into something a bit more stable, like a Earth-mass black hole.

    But you're right, it works better than FTL.

    873:

    Cool, now I'm sure :)

    building a boat out of atoll woods is one of those deceptively tricky tasks that doesn't get nearly as much admiration as it should.

    OMG yes. I can understand the Maori going "woohoo, trees!" when they got there. I'm used to atoll dwellers getting bigger boats via trade because they just don't have the trees, full stop. But even building little ones is an amazing thing to watch.

    There's also some long-lasting rivalry based on who had what trees available IIRC, I remember someone speaking at some length on the topic. Which is part of the larger atoll-vs-island differences, when those that have rock pocking out of the water get soil, trees and usually weather as a result, making their lives/food supply much more stable.

    I know just enough to have it be one more thing that world-builders often don't understand. Like atoll dwellers knowing way more about modern sewage than just about any other primitive people because that's where their soil comes from (I'd put scare quote there but so many scare quotes). Albeit Oceania is pretty recently colonised (we think).

    Actually, you know the problem archaeologists have with Australian history being underwater? I wonder what Oceania was like, and I'm sure someone is thinking about homo floresiensis being the dwarf remnants of non-ocean-going Oceania -dwellers who were severely fscked over by the pre-15kYA increase in sea levels.

    874:

    Mass manufacture really needs to get properly organised and develop a standard consumer. Unfortunately ... this has just been done. The ghastly (from the p.o.v. of the traveller) class 700 units on Thameslink. Newspaper Article Unfortunately, the comments are full of ignoran xenophobes whining about eviul German trains - because Metro-Cammell went bust during the great railway non-ordering 1992-5 otherwise known as privatisation. Also DfT & "Southern/Thameslink" are merrily playing pass-the-parcel, blaming each other .... You really couldn't make this shit up. It's a shame, because APART FROM the shit seating, they are superb trains. Spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar ....

    875:

    Not just AUS history either ... A huge part of the "S China Sea" is quite shallow & didn't drown until about the same time as DOggerland vanished - oe maybe even more recently. There's almost-certainly a lot of Archeology down there.

    Reminds me of the tantalising hints that H.sapiens (etc) discovered agriculture just before the last Ice Age arrived, only to be screwed-over by climate change. Now THERE is a plot-setting for a novel, if ever there was one!

    876:

    How about a carpet of 'molecular black holes' that create/sustain enough gravity to allow for building a flat (or any shape) planet.

    Two words: Hawking radiation.

    It's all fun and games until the last tenth of a second before they evaporate, at which point the temperature of the ground beneath your feet approximates the temperature inside a pair instability supernova during implosion.

    877:

    One"emerging technology" which I am most interested in as a game changer is the extension of "3-d" printing technology to allow printing of a wider range of materials. For example replace the "print head" that extrudes plastics in current 3D printers with a range of interchangeable "print heads" able to 3D print different materials (including metals - something like a MIG welder head). Starts to become which I think of as a fabber.

    From a consumer perspective it means being able to buy "one-off" items (and manufacture very low production runs or customisations) cost effectively so long as the pattern exists.

    I expect most such 3D printing devices - especially something big enough to be able to print a car/house (or at least a substantial part of one) to not be a consumer item - due to size/cost.

    However the smaller printers - perhaps with a more limited range of print materials could even be a consumer item themselves like the 3D printers are starting to become for home/hobby use. Already, the plastic items produced can be used to print items what can be used as "casting patterns" which is becomming a cost effective approach for producing some one-off items (eg engine parts) for vehicle restoration.

    878:

    The gravity would pull all of the atmosphere into the middle of the flat ring. The gravity of the atmosphere and water and dirt collapses into itself in a rounded strip along the center of the flat surface, the "ring" stays the same.

    Ah, right.

    That's a good point. However, ISTR Niven rigged the game; the surface of the ringworld is about ten metres thick, so although it's got an enormous cross-sectional width (let's approximate it to a million kilometers) it's thinly spread out around the inner surface of the ring.

    I'm guessing if the ring's inner surface under the rock and dirt is ridges with a honeycomb of baffles to prevent creep, that'd help. I note that Niven explicitly (in "The Ringworld Engineers") addressed the issue of soil erosion into the shallow oceans with a recycling mechanism; maybe something similar on a larger scale is happening with the underlying rock.

    As for the atmosphere ... it's at roughly 300 kelvin due to constant insolation. There's going to be a lot of turbulence and convection going on, and even on a local scale that's probably sufficient to keep mixing it up. Possibly there are engineered-in safeguards, too, such as large plantations of sunflowers (to heat up the air overhead, setting up convection cycles and shoving cooler, denser air back to where it's wanted). (Air isn't dense, and while the mass of a million kilometer column of air at STP is significant, its gravitational potential energy is probably far less than the thermal energy it's absorbing from the sun.

    879:

    Actually, rather more of that was because Sinclair was great on innovation and crap on engineering, and the underlying technologies (battery and motor) weren't up to the job. They are now, and you can buy a velomobile that meets your requirements for places with hills of up to 15%, except for heating - but the UK almost never gets really cold and you can just wear extra clothing.

    I can't get a motor for my recumbent trike that meets my requirements, because I want something that will get me up the hills I can't pedal up - which means ones with slopes in the 20-25% range. I could, if the DfT would put the whole of the EU regulation into law, but it won't.

    880:

    Yes. Social phenomena are a bit more complicated than statistics, but I agree. I have done that exercise a few times, but am a ghastly wordsmith and worse politician, so it never got further than thought exercises.

    881:

    Replying here because you started it.

    Do German filling stations sell fuel in distance or volume? Hint, I know the answer is volume.

    The nonsense of stating "fuel economy" as "volume per unit distance" rather than "distance per unit volume" didn't appear anywhere until the then EEC started asking manufacturers for comparative "fuel economy test" figures.

    882:

    IIRC Terminal, from Blake's 7 Episodes 3:13 (Terminal) and 4:01 (Rescue)?

    883:

    The thing about the units of fuel efficiency of vehicles that annoys me the most is that the units haven't been simplified enough. Whether you have litres per 100 kilometers or miles per gallon you have one unit which is volume and one which is distance.

    Volume is just distance to the third, so you can simplify this by making the unit an area unit. It's easier with litres per 100 kilometers, because then you have a simple area unit. Doing the calculations, it is probably the easiest to use square micrometers here - then 4 litres per 100 kilometers will be 40 000 square micrometers.

    Logic: 1 l / (100 km) = 10^-3 m^3 / (10^2 * 10^3 m) = (10^-3 / 10^5) m^2 = 10^-8 m^2 = 10 000 µm^2

    Somebody can do this for the mpg units, too.

    (Not completely serious here.)

    884:

    Unit mass fuel per work done makes good sense as a measure of efficiency for a stationary engine since they're normally constant reciprocating speed units. It makes less sense for any form of mobile engine, even a steam engine, since their reciprocating speed is a variable, and their fuel burnt is partly a factor of reciprocating speed selected rather than just time.

    For example, a Gresley A4 would perform 252 revolutions per mile, but could run at anything from 4mph up to 90mph (normal service) and Mallard once ran at 124mph.

    885:

    A Volvo seat. I admit I didn't sit in its real seat for long enough to assess its comfort over long periods, but as a general principle anything that doesn't have a Volvo seat is better off for the fitting of one. Serisly?

    I get wriggles after 15 mins or so in an Ovlov, but can drive most FWD Citroens or VW period Skodas for 8 hours (including comfort and lunch breaks) and still feel fresh enough to take a shower and go out for dinner with friends.

    886:

    How about a "Morris Minor 2-seater", er MG Midget? I know they were exported to the Yousay in sufficient numbers that it was felt worthwhile to change the engine, bumpers and ride height to meet 1974 Federal regulations.

    887:

    Volvo are pretty ordinary seating-wise.

    Mercedes were making a fair fist of it (at least up until my last one, which was a W203 series C-Class Coupé - I haven’t tried anything more recent), the Recaros which you used to get in sporty Vauxhall Cavaliers were pretty fair, but my personal ne plus ultra of automotive seat design is (and for anything remotely affordable I suspect will always remain) pre-GM Saab...

    888:

    At the luxury end of the scale, perhaps. But Volvo fit good seats as standard, not premium.

    If you drive a Volvo then get into a Ford, or Nissan, or Vauxhall, you find yourself wondering how you’re going to adjust the seat pan angle individually from height, etc, etc.

    In the 90s I spent a lot of time driving the M6 in a succession of hire cars (the Army found that it was cheaper than a Rail Warrant + taxi fare, or a Landrover) and discovered the delights of cheap car seats...

    889:

    My current car (Volvo V40) has this, and it’s great. It “just works” - the second I dip the clutch (to get into gear before releasing the handbrake to pull away), the engine starts. Every time.

    890:

    The Panther was a Kirby creation too. You could see this character as a way for white people to shamelessly exploit the black power movement, since the comic showed up the same year the Black Panther Party formed.

    The Black Panther Party named themselves after the Jack Kirby character. Comic out in July of '66, party formed in October.

    There was a brief period where Marvel was thinking about re-naming the Black Panther as the Black Leopard to distance themselves from the Panthers. They got over that idea.

    891:

    Volume is just distance to the third, so you can simplify this by making the unit an area unit.

    The concept of fuel consumption measurements is based on the cross-sectional area of a trough filled with fuel that is sucked up into the vehicle's engine as it drives along with no spillage or wastage.

    892:

    Most of our buses here in Edinburgh now have a hybrid kinetic-energy recovery system that means they pull away from stops and lights on electric drive with the diesel engine off and it only starts a few seconds later. This gets over any starting lag.

    We've got a small number of full-sized electric-only buses being trialled on a city centre route, I should really track one down and see what it's like to ride.

    https://lothianbuses.co.uk/news/article/Lothian-introduce-the-first-all-electric-buses-to-Edinburgh

    893:

    Actually, there's quite a bit of 3d printing of various metals-- the problem seems to be that strong alloys aren't there yet.

    Faint memory of disk habitat sf: A short series of DAW books which had a solar-system-sized disk, at least for the human-habitable zone. Possibly had slots for the planets to still be in their orbits.

    894:

    Patrick Kirch's On The Road Of The Winds is my favorite book for early Oceanic archaeology.

    I think I'm aware of the issues with aboriginal stories in Australia recalling features that are now underwater, if that's what you're talking about, although I understand there is controversy among the geologists about when some of these features went underwater (1,000 or 10,000 years ago). Is there a different issue?

    Kirch mentions, in passing, that many of the modern atolls weren't above water until the last ~2,000 years, due to sea level fluctuations. I don't know if this is correct, but it's possible that the relatively recent settlement of the atolls might simply be due to them not being colonizable until the past 1,500-2,000 years. There's also a book on Micronesian archaeology that I paged through at Powell's some years ago and didn't buy and now can't find. One of its findings was that, in one of the few atolls where they have done an archaeological dig, there were definite layers of settlement, probably due to the island being depopulated by storm or drought. It's a rough environment to make a living in.

    As for the settlement of the Pacific, there's a fairly well worked-out archaeological record that's worth digging into (see Kirch's book above). The two weird things I'd hypothesize that aren't in the book are: --Things like the Medieval Warm Spell and other global climate fluctuations may have played a role in the timing of colonization, as the great burst of people that colonized Polynesia IIRC happened during the Medieval Warm Spell. If this is the case, I'm sure the climatologists (who use tropical coral heads to measure paleotemperatures) and archaeologists will work it out. If climate played no role, then we're stuck with the enigma underlying Moana: why did the Polynesians stop voyaging for centuries? That's actually a real archaeological puzzle. --I suspect the colonization scenario involved guano indirectly. One of the puzzles is that the Polynesians went through this enormous voyaging period around 800-1200 (I'm fudging from memory), then more or less stopped. Partly the stop was because the people who knew each other in, say, Tahiti and Hawai'i died of old age and their grandkids either didn't know the way or didn't trust the welcome they'd receive. The guano part is that, until the islands were settled, they were all huge seabird colonies, meaning they received a huge nitrogen influx. The Polynesians used those huge bounties of seabirds as the food they ate while first colonizing the islands. Seabird bone numbers inevitably plummet in the archaeological record when the islanders first show up. Then soil fertility goes down as the soils got farmed, and no more guano fertilizer was added.

    My question is, how big were the trees that grew around those seabird colonies? When the Polynesians first settled high islands, they'd probably find enormous old trees, some of which made for wonderful voyaging canoes. Three or four generations later, the best trees had already been made into boats and sailed until they rotted or sank, while the next generation of trees, growing up in the absence of all that guano, were younger and much smaller. With smaller trees on the islands, building a huge voyaging canoe would only be possible if a big drift log washed up on the beach (and these did occur, especially after major storms in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest). This is all speculation, but it is consistent with some of the agroecosystem work on Hawai'i showing that soils were depleted of nutrients after colonization and especially after people started farming them. Yes, they added manure to the soils, but it's not clear to me that human manure (which is in part recycled onto the island) is an adequate replacement for seabird manure (which imports nutrients from the sea and leaves them on the island). And even if there's enough nutrients in the system, it's hard to get big trees when there's a demand for wood.

    Anyway, this is my hobby reading, so sorry for going on so long. Some day I'll have to figure out how to write an island story without doing the lame cultural appropriation thing.

    895:

    The alloys available are good enough to use in rocket engines. SpaceX are flying substantial components already and the Super Dracos on the Dragon 2 are printed rather than cast, Blue Origin is doing the same in the BE-4 engine and maybe in the engine used on New Shepard.

    896:

    I don't think Hawking Radiation is a problem in this scenario, because your microscopic black holes are probably contained in a force-field, which may even run off the energy (in part, the system wouldn't be perfect) released by the black holes as they evaporate. Your physical structures (continents) would sit on top of the force fields and if a little Hawking Radiation leaked through the force-fields then the oceans - more massive than whole solar-systems - could be used for cooling.

    The big maintenance problem would be the need for a continual black-hole replacement cycle, but if you're a powerful enough species that humans-vs-insects is your equivalent of pirates-vs-ninjas, and you're building a Big Dumb Object just to settle the issue... replacing black holes may be no more problematic than putting new batteries in a flashlight.

    Or as Lovecraft once said, "Cthulhu is coming, stick out your tongue!"

    P.S. "The Ringworld is unstable!" and "My megastructure can whip your megastructure!"

    897:

    Assuming you can wrangle small black holes at all then replacing them would not be necessary. Make them large enough that the hawking radiation is manageable and feed them matter at a rate that balances hawking losses.

    At this level of hand waving I may as well point out that an infinitely large flat planet should be quite well behaved from a gravitational perspective. No need for the sort of nasty lumpy gravity field you get from black holes at all.

    898:

    Um, check out the last paragraph of this little puff piece on the movie. Or this.

    the tl;dr is that the cartoon character and the party formed in parallel, which initially caused problems for Marvel.

    899:

    How about a "Morris Minor 2-seater", er MG Midget? I know they were exported to the Yousay in sufficient numbers that it was felt worthwhile to change the engine, bumpers and ride height to meet 1974 Federal regulations.

    Never heard of a "Morris Minor 2-seater", but I'm pretty sure the MG Midget was the same as the MGB; designed from the very beginning with the USA export market in mind.

    The only two I'm really certain about are the Morris Minor; that in the mid 60s when one came into my posession no one here (myself included) had the slightest clue about English Whitworth. The other is the MGB, which I studied up on extensively when I got my first one.

    900:

    but it's not clear to me that human manure is an adequate replacement for seabird manure

    It depends a great deal on the soil and rainfall, that I know, but there is always some leaching, especially of the volatile components (mainly nitrogen, but also potassium). My guess is that it might be feasible, especially as a large proportion of their diet was fish, but only if done well and the leaching was not too bad. Whether that was the case, I have no idea.

    901:

    Well, I do know where to start. This reminds me of an argument I had with a friend's now-ex-wife, about 10 or so years ago. She taught HR, and I was complaining about HR. I gave examples, and she said, "that's not what we teach", to which I responded, "it may not be what you teach, but that's what they do in the real world."

    Economics? When it would cost you ROI? It's a lot cheaper to contribute to the reelection campaign, or those free vacations for the regulator/politician and their squeeze of the moment than it is to take it all into account.

    Krugman has some things to say about those economists in todays, or the last column, economists who expounded on what the US was doing under Obama, and were wrong, but will never admit they were wrong in their predictions. That, after all, isn't what the folks who pay them want to hear.

    902:

    Ok, not a problem, then.

    And SpaceX, esp. the launch the other week, and when the US finally does Return to Flight, kids will start being inspired again. There are still a lot of kids who want to be an astronaut.

    And a lot of us who know the universe is a hell of a lot bigger than the funnymentalist "young earth" idiots can imagine.

    903:

    I have a slightly different take on it all.

    First, let me mention I see a lot of Prius, Leaf, et al in Chicago, and around DC.

    On the other hand...just thinking about what I've just skimmed here, and realized that the Big Three has a major split in upper management, and the young Turks are winning.

    In the eighties, the Japanese, esp. Toyota, ate their lunch. They started offering smaller, more fuel efficient... but as soon as the price of gas went down a little, the cars got bigger, with bigger engines again. That was repeated during the Shrub's tenure.

    In other words, the oil industry has had a lot of control over what the US auto industry would produce, or even sell.

    Hell, in '12, '13, when I was looking for a new-to-me minivan, I found hybrid minivans.

    IN EUROPE ONLY. NONE for sale in the US. Doe you really want to argue my point?

    The young Turks see a chance to break that hold, and get ahead of the game.

    And about Morris Minors... I still miss my Dearly Beloved Departed 1986 Toyota Tercel wagon. According to a quick google, 1452 engine, carburetor... and I kept it tuned up, and in 2000, before it died in the car fire, was still getting 35-56mpg highway.

    904:

    Charlie Stross @878 said:That's a good point.

    About ten years ago, I lost my ability to do simple math any more, so this explanation may be off by a few factors of ten. HA!

    Wiki - Earth

    The Earth is 2.59876×10to11 cu mi

    Written out as a number that is:

    259,876,000,000 cu mi - (I hope there are enough zeros. HA!)

    Earth's atmosphere has no definite boundary, slowly becoming thinner and fading into outer space. Three-quarters of the atmosphere's mass is contained within the first 11 km (6.8 mi) of the surface. This lowest layer is called the troposphere. Energy from the Sun heats this layer, and the surface below, causing expansion of the air. This lower-density air then rises and is replaced by cooler, higher-density air. The result is atmospheric circulation that drives the weather and climate through redistribution of thermal energy.

    Let's say that the Earth's atmosphere is 10 miles deep for a nice round number.

    Wiki - Ringworld

    The Ringworld is about one million miles (1,600,000 km) wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 600 million miles or 950 million km in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates to provide artificial gravity 99.2% as strong as Earth's from centrifugal force. The Ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface (equivalent in area to approximately three million Earths), a breathable atmosphere and a temperature optimal for humans.

    Ringworld is a million miles wide. That means a cubic mile of atmosphere lined up across the width of the ring is a million cubic miles.

    Stack a few of those one on top of each other to represent the number of miles deep the atmosphere is. That's 10 million cubic miles of atmosphere, with the gravity of that column of atmosphere pulling itself together, for every mile of ring.

    Here I need to point out what most people miss.

    • You have to look at that column of atmosphere, as a million miles high, not just ten miles thick.

    The gravity of the atmosphere sees that million mile high column. So that's 10 million cubic miles pulling together across the flat surface of the ring.

    • That means you would have a wet soggy mess in the middle of that flat ring. HA!

    This is a great article about the Earth's gravity map.

    The “Potsdam Gravity Potato” Shows Variations in Earth’s Gravity

    Bring up the article and look at the picture of the Earth. I don't know the scale of the variations, but it is still shocking.

    They mapped the motion of detectors in orbit "above" the Earth. Remember that. The detector would rise and fall in its orbit because of the column of Earth directly beneath it. Just as when you are driving along a road that is filled with dips and rises, ups and downs of the road itself.

    The detector is feeling the gravity of the column of Earth directly beneath it. If you have mountains on both ends of the column, there is more gravity. If there is ocean at both ends, the gravity is less. That's how they can map the mid-ocean ridges. They can "see" the mountains under the ocean because of the dip in the orbit.

    BTW, Look at the gravity map and then the discussion above about "Sea levels", and ask yourself the simple question, "Has sea level risen, or has the land sunk." It is a terrifying question. At least it is for me. HA!

    There are far too many examples where we had to design some structure knowing that the ground beneath would sink from the weight.

    • When they designed Hoover Dam, they had to compute how deep the crust would sink from the weight of the entrained water to ensure the dam would hold the water.

    • When Fukushima happened, the sea walls would have worked, but the earthquake "lowered" the wall below the height of the wave. In other words, if it had just been a tidal wave, no earthquake -- no sinking of land -- there would have been no flooding.

    In Al Gore's latest film he makes a key mistake that shows this point. Has that section of Miami flooded because of sea level rise, or has that "section" of land sunk. He never thinks to ask that question.

    An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power | Miami | Paramount Pictures UK

    The Earth is a dynamic structure, constantly flexing. The surface that you are standing on right now can rise and fall, shift and twist.

    That means "sea level" is local not global, and is more about a coast "sinking" rather than sea level "rising".

    905:

    Oh, *wonnnnderful. So, he's on a real head trip...

    906:

    Um, from what you write, you make it sound as though "dark matter" isn't really, it's just seriously depressed areas of space.

    Literally.

    I mean, is there any description of them as made of some not-so-quarks?

    907:

    Old joke: someone gets to Heaven, and is being shown around. St. Pete, or whoever is giving the tour, tells them to be quiet as they pass a grove with a high wall, telling him that's where the Baptists are, they think they're the only ones here, and another walled grove for another group....

    908:

    If that was going to happen, it would have, already. A few years ago, I was googling burlesque, and found a video from, I think, the fifties, French tv... and a musical number with, I kid you not, 52 accordions.

    909:

    And I should have apologized in my first reply for my response.

    If we're ever at the same con, I'll buy you a round.

    910:

    Well, not quite. It's a bit more complicated than that, I'm afraid.

    The biggest issues, as I see it, are this: there's a lot of folks who would like to live on a farm, or, rather, as they imagine it would be. But since the 1890s, massive mechanization came in, and there were simply fewer and fewer farm jobs. Result was people moving to urban areas. It's just gotten worse - I have friends in rural areas, and there's just no jobs. The folks who stayed tend to be less educated, more religious, and more afraid of everyone who's not like them.

    The right-wing media, of course, feeds this like pouring gasoline on a fire. They have, for a long time, because, "let's you and him fight" is always a good deal for the owners (please check how that's worked out in Northern Ireland).

    And the GOP Southern Strategy, Better Racism Through Euphemisms (though I've come to realize that was not all of it, as I'll talk about in my political book, once I write it...), pushes it, because they have no other base to vote for them.

    911:

    Going back to the emerging technology, I just stumbled over this one:

    paper test strips that use CRISPR to test for the presence of DNA from tumors and viruses.

    The point here isn't about CRISPR making gene hacking a reality, any more than it's about lasers making excellent pistol weapons. The point here is that the spinoffs from CRISPR being extremely useful. Extrapolating from this example, cheap tests for the presence of antibiotic resistance genes could extend the potential life of antibiotics and thereby keeping surgery less lethal.

    A second technology that should emerge, but hasn't because of cultural prejudices, is smart beads. Okay, I stole that from Black Panther, but the point is that big, African-style bead jewelry is an excellent way to embody technology, better than the amulets, rings, and things that we've been forced to use due to the Puritanical antecedents of so much Modernism and fashion. A bead bracelet where each bead has a different function (and perhaps some are the power sources), is much more configurable than a single fob. They had a lot of fun with Wakandan tech beads in the movie, and basically the concept is just sitting there, waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it. This is a case where cultural stereotyping about appropriate decoration keep us from seeing some interesting opportunities for wearable tech.

    912:

    Datapoint: just got my minivan battery replaced a year or two ago, five yr guarantee, sealed lead-acid, about $132. Not that much cheaper.

    913:

    "Growing Earth theory"?

    That's ridiculous. Robin Wood explained all that with her book, the Theory of Cat Gravity. Short form: cats lie in the sunlight, fur converts sunlight to gravity, when they're full, they come lie on you, and the gravity sinks into you, making you unable to get up. Eventually, it sinks through the bed to the center of the Earth.

    Which, of course, explains why it's so much harder for you to get up than when you were a kid: it's because there's more gravity.

    Great illustrations (she is an artist)....

    914:

    Psi.

    Please ignore the tendrils in my hair, I'm a fan....

    Of course, if you want a realistic explanation, I recommend Real Magic, Isaac Bonewitz (an enlarged version of his baccalaureate thesis in Thaumeturgy, UC Berkeley, late sixties, with 20 or more pages of bibliography).

    915:

    sthith... so, they're using fifth order forces to shape a complete stasis in the ether? (asks the would-be Dick Seaton)

    916:

    And this has never happened before....

    Ignoring, say, the Cold War, Silent Spring, Dr. Strangelove, the Cuban Missile Crisis, nope, there wasn't anything like this before... can't imagine why it's happening (again, FINALLY).

    Why, yes, I was in my late teens when I was in the streets for the Democratic convention in Chicago in '68, why do you ask?

    917:

    Nah, just a fan of the "Talking Heads."

    918:

    Er, you are off by more than you think!

    It's c. 6 miles thick at sea-level pressure, but that's minor. Even on the Ringworld, that holds, because both the centrifugal force and gravity operate at right angles to the ring, not sideways along it. Yes, there is a proportion pulling towards the centre, but it's very small compared with the main force - that's basic geometry.

    919:

    Um, I did read Bonewits' original version of Real Magic when I was at Berkeley. Still have it on my shelves somewhere.

    Yeah.

    Personally, I think Lynne Kelly got it more right, but whichever. Still, there was (is) a term for explaining the supernatural as science, and it would be nice to remember it one of these days. It's the kind of thing that explains dragons as surviving dinosaurs, the Star of Bethlehem as a comet, Jericho as an earthquake, and so on.

    920:

    "Morris Minor 2-seater" is a joke. Excluding the last-of-the-line model with a Spitfire engine, the only noticeable difference between the MG Midget and the Morris Minor is the bodyshell.

    (No, not that Spitfire. Though I'm sure someone has probably tried.)

    921:

    As SAAB developed their lovely slant-four from Triumph's 1500cc four, I've often wondered if it's possible to finagle an early SAAB 900 turbo head onto a Spit engine with some beefed-up internals...

    922:

    Well, yeah. My own reaction when I read it was "people are surprised? I'm only surprised it's taken them so long". But people were wondering about what kind of fiction inspires teenagers these days, and I thought the comment was interesting (if biased, being from someone who writes the stuff) in giving an example of what they actually do read (something about which I am totally in the dark myself, being more into raising young pigeons than young humans).

    Mind you, in the field of youthful protest it does seem to me that we are woefully lacking in protest songs these days. They disappeared like turning off a light switch when the phenethylamines-and-computers musical disaster struck. I don't even think it's a case of them still being made but no longer being recognisable as music, they just don't get made any more. I guess that's what happens when you sever the connection between music and any higher cerebral functions.

    Which leads me off on a further wild tangent of thought (well, at 900+ why not...) concerning how much electricity one might generate from harnessing the rotation of J P Sousa in his grave. Only two of his compositions are remembered these days; one of them cannot be played in a serious context because of all the sniggering it elicits, and the other one is memorable for being sung with the lyrics "'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go" by striking miners. (And football fans, but the striking miners are more memorable.)

    923:

    It couldn't have happened in the 1950s. We didn't have a high-enough population and we were travelling through a more stable area of spacetime... but now, I'm betting that given Case Nightmare Green, the hideous sound of the gibbous accordion has summoned Tsathoggua, and the French are headed for the fate of those underground people in The Mound, practicing recreational mind-rape and having sex with corpses.

    Meanwhile, the people Luxembourg have escaped Earth, riding a Orion-style spaceship powered by Quadium bombs and Pinot Grand Fenwick!

    924:

    My guess is that it might be feasible, especially as a large proportion of their diet was fish, but only if done well and the leaching was not too bad. Whether that was the case, I have no idea.

    In the short term I've seen it work quite well, there are taro beds that are over a century old on some atolls. The two factors are manure supply and storm frequency, because you can only run so much salt water through them before they stop working. But if the landscape changes the beds are moveable. To a European that's almost unimaginable, but it happens "we moved the farm".

    Longer term isn't really relevant any more, atolls by definition are only a few metres above current sea level so will only last another century at most. Barring the author bringing in one of those magical mystery gadgets that solves all problems (and there's a term for it that I can't remember).

    This is where countries like Fiji have huge advantages, those big volcanic mountains poking up such a very long way mean that the coral can just migrate up as the sea level rises... presuming it can also survive the hot acidic seawater. But the ring of fertile soil around the base, the adiabatic rainfall, the variation in climate up the mountain, all of that means you get a wonderful lush forest and excellent soils.

    Also... many visitors coming to admire those things and wondering if perhaps you'd like to share rather than be slaughtered. (guess which country exports a frightening number of mercenaries, including to the UN)

    925:

    Why stop there? Use a suitable amalgamation of Saab, Dolly Sprint and Stag engine parts to produce a 32-valve twin turbo V8. (Nothing wrong with the design of the Stag engine, the problems were down to things like not taking the casting sand out before putting it together.) You may guess that this is not the first time such an idea has passed through my head...

    926:

    Patrick Kirch's On The Road Of The Winds

    ... is available as DRM'd ebook in Adobe formats, but not in my region*. Ah, the posting of dead tree bits around the world for fun and profit.

    • e-things are generally not available in my region. In this case it is bleakly amusing that a book on Oceania is not available in Oceania.
    927:

    That's exactly how I find Volvo seats - sit in them more or less indefinitely and still get out feeling supple. Like rustproofing, good seats are one of the things Volvo cracked about 20 years before any other maker did. I suppose it's not impossible that modern ones have got crap, which would be very sad, but the redblock-era seats are lovely.

    928:

    If you have something like interlibrary loan within reach, it might be cheaper to get the dead tree version, albeit temporarily.

    929:

    "I want something that will get me up the hills I can't pedal up - which means ones with slopes in the 20-25% range."

    It was fag-packeting the calculations for slopes like that that ignited my hatred of the regulations...

    I reckon 100kg is a reasonable figure for me + bicycle + motor + battery + whatever gubbins I'm carrying. Call it 1000N weight. So a 250W motor will raise it at no more than 0.25m/s, ignoring losses, or 1m/s "along" on 25% gradient. Granted it's a lot faster than I could walk up it (stopping to breathe every few paces), and I can balance at that speed, but it's not exactly easy, and even less easy tipped back at that sort of angle. At least with a trike you don't have to balance...

    Ambient temperatures... I used to be one of those people who goes around in a short-sleeved shirt with no coat or jumper regardless of weather conditions, icicles on beard etc. These days I find it inclemently cold most of the time from October to March, and I'm living in a warmer part of the country. A significant reason for returning to car ownership was that I was fed up with freezing on a motorbike (and with the difficulty of seeing through rain and condensation on visor and specs). No, I want a heater, please :)

    930:

    Mind you, in the field of youthful protest it does seem to me that we are woefully lacking in protest songs these days. They disappeared like turning off a light switch...

    Strongly disagree - it's just that it changed. Try listening to Eminem sometime.

    931:

    Which reminds me that the Daedalus column in the back of the New Scientist once proposed the idea of a train that powers itself on grass clippings mowed from between the rails as it goes.

    So I checked it out. You just about could, it turns out, well enough to provide a country-branch-line service comparable or better to what they had when they existed; but you'd be doing something like dessicating the grass clippings using the exhaust heat, powdering them, and burning them in a solid-fuel diesel engine (per Uncle Rudi's original idea), to get useful efficiency; you'd still really want to be mowing the cess and the six-foot as well; and you'd want ideal growing conditions all the time.

    What it completely ignores is that railway ballast depends on not having plants growing in it to work properly as ballast. Though personally, I like the idea of finding the right combination of substrate and plant to make a self-maintaining ballast where the growth of the plants confers and maintains its good properties. Perhaps some plant that colonises recent lava flows would do it. It would make railway stations more pleasant places to wait, as well.

    932:

    Which reminds me that the Daedalus column in the back of the New Scientist once proposed the idea of a train that powers itself on grass clippings mowed from between the rails as it goes.

    It might have been a Daedalus column that suggested the parallel concept of vehicle engines burning asphalt scraped off the road. Each night a fleet of road-laying equipment would put down a fresh layer of fuel on the road ready for the morrow.

    933:

    That's ridiculous. Robin Wood explained all that with her book, the Theory of Cat Gravity.

    Which is Wrong.

    The Truth: cats are a fermionic superfluid.

    Evidence: cats are frictionless (easily demonstrated) and even flow up and over the rim of a container to occupy it, evidence of superfluidity. But cats can't occupy the same ground state, unlike a bosonic superfluid — they obey an exclusion principle: if two cats try to occupy the same volume of space they end up fighting.

    934:

    I mean, is there any description of them as made of some not-so-quarks?

    Well, I was talking about the gravitational behavior of dark matter, in terms of how it affects the formation of galaxies. For that purpose, you don't have to have non-quark particles, just something that doesn't interact with light and doesn't significantly interact with normal matter (stars, gas clouds, etc.) except via gravity. In the past, people have suggested that dark matter could be lots of black holes, or lots of neutron stars, or lots of (very cool, faint) brown dwarfs (so-called MACHOS). All of those possibilities would work for the gravitational phenomena I was talking about -- as would non-quark particles.

    But when you consider other factors, like the fact that the amount of normal (quark-based) matter that could be in the universe is limited by things like how much deuterium and helium was made in the Big Bang, then there can't be nearly enough normal matter -- even subsequently hidden in black holes or neutron stars, etc. -- then you are forced to consider some kind of "non-baryonic" (i.e., not made up of quarks) particles.

    935:

    Actually, no, you aren't. There are several alternative theories, based on the observation that the currently, er, favoured model is a stack of speculations. If any one of those speculations is wrong, the effects can be explained in other ways. But those are heresy to the True Believers, and so are not taken seriously.

    936:

    That is my intention, yes. We have a reasonable library service here and I can wangle access to a university library if I need it (or just walk in and read it on site).

    One thing that peeves me about university libraries is that many of them now require a login in order to use the catalogues. I suspect they haven't done that to stop non-students using the library, it'll be a side effect of moving the catalogue into the online resources and no doubt it's awesome to be able to log into the portal from home and find then reserve books etc... but for us non-paying "customers" it's a PITA.

    937:

    I'm vaguely partial to the Pratchett Conjecture, to wit: "For something to exist, it has to be observed. For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head." (Thief of Time).

    If we get into some sort of "it from bit" conjecture, then this isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Perhaps dark matter has something to do with the local history of baryonic matter. One could even postulate that Dark Energy is a mechanism for limiting down buffer over-runs by limiting the interactions among objects within the universe, by accelerating them apart as they gain more and more history.

    938:

    Gene therapy seems to be more of a wild card. I think it's going to take multiple breakthroughs before it is safe and useful. Maybe ten to twenty years out.

    My best bet for the next revolutionary tech is genetic enhancement (not "therapy"), but for cultural reasons I expect it to take off in Asia, not the West. I suspect this is an area where we'll be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

    939:

    Still, there was (is) a term for explaining the supernatural as science, and it would be nice to remember it one of these days. It's the kind of thing that explains dragons as surviving dinosaurs, the Star of Bethlehem as a comet, Jericho as an earthquake, and so on.

    But if the supernatural (Yahweh, angels, wendigos, efficacious prayer, whatever) should present credible evidence for its existence, then it would become part of known reality and therefore part of science. Even if that meant presently known phenomena were insufficient to explain the new data and science had to be augmented with new concepts, that's happened many times before and science has survived. Although combining quantum electrodynamics with general relativity and Yahwistic theology would be a trip, I agree.

    940:

    Actually, I think those paper-based gene detectors are more of a breakthrough. For example, they recently reported that hospital wastewater pipes tested were a hotbed of bacteria swapping plasmids for antibiotic resistance.

    If and when we lose antibiotics, surgery of all sorts becomes a lot riskier, because keeping people from dying of infections acquired during surgery will depend more on sterile procedure, hygiene, and sanitation, and the hospitals I've been in aren't great at that kind of thing.

    Now, if there are stupidly cheap ways for detecting where antibiotic resistance plasmids are lurking, you can do some really focused cleaning and possibly redesign to make it harder for bacteria to swap plasmids. You can also more quickly figure out what types of antibiotic resistance are lurking anywhere in a hospital, and if you have methods for countering these, you can deploy them selectively so that you don't also select for broad-spectrum antibiotic resistance. In less controlled settings (like the farms that routinely deploy antibiotics as growth enhancers and foster all this trouble), you can deploy stupidly cheap detectors to help farmers figure out which drugs help the animals, which are a waste of money, and also help investigators know which areas to target for cleanup.

    This is the kind of tech that will save millions of lives. Without something like this, we could easily get into the problematic situation where it's easy to do gene hacking, but dangerous to do even routine surgery like removing wisdom teeth or an appendectomy, let alone treating gut shots, repairing hearts, doing transplants, etc.

    941:

    I'm not a physicist so I can't comment Knowledgably but this theory could do away with the need for dark matter.

    http://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/press-releases/2016/11/new-theory-of-gravity-might-explain-dark-matter.html

    942:

    In less controlled settings (like the farms that routinely deploy antibiotics as growth enhancers and foster all this trouble),

    To my knowledge farm use is not specific, they're used as a generic growth promoter. So knowing more about whether various resistances are present may not actually reduce use - you'd need to also show that the resistance genes mean that the growth enhancement won't happen. Probably "won't happen at all", since a lot of the use of agrichemicals is faith-based.

    I say that in the sense that it is regularly shown that for most farmers they're better off using less of fewer chemicals, but nonetheless they continue using them. You could also view that as a triumph of advertising over facts, perhaps if you were less irritated by poisonous idiots.

    One happy use for robots will be as sewer-cleaners. Those are already sort-of-available, but in small numbers and they're not as effective as they could be. One thing that might be useful is using UV for vision, since one thing those should probably be doing is baking the sides of the pipe they're in with high intensity UV to kill off whatever's growing in the sewer. Leakage from that = light source for vision.

    Or maybe that will turn out to be like antibiotic use in the gut... you wipe out the UV sensitive stuff and get worse things instead.

    943:

    I agree that tech to limit antibiotic resistance is important. But keeping the tech we have (antibiotics, electricity, cars) working safely is maintenance, not progress. Any tech whose primary purpose is to keep things from getting worse may be useful, even necessary, but isn't inspirational.

    944:

    But,although they obey an exclusion principle they do not (Necessarily ) obey a repulsion principle, so there are at least two forces, of different field strengths operating here .... The actualfield-equations could be ... interesting.

    945:

    Reading that article ( On Verlinde's hypothesis ) ... it does seem remarkably close to Pterry's conjecture, doesn't it?

    946:

    Totslly off the topics we've been discussing .... Lots of us here like our beer, & not to far from where I live there's a nice little microbrewery called "Wild Card". { I'm the CAMRA "BLO" - brewery liason officer - fot=r this one, as it's so convenient } Who have just got themseleves full-page(s) publicity in a national braodsheet newspaper HERE
    It's good to see things like this - it certainly cheered me up. 🍻

    947:

    Bugger "Totally" (!)

    948:

    "One thing that peeves me about university libraries is that many of them now require a login in order to use the catalogues."

    really? Here in Italy it would be almost unthinkable (yes, I'm a university librarian). You need to log in for the advanced and personalized services (asking for book loans from home, saving your searches, checking the status of your loans, ...). But simply searching for books is open to all and requires no login. (google http://opac.sbn.it/opacsbn/opac/iccu/change.jsp?language=en ) I'm a devout follower of Ranganathan's line "books are for use", and so are my fellow librarians. Not to mention, once you set the whole catalog (IT infrastructure, cataloging the books or downloading the records, paying licence fees to automation vendors) the costs stay the same wether people from outside the university use it or not. Well, maybe you being in Oceania, it's "the world turned upside down"... :-)

    949:

    simply searching for books is open to all and requires no login. (http://opac.sbn.it/opacsbn/opac/iccu/change.jsp?language=en )

    Some do, some ... didn't. UNSW is an hour away and their system is online: http://primoa.library.unsw.edu.au/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=UNSWS&vl(freeText0)=patrick+kirch&docId=UNSW_ALMA51156852550001731 including location details for the physical books. That's excellent.

    But Sydney University is closer... and have now made the system public again. A couple of years ago it wasn't. https://opac.library.usyd.edu.au/search/?searchtype=X&SORT=D&searcharg=On+the+Road+of+the+Winds%3A+An+Archaeological+History+of+the+Pacific+Islands+before+European+Contact+P&searchscope=4

    Checking around it appears that there has been a major shift, all the ones I've used in the past are now open on the internet. OMG. IIRC my local council library can interloan from at least some of the universities. I will go in tomorrow, today I had 50kg of chicken feed on my bike so didn't really want to stop.

    950:

    My local university library doesn't even let you in without showing student/staff id. (Only place I've encountered this.) Annoying, but less so now that so much is online.

    951:

    Just while I am thinking about it, modern load bikes with power assist make it quite plausible to carry quite a lot of weight. The trick is to get one where the motor goes through the bicycle gearing, because you have a much narrower power band than the motor. That way when you change down for a hill the motor does too, and you can power slowly up quite steep hills with a load on. A direct drive motor that works well at 5kph is not likely to work well at 30kph (although the rules are all about power at the wheel, so you could just accept the loss of efficiency and power on... but no-one does that AFAIK).

    We see this locally with "mummy bikes", Sydney has a tendency for short, steep hills and the power assist is really necessary if you've got kids on board.

    I'm still fit enough that getting older and slower hasn't stopped me from riding 10km for a brand new second hand washing machine the other day. Albeit on a four wheel "bicycle". And slowly.

    952:

    Technically Sydney University is/was like that, but it was trivially easy to get in and out anyway. They don't seem very concerned with members of the educated classes getting in, more with the obviously derelict.

    One technique that works for me is to ask a librarian for assistance. Tell them what you want, they'll often let you in. Like Marino, many of them think they're there to help people find knowledge :)

    953:

    The problem is the 250 watt nominal limit; that's OK for 15% hills, but doesn't cut the mustard for steeper ones; motors burn out if worked too hard at too low an RPM. Do the calculations, as Pigeon and I have done. The DafTies are intending not to type-approve the 1000 watt ones, or make their import legal.

    954:

    And you're wrong, for lots of values of wrong.

    The MG Midget and B are totally different cars for one thing. You can probably service either with 5/8" AF ring and open ended spanners, a 1/4" blade flat screwdriver and a set of imperial feeler gauges though.

    Also, as Pigeon says at #920, The Morris Minor and MG Midget (series 1 to 3) are mechanically and electrically the same car apart from the Minor having semi-elliptic and some Midgets having quarter-elliptic rear springs.

    955:

    That's genius precis, but I think Charlie's closer. I've seen a cat flow 8 feet up a wall to reach a shelf.

    956:

    ...model with a Spitfire engine... You mean "a Triumph engine..." In its 1300 and 1500 capacities, that engine was used in the Triumph Herald 13/60, 1300 and 1500 Mk1s, 1300 and 1500 mk2s, Toledo and Dolomite 1300 and 1500 as well the Spitfire.

    957:

    Er no; the SAAB straight 4 was developed from the Triumph 1.85l by SAAB's usual technique, which will typically mean that not a single part is common!

    958:

    Er, the biggest issue I can see here is that the Triumph V8 is only a 3.0l, and both the Dolly Sprint and SAAB engines are 2.0, so the bore centres may be different (but I'll give you that the Triumph 1.85l 4 was half of a stillborn V8 which is why it has those angled head bolts).

    959:

    Well, I think we can sort of agree then; Car seats are not a "one size fits all" proposition.

    960:

    Actually, there IS evidence for the 'supernatural', in that many of the explorer/scientist/observers who are regarded as reliable have reported such things. A theory that explains it (which I thought of a long time back, but had to keep quiet about when I was working, and which has now been speculated openly by actual physicists) is that the more laws of the universe are created, not observed. When the whole population of an area believed in 'magic', it worked (to about the same extent that 'science' did at the time and in that place). But the 'Western' world's technology was clearly superior, and this led the peoples to believe that its world-view (specifically the 'scientific' dogmatism) was, too, and this in turn caused 'magic' to work less effectively and then fail.

    To Heteromeles: yes - some of the more extreme forms of string theory etc. are similar, which is probably where Pratchett got it from.

    To Mike Collins: yes, but you don't have to go that far. We have no direct evidence that the gravitational constant or the speed of light are absolute constants, over either time or space. As far as I know, we don't even have direct evidence that the red shift is entirely due to recession. There are simpler theories that also explain the dark matter paradox.

    The same thing applies to the extreme extrapolations of general relativity (Hawking etc.), but there is even LESS evidence for the current dogmas about those.

    All this harks back to the topic of this thread. I dislike most modern 'hard' science fiction (Baxter etc.), because I don't regard the assumptions as plausible, and they rely critically on them. Most of the comparable fiction of earlier years was at least entertaining 'adventure', 'what if' or 'human interest', and the key 'twist' was usually less tied up in their (pseudo-)science.

    961:

    .... I know Charlie remakrs about "Death by Power-Point" ..... Non-random comment from a friend after a failed presentation ( CAMRA ) & a largely-wated evening meeting: when I am Chancellor of the Exchequer, I shall tax Powerpoint presentations, and on a logarithmic scale, too!

    962:

    I suspect — or hope — you mean exponential.

    963:

    I have two local universities: one dating from probably before 1100, and one which became a university in 1992. The former first makes outsiders complete a Statement of Research Need for access to its main library, then makes them pay. For a week, £6; for a year, £38. The latter has an "open campus" policy, by which shops, cafés, a print shop, and even an NHS dentist — yes, and a library — are open to visitors.

    964:

    The library, I should have added, is free. More universities should emulate Oxford Brookes.

    965:

    A note for people about electric cars: They all have high voltage DC charging capacity, which typically will get you 80% in 12 minutes, and 100% in less than 30, so, a bathroom and snack break. There are 3 standards, Tesla, a euro one, and a japanese one (of course, it's not that simple). At least here in the USA, a given station either supports Tesla, or the other two. They are common enough in the San Francisco Bay area, and planning a 250 mile (400km) one way trip around a Chevy Spark, with a 70 mile (120km) freeway range, only had one point where I would have needed to use a 220v slow charger, and then only for an hour or two.

    So your range concerns are mostly only going to be any issue at all in very rural areas, otherwise, you can just get a quick charge at a high voltage DC charger, and leave the 220 stuff for overnight and at work.

    966:

    And given HVDC charging, why would you bother switching out batteries? A company tried that, and failed. Tesla was designed to make that easy, but there just isn't a point when 12 minutes gets you an 80% charge, and a bit longer gets you to 100%.

    Now, there may be a point in designing them so that a swap is only a few hundred dollars of mechanics time, so that you can throw a new one in every 5-10 years, that I could see.

    967:
    today I had a 50kg chicken feed on my bike

    My god, what they say about wildlife downunder is true! A 50 kg chicken sounds close to a dinosaur!

    [Yes, I adjusted Moz's quote a bit to increase its truthiness. It's better my way.]

    968:

    "Death by PowerPoint" sound more like one of mine than one of Charlie's. If so, it's a comment on the lack of information content, and the excessive presenting time to "deliver" it, rather than on the size of the pptx file.

    969:

    It's a term that has been in common use for decades. While, yes, it means what you say, the Microsoft suite positively encourages both those deficiencies and the bloated file size, and there is a strong correlation between the two (caused both by the software and its users).

    970:

    And thus are dreams shattered. Oh well.

    971:

    Oh, really? That's true while they are rarely used. But think further. 30 minutes rather than 5 at the 'pump' needs 6 times the number of stations; even smallish garages have 4 stations nowadays, so will need at least 20. 100 KW per station (which is what is needed to do what you say times 20 is 2 MW, and large ones would need at least 50 stations and 5 MW. Even just considering single stations, a single final distribution station (i.e. 11 KV in the UK) isn't going to be able to support more than a few, but I can't find their typical capacity. Without a MASSIVE upgrade to distribution capacity (and a fair one to generation capacity), there can't be that many of them; a few hundred in the UK, no more.

    972:

    I had a run-in with Leeds University libraries in the 1990s. As NHS staff (I was research co-ordinator for Pathology in Leeds and Bradford) I had free use of the university medical library but since I was not medically qualified I had to pay for inter library loans. Since I had an MSc from Leeds University I had access to all Leeds University libraries as a member of the convocation but no inter library loans. However the university refused to allow me to hold both tickets and also refused to give me a single pass to access both libraries. Improved internet access eventually reduced the need for inter library loans.

    973:

    You're not in charge of doing crosswords are you...?

    974:

    Last time I was at the University of Toronto Robarts Library you needed to swipe a card to get in, so no chance of asking a librarian anything. :-(

    I suppose getting in with a crowd of students would be easy, but by the time I can get there it's deserted enough that getting in is trickier.

    At one level I understand — the university is right in the middle of downtown with lots of people passing through* (and some safety concerns for female students) so being able to control who is in your buildings is useful. But it's personally annoying.

    Concerns range from mental health patients off their meds (potentially serious) to entitled urbanites who think that every accessible place is their for their benefit*.

    **A few years ago I read a letter in the local paper from someone complaining about the new "no dogs" sign on the lawn of one of the university residences. Apparently he and his partner had a large dog in their condo (with no balcony) and they objected to having to walk three blocks to a park where dogs were allowed, rather than across the street to the residence, when their dog needed to take a dump.

    The idea that the students wanted to be able to sit on their residence lawn without having to wash out the dogshit seemed to pass him by. (The reason that campus security had started enforcing the rule was student complaint about not being able to use their lawn.)

    975:

    30 minutes rather than 5 at the 'pump' needs 6 times the number of stations

    Not to mention requiring somewhere for people to be during that 30 minutes. When travelling on the highway to Ottawa (5 hour drive) I stop a couple of times for a bathroom break and to buy a snack, but I eat on the road because the rest stops are invariably overcrowded with cranky children (of all ages). Even free wifi isn't enough of a draw. Having to spend half an hour there would be sheer torture, especially in winter when going outside isn't much of an option.

    Looking at my local gas stations in town, each has fuel pumps for a dozen vehicles at a time, along with a small shop selling coffee from a thermos flask, reheated pastries, and packaged snacks. So not a lot of room for vehicles, and not a lot for the drivers to do while they wait.

    If most people start charging at home then less of a need for stations, but still a need for them for those who a driving around a lot in the city. (I've had days where I've burned half a tank of gas without leaving the city. The GTA is easily 3 hours across when driving in urban conditions.)

    976:

    But you get something for all that weight, for example, a Smart Car will demolish a Volvo 240 in a offset frontal collision (and the 240 makes your Moris look like the deathtrap it was), and is a much nicer experience as well. I would assume that as autonomous vehicles become the norm, we will roll back collision requirements and otherwise design vehicles to focus on efficiency and passenger comfort (so, smaller motors, skinny tires, but still have good sound insulation) and much less so on crash survivability, as those almost never happen.

    977:

    A note for people about electric cars: They all have high voltage DC charging capacity, which typically will get you 80% in 12 minutes, and 100% in less than 30, so, a bathroom and snack break. There are 3 standards, Tesla, a euro one, and a japanese one (of course, it's not that simple). At least here in the USA, a given station either supports Tesla, or the other two. They are common enough in the San Francisco Bay area, and planning a 250 mile (400km) one way trip around a Chevy Spark, with a 70 mile (120km) freeway range, only had one point where I would have needed to use a 220v slow charger, and then only for an hour or two.

    So your range concerns are mostly only going to be any issue at all in very rural areas, otherwise, you can just get a quick charge at a high voltage DC charger, and leave the 220 stuff for overnight and at work.

    You need to drive down to a place like San Diego. Hopefully the SF Bay area is the future, not just an outlier.

    To unpack that a bit, some of the stations advertised are far from top speed, and to unpack it still more, you're not going to get much adoption of EV cars outside of cities (or even in Greg Tingey's neighborhood), until the charging infrastructure is a lot more mature than it now is.

    Don't get me wrong: having an EV has cut our gas bill enormously. The trouble is, we can't take the next step and get rid of the remaining IC car until there are bigger EVs with longer ranges, because we do need that on a semi-regular basis, and we're going to need it still more in coming years, due to older relatives needing increasing care. They happen to live in semi-rural areas without nearby chargers, so visiting them in an EV means cutting the visit short to hang out somewhere and recharge for a few hours before heading home.

    978:

    Actually, no, you aren't. There are several alternative theories...

    Do tell. Which theories (or "theories") do you have in mind?

    Note that my discussion was not based on "stacks of speculations"; it was based on standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis calculations, a field dating back to the 1950s and 1960s and based on the Standard Model of Particle Physics, along with thousands of independent measurements of elemental abundances.

    979:

    Re: Emergent gravity (Erik Verlinde)

    Curious why his theory is an either/or. Why can't there be more than one 'parent' to our universe with each parent contributing its share of traits and potentially creating new baby universes with unique emergent characteristics.* Throw in a universe-scale version of epigenetics and things could get really interesting.

    • My understanding - which approaches zero, becuz not a scientist - is that there are two types of strings (open, closed) which due to their status as the antecedents may as well be called the 'parents' of all else in our universe. (Feel free to inform me otherwise - no worries.)
    980:

    Ahem: if the Morris Minor really had been a "deathtrap", chances are I'd be dead. At the time I had it I was young and reckless and didn't give a shit. I hit things, I got hit by things, I put it through fences, I put it in the ditch when the wheel fell off, I rolled it all the way over. I never had to do much more than basically kick it back straight; couple of new wings, but rust would have required that sooner or later anyway. Particularly memorable was the time a chap came flying across a stop line just as I went past, whacked into it on the n/s/r quarter and spun it 360 degrees; damage to Moggy: dented rear wing and wheelrim; damage to his car (a Peugeot IIRC): completely mashed.

    Conversely, I've seen numerous small modern cars of Morris Minor size on recovery trucks, in scrapyards etc, with the windscreen smashed and the front of the roof caved in. I suppose that means they hit someone and threw them into the air and that's where they landed, although I don't recall seeing any blood on them. That's rather less of a severe test than turning the entire car onto its roof at 50mph, which did nothing to the Minor but dent it a little, and I know which I'd rather be in with that happening.

    I think these official crash test things are very like official fuel consumption figures: they are very good at their real purpose, which is to facilitate a particular category of official box-ticking and to enable manufacturers to shout at each other in adverts "ours is better than yours AND IT'S OFFICIAL!!!!!". As far as their ostensible purpose is concerned, though, they have about as much relevance to real-world conditions as the figure for how many bags of oats it takes to fill the car with porridge through the sunroof does to actually taking your shopping home in it.

    See also: designing railway locomotives to look like greedy hamsters because apparently you can harmlessly dissipate the KE of an entire train in nothing more than a couple of cheek-pouches full of cotton wool. Nah. Just put the driver at the back of the train and have them drive using an HD video link to the front.

    981:

    Concerning grid feeds: I think single-digit megawatt figures are typical for the wee substations you find tucked in corners in towns. Fun fact: The GEC Hirst Research Centre at Wembley used to pull 3.5MW, give or take. So did a Class 87 locomotive tanking along the WCML down the west side of it.

    982:

    Re: 'Storytelling is about humanity and its endless introspective quest to understand its own existence and meaning. But humans are social animals. ... And technology and environment inextricably dictate large parts of that context.'

    Most SF I've read doesn't even attempt to describe let alone try to understand human motivation: everyone wants exactly the same things for the same reasons. Very self-centered (infantile) POV. This could also be why that type of SF instead zeroes in on the tech which is (so far) much simpler to describe/understand/control. There's so little understanding of (non-Freudian, non-Skinnerian) psychology to the point that genpop-wide understanding of the human psych may as well be this century's unspoken taboo.

    983:

    Oh, there are protest songs being written. But the FM band, which in the sixties and into the seventies was a lot freer, is now fully owned by corporate interests and advertising, and programming is done by MBAs, not DJs who care about the music.

    The only place you can ear it, other than on youtube, is college radio stations. For example, the Grammy winner "If We Were Vampires" is, indeed, a brilliant song, but why was "At the Purchaser's Request", by Rhiannon Giddens, not even up? She wrote that, based on an actual pre-US-Civil-War ad ina paper, of a "negro wench" for sale, and, at the purchaser's option, they could take ownership of her NINE MONTH OLD INFANT, or not.

    They should have executed large slave owners, and buried them in mass graves.

    And as for Sousa, you didn't even mention the words most kids here know, Be kind to your web-footed friends Be kind to your friends in the swamp Be kind to your web-footed friends, For that duck may be somebody's mother

    984:

    Damn, that should have been, Be kind to your friends in the swamp, Where the weather, it is very damp.

    985:

    No, no, they deal with gravity.

    Actually, I have a larger theory, an actual Theory of Everything, related to this.

    You see, what gave me the clue is that cats, even ones who've never eaten wet foods, or heard one before, come running to the sound of an electric can opener.

    So, the theory is this: they come running, because it sounds exactly like the landing gear of a UFO.

    And that's because the Evil Races of the galaxy enslave cats, while the Good Races treat them wonderfully. This is because the way that UFOs fly is a trained cat gets into a harness, which hold a slice of buttered toast facing upwards from the cat's back. Since both land on the appropriate side, this results in the neutralization of gravity.....

    986:

    Which leads to several questions.

    First, why is it not possible that during either Inflation, nor the early expansion, that smaller masses, or perhaps extremely large masses, created in the Bang and following, have become huge black holes, and hoovered up much of the original mass of the Universe?

    I've also wondered if the very distant object red shift could have been affected by the immense mass of the entire universe during Inflation? Or, for that matter, when all the mass in the Universe was within a Universe only the size of a galaxy?

    Of course, if you like my 4-torus, that explains a lot of it....

    987:

    "Farms that routinely deploy", and farmers would rather use less....

    I don't know the situation in the UK, but in the US, all but a tiny portion of the farming is done by agribusiness, and it's some MBA in upper management who tells them to keep using them. And, of course, antibiotic resistance for the rest of us is an externality.....

    988:

    Hey, Charlie and any other writers: I just read something yesterday that the CEO of Hatchett thinks ebooks are no big thing, and that they've already peaked, and so is not expecting much growth.....

    989:

    I'm pretty sure that the "stillborn" V8 it was half of wasn't stillborn at all, but went into the Stag. Certainly the Stag V8 has those delightful head bolts. And I find it highly implausible that Triumph would have been developing two V8s of similar capacity at the same time. The slant-4 was developed to be made in a range of capacities covering Triumph's entire requirements, from smallest to largest, for 4-cylinder engines, so there's no need to mess with the bore spacing to make a 3 litre V8 with two of them.

    (Anyway, who cares if the bores don't quite line up with the head; if it was good enough for Jaguar... :D )

    Concerning similarity or lack of it between the Triumph and Saab versions of the slant-4, there seems to be a lack of reliable information. Certainly the standard line is "they look the same but they're not at all really, because Saab", but it seems to be one of those plausible-sounding factoids that nobody ever checks. Equally certainly some parts are interchangeable, but few people seem to realise apart from the ones who have actually done it.

    It wasn't a case of Triumph making the engine and then Saab coming along and seeing it and going "ooo that looks nice, can we use it?" like Rover did with the Buick V8 (more or less). Saab got interested in the development at an early stage and their version of it was actually on the road before Triumph's was. They continued to work closely with each other and exchange information on further development of the engine for as long as they were both still using it. Of course none of this guarantees anything, but I do think it is a situation less conducive to gross divergence than if the two developments had been independent following the initial transfer.

    990:

    I merely noted them in passing, when I saw the papers and other reliable references. I can remember that one was written by a Dr I. Drummond.

    I am fully aware of what you base your claims on, and I stand by my point; look at #960 to see some of the speculations your model is based on. Indeed, it was invented precisely because the previous theories didn't match observation, no matter how you tweaked the finagle factors. But you should already know that - it's not exactly hidden from view. For example:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model

    991:

    Yes, that's my understanding, too. So you need one of those for every garage with high-speed charging facilities, and more powerful ones for the main motorway and trunk road ones. Adding 20% capacity to the UK's 11 and 33 KV networks isn't going to be easy, nor is increasing the footprint of refuelling stations by a factor of 5 - as far as I know, neither has even been thought of at governmental level.

    I stand by my view that a simple conversion of petrol/diesel to electric is going to be a disaster, though the exact details will depend on how it is cocked up, and any solution that works will require at least some ventral planning and changes to how transport is used.

    992:

    You survived those incidents and you are reporting your escapades from a survivor's perspective. A lot of people didn't survive accidents in such cars where today, with airbags and A-pillars and crumple zones they might have walked away from accidents that would have required hoses and mops to clean up in previous decades. In 1970 there were 7,500 road deaths in the UK, in 2016 it was something like 1,750 deaths and that's with a lot more people driving more cars.

    There are still a lot of accidents but even in a high speed shunt the car's passenger compartment will stay in one piece, the doors won't burst open, the seats won't detach from the floorpan etc. That structural strength takes mass to achieve, not something the Moggy was renowned for.

    993:

    Ventral planning? Was that a malaprop, or wickedly appropriate?

    I do agree with you, but we'll see what happens next.

    994:

    CERN & antimatter

    Conveniently spans multiple topics. Also, likely to produce interesting tabloid headlines as the project nears launch.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02221-9?utm_source=briefing-dy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180221

    'Physicists plan antimatter’s first outing — in a van

    Researchers intend to transport the elusive material between labs and use it to study the strange behaviour of rare radioactive nuclei.'

    995:

    There is an increasing belief among the people who analyse such things that those features have increased danger as much as they have reduced it. Because of those, people now driver faster, further, and often closer to the edge. That doesn't counteract the extra safety - for motorists and passengers - but it considerably increases the danger to cyclists, pedestrians and other road users. That isn't visible in the overall statistics, because the effect has been to reduce the mileage walked and cycled and is one factor in increasing the mileage driven. But, if you add in the health problems caused by the extra pollution and less exercise plausibly due to the above, the benefits of such features go negative.

    996:

    I see a lot more people (adults that is) cycling these days than I ever did back in the 1970s. Kids back then rode bikes because public transport wasn't available or affordable and families around my neck of the woods couldn't afford cars and/or the petrol to shuttle kids back and forth. The kids rode bikes without helmets, working brakes, lights etc. One of my bikes had a cardboard patch to prevent the inner tube bulging through the rotted tyre sidewall -- I had to replace the patch when it got wet and disintegrated as I couldn't afford a new inner tube (buying a new tyre was in the "impossible" range).

    The average road mileage by motor vehicles is up about 2.5 times compared to that of 1970, the number of deaths is way down, the number of injuries both serious and non-serious to everyone including cyclists and pedestrians is about the same, the population has risen by about ten million. Cars are now designed to not crush or smash bodies into pulp on impact the way they used to. Brakes are better, steering and tyres are massively improved, visibility, lights and a whole host of other things make cars safer for everyone despite the best efforts of car-hating Luddites to convince everyone they are Evil (see, for example the first scaremongering sentence of your post).

    997:

    The problem is the 250 watt nominal limit; that's OK for 15% hills, but doesn't cut the mustard for steeper ones; motors burn out if worked too hard at too low an RPM

    That is why I suggested using one placed before your gear train rather than a direct drive one. You do understand the difference, I hope. On steep hills you're pedaling at 60rpm, the motor is designed to drive your pedals at 60rpm, so it doesn't burn out. The limit will be how slowly you can balance.

    The only complication is that more powerful cyclists might break their drivetrain, but that just means they need tandem-rated parts (a 250W motor is never going to be more powerful than even one peak-condition cyclist).

    Note that this isn't some wild theory of mine, it's based on actually riding real bikes. Bosch, for example, make a number of these units.

    998:

    The Moggy did have mass where it needed it; it was designed at a time when monocoque body shells were still a bit of a daring innovation and they took care to err on the side of caution. The convertible is literally the two-door saloon bodyshell without a roof - no extra reinforcement (the two-door saloon shell even has all the hood mounting points and conversion requires little more than a hacksaw). Try doing that with something produced when they had gained more confidence in monocoques - how about an Allegro? :D

    Crash resistance doesn't dictate that cars must necessarily be massive, although it does make a handy excuse for car manufacturers not to make the effort to use mass with good structural efficiency. Charlie above quotes his Volvo V70's mass as 1485kg. A Ford Fiesta is apparently 1495kg and it's a considerably smaller car. This isn't requirements of crash resistance, it's just horseshit.

    There's also a heck of a lot of mass which is not structural at all, and exists only to make people buy cars with unnecessary frequency. The apocryphal "2 blokes to lift the wiring loom on a Mondeo", and never mind all the things it connects to. People who modify ordinary cars for racing save a phenomenal amount of mass by stripping all this crap out alone (never mind all the other stuff they strip).

    It really isn't possible to justify the lardiness of modern cars on the basis of accident figures. For one thing, it ignores the important differences made by changes in the shape and material of various parts that have little effect on mass one way or the other - radial instead of crossply tyres, better tyre compounds, disc brakes instead of drums, better suspension geometry, etc.

    But it also fails to control for a vast number of other factors which it would take all week to list, never mind assessing them. Drunk driving remained unexceptional long after it was made illegal and only recently has become taboo. Minor accidents may be more likely to be reported these days because the stupidly high cost of things like replacement bumpers and the insistence on mounting them such that if the bumper is deformed it inevitably rogers the panel behind it forces people to claim insurance for what would once have been not worth the hassle. The great majority of reported accidents these days are <30mph urban fender-benders so injury is much less likely. Main roads tend to be wider, straighter and better sighted than they used to be. Separated carriageways are a lot more common. Junctions have been rebuilt to reduce the chance of accidents (eg. rural crossroads -> roundabout). People hardly ever even try to overtake these days because there are so few opportunities and so little gain, so less chance of head-ons when it goes wrong. A lot of the time the de facto speed limit out of town is 45mph because you have no chance of going faster, so you have less chance of an accident and less damage if you do have one. I'm bored now, but I could go on for ages... the point is that pulling any one factor out of the soup is far too much hassle to do oneself and far too useful to expect any reliable researchers to have done it.

    999:

    I don't, and have some observational data to back up my comment, and have seen more. Your last comment shows your prejudices - you may regard statisticians and risk analysts as The Enemy, but is those people I was referring to.

    1000:

    whitroth @988 said: Hey, Charlie and any other writers

    Mark,

    Start reading The Passive Voice blog. They routinely discuss Indy publishing.

    This is the post discussing the Hatchett CEO comment.

    ‘The ebook is a stupid product: no creativity, no enhancement,’ says the Hachette Group CEO

    1001:

    That's pretty much exactly how I see it. Enthusiasm that $manufacturer says they will be producing $largenumber of electric cars in $smallnumber of years, and unthinking assumption that that's the whole thing sorted. On the one hand we have warnings that Britain's electricity supply infrastructure is already creaking, and on the other it's as if people think "oh, electricity is really cheap compared to petrol" [it isn't] therefore charging electric cars must be exactly the same as when the starter battery on your petrol car goes flat and you have to charge it. Two possible disasters that immediately spring to mind are an overenthusiastic scrappage scheme for IC cars followed by OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT the country's ground to a halt, and a panic crash programme of building coal-fired power stations because it's that or the lights go out.

    1002:

    a panic crash programme of building coal-fired power stations because it's that or the lights go out.

    Not coal, we have to import nearly all the coal we burn these days and coal-fired power stations are limited by law to 1500 hours a year operation (about 2 months, usually allocated during the winter to cover peak demand). Gas is cheap, pielines are simple and we have a shitload-and-three-quarters of new gas-fuelled generating capacity which has been built out with little fanfare over the past couple of decades while every unreliable wind farm and solar panel array gets fawning press coverage.

    Quick check -- right now at 20180221 21:00 we're consuminging 42GW of electricity made up from 1.3GW of wind, 7.5GW nuclear, 6.5GW of coal, zero solar (quelle surprise!) and 22GW of combined-cycle gas topped up with 2GW of French nuclear electrons and 1GW of Dutch gas-fired generation plus a smidgeon of pumped storage, hydro and biomass. I've seen as much as 25GW of CCGT capacity online, that's an awful lot of new-build generating capacity that nobody really knows much about.

    1003:

    Elderly Cynic @960 said: I dislike most modern 'hard' science fiction (Baxter etc.), because I don't regard the assumptions as plausible, and they rely critically on them.

    And in response to your comment to Peter Erwin @990:

    • You have to remember that Peter Erwin is still employed and must defend the current "Gravity only cosmology" or risk losing his job.

    Many people here know what happened to Halton Arp(Seeing Red) when he tried to show something as obvious as: Quasars are nearby rather than billions of light years away.

    Wiki - Halton Arp

    • The Wiki article does not point out how Arp lost telescope time and had to move to Germany to continue his work.

    Remember, there are many people who posts on this blog that have to be careful with what they post, for fear of impacting their job/income. You have hesitated to discuss your own personal views in the past because of decades of having to be silent about your own contrary views in public.

    I, on the other hand, am retired, and can say anything I want -- within reason -- without impacting my income. I am free to follow where the evidence takes me without restriction, and I have found so many fun things to use in Story.

    Most of the Gravity only cosmology, has been shown to be wrong, where the Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe stuff explains everything that Gravity only cosmology finds "surprising". Dark Matter/energy was an ad hoc creation to explain what was being observed.

    • Plasma is 99% of all matter in the Universe. The motion of Galaxies are explained by electrical fields controlling that motion, not by "Dark Matter".

    This is a playlist from the ThuderboltsProject. Sadly, there are only seven episodes so far in the planned ten, but this will give you an idea of what they are talking about.

    Top 10 Reasons the Universe is Electric

    As I said up thread, I have followed the Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe since I retired ten years ago, and they have made their case. They routinely take apart the bizarre statements by the Gravity only cosmology people.

    To understand all that requires reading a ton of stuff, watching many interesting videos. Think of it as a University course.

    But then, as I pointed out, some people probably cannot afford to learn this stuff, and risk losing their job in the process. So I understand their position.

    1004:

    Interesting. Thanks.

    Though, the one (so far) novel, no, I intend that to be Big 5 (still looking for an agent). The follow-on, which is elsewhere in the universe, with another cast of characters, is going to need, I dunno, the better part of a year's editing? But it's a two-book story, with a real, reasonable break between the first and the second parts, unlike Some People.

    Yes, I have Reasons I want it Big 5. If I can't do that, after I've bounced, then I'll look at tier 1 small presses. This is important to me, and no, I do not want to run a business, and deal with taxes, and advertising, and all the rest.

    The shorts I'm bouncing, I'd be happy for smaller presses.

    1005:

    But what do your local regulations allow you for maximum power output? Gearing is a solved problem, but the limit is still plain and simply your motor vs. mgh/t. In the UK we aren't allowed more than 250W, which is just not enough to get you up a 25% gradient fast enough for most people to balance. (Especially given that having the front of the bike tipped up at such an angle makes balancing harder in the first place.) I can see your "mummy bikes" being a great idea if you're allowed a kilowatt or so, but I can't see them being any use under UK regs.

    (Dunno what my maximum load on a bicycle has ever been; only 25kg of pigeon food though. Most awkward load would probably be either the fridge or the stack of old PCs and laser printers that the local college threw out.)

    1006:

    No. 250 watts will push 100 Kg up a 25% slope at 2.25 MPH, which needs a 12.6" gear at 60 RPM. For practical use by 60 RPM riders, the top gear must be at least 90" (i.e. 16 MPH), which is a range of over 7:1. There's no rear gear that will provide that, and such motors do not support front gears. THAT'S the problem. With only 500 watts, I would be OK.

    1007:

    It was pointed out some time ago that, if every automotive feature had saved as many lives as it was claimed to, driving would now lead to the resurrection of the dead.

    1008:

    Car engineers have spent a lot of time taking unnecessary mass off car body shells under the constraint that they have to pass modern safety standards for crumple zones etc. They aren't meant to save the car, the job of all that metal origami is to keep the passengers alive and as unhurt as possible. That means the car folds and buckles to beyond-economic-repair in impacts that an older car would survive with a bit of beating out but in bad accidents the older car will need a hose and bucket to clean it out since the occupants would be mushed. It helps that the better brakes, tyres, suspension etc. means fewer incidents of loss-of-control and collisions to start with.

    There's video around of a pair of Chevy cars being crashed into each other, a 1950s model and one from the 21st century. The result? A driver in the modern car might have suffered a slight knee injury, the driver of the older car would have died instantly. They're both write-offs of course.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_ptUrQOMPs

    1009:

    Where does the gas come from? North Sea, or Russia? And how fast is it changing from one to the other? I vaguely remember in the early days of the "dash for gas" some estimate that the North Sea would be good until 2025, which seemed a much more ignorable date then than it does now. Not sure if I'm remembering it correctly, nor how much by way of new reserves has been found since.

    Part of my imagined disaster scenario was that things like 1500h would go out the window, along with things like the practical possibility of objecting to a big-arsed opencast mine on your doorstep... Oh shit, another possibility: underground coal gasification which gets out of control and South Yorkshire ends up like Centralia.

    Though I guess what's most likely is something that's just too plain stupid to ever be thought possible before it happens.

    1010:

    whitroth @1004 said: Yes, I have Reasons I want it Big 5.

    I hear you, Mark. Let me know when the books are published and I'll be glad to buy a copy.

    When I suggest reading TPV blog, think long term. There is usually a lively series of posts about the industry that you will not read anywhere else.

    Another thought to put forth:

    If you Indy publish short novels(50k to 100k, even novellas), that fill in story around the two that you want to publish with the Big 5, you can point to them as building interest for your two main books. Having a successful series of books in the same Verse can help you get someone in the Big 5 interested.

    • Think The Martian and Dust, they were Indy published then picked up by Trad publishers.

    • Dust started out as a series of novellas Indy published, then combined into a novel, then picked up by Trad publishing.

    By Indy publishing different books/novellas, you can build up a following -- and the experience you need -- while still honoring your wish to have your two main books published by the Big 5.

    Start reading TPV blog, and see.

    1011:

    "Car engineers have spent a lot of time taking unnecessary mass off car body shells under the constraint that they have to pass modern safety standards for crumple zones etc."

    And doing a sodding awful job of it, for the most part. So bad that the overall mass, far from decreasing, has increased considerably. There is quite a variation between similar-sized cars from different manufacturers, plenty enough that the ones who are merely bad at it show up the ones who are really hopeless (not that there seems to be any consistency in which are which). I refuse to believe that if one ordinary family car weighs 1500kg and another ordinary family car of similar size weighs 2000kg, when both have to meet the same crash regulations, that the 2000kg one is anything other than pointlessly bloated; and when the situation is the other way round for another pair of cars from the same two manufacturers I have no confidence that the 1500kg one is much better.

    1012:

    Yay. Perhaps coming one day to a streaming service I don't subscribe to, Amazon today announced that they're going turn The Culture into a TV series, beginning with Consider Phlebas

    https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-is-turning-iain-m-banks-iconic-culture-books-in-1823205900

    What could possibly go wrong?

    1013:

    That's interesting; I was wondering why you didn't regard gearing as a solved problem when I did. FWIW my thoughts went something like this:

    A car alternator converts between electrical and mechanical energy over a wide speed range and has a rating at minimum considerably greater than 250W. So I think it is reasonable to expect to be able to get 250W mechanical energy out of it over say a 3:1 speed range without cooking it. I have at least one lying around somewhere, and the 3-phase inverter to drive it as a motor is not hard to make. Almost certainly it would be necessary to make some custom sprockets, but you can easily enough get them laser-cut from a CAD file these days.

    A Sturmey-Archer 3-speed has a difference of 2:1 between top and bottom ratios. So with that and a 3:1 range of drive speed we have 6:1 speed variation overall. If 2.25mph is the minimum speed, the maximum is 13.5, which is close enough to the legal limit of 15mph that I'm not going to worry about the spare 1.5. You could probably relax the 3:1 a bit anyway.

    It's still marginal, and I haven't considered starting off, but there's why my principal objection is to do with wobbling all over the road trying to balance at such a low speed and extreme angle rather than the actual mechanics of it.

    1014:

    Thanks, I'd seen some things like that before, I just thought they were reaching. Your second link has a persuasive bit: "The party's slogan of 'Black Power' also spread throughout the nation, and its black panther emblem was adopted by activists Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, a SNCC veteran in the Lowndes County effort, who together organized the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966."

    1015:

    You fans of fossil-fuel cars will be excited to know that they also help suppress the stench of flowers and the growth of smelly weeds: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731650-200-dirty-talk-how-pollution-is-snuffing-out-plants-scent-messages/

    1016:

    A 3-speed is actually 1.79:1, and the best rear gear is a Rohloff with 5.26:1 (I have one). I ride a recumbent trike when touring, so falling off and starting aren't the problem. But electric assist bottom bracket motors are designed for cadences of 70-90 RPM, and run increasingly inefficiently below that. It's the 100+' hills of 20+% that are the killer, because the cadence at 250 watts, a 19.5" bottom gear and full touring load (130 Kg) would be 38 RPM, and the motor inefficiency goes straight into heat.

    1017:

    With only 500 watts, I would be OK.

    Have you considered pedaling? 250W from the motor, 250W from you, which you should be able to manage for a few minutes if you ride regularly. Or do you have balance issues that mean even a fast walk is too slow for you to balance - in which case can I suggest more wheels?

    1018:

    Increasingly Russia, with the USA telling us we should use its fracking-derived stuff.

    1019:

    whitroth @1004 said: I do not want to run a business, and deal with taxes, and advertising, and all the rest.

    BTW, I read through that part of your post again, and did a double-take.

    I've stumbled across a number of authors who will not consider Indy publishing because they think that they have to do a ton of stuff that is not necessary.

    • When you publish through Amazon, they pay you "net" and handle the Federal/State withholding, so I don't see your problem with the "taxes". If your book makes at least $10 they pay you after 60 days, which can be once a month if your book is generating regular income. They send you a 1099 at the start of the year to use with Schedule C and such. Of course YMMV, HA!

    • The only "advertising" you have to do is publish the next book. No "advertising" that you can afford will work, so why waste the money. As you build up a "body of work" your books should generate more income -- YMMV.

    Sadly, I am a person not a business, so I don't understand your need to run a "business", other than being business like in all of your dealings.

    • It costs nothing to produce the book, if you do everything yourself, DIY -- YMMV.

    I use Draw(LibreOffice) to assemble the cover. Any artwork can be done using free drawing software. I'm on a Mac, so I use Gimp, Inkscape, and am playing with Blender for more complex art.

    Look at the covers for Readme by Neal Stephenson, and see how simple a cover can be and still work.

    Hardback

    Trade

    Look on the Amazon product page, scroll down until you see the "Customers who bought this item also bought" and look at the book covers. I routinely harvest covers that I like to learn from. Making a good cover is not hard. If you can use a wordprocessor you can do a cover.

    • I try and create a cover every week to experiment and learn the "language" of covers. Plus, it keeps my skill level up on the software.

    When you do the paper book, you need to order a copy to physically check to see if things blew up. That would be at "author's" cost and shipping, so that's dollars, not hundreds or thousands.

    • Shoot for a 6x9 paper book, 0.5 inch margins all around, 0.25 gutters. With the font Garamond 11, single spaced, I can fit about 500 words each page.

    The big mistake I've seen is people using a large font and weird spacing, puffing out their book, making it more expensive. In POD, the number of pages determines the cost. It is a Reprographic process not Offset Printing. This is an example of how a POD book is made.

    The Espresso Book Machine

    Notice, each book is made out of letter size paper, and then "cut" to the final block size. That's why the cost of the book depends on the page count. Keep the page count down, and the paper book is affordable.

    You publish the paper book and then the ebook. You price each book so that you make $2. In Trad publishing, you are lucky to make $0.48 for a mass market or $2 for a hardback, so making $2 per copy sold is a valid price.

    BTW, I have seen too many Indy and Trad ebooks priced so high that the regular reader will not buy them. Any ebook over $10 is not going to sell many copies.

    Of course, as I've said, YMMV. HA!

    1020:

    which is a range of over 7:1. There's no rear gear that will provide that, and such motors do not support front gears

    Here in the advanced nation of Australia we have access to bleeding-edge technology from the 1990's such as the Sunstar and Stoke Monkey. This page from the US has a useful list of mid drive units and although many shown aren't road legal in AU/EU they generally come in variants that are. What's notable about many of those pictures is that they're apparently unaware of your requirement that they not support multiple chainrings, so they can be set up to offer extremely wide range of gears at the cost of even more fragility. I much prefer IGH setups where the cost is front-loaded but you have that option too.

    TBH a 7:1 ratio is going to be pushing it for any gearing system, your best bet would probably be an IGH with multiple chainrings, but that's very dependent on your fitness and mechanical awareness (if you over-torque any IGH it will break, but not all manufacturers tell you what the limit is). Otherwise you're likely to have really ugly shifts between chainrings and probably also a bunch of gear combos that don't work (you can either use a 24T-12T small-small gear or a 55T-40T large-large one, but no derailleur will take up enough chain to let you use both) .

    If I was really troubled by hills I'd be more inclined to buy a front hub motor that was geared to cut out at 8-10kph and was at peak efficiency around 5-6kph. That way it would get me out of traffic lights fast, boost me up hills, but be dead weight when riding on the flat. But that trade-off is unpopular with most people so it would be a custom motor (surprisingly cheap, but still custom).

    1021:

    Quick check -- right now at 20180221 21:00 we're consuminging 42GW of electricity made up from...

    From

    http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

    no?

    A most useful resource (I assume it's sort of right/reliable) and it would be nice to see similar from other countries and regions.

    1022:

    In practice I've been considering the exact opposite, a 200W motor geared to boost at 25-50kph because in Australia we have a split system, 200W with no speed limit or 250W limited to 25kph. One sneaky option that might be legal is dual motors and a single controller, because it's the system that's limited to 250W. I haven't checked that, but it would trade an extra 3kg for the second motor for a much simpler mechanical setup.

    I haven't bothered with the speed limit systems because those irritate me to the point where I only use them when I'm injured and can't pedal at all. My commute is extremely PT-unfriendly the walk-train-bus-walk option takes ~90 minutes assuming I can walk 2.5km in 30 minutes. Which is unlikely when I'm too injured to ride a bike.

    My employer has been looking to move further away from where I live for at least five years, but it might happen. If they do I'll be looking at 90 minutes on the bike rather than 45, so an e-assist that gets my cruising speed up around 45-50kph will make a big difference. I've also been trying to find suitable routes to ride at that speed, because I'm not really happy about 90 minutes each way. Those routes are also hard to find - the problem is busy roads with uphill sections, and on those I want more like 1000W of power assist (1:12 gradient at 20m/s, because busy roads have 60kph speed limits and traffic flows at 70kph)

    The sad thing about being a home-owner is that my usual solution of moving closer to work is a huge PITA. Right now I'm getting more rent from housemates than I would if I rented the whole house out, so renting elsewhere would be a double cost - less rent coming in at the same time as I'd be paying rent to someone else. But if work does move I'll likely end up doing that, because 50 year old programmers find it hard to switch jobs (yay for finally making it to the other end of the age discrimination problem... I think?)

    1023:

    "There is an increasing belief among the people who analyse such things that those features have increased danger as much as they have reduced it. Because of those, people now driver faster, further, and often closer to the edge. "

    If you have links, I'd appreciate them. IIRC, Peltzman's original paper wasn't so good. It's pretty much a fundamental finding of cognitive psych that people s*ck at estimating small probabilities.

    1024:

    Don't try to predict the future.

    A) your wishes will make you stupid. Emotion destroys the capacity for rational thought; rationalizing thought takes over. The more IQ and information you have, the worse you will do, because you'll be better at convincing yourself of what you want to believe.

    (This applies to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future.)

    B) It would be inherently impossible anyway. There is too much information and you can't tell what part of it is significant or how it interacts.

    Eg., try to imagine a Roman deciding in 0 CE that the future would be utterly shaped by a mystery cult based on a dead Jewish preacher.

    This is why I don't do contemporary or near/future SF. It reveals your biases and/or ignorance too starkly and too soon.

    Don't try to predict the future. Don't imagine that you can, or that anyone can, understand some underlying structure which would account for and predict people's actions. Don't imagine that you know what'll overdetermine events 10 years from now.

    Incidentally, this is why "planning" in any comprehensive sense always fails.

    1025:

    Hey guys, here's an interesting article about the smallsat revolution

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-21/the-small-rocket-revolution

    Here are some interesting quotes from the article

    "As costs have fallen -- customizable smallsats go for as little as $11,000 these days -- business opportunities have expanded. Planet Labs Inc. now operates more than 200 Earth-observing smallsats for governments, agricultural companies, investment firms and others. With some 6,200 smallsats expected to launch over the next two decades, the possibilities seem almost limitless."

    and

    "Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit and Tucson-based Vector Space Systems are planning launches of competing products later this year. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force is requesting $193 million over the next five years to develop launch vehicles for smaller payloads. At least 35 such vehicles are in the works worldwide."

    1026:

    Eh.. charging will, as previously established, take place overwhelmingly at night because that is when the cars are standing still hooked up to the grid at or near the owners residence. Further, their charging will be managed to level demand - only rarely will a car need a full recharge, since the use pattern is to charge every night, but few people drive 400km every day, which means the average car will have a time in the morning at which it needs to be full, and an hour or two of charging it needs to do at some point before then. - There is no better case for demand management I can think of.

    This means peak demand will not go up at all. Average demand will, and by quite a lot, so yes, some transformers will need beefing up, but.. the powerplants should not keel over.

    Further, from a balance of payments perspective, that is substituting oil imports for smaller gas imports, and gas is cheaper to begin with.

    It does make "Build a whole bunch more reactors" a very attractive prospect, because if you have a grid which has a constant load of 2/3rds of peak load, that is a very good fit for nuclear.

    1027:

    If correct, then the "Electric" as opposed to "gravitational" theory will "win" eventually, as evidence accumulates? how long to go?

    1028:

    "Emotion destroys the capacity for rational thought" Yes, I agree, Reverend Mother. Put aside that gom jabbar, please :-)

    "Eg., try to imagine a Roman deciding in 0 CE that the future would be utterly shaped by a mystery cult based on a dead Jewish preacher". Playing devil's advocate, some Roman may had extrapolated that in future an Oriental cult of some sort (Attis, Cybele, Isis, Mithra) would have played a far greater role, given that they were becoming popular.

    "This is why I don't do contemporary or near/future SF. It reveals your biases and/or ignorance too starkly and too soon". Does it apply to urban fantasy, AH or post-apocalyptic, too?

    "Don't imagine that you can, or that anyone can, understand some underlying structure which would account for and predict people's actions"

    Because the underlying structure is too much hidden, or outside our current explanations and models, or because it doesn't exist? Going back to your Roman example: maybe he may have guessed something about the role of a new religion, but he would be utterly unable to understand economic explanations because economics was outside his conceptual framework. But economic issues did exist...

    1029:

    You keep using that word, "believe" when discussing engineering matters. It worries me a bit.

    As for "bloat" as you call it, people want comfort and safety and reliability and a whole host of other things in personal transport today that weren't available to them in previous generations of cars -- you should see the way touring motorbikes have bloated in the same way with things added like ducted-air hand-warmers and even (and I shit you not) aircon...

    Anyway either professional car designers and engineers with access to the best tools and processes a hundred years of development have provided to reduce the weight of the car, improve fuel economy and reduce materials costs are inept and incompetent hence "bloat" (which appears to be your belief) or it might be they're doing a nearly-optimum job at achieving their aims within a straitjacket of safety regulations and design requirements to meet the sales forecasts, production schedules etc. I choose door number 2.

    1030:

    - You have to remember that Peter Erwin is still employed and must defend the current "Gravity only cosmology" or risk losing his job.

    Nonsense. I know of a physics* lecturer in a leading british university who is working on his own mechanical alternative** to quantum mechanics.

    If you can't lose a job in a physics department for that then being skeptical about a few dark matter model fits is hardly going to register.

    I'm pretty sure you get a few crackpot index points for that claim too.

    Ok, so he was imported from their engineering dept, but even so. *Doesn't pass the bells theorem sniff test of course.

    1031:

    If I was really troubled by hills I'd be more inclined to buy a front hub motor that was geared to cut out at 8-10kph and was at peak efficiency around 5-6kph.

    So would I - if one existed. As you say, it wouldn't be a difficult modification of an existing motor, but I doubt your "surprisingly cheap".

    1032:

    Sorry - I haven't kept them. They definitely weren't cognitive psychology, but were analyses of the statistics, such as they are. The real trouble is that there is damn little data on non-motorised road use (both usage and injury rates) from the 1950s and 1960s, and the modern data is both politicised and privatised.

    1033:

    Let's assume you have waved your magic wand and got effective demand management, and built charging points into most residential car parks; that probably resolves 90% of the commuting and shopping requirements for those of us in the leafy suburbs. Note OGH's point about the urban population, which also applies to most housing estates. However, the problems with that in the UK are NOT just (or even primarily) pollution from exhausts, but congestion and parking (at both ends).

    And it doesn't even begin to tackle the large number of people who drive long distances as part of their work, let alone going on holiday. Just think of what will happen over August Bank Holiday weekend! Plus, of course, goods traffic - both light and heavy. There are 88 motorway service stations for 2,300 miles of motorway, and a large number of busy fuel stations on the 5,300 miles of trunk road and 23,800 miles of other 'A' road. We are talking about at least 500 large refuelling stations with most demand at the busiest periods.

    1034:

    30 minutes rather than 5 at the 'pump' needs 6 times the number of stations; even smallish garages have 4 stations nowadays, so will need at least 20.

    Remember, gas pumps at a filling station need to be optimized for vehicle flow-through and proximity to an underground tank full of potentially explosive fuel. Even so, they're often combined with a small supermarket (and off-pump car parking carea for customers) because they attract passing trade.

    The EV charging station needs proximity to a grid sub-station capable of supplying a few MW of juice, but there are no explosive tanks on hand so you don't need to minimize the number of vehicles in proximity to the bang juice at any moment.

    Also: many vehicle owners will recharge at home in their own garage (yes, Greg, not you or I ...). So demand at stations is mostly going to be from people undertaking journeys outside their battery capacity's radius of operation from home.

    That sounds a lot like a motorway service station to me: a big car park (with charge points at every space, pay by credit card), adjacent to a mini-mall with a food court and shops. The business model is to attract travellers with the juice and get them to stay for the shopping, or to attract shoppers to the mall and sell them a top-up while they're shopping.

    The old-style mom'n'pop gas stop is already dying out, replaced by fuel stations attached to supermarket car parks; this will just merge the "filling station" with the car park at the mall.

    1035:

    It's exaggerated, true, but not nonsense. There are surprisingly eminent professors who believe that some of the dogmas are mistaken and the speculative extrapolations based on them are scientifically crap, but have to keep quiet about saying so to avoid even more influential ones targeting them as heretics. And, yes, I have known quite a few who have made that very clear.

    1036:

    much less so on crash survivability, as those almost never happen.

    Nope, not gonna happen.

    Vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-tree collisions will be very rare, as will vehicle-pedestrian (pedestrians are slow-moving and easy to track) and almost certainly vehicle-bicycle (I can see bikes being fitted with passive lidar-reflectors soon, the way they're fitted with headlight reflectors: same principle, being visible is a cheap safety feature). But the Swedish government is still going to expect cars to be moose-tested; and if you've ever seen what happens when a horse spooks at a passing helicopter, or nearly driven into a brown bear that dashed out in front of you from among the trees ... nope. Wildlife collisions are going to be relatively rare, but they can happen very suddenly and with as much force as a vehicle-vehicle collision.

    1037:

    ...see also Eric Laithwaite, Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, London - and given the Tesla Award by the IEEE.

    1038:

    First, why is it not possible that during either Inflation, nor the early expansion, that smaller masses, or perhaps extremely large masses, created in the Bang and following, have become huge black holes, and hoovered up much of the original mass of the Universe?

    There are in fact some (very speculative) suggestions that tiny black holes could perhaps have been created, and might even form the basis of today's dark matter. This would have been very early on in the universe's history -- before quarks and baryons began to form -- but after inflation. ("Inflation" means that the universe is expanding so fast that any black holes which did somehow form would be lost in all the extra space, so that there would on average be less than one of them in the entire visible universe today.)

    They wouldn't, however, be able to "hoover up" much mass, because the Universe was expanding so fast that only the mass right next to them could have been captured.

    I've also wondered if the very distant object red shift could have been affected by the immense mass of the entire universe during Inflation?

    I'm not really sure what you're asking here...

    1039:

    That sounds awfully like you have been drinking the American Dream Kool-Aid! Yes, that is happening, but it doesn't change my point about the extra land area and electric distribution needed. It's irrelevant whether the fuelling stations are attached to supermarkets or separate, as far as those are concerned.

    Perhaps worse, the domination of UK retail by the supermarkets is a major cause of our traffic (and some other) problems. If your scenario happens (and it may well), I guarantee that it will be a disaster in other ways (including increasing urban and suburban traffic). You aren't assuming that we will actually have any joined-up planning for such a change, are you? :-)

    1040:

    But we've already got the supermarket car-parks and the supermarket dominance of retail, though: that's my point.

    Instead of building some new equivalent of petrol stations only for EVs, I expect the supermarkets to wire their car parks for vehicle charging while you shop.

    Moreover: retailers in the UK currently have a problem with online sales and delivery services eating their lunch. Adding "you can charge your car while you shop" gives them an extra value proposition to get the punters in through the doors.

    (Joined up planning, what's that?)

    1041:

    It's not just the structural "did you survive" aspect of safety design. I may be biased, my father crash-tested a Volvo 360GLT in the mid-80s by decelerating from 45 to zero in the space of the bonnet (he hit a stone wall on the Frogston Road edge on, attempting to avoid someone who had decided to pull out in front of him)*.

    It's also about avoiding the crash in the first place - disc brakes all round, multiple redundancy in the braking systems, handling improvements that come from suspensions that are a touch more complex than a leaf spring.

    Once the crash happens, making sure that the doors can be opened afterwards, so that you don't need to be cut free after any minor shunt. That the fuel pump cuts out, so that you don't risk spraying fuel onto hot engines or brakes. That the fold-down rear seats have strong enough latches that the not-strapped-down 30kg generator set in the boot (trunk for y'all) doesn't attempt to join you in the front. Etc, etc. These things weren't a "given" in vehicle design until the 1990s (GM were still attempting to export US-branded small/medium cars with leaf-spring suspensions to the UK in the early 21st Century...)

    Now throw in the desire to be comfortable in hot summers and cold winters; heaters and AC, insulation for heat, cold, and sound. Add the desire for efficiency - catalytic converters, direct injection engines, heavier gearboxes that contain 6+1 or more gears, not the 4+1 of old. Add the extra paint coatings on metal surfaces, meaning cars no longer start to rust through in three years - and the reinforcement to welds and joints that mean the car is strong enough to shrug off 100,000 miles, not worry about reaching half that.

    It all adds weight, and isn't necessarily "bloat".

    • As it was (these were the days before airbags) Dad broke all the bones under the seatbelt, and spent several days in the cardiothoracic unit while they watched to see how his heart reacted to being bounced hard off the back of his now-broken sternum. But he lived, which (given the delights of metal steering wheels, non-retracting steering columns, et al) was much less likely had he been in a different vehicle. Say, the Peugeot 205 or Mk.1 Golf hatchbacks of that era.
    1042:

    Yes and no. It's a matter of degree. When something is operating at 90% of capacity, an extra 20% load IS catastrophic - and those figures are realistic in at least many areas.

    Only some supermarkets have parking for cars with trailers, LGVs etc., so that would have to be added to those that do not, and some HGVs need to fill up at ordinary garages, so at least SOME supermarkets would need to allow those. That's generally the lesser issue, but I can see large numbers of ways it can (and probably will) be cocked up.

    A worse problem is that many road networks are already operating at near-limit capacity, and this change will add a large proportion to the supermarket access. I don't know what proportion of commuter/shopper drivers involves filling at supermarkets, but what you describe will have almost all of them driving across towns to get to supermarkets to refuel, instead of just some. Similarly, while supermarkets all have suitable access, we are talking about a large increase in the LGV and HGV traffic.

    1043:

    Again, the bulk of all charging is going to happen at home, or home adjacent, (if you do not have any reliable parking at all, why do you own a car, full stop?) because that is going to be cheapest in user time and also in cash. If a shopping center is near a intercity route it makes sense for them to add charging to attract intercity traffic, but it wont drive local traffic, because local traffic is full up.

    To clarify: I expect people to invest far too much money in high-speed charging infrastructure and loose their shirts, because the actual demand for high-speed charging will turn out to be an absurdly small percentage off all the electricity sold to cars. The total electricity sales will be a big deal and probably spur all kinds of investment in beefing up the grid, but I reckon the supercharger model is being drastically overestimated in importance because people are making a false analogy with gas stations. You dont need a super charger near you to use an electric car - That is, in fact, a completely useless piece of infrastructure to you - the only supercharger type stations you will ever use are the ones far from your home and near long-haul highways.

    Maybe your local gas station will install one, but noone will ever use it, because it will be obligated to charge a large premium over what a kwh costs at your standard slow-charger at 3 am.

    And then your gas station will go bankrupt. The only survivors of that bloodbath will be places on long haul routes, and mostly because yes, those will be attractors of retail traffic.

    Instead, all the places you park where so many people in this thread are going "I cant charge there" will miraculously gain a 220 volt outlet, because lifting up the sidewalk and installing one down every x meters is an investment that will pay off very quickly compared to the price differential with the high-speed charging infrastructure.

    1044:

    Wildlife collisions are going to be relatively rare

    For certain values of relatively. The currently florishing population of deer will probably keep the numbers up.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer%E2%80%93vehicle_collisions

    1045:

    I expect the supermarkets to wire their car parks for vehicle charging while you shop.

    Yeah, I can easily picture US shopping malls with parking lot aisles dedicated to charging stations—like with handicap sections. I can also easily see that there will always be some Coal-Rolling, pick-em-up driving asshole who will park their truck across as many spots as possible. Hopefully the owners of the lots will be serious about towing.

    Also, where in all this discussion about self-driving cars do motorcycles/scooters fit? There's still going to be good and bad riders out there.

    1046:

    It depends very much on the objectives programmed into the AI - note that I said objectives, so that includes 'machine learning'.

    The danger is that they will include the current attitude of most UK (and USA?) police forces that the driver is faultless in all 'non-serious' collisions with cyclists, animals and often pedestrians, even if the driver admits he endangered them deliberately. And, no, I am NOT joking - I have definite knowledge of such occurrences, attitudes and even policies. A lot of people claim that won't happen, but none of them actually know what objectives have been programmed in.

    Perhaps more seriously, all three classes of road user can be injured and even killed without the vehicle touching them - the turbulence of a vehicle passing can cause them to fall over or react inappropriately, as can the shock of an unexpected pass, and the latter will only get more common with electric vehicles (being quieter). Another point is that cyclists wobble, pedestrians stumble and animals shy, and get blown about by wind, and the current road policies assume that does not happen - or, at least, is the victim's fault.

    I am not saying that this WILL happen - merely that there is no public evidence either way. The REAL danger will be if the government or courts give the car manufacturers and insurers a "get out of gaol free" card in the form of deeming an AI vehicle to be blameless in the absence of evidence otherwise.

    1047:

    I'm not saying that they're commonplace, but an HV transformer fire isn't a whole lot less nasty than a fire in a bulk citane tank.

    1048:

    multiple redundancy in the braking systems

    LOLROFMHS! How, exactly, do you propose to achieve multiple sets of road tyres and foundation brakes?

    1049:

    (if you do not have any reliable parking at all, why do you own a car, full stop?)

    Because:- 1) there is no reliable public transport from home to work 2) you sometimes make leisure trips where there is no viable public transport and/or you need to carry more stuff than one person can comfortably manage at interchanges 3) you actually enjoy driving...

    1050:

    Well, where I live, the wind speed can be 40mph mean, 60 peak gust for several days at a stretch. Are you seriously claiming that, if you choose to cycle in those conditions and get blown into a heavier vehicle, it's not at least partly your fault?

    1051:

    That is a straw man argument, as well as a gross misrepresentation of what I said. Please stop it. If you want to ask a serious question, reread what I said first.

    1052:

    Like ... more than one brake circuit. All current UK cars have separate ciruits, operated from the same single pedal, f'rinstance

    1053:

    This is why I don't do contemporary or near/future SF.

    Speaking of that, any chance of further novels set in the ERB Homage, er, setting? I really enjoyed those and ItCotCK certainly left room for further development.

    1054:

    It's flu season and you'd rather not get sick.

    1055:

    "A 3-speed is actually 1.79:1"

    Hah, yes, of course... and 2:1 is not actually possible. As I should have realised years and years ago but somehow never noticed. Pythagoras would despair of me.

    Not heard of those Rohloff devices before. I hope they are better at mechanical engineering than they are at making websites; the link to the page that explains the details of their hubs just redirects me back to the front page, so much of the detail remains obscure. Still, it is good to see that the epicyclic hub gear principle is still alive and well.

    1056:

    Are you sure that's not already happened? It was more than 10 years ago, I think, that I read that there are move people alive now than have ever lived since there's been homo sap.

    Of course, there is a growing number of people who died early in the past for good reasons, like being eaten by a bear while waiting for words and pictures to appear on the flat piece of wood they were holding while walking through the woods....

    1057:

    2018 Flu stats:

    It's a bad flu year for the US.

    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

    1058:

    A few things: first, 100k words isn't short, even by modern standards. The two-book series that will come at some point, that needs a huge amount of work, is 205k.

    Second, about "advertising I can afford" - that's exactly the point of why I want large publisher. All I could afford would be copies to every big-city paper book reviewer, and a number of magazine reviewers, and an ad in Locus, and Analog, and F&SF, and not sure what else.

    Thirdly, I can do some art, but I'm not an artist. I could talk to friends who are, including several who've done cover art, but now we're adding a few thou to the costs.

    Btw, if you want to talk about this further, email me offlist. My username (at) (numeral five)(dash)cent(dot)us.

    1059:

    Right, I'm aware that Inflation occurred at between 10^-36 and 10^-33 sec or so. But, if I understand what I'm reading correctly, it still was smaller than, say, the Milky Way now, and I'm picturing accretion disks of small black holes, with the universe hot enough, and enough matter around, to keep them from evaporating before they coalesced.

    And what I was suggesting, at the end, was that a) the gravitational force of all the mass in the universe now being in a volume as small or smaller than a galaxy would have created some serious red shift. I also have just been struck with the question of what red shift did Inflation itself give to the photons at the end of that period.

    1060:

    "if you do not have any reliable parking at all, why do you own a car, full stop?"

    I don't know where you are, but this is very common in the UK: as I mentioned earlier, we have lots of urban housing that was built before cars became common, which takes the form of unbroken rows of houses with no space between them, fronting directly onto the street, the width of each house being comparable to the length of a car. So there is room for at most one car per house - if the street is wide enough for people to park down both sides of it, which isn't always the case - and there is no legal right to park your own car in front of your own house. Living in these areas is great for walking to the corner shop or the pub, and they win handsomely on that score, but they're just the same as nearly everywhere in the UK in that you need a car to go anywhere more distant, and the arseache involved in having to hunt for somewhere to park every time you come home is far outweighed by the usefulness of having been able to drive to wherever it was you went in the first place.

    1061:

    I see that skunks are a North American thing.

    While physical damage from collision with one is rare the worst issue is when you run over one and the car becomes unbearable to be near (much less in for a few days or more. And by run over I mean just having the tires run over a thin flattened circle of fur, bones, and meat.

    I wonder if a skunk smell detector will become an option for autonomous cars at some point.

    In general people can smell a skunk scent or a dead one well over a mile away. And most sane drivers go on high alert for any lumps or discolored areas (small or large) in the road when they notice the smell.

    1062:

    And this kind of area is where Uber (and Lyft and others) think they will mint gold with electric autonomous cars. People will give up their own car and just do autonomous cars by the ride with a rental for long journeys.

    1063:

    I read SF mostly to be immersed in a "sense of wonder". I prefer "hard-SF" as I don't like things that happen without reasons.

    Yes. Calvin ball is fun to read about in a few frames of a comic strip. A day long game of it would get old for most of us. 30 minutes more likely.

    1064:

    That's not actually true. There have been approx 108 billion Homo Sapiens on Earth

    http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

    1065:

    Greg Tingey @1027 said: how long to go?

    They have conferences each year, with regular people and scientists attending. They started in Albuquerque, and now moved to the Phoenix area reaching a bigger population. They plan on having one in England this year or next.

    • They fund science experiments in Plasma cosmology.

    Michael Clarage: SAFIRE and the Electric Sun Model | EU2015

    Their YouTube channel has 500+ videos and 100k+ subscribers. With all that it is simply a matter of time before a Paradigm shift starts. But I'm not holding my breath against the entrenched Gravity only people. HA!

    BTW, dpb @1030 and Martin @ 1037:

    The main areas where EU papers are published are in the IEEE, i.e., Engineering journals not Physics journals.

    1066:

    "You keep using that word, "believe" when discussing engineering matters. It worries me a bit."

    [shrug] I'm just acknowledging that the arguments - yours and mine equally, whether you use the word or not - are not really based on any solid engineering data. Nor can they be without an extensive programme of industrial espionage, or at the very least spending far more time on tedious web searches than is justified by a discussion that has no real point beyond enjoying the online socialising. I use it for the same kind of reason that I tend to sprinkle my posts with "it seems", "I think" etc.

    I think, anyway, that a significant factor in the difference in views is that you believe they're trying to achieve the best possible result under the circumstances, whereas I believe they're after the easiest result that's just not-crappy enough for them to get away with it. The latter, indeed, is an established fact in cases such as the engineering of VW diesel engine management systems - the only thing about that story that surprised me was that so many people found it so unexpected, whereas I never expected them to have done anything different and was only surprised that it wasn't better concealed.

    1067:

    It was concealed in a just not-crappy enough way for them to get away with it :-) They had had a nod and a wink from several of the most critical governments but, when it was exposed, those same governments went into overdrive scapegoat mode. SOP.

    1068:

    I believe most if not all Whole Foods Market store locations in the U.S. have EV charging stations.

    1069:

    Since we're past 1000 comments...

    Why I'll never get rich in the stock market.

    I bought Amazon at about $180. Sold it around $330. Was proud of my profit at the time.

    As I type this the price is just under $1500.

    1070:

    I believe most if not all Whole Foods Market store locations in the U.S. have EV charging stations.

    1071:

    whitroth @1058 said: Thirdly, I can do some art, but I'm not an artist.

    • Don't waste money on advertising, you can't afford it, and it is pointless. Publish the next book. A book a year brings people back to all of your books. Remember, they are not like Trad books that go out of print in months. Indy books are there for decades.

    Don't worry about artwork. You can find a huge amount of art online that is available for small fees, $15 or $20. The covers I play with each week are about clarity of the text, so I do my own. Look at the covers on Amazon, they have to be clear at thumbnail size. Once you play with covers you will come up to speed with no problem.

    • Believe it or not, the artwork for most Trad books are assembled from available sources, not from commissioned art. Look at the credits page on some books and they list the sources for the art.

    For a fun example of what I'm talking about, Dean Wesley Smith puts out a monthly magazine. He basically does the covers at very little cost using art available from the commercial sites, for a few bucks each cover.

    Smith's Monthly Book Series

    Each issue contains a novel and short stories. His novels are usually in the classic size 40k to 70k. He fills each issue, each month, with his own stuff. He uses the 7x10 format, two columns, which lets 100k fit in 178 pages. Two columns is a great format at that size block. You can use a small font and it is clearly readable.

    Go to the first issue, "Look inside" and see the format, read the introduction to see what he is doing. BTW, there are actually more that the 37 issues listed, they just haven't updated the list. HA!

    He publishes the novels in his monthly magazine, and then publishes them as standalone books. Both paper and ebook.

    Seeders Universe (9 Book Series)

    The Diving Series (6 Book Series)

    I forgot to mention last post that KDP offers 70% royalties on ebooks for $2.99 to $9.99, and 35% if the price is below $2.99 or above $9.99, so you need to price in the sweet spot.

    Dean Wesley Smith publishes standalone ebook short stories at $2.99, and novels at $4.99 and Kris Rusch publishes novels at $5.99 because they are longer.

    BTW, happy to email you if you wish. I just want to break down the myths of how hard or expensive Indy publishing is. Look at Dean's stuff and realize that each book cost dollars to make, not thousands. If it cost thousands for each book, he would not do them. HA!

    1072:

    But such a row of houses can - and will - also acquire a row of poles with an outlet and just enough smarts to talk to your phone. So those parking spots become fungible to you, as far as charging goes. Uhm. Well, I suppose rollout might be a problem, with first movers being terrified that being the only electrified street would result in "their" parking being permanently occupied, but that would not stop a city or utility drive to do this for entire areas at once.

    1073:

    there is no legal right to park your own car in front of your own house

    Which apparently doesn't stop people getting all upset when someone—even an ambulance—does it:

    http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-41953644

    1074:

    though I have understood that how you speak is somewhat of a bigger matter in Britain than in for example Finland.

    I always thought the US (where I grew up and have lived) had a wide variety of how to speak the English language. Then I encountered the variety of how English is spoken by the English. Oy vey.

    1075:

    Noah Webster wanted the new country to have a unique language and published a dictionary with new spellings. It sold widely enough to become the "standard".

    1076:

    What phone?

    We've had such area drives already, with cable-TV installation - a considerably easier proposition than the copper to handle hundreds of kW. It didn't exactly come off brilliantly. I think something like half the UK still does not have cable. We're not very good at stuff like that - heck, we've still got lead water supply pipes in some places.

    We haven't got the installers either; we haven't even got installers who can handle low-power signal-only installations. This is a typical example: http://filehost.serveftp.net/pic/shite-cable-laying-1.jpg

    1077:

    Oh, aye. Neighbour wars, dogshit in door handles, nails under tyres... it doesn't happen everywhere, but in some places it's explosive.

    1078:

    how long to go?

    Oh, about the same length of time until the Flat Earthers triumph...

    1079:

    What phone?

    If you can afford an electric car, you can afford a basic PAYG smartphone for paying the meters. (They only cost about £40 today, for Cthulhu's sake: they're already vital in many cities for paying the — rapidly going phone-payment-only, no-cash-accepted — parking meters.)

    1080:

    I merely noted them in passing, when I saw the papers and other reliable references. I can remember that one was written by a Dr I. Drummond.

    I'll assume that "I. Drummond" probably refers to this, which is a single paper on a "bi-metric" theory of gravity: basically, a more complicated form of general relativity, with extra mathematical elements. Just by skimming the paper, I can tell this won't work, because it fails to explain the dynamics of very small galaxies which are (in the conventional picture) highly dark-matter-dominated. (Drummond's setup assumes ensures that dark-matter-mimicking effects only appear for galaxies like the Milky Way, probably because he's unfamiliar with dwarf galaxies.)

    More generally speaking, you're alluding to speculative alternate theories of gravity (the Verlinde model that someone else referenced falls into the same general category), which are a fine thing but tend to a) have real problems explaining astronomical observations; or b) haven't been developed enough to be properly testable yet.

    I'm happy that there are people working on this sort of thing, and it might turn out to be correct, but at the moment it's all highly speculative and uncertain, and far less worked-out than things like LambdaCDM.

    Although I do find it curious that you claim such things are "simpler" than standard cosmology (when of course they're often not), and at the same time you decry "extreme extrapolations of general relativity (Hawking etc.)... [for which] there is even LESS evidence for the current dogmas about those". You can't have it both ways.

    1081:

    so Kennedy was also shown as saying "Cuber" and "Africker," and I don't think standard UK English does that.

    That just means he grew up in the greater Boston area.

    In the US standard English is a myth.

    Heck Philadelphia and Pittsburgh can't even understand each other, much less Minnesota and Mississippi.

    I spent 7 years in the Pittsburgh area and got to learn all about "rhet up", yenz, and such.

    1082:

    More about book covers:

    These two covers do not work. I had to physically hold them to understand the artwork.

    The Darkling Child: The Defenders of Shannara

    Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices)

    You can have complexity, but it's tricky. This is an image beneath a semi-transparent layer.

    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

    Versus the first book.

    The Girl Who Played with Fire

    These are the styles I like.

    Readme

    Tourist Season

    Keeping It Real

    I'm trying to understand Blender so that I can have a single spaceship floating on the white cover like these:

    Starships size comparison (EVE Online)

    With Blender I can do everything from a pocket watch to a spaceship. HA!

    1083:

    Peter Erwin @1078 said: Oh, about the same length of time until the Flat Earthers triumph...

    HA!

    "Flat Earthers" are based on a "conspiracy theory" that is there to hide the fatal flaws, as I mentioned above @831. Do pay attention.

    Infiltrating Flat Earth International Conference - Leftovers

    No need to defend your position. I understand.

    1084:

    Don't try to predict the future.

    Incidentally, this is why "planning" in any comprehensive sense always fails.

    Well trolled sir, well trolled.

    Now here's why you're wrong...

    Actually, all sarcasm aside, there's a subtle and critical point here about black swan theory, and it's worth commenting on, because I don't think most people get it.

    You're correct that black swans (like Jesus) are unpredictable. The Romans, like every other conquering empire, ran into a bunch of Messiahs. I believe Jesus was one of three active at the point when he was crucified? Anyway, the messianic complex is a worldwide, fairly stereotypical phenomenon, one that regularly throws up Ghost Dances, Cargo Cults, and of course, religious messiahs leading people to the promised land in the face of tyrrany.

    Almost always, tyrrany wins. The weird thing about the whole Jesus cult was that, thanks to the apostle Paul (who never knew Jesus when he was alive), the Jesus cult morphed, survived the death of the original disciples, and went on to conquer. That's why Jesus was a black swan, not because he was a messiah, but because his cult survived the death of his followers.

    Now, the other 99.9% of the time, reality is painfully, boringly predictable. There are no black swans, and this is why planning is practiced routinely, and to a large degree, successfully.

    Yes, all plans get undone by Black Swans, that's the nature of Black Swans. Thing is, those little birdies are rare. It's not that they're unimportant. Generally they're frightfully important. It's that they are rare, and reality is fairly predictable in their absence.

    So that you for bringing that up, because your misunderstanding illustrated a really important point about planning.

    1085:

    it wouldn't be a difficult modification of an existing motor, but I doubt your "surprisingly cheap"

    When I talked to a couple of manufacturers about odd things I was told that minor twiddling would add 10%-20% to the retail cost. By that they meant taking a hub motor that already had a 20mm axle hole and redoing the wiring to permit single sided mount (the wires have to exit on the side that has the disk brake). With that change they could also permit almost any input voltage and speed range I wanted, within the limits of the engineering (so 24-96V, and peak efficiency at one of about 5 points between 15-45kph). Twiddling the coil wiring, in other words, is easy when you're already making a custom unit.

    The local imports-directly-from-China bike shop doesn't technically do custom work, it's just that almost everything they do is custom. Viz, they say to their Chinese factory "we want this" and the Chinese people make it. So their low step through upright tricycle has a motor that is almost what you want, because the goal of that bike is "better than a powered wheelchair" and upright trikes are not really great above 20kph anyway. I suspect that if I ask Maurice he would be able to get a low speed hub motor for me, but that would be completely useless to you... you'd need to be willing to buy a whole electric bike from a shop in Australia, or have a no-warranty DIY project bike built around that motor.

    https://www.glowwormbicycles.com.au/collections/ezee-electric-bicycles/products/ezee-carro

    I don't think Ezee have a UK dealer - France or Germany are the closest by the look of it: http://ezeebike.com/distributors/

    But you might find a different 20" wheel load bike that does what you want.

    1086:

    A lot of us have taken to calling him the King in Orange, the Tweeter in the Dark.

    Don't blame me. I voted for the woman in the pallid mask.

    1087:

    Actually the Pinion BB gearbox has a wider ratio, but the chain path in a recumbent is tricky because Pinion like to run the chain tension very high. They suggest things like a 16T or 18T rear cog and a low gear equivalent to a 6T chainring... I expect the whole frame flexes and you need to replace the chain every 500km. https://pinion.eu/en/p1-18-gearbox/

    One of those with a Stoke Monkey would probably work really well, the motor would see a reasonably low gear (406 wheel, 18T cog) so it would help at low speeds. You'd be spending money like a gambling addict or motorist but it would work.

    But for speed bikes they're handy because you put a 40T chainring on and suddenly you have gears for 15kph to 140kph. Not that any speed bikes use them, they're too heavy and lossy, but you know, you could :)

    My inclination is to build my next touring bike around a Pinion and have two or more rear cogs, possibly with a derailleur (which I'll need anyway to deal with frame flex). That would let me run low enough gears to strip the freewheel or destroy the rear wheel.

    1088:

    We know that physics behaves differently between the quantum and the Newtonian scale, and changes again between the Newtonian and relativistic scales. Any attempt to understand what's going on at the cosmological or Big Bang scales is limited by the assumption that physics doesn't exhibit new properties at those scales. If it does, our ability to characterize the effects will be very limited because getting a sufficient data set will be (likely) impossible.

    1089:

    Whilst I made a nice chunk of change out of my Apple stock, I still feel for a former boss of mine who bought a amount of Pre-split Apple for three dollars and sensibly sold when he had made his triple or quadruple I imagine where not a single day goes by where he doesn’t regret that

    1090:

    The trick is to balance that with remembering all the people who bought stuff at the market peak, or just before a company went bust. When you hear about insiders selling stock just before a bust, remember that in order to sell it they had to find buyers.

    I also know a bunch of people who have lost money in cryptocurrencies, most stupidly those who still have the currency but have lost the password. But more of them have traded and still own currency, it's just that they're well behind where they started.

    Me? I use an ethical super fund and pay little attention to the various market trading-gambling options.

    1091:

    It’s actually not correct to think of modern cars as being heavier then older cars (even though they may be physically larger)

    Modern cars are manufactured out of composite materials that are significantly lighter then older steel cars

    This is mostly due to desire to improve gas mileage though it also leads to significantly higher acceleration

    1092:

    “Now, the other 99.9% of the time, reality is painfully, boringly predictable. There are no black swans, and this is why planning is practiced routinely, and to a large degree, successfully.”

    Actually no. Short term reality (say 5ish years ) maybe but any longer time frame then that and even non black swan reality tends to diverge gradually from predictions

    1093:

    Joat (didn't you know who really is? Charlie knows, and me, too) said something interesting about wether it's possible to know the underlying structure of society or not. He believes a lot in contingency (Things may happen perchance and butterfly along, a common path in alternate history) and in the power of few individuals with agency. I don't, but there is a subtler point in it. Sometimes the underlying structure of something exists, but it's beyond the conceptual frame and mindset of the people involved. One doesn't need to be a Marxist (but it helps ;-) ) to look for economic causes, or unless you have some understanding of stuff like germ theory or ecology, epidemics or fields turning barren can be seen just as the work of angry gods. So, having Messiahs and mystery cults was understandable within the Roman mindset, understanding why slavery and latifundia were eventually self-destructive, or that they could have increased crop yelds by better crop rotation wasn't.

    1094:

    "Yeah, I can easily picture US shopping malls with parking lot aisles dedicated to charging stations"

    not just US. Last Sunday I went shopping to IKEA in Rome, and now they have aisles with chargers (there was a Nissan Leaf charging in it). There are some chargers along the streets (mostly used to recharge the small electric cars of the car sharing company Share'n'go) and Reanault Tweezy (the small all-electric two-seater with inline seats) are more and more common. Also, I've seen some all-electric delivery vans. And almost all new Toyota Yaris are hybrid. Btw, I've seen also on the Internet the ads of a German company selling a device you can apply to lampposts, turning them into chargers (probably using the extant power line.). Every lamp post becomes a charger and once you put a SIM card in it, you can pay by a mobile app. Given that we can already pay parking and fuel using the Telepass (our electronic toll collection system for highways) app, paying for charging with it is the next step. And on one Telepass account you can keep two cars, if someone buys a second all-electric or plug-in hybrid car, he'll have already the paying system in place.

    1095:

    Male skunks only & I'm told that the guaranteed remover of the err odour is ... tomato juice. Yes/no?

    Long ago, I heard a very bad song called: "Dead Skunk in the middle of the Road"

    1096:

    Never mind all the extra varieties spoken by the Scots, Welsh & Irish..... The variety of speech-modes suggested by H Higgins in "Pygmalion" may be overstated somewhat, but the err "regional" variation is still huge.

    1098:

    "more than one brake circuit", which typically actually means that you have hydraulic lines from a master cylinder to 2 or 3 wheels, at each of which you have one brake assembly and one tyre. You don't have any redundancy beyond that the brakes will still work "ok" with one line out.

    1099:

    Some of which are actually different languages. I'll ignore that there are at least 8 dialects of Gaelic and just enumerate Doric, Gaelic, Lallans, Scots and Welsh as having their own distinct vocabulary, grammar and syntax.

    1100:

    I was ignoring the various forms of "Gaelic" actually .... The differences in "merely" spoken "English" between someone from Morningside (Edinburgh) Skye Aberdeen, Tyneside, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Brummagem, differnt parts of London & down to the W COuntry, never mind Cardiff or Bangor + Belfast / Dubkin / the far west are bewildering

    1101:

    I said rear gear, not least because the context was electric assistance, especially for very steep hills. It isn't possible for that to drive THROUGH a Pinion gear, without extensive engineering, so any assistance would have to drive the wheel 'directly'. Yes, I know how to solve this, in several different ways, but all involve the sort of construction that needs a good engineering workshop, and are not feasible for a mere customer.

    1102:

    Not inventing a completely new class of substance unobservable except via its finagle factor pervading the universe (whether it be quintessence, aether or dark matter) is definitely simpler, in at least one sense.

    And you are showing your biasses again. I do not have a dog in this race. What I am damning is the unscientific behaviour of the physics establishment, and am pointing out that there is NO MORE evidence for the extremer aspects of the current 'theory' than there is for the theory being flawed in those ranges.

    I am fully aware that there has been 3/4 of a century of fiddling the model to match the observation, but I also know how easy it is to fit data with sufficiently complex but erroneous models. As the saying goes, with seven parameters you can fit an elephant. Even general relativity (the official version) alone has at least 2, plus two arbitrary but constrained functions, and I believe that the model you favour has a couple of dozen. If the alternative theories had had a comparable amount of attention and fiddling, then, yes, you would have a good point. But they haven't.

    I could also describe the hypocrisy involved, where most (sic) physicists damn social scientists and others for relying on non-repeatable experiments, proof by consistency, and proofs that assume most of what they are claiming to prove. ALL of those can be leveled at the sort of physics I am referring to.

    1103:

    It’s not a view which makes me terribly popular in some quarters but I’m increasingly coming to view the assumed/supposed issues around on-street charging of electric vehicles more as a feature than a bug. If even a small proportion of people in the kind of places where it’s an issue decide that any inconvenience in charging an EV makes car ownership (or second/third car ownership for some households) more of a PITA than they’re willing to put up with for the benefits then it’s probably going to make life noticeably better for everybody.

    Declaration of interest: I am one of those smug bastards who owns an EV, has personal off-street charging provision for it, and occasionally drives it into and out of London...

    1104:

    I could easily afford much more than that, but still don't have one, for very good reasons :-) But it's not really the point; yes, that's certainly a possible (and even likely) path. But I can see a lot of seriously harmful effects from it, because of the way that such technologies are abused by the government and commercial cartels.

    Don't get me wrong - moving to all-electric vehicles is both feasible and desirable. But it is NOT a viable solution in itself, especially not for the UK, except for the single aspect of atmospheric pollution in cities and other congested locations. And the potential for cocking it up and introducing other, equally serious, problems is immense.

    1105:

    You simply can't have black holes accreting matter during inflation, for several reasons:

  • There is no normal matter for black holes to accrete during the inflationary epoch. The inflationary model is a period of expansion when the only meaningful thing present is spacetime itself and the inflationary scalar ("inflaton") field that's driving the expansion. The normal matter and radiation that dominates our current universe only appears after inflation has ended, when the inflaton field decays. (This means that it doesn't make sense to talk about the "mass" of the universe during the inflationary epoch.)

  • There's no time for accretion to occur anyway. The inflationary epoch is supposed to last something like less than 10^-32 seconds. That's nowhere near long enough for accretion to happen, even if spacetime wasn't expanding like made during that time.

  • There's no way for accretion to occur when spacetime is expanding by a factor of at least 10^26 in less than 10^-32 seconds. Even if we imagine a magically pre-existing black hole at the start of inflation and some kind of particle next to it that feels its gravity, the distance between the black hole and the particle grows by 10^26 times in less than 10^-32 seconds.

  • Imagine a particle 1 Angstrom (10^-10 meters, about the size of a typical atom) away from a black hole. In less than 10^-32 seconds, that atomic-sized distance grows to one light year. The problem is that inflationary cosmology involves an insanely large expansions of space in an insanely short period of time. Our ordinary intuitions about what might happen will not work very well.

    1106:

    So far, techies who criticize Bitcoin have tended to shy away from criticizing blockchain. Charlie pointed out that Bitcoin is loved by the alt-right. Could the alt-right love blockchain? It seems the AfD co-leader does

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/23/blockchain-reshape-world-far-right-ahead-crypto-technology

    1107:

    Fiddling in my silly way with the notion of our universe being inside a black hole...

    And then this came along: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180221091334.htm

    It's a piece about how a certain theoretical black hole leads to a breakdown of causality effectively--any input leads to infinite outputs inside the Cauchy horizon of a charged, non-spinning black hole, not that such an object necessarily exists.

    So here's the thought: time slows to zero at the singularity, so effectively, once a black hole is formed, so far as the singularity "sees" it, all the mass-energy hits it immediately, because no time passes in that infinite space warp. If you want the source material for a big bang, this sounds like a great accumulation system for it.

    I'm starting to wonder if singularities basically end up wiping all dimensionality from the stuff that fell into them, "denaturing" it, perhaps. If so, then one has effectively the singularity conditions for the start of a big bang, which "explodes" into however many dimensions the underlying reality (ylem?) has pretty much randomly, thereby probably forming a daughter universe that can't interact with the parent universe from which it sprang, due to its wildly different dimensionality. For instance, the daugher's time dimension may be orthogonal to the time dimension in the parent universe, so that the parent universe, if could interact with the daughter, would observe the daughter's entire timespan happen in an instant, while the daughter would observe its parent's history, from when the black hole formed to whenever the parent universe ended, in an instant. Boom.

    The awkward question is whether a singularity that falls into another singularity survives or also gets denatured into undefined whatever. If a singularity can survive the passage through another singularity, then it might show up as an singularity on the edge of the universe of the daughter singularity.

    Perhaps that's where our first black holes came from, and what spawned our galaxies? Well, probably not, but it's not bad for a handwaving. I'm sure I didn't think of this first, so if this idea's come up already, who gets the credit for the more formal version of it?

    1108:

    Tomato juice takes some of the edge off, only time does a complete removal. Sadly, I remember when that song was new.

    1109:

    Interesting. Unlike Tipler cylinders that is, in theory, realisable. While determinism in science is so, so, Victorian, any breach in causality would cause most people's heads to explode - it's fundamental to our model of the universe, scientific method and more. Still, your thoughts would make a good basis for a science fiction story :-)

    1110:

    Blockchain is loved by autocrats, mabe? After all Maduro in Venezuela has started a Venz-blockchain-currency. The whole thing seems to be built on sand to me ... maybe that's why Maduro likes it - he can rip even more people off .....

    1112:

    Fortunately, I don't have an accent but I've certainly noticed that they speak funny in other parts of the country. The Scots they speak in London is an unintelligible patois and one must speak slowly and loudly with hand gestures to communicate there.

    1113:

    Eerily similar to some things that have appeared here recently, this meditation on CDM, galaxy formation, modified gravity, etc., showed up yesterday:

    https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/02/shut-up-and-simulate-in-which-i-try-to.html

    "It screams 'epicycles' directly into your face."

    1115:

    Don't see too much of that in the states, at least the cities I've lived in... except during snow. And I don't care what the law says, if I've shoveled out my parking space to get my vehicle out, I can damn well put a chair in it to come back to, and moving that chair is an egregious attack, and you ought to be shoveled in, so you get to shovel out....

    1116:

    Now just a minute - I've never heard someone from Pittsburgh that I had trouble understanding, and as we all know, of course, Philly does not have an accent, it's the gold standard.

    says the Philly ex-pat

    1117:

    Greg Tingey @1097 Skunks

    We have skunk families that move through the subdivision, harvesting the honey that bees build up under the plastic layer under the yard gravel. All the neighborhood dogs are aware of the skunks and avoid them.

    My back-door neighbor got a set of scotties who were new to the area, and did not know about the skunks. At 1:30am I woke to hear barking, and then "Oh, no" from the neighbor as I closed up the house. She had to take the dogs in for cleaning. They have a standard process to clean the smell off the dogs.

    When I go for walks around the subdivision, I say "hello-hello" to the dogs out walking their people, and say "meow-meow-meow" to the cats out inspecting. I will see an odd shape in the distance -- not dog, not cat -- and calmly avoid the skunk.

    1118:

    Um, beg pardon, but about Christianity and the Roman Empire - are you suggesting that tyranny didn't win there, either? Now, I may be missing something, but I thought it was an Emperor who called the Council of Nicea, and who leaned on them heavily to approve stuff that wouldn't trouble his running the Empire.... And, of course, where in so many times through history since that the Church has not been part of the tyranny (like the funnymentalist evangelists want to be, now)....

    1119:

    "Very bad"? I beg your pardon, but Loudon Wainwright III is very often hysterical....

    I still remember the title, if not the words or tune, from the first time I heard him, at the Philly Folk Festival, late sixties or early seventies, introducing a song entitled "It's Hard for a Rich White Kid From the Suburbs to Sing the Blues".

    He also wronte Suicide is Painless, the theme song for the tv show MASH.

    1120:

    Speaking of, erm, economics: "Keynes believed that if businesses actually obeyed the prescriptions for rational behaviour upon which orthodox economic models are based, nobody would ever build, buy, barter or bankroll anything. The human propensities towards hope, faith, even reckless gambling, have far greater effects upon enterprise than estimations of potential profit, which, in most cases, prove comically inaccurate. ‘A large proportion of our positive activities depend upon spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation,’ Keynes wrote. And if that optimism falters, ‘leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die’. The automation of capitalist accumulation is economic apocalypse."

    Fun read. Getting back to the earlier point, predictions work often enough that, even if they're never 100% right, people base enterprises, even cultures, on them. That probably has something to do with the half-life of the average culture and/or enterprise, but I have no idea how to quantize enthusiasm to figure out how long the resulting system will last before it's maximized its share of local entropy and become unworkable.

    1121:

    allynh & AT @ 1111/3/4 Yeah - Epicycles And it's beginning to look as if something is cracking & alternatives to "Dark Matter" are being seriously considerd. Good - maybe we will get a better model, that you know - works?

    1122:

    Nice writing, there. Several thoughts from reading it: first, what about right after Inflation, in the next few seconds?

    Second, it strikes me that as Inflation ends, would there be a massive shock wave in brand-new spacetime (gotta spank the baby to get it to breath), and now I'm wondering if the shockwave could have created black holes.

    Finally, and this may not be a new thought, but the Original Source seems like a naked singularity, with the mass of the Universe, and as it had no event horizon, because no spacetime, the Big Bang was a variation on the way small black holes evaporate, per Hawking.

    1123:

    Interesting. I note that he favours MOND, which is one model that assumes Einstein's formula breaks down in its limits, just as Newton's did. There are also such variations, which get rid of event horizons and all the problems they cause; one of those effectively replaces (1-2GM/(rc^2)) by exp(2GM/(rc^2)). But the black hole divers keep a tighter rein on heresy than the global cosmologists, despite the issues hinted at in that article.

    1124:

    Um, beg pardon, but about Christianity and the Roman Empire - are you suggesting that tyranny didn't win there, either? Now, I may be missing something, but I thought it was an Emperor who called the Council of Nicea, and who leaned on them heavily to approve stuff that wouldn't trouble his running the Empire.... And, of course, where in so many times through history since that the Church has not been part of the tyranny (like the funnymentalist evangelists want to be, now)....

    Nope, that's not what I'm suggesting at all. What I'm simply pointing out is that the founding of Christianity is a black swan, basically because most messianic cults end with the death of the followers of the messiah that founded them. Christianity is by far the most extreme outlier of the few cults that have survived this normal end.

    Christianity becoming Constantine's state religion probably was not a black swan, although there's the alt-history suggestion that Constantine's rise to power might have had a few swan feathers attached. Sadly, Christianity's non-violent paradigms don't seem to have been all that sophisticated, and even though that diverse array of early Christian churches really messed with the Roman empire early on, they largely abandoned non-violence in the political sphere in exchange for Constantine's promise of power, and with it, imperial standardization. And here we are today.

    Thanks for getting the clarification.

    1125:

    As a SF universe generator, it's pretty useless, unless your story involves black holes. However, it does provide a "physical" process for multiverse creation. Each universe in the multiverse began as a black hole in another universe, but since the process of passing through a singularity leaves all the information in the parent universe, there's no obvious causal relationship between events in the parent and daughter universes. It also implies that mass-energy isn't conserved in the multiverse. If the mass-energy consumed by a black hole in one universe also counts as the mass-energy (whatever) in the daughter universe, you can't use the first law of thermodynamics on a multiverse scale in this model.

    Since time's just another random dimension that pops up at random when a black hole inflates to be another universe, it's not necessarily feasible for any causal interaction to propagate through. Except, perhaps, other singularities, kinks in the fabric of space-time that they are. If black holes can pass through singularities and remain kinky, then perhaps they help determine the nature of the daughter universe that contains them. Not that they'd act as seeds for dimensions (because I'm assuming all that information that falls into a singularity gets shed back in the parent universe), but simply because they're kinky. If they remain in a daughter universe, that daughter universe has to be able to form black holes of its own. That inherent kinkiness probably constrains various dimensions and fundamental values and stuff in ways I don't understand.

    Finally, it might be possible to determine the existence of a multiverse by looking at the behavior of massive black holes. My notion is that black holes of (parameters unknown) form daughter universes with random properties. Occasionally, the properties of the daughter might be sufficiently similar to those of the parent universe that there would be some observable interaction outside the black hole itself. Additionally, daughter universe might impact each other randomly. While we can't look into the universe inside each black hole, if they're seeing each other, then perhaps there will be observable non-local connections between the black holes in our parental universe. I have no idea what those might be or how to look for them, but since the mass energy of each daughter universe is both in our parent universe and interacting with each other as the separate daughter universes collide, then perhaps there's a way to observe the interaction.

    1126:

    In Albany, Oregon there is a truck-eating trestle (low bridge) which has won against every single truck that has gone up against it thus far, over at least fifty years to our personal knowledge (of the history of the bridge, I hasten to say, not actual experience).

    1127:

    Oregon still requires attendants for pumping gas, though in isolated communities there's a variant of self-serve being allowed, especially late at night when the next community is 150 miles away.

    1128:

    Yes, that's less than half what it costs to fill the tank on my petrol car, but resentment of having to pay £40 for a tool to do something whose equivalent I currently do with no tools at all is only a minor part of the objection.

    The main problem is the whole pyramid of assumptions and infrastructure of which "phone" is just the tip. EC's reply in specific, and a considerable amount of the content of this site in general - not to mention your own disturbingly non-fictitious fiction - is one aspect of it. I'd prefer a requirement to submit a form detailing your travel plans before going anywhere - at least the arseholery would be open and visible - over hole-and-corner sneaky methods of collecting the same data unobtrusively enough to prevent most people from noticing and protesting about it.

    Another is the exclusionary assumption that everyone can and does participate in all the rest of the shenanigans that such a system depends on to exist at all. You can't shove banknotes into a phone. All you can do is initiate a cascade which eventually terminates somewhere you can shove banknotes into. This involves things like setting up accounts ("Please submit a copy of your XXXXX" - "What XXXXX?" etc.), being forced to accumulate a debt (because you can't pay for stuff as you go along when you've actually got the money) and then being landed with some huge bill demanding a lump of more money than you ever see, having to go through a second (or greater) iteration of this because the primary instance can't be made to terminate somewhere you can shove banknotes into, being made to pay even more money simply to make the termination happen, etc. etc.

    This doesn't need to be the case - charging points could use the same note recognition technology as automatic supermarket checkouts, for instance. But things like this are practically always thoughtlessly set up by people/groups who(se members) don't personally find it difficult to deal with and therefore are unable to even conceive of the existence of people who do, let alone recognise the need to design their systems in a less exclusionary manner.

    Electricity supply to the house already suffers from that problem; there may be hundreds of "suppliers" (as parasitic payment handlers are officially called), but a pigeon could count the number of actually usable ones on the claws of one foot and not fall over.

    Mind you, it would be a jolly good excuse to mine the local ore deposit and put the result into my own version of the Ford Nucleon concept...

    1129:

    Tomato juice... that's odd. Some enzymatic content? I'd have been more inclined to try things like bleach, hydrogen peroxide, PCB etchant (new or used)... oxidising agents and transition metal ions.

    1130:

    I agree with the frustration about chargers, because where I am, the public chargers use multiple dongles as the equivalent of gas station charge cards, and they're not intuitively obvious to set up at first. Once you get into them, basically they want a credit card number and an address, so they can bill you each month for the electricity you use, sometimes plus a small annual charge. There are competing systems, surprise surprise, which is why it's worth setting up with two or three where I live.

    On the flip side, what you do get are maps of the charging stations, which, combined with the calculated range maps available from an iPhone app that's associated with the car, are pretty useful and absolutely necessary for road trips where you need to recharge to get back home. With some stations, you also get the ability to reserve a charger, so that when you get there, it's (theoretically, I haven't tried this) available for you only to charge your car. Since car charging takes much longer than pumping gas, reserving high capacity chargers isn't quite as stupid as it sounds, provided you can get to your charger in time for your appointment.

    The underlying problem is that civilization running on electric vehicles is different than civilization running on internal combustion, and this is just one symptom of that problem. Change sucks, but then again, if you want to write, say, solarpunk fiction, then the differences between an electrical civilization and a petroleum one are grist for the mill.

    1131:

    My local university library doesn't even let you in without showing student/staff id. (Only place I've encountered this.) Annoying, but less so now that so much is online.

    --Our local university charges 10 dollars a year for a community borrowing card, but you can slide in and read in the stacks all day and twice on Sunday without a dragon at the door. They have some very good atlases I haven't been able to find online.

    1132:

    Yes, that's less than half what it costs to fill the tank on my petrol car, but resentment of having to pay £40 for a tool to do something whose equivalent I currently do with no tools at all is only a minor part of the objection.

    Ahem!

    The aforementioned phone is also: a flashlight, a camera (for taking photos for insurance purposes in event of a fender-bender), a map book (with realtime updates for traffic congestion and roadworks), and, of course, an emergency phone when you need to call roadside assistance (the roadside phone boxes on motorways are now going away because everybody except a few weird eccentrics — who are inexplicably attracted to my blog comments — has a mobile phone).

    If you just want the basic "pay parking fees via SMS and make emergency calls" functionality, a dumb phone is about £s;15. You probably ought to have one in the glove compartment of your car, fully charged, at all times, just like you have a tire pressure gauge and a jack and a spare tire in the boot; it's just basic emergency equipment no driver should be without.

    You can't shove banknotes into a phone.

    Actually, you pretty much can.

    Take a pay-as-you-go phone. Do not link it to a credit card or bank account. Pay using top-ups bought over the counter for cash in corner shops, or from a bank cash machine. (Yes, ATMs these days will sell you a mobile phone top-up in the shape of a 16-digit number you enter on your keypad to tell the phone service provider you've paid. Or, like I said, you can buy them like scratch cards in a corner shop. Or via a web browser if you want to use your credit card.)

    1133:

    They usually do - we've got plenty like that - but they still stop the trains on the line crossing the bridge for "structural checks", no matter how blatantly flimsy the bit of the lorry that hit the bridge was. I'm sure a lot of it is simply because the lorry drivers assume the sign says the bridge is lower than it really is just to mess them around and make them take a more awkward route, because a lot of our road signage is like that. What they ought to do is fix a big solid girder across the road at the stated height a few metres before you get to the bridge so the lorries hit that first, but that's too simple and obvious.

    1134:

    Male skunks only & I'm told that the guaranteed remover of the err odour is ... tomato juice. Yes/no?

    Nope. But the mess you make tends to distract you from the skunk smell.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk#Anal_scent_glands

    1135:

    I've never heard someone from Pittsburgh that I had trouble understanding,

    I lived there for 7 years. I always understood the actual words. But there was a definite drawl and the unusual words and phrases took a while to imprint into my brain.

    Again, "rhet up"

    Also the autonomous driving work being done there exposed something called a Pittsburgh left turn. First driver in line to turn left against oncoming traffic is usually allowed to make the turn instead of waiting. All conveyed via eye contact of course. Took a while for the autonomous systems to be taught how to deal with that. Plus it make the researchers much more aware of how much of daily driving did involve drivers signalling each other via eye contact.

    1136:

    but the err "regional" variation is still huge.

    Pittsburgh has some variations. Or it did. The south side area (Carson street along the mill) was referred to as the "south side" but as one word and no "th".

    The Pittsburgh area has over 150 different towns and cities. And lots of large hills/mountains. And split into 3 chunks due to the rivers. Many with borders along the tops of the ridges and bottoms of the valleys. If you got back 150+ years the immigrants tended to clump together and it created a very varied patchwork of habits and dialects.

    1137:

    On a side trip down emoji land. Apparently the person at Google who did their initial cheeseburger wasn't all that up on the subject of burgers.

    https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-fixes-burger-emoji/

    1138:

    Does Apple still include the Terminal program in OS-X?).

    Uh, yeah. Some of us use it daily. :)

    Now let's go off and talk about fav editors.

    1139:

    That's only semi-sarcastic. Break-even for fusion generating net power still looks like it's 30 years away, just like it was back in the, erm, 1950s. Sooner or later, the broken promises start looking like cons. Dammit.

    Personally at some point I expect someone to figure out that the only way to have stable fusion is to create a star.

    1140:

    We're past the Hubbert Curve prediction of Peak Oil by 2000. That got weirded out by the advent of fracking, then things got further weirded out by the rapid advance of wind and solar...

    There's still a LOT of oil under the ground. But it is deep. The big oil companies know where it is. Or most likely is located. But they are NOT going to tell anyone else.

    Now it IS miles down. But there are a lot of kept secret maps of the earth's crust going down 5 miles with all kinds of things known. But so far it just doesn't make sense to drill an exploratory well down through 3 miles or more of rock. Fracking makes it less sensible. When the oil within 2 miles of the surface of the planet starts to run dry then they will start going after the deeper stuff.

    1141:

    I use iTerm2 daily on macOS in preference to Terminal. But I haven't compared them recently.

    1142:

    some iOS programs crash with certain Unicode text.

    Just fixed. :)

    1143:

    One idea for charging EVs: Use wireless induction charging, and allow the car to have the information to negotiate paying the bill. Possible results: When a installed on a street (or parking lot), your car just charges, no muss/no fuss. Stage 2 would be to enable charging on-the-go, so you can pull at least some of the power off the road you are traveling on. Great for range extending.

    1144:

    Are you familiar with Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection model? Because you're getting awfully close to it...

    (One of the cool thing about it is that Smolin suggested random perturbations of the laws of physics in daughter universes spawned from black holes in the parent universe should eventually lead to a multiverse dominated by universes with law of physics maximizing the ability of black holes to form within them.)

    1145:

    Interesting. I note that he favours MOND, which is one model that assumes Einstein's formula breaks down in its limits, just as Newton's did.

    [Sigh.] Modified Newtonian Dynamics ("MOND") is about postulating a breakdown in Newtonian physics, as the name itself says. It has nothing to do with "Einstein's formula" (which one, I wonder?) "breaking down".

    1146:

    Not inventing a completely new class of substance unobservable except via its finagle factor pervading the universe (whether it be quintessence, aether or dark matter) is definitely simpler, in at least one sense.

    Right, because if 20th Century physics has taught us anything, it's that we already knew all the particles that existed or could exist, and have never been surprised by anything new. So we should assume we already know all the forms of matter that could exist.

    The reality is that the oldest "dark matter" postulate was partly accounted for by finding previously unsuspected matter. The original observations by Fritz Zwicky of galaxy clusters back in the 1930s showed that the galaxies were moving much too fast to be gravitationally confined if only the mass of the individual galaxies were present. In the 1960s and 1970s, evidence for additional mass in the form of diffuse intergalactic gas was found by X-ray satellites. We now know that typical clusters have several times as much mass in the form of dilute, hot gas (millions to tens of millions of degrees hot) filling the space between the galaxies as there is in the individual galaxies -- even if you assume the galaxies have typical amounts of dark matter.

    (Or I could point to the 19th Century prediction and detection of "dark matter" in the form of white dwarfs around stars like Sirius and Procyon, on the basis of explaining the anomalous motions of the stars in question.)

    I am fully aware that there has been 3/4 of a century of fiddling the model to match the observation

    Of course I could be wrong, since you're usefully vague about what "model" is really at issue but -- the real work using dark matter in cosmological simulations began in the 1980s, not the 1940s.

    I believe that the model you favour has a couple of dozen.

    Really? Can you name them?

    I'm ordinarily perfectly happy to discuss things like this, but what I keep getting from you is a combination of: A) You very clearly having almost no clue about what you're attempting to talk about; and B) a mild version of the kind of ranting, quasi-paranoid mentality that climate-change denialists and creationists operate from, what with your unspecified (and utterly unjustified) blather about "bias" and "hypocrisy" and "the unscientific behaviour of the physics establishment", how scientists are blindly adhering to "dogma" and unwilling to tolerate "heretics", yadda yadda yadda. I'm sure it give you the warm fuzzies to imagine how much smarter and more honest you are than those blind, stupid, corrupt scientists, but no, you're not.

    1147:

    Never heard of it. Thanks!

    (Un)fortunately, I suspect that my version of the cosmological natural selection model should be called the --All You Zombies-- subtype. Since I'm postulating that daughter universes don't interact with parents due to, say, orthogonal time dimensions or other unapplied phlebotinium, it's possible that there will be circular inheritance, where a parental universe is actually the distant descendant of its daughter universe, due to there being no grander temporal dimension in the Ylem (or whatever the multiverse exists in), and thus no causality.

    Add in natural selection for breeder universes that maximize hole output and the "kinkiness" of singularities (kinks in space-time) that pass through other singularities to form seed galaxies, and you've got a multiverse model that's both extremely kinky and extremely holey. Perhaps RAH would have approved. Who knows?

    1148:

    Personally at some point I expect someone to figure out that the only way to have stable fusion is to create a star.

    But all nuclear power is evil! :) "Turn off the sun, turn off the sun, darken the world, blind everyone" (I went to chruch, I know the songs).

    I have pointed this out to anti-nuclear activists in the past and been told off for quibbling pedantry. Once by someone who genuinely didn't know the difference between MWh and kW, except he thought that the latter was probably bigger based on the size of solar panels or something. Hooray for social science PhDs and wossnames law of not seeing yer own iggorence!

    Me, I'm against terrestrial fission and fusion power until we have at least a demonstration plant that can make the existing waste safe enough to live around. On nuclear waste timescales we don't even have a theory for how to mark the waste, let alone contain it. Those "long now" people are talking about 10kY as though it's absolutely ages when the nuclear people are talking 100's of thousands of years as just a start.

    1149:

    Looks like Tesla wants more compatible chargers: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/teslas-new-workplace-charging-program-would-corner-office-parking-spots/ Charging infrastructure is coming, might take a few years longer than some would like...

    1150:

    Already survivable, but the purity some would be more comfortable with seems unobtainable. The wastes are no worse than the ores in less than a thousand years, which puts it in the range of human-capable structure. Personally, I'm not comfortable with the idea of even heavy industry when the governments idea of responsibility is "Whatever the nice person with the large bank account says.".

    1151:

    Now that everyone has had a chance to comment on the stuff presented so far, I'll post the next part.

    As I said above @787 I find the following concepts very useful in world building fun stories. YMMV

    • Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe
    • Growing Earth Theory
    • Anatoly Fomenko and his New Chronology

    • The Omphalos hypothesis

    We have discussed the first and the last. I will now post links to "Anatoly Fomenko and his New Chronology" and not bother discussing them. Why? because people like to play whack-a-mole on concepts that they haven't bothered to actually study, and that disturb them deeply -- and the Fomenko stuff is deeply disturbing.

    • Fomenko seems to bring the worst out of some people. HA!

    These are the key links. Look at them. Don't look at them. That is your choice, but I'm not going to waste time defending what is better understood by you reading the books. In other words, I am not interested in reading the books for you, and then spoon feeding them to you post-by-post. That's the whack-a-mole tactic that I'm referring too. Been there, done that.

    • The four books that are available in English so far, IMHO, make their case.

    Wiki - New Chronology (Fomenko)

    The wiki entry is a fair view of Fomenko, with the usual disclaimers that people force into a wiki edit. That will give you an idea of what he is talking about in his books. BTW, the paper books are the size of phone books, not slim volumes. Reading them will take you a very long time, since they go step-by-step -- in agonizing detail -- to show his point. Glug!

    The books are available on Amazon at a good price. They are sometimes out of stock, but are soon available in a short time. I have all four books in paper. This is the first book in the series, the others are listed on the product page.

    History: Fiction or Science? Dating methods as offered by mathematical statistics. Eclipses and zodiacs

    Someone was able to find all four books in pdf. This made it vastly easier to be looking at the same page when we discussed the books, especially for people who could not buy them.

    Warning: These pdfs are huge, so only click on the links when you have time to download them. The value of the pdf is that you can save a copy on your drive to annotate.

    Chronology, Volume 1

    Chronology, Volume 2

    Chronology, Volume 3

    Chronology, Volume 4

    Some of you may remember when I started reading Fomenko and talking about it, that I was looking for others to read the books and discuss them as well. That seemed to be a doomed attempt until I recently found these guys, very intent on discussing many things.

    • I need to point out, that I am more comfortable with ambiguity than most people. It takes a lot before I start saying WTF?

    IMHO, These guys are deeply scary. HA!

    Gnostic Media

    This is their YouTube channel.

    GnosticMedia

    This is the list of episodes that I have listened to so far discussing Scaliger.

    I started with the first video, about the Tartary, then have worked through the Scaliger stuff. This is the stuff that I was hoping to find when I started posting about Fomenko. They have followed a different path in their research but have confirmed the stuff Fomenko has written. Deeply disturbing. HA!

    UnSpun 103 – “Robert Roe: Tartary and the House of Israel”

    UnSpun 074 - Jacob Duellman: “Scaliger notatus, hallucinatio Scaligeri"

    UnSpun 076 - Jacob Duellman: “Scaliger notatus, hallucinatio Scaligeri, pt. 2"

    UnSpun 082 – Jacob Duellman: “Scaliger Notatus, Hallucinatio Scaligeri, Part 3”

    UnSpun 093 – Jacob Duellman: “Scaliger Notatus, Hallucinatio Scaligeri, Part 4”

    UnSpun 098 – Jacob Duellman: “Scaliger Notatus, Hallucinatio Scaligeri, Part 5”

    UnSpun 100 – Jacob Duellman: “Scaliger Notatus, Hallucinatio Scaligeri, Part 6”

    I need to go through other episodes to see what these guys are talking about.

    BTW, normally episodes like this are hard for me to listen too, the spoken word is so slow in transmitting information. Luckily I have a Jigsaw puzzle program on my Mac. I'm doing a puzzle per episode, so that helps me focus. HA!

    1152:

    Well I did an English double major, so... well actually I also did first year maths, applied maths and geology, a mix of Latin, ancient history and Greek, and an interdisciplinary stream called human ecology... and then a sub-major in anthropology. All that and no career path, well other than IT which is sort of the same catch-all that advertising was from the 50s through to the 80s. Hoping to use some pg study to claw my way out of the IT void by the time I'm 50, but we'll see.

    Anyhow, I'm pretty sure I understand the difference between Wh and W, whichever prefix is in front. And while I'm rusty and would need to use references, I have some practice making useful calculations with a material's modulus of elasticity and the second moment of area. And of course I can talk with HIMs at length about UR numbers and v2 vs CDA vs FHIR.

    One thing I've noted over time is that many people have a serious issue understanding risk. This is part of a slightly more general pattern about "getting" the basics in probability and stats, but seems to have some extra socially-accorded special sauce. Like the 10kY versus 100kY point you are making here... people seem to actually want to go along with pretty much anything at all if there's a social frame of reference that sets expectations just so. You could flatly make a frame of reference that says 10kY is a long time but 100kY isn't, and if you can convince people the frame of reference is something they need, then they'll go along with that apparent contradiction, referring to $reasons. Just seems to be how we non-aquatic (nice idea but) savannah apes swing.

    1153:

    Well, as some people have pointed out (not here), there's the half-life issue, which is more important with the purely radioactive risk than with the toxin risk, which also decreases as elements decay, but is about the same in the more stable isotopes.

    What I dislike about the nuclear industry is the carelessness. I'm close enough to San Onofre to get caught in the fallout if something bad happens to it. When engineers in the plant start blowing the whistle on management... When contractors make an error known from the 1950s on in generator design, no one catches it, and it's so expensive to fix that they shut the plant down... When they try to cut a deal with the regulators in a Polish Hotel to stick the rate payers, rather than the investors, with the cost of closure and almost get away with it (except that they got caught)... When they decide burying the nuclear waste right next to the beach (on a seismically active coast) is the best they can do for storage...

    Screw them. Hopefully this explains my antipathy to the nuclear industry. Probably the effing natural gas clowns are a worse danger in terms of unmonitored methane leaks all over the world, but I don't think there are enough honest, competent people in power in the nuclear industry to trust them with saving the world. And that kinda pisses me off, but there you have it.

    1154:

    How long does it take Chicago to plow the streets that all this dibbsing with old furniture is nessesary?

    1155:

    Hopefully this explains my antipathy to the nuclear industry.

    Oh, it does and I completely agree. Whenever anyone argues in favour of nuclear, they always seem to be talking Swedish style geologically stable on geological time scales bunkers for waste when they are talking about safety, but they assume you can do that for less than the cost of... well anything else. It's especially annoying when people keep bringing it up here in Oz, since the "anything else", which is plainly solar, is already so much cheaper there's no point even thinking about it.

    But we get people talking positively about new coal mines, so it's all relative I guess.

    1156:

    It's especially annoying when people keep bringing it up here in Oz, since the "anything else", which is plainly solar

    Speaking of bad faith arguments... here in Oz we have all the anti-green wingnuts :)

    The profoundly irritating thing is that we actually have reasonable geology for a waste dump, but our governments are morally opposed to negotiating a site in good faith as well as economically opposed to operating one in a sane manner. I've read some of the FOI released documents from Lucas Heights and faaark, we can't build or operate a research reactor regardless of how much advice we get from well-meaning foreigners (either that or we're too cheap buy competent advice. Which is also plausible, we were too cheap to buy a decent reactor as well).

    I worked through some costings as part of the BZE grid conversion project years ago and even then it was cheaper to go solar than nuclear, despite deiberately choosing pro-nuke assumptions. Then the nuclear wingnuts took that report and biased it even further in favour of nuclear before concluding that nuclear couldn't work economically! That didn't stop them, it just discouraged them from arguing economics with professors of economics (see John Quiggin's numerous publications for example).

    For the cost of Hinkley Point C (currently about $AU30B) we could build so much, so very much, solar of all sorts with storage of all sorts, and we'd likely end up with more than 5GW of on demand electricity and sod all pollution from it. Plus the first deliveries from that would be within 12 months (as Elon Musk said "within 90 days or it's free!")

    John Quiggin keeps going on and on about the problem in Australia isn't building the reactor, it's creating the capability to build it and run it. We just don't have that here, and unless we want to become a colonial outpost of one of the nuclear powers we have to build that before we can build the reactor. With PV we have the skills and we even export PV researchers to China. Ditto with thermal solar except the researchers go to the US and EU.

    Sorry, venting.

    1157:

    The wastes are no worse than the ores in less than a thousand years,

    The trouble is that no-one is talking about diluting them that way, I think largely because of solubility problems. The Australian glassification approach is probably closest to that, they're trying to make the radioactive bits chemically inert and non-water-soluble. But that's expensive and it makes the energy return on investment pretty awful. I think a solar furnace system should be viable, but then you end up with idiots asking why not just take the power from the solar furnace directly (darn eROI again).

    What we get instead is concentrated, chemically active mixed radionuclides that are mostly poisonous as well as radioactive. Diluting those to safety would mean thousands rather than tens of tonnes of waste every year, and big mounds of it piling up. It might make sense to take them all to Wittenoom or somewhere similar and just make a big pile, then cover it over with mine tailings and pretend we were never there. Although since Wittenoom's only 50m above current sea level perhaps somewhere higher might be better if we want it to stay in a pile for a thousand years. The good news is that we know how to make a pile of rocks that will last more than a thousand years - there are piles like that all over the world in fact.... oooh, tourist attraction: modern day pyramids!

    Wouldn't it be scary if we discovered that someone else had had the same idea 20kYA, and it turned out that a one of those mounds was decorated with scary faced and lightning bolts because inside it was a second hand fission reactor?

    1158:

    With PV we have the skills and we even export PV researchers to China. Ditto with thermal solar except the researchers go to the US and EU.

    Sorry, venting.

    No need to apologise - to me this comes across as admirably restrained. I'm the guy in the corner with the large drink muttering about those -ing -ers who we somehow managed to elect in 1996 and how it just got worse from there.

    1159:

    those -ing -ers who we somehow managed to elect in 1996

    In topical news, over on Crooked Timber there's a weird discussion or two about firearms, and despite Australia being explicitly raised no-one has really taken up the "but the US is not Australia" request, they're just the usual racist bigot ammosexuals. One of the few things Howard did that I really admire was take the Tasmanian shooting as a reason to clamp down on gun nuts. In NZ I was surprised after Aramoana that they didn't come after my guns (I needed a special collectors permit even before the clampdown). I suspect they decided that a 50kg+ weapon that was rated at 2 rounds a minute using a crew of 3 wasn't really mass shooting material (sniper rifles/light anti-armour artillery need an operator and a spotted, big ones need a loader/sighter/packhorse as well).

    I think all you need to know about the US discussion is that they never, ever talk about arming black men or any women, except in the most reluctant "well I suppose technically" sort of way. When members of oppressed groups actually use guns the NRA will either run away or support whoever attacked the gun user (there are couple of notorious cases where black women shot white men in very obvious situations... and went to jail for it). Plus there's the "black man holding something that might possibly look a bit like a gun if you were drunk and it was dark" shot by cop incidents... I thought US cops were supposed to actively defend black men's right to carry guns?

    1160:

    OK So there are no M-way roadside phiones any more. WHO DO I CALL, if I need assistance, or want to report something? Surely not "999-police"?

    1161:

    One of the few things Howard did that I really admire was take the Tasmanian shooting as a reason to clamp down on gun nuts.

    I sometimes wonder what would have happened after Port Arthur with a third Keating government. Most likely a similar approach, but with a non-zero chance of the Daily Telegraph, the Courier Mail or even the Australian taking the gun nuts' side. I guess in the "only Nixon could go to China" sense, except that in our case of course that isn't true, it was Whitlam who went to China after all.

    1162:

    A source of major annoyance ... WRONG height limits - in both directions. The Great Green Beast is 2.04 metres tall - there's at least one "2_metres" one I can get under with abuit 5cm to spare & another I know of that I should be able to get under, but would scrape my roof off. NOT funny or clever

    1163:

    Ah, I hadn't realised that the name/person "Fomenko" was responsible for that load of total bollocks. Very entertaining, maybe, for a far-out story, but it's still bollocks. If only because physical ( Atomic decay to be exact ) dating processes show that it's bollocks.

    1164:

    A second technology that should emerge, but hasn't because of cultural prejudices, is smart beads. ... A bead bracelet where each bead has a different function (and perhaps some are the power sources), is much more configurable than a single fob.

    You think we should have a field-configurable tool bracelet? That's a great idea! Granted the current version is a bit expensive, but early versions often are; costs come down as production volume goes up.

    I've not seen anyone produce 3D printer files for custom parts but that should be straightforward for anyone who's got a 3D printer that works in metal.

    Making it also be a watch band was obvious - but the wristwatch is just one component and can be omitted.

    1165:

    May I add that I reject Fomenko for the exact same reason I'm very suspicious, shall we say, about the "Dark Matter" hypothecations ... "Dark Matter" requires huge numbers of fiddle-factors - err adjustable parameters - allowing the elephants in to the scenario, rather than a straight set of equations. Fomenko is requiring large numbers of actual physical measurements to be either completely wrong or having huge adjustable fiddle-factors. So - probably no to DM & certainly no to Fom

    1166:

    For the cost of Hinkley Point C (currently about $AU30B) we could build so much, so very much, solar of all sorts with storage of all sorts, and we'd likely end up with more than 5GW of on demand electricity and sod all pollution from it. Plus the first deliveries from that would be within 12 months (as Elon Musk said "within 90 days or it's free!")

    Of course you'll have to spend that $AU30B again in twenty years time as the storage wears out and the solar panels decay. And again twenty years later. And again... Short-term thinking at its finest.

    Modern nuclear reactor builds are rated day one for sixty years of operation but realistically they're good for a century, maybe even more. The really expensive parts that can't be easily replaced are built to last, the bits that wear out can be easily and cheaply replaced. With renewables such as solar and wind, the expensive parts wear out in decadal timescales and cost more in the long run, but the long run isn't what makes people like Elon Musk rich.

    1167:

    Hmmm .. "Crooked Timber" is down on Edge, Chrome & Firefox right now ...... Being botted by the alt-right, or simple comms problems?

    1168:

    Of course you'll have to spend that $AU30B again in twenty years time as the storage wears out and the solar panels decay. And again twenty years later. And again... Short-term thinking at its finest.

    Yeah, but twice the power output plus bonus grid stabilisation and a build time of 3-5 years compared to nuclear's 10-20... it's not really a contest of equals. We could match the nuclear plant, bank the spare money, then build a completely new set of generators and batteries in 20 years time... and we'd still be ahead.

    When the technology is changing quickly it doesn't make sense to build around a long service life. In the last 20 years we've gone from 10% to 22% efficient solar cells, and from 50Wh/kg to 200Wh/kg for batteries (that's the easy number to find, $/J has been similar). The rate of change seems likely to continue, and it's quite possible that one of the hundreds of battery systems currently in development will turn out to be radically better then what we have now. So building a plant to last 50 years would be very pessimistic.

    Plus the renewable system has a response time of milliseconds where the nuclear one takes hours to days. That matters a lot when it comes to managing a grid as they're finding out in South Australia right now. Where they used to see power price spikes and grid instabilities any time there was an unexpected change in demand, now the Tesla toy takes the edge off and gives the gas generators time to adjust... and sadly for the generators power prices reflect that.

    The usable life of solar PV is somewhat tricky to work out as the primary result of aging is reduced output. So it's quite possible (and indeed common) to leave panels up until they suffer mechanical failure, then to replace the whole string/subassembly when there's a fault. That can be hard to tell, though, because commercial plants often replace panels prematurely in order to get more output.

    We also see panels and batteries increasingly recycled rather than dumped. We're also seeing the whole setup built to be more easily recycled. My guess is that some current large PV installations will run for 30-50 years, but a lot more will be recycled into newer, better models that use the same sites and much of the old infrastructure.

    In Australia at least one of the nuclear problems we don't really talk about is water supply. Our coal plants were mostly grandfathered in through the water restrictions, but even so in droughts there have occaisionally been similar problems to the ones France had in their heatwave a few years ago - can't run the power plant because you can't cool it. Australia is hotter and drier than France.

    1170:

    Firefox says timed out, others not responding at all. And the main address is a simple "DOTorg" As in: " www DOT crookedtimber DOT org"

    1171:

    Loads for me (in Chrome). Given the below I've no expectation it would be a browser issue.

    damian@hertz:~$ ping crookedtimber.org PING crookedtimber.org (208.113.206.0) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from ds6535.dreamservers.com (208.113.206.0): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=221 ms 64 bytes from ds6535.dreamservers.com (208.113.206.0): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=221 ms ^C --- crookedtimber.org ping statistics --- 2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1000ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 221.916/221.953/221.990/0.037 ms

    ISP versus Dreamcast issue? Homegrown DNS issue?

    1172:

    So there are no M-way roadside phiones any more. WHO DO I CALL, if I need assistance, or want to report something?

    Sigh.

    You're supposed to pull out your smartphone, look up your current location if you don't know precisely where you are, then phone the AA or RAC, like any sane person. Or call the police if it's an emergency — the national mobile phone dispatchers will connect you to the local center once you tell them where you are. (In the US, that part is supposed to be automatic, via E911 service — the phones notify the emergency center of their location automatically when you dial 911.)

    Put it another way: the money saved by not maintaining many thousands of unattended phone booths, connected by cables, alongside motorways, comes off your road tax. (In theory.) And you then spend it on your mobile phone. Which you can easily afford, if you can afford a car. And which EVERYBODY WHO IS NOT A CRANK has at least one of, these days.

    Next you'll be objecting to having to pay for your vehicle to have seat belts, or a spare tyre.

    1173:

    Hinkley C is a case of gouging. The UK has failed catastrophically to invest in any new generating capacity other than combined cycle gas turbines for many decades. This puts the UK at an entirely unacceptable level of exposure to geo-political and economic risk, since the gas is almost all imports now.

    Summarizing the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_England

    Still operational powerplants in the UK:

    14269 MW of coal fired capacity - all of it 43 or more years old.

    27566 MW of gas fired capacity.

    ca 1360 MW of biomass.

    160 MW of waste-to-energy

    6190 MW of nuclear power - most of this is also not that far from retirement, and AGR's dont life extend as well as pwrs.

    This means the UK government is looking at a future in which the entire grid will be natural gas, and all that gas at international market prices. At this point they flinched and admitted in their hearts that privatisation was a failure and the market was not ever going to build them any generation capacity whatsoever that involved making capital investments.

    But being faithful disciples of the dogma of the sacred market, they did not bite the bullet and buy a series of new reactors out-right, they opened a bidding round from all the reactor vendors for how high a price guarantee they would need to make the investment.

    The only vendor willing to actually build things turned out to be EDF, which lead to the UK side of those negotiations being taken to the cleaners very badly. I mean, its a better deal than "Buy another 60 years of gas from the Russians at whatever the market rate will be in 2030, 2040, 2050..." but it is not a good deal. EDF gouged the UK and they gouged the nation good.

    1174:

    Truly it is said, if tou want to hurt a physicist, hit him in the dogmas.

    I will point out some of your misrepresentations, and stop there. You can check all of my statements of fact if you care to revisit the documents of the eras. I shall summarise my point at the end.

    Einstein's formulation is an extension of Newton's and, if you modify the latter, you necessarily modify the former. Basic logic.

    Exactly why you believe that the discovery of inter-galactic gas is evidence for the existence of dark matter is beyond me.

    The dark matter theory did not arise like Athena from the head of Zeus in the 1980s, but was the culmination of several decade of fiddling to make the ugly observations match the beautiful theories.

    I worked together with some of the world's leading physicists, and some of the things I said (such as the number of undetermined variables) came from them. You are almost certainly making the serious logical error of ignoring the implicit variables that occur in most formulae (such as GR) - most physicists do.

    SUMMARY AND REPETITION OF MY POINT

    As I said, I do not have a dog in this race. However, I am applying the same logical criteria of evidence that YOU apply to alternative theories to YOUR favoured theories, and find them seriously wanting. To give just two examples:

    For example, falsifiability. In the model you favour, sweeping inconvenient discrepancies under the carpet and adding yet more finagle factors is acceptable for the established theory, but disproves alternative ones. That is hypocrisy, pure and simple.

    And I notice that you are ignoring my point about direct proof (i.e. proof NOT assuming the model that you are setting out to prove).

    The absence of direct evidence is precisely why I doubt the existence of black holes and related lunacies, and why I am deeply suspicious of the new aether, sorry, dark matter.

    1175:

    AHEM You know perfectly well that I have a smartphone .... I just wondered, if it was not an emergency - who do I call - before, say the "AA" ( yes, I'm a member ) if I want word-of-mouth assistance or comms? No need to go off "pop" - though I might, as usual, have phrased my question badly.

    1176:

    I am not sure that the deal is even that good, because so much of it is secret. In particular, I believe that the costs and risks associated with decommissioning, accidents and insurance (e.g. against suppliers going bankrupt) will fall upon the public purse - and we are already seeing how much of a problem the first is.

    But, otherwise, I agree. At a meta-level, it's a result of those Thatcherite/monetarist fanatics having de-skilled the UK so thoroughly that we can't even run the infrastructure we have, let alone build more, and not let's even think about innovating!

    We have a lot of leading-edge research laboratories, but most of those I know of are mostly staffed and supplied from abroad - the proportion of UK staff and equipment is often very small. I don't know if the same is true of our small amount of high-tech production, but I suspect it, especially given the reaction of the car makers and others to Brexit, both immigration and the disruption of HGV traffic from the continent.

    1177:

    UK has failed catastrophically to invest in any new generating capacity other than combined cycle gas turbines for many decades. Yeah, cowardice in the face of the fake-green lobby - see below, later.

    and admitted in their hearts that privatisation was a failure and the market was not ever going to build them any generation capacity... But, very noticeably, NOT admitted that to the public, oh dearie me, not!

    The fake & real green lobbys. Real: GW, much pollution (notably plastics & even now water-supplies), species diversity & survival, rewilding etc ... Fake: "Nucleeearr is EVULLL", followed at present by the fashionable 2 minutes hate against diesels ... Though the worst offenders are buses, taxis & other commercials, oh & river craft - I was shocked at the amount of filth coming out of a river-bus on the Thames, recently. Wo=ith those "commercials" the "churn" rate is high, due to wear & tear. Persecuting private owners is actually a waste of time & effort ( Yes, I have an interest, but even so ... )

    1178:

    Decommisioning costs for nuke plants are very easy to lower if you find them too high. A defueled reactor is a nigh-indestructible building which at its core has a bunch of steel which is contaminated with neutron-activated isotopes. They are expensive to tear down because bringing down meters of concrete while wearing radiation protection gear is a pain in the neck... But why the heck would you insist on doing this in the first place? Strip the clean parts of the building bare (so nothing can catch fire and noone breaks in to steal copper) then veld the doors shut, come back in fifty years when you can take the reactor vessel apart without the haz-mat gear.

    1179:

    Einstein's formulation is an extension of Newton's and, if you modify the latter, you necessarily modify the former. Basic logic. Not necessarily so. At low numbers/speeds,away from deep gravity wells, there be no perceptible change & Newton's basic equations remain unchanged, don't they?

    I think you are wrong about Black Holes ... there is too much cough observational evidence to pretend that they don't exist BUT Æther oops "Dark Matter" though - far too much like a convenient handmade mix of Unobtanium & Handwavium ISTM.

    1180:

    You know perfectly well that I have a smartphone ....

    Greg, cellphone service has been a Thing in the UK for 33 years now.

    Personal computers have been a Thing for about 40 years.

    A smartphone is a cellphone merged with a personal computer.

    Not having a smartphone is not quite as bad as not having indoor plumbing, but it's getting to be the 21st century equivlent. Payphones are going away because BT is finding they're getting used an average of once every six months, and the cost of maintaining them is non-negligible, because almost everybody has a mobile phone.

    Here's a hint: I only have a land line because I need it for (a) the DSL connection and (b) genuine emergencies — although anything that takes out the 3G and 4G networks (which run off stations connected by cable and equipped with UPSs) will quite possibly also take out the 50V DC exchange circuits. The wired land-line phone ringer is switched off because nobody calls it any more except robo-dialing spambots. If I was willing to switch back to the piss-poor service provided by the local cable monopoly I wouldn't have a phone land line at all.

    You're entitled to live your own hair-shirt lifestyle and deny yourself modern conveniences like hot and cold running water or mobile phone service, but please don't assume the rest of the world needs to play along and go out of its way to make life easier for you.

    1181:

    Oh, no, you can't. You may need lighter haz-mat gear, but there are too many toxic materials to do most of the dismantling without. Even assuming the fuel and its decomposition products haven't contaminated other components. I take your point, but somwhat cheaper does not equate to cheap.

    1182:

    No. The whole point about MOND is to modify the formulae for very low accelerations, precisely where Newton and Einstein match most closely.

    And you have missed my point about black holes and, for example, (1-2GM/(2c^2)) versus exp(-2GM/(2c^2)). The former goes to zero (and its inverse to infinity) for finite mass, and the other doesn't, but both have extremely deep wells. What I am saying is NOT that I disbelieve extreme mass concentrations, but I doubt finite and crossable singularities - and I mean true mathematical ones. There aren't the same problems with point singularities, so a model that includes those is fine (I am over-simplifying). What I am NOT seeing is any evidence (NOT based on assuming the result) that those phenomena have a finite event/Cauchy horizon.

    1183:

    A smartphone is a cellphone merged with a personal computer.

    The reason I don't have one is because it isn't. The fundamental difference is whether I can select, configure and modify it to meet my requirements, and (at least in theory) prevent the vendor from pursuing its interests to my detriment. Unless, of course, a usable open source smartphone has appeared when I wasn't looking :-)

    1184:

    You are still misunderstanding me - I think we are talking past each other. Shall we drop it?

    1185:

    Re: '... everybody except a few weird eccentrics — who are inexplicably attracted to my blog comments — has a mobile phone).'

    Hey! That there's mighty good SF world/society-building source material you've got!

    On a serious note though: because smartphones have allowed most of the planet's population's attention to be anywhere but where their bodies actually are, it's a wonder that central authorities/gov'ts are not concerned about being able to reach their populations in the event of a massive and happening-right-now-and-fast! emergency*. This could be the argument for gov'ts to obtain override access to mobile/smartphones which would also mean to the Internet (browsers, email).

    • Japan's earthquake-siren system excepted - but that's only for earthquakes.
    1186:

    To be clear, I don't think any energy industry is clean. For instance, all those lithium batteries we're so hot about need cobalt, and 60% of the world's cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Somehow I don't think the Congolese are going to get on their political feet any time soon, given that particular resource curse.

    Fortunately, Chile and Bolivia are in better political shape than the DRC, because they're the major suppliers of lithium to the world economy.

    Since I've got a pile of old laptops that need to be sorted out before recycling, I'm as guilty as anyone of not feeding the battery recycling ecosystem. Furthermore, I'm aware that recyclable battery components aren't in the same class of cursed extractive resources as are fossil fuels. However, we do need to realize that industrial civilization is rapacious, and if it prefers to hide its more destructive impulses in places where no reporters are looking, it's only (perhaps) because we consumers would rather not feel ashamed about our complicity in other peoples' misery, and our simplest solution is to try to remain ignorant as much as possible. And to look at shiny things to be happy.

    1187:

    No dilution needed, the more intensely radioactive elements undergo nuclear transmutation. In my Granddaughter's lifetime, the plutonium that gave me nightmares as a child will degrade enough to not dependably reach supercriticality, even with non-nuclear components replaced. The radiation will be no worse than the original ore (Something to treat cautiously.) in about a thousand years, less with reprocessing, which I suspect is not as nasty as how it was done seventy years ago. FWIW, if solar, wind, geothermal and whatever render nuclear power obsolete, it won't bother me.

    1188:

    Yes, I was thinking of that. My grumbles about that band are the usual problem with putting any sort of (screw) driver head on a tiny tool: it's only useful for a small range of things that need to be tightened or loosened. If that screw head is recessed more than a few millimeters, the driver is useless. Additionally, it's TSA compliant, so the tools I use the most (scissors and pen knife) are nowhere to be seen.

    As for bead tech, I was thinking about things like RFID dongles, barcodes, and the like. Some of these might be formatted as beads and worn, as opposed to being carried as miniature cards on a keychain. Of course it's easier to print a barcode, and even easier to put it in an app on a phone.

    There might be also cases where having the tech equivalent of pop beads, each of which have one or a few specialized functions, and the beads can be daisy-chained together, might be good. For instance, if you could make a bracelet of such beads, with a rechargeable battery bead at each end, you could alternately swap out each battery and keep the bracelet as a whole running indefinitely (assuming you wanted to wear it). You might also reconfigure bracelets or necklaces for various occasions. You might even have genuine tech beads (with holes through them), where the cable they are strung on acts as a low level induction charger (and perhaps antenna?) that the beads run off of.

    Anyway, beads are just a format for tiny tech. Given the cultural prejudices of the tech world, I don't think they'll take off unless a black swan sheds a few feathers on them sometime. It was fun seeing them used in Black Panther, if only as a reminder that we've focused too much on the 2001-Monolith style of smart phone a bit much recently.

    1189:

    Fantastic!

    1190:

    On a serious note though: because smartphones have allowed most of the planet's population's attention to be anywhere but where their bodies actually are, it's a wonder that central authorities/gov'ts are not concerned about being able to reach their populations in the event of a massive and happening-right-now-and-fast! emergency*

    You know the US Emergency Alert System is going that way? WEA launched in 2012; tests were carried out in the UK in 2013 although it's unclear what has happened since then.

    1191:

    Actually smartphones make it a lot easier to reach the populace in the event of an emergency

    As an example my friend was vacationing with his family in Hawaii when the bogus missle alert went off, and he got the alert immediately

    A lot of this smart phone hate is purely “old man yells at cloud”, other then the privacy concerns (which are legit but unavoidable at this point ) there is not valid reason to not have one

    1192:

    Re: CERN, antimatter & Hawking radiation

    As a couple of commenters mentioned: black holes leak Hawking radiation (likely a form of EM). From what I understand (which approaches 0), what this 'probably-EM' radiation is has not been determined. Further, some of those same theorists also thought that various astrophysical phenomena that have since been observed and verified could not exist mostly because their theoretical models could not fit OR PREDICT them. (IOW, not enough data at this time folks to carve anything into stone.)

    http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_blackholes_theory.html

    Excerpt:

    'According to Hawking's theory, the amount of mass lost is greater for small black holes, and so quantum-sized black holes would evaporate over very short time-scales. But it is hoped that such mini black holes might be experimentally re-created in the extreme conditions of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which, among other things, would lend much-needed credence to some of the current theoretical predictions of superstring theory regarding gravity.'

    However - isn't quantum fluctuation (quark-level goings-on) also super rapid with stuff coming and going into and out of existence at might be FTL speeds? So, maybe these two concepts are related. Another 'however': given that CERN uses only a minuscule micro fraction of all the data collected, how do they know/test that they haven't tossed out the real/relevant data? What I've read about their data retention process (hence, basis of future analysis) sounds kinda biased in the self-fulfilling prophecy direction.

    Anyways, no theory regardless of its mathematical elegance should displace or be a substitute for real data otherwise it's no different than religion.

    1193:

    Re: WEA

    Thanks for the info and link. Didn't know this existed and below may be why.

    Any USians here ever receive any info about this from their wireless carrier? My guess is that even the mobile phone sales staff haven't heard about this 'feature'.

    https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/wireless-emergency-alerts-wea

    Excerpt:

    'WEA is a public safety system that allows customers who own certain wireless phones and other enabled mobile devices to receive geographically-targeted, text-like messages alerting them of imminent threats to safety in their area.

    WEA enables government officials to target emergency alerts to specific geographic areas – lower Manhattan, for example.

    WEA was established in 2008 pursuant to the Warning, Alert and Response Network (WARN) Act and became operational in 2012.

    Wireless companies volunteer to participate in WEA, which is the result of a unique public/private partnership between the FCC, FEMA and the wireless industry to enhance public safety..

    1194:

    Greg Tingey @1165 said: So - probably no to DM & certainly no to Fom

    Fair enough. HA!

    1195:

    No, there are many other reasons for concern. In my view, the worst danger is that they have become an Article Of Faith, rather than a mere tool, with all the consequences that implies. Criticisms of their many current design faults (including security aspects) are often treated as heresy, so are not resolved. They are often used as solutions to problems that should be addressed at source, and to force the public to conform with the demands of the service suppliers.

    Yes, they are becoming ubiquitous, but there are a LOT of people who don't use them (mainly elderly technophobes). And there are a few people like me who don't use them for entirely logical reasons, often related to their design faults. I may be forced to, in the future, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. However, let that pass, unless people really want to know my reasons.

    One aspect that I find really loathesome is that their requirement and denial is starting to be used as extra-judicial discrimination against and punishment of some vulnerable people. That doesn't affect me, personally, but that doesn't make me like it any more. That's not a reason that they are an abomination, but relates to the point in my first paragraph.

    1196:

    Any USians here ever receive any info about this from their wireless carrier?

    I don't think our carrier (Cricket) ever mentioned it, but it seems to be a standard feature here (San Antonio, TX). A few times a year the phone will dong and display an alert, usually Amber (possibly kidnapped child) but occasionally severe weather.

    1197:

    In case anyone was curious of the numbers , currently 77% of the US owns smartphones and 95% own a cellphone , as opposed to 88% who are on the internet at all

    http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/12/evolution-of-technology/

    The main holdout group is age 65+

    1198:

    Allow me to nitpick:

    Well, according to Statistica, 95 percent of UK households had a mobile phone in 2015-2016

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/289167/mobile-phone-penetration-in-the-uk/

    That is the same percentage of people under 35 who own smartphones. However, only about 88% of those between 35 and 54 own smartphones and less than half over 55 do as well. Perhaps the 35-54 demographic has caught up since?

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/271851/smartphone-owners-in-the-united-kingdom-uk-by-age/

    In other words, you're right about the ubiquity of mobile phones, but wrong about the ubiquity of smartphones. Eccentrics shun mobile phones, but significant demographics shun smartphones.

    1199:

    Interesting statistics, thanks. I'm actually surprised that 51 percent of the US population owns a tablet. I seem to remember reading that tablet sales were declining. I wonder what changed that?

    As for the broadband percentage, about 75 percent of the US population lives in metro areas over 250k, and 16 percent live in rural areas. I wonder if these numbers provide some sort of limit on the spread of broadband and the internet in general?

    Where did you get that 95% own a cell phone in the US?

    1200:

    However, there is a big difference between ownership and usage in the elderly. A considerable number buy a mobile phone, or are given one by children etc., find that they can't use it or dislike it, and leave it in a drawer or on a shelf. Inter alia, almost all are extremely difficult to use by people with the near-ubiquitous disabilities of the elderly. That is the reason I almost never use mine and, when I do, use one that is a decade or two old.

    1201:

    Well IIRC, I'm 3 or 4 years older than you - got a mobile ( the ubiquitous "nokia" of the period ) in, um, err .. 1993 - 6 months before I doscovered the Internet. Switched to a smartphone about 5/6 years back. and yes, I do have problems with loading "apps" there are a couple I could do with & one I want to delete, but can't now find the "clues", oh dear ... still (contra to what Charlie imagines) I usually manage. Having a moderate camera at all times is SO useful .....

    1202:

    "In my Granddaughter's lifetime, the plutonium that gave me nightmares as a child will degrade enough to not dependably reach supercriticality"

    Is your granddaughter an Elf? If so, how did that happen? Looks like we may have something more interesting to talk about than plutonium :)

    The half-life of 239Pu is about 24,000 years. And it decays to good old 235U, also fissile, half-life 700,000 years. So fissile content is not going to change appreciably over any human-reasonable timescale.

    But then, y'know... anything with significant amounts of actinides in it is not waste. It's fuel. That some cockend has decided to use a cycle that throws away 99% of the available energy in the form of fizzling toxic soup is not an argument against nuclear power, it's an argument against cockends.

    And the solution is to do something quite straightforward but which we nevertheless don't bloody do: design and build a system for providing an energy supply. What we actually do is design and build a system which attempts to influence some irrelevant numbers, in the context of some other numbers which are made up, based on the known-false assumption that the made-up numbers will remain the same indefinitely and nobody will make up any different ones instead. One side-effect of this system is an electrical energy output; another is fizzling toxic goop.

    This applies to all our current systems which (to describe them accurately rather than conventionally) pretend to the purpose of supplying energy. The difference with nuclear is simply that it produces its toxic goop in concentrated lumps located in first-world countries, instead of producing it in third-world countries where it only poisons foreigners who don't get mentioned in first-world news media or just scattering it throughout the atmosphere (it being decreed in the Holy Writ of Mammon that foreigners who don't get mentioned in first-world news media and the atmosphere are placed in the world to act as entropy sinks for people who make up numbers and control the news media).

    Actual nuclear waste is not really too much of a problem because it does decay on human-reasonable timescales, so it is feasible to contain even the more troublesome longer-lived components such as 90Sr until they're no longer a problem.

    1203:

    Just for comparison, around 16% of US population have a smart speaker. I think that this is a more significant number

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/12/39-million-americans-now-own-a-smart-speaker-report-claims/

    This is the newest mass-market device since the tablet. I wonder how many years will it take for this to become essential?

    1204:

    You almost certainly don't have my disabilities; in several relevant ways, my abilities are those of someone in their 90s (and have been for some decades). I was given my mobile phone by my daughter (an old one of hers) a decade or so back, but have been using the 'Internet' since 1979, Email since 1969 and computers from earlier still.

    The ergonomics of mobile phones ARE as hostile to the elderly as I said they were, but people suffer from the disabilities of the elderly at different rates.

    1205:

    The key word, of course, being "usable" (or something close to it). Android is after all technically Linux, and you can get the source code, but even if you did fancy trying to vet all those gigabytes of source yourself, it's still only the first step. There is still the same problem of needing to control and sanitise web access via the browser that exists with a normal PC, but with neither the tools to do it nor even the user interface to operate them without extreme pain. And every single "app" you download needs to be decompiled, analysed, cleaned, and more or less rewritten from the ground up because that's easier than putting it back together. No source code, and while you can decompile Java, the result isn't necessarily any easier to deal with than just editing the bytecode directly in hex. I've done a bit of this with Android in an emulator and it's got one of the worst effort:reward ratios for any hack I've ever done, even with the advantages of complete PC facilities.

    And it still doesn't solve the problem because the thing in your pocket is not an isolated system, it's part of a much larger system nearly all of which you have no control over at all, those who do have control over it including hooky bastards whose known transgressions include MITMing SSL connections and altering data. You can't really do any better than standing in the corner; even getting behind the sofa is not really on.

    1206:

    Let's talk about the nonexistence of Black Holes, among other things.

    All of the "Gravity only cosmology" discussions above has been refuted in video after video. I pulled out a few, watched them to see if they address the point. They do. You just have to start watching them to see.

    These first two videos are all that you need to see that Black Holes are impossible. These two videos will burn your brain. HA!

    STEPHEN CROTHERS: Black Holes & Relativity, Part One | EU 2013

    STEPHEN CROTHERS: Black Holes & Relativity, Part Two | EU 2013

    This video is two years later.

    Steve Crothers: General Relativity -- A Case in Numerology | EU2015

    • If you still "believe" in Black Holes and the Big Bang after you watched those videos, then I can't help you. HA!

    These are more videos to watch.

    Hawking Still in the Dark on Black Holes | Space News

    Steve Crothers on Failures of Big Bang Cosmology | Space News

    WHAT IF? Asking the Dangerous Questions | Following the Evidence

    Are the Dominoes Falling for Standard Cosmology? | Space News

    Now, I could keep spoon feeding these videos to you guys, but I recommend:

    Watch the many videos on the ThunderboltsProject YouTube channel for more information.

    HA!

    1207:

    Yes, precisely. While some of the same remarks apply to PCs, I can (for reasonable effort) run my browser in a chroot ghetto and flush cookies and other such crap at frequent intervals, AND use separate ghettos for my general browsing and financial transactions. That's not perfect, but is resistant to most script-kiddie attacks and some abuses by the Web sites. Those aren't my only defences, either.

    Yes, I know that I am paranoid, but they ARE out to get me :-)

    1208:

    No dilution needed, the more intensely radioactive elements undergo nuclear transmutation. The radiation will be no worse than the original ore in about a thousand years

    So given a lump of uranium oxide (a fuel pellet) what decay path renders it "no worse than ore" in a hundred or a thousand years? Also, can you explain why after 50 years the nuclear fuel pellets we have seem to be following the classical decay path with radiation levels suggestive of many thousands of years before they're emitting at uranium ore levels? This is important since storing and reprocessing those pellets is complicated and expensive as well as dangerous, but you're saying we can just wait another 50 years and the problem will go away all by itself. But then, the tailings at Hunters Hill are more than 100 years old (refining stopped in 1915) but they're still more radioactive than ore and following the classical decay path.

    I suppose my ultimate answer to this is: why don't people like you take advantage of the stupidity of people like me and buy houses on nuclear hazard sites? In Sydney the price of a house on the old uranium refinery site is effectively zero when a couple of houses down they're $3M-$5M. Apparently not even the most enthusiastic pro-nuclear advocates see that as a good deal (this is the oldest trick in the book: don't listen to what they say, watch what they do).

    1209:

    I seem to remember reading that tablet sales were declining. I wonder what changed that?

    Nothing changed that; it's just that the potential market hit saturation rapidly and tablets — mainly used for casual gaming and web browsing — stay useful longer than PCs. (They've only been a market category since 2011 and the introduction of the iPad, and they seem to stay usable for 3-5 years.)

    1210:

    I'm thinking Charlie is getting mixed up between you and me... hot and cold running water? Why, yes, I do wash in cold water because the crappy hot water system in this house is grossly inefficient for supplying washbasin quantities of hot water, so I only use it to fill a complete bath. I believe I've even mentioned this on here before... :)

    It's not out of any wish to deny myself modern conveniences, though. It's because I don't want to run the immersion heater for half an hour to make the water hot enough for a worthwhile basinful only to have all the surplus go cold again before I next want it. I can tolerate the minor inconvenience of washing in cold water, but I can't be arsed with all that. The system works well enough for making and immediately using a full tank of hot water for a full bath, and that's the important bit.

    I could make and install a 3kW point-of-use water heater for nothing using junk I have lying around, but while it would solve the inefficiency-with-small-quantities problem, it would make no noticeable difference to the inconvenience because I can't be arsed with waiting for 3kW to do its stuff. Nor can I be arsed with spending £200 to fit a 20kW heater that I wouldn't need to wait for. It's all about minimising the inconvenience, not at all about deliberately inducing it.

    1211:

    The ergonomics of mobile phones ARE as hostile to the elderly as I said they were, but people suffer from the disabilities of the elderly at different rates.

    There are mobiles designed for the elderly with ergonomics in mind (tactile large buttons, big display elements) ... alas, sensory impairment usually correlates with age, as does cognitive impairment, and by the time the former is obvious the latter is often so advanced that learning to use a new device is impossible.

    Also, situation not aided when poopy-head carers kids palm off their (wildly-inappropriate) old phones on their elderly relatives so that they can get the cheap upgrades from their carrier. Ahem.

    1212:

    And it still doesn't solve the problem because the thing in your pocket is not an isolated system, it's part of a much larger system nearly all of which you have no control over at all, those who do have control over it including

    Forget it, the battle is lost. These days the SIM card in your phone is likely a UICC card, with a bunch of code and data and an embedded CPU on board. The micro-SD card you store photos and music on has an embedded ARM microcontroller. The baseband processor runs a proprietory OS blob to which you — and the phone's notional OS — has no access, but which can be modified/backdoored by the carrier. And so on.

    Of course, the same goes for your PC, which — if you bought it in the past decade — probably comes with an Intel Management Engine component on board the CPU which happens to run a version of Minix with full access to the bare metal. Your hard disk also has an ARM microcontroller running its own OS stack to provide raw read/write access and cache management. The USB controllers on your motherboard have their own microcontroller stacks. And so on.

    It's black boxes all the way down, and the only way to be reasonably secure is to run an Apple IIe and wear a tinfoil hat.

    1213:

    You have my sympathies. Immersion heaters are the devils work.

    For the record "modern" gas combi boilers are pretty rubbish for providing washbaisin or even kitchen sink sized amounts of water too. At least in my house where the volume of pipework between the boiler and the point where the water is needed exceeds the volume of the sink.

    Running 30 amp cable throughout the house and putting electric shower style heaters on every tap would fix it but it isn't going to happen.

    1214:

    I know - and they are mostly 'designed' by young marketdroids :-(

    I have one such fixed telephone, and would like to buy another, but most of them have precisely what your describe and no better acoustics (not even serious amplification, in many cases). Mobile phones are even worse :-(

    In my case, my daughter used her knowledge of her father to do something appropriate, but I agree that is not the norm.

    1215:

    Personally, I have a non-smart mobile phone. Smartphones seem very good for uses that I don't care about (video, music, Candy Crush, Facebook) and rather bad for functions that I actually use (phone calls, plus my phone has an actual keypad for texting). I'm rarely far from (at least) a laptop computer, so mobile computing doesn't mean much to me. I also have a Kindle for reading that could perform some smartphone functions if I felt like messing with it.

    1216:

    Well, um, helping an aging relative with severe osteoarthritis in her hands set up an iPhone was a good education in how hard it is for people with distorted joints and problems with tactile sensations working on a glass pane. Now if she'd spent the last decade with the rest of us learning how to deal with the glass slab as it got more complex, it might be different. Unfortunately, the iPhone operating system kind of assumes that if you're an adult, you know what it's about because you've been paying attention to phone evolution for the last decade, like most people.

    If you were willfully not paying attention and are forced by circumstances into getting one, trying to work an iPhone with clumsy fingers and poor sensation in your fingertips is a great way to become extremely hostile to it in short order, especially if you don't want to deal with the learning curve you've tried to avoid scaling for a decade.

    I suspect this is the problem with getting people over 65 to adopt these things. They didn't wanna, and now they gotta, and that's not the kind of situation that fosters the good learning environment that most of us had, because we simply played with the damned things until we got used to them.

    I'd add further that I already tried buying this relative a cheap, friendly, flip phone with big buttons, but she used it so seldom that the company unilaterally shut down her account, even though I was paying for it. The part about turning down free money was kind of stupid on their part, but there you have it.

    1217:

    Yes. And the same applies to people with serious hearing impairment where the setup or some other action involves ringing a number and following the recorded directions. With humans, I can ask them to repeat more clearly and loudly (often 3-10 times), but that doesn't work with machines, and even with humans I often have to give up. I am lucky, because I can ask my wife to do it, but banks etc. are very unhappy about being told to speak to my agent.

    1218:

    Yes. iOS and Android both badly need a "simple" mode that obscures most of the details but lets the user do basic phone stuff — send/read text messages, make calls, check voicemail, take photographs — with extra-large/clear icons/controls and all the extended options hidden behind a "advanced mode" toggle. Apple ditching skeuomorphic design circa 2014 was fine for existing users who had grown accustomed to the OS, but probably cocked things up beyond repair for crumblies with poor visual acuity and no familiarity with software-as-software rather than as a metaphor for physical objects.

    Apparently — so I gather — Apple got the iPhone user interface very right indeed for blind/severely visually impaired users, at least compared to desktop OSs and insofar as a device that's a near-featureless slab of glass can be useful to someone who's blind. (Lots and lots of visual enhancements plus voice output and speech interaction.) But cognitive and touch impairments are much harder to get right, especially in an industry burdened with featuritis.

    1219:

    I’d imagine tablets as being pretty good for the elderly, better then then physically reality at a lot of things like reading

    Here is a study specially on 65+ using technology

    http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/05/17/tech-adoption-climbs-among-older-adults/

    1220:

    I’d imagine tablets as being pretty good for the elderly, better then then physically reality at a lot of things like reading

    Here is a study specially on 65+ using technology

    http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/05/17/tech-adoption-climbs-among-older-adults/

    1221:

    I do most of my reading on my iPad nowadays. Sharp display and I can increase the print size to what's comfortable to me (which is larger than standard print size). An added advantage is that even my old iPad is lighter than a hardcover, so I can hold it longer. Finally, I can carry thousands of books with me and read what I feel like when I feel like it. (I also don't feel guilty about highlighting an ebook, while doing that to a print book feels like vandalism.)

    Not ideal for art books, or books where layout is important (like many textbooks) because showing a full page at a time means I'm looking at smaller text than the print book would be, so I tend to stick to print for those. (As well, when studying where I want several books to refer to several books I prefer paper, because I can just lay them out on my desk side-by-side, while I only have the one iPad. If iPads were cheap enough that I could have half-a-dozen iPad Pro screens just for reading I might switch.)

    1222:

    Not an elf, I've read that plutonium bomb pits are viable for around a century, the plutonium is continuously becoming something else, when enough of it does, it's no longer suitable for blowing things up. I presume it could be reprocessed, if they restarted Savanah River.

    1223:

    Closest such is on the other side of Missouri from me, and not a residential area anyway (Supplied the uranium oxide in the original pile.). Are you also worried about depression glass? (Uranium used to color it.)

    1224:

    Are you also worried about depression glass?

    Not at all, it's benign compared to a lot of what you do to each other.

    But I feel the need to remind you that Sydney is not part of the USA. A product only ever made and distributed in the USA is unlikely to concern me. I had to look it up.

    1225:

    Now I get to mention something deeply scary, Growing Earth Theory(GET).

    Wiki - Expanding Earth

    The wiki page mentions the different versions along with the consensus view. The wiki page will give you a good overview of the concept.

    There are three forms of the expanding earth hypothesis:

  • Earth's mass has remained constant, and thus the gravitational pull at the surface has decreased over time.

  • Earth's mass has grown with the volume in such a way that the surface gravity has remained constant.

  • Earth's gravity at its surface has increased over time, in line with its hypothesized growing mass and volume.

    • IMHO, based on the fossil and geological evidence, the third form is correct.
  • Before the 70s, every geology text book showed all of the competing theories. After the 70s only one theory was left -- by editorial fiat -- plate tectonics. There was no science to back up plate tectonics -- only philosophy. There was a Navy Captain who wrote a paper that he called "geopoetry" proposing that plate tectonics was the one true path, and without any science, everyone accepted his viewpoint.

    Harry Hammond Hess: Spreading the seafloor

    History of Ocean Basins by H.H. Hess

    "I shall consider this paper an essay in geopoetry"

    At no time in the past decades has anyone shown plate tectonics to be true. There is no place where "subduction" has been shown to exist. A few "plates" near Antartica are such that they cannot have a subduction zone to even work as tectonic plates.

    This is a fun video by Neal Adams that shows the concept. He has many more videos on his YouTube channel when you are ready to look. Click on his "Science" playlist to watch all the videos.

    Neal Adams - Science: 01 - Conspiracy: Earth is Growing!

    BTW, GET is not just about the Earth, every planet grows.

    Neal Adams - Science: 02 - Conspiracy: The Moon is Growing!

    Neal Adams - Science: 03 - Conspiracy: Mars is Growing!

    One of the original theories was by Alfred Wegener.

    Neal Adams - World Conspiracy of Science- Earth Grows, Science Knows

    This is a Samuel Carey video describing his theory.

    Neal Adams/Samuel Carey

    James Maxlow continued Carey's work. This lecture lays out everything up to now.

    Expanding Earth Theory - Growing Earth is Still Baffling Mainstream Science [FULL VIDEO]

    James Maxlow

    I have a copy of his original book. He has a new one out. The hardback is over $200, the ebooks are not. IMHO, He priced his ebooks wrong. HA!

    On the Origin of Continents and Oceans: Book 1 Empirical Small Earth Modelling Studies

    On the Origin of Continents and Oceans: Book 2: The Earths Rock Record

    The Fossil evidence:

    We have fossil evidence of large animals that we call dinosaurs. There is also fossil evidence of large insects. The dinosaurs are physically impossible on a one gravity Earth. The largest land animal today are African Elephants. Their muscles/bones place them at 75% of their maximum strength. They can't get much larger, because if they lie down on the ground, they have to have the strength to get up again.

    The earlier dinosaurs were larger than the later dinosaurs. The more the Earth grew, the smaller the dinosaurs, until now they are birds. You have pterosaurs that stood taller than a giraffe but could fly. Museums show a pterosaur with full wingspan and it is the same size as a WWII Spitfire. That pterosaur could swallow a human in one gulp. The largest flying bird today is less than 20 pounds.

    • I love the Jurassic Park movies, but if they tried to grow a dinosaur the same way, they would not grow larger than an Elephant, if they could grow at all. Gravity now may be too much for the eggs.

    Watch this video as an example of insect size. When you get to 1:45 the lady makes the bizarre claim that "oxygen" let them grow so big. She wastes most of the video spinning that story. Think about it, she lies so easily. Once again this is a violation of physical law. If the oxygen level grows too great everything burns. One lightning strike and everything goes. They got big because gravity was low.

    The Age of Giant Insects

    At 0:50, notice the size of the pterosaur compared to the lady. She is lunch! At 1:50 see the largest flying bird, the Albatros in comparison, at 19 pounds! Starting about 2:10 she talks about how the pterosaur took off. Nonsense! They were made of meat. The weight of blood and muscle alone would stop them from flying in a one gravity Earth. Is she crazy! Yes!

    The Biggest Thing That Ever Flew

    What! The dinosaurs got big because they laid eggs! Air sacks! Is this guy on drugs? HA!

    How Did Dinosaurs Get So Huge?

    I'm having too much fun with this. HA!

    Now we get to the part that everybody stumbles on, where does all the new matter come from. Like Maxlow said in his lecture -- you did watch the lecture, didn't you -- the mechanism is unknown. Not knowing "how" does not negate the "growing" evidence that GET is happening. GET it? HA!

    For Story purposes, I'm going old school and do what Asimov did in The Foundation Trilogy -- Transmutation.

    1226:

    Well, I used to have this problem - London is a "very hard" water area & I was stuck with replacing the damned things every 3-4 years. Then, someone woke up & started making imm-heaters that: 1: Would dial down to 60° C 2: Had a different alloy-metal outer coating so that "fur" hardly sticks to & flakes off. Current heater has been in for about 20 years, now. Agree re. "combi" boilers, they are thermodynamically inefficient & badly designed ... But since my hot water is separate, my central heating boiler is also separate, sits in the middle of the house with a modern flue inserted up ( oh-err missus! ) a pre-existing chimney, so most of the "waste" heat is actually dispersed inside the house, rather than vented to the environment in some stupid "balanaced flue" cobblers.

    1227:

    I got caught like that. About 8-9 years back, I was doing finance at a beer festival, & one of the other "tellers" phones went off, whilst he was out collecting dosh from the bars ... I had the generic "non-smart nokia & I think he had a very early Apple ... I couldn't answer it, I couldn't do a damned thing with it ... because no-one had ever told me about "swiping" & I had never seen it done. So easy, yest so difficult - without the appropriate information.

    1228:

    Errr ... NO Subduction does occur - that's why you get earthquakes deep down, that sometimes produce tsunamis - also, how do you explain the continual raising of the W coast of S America ( as per Charlie Dawin & ever since ... ) without PT?

    One way-out hypothesis too many. [ HINT: Just becuase one supposed "theory" - Dark Matter which is all too plainly "epicycles" - it does not generically spread to all the others, does it? ]

    Large insects in the Carboniferous, when the Oxygen content of the atmosphere was nearer 30% than 20%, so their spiracles &/or book-lungs could support a bigger size body.

    1229:

    Had a quick look at that ... The graphs are interesting. I'm now 72, have been on the 'net since 1994, had a moibie at about the same time, have tablet in the house (not mine) - obviously got broadband (though slow) Refuse point-blank to go near "social" media ( with the very ocasional use of Twatter from this machine) simply because 99.99999...9% of it is total shite & life is certainly too short.

    From those same graphs, it looks as though the crumblies appreciate the useful bits, though

    1230:

    An it's (pretty powerful) computers all the way down high point from 2015, installing Linux on a hard drive.

    http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

    I once found that an 8pin FT232R USB-485 converter was actually a sawn of microcontroller (still re-programmable!).

    On the baseband firmware thing, we were given a lecture by a really nice man with a home brew pico cell who explained that the real telecos (those with towers) have right, keys and capability to update your phones baseband firmware. Your teleco (those with and without towers) also probably installed themselves as a trusted root authority so they can MITM your https traffic.

    Every phone was made backdoored, and those that aren't probably aren't legal in your country.

    1231:

    I discovered when I became single again that it's basically impossible to meet new people more than once if you don't have those things. Well, at least in the 40-60 year age group that I'm interested in. For the under-40's you need to be using whatever the flavour-of-last-year is because they're only a year behind the teens these days.

    So now I have my phone and the social networks phone. As OGH keeps saying, smartphones are cheap and so are plans. My geriatric paranoia means I turn on my second hand bought-offline phone at the local library, do my stuff over wifi, then turn it off and pull the battery back out. I have a SIM for it with data enabled for when I'm out and about meeting people. But I leave my phone at home when I'm doing that. With any luck the capitalists won't connect the two.

    It's a PITA, but my way beats having to explain to every person I meet that I don't want to sell everything I do and say to anyone who's interested. Doing that marks me as weird in the tinfoil-hat-and-muttering sense, and that's no way to meet interesting people. Just asking people not to take photos of me is bad enough.

    1232:

    re iPhones and elderly. I saw an article recently describing a way to simplify jailbroken iPhones by removing unnecessary apps even those which Apple will not allow you to delete. This can be accomplished without jailbreaking by simply dragging unwanted apps into one icon and parking that icon on another screen. I don't want you to think I'm trying to teach granny to suck eggs but some of your other readers might be interested in this link.

    https://blog.fonepaw.com/set-up-iphone-elderly.html

    I don't consider myself to be elderly at 69 just old.

    1233:

    As of iOS 11, you don't need to jailbreak to remove most of the default Apple apps .

    Looking at my iPhone, the only stuff that appears to be undeletable is:

    App Store (you can't reinstall apps without this) Settings (Duh) Messages (no SMS without this) Phone (no phone calls without this) Camera (no photos without this) Photos (so you can see the photos you took) Clock Health (I can see situations where a confused person deleting this could get into medical trouble) Wallet (you don't have to stash your credit card in it, but you can ...) Find iPhone (because that which is lost may need to be found) Safari (the default web browser)

    Everything else? You can junk it (and reinstall as/when you need it).

    This doesn't help with the fact that some of these apps are really bloated, for desktop levels of bloat, but it does offer a radically slimmed-down gizmo with barely more uses than an old-school Nokia featurephone running Symbian (except the web browser is infinitely better).

    1234:

    No, it is not a "very hard" water area, by traditional standards. I have lived in such, and things like electric kettles and immersion heaters started to fail after weeks or months.

    1235:

    It is where I live ... water comes off the chalk above Stortford, or from Chalk wells (Amwell) YMMV for other parts of London

    1236:

    I do live in a had water area. But water softeners do a good job. The immersion heater is still working well after about 20 years. But I just had to replace the main cut-off tap in the house which would not turn off and is of course before the softener.

    1237:

    Yeah, but is it actually cloudy as it comes out of the tap? :-) Not all chalk-derived water is equally hard. Calcium bicarbonate's solubility is 160 g/L, but the UK water company definition of 'very hard' seems to be above 0.3 g/L - that leaves a LOT of leeway!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_bicarbonate http://www.dwi.gov.uk/consumers/advice-leaflets/hardness_map.pdf

    My belief is that modern water supplies soften the hardest water, for all the obvious reasons and more.

    1238:

    I've read that plutonium bomb pits are viable for around a century, the plutonium is continuously becoming something else, when enough of it does, it's no longer suitable for blowing things up. I presume it could be reprocessed, if they restarted Savanah River.

    On plutonium pit aging, see

    https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/pit.pdf

    https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R43406.pdf

    AIUI, the aging processes of concern are metallurgical, chemical and mechanical and could be addressed, in the extreme, by recycling the material after chemical purification.

    BTW, aging doesn't seem to be of concern for U-235, at least not nearly as much. I once had an opportunity to have lunch with one of the JASONs (Bob LeLevier) who was working on their pit lifetime extension studies. He said that several of the group advocated forgetting about Pu primaries and switching to all uranium ones. I guess they lost out, as Pu still seems to be the standard.

    1239:

    "BTW, aging doesn't seem to be of concern for U-235, at least not nearly as much."

    My understanding is that it's not the aging, but the fact that plutonium is biologically active in a way that uranium and thorium are not, which might be a result of evolution not having been exposed to it (or might not).

    1240:

    Nuclear waste repositories are badly named - The accurate description of their purpose would be "Nuclear fuel Reprocessing for the Extremely Lazy and Patient".

    Solid fuel rods are retired from active use with most of their fuel content still in them, because there are too many accumulated fission products in them, and separating the fuel from the waste while those fission products are still unstable is a pain in the neck. Not impossible, but expensive.

    In four, five hundred years, those fission products will have run their decay chains to the end, and separating those stable end products from the remaining fuel is comparatively trivial. This is why noone has any interest in the various schemes to permanently dispose of nuclear waste - it is not difficult to do so. Stuff dropped down a deep borehole or into a subduction zone is not going to make it back to the surface in geological eras - it is because permanent disposal is not desired - What is desired is a location from which our descendants can retrieve the stuff if they want it, or leave it buried if they do not at their discretion.

    1241:

    My understanding is that it's not the aging, but the fact that plutonium is biologically active in a way that uranium and thorium are not

    That may be another concern, but in the context of the conversation (this was in the late 1980s), the worries seemed to have to do mostly with the weird and incompletely understood metallurgy of plutonium.

    1242:

    Here's an article updating us on the state of an unsexy component of automating cars: up-to-date mapping. This article chronicles the approaches to ensuring that Google loses its current lead in accurate maps

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-21/nobody-wants-to-let-google-win-the-war-for-maps-all-over-again

    1243:

    I don't think it deletes them, it only hides them. The built-in apps are on the root filesystem, which is read-only, but the arrangement of the apps is a preference on the user filesystem.

    1244:

    It's a PITA, but my way beats having to explain to every person I meet that I don't want to sell everything I do and say to anyone who's interested.

    You're reducing their take by a fraction of a percent. Much like intelligence agencies, Google et al really don't care about you as an individual. Individuals are beneath notice, for them it's all about mass observation.

    For you it's a principled position, I get that, but it's a point that often escapes the true tinfoil wearer (like most of us, mildly discomforted that they really don't matter in the Grand Scheme of Things).

    Just asking people not to take photos of me is bad enough.

    Again, not an unheard-of position.

    The people who normally take that approach have had an... interesting life (for a given value of "Tier 1 / spent time hunting+interrogating terrorists*"). Even then, I know one or two who have relaxed their rules about having a name anywhere near their photo, but it took a decade or three for them to consider it.

    • and I mean "interrogating", not "torturing". The latter is strictly for second-raters and psychos.
    1245:

    My understanding is that it's not the aging, but the fact that plutonium is biologically active in a way that uranium and thorium are not, which might be a result of evolution not having been exposed to it (or might not).

    In biological terms that's such arrant nonsense that it belongs right up there with the flat earth stuff/electric universe/expanding earth nonsense theories also brought up on this thread.

    Trust me, that's not how evolution (and heavy metal toxicity) works.

    1246:

    Heavy metals that are also alpha emitters are very bad news if you ingest them. There's not really much more to it than that.

    1247:

    Greg Tingey @1228 said: One way-out hypothesis too many.

    That's a good way to put it. Welcome to my world. HA!

    I have at least one more post that takes things the next step beyond "way-out".

    BTW, When you get the chance, you might actually look at all the links and see that this really is "Science". HA!

    Plus, the latest ThunderboltsProject newsletter just mentioned:

    "The independently organized 2018 Electric Universe conference in Bath, England, now has a Website. Take a look: http://www.electricuniverseuk.com/ Be aware that the dates changed from those originally announced. The new dates are Saturday 7th July – Wednesday 11th July."

    1248:

    What a bomb pit needs to be to go bang rather than phut is about as far removed from what makes stuff coming out of reactors dangerous as it can be and still involve plutonium :)

    Nobody is worried about actual nuclear changes in a pit on timescales of 1/240 of a half-life. The concern is with what the mechanical energy of an alpha decay event (and the much rarer occasional spontaneous fission) does to the structure of the metal on a scale of up to a few hundred atoms, and how that might affect its response to the compressive forces exerted to make it go off. Nobody's even really sure if it would make any noticeable difference anyway; it's more a case of playing safe on the grounds that alpha decay does cause observable structural alterations in rocks etc, and plutonium is such bloody weird stuff in its "large"-scale properties that nobody would be all that surprised if it started growing tentacles. Practically, the pit is the component of a nuke less likely to deteriorate for want of maintenance than any other. They're just not really happy that "less likely" is good enough.

    With environmental contamination, though, that humanly-long 24000-year half-life becomes a problem rather than a useful thing. It's long enough that you can't rely on the stuff fading away, but it's still short enough to make it highly radiotoxic, and its chemical toxicity is if anything even worse. Microgram quantities are enough to be nasty, and it can be highly mobile in groundwater under the right conditions. So you need to be very careful that it's going to remain properly immobilised for as long as there is a chance of lifeforms with lifespans long in relation to the rate that plutonium damages them being around, and that's long enough that it's a bit tricky to cope with.

    1249:

    Oh, I trust you - my knowledge of biochemical pathways is small. But more than one apparent expert told me that was the worst difference between plutonium and uranium and thorium. After all, the latter are of the order of 10 ppm in granite, and I have not heard of such poisoning from that source.

    1250:

    See above... I think there are two different kinds of "concern" getting mixed up here: the metallurgical kind relevant to bomb pits, and the toxic kind relevant to contamination. Both apply much more to plutonium than to uranium, but for different reasons; in the pit case the amazingly weird metallurgical properties of plutonium, and in the toxicity case the combination of it being quite an active alpha emitter and its ability to take the chemical heavy-metal-toxicity aspect to a whole new level (invisibly small speck in a wound means eventually your arm falls off kind of level).

    1251:

    There's at least one study of case histories of people who suffered gruesome results from seemingly trivial plutonium exposure in US facilities which is freely available on the web, although I'm buggered if I can remember anything specific enough to be useful as a search term to find it with. Some of it needs quite a strong stomach to read, and it has a distinct flavour of "we have no idea why it does this except that it's chemical rather than radiological".

    1252:

    I view it similarly to Moz but with extra bits added: the agencies may be concerned with the mass rather than individuals, but the mass is composed of the individuals, and the more individuals are disapprovingly aware of the mass surveillance the more difficult it becomes for it to work. So as long as I feel sufficiently with-it at the time to be adequately articulate for the purpose, I'm quite happy to treat people to a lecture on the army of invisible spies looking over their shoulder and writing down everything they do. If they turn out to be inclined towards agreement, all well and good. If they don't, even if their reaction is reflexive unthinking denialism and refusal to contemplate it, at least I've put a thought in their head where there was nothing before.

    Similarly with photos. I may not be worried about possible abduction etc. but I do want to avoid the possibility of people being able to recognise me when I don't recognise them. Because it's embarrassing and weird and it does my head in and pisses me off. Particularly these days when people are likely to put the photos on bloody arsebook and have their evil face-recognition server farms exert their multiplying influence.

    The difference is that I have the advantage that "being single" is something I now view more positively than negatively, and so am not concerned with concealing my opinions in order to facilitate altering the situation.

    1253:

    And a number of other people got quite large exposures and died in their nineties. Heck, lots of them are still alive. Google UPPU club. Heck, the (tiny) statistical cohort of people with plutonium exposure has had better health outcomes than the average american. Lots better.

    (..obviously this is because getting exposed to plutonium required you to first be a pretty darn elite engineer or scientist, which is a very healthy group of people...)

    Uhm. Let me see how to put this. The general concern about radioactive toxicity is deeply overblown and weird. It is poisonous, yes, but it is a poison produced in small quantities as far as industrial society is concerned, it is very tightly controlled, it is handled with care, disposed of with paranoid caution.. And and while these concerns are treated with great seriousness nobody seems to give much of a shit about dioxins and mercury emissions unless it is their jobs to care as public health officials.

    And those poisons go into the air, not 300 meters below ground in a carefully designed facility.

    Something is very, very wrong about our ability to do comparative threat analysis.

    1254:

    the latter are of the order of 10 ppm in granite, and I have not heard of such poisoning from that source.

    Radon out-gassing from granite is a noted cause of lung cancer in areas where houses are built atop granite rock; cellars are required to be fitted with ventilators in such areas. Radon is a noble gas and a decay isotope of uranium 238 with a half-life of about 80 hours, and as an alpha emitter, it's biologically dangerous if inhaled — because it's heavier than air it accumulates in unventilated cellars over granite bedrock.

    But direct toxicity from uranium and thorium in granite is not a public health issue to the best of my knowledge. (Toxicity from spent uranium anti-tank rounds in war zones is another matter, but that involves relatively large quantities of uranium that's been violently dispersed and possibly mixed with other hazardous materials inside a tank ...)

    1255:

    I do want to avoid the possibility of people being able to recognise me when I don't recognise them. Because it's embarrassing and weird

    Then you should avoid my line of work. Just sayin' ...

    1256:

    My problem isn't longevity of the heating element, it's that the physical configuration of the system is not suitable for producing small quantities of hot water relatively infrequently.

    The heater is at the bottom of the cylindrical hot water tank. (No holes to fit one elsewhere.) When the heater is switched on in the tank full of cold water, a plume of heated water convects upwards towards the top of the tank, to be replaced by more cold water sinking down. The convection is enough to induce significant though incomplete mixing; the overall tank temperature takes on a profile that increases smoothly from bottom to top. It's not uniform, which would be even worse, but nor is there significant stratification that might concentrate the heat near the top, until the whole tank gets much hotter.

    So by the time the water at the top of the tank, near the outlet, is hot enough to run a worthwhile washbasin-full of hot water (as opposed to a lukewarm "why did I bother" one), most of the rest of the tank's contents has also been heated, although not enough to be any use.

    Then, when I do run the hot water into the basin, the resulting inrush of cold water into the hot water tank gives the contents a good stir. By the time the motion has died away, the whole tank is mixed, and instead of being cool at the bottom grading to sort of hottish at the top, it's just tepid all the way up. So if I try to run a second hot basin-full later in the day, it doesn't work. It's not even much of an advantageous starting point from which to do some more heating, because despite the rather good jacket on the tank most of the heat has still dissipated.

    It's acceptable for a complete bath, when I leave the heater on long enough to make the entire tank nice and hot, and then use all that hot water in one go to fill the bath (it's a small tank). But it sucks for basin-fulls.

    The immersion heater is only supposed to be a backup; there is also a gas boiler to provide heat both to radiators and to the water/water heat exchanger inside the tank. But the inefficiency of that is so gross that I'm at a loss to grasp where all the heat goes. It actually costs more to heat the water by gas than it does electrically, despite the price per kWh being about 4 or 5 times less for gas.

    It's effectively useless for its central heating function as well. The house is extremely well insulated - double glazing, multiple layers of insulation in the walls, and a great haystack of fibreglass in the roof. It almost never needs any more heating than a 1kW heater (with thermostat regulating it) in either the main room or the bedroom (not both), according to whether I'm in bed or not. It's far cheaper to do this with an electric heater that puts all its heat into the room than it is to use the gas heating and have it throw 10kW up the chimney or whatever it does with it.

    Apart from anything else the sheer inelegance of the situation grinds my gears, but it's barely even possible to get a gas-powered space heater that's efficient at such low outputs unless you're prepared to tolerate having several pints of water a day distributed around the room, which I'm not. The water heating could in theory be solved quite well, as the layout of the walls and the gas and water pipe runs would make it simple to put a point-of-use heater directly above the washbasin, ie. pretty much an optimum arrangement with the only dead volume being that of the heat exchanger itself... but I find it less hassle just to put up with cold water.

    1257:

    Agreed. I'd always understood that plutonium was effing dangerous for the same reason that fluorine is--it's active and toxic, as well as radioactive. That bit about pure metal fluffing up and powdering when exposed to moist air (and then accumulating in bones if absorbed) should make every chemist really sit up and take notice. It also disrupts its own crystal structure through its own radioactivity, increases in resistance as it gets colder (! But only down to 100k), doesn't conduct heat well, but melts at 640oC.

    That's just from reading ol' Wikipedia. Sounds like a wonderfully easy thing to form into fuel rods and other complex structures.

    Oh, and like other metals, you can react it with fluorine to make various chemicals of interest to, erm, very special chemists. Talk about PuFFF the magic dragon...

    1258:

    There's at least one study of case histories of people who suffered gruesome results from seemingly trivial plutonium exposure in US facilities which is freely available on the web

    I try to keep up with this subject, albeit casually. That doesn't ring a bell, and I'd appreciate a pointer if you find it again. I'll look around for it and do likewise.

    1259:

    Sure, the sample is tiny. But it does seem to include instances of acute plutonium chemotoxic (as opposed to chronic radiotoxic) effects of a kind that don't happen with other heavy metals, and the tiny sample size doesn't help with understanding what actually happens in such cases.

    Completely agree about environmental radiotoxicity and relative risk perception. Especially when you can detect radiological contamination just by waving a magic wand about, which is vastly easier than detecting most chemical hazards.

    1260:

    Precisely. And, in granite areas, many people will ingest micrograms of uranium and thorium a day (i.e. hundreds of milligrams of granite dust), over the whole of their life. That indicates that they are neither particularly toxic nor accumulative. My understanding is that plutonium is both.

    1261:

    Don't worry, I reached that conclusion a long time ago :D

    Concerning radon, I've encountered the suggestion that about half the carcinogenic effect of tobacco smoke is down to it transporting naturally-occurring 210Po from radon decay into your lungs. Though I'm not sure how reliable this is, as there seems to be considerable confusion over how much of that is airborne charged particles being attracted to smoke and how much is the tobacco plant bioaccumulating it.

    1262:

    Plutonium metallurgy, from someone who probably knows about about it. (Hecker is a former director of Los Alamos)

    https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00818035.pdf

    Plutonium and Its Alloys From atoms to microstructure Siegfried S. Hecker

    1263:

    s.b. just one about there. Wish editing were allowed.

    1264:

    I do want to avoid the possibility of people being able to recognise me when I don't recognise them

    Oh, dude, that's ... not something I worry about. I am shite at faces, and nano-famous enough that there's a big-ish cloud of people who recognise me, and comparatively few that I recognise.

    Then there's people I'd only recognise in context. I suspect if I met Charlie in an SF context I might recognise him, but otherwise no chance. Likewise my local MP's, one of whom is just another generic white guy and while I respect him picking him out of a lineup is unlikely (I've met him a few times).

    My objection to photos is purely machine privacy-related, the more links there are in the various systems between my names and faces the easier I am to track. I'm one of less than 10% of kiwis who have opted out of the national DNA database, for example. To me that's obvious, but apparently the few kiwis who know about it don't care enough to write a letter.

    1265:

    And those poisons go into the air, not 300 meters below ground in a carefully designed facility. Something is very, very wrong about our ability to do comparative threat analysis.

    While I broadly agree with you, the cost of the threat analysis makes it hugely easier to just say "that's clearly bad, I shall avoid it" for many risks. Radioactive waste fall into that category for 99% of people, as does non-atmospheric mercury and a bunch of other stuff.

    Interestingly if you look for the details online it's pretty easy to DIY a particulate filter that will work down to about pm1 and you can just leave that recirculating air in the room you sleep in. Filtering lead out of your water is much harder, sadly.

    But if you really care, for $US500-odd you can buy the widget I have in my bedroom and get a more detailed idea: https://www.uradmonitor.com/?open=82000090

    A lot of people aren't in a position to spend $US500 to find out that in fact the air quality where they live is what you'd expect if you look at the broad-scale maps. They're also not really in a position to spend hundreds of dollars to address each pollutant, let alone my reaction of building a "clean room" in the backyard and using that as their bedroom. Amusingly it's also largely Faraday Shielded as a side effect of using steel-EPS sandwich panels (the cheapest SIPS I could get). I wouldn't have paid extra for that but .. :)

    1266:

    Also for you DIY types: the sensors in that toy cost as much as the whole thing, if you buy them one at a time more or less retail (they're not really "retail" retail, but anyone can buy them via outlets like Element14 and RS). While I don't really care about radioactivity, it wasn't worth the hassle of rolling my own just to avoid the $100-ish that adds to the total cost.

    Shortly I will have another couple, one for outside (as my contribution to the network, as well as to monitor the effectiveness of my internal filters), plus one for work. When I had the existing one at work we found that the air inside really is as bad as it feels - CO2 over 1200ppm a lot of the time, for example. That's the "feels bad" CO2 level where you notice that your brain, it no work so gud no more.

    1267:

    Picking up a couple of points:

    • Nuclear in the UK currently carries a £100Bn (overt) to £300Bn ("we plan for this but we don't talk about it") cost to clean up after existing plant. Solar doesn't and won't.

    • The only new nuclear provider in the UK is in the middle of going spectacularly bust, despite being offered prices 6-8x what solar/wind builds for

    • Fusion is 50 years away. Still. I have a great bridge in London for sale btw, comes with a lifetime supply of fusion for the lifting mechanism.

    • London busses went hybrid. London taxi manufacturers are now making electric taxis. If Essex Knowledge Man is buying these, the petrol heads have lost the argument

    If I was a betting person, I'd be building robots. (checks - yes I am). If I bet on market economics, I'd want to bet on "lawsuits against people who carried on backing diesel/nuclear after we knew they were practising genocide"...

    1268:

    Science and Technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds over the past century. Theoretical Physics and Cosmology have become bizarre religions -- that violates basic Physics -- over that same century.

    A century ago, there was a war in Cosmology.

    They did not know that there were other galaxies. Hubble's work on the 200 inch at Palomar resolved the fuzzy nebula as being separate galaxies, separate "Island Universes".

    • To the day he died, Hubble refused to use the word "Galaxy" he always called them "Nebula".

    You had a guy called Harlow Shapley who "believed" in a Universe where the stars were randomly scattered. He routinely destroyed the careers of astronomers that claimed there were galaxies. It was only when the proof was there that he changed his "belief". At that point he laid claim to the work of others, and he claimed the credit for the shape of the galaxy itself, the position of the Globular Clusters, the center of the Milky Way is called Shapley Center after him.

    Wiki - Harlow Shapley

    Wiki - Great Debate (astronomy)

    Why the `Great Debate' Was Important

    The Shapley - Curtis Debate in 1920

    The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900-1931

    The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition has come out of copyright and there are a number of copies you can access to see where things were a century ago.

    Wiki - Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition

    If you look in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition 1911, there is no entry for "Universe". They did not use that term the way we do.

    Go to page 745

    Read the entry for "Nebula" and see what Hubble went looking for. They thought Andromeda was just a cloud. They use the word "galaxy" in the entry, but not in the way we do.

    Go to page 332

    The word "galaxy" has a brief paragraph on page 396.

    "Galaxy, properly Milky Way... The word is more generally employed in its figurative or transferred sense, to describe a gathering of brilliant or distinguished persons or objects."

    Go to page 396

    Read the entry for "Nebular Theory" and see that it is filled with caveats, and hedges. You will recognize much of what is said. The definition changed over time by editorial fiat, not actual science.

    "It is emphatically a speculation; it cannot be demonstrated by observation or established by mathematical calculation. Yet the boldness and the splendour of the nebular theory have always given it a dignity not usually attached to a doctrine which from the very nature of the case can have but little direct evidence in its favour."

    It goes down hill from there. HA!

    Go to page 333

    A century ago, there was a war in Physics.

    After WWI, the pacifist movement tried to bring Europe back together. You had Eddington fake the test of Einstein's general relativity using a solar eclipse in 1919. His equipment, and conditions, were not adequate to the task. They turned Einstein into a rock star for political reasons.

    Wiki - Arthur_Eddington#Relativity

    • The bending of light that occurs near the Sun, is because the light is passing through the Sun's atmosphere. Light bends the same way it bends in water. Not from gravity.

    I took physics in High School, and many semesters at University, as I got my Civil Engineering degree in the 70s. The heart of Civil Engineering is the Scientific Method. Testing, testing, testing. All over the world labs are testing materials. Breaking rebar, crushing concrete, bending, twisting steel beams. The Civil Engineering of the 70s is nothing compared to today. When I watch NOVA and see them build super skyscrapers like the one in London -- where they assembled it like Tinker-Toys -- it scares the hell out of me.

    • If you can watch this video and not be terrified when they straighten the building by jacking up one side and using shims, then I can't reach you. You might as well stop reading now, and stay happy in your limitations. HA!

    Super Skyscrapers - The Leadenhall Building, London 2014

    Are you still with me? I literally mean that you need to watch the NOVA video to understand. Right? Then let's begin.

    (Wait! I'm "Arguing from Authority" that means I've already lost people. Oh well, let's be Quixotic and finish up. HA!)

    As I said before, I find the following concepts very useful in world building fun stories. BTW, I have been amazed that people have not asked me how these are good for Story. We'll get to that.

    • Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe
    • Growing Earth Theory
    • Anatoly Fomenko and his New Chronology

    • The Omphalos hypothesis

    If you understand the list above, then that means:

    • No Big Bang
    • No Expanding Universe
    • No Inflation
    • No Dark Matter/Energy
    • No Black Holes
    • No Neutron Stars
    • No Oort cloud
    • Comets are not dirty snow balls
    • The Sun is not an exploding hydrogen bomb

    • All those elements are no different than Magic, Dragons, etc..., just fun Fantasy concepts. Think of all the novels that suddenly become Fantasy, Niven, Reynolds, Baxter, the list goes on.

    Lets look at what real Mundane SF means for Story, i.e., based on real science, not the "Scientism" of today.

    Based on Fomenko: You have a Time Machine.

    • You go to Jerusalem today. You jump back in time 2000 years to see the Crucifixion and there is no Jerusalem there.

    • You go to the ruins of the Colosseum today, jump back 2000 years to see Gladiator combat, and there is no Colosseum, no city called Rome. No Romans. You look around trying to find out what happened and you find that nobody speaks Latin.

    • Latin is a made up language, not ancient.

    • You go to Athens today, jump back thousand of years to see "Ancient" Athens and there is no city there. No Greeks.

    Based on Growing Earth Theory: You have a Time Machine.

    • You jump back in time to see the Dinosaurs and find yourself on a small Earth, the size of the Moon, so at 1/6th gravity.

    • You would see T-Rex hopping around like a Kangaroo, not running. The hips of a T-Rex are designed for hopping, not running. The T-Rex would come down on its prey slashing with its hind claws, just like a Kangaroo does. Death from above!

    BTW, Do you see the fun Time Travel stories now possible, and how it makes that old shoe new again.

    • Now that you are back in time, at the dawn of recorded history, look into the sky and tell me what you see.

    Symbols of an Alien Sky (Full Documentary)

    BTW, Whether they are right or wrong, that Sense of Wonder is rare in SF today. You have to go back to E.E."Doc" Smith or Blish to get close.

    From the Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe view: You have a starship.

    • Quasars are ejected from a galaxy: Age, and grow into a new galaxy. Quasars start out small, and because of the electric power from the Birkeland current they grow in mass, GET it?. They are not billions of light years away.

    • The shape of the galaxy is controlled by the galactic Birkeland current, not by rotation. The galaxies do not rotate by gravity. The stars do not "orbit" around the center. They are held in place and move because of that Birkeland current.

    This video is a lie, except for the actual data they are using to tell their lie, no matter what David Brin or Gregory Benford says. HA!

    Monster of the Milky Way

    There is no Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. The center has been imaged by Andrea Ghez. Look at 18:40 and 19:10 to see the stars moving. They see the stars moving because of the Birkeland current. Look at 20:00 There is no sign of a Black Hole. An actual Black Hole would have an accretion disk that would glow in the infra red, as explained at 35:00 to 45:00 when they search for the accretion disk. They see a brief flash. When they call that flash proof of a Black Hole, they are once again forcing fact to fit dogma. What they saw was the classic Z-Pinch of the Birkeland current, not a Black Hole. This is physical proof that there is no Black Hole.

    • The Andromeda Galaxy has a blue shift showing that it is older than the Milky Way, not because it is approaching us and will collide in three billion years. Andromeda is probably the parent of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way used to be a Quasar.

    • Look at all the novels that were based on watching the Galaxy go through complete rotations as Empires rose and fell. How an explosion deep in the core sent a wave of sterilizing radiation outward, Niven, Baxter.

    • Look at the novels that depended on Neutron stars, Black Holes, supernovas as their main story points, all Fantasy.

    From the Plasma cosmology/Electric Universe view: The Sun is not an exploding hydrogen bomb.

    • The Sun is not powered by fusion in the core. The Sun is powered by an external galactic current. The glow you see is a gas discharge in "glow mode". The Sun can vary depending on that electric current. The Sun can flare or go dark as the current changes.

    • The Sun will not age, expand to Red Giant, engulfing and destroying the Earth.

    • A Red Giant is a star in a low energy glow mode, with the planets safely within that shell. There is no fusion going on inside the star to destroy the planets. An interesting fact: The Earth's plants are optimized for that frequency of light. Think what that implies, and you would be right.

    • If you build a Dyson Sphere around the Sun, you cut off that current and the Sun goes dark.

    • Sorry Charlie, but if you build your beloved Matrioshka brain, the Sun goes dark.

    • If you build a skyhook and have it pierce the atmosphere, it is like hammering a nail into a capacitor and will explode.

    • All space tethers have exploded because of the electrical fields in space.

    • No solar sail can ever work, because the electric charge would blow up the sail.

    _ There is no Oort cloud. No easy source of ice to terraform Venus or Mars. Scratch that idea off the list.

    • In SF, how many times has a space civilization thrown something dangerous into a star to destroy the object. Do that, and you put something dangerous in the richest source of energy and material you can find. That would eat the star.

    The important point to remember is that:

    • Any advance civilization, with starships, would know all this. HA!

    Based on the Omphalos hypothesis.

    • Here I'm having fun with a concept that by definition can never be proved. Tough!

    You have a Time Machine

    • In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Vogons destroyed the Earth. The Magrathea replaced it with a full copy. That copy was complete from the moment before the destruction. None of the people were aware of that destruction. If you jump back in time, the Earth is gone. Jump back further, and the original Earth is there.

    • In Keeping it Real by Justina Robson, the supercollider shattered the Verse, creating seven worlds. The people remembered the event, finding themselves on a changed Earth. Jump back in time to stop the supercollider, and you can't find it. On the new Earth it was never there.

    • This concept is so fun, that it is at the heart of the stuff I do.

    Let's sum things up.

    In October 2007, I was out walking and I saw a pearl in the evening sky.

    We often have research balloons pass overhead, high in the atmosphere. They are teardrop pearls of light in the evening sky. This, on the other hand, was a big round pearl, larger than I have ever seen. The local TV news usually talks about each research balloon, because they get many calls asking, "What is that?" There was no discussion on the TV news. That I found strange.

    When I retired, and started looking for "new" Physics, it turns out that what I saw was Comet Holmes when it was briefly the largest object in the Solar System. Briefly larger than the Sun.

    Wiki - Comet Holmes

    Comet Holmes (official designation: 17P/Holmes) is a periodic comet in the Solar System, discovered by the British amateur astronomer Edwin Holmes on November 6, 1892. Although normally a very faint object, Holmes became notable during its October 2007 return when it temporarily brightened by a factor of about half a million, in what was the largest known outburst by a comet, and became visible to the naked eye. It also briefly became the largest object in the Solar System, as its coma (the thin dissipating dust ball around the comet) expanded to a diameter greater than that of the Sun (although its mass remained minuscule).

    Here is what I found along the way.

    Episode 3 Symbols of an Alien Sky: The Electric Comet (Full Documentary)

    In the past ten years, I have stumbled on to many concepts along the way that seem to go "a step to far". I started with my basis as a Licensed Professional Civil Engineer(Oops! "Arguing from Authority" again.), and I agree with George Johnson(Fire in the Mind) that Northern New Mexico is the center of the universe.

    Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order

    I live in a world where people like this exist.

    Extremely Dangerous job! High Power Line Worker

    I suspect that even he would feel that I what I have talked about is too "way-out". Welcome to my world. HA!

    There now. I've planted enough Easter Eggs to keep everyone busy.

    Have fun.

    1269:

    ... flat earth stuff/electric universe/expanding earth nonsense theories also brought up on this thread. 😧 Unfortunately, given that the "Standard Model" for Astrophysics is all too clearly broken ( Do I need to say "epicycles" again? ) this will also mean attendant hordes of hypotheses/funny-ideas/crank-lunacy ( delete as appropriate ) popping up at the same time.

    Also, partly-replying to allyunh @ 1268 here ... "Try to mount only one hobby-horse at a time, or you will fall off, as they diverge"

    1270:

    Ah yes, well. Whereas my hot-water tank is a largish vertical cylinder with the Imm-heater fited centrally from the top & extending down about a metre, or just under. Said tank is heavily "lagged" ( i.e. insulated ) ppower is left "on" almost all the time - remember that I have set the thermostat down to about 59° C to avoid "furring", the hot-water outlet is at the top & the cold water inlet is at the bottom. Yours appears to be perversely badly "designed" so as to not actually work.

    1271:

    London busses went hybrid. London taxi manufacturers are now making electric taxis. If Essex Knowledge Man is buying these, the petrol heads have lost the argument For "commercial" vehicles with known running & routes & set-up special charging & refresh points, very much so. For other commercial vehicles, I suspect so, if not now, then very soon. For private-car owners, not for another 5+ years, if not longer. And, since the majority of pollution from vehicles in London & other cities comes from those first three classes AND from road/trye intereaction, that should ( Note "should" ) largely solve the problem. But that won't stop the New Puritans hounding the private owners, will it?

    Note - there are now 4 or 5 London Bus routes that are not "just" hybrid, but pure-electric, with that number set to increase ....

    1272:

    Er, in at least one place, you are assuming conspiracy where it was self-delusion. Einstein had been promoted to sub-deity status, because of his revolutionary insights into photonics and motion, and all the 'proofs' of general relativity up to about the 1970s were wishful thinking. But no more than that. And some of the recent tests (e.g. time dilation with gravitational potential) HAVE been valid proofs - i.e. they had not been previously observed, his theory predicted them, and they occurred with the values predicted.

    Whatever one may say about its extrapolations, general relativity HAS been proved to be a good model for the low curvatures we can observe directly. That is not in dispute by any physicist that I know of. Nor by me.

    1273:

    On J-Phones.

    I actively struggle with "touch" screen technology, not because I don't understand concepts like "tap" and "swipe", or because I can't or don't "do it right" but because my finger tips simply don't have the correct resistivity to be reliably detected.

    1274:

    ...breathing the radon is sufficient (if you're breathing granite dust, I'd suggest you have other, bigger, problems). To the tune of "9% of lung cancer deaths in Europe" (link), and Aberdeen being particularly well-known for it.

    1275:

    You have made several mistakes there. Radon is produced very slowly in granite; the problem is that buildings have many tonnes of the latter, and the radon often accumulates (which is wehat that paper is about). Breathing ANY mineral dust causes silicosis, granite no more not less than most others. And, in areas where granite is the surface rock, the mineral dust WILL be granite - even where it is used mainly for roads, a fair amount will be! And, lastly, I used the word "ingest", which includes eating - eating 1/20th of a cubic centimeter of mineral soil in food a day isn't exactly unusual in many circumstances. I was, of course, referring primarily to that.

    Yet no major link between granite and (say) cancer has been found, EXCEPT via the radon accumulation in buildings.

    1276:

    You too?

    "Touch" screens are either too sensitive or too insensitive, or have either a low-pass or high-pass filter in their circuitry, which gives you at least 4 options when encountering a strange one ( One you are not used to ) I was obliged to deliberately, publicly shout at & snarl at someone trying ot "help the old man" with one such at a medical-centre appointment recently ... Fuckwit Medical Assistant: "Oh let me help you with that" Me: "I know how a touchscreen works & this one doesn't" FMA: Let me show you Me: It dosn't work - watch - demonstrates non-working FMA: Oh but let me help you Me: What part of "It doesn't work, don't you understand?" FMA: Oh, it's easy really, let me put the information in for you (Assuming I can't even read ) Me SHOUTING: It doesn't fucking work, can't you see that - I've got a smartphone & I can use that, but this bleeding thing's borked ..... subsides into muttering.

    Turned out, that this public-use screen was set-up for light brief touch as if a butterfly had landed, entirely contra to sane expectations, oh dear. Also, I have to tread carefully around Medics who don't know me, as they seem to assume that everyone has an IQ of 80 & illiterate with it ... and the "Talking to Morons" approach that they normally use tends to annoy me, shall we say?

    1277:

    Yes. I have frequently had such devices fail because my reactions were too fast for the poor, slow electronics - yes, even in my 60s! The number that I have to hold a press until they wake up from their electronic dreams, or stroke them as if I am trying to seduce them when moving a cursor, is legion.

    1278:

    Greg Tingey @1269 said: "Try to mount only one hobby-horse at a time, or you will fall off, as they diverge"

    Lorenzo Horse Show OSTRAVA

    Yes! Now you see my dilemma. HA!

    1279:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1272 said: Er, in at least one place, you are assuming conspiracy where it was self-delusion.

    Sadly, I don't "believe" in "conspiracy theory". And the fact that you have posted in the negative, when you have had no time to view the links, tells me that you voiced your opinion without once looking at the evidence. When I say that, I'm not being mean or attacking or trying to score points. It is just a clear statement of fact.

    Remember: I said this was a University course, it can't be understood in minutes.

    • It took me years going through everything to understand what was going on.

    BTW, The Electric Universe people routinely show that general relativity fails. IMHO, They have made their case.

    Anyone who looks at all the Easter Eggs that I have posted will see that as well, but I don't expect valid opinions about any of this for years.

    As long as this thread stands, I can point people to it so that they can learn and make up their own mind.

    Have fun.

    1280:

    This sounds tiresomely familiar ....

    1281:

    I was referring to your remarks about Eddington, and your apparent claim that light is not bent by gravity. Even if the latter were not so, Eddington was NOT setting out to distort the evidence; he merely weighted his observations inappropriately (which he did). However, more recent measurements and calculations demonstrate that your theory is NOT tenable, and Einstein's formula predicts the effect completely. Of course, that's not a good proof of general relativity, for reasons I could explain, but that's not the point.

    While I haven't rechecked the observations, I have rechecked the calculations, of both hypotheses, and stand by them. There are valid alternative hypotheses for the light bending, but yours is not one of them.

    1282:

    Re: 'No solar sail can ever work, because the electric charge would blow up the sail.'

    First - great summary of ideas, thanks! Will likely be reading up on these for some time.

    About the solar sail: Les Johnson of NASA spoke at the last Boskone about sending out a solarsail powered probe within the next couple of years. The solarsail would be made of mylar (not graphene the subject of a new non-fic book he co-authored). Interview below.

    FYI- Johnson is a PhD physicist with decades of experience at NASA. And, his first SF novel (Mission to Methone) came out the same day as the non-fic book. I'm only the second chapter where his scientist actually tells the OO pressmen to get stuffed and a (gasp!) sane POTUS actually backs him. Amazing what interesting alternate realities SF can imagine!

    Seriously - I'm enjoying Methone and his non-fic 'Graphene' is next on my to-read pile.

    NASA / JPL HELIOS* solar sail (animated/CGI video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTyHejIpNGg

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/24/16927224/graphene-materials-les-johnson-joseph-meany-book

    • HELIOS acronym stands for:

    High-Performance Enabling Low-Cost Innovative Operational Heliogyro SolarSail

    BTW, I suggested that he visit this blog since it attracts quite a few folk with hard-sci and SF/F leanings who enjoy a good banter.

    1283:

    "- No solar sail can ever work, because the electric charge would blow up the sail."

    That would be a surprise to the IKAROS spacecraft

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

    1284:

    The perverse design is pretty much a de facto plumbing standard. The high-level immersion heater mount - immersion heater sticking in downwards from the top - is a feature you only usually find on large tanks. The reason for its existence is exactly the problem in question - to avoid having to heat the whole tank when you only need a small amount of hot water - but the standard idea of how large the tank has to be before that becomes significant is faulty: they assume it's not worth providing a high-level mount on small tanks like mine, and they are wrong.

    There is a further obstacle to a high-level mount with my tank since it is one of those abominations with a titchy cold-water header tank on top, combined with it in a single unit, but that's not the determining factor; a hot-water-only tank of the same hot-water capacity would still be unlikely to have a high-level mount.

    The low-level mount like mine, that has the heater sticking in horizontally at the bottom, is the one you get on all tanks, large and small. Your tank more than likely also has this mount; you could, in theory, have two immersion heaters installed, one to heat the whole tank and one to heat only the top bit. But this is rarely actually done except by people who have a Gavin Maxwell approach to domestic engineering, and even if it has been done it's not unusual for the present owner not to realise they've got it.

    1285:

    Here you go:

    ‘Black Panther’ and the Real, Lost Wakandas

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/black-panther-and-the-real-lost-wakandas

    "The blockbuster movie imagines an advanced African nation untouched by colonialism. That’s not fiction, it’s true history that was covered-up by racist Europeans."

    1286:

    DIY/radioactivity: ex-Soviet beta-gamma Geiger tubes such as the CTC-5 (STS-5) are cheap on ebay, and the circuit to make them work is readily constructed from junk box parts.

    http://filehost.serveftp.net/pic/geiger.png

    KSE13001 transistor: switching transistor out of a defunct CFL Transformer: scrounge something with the right measurements out of eg. an old PC PSU, or wind it yourself, Epcos B65807J0000R097 core ought to work RS 249-794: or any piezo beeper that beeps when you put 12V DC on it.

    1287:

    "...an advanced African nation untouched by colonialism. That's not fiction, it's true history that was covered-up by racist Europeans."

    ...and then, strangely, revived in fictional/legendary form by various authors from the same racist-European stock that did the covering-up.

    1288:

    Who, in that article and elsewhere, were as revisionist as the more bigoted imperials were (of whom Rhodes was not one, incidentally). Great Zimbabwe is impressive, but was no way an advanced urban empire; it was a hydraulic empire that collapsed due to its social and technological limitations. For a MUCH better example, try the Benin empire:

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

    1289:

    I've only seen synopses of the movie but my thoughts are tending towards Saudi Arabia as the basis for Black Panther's Wakanda -- an absolute monarchy riven by blood feuds in the upper ranks, protected from the world by its grasp on a rare resource, secretive and not open to outsiders with a charismatic revolutionary causing bloodshed in an attempt to revolt agianst the established order (Osama bin Laden). Once the oil/vibranium runs out I give it five years, max.

    1290:

    You might enjoy "Everfair" by Nisi Shawl.

    Alt-history (and alt-atomic-technology too), set in the Congo.

    1291:

    @1283

    Wow! That's beautiful, but it's only 20 m. The next solar sail planned is for 50 m.

    • There will be scaling problems, trying to make a sail that is large enough to carry a real payload.

    The danger is, the space tethers that blew were long enough to build up an electric charge that overloaded the tether.

    The same will happen when you have a large enough sail, spinning, building up a charge.

    @1282 NASA / JPL HELIOS solar sail

    Look at that beautiful video of the HELIOS.

    It is 20kg, and will spread out the sail to a quarter mile diameter. How much of that weight is the sail and controllers. How much is "Payload". Now scale up the design to carry a real weight like the Galileo spacecraft at two tons. IMHO, It will not survive moving through an electrically active Solar System.

    • It's all about moving through the Solar System building up charge.

    Watch the Electric Comet video I posted and see the observed dangers of electricity in space.

    Episode 3 Symbols of an Alien Sky: The Electric Comet (Full Documentary)

    Look starting at minute 33:00 for the Deep Impact probe when it fired an 800 pound copper projectile at Comet Temple 1. The electrical flash and massive impact was a surprise to people.

    We have barely stepped into space. It will take craft exploding to make people pay attention. The ThunderboltsProject guys have expressed concern many times about possible destruction of craft through electricity.

    This is real people. This is Science. HA!

    1292:

    DIY/radioactivity: ex-Soviet beta-gamma Geiger tubes such as the CTC-5 (STS-5) are cheap on ebay, and the circuit to make them work is readily constructed from junk box parts. Sweet! I have an old lab-grade Geiger counter where the electronics (but not the tube) got soaked in a flood years ago (and writing/codes are hard to decipher); that circuit diagram looks tractable for anyone who knows which end of a soldering iron to hold.

    (What do you think of this "instructables" (uses a 555)?: http://www.instructables.com/id/Simplest-Geiger-Counter/ )

    1293:

    I'm seeing pottery, bronze, and stone walls. "Advanced" is perhaps too strong a word.

    The whole "lost city" trope in pulp adventure fiction was based on cities like this in Africa and Asia, where civilizations large enough to build stone buildings had grown, died off, been pretty much forgotten, and then were discovered by 19th century archeologists. Idiots thought maybe aliens had built them, instead of the humans who had been in the area for millions of years.

    @Elderly Cynic: The Benin Empire was a major exporter of slaves, so I wouldn't hold it up as a society "untouched by colonialism". It was more of a colonizer; that's what the word "empire" means.

    1294:

    Re: NASA / JPL HELIOS solar sail payload etc.

    Technical paper (PDF) is below for the sail. Haven't read thoroughly - because probably wouldn't understand much anyway - but page 9 discusses weights and power.

    https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20130014933.pdf

    From what he mentioned at Boskone, testing tends to be done in quite small, measured increments. My impression is that measuring the amount and reliability of the solar powered panel is the primary objective. Then longevity of such sails. Etc.

    Also, am assuming that he'll touch on the payload issue in the Graphene book.

    1295:

    Here's something completely out of left field: apparently US universities are competing who can launch a suborbital unmanned rocket (basically a sounding rocket).

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/the-race-to-space-heats-up-on-college-campuses/

    1296:

    Elderly Cynic @1281 said: There are valid alternative hypotheses for the light bending, but yours is not one of them.

    Strange, I wasn't aware that the theory was mine. I have found so many great science theories in the past ten years -- that explains everything better -- that I have not had to come up with my own theories. Everything I've found is evidence based -- sitting out there on the web, for anybody to find -- and great for Story. Which is the point of all this, but I digress.

    You said: "While I haven't rechecked the observations, I have rechecked the calculations, of both hypotheses, and stand by them."

    • Sorry, I have no idea what you "calculated" but these guys disagree with you.

    Wait! To save time, this is the part -- from the last link -- about refraction through the Sun's atmosphere:

    "3 - c) Delay Due to the Plasma around the Sun.

    It is well known that the Sun is surrounded by a plasma and that the velocity of electromagnetic radiation is reduced when moving through such a medium. Radio signals have been observed while going through the solar corona and a corresponding delay has been measured(2). Furthermore, it is well known that the velocity of transmission of a radio signal is also slowed down when traveling through neutral gases, even if that contribution is frequently neglected. The fact that many spectral lines are observed in the solar corona proves that the plasma is not fully ionized. Since the delay produced and observed due to the plasma in the solar corona is not due to general relativity, it must have a different origin. An analysis of that phenomenon is presented in appendix I of this article."
    • And if you are looking for the word "atmosphere" and can't find it. Look for "plasma" and "neutral gases", that is the "atmosphere".

    You are free of course to "argue" all this stuff with the author, Paul Marmet(Wait! he's dead. Never mind.)

    I need to read all of the Paul Marmet stuff again. Thanks for reminding me.

    TL;DR, Everyone else is free to read all of the links, if they so choose. HA!

    For the stuff on Eddington:

    This paper(rant) will upset many people, on many levels(Read this paper many times to see the "Beauty"* of it.") Beautiful rant or not, this paper describes the war in Physics a century ago. This guy is very intense in his observations of what happened. Very intense. HA!

    The Eclipse Data From 1919: The Greatest Hoax in 20th Century Science

    I agree with his point about “Strong models corrupt weak men and women. . .The desire to conform, is almost as strong as the desire to create.”

    Here is another view by Paul Marmet:

    Wiki - Paul Marmet

    Newton Physics

    "In the web pages below, we present explanations which are compatible with Newtonian and semi-classical physics. We apply the principle of causality and avoid models requiring a probabilistic existence of matter and non-locality. This differs from the current approach of modern physics."

    The key stuff for the discussion of light refracting through the Suns atmosphere vs Gravity bending are in:

    The Deflection of Light by the Sun's Gravitational Field: An Analysis of the 1919 Solar Eclipse Expeditions

    Which lists a newer paper:

    Relativistic Deflection of Light Near the Sun Using Radio Signals and Visible Light

    "Abstract.

    This paper reports a detailed analysis of one of general relativity's predictions, which claims that light should be deflected by solar gravity. The experimental data related to that prediction are analyzed. The substitution of the direct experimental test for the deflection of visible light during solar eclipses by the indirect measurement of the delay of radio signals traveling between a space probe or from extra galactic sources and the Earth is examined. Three different causes of the delay in the transmission of light near the Sun are examined. They are the relativistic delay, the delay caused by the plasma surrounding the Sun or for a geometric reason. The delay predicted by general relativity is equivalent to a reduced velocity of light in vacuum, in the Sun’s gravitational potential. Since the value of c is defined on Earth, inside the solar gravitational potential, this leads to a double value for the velocity of light on Earth. Furthermore, Einstein’s general relativity predicts that photons slow down when approaching the Sun, so that their velocity must be reduced to zero when reaching the surface of a black hole. This paper shows how all the experiments claiming the deflection of light and radio waves by the Sun are subjected to very large systematic errors, which render the results highly unreliable and proving nothing. A previous preliminary paper (*) giving an analysis of the experiments using visible light already appeared on the subject. Furthermore, the internal incoherence of general relativity, which leads to a double velocity of light on Earth, adds to the weakness of these tests. Following those difficulties, and since it has also been demonstrated that the deflection of light by a gravitational potential is not compatible with the principle of mass-energy conservation, we show that no one can seriously claim that light is really deflected by the Sun."

    Have Fun.

    The Matrix, Agent Smith's Speech*

    **Yes, I did go there. HA!

    1297:

    Functional but crude; I can't tell if his "piezo from a microwave" is just a piezo element intended for use with an external oscillator or if it's a complete sounder with oscillator built in that just wants DC (mine is the latter), but either way I'm not happy with the "hot end".

    Every time the Geiger tube fires it applies a 400V spike to the piezo, which is far more than either a plain element or an integrated sounder can stand. Either the semiconductor junctions (if it has them) or the piezo dielectric itself (if it hasn't) will break down. That won't prevent him getting a click from it, but I can't say how long he'll carry on getting a click.

    Also there is nothing to limit the current when the tube fires except whatever the breakdown impedance of the piezo happens to be - and it certainly won't be anything like the few megohms typically specified in Geiger tube data sheets. This will clobber the performance at higher count rates and may damage the tube eventually.

    This is why, on my circuit, there is a 4M7 resistor in series with the tube, and a transistor to switch DC to a sounder when the tube fires. (The latter also means it produces extremely short beeps instead of actual clicks; they still sound like clicks to hear, but are much louder and easier to hear.)

    Looking at the power supply department, now, I personally am not fond of zener diodes, especially as straight shunt regulators - they have a certain tendency to random failures even when apparently operating well within their ratings; doesn't happen that often but it's really annoying when it does. Also, they have soggy knees.

    The rest of the power supply is a bit Lego, too... driving a mains transformer backwards with an asymmetrical square wave at 50 times its design frequency or so and hoping you get neither too much nor too little output while depending on stray resistance to keep the smoke in isn't my idea of how to do things! OK for lashing something up when you need a dinky high voltage supply for a few minutes to test something, but I'd never be happy with it as a permanent arrangement; just knowing how crude and inefficient the thing in the box was would do my head in :)

    Hence mine being a self-oscillating inverter with feedback regulation using a string of neons as a voltage reference.

    (OK, I'll admit it. I have kind of a thing for blocking oscillators.)

    I get the impression that his intention was indeed simply to lash something together for a few minutes to test it, whereas the intention behind mine was to put it in a box with a battery and check out environmental radiation levels with it (eg. in old mines, which can be hot enough that you want breathing apparatus).

    1298:

    That gets even more complex and ugly, because most civilizations ran on slaves before fossil fuels became common. Supposedly, some African civilizations measured wealth in slavery rather than land ownership, because land was not owned individually. They weren't prompted to raid for slaves by whites. HOWEVER, they found that trading in slaves with white traders made certain groups very wealthy at the expense of those whom they captured and sold.

    As for where Wakanda came from, Jack Kirby's mind is a big part, as was his apparent black friend, and was whole question of civil rights that was in the air, as was Stan Lee's savvy in seeing a need for black superheroes and filling it. And yes, some of it's Haggard, Burroughs, and Howard, among many others.

    If white fantasists have talked about lost tribes of Israelites (or pick whatever white group) in lurking in "darkest Africa" in some advanced city it's easy to re-spin that into the idea that those lost tribes might be black, rather than white. I'd also submit that it's an exercise that needs doing repeatedly, because people tend to innately slip into the notion of brown-skinned savages in a jungle unless people play with counter-examples (see this blog entry, especially the later comments).

    Finally, I wouldn't denigrate bronze age civilizations too much. Yes, their military tech isn't much compared with guns. However, both the Inkans and the Minoans seem to have had more people living in their polities (high Andes, Crete) than live there now. If you're looking at life support technology rather than weapons tech, they were pretty sophisticated, possibly more sophisticated than what's going on there now. That's another trope that goes with colonialism, that technological status correlates strongly with how advanced their weapons are.

    1299:

    talked about lost tribes of Israelites (or pick whatever white group) in lurking in "darkest Africa"

    That continues to annoy me because there are actually tribes of Israelites lurking in Africa... it's just that they're black. Also poor, which is not a good look anywhere.

    But despite the nasty racism in Israel they keep at it, like this for example: http://www.irinnews.org/report/94819/tribulations-being-ethiopian-jew (chosen because it's a positive article).

    I think it's probably easier to plot how advanced a society is by the quality of its sanitation, simple because that's generally made of stone or via significant earthworks. The whole "do they have bodkin points and machine guns" thing is very Eurocentric. Not to mention that finding archaeological evidence of tactical superiority is bloody difficult. Questions like "why didn't the mongol empire build castles" can't be answered by comparative military might so if we didn't have recent records we'd be in the dark. But that might explain why other nomads were "left alone" by settlers with nominal military superiority.

    Is there a readable alt-history that imagines the Americans weren't largely wiped out by European diseases?

    1300:

    The Persians seem to have developed some pretty amazing methods for providing water and coldness in the middle of the desert, and performed some pretty amazing feats of engineering too.

    1301:

    History is usually complicated and ugly. Not my fault, it was like that when I got here.

    Pretty much any civilization with neighbors finds military tech very useful for deciding things like who gets to be the masters and who has to be the slaves. Being the masters makes developing life support tech much easier.

    1302:

    That was a fun rant! Hence mine being a self-oscillating inverter with feedback regulation using a string of neons as a voltage reference. An aside: as a kid I noticed that the threshold voltage for neons is light-sensitive (lower in light). I see in a google search that a few others have noticed this: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/flickering-neon-bulb-what-causes-the-flicker.442225/ Assumed after learning a little physics that this was the photoelectric effect.

    1303:

    I won't speak about Crete, but with the Incas, that statement is true but somewhat misleading

  • Latin America didn't reach its pre-Columbian population (by some estimates) until the mid-20th century. I don't know enough to say for certain that the population rise has to do with the introduction of vaccines, since the populations were rising before their introduction, but I believe that it was a factor. Some regions sooner than others.

  • The Australian Outback has 690k people now, according to Wikipedia. The link is dead, but I vaguely remember the source it linked to saying that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outback

  • However, that has nothing to do with the technology to live in the Outback. It has far more to do with automation in the agriculture and mining industries, as well as urbanization.

  • The Inca civilization was primarily mountain-based. The coast was relatively under-populated. Today's Lima is a megacity of over-10 million.

  • Peru now has a TFR of 2.5

  • Bolivia undercuts my argument somewhat due to the fact that I know very little about that country other than the fact that it lacks access to the sea.

  • In short, I don't have the numbers to decide how much the lower population in the mountains has to do with how long it took the population to recover and the popularity of modern urbanization?

  • 1304:

    Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten about the Ethiopian Jews (among others).

    As for why the Mongols didn't build castles, it was because they were so good at force concentration that, even though they were vastly outnumbered by the Han Chinese, they regularly fielded more horse archers at particular battles and beat them fairly regularly. Who needs castles when you've got superior mobility?

    As for sanitation, Knossos had sewers, and I think that makes your point admirably.

    1305:

    Thanks, SFreader @1282 and @1294. This stuff is deeply scary. HA!

    HELIOS

    NASA / JPL HELIOS* solar sail (animated/CGI video)

    Heliogyro Solar Sail Research at NASA - 20130014933

    They need to build it, They need to see how it spins. They need to see how it fails.

    I can't find a good YouTube video to demonstrate what I'm saying, This is a nonlinear system. There are too many degrees of freedom. I need to see it spin.

    TL;DR - I'm going to do stream of conscious here. It will not be pretty. Jump to the end for a fun video if you don't want to travel this stuff with me.

    At 2:06 on the video they mention "Cameras will capture the motion of the blades, sending proof of deployment to Earth, recording video to compare with computer models, and communicating blade motion to the blade control system."

    This is deeply scary. I need to see it spin.

    I can already see failure modes that disturb me.

    • Have any blades not deploy, and you create an imbalance.

    • Have a partial deploy, imbalance.

    • Have anything hit a blade at speed and you vaporize the blade at that point. -- At those velocities the object would not simply punch through a thin film, it would see that thin film as a solid surface and vaporize both.

    If you have a metal tape measure, extend it fully and see how it behaves. That tape measure is more rigid than the film. Twist one end of the tape measure and see what the free end does. Yes, each blade is spinning, placing the blade under tension, but twist the tape measure and you will see that the blade will not turn as a rigid structure would.

    • If a harmonic wave starts up in a blade, it will not dampen. -- The more you try to correct the harmonic imbalance, the more energy you are adding to the system. -- As one blade develops an imbalance all of the blades react. No blade is isolated from the whole.

    • The blade will develop ripples, both laterally and longitudinally. Those ripples can occur at the same time causing a whipping motion that can not just tear one blade, but many. Think flailing arms. Medusa!

    • Can you say Bullwhip. Yikes!

    At 3:00 it shows HELIOS out near Saturn. If they go near a gas giant there will be sorrow. The electric fields are so great it will induce currents. When you have currents, you have magnetic fields. If you have magnetic fields they will induce twisting in the film. You will no longer have control of the angle of attack on the blade.

    I need to see it spin. I need to see how it fails.

    Bottom of page four, pdf:

    "To minimize aerodynamics drag effects, we selected a 1200-1500 km altitude, initially dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit as our best option for a LEO mission. We also desire minimal eclipsing to avoid potential complications of thermalelastic transient dynamic effects."

    The constant change from light dark will cause the material to change, so:

    Google and Wiki - Sun-synchronous orbit

    "Since the satellite is close to the shadow, the part of the Earth the satellite is directly above is always at sunset or sunrise. That is why this kind of orbit is called a dawn-dusk orbit. This allows the satellite to always have its solar panels in the sun. Generally, sun-synchronous orbits are medium or low orbits."

    Page 5:

    "The HELIOS spacecraft must first acquire the sun, establish a sun-pointed attitude, deploy the blade reel hex truss, and spin-up prior to deployment of the sail blade membranes."

    • The camera mast that monitors the blade deployment must be on the sun side of the blades otherwise the blades will be dark. If you do not have two camera masts, one on each side, you run the risk of not having control if the sail flips. And it will flip at some point.

    • The height of each camera mast is the limit of how far you can see down each blade. -- They will not be able to see the full length of the blade. They will not see where the failure begins.

    • The cameras must be able to change focus which adds weight and increases failure mode if the focus control fails. You have to have the ability to see each blade with at least two cameras at a time for parallax control.

    Page 5:

    "Attitude control of the core vehicle is accomplished using magnetic torque coils with large loop areas." - What!!!! Are you insane.

    Wiki - Magnetorquer

    "A magnetorquer or magnetic torquer (also known as torque rod) is a satellite system for attitude control, detumbling, and stabilization built from electromagnetic coils. The magnetorquer creates a magnetic field that interfaces with an ambient magnetic field, usually Earth's, so that the counter-forces produced provide useful torque."

    "Disadvantages

    The main disadvantage of magnetorquers is that very high magnetic flux densities are needed if large craft have to be turned very fast. This either necessitates a very high current in the coils, or much higher ambient flux densities than are available in Earth orbit. Subsequently, the torques provided are very limited and only serve to accelerate or decelerate the change in a spacecraft's attitude by minute amounts. Over time active control can produce very fast spinning even here, but for accurate attitude control and stabilization the torques provided often aren't enough.

    A broader disadvantage is the dependence on Earth's magnetic field strength, making this approach unsuitable for deep space missions, and also more suitable for low Earth orbits as opposed to higher ones like the geosynchronous. The dependence on the highly variable intensity of Earth's magnetic field is also problematic because then the attitude control problem becomes highly nonlinear. It is also impossible to control attitude in all three axes even if the full three coils are used, because the torque can be generated only perpendicular to the Earth's magnetic field vector.[1][2]

    Any spinning satellite made of a conductive material will lose rotational momentum in Earth's magnetic field due to generation of eddy currents in its body and the corresponding braking force proportional to its spin rate.[3] Aerodynamic friction losses can also play a part. This means that the magnetorquer will have to be continuously operated, and at a power level which is enough to counter the resistive forces present. This is not always possible within the energy constraints of the vessel."

    That is the Achilles heel of the test sail. Note: I bolded "highly nonlinear" in the above. Yikes!

    Page 6

    "HELIOS blade pitch control is accomplished using..." No it's not. My God! Read that paragraph and cringe.

    "Active damping will be provided using information from the distributed photovoltaic sensors along the blades, and closed-loop actuation of the pitch control motors." Whoa! No.

    Page 7:

    "Each sail blade membrane consists of a 220-m x 0.75-m x 2.54-um Mylar carrier film metallized on both sides with 0.1 um of aluminum." - Just shoot me now.

    • How will those metallized blades effect the radio communications. See the Sea Water Antenna below.

    Page 9"

    "The stiff battens provide resistance to chordwise curling of the blade membranes, which can introduce undesirable solarelastic dynamic responses."

    • Yikes! If the blade is hit or tear, those "battens" would hold the ripped pieces to the blade, creating uneven force beyond the tear. Imbalance.

    I need to see it spin.

    Page 12:

    "These deflection modes would make control of a pure membrane heliogyro blade difficult, due to adverse couplings with solar radiation pressure, although the addition of battens should mitigate these issues." - Mitigate!

    "A small difference in tip twist is expected because of the relatively coarse chord-wise finite element discretization and the fact that solar radiation pressure was not included in the theoretical solution." - Small twist!

    Page 14:

    "B. Heliogyro Flutter and Solarelastic Stability Studies"

    "The eigenvalues of this system can be evaluated as a function of fixed rotational speed and incident solar radiation pressure to determine operational stability boundaries for a given heliogyro design." - Please, not eigenvalues.

    Page 16:

    "C. Ground Validation Experiments

    Membrane structural damping will have a significant effect on all the dynamics of heliogyro blades, and reliable membrane damping estimates will be critical for designing the heliogyro blade control and damping augmentation systems. Although membrane damping is expected to be very small, even a small energy dissipation capability could be sufficiently stabilizing for many heliogyro blade vibration modes, particularly higher-order elastic modes which may cause undesirable narrow band instabilities at certain rotational speeds." - You think!

    Page 19:

    "IV. Conclusion

    Our renewed analytical investigations into the coupled structural dynamics of heliogyro membrane blades have also revealed no intractable stability and control issues, although to what degree major damping augmentation systems will be needed to ensure solarelastic stability and damping of blade transient responses remains a subject for future work."

    I need to see it spin. I need to see how it fails. HA!

    For those who watched the video, read the pdf, along with me as I stumbled through this, here is a video that will blow your mind.

    Sea Water Antenna

    Why the Antenna video. You have a spinning sail with multiple, metallized, long thin arms, building up an electric charge. That electric charge creates a magnetic field. How well will the antenna work at that point.

    Now scale this up to carry a two ton Galileo size probe, and you create greater instabilities.

    I want to see it spin. I want to see how it fails. I need to know. Launch it. HA!

    1306:

    Moz: I'm one of less than 10% of kiwis who have opted out of the national DNA database, for example

    Just wondering, which NZ database you're talking about? e.g. the Police one apparently has about 160k samples (mix of evidence, voluntary & involuntary) and 40k DNA profiles from a 4.5M population.

    1307:

    they found that trading in slaves with white traders made certain groups very wealthy at the expense of those whom they captured and sold. This. So very conveniently forgotten by all the "Evil white Imperialists" ranters out there - there were two parties to all those revolting err "commercial transactions" back then, not one. Also, "arab" slave-trading up & down the E coast - that's how Zanzibar got rich, after all & why in some areas, Nigerians or Ghanians & "not popular" with people from the W-Indes.

    1308:

    They need to build it, They need to see how it spins. They need to see how it fails. ASSUMPTION - that it will fail. Maybe it won't - then what?

    1309:

    Just wondering, which NZ database you're talking about?

    Until the recent change of government this was due to become part of the integrated government database: https://www.nsu.govt.nz/pregnancy-newborn-screening/newborn-metabolic-screening-programme-heel-prick-test

    Given the complete lack of consent for all the other data they were proposing to add to that it seems unlikely that "we're only DNA analysing 1% of the samples" would be the actual policy. It remains to be seen exactly what Labour do with the proposed database, but destroying the data seem unlikely.

    For those outside NZ, this is the integrated system I'm talking about: http://norightturn.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/feeding-big-brother.html

    I suspect the major actual privacy protection here is that a 50 year old blood spot might not yield enough intact DNA for useful analysis.

    1310:

    And, indeed, the public access screens where I can input all the relevant transaction data except that I can't get the "return screen area" to see my touch. It's almost like the sensitivity is a variable with the screen co-ordinates.

    1311:

    I would point out that the Benin empire had ironworking and a lot more, and was as advanced as much of Europe (which, admittedly, was still to come out of the dark age) at the time. And, as far as slaves go, yes, precisely, and may I raise ancient Greece?

    1312:

    Also, the Mongols were herders. It's really hard to move a castle when your horses have grazed out the local area and you need to move on.

    1313:

    But neither of those links support being one of 10% of those unwilling to contribute to an unspecified database.

    1314:

    In a way, it is. Most modern GUIs use the model where the application or one of its libraries waits for an event, and any events that aren't picked up are ignored. That means that many forms of delay show up as insensitivity and even events going to the wrong application.

    Back when GUIs were starting to be mainstream quite a few of us pointed out that the model was fundamentally defective, and others were proposed and even being developed. But, as usual, the horrible hack won out, because it is quicker to get a product to market if you don't worry about quality or failure modes. And, again, market domination was used to claim that it was the technically right solution and to deny the problems.

    There have been layers of complexity added since, CPUs are a lot faster, and there are now de facto conventions on avoiding those, so those are less visible than they were, but the fundamental problems remain. As an aside, the main reason that there are few security breaches through the GUIs is that the lower levels of those are largely a black art and almost nobody understands them in depth any longer.

    1315:

    “ASSUMPTION - that it will fail. Maybe it won't - then what?”

    The you’ll know it’s a hoax perpetrated by the same people who fabricated the Apollo lunar landing footage, presumably for the same purposes. Because New World Order, the UN, Prorocols of Zion,....

    1317:

    I've done a bit of reading about South American civilizations, but I'm not an expert.

    The usual story is that there's more arable land over 3000 m in the Andes than there is below. Agriculture on the west coast was confined from an early date (like <3000 BCE) to these river valleys, and the oldest ruins are found there. Nonetheless, agriculture did better high in the mountains, especially when they started terracing everything to feed people.

    As for the population drop, it really is Guns, Germs, and extractive colonialism. For centuries, Latin America was run to extract resources for global empire, whether it was silver traded to China for silk, gold for Europe, or whatever, a lot of people died in the mines. Whatever you think of the Inkas, their predominant wealth was in people and arable land, and they maximized both. To the Spanish, the land was there to make a profit off of, and oddly enough, populations fell massively. There are still unused agricultural terraces in Peru, which tells you that the population is only now recovering. Now? We'll see.

    I'm interested in the Andes because it's one of the more hostile places on the planet, yet it sprouted civilization after civilization. Since I'm interested in the little question of how to survive climate change, I use the South American peoples as a major source of inspiration for ways to possibly do it.

    1318:

    Just to deposit a pointer to a new study for lovers of comet-impact global catastrophes (and who isn't one?):

    https://www.lpi.usra.edu/planetary_news/2018/02/26/12800-years-ago-massive-wildfires-were-started-by-a-ball-of-ice/

    Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago.

    In two companion articles published in the Journal of Geology, an international team of more than 30 researchers have produced new results linking the Younger Dryas Period to a possible cometary impact. Geochemical evidence from more than 170 sites across the Earth points to a cometary impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas Period, ca. 12,800 years ago. High concentrations of platinum have been detected in ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet and a major peak in aerosols produced by biomass burning is recorded in sedimentary cores that date back to this time. These fires are estimated to have consumed as much as 9% of the total biomass of Earth.

    1319:

    Greg Tingey @1308 said: ASSUMPTION - that it will fail. Maybe it won't - then what?

    Sorry, Greg. A little known fact. Engineers test to destruction. We have to know "how" things fail so that we can build based on that "failure".

    That's why we design using a "Safety Factor". HA!

    I need to see it spin. I need to see how it fails.

    1320:

    I saw you plam thatr card. 1. There is also "Non-destructive Testing" 2. Were they talking about destructive testing, or not? 3. I also am an engineer of sorts, so don't do that again 'kay - please?

    1321:

    This conversation reminds me of a John Campbell editorial I once read about the Dean Drive, a purported reactionless drive. I've just found a web copy of the editorial, from Analog 64(4): 83-106 (June 1960). It's interesting as a characteristic display of Campbell's attitude to scientific orthodoxy.

    It's also interesting because:

    At this time, he [Dean] has no operable models that do lift themselves; he has photographs of models that did. In measuring engineering performance factors, to get necessary engineering data, these models had to be tested to destruction --- and were.
    Hmmm. If you had just built the key to the Universe, wouldn't you make sure that you retained at least one functioning copy?

    1322:

    Greg Tingey @1320 said: 1. There is also "Non-destructive Testing"

    HA! Put stress on the word "also".

    We can't know the "Safety Factor" unless we destroy.

    All over the world, they are testing to destruction: breaking rebar, crushing concrete, etc... It is what we do.

    We build a bridge. If it carries the design weight, lasts the design lifetime, then we have done things right. If the bridge fails, we did it wrong.

    We always test to destruction, because lives are involved.

    1323:

    This report of significant progress with supercapacitor tech warms my heart; welcome news. (Reads like there is something substantive backing the hype; does anyone know more?) UK supercapacitor results suggest challenge to battery technologies Pull quote: Polymer materials developed and tested at the universities of Surrey and Bristol appear to have better energy storage properties than lithium ion batteries and could be used in supercapacitors and details: The material achieves practical capacitance values of up to 4F/cm2 with a smooth electrode; existing supercapacitors typically only reach 0.3F/cm2 and rely on complex extended surface area materials. Moreover, the researchers claim, using a specially treated stainless steel electrode – the details of which are classified pending a patent application – the material achieves results of 11 to 20F/cm2. Bristol University is working on a complex series-parallel cell structure in which total capacitance and operating voltage can be controlled separately

    If these capacitance values can be achieved in production, the resulting supercapacitors could achieve any densities up to 180Whr/kg – better than lithium ion batteries.

    1324:

    Oh, very likely - a lot of people have reported the potential for superconductors to achieve that sort of thing. There are just two problems: getting them into production, and safety. As that says, superconductors can discharge very fast - but it doesn't say that 180 Whr will heat 1 Kg of water up to boiling point AND boil 25% of it away! That's explosive (literally).

    1325:

    I'm fascinated by the response triggered by my post @1285 about the Black Panther movie.

    A hundred years from now, Africa will be Ascendant, with their own Myths, driving their own Nationalism. Just as China is now Ascendant, with their own Myths, their own Nationalism, and the rise of the new Mao.

    China might make Xi Jinping president for life. What does that mean for the U.S.?

    China has their Myth of being thousands of years old. That has driven the Nationalism of the past decades. Watch any Chinese movie of the past twenty years, and you can see the deliberate spin building that Myth of "Ancient China", building that Nationalism.

    55 Days At Peking 1963 Trailer

    • This is the story of all the Ascendant World Powers fighting for control of a "Barbaric" China. It was filmed at the height of the "Cold War".

    Wiki - 55 Days At Peking

    China has made movies showing those brutal attacks by the Nationalist World Powers over a century ago, that led to their Fall -- justifying their current Ascendant Nationalist rise to power. China has made movies of the Myth of "Ancient" China, the Civilization that was at the "Center of the World" -- the "Middle Kingdom" -- for "thousands" of years to show that they are worthy of that Ascendant Nationalism.

    • The problem is, China is not thousands of years old. Divide by twelve. China is a little over a thousand years old, just as Europe is.

    Fomenko points out that China used the Lunar Calendar. It's not the "Year of the Dog" or the "Year of the Horse" it is the "Month of the Dog" the "Month of the Horse".

    • Divide by twelve.

    Next time you are at a Chinese restaurant look at the Chinese "calendar" on the place mat. There are twelve "years" listed. Really? twelve "years"? It's not twelve "years", it's clearly twelve "months" based on the Chinese Zodiac. Think about it, how can a "Zodiac" be about "years". It's about "months". But I digress. HA!

    • Divide by twelve.

    All roads lead back to Tartary. A world spanning global power that has been erased from History by the Myths and Nationalism of each Ascendant power.

    • No one has watched this podcast yet, have they.

    UnSpun 103 – “Robert Roe: Tartary and the House of Israel”

    • See, I said those guys were scary. HA!

    I was always good with History -- I always love a great narrative. I was born in 1956, when we were in a "Cold War" with the Soviet Union. When I started school Kennedy came to power and chose to fight that "Cold War" by having a "Space Race", so they flooded the schools with money to "Educate" the youth.

    • Before that time, kids at school would be using the same textbooks that their parents had when they were kids in school.

    That flood of money had new textbooks coming with each new grade I entered. I would learn History, get good grades, then the next year have all new History books. I noticed that the new History books were different than the ones before. Each year the flaws of America's past were being stripped away and replaced by American "Exceptionalism". I made no comment, because I wanted to keep getting good grades, but I kept watch.

    • I saw as a kid, the Myth of America being written before my eyes. America was Ascendant and practicing its Nationalism across the world. The Dream of Pax Americana always before us.

    I am watching History being rewritten again, and now so are you.

    1326:

    That is so "Not even wrong" I don't know where to start ....

    1327:

    No more dangerous than a litre or two of very highly flammable aerosol-capable liquid petroleum-products, actually. Just that the failure/explosive modes are different ones .....

    1328:

    The problem is, China is not thousands of years old. Divide by twelve. China is a little over a thousand years old, just as Europe is. Oh dear, more bollocks. Radio-dating & records ( many of them ) & other physical evidences show that that's cobblers. Fomenko is a fraud & a liar & we all know it.

    1329:

    Not quite. Once such a 'fuel' has started 'burning', it can't be extinguished, and it can't be kept safe by enclosing it tightly.

    1330:

    That's explosive (literally).

    Yeah, not being an electrical engineer but having experienced a couple of rapidly discharging capacitors, I do wonder about how to deal with that problem.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbN02JG-QGE

    1331:

    Jocelyn Ireson-Paine @ 1321 said: This conversation reminds me of a John Campbell editorial I once read about the Dean Drive, a purported reactionless drive.

    Thanks for reminding me of the Dean Drive. A. Bertram Chandler wrote all those fun books using the Dean Drive. I want to see more books using fun stuff like that. HA!

    • Chandler had the Dean Drive and Gaussjammer

    • Blish had his Spindizzy and the drive from Welcome to Mars, which is similar to the drive in the movie Explorers.

    Explorers Trailer

    • Harry Harrison had the Daleth Effect "In Our Hands, The Stars"

    BTW, Here is a set of lectures by Professor Eric Laithwaite that will burn your brain:

    CHRISTMAS LECTURES exploring the world of engineering

    No one is doing "Sense of Wonder" science TV the way he did. HA!

    1332:

    The "less than 10%" number came from a tweet from a government employee, it wasn't an official statement. The actual number isn't, AFAIK, made public. I wouldn't be surprised if it's less than 1%, but that the 10% one is what I recall from an exchange I can't find on twitter any more.

    The whole point of that database is that it's unspecified, because if they specifiy it they have to justify it.

    1333:

    Oh, no, please, I thought we'd had a hairsbreadth escape from Laithwaite on gyroscopes earlier in the thread...

    1334:

    Pigeon @1333

    HA!

    My work is done here. Thanks...

    1335:

    You'd think so, wouldn't you. But it always seems to be the case that the last working model in existence was tested to destruction, or was taken apart to build a bigger one from the bits which doesn't work yet, or the cat ate it, or it just goes all shy and stops working in embarrassment when all these strange people are looking at it, before anyone apart from the inventor gets to hear about it. One might hypothesise that the universe doesn't really want people having keys to it and so moves in mysterious ways so as to bugger them up before the idea takes hold.

    1336:

    Further upthread, I'd forgotten about geology denialists. They have a point, why believe an intricate and difficult to understand theory that is backed up by a network of observations based upon the fundamental workings of the universe, when it's so much easier to make shit up to suit yourself.

    1337:

    See also: "tales from the White Hart" (!)

    1338:

    Thanks for reminding me of the Dean Drive. A. Bertram Chandler wrote all those fun books using the Dean Drive. I want to see more books using fun stuff like that. HA!

    Re the Dean Drive, the current buzz (since 2016) is the EMDrive: Overview of the Current State of Understanding of the EMDrive Bunches of refs in this review. The NASA paper that made the news is Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum, pdf ) Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggested that the system was consistently performing with a thrust-to-power ratio of 1.2±0.1mN/kW Hit scholar.google.com with the NASA paper title for more refs including other theories. e.g. A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION FOR THE EM DRIVE BASED ON A PILOT WAVE THEORY (Sorry about the wonky researchgate link; the one in google scholar seems semi-broken for sharing.)

    1339:

    Back in grad school I heard of a guy who was working with a superconducting NMR magnet at 2am. He saw smoke coming from the probe (inside the toroidal magnet) and, being rather less aware than he should have been, ran to get the fire extinguisher. Naturally the magnet grabbed the extinguisher. It punctured the liquid helium containment, the helium flash boiled, and he was thrown across the room.

    He got up and went over to inspect the damage. Now, it is common to surround helium cryoshrouds with cheaper nitrogen cryoshrouds to limit the evaporation of the helium. As he was walking back to the magnet, the superconductor got warm enough to develop a resistance. Since there was about 100,000 amps running through the superconductor material, it then rapidly got a great deal warmer. The nitrogen boiled, and he was thrown across the room again.

    As I heard it, he was okay. Unemployed, but okay.

    1340:

    A hundred years from now, Africa will be Ascendant

    Maybe, but you don't know that, and neither does anyone else. As a history lecture once told me, it's difficult enough to predict the past.

    Given that so much of Africa is equatorial and that global warming seems unlikely to be stopped, I see a fair chance that much of Africa will be uninhabitable in a century. But that's just an extrapolation from present trends, not a Capitalized Pronouncement.

    1341:

    Since it hasn't been done yet.

    .

    For an absent Mind. Also fitting is that he dedicated his latest endeavors to making VR worlds and thus strove to make 'World Building' More Authentic (in a non-literary medium). He'll be missed: we do remember a video he made about visiting ~things~.

    “How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?” C. McCullers.

    As for the rest:

    Iuppiter intumuit, quaque est non usa modeste eripit huic linguam, Mercuriumque vocat: 'duc hanc ad manes: locus ille silentibus aptus. nympha, sed infernae nympha paludis erit.'
    iussa Iovis fiunt. accepit lucus euntes: dicitur illa duci tum placuisse deo. vim parat hic, voltu pro verbis illa precatur, et frustra muto nititur ore loqui, fitque gravis geminosque parit, qui compita servant
    et vigilant nostra semper in urbe Lares.

    OVID, Fasti ii.

    p.s.

    1342:

    I think you should read the adjunct to that 12 chapter collection: Let There Be Light.

    12, 13. Such mystical numbers in your culture.

    1343:

    Bill Arnold @1338 with many links

    Wow! Now you're talkin'. HA!

    I've been following the EmDrive in the press.

    I'd read the article from MOTHERBOARD, in November 2016, about the leaked NASA paper, by White and March, and read nothing since.

    The Fact and Fiction of the NASA EmDrive Paper Leak

    "Mach effect pioneer James Woodward breaks down the significance of a leaked paper detailing the successful test run of NASA’s 'impossible engine.' "

    Low and behold, there's the link to the leaked paper that I was waiting for.

    • Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum

    If the device works, everything changes. Not just as a spaceship drive, but the Science that follows.

    My favorite theory about the EMDrive is that it is acting against the aether. The aether never went away, it was just abandoned by the researches when they could not get funding. HA!

    Dayton Miller's Ether-Drift Experiments: A Fresh Look

    I need to read this stuff, ASAP.

    Thanks...

    1344:

    Via Google translate

    Jupiter was angered, so far as she had used with moderation tearing that language, Mercury to him: "This lead to the ghosts suited for the silent room. nymph, but the infernal marshes. " Jove made. Going reached a grove; as well as to be led to say that it pleased the god. force her, look for the words she prays and failed attempts to change the mouth to speak, bore twins who keep crossroads watch forever in the city of gods.

    1345:

    I too have been distantly following Shawyer's efforts ... at least he has equipment that can be publicly tested ... Yet, rather than take actual observations, lots of people refuse to look, claiming it can't work... "Mach Effect" huh? Hadn't thought of that ... I visualise it as a sort of "QM hydraulic jack" - hence the differential cone-end sizes. If ( as I think it does ) work though, it will need very rigid superconducting walls to the cone to get decent efficiencies & thrusts. Um.

    1346:

    That's explosive (literally).

    Is it? Does the vapour front actually move through the liquid at above the speed of propagation of sound in the liquid?

    Perhaps you should keep in mind that some of us are at least related to explosives chemists before making potentially hyperbolic statements like that?

    1347:

    Yes. That's what annoyed me about 'cold fusion'. There was strong evidence that it was simply releasing stored energy, but the explosions indicated that a lot more energy was being stored than could be accounted for by any known theory. I was told by several physicists "since it's clearly not cold fusion, it's not worth considering further", and "any money spent is just being wasted", but energy storage mechanisms aren't exactly a minor technology and spending the odd million on far-out research is perfectly sane with a potential pay-back of ten figures!

    When such anomalies are found, they are almost always simple errors. But, every now and then, they lead to a breakthrough, usually in a completely unexpected direction. Antibiotics, PTFE, etc. Research is just making an original mistake :-)

    1348:

    You are confusing a high explosive (i.e. one which detonates) with explosives in general. Ask yourself the same question about black powder, which I hope you will not deny is an explosive! Actually, (deliberate) steam based explosions are a known technology, which no doubt surprises you.

    1349:

    Used in coal mining - no flash or spark to set of Methane or coal-dust secondary explosions or fires, yes.

    1350:

    And in other types of mining to crack granite before black powder became available.

    1351:

    Jupiter fumed and wrenched from her the tongue she had used so indiscreetly. He also called for Mercury. “Take her to the deadland,” said he, “that’s the place for mutes. A nymph she is, but a nymph of the infernal marsh she’ll be.” The orders of Jupiter were obeyed. On their way they came to a grove: then it was, they say, that she won the heart of her divine conductor. He would have used force; for want of words she pleased with a look, and all in vain she strove to speak with her dumb lips. She went with child, and bore twins, who guard the cross-roads and ever keep watch in our city: they are the Lares.

    http://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidFasti2.html

    It's the genesis myth for Roman Guardian / Tutelary deities.

    c.f. Lares vrs Lemures and Quintus Valerius Soranus.

    If you want the short-hand: it's a blessing to the journey to the underworld & so forth.

    1352:

    Ask yourself the same question about black powder, which I hope you will not deny is an explosive!

    Well actually I'd have called black powder a deflagrant, not an explosive.

    1353:

    "Deflagrant" is not a normal English word, and is not in the OED.

    1354:

    "Deflagrate" is in the dictionary, though. I've only ever heard ATs and ATOs use it, in reference to low explosives. Then they start muttering about "brisance", and arguing over black powder...

    1355:

    I do wish people who claim expertise in an area would make it clear when they are typing using Expert language and labels rather than mere commonly used language and labels. That way arguments over definitions can be reduced and conversations can be more productive.

    1356:

    Which reminds me that I was surprised to find that Honister slate quarry use dynamite rather than powder for blasting. Seems the important difference between "now" and "then" is that a composite of powdered slate in an epoxy matrix is found to be not without use.

    1357:

    Greg Tingey @1345 said: "Mach Effect" huh? Hadn't thought of that ...

    Yes, you have to go old school.

    That was part of the war on Physics a century ago. Many of the great concepts were set aside simply because they did not have the technology to test them.

    1358:

    I think that I have seen it, once, and thought to myself "Why doesn't the pretentious sod just say 'burn' or, if relevant, 'burn rapidly'?" A lot of technical papers and books are like that - jargon is useful when it is (a) more precise or less ambiguous AND (b) that matters. But far too many people use it just for appearance. I am not guiltless in that respect, but do try to avoid that.

    1359:

    I've known the word for ages, but never found it useful for any purpose other than denoting the difference between how things like black powder go off and how things like dynamite do. And not very useful even for that, because if the other person hasn't picked up from the context that that's what you're talking about, they usually need the difference explained from scratch in any case.

    I first encountered it in a chemistry lesson aged 10 when a particular piece of apparatus was named as a "deflagrating spoon" and the reason given as being because it was for burning things in. Question in my mind: so what makes "deflagrating" different from "burning", then? Answer, based on what we did with it: it's when you do it in a little spoon in a chemistry lab.

    I suspect that it is mostly my reaction "but this is silly" that made the word stick in my mind at all :)

    1360:

    Elderly Cynic @1347 'cold fusion'

    Cold fusion research is still ongoing. It simply got renamed. HA!

    Wiki - Coldfusion#Currentresearch

    When you read the wiki page, you can see how Cold fusion had a stigma attached making it hard to get funding, or get published in Journals. It became political, i.e., Fighting for funding, and space in the Journals ruled, not Science.

    • When did "Pure Science" stop happening.

    It is that problem of getting funding and publication in Journals on so called "Out of the Box" research that has created a call for setting up a fund that is dedicated to such research.

    • Dr. Gerald Pollack is at the University of Washington.

    He gives a detailed discussion of the problem and offers a solution. This video will upset some people.

    Dr. Gerald Pollack: Institute for Venture Science — Funding "Out of the Box" Ideas | EU2014

    The Institute is up and running, they are already calling for proposals.

    Institute for Venture Science is launched

    Institute for Venture Science

    This is a example of what Pollack does on "Water".

    Gerald Pollack: The Fourth Phase of Water | NPA19

    This is his website. He has been studying water for decades and has tons of papers.

    Pollack Laboratory https://www.pollacklab.org

    I have his books.

    The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor

    Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life

    1361:

    Similar to the article about the Black Panther @1285, America has it's dark secret of covering up large scale Native American cities. If you have read Jared Diamond and Charles C. Mann you know that the Native people were wiped out by disease, leaving only 1% of the original population.

    White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities

    "Pioneers and early archaeologists credited distant civilizations, not Native Americans, with building these sophisticated complexes"

    Here are some quotes:

    "Early archaeologists working to answer the question of who built the mounds attributed them to the Toltecs, Vikings, Welshmen, Hindus, and many others. It seemed that any group—other than the American Indian—could serve as the likely architects of the great earthworks."

    BTW, I had to laugh when I read this part. Yes, my grandfather was from Wales.

    "Bartram’s account of Creek and Cherokee histories led to the view that these Native Americans were colonizers, just like Euro-Americans. This served as one more way to justify the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands: If Native Americans were early colonizers, too, the logic went, then white Americans had just as much right to the land as indigenous peoples."

    "The creation of the Myth of the Mounds parallels early American expansionist practices like the state-sanctioned removal of Native peoples from their ancestral lands to make way for the movement of “new” Americans into the Western “frontier.” Part of this forced removal included the erasure of Native American ties to their cultural landscapes."

    "In juxtaposition to this evolutionary model there was unease about the “Vanishing Indian,” a myth-history of the 18th and 19th centuries that depicted Native Americans as a vanishing race incapable of adapting to the new American civilization. The sentimentalized ideal of the Vanishing Indian—who were seen as noble but ultimately doomed to be vanquished by a superior white civilization—held that these “vanishing” people, their customs, beliefs, and practices, must be documented for posterity. Thomas Jefferson was one of the first to excavate into a Native American burial mound, citing the disappearance of the “noble” Indians—caused by violence and the corruption of the encroaching white civilization—as the need for these excavations. Enlightenment-inspired scholars and some of America’s Founders viewed Indians as the first Americans, to be used as models by the new republic in the creation of its own legacy and national identity."

    There were 300 million people in North and South America before Columbus landed. By the time Americans were moving into the "frontier" there were barely three million.

    1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

    Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond Ph.D.

    1362:

    Bartram’s account of Creek and Cherokee histories led to the view that these Native Americans were colonizers, just like Euro-Americans.

    Why wouldn't they be? Everyone else is. Tribes colonizing other tribes is pretty much all of history. The bit that's happening now is demographics, unless those involved lack indoor plumbing. Then it's anthropology.

    I grew up in Indiana, just west of Iroquois lands. The remnants of the local Wea tribes had some extremely harsh things to say about the Iroquois. Pretty much the same things Mexicans say about gringos, actually.

    And don't get me started on the Aztecs.

    It's silly to assume that all the crap started exactly when we started writing stuff down, and that everything that happened before we started writing was warm and fuzzy. The crap is probably older than humanity, if you believe the primatologists.

    1363:

    Question in my mind: so what makes "deflagrating" different from "burning", then?

    A material which 'deflagrates' combusts exothermically without the presence of an external source of oxygen. Black powder will combust in a vacuum but unless it is contained so its pressure and temperature increases and the combustion wavefront speed is high enough (close to the speed of sound in the gas in the pressure vessel) it will not explode hence it deflagrates.

    Material which 'burns' combusts exothermically by combining with an external source of oxygen, including atmospheric oxygen but not limited to that. RP-1 burns with the addition of oxygen from tanks in rocket engines, wood burns in atmosphere.

    It's technical jargon but when it is necessary to be precise then technical jargon is important.

    1364:

    Remember, gas pumps at a filling station need to be optimized for vehicle flow-through and proximity to an underground tank full of potentially explosive fuel. Even so, they're often combined with a small supermarket (and off-pump car parking carea for customers) because they attract passing trade.

    And half the drivers don't know which side of the vehicle the fuel filler is located on, so they end up dragging the hose over top of the car because they've pulled up to the wrong side of the pump. Then they leave the vehicle sitting there, blocking the pump, while they go inside to pay and do their shopping.

    1365:

    Yes. Calvin ball is fun to read about in a few frames of a comic strip. A day long game of it would get old for most of us. 30 minutes more likely.

    43-Man Squamish?

    1366:

    Male skunks only & I'm told that the guaranteed remover of the err odour is ... tomato juice.
    Yes/no?

    Long ago, I heard a very bad song called: "Dead Skunk in the middle of the Road"

    Tomato juice works, but it takes a whole lot of it. You might get run out of the store before you can fill your shopping cart.

    Up at Ft. A.P. Hill we had problems with them trying to get into the tents looking for food. The PX didn't stock anywhere enough tomato juice and there was no commissary on post.

    The real danger wasn't how bad it smelled if you startled them & they sprayed you, that summer there was a bad problem with rabies.

    The answer was to get moth balls (naphtha) and lay a line of them all around the bottom of the sidewalls. Skunks didn't like the smell and would wander off looking for easier pickings.

    1367:

    Of course. But that fits neither with what they told us it meant nor what we were doing with the so-named apparatus...

    1368:

    What we get here is slightly different: most cars have the filler on the same side, and you get a queue of cars all waiting to get to the same side of a row of pumps, all fuming away at the people who have left their car there while they go shopping and all planning on doing the same thing themselves.

    This means that the other side of the row of pumps is completely clear, with nobody using it. So I just drive round to the other end, go in the clear side and fill up no messing.

    OOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH you don't half get some dirty looks from people still queueing. As if it was my fault they're too thick to come up with the same idea themselves.

    Indeed it would be even easier for them than it is for me because with most cars you can quite easily reach the filler with the hose from the wrong side. Mine is an exception in having a filler at a funny angle that means you can't.

    1369:

    You can burn substances in air in a deflagrating spoon but you can also deflagrate materials in one too. Calling it a burning spoon means you wouldn't be able to deflagrate material in it. It's dual-use.

    It's a good thing to know about, that combustion doesn't always require air or other external supply of gaseous/liquid oxygen -- a solid-rocket motor rocket deflagrates, for example so cutting off access to oxygen from outside won't turn it "off". The classic firefighting techniques are based on removing access to air to stop combustion but that doesn't work on some materials since they have their own self-contained exothermic chemistry to keep the fire going.

    1370:

    And half the drivers don't know which side of the vehicle the fuel filler is located on

    Something I only discovered recently. On most cars (at least, the European and Japanese ones, not sure about Detroit), look at the petrol pump symbol on the fuel gauge; it has a small triangle next to it, pointing to remind/tell you on which side of the vehicle is the filler cap....

    1371:

    You should have tried the old Series III military Landrovers (chassis frame, aluminium body shell, all older than me when I started using them, indestructible and agriculturally simple). There was a forty-litre tank under each front seat; filled by lifting the seat and unscrewing a saucer-sized cover. Taking the filler hose inside the door seemed... unnatural (no worries about fumes, these things had canvas roofs, and were as far from airtight as it gets).

    Anyway, there was a manual switch valve on the front of the driver’s seat / fuel tank, controlling which of the two was feeding the engine. More than one person called for help claiming a lack of fuel, to be reminded that they hadn’t switched over...

    The replacement of such vehicles (fleet dieselisation took a while) was sped up after a nasty accident where the vehicle inverted, the filler caps hadn’t been screwed on securely, and the fuel spilled and caught fire.

    1372:

    There's a difference between car drivers and car owners. Someone who's owned a car for a while knows which side the filler is on automatically, by learned reflex. Hiring a car, especially in a foreign country where they drive on the weird side of the road is more likely to cause the driver to have to actively search the bodyshell to find the filler cap.

    1373:

    Which isn't the meaning in ordinary English. Yes, it is sometimes important to be precise, but it is NOT acceptable to claim that a technical usage supersedes the normal one in ordinary communication. There is, for example, a similar issue with 'correlation' in statistics.

    1374:

    Well, SOME owners. I took me over 5 years to remember which side reliably, and I still have to look to see exactly where it is :-) But I am very much NOT a car-lover.

    1375:

    The deflagrating spoon was used in a chemistry lab class, not to make tea with in the kitchen. Even in the kitchen when talking about a spoonful of tea-leaves in "ordinary communication" you sort-of hope that the user is sufficiently nous to realise they shouldn't use a soup-spoon for measurement in that case.

    1376:

    I suggest that you reread what YOU said in #1346, #1352 and #1363. This blog is NOT a chemistry class, and the words 'explosive' and 'deflagrate' do not mean what you said they do in normal English.

    1377:

    I know where the filler is on my car. But half the time I can't get to the correctly side of the pump because of blocking by other cars. So I go to the other side. Almost all pumps have long enough hoses for this. Some drivers won't do this and seem to think I'm queue jumping. And all the talk of filling stations being blocked by cars ignores the fact that fast chargers are being installed in all kinds of car parks. Two have just been opened in the corner of my gym car park.

    1378:

    No, it doesn't. It makes no difference where the chargers are located as to how much space is needed, and car parking space is also in short supply in the UK. The simple fact is that even fast chargers need more space, because it takes longer to fill. And even a single fast charger needs MUCH more power than a domestic supply or small business. It's all soluble, yes, but it will cause OTHER problems unless it is properly planned and implemented.

    1379:

    More power? Yeah kinda.

    The fundamental problem is that 1kWh sends a car around 4 miles. As you know (probably better than I do) that kWh is an amount of energy, expressed in this unit only because power (flowing energy) comes in kilowatts and it takes an hour to pass through one kWh of energy. Home chargers can play games with trickling in solar electricity to a big battery, then rapidly dumping it into a car, but that energy still has to come from somewhere.

    When you look at the fantasies of battery service stations, where someone with a hydraulic lift pops the drained battery out of your car and sockets another, fully charged one. Now gas allegedly holds 33.4 kWh per gallon, but if you look at car mileage, it's more like 10 kWh/gallon (matching EV car range to gas guzzler range). Gas stations sell around 4000 gallons/day, or (with this estimate) 40,000 kWh per day.

    That's a lot of energy. At my rooftop conversion rates, that's at least 40,000 m2 of solar array in a sunny summer climate, just to generate a service station's worth of electricity every day (I get about 1 kWh per 10 ft2 of solar panel per day in the summer, and 10 ft2 is about 1 m2). Houses run on 20-30 kWh/day, so that single service station needs electricity equivalent of 1,500-2,000 homes, and there are something like 168,000 gas stations in the US right now.

    Hell of an infrastructure building boom we're talking about. It's telling that our current Republican President, who alleges himself to be a developer, isn't looking at those figures and salivating. There are careers and industries to be made here. Weirdly, a lot of developers aren't seeing it. Guess the ones that do are the ones who will get richer, or something.

    1380:

    NOT acceptable to claim that a technical usage supersedes the normal one in ordinary communication

    egg-zackary!

    It is amusing when common usage crawls so far up its own arse that it loops back to match the technical meaning, though. Quantum leap and biased are the two examples that spring to mind. In both advertising and physics a quantum leap is the smallest possible change. Likewise in engineering a bias is an offset from neutral applied to an output. In politics a bias ... same thing. But via bias being a disqualifying inability to recognise a neutral viewpoint.

    1381:

    Yes, but what I'm trying to point out is that they didn't tell us that, so I ended up knowing an incorrect definition of the word - and would probably still be using that incorrect definition if I didn't have personal interests that exposed me to its correct usage.

    Even as it was I'm pretty sure I learned what "brisage" meant a long time before I got the right definition of "deflagration". (Although to be fair it's not that unusual for me to spend years wondering WTF it is that people mean by "snurdifaction" and why they make such a big deal about it, only to eventually discover that it means always using braces in your if statements even if they're not strictly necessary because it makes the code easier to read.)

    1382:

    Gas stations sell around ... 40,000 kWh per day.... that's at least 40,000 m2 of solar array in a sunny summer climate ... something like 168,000 gas stations in the US right now.

    Or to put it another way, each inhabitant of the USA is burning the future, even more than most other westerners are. Sadly only by a small margin, if the rest were hugely better than that a: the problem would be smaller and b: we'd have a clear idea of how the USA had to change.

    I'm more of a "fair shirt environmentalist" because I look at the ecosystem carrying capacity and say "you've got this much coming in, what do you want to spend it on?" rather than the more usual "we must maintain our existing spending, and allow for growth".

    Nature doesn't do bankruptcy protection. You're either living within your budget, or you're not. And "not" here applies to living rather than budget.

    OTOH, you could look at it the other way - the USA has currently paved about 16 million hectares (61,000 square miles) to cater for the aforementioned motor vehicles. To supply electricity for them if they were all electric would mean covering 0.672 million hectares with solar panels. That's about 4% of the paved area, so you could afford to be pretty fussy about which roads and parking lots you actually roofed over. Ignoring the 3/4 of the country where it snows sometimes, for example, wouldn't matter.

    1383:

    Oh, yes, like the Sinclair QL - which stood for "quantum leap". A home computer with a 32-bit processor!!!! - yet still beset with all the epic half-arsedness that was the fundamental design paradigm and source of intrinsic shitness common to all Sinclair products, manifested in such features as using the most ultra-pov version of the processor with only an 8-bit data bus that threw away all the advantage, and limiting the mass storage options to an abortion that was roughly equivalent to a paper tape punch/reader loaded with bog roll yet still wasn't all that much cheaper than a proper full-on standard 5.25" floppy drive.

    1384:

    "fair shirt environmentalist"

    That was a typo, but, you know, I'm going to run with it.

    1385:

    each inhabitant of the USA is burning the future, even more than most other westerners are. Sadly only by a small margin,

    The margin isn't that small -- US fossil fuel burn is about 16 tonnes per capita, coal-mad Germany is about 10 tonnes per capita and eco-nuclear France is about 6-7 tonnes per capita. Even black evil polluting China is only in the Germany bracket for fossil fuel usage per capita since there are a lot of quite poor people there. All of the fossil fuel being burned dumps the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere, of course.

    In other news America's coal production increased last year, up 45 million short tons from 2016 although consumption is slightly down, by about 12 million short tons. The rest goes to export.

    1386:

    In the context of a carbon budget between 0.1 and 2 tonnes, the gap between 10 and 16 is small.

    Although there is another way: those emissions are per capita and the budget is total emissions, so we could have a more generous allowance per capita if there were fewer capitae. Capitas? More de-capita? Fewer people, anyway.

    1387:

    Not really. Places like the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have a much higher per capita fossil fuel burn than the US does but there aren't anywhere near that many people live in those nations.

    I think a big factor in the US profligate fossil fuel burn is air travel -- some numbers I've dug out on a cursory search indicates per capita air travel in the US is about 5000 km per annum, man woman and child and the figure is increasing year on year (up about 10% since 2014). Only Europe comes close to that air travel figure but still nowhere near US levels.

    1388:

    "fair shirt environmentalist"

    Is that the type of environmentalist who keeps up-to-date on the newest high-tech outdoor gear, only buys organic at boutique shops, and jets off to holidays in eco-reserves several times a year?

    1389:

    type of environmentalist who keeps up-to-date on the newest high-tech outdoor gear, only buys organic at boutique shops, and jets off to holidays in eco-reserves several times a year?

    No, you're describing a give-me-the-shits environmentalist which is a completely different thing.

    I had one as a housemate once who tried to persuade me, with the appearance of sincerity, that individual actions make no difference unless that action is signing up to support an environmental NGO ... like the one he worked for. The topic came up in the context of his inability to turn appliances and lights off but also covered his love of long showers (in Melbourne's last big drought) and him being one of two motorists in a household of six adults.

    Sometimes I think that rather than asking to be allowed to kill smokers in self defense I should focus on shooting down passenger planes (Australia allows a plea of necessity). But then... "middle aged white man with a grudge kills lots of people" is playing to type, and I like to think of myself as unusual. I'd either have to go big (bigger than Bush! Badder than Stalin!) or go home... so I've gone home.

    1390:

    Now that people seem to be slowing down on comments about my posts, I can write the conclusion.

    Believe it or not:

    • All of the Easter Eggs that I posted above are "evidence" based "Science", even the Fomenko is evidence based research that anybody can do.

    The reason that people are commenting without actually doing the work, without actually bothering to understand the links I posted -- all those Easter Eggs -- is explained in this book.

    THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION Why We Never Think Alone By Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach

    Here is a book review.

    People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows

    The book review itself is insightful, even if you never read the book. The book is deeply disturbing because what they are saying is right, just that some of the examples they give are wrong -- in a way proving their own point.

    • Sadly, no one here will read the book, because of their A Priori assumptions. HA!

    In closing:

    This may be hard to believe, but the stuff that I have talked about is but a small selection of what I'm interested in and follow. These are the easy things that you can come up to speed on.

    Each of the many blogs that I visit and post on, like this blog, make Strange Honey. I have great fun collecting that Strange Honey.

    Thanks...

    1391:

    It's interesting that both rationality and irrationality have been seized on by (white, male) supremacists to bolster their story of supremacy. Indeed, during WWII, we had the white supremacist ideology sustained by the batshit theories of the original Nazis. On the other side, we had the rational scientific white capitalists fighting them, along with the rational male communists (who were, just possibly, a bit less sexist).

    So the point? Attacking rationality isn't useful, if your goal is to make the world a better place.

    We have limited intellects, and rationality is a useful discipline. I agree that we aren't naturally rational, but I'd also simply posit that it's worth doing, along with the humility to admit when one is wrong, in order to improve. It's hard, I'm not very good at it, but it seems to be worth doing. Got something better?

    1392:

    Question: What do you guys think of the weapons Putin just announced?

    1393:

    Europe has proper trains, 99% of the US doesn't have any trains

    1394:

    Except that (especially) in the case of Fomenko, it is emphatically not based on any actual science or evidence, but a mixture of 10% wishful-thinking & 90% bullshit. Very reminiscent of Velikovsky, in fact.

    1395:

    KGB agent Putin, who is doing his best to return to aspects of the "Cold War"? Ex-KBG-agent Putin running foa a fake election, where posturing to a nationalistic public against a foreign enemy ( Whather real or not ) will get you votes. Ex-KGB agent Putin giving potential future enemies a moment's paus, at the least, whilst they evalute how much of his bluster is real, how much fake & how much just might be "In development"?

    One thing, he has really learnt from the clandestine activities of Kaiserine Germany, 1911-17, hasn't he?

    1396:

    Bugger Typos ....

    1397:

    The really disturbing thing is that those apply at least as strongly to the USA and UK, with changes to match our different circumstances. I wish that WE had learnt something :-(

    Actually, I don't think that he NEEDS to 'arrange' the election, though both Trump and May did.

    1398:

    No At present he (Putin) doesn't need to arrange an election, but there is always this tendency to rig things if you are an autocrat, even when you don't need to. It can come back to bite you though - it was one of the principal reasosn for Louis-Philippe of France going come 1847-8 ( Coupled with the utterly crap harvest across Europe those two years, of course )

    1399:

    Question: What do you guys think of the weapons Putin just announced?

    Very retro. If you look at the 1983 document "Possible Soviet Responses to the Strategic Defense Initiative", you'll find most of them. The nuclear torpedo isn't quite there, but the proto-JASONs did a study on a nuclear powered long range torpedo back in 1958, so the idea was certainly in the air from early days.

    https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/19830912.pdf

    JASON: Can a Cold Warrior Find Work? Science Magazine, 29 November 1991, p.1284

    I'll opine that none of the newly announced weapons seem to add much to Russia's strategic capability against the US, which is already pretty much at the saturation level.

    1400:

    I think that we're getting selective bits of the story.

    Digging back to this Washington Post article in 2015, it appears that the Pentagon was planning a whole new generation of nukes back them. It also goes back to Clinton expanding NATO and Bush II walking away from the anti-ballistic missile treaty.

    So yes, Putin's following suit, but we've got our own crop of idiots in power, including some we allegedly admire.

    In a real sense, though, nuclear war currently seems to be about having more and better nukes, not about actually using them. The problem is when somebody decides they don't want to play that game.

    1401:

    Now this is a timeline to build stories on. HA!

    Generations https://xkcd.com/1962/

    "For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too."

    1402:

    Smart phone alerts (US); We all had one for "Potential Flash Flooding" here (NW Arkansas) last week; I was in a public place, everyone's phone was going off. About thirty minutes after peak danger, and only applied to a tiny portion of the county, but....

    I have seen (received) tornado alerts and one "amber alert" (missing child) in the last couple of years.

    We are one hour drive south of Joplin, and on the Oklahoma border.

    1403:

    Thought I'd stick this in here:

    http://www.gutenberg.org/files/55793/55793-h/55793-h.htm

    It's interesting to see how the comments about charging time, range etc. that people were making 115 years ago are exactly the same as they are making now.

    It also contains the remarkable information that Rider Haggard came up with the idea of Amazon next-day deliveries of dead sheep.

    1404:

    That's an amazing book.

    Thanks...

    1405:

    The Terra Ignota Series is great! I especially like the second one, Seven Surrenders.

    1406:

    I'm waiting for the documentary to come out on DVD. I have all of his Daedalus books.

    Perpetual Motion Machine. Distributed by Galloping Films

    Perpetual Motion by Daedalus

    "This is an excerpt from the BBC "Inside Out" programme that featured the perpetual motion machines of Dr David E H Jones, known across the scientific spectrum as Daedalus."

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