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All Glory to the New Management!

Dead Lies Dreaming - UK cover

Today is September 27th, 2020. On October 27th, Dead Lies Dreaming will be published in the USA and Canada: the British edition drops on October 29th. (Yes, there will be audio editions too, via the usual outlets.)

This book is being marketed as the tenth Laundry Files novel. That's not exactly true, though it's not entirely wrong, either: the tenth Laundry book, about the continuing tribulations of Bob Howard and his co-workers, hasn't been written yet. (Bob is a civil servant who by implication deals with political movers and shakers, and politics has turned so batshit crazy in the past three years that I just can't go there right now.)

There is a novella about Bob coming next summer. It's titled Escape from Puroland and Tor.com will be publishing it as an ebook and hardcover in the USA. (No UK publication is scheduled as yet, but we're working on it.) I've got one more novella planned, about Derek the DM, and then either one or two final books: I'm not certain how many it will take to wrap the main story arc yet, but rest assured that the tale of SOE's Q-Division, the Laundry, reaches its conclusion some time in 2015. Also rest assured that at least one of our protagonists survives ... as does the New Management.

All Glory to the Black Pharaoh! Long may he rule over this spectred isle!

(But what's this book about?)

Dead Lies Dreaming - US cover

Dead Lies Dreaming is the first book in a project I dreamed up in (our world's) 2017, with the working title Tales of the New Management. It came about due to an unhappy incident: I found out the hard way that writing productively while one of your parents is dying is rather difficult. The first time it happened, it took down a promising space opera project. I plan to pick it up and re-do it next year, but it was the kind of learning experience I could happily have done without. The second time it happened, I had to stop work on Invisible Sun, the third and final Empire Games novel—I just couldn't get into the right head-space. (Empire Games is now written and in the hands of the production folks at Tor. It will almost certainly be published next September, if the publishing industry survives the catastrophe novel we're all living through right now.)

Anyway, I was unable work on the a project with a fixed deadline, but I couldn't not write: so I gave myself license to doodle therapeutically. The therapeutic doodles somehow colonized the abandoned first third of a magical realist novel I pitched in 2014, and turned into an unexpected attack novel titled Lost Boys. (It was retitled Dead Lies Dreaming because a cult comedy movie from 1987 got remade for TV in 2020—unless you're a major bestseller you do not want your book title to clash with an unrelated movie—but it's still Lost Boys in my headcanon.)

Lost Boys—that is, Dead Lies Dreaming—riffs heavily off Peter and Wendy, the original taproot of Peter Pan, a stage play and novel by J. M. Barrie that predates the more familiar, twee, animated Disney version of Peter Pan from 1953 by some decades. (Actually Peter and Wendy recycled Barrie's character from an earlier work, The Little White Bird, from 1902, but let's not get into the J. M. Barrie arcana at this point.) Peter and Wendy can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg here. And if you only know Pan from Disney, you're in for a shock.

Barrie was writing in an era when antibiotics hadn't been discovered, and far fewer vaccines were available for childhood diseases. Almost 20% of children died before reaching their fifth birthday, and this was a huge improvement over the earlier decades of the 19th century: parents expected some of their babies to die, and furthermore, had to explain infant deaths to toddlers and pre-tweens. Disney's Peter is a child of the carefree first flowering of the antibiotic age, and thereby de-fanged, but the original Peter Pan isn't a twee fairy-like escapist fantasy. He's a narcissistic monster, a kidnapper and serial killer of infants who is so far detached from reality that his own shadow can't keep up. Barrie's story is a metaphor designed to introduce toddlers to the horror of a sibling's death. And I was looking at it in this light when I realized, "hey, what if Peter survived the teind of infant mortality, only to grow up under the dictatorship of the New Management?"

This led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, only some of which are explored in Dead Lies Dreaming. The nerdish world-building impulse took over: it turns out that civilian life under the rule of N'yar lat-Hotep, the Black Pharaoh (in his current incarnation as Fabian Everyman MP), is harrowing and gruesome in its own right—there's a Tzompantli on Marble Arch: indications that Lovecraft's Elder Gods were worshipped under other names by other cultures: oligarchs and private equity funds employ private armies: and Brexit is still happening—but nevertheless, ordinary life goes on. There are jobs for cycle couriers, administrative assistants, and ex-detective constables-turned-security guards. People still need supermarkets and high street banks and toy shops. The displays of severed heads on the traffic cameras on the M25 don't stop drivers trying to speed. Boys who never grew up are still looking for a purpose in life, at risk of their necks, while their big sisters try to save them. And so on.

Dead Lies Dreaming is the first of the Tales of the New Management, which are being positioned as a continuation of the Laundry Files (because Marketing). There will be more. A second novel, In His House, already exists in first draft. Tt's a continuation of the story, remixed with Sweeney Todd and Mary Poppins—who in the original form is, like Peter Pan, much more sinister than the Disney whitewash suggests. A third novel, Bones and Nightmares, is planned. (However, I can't give you a publication date, other than to say that In His house can't be published before late 2022: COVID19 has royally screwed up publishers' timetables.)

Anyway, you probably realized that instead of riffing off classic British spy thrillers or urban fantasy tropes, I'm now perverting beloved childhood icons for my own nefarious purposes—and I'm having a gas. Let's just hope that the December of 2016 in which Dead Lies Dreaming is set doesn't look impossibly utopian and optimistic by the time we get to the looming and very real December of 2020! I really hate it when reality front-runs my horror novels ...

1053 Comments

1:

I pre-ordered several weeks ago, when Amazon started getting serious about telling me about it. Looking forward to reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywCH3HN2S7E

2:

I know that it was probably not one of your childhood icons, but my reaction to reading this was "Ah! An ideal setting for a Mowgli story. With tentacles."

3:

This all sounds fascinating and wonderful and I am anxiously awaiting Dead Lies Dreaming's delivery to my kindle in a months time.

A new Charlie Stross book is always a happy time and I am thankful that your muse keeps beating you about to write more. I shall expect the next writing project when it arrives and thank you for continuing to write.

thank you Charlie.

Steve

4:

Just double-checked my Amazon pre-order for the hardback and it still looks like it's good :-). All I can say is, all hail the new management!

5:

I will have to check in with Transreal & get me a signed copy, I see .... However ... EC ... The Mowgli stories already have realistic attitude to death ... Everyone comes to Chil, the Kite, in the end. Or - Bagheera - A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down. Yes?

6:

This is not a spoiler because it won’t mean anything until you’ve read “Dead Lies Dreaming”: but the central protagonist of the trilogy is Eve, and “In His House” kicks off with Eve, a week after the climax of DLD, hunting for a very important missing piece of paper (not the book) ...

7:

Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie (novel published 1911). Peter Pan by Walt Disney Studios (movie released 1953). Time elapsed between novel and movie: 42 years.

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross (novel published 2020). The Lost Boys by Walt Disney Studios (movie released 2062). Time elapsed between novel and movie: 42 years.

Any thoughts? Should the film of your book be a classic animation, a Pixar-like animation, or a "live action" / greenscreened version? And more importantly, will the movie-to-be be a musical?

8:

Live action (or photorealistic CGI). And there's far too much shooting and bleeding for it to be made by Disney. Not to mention the torture scenes, before we get to the gruesome body horror in "In His House".

9:

I'm always looking forward to new Laundry (or Laundry-adjacent) material, so I'm a happy camper.

Regarding adaptations... this seems tailor-made for an anime studio. Someone like the guys that did Hellsing Ultimate or Black Butler.

10:

Kipling was of course a pretty good hand at horror when he wanted to be. Bubbling Well Road springs to mind.

Charlie: this is probably a silly question, but how comprehensible is your work likely to be to someone who doesn't know the Disney version of Peter Pan as well as not knowing the original?

11:

This reminds me of Régis Loisel's 6 volume boardbook (hard bound comics) series: Peter Pan. He obtained the legal rights for the characters. He wrote and drew the series from 1990 to 2004. It was advertised as a dark and violent prequel to Barrie's Peter Pan. It was too dark and violent for me. I only read one volume, a library copy.

12:

And The Mark of the Beast and others. But I was thinking about the human brought up by non-humans aspect - while The Jungle Books are not squeamish, they are not horror.

13:

Amazon informs me that I pre-ordered this book on December 31, 2019.

14:

Question Charlie, when you say "Also rest assured that at least one of our protagonists survives" is this you being cheeky around the fact a large number of the cast has slowly been becoming both less than human and... one could even argue alive for a definition of the word at least?

Or is this a blunt, lots of folks are going to die, protagonists among them, hard stop?

15:

how comprehensible is your work likely to be to someone who doesn't know the Disney version of Peter Pan as well as not knowing the original?

Quite comprehensible, they'd just miss some of the deeper references.

16:

is this you being cheeky around the fact a large number of the cast has slowly been becoming both less than human ... or is this a blunt, lots of folks are going to die, protagonists among them, hard stop?

What, I didn't kill enough of them in The Rhesus Chart or the climax of The Labyrinth Index?

Seriously: I don't know. I know that one particular major character must have survived because they show up in In His House. I know that a different one dies, because they die in the penultimate Laundry story arc novel The Valkyrie Confession (assuming I ever write it -- it's kind of dark and I may leave it out, in which case that character doesn't need to die). I know my fans will form a torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob if I kill off Bob and Mo or don't give them at least a happy-for-now ending.

But I don't know because you're asking me about a book I haven't written and indeed had planned, only for COVID19 to blow my planned resolution of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN right out of the water.

17:

Haha, completely fair answer then.

Was trying to figure out if Bob and Mo counted as alive enough to be killed off given the last few books.

18:

Am I allowed to offer some non-spoiler commentary on it?

19:

You mean that anything produced by Disney in the past half-century has DEPTH?

20:

If I remember correctly the Mandate needs to be quite close to people to brainwash them, so I'm curious as to how he turned all of Britain into a dictatorship featuring massive piles of skulls in London without sparking a civil war/Scotland breaking off/the EU launching a first strike once they realise who's running the show etc etc.

Also, I've got a question about The Labyrinth Index. If memory serves the spell cast by the Black Chamber making people forget the President exists only covers the US. Given all the overseas military bases, embassies, overseas citizens etc etc how come the whole world didn't freak out within a day once they realised the Americans no longer knew they had a President? If nothing else surely NATO would notice almost instantaneously.

21:

I bought an edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens from Folio, and then realised that my young sons might not appreciate it (they had just been in a musical production of Peter Pan). I assume that is in the same thread as the original play?

22:

Look, the sheeple were persuaded to give the ERG free reign, so why wouldn't they do the same for the Mandate?

24:

If I remember correctly the Mandate needs to be quite close to people to brainwash them

The Mandate has levelled up continuously since he first showed up on the Laundry's radar a couple of years ago; he's got full-blown Elder God mojo at this point. The whole of Westminster is in his thrall, and the UK is governed and run as an elective dictatorship, and if you've got CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN coming at you on all sides why wouldn't you want the strongest and most experienced pair of hands at the helm? Even if it costs the odd human sacrifice ...

25:

Is now the best time to release a new work? How much does in person promotion by yourself usually figure into the marketing plans, something you probably cant do much of in the current environment.

26:

And there's far too much shooting and bleeding for it to be made by Disney. Not to mention the torture scenes,

So a musical, then?

Nothing like singing and dancing to gently elide the underlying horror…

27:

I know my fans will form a torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob if I kill off Bob and Mo or don't give them at least a happy-for-now ending.

This is when you pastiche Chinese romantic films: they realize they love each other, then one of them dies while the other survives (and the dead one didn't die saving the survivor).

28:

Could we get Mel "The Inquisition" Brooks to do the musical?

Not that there is that much difference between some musicals and torture...

29:

Is now the best time to release a new work?

No, but as books are scheduled years in advance I don't get a choice in the matter.

(In-person promotion is thankfully not that big an element these days, and everyone's doing it via the internet these days -- watch this blog for possible Zoom talks over the next couple of months.)

30:

Trottelreiner REALLY - is that the best you can do? The Spanish Inquisition ... which non-one was expecting! Continuing with - Or again, oh dear [ Monty Python, of course.... ]

31:

well, some of the movies they distribute... (Coco, Inside Out...)

32:

"Even if it costs the odd human sacrifice"

I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines that would bring the country 'round to supporting it wholeheartedly.

I might even write a couple of them down, on the kind of day when people who've told me "You need to get out more" ring up and tell me, very carefully and clearly "Actually, Nile, we'd rather you stayed in".

And I guess you've kept that in the background, in your writing, because someone has to buy it, and not sue you for trauma; and you would rather not descend into writing something that would make you wake up screaming in the night.

33:

The short version: I can see an Elder God, or something far, far worse than the Black Pharaoh as you have portrayed him, becoming the Prime Minister, and a wildly popular one, by the use of money, media influence, and social media manipulation.

It's not even difficult.

34:

I'm meaning no offence, but you lost me at 'torture scenes'. That's not a desired or even acceptable part of my reading escapism.

35:

Could we get Mel "The Inquisition" Brooks to do the musical?

I was thinking Gilbert and Sullivan myself…

(They're dead? In the Laundry-verse, is that really a barrier?)

36:

I was thinking Gilbert and Sullivan myself…

(They're dead? In the Laundry-verse, is that really a barrier?)

I am the very model of a non-Euclidean Deity I've information that will turn you mad with spontaneity. I know the gods of old, and their true names prehistorical From Azathoth to Cthulhu, in order categorical...

37:

All glory to the Hypnotoad Prime Minister!"

38:

I got to read this book a while ago, and it was good. It was clearly set in the horrible, depressing Laundryverse, and yet... it's a shockingly up-beat book, about love and family. Also about hate and family, evil and family, and so forth.

But it's a good book.

39:
if it costs the odd human sacrifice ...

Surely he's going for prime numbers of human sacrifice.

40:

Nor me; I am not into sadism. But there is a huge difference between scenes that are an essential part of the story and not overdone, and when the story (author?) seems to relish the torture and mayhem or it starts to dominate the story. Given OGH's record, the former seems more likely.

41:

He is going to keep going until he gets to an even prime greater than 2.

On another topic IIRC there was a mention in TLI that the black pharoah had active avatars in various other countries including N Korea, so that's our post brexit trade deal sorted.

42:

I've had similar conversations with my son about the Jungle Book characters. Kaa is particularly ill-served by all film adaptations which automatically decided "snake is scary, must be evil".

Which completely misses the point of the character. The snake is scary because the snake is the adult protector. The wolves, Baloo and Bagheera are all in the situation of being big sibling figures, and Mowgli outgrows them - but he grows into his friendship with Kaa. A child might look up at their parents (or other role models) and love them, but still be slightly scared of what they can do, especially when it comes to protecting their child. As the child grows up, they (hopefully) build this into more mutual respect. Making Kaa the baddie does a profound disservice to Kipling's work.

(I'm put in mind of the Neil Gaiman poem "Locks", where he dissects the Goldilocks story. Checking in his child's bed to see if anyone has snuck in. Again. Again. Again...)

44:

Surely he's going for prime numbers of human sacrifice.

This is where those factorisation algorithms for large numbers (and the dedicated chipsets for doing the same) come into their own... Though I guess this is already a plot element in the original Laundry.

45:

Films of books almost invariably disgracefully misrepresent them, and we would be (culturally) better off without them. But, marketing, beloved child of Cthulhu, dictates otherwise :-( I have heard that the Disney ones are even worse, but I am glad to say that I have never seen one. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Actually, Baloo and Kaa / Bagheera are more like uncle figures - the former is a common trope; the latter is rarer, but occurs. Remember that Kipling's background is from when children of his class were often brought up by relatives (as he was), a long way away from home; I had 6 months of something similar. I read the wolves as the 'adoptive' family and the others as friendly relatives.

The stories got darker later, of course.

46:

Hi Charles,

what about ebook editions?

47:

I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines that would bring the country 'round to supporting it wholeheartedly.

You remember the Newgate Calendar?

There's a scene early in In His House (should it survive to the final draft and eventually be published) in which one of our petty crooks is passing Marble Arch and a street vendor sells her the modern version -- a glossy part-work magazine complete with a cover-mounted DVD showing the public executions of the current inmates on the corner-gibbets of the Tzompantli. (She deliberately pays for it with a forged banknote, which is itself a capital offense -- hanging, drawing, and quartering, if we go back to Newton's mint.)

You know it makes sense!

48:

Ebook editions (for their respective territories) are published at the same time as the hardback paper editions. You can find them via the usual stores.

49:

None of them are parents, of course, not being human. (And the actual parents having been killed and eaten by Shere Khan. :) The point is what they represent. The wolves were immediate siblings and family, of course, but Baloo and Bagheera were all about how you protect yourself, and pretty much they were a "dividual" rather than having definitely distinct characters. For me this always felt more like "bigger brother" territory. In the second-to-last Mowgli story though, he's completely outgrown both of them, and Kaa is who he turns to for guidance on how to think like an adult.

I'm not sure this would translate well into the Laundryverse though! Talking sentient animals would be an interesting diversion, but I'm not sure how it'd fit. I could see a demonic/magical version of a "universal translator" giving a very Stross-like spin to Dr Doolittle though, in the same way that Bob can command the undead. (With easy access to comedy elements for exactly what the inner monologue of various animals sounds like.)

50:

Films of books almost invariably disgracefully misrepresent them

It's the nature of the media conversion process.

A film script runs at one page per minute of screen time, and about 250 words of dialog and directions per page. So a 2 hour feature film is the output from a 120 page script. This is a lot shorter than a novel, for some reason!

If you want a faithful representation of a book in visual form you need to turn to TV mini-series or graphic novels.

A TV show may only have 42-60 minutes per episode (depending on advertising intermissions -- streaming services omit the ads because they're pay-to-view), but it has a lot more hours of screen time than a movie, so can do a much better job. Production costs are in the range £300,000/hour to £3M/hour for a high quality show.

A graphic novel ... roughly the same timing rule applies -- 1 page of script per illustrated final page, 24 pages/issue, 124 pages to a collected volume -- and is written in the expectation that a reader will scan maybe 1 page/minute (or slower). The constraint there is that the artistic style needs to be consistent, i.e. to emerge from one person -- and good artists seldom work faster than 1 page per day, so a 124 page book involves not just a script but also the work of the primary artist, colourer(s), and letterer(s), for about 6 months (leaving time for weekends, vacation, and sick leave). Assuming you don't pay them abusively you're therefore talking about 2-3 artist-years' of work per 2 hour book, plus editorial, which isn't going to come in at less than £100,000.

So of the three forms, graphic novel adaptations are the cheapest to produce (ball park: £25-50,000 per hour of viewing time), then TV (roughly £300-3M per hour) and finally film (£3M to £300M per hour).

... Guess why none of my work has been turned into a movie yet?

51:

Hmm. I agree that it's hard to tell sufficiently elder siblings from uncles and aunts, but I am pretty sure that my upbringing was closer to his than yours was and I have a brother 14 years younger. Quite a lot of the story related fairly closely to my childhood experiences. I strongly got the bumbling uncle from Baloo, and the protective guardian from Kaa and, to some extent, Bagheera.

In my original post, my mental image was of an orphan being brought up by a variety of non-humans (or at least only partly humans), which WOULD fit into the Laundryverse. Phangs, elves, the Eater of Souls etc. are alien more than intrinsically hostile, and there is no reason for there not to be more. But, as OGH has said and I can witness in other contexts, an ideas person has FAR more ideas than he can possibly implement.

52:

Right. But that's not the whole story, and isn't actually what I was referring to.

The Bridge on the River Kwai was a good film, but I had read the original story, but the end would have grated even if I had not and it spoiled the film for me. Ditto one of King Solomon's Mines (in addition to being obviously Not Being Set In Africa, where I was living), for too many reasons to describe. I watched one episode of The Lord of the Rings, and would have found it OTT and cartoonish even if I had not known the book. There are probably others.

In all the above cases, the gratuitous distortions were obviously at the behest of marketing, or a director who was more of a marketdroid than an artist. Yes, I take the point about the need for drastic shortening (and changes) to fit the process, but is there any need to destroy the spirit of the book while doing so?

53:

Kobo implies that it is releasing the UK edition on October 27th. Whether that will happen is in the Elder Gods' laps ....

54:

I am an enthusiast of 'Team Four Star', who made the very good parody "Hellsing Ultimate Abridged". Imagine a combination of Mr Punch and a vampire. With lots of black humor. As they say, "dying is easy, comedy is hard!" Scene:(Twilight-esque vampires kissing beside dead victims. There is a knock on the door) Q:"Who is that? A:"Well, you know...(first vampire hit by hail of bullets fired through door)...just a real fucking vampire".

55:

I read Barrie's Peter Pan when I was ten or eleven but I didn't really grasp some (maybe a lot) of it. For example, this sentence:

"Here, a little in advance, ever and again with his head to the ground listening, his great arms bare, pieces of eight in his ears as ornaments, is the handsome Italian Cecco, who cut his name in letters of blood on the back of the governor of the prison at Gao."

I found it just now by searching for "Gao" because the name had stuck and I remembered being puzzled by the last part, and the adverse reaction of a passing adult whom I accosted for an explanation.

56:

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." —John le Carré

57:

None of this can be any worse than how you turned a common childhood fantasy character on its head in Equoid, right ;)

58:

Wait ‘til you see what I’m doing to Mary Poppins! (Alas, can’t be published before late 2022.) Also, Hello Kitty gets the Laundry treatment in next summer’s “Escape from Puroland”.

59:

Big fan of Hellsing Ultimate Abridged (and SAO Abridged, but I digress).

I suggested the anime, though, because it's incredibly dark and bloody. Alucard is a walking Eldritch Abomination who would probably get along great with PM Everyman.

60:

You are most welcome. :D

61:

That's ... kinda the penultimate pre-climax of "The Rhesus Chart", more or less?

(If plans come to fruition we will see more of Old George in "Bones and Nightmares", although it's set at a time where he's more Young George than anything else.)

62:

While riding my trike, I was thinking of how Equoid could be turned into a decent (horror) film, without mangling it too horribly.

I am not sure how I will take to Escape from Puroland, as my knowledge of the Hello Kitty genre is limited to playing the DOOM wad. I am not much stronger on Mary Poppins.

63:

Elderly Cynic @ 19: You mean that anything produced by Disney in the past half-century has DEPTH?

Shallow is DEPTH, just not very much of it.

64:

Max Samuel @ 20: If I remember correctly the Mandate needs to be quite close to people to brainwash them, so I'm curious as to how he turned all of Britain into a dictatorship featuring massive piles of skulls in London without sparking a civil war/Scotland breaking off/the EU launching a first strike once they realise who's running the show etc etc.

Also, I've got a question about The Labyrinth Index. If memory serves the spell cast by the Black Chamber making people forget the President exists only covers the US. Given all the overseas military bases, embassies, overseas citizens etc etc how come the whole world didn't freak out within a day once they realised the Americans no longer knew they had a President? If nothing else surely NATO would notice almost instantaneously.

Science Fiction/Fantasy operates on the willing suspension of disbelief by its readers. You're supposed to fill in those gaps yourself.

As far as the EU, NATO and other allies around the world vis-à-vis the Black Chamber, I suspect they all have problems of their own with various manifestations popping up. IIRC there are suggestions in The Labyrinth Index that the middle-east has had an outbreak of Djinn (which the Host of Air & Darkness are being sent off to fight) and The Delerium Brief begins with Bob just back from battling Kaiju in Japan.

They probably haven't even noticed the U.S. has forgotten it has a President. And I expect the military, diplomats & expats are on their own.

65:

And, given the current situation, anyone who did notice would heave a sigh of relief and collectively agree not to do anything to remind the USA of the existence of a president. The Mandate, of course, is not a member of the class 'humans, near-humans and half-humans', so doesn't count as 'anyone'.

66:

"A TV show may only have 42-60 minutes per episode"

Charlie, I have very bad news for you: when my late wife and I taped some B-5, for example, in the nineties, it was 42 min. When my late ex and I were taping some shows, 15 and more years ago, it was 38 minutes of show.

67:

The thing about the Jungle Book films that really makes me cringe is King Louie's song. When I was young I just thought "What a silly monkey, thinking that having fire will turn him into a man". These days I can see the vicious racist subtext. Let me spell it out...

  • King Louie is a monkey who wants to level up to human being, and thinks he can do it by acquiring knowledge.

  • The song is jazz, which was created by black Americans, and widely condemned as "jungle music".

  • So the subtext is very clearly equating blacks to monkeys, and saying that black people can't become fully human merely by acquiring knowledge; no matter what they do, they will always be monkeys in the jungle.

    Urrghh.

    (Aside: I'd always thought from the singing that it was Louis Armstrong, which would have made it even worse. I was surprised to learn that it was actually an Italian American called Louis Prima.)

    68:

    Not knowing about it, I found a video on theirtube of someone playing the Hello, Kitty wad.

    sigh

    Wish someone had come up with a toolkit to replace the monsters themselves with other forms....

    Also, I was never crazed about unicorns. Ever read Ariel, by Boyett? And I have quoted, since I first saw the cartoon in the nineties? eighties? the unicorn and something else, standing in front of a shop window in the middle of the night, with the caption, "if I see one more CUTE UNICORN...."

    69:

    I'm not convinced by the structural biomechanics of a unicorn. The usual depictions are quite clear that the skull is the same shape as a standard horse but with a great big long pointy pole glued on the front. Strikes me that any more than a little lateral force on that is just going to lever the front of the creature's brain case off, and make it easy to scoop out the contents and have them on toast.

    70:

    re Louis Prima: less well-known than Armstrong, but not really that obscure, and there's an award named after him :)

    71:

    That was intended to be a reply to comment #19 by ElderlyCynic, btw, I seem to have messed up (sigh)

    72:

    Mediaeval unicorns were goat-like. We are clearly more stupid than we used to be.

    73:

    I happen to agree. There's a cute little American comic strip called Phoebe and her Unicorn where the unicorn (Marigold Heavenly Nostrils) is as the Medieval portrayal. It's a bit like Calvin and Hobbes, without the greatness of that strip.

    Anyway, people have been occasionally making unicorn goats for awhile (here's the one that Ringling Brothers used to have. That unicorn ("Lanceolot") was apparently created by Oberon Zell who patented the technique of surgically making unicorns. As a good magician should, of course.

    But where this whole horny equine thing came from? Probably because of the sexual symbolism of having a goat who was conceptually rampant at both ends, perhaps? I dunno. Could be that a goat with a single horn wouldn't be as scary as a horse with a lance attached.

    I suppose, if you wanted to be really messy, a magical goat that was a unicorn would be a really interesting way to go. Personality of a goat. Plus magic. What could possibly go wrong?

    74:

    Actually, thinking about it, where might one go with a backstory that "in the 1970s, a wizard patents a way to surgically turn young goats into magical unicorns by fusing there horns." I mean, they're still domestic animals. But they're magical goats. Ummm.... Hmmm.... Horror? Or comedy?

    Oh by the way, the patent expired in 2001, so anyone can do it now.

    75:

    Re: 'Horror? Or comedy?'

    I could really use some comedy these days.

    Wonder if any academic ever did an analysis of fiction top sellers' plots and/or background atmosphere based on then-current socio-politics plus a hero vs. antagonist personality profile analysis. Victor Hugo would be

    76:

    Oh, ar? That makes more sense of the hypothesis that the idea came from people seeing the Arabian oryx side-on, then.

    77:

    The standard thoughts about the origin of the unicorn are:

  • Indian rhinoceros
  • Aurochs
  • The latter isn't one-horned, but there are seals and possibly other illustrations from the fertile crescent of the "re'em" (probably aurochs) portrayed in silhouette, which gives it a single horn. Re'em got translated as "unicorn" in various Bibles, but as a metaphor (he has the strength of a re'em), it makes sense as a referent to the aurochs, which were monsters.

    Sad and boring, it's true. I'd much rather have fun with people making flocks of their own unicorns and making a nomadic living with them. But I'm weird.

    78:

    What about narwhals? Note that unlike rhinos they are carnivorous.

    79:

    Re the Jungle Book- maybe not surprising because Kipling [on the other hand when I read his early "The Light that Failed" I was expecting the book to be about something else entirely, not about the main character's encroaching blindness which, apparently, was like that of the author's, which only goes to show the wholly unsurprising fact that there's more to an author than I think.]

    81:

    In the size pic, the paraceratherium is up there with my favorite from when I was about 12, the baluchitherium - wait, you mean it's the same critter?

    That spoils a joy of my childhood, the bums.

    82:

    Oh, narwhal horn was used as unicorn horn for quite some time, and that seems to be the origin of the Medieval unicorn horn shape. But I don't think that the cetacean source was necessarily disclosed to the customers.

    As for Elasmotherium, you first have to postulate that it survived into the present...

    Anyway, there's a moving target here. The Hellenistic world thought of these as living creatures. Since they were trading with India, since India had one-horned Indian rhinoceroses, and since rhino horn seems to have been a trade item since, well, Greek times, that's the logical answer right there. Medieval Europeans didn't see rhinos until they started traveling to India on a regular basis, so it's unsurprising that they'd get weird ideas about what they look like, especially with shysters selling any bit of horn they can get their hands on as unicorn horn.

    As for the aurochs=unicorn thing. There's a Hebrew word "re'em" that sometimes gets translated as "unicorn" and there are bronze age seal drawings showing an aurochs in profile that makes it look like it has a single horn. The assumption is that the scholars translating the Hebrew into [language] had no idea what an aurochs looked like, and so translated it as "unicorn." Probably the seal images had nothing to do with it until the more modern cryptozoologists and uninformed humanities scholars got in the act.

    And we haven't even gotten to the Chinese Qilin. How ancient are they? Elephrhino (Hell if I know. It's a childhood joke about what you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino). Speaking of which, in Shang era China (cf 1400 BCE) Indian Rhinos and Indian Elephants were fairly common in forests and wildlands bordering the Yellow River. Subsequent clearing for farming ultimately drove into extinction. The Chinese of course knew about elephant ivory and rhino horn from trade with southeast Asia, but who knows whether they got their old stories about elephants and rhinos on their home turf confused and mythologized something else? It certainly happens.

    83:

    The Qilin is a very different beasty, though, and I've even heard it claimed that they were based on the giraffe.

    84:

    I've been under the impression that novellas translate better to movies than books. Makes sense.

    One remedial reading/writing exercise I had for my middle school students (ages roughly 11-13/14) with learning disabilities was to rewrite a child's picture book as a one-act play, then have them perform it for kindergarten and first grade classes. It was a really good way to slip in some social studies learning especially since I liked to do this around MLK Day (did one on Rosa Parks and another on Martin Luther King Jr). The other time was the period between Thanksgiving in the US and winter vacation. There were always a lot of things going on during that time (including closures for bad weather, concerts and so on) and it was entertaining as well as educational. I used Jan Brett holiday-themed books for those plays.

    The other piece was that this removed the stigma of poor reading and reading picture books, because, as I explained to the students, that little book when translated into a play ended up being at least 20 minutes long. I really did learn to appreciate the complexity of translating written words into play/script form. We did it as a group, and it actually did turn out pretty well. Or so I thought.

    85:

    Zheng He brought giraffes back from Africa, which were associated with the qilin.

    Have you read Retreat of the Elephants?

    This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and religious sources, which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of the Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape.

    Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time.

    https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119930/retreat-elephants

    86:

    Yes, in fact I did read it some time ago. That's my basis for thinking that someone could have gotten weird about ancient Chinese rhinos being Qilin. The more I think about it the less I like it, but the Chinese are no less prone to making up fabulous beasts than the Europeans are. See Chinese lions (aka foo dogs), for example. Or those lovely Chinese dragons.

    87:

    reynoldsward @84: I've been under the impression that novellas translate better to movies than books. Makes sense.

    88:

    Aaargh!! Re novellas...

    Yes, they do seem to work best.

    A perfect example of such is the movie "RollerBall" (1975), based on the novella, "Roller Ball Murder", by William Harrison, screenplay by William Harrison.

    Okay, when the author writes the screenplay, you'd expect the story to remain the same, but it fits well into 125 minutes.

    89:

    Speaking for myself, I am hooked on the Laundryverse series and tend to pre-order as soon as the opportunity arises. Yet I have never met OGH, and suspect that our viewpoints, politics and neurotypes are sufficiently different to elicit a reaction similar to that of mixing potassium metal and water, should we ever meet.

    So no, I suspect that book signing tours are not actually all that important, once a reputation has been established.

    90:

    Uneven horns are fairly common in some ruminants, and narwhals are closely related to beluga, so I was wondering how likely it would be for a ruminant to evolve to have a single horn. I can see it being advantageous in thick undergrowth, so it's not anti-Darwinian. While it's not actually impossible that such a thing evolved, lasted until prehistoric times, and has left no evidence, it's not the way I would bet :-) But it would fit well with a (closely) parallel universe, where elves, dwarfs, trolls and unicorns could all have diverged from us 3-8 megayears ago.

    91:

    Yes, gods - that patent was REAL? From the description, that implies a unicorn could evolve in (say) a tenth of that time. One could probably be bred in a couple of centuries.

    92:

    Or unbred, if two horns turned out to be a dominant gene, though that seems unlikely - it would presumably be obvious from the fossil records. But bred, then unbred doesn't seem unlikely, nor does the idea that someone in the past few thousand years had the same idea as the Zells.

    93:

    I'd really like to see a movie made from Schmitz's novella, "Demon Breed". Any time I read it I see it spooling in my head as an SF action-thriller movie, part "Die Hard" and part "Avatar" with a good chunk of James Bond-style OTT posing thrown in.

    "How do you like your Greater Palachs, Tuleva Etland?"

    "Shaken, not stirred."

    94:
    With easy access to comedy elements for exactly what the inner monologue of various animals sounds like.

    Just be careful with the squirrels.

    95:

    And will your eventual CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN novel be based on the Very Hungry Caterpillar?

    96:

    Talking sentient animals would be an interesting diversion, but I'm not sure how it'd fit.

    It wouldn't.

    TLDR is, human language is innately human. We know certain other species can communicate or have language skills, but firstly, there's a lot of argument over the semantic richness of their communications, and secondly some of them are biomechanically not adapted to human speech (or sign language, for that matter), and thirdly, as Wittgenstein pointed out, "if a lion could talk, we could not understand him": he'd be talking about lion perceptions of lion interests and framing them in terms of lion cognition. We'd be, at best, "talkative food".

    Now imagine talking to a communicating bee hive. What's that going to be like?

    97:

    Now imagine talking to a communicating bee hive. What's that going to be like?

    Like she of many names?

    98:

    I am not convinced. We are both social mammals, and we have most of that in common, including basic domination, sex, family etc. To some extent, we share reactions to external conditions, vulnerability and predation, even with lions, and far more with jackals etc. Yes, we would be talkative food, and would have little communication outside those areas, but I don't see that nothing would be feasible.

    A talkative beehive is another matter entirely! We might, just, be able to talk about the basics of the weather - e.g. "Wind too strong".

    99:

    FieryOne No, the bees would mae a lot more sense. I suggest you ask Greanny Weatherwax or Tiffany Aching

    100:

    My personal favorite "like to see a movie of" is Niven and Pournelle's "Footfall."

    For OGH's work I'm not sure what would translate well to film. "A Colder War" would be nice to see,* but how would anyone make "Accelerando" into a movie? "The Atrocity Archives" would be fun as film, but the cinematography would have to be first-rate to capture feel of the parallel earth.

    • It would be particularly nice to see updated for the Trump era - if you thought Reagan screwed up relations with the Elder Gods, what would Trump do? And we could have John Bolton as Cthulhu!
    101:

    Didn't Gregory Benford do just that in his part of Beyond the Fall of Night? At one point one of the characters encounters an "anthology intelligence" which flies as a squad around him, forming shapes to communicate.

    102:

    I'd really like to see a movie made from Schmitz's novella, "Demon Breed".

    Yes, it has a lot of good cinema-friendly adventure in an exotic setting. Done right, it would show the Parahuans' dawning realization that "Things Aren't Going Right." I'd hope that the final part, the other aliens' formal hearing into what happened, could be included, but that might not be easy to meld with the adventure.

    103:

    Might it work better as a video game than a movie? And did you notice that the animals on that planet had trilateral symmetry?

    I've thought about Schmitz's stories for movies or a TV series for years. Problem is, their time is kind of past (super spies and psionics?), and a lot of what made them novel (strong heroines) is getting done by people like Joss Whedon in other story universes, so they'd look a bit derivative. Still, fun stories, and some of my favorite monsters and settings.

    104:

    Yes, it has a lot of good cinema-friendly adventure in an exotic setting.

    First time I saw the trailers for Avatar I thought "That would be perfect for a movie of Demon Breed".

    It's got a lot going for it in terms of modern movie production -- Nile Etland is the quintessential Competent Female character magnified a thousand by her portrayal of a Tuleva super-human. I don't know it meets the Bechdel test since she's the female protagonist and the only other female of note is on one of the sleds and they never meet. It's possible one or more of the Parahuans she engages with is female but I don't think it's ever made clear. Sweeting is female, though... Mutant hunting otters for the win! (and some great underwater cinematography).

    The main male character is very much a Sidekick and definitely not a Romantic Interest, having to be rescued by Nile Etland before being fridged in a floatwood plant while she goes off to save the planet.

    I want this! Instead we're getting Marvel Movie 23 and Dune Dun Again. Boo.

    105:

    Now imagine talking to a communicating bee hive. What's that going to be like?

    Pretty easy. Researchers have made waggle dancing mini-robots for years. Heck, I talk to bees to not get stung when I walk through a bush they're busy visiting. They don't understand the words, but they understand the attitude.

    Wittgenstein pointed out, "if a lion could talk, we could not understand him": he'd be talking about lion perceptions of lion interests and framing them in terms of lion cognition. We'd be, at best, "talkative food".

    It seems likely that Wittgenstein never owned a cat, doesn't it? My cat's yelling at me from the other end of the house that she wants some attention, and she'll get it once I'm done here. While I'm pretty sure that she doesn't have an internal monologue, I'm pretty sure we're co-creating a system to communicate with each other that's more than good enough for our needs.

    I'm also pretty sure that: a) most animals we've domesticated (cats, pigeons, horses, dogs, etc.) are good enough at understanding us in their own ways b) humans that live with these animals are pretty good at communicating with them, especially if they get some education in the matter, and c) animals of different species routinely communicate with each other, and some of those communications can be surprisingly sophisticated.

    As for "talkative food?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gd18a8cdI. Note that I don't advocate keeping big cats as pets. But not understanding them? Pffft. Disproof by example.

    106:

    Uneven horns are fairly common in some ruminants, and narwhals are closely related to beluga, so I was wondering how likely it would be for a ruminant to evolve to have a single horn.

    The basic answers are: a) rhinos evolved back in the Eocene, long before there were ruminants. They don't have single sharp horns, but some do have single horns. b) ruminants won't evolve single horns because they're a crap design, especially for ruminants.

    As for b), there are a couple of problems. One is: what do you do with a single horn? Impale things? And when the horn gets stuck, or breaks, or gets dull, then what? At least woolly rhinos used their large, but narrow, front horns as snow shovels.

    It's hard to have breeding battles with single horns. Narwhals apparently do duel with their single tusks, but they also appear to use their tusks as cudgels to whack fish laterally before grabbing the stunned fish with their mouths. The tusks, incidentally, are particularly straight or sharp. Not a good ram, compared with what other dolphins have.

    Now, let's get to ruminants. Primitive deer (like musk deer) do have sharpish spike antlers. You wouldn't want to get jabbed by them. Heck, you don't want to be gored by any antlers. The dozen tines of a bull elk would be that much worse.

    And that gets to the point: antlers are bone, with a hard sheath and sometimes a spongy interior (in elk). Their not steel spears, they're bone, so a long, thin bony point is an injury waiting to happen. Deer get around this in two ways: they make a lot of shorter points mounted on a rack (antlers), and they keep them "sharp" and "repair" breaks by shedding them annually and regrowing them. It's a hell of a waste of calcium, but it works, both as a weapon and as a health signal.

    Bovines (goats, antelopes, cattle) don't shed their horns. They just grow them from the base. Note that they rarely have straight stabbing horns? Their problem would be keeping the tips sharp. Now bulls and bison do have sharp horns, but they're not in the main line of thrust, they're hooks off to one side. Bison in particular can be very dextrous and very brutal with those short horns of theirs. I've seen a story about a bull bison using a horn as a ribcage opener on a domestic bull, and tourists are regularly getting gored in the ass by cow bison keeping the idiots away from their calves (which, IMHO, speaks highly of the self-restraint of the female bison). Sheep, goats, and antelope tend not to ram with their horns but butt heads. They only bring the tips to play (if they have them) in hooking motions when they're chasing something away. I suspect this has to do with the breaking strength of the horns. They aren't built to take the full force of impact (through the tip of the horn, down the shank, to the skull), but rather take a lesser, lateral force with a hooking jab.

    Now a unicorn goat may be socially crippled. Goats butt heads to establish rank. How does a unicorn goat (or bull, for that matter), but heads? It's got a somewhat curving straight-ish horn, and it's going to slam that into the thickest part of its rival's skull, where it will slide off, and...? Get the picture? It's not useful.

    As a magic wand (or a fish cudgel, or a snow shovel) a single, straight horn is useful. As a spear, it would have to have a sharp tip while growing from the base, and horns simply don't grow that way. Nor do antlers.

    I think the most useful point in this process isn't the arguing, it's actually thinking about a couple of things. One is how structures grow, and the other is the complex physics of using materials for specific purposes. A sword made out of horn won't work the way a steel sword would, due to the properties of the horn. This is doubly true if it is grown rather than manufactured. Thus, if you want to make a horn weapon, you've got to work with the properties of the horn as a material and the process by which it is generated. That generally leads to something that doesn't look like a sword, but that's okay. That's just physics in action.

    107:

    I would point the group at the East African oryx:

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

    which not only has straight-ish horns, but also occasionally loses one:

    http://www.theequinest.com/images/oryx-1.jpg

    108:

    Accelerando would make a great one-off season on a streaming service. Something that could be binged in one go. Probably 6-8 hours of final produced content. If it blew people away you could then hand over follow up seasons as side stories. Plenty of universe there to flesh out.

    The best model to match to the Laundry Files is probably The Expanse. They took a set of novels and stretched and mixed pieces and parts to make a solid multi-POV structure. Sticking with the structure mainly from Bob's POV would be tough. It has value in the books, but in a series it is a very small hole through which to see the larger world. The Expanse also hasn't felt obliged to stick to "One Book - One Season" as has been the case with other series. That has given them the freedom to flesh out characters and settings, and lay ground work earlier too.

    You could do the Laundry Files as a Marvel Cinematic Universe of movies, but the only narratively satisfactory way to do that is to guarantee a multi-movie deal at the very high end of the budget spectrum. That would have the benefit of making a single main POV character easier to do though.

    The one I don't hear people mentioning that would be excellent and is practically built for big budget movies or TV series is the Eschaton universe. You can start with any number of near contemporary people and mix them with Super High tech people a thousand years more advanced. Avoid the temporal plot issues Charlie had all together, or use a different way of handling them, and it is a universe ripe for space opera.

    I know Charlie hates TV and isn't a big fan of movie franchises either, so this is mostly just wishful thinking on my part.

    109:

    One is: what do you do with a single horn?

    Roll cars?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNncy1mUx1k

    110:

    "The Atrocity Archives" is under option for TV, and bounces in and out of that pre-pitch limbo every few years. Eventually it might stick. (It's more likely to turn into a graphic novel first -- that's increasingly a viable route into getting TV/film studio attention, and the startup costs are much lower, so it's not impossible.)

    111:

    Translating the Laundryverse to video does have a bit of a "Men In Black" problem, as well as a bit of a Torchwood problem, as well as precursors among lesser TV shows like The Librarians and Grimm. Setting itself apart from those would take a bit of doing. The loyal fanbase does help, though.

    And actually, thinking about it, the Laundryverse has a "Lovecraft Country" problem, in that the HBO series seems to be very popular and better than the book, for reasons peculiar to the book. That's a real bar to clear.

    Still, maybe if Brexit fizzles and Covid19 clears, there will be enough extra money for the BBC to cast Bob*...?

    Oddly enough, the Merchant Prince Multiverse might have better TV carrying power, since it looks like it would take less in the special effects department. Getting some video money (HBO, perhaps) and ending the first series with a nuclear war might make up for the misery of the last few years.

    *Wonder how casting Bob as black of multi-generational Caribbean descent would play? Computer nerds are presumed to be white, no?

    112:

    You are creating straw men.

    Where did I say that such a horn was straight and pointing straight forward?

    Or that it would be an actual evolution of a goat?

    I am fully aware that very few of the ruminants use their horns as spears; there are several antelopes that have their horns very close together (the oryx being the best-known), which makes them little different (as weapons) from a single horn of the same shape. Your knowledge of mechanics is at fault if you believe that a centred horn is necessarily much weaker than one towards each side.

    I will accept that a single horn is less useful for a butting competition, but I don't believe in the religion that anything that didn't happen couldn't have happened. In any case, there isn't a single form of sexual competition even among ruminants - see below.

    Where a single horn does help, somewhat, is in thick undergrowth. Despite being woodland creatures, there are records of at least red deer getting tangled up in undergrowth by the horns. Wikipedia's description of kudu (another woodland creature) is interesting, too. If correct, it gives a slight evolutionary advantage to a single horn - two curved horns are easy to lock for a pulling competition (try it), and will never be possible to unlock.

    113:

    Plenty of universe there to flesh out.

    Which is exactly why it makes for terrible film/TV.

    Film/TV needs to be about character interaction, dialog, and action. Accelerando is almost none of the above. (Indeed, my fiction in general is pretty poor material for visual media -- too much interior narrative/introspection.)

    114:

    I know you love to argue, but would you realize, please, that I normally use a 5-6' hiking pole or trail hoe in thick chaparral, and I have done so for a good chunk of the last half century? Long poles are really useful on the steep slopes I work on. It's not because they're easy to maneuver in the brush (They're a fucking nuisance) but rather, when you're working on a slope that's 50 degrees and made of mudstone, the long stick can act as a third leg to help you rest your weight on that isolated stable spot a couple feet down while your feet and body negotiate the bush you're stuck in, without falling down the hill. This makes up for the awkwardness of using a staff in the brush.

    And before you argue that unicorns don't use their horns as legs, of course they don't. The problem is moving anything long and straight through anything resembling dense brush. As I said, it's a fucking nuisance. The only reason to do this is if the stick has some other critical use, like keeping you from falling down a slope.

    So no, a single horn does not provide an advantage in the forest. The many forest deer and antelope simply have shorter horns. Or antlers (cf white-tailed deer, roe deer, etc).

    If we're talking about a unicorn, we're talking about a single, more-or-less straight horn, centered on the head, and growing perpendicular out of the forehead. Now there are a lot of fossil mammalian herbivores (and for that matter, dinosaurs and synapsids) that have head decorations, and the only ones that even tried this arrangement are narwhals and some rhinos. And neither uses their horns the way a unicorn is theorized to do.

    115:

    In general, yes, but I would except Equoid, the Concrete Jungle and Down on the Farm.

    116:

    I think you underestimate the potential in Accelerando for a visual medium. Film/TV are about overcoming obstacles, and conflict in how to to that. Accelerando is an asteroid apocalypse story where the asteroid is our own tech, helpfully an aspect of that tech is ?personified? in a cute furry entity. It is an escape story, and there are plenty of characters or aspects of characters to riff off of, to show their POV during the apocalypse. There is problem solving all throughout it, which is great to visualize. The ending as written with the kids is a great teaser for more super weird stuff should people want to continue.

    117:

    OGH @ 96, "if a lion could talk..."

    Also, you couldn't trust a word they'd say...

    119:

    Yeah, that one would work. The idea that there are a lot of Tuvelas, and they're not visibly different from "normal" humans, that could be brought out a little more.

    There's also his "Agent of Vega" stories - they'd be good, also. People working to prevent/stop invasions of extremely-hostile extremely-alien critters, as well as some very weird humanoids...

    120:

    The bigger problem with Accelerando is that we're right now living through that future, and it's...not here. It's becoming a paleofuture as we speak, sadly.

    Now, if you want a truly ridiculous alt-future, how about one in which Donald J Trump goes bankrupt in 2000 and becomes a business school case study in what not to do. What happens next? And/or, heck, a cat-5 hurricane takes out Florida as the turning point in the 2000 presidential election, and we get President Gore.

    Then maybe...Accelerando? I don't know. But why not?

    121:

    Speaking from family experience - bulls can kill you by shoving you into a solid object like a wall. Easy to do, leaves interloper just as dead as using horns.

    122:

    head decorations, and the only ones that even tried this arrangement are narwhals and some rhinos

    Scratch the Narwhal from that. Its pointy bit is a tusk, usually the upper left canine, and not a horn.

    123:

    Why would unicorn horns have to be long? I'd think anything less than two feet long would work fine for whatever purposes unicorns need them for.

    124:

    Are we already in the outer solar system and I missed it? Was the solar system disassembled in a grossly non-visually amazing way, and I missed? Did we all start living in a simulation?...alright don’t answer that last one.

    We are living through the first part of the book, with reality’s own writer fiat being exercised on various matters. The later half of the book is a huge launch into a world that isn’t here, yet.

    125:

    To remind you, I have experience with chaparral (and similar undergrowth in both Africa and Europe), as well as carrying a stick (and sticks) through them.

    And who is this "we" you are talking about? Some of us are rather more mentally flexible. Fer chrissake, an evolved unicorn would be nothing like those totally damn-fool horses with narwhal tusks of mythology.

    126:

    It seems to me that there must be a lot more to it than things getting stuck in the vegetation. I too have used third legs - found on the spot, rather than brought with me - and it's quite easy not to get them stuck if you hold them by one end and let them trail behind you. The oryx horn pattern seems to be close to the ideal for not getting stuck in the forest, but they don't live anywhere near one.

    OTOH trying to cart an un-trimmed chunk of tree, even quite a small one, with branches and things, is a pain in the arse; because it's got bits sticking out all over at all sorts of angles, it's constantly getting tangled in everything and there isn't really any angle to carry it at that reduces that tendency very much. On this basis red deer (US: elk) horns (antlers) are a bloody awful design, and indeed (as EC says) they do get them tangled in vegetation and are then quite likely not to get out alive. They also get them inextricably tangled with each other when fighting and then they're both fucked. But most of the time they don't seem to find it too much of a problem.

    As for single central horns, I suspect they are pretty much precluded by the way mammals are glued together down the middle. A single central horn would be growing out of the seam. Narwhal tusks are not really single, in that they are made from "one on each side" twisted round each other, and rhino horns of course aren't horns. It's easy for evolution to come up with all kinds of variations on the theme of things that are the same on each side, but the narwhal kind of variation takes some arriving at, and the kind of asymmetry it would take to produce one in the middle doesn't seem to happen at all on anything beyond fish.

    127:

    More likely, climate change is going to mess up our ability to do the Accelerando thing as predicated in the 1990s by Kurzweil and crew. The only reason for positing President Gore as a necessary precondition for that is that we're currently about 30 years behind where we need to be to deal with climate change. If he'd actually won that election and done something about climate change, we'd only be about a decade behind. And that changes the balance to favor something a bit more like a singularity.

    So far as I can tell right now, one critical time period for AI is around the late 2030s early 2040s. If trend lines continue to hold, that's when a computer with about the computing power of a human brain will use about as much power as a human brain. That's assuming that trends in lessening watts per flop and increasing computing capacity both continue to hold, which is a really huge assumption.

    At the same time, the 2030s and 2040s are when the shit really starts to hit the fan on climate change, both in trends (hello 2oC rise over baseline) and in our attempts to go carbon negative. California, for example, has pledged to go carbon neutral before 2045. If that particular miracle happens (and there are a lot of forces arrayed against it--fighting them is one of my major jobs), then we've still got a really crappy environmental situation, but we have a chance in hell of doing something about it.

    In addition to a really miserably climate around 2040, we may actually have human-comparable computers that only use a few hundred watts, which may or may not be a game changer, depending on how they're made, deployed, who owns them, who makes them, and what they're used for.

    Now I think Charlie will have an interesting critique of this massive over-simplification, and I'd probably agree with him on most of it. However, if you want to tip the climate/singularity balance in favor of something more like a Singularity and a bit less like a climatic civilization crash, I think the simplest science fiction solution is to set the story in an alternate universe where the US starts dealing with its petroleum dependency a few decades earlier and makes the crisis a lot less bad. Hence, Trump goes bankrupt, Gore wins the 2000 election, and most of us are driving electric cars in 2020.

    128:

    I should note that American elk tend to live in things like Pacific Northwest Coast rainforest (on the meadows), rocky mountain forests (burned regularly and open) and in grasslands around the state. They're not chaparral animals. Chaparral deer are mule deer, which are quite a bit smaller. Oryx are desert species. The one we should be arguing about are moose, which, oddly enough, don't have so many points on their antlers.

    As for horns: they're keratin with a bony core. Rhino horns are also keratin, without the core. Antlers are bone. But otherwise I agree on the central point, which is that it's hard to get a bony cored object off a suture in a mammalian skeleton.

    As for getting antler stuck in brush...I don't disagree that elk/red deer antlers can get stuck in stuff, but I've also see buck mule deer do pretty darn well in chaparral. Granted they prefer trails, but I think experience growing up in the terrain makes it a lot easier.

    129:

    So far as I can tell right now, one critical time period for AI is around the late 2030s early 2040s. If trend lines continue to hold, that's when a computer with about the computing power of a human brain will use about as much power as a human brain.

    Unfortunately, last time I looked there was some pretty solid evidence that individual neurons in the human neocortex are computationally sophisticated -- they're not simple gates/switches/neuristors, they actually perform meaningful data processing internally before they emit anything.

    This may well move the goalposts on brain-equivalent AI by anything from 2-7 orders of magnitude, in the wrong direction.

    130:

    That would explain a lot, right? Charlie frequently predicts the future, so we're living in an Accelerando-type universe, and this is a historical sim being played for laughs!

    "You think that's terrible? I had a DM once who sent us to a universe where Trump was President! And we were all zero-level characters in our fifties!"

    131:

    Heteromeles @ 73: Anyway, people have been occasionally making unicorn goats for awhile (here's the one that Ringling Brothers used to have. That unicorn ("Lanceolot") was apparently created by Oberon Zell who patented the technique of surgically making unicorns. As a good magician should, of course.

    The last time I went to the circus was the year Ringling Brothers introduced their "unicorn"

    Alas, Ringling Brothers Circus is no more.

    I liked the one quote from the article about Ringling Brothers “Many people could not even recognize them as being goats at all,”.

    "Many people" are blind as a bat. All you gotta do is look at it and you can see it's a goat whose horns are growing together. Moreover, if you're still not convinced, just smell it. It smells like a goat.

    Cool beans, and apparently it doesn't do the goat any harm.

    132:

    Oh, yes. If a ruminant were to evolve a single horn, it would be as the narwhal did - a single one of a bilateral feature became dominant and migrated to the centre; there are other such examples in evolution. The horn-tangling issue is pretty minor compared with the sexual dominance aspect, which explains both red deer and kudu. My point never was that such a thing was likely, but that it's not biologically impossible. It didn't happen, that's all.

    133:

    I recently read an article which says that Broadcom (I think) has figured out how to attach processors and memory directly to a hard drive. There's your neuron right there!

    Worst-case scenario, we're looking at emulating neurons in memory, which means each getting a little processing time from a multi-core processor. The big problem is that it won't be either fast or smart in it's earliest incarnation.

    134:

    "A Boy and His God" would be a really fun cartoon. I'm not sure you could get a whole movie out of it.

    135:

    DigiCom @ 107: I would point the group at the East African oryx:

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

    which not only has straight-ish horns, but also occasionally loses one:

    http://www.theequinest.com/images/oryx-1.jpg

    It points in the wrong direction, but I guess the same kind of surgical intervention that worked on baby goats might work a baby Oryx, and I guess if it did, it would also be possible to turn the horn bud so the horn grew at the right angle.

    But why?

    136:

    I'm glad you saw it. I remember the ads, but we never went.

    Getting back to this part of the thread, I don't drag Oberon Zell for patenting this procedure. AFAIK, he made and sold a couple of unicorn goats to the circus. Considering how simple it is to do this (he's not the first, and by rights he should have gotten rejected on prior art), he was simply protecting his business. IIRC, he and his wife used the money from the unicorn sales to go hunt for Papuan mermaids. They found out that there weren't mermaids, just cryptozoologists who couldn't translate the local word for dugong properly.

    Anyway, if we wanted to descend from here into really base fantasy...

    Let's posit, for a second, that the surgically created unicorn horn has the same powers as the original: detoxification. In a goat this isn't a bad thing: they'll always find food and water, because their magical horn makes it for them as they go.

    Then we shift over to this rather archaic form of survival, Jim Corbett's Goatwalking. That's a rather odd 1991 book that's worth hunting out if you like odd books, but what he's describing is probably about 4000-5000 years old: a herder befriends a herd of goats and goes wild with them (domestic and tame don't quite work in this context). So long as the females produce milk, the herder has a source of liquid and protein, and can forage on other things as they go. It's an interesting survival strategy, because it means that a human can live off the goats, not just off what (s)he can forage. This technique almost certainly is where the Eurasian nomads came from: unfree people (call them slaves, serfs, or peasants) took their flocks and bugged out across the steppes to get away from tyrannical rulers. It's documented to have happened repeatedly, in China (where the wall was as much to keep peasants from escaping to the steppe as to keep the Mongols out), Russia (the cossacks are peasants turned nomads), and so on.

    So in any intolerable situation, say a climate crisis that breaks civilization, or being taxed to death on a really borderline farm, making a herd of unicorn goats would be a magical way to really bug out and live anywhere, depending on the unicorn's magic horns to make water drinkable and food palatable. The unicorns couldn't reproduce their magic, that's the human's job. It's also the human's job to referee, because the single-horned goats can't easily butt heads to establish their customary dominance hierarchy. Still, there's an interesting idea in there, and I'm pretty sure no one's used it yet...

    137:

    This may well move the goalposts on brain-equivalent AI by anything from 2-7 orders of magnitude, in the wrong direction.

    So, three to ten years, then...

    138:

    I'm now perverting beloved childhood icons for my own nefarious purposes

    So, Peter and Wendy, you've mentioned Mary Poppins, who else? Rudyard Kipling and Roald Dahl are already dark, and I don't know whether Julia Donaldson is widely-known enough (and the Gruffalo is already slightly subversive)... Andy Pandy's basket as a metaphor for the Sleeper? Zebedee as a weakly-Godlike emergent AI? The Wombles as highly-organised ambush predators?

    Oh, F**k. You're going to do A. A. Milne, aren't you. Heffalumps and the Hundred Acres of Terror...

    139:

    Little Nemo in Slumberland?

    140:

    Actually, I'm waiting for the story, seven months or so from now, about how Lil Abner's "Schmoo" series was actually about Shoggoths.

    141:

    You're going to do A. A. Milne, aren't you

    Oh thank you so much, now my brain is trying to fill in such gems as...

    Tzompantli tzompantli tzompantli high
    A die can't minion, but a minion can die
    Balk me or fail me and I reply
    Tzompantli tzompantli tzompantli high

    ...and...

    They're piling skulls at Buckingham palace,
    Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

    142:

    Little Byakhee on the Prairie? Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family settle the Dreamlands?

    Really Deep Holes? Bad children are sent to live with Deep Seven in the hopes of reforming the poor, naughty kids. "You take a bad kid, and send him down a hole that leads to the deep mantle, and he becomes a good kid!"

    Old Yeller? A young ghoul befriends a midwestern family in need, then must be put down because it's mating season...

    Tom Swift, Reanimator?

    The Heinlein Cthulveniles?

    The Muppets of Madness?

    143:

    It's worth suggesting that "dominance" could be a dead end there, but sexual selection may not be. I think the latter is the pathway Darwin himself is more likely to explore if the telos is a unicorn's horn. I mean, not just symbolically. Female sexual selection is perhaps a stronger driver than natural selection in producing the more outre traits that some animals are famous for. Frank already mentioned the possibility the horn could be an indicator of health, which is where this stuff (per some hypotheses) gets started. But it doesn't take more indicator-of-health-ness for the feedback loop to kick in and generate things that are quite fanciful. Is a single strait forehead-mounted horn too tame? Surely you want a rainbow-striped spiral and a mother-of-pearl sheen... all this is quite possible.

    144:

    So does that mean we're finally going to find out what happened to James James Morrison Morrison's mother?

    145:

    I can see a whole other ending to "what to tiggers like to eat?" going on...

    146:

    There are multiple meanings of "dominance" here.

    One is the question of who gets to breed with who. Normally this is which male gets to breed with which females, but there's a whole group of birds that flipped it, so that the females fight over which males get to care for their eggs. But that doesn't happen in mammals.

    The other issue is the dominance hierarchy of the pecking order, which minimizes fighting once it's sorted out. This is part of the problem for unicorns, because the horn is either too deadly or too ineffective to be used as a weapon to establish who gives way to who.

    In the hypothetical herd of goat unicorns, even if they were all female, they'd still need to settle who's boss. If they all have single horns and butt heads, that gets kind of messy and ineffective. The human herd boss would need to help sort out and enforce the order to minimize bloodshed and damaged horns, and also to teach them alternative ways to squabble and sort things out.

    147:

    No, that's completely wrong. It would be Tom Swift and His Electric Reanimator.

    148:

    Getting somewhat back to the forthcoming book, do any of the characters think to themselves "things used to be different and better before all this human sacrifice / public execution / magic stuff? Who ordered this?"

    I imagine that they'd have to say this in the privacy of their own brains, or they'd become subject to this human sacrifice / public execution stuff.

    Needless to say, I'll be reading to find out.

    149:

    Only if I was heading towards the Swiftian. But I was going the other direction, so I took my cues from Lovecraft's title instead, though it I'd done that perfectly it would have been Tom Swift-Reanimator. (For some reason Lovecraft used a dash instead of a colon.)

    What I did screw pretty badly up was the punchline of the "Holes" bit. If I'd paused to rewrite it would would have been, "You take a bad kid, and send him down a hole which leads to the core-mantle boundary, and he becomes a good kid!" The better line came to me about 30 seconds after I'd posted, and I think "core-mantle boundary" is a lot funnier.

    150:

    Thinking of AA Milne again...

    "Anthony Martin is doing his sums."

    What sums???

    151:

    bravo for this image ... logged in specifically to say that ... :)

    152:

    I'm thinking that (computational neurons) might make things easier.

    It's looking like Moore's Law has or shortly will end.

    However if brains are just lots and lots of small computational units with a bit of attached memory, there's nothing stopping us from simply piling up lots of processors with local memory. And while making ever faster processors probably hasn't got much headroom left, making cheaper processors is limited by the cost of raw materials, and that leaves a lot of room for improvement (computers currently being much much more expensive than sand).

    The SpiNNaker project kicked off in 2012 and has a million cores with local memory (128 MB for every 18 cores). Each core simulates 1000 neurons.

    Five years later SpiNNaker 2 kicked off with 10 million cores. I'm not sure how many neurons each core simulates, but if it's 1000, then that's a 10 billion neuron brain. The human brain is under 100 billion neurons.

    That puts human brain level neuron numbers in reach some time around 2025.

    Of course that's only the start of what's needed, but not a bad start.

    153:

    Pretty much what I said. The problem is to get the device to sit on top of shitloads of artificial stupidity, so it can, metaphorically, walk and chew gum at the same time, then have it talk to itself after the manner of human consciousness.

    154:

    It's not just the neuron emulation count, because I wouldn't be surprised if we don't have that much capacity in data centers doing other things.

    Rather, it's the ability to simulate 100 billion neurons or so on a 100-watt system. Right now, I it takes, what, a large solar farm to power that many computers?

    155:

    You're right. The problem here is the hardware platform. So let's think about this. If really good 2012 hardware can manage 1000 neurons per processor, I suspect a 4-gig Raspberry Pi can do the same or even a little better. So 4000 neurons per PI, with 250 PIs to get you a million neurons, plus either awesome wifi or 250 ports worth of physical switching... that's still a shitload of power even if all you're doing is using USB-3 power cables, and you only need to do it a thousand times over to get to a billion neurons.

    There may be more efficient solutions than a low-power board like a PI, but the numbers are still pretty-much definitive. So agreed, we're not getting AI until the hardware has gone through at least a couple more generations, unless there's a way around the number of neurons.

    More speculatively, I'd guess it's a matter of whether you get to AI more quickly going from the bottom up or the top down. Going from the bottom up you've pretty much got to emulate an organism, or at least an entire brain. Going from the the top down you figure out how a computer can have a rational conversation with itself about the real world and define some memory requirements. I suspect that top-down costs a whole lot less in hardware, but is much more difficult to accomplish.

    156:

    Troutwaxer Only if I was heading towards the Swiftian. Be careful what you wish for, as might end up with the OTHER Swift ... In the land of the Houghinyms

    157:

    So, three to ten years, then...

    Three to ten years if Moore's Law is still in effect at that point. Spoiler: it won't be, we're already at 5nm node size and the laws of physics preclude going much further. The covalent bond radius of silicon is about 110pm, so our node size is already only about 50 atoms wide. I can conceive of it getting down to somewhere on the order of 5 atoms rather than 50, but single atom resolution puts a hard stop on the process.

    158:

    who else?

    Sweeney Todd, obviously. Jane Austen (and the whole Regency gothic sub-genre) is pencilled in for "Bones and Nightmares", and I'm contemplating Kingsley's "The Water Babies" (with added Deep Ones).

    I'm mostly avoiding anything so recent it's still in copyright. (Peter Pan wouldn't be, if not for Disney in the US and Great Ormond Street Hospital in the UK.)

    159:

    They're piling skulls at Buckingham palace,

    Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

    No, no, no, the Laundry Files are definitely rated 18: so it'd have to be:

    They're piling skulls at Buckingham palace,

    Christopher Robin went down on Alice.

    160:

    Getting somewhat back to the forthcoming book, do any of the characters think to themselves "things used to be different and better before all this human sacrifice / public execution / magic stuff? Who ordered this?"

    The protags are all, to a greater or lesser degree, magically enhanced: the non-magical walk-ons/spear carriers are at least drawing a steady pay cheque. They probably realize on some level that it's a shit-show, but at least they're benefiting indirectly from it.

    Meanwhile public executions have always been treated as street theatre, because many people are shits.

    161:

    So let's think about this. If really good 2012 hardware can manage 1000 neurons per processor, I suspect a 4-gig Raspberry Pi can do the same or even a little better. So 4000 neurons per PI, with 250 PIs to get you a million neurons

    You're ignoring Apple again, aren't you? The shiny magic mirrors with face recognition have some rather advantaged stuff inside them, including a dedicated AI coprocessor claimed (for the current A12X processor) to be able to perform up to 5 trillion ops/second. The stated purpose is to support machine learning algorithms running native on iOS/iPadOS machines -- the latest models use it for some rather whacky computational photography stuff as well as augmented reality and face recognition. I'm not sure what that maps to in terms of simulated neurons, but it's probably more than your RPi's 4000 neuron sim!

    162:

    It's also more-or-less at the point that you need a new magic spell for each shrink, and there is no guarantee of finding one.

    But I find the revelation that you can put a processor on a hard drive bizarre - by computing standards, that is ANCIENT technology, and gets hyped as a coming thing once every decade or so (when people's memories have had time to fade). As I have posted before, there is no technical difficulty whatsoever in producing 'computational neurons' on a massive scale (say, a million cores to a commodity chip). Intel's management could say 'let it be done' and they would be shipped in quantity by the end of 2021. It's all trapped in the vicious spiral of they don't see a market, because there are no applications; there are no applications because such things have been neglected for over four decades; and the neglect is because the available chips have gone in the direction of high complexity and low parallelism.

    163:

    The usual depictions are quite clear that the skull is the same shape as a standard horse but with a great big long pointy pole glued on the front. Strikes me that any more than a little lateral force on that is just going to lever the front of the creature's brain case off

    How is that different from a deer, moose, or similar?

    164:

    Right. But, if you want those horse/narwhal things, you are going to have to require ongoing magic, anyway - I am not disputing your claims that THOSE are biologically ridiculous - so you can trivially add a bit more to resolve that.

    For example (and this is not original), unicorn's horns are only partly material, and appear only when they want to defend against predators, wave their willies against a rival, etc. They could then also have the property that they become immaterial again in contact with other unicorns (that is). The dominance competition (sexual and otherwise) would then be by displaying their horns and, if that failed, horse-like fighting.

    165:

    It's all trapped in the vicious spiral of they don't see a market, because there are no applications;

    Apple sees the applications (face recognition, computational photography, augmented reality, gaming, on-device deep learning) and is going for it hard in their own processors, which I need to remind you are manufactured in quantities of double-digit millions and are highly profitable (because ecosystem). However, they're secretive -- they prefer to sell shinies on "the magic" and "it just works" rather than issuing long data sheets that their competitors (cough, Samsung, Nvidia, Intel) might crib from.

    166:

    That abuse of copyright law is obscene, but that's by the way. I am surprised nobody has mentioned Beatrix Potter, though I assume you have considered her; Greg could come back as Mr McGregor :-) I can't actually think of any others that seem suitable, haven't faded almost to oblivion, and aren't already dark.

    167:

    Moreover, if you're still not convinced, just smell it. It smells like a goat.

    WHile you and I and others around here might recognize "goat ordor", most people these days would not. Stink yes, goat no.

    At least most people in the US who might go to a circus.

    168:

    SpiNNaker draws 100 kW. Don't know what SpiNNaker 2 draws.

    I'm not sure why it would have to be 100 W. At 100 kW it would cost about the same as a minimum wage worker per hour but I'd have to think it would be more productive.

    169:

    100 W is a human brain's energy consumption.

    If I put 100 kW through your skull, your head would explode as that's enough power to bring your brain to a rolling boil in a couple of seconds :)

    170:

    Wait, are we planning on installing the AI in someone's head?

    Are we pan dimensional mice?

    171:

    "The Innocents Abroad in Case Nightmare Green" might be entertaining, or possibly "South"or "Alone"* retold in a lovecraftian manner

    *Antarctic exploration stories by Ernest Shackleton and Richard Byrd.

    172:

    Yes, I know that, but that wasn't what I meant. What I meant is that there were no applications for the sort of low-power, highly parallel chip I was describing; the ICL DAP and BBN Butterfly are way back when, now. The SpiNNaker is a possible lead-in for such things, but I was talking about a 10-100 watt, single chip device; a mini-supercomputer might have a thousand of them, a full supercomputer ten to a hundred thousand.

    The point is that you need radically different algorithms, data structures and communications methods for that sort of computer, compared to the things that Apple and everyone else uses today. While Intel could easily make them, and Apple could afford to, turning them into what Apple actually sell would take at least a decade and a LOT of innovative, highly-skilled manpower.

    I still think that Intel should produce such things, sell them cheaply, and let the army of amateur geeks loose on them. Unfortunately, only some Japanese companies (e.g. Hitachi) seem to think that way, and the reaction is the west is to ask "But where's the () profit?", with the word "immediate" being implied in the parentheses.

    173:

    "The point is that you need radically different...."

    Which is what I meant when I said that having the hardware is just the start.

    174:

    re Wittgenstein and cats: a quick search suggests it's very hard to find biographies of Wittgenstein that talk about him, rather than his beliefs; whether he and his family were owned by cats, as opposed to how the word cat figures in his theory of language (not a small thing, I studied early and late Wittgenstein in college with great interest, you can laugh if you like- I wouldn't even act on a mandate to stop you- but I still understand those questions interested and interest me.)

    175:

    and not-so-funny moments like when he kept (succeeding in) running over the moderator in the presidential debate, is there an exit button for this alternate universe?

    176:

    If we're going that way (and I've periodically been thinking about writing exactly that parody for a while), it'll be much more than a soldier's life that's terrible hard. Says Alice.

    We also have the prospect of more tentacular things than just bears if you happen to step on the lines of the squares. "Cherry stones" not as a list of possible careers but as a menu (cf "To Serve Man"). And exactly who or what Christopher Robin might be saying his prayers to.

    Back in the early innocent days of the internet, before the web existed and we welcomed random emails forwarded round, I remember a story of Winnie the Pooh as a drug-crazed serial killer. Damned if I can find it now. (Mind you, I'm probably damned for finding it funny, but that's by the by.)

    177:

    "Ye’re all damned!"

    178:

    "Nightmare in Moominland" has a certain appeal, but it's far too recent.

    (I'm not tackling any American kid-lit of any vintage: it's not part of my background or target audience.)

    179:

    Not even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn? Aw, shucks!

    But, seriously, I don't see much scope for doing anything much more than adding tentacles, and mere transliteration doesn't seem to be your scene.

    180:

    I've got no problem with that.

    181:

    Copies are still out there, some illustrated. The search term you are looking for is "Pooh goes apeshit".

    182:

    Thinking of old internet circulars. I can imagine The Mandate narrating a version of "I like monkeys"

    183:

    If one apple device can do a 40,000 neuron sim (10 times what we're assuming a PI could manage, and probably a little too high*) you'd still need 20 of them to get you a million neurons, and a thousand times that to get you a billion neurons - the power requirements are still obscene. If you can put 100 apple devices in 2U of rack space - line them up in rows, without screens in a box - you're at 3200 apple devices in a full-sized rack so a billion neurons is 8 full racks, with 100 billion neurons being 800 racks - and we still haven't talked about how to network all these devices, or how to cool them, which means at least a hundred more racks! (PIs are probably better for cooling, as you can buy a little box with a fan.)

    Assuming it hasn't been done already, some possible ways to make this a little smaller would be to write your neurons in pure assembler, which might bring your neuron speed up and the size down. Also, a real server might have better economics - a 16-core AMD Threadripper with 64 gigs of memory might run more neurons per watt. (I saw an amazing Broadcom-based server at the most recent Linux convention back in February!) If you wrote your own OS, or significantly pared down a Linux or BSD kernel you might get some better results too!

    I'd go top-down, write some software which can reliably send and receive messages to itself, and go from there - you can probably skip a lot of neurons!

    • A modern PI can run two 4K monitors simultaneously, so it's got a pretty good math coprocessor if someone wants to write the code to make the CPU talk to the GPU and use it for calculations.
    184:

    Overnight it expanded to...

    They're piling skulls at Buckingham Palace Christopher Robins is there with Alice Alice was bothering one of the guards A Headsmans job is terribly hard Said Alice

    ...18 for violence?

    185:

    But I find the revelation that you can put a processor on a hard drive bizarre - by computing standards, that is ANCIENT technology, and gets hyped as a coming thing once every decade or so (when people's memories have had time to fade).

    This is true of course, and all that's really happening is someone building something Raspberry PI-ish from the other direction. The big deals here are first, that you can make everything much smaller, and second that now you can do some preprocessing, which might mean a much bigger database with real ACID capabilities - shard your SQL database and let the drives do your searching instead of firing up a no-sql database which doesn't have solid consistency.

    186:

    Well played sir, that's the one. Ah, memories of evenings in the uni computer lab playing MUDs, in the days before the Harry Fox Agency removed all the ripped MP3s from the Archie FTP servers...

    187:

    The reason a unicorn's horn is a spiral is because it's two horns twisted together, each horn attached to one side of the skull, with appropriate bracing.

    188:

    In the early 1990s or so, I ran across a (I thought) -very- funny short story in which one of the Scooby Gang reveals that they had a secret history of being agents of Shub-Niggurath, etc. In trying to look this up now I find that a tamed version of this idea has actually been used in more recent shows, apparently.

    189:

    Like any comedy skit which riffs off shame, embarrassment and dysfunctionality, it's only funny if you're watching from outside. The aliens simulating us are rolling in the aisles (while other aliens are protesting outside the simulator!)

    190:

    That's exactly what Intel did with the Xeon Phi, and it merely takes you further down the dead end we are in at present. If you want to move in the direction of low-power, truly-massive, local-communication parallelism (like the brain), you HAVE to stop perpetrating serial designs with parallelism hacked where and how is possible.

    191:

    189: ... oi. Too true.

    (my own 188): found it. It's called The Insects from Shaggy, and it's at a site called Maison Otaku.

    192:

    ...it's not part of my background or target audience.)

    I don't know about that. Scratch an American science-fiction fan and you're likely to find someone who's a major Muppet fancier - and of course Henson brought us Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

    But I don't think you'll be doing Muppets soon regardless - they're not quite right as laundry-inspiration-fodder.

    193:

    - shard your SQL database and let the drives do your searching instead of firing up a no-sql database which doesn't have solid consistency.
    So one bunch is making a new DAP and another crew is revisiting CAFS.

    194:

    Charlie @96: Now imagine talking to a communicating bee hive. What's that going to be like?

    It's been done in webcomic form: Skin Horse is a webcomic about a secret government agency to provide social services to non-human sentients; it's run by Gavotte, a swarm of bees as a group intelligence, with Unity, a lab-bred zombie teenage girl, Sweetheart, an intelligent talking dog, Moustachio, a clockwork robot receptionist, Nick Zerhakker, the brain of a teenage boy harnessed to an armed CV-22 VSTOL, and Dr. Tip Wilkin, the token, crossdressing, human psychologist.

    195:

    You're assuming Apple devices, not Apple CPUs.

    This is your regular scheduled reminder that most of the power draw in an iPhone or iPad is the screen and radio stages, not the CPU. TPD of a current 11" iPad Pro is around 7 watts; the CPU almost certainly accounts for not significantly more than 1 watt out of that.

    So it's plausible to imagine on the order of 1000 A12X cpus on dedicated cards in a 4U rack (1kW of power draw). I'm pretty sure Apple preannounced Thunderbolt support for the new Apple Silicon Macs, so there's your interconnect -- iSCSI or 10Gig ethernet over TBolt, or maybe a dedicated PCIe channel-based interface.

    196:

    Creatures which grow horns because of evolution grow them in a manner and location which take account of the forces they can set up. If you look at eg. a cow skull it has a considerable bony boss that the horns grow from, and it is close to the point where the spine and the neck muscles connect to the skull so the forces can be transmitted directly to the animal's body.

    The standard depiction of the unicorn only works if you assume the skull is a solid lump, which it is not. Those horns are attached perpendicularly to what is basically a fairly thin plate of bone with either squishy things or empty space behind it, depending on exactly where they put the horn. There can be no reinforcement, either, because if there was the shape of the skull would be very noticeably different from a standard horse, and it isn't.

    If you imagine making a crude model of the head and neck of a horned animal using a big cardboard box gaffer taped to the end of a telegraph pole, and spears for the horns, then a cow or a deer or something is more closely modelled by taping the spears to the end of the pole at the same point the box is taped to it, whereas to model the unicorn you have to try and stick a spear to the middle of one of the faces of the box, and as soon as you knock it sideways it comes unstuck or the face of the box collapses.

    197:

    No, I don't think the problem's the hardware platform. Great, you've got the equivalent of one human's neurons (and you're eating the power provided by one entire diesel locomotive, several megawatts).

    What runs on it? I've seen, fairly recently, that the "AI" we have are actually more like fancy expert systems.

    199:

    I'd love to see you do the Bobbsey Twins....*

    But let's get classical: how about Byron and Shelley?

    Or Edison and Tesla? For anyone who's never read about him, Tesla was SERIOUSLY strange.

    200:

    The one I'd like to find was less of that, and more real - a sysadmin is given a pound? three pounds? of chocolate covered espresso beans, and puts it on his desk. By the end of the day, half the organization has quit, of the remaining half, half of them hate the other hand, and a quarter are more productive than ever.

    201:

    re Wittgenstein and cats: a quick search suggests it's very hard to find biographies of Wittgenstein that talk about him, rather than his beliefs; whether he and his family were owned by cats, as opposed to how the word cat figures in his theory of language (not a small thing, I studied early and late Wittgenstein in college with great interest, you can laugh if you like- I wouldn't even act on a mandate to stop you- but I still understand those questions interested and interest me.)

    I'm not laughing. Many of my interests are more silly. Wittgenstein's notion about a lion is just so uninformed that it serves as a timely reminder to pay attention to reality as part of one's philosophizing. That's all.

    For what it's worth, I think the "primitive animists" got it somewhat more right than more modern philosophers. They actually had to deal with living things on a regular basis, so the idea that they had wills and intelligence of their own isn't stupid. Couple that with what seems to be an innate human desire to personify things as a way to understand them using our "people skills," and you've got animism in a nutshell. It's not right, but it's a lot less wrong than assuming that free will or sentience are binary qualities (things have them or not) and only humans have them.

    202:

    Quite a variety there. It does rather look as if the older ones are better engineered than the modern ones, but the rot seems to have set in pretty quickly.

    203:

    Tesla kept pigeons in his hotel room. He was all right.

    204:

    Wait, are we planning on installing the AI in someone's head?

    It's an arbitrary figure, but if you can simulate the brain of a human with the energy used by a human, in the space used by a human, then we're pretty obviously in a place where computers are transhuman when they exceed those limits. Whether we can get there is another question. Whether we want to get there is a third and probably more important question, actually.

    Note that I'm not arguing that computers don't do a large number of transhuman things right now. They do. This is just a way of quantifying when we're in unquestionably transhuman territory, assuming we get there at all. For all I know, the Butlerian Jihad will kick in during the 2030s and this will become a moot point.

    205:
    But I don't think you'll be doing Muppets soon regardless - they're not quite right as laundry-inspiration-fodder.

    Even if Charlie wanted to do his own take on Muppets (with or without David Bowie in spandex trousers), everything the Henson company ever did a) is still in copyright b) belongs to Disney, these days.

    Even if you were absolutely sure what you'd come up with was suitable parody to qualify for a "fair use" exemption, I personally still wouldn't touch it even with a lawyer on a ten-foot pole.

    206:

    What runs on it? I've seen, fairly recently, that the "AI" we have are actually more like fancy expert systems.

    And in related news, these new-fangled automobiles ain't nothing but a fancy steam locomotive. It'll never catch on!

    (Seriously, there were huge conceptual breakthroughs in neural network theory and tech in the past decade or so. We're still working through all the implications. Expert systems are just glorified IF ... THEN messes, or -- if Bayesian -- probability stack-ranking: the new hotness is how to derive the relative probabilities automatically and hopefully objectively from raw input data.)

    207:

    Since UK copyright is author's death plus 70 years of course, there's always

    --HG Wells (Star Begotten? The Island of Dr. Moreau?) --Rudyard Kipling (Puck of Pook's Hill? Rewards and Fairies? Just So Stories*?) If you want to rip off the best.

    *Does the Mythos run on Lamarckian evolution? Read and find out how the mad scientist's daughter got her tail).

    208:

    I'm not sure I buy it, particularly where power is concerned. You've still got to support IO, memory, long-term storage, etc., and a GPU if that's involved in running your neurons, so these devices would each draw 2-3 watts depending on whether they ran a GPU or not. (You don't gain much trading wifi for 10-gig connectivity - IIRC cabled networks use a 12-volt system, not sure about Thunderbolt.) Not to mention that each "chassis" holding your special-purpose cards is going to need IO, power, and - this is a huge expense with a thousand CPUs - cooling. Furthermore, your chassis needs to handle switching and routing... So I might buy 400 CPUs in a 4U rack, and once you deal with cooling, switching, and 10-gig routing, now you're probably back up to 4-5 watts per device.

    But let's assume your numbers are correct. We put 1000 CPUs in a 4U rack. At 40,000 neurons/CPU we end up with your chassis supporting 40,000,000 neurons. If we put 18 of these in a 6-foot rack we've now got 720,000,000 neurons per rack, so now we're up to 138 racks to run 100 billion neurons. (I'd guess that best practice would be to separate each chassis by 1U for better cooling, so more likely 14 chassis/rack, which means more like 180 racks to emulate a human brain.)

    So with your numbers, plus overhead for switching, routing, and cooling, the bare-minimum power-draw to emulate a human-brain is probably around 300 kilowatts.

    209:

    "What runs on it? I've seen, fairly recently, that the "AI" we have are actually more like fancy expert systems."

    Yup. No arguments there. If we're looking for conscious AI that's a big, big question.

    210:

    Not kid lit, though perhaps too old anyway.

    211:

    You might be right about that. On the other hand, I don't think Warren Ellis was sued for The Sex Puppets (though that might have been before Disney bought the Muppets.)

    212:

    Apple did announce Thunderbolt support for the upcoming Apple silicone. Though I don't have any inside info, I expect an entertaining number of cores for the desktop CPUs, raising the possibility of emulating certain politicians with an economical number of Macs. :)

    213:

    Yeah, but you emulate Trump without AI.

    214:

    Since UK copyright is author's death plus 70 years of course, there's always

    Incorrect. UK copyright is IIRC up to a century (corporate), and rights-holders in the UK usually also sell within the EU; Spanish copyright (and South African) run for life plus 90 years. Corporate rights may extend stuff indefinitely if it's turned into a film or TV property that adds to the original -- I know of at least one ongoing infringement lawsuit brought by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate against the makers of "Enola Holmes".

    Wells should be out of copyright on paper in the UK ... but not throughout the EU, and the films arguably extended the estate's rights.

    So you need to be very careful.

    215:

    Re: Beloved children's/young adult's classics in the Laundryverse

    Guess we'll have to wait until 2033 for the 70 year copyright protection on C.S. Lewis' Narnia series to expire. Then after an additional 10 years maybe we'll see Narnia and Middle Earth characters interacting.

    Lewis' Space Trilogy would be much easier to fold into the Laundryverse.

    216:

    To get into the rat's nest here for a second, IIRC, US literary copyright concerns words, not ideas. Isn't that the case in the UK as well? If so, there's nothing wrong with doing Kim in the Dreamlands, provided the idea's being swiped, not the words themselves.

    217:

    It's also the human's job to referee, because the single-horned goats can't easily butt heads to establish their customary dominance hierarchy.

    Another thing goats do to establish dominance is to rear up on their hind legs.

    Humans by our nature look like Very Dominant Goats in goat body language. This has its implications for integrating into the herd.

    My local library has Goatwalking and I've asked their system to reserve it for me.

    218:

    No problem. Just repurpose a program generating Vogon poetry.

    219:

    Lewis' Space Trilogy would be much easier to fold into the Laundryverse.

    There's some older stuff that might fit, if you file off the serial numbers -- there's a whole corpus of fantastical writings by Lord Dunsany and of course one of the inspirations for the Chthulhu Mythos, "The Night Land" by William Hope Hodgson. That one is an interesting read, one part Victorian melodramatic romance, one part existential despair with tentacles and one part masterful wife-beating with an occasional bout of spanking. It has some wonderful world-building in it though.

    220:

    If only they'd made a film of The Beekeeper's Apprentice....

    221:

    That is the theory, yes, but the practice is that it is perfectly legal to sue someone into bankruptcy for a bogus claim if it is done according to the proper ritual, and the plaintiff can drive the defendent into bankruptcy before the case finishes.

    222:

    !@#$%^&(#$%^&()#$%^&()_#$%^&()$%^&*()#$%^&*!@#$%^&*()+@#$%^&()_+#$%^&()_ C.S. Lewis.

    The first book of his space trilogy was sorta-kinda interesting, when I was in my teens.

    I only finished the second one because a) I'm a completist, and b) I was still a teenager. 200 or more fucking pages of the Venusian Eve, and the Earthman trying to keep her from eating the Venusian Apple.

    BULL-FUCKING-SHIT.

    And then, the last of That Hideous Trilogy, where ALL people for ANY advancement are all 100%, dyed in the wool, EVIL, and literally drag the animals out of the city zoo to tear them to shreds? Really?

    And the only reason I read that last piece of shit was because I read there was a mention of Numenor in it, and there is, unfortunately.

    You want me to tell you how I REALLY feel about C.S. Lewis' fiction?

    223:

    And the program's library should include Sam Kinison stand up recordings.

    224:

    That's actually a vote for Kipling, not against. Gaiman got away with The Graveyard Book, so it should be possible to repurpose some favored tropes without getting sued.

    225:

    A Voyage to Arcturus might be compatible with the Laundryverse. (We seem to have gotten away from children's books a little.)

    I shudder to think about how E.R. Eddison would work out.

    226:

    Maybe. It might accidentally tell the truth.

    227:

    I haven't read them since I was eleven. Thanks for reminding me not to bother trying again.

    228:

    In the early 1990s or so, I ran across a (I thought) -very- funny short story in which one of the Scooby Gang reveals that they had a secret history of being agents of Shub-Niggurath, etc. In trying to look this up now I find that a tamed version of this idea has actually been used in more recent shows, apparently.

    To good effect, too.

    It's not as if it's a hard question. Which one would you guess was touched by extradimensional interference?

    If Scooby Doo is your thing, it's worth watching.

    229:

    But I don't think you'll be doing Muppets soon regardless - they're not quite right as laundry-inspiration-fodder.

    I dunno, I thought The Happytime Murders was an amusingly dark comedy. There's possibilities there…

    (And possible lawsuits, so I'm not expecting anything in that direction.)

    230:

    Charlie @159 - damn you! I was just about to go there.

    As for neutron simulation/Pi stuff - I love me some Pi. I must have at least 60 core of Pi ranging from the very first model to the latest Pi 4, including several experimental ones I got sent because I worked for RPF for several years on making Scratch faster. I really doubt a Pi 4 could simulate 1000 neutrons effectively though. The Apple A series chips though - now those are astonishing devices with incredible performance and all those extra special purpose toys. The latest iPads with the initial A14 variant gives some idea of how fast the next generation of MacBooks will be - the A12 based prototype machine is easily as fast as my fast i7 iMac. But it isn’t simply cpu speed that matters for this. The communication speed between v-neurons is crucial to system performance. The ancient Transputer project understood this but got crushed by the intel spending monster once they accidentally got the IBM PC deal.

    232:

    Random thoughts:

    Aslan as an Eldritch Abomination? The Color Out of Time Fairy Book? Is Gormenghast somewhere in Carcossa?

    233:

    s/Time/Space/1

    234:

    Not only did Tesla keep pigeons in his hotel room, he reliably fed them when he went out - even in his direst poverty.

    One person described the pigeons flocking around Tesla like he was St. Francis of Assisi.

    235:

    Jim Henson didn't (as far as I know) ever quite show George Lucas* levels of enthusiasm for letting other people play with his toys, but he was a man with a keen sense of humour and a solid desire not to be a bully.

    • In case anyone here is unfamiliar: Lucas regularly lent people models, props and outfits from the original Star Wars trilogy free of charge for use in fan films.
    236:

    Aslan: ha, ha, ha, none of that mattered, because you're all dead, and you're all MINE! (reaches for bbq sauce).

    Ok, takeoff of an old underground pic in an underground comic: "He's coming! Even the grave couldn't hold him, and he WANTS YOUR SOUL!"

    237:
    Aslan as an Eldritch Abomination?

    A self-reincarnating spell-casting shape-changing talking animal that plucks children from their own world and dumps them into another, judges them based on how well they cope, and then removes their souls to his private kingdom when they die?

    You don't need to change much, I'd have thought!

    238:

    "Aslan as an Eldritch Abomination?"

    Take off the High Church Anglican tinted glasses, and Aslan already is an eldritch abomination.

    JHomes

    239:

    Muppets? Maybe not so much.

    Poppets out of witchcraft? Homunculi? Totally legit.

    240:

    So... you've not seen Beatrix Potter and Sven Hassel's famous collaboration, "Peter Rabbit, Tank Killer"?

    241:

    You might be forgetting the film which got Peter Jackson on anyone's radar, "Meet the Feebles". As a parody of the Muppets (via "The Godfather" and "The Deer Hunter" amongst other take-offs) it was really quite something. More recently of course there's also "Avenue Q" as a take-off of "Sesame Street".

    So yeah, you can apparently do a fair bit with that idea and get away with it, so long as you file off the serial numbers well enough.

    242:

    Maybe, maybe not - Moore's Law has been "going to fail, real soon now" for over thirty years...

    A few years back, I was working for a programmable logic firm. I know that parallelism failed as the next way we'd keep things improving, but I reckon that FPGA coprocessing increasingly has legs. At one point, I was integrating (one of?) the first credible C-to-gates tools* into the FPGA design flow. Coupled with reconfigurable logic, i.e. rewiring the FPGA on the fly, you've got an incredibly powerful mechanism for producing task-specific computers that can run alongside today's general-purpose computers.

    ** Many had tried, but most just couldn't deliver the necessary quality of results. These days AIUI, the digital designers are using C++ for a lot of their circuitry rather than VHDL/Verilog, because they get better outcomes that way...

    243:

    I hadn't forgotten either of those things - they both happened before the muppets were sold to the house of mouse.

    I did incorrectly say that the whole Henson company now belonged to Disney, though. There were (at least two sets of) discussions about that, but in the end only the (non-Sesame) Muppets changed hands. (Sesame Street and residents belong to an education non-profit.)

    244:

    "I really doubt a Pi 4 could simulate 1000 neutrons effectively though."

    Without seeing how big a virtualized neuron is, how fast it will run, how much memory it uses, whether or not it's interpreted, etc., I'm not certain of my numbers either. But I'll have a much better idea of what it will do after I've played with my new PI 4 for a couple days.

    245:

    And don't forget earlier inspirations, such as Charles Dickens.

    There is, for instance,

    A Tale of Two Cities (set in the chaos of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN)

    A Solstice Carol (a heartwarming story of how the celebration of the Black Pharoah's advent changed the life of a wealthy businessman forever, part of a campaign to have this day become a holiday marked by wild consumption. Consumerism, I meant.

    Twisted Oliver The powerful story of how a poor child in the Midlands benefits first from the K-syndrome and then from genetic testing.

    246:

    If you were going to target American audiences, you would probably get bigger recognition from cartoons or other childrens shows. Mister Rogers (or Captain Kangaroo) meets an Elder god....

    Really wonder how weird Bugs would turn out...

    247:

    As quoted in The Illuminatus Trilogy: "That Wascally Wabbit." Turn the head sideways to understand what a fnord shoggoth looks like.

    248:

    The Merchant Princes series seems more TV-friendly than most of your work, as it starts out as a journalist investigating crimes and introduces magical travel soon after, and has a lot of interpersonal interaction, and a good excuse for some GoT medieval battles mixed with Succession. I'm sure there's a high concept pitch in there somewhere.

    249:

    Troutwaxer @ 213: Yeah, but you emulate Trump without AI.

    Well, you wouldn't need the 'I' part anyway.

    250:

    Hmmm. E.R. Eddison's Zimiamvian books meet the Laundry Files...yeah. That would work, especially Fish Dinner in Memison.

    251:

    Hmmm. E.R. Eddison's Zimiamvian stories encounter the Laundry Files. Yeah, it could work, especially Fish Dinner in Memison. But then again, I do have a soft touch for Fiorinda and Barganax. And Mary and Lessingham. Hmm. Yeah. It'd work.

    252:

    "But it isn’t simply cpu speed that matters for this. The communication speed between v-neurons is crucial to system performance."

    Disproof by counter example.

    "Depending on the type of fiber, the neural impulse travels at speed ranging from a sluggish 2 miles per hour to, in some myelinated fibers, a breackneck 200 or more miles per hour. But even this top speed is 3 million times slower than the speed of electricity through a wire."

    Myers, David G. Psychology 4th Edition.New York:Worth Publishers Inc,1995: 43.

    So even assuming the physical data centre is 3000 times larger than a human brain (linear dimensions) the electric thinking machine should communicate neuron to neuron a thousand times faster than a human brain. (remembering that in the SpiNNaker architecture the neurons share silicon with the memory so that's not a bottleneck). You can pack a lot of inefficiency into a communication system and still be orders of magnitude faster than human brains for any computer cluster of reasonable size (say, no larger than a university data centre).

    That's before you consider that nerve fibres need time to reset after each signal.

    If we can get silicon to run a brain at all then, performance isn't going to be an issue. The most time critical thing I can think of that human brains do is detecting sound direction. That's a very useful skill and would be strongly selected for. It's still a bit mushy though, so I've got to think that it bangs up against physical limits. So I think the brain can't really detect time less than 1 cm at the speed of sound. If we call that a clock cycle, that would mean the human brain runs at no more than 35 kHz. (probably much less). Silicon runs around 10 thousand times faster.

    But, as I've said before, making the hardware is the least of the problems. Your gut has nearly as many neurons as a cat and runs independently to your brain (though they chat). I don't think your gut could track a mouse though.

    253:

    Hmm, category error. The *computing system performance * is not the same thing as the actual brain performance.

    Neurons have their protocols for interconnection and software has its own. If we’re simulating 1000 neurons on a board like a Pi, then making the connections between that group will be reasonably easy to do way faster than real brains. But we aren’t even faintly talking about that being the whole story. We’d need thousands or millions of boards talking together and making the multiples of v-neurons per board able to have connections to other v-neurons on other boards. Experience (admittedly some time ago and possibly out of date) suggests that it can be quite expensive. Timing may be ‘interesting ‘ too; if I’m remembering right (it’s fuckin’ 2020 so of course I may not be) some aspects of neuron signalling has time matching and decay factors. Simulating that across millions of physically distinct cpus might be fun.

    I have acquaintances working on this stuff and I think they’re not really looking at general purpose cpus but at specialised hardware.

    254:

    "I have acquaintances working on this stuff and I think they’re not really looking at general purpose cpus but at specialised hardware"

    Well yeah. SpiNNaker for one. I didn't think you were actually serious about building a human brain out of Raspberry Pis. Just sort of generally stating that communication between neurons was a bottleneck and it wasn't all about cpu speed.

    I'm pretty sure that the first human level AI won't be made out of repurposed mobile phones or hobbyist computer boards.

    Interesting very shallow overview of SpiNNaker. This is from 5 years ago, the current SpiNNaker 2 is 10 times the number of cores.

    https://youtu.be/2e06C-yUwlc

    255:

    No. The Raspberry PIs were more about getting power consumption to rock bottom and seeing what we ended up with in terms of racks and power consumption.

    256:

    Isn't there another problematic assumption in here, that humans do general purpose computing? By the time we've finished developing, we're pretty hardwired, because our brains have spent a few decades growing and paring away neural connections to do whatever it is we do (program computers, tennis, country music, grifting). That may be one reason why humans do what may appear to be things that are ridiculously complex, with neurons that, when simulated, are too potentially too slow to handle the job. The computer's running a program, while the brain's basically a dedicated analog system doing what it's designed to do. That system can be rebuilt to some degree, but slowly.

    Still, I think one could get an estimate for the difference between brains and computers by figuring out the minimum currently needed to simulate a neuron, and the minimum needed to simulate connections between two neurons, and then multiplying that out to see what kind of behemoth scale it would take to supply that many neurons and connections using currently available systems. Raspberry PI may be suitable for such order of magnitude efforts.

    Remember, this is about getting an estimate of resource and energy use that's ballpark correct, not about building a human brain emulator just yet.

    257:

    Fiorinda destroys the world.

    258:

    "Remember, this is about getting an estimate of resource and energy use that's ballpark correct, not about building a human brain emulator just yet."

    Well SpiNNaker 2 is pretty much that.

    They're building it now. They are expecting to stay in the same power budget as the first SpiNNaker (100 kW) 10 times the number of cores (10 million) and 5 times the number of neurons per core (5000). So about 50 billion neurons.

    That certainly gives us a ball park for emulating a human (<100 billion neurons). 100 kW and 10 cabinets gets us more than half way there.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02385

    [[ '<' is the start of a tag. If you want the actual character, use '&lt;' - mod ]]

    259:

    .Guess we'll have to wait until 2033 for the 70 year copyright protection on C.S. Lewis' Narnia series to expire.

    You haven't read Lev Grossman's The Magicians, I take it? (It pastiches Narnia brilliantly and brutally, with a side-swipe at Harry Potter along the way.)

    There are ways to work around in-copyright restrictions, and it also depends to some extent on how litigious (read: rent-seeking) the estate is. However, I'm deeply uninterested in Narnia and Lewis' work -- I'm allergic to Christian evangelical allegory.

    I'm not making any excuses for my preference in childhood favourites to chew up and spit out: it's just me.

    260:

    The bit of my comment after the opening bracket was truncated. The last paragraph should have been:

    That certainly gives us a ball park for emulating a human (<100 billion neurons). 100 kW and 10 cabinets gets us more than half way there.

    [[ fixed here too - mod ]]

    261:

    Grrr, I seem to have written something with a tag in it using a more than symbol. 3rd time lucky?

    [[ You kept using the less than symbol < - mod ]]

    That certainly gives us a ball park for emulating a human (more than 100 billion neurons). 100 kW and 10 cabinets gets us more than half way there.

    262:

    Heteromeles Isn't there another problematic assumption in here, that humans do general purpose computing? Didn't Heinlein have something to say about that - about what a human could do?

    263:

    Ah, yes.

    Somewhere in here I've got a copy on paper of my first tech author job -- turning the handwritten field service engineer's notes for a very interesting box into an actual manual for the Real World Graphics' Transputer Reality System, as supplied to Norview, a manufacturer of shipping bridge simulators -- the Transputer Reality System was a brief (I think they only made about a dozen systems) foray into parallel T800 hardware before Graham gave up on Inmos and switched to Intel i860 RISC (four of the bastards on a single ISA-bus card, along with 16Mb of RAM and 4Mb of VRAM was quite the epic GPU back in 1990). (RWG was the small graphics supercomputing firm started by Graham Rowan, the bloke who designed the hardware for the Quantel Paintbox circa 1980.

    IIRC the TRS was a VME-bus chassis with eight cards, including separate compute and rendering units, designed to drive five monitors (1024 x 768) at a decent enough frame rate to render the view from the bridge windows of a container ship or supertanker in real time and colour. It sold for rather a lot of money because not that many folks want to buy life-size bridge simulators for supertankers ...

    It went out of production around 1990; I wonder if I should scan and upload the manual? It may be the only surviving relic of the system.

    264:

    I've never seen Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo, and I'm not targeting an American audience.

    265:

    Unfortunately it's based on the assumption that brains = neurons. There are some indications -- our understanding of microbiology at that scale factor is incomplete and messy -- that glial cells do some processing/modulation too, and there are two orders of magnitude more of them: looking at a brain and assuming neurons are where the action happens could be like looking at the visible tracks on a PCB and assuming they're a computer and assuming the black boxes with lots of legs are just neatly packaged patch boards. Worse, there may be intra-cellular data filtering going on within axons that isn't easily detectable by looking at the next level up.

    That's my problem with naive assumptions that we can simulate a human brain in hardware. A brain sim, sure: but it may be as close to a human brain as a Boeing 737 is to a seagull, architecture-wise, and leave out important bits (the self-directed goals, the egg-laying, the shitting everywhere).

    266:

    Didn't Heinlein have something to say about that - about what a human could do?

    Heinlein was talking out of his arse. I'm not going to dignify that ludicrous quote by repeating it here: suffice to say, he had unconscious objectivist leanings and didn't really grasp the significance of large institutional superorganisms.

    267:

    While your second sentence is correct, I strongly disagree with your first. I am surprised to see you favouring the currently dominant viewpoint that people (except, of course, our Holy Leaders) are nothing but anonymous, fungible, specialised cogs, and any who are different should be forced into that mould or eliminated. That dogma has been taking over even academic research for a long time, I had that fight many, many times in my career, and failed to resist it even in my area.

    In particular, the dogma is one of the things that assists wage slavery, and traps people in unemployment (or near-unemployment). People trying to break out are blocked by the constraint that they are not considered for anything other than what they are trained for and/or have long experience in. Minimum experience 10 years programming Cobol on IBM 370 platforms was a common condition, and modern ones are little better. Even I have personal experience of that :-(

    Yes, it was an extreme statement to attract attention (surely not, in an ASF writer?), but he was stating that humans should retain their mental flexibility, and should NOT be let themselves be trapped in restricted roles (whether of their own making or imposed on them). I can do at least 2/3 of his list, and can add an equal number of comparable skills.

    Consider a large institutional superorganism; the number of times I have seen one fuck it up because none of the people on the planning or decision committees (either technical or executive) were prepared to think outside their box. I have even taken some of them to task obvious blunders (i.e. where all they needed was commonly-known public knowledge) and got the answer "That's not part of my role." Yes, of course, many of them excluded people like me because we raised issues they weren't "qualified" to think about. But, as the saying goes, there's never any time to do it right, but plenty of time to do it over.

    268:

    I'm not sure what general intelligence would look like compared to what humans have got.

    There could probably be good science fiction about aliens and humans operating in each other's blind spots.

    269:

    There could probably be good science fiction about aliens and humans operating in each other's blind spots.

    Peter Watts does something like that in Blindsight (and sequels).

    270:

    Consider a large institutional superorganism; the number of times I have seen one fuck it up because none of the people on the planning or decision committees (either technical or executive) were prepared to think outside their box.

    Depends on how you define vertical fornication, doesn't it? Just remember that the ostensible goal of a project and the actual goal of those in charge is usually very different. (Accomplishing a task vs. career advancement.)

    271:

    There is (*), but (for obvious reasons) even the alien thinking isn't that alien. All right, I am a pretty radical and out-of-the box thinker as far as humans go, but there are sound theoretical and practical reasons to believe you can't describe what you can imagine. I have actual experience of how culture-dependent such 'basic' concepts as variables, probability (as most people know it), and logic are.

    I have imagined languages where "The cat sat on the mat" required a paragraph, and where you could reduce a paragraph of conditional and qualified statements to a few words; and mathematics where the concepts of numbers were advanced concepts, but things like the topology or random walk theory were basic.

    The key generality difference between current 'AI' and human intelligence is imagination and all that it implies. We (and some animals) can take a concept in one area, and use it to build a not-obviously related one in another.

    (*) E.g. The Dance of the Changer and the Three by Terry Carr or The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang.

    272:

    The reasons that they have chosen (or been forced) to constrain their abilities is not what I was talking about, but (a) the simple fact and (b) the undesirability, from the POV of either society or the institution. Yes, Heinlein was being provocative in implying they weren't fully human, but he was making a damn good point.

    As another example of the harm this causes, I knew some of the last of the English rural working class, and I had close friends and colleagues who came from the industrial working class. Despite their status, they were FAR more multi-knowledgeable and multi-able (including about politics) than the underclass that is called the working class by the loony left today. This is the result of deliberate dumbing down of the electorate by TPTB (including the mass media) over the past four decades, and is WHY we are now governed by incompetent fascists and voted for Brexit, of course. Scotland has done slightly better.

    273:

    [With links for y'all of the "Captain Kangaroo" persuasion...]

    So, if not "Wombles as ambush predators" (I'm still hoping for that - just wondering how many lost dogs / dog walkers / joggers on Wimbledon Common would be needed to support the dietary needs of a colony of trapdoor wombles, who very definitely make good use of the things that they "find").

    Are we about to see "Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, and Cthulhu", i.e. Camberwick Nightmare Green?

    (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the Fire Brigade is in Trumpton, but I don't hold out much hope for Pippin Fort. No doubt they'll be burning the unworthy as fuel for the Chigley steam engine, or strapping their skulls to Windy Miller's sails)

    You can't subvert anything from Aardman - the Lancashire Inquisition would descend to punish any Heresies against Gromit. Nor Paddington Bear - certainly not after the second film, and one of Hugh Grant's greatest performances...

    ...alright, you can have Morph. Thousands of him, sliding under doors and forming outlandish shapes. I blame Tony Hart, he was a Gurkha you know. I was going to embed the "Vision On" logo, but decided it was too unsettling...

    274:

    I'm surprised how closely Hart and Keysell resemble The Doctor and one of his sequential sidekicks. I probably shouldn't be, but I am not a television person.

    275:

    Well Sylveste(r) McCoy was a regular...

    276:

    I strongly disagree with your first.

    Heinlein's list of life skills is both highly selective and highly culturally dependent. Culturally dependent in that it focusses on the useful skills for an aspirational male WASP aristocrat during a certain period (his birth era, plus or minus a generation: say, from 1880 to 1930) living within memory of the open western frontier. Highly selective in that these are individual skills, not collective ones (how to referee a soccer match, run a construction project, act as first responder at a mass casualty event) that require effective interaction with other people other than as an officer/master and commander. Moreover, a bunch of them require lifelong practice to achieve or mantain proficiency at -- a luxury to most people insofar as people currently prioritize survival (and therefore paying work) over stuff like fencing or ballroom dancing.

    Like the original form of Alan Turing's imitation game, it tells us more about the author's prejudices and blind spots than about humanity.

    277:

    Surely a 737 shits continuously all the time it is awake. Look at the continuous white streaks it leaves behind it in the sky, and if it wasn't gaseous it would be leaving piles of it all over the airport too.

    278:

    This is probably wrong, but my understanding of AI general intelligence is that it's a program running on a machine. If you had two such machines, call them "Heteromeles" and "Charles Stross," if these were general intelligence machines and each could run the H or CS programs, you could swap the programs on the two machines and they'd run equally well.

    Now, if human brains were generally intelligent, this would imply that you could take "me," and "Charlie," and swap us between each others' skulls, and we'd work equally well, although Charlie would hate my computer setup and I'd crash Antipope trying to maintain it. If I understand the general intelligence idea correctly.

    Obviously you can't swap people between brains, because who we are is expressed by physically connected neurons. These connections proliferate early in life, and then go through subsequent cycles of proliferation and pruning until we die. We are structure.

    So, in other words, this version of general intelligence is basically that the AI has a soul, specifically, the program that can be installed and run on any general intelligence machine. If humans have souls (and I tend to group with the Taoists and Buddhists here), it's not our entire personality and it can't be extracted intact from my skull. The composite being known as "me" or "you" continually changes throughout life and disintegrates on death.

    Or, if you don't like the idea that self-aware AIs will have the structural equivalent of souls that can transmigrate among computers, while humans don't have equivalent structures, consider the story of the golem. Install a magical script, and the clay comes to life. So if you can't stand the idea of programmers trying to make souls, maybe they're trying to make general purpose golems instead.

    279:

    Preface And Public Announcement: 1. I have not forget or forgave anything. That means, I'm not going to discuss, mention or take note of these topics, leaving people to their ignorance. 2. And I have no desire to know anything of their relationships with New Management. 3. It's not the first time an individual is inflammatory allergic to my opinions or manners, but whatever the case, I say, "it's their loss, not mine". 4. Having said all that, I am still bold enough to barge in on different occasions.

    to Nancy Lebovitz @268: I'm not sure what general intelligence would look like compared to what humans have got. The definition of "general" is too general for people describe it, but I've seen enough option for people interested in topic to at least divide them by power they possess. Like this game I am considering to buy as of recent: https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/AI_Cores Personally, I think, this is way too simplified. I created a bit different measure of intelligence that can be described as "centralisation", where most centralised powerful intelligent systems were highly self-regulating and having mind of their own (like Golem XIV by Stanislav Lem, can be considered Alpha-class intelligence), to human-like decently-networked intelligence (beta-class, human models) to smart search algorithms on different levels.

    There's possibility to hammer a smart search algorithm to reshape and hammer it down to resemble human behaviour, but it still does not count, and we are not even there. But the most strange of them would be most decentralized ones, that are so vague in form it is impossible to isolate them from environment - I think, Charlie did describe their incarnation in the form of corporations and bureaucratic structures.

    to Robert Prior @269: Peter Watts does something like that in Blindsight (and sequels). I read that a lot, very inspiring - but not in a family-friendly manner.

    280:

    "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."

    The list is not quite what you say, considering that there are some domestic skills (with changing diapers put first!), and that "cooperate" is mentioned. It's not exactly "elite male". I'd say it's mostly a combination of farmstead and military plus some liberal arts.

    Would anybody care to suggest better lists, proposed without Heinlein's (or Lazarus Long's) arrogant tone?

    For amusement, contemplate Brin's Glory Season for contrast. The planet is run by clone groups of women, and one of the things which keeps men done is that they're expected to have a wide range of personal skills-- they don't get the advantage of specializing to work in groups.

    281:

    78: can't see why a horse analogue couldn't have plaited tusks as a horn. Perhaps it would fight differently, fencing as opposed to ramming?

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

    and as for Mary Poppins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic

    282:

    to Elderly Cynic @267: Of many quotes I've heard from Heinlein, this is probably the one I disagree the least. I actually prefer the diversity and it is especially funny and natural when the diversity comes not from a design but from the lack of it. If there wouldn't be any improvisation or imagination in engineering, nothing would work and nobody would understand anything. For one, my first job was listed an "engineer" (which is local equivalent of "design engineer") and I never did design jobs on this position, I only did what can be described as "drafting" - converting design into a practical form for metal and wiring. My second job was entirely opposite - I was a design engineer, while my job is listed as aforementioned "drafter". It goes even more strange from here (like, consulting with four different "bosses" on the same topic).

    I am surprised to see you favouring the currently dominant viewpoint that people (except, of course, our Holy Leaders) are nothing but anonymous, fungible, specialised cogs, and any who are different should be forced into that mould or eliminated. That dogma has been taking over even academic research for a long time, I had that fight many, many times in my career, and failed to resist it even in my area. IMO, anonymity and fungibility is inherently opposing to specialization. If you are replaceable and constantly hopping jobs, you will know a lot of things in many areas, but none of them good enough to compete with those who have been stuck there since childhood, or for another decade, actually working hard on problems (if they actually do that). If you are a specialist, you will know that your skills and connections are important, and how they are important, your position is beneficial, and you will actively oppose some everyman walking in from the street. You don't even need to a be a genius for that. Believe me, I've been through that experience on a very elementary level. This is why those "superorganisms" are so prolific these days - first, because they and their core competencies hardly meet their competition, second, because they are very self-aware about that. How many leading high-tech producers of IT infrastructure there are? Probably you can count them with your fingers.

    People trying to break out are blocked by the constraint that they are not considered for anything other than what they are trained for and/or have long experience in. Minimum experience 10 years programming Cobol on IBM 370 platforms was a common condition, and modern ones are little better. Even I have personal experience of that :-( Minimum experience managed in "years" is rather obsolete, nearsighted measure of it, and even my career has had some months that were more productive in experience than other years. Particularly my last year, where my primary project has been stalled for months because of all delays in quarantine measures, and some important people plain refuse to reply to our queries. But there's no way around time constraints all the same, because when you are doing it yourself, without that experience, it takes ten times as much time and effort as the person who has already trained to do that. And by the time you will study enough to know how to do what you want, you will forget half of the work you've been doing before that. Division of labor is a real thing, as far as efficiency is concerned.

    283:

    To have the real sense of the quote, you need to add the last sentence, which is "Specialization is for insects," and consider, given that the quote comes from page 248 of "Time Enough For Love" and almost certainly comes in the context of his discussion of the kinds of skills require to pioneer a new planet - it's a character speaking, BTW - and that character has faults, which are also discussed in the texts of multiple books.

    Having read his biography, I don't think that Heinlein was particularly invested in that exact list - I don't doubt that he'd happily accept the friendship of someone with a list of 22 skills which were utterly different than the ones he listed - outside the context of pioneering, the skills are clearly examples.

    If Heinlein had written "I prefer people with domestic skills, good knowledge of math, an understanding of the arts, basic knowledge of a real-world skill like construction or engineering, the ability to work a garden and a background in the military or a well-run business" I don't think the quote would be nearly so controversial.

    I can manage sixteen of the skills he lists, and probably manage a couple more if I had to, plus my own particular set of competencies.

    284:

    That certainly gives us a ball park for emulating a human (<100 billion neurons). 100 kW and 10 cabinets gets us more than half way there.

    Not sure how big a computer cabinet is in this case, but let's call it 1 m2, or 10^6 cubic centimeters. Human brains lump out in the 1100 to 1300 cc range, so call them 10^3 cc. So to shrink a 10^7-ish cc volume of computronium into a 10^3 space requires it to shrink around 10^4. Now Moore's Law is the idea that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. So IF we assume that means computer volumes can shrink by a factor of two every two years (and not by simply making smaller transistors), that's 13-14 cycles, or 25-30 years from now.

    If I'm wrong about the size of Gasdive's computer cabinets, and 10 cabinets are only around 10^6 cc, that's 10-11 cycles, or around 20 years from now.

    Energetically, we're trying to go from 200 kW to 100 W, so that's a factor of 2000 decline. Koomey's Law is that the number of computations per joule shrinks by 2 every 2.5 years or so. So that's 10-11 cycles, or 25-30 years.

    So if we're ballparking things, and if we assume that some variation on the theme of Moore's and Koomey's shrinkage laws continue to hold for another 30 years (giggles are appropriate), then the 2040s look to be nucking futs. This is certainly oversimplified to the point of being untrue, because we won't keep going as we're going now, and wake up one day to find that the world became utterly unrecognizable overnight. But, assuming nothing else changes (hah!), sometime in the 2040s will be when you can cram a human-scale general intelligence into a computer cabinet the size of a human skull and run it off a reasonably sized solar panel. What fun.

    285:

    Oh, I fully agree with THAT - my list of skills is, obviously, similarly dependent on my background (*). But his point that people should have a wide range of skills (including, as Nancy Lebovitz says, ones that cross 'gender roles' and are common to most people) and the other points I made stand.

    (*) How many readers here can make and repair nets, and make netting needles from pieces of wood? No, those are not required skills for most people :-)

    286:

    can't see why a horse analogue couldn't have plaited tusks as a horn. Perhaps it would fight differently, fencing as opposed to ramming?

    Pigeon answered this at 196 quite well.

    I'd add two additional problems. One is that, if you can make a cardboard or other lightweight sword analog and fix it to a bill-cap, you'll see what one big issue is: you're looking down the blade. Now many ruminants and horses can't really see in that direction. Presumably something that fenced with its face would have stereoscopic vision? Well, narwhals don't, and rhinos don't and...we don't have many other examples. But the problem I'm pointing to is that, if you're fencing with your face, your eyes are the easiest target to hit. There's no guard, and if it doesn't hit our eye, the next thing in line is your brain, which is even worse. Pigeon's comments about lateral forces breaking that part of your skull are also very much on point, as it were.

    Narwhal males do indeed fight with their teeth, but they seem to fight the way they hunt fish, by bludgeoning their opponents with their tusks. And note this is a tooth, not a horn, and it's fixed to a stronger part of the skull. Sawfish and swordfish also hunt this way, incidentally.

    The other problem is sharpening the tip. Use a horn for stabbing, it gets dull and needs to be resharpened. But animals tend to make sharp tips by growing them from the base, which is a problem. Deer get around this problem by growing new sharp-ish tips every year. But a unicorn? I guess they've got to grow sharp horn somehow, from the base, and that gets tricky, although it can be done (see bull horns, for example). Cat claws also grow sharp, but I don't think they grow the same way, so if you're dealing with that, you're not talking about a ruminant, but about an animal with a claw growing out of its head (at cat-i-corn?).

    Actually, the above gave me an interesting idea: an alien monster formatted like a unicorn, but with a serrated antler instead of a single horn. Basically a terrestrial sawfish. Hmmmm. Unfortunately, I don't know of one from myth, so it gets relegated to an alien world and SF. But still.

    287:

    Pigeon answered this at 196 quite well.

    My solution is that Unicorns were bred by the Elves as Cavalry steeds and magical encouragements towards virginity.

    Actually, the above gave me an interesting idea: an alien monster formatted like a unicorn, but with a serrated antler instead of a single horn. Basically a terrestrial sawfish. Hmmmm. Unfortunately, I don't know of one from myth, so it gets relegated to an alien world and SF. But still.

    I think Gamera fought one of those once. Monster's name may have been Zigra, but it was a 70s Gamera movie so I'm not going to waste the time looking it up.

    288:

    The other problem is sharpening the tip.

    That's easy! Make it out of something self-sharpening instead, like uranium. Implementation left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

    289:

    David Coppertop, wearing a copper mesh hat to protect his brain from Undue Influences, working hard for someone with Power, and living in a hovel.

    290:

    Yct led me to another structure. Consider that we use CPUs to set things up, but for certain purposes (graphics, computation on large sets of data), we use GPUs to offload, and which are specialized. What percentage of human intelligence is one, and which the other?

    Perhaps our CPU "learns" something, then builds - in the sense of "grows", or a muscle or brain pattern, on how to do that, and tells that to run when it needs it.

    291:

    The number of times a superorganism fucks up because they couldn't think outside the box?

    Even more often, they don't have a clue what the organization does and how they do it - too many MBAs. The result is the tossing around of buzzwords that they don't know the definition of.

    For example, one of my daughters who's a programmer called to rant a couple days ago. She's spent two weeks working on a project she was handed, being told ethernet logs.

    Then, after two weeks, she's in a meeting, and someone says something, and it comes out they want to send logs over the 'Net, not log all ethernet packets.

    They had no clues, it was all Magic Words to them.

    292:

    Computer cabinet/rack: a server is 19" wide, about 2" high, and vary in depth from 24" to about a meter. Servers are frequently referred to as pizza boxes (but double the length).

    The racks holding them average 6'6" to 7' plus.

    Ex: https://www.racksolutions.com/rack-mount-enclosure.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlpKDuviT7AIVnD6tBh2KxgmNEAQYASABEgKc9PD_BwE

    293:

    To amplify, rack space is measured in "U"s which is short for "unit." A single "unit" is 1.5 inches high and 19 inches wide. A full-size rack is usually 48 Units high, and you can add 3-5 inches for wheels, a top, and so forth.

    Oh shit. That means I miscalculated above how many of Charlie's 4U chassis would fit in a rack... It should be 12, or maybe 10 if a 1U space is left between each chassis for cooling purposes.

    Originally a "pizza box" was a Sparc 5 or Sparc 10, which were just about perfectly sized to fit a medium pizza and were stackable, but as you noted, any 1U server probably qualifies these days.

    294:

    Charlie I think your last half-sentence: and didn't really grasp the significance of large institutional superorganisms. hits the nail. Thanks, makes a lot more sense.

    EC People trying to break out are blocked by the constraint that they are not considered for anything other than what they are trained for Yeah; "We can't get the trained staff" - FUCKING LIARS I spent between the ages of 45 & 65 trying to get paid employment with an Engineering MSc, right. Actually, you were much too generous, your last parahgraph should have read, at the start: "Consider a large institutional superorganism; the number of times I have seen one fuck it up because none of the people on the planning or decision committees (either technical or executive) were prepared to think outside their box<.sAT ALL There, fixed that for you (grin).

    WHitroth Even ONE "MBA" is too many. EXTERMINATE!

    295:

    No. NO 4U servers. Absolutely not. Even if you provide the Genie lift, NO. I do NOT EVER want to have to deal with one again.... (No Genie lift https://www.tmsequip.com/products/genie-lift-gl-8-w-std-base-lifting-height-10-ft-5in-height-stowed-5-ft-7-5-in-load-capacity-400-lbs.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInfuNkouU7AIVJIVaBR1MBw8YEAQYASABEgK8Q_D_BwE and yes, that's a winch on the back)

    NO!

    296:

    It took both of us balancing a 3U storage module on our heads to get it into the 56-60U slot in one rack. I couldn't have done it single-handed (or single-headed).

    297:

    "Trained staff"

    For one, one in ten ever does training. The rest DO NOT DO IT.

    Second, they want you, before they talk to you, to have done a mind meld with the last three people walking out, so you can do all of their jobs, with no ramp-up time.

    And third... that was why I never went past my BS - I was afraid of some asshole in HR rejecting my resume because I was "overqualified".

    298:

    Would anybody care to suggest better lists, proposed without Heinlein's (or Lazarus Long's) arrogant tone?

    The whole "take orders; give orders" thing is amusing, having conducted leadership training and assessments over a few years. IMHO, "do what I say" is easy. Saying "do this coherent plan" is actually rather difficult, and it's surprising how few people do well at breaking down a team activity into separate tasks, expressing them clearly enough, then coordinating them: in their head, on the fly. All of those "command tasks" which involve a couple of planks, a bunch of ropes, and the need for your team to cross a bottomless chasm marked out by some lines on the ground, are a brilliant microcosm of it; it's a learned skill in part, can be fairly stressful to participate in, and is absolutely fascinating to watch from the outside.

    The truly irritating are the Dunning-Kruger types who are incorrectly convinced they are brilliant at giving orders. There's fun in designing training exercises that help them realise that they aren't, without destroying the training value for everyone else involved...

    Anyway, here's a quick go at it - I prefer principles to checklists:

    Take full care of yourself. Take full care of others (including children of any age). Accept responsibility for your actions; understand the impact of your actions on others. Do your fair share, and then some. Accept but control your fears, sufficient to do what needs done when things are scary; control your temper, sufficient to cope when things are stressful. Be willing to do the hard thing that's right, instead of the easy thing that's wrong. Understand that you might not be correct; understand that others might not be incorrect. Be willing to put yourself forward, and to be that first penguin off the iceberg. Keep learning. And when it really hurts, get up again and keep going. ;) Oh, and understand that maxims make good teammates, but a lousy boss ;)

    Or the simpler form for when things get stressful: Look out for the people around you, whoever they are; dig in and carry on no matter how sht things get; don't be a jack b*tard[1].

    [1] Non-widespread UK slang: To be "jack" - to look out for yourself over others, to be selfish.

    299:

    Just to be a contrarian, I'm going to post Zhuangzi's famous allegory of the "Altar Oak." This was written around the 4th Century BCE* and definitely during the Warring States Period, when a number of Chinese Kingdoms vied for dominance and war was a miserable part of life. It's one of the foundational documents of Taoism. If you're a bit of a lateral thinking, you can read this as an allegory about one way to lead a free and easy life:

    "Woodworker Shi was on his way to Qi. As he came to Quyuan he saw an oak planted as the village altar tree. It was so huge that a herd of several thousand cattle could have stood in its shade – its trunk was a hundred arm-spans round, tall as the hills, and a hundred feet straight up to the lowest limb. A dozen of its branches were so big that a boat could have been built from each one. The throng of gawking sightseers was big as the crowds on market days, but the woodworker did not so much as glance at it and walked right past without stopping. His apprentice, however, stood and gazed his fill before running to catch up. “Master, since I first picked up my ax and hatchet to follow you I have never seen lumber of such fine quality! Yet you were unwilling to look at it and walked right past without stopping. Why?”

    “Enough!” said Woodworker Shi. “Say no more about it. It’s waste wood! Make a boat from it and it will sink; make a coffin from it and it will rot; make a utensil from it and it will break; make a gate from it and it will run sap; make a pillar from it and insects will infest it. You can’t make lumbar from such a tree; it’s useless! That is why it has lived to such an age.”

    After Woodworker Shi returned home, the altar oak appeared to him in a dream. “What were you comparing me to? Did you mean to compare me to those lovely trees, like the sour cherry and pear, the tangerine and pomelo – fruit bearing trees that are ripped apart once their fruit ripens? Disgraced by all that ripping, their limbs split and their branches torn, they find only bitterness in life and end by dying before their natural years are up. They bring it on themselves, being torn up by the common crowd. It is thus for all types of things. Now, I have sought to be useless for a very long time, and though I came close to death I have now reached my goal – for me that is of great use indeed! Were I useful could I ever have grown so big? And after all, you and I are both things – what sort of thing are you to go sizing up another thing this way? You near dead waste of a man, what do you know of waste wood?”

    Woodworker Shi awoke and was explaining his dream. His apprentice said, “If it sought to be useless, how could it serve as an altar tree?”

    “Hush!” said the woodworker. “You should keep your mouth shut. It surely planted itself there knowing that it wouldn’t be recognized by the mocking crowd. If it were not an altar tree, wouldn’t it risk being cut down? Moreover, it protects itself differently from the common run; if you try to understand it by the common standard you’ll be far wide of the mark!”

    *A minor irony: The Zhuangzi has some text from the Tao Te Ching in it, and mentions Lao Tzu. However, the oldest known copy of the Zhuangzi is considerably older than the oldest known copy of the Tao Te Ching. Another thing to appreciate about Taoism.

    300:

    On the Heinlein list:

    In "Mother Earth, Mother Board" Neal Stephenson writes about the fraternity of cable layers (bear in mind this was written in 1996 when digital cameras were not a common thing):

    Handley, for example, was a founding member of SEAL Team 2 [...]. In addition to being an expert diver, he has a master mariner's license good up to 1,500 tons, which is not an easy thing to get or maintain. He does all his work on a laptop (he claims that it replaced 14 employees) and is as computer-literate as anyone I've known who isn't a coder. [...] The crews of the cable barges tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: ship's masters who also know how to dive using various types of breathing rigs or who can slam out a report on their laptops, embed a few digital images in it, and email it to the other side of the world over a satellite phone, then pick up a welding torch and go to work on the barge. [...] you can overhear them learnedly discoursing on flaw propagation in the crystalline structure of boron silicate glass or on seasonal variation of currents in the Pearl River estuary, or on what a pain in the ass it is to helm a large ship through the Suez Canal.

    These guys definitely tick quite a few boxes on Heinlein's list (apart from the diaper changing).

    301:

    These guys definitely tick quite a few boxes on Heinlein's list (apart from the diaper changing).

    You might be surprised; a lot of them are fathers, and that whole "don't be Jack" thing applies to childcare and nappies (what y'all call diapers) too. I know a Tier 1 type bloke who would be very offended if you suggested he couldn't take care of his daughter while Mum went away for the weekend; and last year was at the funeral of an ex-RM friend who had been in the SRR, passed selection for SBS, and had become a primary schoolteacher (I met Stewart when he was our team's performance psychologist, and we shared a room in Melbourne for two weeks).

    302:

    "Never seen Mr. Rogers..."

    For your edification: "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" with Tom Hanks.

    Fred Rogers was known for being the quintessential nice guy. Hard to understand how he managed to stay on TV all those years. (I NEVER watched either show growing up, always loved Bugs tho... (and Popeye and Bullwinkle and ...))

    303:

    “Cat claws also grow sharp” And when they get dull the cat sharpens them (on my furniture.). Unicorns could hone their horns on rocks.

    304:

    Actually the movie about him is quite good. Not a bio, mostly about an interaction with a magazine writer doing a write up on him. It even brings up his faults (which were well known in the Pittsburgh area where he lived).

    Worth a watch. And most likely not what anyone who just knows the character "Mr. Rogers" would expect.

    305:

    the way cat claws grow, a succession of shells.. that could be the way. but that would rule out the babyrusa-type tuskhorn

    306:

    Yes, shedding the outer, damaged bit. Such a system would probably be a nightmare for something that's long and thin, both because of poor adhesion between layers and damage to more than one layer. But something like that (or filing the horn down on rocks) would be needed is a unicorn was daft enough to want to mount a long, sharp horn on its brain case between its eyes.

    Making the horn a magical non-weapon probably is a better solution, don't you think. Giving a goat a tool that it could wave at any food and make it edible, and any water, and make it potable, would qualify as useful magic, at least for a goat, don't you think?

    307:

    First source I’ve seen tonight: President Trump tests positive for coronavirus

    True, or looking for an excuse to cancel the next debate?

    309:

    In the world of the book I just finished writing the decision was that unicorns can magically adjust their mass. They're not as heavy as a cavalry horse, and don't have the sharp teeth and incredible endurance of the dire wolves elite Orcish cavalry rides into battle, but they're very fast, and frequently agile enough to dodge pikes. In the last couple feet of their charge unicorns can increase their apparent weight by a couple tons... which makes them very tough opponents.

    310:

    That's pretty much how we think meat brains work. You can experience it yourself. You can read how to fly a helicopter in about 2 minutes. It takes about 100 hours of practice to burn those pathways into callable routines.

    311:

    JPR As you say Karma! It's to be hoped he gets it as badly as BoZo did, but does not die ....

    312:

    "Obviously you can't swap people between brains, because who we are is expressed by physically connected neurons. These connections proliferate early in life, and then go through subsequent cycles of proliferation and pruning until we die. We are structure."

    That's basically a description of how spiking neural networks work. Over simplified: connections are made and pruned between virtual neurons. Activation potentials are modified. Though there are physical connections from every vneuron to every other, software means that in reality only a few are connected. Just like on the internet every computer is connected to every other, but in reality, due to software, your laptop is only taking to a few. There's a virtual structure created as the system learns.

    313:

    Only partly. That's how reflexes and some other subconscious skills work, yes - you need 50-200 hours repetition, and then never entirely forget them. But it's not how conscious skills work - they can be learnt in minutes or hours, and are fairly easily forgotten.

    314:

    Trump would doubtless think that karma is something you order at an Indian restaurant.

    315:

    Even if Bob is now the Eater Of Souls, suppose if Angleton could be brought back from whatever closed-up pocket universe he and Old George got stuck in, he would be a formidable entity considering his experience (although he might need to go PHANG to avoid Kranzberg syndrome). Even Old George might be salvaged as a useful operator, with the Black Pharaoh wielding the whip and keeping him in line.

    316:

    Nope, Angleton is Gone.

    (We should, however, see more of Old George, albeit circa 1820 when he's decidedly not old, in "Bones and Nightmares", the book after "In His House", which in turn is the book after "Dead Lies Dreaming".)

    317:

    Re: '... hoped he gets it as badly as BoZo did'

    Hope Biden is okay after all that ranting at the 'debate'. Wonder whether DT suspected he was infected - if yes, then he knowingly tried to physically/medically harm* his political opponent. Pretty sure that's not considered okay even these days.

    • I.e., Forcefully expelling and propelling virus laden aerosols. Everyone on that studio set needs to get tested & retested. Plus all of their close contacts which could mean about 1,000 people.
    318:

    Plus all of their close contacts which could mean about 1,000 people.

    Me thinks you're low by a factor of 10. The US White House operations is huge. And interacts with Congressional operations which is also huge. Now toss in the Pentagon.

    319:

    "...interacts with Congressional operations which is also huge."

    Trump met with Mitch McConnel at the Capitol a couple of days back. Just sayin'

    320:

    [I see SFReader already mentioned this.] Trump stood on a debate stage, mostly facing Biden, and sprayed exhalations laced with lies at Biden for 90 minutes. If the debate participants and other people in the room weren't given a rapidtest before the debate, and Biden gets infected, there would be people who believe that it was a political assassination. There would be people who believe this anyway. Another angle; Regeneron[1] is well along in their trials of an antibody cocktail[2] for wealthy/connected people infected with SARS-CoV-2. (This is very known to relevant Trump administration people.)

    [1] I interviewed with that company several months ago. (They were looking for a Kubernetes-is-the-hammer-for-all-nails-and-not-nails person. Interesting company though.) [2] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/provocative-results-boost-hopes-antibody-treatment-covid-19 - remember, investors and greed are involved.

    321:

    Nope, Angleton is Gone.

    But is he actually dead, or merely unavailable?

    (There's a WMG over on TVTropes I'm still wondering about)

    322:

    Mary Poppins is easy... the Wizard of Northampton took care of it already:

    https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3815529.html

    (NSFW due to gore)

    323:

    If the election comes down to K Harris vs M Pence ... who'se going to win?

    324:

    It should be 12, or maybe 10 if a 1U space is left between each chassis for cooling purposes.
    Insulation maybe, not cooling. You don't want air in a rack other than that being pulled into the front of boxes and spewed out the back. Current data centre design has cool air corridors with the racks arranged with the fronts in the cool air. Any space in the rack that isn't filled gets spacer panels to prevent airflow, so as not to waste the cool air.

    (Old fashioned racks often sucked cool air in the bottom and spewed hot out the top -- that doesn't really work and you end up with the equipment at the top of the rack noticeably hotter than at the bottom. I've got one crappy old rack in service where there is a 10C difference in temperature on two identical servers just because they are not in the same place in the rack).

    325:

    The adventures of Conan Doyle spring to mind, though I wouldn't have thought Angleton was the one to trigger them ....

    326:

    Which presumably replaced the scale models you sat in type of simulator - that's where Ian M Banks got the idea for The model battleship fights in Matter from.

    327:

    I kind of assumed that as he got taken down by Bumble Bee on her first mission.

    328:

    This hideous strength certainly might maybe there is scope for a historical post ww2 Laundry Novel

    329:

    I must get round to reading the books after watching the TV Show Margo is just awesome.

    I totally stole her to be my Drow Characters sister in the Starfinder (dnd in space ) game

    330:

    There's a difference between "basic competence" (or at least "not complete incompetence") and "specialisation".

    On a similar situation to Laz Long, my folks jacked it in and sailed round the Med for a few years. Yachties have to be self-reliant and highly practical, because things break, the sea is not your friend, and the people and equipment you have when things go pear-shaped are all you've got to work with. That said though, there is a substantial barter economy in marinas amongst yachties, and if they can call on their neighbour two boats down who's actually an expert then they absolutely will. For sure you can change your own fuel pump if you have to, but if you've got someone on hand who used to be a mechanic then everyone recognises that not only will it get done quicker, but it's less likely to have problems in future. (Because things break, and the sea etc..)

    Specialisation may be for insects, but individual (in)competence is for the birds. Literally. Look at what termites or bees build, with specialisation; and compare it to a pigeon's nest or even a weaver bird. Insects FTW.

    331:

    Bill Arnold @ 320

    Trump stood on a debate stage, mostly facing Biden, and sprayed exhalations laced with lies at Biden for 90 minutes. If the debate participants and other people in the room weren't given a rapidtest before the debate, and Biden gets infected, there would be people who believe that it was a political assassination.

    Hanlons Razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

    Which applies to quite a lot of Trump's actions, come to think of it.

    332:

    This hideous strength certainly might maybe there is scope for a historical post ww2 Laundry Novel

    Nope.

  • As noted previously, I dislike C. S. Lewis' work.

  • As I've said elsewhere, spies don't mean today what they meant when I started writing the series (in 1999!). The Laundry story arc at this point has run its course, except for the penultimate crisis, the finale, and the wrap-up, plus one or two loose ends. I know roughly what they are, and I'll get to them when the world stops spinning.

  • Meanwhile I'm keeping the universe going, but to all intents and purposes "Dead Lies Dreaming" is the start of a new series.

    (I wanted my publishers to sell it as "Tales of the New Management, book 1" but they decided "The Laundry Files" has more name recognition, so "Laundry Files book 10" it is.)

    333:

    For the record, Biden tested negative.

    334:

    Paul maybe - except that DJT is a vicious, malignant shit. He's on record multiple times of using the state for petty, personal & vindictive actions.

    335:

    For the record, Biden tested negative.

    Just a reminder: people can come down with Covid19 symptoms up to two weeks after exposure. Biden's going to get really annoyed with all the retesting, although I wish him well.

    Actually, I wish Trump well. I want him fit to stand trial next spring.

    Now, about those odds. I haven't checked recently, but the last time I looked, about 50% of covid19 positive people were effectively asymptomatic, about 40% had a "light illness" which meant anything from cold/flu symptoms to serious illness that they didn't take to the hospital (and yes, a majority come out with lung or other damage). About 10% go to the hospital, and about 3-5% die.

    Assuming Trump's not lying about his diagnosis, as POTUS, he's got access to the best health care in the world, including convalescent plasma donated by recovered soldiers. Despite his age and physical condition, I seriously doubt he'll die unless he strokes out or has an MI in the middle of the night when no one's looking. The most likely outcome (assuming the reports of him showing symptoms aren't a lie) is that he gets forced off the campaign trail with light symptoms for two weeks, then comes roaring (and coughing) back, bragging about how he beat the stupid disease and it's no big deal. That's a pretty decent reset.

    Obviously, I'd prefer that he was completely miserable until mid-November, thereby screwing up his campaign and losing the election bigly. But I have to acknowledge that, just on the odds, this is an unlikely outcome, much as I may hope for it.

    336:
    I want him fit to stand trial next spring.

    My thoughts also.

    DJT is going to have a tough time getting decent legal representation while having negative net worth. I hope his Legal Aid team is good.

    337:

    Negative net worth? Perhaps? Stiffing his lawyers? That's what they're likely to pay attention to. After all, dude's got at least one more biography in him to pay for his legal bills, assuming he gets that far.

    338:

    Hanlons Razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. What if [He] (sorta?) knew that he was infected? (Note that with this crew of liars they could be lying, but the probability of that has been decreasing as new signs emerge.) At any rate, the White House should have been enforcing masks and daily rapidtests. They were willfully not being careful, for a very long time, for various reasons but in part from being high on their own propaganda supply (e.g. anti-masker shit), some of them. This is the White House willfully taunting [probability] the last 6 months: "the stochastic digraph for Russian roulette"

    Anyway, the point is (partly) that the QAnons attempting to spin up conspiracy narratives about how this was a plot to kill Trump will not have the narrative space for themselves.

    339:

    Btw, folks, a) Melanoma's reporting "mild symptoms" (and she's 20+ years younger), and b) happy, happy, joy, joy, a Utah GOP Senator on the Judiciary Committee has just tested positive. This is the committee that starts the SCOTUS nomination....

    340:

    …he gets forced off the campaign trail with light symptoms for two weeks, then comes roaring (and coughing) back, bragging about how he beat the stupid disease and it's no big deal.

    Of course, even recovered cases have shown some severe organ damage. And he's 74, overweight, and in a high-stress profession.

    341:

    At any rate, the White House should have been enforcing masks and daily rapidtests. They were willfully not being careful, for a very long time, for various reasons but in part from being high on their own propaganda supply

    Reporters that WH today are saying mask wearing is still a minority position. Which boggles their and my minds.

    342:

    Negative net worth? Perhaps? Stiffing his lawyers?

    His habit of stiffing anyone who works for him becomes problematic when it extends to the lawyers defending him from lawsuits over him not paying his bills.

    Of course he did that; you can read about Trump’s Long History of Getting Sued by His Own Lawyers, or the article Trump's team is what happens when you don't pay your legal bills about his impeachment defense, or spend ten seconds on Google.

    Nobody would expect otherwise these days. He will probably attract up-and-coming grifters and con artists for his criminal trials just as he did for his impeachment.

    343:

    The script is writing itself.

    NYT, just now:

    Updated Oct. 2, 2020, 5:47 p.m. ET 2 minutes ago Covid-19 Live Updates: Trump Receives Experimental Drug Treatment for Mild Symptoms

    President Trump has a cough and low-grade fever after testing positive for the coronavirus, according to two people familiar with his condition, and was going to undergo tests at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

    President Trump remained “fatigued but in good spirits” on Friday after receiving a promising experimental drug to treat Covid-19, according to a memo from his doctor, and was expected to undergo tests at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he would remain for a few days.

    344:

    Covid-19 Live Updates: Trump Receives Experimental Drug Treatment for Mild Symptoms

    <snark>

    Time to shine a light up his ass!

    Or is he getting the bleach enema?

    </snark>

    345:

    For those in the US if we surf the various news channels just now (6pm ET) we get to see a green helicopter parked on the lawn of the WH with incredibly highly paid news readers all saying he has mild symptoms and is headed to Walter Reed. Over and over and over and over and over .....

    346:

    Yeah, just saw this. Speaking of questionable statements from the White House: ";President Trump remains in good spirits, has mild symptoms, and has been working throughout the day. Out of an abundance of caution, and at the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the President will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed for the next few days. President Trump appreciates the outpouring of support for both he and the First Lady,; White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement. (see https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/trumps-test-positive-for-covid-19 for live coverage of WH emissions in chronological order).

    Remind me. Didn't the Denizen of #10 Downing Street go through a similar scenario some months ago?

    347:

    Reporters that WH today are saying mask wearing is still a minority position.

    Apparently this has changed in the last hour or so.

    Now apparently everyone in the WH is "wear'n".

    348:

    Martin @ 273: [With links for y'all of the "Captain Kangaroo" persuasion...]

    So, if not "Wombles as ambush predators" (I'm still hoping for that - just wondering how many lost dogs / dog walkers / joggers on Wimbledon Common would be needed to support the dietary needs of a colony of trapdoor wombles, who very definitely make good use of the things that they "find").

    I like Soviet Womble, but that's probably off topic.

    349:

    For the record, Biden tested negative.

    If exposure was at Tuesday's debate, it may be too soon to tell. IIRC it takes 4-5 days for levels of virus to build enough to be detectable.

    350:

    Re: 'Another angle; Regeneron[1] is well along in their trials of an antibody cocktail[2] for wealthy/connected people infected with SARS-CoV-2.'

    Yep - their share prices jumped as soon as the headlines came out that DT was dosed with their product.

    351:

    Didn't see the helicopter shot. Any resemblance to the last day of the US Embassy in Saigon?

    352:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 280:

    "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."

    I don't know if I could write a sonnet or not, but I used to know a whole bunch of dirty limericks.

    353:

    Any resemblance to the last day of the US Embassy in Saigon?

    Alas, no. It was sedate as such things go.

    354:

    Re: ' ... it takes 4-5 days for levels of virus to build enough to be detectable.'

    Day 10-11 is often the critical day. According to Daniel Griffin, MD (TWiV) many patients that end up in ICU seemed fine for the first 9-10 days and then Wham! the virus-cytokine storm cycle knocks them flat.

    Something to keep in mind: an MD's end points don't correspond to lay folks' end points. When an MD says 'not serious', lay people would say 'not dead'. (Or, when they tell you that you 'might feel some discomfort' during a colonoscopy or intubation ... without anesthetic.)

    355:

    SFReader @ 317:

    Re: '... hoped he gets it as badly as BoZo did'

    Hope Biden is okay after all that ranting at the 'debate'. Wonder whether DT suspected he was infected - if yes, then he knowingly tried to physically/medically harm* his political opponent. Pretty sure that's not considered okay even these days.

    * I.e., Forcefully expelling and propelling virus laden aerosols. Everyone on that studio set needs to get tested & retested. Plus all of their close contacts which could mean about 1,000 people.

    I dunno. I think at least part of his performance was trying to be so obnoxious that Biden would refuse to take part in future debates, so he could accuse Biden of being afraid to debate him.

    I don't have any doubt he already knew he was infected, but he might still have been in denial. I don't know if he's got enough cunning to recognize he could be spreading the virus to his opponent. I wouldn't put it past him, but I just don't know if he's smart enough to come up with such a plan.

    The debate performance seems to have backfired on him because instead of Biden refusing future debates the organizers decided to add additional controls to prevent future bad behavior and now he's the one who's refusing to participate.

    356:

    Paul @ 331: Bill Arnold @ 320

    Trump stood on a debate stage, mostly facing Biden, and sprayed exhalations laced with lies at Biden for 90 minutes.
    If the debate participants and other people in the room weren't given a rapidtest before the debate, and Biden gets infected, there would be people who believe that it was a political assassination.

    Hanlons Razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

    Which applies to quite a lot of Trump's actions, come to think of it.

    There is, however, overwhelming evidence of Trumpolini's primary motivation being malice. His incompetence may keep him from effectively implementing his maliciousness, but it doesn't mean he's not driven by evil.

    357:

    Re:' ... there would be people who believe that it was a political assassination.'

    Walter Reed National Military Medical Center is a top military hospital so I'm guessing that they* have the know-how and equipment to rapidly sequence (and identify) DT's particular COVID-19 strain. If Biden tests positive - using the same series of tests and vallidations, probably at the same hosp becuz he is still referred to as/deemed a US VP - this could be sufficient to confirm whether DT was the origin of Biden's infection.

    • Johns Hopkins Uni or any of the within-a-couple-of-hours-emergency-helicopter-flight Ivy League Med schools/uni/science labs or Fauci/CDC would probably volunteer to validate/confirm these tests and conclusions. And they'd probably make the effort to conduct blinded lab tests by having WRGH send them several different patients' blood for analysis with the test tubes identified by number only (not by patient name/number but a completely different set of numbers).
    358:

    the organizers decided to add additional controls to prevent future bad behavior

    Someone standing behind each candidate with a bowlful of mashed potatoes, to be used if they speak out of turn? :-)

    359:

    they* have the know-how and equipment to rapidly sequence (and identify) DT's particular COVID-19 strain Thanks for filling in the details. The other part of it would be evidence that DJT knew or suspected that he was infected when at the debate. That might be a little hard. He was definitely infected and infectious though if the reports of symptoms on Thursday are to be believed. People have noted that DJT never looked at the camera during that debate, and mainly looked a Biden, while spewing SARS-CoV-2-laden air in Biden's direction, disguised as as endless stream of loud lies. (Loud spreads SARS-CoV-2.) They should have had a fan or barrier between the two.

    360:

    Maybe it’s a bad angle, or maybe I’m just indulging in wishful thinking, but the photo on the front page of the Grauniad that purports to be of Thrump walking to the escape pod, sorry, helicopter, really doesn’t look like actual Thrump to me. I call stand-in.

    361:

    Going forward at least, they should put the two "debaters" in separate isolation booths, like those used on the old $64,000 Question (now there is an old reference). Separate mikes in each booth, controlled by the moderator, which would take care of the problem of audio leakage from one to the other's mike. It is probably too much to threaten to turn off the air in one booth if the occupant keeps trying to talk over the other.

    Enjoy!

    Frank.

    362:

    Re: ' ... put the two "debaters" in separate isolation booths, like those used on the old $64,000 Question (now there is an old reference).'

    Good idea - they should give it a test in the upcoming VP candidates debate since depending on how things go over the next couple of weeks, these two might end up as the de facto presidential candidates.

    You mentioned oldies ... I associate Weird Al with old Top-40 hits or musicals covers so I was surprised when this video popped up.

    WE'RE ALL DOOMED - Trump vs. Biden ft. "Weird Al" Yankovic

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un9x-DjTMT0

    363:

    the photo on the front page of the Grauniad that purports to be of Thrump walking to the escape pod, sorry, helicopter, really doesn’t look like actual Thrump to me.

    If you can watch the video of him getting in at the WH and out at WR, it's him. Or the world's best impersonator.

    364:

    And, as someone I read a few minutes ago, he also lives in public housing.

    365:

    Ah, yes, after they combined Walter Reed, which the GOP had let fall apart, and then sold the land off to developers, with the Naval Medical Center.

    Johns Hopkins? How 'bout the world's largest research hospital... which is across the street from Walter Reed.

    Building 10, On the 308 acre campus of the NIH.

    366:

    Shouldn't that be milkshakes?

    367:

    Oh, and "low-grade fever" and "exhausion" and "given him a completely experimental drug treatment on the President" by IV (they said "infusion") and chopper him to Walter Reed does not sound like "mild", sounds like they think it's on it's way to "a lot worse".

    And remember he's a germaphobe.

    I hear he hasn't tweeted in over 18 hrs, so he's really sick.

    368:

    Agree with some of that, but it was also around six pm in DC on a Friday, so why not take the helicopter?

    369:

    Why if people got physically ill (in the short run, obvious symptoms) from being lied to? Social arrangements would be very different.

    370:

    Shouldn't that be milkshakes?

    No. Mashed potatoes.

    Story from Trump's childhood, according to his niece. He was being a dick at the dinner table (as usual) and his brother dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes over his head and everyone laughed at him.

    Apparently this family story was repeated at a family dinner at the White House and he got all closed, arms crossed, chin down, scowling… He can't stand being laughed at.

    371:

    If you don't have to lie in person then tv and radio would be regulated using anti radiation missiles, spam filters would be AI complete and fact checkers/censors would be on hazard pay.

    Assuming such media are permitted at all.

    372:

    I hear he hasn't tweeted in over 18 hrs, so he's really sick.

    No, he's just mildly feverish and unused to feeling unwell. (Trump dunks on people who are sick regularly; implies he doesn't usually get sick himself.)

    I view the Walter Reed admission as precautionary, like Boris Johnson's ICU visit. The thing about Trump is that he's very overweight and elderly, and also shows signs of having had TIAs or minor strokes. That's a red flag for comorbidities for COVID19 and he's at higher-than-normal risk of stroke or other life-threatening symptoms e.g. kidney necrosis.

    Reminder that at this stage, all drug treatments are "completely experimental", with the possible exception of dexamethasone for patients who are going downhill and likely to need oxygen or ventilation (it's proven to cut the mortality rate by a third, costs pennies, and has been licensed for about 60 years).

    The Regeneron treatment he's on is in second-stage trials and looks highly promising so far. He's also being given remdesevir -- expensive, doesn't do much, but better than nothing. No word on his hydroxychloroquine/bleach regime, which is a shame.

    Much more interesting is the effect this has had on the Senate judiciary committee, which gets to vote on that empty Supreme Court spot! It's currently tilted 11/9 Repub/Democrat, but two of the Republican members just tested positive because Trump infected them. So the Democrats may be able to block confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. I understand that McConnell may be able to move confirmation to the floor of the house, but again: the Republicans are down at least two senators and their pattern of recklessly ignoring infection control measures suggests that in the coming days they may have several more in isolation -- and a confirmation vote on the floor of the house requires in-person attendance.

    So Trump may have inadvertently sabotaged his own supreme court pick.

    373:

    Charlie As of since I sat down in front of the screen this morning: CNN has now quoted an advisor saying Mr Trump has experienced "trouble breathing" and is feeling "very fatigued". He can go into a coma & stay there, as far as I care, but he has got to stay alive until 4th November ... However I love the idea of the SCOTUS pick set-up being shafted, how "fitting". 😁 Other sources, including former DT servants who have turned against him, after being shafted ( Scaramucci f'rinstance ) are now saying: "It's all over - he can't divert to anything else, he's denied science & advice, he can't switch to "LAw & Order" (etc) - it's all about the virus, which he has disregarded & the elctorate can see thi.

    374:

    There is a high chance the doctors have confiscated his mobile - "Mr President, you MUST rest." Who ranks whom between a consultant in his hospital and the president in bed as a patient? No contest.

    Thanks for the court nomination update - let's hope. We need some good news.

    375:

    So Trump may have inadvertently sabotaged his own supreme court pick.

    As my brother said last night when I made a similar comment, Mitch will do whatever is needed to get the vote through. Even if that means bringing those two into the chamber in bubble suits to vote to change the rules to allow remote voting by quarantined Senators via a new app on their phones. If only for SCOTUS votes. Then they can go back to their isolation with phones and app in hand.

    376:

    Re: 'How 'bout the world's largest research hospital... which is across the street from Walter Reed.'

    NIH - only ever thought of the NIH as a research lab. But, you're right they'd definitely have both the expertise and equipment.

    My impression that the choice of hospital for treating DT is more than just medical abilities/facilities.

    He's dumped on and tried to quash research scientists so if anything goes wrong - whether or not he recovers - they could become a political target. The Ivy Leagues have both the facilities and -- pretty importantly now -- the prestige/alums/funding and an established track record of winning legal filings.

    So far it seems as though DT considers the military as politically neutral - no threat to him personally - even though he has no respect for any of the military vets who were wounded or suffered during their service.

    Next phase is swearing Pence in if DT slips into a coma. There's little guidance for determining whether a POTUS is physically (medically) fit for holding office based on the piece below.

    https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/09/21/whos-not-medically-fit-be-president-10196

    377:

    Since yesterday afternoon I've been imagining the doctor who's been assigned to Trump having a talk with the head of Trump's Secret Service detail... "If one of those quacks who's touting hydrochloroquinine or oleandrin shows up to treat the President - shoot them!"

    378:

    My impression that the choice of hospital for treating DT is more than just medical abilities/facilities.

    Walter Reed has a section set up specifically to serve Presidents in case they need to stay in the hospital. Except in the case of lights flashing run for an emergency to nearest facility[1] it IS where any POTUS would go.

    There's little guidance for determining whether a POTUS is physically (medically) fit for holding office based on the piece below.

    Doesn't matter. If half+1 of the Cabinet agrees the VP can take over. For any reason they think is reasonable. Then POTUS can say no if they disagree. Then Congress can vote on it.

    379:

    [1] When the President goes anywhere that is planned the SS advance team checks out all the hospitals in the area to determine which can handle what kinds of situations for the POTUS. And if something does happen they go to the closest one (time wise) than can handle the specific issue.

    And I suspect they maintain a DB of such information in general plus based on past research for unplanned trips.

    We spend an unholy amount of money on POTUS protection. Much of it in prep for things than never happen.

    380:

    Hm, the Biden/Trump debate moderator off-offhandedly says that D.J.Trump wasn't tested for SARS-CoV-2 by the debate organizers. The "honor system" was used. Trump was certainly positive and infectious. Since Trump is devoid of honor, I will assume with middling high probability that [he] knew he was infected. Trump Reportedly Arrived to the Debate Too Late to Be Tested by Organizers (Aaron Mak, Oct 02, 2020) During a Fox segment on Friday, Wallace said that Trump arrived too late to the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic to be tested. “For them to get tested, there wouldn’t have been enough time to have the test and have the debate at 9 that night,” he said. “They didn’t show up until 3, 4, 5 in the afternoon. Yeah, there was an honor system when it came to the people that came into the hall from the two campaigns.”

    381:

    A mildly left-wing rant courtesy Daily Kos and Showercapblog.

    Sample quote: "HEY LOOK while I was writing, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis also tested positive, and yes, he was at the Coney Barrett event. So this woman allows a party thrown in her honor to be held in conditions which openly defied public health guidelines, causing an outbreak of a deadly disease that reached the very Oval Office, and we’re supposed to let her exercise judgment over the rest of us for the rest of her life? Are you fucking insane?"

    It looks like JBS was right, and the Amy Barrett rollout was a super-spreader event. I'm guessing even odds (or better) that there won't be a Republican majority in the Senate to ram through her nomination until November, even if she doesn't get sick or withdraw.

    As to whether Trump knew he was sick...Timeline time. With yarn. I haven't been looking at the testing recently, but there are two classes of the Covid19 test: PCR (look for viral RNA in the sample) and antibody (look for antibodies to Covid19 in the sample). Back in the Paleogene of four months ago or so, the first trials of some of the antibody tests showed that during the first few days after exposure, they're not very good. This shouldn't surprise anybody, because it takes time for an immune system to ramp up and fight. About the time someone becomes symptomatic, they become more reliable, although as we've found, there have been plenty of people who definitely had Covid-19, were symptomatic, and tested negative. PCR is more reliable, but takes longer.

    So anyway, the Friday Red Rollout Event (shout out to Game of Thrones) seems to have been where a bunch of people (reporters, secret service agents, lackeys), and politicians (are they people? I guess so, biologically) were exposed.

    If the White House is doing PCR testing routinely, the earliest they would have picked up on this is maybe Saturday but probably Sunday or later (there's got to be enough virus to find). So if Trump was exposed on Friday, they might have known Monday that he was infected. Did they? One bit of evidence is this Twitter picture allegedly from Monday, which shows Pence suddenly distancing himself from Trump. This was an arrangement that they'd had in the early days of the pandemic, only to abandon them with Trump's bleach etc. messaging. Could mean they knew Trump was infected but not symptomatic...or it could mean they knew he'd been exposed and actually cared.

    So it's likely that, at the Tuesday debate, Trump knew he'd been exposed. He might well have known he was testing positive. If so, that might explain the unhinged spewing at Biden. It also shows something about what Trump thinks of his family, as four of his children were sitting unmasked in the front row for the whole thing. Melania wore a mask until she got on stage, and was infected at some point anyway (spousal privilege, basically).

    From there, Trump and Hicks apparently became symptomatic Wednesday, officially got tested Thursday (!?), and we got the Friday drama thingie. I suspect this is implied causality, not the first time anyone got tested. If they have any sense, they're testing far more often than when people feel ill, so they may well have known that Trump was infected and had been counting on him being asymptomatic so that they didn't have to tell anyone. When he became symptomatic, the jig was up, especially as I'm sure reports were rolling in that attendees of the Red Rollout were turning up positive all over the country.

    So, if anything, the Big Lie here wasn't a conspiracy to make everyone believe Trump was ill when he was fine, it was to cover up that he'd been infected, in the hopes that no one would notice. If so, while infected, he went to multiple events where he met, unmasked, with supporters and donors. This might provide a clue into how much esteem he has for these people.

    I dunno. The best that can come out of this (aside from a November Blue Wave) is that a whole generation of writers have a real world models for the powerful yet bumbling antagonists in their novels. If you'd written this into a fantasy in 2015, unless it was a farce, no non-historian would have believed that evil geniuses could be so inept. Now we know better. Hope there's still a publishing industry left to support them.

    382:

    SITREP:

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/03/world/covid-trump

    Shortly after the upbeat briefing by [Trump's doctors Saturday morning], a person familiar with the president’s health gave a more sober assessment to reporters at Walter Reed on the condition of anonymity. “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care,” this person said. “We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

    Two people close to the White House said in separate interviews with The New York Times that the president had trouble breathing on Friday and that his oxygen level dropped, prompting his doctors to give him supplemental oxygen while at the White House and decide to transfer him to Walter Reed where he could be monitored with better equipment and treated more rapidly in case of trouble.

    [snip]

    While describing what [the White House physician] said was the president’s progress, he said Mr. Trump was “just 72 hours into the diagnosis now,” which would mean midday on Wednesday.

    383:

    As of 28 min ago (as I type this), "the White House doctor says Trump is doing well".

    Riiiight. Not what else I read. He's in deep do-do.

    Meanwhile, Charlie, about the "fictional" Laundryverse: from the Atlantic: "K, the overlooked variable driving the pandemic"

    Fess up!

    384:

    The publishing industry is in NYC and it is alive and well. It doesn't like SFF farces though.

    385:

    Oh, btw, Ellen tells me, concerning the GOP Senators testing positive (3 in 3 days) that McConnell says no votes for two weeks....

    386:

    The NIH, nope. The NIH is comprised of 27 Centers and Institutes, and over 20,000 people work on campus (about 80% of the population of the Pentagon). You can find a map - look at the dozens of large buildings. Really.

    387:

    To clarify: prior to 2016, only a SFF farce would have had a leader like El Cheato. One of the good things he's done is to give permission for an author of any SFF mode to write in a character like him.

    Heck, Whitroth can now start a "King in Orange" pastiche, centered around a story that makes people so enraged that even shy introverts drop what they're doing and become activists for years once they read it. Heck, there's even room for a retread of "The Repairer of Reputations," especially in the current media landscape. Reputation rehab is a niche industry now.

    388:

    I've been making graphs of COVID-19 incidence rates for a number of countries and have noticed that several of them show longish periods of linear growth rather than exponential. Not being an epidemiologist, I figured that was just one of those things I don't understand, of which there are myriads.

    Well this came up just now. Apparently the linear growth has been puzzling other people.

    https://www.pnas.org/content/117/37/22684 A network-based explanation of why most COVID-19 infection curves are linear PNAS September 15, 2020 117 (37) 22684-22689; first published August 24, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010398117 Many countries have passed their first COVID-19 epidemic peak. Traditional epidemiological models describe this as a result of nonpharmaceutical interventions pushing the growth rate below the recovery rate. In this phase of the pandemic many countries showed an almost linear growth of confirmed cases for extended time periods. This new containment regime is hard to explain by traditional models where either infection numbers grow explosively until herd immunity is reached or the epidemic is completely suppressed. Here we offer an explanation of this puzzling observation based on the structure of contact networks. We show that for any given transmission rate there exists a critical number of social contacts, Dc , below which linear growth and low infection prevalence must occur. Above Dc traditional epidemiological dynamics take place... etc.
    389:

    Interesting. Thanks. I may look at that. While I am not an epidemiologist, I did know that the simple exponential network assumes an essentially uniform mixing model, and that more complex systems behaved somewhat differently. There are actually several ways in which near-linear growth can be achieved, buT most are rather implausible. This sounds very plausible.

    390:

    Heteromeles One small problem: The Antibodes test ... WIll also show positive if you've been exposed to C-19, but it's bounced, or you've had it & recovered, yes?

    Various - I, too, have noted the err... slightly differing accounts of how "well" or "Ill" DJT actually is.

    391:

    they may have several more in isolation -- and a confirmation vote on the floor of the house requires in-person attendance

    Unless they decide 'screw isolation, this is important' and show up anyway.

    392:

    Re: 'We show that for any given transmission rate there exists a critical number of social contacts, ...'

    Sounds similar to the cluster vs. person approach discussed in the article below which Japan and Sweden apparently took.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

    Would be informative now and for future planning to see an analysis of contact tracing by country showing metrics like: average number of contacts per person, demos of each contact, locations of contacts, number of contacts per contact (2nd gen of contacts), amount of time to locate each contact (# of elapsed hrs/days between initial contact and contact-tracing phone call, etc.).

    How quickly health authorities can contact trace, reach and require self-isolation of infected persons probably also features into the relative spread/control over this (and any future) pandemic.

    Similarly, the reproduction rate of the virus could also dictate how long it takes for someone to reach infectivity and/or a serious disease state. Therefore you'd want to reach the Day-1 contacts and their post-initial-exposure same-day contacts that much faster.

    Basically lots of variables to consider and leaving any one of them uncontrolled for could screw things for everyone. Stuff like that happens in complex systems where one teeny glitch can shut down everything - as in why NASA engineers obsess over every little nut & bolt.

    393:

    Excerpt: Narrative is humanity’s defense against the randomness of existence. We tell ourselves stories not to sink into chaos. Would-be authors of our time on Earth, we impose order onto our lives by drawing connections between events, underscoring thematic trends, fleshing out character psychology and shoehorning our years into plots with beginnings, middles and ends.

    Packaging experience in this way doesn’t simply protect us from the possibility of meaninglessness. It helps foster the illusion that the future is predictable and that, whatever else might happen to us, anarchy will not mow us down.

    Among the many catastrophes we can lay at Donald Trump’s feet, his long-shot presidency has plunged the nation into a narrative crisis. --- end excerpt ---

    https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-10-03/trump-tests-positive-covid-tax-returns

    394:

    Among the many catastrophes we can lay at Donald Trump’s feet, his long-shot presidency has plunged the nation into a narrative crisis. Charles McNulty thinks that this is a narrative crisis? This is just a warm-up. The release of Dead Lies Dreaming just before the US election may have consequences. The Script Writers may stealdraw inspiration from the contents. :-)

    Thanks for the link.

    'It’s a hoax. There's no pandemic': Trump's base stays loyal as president fights Covid - News that the president has contracted coronavirus prompted alarm and confusion among Trump supporters in Missouri (Chris McGreal, Sat 3 Oct 2020) Space is Fake! - Flat Earth Man Exposes Space Fraud! (Nov 15, 2018) (Via)

    395:

    Among the many catastrophes we can lay at Donald Trump’s feet, his long-shot presidency has plunged the nation into a narrative crisis.

    And a narrative would have someone is tracking continuity.

    If a supporting character gets caught blowing off Christmas that's either a villain's character establishing moment or a cue for some heartwarming event. It doesn't just get ignored, otherwise why include it?

    But the last several years have just been a hot mess. We expect scandals to be wrapped up rather than being pushed out by new scandals - and it's been all Trump scandals all the time.

    396:

    COVID-19 - Fauci Lecture at MIT (Sept 24 2020)

    Good lecture overall and well-presented. Fauci covered a range of areas but the highlights for me were:

    1- Finally some data on what proportion of the US population is at risk of serious disease/complications (approx. 40%).

    2- Also - the laundry list of risk of co-morbidities is considerably longer/more detailed than usually mentioned elsewhere.

    3- Ditto on the range and incidence of after-effects (long-haulers as well as post-recovery), why this is scary and has to be taken seriously.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J38QN1vnSO0

    'The fourth lecture in the COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic Series, presented by the MIT Department of Biology. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), gave a talk titled "Insights from the COVID-19 pandemic."'

    397:

    David L’s mean expectation of actual serious thought notwithstanding ;-) I am enhancing my theory that it was not Actual Trump that got on the helicopter. I claim that it was indeed a stand-in - and that Agent Nightmare Orange has in fact done a runner in order to escape to a friendly and extradition proof regime. The stand-in will of course die and be buried as if the real thing. You heard it first here!

    398:

    Apropos of nothing: in a demonstration that real world plants are every bit as bad as triffids if not worse, Giant Hogweed is taking over abandoned fields in Russia (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/03/opinion/sunday/russia-hogweed.html).

    This is what rewilding looks like when it's done in a thoughtless and uncontrolled fashion. The plants that are the best competitors and the least threatened by animals are the ones that dominate.

    399:

    Re: '... not Actual Trump that got on the helicopter.'

    Alternate scenario:

    It was Actual Trump but he'll have a relatively mild case, be discharged from hospital, continue his run for prez, lose (despite putting up a 'heroic' fight) and in mid-January 'suffer' a variety of post-recovery/long-hauler symptoms. He'll consult only with whoever his present personal quack is and refuse to be checked by any of the docs that actually treat him at the WR and know what the hell COVID-19 looks like. Basically, he'll try to evade criminal prosecution on humanitarian grounds.

    400:

    Re: 'This is what rewilding looks like ...'

    Yeah - scary.

    Wonder which will win in North America kudzu or giant hogweed - we've got both in some parts.

    401:

    That NYTimes pieces is eeek. "good crop"!????? Bold mine: After World War II, Soviet agronomists, keen to quickly rebuild the country’s agriculture industry, thought that the plant’s impressive biomass could make it a good crop to feed livestock. Seeds were distributed throughout the country. Hogweed contains a high concentration of furanocoumarins, substances that cause severe burns and blisters when affected areas of skin are exposed to sunlight. Even so, the plant was grown nationwide. By the 1980s, when the plant began infiltrating central Russia’s wilderness, tests showed that cows fed on hogweed produced poor-tasting milk. Efforts to make the plant less toxic failed.

    402:

    The more interesting bit is towards the end of the article, where the central government gets blamed for funneling large amounts of money into a few huge agrobusinesses and abandoning small farms and small farm towns. As people move to the city, the hogweed takes over, at least in this version of events.

    That's US agricultural policy here, too. I'm a fan of small farming. Partly, yes, it's romantic sentiment, but more it's about getting human intelligence out on the landscape to try to make places more livable for more things, crops and wildlands alike.

    I mean, right now I'm wandering around parks and vacant lots, pulling out weeds, while sometimes dozens of people go by me, thank me for my service, and don't ask if they can help. That's how spaces get trashed.

    404:

    So what controls giant hogweed in its native range? There must be something.

    I mean, gorse is harmless enough in Britain that they used it for hedges around pastures. I don't think fennel in England grows to 2+ m either (trying to clear it out of my mother's garden when I was a kid is a nasty memory). It may be that whatever keeps giant hogweed in check at home will go after different things or otherwise won't work well in a different environment, but that's the first thing I'd look for.

    405:

    And the US has never, ever done that.

    In the 1920s, they imported Kudzu* to Georgia, USA, figuring it would be great cattle feed, according to my late ex, a Floridian. Unfortunately, kudzu liked the South a lot more than cattle liked kudzu.

    • aka the vine that ate the South, and when they say "a yard a day", they don't mean 3'....
    406:

    Thanks Nancy. I'm not surprised, somehow. But it's good to know the backstory.

    407:

    Kudzu's edible by humans, too. As are cardoon and fennel around our area.

    The thing about kudzu is that's prolific, but apparently not terribly delicious. IIRC, it's on the "we used to eat that, until sweet potatoes/rice/whatever came along, and we don't eat it any more.

    Since kudzu's predicted to do well under climate change, I'd suggest cultivating a taste for the stuff. After all, what better way to hide your survival bunker than under a thicket of kudzu, where you and your three goats force yourselves to eat kudzu and survive while you look for a partner of the appropriate sex to procreate with?*

    *This is the "Tunnels and Trolls" survival plan, kudzu subplan.

    408:

    To add to the conversation on invasive plants, I only recently learned that tumbleweed isn't native to the Americas. It has such a presence in our cultural memory of "The Wild West", but it wasn't over here, then. CGP Grey made a video on them.

    We could really do with better ways to deal with invasive species.

    409:

    Heteromeles THAT is NOT "Giant Hogweed" Heracleum mantegazzianium, actually. Or, I don't think so. Did you note the bit in the article, which said .... "Giant hogweeds grow naturally in the Caucasus Mountains." It's "Persian Hogweed" Heracleum persicum Note the multiple flower-heads, which are "domed"? Giant Hogweed has a single, huge, much flatter flower-head. And - Nancy Lebovitz - THANKS - the picture in that article looks remarkably like "Golpar" seed.

    H. persicum is widespread in the Baltic countries ( It's a notifyable weed in Lithuania ) & is welcomed in Tromso, Norway, where it's called the "Tromso Palm" Unlike Giant H. - Persian H. has edible seeds which are used in "Persian" cooking & neigbouring cuisines - they call it: "Golpar"

    I know all this, because I've got some seeds, after madam went to Iran last year - & carefully looked it up. [ Though the botanical illustration on the wiki page is of the wrong one. Try here instead .. ] Fun botanical times .... And, yes, it will & does grow here, though we must be close to the Southern limit of its range - it likes cold winters.

    AVR WHICH "Fennel" ??? Normal Fennel is Foeniculum vulgare maximum of about 2 metres as a flower-spike. Then there's Gaint Fennel Ferula communis - big enough for Prometheus to conceal a tiny fire inside it's hollow stem to bring to Humanity, after all ...

    410:

    The one that English gardeners brought over as a herb. It forms thickets too dense to push through. The flower heads look a lot like that hogweed which brought it to mind, though the foliage looks more like finely-branching stems.

    411:

    AVR Herb Fennel Compare & contrast with Giant Fennel I assume you mean the former - but ... "thickets too dense to push through" Uh? Or is it, like a common(ish) plant here, Vipers Bugloss, that has become invasive in the USA? Where are you - what's your climate/USDA range?

    412:

    ‘ individual neurons in the human neocortex are computationally sophisticated‘

    I attempted to build a neural net that could simulate a neuron when I was a grad student, but gave up as it was just too hard.

    I think we have no clue what the computational power of the brain is. And it’s a mug’s question: you don’t build cars by analysing in detail the architecture of a horse’s muscles.

    413:

    I don't know the ecology of that area, but suspect that it is close enough to areas I do know to explain that: competition.

    If so, the 'original' ecology was mixed forest or woodland, and the trees shaded out such things, which grow at edges (e.g. by streams, rocks etc.) and where an old tree has died or fallen over. There is then a mass of casuals (e.g. annuals with long-lived seeds), followed by the woodland under-shrubs (which normally grow in areas of thin canopy). But, eventually, new tree seedlings take root and, once they get above the undergrowth, start to take off and shade out the other plants. Note that a plant like giant hogweed is not well adapted to living at edges, so has only a few niches where it will out-compete other species.

    In Britain (with 99% of its ecology made up of recent invasions), giant hogweed is relatively rare and not particularly invasive. The only land plant that is a serious ecological problem is Japanese knotweed, though a few others are claimed to be (and may be problems, locally). My (significant) experience of giant hogweed is that it is not as toxic as the hysteria makes it, but that may be that some people are highly sensitive and others less so.

    414:

    Right. But most of this weebling is actually even more fundamentally broken. We don't know how human thought operates (there is evidence it is not a single mode), and we don't know how to measure 'brain power'. As the (very few) perspicacious observers have pointed out, even the best 'AI' looks more as if it is approaching the abilities of an extreme idiot savant, rather than a normal human being, let alone an intelligent one.

    415:

    "Tunnels and Trolls" survival plan, kudzu subplan.

    I suppose if your bunker is also under a bridge, there's a solid precedent for increasing your livestock, one billygoat at a time. Although the alternative historical viewpoint would be that bridge trolls are an analogy for homeless people, and that presumably at one time Billygoat was a brand of (or simply slang for) white port wine (or perhaps green ginger wine), sold in 2L (1/2 gallon) bottles.

    416:

    ‘ The thing about Trump is that he's very overweight and elderly, ‘

    His official presidential medical report says 6’3” and 248 lb. More likely is 6’2” and 255 lb. Which is overweight, but not very. Does not drink, or smoke.

    I’d guess his odds of dying of Covid are around my odds of rolling a critical on a d20. Not all that high. But I’ve seen a lot of criticals rolled.

    417:

    No, he is not only "overweight, but not very" - even the official report makes him obese (but not very). His non-smoking is definitely a factor in his favour. Overweight (but not very) would be just over 200 pounds.

    418:

    Not that I set a lot of store in BMI, but the CDC calculator says,

    Height: 6 feet, 3 inches Weight: 248 pounds Your BMI is 31, indicating your weight is in the Obese category for adults of your height.

    Height: 6 feet, 2 inches Weight: 255 pounds Your BMI is 32.7, indicating your weight is in the Obese category for adults of your height.

    419:

    Can we have those BMI figures in RealMoney TM please?

    420:

    My dear Greg, really! You are of the right age to have been taught unit conversion at school, were assuredly taught using all of those units ( except BMI), and it is an essential engineering skill. I don't expect you to do simple arithmetic in your head any longer, though you may well have been required to at school, as I was - but surely you can find a calculator on your computer? There are also conversion sites for the arithmetically challenged.

    Oh, and BMI is a simple number, because it is defined in MKS. So no conversion is relevant.

    421:

    EC You should know better .... I started using what were then called "mks" units in 1960 or '61 I can do most conversions in my head, without even need for pencil-&-paper BUT I can't resist the temptation to wind up the unconverted & primitive USAians on the subject. Or bloody effing Brit newspapers that STILL give temperatures in Fahrenheit!

    As in 6'2" = 1.88m 255lbs = 113.8kg 113.8/(1.882) = 32.2

    422:

    And while you're at it, 15 hands tall at the top of his sagittal crest, and around 13 stone, because I suspect fudging is involved in the official figures.

    And just remember that Fahrenheit, primitive as it is, is more precise than Celsius on a per degree basis.

    423:

    We called them "MKSA" in school in the 60s. The "A" was for Ampères. We called the other units "FSS" for Foot, Second, Slug.

    Did you have an acronym for those other units?

    424:

    Yes, it as bad as it is described. I live in one of epicentres of that particular agricultural catastrophe, here they had planted huge fields of this green menace (dibs on a thematically appropriate, invasive-plant-management-failure-photosensibilisation-powered supervillain). Naturally it spreads around. Often - along the roads, but that is because our forests are vast and usually do not have suitable habitat areas for the plant. And yes, if you see an abandoned farm or other agricultural facility, you can easily spot the hogweeds around. Some work is being done on trying to control its spread into our settlements and towns, but, as it is customary for modern Russia, these measures are ineffective. I think, I can find giant hogweed within 1 km circle around our main square, and this is in a city that has population more than 200 thousand people.

    425:

    Joking aside, I've really got to get more people using the Bradley Method of Weeding (e.g. https://pvcblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-bradley-method-interesting-approach.html and https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/2062/2014/04/bradleytechnique.pdf?x96359). It's by far the cheapest and most effective strategy for getting weeds out of natural areas. The one catch is that it isn't fast. The Bradleys (Joan Bradley and her sister) were both retirees in Australia who did a tremendous amount of weed clearance by working sensibly. They didn't have any money and certainly weren't strong, so they worked strategically and kept it up. You can read the strategy in the links, but it's basically about going from the spreading edge of the infestation (e.g. where the weeds are just showing up), minimizing disturbance when you weed (So that there are few places for weed seeds to get established), and working gradually, so that the natives can re-establish outward into the weed areas.

    We've got a small group, again, mostly retirees, who've cleared acres of weeds out of nearby parks and won thousands of dollars in awards for their work. They do use herbicides, but the key point is how they target the infestation, not just the tools they used (and they're fully licensed to use the stuff they use too).

    So if I were stuck in Russia and dealing with giant hogweed, I'd start working out how to use the Bradley Method to contain its spread, then work back to see how much of each infestation could be controlled over the next decade or two.

    426:

    Isn't that a Genesis song?

    427:

    "dibs on a thematically appropriate, invasive-plant-management-failure-photosensibilisation-powered supervillain"

    He's called Chase, IIRC. And he has the proper James Bond supervillain credentials in the form of his bulk compost shredder.

    428:

    So this "BMI" cack is mass per unit area, then? With an implied density, like paper. Probably doesn't work for Trump because his density is way beyond normal limits.

    429:

    And it’s a mug’s question: you don’t build cars by analysing in detail the architecture of a horse’s muscles.

    Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! IMHO there's been a lot written about how thought works, and this may provide some insights for the programmer!

    430:

    It's a reasonable thing to do if you're trying to build an artificial horse, though.

    431:

    In our case it can grow in almost any kind of clearing or field, or ditch that runs along the road. It might be less toxic than some people fear (myself included), but under its "canopy" literally nothing else grows. No other grasses, no shrubs, nothing. The environment it creates is not suitable for other organisms too (small animals and ground-nesting birds for example).

    432:

    I've thought a little about this; mainly theorizing, and the thing that's obvious to me is that consciousness sits in the "control room" for a large suite of "artificial stupidities;" lower-level entities that are really good at their job - hearing, site, etc. - that don't otherwise have a clue about the significance of what they're doing.

    Then consciousness argues with itself and makes decisions according to any of several modes, some of which are easily accessible and some of which aren't - talking to one's self about a decision vs. instinct, or whatever - and don't forget that if you lay your hand on the table and then decide to lift one finger at random, parts of your brain are working on the problem long before you move, so it seems obvious that some decisions move from lower-levels to more conscious levels. Then Freud observed that thinking seems to involve multiple entities with varied agendas, not to mention that your brain will sometimes throw random stuff at you in the hopes that it will help!

    Finally, consider that the human brain seems to go through a reboot at around three-four years old... There's a lot happening there that's probably not obvious from the process of trying to imitate the behavior of cells!

    So if I were going to try to write artificially-intelligent software, I'd write an ego, an id, a superego, a random-word-arranger with some kind of gate-keeping software for purposes of "inspiration," and also include some kind of Bayesian rule generator because "rules of thumb" are important, then a final bit of software that accepted input from all of the above and "made decisions." And I'd put them atop a suite of artificial stupidities so the machine could have some senses...

    Now all I need is a huge grant and my grandchildren will have something for you in a hundred years or so!

    433:

    Why not a "High resolution" Celsius with the boiling point of water at 200? You could have a finer grained temperature without the PITA of 32 & 212 degree freezing & boiling points of water. I'll just not be holding my breath waiting for it.

    434:

    Troutwaxer @ 432: So if I were going to try to write artificially-intelligent software ...

    There is some thinking that we should try to link up the linear algebra engines which are so good at pattern recognition with some kind of rule-based reasoning which could make use of patterns discovered by the linear algebra. If I were doing AI research today, that is where I would be looking.

    Of course, XKCD.

    435:

    Where is that? It hasn't been the case in any of the patches I have seen in Britain, including a well-established one I was closely familiar with. Also, the Bradleys are late on the scene - that's how many of the Rubi (and periwinkles) invade - and, yes, brambles can do it to giant hogweed.

    Maybe British wild plants are just tougher :-)

    436:

    So this "BMI" cack is mass per unit area, then? With an implied density, like paper. Probably doesn't work for Trump because his density is way beyond normal limits.

    I'm not going to fuss to much about the volume to surface area, but BMI is obviously a version of that.

    I asked my pharmacist wife why some drug doses scale as human surface area, while other doses scale with body mass. Got a shrug in return, but they do need both, which is one reason why they need to get your height and weight early on in the visit.

    I don't think they use BMI in dosage calculations, but I can see why they use numbers they normally get to get a gauge of how much you're lugging around, whether it's muscle or fat.

    Given who the President is, the precise method of determining his body fat (which involves holding him underwater for some time and calculating weight and displacement) is something both he and the Secret Service might object to.

    437:

    His odds of dying, without extraordinary care are around 10 percent for a man his age. He's in the upper third of the 60-79 years old category, which has an average death rate of 5%, and the next category, 80 and older has a 15% death rate, so 10% is probably fair.

    The major risk items are:

    Cardiovascular disease Diabetes Chronic respiratory disease Hypertension Cancer

    each of which adds from 20-50 percent to the risk of dying. Trump doesn't admit to any of these, and he does play golf regularly. He takes a statin (presumably to reduce cholesterol) so arguably he has mild cardiovascular disease. I'd put his chances of dying at around 15-20 percent, probably with similar levels for all the people over fifty who've gotten nailed at his super-spreader events...

    These estimates are made in the expectation of ordinary care, which the President is not receiving. I would guess at this point he's getting the best COVID-19 care available on the planet, so I'd put realistic chances of death at around 10-12 percent.

    The more interesting question is whether he's going to be so badly damaged by the disease that he can't manage the office of the presidency anymore - I'd put those chances at around 15 percent (if he doesn't die.) So I'd guess around a 25% chance that Trump won't return to the White House.

    439:

    Thank you, Heteromeles! I have to find time and get in touch with people in the local Institute of biology, see if they know about this method. They developed their own approach, but I know too little about it. Might be Bradley Method, actually, because they said repeatedly that it was slow and methodic. Too slow for local administration's tastes.

    440:

    If you want to build an "artificial horse" (that is, an automobile) you'll get there a lot faster by studying/improving the cart!

    441:

    Well, I just learned yesterday that there are multiple species of Heracleum, so I'll leave the problem of what to call them all and which ones are worst to the people who have to deal with them. Which so far doesn't include me.

    Around here, Foeniculum vulgare and Cynara cardunuculus are two very common weeds, as is Brassica nigra and Hirschfeldia incana (two field mustards). They were brought in as herbs or vegetables and abandoned, and now they show up in areas that are frequently burned and otherwise disturbed. We don't have Ferula, which is a pity, because I'd love to make a proper thyrse in honor of Dionysus (/sarcasm).

    San Diego's around the latitude of Cairo IIRC, and our climate can be matched to Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, or the Canary Islands. Our nastier wildland weeds include tamarisk, pampas grass, and giant reed. Near homes we get to deal with things like slopes of nasturtium and vinca.

    442:

    I have trouble with both interpretations of Libet's test. My own interpretation is that conscious reasoning time is the most valuable (and probably the most energy-expensive) resource available to the human mind. So it makes sense to push anything that doesn't require conscious reasoning down to a lower-level and letting something else handle it.

    Getting distracted by issues of "free-will" and "free won't" and whether either exists is silly.* The "system" of the brain wants to do whatever it does at the lowest possible cost (to the important resource of conscious thinking-time) and so it makes the necessary arrangement. Essentially it's offloaded that calculation to a cheaper processor.

    • The big-brains can do their philosophical masturbation without me - I want to know how the mechanism works!
    443:

    A bit less so for those days than more recently. I'm older, and there was a change I noticed.

    444:

    On the subject of Trump's chances, I just read that he is receiving dexamethasone, which he would only be given if he's either getting markedly worse, or if he's experienced a cytokine storm. So add whatever percentage dexamethasone suggests to my earlier guess.

    445:

    Nah, trolls do lurk under bridges. I know - back around late eighties/very early nineties, we'd be driving into Austin from the exurbs, and have to take Loop 1 north of US 183 to where we'd drop the kid off for day care. The road rose, then went down, and there was an overpass above where the road bottomed out. And for a few days a month, when they had to meet their quota of speeding tickets, the troll with his decorative gumball machines on the roof would be waiting under the overpass....

    446:

    As long as the id part doesn't have access to an unlimited amount of power, say, drawn from the molten core of the planet....

    447:

    Holding him under water... could we estimate by putting his head in the toilet and flushing?

    448:

    It sounds like the doctors are stuck wearing shock collars under their white coats, and the collar controls are in the hands of the White House Press Secretary. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Still, it saddens me when people who one (would presume) are skilled professionals don't even get to choose which orifice they're talking out of when talking to the press, and the information they want to get out has to be coded to slip by their minders.

    So far as probabilities go, I'm not sure whether this makes any difference. The bad news would be if that Regeneron drug they gave him caused the reaction he's experiencing now. But we'll probably never know.

    And I'm sure most people reading this know, but Remdesivir is (was) thought to basically be Tamiflu for Covid19. If it works (e.g. it's injected early enough on), it shortens the course of the disease by a few days. I'm not sure whether this is supported by later work, or whether (like Tamiflu) it's less useful later in the course of the disease.

    449:

    Well, the US military did build a robot mule.... https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/legged-squad-support-system

    Though I think I'd just say "neighhhhh"

    450:

    Most recently: Trump's had dexamethasone and required oxygen a couple of times.

    He's not on full-time oxygen yet, much less a ventilator, but bear in mind he's watching TV so those interviews with his doctors are clearly pitched to sound reassuring to him rather than to accurately convey the severity of his condition.

    The "going home tomorrow" stuff is bullshit. More likely he's going to be in the hospital for a week, even if he does get better and go home afterwards: more realistically, he's got a 20-25% probability of dying in the next 3 weeks.

    We'll know it's serious if the doctors at Walter Reed stop bullshitting the TV -- that'll be a sign that he's on mechanical ventilation or otherwise sedated so they no longer need to make happy noises.

    451:

    Hogweed reminds people of triffids, but I'm also reminded of Disch's The Genocides.

    452:

    Just to be fair, keep in mind that Trump's condition is also important national security and electoral information. If one can get a good read on medications, condition, pre-existing conditions, how long he's had the disease, etc. then it's not hard to do a very fine-grained calculation (much better than mine or Charlie's) about the President's chances of dying, his chances of dying on a particular day, his chances of being permanently brain-damaged, lung-diseased, etc... this would be really valuable stuff to the wrong people. So I don't resent the poor information we're getting, and his doctor doesn't just have to worry about the President, he's being "counseled" by Admirals and high-level defense department officials, and fielding calls from Supreme Court Justices.

    Meanwhile, the poor man has less experience treating COVID-19 than the average New York ER doctor!

    453:

    "an "artificial horse" (that is, an automobile)"

    Ah, but that isn't. The situation is that while you may well manage to make something that beats all comers at 24 hours of lemons, if it doesn't also eat grass, whinny, jump hedges, do big shits, run away from paper bags, kick people really hard, occasionally try to fuck policemen, and all sorts of other things, you can't tell if it's working properly, or even at all.

    454:

    The test WAS for a case where conscious reasoning was involved! I agree that the 'explanations' are plausible but unsupported, but one of them is very close to yours. My point was simply that we don't know how any of the higher mental functions actually work, so claiming that we can model them on computers in any definite timeframe are at best grossly optimistic and arguably complete bullshit.

    That excludes the theoretical grounds I have for believing that they may be a different level of operation, and even that we might be tackling an impossible task. Note: "may be" and "might be". Obviously, I can't know, either way, until and unless someone succeeds in emulating them.

    456:

    Yup, and an absolute banger:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTuJQL8GBqY

    “Long ago in the Russian hills A Victorian explorer found the regal Hogweed by a marsh He captured it and brought it home Botanical creature stirs, seeking revenge Royal beast did not forget He came home to London And made a present of the Hogweed To the Royal Gardens at Kew”

    457:

    "...claiming that we can model them on computers in any definite timeframe are at best grossly optimistic and arguably complete bullshit.

    You'll get no arguments from me on any of that. I'm just pointing out that running artifical neurons isn't necessarily the "right" way to do things, and there's a lot of information about how the brain works that's not being applied in taking that approach.

    458:

    The "going home tomorrow" stuff is bullshit. More likely he's going to be in the hospital for a week,

    As I told my wife earlier today. He most likely didn't want to go to WR. And he likely wants to go back to the WH ASAP. But I suspect that periodically the brighter bulbs keep pointing out that he really doesn't want to be seen in an ambulance or on a gurney. And getting to and staying where he is now is the best way to avoid THAT photo op. Which in the end is his primary consideration.

    459:

    and fielding calls from Supreme Court Justices.

    I really doubt that one.

    460:

    "Is it safe for me to leave town for the weekend?" Think about it.

    461:

    That is, of course, true. There just seem to be these little "goofs," like saying the President had been known to be sick on Wednesday when the official diagnosis came Thursday, and that, oops, he got some shots of oxygen, and now dexamethasone. The problems with the multiple story lines are:

    --It's the typical abusive jerk move of playing on uncertainties--do they need to do this even now? --They're making it seem like he's worse off than he is, and that they're being told not to say anything like that.

    And if the Walter Reed doctors aren't skilled at treating Covid19 cases, why the fuck haven't they drafted in some doctors from NYC (a few hours up the road) to take over the President's care? Do they wait until he's intubated and they're pulling clots out of his brain before they do that?

    The simplest (and most impossible) course would be to simply invoke the 25th Amendment, make VP Renfield the Acting President, and let El Cheeto get on with the business of dealing with the virus, with once-daily updates from the hospital about his progress. That's one of the things the Amendment was made for, IIRC.

    462:

    And you will get no argument from me on that one!

    463:

    Apropos of the earlier unicorn thread, here's a cutesy little unicorn meme that you can get on a t-shirt (ad alert!) that rather seems like it would fit into the earlier discussion about making unicorn horns functional: https://www.teeturtle.com/products/chainsaw-unicorn

    464:

    would be to simply invoke the 25th Amendment, make VP Renfield the Acting President, and let El Cheeto get on with the business of dealing with the virus

    Well the provisions allows the Pres to say "Nope". And then it can take days to resolve.

    When dealing with my mother as she aged out into incompetence she gave my brother what she said a medical power of attorney (POA). But she goofed. She gave him a Full POA. (We suspect she had both ready and just gave out the wrong one.) We discussed using it several times but there were two issues: 1. She could revoke it at any time and we would then have to prove she was incompetent. In theory not at all hard to do with her but expensive and time consuming. 2. My brother's main point was when you do pull the pin on the nuclear hand grenade you seriously need to be sure of what your next steps will be.

    465:

    Just checked on the polls-of-polls on the US fuck-up, errr ... election. Looks as though, especially in the gap between the "debate" & the announcement of C-19, DJT's percentage dropped, noticeably. Biden is, largely about 10% ahead. It seems as though Biden & co have it in the bag - provided, of course that dirty tricks, especially not counting votes &/or "losing" them are not allowed to perform. There's going to be a lot of rabid shouting from the US right-to-fascist loons, that you can be sure of. I do hope Ms Harris eviscerates VeepPonce at their debate.

    466:

    It seems as though Biden & co have it in the bag

    You seem to be assuming a steady state for the next 30 days. Events of the last few weeks would imply that is a poor assumption.

    College (and pro to some degree) is already having issues playing games in empty stadiums. I'm waiting for some high profile coaches and/or athletes to have to check into hospitals.

    As I mentioned on this post or the previous one, just as our R Tillis was looking like a fail in in re-election race for the Senate he gets what appears to be a mile case of Covid-19. Then his D opponent admits to sexting.

    Airline "for real" layoffs begin now. Until now a lot of these folks have been terminated but are still getting a paycheck. That will stop for many over the next week. My wife's last paycheck will be Friday.

    Bars and restaurants are opening back up. I'm waiting for the US to emulate the UK and have infections and such to start rising.

    And add in schools (18 years old and younger) are starting to have in clase instructions due to small riots breaking out with parent groups. The results may not be good.

    But other than that and a few dozen other things what could go wrong over here in the next 30 days? Everything I mentioned in theory would help Biden but there are a lot of other things which might not.

    467:
  • By now, Walter Reed docs probably do have experience with C-19.
  • Across Rockville Pk is the NIH, and they've been working with C-19 patients for months, in a clinical research setting.
  • Don't need to bring docs from NYC....

    468:

    Notice that I said "Impossible?" I know it's difficult, made more so because Trump's no good at setting up teams and systems.

    If we had a working executive branch, one of the two would have announced that Pence was taking over for the duration, because there's a pandemic on, while the President goes off to make a hopefully speedy recovery. There's this little thing called confidence which is said to be important in politics, and part of the confidence is picking the right person for the job, and doing smooth handoffs in awkward circumstances. A big part of the VP's job is to take over for the President. If he's not trusted to do that, well, who's supposed to coordinate the response to the pandemic? (rhetorical question).

    469:

    Trump is a notorious micromanager. I doubt very badly that anyone he'll tolerate has much capacity or willingness to do independent work.

    470:

    You missed messes like what happened at the University of Wisconsin. They did such a bad job of reopening the school that two dorms had to go into two weeks' lockdown with two hours' notice (lines at all the local stores as students desperately bought what they needed), then suspended classes, all the while causing a big spike of cases in the surrounding city.

    I don't think they're the only school to do this, either, just one where I have connections and hear gossip.

    In a sad way, this is why I hope that the Masque of the Red Virus keeps playing out around Republican haunts in DC for the rest of the month. I don't want anyone to die, I just want them to STFU (involuntarily, as needs be) and let the sane people cope with the disease for awhile. As it is, they're aiming to surpass the total killed on the Confederate Side in the 1860s (258,000) by January.

    471:

    I completely agree with you on the small-minded part of that statement. Not sure that I agree he's a competent manager.

    472:

    I didn't say either of those things.

    473:

    I didn't say either of those things. This is true.

    474:

    Most recently: Trump's had dexamethasone and required oxygen a couple of times... more realistically, he's got a 20-25% probability of dying in the next 3 weeks.

    The dexamethasone news seems like quite a big deal. Because as I understand it, dexamethasone is not something you give out of "an abundance of caution". It decreases Covid mortality by a third among those who need ventilators, but I believe it is not good for you to take it unless you need it. Giving to to someone so early in their diagnosis is quite unusual.

    So is Trump now rolling a D4? Or a D6? So hard to know. Either way it's not a roll I'd want to stake my life on.

    (My wife's cousin, a pulmonary specialist in London, was one of several collaborators in the 'RECOVERY' clinical trial that is the reason dexamethasone is now widely used for severe cases. She's supposed to be working part-time this year so she can spend time with her very young kids, and instead was working insane shifts treating Covid patients, with colleagues dying. That family connection doesn't make me any sort of expert, but it does mean I've been following the news of dexamethasone as a treatment with a bit of interest.)

    475:

    The giant hogweed isn’t just an invasive plant. It’s a metaphor for what is happening to much of this country.

    “At the national level, the government does nothing,” she said, rising up on tiptoes and hacking off giant umbrella-like flowering structures on stalks three meters in the air. It’s a trustworthy method to prevent the weed from seeding — one activist in a hogweed-fighting social networking group confessed to arming herself with a machete on cycling trips.

    "Opinion"! Pretentious as usual, I see. These news are actually very old, at least a decade old, but recently there was more notable development. https://www.rt.com/usa/giant-hogweed-invades-russia-spreading-to-america/ (2009) Actually, it is hardly possible to convince regular people that the problem is real. I imagine, they have been more agitated recently because government has taking more active measures, subsidizes, and also fines people for negligence since at least 2018 ("how dare the government do that to us!"). https://www.1tv.ru/news/2020-08-04/390747-mnogie_regiony_vvodyat_shtrafy_za_popustitelstvo_opasnomu_borscheviku_v_tom_chisle_i_moskva

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum This thing's been around since forever, but I am a city dweller, I can't say I ever suffered from it (I guess I also never dared to try out really, too). Any responsible person gets rid of it so it never grows too big or too hard to deal with, and all of my relatives who have village houses are very responsible.

    From what I gather, the actual problem is with the different type of the plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_sosnowskyi It is more like a tree rather than a regular plant, it has more sturdy stem and giant flower cap. Very troublesome and hard to deal with, also very invasive and grows thick groves everywhere with sufficient humidity. It travels very fast alongside of the roads, with the cars doing most of the job.

    I regularly visit my parents who live some two regions away (by the bus), and I do remember this plant taking over the sides of the roads at some point, maybe a dozen years ago. It was looking really bad, and at some places, where forests were giving place to fields, they were covering every side, growing in the more wet places. However, as of recent times I don't really remember seeing much of these, and they've been cleared off the sides of the roads, at least. I've also seen more cultivated lands, naturally. OTOH, there were parts of the road I no longer pass on my way, but when I check them on Google Street view, they are as clean as ever. The real problem is, though, you need to exterminate them for decades so they can't make a comeback.

    476:

    “--It's the typical abusive jerk move of playing on uncertainties--do they need to do this even now?” Habit?

    477:

    Apparently Trump just took a joyride. Got into the Presidential limo with a driver and either a medical or Secret Service person, and drove around the fucking block then back to Walter Reed again. I suppose it might have been his Secret Service double, but what a fucking crazy stunt!

    478:

    He waved at his supporters, from behind his mask. They were hanging around in front of the hospital.

    479:

    Apparently Trump just took a joyride. ... drove around the fucking block...

    I had to look and yes, he did that. The CDC says don't do that when you're sick, but you could have guessed what smart doctors would say and that Donald wouldn't listen.

    480:

    Heteromeles @ 351: Didn't see the helicopter shot. Any resemblance to the last day of the US Embassy in Saigon?

    Jumping back a bit, because I have now seen the helicopter shot they used in the New York Times ...

    https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/10/04/opinion/sunday/03Dowd2/03Dowd2-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp

    It had great light. It could have been a great photo, worthy of a Pulitzer ... but it's not.

    The problem with it is the shutter speed is too high. It stops the motion of the rotor blades and the helicopter seems to be suspended in mid-air with no visible means of support.

    A competent photographer should have known to drag the shutter slightly so the rotor blades would have a bit of blur suggesting their motion.

    481:

    SFReader (replied to this comment from JBS) @ 357:

    Re:' ... there would be people who believe that it was a political assassination.'

    It's a true statement, but I'd just like to point out that I didn't write it.

    482:

    Robert Prior @ 358:

    the organizers decided to add additional controls to prevent future bad behavior

    Someone standing behind each candidate with a bowlful of mashed potatoes, to be used if they speak out of turn? :-)

    I was thinking something more along the line of isolation booths like they used on early TV quiz shows

    https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Van-Doren-03.jpg?w=1240

    ... something where the "moderator" could mute the microphone & also protect innocent bystanders from spewing aerosol droplets.

    483:

    Charlie Stross @ 372:

    I hear he hasn't tweeted in over 18 hrs, so he's *really* sick.

    No, he's just mildly feverish and unused to feeling unwell. (Trump dunks on people who are sick regularly; implies he doesn't usually get sick himself.)

    I think he's a lot sicker than they're letting on at this time. Maybe not on death's door as some hope (myself included, although I do hope he can hang on long enough to lose the election), but more than "mildly feverish" and "feeling unwell". The one thing you can be absolutely sure of is they're lying about it.

    I view the Walter Reed admission as precautionary, like Boris Johnson's ICU visit. The thing about Trump is that he's very overweight and elderly, and also shows signs of having had TIAs or minor strokes. That's a red flag for comorbidities for COVID19 and he's at higher-than-normal risk of stroke or other life-threatening symptoms e.g. kidney necrosis.

    Reminder that at this stage, all drug treatments are "completely experimental", with the possible exception of dexamethasone for patients who are going downhill and likely to need oxygen or ventilation (it's proven to cut the mortality rate by a third, costs pennies, and has been licensed for about 60 years).

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/10/04/donald-trump-covid-19-what-we-know-steroid-dexamethasone/3616811001/

    The Regeneron treatment he's on is in second-stage trials and looks highly promising so far. He's also being given remdesevir -- expensive, doesn't do much, but better than nothing. No word on his hydroxychloroquine/bleach regime, which is a shame.

    Much more interesting is the effect this has had on the Senate judiciary committee, which gets to vote on that empty Supreme Court spot! It's currently tilted 11/9 Repub/Democrat, but two of the Republican members just tested positive because Trump infected them. So the Democrats may be able to block confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. I understand that McConnell may be able to move confirmation to the floor of the house, but again: the Republicans are down at least two senators and their pattern of recklessly ignoring infection control measures suggests that in the coming days they may have several more in isolation -- and a confirmation vote on the floor of the house requires in-person attendance.

    So Trump may have inadvertently sabotaged his own supreme court pick.

    A confirmation vote on the floor of the Senate requires in-person attendance, but yes, I hope he has sabotaged it.

    484:

    Memo to El Cheeto Grande:

    Listen Mr. Alpha Silverback Gorilla wannabe: --Nothing projects lack of confidence like doing damn-fool publicity stunts when everybody wants you in treatment. --Nothing projects lack of confidence like having your official doctor and your chief of staff not agreeing on the official line about your health. --Nothing projects lack of confidence like putting your own bodyguards at risk from you. --Nothing projects lack of confidence like failing to give your designated alternate the authorization to do his job. --Oh, and nothing projects cluelessness like not even wearing a standard medical-grade N-95 mask, like the ones the people treating you are wearing, and which they would have given you for free. That $15 cloth mask you have on, sir, doesn't even have a nose wire. Must fog up your glasses when you read stuff in it. Sir.

    Speaking of lack of confidence and knowledge, I saw rumblings that the Secret Service isn't happy with Trump's shenanigans, although they refuse (rightly) to say how many agents have been infected while working at the White House. Hopefully whoever drew the short straws this afternoon are either already immune or manage to get lucky.

    Unfortunately, the SS is hardly blameless in this. Eleven agents at the training facility that pipelines agents to the security detail tested positive in August (NY Times link). Apparently they "are believed to have contracted the virus during training exercises and at a graduation celebration inside a nearby hotel where they did not practice social distancing." Clueless. Now the world knows that the best way to get the President is through biological warfare caused by infecting politicians or guests, because his bodyguards don't know how to enforce basic health precautions that billions of people are using successfully elsewhere in the world.

    If he really is on Day 9 right now of the disease, things could take a serious turn for the worse as early as tomorrow. Hopefully this won't be the last photo op the world remembers his administration by...

    485:

    whitroth @ 385: Oh, btw, Ellen tells me, concerning the GOP Senators testing positive (3 in 3 days) that McConnell says no votes for two weeks....

    My current assessment is that sometime during the lame duck session, no matter how the election turns out, Moscow Mitch will force the confirmation through.

    The only thing that will prevent her getting on the court is if a bunch of the GOP Senators who are currently coming down with SARS-CoV-2 CROAK between now and the election.

    As desirable an outcome as that might be, I don't think it will happen.

    486:

    SFReader @ 400:

    Re: 'This is what rewilding looks like ...'

    Yeah - scary.

    Wonder which will win in North America kudzu or giant hogweed - we've got both in some parts.

    Just a SWAG, but it looks like the two prefer different climates, so each will flourish in areas where other will not. The thing about Kudzu is goats can eat it.

    487:

    whitroth @ 405: And the US has never, ever done that.

    In the 1920s, they imported Kudzu* to Georgia, USA, figuring it would be great cattle feed, according to my late ex, a Floridian. Unfortunately, kudzu liked the South a lot more than cattle liked kudzu.

    * aka the vine that ate the South, and when they say "a yard a day", they don't mean 3'....

    The thing about Kudzu is they never came up with a good method for mechanical harvesting. It would have worked a lot better for cattle feed if they had. Goats will eat Kudzu even if cattle won't.

    Sometimes in the summer, you can actually SEE Kudzu grow.

    488:

    Once or twice my late ex, while we were still in FL, swore she'd been doing something in the back yard, and the kudzu felt her up.

    489:

    Apparently Trump just took a joyride. Got into the Presidential limo with a driver and either a medical or Secret Service person, and drove around the fucking block then back to Walter Reed again. I suppose it might have been his Secret Service double, but what a fucking crazy stunt!

    Should have expected that.

    This is reality TV star stuff from someone pretending to be president. Instead of just being sick, he has to make it a bad movie about a sick president attempting to appear healthy for "national security reasons" because (insert incoherent plot hook here).

    490:

    I'd guess we're somewhere between Day 7 and Day 9, so there's 5-7 more days in which there is a high level of danger for Trump. I'm not sure it's possible to be more precise than that.

    491:

    Once or twice my late ex, while we were still in FL, swore she'd been doing something in the back yard, and the kudzu felt her up.

    Not surprising. This is where the legend of the "jumping cholla" comes from. These lovely prickly pear relatives have rounded stem joints instead of flat ones like prickly pears. In the "jumping" chollas, the joints have a bad habit of falling off with little pressure, and littering the ground around the parent plant. It's a dispersal mechanism, because the joints can root and grow a new plant. But it's easy to step on one or brush against one without noticing, leading to the story that they jumped from the parent plant onto your leg or shoe.

    Heck even poison oak does it. I was doing a survey in a poison oak thicket, and the tip of a long vine stuck itself right into my ear canal, giving me the most miserable "wet willy" of my life. Swabbing my ear canal out with Tecnu was even worse.

    492:

    I don't think they're the only school to do this, either,

    I live within 20 miles (as the crow flies) of UNC-CH, NCSU, and Duke. The first 2 and the rest of the UNC system was under pressure from the politicians to OPEN UP and LETS GET SCHOOL going. Both shut down within 2-3 weeks after college students, well, they acted like college students. And being public they couldn't toss them into jail plus the state legislature, run by R's[1], would have tossed the admins out on their ears. But this open then go remote after 2 weeks has made a total mess of the local economies that surround the schools. Off campus rentals are abandoned. 100s of support staff hired then laid off. Etc.

    On the other hand Duke is private. And can turn away 1000s and still fill the classrooms. When you arrived on campus you got tested with a good test[2] and had to sit in your dorm room (food provided) until the results came back. Break the rules and you were sent home. The caught under 10 students with Covid-19. And very few since. They enforce the rules and are serious about it.

    Plus a large Community College system and a dozen or so smaller colleges.

    [1] There are a lot of D's around here who also want the bars and restaurants opened because people need to earn a living. No talk of people getting sick. Pocket book overrides safety.

    [2] Duke has a world class medical center. And I do mean world class. And they get a lot of funding from overseas crazy rich oil sheiks and such. I is a floor, maybe 2, in one of the hospital buildings where one of these guys can move in with 100 or so of the family and servants when they arrive for a treatment. And are charged appropriately for very high class hotel service. Big profits there.

    UNC-CH also has a great medical center but relative to the campus size it is no where near a domineering presence as the Duke one. And doesn't have the VIP floors for 100 or so.

    Both have actually done a lot of work on Covid-19 and Vaccines.

    493:

    joyride. Got into the Presidential limo with a driver and either a medical or Secret Service person, and drove

    And now everyone involved gets to be quarantined for 14 days if they follow the rules.

    494:

    Pigeon @ 427:

    "dibs on a thematically appropriate, invasive-plant-management-failure-photosensibilisation-powered supervillain"

    He's called Chase, IIRC. And he has the proper James Bond supervillain credentials in the form of his bulk compost shredder.

    There's nothing wrong with bulk compost shredders. I've finally got a replacement for my old worn out one on the way.

    Similar to my old worn out one, but my old one is actually in better shape:
    https://smithauctions.hibid.com/lot/11217-145525-287630/troybilt-super-tomahawk-chipper-shredder/

    This is what my new one looks like (or will look like when it gets here):
    https://www.michigan-sportsman.com/forum/media/2015-07-18-00-08-14.114648/full?lightbox=1&last_edit_date=1437262457

    I'm hoping I will eventually get the old one repaired. I had a bearing fail while I was running it. I replaced the bearing, but I wasn't able to get the internal mechanism positioned correctly. The chipper blade scrapes on the side of the housing. I think I need a new thrust washer to keep the bearing from sliding on the shaft too far, but now I've got the bearing on & I can't get it back off without tearing it up.

    So it's sitting at a local machine shop waiting for them to remove bearing, and the shaft & polish the shaft so everything will fit together properly. And I'll need to get a new thrust washer to hold the shaft in the right position.

    Haven't figured out what I'm going to do once I have both shredders working.

    495:

    I'm not sure about that. It's a highly modified vehicle, so it might have a partition between the driver's area and the rear of the car, and separate air-conditioning systems.

    496:

    Think about it. Maybe he was just doing a photo-op for supporters... or maybe he was trying to get them to take him back to the White House, and he was in such bad shape that they said, "NOPE".

    497:

    Per politico, part of the messaging chaos around El Cheeto's health is that the chief of staff Mark Meadows, took it upon himself to offer an alternative narrative to the one from the doctors that painted a more dire picture of the President's condition.. Why? Who knows?

    The link is to Politico, which asserts that Meadows has the reputation in DC for being untrustworthy and occasionally backstabby. Make of it what you will, but since this administration has been a chronic credibility crisis from the inauguration on (remember the fuss about inaugural crowd size?), adding to it now is both par for the course and deeply counterproductive. IMHO, of course.

    As for Pence, apparently he's hitting the campaign trail on his boss's behalf. Hope he keeps his mask up and sanitizes frequently.

    498:

    “The best way forwards to protect the NHS, save lives, to keep our children in school and the economy moving is to follow the rules wherever we live,” Johnson said.

    You think DT would accept the phone call if placed by BJ?

    499:

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

    I edited the wikipedia page to include information about the USSR and Russia.

    I didn't know how to add footnotes and the map needs to be updated if anyone wants to take a crack at that.

    500:

    Just about every medical public opinion in the USA that is not controlled bythe MafiaRethuglican spooks is unanimous in loud criticism of DJT. Fun!

    501:

    I think we have a strong argument that Trump isn't lying about having the virus. There's no way he's willing to miss campaigning.

    502:

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudzu-vine-ate-south-180956325/

    Debunking the kudzu menace. I have no idea whether this is accurate, but the Smithsonian is a respectable source.

    503:

    there's 5-7 more days in which there is a high level of danger for Trump

    As opposed to 107-1,568 more days when there's a high level of danger from Trump?

    504:

    Yes. Given how it grows (and isn't a significant problem) in Britain, I believe them.

    I have had many arguments with the people who get hysterical about various plants destroying diversity in Britain, but side with Oliver Rackham that going out and LOOKING is essential to avoid propagating 'factoids'. Even ignoring the fact that our ecologies are essentially all man-made and made up of recent invaders, the only recently-introduced land plants that actually form monocultures are Japanese knotweed (but only beside water) and possibly Rododendron ponticum (in a VERY few places). Plenty of other plants do so in favourable conditions, and some cause local trouble (e.g. bracken, gorse and brambles), but they are 'native'.

    505:

    Kudzu dies back in winter, so it isn't going to be as big a deal in Britain.

    506:

    because it looked as if it covered everything in sight, few people realized that the vine often fizzled out just behind that roadside screen of green.

    Driving between Memphis and Nashville in the mid 90s, I saw mile after uninterrupted mile of kudzu. It's fascinating to find out that that was an almost Potemkin screen.

    507:

    Oh, yes, but that wasn't what I meant; I know that we are too cold and dark for it to become seriously invasive. It's where I have seen it establish itself, and where I have not, which matches what the Smithsonian article said. Basically, it seems to need at least partial sunlight and bareish ground to establish itself from seed - which is precisely what has been created around those roads! So that's why I believe it ....

    508:

    EC Fallopia japonicacan be a real menace almost anywhere, actually. IIRC, Network Rail have a dedicated team on that plant-problem, because it loves railway cuttings & embankments. You are a Rackham fan, as welAl?

    509:

    You're talking about Pence, who visited KSC, and there's pictures of him in the clean room putting his hands on something that's going to go into space that has a sign on it saying "DO NOT TOUCH"?

    I'm hoping he ignores the mask.

    510:

    Unfortunately, there's global warming... and no, I'm not being snarky.

    511:

    It's a highly modified vehicle, so it might have a partition between the driver's area and the rear of the car, and separate air-conditioning systems.

    Maybe the limos. But the closeup views in the videos of the event shows a typical SUV interior with no partition between front and next row of seats. This was not a Navigator or Expedition sized SUV. More of an Explorer.

    4 people in total. All with just masks.

    512:

    I wasn't able to tell whether there was a partition or not. Do you have a link which makes things clear?

    513:

    You aren't thinking ecologically, which is what I was talking about; in that context, it's not even a problem in Britain. Network Rail have problems with many plants - buddleia, Russian vine, ash, sycamore, brambles and more - but that is another matter entirely (and note that two of those I mentioned are 'native').

    514:

    It's grossly exaggerated as far as the effect on northern Europe goes, as can be told from the fact that few plants that are rampant invaders in southern Europe or the USA even naturalise in our 'hot spots'. People from your southerly climes rarely realise that temperature is less important than insolation for most plants adapted to growing in the open.

    Even hardy plants have essentially stopped growing here, but the temperatures are c. 10-15 (night-day), AND I live at only 52 north. OGH at 56 north is much worse off.

    515:

    Re: '... going out and LOOKING is essential to avoid propagating 'factoids'.'

    Not a trained botanist or horticulturalist so I usually have to look up plants. Problem is many/most of what should be the most learned/reliable sites have no photos, useless photos (can't make out any details), only drawings/sketches that could be of any plant frankly because I don't know anything about these plants and can't tell one plant from another.

    Suggestion to scientist/tech experts:

    If you're serious about/committed to advancing education of the general public about your area of expertise then learn how to teach/prepare informative presentations (visual, audio as appropriate) otherwise you're just blowing smoke (pretending to be an educator/pro-whatever) and adding to the confusion.

    Life cycles/stages - Plants like most living things differ in appearance depending on their life stage and sometimes season. If your one photo on a webpage devoted to one particular plant shows this plant as a seedling in very early Spring - how am I supposed to recognize the full-grown version in Summer, Winter or Fall?*

    Sheesh!

    How this relates to EC's comment - maybe ordinary folks end up on factoid sites because those sites are more effective communicators/explainers.

    • I just tried the local uni's botany dept's website (which is partnered with the municipal botanical garden) for info about giant hogweed. Result: A page of info and one photo of the prof standing beside the plant about 20 ft away from the camera. No damned way I could possibly identify this plant from this photo apart from: 'it's big'.
    516:

    Speaking as someone who pretty much gave up doing public education on plants, and now helps others with that thankless task....

    Oy. Most civilized people deal with plant identification the same way QAnons and Trumpers deal with politics, with a mix of magical thinking, ad hoc reasoning, and general repugnance. It's slightly easier to change minds (at least flowers are more attractive than the average politician), but not much.

    One basic problem is that there are over 200,000 plant species in the world. There's over 7,000 growing wild in California and over 2000 growing wild in San Diego County. Very few people know even the local plants. A PhD botanist is expected to know 500-1,000 species, if they're field workers.

    Those numbers intimidate people. Pointing out that everyone spends their lives learning plants (or any other speciose group, like insects, fungi, or fish), doesn't help, because most people are too egotistical and insecure about their knowledge to want to plunge into an abyss of ignorance, even for the chance of finding unending pearls of wisdom and beauty. I assume computer programming and security are similar?

    Anyway, about giant hogweed ID on the web. The problem is there's a bit of an informal policy about the carrot family (Apiaceae), which Heracleum belongs to. That policy is: you don't fucking give ignorant idiots ideas that they can ID the family on their own! The reason is not just the joys of phototoxic furanocoumarins that a bunch of genera (not just Heracleum) produce, it's that a fair number are toxic far beyond this. Some, like poison hemlock and the water hemlocks, are lethally, horrendously, often incurably poisonous.

    As with white-gilled mushrooms, this is a group where bad taxonomy kills. Giving people a bit of knowledge is more dangerous than telling them to leave the plants alone unless they want to take the time to learn them properly.

    And since I have been trained, and have still screwed up IDs of unknowns in this group, this is a rule I take very, very seriously.

    517:

    Oh. And in other news, El Cheeto Grande is set to check himself out of the hospital in about an hour. I would add against medical advice, but apparently he's done his thing on that system too.

    In possibly unrelated news, feel free to google "dexamethasone psychosis." One place to start is: https://www.mdedge.com/psychiatry/article/62206/mental-health/corticosteroid-induced-mania-prepare-unpredictable .

    Since I'm a dreary pessimist, I predict this will be another unpleasant week the ol' US of A.

    518:

    I will try most wild plants as food, if I think they are plausibly interesting - though, as I have said, northern Europe is very forgiving in that respect. Exceptions are anything I know is seriously poisonous or think is in the Solanaceae, Leguminoseae or Umbelliferae (Apiaceae), unless I can identify at least their genus. While a trial helping of even water hemlock leaves is unlikely to kill me, it might be a seriously unpleasant experience - and a helping of cooked roots might kill me. In the tropics, even a taste of the wrong plant can be extremely dangerous.

    But even that requires enough botanical skill to identify the family of a plant, which many people don't have, and I can't always separate Compositae and Umbelliferae without flowers or fruit.

    As you say, white-gilled mushrooms are an absolute no-no unless you are CERTAIN of their identification. I used to be capable of that in Britain, but would no longer risk them.

    519:

    One of the things I have thought of doing (for 30 years) is writing a GOOD taxonomic key program - not one that demands you have perfect specimens, including flowers and fruit, but one that works on whatever data you have (including size and habitat). The problem is I have never found a source of the data - writing the program is trivial.

    520:

    The reason is not just the joys of phototoxic furanocoumarins that a bunch of genera (not just Heracleum) produce...

    Contemplate that, while making your next margarita or sangria.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophotodermatitis#Phototoxic_species

    521:

    writing a GOOD taxonomic key program

    Start with tropical reef fish.

    From what I can gather, and this is very approximate, there are quite a lot of species that look the same but are not. There are also species that are fine to eat at certain ages but become poisonous as they age. or vice versa. There's also some parasites that almost all old fish in that species have that make the fish poisonous. But not all old fish... sort of like how you can get vCJD from beef. Some beef...

    This is where you can have fun "cultural experiences" where a five year old will do the "how can you be so dumb" face when you're excited about catching a fish (that will kill you) and meanwhile you're still getting over the idea that a five year old is running round with a razor sharp knife because hey, kid's gotta eat.

    Every now and then some happy family of yachties catch a lovely fish and have it for dinner after carefully identifying it. Their bodies are found some time later because they failed to note the slightly enlarged liver (or some equally subtle sign) that distinguishes the variant that is deadly to eat from the equally tasty one that doesn't kill you.

    522:

    Say "phototoxic furanocoumarins" three times, fast.

    Rubber baby buggy bumpers....

    523:

    Heteromeles I am only a very amateur botanist - got there partly through observing really interesting plants in the wild like this one & through keeping an allotment, but even I can probably identify at least 300 species "in the wild", possibly more. However, I'm really annoyed with the professional nomenclature-people. What was wrong with calling the Grasses Graminieae or the "Carrots" Umbellifferaea - it's not as if the genetics of the Families is changing, though DNA samppling does definitely change species/Genus labelling .. Grrrr ...

    Follow Carl v Linne ... look at what's similar, look at the flowers ( Which reminds me, the Labiates are now the Mints iirc, which is just bollocks.)_

    Hogweeds - I hadn't realised that there was an intermediate soecies (perhaps) between "Giant" & "Persian", as previously mentioned - oh dear.

    Correct, however, in that the Umbelifferaea are almost as bad as the Solonaceae Edible? / Poisonous? / Both? - yes, the latter is often the case - consider the potato, for instance. Fungi: If it's got white gills & a double "cup" at the bottom - DON'T - even if it is "Grisette" - not going there. Brown/pink gills & doesn't stain yellow - take it home & eat it. The ones I steer clear of are "Chanterelle" as distinguishing that from the false one is....

    As for DJT, words fail me ... maybe it would be better if he fell over? Does Pence automatically step into the slot & they pick a new Veep, or what?

    EC NO Hemlock Water Dropwort is reckoned to be the most poisonous plant in the UK - even a few leaves would make you very seriously ill. A helping of root would DEFINITELY kill you. White-gilled in late April, though, gives you "St George's Mushroom" - REALLY TASTY. Fortunately, none of the Amanitas would be producing fruiting bodies at that time.

    P.S. That Dredge link fom "H" is broken - can we have one that works, please?

    524:

    Also, there's human variation as well. I'm more sensitive to (some) bitter flavours than average, so a lot of slightly-off food tastes violently disgusting to me. Rotten milk products, for example, and sometimes I wonder whether that's also why most alcoholic "beverages" taste foul too. I know for a fact that many other people can't taste those things, perhaps at all. My mother, for example*. Or anyone who likes yoghurt.

    I wonder whether the same happens with (certain) locally poisonous species. People who can taste the difference survive, those who can't tend not to.

    • yes, on multiple occasions I have rejected the foul garbage she was trying to poison me with. I was a "fussy eater" but also prone to inexplicable bouts of diarrhoea depending on who won a given argument.
    525:

    Does

    Pence automatically step into the slot

    Yes.

    & they pick a new Veep, or what?

    That would be What.

    Remember, Pence, the notionally new POTUS, would still be the GOP's candidate for the VPOTUS election on 3 November and a dead man would still be the POTUS candidate. So how would that work?

    At a guess, the GOP would scramble, hold a new convention and pick new POTUS (likely but not necessarily Pence) and VPOTUS (who knows?) candidates. And then new ballots would need to be printed and distributed.

    526:

    Ok, he's flying back to the White House, allegedly will "isolate" in the residence, and they're talking campaign trail starting Monday.

    Who wants to be that somewhen between tomorrow and two weeks from now, he collapses and is in the hospital again?

    527:

    The link should work now. The blog program accidentally incorporated the period at the end of the sentence into the url.

    To answer Allen (525): the ticket that wins gets the job, so presumably Pence would be Potus and he'd select a new VP.

    I won't be entirely surprised if, assuming we get through this mess without a nuclear war, a saner administration floats a new Constitutional Amendment to fix the shortcomings of the 25th Amendment. For example, there's no provision of what to do if the VP becomes debilitated, even though that kind of matters too. And there's active disagreement among lawyers as to whether it's "constitutional" for the Speaker of the House to become President. Well, it's in the Constitution, but separation of powers?

    We've got to get through this week, then this month, first. What a mess.

    528:

    Oh, and what about the many ballots that have already been cast? We put ours in the mail on September 25, and apparently a lot of other early ones have also been cast. Are they invalidated and have to be recast with the new slate, just shifted to assume that votes for the former GOP candidates transfer to the new ones or, again, what? Lot of whats here.

    529:

    He's on a big "upper" because of the steroids. He's going to go on a "downer" in a short while. Is that enough of a collapse for you?

    530:

    I can well imagine how thankless a task teaching The Public plant ID is, having made some effort toward the same thing with birds. Most of them are a bit bamboozled by the idea that anything except owls can fly at night, never mind that many species do so routinely.

    531:

    They (heh heh) exist: the best ones are iNaturalist and Facebook interest groups. That way you group-source a bunch of experts who double check your ID. Sorting out who has a clue and who has no clue gets interesting, and "I don't know" is a common answer, especially with out-of-focus leaves.

    There's actually a highly detailed online key for the Asteraceae of California. It's almost useless.

    One problem with the Apiaceae is that the fruits are the most diagnostic feature unless you're familiar with the plant. And if you don't have fruits, well, you'd better be working with someone who knows the plant.

    532:

    No. I mean falling down where people see him, and going out on a stretcher.

    That is, of course, assuming that they don't, as I was saying a couple of years ago, they notice one morning that he's not tweeting, and they find him "unresponsive".

    533:

    Short form:

    The RNC picks the new slate. They would likely pick Pence and a new VP. There won't be a new convention.

    As for the ballots, they would not change. It's far too late to print up new ones and send them out. The votes for the original slate would be assigned to the new one.

    534:

    Re: 'One basic problem is that there are over 200,000 plant species in the world. '

    And about 3,000,000,000 smartphones with built-in cameras (lenses) - so still no excuse for not snapping/publishing pix of the life cycle of whichever plant you're discussing. :)

    Speaking of plant names -- years ago I'd heard that various genome projects really upset the apple cart of then-current taxonomic systems. If yes, then I suppose that I shouldn't rely on any books published prior to 2000?

    BTW - an article I read in the local paper about local flora mostly wrt to how local gardeners could help ensure native plant diversity included an interview with a local uni botany prof/researcher. The interviewer asked whether there were any particular native plants that amateur gardeners should be wary of. The prof's response: assume most are toxic. Thought that this was very interesting and probably why the beginnings of human civilization are so closely tied to grain cultivation (expanded food sources esp. of high protein types/food security).

    535:

    I thought that y'all might appreciate a report from the front lines in western Virginia. The state liberalized the voting rules to allow for non-photo IDs like utility bills, bank statements and voter registration cards and also mandated early voting, starting 45 days before the election. We're 12 days into voting in my small town and we've had about 13% of registered voters vote in person and absentee ballots for about another 5% have already been received (2-3 days turnaround). Aside from from the first few days, we've had very few actual lines and people come in and vote in a few minutes. This is apparently not the situation in larger jurisdictions as I believe that only one early voting place per jurisdiction was intended and people have been caught flat-footed by the scale of the response. We have had no demonstrators for either side appear, but we're in city hall with our front door opening onto sidewalk of the main street downtown and there's really no place for anyone to congregate.

    Numbers are finally starting to taper off a bit as I expected, although I thought this would have happened after the first week, not this late. My town had 67% of registered voters vote in the 2016 election and I expect that that percentage will be higher this time, although I have no idea how much. Voter registration is still open until the 13th and we've had about a 10% increase in the number of registered voters since the polls opened, so a significant number of non-voters will probably vote in this election.

    As my registrar receives the absentee ballots, she checks to make sure that they're properly filled out and contacts the voters to resolve any problem with missing signatures, etc. The ballots remain sealed in their security envelope as the outer envelopes have all the contact information and are bar-coded for tracking purposes. I'm uncertain how many people we've sent absentee ballots to, but I'd estimate that it's in excess of 20%. We've had hundreds of people return their ballots to be voided so they can vote in person, probably because they've heard the horror stories about mail in problems. That hasn't been a problem here and may only be an issue in larger jurisdictions.

    Virginia uses a scan and save system where each ballot is scanned and tallied by a machine and the ballot is saved so it can be tallied again if a recount is required. Each voter is marked as having voted in our system and the daily record is sent to a state-wide database so that people cannot vote in different jurisdictions. Each poll book is not connected to Internet as the daily tally is stored on a thumb drive which is then transferred to another machine for transmission to the Dept. of Elections at the end of the day. Strict accountability is maintained for the ballots and we must explain any discrepancies between the poll book and the scanning machine. For example we had some idiot pick up their ballot in person and drop it in the dropbox outside intended for absentee ballots rather than send it through the scanner as instructed. So sending multiple ballots to voters will cause a red flag to be raised and the extra ballots for those people will be voided.

    As the scanner kicks back ballots that are improperly filled out (marking outside the lines, etc. (we void the messed up ballot and give them a new one)), there's not much for the 3-person electoral board (2 Democrats and 1 Republican with the balance held by the party in power) to do other than process the late arriving ballots. I'm not sure off-hand when they have to be postmarked by, but they have to be received by noon on the Friday after the election. Considering that we've already received so many absentee ballots, I don't honestly expect to see very many arriving after the day of the election.

    I think that Virginia's system is very secure and I can't see many ways that it might be abused without being spotted and nobody can pull out boxes of ballots from their trunk on election evening to give the victory to the favored son or daughter (looking at you, Minnesota!). I think that the major weakness is that the Dept. of Motor Vehicles also acting as the voting registrar as the clerks there are not always assiduous about determining actual citizenship.

    I definitely like early voting as it promises to significantly shorten the lines for my ward on election day. The polls are open 13 hours here and I have 4200 voters in my ward, so about 3000 voters with a 70% turnout. That's 230 people per hour and my crew can process about 3-4 people per minute at best. The lines would be long. If we have half the registered voters vote early or by absentee ballots that will make lines much shorter and my people much less stressed and less prone to making mistakes. Plus voters can come in at their convenience (although election day is a state holiday) and are more likely to do so in good weather like what we're having right now.

    My area is pretty rural and almost everyone has a driver's license so the change to the ID requirements really hasn't affected us as I'd estimate 98% present their license to us, and 2% use passports or voter registration cards. Working half a day for all but one day that we've been open thus far, I've only seen one person use a bank statement. I suspect that that will matter more for voters in the inner cities.

    Since no ballot is tallied until election day in this state, I have no idea whether the significant numbers of early voters bodes well for one side or another. If the numbers were available to compare early voters between areas that voted for the Republicans or the Democrats in the 2018 Congressional election, you might be able to draw some conclusions, although my town voted for Hillary by a 2% margin in 2016 and I think went more for the Democratic candidate than the rest of the Congressional district, so who really knows?

    536:

    Troutwaxer @ 512: I wasn't able to tell whether there was a partition or not. Do you have a link which makes things clear?

    No partition, but heavily armored.
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2020/10/05/a-look-at-trumps-armored-suv-and-why-that-photo-op-was-a-bad-idea/#3972c29e40a9

    Those are "bullet proof" windows made up of multiple layers of Lexan polycarbonate sheets. The windows can't be opened.

    537:

    They (heh heh) exist: the best ones are iNaturalist and Facebook interest groups. That way you group-source a bunch of experts who double check your ID. I have wondered a bit perhaps along EC's lines after watching botanists keying specimens out. Flora of Xs are nice, but they're a single decision tree (at least what I've seen) to a leaf (species) node (hopefully). It would be nice to have a more flexible decision system that had multiple paths to leaf nodes, perhaps guided by software; "take a picture of the X, please, with something of known size to show scale". iNaturalist is fun, and even their ID automation can be surprisingly helpful (sometimes), but doing it right would be really really nice.

    538:

    Re: '... a big "upper" because of the steroids. He's going to go on a "downer"'

    If dexamethasone acts similarly to prednisone on the body overall esp. the adrenals and CNS, and he stays on it long enough at a high enough dosage, he'll likely fly into a steroid rage, i.e., become physically violent. He might also experience some physical changes like chipmunk cheeks, bushier eyebrows, fatty deposit on his back and shoulders producing a humped back, increase in the apparent size of his thigh muscles, etc.

    The 'alternate scenario' is looking likelier: he's using COVID-19 as his do-not-go-to-jail card.

    539:

    About plant and fungus names.

    Fungi really got shifted around, so don't trust any names prior to 2000.

    As for plants, about 75% of them are still more-or-less where they were before. A few big groups (the Scrophulariaceae and Liliaceae) got broken up, for good cladistic reasons. The names of the plants often didn't change, but the family did.

    Some groups (good examples include American monkeyflowers, asters, goldenrods, and Lotus) got renamed at the genus and sometimes species level. What happened there was the rule of priority, which is that the oldest valid name that's attached to a specimen of the group is the name of the group, with some exceptions. With Lotus (not the sacred lotus, but a bunch of sprawling little legumes), the American species were first named in the genus Acmispon. Some taxonomist in the 1920s lumped them all in with Lotus (an old world genus) and there they stayed until genetics work showed they weren't Lotus, at which point Acmispon got resurrected as their group name.

    There are a few real Asters in the US, but it turns out it's really easy to make an aster flower or a goldenrod flower out of plants in that particular tribe of the Compositae (aka Asteraceae). As a result, the North American plants people had labeled as goldenrods and asters were more closely related to each other than they were to European goldenrods or Asters (IIRC), so they all got renamed. American monkeyflowers got lumped into Mimulus, and it turns out the oldest collection with the genus name of Mimulus is an Australian plant. So they had to rename all the North American ones.

    You can see the pattern, hopefully. The same thing happened with fungi, but it turns out that morphology is a really bad way to identify fungi, because shapes like mushrooms, truffles, and yeasts are really easy to evolve, and have evolved many times independently.

    540:

    Thanks for the down-in-the-trenches.

    I'm in MoCo, and we've got the scan-and-save also.

    Fuck the news cycle, a valid election is more important, and if it takes time, suck it up, news media.

    541:

    Allen Thomson @ 525:

    Does
    Pence automatically step into the slot
    Yes.
    & they pick a new Veep, or what?

    Remember, Pence, the notionally new POTUS, would still be the GOP's candidate for the VPOTUS election on 3 November and a dead man would still be the POTUS candidate. So how would that work?

    At a guess, the GOP would scramble, hold a new convention and pick new POTUS (likely but not necessarily Pence) and VPOTUS (who knows?) candidates. And then new ballots would need to be printed and distributed.

    It's kind of weird. First of all there's the question of the remainder of Trumpolini's current term. If he shuffles off this mortal coil between now and Jan 20, 2021, Mike Pence Pretense becomes President ... for days or hours depending on when it is. Also according to the 25th Amendment Pence Pretense has to submit a replacement Vice President to Congress for their approval, but I don't know what kind of timeline is specified by the amendment, so I don't know if the lame duck Congress would act on it or not before the inauguration on Jan 20, 2021

    Then there's the separate question of who will be the candidate on election day.

    IF Trumpolini snuffs it between now and election day, the Republican National Committee chooses a new candidate. They'd be f****** Idiots to choose anyone except Mike Pence Pretense, but it is, after all, the Republican National Committee and they ARE f****** Idiots, so there's no telling who they'd choose.

    There wouldn't be time enough to print new ballots between now and election day, so the ballots will still likely say Trumpolini/Pretense no matter who the RNC chose.

    IF Trumpolini survives until after the election AND Trumpolini/Pretense win the election, Pretense is sworn in as President on Jan 20, 2021.

    542:

    Re: 'Since no ballot is tallied until election day in this state, ...'

    Good to know that things are working smoothly in western Virginia.

    I recently watched John Oliver's video where he talked about how the media historically report in-person voting day results as though those are the only votes that matter and by doing so have trained the public into feeling that whatever result they see on the news by the end of that day is the actual final result. If the media continues to focus just on the Nov 3 in-person voting - ignoring or downplaying mail-in votes - this will work in DT's GOP's favor esp. since some polls suggest that the increase in mail-in voting skews Dem. The media should also continually mention that almost every state has a different set of rules/procedures for voting in a Federal election - therefore why delays in final voting results for different states.

    Then they'll have to remind people about how it's the Electoral College's vote that actually matters ...

    Oy vey!

    543:

    As for the ballots, they would not change. It's far too late to print up new ones and send them out. The votes for the original slate would be assigned to the new one.

    I suspect you're right, as that would be logical, easy and possible.

    However, in many places, the ballots aren't for slates as such, but for individual candidates.

    In fact and e.g., Texas recently eliminated single-party voting and now mandates position-by-position votes. So, if an absentee voter voted for Trump and Pence for P/VP on 20 September and Trump became unavailable subsequently, that voter might decide that the best choice would be Pelosi and Pence. How to vote that?

    544:

    waldo @ 530: I can well imagine how thankless a task teaching The Public plant ID is, having made some effort toward the same thing with birds. Most of them are a bit bamboozled by the idea that anything except owls *can* fly at night, never mind that many species do so routinely.

    The only ones you really need to know around here are poison ivy and poison oak ... "leaves of three, let it be". Occasionally you might mistake Virginia Creeper or Jack in the Pulpit for them, but it won't cause you any problems NOT messing around with them.

    546:

    Thanks Mod for fixing my unwanted tags. I need to learn to use the preview.

    547:

    I wasn't referring to the outside windows, but the partition most limousines have between the driver's area and the passengers? The one with the electric, roll up window? Do you know if the presidential limousines have such a partition?

    548:

    That's why I said "short form".

    There are a lot of exceptions, especially since you technically aren't voting for candidates but electors, and in some states the electors HAVE to vote for the candidate named on the ballot, no matter who the candidate actually is.

    549:

    "HAVE to vote for the candidate named on the ballot, no matter who the candidate actually is."

    So they HAVE to vote for the dead guy if he's the one named?

    550:

    DT - COVID-19:

    Recorded/uploaded today - 34min video discussing DT's COVID-19 treatment: which drugs, why, optimal timing for each, etc.

    TWiV Special: Presidential COVID-19 with Dr. Daniel Griffin

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFpp3pIRjGQ

    551:

    About the RNC choosing a replacement... you may have missed that the chair of the RNC announced she's positive over the weekend.

    There are going to be a lot of sickly-if-they-survive Reptilians.

    552:

    I wasn't able to tell whether there was a partition or not. Do you have a link which makes things clear?

    I tend to have various cable news on in the background when working. I looked up and saw a clip of the drive by and rewound it (Tivo) and watched. The view was sharp with only about 1/2 of the length of the SUV in the frame. You could see the back of the head of the driver through the back seat (2nd row) window where Trump was sitting. It was obvious the interior was a standard 2 bucket seats up front with a bench for the back(2nd) row. And you could clearly see the backs of the front row seats. Any kind of partition would have been very obvious. I drove one of these for nearly 20 years and there just isn't room to partition the two rows of seats and not have no leg room in the back or the front seat folks jammed into the dash.

    The clip was on CNN or MSNBC.

    553:

    And then new ballots would need to be printed and distributed.

    The NYTimes and Washington Post both have some detailed articles on how things should happen and where the "holes" are located in the current set of laws.

    But print new ballots and distribute them? Not going to happen. At all. If for no other reason than early/mail/absentee voters have already voted using existing ballots. Aside from the logistical nightmare, changing the ballot during voting would violate sooooo many laws and ideas of propriety.

    554:

    and what about the many ballots that have already been cast?

    While it is not obvious, as far as the Presidential race you are really voting for a slate of electors, not the actual people running for office.

    555:

    I was on dexamethasone for a while as part of chemotherapy. 4 mg/day rather than the 6 mg/day used to treat covid-19, sometimes actually per day and sometimes 1 big dose per 5 or 10 days. It doesn't have a lot of effect on your mental state aside from making it hard to sleep especially on the big doses. The only noticeable lasting effect was that my chest hair darkened a little.

    Not all steroids have massive visible effects.

    556:

    Herb fennel, though it's less spindly than that pic. And yes it does form dense thickets, though it's one of the more minor invasive plants here.

    I'm in Wellington, NZ. Convolvulus (morning glory in Britain I think?), Darwin's barberry, wandering willie, old man's beard, gorse, brambles and bracken are more common invasive plants here. The list in all of NZ gets a lot longer.

    557:

    AVR Calystegia sepium OR Convolvulus arvensisis this one - a.k.a. "Bindweed" - but it's still a "convolvulus" .... "Morning Glory is also a real "Convolvulus" but it's this one - & they can be blue or purple, too. Closely related, obviously. ANd yor USDA hardiness zone is ....9-10

    558:

    Ohhh, just wait until you meet our giant hogweed. Grows just fine at 62 degrees northern latitude, survives harsh winters, survives two-three days of snow in the last third of May (last two decades - common occurrence where I live), and generally acts as if its original habitat wasn't much closer to equator.

    559:

    Bindweed is a pest in some parts of the country, but no I really meant morning glory, called convolvulus here. If you want to clear an area of it you need to keep digging it up for multiple years. White flowers are normal tho' I've seen royal blue up the coast a bit.

    The local area would be a temperate rainforest except that we built a city on top of it and cleared the hills around for pasture.

    560:

    As far as alcoholic beverages are concerned, I occasionally — for some hours at a time — find alcoholic drinks taste rank. When it happens, there's an aftertaste that comes through which is distinctly off.

    When it does happen, it's pretty much anything alcoholic that does it: beer, wine, cider, spirits. I'll also get an edge of it from latte coffee, which may be the milk just not being totally fresh.

    It's something that has only started in the last year or so, but if it's what you taste, yeah, it's horrible. I've not tried yoghurt during one of these episodes though.

    561:

    I took the trouble to look up the scientific and (real) medical information on it. The LD50 for an adult was a good mouthful (perhaps a helping) of root, and there is considerably less toxin in the leaves. You are quoting the media's factoids.

    562:

    The thing that really grates is that competent key programs were written in the 1960s - they really ARE trivial - and (as you say) there is a lot of highly diagnostic information that is damn-near impossible to look up in books, either mass-market or professional. Also, a good key program should handle uncertainty and probabilities. For example, growing in waterlogged soil, or fed on by black bean aphids - yes, the latter includes a huge number of species, but there are plenty more on which they rarely feed.

    563:

    Plenty of things grow, and some grow well, at high latitudes - especially in places like Alaska and Canada which get fairly decent summers(*) - I was referring to them becoming serious ecological problems. As I understand it, giant hogweed is accustomed to pretty cold winters in its native habitat (altitude rather than latitude). 2-3 days of snow at the end of May isn't particularly rare in the Scottish Highlands, incidentally.

    (*) Dare I mention wheat as being one of them? :-)

    564:

    There are a good many morning glories and Convolvulus, both annual and perennial. The one that is impossible to get rid of with me is Convolvulus arvensis (field or lesser bindweed), which I say is a New Zealand plant that has come the long way to the surface.

    The whole of southern Britain was a temperate forest, and the western parts were sometimes classified as rainforest.

    565:

    So they HAVE to vote for the dead guy if he's the one named?

    In a strict interpretation of the laws of 33 states (and the District of Columbia) yes. Of course, the states could waive the penalties in this matter.

    In a Supreme Court case this past July (Chiafalo v. Washington), the judges specifically noted this situation, but chose not to address it:

    "The Electors contend that elector discretion is needed to deal with the possibility that a future presidential candidate will die between Election Day and the Electoral College vote. See Reply Brief 20–22. We do not dismiss how much turmoil such an event could cause. In recognition of that fact, some States have drafted their pledge laws to give electors voting discretion when their candidate has died. See, e.g., Cal. Elec. Code Ann. §6906; Ind. Code §3–10–4–1.7. And we suspect that in such a case, States without a specific provision would also release electors from their pledge. Still, we note that because the situation is not before us, nothing in this opinion should be taken to permit the States to bind electors to a deceased candidate."

    566:

    The NYTimes and Washington Post both have some detailed articles on how things should happen and where the "holes" are located in the current set of laws.

    Thanks for pointing that out. Here's a summary which contains pointers to WP articles for those who can use them.

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/03/trump-coronavirus-2020-elections-biden-what-exactly-happens-if-a-presidential-candidate-dies-before-election-day/

    567:

    My distant recollection of the California ballot is that it has you voting for a slate of electors 'pledged' to a particular candidate. If a candidate dies, the electors could still be voted on. Then they could vote on someone newly chosen by the party.

    568:

    ...unless there are rules about electors changing their votes. Other comments have addressed this better than I.

    569:

    Going back for a moment to the Beirut ammonium nitrate explosion, there's a news article about it at

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54420033 Beirut blast was 'historically' powerful

    It's based on a journal article

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00193-020-00970-z Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media

    that, interestingly but not surprisingly, comes up with yield estimates that are consistent with the ones made immediately after the explosion. Those also used damage-vs-distance data taken from images.

    570:

    Calystegia sepium OR Convolvulus arvensisis this one - a.k.a. "Bindweed" - but it's still a "convolvulus" ....

    Related, of course, to Honeysuckle (by marriage) :-)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYr0eNtpDHs

    571:

    Re: '... summary which contains pointers to WP articles'

    Thanks!

    What would be really useful is a clickable map* showing this info by state so that we could see various options/situations/Electoral College voting rules & top-of-the-ballot-name deadlines at a glance - by state and by the country overall.

    • This type of info display/organization tech has been around for a while and is widely used at biz meetings -- really don't understand why the media don't use it. Would more clearly communicate what's happening esp. the current hodge-podge logistics vis-a-vis 'participatory democracy', esp. the unlevel playing field based on which state voters live in. Hell - even a basic Excel spreadsheet would be more useful in accurately describing the current situation.
    572:

    Re: 'The only noticeable lasting effect was that my chest hair darkened a little. Not all steroids have massive visible effects.'

    Glad to hear that you didn't experience too many undesirable side effects.

    I'm aware that immuno-suppressants vary and that are probably some new ones available since the three that my family member was on post-BMT to manage cGVHD. Prednisone - was the first choice of the lot if you needed a sledgehammer immuno-suppressant STAT! Definitely a life-saver but you don't want to stay on it too long and you need to manage the step-down very carefully.

    573:

    When I was on chemo 19 years ago, I didn't get that drug. On the other hand, my oncologists were annoyed that they didn't get any of my hair....

    574:

    Election 2020: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AytDzZ2ecCc

    ... and the BEST "Get Out The Vote" PSA ever made - District Attorneys, Sheriffs, Cash Bail & down ballot races
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDJ5SX6X1cg

    575:

    Troutwaxer @ 547: I wasn't referring to the outside windows, but the partition most limousines have between the driver's area and the passengers? The one with the electric, roll up window? Do you know if the presidential limousines have such a partition?

    The Presidential Limousine has it. That Secret Service Suburban does not.

    576:

    whitroth @ 551: About the RNC choosing a replacement... you may have missed that the chair of the RNC announced she's positive over the weekend.

    There are going to be a lot of sickly-if-they-survive Reptilians.

    I didn't miss it. I don't care if they ALL come down with it (and die). I just don't want them infecting me.

    How much trouble they might have finding a replacement candidate doesn't concern me either. They brought it on themselves. If they want sympathy, they can look it up in a dictionary. It's in there somewhere between "shit" and "syphilis".

    577:

    AVR @ 555: Not all steroids have massive visible effects.

    Prednisone does. Fortunately when I was having to take it I was doing heavy construction labor & the weight gain was almost all muscle. And the increased irritability (so called "roid rage") was much in evidence. I never lost control, but I was angry all of the time.

    I'd take them again if the doctor prescribed them because they did do what they were supposed to do (controlled internal bleeding), but I hope to Dog I never have to take them again.

    578:

    Got it. Thanks.

    It's nice to finally see those fuckers doing their experiment in herd immunity on their own herd!

    579:

    Sadly, the John Oliver video is not visible in Canada.

    580:

    ...other than the poor guys from the Secret Service, of course, or the White House cleaning staff, or similar people.

    581:

    JReynolds Or the UK, either

    582:

    What would be really useful is a clickable map* showing this info by state so that we could see various options/situations/Electoral College voting rules & top-of-the-ballot-name deadlines at a glance - by state and by the country overall.

    Great idea. Let us know when you have it ready to roll out.

    Each state (and territory?) gets to write their own rules. In general they have evolved to a similar set of basics with a few variations. But all the edge cases are written into over 50 state and federal laws and court decisions at both levels. Which is why you can be a research fellow at a university specializing the such things.

    583:

    Check out these sites with different info:

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/ for data, news, and analysis https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/ for data, and analysis https://www.electoral-vote.com/ for data, news, and analysis

    Electoral-Vote is daily reading for me these days. They break out a ton of the edge cases, and make clear what is worth paying attention to, versus hype and drama.

    584:

    Annoying part about not reading here for a few days is that I end up with dozens of responses to various threads, some of which have already gone beneath the waves by the time I get to writing.

    Re: OGH works becoming film/tv. Early Laundry was largely 'The Office' combined with Elder Gods, and done very well. I'd love to see that on screen, though the capacity for messing it up would be daunting.

    I'd love to see a large budget movie based on the Laundry or Eschaton settings. Not least because either would make OGH very wealthy and we need more literate intelligent people in that strata. Merchant Princes seems purpose built for a series + endless spinoffs.

    Re: AI matching human brains. Not the goal IMO. I'm more concerned about human brains putting AI (of any level) to work on various tasks without considering ramifications. Consider the current mostly inadvertent weaponization of our species' social instincts through 'engagement' algorithms and our attraction to things that upset us in that context. Unintended consequence of a goal of 'more engagement to boost profits and ad sales' being metastasizing fascist thought and practice.

    Re: Invasive species. I would happily see the end of "morning glory' and 'English Ivy' in my community, both of which provide about 1 tonne of biomass on my property every year of which I must dispose appropriately. At least the invasive blackberry provides fruit.

    Re: Obesity and definitions thereof. I'm 6'4 and 280 lbs. I am not obese, I am quite dense. The BMI is utter bollocks for anyone more than 1 SD from the mean.

    585:

    I've not tried yoghurt during one of these episodes though.

    I advise caution. It's not pleasant if it goes down, but it's unbelievably foul if it comes back up. If you feel that you might vomit trying to eat it, I would be inclined to give up at that point.

    One of my parents, among his many similar deficiencies, was not easily dissuaded by "psychosomatic bullshit"/disobedience and forced the issue on a few occasions. In somewhat related news, I got to try intensive courses of various antibiotics as a child which is unlikely to have helped my microbiome reach a happy state. But apparently oral antibiotics can sometimes cure diarrhoea rather than causing it.

    586:

    the poor guys from the Secret Service, of course, or the White House cleaning staff, or similar people

    I struggle with that. I realise the USA is a forced-labour society in many ways, so a lot of those people aren't there by choice. But at the same time... really? They really have only the two choices "work at the current white house" or "starve to death"?

    Given the obviously high probability of getting covid at work if you work there, I'd be really dubious about the "covid is better than starving" option, even for the lowest-skilled of the workers.

    But, as I was reminded watching the start of a "youtubers gives career advice" video this morning, I've worked hard to make sure I had career choices, because that really matters to me. I realise it's harder to do that now, but FFS don't lock yourself into a "youtube fame or bust" if you have any other option. Likewise "janitor at the white house or death" strikes me as the sort of luck that makes Job look fortunate.

    587:

    I struggle with that. I realise the USA is a forced-labour society in many ways, so a lot of those people aren't there by choice. But at the same time... really? They really have only the two choices "work at the current white house" or "starve to death"?

    Probably more like "Work at the current White House or lose your government pension, which by now may be substantial." You might also note that Trump has been on dexamethasone for the last few days and is not currently to-gether. He's just decided that the stimulus can wait until after the elections, which is not going to have a good effect on the U.S. economy, not to mention whatever he has unplanned for tomorrow. This is not an easy decision.

    588:

    Canceling negotiations until after the election - when I saw that, an hour or two ago, my instant reaction was "wow, he's going all out to help Biden".

    589:

    "I've worked hard to make sure I had career choices, because that really matters to me."

    That sounds like a good idea. What did you do?

    590:

    JReynolds @ 579: Sadly, the John Oliver video is not visible in Canada.

    At least you don't have to worry about Trumpolini stealing your election.

    591:

    https://gbdeclaration.org/

    Petition: "those who think they are invulnerable should be allowed to ignore the pandemic"...

    No, seriously, that is actually what they're asking. But they're phrasing it as "those who are less at risk" yadda yadda "we must must protect the economy".

    592:

    David L @ 582:

    What would be really useful is a clickable map* showing this info by state so that we could see various options/situations/Electoral College voting rules & top-of-the-ballot-name deadlines at a glance - by state and by the country overall.

    Great idea. Let us know when you have it ready to roll out.

    This one seems to have a clickable map with info on how to vote in every state:
    https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/how-to-vote-2020-election/

    I didn't go into it too deeply because I've known how, when & where to vote for months now (the same place I've voted on election day for the last 45 years or so ... (give or take a mobilization or two).

    I've been doing my best to maintain my social distancing & isolation so I'll still be healthy come election day, but I do even have a backup plan for early voting if I suddenly lose my sense of taste/smell (i.e. I have a plan for how I will vote without becoming a hazard to others).

    593:

    I think you want to be replying to Moz at 586.

    594:

    "make sure I had career choices" ... That sounds like a good idea. What did you do?

    Mostly I got a STEM degree in the 90's, during which I realised that almost all STEM work involved coding at some level* and since I didn't hate that I decided to focus on it. I worked very briefly in finance and hated the people, and in retrospect part of that was working for large companies. I work for small ones now.

    I was somewhat surprised at university to realise just how many other electrical engineering students were there because it seemed like a decent career that would let them do something they actually cared about as a hobby. I would have guessed maybe 50/50 going in, but it seemed more like 90/10 in practice. Overwhelmingly they were "I could try to be that one in a million who makes a decent living at ..., or I could become an engineer, get a salaried job, and ... on the weekend". Boring jobs are good in many ways, but too much career advice is "do what you love" and forget to add "if there's good money for people who are mediocre at it".

    • excel spreadsheets count, and errors in them kill more people than is commonly realised. But most programmers work on things where "try again" is a valid response to problems with their software.
    595:

    [g] I went back to college in the late seventies, having decided that computers looked like fun.

    I've worked for fortune 50 companies, and I've worked for a company that, including the three part-timers, there were nine of us.

    Thinking back over my career, though, just over half my career (including the years I was out of work) have been service - starting at a community college, and ending at the NIH. Only a few jobs were the goal was making money for management.

    596:

    Re:'... a clickable map with info on how to vote in every state:'

    Thanks - much appreciated!

    Makes sense for the major networks to provide this info to viewers.

    597:

    Re: US election 2020 - 'data, and analysis'

    Thanks - much appreciated!

    Good article below about how difficult it's likely to be to forecast this year's election because 2020 has been and continues to be an unusual year. Last time an election year was 'unusual' was in 2008 during the last major financial meltdown when Obama won. Basically: models work when it's the same old, same old world.

    https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/the-trial-heat-and-convention-bump-forecasts-of-the-2020-presidential-election/

    598:

    At least the invasive blackberry provides fruit.

    My childhood memories of wild blackberries are about a wonderful taste and chiggers a day or few later. Oy veh.

    599:

    so a lot of those people aren't there by choice. But at the same time... really?

    As to the White House staff, the US job market for hospitality positions is non existent just now. And may be this way for a very long time.

    Ditto most of the rest of the world.

    And to layer on top of it, many of these people, after they retire, talk about being proud of the service to their country no matter what their feelings about the sitting president.

    600:

    Some years back one candidate for L.A. county sheriff (the incumbent!) died before the election, but after the ballots were printed. He lost - but he still got 30% of the votes.

    601:

    I got 1mg of dexa as part of the reaction-control mix they gave me at the start of my chemo sessions. (It also included 25mg of Benadryl, which takes about 10 minutes to hit, given as part of an IV. That pretty much meant I didn't notice much for the next hour or two. The drug bags had two different monoclonal antibodies plus two more standard chemo agents. The mabs are very pricey, but worked very well for me.)

    602:

    The WH staff go with the building. (It's handled by GSA, "General Services Administration".) They're permanent employees, but not employed by the president.

    603:

    I said I struggle to sympathise, not that I can't, or that I agree with your president about them. And to the exact extent that staff are forced to stay for fear of losing money they are already owed I consider them involuntary labour.

    being proud of the service to their country

    Trump seems working to fix that, not least by denigrating the suckers in the military. If he does manage to get another 20% of you to vote for him that's an endorsement, insofar as your elections ever endorse anything.

    Chris Bertram has a piece in the Guardian questioning just how far you can go down that path before the myth of democracy falls apart completely.

    604:

    To be clear: he got 20% of you to vote for him last time and my question is whether he can repeat the trick. Not whether he can get 60% or 90% of the votes cast because I think even Trump would struggle to do that.

    (I'm talking about votes cast out of total population as a measure of democratic participation and legitimacy, not "of those people both eligible and able to vote what percentage support a given candidate" because that tells you little)

    605:

    Moz Indeed There appears to be a really sever democratic deficit in the USA Her, in General Elections, the percantage of those voting is considerably higher - I don't think it's ever been below 50% & is often in the mid 70's .... Which tells you, straight off, that something is badly wrong

    606:

    FIVE weeks to go! Meanwhil - Moz There is something seriously WRONG with the remains of US "Democracy" if your voting figures are that low. Here, it's very unusual for a general election to get less than 60% turnout - & often well over 70%.

    607:

    I haven't done his math but I would want figures that exclude everyone under voting age.

    608:

    On career choices and degrees some STEM subjects are better than others. My son who has BSc in marine biology and an MSc in marine environmental protection is, as far as he knows, the only one on his university course who actually works in marine biology. His wife who has the same qualifications teaches A level biology.

    609:

    Well, I have a MSc in space technology, but I'm a software engineer, very much not in space tech. (Admittely those space technology studies also included a lot of generally applicable things, like, for example, software engineering...)

    610:

    We (a software company) used to have a Technical Author whose degree was in Marine Biology (and whose studies apparently took her to Sharm El Sheikh).

    Come to it, I seem to recall a qualified Pharmacist who became a Technical Author before then dropping the 'Technical' part.

    612:
    Come to it, I seem to recall a qualified Pharmacist who became a Technical Author before then dropping the 'Technical' part.

    What?!? Surely such a career path is unpossible! /s

    613:

    Come now! Next you're going to tell me the fellow was in software or something! The very thought is absurd!

    614:

    Meanwhile, just to prove our (mal)administration can fuck it up just as well as Trumpolini's lot And reports that DJT is the "superspreader" + even for him, really insane rantings on Twatter ... I'm dreading 4th Nov, where intial figures show him "ahead", because they have not yet counted the absentee ballots. I think he'll make an open power-grab at that point. Opinions?

    615:

    Well yes, but I also acquired a conversion degree in computer science before the tech author gig. Which I fell into because there was a recession on in 1990 when I graduated the second time, and tech author jobs were easier to find (with some writing credits on the side) than software dev.

    616:

    Honestly, Greg, it's really hard to tell right now. On one hand it looks like Trump getting COVID plus his deranged crap after getting high off the dexamethazone has really, really alienated a lot of people, and he just screwed up the negotiations between his treasury secretary and Pelosi over a new stimulus package, so I'd expect the time between now and Election Day to be one long round of layoffs, furloughs, and bankruptcies, with a side order of "he's in the hospital again."

    From that standpoint the only thing that will keep Biden out of office is massive cheating, or a complete failure on Biden's part (or Harris's) to keep things together.

    On the other hand, I don't know what Trump has by way of October surprises, I suspect the crazy lady is going to be put on the Supreme Court, and it wouldn't be surprising to see Trump do something that comes completely out of left field, like attempting to assert that California is in a state of insurrection so our votes can't be counted... or whatever.

    Really, it's a matter of whether Trump can successfully wipe his ass with the Constitution, or whether he (and his Republican allies) are too sick and high to actually follow whatever plan someone has put together for them. I think.

    The surprises are coming so thick and fast that it's gotten well-beyond anyone's ability to predict.

    617:

    They had you on Benadryl? Do you know what the "std" chemo drugs were?

    When I was on chemo the first half of '01, they had me take oral Benadryl (or clone). The second or third chemo session - I was going for chemo, then to work - I forgot the benedryl clone. Around 10:00, in my cube, I realized I was freezing, and decided to go to my oncologist. My manager and the other admin said "you're not taking the El" (this was Chicago) "we're driving you". When I hit 104F, the doc put me in the hospital.

    Turned out to be a reaction from bliomycin. My oncologist contacted the developer, who told him they were watching this, that 12 people had died.

    So you understand why I'm asking what the "std. chemo drugs" were.

    618:

    Everyone's talking about the probability that they will NOT declare the winner election night, due to the huge number of mailing/drop-off ballots.

    The media's desperate to declare... but no one wants to be the one who pulls a Dewey Defeats Truman.*

    • In '48, one newspaper published, with a huge headline, that - and Truman, who wound up being declared the victor, held that up for the cameras.
    619:

    !@#$%^&@#$%^&#@$%^&@#$%^&#$%^&(

    The US is a complete and utter disgrace to the very concept of democracy. If we're lucky, and it's a Presidential election, and it's a good turnout, we don't get 60% turnout.

    I would love for the feds to add a $50 or $100/per voting age adult to the tax return if you do not vote.

    620:

    Of course, part of the problem is that the higher the turnout, the more the vote goes to the Democrats, so the GOP is all about voter suppression.

    621:

    I realise the USA is a forced-labour society in many ways, so a lot of those people aren't there by choice. But at the same time... really?

    You'd have to see their contracts to know for certain. If they have family members kept alive by their medical insurance, or retirement benefits that don't vest until the day they retire, then they face a tough choice.

    I just learned that in Kansas teachers have to pay a penalty to quit (or retire) anytime other than the summer: $2000 to $10,000! This is supposedly to cover the cost of finding a replacement teacher.

    One teacher interviewed talked about the $2000 penalty being 'almost a month's paycheque' so that's a significant penalty. She decided in May (the deadline) not to quit, as cases were coming down, but now wishes she had and is trying to find the money.

    622:
    I would *love* for the feds to add a $50 or $100/per voting age adult to the tax return if you do *not* vote.

    Why go for the stick instead of the carrot?

    (1) Make Election Day a paid holiday; (2) Everybody who votes gets a tax credit of $100?

    623:

    The Dems are talking about making it a holiday. As it is, your employer is required by federal law to let you take time off to vote.

    Pay... not sure.

    And too many suckers will take a paid holiday, and "it's too much trouble to vote".

    Just wait for the "forcing me to vote is infringing on my freedumbs!"

    624:

    What good is a forced vote? Wouldn't people just vote more or less randomly or by name recognition even more than they already do?

    625:

    IIRC Australia mandates voting (no doubt I am being wildly simplistic here...).

    Does random voting or pure name recognition happen much in Oz?

    (I know, "can't get there from here" - transition is a serious problem. But it would at least be interesting to know what a stable mandated-vote arrangement looks like.)

    626:

    David L @ 598:

    At least the invasive blackberry provides fruit.

    My childhood memories of wild blackberries are about a wonderful taste and chiggers a day or few later. Oy veh.

    And my Mom learning how to put up jars of home-made blackberry jam (and Scuppernong jelly).

    627:

    I don't think it's ever been below 50% & is often in the mid 70's {in the UK

    I think you misread. In 2019 the UK population was about 67,576,800 but only 32,014,110 votes were cast, about 47%. By comparison in 2018 Aotearoa had 4,699,755 people and 2,630,173 votes in 2017, about 57%.

    The UK has slightly more democratic participation than the USA, but significantly less than Australia or Aotearoa. I suggest that the House of Lords makes you less democratic than the participation rate makes it look, though.

    628:

    Note that in Australia attending the polling booth is mandatory, voting is optional. You can do that by refusing the ballot, by spoiling it, or if you actually want to cause trouble, by stealing it (the polling clerk has to account for every ballot).

    Australia has 2-5% "donkey votes" where people tick the first box and walk away. We also have ~1% "spoiled ballots", traditionally a cock'n'balls but lucky scrutineers get to see an essay on whichever aspect of the current system most offends that particular voter.

    It's worth noting that even in voluntary-voting elections the donkey vote exists. The spoiled vote count goes up proportional to the complexity of the voting system, and there are many learned arguments (and some iggorent ones) about the optimal complexity.

    629:

    P J @ 600: Some years back one candidate for L.A. county sheriff (the incumbent!) died before the election, but after the ballots were printed. He lost - but he still got 30% of the votes.

    In 2000, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan beat John Ashcroft (yeah that John Ashcroft) in the Senate race despite having died in a plane crash on October 16 - three weeks before the election.

    John Ashcroft became the first ever U.S. Senate candidate, incumbent or otherwise, to be defeated by a dead person.
    630:

    u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/

    There are at least three aspects, and the US generally does badly on all of them: eligibility, turnout, and validity. "Democratic participation" rolls all of them up in to a kind of "well, who actually decides?" question that is useful because it doesn't just cover democracies (the "one man, one vote" system used for example in England around 1066 ... the participation rate is the inverse of the population).

    Who could legally vote is where the UK is currently following the US with the "hostile environment" having as one effect preventing the wrong people{sic} from being eligible to vote. But it's also where you get bullshit like elderly people being held to much lower standards than young people despite (often in explicit defiance of) whatever age discrimination laws they have, and of course "just paying taxes doesn't get you representation", "you're too black, or too poor to get away with lawbreaking? Then you can't vote either" and all the other anti-democratic measures modern democracies rely on.

    Turnout is again obviously and publicly gamed in the US with their "you get a polling booth, and you get a polling booth, and those black folks* ... I suppose we have to let them... they get a polling booth, but only one".

    Validity is where Australia stands out (and the US, again). The first two, though, go out of their way to enforce petty regulations and the US especially tries to make the ballot as confusing as possible. In Australia and Aotearoa there's a bunch of bureaucrats who try their best to make it as simple and obvious as possible but with nigh on half the population being first or second gen immigrants pushing the "English as another language" rate up there are non-trivial challenges. The legislatures in Australia don't help with their incessant tinkering and resilience to expert advice.

    Astonishingly the UK managed zero spoiled and invalid votes in their last general election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election#Full_results

    • the O may be pronounced subtly differently
    631:

    Runout was 63.7 percent. Your population figure includes those under 18 who can't vote.

    632:

    I mistyped. The turnout was actually 67.3 percent

    633:

    Yes, that is exactly what I said. It also includes immigrants, criminals, the insane and whatever other groups you disqualify from participation. I tried to be very clear.

    634:

    Mike, I too would prefer the participation rate to be higher.

    But voting over the years has been a very hit and miss thing. Sometimes you had to own property to vote, more often you had to be an adult male, often the right race, almost always the right nationality (when that too is often restricted by race)... so saying "we had 67% turnout" and the same was true when Lincoln was elected... do you really want to go there?

    If nothing else it makes international comparisons either irrelevant or very difficult - it's quite possible that the "US equivalent turnout rate" in Australia would be over 100%, for example (and likewise the "Brazilian equivalent turnout" in the US would be nearly as bad as the participation rate). But just saying "of those eligible to vote" means that in Austria you're counting any EU citizen over the age of 16 who resides in country, but in the US you're counting citizens over 18 with no criminal convictions who have not been prevented from voting. They're not the same groups, not even close.

    635:

    Thanks for the inside knowledge Moz.

    636:

    Oh, and the confusion aspect is very real, we has an election where the "Liberal Democratic Party" was first on the ballot, and they collected several percent of all votes from the "Liberal Party" who are one of the big two(ish) parties.

    I vaguely recall there also being an election (Tasmania?) where two candidates had the same name but were from different parties. Kevin Bonham's blog would be the place to look if you really want to know.

    Note that both of these can occur under almost any voting system. Under systems with no randomisation of order (does such idiocy exist?) that could be used to game the ballot and inevitably I assume you would end up with Aaaaaron Aaaaaaaaaronson from the Aaaardvark Democratic Project squaring off against Aaaaaaaaamanda Aaaaaaaaaamunsden from the Aaaaaaavian Republican Party.

    637:

    Your population figure includes those under 18 who can't vote.

    Yes. If you limit the sample to people who are eligible to vote, the participation rate here down under goes well up into the high 90s. However there are differences across these jurisdictions about who is eligible and these differences need to be taken into account, something we do automatically if we use total population in rolling up the participation rate.

    We all exclude under-18s, perhaps rightly. However there have been serious proposals to lower the voting age to 16, and in some discussions at least ambit claims to lower it to 12 or even 6. I'm not making an argument for or against any of these proposals, just pointing out they exist and are discussed in some forums. However please agree that we can safely take these as a point of commonality, so if we include the under-18s for both the UK and Australia add therefore get a lower participation rate, the comparison is still valid because it should cancel out for both. And while I would invite you to disagree, I think that it's pretty clear that those under-18s have future interests that the voting system should represent, even if this is implemented in the suffrage of others.

    More problematic is how over-18s may be ineligible in these various jurisdictions. In Australia, although there are some minor variances from state to state, if you are a former prisoner or are currently serving a term of 3 years or less, you can enrol to vote and vote. This means that in general we disenfranchise prisoners serving serving a term of more than 3 years. I understand there are many more variations of this form of disenfranchisement across the West, especially in the USA. To me 3 years seems a bit arbitrary, but I can see how it may mitigate the concerns of one corner of political discussion and stop them demanding worse, as appears to happen in the USA where some states make it difficult or impossible to regain the franchise.

    So really when we do comparisons, depending on what it is we want to compare, we need to calculate participation rates using both total population and eligible population. The latter shows us what are the impediments the voting system itself puts in the way of voters (for instance, voting on a working day, or arranging that there are too few polling places for certain electorates... all the way through to allegations of voter fraud and onerous ID requirements that disproportionately affect certain sectors of the population). But if you want to include the effects of disenfranchisement, this doesn't give you that, you need to use the former.

    638:

    I sympathize with them just as I sympathize for the people getting Covid in meat packing plants.

    639:

    Oh, in Australia and Aotearoa at least, and I hope anywhere democratic, any random can go along to watch the counting. It's not exciting so I don't think we've ever had to restrict that beyond "you can't interfere and if you try there will be trouble". You just give your name to the clerk, then turn up at the time and place for the counting.

    But I've done it. It's interesting... once... for about half an hour. Then it's just boring. And it takes sodding ages.

    The "fun" part of scrutineering comes when ballots are not filled out properly. This varies by state and election, but there are always "saving rules" of some sort that allow a vote to be considered valid if it can be interpreted reasonably to some degree. Some states require 'at least 1,2,3,4,5,6 preferences' others count any preferences given and have rules for "just vote 1" because sometimes that means "vote according to the party's published preferences". I don't think any allow non-consecutive numbers any more because certain people were going 'πᵉ,54321,35626141...∞' and that sort of boundary-pushing. It's bad enough that people write numbers in fun ways, and we get to argue about whether a 2 is really a 7 and so on.

    Aotearoa has or had an "intention of the voter" test, which saves ballots sometimes to a ridiculous degree. People could write "they all suck but that arsehole Bob sucks least" ... and congratulations Bob, you got another vote. There's an "offensive ballots don't count" rule but I don't know what the threshold is.

    640:

    So, how much of a lie can you pack into one sentence? Can you beat "the President is symptom-free"?

    641:

    Re: 'I was going for chemo, then to work - I forgot the benedryl clone ...'

    Oy! - Benadryl was usually given immediately as part of a 'drug cocktail' after any platelet transfusion to avoid seizures. The rationale is that even if the blood/platelets are well-matched, there's always something foreign in there and after a while - many transfusions - the body develops enough recognition and response to mount an attack to that whatever. This is also why mixed pool platelets from a number of different donors are often given first - to prevent a strong immediate immune reaction to something not screened for but that might precipitate a reaction. I was at the bedside the first time my family member got seizures post-transfusion. You really don't want this to happen to you. I don't recall the Bendryl dosage but probably not the usual OTC amount.

    Meds like benedryl aren't headline grabbers when discussing improved cancer therapy success rates but they can make a big difference. Something very similar is happening with COVID-19 treatment: docs are using good old boring drugs (e.g., immuno-suppressants) to help stabilize the patient before, during and/or after they receive whatever the latest newfangled treatment is.

    642:

    "Trump is feeling good."

    643:

    how much of a lie can you pack into one sentence

    More clauses required: "the best president ever has announced his complete recovery from a minor illness and the nation is rejoicing in his return to peak physical form".

    644:

    Britain does allow several classes of non-citizen immigrants to vote. Irish citizens and some Commonwealth citizens with leave to remain living in Britain and on the local Electoral Register can vote in all elections including General Elections for Parliament. Until we leave the EU citizens of EU countries living in Britain and on the Electoral Register could vote in local elections.

    Voting for the Scottish Parliament is open to 16-year-olds and upwards who are British citizens, EU citizens, Irish citizens and Commonwealth citizens, resident in Scotland and on the local Electoral Register. Basically, Moz, if you came to Scotland to live you could vote here for the Scottish Parliament as well as the local council and even the House of Commons.

    645:

    Here in Canada we have the absurdist Rhinocerous Party.

    In one notable election they ran a John C. Turner against the incumbent prime minister, John N. Turner in his home riding. More recently they found someone named Maxime Bernier to run against the wannabe Trumpist Maxime Bernier of the CPC.

    My favourite platform was by a friend of mine, who was their transportation critic in the late 80s. He proposed switching to left side driving to better reflect our historical links to Britain. In order to make it an easier transition he suggested we phase it in slowly, starting with motorcycles.

    646:

    Re: "Trump is feeling good."

    Yes, according to his personal physician - an osteopath, not an MD. Wonder what sorts of tests Conley's been giving him.

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

    647:

    And wasn't there one election where the Rhino's looked dangerously close to winning in one riding, so they ran two candidates to split the vote?

    648:

    FWIW, the US president just did a literal drug testimonial video on twitter for the Regeneron antibody treatment - "... they gave me Regeneron. It's called Regeneron."[2] [Narrator: it is called REGN-COV2; the company, which he was not given, is called Regeneron] Trump credited it with curing him, and promised free doses to everyone.[1] (If I had to bet, I'd bet it actually is a breakthrough treatment particularly early in the infection sequence before the adaptive immune system makes its own antibodies) Apparently he knows the CEO who is a member of his Bedminster golf club.[3] FWIW, I mentioned the possibility that Trump would be treated with this drug in this thread, several hours before it broke in the news. Real points (I am [amused]!) to the one(s) with many names, who mentioned Regeneron in a odd tirade (I assumed it was in part a stock tip) in early July 2020, deleted by mods. I had a reply, never posted, before the deletion, where I mentioned that I'd interviewed with Regeneron months prior, and, still relevant, "... some from the sound of it fairly massive computational infrastructure. (They do computational biology among similar things; some successes.) The IT people I talked with were edgy(&smart) but OK. REGN-COV2 isn't a vaccine, it's an income stream product. If it works, they can repeat for any new disease, probably fairly quickly, with a sweet spot prior to an approval of a decent vaccine."

    [1] Since there are not in fact enough doses for everyone, priority will be given to the rich and powerful, because they are worthier than the lesser people, who are not part of the class "everyone". [2]

    A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT! pic.twitter.com/uhLIcknAjT

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020
    [3]

    Trump has known the CEO for years. He’s a member at Trump’s Bedminster N.J. golf club, where Trump had attended a fundraiser before testing positive. Trump’s conflicts of interest are so broad that they frequently create their own conspiracy theory coincidences

    — Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) October 6, 2020

    649:

    Basically, Moz, if you came to Scotland to live you could vote

    It's good to know that the UK has granted the franchise to selected non-citizen immigrants.

    It might not shock you to learn that one reason I got citizenship in Oz is so I can vote*. I thought swearing allegiance to the criminal scum that run the place was worth it largely in the hope of replacing them with slightly less criminal scum.

    • there's also ever-increasing hostile environment bullshit which meant that many kiwis got citizenship here out of fear that they might not be able to in the future and that it would become essential if they wanted to stay. An entirely correct fear, as it turned out.
    650:

    He proposed switching to left side driving to better reflect our historical links to Britain

    A much better plan was proposed by a friend of mine: every year we permanently disqualify the worst 5% of drivers. He vacillated on the question of whether they should be allowed to retake the tests and get another one, usually preferring the idea of an exponential decay in the number of motorists*.

    • obviously you set the rate somewhat higher than the number of people who become newly eligible each year. Or, you know, much higher :)
    651:

    Your plan is rational, which is not the goal of the Rhinocerous party.

    I agree with you in one sense - I think the driving test should be much harder to pass (say a 40% failure rate and >6 months to retest) and that if you get a small number of tickets you should have to requalify.

    I also think that if you harm or kill someone even once through bad driving then your driving career should be over.

    And we should build our cities and communities around the idea that >50% of adults are unable to drive vehicles.

    652:

    http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2020/10/as-expected.html

    the Make It 16 campaign went to court to argue that the current voting age is unjustifiably discriminatory and breaches the Bill of Rights Act. As expected, they lost, with the judge deciding that while prima facie discriminatory, it was a justified limitation {with no reason required} and

    The Attorney-General did not advance any factual arguments about the merits of any particular voting age, but rather submitted that the age of 18 is objectively reasonable.

    But the whole point of the case is to ask "is it, though?" And it speaks volumes that when confronted with that question, the government refuses to answer it, and the courts refuse to inquire, and both basically fall back on tradition: it should be this way because it is this way.

    All hail our mighty democratic tradition... by which I mean, obviously, the traditional law that only Athenian soldiers are allowed to vote.

    653:

    rational ... is not the goal of the Rhinocerous party

    Bah, I prefer my lunacy plausible, but not quite plausible enough to win. The idea is to have some utterly ridiculous hook to get people to watch, then a bunch of radical-but-useful policies to start them thinking. Lead off with "we should have a president for life, and execute them after five years", but follow it up with "we support the traditional Republican policy of 80% income tax rate above twice the median income and taxing every corporation that operates in the US as though all their operations were carried out here" (or whatever their closest policies to that actually were). Maybe add "and give every former slave forty acres and a mule" but to keep the libertarians happy add "and all land stolen from native americans to be returned".

    654:

    I expect him to collapse, hopefully in public, in the next week or week and a half.

    Has everyone heard yet about the fly on Mike Pence's bullet-proof hair that was there for about 2 or more minutes?

    655:

    Here in Canada we have the absurdist Rhinocerous Party.

    Is the name taken from the movie "Rhinoceros"?

    One of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. Way back around 77 a group of us in our early 20s went to see it at a local near a university theater after a football game. We thought we were going to see a comedy based on the lead actors. Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Karen Black, etc...

    A bit over an hour into the film it looped back about 15 minutes then continued to the end. The loop fit into the plot (such as it was) in a bizarre kind of way. It wasn't till years later that I discovered the loop wasn't intentional. At one level we were all wondering if we'd be in their forever watching the movie loop.

    656:

    Ok, this one I'm going to object to. The best doctor I ever had was an osteopath. Saying his doc's crap because he's an osteopath, rather than just a Trumpolini-grubbing lying scum is right out.

    Oh, and it was my doc, the osteopath, who got me through cancer 19 years ago, so shut yo mouf.

    657:

    Has everyone heard yet about the fly on Mike Pence's bullet-proof hair that was there for about 2 or more minutes? I'll just note that flies are not usually attracted to white. (Hair, in this case.) I wonder if it laid eggs. (Yeah, the jokes have been flying on twitter.)

    658:

    How about reasonable?

  • Any accident while driving where someone is injured, your license is suspened for some period of time, depending on how serious the injury was.
  • Any accident where someone is disabled or killed, you lose your license forever.

  • If you're caught in an accident, and you were on your mobile, you loose your mobile.

  • 659:

    I'm not wild about punishing victims deliberately, especially using the legal system. Look at how most of them treat rape victims and ask whether that's where you want to go with motor vehicle crashes. Sure, there's an argument that we don't want unlucky people driving, but that's close to specious.

    I'm also careful about forcing people out of society. When everything is built around driving, banning people means they either habitually break the law or become socially crippled.

    Sure, for me, in a major city with good public transport, and I can afford to live almost anywhere in it... losing my license would be at worst a slight social stigma. But for a povo in the US that's going to fuck them even worse than they are now. If there is public transport it's going to suck compared to driving. There probably won't be. So they're going to be much less employable, they're going to struggle to make and keep social connections, and so on.

    So even for actual offenders rather than simply people who were driving near the site of a crash, I think we should be really careful about banning them.

    I'm sorry this wasn't immediately obvious to people who read the 'worst 5% get permanent bans". Satire is hard.

    660:

    My real thoughts on driving is that we should make permits for it more like those for any other dangerous machinery, and the punishments should be the same.

    Right now if you carelessly kill someone with a firearm (outside the USA) or a baseball bat, you're almost certainly going to be investigated and charged, even if not actually convicted. Sure, you were just running around knocking caps off people's heads with it, we all like a laugh. But someone died, peep, and that's not fun.

    But if you are driving round punishment passing people when you kill one of them... everyone is sure you feel really bad that you were at the site of the accident. Drivers generally don't even have to express remorse, just to refrain from being too obviously offensive when anyone is watching.

    I would prefer to err the other way: if someone dies, of course there's a crash investigation and of course we presume that a crime needs to be uncovered. We might be wrong, but that's much easier corrected than the alternative. If people ran a real risk of going to jail for killing someone with their car they might take the problem more seriously. right down to the very bottom end, where lawmakers and road-builders have to decide what an appropriate speed limit is because those speed cameras give you a 5% margin of error then everyone gets a ticket.

    661:

    Mike Pence: Black flies matter!

    662:

    expect him to collapse, hopefully in public, in the next week or week and a half. Has everyone heard yet about the fly on Mike Pence's bullet-proof hair that was there for about 2 or more minutes?

    Mike Pence: Black flies matter!

    El Cheeto. Public collapse? Oh heaven forfend! No, he'll collapse at home (so to speak). Then his minions will demand the use of the Pentagon's "Crown jewels" (Next-Gen stealth helicopter, North Korea, for the peri-nuclear infiltration thereof). That will take a few hours (or so) to wing east from Area 52. Once it lands at the White House, they'll load him in the gunner's seat of the 2-seater Helicopter (thereby exposing one of the only two competent pilots) and try to silently ship him over to Walter Reed without anyone noticing. Except that someone will take pictures, the copter will get outed on Twitter, and that will be a cool billion in military R&D down the tubes, with the pilot expected to recover from his infection too. But He Will Survive, because we need him alive and competent to face charges. Yeah.

    I voted and hand carried my ballot in today. I get to be giddy for another hour or two at the thought of all the election flyers I get to shred from here on out.

    663:

    Has anyone ever imagined that a debate between the Vice Presidential candidates of the US would be won by a fly?

    I mean, Harris did well, Pence kept running off and the mouth... but anything he might have said was upstaged by the fly. I mean, Harris 1, fly 1, Pence 0.

    And Trumpolini desperately needed Pence to hit a home run. Biden selling fly swatters when the debate was hardly over takes it.

    664:

    Harris 1, fly 1, Pence 0. The Fly was very well done. Hat off to the scriptwriter for this episode.

    665:

    Me to SO: Ok, so tomorrow, at the virtual ROFCON, at 18:00 Central time, Tom Smith has a concert online. Do you want to bet that he doesn't have a song about the fly? Her: That's a sucker bet.

    666:

    Whitroth MANY years ago, I was driving home, v slowly down a local back-street. A small child ran out, head-first, between 2 parked cars. We were both "lucky" - half a second earlier & I'd have run over him & killed him. As it was, he was thrown back with a greenstick fracure of one lower leg. Comment from the police, when they showed up: " You were going really slowly, weren't you?" To which I replied - "Look at the width of the road & the blind T-junction I'm coming up to, OF COURSE I was going slowly".

    Old song about: "there was an old woman who swallowed a fly ..." Here

    667:

    I get to be giddy for another hour or two at the thought of all the election flyers I get to shred from here on out.

    For a decade or so I've started just piling them up just to see how many I get. I think the record was in 2012 with Obama running for re-election. Between federal, state, and local when it was over I could cover a 12x12 foot area.

    We all have our odd hobbies.

    668:

    Biden selling fly swatters when the debate was hardly over takes it.

    Sold out at 3:40 am EDT.

    https://store.joebiden.com/truth-over-flies-fly-swatter/

    Any bets on them upping the order?

    669:
    Under systems with no randomisation of order (does such idiocy exist?)

    In the upcoming Cote d'Ivoire presidential elections candidates are on the ballot in alphabetical order.

    Normally Ivorians write their names "family name, personal name". For some reason the sitting president, Ouattara, Alassane has decided to put his name on the ballot as "Alassane Ouattara". Odd that. (Ignoring the whole question of whether he's allowed to be on the ballot at all).

    670:

    Oh, in Australia and Aotearoa at least, and I hope anywhere democratic, any random can go along to watch the counting.
    In France if you want you can ask to take part in the count after you've voted. Sometimes they'll ask you whether you want to take part if they haven't got enough people yet.

    (They asked me once, but I had to refuse as the France-England match was starting at the same time as the count).

    671:

    The movie Rhinoceros was released in 1974. The Rhinoceros Party of Canada was born in 1963 and it has a brilliant, outstanding, and spectacular article in Wikipedia.

    672:

    We have the "Monster Raving Loony Party" Some of whose ideas weren't so loonie after all, as it turns out.

    673:

    For those interested in audiobooks, there's a Youtube channel by someone under the odd monicker of HorrorBabble who presents well-produced readings of the works of Lovecraft, Chambers and other early horror and fantasy writers. Copyright is another matter, of course as in most things Youtube.

    The King in Yellow -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARf7LKo-hnk

    674:

    Punishment for driving offences:

    I've suggested elsewhere that one of the consequences should be an immediate immobilisation of the vehicle for, say, 24 hours.

    675:

    Re: 'The best doctor I ever had was an osteopath.'

    Glad he helped you through your cancer.

    I'll stick with evidence-based medicine as a guiding central principle. It's the reason I'm leery of the 'clinical study results' in some places, e.g., Russia's current COVID-19 trial. Without a well-thought out study design, assiduous data collection and analysis - you cannot know with certainty how well a treatment works, why, for whom, when, etc.

    676:

    The movie Rhinoceros was released in 1974. The Rhinoceros Party of Canada was born in 1963
    And Ionesco wrote Rhinocéros in 1959.

    677:
    Your plan is rational, which is not the goal of the Rhinocerous party.

    The first Federal election I was old enough to pay attention to was 1979. That was the one where the Rhinos promised that they'd annex the USA and make it Canada's third territory.

    Good thing they didn't win the election!

    678:

    QUOTE

    Close ANOTHER UNIVERSE EXISTED BEFORE OURS – AND ENERGY FROM IT IS COMING OUT OF BLACK HOLES, SAYS NOBEL PRIZE WINNER Sir Roger Penrose also claims that another universe will exist after this one

    Adam Smith @adamndsmith 1 hour ago

    There was an earlier universe before the Big Bang, and evidence for its existence can still be observed in black holes, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist has said.

    Sir Roger Penrose made the claim after recently winning the award for breakthroughs in Einstein’s general theory of relativity and proof of the existence of black holes.

    Sir Roger argues that the existence of unexplained spots of electromagnetic radiation in the sky – known as ‘Hawking Points’ – are remnants of a previous universe.

    It is part of the "conformal cyclic cosmology" theory of the universe, and it is suggested that these points are the final expulsion of energy called ‘Hawking radiation’, transferred by black holes from the older universe. ENDQUOTE

    Got to be several thousand SF stories in that one? Would the Laws of Physics be the same in those "other" universes, or subtly different?

    679:

    Oops - I forgot...

    Flies land on rancid meat, to lay their eggs, don't they?

    680:

    In the USA, osteopaths take nearly the same education and experience to qualify as MDs. Granted it comes with some amount of "special content" but it's generally agreed (by qualified medical professionals) that DO is equivalent to MD. I was very confused about this when I first moved over to the USA.

    681:

    Osteopaths have been better doctors for me - more likely to prescribe exercise than to just push a pill, like MD's tend to, IME.
    They all only just practice, anyway . . .

    682:

    He was a damn good mathematician, once, may be the first such (*) ever to win a Nobel prize, but went cuckoo a long time back. That hypothesis has no more evidence for it than the ones he proposed in Shadows of the Mind.

    (*) Criterion: someone who has published a paper that has advanced (abstract) mathematics as such, as distinct from its application to a science.

    683:

    Better than my father, who was driving home with some co-workers, and a kid ran out (at dusk) between cars. My father crashed into a phone poll to avoid the kid, and had an ex-car and broken ribs.

    Or my son, who got hit as he was running out from between cars with other kids, taken to the ER, no damage... but then, it was in front of my Mom's place in Philly, and by "two lanes" we're talking "one parking lane, and the other really narrow".

    684:

    In the US, to be a poll watcher, you have to sign up to do it, there are limited numbers of them, and you have to attend a training class, telling you not only what to do, but what you cannot do.

    And there is also no electioneering allowed within 100' of the polls (or the door to the building), and that's been true in every state (and commonwealth) I've lived in.

    685:

    As other people have noted, I've never noticed the difference between a DO and an MD, other than a) my old doctor would do adjustments, as well, and b) when I went on antidepressants, he also recommended St. Johns wort. Still got shots, blood tests, ekg....

    686:

    I'm having trouble understanding what he's proposing. Is it that superhumongous black holes from previous universes fell into the Big Crunch, and then came out during the Big Bang, surviving Inflation?

    687:

    Although I lack Penrose's stature and, erm, creativity, I had a similar take some time ago.

    I'm not sure whether there's enough matter in the universe to do the big crunch thing, as I thought the answer on that was, erm, no. However, if I understand it right, a crunch looks a lot like everything in the universe falling into a black hole at the end of time. That's point one: it's possible to link the starts of universes to black holes, if they're both singularities. This is off in the hand-wavey, math free section of light-weight cosmology.

    The second problem is that, early on in our universe's history, a bunch of very large black holes appeared. These became the centers for the first generation of galaxies, if I understand correctly. The continuing problem is where they came from, since some un(der)explained physics seems to be involved in their formation.

    The third handwave is my question about what happens to a black hole that falls into another black hole. This is a perceptual problem: we think we know from the outside what happens: the black holes merge, and the resulting black hole has the mass of both its precusors. What happens on the inside, though? Black holes, by the definition of the viewer on the outside, have no time passing. If there is time passing on the inside of a black hole, it's effectively in a "temporal dimension perpendicular to the outside viewer's temporal dimension" (my personal BS rendering of "from the outside, it doesn't look like time passes in a black hole, and vice versa."). So I'd speculate it's possible that when a smaller black hole gets taken into a bigger black hole, it survives as a singularity, contributing its mass but not being destroyed (putting a smaller water balloon inside a bigger one, basically).

    If this happens, and if time passes inside a black hole, then I'd speculate that the black holes form universes inside them, with temporal dimensions perpendicular to the temporal dimensions of the parent universes from which they took their matter. Any black holes the universe-parents swallowed may well show up as black holes inside the daughter universe, forming galaxies of their own.

    It seems that Penrose thinks something vaguely similar, except he has the remnants of pre-Big Bang black holes as evaporating "Hawking spots" rather than as the hearts of the first galaxies. Personally, I like mine better, because a) I came up with it on my own (although I'm scarcely the first to think it), and b) it replaces two mechanisms (universe bang-crunch and black hole formation) with one mechanism (black hole formation) that's independent of the mass of the parent universe.

    With respect to this last, if black holes spawn universes inside them, then it appears there might be two ways they can go afterwards: if their mass is insufficient, they ultimately evaporate into whatever their surrounds are via Hawking radiation, because they're warmer than absolute zero and therefore emit stuff. If they're mass is sufficient, they may fluctuate, booming and crunching, evaporating mass but still big enough to ultimately crunch themselves and thereby regenerate.

    To meta-hand wave at a higher level of BS*, I'd speculate that black holes and universes exist in some sort of multiverse, and that expansion may be controlled by whether another object is already occupying the space the black hole can expand into temporally or not. Remember, the black hole time stop only works if the two time dimensions are perpendicular to each other. This may imply that multiverse spacetime is limited, and this creates a situation where certain black holes can expand into universes, while others are constrained to stay as unexpanding singularities until whatever's jamming their space evaporates or is subsumed into another universe or black hole.

    How much of this corresponds to what Nobel Laureate Penrose is thinking, I have no idea. I'm sure his ideas are much better worked out and have real math behind them. I'm just trying to get into orbit by waving my hands.

    *why is this fly buzzing around my hair?

    688:

    I think the driving test should be much harder to pass (say a 40% failure rate and >6 months to retest) and that if you get a small number of tickets you should have to requalify.

    I believe that Dutch licensing used to be like that in the 1970s. One of my cousins got her drivers license in Canada because it was cheaper and easier, and when she moved back home she could get a Dutch one on the strength of it.

    My memory from then what that at the time if you failed the test in Holland you had to retake all the classes before taking the test again. Similarly, if you had too many (or too serious) moving violations then you lost your license and had to start over. Essentially, no 'right to drive'.

    Very old memories, so possibly wrong, and no idea what it's like now, but it's always been my ideal of how we should run things here.

    689:

    The more I use the UK gummint's COVID interface, the more deficiencies I find. Anyway, here are some charts, showing that the second wave is taking off explosively. I believe that the spike was due to their IT debacle, but has nearly been caught up by actuality; however, if it isn't, then the graphs underestimate the number of cases.

    https://imgur.com/a/0UfuRVa https://imgur.com/gallery/MLSlMRJ https://imgur.com/gallery/SPIXIc1

    It may interest people that there were c. 200 fewer deaths over this August bank holiday than usual - at a sky-high level of significance.

    690:

    I frequently see this type of comment regarding a dead candidate getting votes, like it's irrational. Seriously, should you vote for the other candidate simply because your preferred candidate died? Should a Biden supporter vote for Trump if Biden died?

    691:

    In Virginia, 40' is the minimum distance at which electioneering can be done.

    Poll watchers here need a letter from their party, who will presumably inform them of the applicable rules. If not, they'll soon receive a sharp reminder from the precinct/ward chief or his deputy. The most important one probably is that the poll watcher cannot leave the polling station until the polls close, just like the officers of election themselves.

    Every state will have different rules about these sorts of things as running elections is not one of the enumerated powers of the Federal Gov't and remains under the individual states. However much power the Feds have claimed over the decades, the US really is a federation at its heart.

    692:

    When I dropped off my ballot yesterday at the County Election HQ, they'd helpfully posted signs about where the free speech zone was and where campaigning and showing slogans had to stop.

    693:

    It seems perhaps that Penrose and I have different takes on the question of the Hole-y of Hole-ys in our universe. I believe in a Cantorian infinity of holeyness, while apparently he believes in hierarchical holeyness. But he's now the annointed, official expert, so presumably he's pulling this out of a different orifice than I am.

    Note that I just had to quickly write yet another dreary environmental comment letter, so imagining a fractal cascade of black holes swallowing each other ad infinitum and in recondite reticulations, suits my mood at the moment.

    694:

    And on the comic relief front (because we all need some), apparently the Facebook AI thinks naked onions are too suggestive for the internet…

    Jackson McLean, a manager at Gaze Seed Company, said the business was unable to advertise its walla walla onions on Facebook after the company told them the picture on the seed's packaging went against Facebook's advertising guidelines.

    "We got notified the other day that it's an 'overtly sexual image' that they had to ban from the site," McLean said Monday. "I guess something about the two round shapes there could be misconstrued as boobs or something, nude in some way."

    "I just thought it was funny," he said. "You'd have to have a pretty active imagination to look at that and get something sexual out of it.… 'Overtly sexual,' as in there's no way of mistaking it as not sexual."

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/onions-too-sexy-for-facebook-1.5750881

    695:

    whitroth @ 640: So, how much of a lie can you pack into one sentence? Can you beat "the President is symptom-free"?

    Symptom free or not, I don't think I'm allowed to beat the President. If I was, I'd beat him like a rented mule.

    696:

    Troutwaxer @ 642: "Trump is feeling good."

    He may be feeling better, but he'll never be any good.

    697:

    Bill Arnold @ 657: Has everyone heard yet about the fly on Mike Pence's bullet-proof hair that was there for about 2 or more minutes?
    I'll just note that flies are not usually attracted to white. (Hair, in this case.)
    I wonder if it laid eggs.
    (Yeah, the jokes have been flying on twitter.)

    Flies have an affinity for dog turds. I'm only surprised there weren't more of them.

    698:

    whitroth @ 658: How about reasonable?

    1. Any accident while driving where someone is injured, your license is suspened for some period of time, depending on how serious the injury was.
    2. Any accident where someone is disabled or killed, you lose your license forever.
    3. If you're caught in an accident, and you were on your mobile, you loose your mobile.

    Whose fault was the accident? Are you going to penalize me because while I was driving some idiot ran a stop sign, T-boned my car & fucked himself up because he wasn't wearing a seat-belt?

    699:

    Heteromeles @ 662:

    expect him to collapse, hopefully in public, in the next week or week and a half. Has everyone heard yet about the fly on Mike Pence's bullet-proof hair that was there for about 2 or more minutes?

    El Cheeto. Public collapse? Oh heaven forfend! No, he'll collapse at home (so to speak). Then his minions will demand the use of the Pentagon's "Crown jewels" (Next-Gen stealth helicopter, North Korea, for the peri-nuclear infiltration thereof). That will take a few hours (or so) to wing east from Area 52. Once it lands at the White House, they'll load him in the gunner's seat of the 2-seater Helicopter (thereby exposing one of the only two competent pilots) and try to silently ship him over to Walter Reed without anyone noticing. Except that someone will take pictures, the copter will get outed on Twitter, and that will be a cool billion in military R&D down the tubes, with the pilot expected to recover from his infection too. But He Will Survive, because we need him alive and competent to face charges. Yeah.

    That sounds like a whole lot of trouble for nothing, when they could just sneak him down the back stairs & commandeer the next regular delivery van that calls on the White House & slip him into the back with no one outside the wiser.

    For that matter, I'm sure the Secret Service has vehicles on standby at the White House & they get exchanged regularly for servicing. It's no big deal if one of them were just to be driven off.

    News Media & ambulance chasers can't follow every vehicle that comes & goes from the White House. ... well they could, but it would be a waste of time.

    700:

    John Hughes @ 669:

    Under systems with no randomisation of order (does such idiocy exist?)

    In the upcoming Cote d'Ivoire presidential elections candidates are on the ballot in alphabetical order.

    Normally Ivorians write their names "family name, personal name". For some reason the sitting president, Ouattara, Alassane has decided to put his name on the ballot as "Alassane Ouattara". Odd that. (Ignoring the whole question of whether he's allowed to be on the ballot at all).

    I guess no one read it to him out loud so he could see how much it sounds like Alassane Outa Here?

    701:

    It doesn't, though. French-derived spelling, so it'll be "Wattara" or similar. (cf. "cotton wool made from seals".)

    It's less dubious, though, to observe that Britain's new Downing Street press secretary is now an Austin Allegro with a Briggs & Scrap'em engine.

    702:

    Are you going to penalize me because while I was driving some idiot ran a stop sign, T-boned my car & fucked himself up because he wasn't wearing a seat-belt?

    As written, Moz's Law would penalize you if you were injured by the stop sign runner…

    704:

    As written, Moz's Law would penalize you if you were injured

    {citation needed}

    JBS was objecting to Whitroth's proposal, which he quoted, not mine. I want to see the actual quote where I suggested penalising victims.

    705:

    You're right, and I apologize. That should be Witroth's Law.

    706:

    EC & Everybody ealse YOU TOO grow the world's rudest vegetable? "Trombe" - a large green "courgette" with a swollen distal end, which can reach over a metre in length ( Well, mine have, this year ) Holld one centally, at about waist-height - NOT for the sensitive viewer. I will send Charlie a picture & leave it up to him as to whether it's a danger to public morality or not....

    707:

    Thanks.

    It griped because I specifically objected to Whitroth's idea on those exact grounds in 659 "I'm not wild about punishing victims deliberately"...

    708:

    Punishment for driving offences: should be an immediate immobilisation of the vehicle for, say, 24 hours

    One amusing thing you could do is sit on the bonnet of any car with an open container of alcohol in your hand. That can be enough to get you a driving offence, leading to the immobilisation of whatever car you happened to be leaning on at the time. "Sure, this is my SupaWanka 4000, CoalBurnerSupreme edition, officer, absolutely it is. You can tell by the matching Truk Nutz. Now, ticket me the $50 and immobilise it like a good chap".

    You'd get howls of outrage at all the people this would kill, prompted primarily by the completely genuine outrage of the car-dependent at the inconvenience they would suffer. And it would really kill people, ones of them. Whether the net death rate would drop might be an epidemiology question rather than just a "road toll goes down more than the consequential death rate from this law".

    It would also put even more arbitrary power into the hands of the racist thugs terrorising America's cities and towns*. It might reduce the murder rate if they could ruin someone's life by issuing a trivial defect notice rather than having to shoot someone, I suppose. Would that be compensate for all the times they issued the trivia notice just to remind their inferiors of their status?

    • if you think this describe all US police that's on you, buddy.
    709:

    Recall Renfield, Dracula's minion, who, opens Bram Stoker's novel, incarcerated in a bedlam asylum, eats all the flies in order to set on the path to eternal life? Also, as every Christian-educated person knows, flies are the signature of the father of lies.

    And in the meantime, this particular father of lies has canceled his events for tonight in AZ and tomorrow in IN to fly back to D.C. -- "Nobody's sicke!" he yells but refuses to speak further.

    But I think we know why the guy loved by a fly is flying back to D.C. Pelosi announced this:

    "Citing 25th Amendment, Pelosi, Raskin move to create panel that could rule on president’s fitness for office"

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pelosi-presidency-succession-trump/2020/10/08/3c71dfae-09a5-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html

    Toward the end of the long piece she does say she's not going to try to remove him from office. But essentially all the language prior is that due to covid-19 he's unfit to carry out the duties of President.

    So at least for a while we'll have Prez 'flies are on him' Pence. Irk,

    710:

    Sorry, JBS, but you're being sensible when talking about El Generalissimo Fiasco Drumpf. That should be a tipoff right there that perhaps you're mixing up the context a bit.

    The reason I went with the unrealistically expensive, elaborate, and destructive solution is that seems to be all he and his thralls can come up with at the moment. Sure, they should throw him in a converted van and whisk him away. Hell, just throw him in an ambulance, ask the reporters to wait an hour to report the news, and that would probably be fine.

    Do I think they'll do this? No, they'll likely throw him in Marine One* and take him that way, if he's sick enough. Problem is that that this is an admission of weakness and failure, if I understand how their minds operate**, so a more elaborate and short-sighted approach is indicated if they can possibly figure one out. Doing the sensible thing in the face of Covid19 will signal the effective end of El Fiasco's reign, whatever happens after that.

    *Marine One is the USMC helicopter the president is on, whatever its make or livery. So a blackhawk taking him to Walter Reed would be Marine One for the duration of the trip.

    **Any apparent understanding I may demonstrate of their thinking is totally coincidental. Really.

    711:

    They remind me of those awful plastic trumpets that were all the rage with sports fanz for a while.

    It's mulberry time at my place, so I am spending happy time down the bottom of the garden eating w... mulberries. My hands are almost permanently bloodstained as a result, because ripe berries leak lovely red juice that lingers. The ripe ones are basically little bags of red sugar that fall off the tree if you look at them funny. Fortunately the chickens and other birds don't seem to eat them so I don't have to net the tree.

    712:

    I follow Sydney Electric Bikes on Facebook. A couple of days ago they posted a screen shot of two notifications that their product wasn't approved for advertising on Facebook. Both were side on shots of a bicycle in front of a blank wall. One because it shows excessive cleavage and unnecessary focus on body parts. The other because it was advertising offensive weapons and alcohol.

    713:

    The username is whitroth, with an "h". And I was proposing that the people who cause the accidents lose their license, not people who get run into.

    In the US, getting a license is almost a joke.

    714:

    Those charts are really interesting/informative; thanks. Have you shopped them around at all?

    715:

    Apparently "no flies on him" is an idiom familiar to the US and may be part of the reference? That's what comes to my mind with the occupy Pence thing that's going round. Or is it just the simple "I ain't dead" idea?

    https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/no+flies+on+him

    716:

    "And I was proposing that the people who cause the accidents lose their license, not people who get run into."

    While I can readily believe that this is what you meant, it is not at all clear from what you said. Given that Enforcement, even if they are honest, must go by what was said, it behooves one to be careful about such.

    JHomes.

    717:

    Thanks linking that. One of those says it dates back to 1840 Australia at least. And another says: "1 somebody is not stupid and therefore cannot be tricked or deceived easily"

    718:

    F'in internet rabbit holes. :-) This thread has lots of material: Lyr Req: There are no flies on Jesus The oldest I saw in that thread was 1887, 'There are no flies on Jesus; There's two or three on you and me, But there are no flies on Jesus.'

    Pence would probably like that one a bit more than the Ba'al Zəbûb comparison. Crazy stuff. Pence should technically be in quarantine for another week (so should DJT), and rumors are a-flying, and speculation, e.g. Pence’s Red Eye Raises COVID Concerns (Aaron Gould Sheinin, Oct. 8, 2020) A study from China, published in late March, found 12 of 38 patients with COVID-19 also had pinkeye.

    719:

    That's pretty much why I keep thinking "yep, definitely can't say 'no flies on Pence' all right".

    But then Trump's whole schtick is that you only work for him if there's something in it for you, and you'd better be damn sure you get it. Preferably before you do the work. I wonder sometimes whether Pence is finding the price higher than he expected, and his rise to the presidency slower. Coz really, looking at Trump, would you bet on him both surviving the first four years and not being impeached (or lynched) by his own party?

    720:
    And there is also no electioneering allowed within 100' of the polls (or the door to the building), and that's been true in every state (and commonwealth) I've lived in.

    In France it's not 100', it's 24 hours :)

    721:

    I'll save you the bother :-)

    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/419186677801397773/

    To anyone else, this is a VASTLY superior 'courgette'. It's actually C. moschata, not C. pepo, so is related to the butternut. It is much less watery and better flavoured than ordinary courgettes, remains good up to a kilo or more, keeps in a cool place for some weeks, and is more virus-resistant. Its flowers are better for cooking, too. But it's as rampant as C. maxima (hubbard squashes), and needs at least 3mx3m, preferably 4mx4m.

    722:

    I will send Charlie a picture & leave it up to him as to whether it's a danger to public morality or not....

    I have seen Greg's fruiting body and it is indeed impressive.

    723:

    No. From the news etc., there are plenty of other people who have done at least some of the same - there's nothing there that any competent statistician investigating data wouldn't do. I haven't posted some of the other tests I did (equally simple), but they include one that showed the bank holiday lockdown effect.

    I must write to Private Eye about the way that the data on testing and tracing has been suppressed - nobody seems to have done so yet. It gave me slight advance warning that there were forthcoming fiascos, but there were other signs, too, and the fiascos are now public knowledge.

    724:

    The real solution to car fatalities, traffic accidents, road rage, speeding, drunk-driving, and EVERYTHING — and also to airliner crashes, train crashes, ferry disasters, hovercraft/eel explosions, and any accident above the level of tripping over your own shoelaces — is for someone to invent teleport booths.

    Anything short of a mature teleportation-based transport infrastructure is just fiddling while Rome burns.

    By "mature" I mean point-to-point over any reasonable distance at such low cost that we can use them instead of doorways within our own homes to connect rooms in different locations (e.g. a living room with a view of sunset over the grand canyon connected to other rooms in different time zones so that if you have more than one bedroom it will always be nighttime in one of them).

    725:

    Doing the sensible thing in the face of Covid19 will signal the effective end of El Fiasco's reign, whatever happens after that.

    AIUI McConnell has already thrown Trump under the bus -- getting him to flounce on an extended COVID19 aid package, thereby taking responsibility away from the Senate republican party, was a sign. McConnell expects him to lose, and is also worried about losing his senate majority, and is therefore pivoting to get a new radical Republican appointee on the supreme court ASAP. Hence clearing the decks of all legislation that might compete for time with the confirmation hearings.

    The Democrats can only count on having two years to fix things before the repubs re-take the senate. Having a baked-in supreme court majority means that anything they do in those two years can be challenged successfully, however spurious the grounds might be.

    I'm not sure McConnell has realized that if Biden announces Medicare for All he'll be creating a political third rail -- analogous to the UK's NHS, which the Tories hate but can't publicly be seen to dismember (hence creeping backdoor privatization of bits of it). Biden's other goal should be to damn civility and pack the supreme court: ideally take it up to 20 justices to lock the republican majority out for a generation and allow time for the other reforms to bed in. But this is me pipe-dreaming: I'm not sure he's got the determination to go the full distance (where Obama tried to be conciliatory in his first two years and ran into McConnell).

    726:

    Yes, the Farcaster portals (tamed black holes really) were sometimes installed in the homes of the very rich for this reason. There's an article on the Farcasters in Wikipedia. Thank you Dan Simmons.

    727:

    OGH at 725:

    Depends on how long Biden remains President. If he retires after a year, Harris then has the option. Does she have the determination? Personally I'm not sure, but I've not watched her closely.

    728:

    I'm not sure McConnell has realized that if Biden announces Medicare for All he'll be creating a political third rail

    In some ways we're there. ACA (Obamacare) is polling at 60% or higher approval NOW.

    Which is why MMcC is fearing the current case before the SCOTUS. Them turning it over is likely to keep/turn the Senate D in 2 years.

    729:

    Biden seems smart enough and to have an ego that will let him retire in 4 years. And if it makes sense for political and/or medical reasons in 1 1/2 years.

    730:
    point-to-point over any reasonable distance at such low cost that we can use them instead of doorways within our own homes to connect rooms in different locations

    Isn't that like the technology they had in Glasshouse? Before they got onto the prison ship that might not have been a prison ship.

    On a related note, have an SMBC.

    731:

    Yes. But such houses also assume a hundred times as much resource/capita than we have at present. Now, in the absence of a fairy godmother and a hundredfold reduction in population, we COULD solve our transport problems in the UK (and most of Europe), for an engineering meaning of 'solve' (*). But (inter alia) it would need a strong, VERY tough-minded, competent government that governed for the long-term benefit of the country as a whole, and was prepared to force major social changes.

    Realistically, the appearance of a fairy godmother is more likely.

    (*) No, the above proposals wouldn't work, but there are others that would.

    732:

    Using a Farcaster portal would be cheap for public transport, since it would use a singularity for power.

    733:

    Late to the party but I'm glad it has been mentioned that actual neurons (and there are dozens of types) are very much not a "weighted sigmoid function".

    There's a paper "Dendritic Computation" back from 2005 that basically ends with "it may as well be that computational power of a single neuron is in fact orders of magnitude higher than currently assumed".

    And then the specialization of neurons... I think a much better concept of brain would be "a whole bunch of FPGAs strung together". In fact after reading a third of the comments here I'm now more inclined to doubt there is anything really "general purpose" in the brain - there is no "portable software" there. If Lisp was code == data then a brain is code == data == hardware.

    I also do find the Boeing 737 vs seagull comparison very apt - will propagate it!

    734:

    "By "mature" I mean point-to-point over any reasonable distance at such low cost that we can use them instead of doorways within our own homes to connect rooms in different locations (e.g. a living room with a view of sunset over the grand canyon connected to other rooms in different time zones so that if you have more than one bedroom it will always be nighttime in one of them)."

    No, thank you. That makes internet kettles look sensible. If any of the doors in my house stop working I can in extremis restore normal passage using nothing more than my own body. Being able to choose from a selection of toilets positioned so that I can shit off any of the world's famously tall edges whenever I want sounds great, right up until the point the system fails in the middle of the night and leaves me stuck naked and shivering on the Trolltunga with a dirty arse and no way to get back.

    735:

    In Hyperion the poet Martin Silenus has a Farcaster portal for his toilet. It opens on a raft on a water planet.

    736:

    ISTR that Larry Niven had a little essay on teleportation things and discussed what happens if conservation laws still apply to them -- gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, linear momentum, angular momentum, etc. Also what about pressure differences on either side? Not to mention that darned special relativity.

    738:

    Robert Prior @ 702:

    Are you going to penalize me because while I was driving some idiot ran a stop sign, T-boned my car & fucked himself up because he wasn't wearing a seat-belt?

    As written, Moz's Law would penalize you if you were injured by the stop sign runner…

    I wasn't injured in the non-hypothetical instance referenced, but my 1964-½ Mustang was totaled.

    739:

    Bill Arnold @ 718: F'in internet rabbit holes. :-) This thread has lots of material:
    Lyr Req: There are no flies on Jesus
    The oldest I saw in that thread was 1887,
    'There are no flies on Jesus;
    There's two or three on you and me,
    But there are no flies on Jesus.'

    Took me a couple of read-throughs to figure out it was not saying "There are no FILES on Jesus" ...

    This modern world!!! Anyone here ever made a FOIA request to see what files (or flies) the FBI is keeping on them?

    740:

    Elderly Cynic @ 723: I must write to Private Eye about the way that the data on testing and tracing has been suppressed - nobody seems to have done so yet. It gave me slight advance warning that there were forthcoming fiascos, but there were other signs, too, and the fiascos are now public knowledge.

    Funny you should mention Private Eye. I have a tab open to where I can order a Arkell v. Pressdram (1971) T-shirt right this instant.

    741:

    Terry Pratchett's toilet implementation (see, this is what people really want from it) also mentioned conservation of energy, or the problems of it not working properly. And Charlie himself has of course made it clear that as far as pressure differences are concerned they're just another hole.

    Thinking about it, I'm sure the kind of universality Charlie originally posited has already been the background to a story or series. Something about a kid who discovers that she actually can go to school by walking down the street and it's more fun that way, and then gets in fights with her mum who insists that she has to carry on using the teleport, for reasons of "hygiene".

    742:

    Charlie Stross @ 725: I'm not sure McConnell has realized that if Biden announces Medicare for All he'll be creating a political third rail -- analogous to the UK's NHS, which the Tories hate but can't publicly be seen to dismember (hence creeping backdoor privatization of bits of it). Biden's other goal should be to damn civility and pack the supreme court: ideally take it up to 20 justices to lock the republican majority out for a generation and allow time for the other reforms to bed in. But this is me pipe-dreaming: I'm not sure he's got the determination to go the full distance (where Obama tried to be conciliatory in his first two years and ran into McConnell).

    It's better the court be composed of an odd number of justices. Make it either 19 or 21. If it's 20, there are too many cases where it would split 10-10 and I just don't think that would be a good thing.

    Personally I favor leaving it at 9 justices and doing away with lifetime tenure. Give them 18 year terms staggered every 2 years, REQUIRING each Congress to confirm a new justice during its term.

    I don't know how you'd accomplish that without a Constitutional Amendment.

    743:

    waldo @ 727: OGH at 725:

    Depends on how long Biden remains President. If he retires after a year, Harris then has the option. Does she have the determination? Personally I'm not sure, but I've not watched her closely.

    If Biden were going to resign, he'd want to wait until AFTER January 20, 2023, so that Harris could have the full benefit of the 22nd Amendment (i.e. serving less than half of Biden's term and thus remaining eligible to win two full terms in her own right.

    744:

    Considering how Farcasters worked in Hyperion (and stopped working), the Stephen King short story "The Long Jaunt", and various Star Trek characters stuck in teleporter memories at various times, I'm noping the hell out of that one.

    745:

    Allen Thomson @ 736: ISTR that Larry Niven had a little essay on teleportation things and discussed what happens if conservation laws still apply to them -- gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, linear momentum, angular momentum, etc. Also what about pressure differences on either side? Not to mention that darned special relativity.

    That brings back a question I had about one of OGH's books. I think it's in one of the original series where younger members of the Clan Corporate are sent exploring new earths & come across the dome that has the door going out to the middle of nowhere and when they open the door a powerful wind develops as pressure tries to equalize.

    Anyway, my question was ...

    If you have a hole into the vacuum of intersteller space the size of a standard door, how long would it take for earth's atmosphere to exhaust through the opening?
    746:

    Pigeon @741,

    The story is by Asimov It's Such a Beautiful Day.

    I'd agree that it would be imprudent to rely on teleportation to get around what was in effect a single dwelling, for the reasons given above. If one had multiple dwellings, each of which one could live in for an extended period if needed, then linking them via teleportation might be more workable.

    JHomes.

    747:

    I've usually read the book , then sought out the source - read that and then reread charlies. Missing bits get filled in ( sometimes)

    748:

    Teleport, instead of walking?

    What, are you rewriting Bradbury's Last Pedestrian?

    749:

    I'm pretty sure Vernor Vinge's standalone novel "The Witling" had a ruler's residence that was made up from a number of rooms in various parts of the planet connected by teleport gates.

    "Lion Loose", one of the Telzey Amberdon stories by James H. Schmitz was set in a complex of teleport-linked spaces but with limited or no access to the outside world.

    750:

    Completely OT, but I just got back from picking up my "new" replacement Troy-Bilt chipper/shredder.

    It's still sitting on the trailer. I have to unload it & service it (they had to drain the oil & gas for it to be shipped) before I can use it, but I predict there's yard work in my near future.

    752:

    Re: 'I wonder sometimes whether Pence is finding the price higher than he expected,...'

    And I wonder whether Pence is actually working for MM with the pay-off being Amy Coney Barrett as the next SCOTUS judge.

    753:

    Portals at different latitudes would create some interesting options for heating and cooling. Open the windows in your Arctic bedroom to cool your deck in the Serengeti. Air conditioning by geoarbitrage via teleportation.

    At scale it could create all sorts of wacky climatic effects as well.

    754:

    Please resist the temptation to connect the teleport on the output of your shredder to what Charlie thinks is the disposal point in his toilet. You might think it hilarious that his naked arse gets blasted with splinters but some of us want him to keep writing books, not spend the next month lying on his front while his staff excavate the debris field.

    I took his comment more as a "look over there" than a sensible response, unless by "real solution" he means "I have one right here and know how to make more".

    755:

    Pence is actually working for

    I was think more along the lines of just how many times he can tell lies that kill good, dutiful Christian folk before his God says enough. It seems that no matter what the God-given rule or restriction, Trump will find a way to make Pence break it.

    So assuming he is actually a believer, has he long since decided that burning in hell for all eternity is a price he's willing to pay for whatever he thinks he's getting on earth today?

    756:

    how long would it take for earth's atmosphere to exhaust through the opening

    I don't know for sure, but suspect the mass flow rate is something like dm/dt = Aρv, where A is the area of the doorway (maybe 3 m^2), ρ is the mass density of air (~1.25 kg/m^2 STP)and v is the speed of sound (340 m/s). So 31.25340 = 1275 kg/s. The mass of the earth's atmosphere is 5e18 kg, so to get to 4e18 kg (to avoid having to calculate the decrease of ρ with leakage)would take 1e18/1275 = 7.8e14 seconds, or about 25 million years. Say something like 100 million years to get really thin.

    Corrections welcome.

    757:

    Oh, and, that angular momentum thing.

    Suppose you stand on the equator and jump 90 degrees east, conserving linear momentum. That means that you emerge traveling 463 m/sec (Mach 1.4) straight up, which would be exciting for you and bystanders. But, more than that, where you left your velocity was perpendicular to the radius vector to the center of the earth and where you came out it's parallel. The angular momentum is mass times the vector cross product of r and v, and that varies as the sine of the angle between r and v. Which is 1 where you started out and 0 where you arrived. So what happened to the angular momentum?

    758:

    Re: '... how many times he can tell lies that kill good, dutiful Christian folk before his God says enough.'

    N times to the forever power.

    'God' is just a convenient cover for your standard low-wattage brain power, unimaginative authoritarian. Besides, the Bible is filled with enough internal contradictions that he can always quote something that backs up whatever spin he wants.

    759:

    I was kind of using the assumption of charity: if he genuinely believes in the God he claims to, what would that involve? Is there some way he can hurt all mankind just to save his own belief?

    I mean sure, all ideologies lie and the lies range from relatively benign "we want a classless society" from people who actually do but admit that they will need some sort of organising group; through to the explicit "Make America Great Again" type ones where the person lying has long since lost all memory of what the truth looks like. But there appear to be actual genuine Christians out there, and it's at least somewhat plausible that Pence might be one. Those people are necessarily not deep thinkers, but since that's also a prerequisite for people who work for or with Trump we already knew that.

    760:

    Larry Niven had a little essay on teleportation ...

    Yes; unlike the companion piece on time travel the teleportation essay doesn't seem to be up on the net with the original's cute illustrations, which are as good a reason as any to dig through your boxes of old paperbacks. Anyone who missed it can find the badly formatted text here or this delightful recording of Larry Niven reading it from Boskone 5 in 1968. (I assume it's delightful; as I type this I can google but not listen to audio.)

    761:

    If you have a hole into the vacuum of intersteller space the size of a standard door, how long would it take for earth's atmosphere to exhaust through the opening?

    Quite a while!

    This being a scientific question that's both rationally expressible and rather far out, naturally there's an xkcd about it. Someone asked How quickly would the ocean's drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space was created at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the ocean? and in this scenario even with the larger hole it takes thousands of years before the Netherlands really starts winning its war against the ocean.

    The analysis of holes full of all the Earth's air suggests we probably shouldn't do that.

    762:

    There's also the question of where the other end is. Specifically, it may start experiencing atmospheric drag as well as the rocket effect, so it's likely to move or at least try to. Quite what that does is often not specified.

    But generally there are bigger holes in the fiction so I try not to bother my little head with them. Like Miriam's chair in the Merchant Princes series... you just ignore it and move on.

    763:

    724, 726, 736 etc. Larry Niven's transfer booths / puppeteer stepping discs. He had some interesting thoughts on the side effects on, for example, flash mobs or 48 hour birthday parties following the sun.

    749, 757 Vernor Vinge's The Witling, if I remember correctly, was based on a race of people/aliens with natural TK/TP abilities rather than technology. He also used the conservation of momentum as a key plot point determining the possible practical range of TP travel distance or source/destination locations on a rotating approximately-spherical planet.

    764:

    And then there's The Stars My Destination for social implications of teleportation (limited by people only being able to teleport to places they've been), even though there's no physics that I recall.

    765:

    Such things make a good story, but aren't plausible.

    I did some thinking about this a while ago, and it gets complicated fast; Vinge referred to one of the issues, but there are others. It isn't just the mechanical conservation laws (several of them), but the electromagnetic ones and theoretically even others. Essentially, any such scheme drives a coach, horses and herd of bulls through conventional physics.

    The black hole divers and related loons (and I am referring to eminent scientists here) often say that's feasible by using black holes, wormholes and cosmic strings, but what they are usually doing is making a classic logical error that they were taught not to do at school. Basically, you can prove any old nonsense if you extrapolate through a singularity.

    It might be possible and not break physics, but needs a damn sight better analysis than I have seen any of them give it, and immeasurably more than I am currently capable of. However, as I have mentioned before, information is only loosely connected to the rest of physics and the same restriction MIGHT not apply.

    766:

    Carrying over .. Charlie .... Why do you think there will still be a crash-out, when even senoir tories have finally realised what a disaster it will be? OK - we get a total shot sandwich of a "deal" - with lots of fudging & kicking the can down the road, but a complete crash guarantees that Labour wins the next election, which could come a lot sooner than 2024.

    In the meantime, & senior lizard/Senator in the Rethuglicans has openly come out against Democracy - as in "Oh, what a gove-away" moment.

    767:

    You seem to have the peculiar idea that modern politics is about consensus. As with many countries shortly before they turn into fascist, repressive or totalitarian states, the extremists have seized control and the 'silent majority' (which may well not be a majority of Tory MPs) do little but whinge ineffectively. Yes, they have slowed down the Gadarene rush but nothing that is both important and irreversible. Bozo has boxed himself into a corner, and knows that if he behaves like a responsible politician, let alone a statesman, his 'supporters' will eat him alive. What do they say about about riding a tiger?

    Look at the OTHER legislation being pushed through, as well as what the Internal Markets Bill does that the press has not picked up on, for more evidence. Allowing pretty well all official bodies to authorise its agents to commit crimes, and giving British forces immunity for committing war crimes, are both extremist policies.

    The more Starmer carries on, the more he looks like another sociopathic High Tory in Labour colours, just as that ** Blair was. I don't think there will be any help from that quarter.

    768:

    EC Agree about the "Internal Markets Bill" I wonder how long the Lords will be able to delay ( Or even prevent? ) implementation ... Blair - lot the plot over Iraq, the idiot, but another Blair or even another Margaret Thatcher would be a relif from this lot. And Starmer is to the left of Blair ( just). What almost nobody seems to have noticed is that they are doing the exact opposite of what Mrs T did - certainly as regards Europe & the "Single Market"

    769:

    O.G.H.@724says: "point-to-point over any reasonable distance at such low cost that we can use them instead of doorways within our own homes"

    "Portal" won video-game of the year a while back exploring a related topic. It involved a gun shaped device that could make rift openings big enough to run or fall through, projected on to any solid surface you aimed it at. The spaces these portals linked to had to be selected and marked in advance of the intended rift creation, but several could be deployed simultaneously such that the protagonist jumped down one and came hurtling out another just far enough to retrieve some required game token that was otherwise unreachable. The hard part was remembering when and in what order to deactivate the portals as she fell back through them in series, so she could land safely on solid ground, and avoid a cascade of accelerating falls, or an abrupt fatal impact.

    The back story was a research program run by a malevolent A.I., using humans as test subjects. Here's the lyrics from its theme song, "Still Alive", sung in a pure, uninflected female voice, an actual performance by a vocalist in a recording studio, but in a style imitating the artificial quality of a speech synthesizer. Straddling conventional impressions of life and death, it firmly occupies "uncanny valley" for an effect that's creepy, disturbing and quite unsettling:

    This is a triumph I'm making a note here, 'Huge Success'. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction. At Aperture Science, we do what we must Because we can For the good of all of us Except the ones who are dead But there's no point crying over every mistake You just keep on trying till you run out of cake So the science gets done, and you make a neat gun For the people who are still alive I'm not even angry I'm being so sincere right now Even though you broke my heart and killed me And tore me to pieces And threw every piece into a fire As I burned it hurt because I was so happy for you Now these points of data make a beautiful line And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time So I'm glad I got burned, think of all the things we've learned For the people who are still alive Go ahead and leave me I think I prefer to stay inside Maybe you'll find someone there to help you Maybe Black Mesa That was a joke, haha, fat chance. Anyway, this cake is great It's so delicious and moist Look at me still talking when there's science to do When I look out there it makes me glad I'm not you I've experiments to run There is research to be done On the people who are still alive And believe me I am still alive I'm doing science and I'm still alive I feel fantastic and I'm still alive And as you're dying I'll be still alive And when you're dead I will be still alive Still alive Still alive

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkaVY2IezCo

    770:

    The ASHPD is fun, but I'm holding out for Boom Tubes.

    ping

    771:

    Bugger Iraq - I said "fascist, repressive or totalitarian", and that is what I was referring to - in that respect, Blair was worse than any other prime minister I can think of, and the other two bills are FAR worse than the Internal Markets Bill (which seems to be largely designed to crush rebellious Scots).

    772:

    Run it past, for eveyrone's benefit, please?

    Who, both in particular, in name-of:"Evil-Coporation"TM & in general will profit from a Brexit crash 8, most importantly - HOW? I can understand making money on a falling market & "Betting" in advance that Sterling will crash, but what else? I assume also "betting" on large company shares going down, to be picked up cheaply ... What else-else? Are there any models for developed countries ( I do not include Greece in this case, because Greece should never have been "inside" the EUro to start with, given their non-collection of taxes, etc. )

    If there is mass unemployment ( On top of that caused by C-19, what profit can be made from that, as I always thought that nearly-full-employument was the most profitable status foir anyone wanting to make money, yes?

    773:

    Yes. But such houses also assume a hundred times as much resource/capita than we have at present.

    I don't follow your reasoning.

    A "mature" teleportation tech that is cheap enough to build into doorframes would atomize our current cities, and do very interesting things to logistics -- especially if the energy cost of teleportation is minimal. Even if it isn't, much of the energy we spend on transport goes into overcoming rolling resistance, air or water resistance, and gravity: not to mention producing the transport infrastructure. (Roads aren't free, railways require lots of steel rail and overhead copper conductors, never mind the track bed, and so on.)

    Meanwhile? If everyone wants a living room with a particular view, you can build dense hive-like structures of living rooms with that particular view, rather than sprawling, expensive, individual homes: the rest of the home is elsewhere.

    774:

    There's a certain branch of American Christianity that doesn't follow the "faith without works is dead" verse in the Bible. Specifically, there's a belief that if you've been baptized, said the magic words, annual give 10% of your income to your Church to keep your membership up to date, and so forth, then you get to go to heaven when you die, regardless of what you do on Earth. Their idea is that God is all-forgiving and everyone's a sinner in this fallen world, so keeping up your membership is sufficient to get to Heaven.

    Possibly this notion dates back to the Gnostics, although I could be wrong.

    This is not unique to Christianity. There's a similar idea in Buddhism that both meditation and Pure Land visualizations are necessary for enlightenment. In this case, meditation is becoming aware of your current reality, the Pure Land is a visualization of what enlightened reality would be like, so you get a sense of where you are and where you want to go. Which makes sense if you think about it. Predictably, schools in China (and their missions in Korea, Japan, and elsewhere) started teaching that Pure Land visualizations, or even mantras invoking a Pure Land, were sufficient to get practitioners to a next life where they could become enlightened in a single lifetime. This was great for spreading Pure Land Buddhism to all genders and classes, including those prohibited from ever becoming monks. It also led to a great deal of violence, for instance with the Japanese Ikko Ikki (and this is worth looking up on Wikipedia).

    Getting back to Tuppence: he's likely a believer and a practitioner of a church he believes in, but he's not practicing what Jesus taught in the gospels. His opponents are more doing that. Jesus was a left wingstreet radical by today's standards, not a politician, and he died as most messiahs have died over the centuries. The weird part about Christianity isn't this part of the story, it's that Paul (primarily) promulgated his cult around the Roman world, it took off, and survived, with thousands of mutations.

    775:

    Being able to choose from a selection of toilets positioned so that I can shit off any of the world's famously tall edges whenever I want sounds great, right up until the point the system fails in the middle of the night

    Nope, what a mature teleport tech would buy you in terms of toilets is a discreet ring-shaped teleport gate your doctor sticks up your colon. Shit never comes out of your arse if it's working properly: it just goes straight to the cornfield sewage treatment works, via some health monitors that trigger an alarm if you've got diarrhoea or occult bleeding in your stool. If it fails, your first warning is that you begin to feel a pressure in your rectum, then need to look for an old-fashioned toilet -- assuming you haven't already had a message about it.

    Hell, you may want a similar ring in your trachea that ensures you breathe only pre-purified/filtered air and if you find yourself deep underwater you can still inhale. Make it unidirectional and you can inhale purified air and exhale through your larynx.

    (In both cases, the important point is that the failure mode is for it to turn into a pass-through, not a barrier. That would be embarrassing.)

    776:

    If you have a hole into the vacuum of intersteller space the size of a standard door, how long would it take for earth's atmosphere to exhaust through the opening?

    A surprisingly long time. Air isn't going to vent at a speed greater than mach 1, so you're approximating a column of air 330 metres long at surface level pressure passing through the gate each second. For a gate with 1 square metre area, it's therefore going to take over 3 million seconds (about 36 days) to vent a single cubic kilometre of air. So Earth is losing 10 km^3 per year, out of a total atmospheric volume of $BIGNUM km^3.

    777:

    Teleporter in my colon? Only if someone invents the teleportational equivalent of a diode first. I don't want the sewer to have any chance of teleporting into my colon by mistake.

    778:

    But generally there are bigger holes in the fiction so I try not to bother my little head with them. Like Miriam's chair in the Merchant Princes series... you just ignore it and move on.

    The chair introduces a plot point that starts as a tiny snowball but begins to grow in book 6 ... then becomes an avalanche in the "Empire Games" trilogy. Just sayin'.

    779:

    Charlie .... Why do you think there will still be a crash-out, when even senoir tories have finally realised what a disaster it will be?

    It's beginning to look as if BoJo is realizing he's made a mistake and is looking for small micro-deals relating to specific trade issues with the EU. Far too little, too late.

    But the real problem is a huge amount of money is being bet against the London stock market, against Sterling, against anything good coming out of Brexit -- the gamblers are out in force. Also, the disaster capitalists are getting their noses in the trough. HMG is apparently set to spend £500Bn on "Brexit consultants" this year; never mind all the uncounted millions splurged on bankrupt satellite corporations (whose satellites don't do what the government wanted, i.e. Galileo service, which Brexit has ejected the UK from without a backup), ports with no roads, no docks, and no customs infrastructure, and similar nonsense.

    They're not even trying to pretend to be running the country sensibly any more, they're just trying to carve out chunks of money from the public purse to pay themselves and their cronies.

    As for "guaranteeing Labour wins the next election", you noticed that they're currently gerrymandering the constituency boundaries? A "no deal" pretty much ensures Scotland will leave, which in conjunction with the boundary commission changes bakes in a Tory majority for the next few decades. And if that doesn't work there's always the Two Minute Hate, MC'd by Priti Patel and a backing chorus of right-wing oligarch owned media corporations.

    780:

    I wonder how long the Lords will be able to delay ( Or even prevent? ) implementation ...

    12 months max, then it's Parliament Act time. With a side order of Lords reform to downsize the house if they get uppity.

    781:

    If there is mass unemployment ( On top of that caused by C-19, what profit can be made from that, as I always thought that nearly-full-employument was the most profitable status foir anyone wanting to make money, yes?

  • Privatize the JobCentres and other "support" facilities for the unemployed.

  • Unemployed, penniless people can be profitably convicted of crimes (stealing food from dumpsters, vagrancy, etc) and jailed, thereby generating jobs and revenue for private prison corporations.

  • You can make payment of low-end benefits contingent on workfare -- sub-minimum-wage labour that will be of great benefit to sweatshop owners. Make British exports competitive again (with de-facto slave labour)!

  • I could go on, but I really don't want to. Let's just say I'm digging into that territory in In His House (the sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming).

    782:

    There's also the question of where the other end is. Specifically, it may start experiencing atmospheric drag as well as the rocket effect, so it's likely to move or at least try to.

    This occurred to me as the rational way to accelerate the Mobile Archive Suckers in the Glasshouse universe. Each MAS could have its T-gate connected to matching mass drivers, one on either side; every time it fires through the gate the recoil makes the ship a little faster, and every time the base station returns the payload the act of catching it also transfers kinetic energy. A single payload mass could be reused indefinitely.

    In that setting finding a massive planet whose position nobody really cares about is a trivial problem. MAS base stations might be on rogue planets lightyears from anything interesting.

    It would be convenient to have two starships on similar schedules going opposite directions but this probably doesn't happen very often.

    783:

    Who ... in general will profit from a Brexit crash 8, most importantly - HOW?

    Let's say it was all going swimmingly and everyone was expecting things to turn out "grand".

    The amount of paperwork, forms, agreements, etc... that would need to either be re-written or have addendums added is staggering. Now add to that that most of these need to be reviewed by lawyers. If for no other reason than to say, this one is OK if the other parties agree to our standard Brexit disclaimer form 27.

    As it is now with a crash out, these documents can't even be close to being finalized.

    784:

    Sounds like a perfect application for a Tesla valve. Optionally located outside your colon, but plumbed in between via another teleportal.

    Actually this is going to need a serious bus+adapter architecture.

    785:

    The chair introduces a plot point that starts as a tiny snowball

    To me it was a significant gun on the mantelpiece in act one that just sat there while everyone spent books 1-5 running round saying "if only we had a gun". I spent probably way too much time thinking about how that worked and what the consequences would be outside the official storyline. Not to mention questions like why no-one tried parachuting, and what happened to ancestors who had the ability - per the lost woman in The Peace War series, at some point your characters could well run across signs that a single individual made a one-way trip sometime in the deep past.

    786:

    The amount of paperwork, forms, agreements, etc... that would need to either be re-written or have addendums added is staggering.

    Are you suggesting that it was a conspiracy of bureaucrats?

    I think it was more obvious than that: a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires thought that fucking shit up brings opportunity, so they did. Why bother hunting a country and killing it when you can chase it off a cliff and loot it while it flails about? The best thing is that you can get a loud chunk of the population to go along with it, and loot them too.

    787:

    finding a massive planet whose position nobody really cares about

    I suggest a planet that people do care about, that you want relocated or at the very least want the spin changed. If you have the teleport range for interstellar flight then it might make sense to terrorform your destination using the propellant - aim for somewhere like Venus, and spam enough high speed ice at it to having it spinning and further from its star by the time you arrive. Or use actual Venus, or surface launchers on Mars, the same way.

    Conservation of energy/momentum is going to be your plot hiccup, either in the minds of the audience or in the actual book. Hefting mass out of our solar gravity well isn't cheap, but the energy you get back when you pull something down might be a bigger issue.

    You're also going to have to handwave the software the runs these things, either by making them really dumb or by inventing a way around Godel and pretty much the entire field of of software engineering. Coz while it might be embarrassing if the port in Charlie's colon stops working, it'd be annoying for everyone if script kiddies hacked it to accept from the centre of a distant star instead. There's nothing like a few tonnes of condensed plasma travelling at .5c to unsettle your stomach.

    788:

    The real nightmare is that planets normally trace arcing spirals in real time. They're orbiting around a star that is itself moving. But that spiral is shaped by the influence of any large moons. But that combined moon+planet+central star spiral is shaped by the star orbiting the center of mass of the galaxy. But that is deformed by the gravities of passing stars and other lumpishness. Plus the galaxy's center of mass is also in motion...

    The upshot is that keeping two points of a teleportation system aligned relative to each other across interstellar or even interplanetary distances (say one on a rapidly accelerating spaceship, one on the surface of a star) is actually a non-trivial neat trick of some sort of astrometrogation.

    Note that the same can be said for time travel of the big jump variety. Solve one, solve the other.

    But anyway, if you want to complicate the math somewhat, use a long-distance teleportation system to transfer large amounts of mass between an aceelerating spaceship and either another spaceship or the surface of a rotating planet.

    Actually thinking about it, if there are conservation laws but very long distance teleportation is possible, keeping an active teleportation gate open aboard a ship might be some form of perpetual motion machine, simply because of the heat generated by moving it, let alone sending reaction mass through it. Hmm.*

    *Didn't Peter Watts use something like this idea?

    789:

    dense hive-like structures of living rooms

    Which makes for some really interestingly different arrangements for things like utilities, tenancy and title. Presumably you can rent a living room to add to the house you already own. Or your composite "house" has a single "hallway" that you lease from the teleportal company, while you variously rent, own or timeshare each "room" that you add. All these rooms need their own individual connections to utilities, but that can be any combination of physically local and teleported in, potentially via a services contract with a "cloud" provider.

    The developer of the hive-like structure on an island in the Hebrides with a view of the aurora could let out rooms with heating, air, electricity and data all provided. Or you bring your own via teleportal fittings that can be managed by your own providers. So world building, much complicated, wow.

    790:

    You wouldn't even need the room to be at the desirable location: just the window and door, with the rest of the structure somewhere cheaper.

    791:

    First, move your capital offshore before the big day. Some of it will grow faster once banks, manufacturing etc. move out of the UK and into the places you've moved capital into but the important thing is to keep it safe.

    Post Brexit the UK will stabilise at some point. Probably a distressed point. Distressed means it's cheaper to buy influence, and whatever barriers are in place against cutting wages, weakening health & safety rules, extracting subsidies from govt, setting up monopolies - anything - will be easier to break or bypass. Some of these may be harder to do in the event of a deal with the EU so push for no deal. Move some capital back into the UK and do as you will.

    Profit.

    792:

    On a world-building side for a story, it's quite easy, as Dan Simmons and James Schmitz, among others, have demonstrated. Basically, any scene can be set anywhere, and moving between scenes requires going through a portal. Simmons got a bit giddy with his farcaster system, such as the world-river, where each segment of it was on a different world, and differential gravity (somehow) kept the water moving. Or skyscrapers without elevators, with suites connected to wherever without elevators. A problematic safety consideration. Schmitz used it to have alien infiltrators in a massively portaled world, where locked room murders could happen (temporary portals, among others), there were boobytraps (portals in floors, to portals on cliffs, etc.) training areas (portals in parks), and so forth.

    It's probably easier, actually, than having a single world or station with all the stuff right next to each other in a logical way. The biggest problem is why portals aren't the solution to every problem.

    And that doesn't even get into the joys of magical gates and teleportation. Aspirin's MYTH-Inc. series had, IIRC, the biggest flea market across the worlds had all the merchants with little tents. But in each tent was a gate, that led to a mansion on another world. What was on that other world? Maybe better not to ask.

    793:

    So yeah, conservation laws and teleportation: you can send anything any distance, as long as the heat of transfer means that no information arrives other than (possibly) the mass of what got sent through the gate.

    That's a reasonable formula for a perpetual rocket engine, actually: you keep the open portal system cool by feeding something like a high pressure stream of hydrogen gas through it. I suppose you could use it for some form of gate-based morse code information system, but...yeah.

    794:

    More fun to play with teleportation, but I should point out that forced labor in prison camps during a pandemic is basically setting the stage for a really bloody revolution if the system cracks even slightly. Note that I'm not talking about just the UK here, as the US and China have it even worse.

    If you want to turn this into a SFF scenario (probably wiser), this is the grimdark equivalent of Niven's organlegging society, where everybody was perfectly peaceful, and if they weren't, they were chopped up for spare parts.

    The ultimate problem with either system is that it's built on a fundamental principle that civilization is an exploitative and metastasizing system run by a parasitic managerial class (otherwise known as a system that grows to guarantee profits for investors). While this has been the story of colonial Eurasian empires, I suspect that it's probably more useful to try speculating about how to make cultures that are a bit--how to say this--more resilient than this model. After all, rapid growth and long term resilience often seem to be mutually exclusive in a wide variety of settings.

    While I don't expect you to start writing different kinds of books, and while there's certainly a lot of horror embedded in late stage capitalism, I kind of hope the field continues to diversify just a bit beyond that. For all our sakes. We want the kids reading stuff to imagine something beyond hunger games, after all.

    795:

    prison camps during a pandemic

    You don't need the labour to have a problem, and there's probably some interesting if unethical research to be done on whether locking prisoners in their cells for a couple of months does more damage than forcing them to work does. I read an article the other day about how the 23+ hour lockdowns in UK prisons are creating problems, and the brief surge attack on prisoners has passed so now prisons are struggling with normal understaffing problems when the prisoners are extra antsy. I suspect part of the issue is that solitary/seclusion is no longer a threat because everyone is doing that all the time. There may even be an element of "I'm doing the time, so fuck you I'm doing the crime" (ie, the penalty for attacking a guard is a month in solitary, so once a month each prisoner attacks a guard).

    Our Rupert has made sure that prison release programmes carry a political cost, so they're either cancelled or being done very quietly. I vaguely recall reports that a judge in Aotearoa had released someone on the basis that jailing them would be unjustifiably harsh due to the threat of covid "we don't have the death penalty here".

    796:

    Re: '... move out of the UK and into the places you've moved capital into but the important thing is to keep it safe.'

    Not sure I understand what you mean by 'move out of the UK': (a) sell any UK shares/assets or (b) change banks/financial institutions, or ... ?

    If (a) - then there's a possibility of a market glut, share prices fall, etc.

    If (b) - where do you find a buyer, plus possibility of (a).

    If you mean hiding undeclared income/profits, i.e., tax evasion ... you'd probably not want to change anything.

    797:

    Sadly paywalled, but worth reading if you can get to it: Do Trump’s Taxes Show He’s a Failure, a Cheat, or a Criminal?. The tl;dr is that all three are plausible, possibly in sequence. And the good news is that, thanks to his cockroach-level constitution, he'll likely live long enough to either continue, erm, owning a string of laundries or just possibly explaining their operations to all sorts of fascinated officials. Shall we say.

    798:

    Are you suggesting that it was a conspiracy of bureaucrats?

    Not my point.

    If you're a lawyer / law firm serving buinsess clients in their business dealings Brexit is going to generate a lot of revenue for you or your firm. Doesn't matter if you or your firm is for or against. It will just happen. Not planning for it and how it affects your clients would be malpractice.

    But the money will roll in.

    799:

    Niven has explored quite a lot of the possibilities inherent in teleport.

    His Puppeteers live in Arcologies that are pretty much solid living space. Corridors, ventilation, lifts, plumbing... None of it uses physical volume. It's all stepping disks.

    The disks can absorb limited differences in height and velocity, but not much. I think 60m/s is the limit. World spanning travel is done by having connected disks a few hundred km apart and unconnected a few metres apart. So you step from one to the next a few metres and it jumps you hundreds of km. The user experiences a stroll over a few dozen disks. You can jump from spaceship to spaceship but matching speed gets harder as ships get further apart.

    They're also used for things like mining. You put a stepping disk in water and like Maxwell's demon, it allows through only what you want. Land your spaceship on a water planet and your tanks fill with deuterium, or whatever you want.

    None of which is as creepy as the one I read years ago from another author where they scan you like a Star Trek teleport but you don't disappear from the sending station. Instead when the receiver reports that you came through correctly, the sending station staff kill the original you.

    800:

    Charlie @ 779 It's beginning to look as if BoJo is realizing he's made a mistake and is looking for small micro-deals relating to specific trade issues with the EU. Far too little, too late. Also, reports that the dime has dropped that DJT is going down bigtime & if they want a Trade Deal with the US - that means Biden & the Dems so screwing with Ireland is a no-no ... So some sort of Shit-Sandwich "Deal" is going to be necessary. OTOH, your later bit about excising Scotland, quite rightly points at the fascists who have invaded the tories ( In the same way as the marxists tried to with Labour ) - learning from how not to do it from the Labour takeover by the hard left ... will be very much visible & loud, if not actually in charge Whatever happens it's going to be MESSY. @771 I wouldn't have thought there was actually that much money to be made from that. Also, even the tory shires voters will rebel against that sort of thing - eventually. There's the problem - eventually - & it will take years for the penny to drop.

    ANd ... if it's a bad as expected - food & medicine shortages lasting months in early 2021, won't there be ouright revolution on the streets, with a v large proportion of the population wanting the Brexiteers dangling? ESPECIALLY the many moderate Brexit voters ( I know two ) who will be/are already very angry that they were conned? I remember my own reaction, after I realised, only in the last days before the vote, that the whole thing was a gaint con-trick, & I'd very nearly been "had". [ The same way that I really, really don't like organised, especially monotheistic, religions, for the same reason. ]

    801:

    Yes. It's a case of the rats sinking the leaving ship.

    I am expecting the UK to be as broke as in 1950 in 2025, but without the infrastructure or skills to rebuild.

    802:

    They do. I am not talking about the cost of transport, but the resources for such houses to exist at all. We need a factor of ten population reduction, anyway, just to survive in the long term and give the whole population a reasonable quality of life. But such distributed housing would make a lot of our problems worse.

    People wouldn't just sit in their rooms looking at the view, but would want to go out, which would mean that every location would end up with 'appropriate' facilities, as well as the housing. It would mean that concrete cancers that have destroyed much (most?) of the Greek and Spanish islands and many coastlands would become universal, with the resulting destruction of ecologies and loss of open space.

    Your example of a view shows the problems, too. A kilometre stretch with single rooms ten stories high has only 2,500 of them. Even in the UK, we are talking about 30,000,000 households. How many of those want a view of St Michael's Mount? Have you SEEN Marazion, especially in summer, and can you imagine it several times more crowded?

    Cornwall is the UK's most extreme example, and has been deliberately kept impoverished for the benefit of the London-based wealthy. 'Second homes' and, FAR worse, holiday parks take more money out of the local area than they put into it. Such distributed housing would have similar effects, only worse.

    With a massively smaller population, or one where only a tiny minority could afford such houses, the problems are containable. Without, no chance.

    803:

    Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly.

    804:

    Thanks. I can never remember titles and authors

    805:

    ... Or you have scarcity limiting availability hence demand-based pricing, just like we do now. Only with rather more availability, b/c your desirable residential spots only need to hold a room, not an entire house and garden.

    806:

    That's back to only a tiny minority being able to afford such things, just as we do now with private islands.

    807:

    I suspect the "nice view" teleporter facility would end up being a hotel room most folks would rent by the hour, not a permanent part of their actual residence. It doesn't need all the other things a hotel room needs to support it like corridors, lifts, restaurants, a lobby, car parks (what are cars, Mummy?) etc., just a custodial staff that comes in and cleans up after each visitor has left before the central teleporter control tags it as being available for occupancy again.

    808:

    "...don't disappear from the sending station. Instead when the receiver reports that you came through correctly, the sending station staff kill the original you."

    I've come to the conclusion that the best explanation for Star Trek style beaming is that they forced some of the matter in another location to match all the quantum states of a human being and their clothing/equipment.

    They don't kill the other you. They just look at them wrong!

    809:

    Hang on, I suggested that myself when the subject came up before. And you objected with a big list of how it would kill you in nasty ways.

    810:

    Problem is that a window with a good view is probably easier to do with VR than with teleporting to an actual room.

    I'll point out that, in general, the farcaster house is an example of conspicuous consumption, and that's about its only value. It's another example of spreading out a system across unreasonable distances.

    It also only works if the teleport cancels all sorts of conservation of motion issues. Otherwise, you don't particularly want to have one room in your house in San Diego and another room in London. They're moving at rather different velocities and even temperatures. Having two rooms joined up where there's a hurricane-force wind flowing through the portal and people hit the opposite wall hard if they step through.

    And if the teleport cancels conservation laws, but it's a portal and not a booth...what happens to things like blood flow, nerve impulse propagation, digestion, and even urine and fecal retention as you step through such a portal? Probably worth thinking through, if only to avoid thoughts about post-soviet large scale laundering operations and the political consequences thereof.

    811:

    Harrison did it somewhat earlier, in his 1970 story collection One Step from Earth, all of which examine various possibilities arising from 'matter transmission'.

    812:

    For the ‘seeing a nice view’ part, if only we had some sort of system that could capture the photon stream, encode it, package it up and transmit it to *multiple * locations for consumption via large window-like apparatuses. That would save any of the problems with vast walls of poncey living rooms polluting nice locations. I dunno, nut I’m thinking it might even be possible right now because I happen to know The Secret to teleporting photons across surprisingly large distances very cheaply... Contact me directly for details of financial opportunities.

    813:

    None of which is as creepy as the one I read years ago from another author where they scan you like a Star Trek teleport but you don't disappear from the sending station. Instead when the receiver reports that you came through correctly, the sending station staff kill the original you.

    For a movie treatment of this, see "The Prestige" with Hugh Jackman and Christopher Nolan.

    814:

    Yes. That way you would not need frontages the size of rooms, you'd just need little ones the size of human pupils. That gives you something like six orders of magnitude, so you've a decent chance of other unrelated matters limiting things before it becomes a problem.

    815:

    As regards conservation, maybe it turns out that the device does not actually transport you from wherever you are to the edge of the Grand Canyon, instead it simply maps a small region of your current universe to one of the parallel universes in which there is a Grand Canyon at the same location, at the same gravitational potential, with the same velocity etc. as your living room. (Well, not exactly the same location; a bit off to the side would be preferable.) If the conservation-related conditions don't match up, the mapping simply doesn't exist in the first place to be portalised, so you don't have to worry about being smacked in the head with a wall or whatever. Also, there are a practically-unlimited number of such parallel universes which differ only in some electron somewhere having a different spin or something, so there's "enough for everyone" and you don't get the crowding problems. On the other hand, that does mean that anyone you do meet there is not quite the same person as you meet here some other time, or anyone else meets there. So the longer you have this setup in operation the more the idea of "consensus reality" disintegrates.

    816:

    ‘Little ones the size of human pupils’ - well, just a few, or a few hundred in general. That would be plenty of, well, I’ll call them ‘cameras’ to provide an image stream that I can transfer to any number of receiving stations (I call them “televisions “ because of the long range viewing thing). Of course, I’d have to have some sort of armed security force to prevent people from standing in view of these ‘cameras’ and spouting rubbish that they want to try to force ‘viewers ‘ to watch.

    818:

    There are also precursors to this idea in Simak's Way station and in Pohl and Williamson's duology The Saga of Cuckoo

    I was goofing around last night, and I realized that even the crudest teleportation device: something that transmits at best light beams or high entropy, high temperature plasma at sub-light transmission speed, and which, like a wormhole only has one pair of connecting portals, can be immensely useful.

    For example, take settling the Oort cloud. The bodies out there are basically small, dirty icebergs that are really cold and really far apart. Why would anyone bother? (true answer: they probably won't. But read on). However, if you have portals, you can move mass around. And if the temperature of the mass is proportional to the difference in velocities between the two portals, then you've got a decent way of fueling a rocket. Moreover, if you have a way of using the plasma to build things (either by cooling it, making a plasma sorter and printer out of handwavium, etc.) then the base can ship elements mined at the base to the ship, and even to a new base once one is set up. Then, once the new base is running, they can ship material to the old base to get it moving to either catch up or go to a new body all together. The hot teleportation portals thus can be used to spread ships and mining colonies among Oort cloud bodies fairly effectively.

    The energy for the effort is coming from (handwave) turning differences in inertial frames into a steep gradient with the teleporter being the machine in the middle that utilizes the gradient. Effectively, you're harvesting the energy differential between the nonlocal universe (where teleportation works) and the local universe (where the separate bodies exist quite far away).

    And there can be some interesting consequences for putting limits on the system. If too much energy causes the portal to melt, then that limits things like distances and delta Vs that are accessible. The above model assumes portals are paired (basically as wormholes), but if there's a stargate network where you dial up a destination, things get more interesting. Resource use also gets interesting. Keeping accounts of all the elements required for living, where they are needed, where they are surplus, and what it costs to ship them, all become the basis for Oortian economies. Plus there are ample opportunities for both politics and things like nasty surprises (cutting of the rocket fuel in mid-flight, for example, or unexpectedly porting through something radioactive and unstable.

    Fun stuff. Not sure what to do with it yet, but I don't think people have really thought about how even crappy teleportation could be used.

    819:

    Re: ' ... teleport cancels conservation laws, but it's a portal and not a booth..'

    What about space/distance's partner 'time'? If your portal is capable of zipping you through space, it should as easily zip you through time.

    Or, embed your teleport endpoints within some sort of Matryoshka to absorb/buffer any bumps. Doesn't require any major additional real estate if the Matryoshka layers are atom size (e.g., graphene). Could even be a specially fitted multi-layered suit.

    820:

    None of which is as creepy as the one I read years ago from another author where they scan you like a Star Trek teleport but you don't disappear from the sending station. Instead when the receiver reports that you came through correctly, the sending station staff kill the original you.

    I'm guessing you didn't read Schlock Mercenary. Spoilers below.

    At the opening of the story FTL travel around the known galaxy was by artificial wormhole, which was pretty convenient. Almost nobody knew that the technology was really much more like a Star Trek transporter and that anything going in could come out from as many terminals as the operators felt like. Pretty much everyone who had ever traveled between star systems had been copied, interrogated, and killed - most of them repeatedly. When this became public knowledge the rest of the galactic population was very unhappy and the operators were very unpopular.

    821:

    Simak's Way Station had a large tank buried underneath the teleport station, when the traveller who stopped by the station left to continue their journey their body stayed behind and it was dumped into the tank. Just how large the tank was and how it would be emptied when necessary was elided over, rather.

    The exact mechanism of Simak's teleport was not detailed, as I recall. It seemed like the body would be replicated at the receiver and the traveller's "soul" would be transmitted in some manner. There was a certain amount of Handwavium in the story with a major plot point being one traveller who died at the station before they could be teleported further down the line. Good story though, recommended reading, like most of Simak's works.

    822:

    Oh my. The Five Eyes have agreed; end-to-end encryption is BAD and cannot be tolerated!!!. This effectively means banning anonymous communications by dissenters worldwide; if any government where a provider operates demands access, they would be unable to seriously deny that they could not oblige, unless the solution was something like mirroring (unencrypted) all "encrypted" communications on Five Eyes servers. The Five Eyes are not the world, but many (though certainly not all) of the world's political leaderships are sympathetic. The political fights over this are now seriously on after this broadside. International Statement: End-To-End Encryption and Public Safety (Department of Justice - Office of Public Affairs - Sunday, October 11, 2020) However, we challenge the assertion that public safety cannot be protected without compromising privacy or cyber security. We strongly believe that approaches protecting each of these important values are possible and strive to work with industry to collaborate on mutually agreeable solutions. ... SIGNATORIES Rt Hon Priti Patel MP, United Kingdom Secretary of State for the Home Department William P. Barr, Attorney General of the United States The Hon Peter Dutton MP, Australian Minister for Home Affairs Hon Andrew Little MP, Minister of Justice, Minister Responsible for the GCSB, Minister Responsible for the NZSIS The Honourable Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness [ed: Canada] India Japan

    (How are India and Japan involved?) It would still be possible to do boutique secure communications, e.g. with a private Signal(forked) server network and [protocol hopping], but nation-state level attention would be focused on such things. (Many other possibilities, but panopticon totalitarianism tightens pretty quickly in any event.)

    823:

    The Five Eyes have agreed; end-to-end encryption is BAD and cannot be tolerated!!!.

    Not to worry; they're mostly trying to protect the children. (The string "child" occurs, by my count, thirteen times in the document.) What kind of monster would be against protecting the children?

    824:

    P.S.:

    The document does say about the bad stuff encryption facilitates, "This includes responding to the most serious illegal content and activity on its platform, including child sexual exploitation and abuse, violent crime, terrorist propaganda and attack planning; and safeguarding the vulnerable"

    I didn't see anything about financial crimes, but perhaps just missed it.

    825:

    Heteromeles @ 774: There's a certain branch of American Christianity that doesn't follow the "faith without works is dead" verse in the Bible. Specifically, there's a belief that if you've been baptized, said the magic words, annual give 10% of your income to your Church to keep your membership up to date, and so forth, then you get to go to heaven when you die, regardless of what you do on Earth. Their idea is that God is all-forgiving and everyone's a sinner in this fallen world, so keeping up your membership is sufficient to get to Heaven.

    For most people the break point is the magic words. Say 'em and get baptized and you're done. Good to go no matter what you do after that. There's no ongoing commitment required.

    The cults that expect you to keep on paying ain't gonna' be satisfied with 10%. They want it all; 110% or you can go to hell.

    826:

    What kind of monster would be against protecting the children? I'll note that QAnon is all-in on priming 10s of millions of people to be extremely concerned about Evil Monsters who abuse children. (e.g. by eating them.) This document is (at least) exploiting that concern. (I'm seeing reports of more of the Biden/pedophilia meme circulating, similarly primed by QAnon. There will be consequences.) Curiously, the American extremely radical right (and maybe elsewhere) are increasingly fans of messaging applications with end-to-end encryption. We see the some of the OPSEC failures (e.g. the hilarious Michigan governor kidnapping plot[1]) but there are certainly cells/groups operating (of many ideologies/political persuasions) with OPSEC/COMSEC good enough that they remain undetected.

    [1] LONG thread, funny: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/1314237833276612609

    827:

    Charlie Stross @ 776:

    If you have a hole into the vacuum of intersteller space the size of a standard door, how long would it take for earth's atmosphere to exhaust through the opening?

    A surprisingly long time. Air isn't going to vent at a speed greater than mach 1, so you're approximating a column of air 330 metres long at surface level pressure passing through the gate each second. For a gate with 1 square metre area, it's therefore going to take over 3 million seconds (about 36 days) to vent a single cubic kilometre of air. So Earth is losing 10 km^3 per year, out of a total atmospheric volume of $BIGNUM km^3.

    Not surprising because I had no idea what the magnitude of the answer might be, although I recognize a single doorway is a relatively small aperture.

    IIRC, in the story, there is a structure on the other side of the door. I wonder if water vapor in the air might flash freeze going through the door & if there might be a build-up on that structure on the other side sufficient to eventually plug the doorway?

    Or would the ice sublimate away faster than it could build up?

    828:
    If there is mass unemployment ( On top of that caused by C-19, what profit can be made from that, as I always thought that nearly-full-employument was the most profitable status foir anyone wanting to make money, yes?

    Gobble up assets willy-nilly at pennies on the dollar (or pence on the pound).

    Steal everything that isn't nailed down and if it can be pried loose with a crowbar it wasn't nailed down was it?

    829:

    Heteromeles @ 797: Sadly paywalled, but worth reading if you can get to it: Do Trump’s Taxes Show He’s a Failure, a Cheat, or a Criminal?. The tl;dr is that all three are plausible, possibly in sequence. And the good news is that, thanks to his cockroach-level constitution, he'll likely live long enough to either continue, erm, owning a string of laundries or just possibly explaining their operations to all sorts of fascinated officials. Shall we say.

    He's all three at the same time. His claimed "losses" are not his actual losses. It's all accounting trickery that would turn Enron's management green with envy. He is a failure because every business he's ever "owned" has been profligately run into the ground, but not before he criminally stripped assets.

    The only thing you can say for sure about his tax returns is they're a pack of lies.

    830:

    LONG thread

    Makes me think that this blog would be a much better place to organise something secret. Fewer people read it...

    Psst, guys, wanna do a crimez?

    831:

    Mr. Tim @ 813:

    None of which is as creepy as the one I read years ago from another author where they scan you like a Star Trek teleport but you don't disappear from the sending station. Instead when the receiver reports that you came through correctly, the sending station staff kill the original you.

    For a movie treatment of this, see "The Prestige" with Hugh Jackman and Christopher Nolan.

    I don't remember the name of the author or the book, but one twist I read on this was a detective story set on Mars where the guy invented such a teleport booth that was supposed to kill the original once the duplicate was complete at the remote receiver ... and proceeded to demonstrate it using himself as the test subject. Except that he cheated and built a hidden back door into the booth & while everyone's attention was focused on the remote receiver station, he sneaked out that back door, looted the corporate accounts and absconded to a planet with no extradition treaties before anyone realized what he'd done.

    Of course the guy on the other end knows what he was planning, although denying it to the authorities, and is looking to catch up with the original to demand a share of the loot.

    Which is where the "detective" came into the picture ... I vaguely remember the detective was like an interplanetary Simon Templar that the duplicate hired to track down the original.

    832:

    Well, I'm a naive innocent. A rube, as it were. And therefore I learned from the above article that, when someone has a business that hemorrhages money but which inexplicably stays open for years--a golf course, perhaps--that's the kind of thing that gets IRS and FBI agents interested in this fascinating thing I know next to nothing about: money laundering.

    I also learned from the article that one of the many sources of money needing to be laundered are those who benefited mightily from the breakup of the old Soviet Union.

    And I learned that one of their known intermediaries was Deutsche Bank.

    And I learned that one of the places their money, certainly by accident, ended up, was the City of London.

    And since the Dear Leader became a customer of Deutsche Bank, he indulged mightily in buying things like the Trump Turnberry Golf Club and Resort in Scotland, a place that, unlike, say, much of China, Asia, or the Middle East, has a positive surfeit of golf courses. The Turnberry may well not have turned a profit in years, but it's still owned by Dear Leader Inc.

    Now it's fascinating coincidence to me that two places that are dealing with innovative nonviolent political interference by Russia happen to be the US and the UK. Given UK libel laws, it's counterproductive to speculate much further of course, so I'm sure all of this is coincidental. But the pareidola caused by these subjects appearing, by random chance, to have various and sundry causal relationships is amazing and fascinating, although I'm sure that, as Ian Fleming wrote, it's coincidence.

    [[ fixed broken link - mod ]]

    833:

    Bill Arnold @ 826:

    What kind of monster would be against protecting the children?

    I'll note that QAnon is all-in on priming 10s of millions of people to be extremely concerned about Evil Monsters who abuse children. (e.g. by eating them.) This document is (at least) exploiting that concern.
    (I'm seeing reports of more of the Biden/pedophilia meme circulating, similarly primed by QAnon. There will be consequences.)
    Curiously, the American extremely radical right (and maybe elsewhere) are increasingly fans of messaging applications with end-to-end encryption. We see the some of the OPSEC failures (e.g. the hilarious Michigan governor kidnapping plot[1]) but there are certainly cells/groups operating (of many ideologies/political persuasions) with OPSEC/COMSEC good enough that they remain undetected.

    [1] LONG thread, funny: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/1314237833276612609

    Anyone else think it's significant the Michigan terrorists were holding secret meetings that:

    took place in the basement of a shop, which, according to the court documents, “was accessed through a trap door hidden under a rug on the main floor.”

    I wonder if the pizza is any good?

    834:

    Heteromeles @ 832: Well, I'm a naive innocent. A rube, as it were. And therefore I learned from the above article that, when someone has a business that hemorrhages money but which inexplicably stays open for years--a golf course, perhaps--that's the kind of thing that gets IRS and FBI agents interested in this fascinating thing I know next to nothing about: money laundering.

    Yeah, that would certainly qualify for the "a Criminal" part.

    My point was you can't believe the claimed losses on the tax returns. Those lies are more indicative of him being "a Cheat", although there is plenty of other evidence that did not come from his tax returns that he is "a Failure"

    He's all three at the same time, but the Tax Returns are stronger evidence for him being "a Cheat" and "a Criminal" than they are for him being "a Failure". For that you need additional evidence (which there is in abundance).

    835:

    Re: the tax returns. As my late grandmother used to say, with a certain twinkle in her eye, "Really? Do tell."

    I'll also note that OGH is under British Libel law, not US law. So when talking about whether certain people known for their litigious natures are potentially doing something both illegal and reputation sullying, and how that may make them open to the influence of others...well I think indirection is only polite. After all, we won't pay for any problems caused by our babble. He will. Hopefully I'm not being too over-cautious.

    836:

    You're right. I hadn't read that one. Interesting that the next comment is about banning end to end encryption, which does for data what that story does for people.

    837:

    Remember that in Australia that's mostly irrelevant because the government can issue a secret order requiring any person to make available anything they know, or make whatever changes are directed, to any IT system in Australia*. There are significant penalties for refusing, and for divulging the existence of the secret order or anything you've done.

    • in the form specified, although I suspect that "your DNA as viable sperm" might be stretching it... but we'd never know, because if you are so instructed and you want to challenge the instruction you have to use a lawyer approved by the government in a secret court. I'm not saying they would use this to fertilise an egg, merely that denying them the opportunity would make an interesting test case. ** the definition of "in" has not been formalised so far as I know, could easily translate to "accessible from". Nor have the limits on the "changes or alterations" that may be required, so it's possible they would instruct someone vulnerable to Australia law to act while outside Australia.
    838:

    Also, it's not vertain that refusing to comply because the instruction is impossible would get you out of trouble. The laws of Australia trump the laws of mathematics, after all.

    839:

    Not only do you have to allow access to read any information. You have to allow access to write anything to private information systems.

    So that would include writing viable sperm to your eggs, or crispr to your genome.

    Plus the obvious of installing software to do... anything.

    840:

    Down with SSH and PGP! I can see a resurgence in steganography, and possibly an open-source tool to automate that.

    gasdive in #839 points out the real horror of such laws - the UK is similar.

    841:

    The Five Eyes have agreed; end-to-end encryption

    Australian commentary:

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/dutton-pushes-against-encryption-yet-again-but-oversight-at-home-is-slow/ "We, the undersigned, support strong encryption, which plays a crucial role in protecting personal data, privacy, intellectual property, trade secrets and cybersecurity," wrote a bunch of nations on the weekend -- the Five Eyes, India, and Japan. As a statement of intent, it's right up there with "Your privacy is very important to us", "Of course I love you", and "I'm not a racist but...". (etc.)
    842:

    The Honourable Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness

    For non-Canadians, this is the chap who, while police chief of Toronto, proceeded to lie to the civilian oversight committee about the plans and actions of the police during the G20 protests, at which civili rights were systematically ignored.

    Not an inspiring record on matters of civil rights.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2018/03/24/g20-policing-fiasco-left-a-permanent-emotional-scar-former-police-chair-writes-in-new-book.html

    843:

    For most people the break point is the magic words. Say 'em and get baptized and you're done. Good to go no matter what you do after that. There's no ongoing commitment required.

    Which is interesting, because doctrinally baptist washes away the sins that you have committed before being baptized, so you're starting with a clean slate. Doesn't do anything for sins you commit after. Which is why many early Christians delayed baptism as long as possible, so that when they died they had fewer sins on their record.

    So it's a pardon, not a carte blanche.

    844:

    Thought the folks here might like a quick reference to DT's record on science:

    'A four-year timeline of Trump’s impact on science From travel bans to human spaceflight to the coronavirus pandemic, US President Donald Trump’s policies and actions have changed science.'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02814-3

    845:

    Yes, but since when does the current (predominantly American) Evangelical Jesusism (tm) have anything more than a very passing acquaintance with Christian dogma? (/Snark)

    846:

    Geezer Xtian doctrine, all of it, is based on Blackmail, anyway.

    847:

    One smart Star Trek author realized that you can transport stuff by simply keeping it in the transporter's pattern buffer and holding off on turning it into matter until you need it... there's a twist that could fuel a story or two!

    848:

    Q-Anon. Yeah, about that...

    QAnon's biggest news hub was run by a senior vice president at Citigroup, the American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Jason Gelinas worked in Citigroup's technology department, where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers, &lt...&gt Days after Gelinas was outed as the man running the site, Citigroup "had put him on administrative leave and his name was removed from the company's internal directory. He was later terminated."

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-07/who-is-qanon-evangelist-qmap-creator-and-former-citigroup-exec-jason-gelinas

    849:

    "He was later terminated."

    The distinction between Citigroup and the Mafia gets smaller by the day :-)

    850:

    Generally ... This weekend the "FT" came up trumps: Following an in-depth article on DJT's USA, a reply came in saying this.... Having been a traveller to/from the USA for over 30 years - including living there - I had always thought the country had probllems, but they were glosssed over, because that was where the money was. Trump & C-19 have merely exposed things that were always there in plain sight: - guns, greed, the costs of health & education, lack of community, police brutality & the nonsense of "American" exceptionalism. At the same time, commenting on the black farce of this country's utter failure to get to grips with C-19, & the madness of excepting all the rules over "christmas", the following beautiful pice of satire emerged: In an interview with "The Daily Telegraph" Covid said it had worked hard all year, & was looking forward to a break & spending time with its spores. 😈

    852:

    @824 says:"The document does say about the bad stuff encryption facilitates, "This includes responding to the most serious illegal content and activity on its platform, including child sexual exploitation and abuse, violent crime, terrorist propaganda and attack planning; and safeguarding the vulnerable" I didn't see anything about financial crimes, but perhaps just missed it."

    Mentioning financial crimes would be saying the silent part out loud, it's pretty obviously what all the fuss is about in the first place. Western Liberal Democracy and Free Market Economies have discovered their ultimate failure mode in the tens of trillions of wealth already vacuumed into untouchable trusts and tax havens. Be they Caymans trusts or Nevada havens, once it's encryption protected "the money is gone."

    The race is now on to see whether state power withers away due to tax starvation, or whether some bright spark in high office first figures out they can simply print the funds they need to sustain economic survival, seeing as how they're cushioned against hyperinflation by all the vast reserves of untaxable dollars sloshing through global markets. Money to fund governments would just be a rounding error compared to what's already hidden.

    If they have to use the fight against child sex exploitation as an untouchable pretext, to get back taxation authority over all the untouchable trusts, I say go for it. It beats having the whole planet turn into one big Brazil with a GINi coefficient so close to "1" it's not even worth calculating anymore. Sanctity of privacy loses much of its power to inspire, when almost everybody knows they're riding a conveyor belt to a meat grinder of poverty, sickness and humiliation.

    The part that's hard for me to understand is that many of the names signing on to that document are right wingers. Maybe they're so eager to restrain political freedoms, they can't see how the loss of privacy weakens their own financial backers. Must be some truth in the old saying, never interfere with your enemies when they're shooting themselves in the foot. Kind of shortsighted, but that may be what saves the world; you don't have to be smart to be rich, just domineering. It's a new version of the old parable on how all the different parts of the human body chose their leader, with the moral being "you don't have to be a brain to be the boss, just an asshole." Why, there's probably some leaders who even prove the point.

    853:

    The part that's hard for me to understand is that many of the names signing on to that document are right wingers.

    Looking at contemporary politics, I think many right-wingers feel that rules don't apply to them, so what they are advocating is what will be applied to the rest of us, while they get to keep doing what they've always done…

    854:

    https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/analysis-finds-true-pandemic-death-toll-is-much-higher-than-200000-in-us/

    Excess deaths in the USA have been significantly higher than the official covid death toll.

    for every 100 excess deaths directly attributed to COVID-19, there were another 36 excess deaths—also likely caused by COVID-19, but in a less obvious manner.

    855:

    Mentioning financial crimes would be saying the silent part out loud,

    That was my very thought.

    What I still don't totally understand is that the kind of end-to-end encryption the Five Eyes seem to be so upset about is primarily of use for people who can't use readily available kinds that are more secure against gummint snooping, but more of a bother/expensive/dangerous to implement. Aside from child pornographers, that might be petty criminals, grass-roots terrorists and deep-cover spies. Plausible -- but likely? -- I dunno.

    Generating and securely shipping around terabytes of key for symmetrical cyphers or, for that matter, OTP, is something MegaBank can do readily enough. It's something governments have been doing for decades.

    856:

    I think it's less about the kind of targetted snooping you're imagining and more about wholesale surveillance at a societal level. The great advantage of the internet is that almost anything they care to know can be found out.

    In a way this is a "change is bad" complaint - they used to have full access to everything, even after HTTPS became common, because they could get feeds from the wholesale end of the communications. But end to end encryption means those feeds have become worthless because even if the encryption can be cracked, it can't be cracked wholesale in real time. Which is what matters when you're doing data matching across the whole population.

    Blithering about child pron is no more meaningful in this case than when QAnon does it (although it is just a likely to end up with a few random people being murdered, in the US). It's just a conversation-stopper that makes it clear to everyone that we're not having a sensible discussion of risks and rewards, costs and benefits. This is "give us everything. Now. Or we will fuck you up". That approach has been working really well so far so why would the spies change now?

    857:

    The part that's hard for me to understand is that many of the names signing on to that document are right wingers. Maybe they're so eager to restrain political freedoms, they can't see how the loss of privacy weakens their own financial backers. (H/T Moz 856, saying related things.) Or perhaps they think that banning unmonitored dissent through ubiquitous surveillance is a tool to help them safeguard that high GINI ratio. (It's more about safeguarding power, but maybe a few have thought it through.) I'd prefer other tools against tax starvation. No reason, for instance, that the world should tolerate tax havens, other than the power of those who use them. Many of those havens are vulnerable, as Heteromeles and others have noted multiple times, to various attacks including on their communications and electrical infrastructure. (And if the encryption keys are forgotten, money hidden by them goes poof. :-) No reason that tax systems be set up to massively favor the extremely wealthy, other than the power of the extremely wealthy to arrange for such favorable treatment.

    More to the point, end-to-end encryption is only peripherally related to tax avoidance/cheating/graft/looting-by-the-powerful. The rich and/or powerful have had many means to avoid taxes (etc) for a long time; end-to-end encryption is maybe helpful when arranging for a hidden asset using a burner smartphone, or whatever, but there are other ways.

    858:

    The other thing to remember about this "we're doing this to protect you from crime" garbage excuse is that it's coming from organised crime syndicates.

    Almost every country has a law that prevents spying on their own population. The Five Eyes syndicate was expressly created to break those laws. Spooks from Country A can't spy on citizens of country A, but Spooks from Country B can. So they've established "intelligence sharing" so I spy on your citizens, you spy on mine and we swap results.

    Getting your mates to break the law for you doesn't mean you haven't broken the law. Having your friends murder your ex doesn't mean you're not a murder.

    These are scofflaws who brag about their crimes and who then use "law and order" as an excuse to commit more crimes.

    859:

    organised crime syndicates

    Like terrorism, state actors are by definition not organised crime. They may do things that are grossly immoral or unethical, but unless they really screw up, what they do is legal.

    Whether a conspiracy of politicians counts as organised crime seems to vary more or less randomly. Here in NSW we've got Berejiklian's "I tried to stop him telling me about his crimes, I needed to think he was just an idiot" right now, which I struggle to read as anything other than an admission of culpability. But IANAL 😏

    But then you also have the rolling maul of lawbreaking and collusion in the US White House right now that suggests some kind of necessary but not sufficient condition. "you don't have to be a criminal gang, but it helps"?

    860:

    Someone has big data'd their way to a set of six clusters of covid symptoms, with different outcomes for the patients.

    Summary article: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200729/study-uncovers-six-coicd-19-symptom-clusters

    https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-clusters (longer article)

  • “Flu-like” with no fever: Headache, loss of smell, muscle pains, cough, sore throat, chest pain, no fever
  • “Flu-like” with fever: Headache, loss of smell, cough, sore throat, hoarseness, fever, loss of appetite
  • Gastrointestinal: Headache, loss of smell, loss of appetite, diarrhea, sore throat, chest pain, no cough
  • Severe, level 1 with fatigue: Headache, loss of smell, cough, fever, hoarseness, chest pain, fatigue
  • Severe, level 2 with confusion: Headache, loss of smell, loss of appetite, cough, fever, hoarseness, sore throat, chest pain, fatigue, confusion, muscle pain
  • Severe, level 3 with abdominal and respiratory pain: Headache, loss of smell, loss of appetite, cough, fever, hoarseness, sore throat, chest pain, fatigue, confusion, muscle pain, shortness of breath, diarrhea, abdominal pain

    Usefully the initial symptoms are different, opening the way to focus on the patients most likely to need more care.

  • 861:

    I took a unit* in international trade law earlier this year. The lecturer chose to include that quote from Trumble in her PowerPoint deck. It was in the lecture about state sovereignty so I’m not 100% clear whether she was earnestly serious, taking the piss or both. I assumed both, for the sake of finishing the course.

    • As part of my back-to-school masters, which I have now finished and graduated with. Currently in a pleasantly liminal hiatus in the process of a segue into the back-to-school PhD, but with scholarship and strangely laid-back thesis-by-publication plan. Haven’t had paid work since April, of course, so it’s an interesting spin of the whee.
    862:

    I'm not talking about state actors on the international stage, but government departments acting locally, and breaking local laws. Its certainly possible for a department to break the law while acting within state borders.

    I agree, that if a state decides to drop incendiary bombs on a neighbouring state, that's not criminal. But if a fire fighter starts setting fire to houses, it's a crime, even if they're a government official charged with responsibility for fires.

    The local spooks are, in most countries, prohibited by specific laws against spying on locals and their role is to protect the country from outside spooks. It's as though you've had to specifically write laws telling the fire brigade that they're only allowed to protect the country from fires, not light them.

    And then you've got a press release from the Fire Brigade that proudly proclaims their agreement with foreign Fire Brigades who will light fires on our soil in exchange for us burning down buildings in their country. They even have a name "Five Firebugs".

    863:

    What the Five Eyes lot do is one of those fun questions for lawyers, because they are generally supervised by a small parliamentary committee and their legislation is often vaguely worded, or the words are redefined so they don't mean what a lay reader would think. One common trick is the Torah one, "don't commit murder" where acts by secret police are only in breach of the law if parliament or a court decides they are after the event.

    You quickly get into the weeds of who officially knows what, who gave permission for what, whether anyone is allowed to know whether a given act would be illegal if it took place and whether anyone must be told if it did. There's a whole lot of "technically it would appear that that is illegal" but when it's never the subject of any official disapproval it's hard to think laws have actually been broken. De facto, definitely, but even de jure (the official disclosure that secret laws exist makes this even more fun).

    Again, Australia has done the unusual thing of telling us this stuff. The cliche example is that if someone is kidnapped in front of you it might be an offence to ring the police, but the only way for you to find out is to report what looks like a crime and see whether you vanish into a secret court to be prosecuted for revealing a secret anti-tourism action. It's only two years in jail, albeit afterwards you're not allowed to talk about it (so you just appear and say to friends "I went away"... and they just nod quietly and don't ask questions?)

    864:

    Keithmasterson @ 852:

    Western Liberal Democracy and Free Market Economies have discovered their ultimate failure mode in the tens of trillions of wealth already vacuumed into untouchable trusts and tax havens.

    I wish I knew enough macroeconomics to figure this out properly, but...

    If you read Moneyland by Oliver Bullough you will learn a lot about how wealthy people shunt money out of the reach of tax collectors and ex-wives. We don't know how much money is hidden away, but its a lot.

    Meantime over the last twelve years the central banks have been pumping money into the economy as a Keynsian stimulus. The idea is that if you put money in peoples pockets they will spend it, and as long as you don't exceed the underlying economic capacity this will create jobs, more economic activity, etc, without creating inflation.

    However these days the economy is dominated by people and companies who are very good at creaming off a percentage of that economic activity and putting it in the bank. In the past governments taxed this money and spent it, but they do it a lot less these days. This is partly due to the Thatcherite/Reaganomics view that lower taxation also stimulates economic growth, but mostly because the Moneyland phenomenon means that if you increase taxes the money you were going to tax evaporates and turns up somewhere with a lower tax rate.

    So now there is lots of money in banks looking for a return on investment. This over-supply of investment money has caused interest rates to drop (because of competition from other would-be lenders) and asset prices to rise (because interest rates are so low). Assets include houses and other buildings, and also shares.

    The only solution to this is to start taxing stuff more effectively. However doing so is going to require coordinated international action along the lines of a World Tax Authority.

    865:

    Just spotted OGH being heavily mentioned in El Reg today.

    https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/10/13/cyberfirst_ads_cancelled/

    As a sound engineer who has been shat on quite royally by UK.gov in the past 7 months (including being rejected by Arts Council England for a share of the supposed £1.57bn because my work doesn't "align with their remit"), I very much appreciate the publicity for the arts.

    866:

    That's a thing that Happens; apparently if you have >30,000 followers on social media you're some kind of "influencer" for purposes of advertising law in the UK, and while I don't do Facebook I have about 46,500 twitter followers at present (doubtless about 90% of them bots, but I can hope).

    867:

    to Nick Boulton @865: The fact that we are ruled by kleptocracy and clueless management does not inherently mean that there are no such people among the ruled ones. More than that, the conditions of that social contract inherently predisposes the situation where more and more people become the same in order to survive. However...

    This strategy to use re-skilled workers looks surprisingly fresh as compared to other option of usage of direct and strong-handed security-type. Perhaps, they expect these people to dive more deeply into the pains and troubles of modern art rather than bag any opposition before. Either they figured it out by themselves or they've learned from the best, IYKWIM.

    Worse, from their point of view, is that artists question authority and defy attempts to herd them.

    Actual, solution to problem of control seems very simple from my point of view here in my country, it's been proposed for years to at least control the projects subsidised and sponsored by government while leaving the individual initiative to the public. Making the people financially and morally responsible for their own actions rather than offloading issues on government and taking the money. Because it has been uncontrolled and free-floating in budget money for decades (since the creation of that government), and it proves to be virtually impossible to dislodge kleptocratic management from government bureaucracy fused with them via financial channels. Naturally, it was met with tremendous resistance by corrupt clans who occupy the top echelons of "culture" in my country, even when though their moral and financial bankruptcy has been proven time and time again.

    There has been a scandal recently where a certain studio, who were virtually unknown to wider public, took millions of dollars from budget and stole them via some money laundering firms somewhere in the Baltics, while showing off something that can be qualified as "art" only after a bottle of absinthe. I've posted the story here in this blog before but you have to see it with your own eyes to believe it. Not only the uncovered perpetrators denied conviction, pledged innocence and even charity, they started to blame government for criminal involvement in their activity and violation of various rights. All the while the trial has been postponed and challenged numerous times. That is how bad the situation can get.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r3ctrs9Vdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpXrvEquut4 A brothel. Not a theatre.

    TBC

    868:

    @867 There’s a reason the USSR is remembered in literature mostly for the art that dissidents created, and the Brexit-ultra Tory junta is absolutely intent on recreating the mistakes of Sovietism.

    And that reason is very superficial. Because since the creation of it, USSR has always been and seen itself as a dissident to established imperialistic order, any dissident within it (be he a regular intellectual, a pervert, a criminal, defector or terrorist) has been seen as an ally of the order and even a hero - right until their function were completed, that is.

    But still, this is a business as usual and the thing of the past. I am always more concerned of the present, or rather why modern Russia can't be remembered in literature for barely anything at all (barring indie projects like Metro 2033 which is subpar at best). And the reason may be more familiar, because it is also fairly popular thing, it is called "cultural genocide". I mean, the one that starts with throwing down the statues (of communists), banning their books and ideas and ravaging the museums and art schools. Anything and everything that even reminds of the certain epoch had to be destroyed, perverted or appropriated in the name of one true way of Freedom and Democracy. It is too bad people learned nothing from this experience and treated it as a greatest achievement and triumph of civilization.

    You can't even say it was a "mistake of Sovietism", it was really no more than a misfortune for it. A type of misfortune where you stumble in dark alley, erm, to find your arm, leg and kidney taken by an organ leggers - not because they are so kind to leave you bleeding and crawling home, but because selling the whole warm body on the black market would be kinda sus.

    幸運が三度姿を現すように不運もまた三度兆候を示す。 見たくないから見ない、気が付いても言わない、言っても聞かない、そして破局を迎える。だが、俺達の世界じゃ三度どころか最初の兆候を見逃せば終わりだ。 That is a quote, btw.

    869:

    @867 There’s a reason the USSR is remembered in literature mostly for the art that dissidents created, Out of curiosity, what were you replying to? (Interesting comments, thanks.)

    870:

    to Bill Arnold @869:

    Practically speaking, I was not replying to Nick Boulton, but rather reflecting on OGH twitter. There is a series of tweets that was referenced in the article in the link @865. The link itself is leading to comment section, not the article.

    872:

    Total COVID deaths by state according to political party. Fucking Wow!

    https://dangoodspeed.com/covid/total-cases-since-june

    874:

    Oh. You're quite correct. But the link is still astounding either way. (And I suspect that deaths will follow cases pretty closely.)

    875:

    Evidence from the UK (with a comparably advanced and dysfunctional system) is that hospital admissions and cases start together, and deaths follow a couple of weeks later. Treatment of COVID is vastly better than it used to be, but the reason Trump did so well was probably that the devil looks after his own.

    876:

    Re: 'Jason Gelinas worked in Citigroup's technology department, where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers, ...'

    The AI bit makes me wonder if he'd read Daemon (Suarez). If yes, then I wonder whether the bank and/or Feds are taking a serious look into any projects he was involved in - in any form. Would also look at DT's tweets and the bank's stock market performance. (Yes - most of the big banks have been doing well but some may have done exceptionally well ... for some reason.)

    The 'hints' and 'coincidences' remind me of Polly or suggest a rapid descent into some variety of schizophrenia.

    877:

    hospital admissions and cases start together, and deaths follow a couple of weeks later.

    Yes, I was looking at that a few days ago. There are some places that have sharp peaks of case and death rates in the data, and the peaks are around two weeks apart.

    BTW and if I haven't mentioned it, these are the sites I like for country and US state data. All data are suspect, but these seem to be relatively respectable.

    Country: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data

    US: https://covidtracking.com/data/download

    878:

    but the reason Trump did so well was probably that the devil looks after his own. Well, that, but also, his adaptive immune system got an early augmentation with a quadruple dose two-monoclonal-antibody cocktail. I don't know the details of the SARS-CoV infection sequence in people his age, but perhaps he got up to a week's start on the antibodies. SARS-CoV-2 rampaged through his body for a week, so it might have done some permanent damage; his doctors won't tell us though. The CEO of Regeneron is (reportedly) a member of his Bedminster NJ golf club and they reportedly talked a lot even prior to his being infected. Favors traded. Regeneron got a very valuable infomercial, and Trump might have gotten his life.

    879:

    Actually, I disagree.

    I can think of the Bolshoi Ballet, the Orchestra....

    880:

    On the other hand, doctors are saying his most critical time is later this week.

    Which is when I expect to see him collapse in public.

    881:

    Re: '... his most critical time is later this week'

    Could be any day now. Anything could happen to DT because this virus affects different people differently*. Nor does it seem to follow a simple infectious life cycle.

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/evidence-mounts-that-immunity-from-covid-19-antibodies-has-limits-1.5143502

    • By now - approx. 37 million confirmed cases worldwide - there must have been some twins that have been infected with COVID-19 and twin studies are ideal for drilling down and figuring out the relative contributions of different genetics vs. environmental factors.
    882:

    whitroth You would do better if you considerd the Mariinsky ( Kirov) ballet & orchestra companies .....

    883:

    SFReader @ 881:

    Re: '... his most critical time is later this week'

    Could be any day now. Anything could happen to DT because this virus affects different people differently*. Nor does it seem to follow a simple infectious life cycle.

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/evidence-mounts-that-immunity-from-covid-19-antibodies-has-limits-1.5143502

    * By now - approx. 37 million confirmed cases worldwide - there must have been some twins that have been infected with COVID-19 and twin studies are ideal for drilling down and figuring out the relative contributions of different genetics vs. environmental factors.

    If he does collapse, I hope he doesn't die right away. I want him barely conscious on a ventilator in ICU watching how Pretense and Moscow Mitch deal with the 25th Amendment ... maybe just barely able to tweet about it.

    884:

    I have about 46,500 twitter followers at present (doubtless about 90% of them bots, but I can hope).

    No doubt obvious answer is obvious once it's known, but... why?

    Some twits want large numbers of followers for the ego boost and boasting rights; that obviously doesn't apply. Other SF oriented users wanting automated watching of what you think is cool would be countable in dozens. Is this a camouflage maneuver, to make the bots look as if they are humans with personal interests?

    885:

    Bots follow real people so they look more real, and often in the hope that real people reflexively follow them back. Following OGH makes you look like an SF fan.

    886:

    Meanwhile in programming land I am looking at the three ways to send an SMS using Amazon, and wondering if the other two also become non-responsive. Right now if my server doesn't shut down cleanly it's about 90% chance that it has hung waiting for an AWS "Publish" call to return.

    So I'm vomiting out code to call the async version, and the future-based version, in the hope that one of those can survive being called in a threaded context. It seems obvious that if that doesn't work it must be me, because surely AWS libraries are threadsafe? But... if I limit myself to one message sending thread the problem goes away. And trust me, the AWS interaction is within a single method on a single class, so there's no "you're sharing stuff" going on, if there's hidden sharing it's inside AWS. Admittedly I have multiple instances of that class, each in its own thread (it can take 20s to send, and I sometimes need to send 100's of SMS per minute).

    Their documentation is awesome, BTW: trivial examples and header files. But the trace logs suggest it all turns into curl calls... since I already use curl I might switch to their HTTPS API and use curl directly.

    887:

    The issue may be one of timing. One thread's waiting, another is responding, and they're not talking. Do the threads join only after all of them return?

    Or the issue could be on the other side. I was testing a new version of a website once, and sometimes I'd see it, and sometimes it would fail. Turned out on the other end, they were using IBM's WebSeal in front of four servers.. and it was stateless. You sent a message, a message came back from that server, but as yours tried to respond, it randomly got one of the other three servers - no persistent connections.

    888:

    To be fair to the Regeneron CEO, On October 11 he's quoted as saying "The president’s case is a case of one, and that’s what we call a case report. And it is evidence of what's happening, but it’s kind of the weakest evidence that you can get," Schleifer told CBS News' "Face the Nation."

    There are a couple of ways to read this, but mine is that he wants to get a legitimate emergency use authorization for his cocktail as soon as he can ramp up production, and he doesn't want to be in the middle of a hydroxychloroquine-scale fiasco. So he's being honest.

    As for what happened to El Cheato, remember the likelihood at the beginning: 50% of people who get it are asymptomatic, 40% get minor symptoms, 10% get hospitalized, and 3-5% get in serious trouble or die. Probably El Cheeto would have been in the 5-10% range without Regeneron, and he got booted to the 10-20% range by having an immune response injected into him.

    He's also probably still infectious, clueless about quarantine or infection control, and likely to have long term heart or lung damage, although it may be trivial in terms of what it does to his capacity to function. I wouldn't go anywhere near the White House right now, although to be fair I've had negative desire to go near DC for the last four years.

    The concerning issue is if IQ 45 still telling his doctors to prescribe steroids because they make him feel so good*. If so, one hopes that VP Renfield is trucking around The Football, and the one by the Orange Laundryman has a set of soft restraints and a fake twitter phone to distract him if he loses it and wants to burn the world down because his coke was warm.

    *A riff on Michael Jackson? Heaven forfend!

    889:

    The problem is that all of this is hidden inside the opaque AWS api. Which is implicitly thread-safe, in the sense that other bits of it have thread pools and so on. One has to assume they have at some point hooked the thread pool part up to the SMS sending part - each thread in my code creates its own SNSClient but are those SNSClient's thread-safe from each other... hoo nose?

    My code seems to work in the general sense - I have a common ancestor that is the "send messages" class and a sibling class that sends SMS's using a different provider (as well as others to send push messages etc). Those all work, and except for the curl calls being non-cancellable they all stop promptly when commanded (viz, code I control will stop in much less than a second). So I set a global shutdown flag and join on each member of the list of threads. That way I get a pretty note in the log file saying "joining on thread Bob" just before the program hangs at shutdown (ideally not, but you know). I'm not kidding about the first AWS SMS taking 15-20s, but luckily later calls seem to be more like 5s so there's a reasonable chance that I can shut down within the 10s systemctl timeout.

    890:

    Whitroth @879, Mr. Tingey @ 882

    I think there's a significant difference between things like orchestras, ballet companies, where basically they rehash old and thoroughly approved 'classics', and other things like writing, painting, sculpture, composing, where the 'artists' are creating something new and therefore subversive.

    891:

    where basically they rehash old and thoroughly approved 'classics'... new and therefore subversive

    You're probably too young to have been shocked when they started using women "actors" to play female parts in the classics.'twas a scandal. Every time. For decades. There's also a great deal of caustic wit in the old satires, much of which is readily translated to a modern setting. The UK have Boris "Pinafore" Johnson, for example, who is a right ship's captain* if ever there was one.

    The problem with reading "the emperor's new clothes" to trump is his attention span, but you might not survive to the end of "Snow White" if you looked at Putin the wrong way during certain sections. "the WICKED stepmother gave Snow White a POISONED APPLE"...

    • that whole play is all about the incompetent admiralty, not least those admirals who'd never been to sea.
    892:

    darkblue Cobblers "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (district)" to you too ... Or "Akhenaten" by P Glass, or Thomas Ades' "Tempest" - all operas. I've seen/heard excerpts of the first two & been to an actual performance of the last. You plainly haven't a clue.

    893:

    Cobblers You plainly haven't a clue.

    wtaf?

    You don't know me, my social background or my educational background, you're in no position to judge how many clues I may or may not have.

    I take it you're not in the habit of listening to doom metal...

    894:

    The COVID-19 sorting algorithm!

    895:

    ONE; Imagine my surprise - not! QUOTE: Boris Johnson will not walk away from Brexit trade talks this week despite the passing of his deadline for the “outline” of a deal, No 10 has said. It comes as the PM prepares to discuss negotiations with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday.

    Downing Street is said to be encouraged by Angela Merkel’s latest remarks. The German chancellor suggested the EU would have to be more “realistic” in compromising on fishing rights, saying a deal had to be “in British interests as well as the interests of the 27-member EU”. ENDQUOTE

    He's now getting ready to "betray" the Ultras in the Brexit loonoe-group, obviously, what a shame.

    TWO: darkblue You made a comment which was completely out of touch with reality, as both I & Moz noted .... There's also the well-known trick, again usually in opera, but also in stage & films, of "re-timing" a well-known "theatrical" performance. The Ian McKellan performance as a fascit take-over of Britasin in the 1930's version fo "RIchard III" was a case in point. Or a Holland Park Opera performance of "Die Fledermaus" - usually thought of a a light fluffy comedy ... until you re-set it in the corrrect city ( Wien ) but timne it the year before the Anschluss ... Suddenly, it becomes very dark indeed. I've seen the same done with G&S' "Mikado" - brought forward to 1905 ( Russo-Japanese War ) - which produced some "interesting" staging & thoughts.... There was also the Branagh "Hamlet" set in Metternich's EUrope .....

    896:

    He's now getting ready to "betray" the Ultras in the Brexit loonoe-group, obviously, what a shame.

    In that case, expect fireworks when it hits the 1911 Committee. It's possible that this is how Boris plans to secure his second full year as PM in charge of a mutinous crew: if he takes it right down to the wire, surrenders, then positions it as a necessary evil to prevent complete economic collapse, the loonies will try to topple him but there might be enough sane Tory MPs to head them off at the pass -- in which case there can't be another challenge for 12 months.

    ... But that implies strategic thinking on Johnson's part which is a bit like expecting moderation and honesty on Donald Trump's.

    More likely he's just pantsing it in the hope that something will come up, and when it doesn't, he'll flail wildly.

    897:

    to whitroth @879: I can think of the Bolshoi Ballet, the Orchestra.... Well, I am not a fan of theater or ballet to any capacity, so I was referring to literature. But not only it.

    Further on my previous @868: Of course it is not such a dire situation as it was in the 90s, and in many modern arts it is much better. It's just they are mostly for internal consumption. There's music, there's movies (including documentary ones), the paintings (perhaps) and other installations, but I have my own negative experience with popular science.

    Namely, there has been three of my favorite magazines from high school that were lost to mismanagement in second half of 00s. Mostly I attribute it to rise of internet media and my own growing up, but I miss their unique format. Modern magazines (much less, "popular" ones) don't need any unique styles, or formats, or insights. They exist to provide place for advertisements and teach people how to buy more stuff, and regularly resort to reprinting news feeds from internet.

  • Modern IT, industry news, a lot of popular science and philosophy, etc. Lots of long articles that made you think on things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerra Lost to financial issues and editorial politics in 2009. Also because it did not fit into business model of modern journalism.

  • Gaming reviews and industry comments, very interesting and variable editing and style, much information for hardcore players. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game.EXE Actually same publisher, but different team. Lost to pretty much same issues, just much earlier, in 2006.

  • 150-years old geographic journal with a lot of popular science, history and technology thrown in. Also long and detailed articles. At least it used to be - it is not closed, but IMO it the worse alternative to what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vokrug_sveta Despite all the effort to save it, by 2009-2011 it was slowly dying, bloating with advertisement and until it was bough out and bastardized by our "liberal" cabal. It was cleansed of anything that would not fit into their format, I imagine, for the revenge of trying to upkeep good old Soviet traditions, so now it is nothing but shitty clone of NatGeo or similar. It's remains are owned by some media magnate I don't give a damn about.

  • There were, of course, other sci-fi, technology and youth journals, but they don't stir my imagination as much. A lot of things improved since then, and many things reappeared with new energy, my optimism is improving. But at the time, my soul was ravaged and my interest was ruined.

    898:

    Yes. And if you click on the "Fewest" button it does the same process, but in reverse, and you can watch the blue states rise to the top.

    899:

    "More likely he's just pantsing it in the hope that something will come up, and when it doesn't, he'll flail wildly."

    Agreed, with one reservation. The most consistent aspect of his policy has been the moves to sell us down the river to his natal country, and I don't think he will abandon that. Inter alia, that means the EU is vanishingly unlikely to allow the UK to export foodstuffs and some other goods without a lot of bureaucracy. If there IS a deal, I can foresee the EU losing its cool when some UK 'value-adder' plays fast and loose with the rules, with the connivance of our bureaucrats and politicians.

    900:

    &ltrolls eyes&gt

    So, you actually don't know classical music, and are completely unaware that people still write it.

    Horrible news for you: the music for Star Wars, composed by classical composer and orchestral conductor John Williams, is classical music.

    901:

    We agree, Greg. I have, in fact, heard enough recorded to know I really don't like Philip Glass.

    But then, I never claimed to Like Cul-chah (with nose in air), I can be cultured, and pick and choose what appeals to me.

    902:

    "Doom metal"? Is that like the 9 Inch Nails music for Doom, the videogame?

    If not, no, I don't tend to look forward to the end of the world. I prefer there to be a future, one that I want to live in, and one that I hope my kids and grandkids get to live in.

    Give me the Jefferson Airplane, or the one and only album of the original Jefferson Starship, Blows Against The Empire (nominated for a Hugo).

    903:

    You and I are in 100% agreement. Modern "journalism" (it's not reporting, or news, it's some fool's "journal") isn't about the stories, it's about ad placement. The people running them mostly have MBAs, and frequently business degrees... meaning they have no idea what the publication actually publishes, anything of its history, and have probably never read it. They think the money is in ads, have no interest in worrying if the publication even still exists in 10 years, because they'll have changed jobs twice by then, at least.

    I've seen that as late as the eighties, the USSR was still officially pushing the future, and space, and what could be, while the US was busy "make money is all that matters, nothing else".

    I want our goddamned future back.

    904:

    There are some real journalists and real reporting left in the UK - not many, but some. If 'twere not so, Bozo and chums wouldn't be so keen on creating a UK version of Faux News.

    905:

    Quite right Greg. I have a Hindemith viola concerto playing in the background. "Thoroughly approved classics" implies not understanding the music.

    906:

    Why do you think I start my day by reading the Guardian (non-profit organization)?

    907:

    Apropos of nothing: Nature today reported a finding of superconductivity a photochemically transformed carbonaceous sulfur hydride system at 15 deg C. Woo hoo! That's practically room temperature for Charlie!

    Well technically, that's 15 deg C under 267 gigpascals' pressure. But mere trivia. We've got room temperature superconduction!

    908:

    I recall my father saying he saw a production of the Mikado in New York; it would have been around 1945-47. The only change, he said, was the 2nd line was changed from 'we are gentlemen of Japan' to 'we are gangsters from Japan'.

    909:

    I think there's a significant difference between things like orchestras, ballet companies, where basically they rehash old and thoroughly approved 'classics', and other things like writing, painting, sculpture, composing, where the 'artists' are creating something new and therefore subversive.

    Rather oddly, the last times I went to the ballet, the opera, and the symphony they were performing new works.

    910:

    I want our goddamned future back.

    Was it Cory Doctorow who said he was expecting more flying cars and fewer fascists?

    His novel Attack Surface is just out, BTW. It's a sort-of sequel to Little Brother but from a different character's perspective, and can be read stand-alone. Recommended.

    911:

    Also, if you think classical (or in this case pre-classical) works are without controversy, Hidlegard of Bingen would be an interesting person to look into. Now, admittedly, some of the controversy is unrelated to her artistic works, but there has been a bit of fuss about whether the feminists can have her or indeed whether her scribblings can be translated into something we moderns call music. Philip Glass eat your heart out.

    (she wrote before modern musical notation was invented, so while what she wrote may have made perfect sense to her and even to others living around that time, exactly how to perform her works involves a fair bit of, dare I say, inspired guesswork)

    My laugh for the week came from Amy MacDonald, who uploaded the audio of one of her new tracks to youtube. Well, sort of... 4:32 of silence. I commented "a cover of 4:33" with a link... and a few hours later the video was removed. I was genuinely saddened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

    912:

    Charlie More likely he's just pantsing it in the hope that something will come up, and when it doesn't, he'll flail wildly. Yeah, I'll go with that, but even so ... it's buying time. ( I think you mean the "1922" committee, don't you? )

    Whitroth THANK YOU for nailing it ... see also ( As I mentioned before ... Philip Glass ) etyc etc ... I also somewhat dislike other parts of GLass' work ...

    913:

    Reply @Robert Pryor

    "I want our goddamned future back.

    Was it Cory Doctorow who said he was expecting more flying cars and fewer fascists?"]

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/10/cory-doctorow-technologists-have-failed-to-listen-to-non-technologists

    ["Q:So whose guidance should we be seeking?

    A:Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains. This is how you get physicists designing models for reopening American schools – because they completely fail to take on board the possibility that students might engage in, say, drunken eyeball-licking parties, which completely trips up the models....']

    And --

    https://slate.com/technology/2020/10/cory-docotorow-sci-fi-intuition-pumps.html

    [....Somehow, I couldn’t help but feel responsible. I’m a science-fiction writer, and I write a lot of disaster stories. Made-up stories, even stories of impossible things, are ways for us to mentally rehearse our responses to different social outcomes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s conception of an intuition pump—“a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem”—suggests that fiction (which is, after all, an elaborate thought experiment) isn’t merely entertainment.*

    That’s true. And it’s a problem…. "]

    914:

    Re: ' ... they were performing new works.'

    In live theatre, 'new' can have a different meaning.

    Took a little break from news yesterday to do some chores ahead of winter. Decided to just let the YT algo on auto pull up the music. Not bad - most of the selections were artists/songs I would have chosen if I had been already familiar with them. Anyways - I've now discovered that there was an updated West Side Story on B'way* and a SKorean version of Jesus Christ Superstar**.

    • Isaac played Tony in the updated WSS which, like all B'way', is currently on hiatus. This kid's straight from college into a B'way male lead role - not bad at all. This is the video YT pulled up; couldn't find a video of him playing Tony.

    ISAAC POWELL sings "ON MY OWN" from LES MISERABLES at MISCAST20

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CGzqOy6BaA

    ** 최재림 MV - Heaven on Their Minds (지저스 크라이스트 수퍼스타)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61w1he9FeoY

    For me, Gethsemane is the show-stopper - and he does a brilliant job of it. (I think I'm going to spend more time/effort looking for non-English performances.)

    박은태 MV - 겟세마네 Gethsemane(지저스 크라이스트 수퍼스타)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD-Kg65yhHg

    915:

    I have a CD of a version of it that was on TV in the sixties. It's that short, becuase it had to fit in a one-hour format. (These days, you have 38 minutes, maybe.)

    It stared as the Lord High Executioner, the role he was born to sing... Groucho. For real. I saw it in my teens, and those fools didn't save the video, only the audio's available.

    916:

    Hildegarde? Hell, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that caused a literal riot on its premier, and that was 1913....

    917:

    Foxessa, it's not all technologists. Please don't leave out who's in charge: MBAs and the plethora of upper management, who tell the technologists what to design for.

    "You want to add that? No, no, that's not going to happen, and it'll cost too much, anyway".

    918:

    I was thinking about works composed in the 21st century, but thanks for those links.

    I quite liked this performance. Sadly, AFAIK it hasn't been recorded.

    https://www.ludwig-van.com/toronto/2019/11/06/preview-cree-sami-culture-meet-operatic-form-soundstreams-two-odysseys/

    919:

    Thanks for those links to Cory Doctorow's musings. (I also quick read his How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism) He's painting with a rather broad brush, and duels with some straw beasts, but overall interesting. (He underestimates the realities of stochastic mind control. In the very small, it's only really doable [artisanally] by rare and skilled sentient persons, but in the large sentiments/narratives/zeitgeists/etc can be and are constructed and manipulated, regularly, if often crudely and unreliably.) As one who has done work in the belly of such beasts, there are a lot of technologists who are quietly skeeved about (the exponential growth of) surveillance capitalism and don't aid or abet it. (And maybe even make some moves to damage it.) Also, while control of monopolies is crucial, there are other tools, IMO. (E.g. boosting general population-level awareness of self(s) (including awareness of ones' emotional responses, and a habit of estimating ones' confidence in the accuracy of ones' thoughts) vs manipulation techniques, which will be an arms race.)

    920:

    A moment of amusement: https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahmarder/steve-martin-already-has-the-best-halloween-costume?origin=web-hf

    The positive spin, Pence has met a being that accepts him for what he is.

    921:

    We've been watching a bunch of Russian TV recently (all sub-titled). Actually, it is pretty good, Detective Anna (currently on IMDB-TV), Silver Spoon (Netflix), Ancestral Lands (was on Amazon Prime, it probably moved by this point) and a bunch of others that are Historical Dramas. It is interesting to me that Russians appears to be trying to re-connect with their past. The dramas seem to be fairly accurate from what little I can tell, not being a historian.

    922:

    This just appeared and might be relevant to considerations of what AI, or just I, is. My expectations of philosophy are generally low but given our profound ignorance of such matters this at least seems to be asking some interesting questions.

    http://dailynous.com/2020/10/15/philosopher-wins-1m-grant-study-human-animal-rationality/ Philosopher Wins £1m Grant to Study Human and Animal Rationality By Justin Weinberg. October 15, 2020 at 12:18 pm Giacomo Melis, a postdoctoral research fellow in philosophy at the University of Stirling, has won funding of just over £1 million (approximately $1.29 million) for his project, Agency, Rationality, and Epistemic Defeat. The funding is in the form of a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship, a government grant program “designed to establish the careers of world-class research and innovation leaders across the UK.” Dr. Melis’ project has, according to a press release, two broad goals: “to develop a theory of rational belief-revision that applies to the various agents discussed in philosophy and cognitive science (thereby developing a common framework for these disciplines); and to design and run new cognitive tests on some presumed unreflective agents (pre-verbal children, pigs, and dogs) aimed at assessing whether they may be capable of some form of reflective thinking.” The project takes an interdisciplinary approach to its subject matter, bringing together analytic epistemology, cognitive developmental psychology, and cognitive ethology, and will involve not just research but also several public-facing lectures and events.
    923:

    Thought this was interesting -- kinda StarTrek-y.

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201006153507.htm

    'Remote control of blood sugar: Electromagnetic fields treat diabetes in animal models

    Study suggests EMFs alter redox signaling to improve insulin sensitivity

    Summary: Researchers may have discovered a safe new way to manage blood sugar non-invasively. Exposing diabetic mice to a combination of static electric and magnetic fields for a few hours per day normalizes blood sugar and insulin resistance. The unexpected and surprising discovery raises the possibility of using electromagnetic fields (EMFs) as a remote control to manage type 2 diabetes.'

    From an SF/conspiracy story POV, lots of possibilities for using the same to cause medical harm.

    Here's the journal link:

    https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(20)30490-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1550413120304903%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

    924:

    Just got And the Last Trump Shall Sound, a collection of three novellas by Harry Turtledove, James Morrow, and Cat Rambo. Looks interesting.

    https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-64710-005-6

    925:

    @ 917: You have criticism of what Cory Doctorow wrote / thought? Then take it up with him, not me.

    927:

    We did tell you that our sense of humor was a little different to yours[0]. It's a Mirror, remember? You get to look back at all the Chekhov Guns and groan that you missed it. But then read MF / USA mainstream reporting on it and wonder if it's worth the bandwidth. For the record: he wasn't making it, he was curating it. But it should tell you something about the societal level the actual creators are playing at.

    UK Queen visits DSTL new Forensic Explosives Investigation lab at Porton Down on the same day the Crime Bill (revision III) passes and the Welsh declare autonomy / border controls! Big Statements from the Firm. It's in the water. And there's a King in the North once more, which is making Sir Kier looking like the bad guy, if you know the series, you'll know which one.

    Anyhow. Actual non-bullshit level stuff:

    Results are in: 90%+ ANNIHILATION vote "less than a month", carried. Big on Democracy in [Redacted] levels. Corals & ACB confirmation & perma-frost & a load of other things carried it.

    does a grep, remember what the penalty was? Being torn apart on the disc of a black hole

    Black hole seen eating star, causing ‘disruption event’ visible in telescopes around the world https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/black-hole-star-space-tidal-disruption-event-telescope-b988845.html Independent 12th Oct 2020.

    Sealed :: and yet the call back is there.

    Not much to say after that one. Apart from retro-actively claiming a 15th Covenant for the reverse clearance count-down of the big Three Abrahamic religions snapping their moves before they made them. Inherent style, inherent grace, it's how we were built.

    16th? Could be Kessler, but you've Icelandic volcanoes making their moves (air industry is toast until 2024 anyhow, might as well get it done) and fun fun fun.

    ~

    Liked Doctorow's Terminator Cat image though. Crude but direct. But, yeah. 90%+. ...Let me tell you about the big beat.... You're Fucked

    Third link: さいのこう。 https://twitter.com/2agent/status/1314135613126242305 ペン 8th Oct 2020 -- it's Glaucus atlanticus, or nudibranches mating (greeeeep)

    Gonna have to pull some moves to beat this rap. (Ice-Cube went Trump: if notable Dem members hadn't been utter dicks to him, guess what?)

    ~

    Anyhow: enjoy the 3000 year old 'Conspiracy theory' get used to trash modern day bullshit Nationalist lies. Hit me up when you spot the next Mind who can do that so easily.

    [0] Note the name: it's the Greek rather then Jewish version. Which is itself a joke about current films (Cleopatra). Hebe / (Heeb/Hebe), see? But no, we mean it as the Goddess, as ever. Hit this up: jewish monotheism was pushed coercively upon my idolatrous anarcho-communist judean ancestors with the aid of the imperialist egyptian ruler akkkenhaten. i am a neo-canaanite. seth is my slave name you can now call me mr moloch https://twitter.com/praisegodbarbon/status/1315734782341513216 Boston Psychology PHD, twitter, Oct 12th 2020. Now go grep for "Village" and garner a taste of what the joke is about 'the Valley(ies.. Welsh...sigh)". Note: you will have to understand some really Byzantine politics, modern PR moves, currents in young JTwitter and a 3000 year old 'Conspiracy Theory' and so on. He's a nice boy, slightly mis-used the weapon, but he grokked it (almost: couldn't cross the line and got the Imperial Player wrong, but soooo close. Couldn't quite ditch the lies about the Big M (there were many other Caanite Gods/esses)). Intelligent and nice boy, which means he's dog-food, of course.

    928:

    Officially it's >10-15%

    17m boom + lots of variables, might hit you a 20-25 (which is huuuge). Won't cascade, might drop a few naughty satellites, potentially a bit of nuke powered junk and a chunk of some Sat coverage and if it gets real spicey, SPACE FORCE and CN naughty laser stuff might just start a tiff because there'd be plenty of cover for it.

    ~

    Trump resurrection narrative and Dem's caving to the Federalists on everything to get Gilead was getting reaaaaaal boring for people wanting a future.

    929:

    Triptych.

    No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn

    The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat): Doors [[ Three links already used today - mod ]]

    930:

    A question: if you're replying to something I posted, why do you just post, and put a post number, rather than hit "reply" on my post? Doing so makes it a lot easier for me to find out what you're replying to, if I need to.

    Several other folks do this as well, and I don't know what - I'm not talking about replying to several posts, just one.

    931:

    [[ Three comments already today - mod ]]

    932:

    Coz reply is broken by the seagull-hiding plugin, so it only matters to some people. And not everyone has been bitten by the renumbering that happens when some poor muggings has to clean up piles of birdshit or other nasties.

    For those not yet bitten: when posts are deleted everything after that gets renumbers, so your "re: 117" can end up pointing to some random post. If you're unlucky it might look kind of relevant but in an offensive way.

    933:

    A question: if you're replying to something I posted, why do you just post, and put a post number, rather than hit "reply" on my post?

    As Moz pointed out, a post number is not always useful.

    The included quotes that you see here are a habit I picked up all the way back in the Usenet days, when a reply could be seen days after (or hours before) the post which it was answering. Ideally every post should be self-contained enough for the reader to have an idea of what the author meant to say and in what context. Obviously this did not always happen but attempting it was a good habit.

    934:

    I see... the way I do in emails.

    Thought it was being rude here....

    935:

    whitroth, the multithreading issue turned out to be in AWS, and it's fixed in the latest version. Centos should get that fix sometime this decade... the coworker who reviewed my code decided to search for bug reports rather than "how send SMS' and eventually found this: https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-cpp/issues/1456

    So he has spent quality time installing the updated libraries that the updated AWS needs, and why we bother with Centos at all continues to not be my problem. I develop on Fedora and as long as someone can make the CI build on Centos that's all I need.

    936:

    "Start of the Kessler cascade tonight?"

    It appears not. This time.

    JHomes.

    937:

    Having reread what you posted, it was espousing what he had said (whether you meant to or not), and whitroth's remark was justified.

    My objections to a lot of science-fiction 'predictions' is that they simply haven't thought things through. In particular, they (and almost all humans) refuse to see that virtually everything exists in a linked system (essentially an ecology analogue). Flying cars are one such imbecility - yes, they are feasible in Wyoming, Siberia or the Australian outback, but there is just no way they make sense in most of Europe or near the urban areas of the USA. Even Kipling's ones made sense only in terms of car ownership in 1905.

    What someone was trained as or is employed as is FAR less important than you they think. Ecologically-minded polymaths are the ones who are best at such things.

    938:

    Going back to encryption, child pornography and financial crimes, this. Just how much the "proprietary encrypted email system" really had to do with the matter isn't totally obvious, but it's at least mentioned.

    Houston tech mogul Robert Brockman charged in record U.S. tax evasion scheme By Sarah N. Lynch October 15, 202012:53 PM WASHINGTON, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Houston technology executive Robert Brockman has been charged in the biggest tax evasion case in U.S. history after fellow billionaire Robert Smith turned against him to avoid prosecution himself, the Justice Department said on Thursday. Brockman, the 79-year-old chief executive of Ohio-based Reynolds and Reynolds Co, is alleged in an indictment unsealed on Thursday to have hidden $2 billion in income from the Internal Revenue Service over two decades, using a web of off-shore companies in Bermuda and St. Kitts and Nevis. Reynolds and Reynolds provides software used by auto dealerships to help manage their business. The indictment alleges Brockman appointed nominees to manage the off-shore entities for him as a means of hiding his involvement, saying he even went so far as to establish a proprietary encrypted email system and use code words such as “Permit,” “Red fish” and “Snapper” to communicate. He faces seven counts of tax evasion, six counts of failing to file reports disclosing foreign bank accounts, and numerous other counts including wire fraud, money laundering and evidence tampering.
    939:

    Moz @935: ...and why we bother with Centos at all continues to not be my problem. I develop on Fedora...

    I have to remind our out-sourced developers not to use Fedora (or Ubuntu or Debian or (insert whatever is Linux flavour-of-the-month", it's not terribly useful when your customers are running (in the Linux space) Redhat 6 and 7 (and now 8), because, well, there are features in the bleeding-edge that didn't exist five minutes ago.

    We use mainly C, with an unfortunately increasing use of C++, and every now and then I have to point out that using GCC/G++ isms is just not portable to Solaris/AIX/HP-UX systems that can't/won't have be updated to the latest Garbage Compiler Collection libraries, and we get quite a bit of income from those solidly stuck-in-the-mud customers. :-)

    And Centos is often better than it's Redhat equivalent, RH8 was missing many shared objects, but Centos 8 wasn't - and I'm not talking about EPEL, this was core stuff - so some of our release notes include lines like, "If you wish to use feature X on Redhat 8, you will have download and install the following packages from ..." which usually stops them using feature X, because, of course, who is going to verify the packages are suitable for deployment across the whole data centre. :-)

    940:

    Just how much the "proprietary encrypted email system" really had to do with the matter isn't totally obvious,

    OK, I found the indictment linked at

    https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ceo-multibillion-dollar-software-company-indicted-decades-long-tax-evasion-and-wire-fraud

    and it contains numerous instances of "BROCKMAN, using his encrypted email system..."

    So apparently encryption did play a significant role.

    941:

    Thanks for this!

    I see two happy-fun questions and a sad note about this case.

    The happy fun notes are Schneier's frequent comment that proprietary encryption does not necessarily mean the best, so it's an open question whether the government just cracked his junk(?) and read the emails, or whether they flipped someone else in the conspiracy and thereby nailed him. I'm actually betting the latter, but they'll find out.

    The other happy fun note is that there's trillions of dollars hiding out there in the islands, so I'm happy to hear see that, even now, the feds are going after the wealth management industry that's been proliferating since the 1980s. A lot of good can be accomplished by on-shoring those funds all over the world. It's not just about money, it's about political influence, corruption, and the over-sized impact billionaires are having on things as diverse as climate change.

    My sad thoughts are for the jurors who are going to have to hear this criminal case. My wife got shanghaied into a month-long fraud case that appears less complex than this mess. I don't envy the fourteen who'll have to deal with this mess, especially the alternates who will sit through it and then go away, having lost months of their lives.

    942:

    whether they flipped someone else in the conspiracy and thereby nailed him. I'm actually betting the latter

    Me too. A certain Individual One plays a prominent role in the indictment and a modest amount of research locates a good candidate for who that was.

    https://www.fa-mag.com/news/billionaire-robert-smith-fighting-u-s--criminal-tax-inquiry-57610.html

    943:

    Missed Moz's original reply to me. I use CentOS, as we did at my late job.

    I do not want fedora - that's bleeding edge. I want to do things on my computer other than work on the o/s. And running an organization that's not doing software development other than in-house stuff, not o/s level, I would never put on fedora... or, for that matter, an odd release of Ubuntu (i.e. 17 or 19) - nothing other than LTS (long term support). I do not want 7 updates today, and 15 in two days, including fixes for some of today's 7.

    And no one should be running CentOS 6 - really, really, as much as I didn't want to go to freakin' systemd, 6 is about to be EOL the end of November.

    944:

    Meanwhile, I'm beginning to wonder if the Black Pharoah would be in improvement on BoZo the clown & the really unpleasant people in his shadow. Either he's getting really ready to trumpet "No Deal" - with more than 2 months to go, or he's going to pivot at the last moment - & I'm beginning to agree with Charlie that we are, indeed, fucked as a nation. I wonder IF I can get Scottish citizenship, if/when the dust settles & if I'm still alive, of course. What with the food riots we WILL get in late January or early Feb, if this goes on & C-19 totally out of control, anything is possible & almost none of it good.

    945:

    Scott Sanford @ 933:

    A question: if you're replying to something I posted, why do you just post, and put a post number, rather than hit "reply" on my post?

    As Moz pointed out, a post number is not always useful.

    The included quotes that you see here are a habit I picked up all the way back in the Usenet days, when a reply could be seen days after (or hours before) the post which it was answering. Ideally every post should be self-contained enough for the reader to have an idea of what the author meant to say and in what context. Obviously this did not always happen but attempting it was a good habit.

    The post numbers are somewhat helpful when someone makes a lot of posts & it gives you the vicinity to look at even if there are number changes due to the moderators deleting SPAM. I use the reply button, include a post number (the number I saw when replying) and quoted text all to give others some clue what I'm replying to.

    I still occasionally take a look at Usenet. Not much there anymore in the ALT hierarchy. I guess they're all on Fakebook now.

    946:

    JHomes @ 936:

    "Start of the Kessler cascade tonight?"

    It appears not. This time.

    How hard might it be to build a system that could rendezvous with stuff like worn out rocket bodies & defunct satellites, clamp on to them and de-orbit them so they could burn up? For it to be cost effective you'd want something that could grab hold & do a de-orbit burn before releasing the object and boosting back to orbital speed to go hunting another piece of junk.

    For it to be effective, I guess you'd need several different models, maybe something with a net to collect smaller pieces & when the net gets full, just bring them all back.

    Would it be possible to control the reentry well enough to have it crash into a designated piece of desert somewhere so the materials could be recovered & recycled?

    947:

    Allen Thomson @ 940:

    Just how much the "proprietary encrypted email system" really had to do with the matter isn't totally obvious,

    OK, I found the indictment linked at

    https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ceo-multibillion-dollar-software-company-indicted-decades-long-tax-evasion-and-wire-fraud

    and it contains numerous instances of "BROCKMAN, using his encrypted email system..."

    So apparently encryption did play a significant role.

    It seems to be based on the premise that the US Government scans (reads?) ALL email & telephone traffic originating/terminating within or passing through the U.S. and the encryption was intended to thwart that surveillance. I don't think the encryption in and of itself was illegal, it was the communications it was concealing that were illegal.

    Using the encrypted system is evidence he intentionally evaded taxes. As I understand it, proving white collar crimes often hinges on proving the accused KNEW he was breaking the law & INTENDED to do so.

    948:

    Flying cars are one such imbecility - yes, they are feasible in Wyoming, Siberia or the Australian outback, but there is just no way they make sense in most of Europe or near the urban areas of the USA.

    Not coincidentally, small private planes are very popular in Alaska. Cars will get you around Anchorage but moving around the state requires air travel. Air taxi services are quite common in Alaska, for those who don't own their own aircraft.

    Even in the US not everyone understands Alaska. Back in 2008, despite many real reasons to criticize Sarah Palin, some people complained about her travels around the state by private plane. That would be a silly and extravagant way to get around New Hampshire or Delaware but it's practical and rational if one is visiting Alaskan communities.

    949:

    Not a great day around here computer wise:

    Got up this "morning" to discover one of the disks in my NAS has died. Fortunately, it's a RAID-1 mirror, so I haven't lost data yet and I was already in the process of copying that data onto another hard-drive. In fact, I think the stress of copying & verifying the copy may have been what did in the disk.

    I'm in the middle of building a file server to store the data (mostly photographs & MP3 music files, but a few documents & spreadsheet inventories.

    The new server will be set up with RAID-6 (2 disks of fault tolerance); actually 2x5 disks in 2 RAID-6 configurations because I still don't have a workable backup scheme. It's probably going to be the last computer I ever build.

    For backups I used to just copy everything to an external hard-drive & take it over to my Mom's house on Sundays (and collect the disk I left there the previous week). But Mom died & I don't have another relative close enough I feel like visiting. I no longer have anywhere to take the backup disks.

    I have two IcyDock 5 in 3 drive cages (so each RAID-6 can have 5 drives) and I have ordered two of these:

    https://www.newegg.com/riitop-model-pces36p-cb-pci-express-controller-card/p/17Z-0061-00072?Description=PCI%20Express%20X1%20Sata%20cards&cm_re=PCI_Express%20X1%20Sata%20cards-_-9SIA6V8A3D1658-_-Product

    ... because the mother board I plan to use (salvaged from a HP Pavilion a4000) has two PCI Express x1 slots. It only has 512MB RAM, but I'm not going to be streaming from it. It's just for storage. I have a 750W modular power supply which should be enough to power the drives. I'll be using a 120GB SSD for the OS (because I have a spare one on hand). And I have spare monitors, keyboards & mice, etc.

    I just need to figure out which OS (which flavor of Linux) to install on it. I expect the RAID will be some kind of software configuration using multiple SATA drives. I want something I can easily install; map as a network drive from my actual computers and then just leave alone.

    I've taken so long building it, I'm already going to have to replace the first set of drives (5x2TB NAS drives) I bought for it. I'm looking at some 4TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives. I favor Seagate over WD because I've had more problems with WD drives in the past.

    What do y'all think?

    950:

    Most of the stuff up there, if de-orbited, is probably small enough to burn up on re-entry, so keeping it intact to the ground is a challenge.

    Strapping something onto a bit of debris means that you have to match its velocity, which takes a fair amount of resources.

    My four (admittedly SFF) suggestions are: 1. Ground-based lasers. For a certain class of sizes and materials, boiling the sucker might be a good way to de-orbit it. The stuff boiled off has to be too small to damage and the delta V has to be sufficient that it goes into the atmosphere. The downside is that I don't think anyone particularly wants to be known to be that good at shooting things with lasers.

    B. Ye old ball of aerogel/balloons. The idea is to make a cheap-ass whipple shield that will shred and capture stuff that hits it without shedding more material, then deorbit this. Probably it's easier to make a cluster of balloons than a gigantic ball of aerogel, but basically, as with the old ECHO satellites, you want something that inflates in orbit, is tough enough to cause anything that hits it to turn into plasma (delta V goodness), and is also tough enough to capture the resulting fireball without spalling lots of material in turn. Don't know if that's possible (I think the answer with aerogel is, erm, no), but I like blowing bubbles.

    III. The electromagnetic whale. I seem to recall a scoop shaped ship for capturing materials slung off the moon and slowing them down for making space stations. This is a similar idea: a large, funnel-shaped framework holding a bunch of electrified loops, to put a charge on, then slow down, anything going into the funnel mouth, then to shunt the now slowed material down into the atmosphere to burn up. Getting something of this scale into space would be fun in so many interesting ways.

    Delta: a variation on John Powell's Airship to Orbit scheme. What I'm thinking is that crazy bit, where he uses a two mile-long V-shaped airship that's basically made out of plastic film, hydrogen, and VASIMR engines, that slowly accelerates to escape velocity over the course of a few days while climbing out of the atmosphere to dock at a space station. If such a beast could fly, rigging it as a catch balloon or as an electrowhale might be comparatively easy. At that point, we actually do have a way to fly something up and get the crap it collects taken back to Earth. Assuming you can accelerate a semi-dirigible to orbit starting well over 100,000 feet, which is one of those cheerful assumptions.

    Better ideas? There's got to be some out there.

    951:

    That's mean.

    The rules were no more than three (3) links per post (with explanation) ((which we do try to follow)) and no more than three posts per day and you cut off the goooood stuff. Hey, not our rules and you can do anything you want, but 'meh'. And the fourth post wasn't even us, it was a free-rider, since we posted the Nice and Accurate and (also true) %stats for an Event that Wasn't Going To Happen but hey, here's a bit of Calm-Juice stuff to cut the heart attacks out.

    Watching the Smart Brain[tm] Humans work it all out in real-time was interesting, you really need to give your Scientists better computing power, there were Insurance outfits modelling it faster than them[0].

    Look: when we make a 'gag' about "disabled" (while stating "that's not an insult, we would be proud to be one of you"), chances are we're on your side:

    This is appalling, Starmer’s team leaving disabled people to fend for themselves: Labour waters down criticism of government by its own shadow disability minister – removing all reference to trade unions, and the term ‘discrimination’ https://twitter.com/DawnHFoster/status/1317159504962879489 -- She got fired from Graun + any MSM for being "too lefty" and she's about as lefty as a normal Secretary of State in 1957. But that's a real charity link, and they're going full (as if prior 10 years of Bald-driven nose-pick eating crappy state funds wasn't enough) elimination.

    We're just front-running.

    UK people, you're getting slaughtered out there. One of the sweetest kindest Souls we've ever met was a young woman from the UK who had X, Y, Z. Genuinely.

    All we want to know is one thing: Why do you let your Reality Do This?

    Becky is pregnant

    ~

    If it really is "all a grift" (universally) then - why not play with Our Stuff? It's not hard to break models and Minds, is it now, SIS?

    Literally destroyed our futures for this shit.

    [0] https://www.swissre.com/media/news-releases/nr-20200923-biodiversity-and-ecosystems-services.html -- Auz, IS, kinda like... everyone fucking knows by now, thus all the panic treaties.

    952:

    Note: current log-in name / password aren't targeted @ Host, they're targeted at the people Info-Bubbling. And Dr Cow just soiled his card with a re-bubble of that terrible reversed pyramid nonsense:

    If you think it's funny, and if you think that doesn't have effects, and if you think Penis Cream Skin Care (actually a sub-spin off of an entire fucking Corporate hegemony that both includes skin grafts (good) and snake-oil-to-skin-damamged-Florida-Grannies (bad) then we've a huge scoop for you).

    Know what the sad thing is? Can't even be counter-culture these days without bowing to "Big Skin" where skin crafts (UK tech, natch - used to be one of the UK's specialties) now cost $millions, the people spinning the tech into Facials (ho-ho-ho, Mad Men, 2017) are also working to prevent decent skin-graft tech becoming cheap and knowing exactly who is big in "Big Skin" in South Korea (hint: fucking Christian Radicals...) and so on..

    Can't even be against all of that, in case some fucking muppet from the ADL thinks it might harm their cause.

    And then: you post nonsense about it with a big sticker saying "ANTISEMITISM HERE" for the bug-bears to find.

    You're not smart. You're fucking stupid. And the next FBI sponsored bomb that actually has some real talent behind it? Yeah: your BAG baby.

    The FBI only catch the stupids is a fucking ancient tale.

    ~

    Ohhh. Didn't quite catch that Fishmonger move, did you now? λόγος .... We do like him though. All 5' "manlet" of him. Rawwwr

    Actual important bit: 90%, 3 weeks.

    FinTwit noses are twinkling.

    953:

    B is not really viable, whatever method you use needs to be able to selectively deal with debris and not just clear out an entire orbit. People will tend to get a bit upset if you collect their brand new fully working Shiney (tm) satellite and dispose of it a week after it was launched. Lasers in space have actually had a lot of thought put into them. They don't need to be particularly powerful as what you want to do is vapourise a bit of material on the front of the object so it acts as a retro rocket and drops the object into a lower orbit. Probably not viable for dealing with an 8 tonne Envisat but just the thing for the random few centimetre/few tens of grammes objects that will give you a really bad day if they hit at the wrong angle.

    SSTL launched the RemoveDEBRIS experiment via the ISS a couple of years ago which tried out various methods of capture including a harpoon, a net and a drag sail, althoug it carried its own targets rather than using actual debris.

    954:

    I saw a proposal years ago that had a satellite attach a small reel of electrically conductive braided string. The string unwinds and drags against the magnetic field of the earth, deorbiting the satellite.

    It was initially thought to be installed on satellites as an end of life deorbiter being lighter, cheaper easier and more reliable than a rocket motor, but there's no reason a hunter sat couldn't have a bunch of them that it could atach to dead sats with sticky tape. Elon's starlink platform has most of what's needed. An ion drive, a map of junk and some smarts. Currently they're actively avoiding junk, but they could be programed to hunt it instead.

    955:

    Oh, and last one.

    For Host, along the lines of the Cruise Ship drama:

    The H. Biden drops are 100% real, put onto a format that allows denial, flags up all the nice spicey people for the (faaaaaaaaailing Democratic run) and don't even cover the spicey stuff you can get easily if you bribe a member of Служба безпеки України. (Which is... basically a given at this point).

    Want H. Biden high as a kite in a Ukraine strip club getting a blow job? Current rate: $5000 (being generous).

    L'Orange even said to B that "we have all the tapes" etc, live on air. He wasn't talking about the Murdoch drooling-Mind sanctioned versions released for the gullible public.

    Hint: Getting failsons on camera doing bribery is like why certain failsons are sent to other countries, it's a version of the Anglo-Saxon child exchange programs(hello Bibi's little Man, stripclubbribediscussionoildeal19.mp4) doing this stuff is standard M.O. practice.

    100% no-one is shocked that H. Biden is a horny fucker who does drugs. Absolutely no-one.

    What's it's actually signalling is that the 0.1% don't give a flying fuck about conventions anymore, and it's going to get messy.

    90% - 3 Weeks.

    Do a grep. 100% none of these fuckers are going to survive it.

    956:

    Of course almost all the proposals deal with deorbiting the big chunks early rather than waiting until they're all smashed into millions of invisible bits of deadly shrapnel.

    Knowing humans, exactly nothing at all will be done at the stage where something can be done.

    Maybe after it all goes to shit we'll do something like load starship up with lots of liquid air and just keep bouncing it straight up and down to make big clouds of gas that last a few minutes in the orbital plane. Any tiny things that run through it would be slowed by the few metres per second needed to deorbit.

    But that would be a long slow expensive recovery from a problem we shouldn't have caused in the first place because its been perfectly obvious to everyone for many decades. (like so many problems).

    957:

    What do y'all think?

    I want one :-)

    958:

    Redhat 6 and 7 ... We use mainly C, with an unfortunately increasing use of C++ ... And Centos is often better than it's Redhat equivalent, RH8 was missing many shared objects, but Centos 8 wasn't

    We are slowly migrating to Centos 8 as it stabilises and we manage to compile various libraries using that. The trouble with stable and LTS is that it means you're really limited in your choice of third party tools. A lot of open source stuff just doesn't support 5 year old OS's, let alone proper enterprise ones. AWS are kind of typical in some respects: you have have the latest security fixes, or you can run on legacy OS's. The contortions OpenSSL went thru a while ago to get a critical fix backported to Centos 6 were pretty horrible.

    I'm using C++ as a compromise between a modern language and one that supports what I need to do. If I'd started this project a year later it would probably be 100% Rust. But if you can get even C++17 and contort yourself a little C++ is almost a modern language, at least in places.

    And seriously, why do you care what OS your developers use? Do you not have a dedicated build environment with some kind of automation so that only code that you can use passes your tests?

    The project I work on is tiny, but we still have to support three versions of the code, often on different variations of Centos, and that's not something I have to worry about directly - I commit code changes, the CI system checks them out and builds them ... 12 different ways... the various integration/system tests run, and if something goes wrong I get an abusive email "wah wah wah the clang thread sanitiser says 'your code is no good'. You have to fix it. Your robot overlord is displeased. Signed, robot"

    959:

    Not coincidentally, small private planes are very popular in Alaska.

    Same in straya, mate. Some people have wee helicopters as well/instead, because they're useful for chasing big hairy beasties around but they also work for travel. We don't quite have an electorate the size of Alaska, but some of the rural ones are bit silly... you could drop Belgium in and lose it sort of scale (no, that is not a suggestion for how to deal with the EU).

    960:

    Using the encrypted system is evidence he intentionally evaded taxes. As I understand it, proving white collar crimes often hinges on proving the accused KNEW he was breaking the law & INTENDED to do so.

    Which may be part of the upset about encrypted-by-default. IF your phone, laptop and all your online communications are encrypted because that's how they're set up out of the box, that fact no longer tells you anything useful.

    Of course, the lack of encryption of the hardware merely tells you that the person who has (not) set it up that way doesn't value their privacy and is happy to have the contents of the device made public. Or at least, is not willing to exert even the most minimal effort to avoid that outcome.

    My ex, despite being largely one of those people, still managed to memorise a ~10 word sentence with a couple of spelling mistakes in it, in order to boot the desktop computer. Which she still has, still encrypted. She caused a minor stir at her last job when they gave her a laptop and her first question was "what's the password to boot the OS" and followed it up with some polite version of "what? Are you complete fucking morons?" when told it wasn't encrypted. It's one of those things that is obvious once it's pointed out... if you lose it, what exactly has been taken?

    961:

    MODERATORS Seagull - currently at 955 Appears to be insane ( Even more than usual ) claiming that Biden is corrupt & drug-riddled & that Orange El Trumpolini is going to win. DO we REALLY have to put up with this?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    In the meantime, any answers to my Q's @ 944? Pundits are suggesting "A giant game of "Chicken" which could go horribly wrong" - including the Speccie - & if they are worried, it shows that BoZo is completely out of control Incidentally, in case people have not noticed, he's actually a vicious little shit. [ Just better at hiding it than DJT - so far. ... Deselecting & ejecting a tiry MP for opposing failingGrayling ... A campaign against London, now he's no longer Mayor - expressed in several ways ... His ongoing dislike of the BBC, because they dared to ask awkward questions

    962:

    Nonsense. H. Biden is not what anyone else means by just "Biden". Her drooling over a self-admitted addict's humiliation is distasteful, but not news. She didn't say that Trump was going to win, but that there would be civil disorder and, regrettably, that is almost certain. Actually, I am horribly afraid that Trump IS going to succeed.

    As you really ought to have realised by now, Bozo is an irrelevance - he is just a front for the fascists and corporate gangsters. Things will not get better when we get Premier for Life Patel, which is looking increasingly horribly plausible.

    963:

    You don't have to put up with the troll mister Tingey. Just do like I do: When I see its name above a posting I jump over it, without reading a single word.

    964:

    EC Thank you for the translation ... which should not have been necessary, of course, if people would speak plainly. As to "civil disorder" - I agree, as when Biden wins the fascist nutters will try to erupt & there will be troubke .... Depends upon what you mean by "succeeed" of course - I don't think DJT will come anywhere near winning the actual vote, even restricted as it is, but the shenaningans, especially of the RC female fascist is put on the Supreme Court could be very disruptive indeed. Agree that Patel os a fascist, but I don't think she will make it to the top.

    Question: How, in a "democracy" when a government still has well over 3 years to run, but it's onbvious that : 1) They haven't a fucking clue ( C-19 + Brexshit ) 2) They really did lie to everyone for 4 years 3) We have food riots on the streets 4) They cannot be unseated, because turkeys don't vote for Xmas?

    Consider 1940 The tories were prepared to accept a new leader, from their own disaffected ranks ( Churchill ) - who was solidlybacked by Attlee & Labour. That does not apply now, because BoZo has purged the tory party Consider 1776-82 Lord North was, eventually forced out, after the greatest disaster of Brit political history since the Civil Wars. But Britain herself was never threatened. I think we have to go back to a very distant past, to find a leader who was simultaneously so arrogant, smug, incompetent & vicious. 1211-15 John Plantagenet. NOT a pleasant thought. Who is our William Marshal to save us?

    965:

    You are too optimistic. Look at the way even very modest amendments to the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill were voted down, and what that implies. Those shits would love Patel as PM. As I posted in 2016:

    Who groans beneath the Empire's curse, And strangles in the strings of purse, Before she mends must suffer worse.

    Her living mouth shall breed blue flies, And maggots creep about her eyes. No man shall mark the day she dies.

    69 in http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of-life-and-death.html
    966:

    JBS @949: ... it's a RAID-1 mirror, so I haven't lost data yet

    What do y'all think?

    967:

    Trying again...

    JBS @949: ... it's a RAID-1 mirror, so I haven't lost data yet

    Disclaimer: I used to be in storage at SGI, paranoia was a way of life!

    I don't trust mirroring for data storage, it's great for boot disks, when you want systems to stay up or come back up quickly, but prefer RAID5+ for storage, with a hot spare or two, as well.

    That said, mirroring in ZFS (which I run on my Solaris system at home) and BtrFS is a much better thing as they use checksums to tell you whether the data is valid, which is always good to know. :-)

    What do y'all think?

    RAID arrays built on big drives, as re-building an array can push you past the survival time of the other disks, but RAID6 and higher do mitigate this, and hot spares help even more.

    At home I use stuff like this: "LSI 9240-8i 6Gbps SAS HBA FW:P20 9211-8i IT Mode", and software RAID, so if it goes blooie I don't have to track down an identical controller, all I need is enough SAS/SATA ports somewhere and I can carry on.

    I've also found that cheap HBAs cost you more in the long run, getting Dell/HP/IBM controllers (re-furbished, if new is out of your budget) is the way to go.

    There's another thing I don't like - Hardware RAID makes everything worse, you need to have spare controllers as well! But you aren't doing that, so it doesn't matter :-)

    It looks like it will all work, modulo the no-name HBAs, they might be fine.

    I use iDrive cloud backup, they've currently got a deal going giving 10TB for USD99 per year, seems to be the best value ATM.

    968:

    Not disagreeing, except that the leader of the Conservatives has to be voted on by the membership. I suspect she is too brown for them, especially after the recent UKIP entryism. Same goes for Sunak; and I also suspect that was a factor in Johnson's choice of them.

    969:

    I don't think that you realise what the membership has turned into, nor just how much of a figurehead Johnson is.

    The former was dying of old age until the extremists launched a recruitment campaign - though it's still tiny. From what I can find, at least 30% and possibly 50% are likely to be extremists.

    https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05125/

    While Johnson COULD have faced down the extremists and appointed a more balanced cabinet, he is a spineless creep (among other failings) and it was much easier just to rely on the ERG and other extremists for support. They are now exacting their price.

    In politics, victory (however obtained) enhances power, and my prediction for the next leader election (assuming it comes in 2021) is that Patel will beat Gove and Sunak will have fallen by the wayside.

    970:

    You may well be right.
    The sane move, from my reading of the party (I'm not a member), is to push Hunt into No. 10 and put the blame for both Brexit and the Covid failure on Johnson.
    But your expectation of sanity from them is much the same as mine.

    971:

    For a very limited interpretation of 'sane', perhaps. Remember who was responsible for suppressing the results of Exercise Cygnus, ensuring that its recommendations were not followed, and giving us the highest COVID death rate among health workers in the developed world.

    972:

    Moz @958: And seriously, why do you care what OS your developers use? Do you not have a dedicated build environment with some kind of automation so that only code that you can use passes your tests?

    Of course we have a build farm, and test harnesses, and automate things as much as possible, but when the developers deliver something they've written, we have to get it to build, and not just on Linux systems. Our customers are large banks and other financial institutions, government departments, data centres, and the like. And that includes Azure, AWS, and our own cloudy offerings.

    You can't tell these people, "Just upgrade," the won't.

    There's about 15,000,000 lines of C, C++, PHP, PERL, Python, shell, CMD, Powershell, and internal languages code in one of our products, and then we build various OSS bits, such as OpenSSL, ourselves, to ensure that every body feels nice and secure, and yes, getting the latest OSS stuff to build on an old OS is difficult, but our customers deprecate things until they rust away, so it keeps me gainfully employed. :-)

    We have Redhat 5 (32- and 64-bit), 7 (64-bit), 8 (64-bit), Solaris SPARC 10 (64- and 32-bit), AIX 7 (32-bit), and Windows Server 2K16 (32- and 64-bit), as our "we can deliver it today" systems.

    Then someone sells an HP-UX 11 license - Is it PA-RISC or Itanic??, or, a SLES10 license, and I keep Solaris 8 and 9 zones, and a Win2K8 server VM alive, just in case...

    So some eejit writes some code that uses some bleeding-edge feature... Often, it doesn't compile, but then we have to work out why, and tell them how to fix it (unfortunately, they're allowed to say, "But it works on my machine!" - I had nothing to do with the contracts, it was all SNAFUed before my time, and pointing out stupidity at that managerial level is a career-limiting move).

    Of course, failure to build is easy, less so is working out just why something that has worked for a couple of decades has started failing, and in different ways on different systems.

    I used to think wrangling 10,000 small-ish customers was a problem, it was a doddle, a few dozen REALLY FSCKING BIG ONES is much, much harder.

    973:

    Indeed. "Sane", in this context, means "capable of winning the next election"; assuming there are any.

    974:

    gasdive @ 956:

    Of course almost all the proposals deal with deorbiting the big chunks early rather than waiting until they're all smashed into millions of invisible bits of deadly shrapnel. Knowing humans, exactly nothing at all will be done at the stage where something can be done.

    Actually its probably easier after the Kessler event. Right now de-orbiting space junk means each bit of junk needs a separate mission, right down to whatever you can track on radar. Doing that without creating junk faster than you de-orbit stuff is going to be a challenge, never mind the scale of the problem.

    As of January 2019, more than 128 million pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in), about 900,000 pieces of debris 1–10 cm, and around 34,000 of pieces larger than 10 cm were estimated to be in orbit around the Earth. [Wikipedia]

    Once everything useful in LEO is shredded you don't have that problem any more. You can put up big sheets of kevlar or whatever in retrograde orbit and let them vaporise the small stuff and give the big stuff enough of a knock to de-orbit. Anything left is going to be big enough that you can either continue tracking it or else send up something to grapple and deorbit it individually.

    975:

    At those impact speeds, the material is almost irrelevant, though something that would sublime (eventually) would be better, as it wouldn't leave long-term junk in orbit.

    976:

    EC @ 969 I think your numbers are too pessimistic ( from our p.o.v. that is ) but you are correct. Fascists have entryised what was once the Conservative Party in the way that the Marxists have tried twice with Labour & failed ... but it looks horribly as if they have succeeded this time. OTOH, BoZo is not quite as spineless as you may think - remember what I said about him being a vicious little shit? He's amazingly slippery - someone with his record of lying, cheating & betraying promises simply should not have made it this far. He's quite capable, if it really looks like he's going down to an even-further-to-the-right internal coup of asking for a Prorogation, just out of spite, if he's not going to be in charge any more.

    On the other side of the Pond, it looks as though DJT's nasties are going to try to replay the "Hilary emails" &/or "James Comey" fake scandal in a re-run, to try to get voters to switch back - it worked last time, but then - so did a lot of other things.

    977:

    I’m so pleased I’ve managed to spend almost all my career writing Smalltalk. I mean, sure, I’ve had to do a great deal of scary C and assembly and stuff to make it possible but, wow, so much less pain overall. We have a little snark “Java - the best argument for Smalltalk since C++” Or perhaps one prefers “C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce”

    978:

    With regard to the matter of de-orbiting the junk materials in earth orbit, high, low, or otherwise: it seems to me that de-orbiting into the atmosphere just pollutes the upper atmosphere with a large supply of various elements, especially heavy metals. Does "burning up in the atmosphere" reduce the various atoms back to individual neutrons, protons and electrons? If not, we are just leaving a lot of dust in the upper atmosphere, which will slowly drift down to the lower atmosphere where we live. The discussion of orbital junk describes it in terms of size, but what is the mass of the orbital junk, that we plan to distribute into the atmosphere? I would suggest a possibly harder, but more useful solution: de-orbit it in the other direction, and take it to the moon, to be used as feedstock for research stations and colonies (if ever) there.

    Given the current climate crisis, where we have used the lower atmosphere as a heat sink for industry, why use the upper atmosphere as a sink for orbital junk? I am sure if James Watt had been asked about escaping steam he would have said "What's the problem? It is just a little heat!"

    Frank.

    979:

    Uh-oh. I think I just spotted a crack in the simulator - I just dropped a slice of buttered toast and it didn’t land butter side down. This could be so very bad...

    980:

    Actually, to do a somewhat deeper dive (thanks to JP Powell's Floating To Orbit)...

    Yes, there's a lot of dust in the atmosphere. Among other things, it's what helps nucleate raindrops and ice crystals. There's also quite a lot of life in the upper atmosphere too, mostly bacteria.

    The interesting thing is that meteors burn up in the mesosphere (50-80 km up). It also turns out there are bacteria at that altitude, something scientists discovered over 40 years ago but have not really explored. Estimates for the density of bacteria in the upper atmosphere are rather jaw dropping, actually, though not on par with estimates of bacteria in the deep biosphere.

    So yes, stuff falling through the atmosphere turns into an atomic plasma (aka burns up). Some of it stays up there, especially the gases. Some of it ends up on the surface (mostly in the oceans) as dust and bigger debris. And some of it apparently gets consumed by bacteria that live at high elevations.

    While I agree it's wasteful to basically burn your orbital trash, I suspect that in many cases, it's probably the more cost-effective than trying to recycle it, since doing the latter involves a massive change in velocity, which in turn needs a lot of energy of its own.

    981:

    You're probably right. Sort of. What you really want to do is turn everything that could be lethal while moving at 10 km/sec into plasma. If you do it wrong, the shower of debris from your "junk collecting" collision actually makes the problem worse.

    SOmething like a whipple shield (10 layers of thin mylar over a layer or two of kevlar) would work. Basically the object hits the shield, vaporizes while making a hole in the shield, and then the spray of crap passes through secondary vaporizers until the tiny bits hit the kevlar.

    This is why I suggested a cluster of balloons. Getting the geometry of a whipple shield to unfold is tricky. The shield works because there is space between thin layers, and it's less useful if it gets wrinkled. Simulating that shield by blowing up a cluster of mylar balloons might work better and is possible using 1960s technology. What they did with things like the ECHO balloons was to blow them up, let them harden, then suck the gas back in, leaving effectively a mylar shell around a decent vacuum.

    What I'm thinking about is a cluster of balloons deployed around a satellite bus covered with kevlar, so that the vacuum balloons catch the debris, the kevlar inside stops stuff that's medium sized, and the inside of the satellite reuses the store of gas from balloon inflation to maneuver and ultimately to deorbit the collector when it is shredded enough to start becoming a source rather than a sink for debris.

    982:

    0.1% don't give a flying fuck about conventions anymore, and it's going to get messy. Not looking forward to this. Hard choices will need to be made, by many. I have, however, been enjoying(well, [seeing], with satisfaction) the Trump administration(/campaign) "Reign of Error". UK, similar, though the Brexit pain will not be good.

    If it really is "all a grift" (universally) then - why not play with Our Stuff? It's not hard to break models and Minds, is it now, SIS? It is not universally "all a grift". There are, however, (a lot of) models and Minds that ... need breaking.

    Now... we have to do a bit of magic (I captured that thread.) I won't fib, the (local) chaff and related are tiring for me to parse, though usually quite artful. (Some thanks long due, now expressed.) (I don't see most of the elsewhere.)

    The Glaucus atlanticus video/bit was wonderful[1]. (and ZE IS Not POOR.)

    [1] got me rabbit-holing, e.g. New Interpretation of a Nudibranch Central Nervous System Based on Ultrastructural Analysis of Neurodevelopment in Melibe leonina. I. Cerebral and Visceral Loop Ganglia (1992 Jun)

    983:

    This piece is good: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic? (Jeffrey Shaman, Marta Galanti, Science, 14 Oct 2020) Nice short abstract: "Reinfection, seasonality, and viral competition will shape endemic transmission patterns" Short, moderately dense, and helpful article, that clearly describes a bunch of dynamics involved, and clearly introduces the relevant vocabulary. (Not a virologist, so I'm assuming it's correct.) In single-chart form: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2020/10/13/science.abe5960/F1.large.jpg

    984:

    Rough estimates reckon about 18,000 tonnes have been launched into orbit and ESA think about 8,800 tonnes remain. A fair bit of that mass is up at geostationary orbit and a decent percentage of aging payloads up there make it into a graveyard orbit another 300km or so out where they'll slowly drift further out and away.

    985:

    unfortunately, they're allowed to say, "But it works on my machine!" - I had nothing to do with the contracts

    I think that's your problem. Even for that brief nightmarish interval where I worked for a big bank, the rule was "you haven't finished writing it until it passes all the builds".

    Of course, what that meant was that things that passed all the steps were the problem. Luckily I only once had "tens of thousands of branches are using software that gives wrong answers. We need to fix this. Urgently. You, you, and Moz, start working on the fix. You, review their fix. Moz, stay and supervise the build and deployment". {12 hours later} "I think that's done it". At least my boss had the decency to hang round and help for the duration (and actual help, like "it's been three hours. You need to pause, get up, walk round" and of course "forget pizza, there are proper restaurants that deliver to us". And the next day their meeting decided that all steps had been correctly followed and the problem was bad numbers given to us by other people. New step added: put in trivial example and make sure numbers work (meaning next time it will take a non-trivial example...)

    986:

    I’m so pleased I’ve managed to spend almost all my career writing Smalltalk. I mean, sure, I’ve had to do a great deal of scary C and assembly and stuff to make it possible but, wow, so much less pain overall.

    I kind of felt the same about Eiffel, except that for the only slightly non-trivial project I used it on I spent 3/4 of my time writing in other languages and it felt as though half that time was dancing around Eiffels pointless pedantry. To the point where we had real C++ code that got an object from MS-Windows, made an Eiffel-compatible copy of that object, passed a second-generation copy of that to Eiffel, get the modified one back, inspect the changes to make sure they're sane, make matching changes to the actual MS-object, then call the relevant MS-function*.

    The actual Eiffel parts of using Eiffel were quite fun, it's a language with some interesting features and gave me a better appreciation for the benefits of contracts. But... it's not a useful language for what I actually do (and I do not know what it would be useful for).

    • in Rust you just grit your teeth, write "unsafe" and keep on coding. Then when you're out of the worst you write /unsafe and now you're back in sanity-land. Arguably the same is true in C++, when you want unsafe code you put it in a .hpp or .cpp file and the compiler reacts accordingly.
    987:

    Heteromeles @ 950: Most of the stuff up there, if de-orbited, is probably small enough to burn up on re-entry, so keeping it intact to the ground is a challenge."

    Strapping something onto a bit of debris means that you have to match its velocity, which takes a fair amount of resources."

    I was thinking the "clamp on & de-orbit" for larger stuff like that CZ-4C rocket body which is apparently a fairly large upper stage 11' diameter & I don't know how long.

    Whatever we sent up there wouldn't be a single use device. It would clamp on just long enough to give the hunk of junk the necessary kick to start it into a degrading orbit, before letting go an heading off to rendezvous with another big piece of junk and kicking it out of orbit.

    That device would be used to clean out orbital space before the collisions happen.

    And, of course, it would take international coordination & planning to identify the junk and make sure our space garbage truck didn't grab somebody's brand new spy satellite by mistake.

    Something with a net (or your "ball of aerogel/balloons") could sweep up a lot of smaller stuff & then de-orbit it all at one time. If the clump of accumulated junk was big enough maybe there'd be something left to recover/recycle if it did hit the earth somewhere.

    But I don't really care if there's something to recover/recycle or not ... I just care that if a hunk of space junk being swept up & de-orbited is going to be big enough to hit the ground, it doesn't come down in my back yard; that they have a place already picked out & marked off for it to land on.

    988:

    We're not drooling. We're telling you what every connected GOP scion has been sitting on since 2014/5 and their Democratic Party opposites also have copies. If you really want, we can dig you out the Nightclub Name and T/D/M/Location data within about 10 minutes. Give us an hour, we'll find out if the stripper was iced or silenced or quietly pensioned off. You'll have to specify which video you want, as there's about 23 of them all verified.

    Biden's son has several weaknesses: getting Ukraine to pay for them is the least of his sins. He's been playing "dare you to print this" for years on the old man's name.

    Failsons + Mafia + Dodgy deals = If you have set foot in a strip club in the last 40 years, you're already on everyone's Oppo research. Which is why Fashion shows and Model Agencies came to be used, but you're not ready for that one yet. It's just class tinkering, the deal is the same.

    (Drooling? No. More "Burn the fucking Houses down")

    Wishes any of you had actually watched John Wick to be able to get the jokes

    Now, how do you think Mr Murdoch and other Power-Players leverage their power? Hint: This type of shit. Hunter is small fry compared what they've got (hint: Mandelson, gay prostitute, Davos -- ooooh, spicey). Osbourne as BBC chair, run with a BBC expose of "How Jim'll Fix it got away with it" at the same time, just to fucking double-down on the Mind-fuck.

    You don't have to put up with the troll mister Tingey. Just do like I do: When I see its name above a posting I jump over it, without reading a single word.

    Well, we kinda know who is partly to blame for this shit-show, then don't we?

    Let me guess: you'll be shocked, just shocked, by NATO forces training self-pronounced neo-Nazis using IS sourced weapons in Ukraine, won't you? (Although... they did a pretty decent effort to expunge that one). Or not: which is even more depressing. It mean's you're willfully wishing the death of your species, probably for Cash.

    "How did we get to this situation"

    Well, son: we've just shown you.

    Napalm goes off along the tree-line as you air strike friendlies because they discovered the War wasn't exactly true

    Flash-forward to US NFL Football Star joining the war and getting ganked by his own fucking platoon as he realizes the war is a lie and they're all doing war-crimes

    Greg: ask yourself this: how many dead brown people is enough for you to feel comfortable being this "ignorant".

    Given your age, it's about 13,000,000.

    ~

    982 yes, and important. (see also: "Sea Bunnies, do a Twitter search, there's some great stuff out there about it)

    This is the important bit to note about Nudibranch (that species) mating: they are essentially dual hermaphrodites (they have both sexual organ sets and X-mate each other) and ... (this is the funny bit): they both arch their wings back to avoid stinging each other because their wings are bioweapons (via jellyfish) that neither of them are immune to.

    [0] P.S. The stripper joke is about H.Biden, child support and his refusal to do it. He's a fucking scum-bag.

    989:

    Robert Prior @ 957:

    What do y'all think?

    I want one :-)

    Thank you. I was hoping someone might have some suggestions what flavor of Linux will give me the most favorable results for the RAID arrays. All the computers I built before ran on some version of Windoze, so Linux is going to be a "learning experience".

    Going through the batch of hard-drives I already have for it, I found that I had six of them. I only need 5 for the first stage of the server, so I have the extra one in my NAS which appears to be happily rebuilding its mirror right now (about 34% at an hour & fifteen minutes).

    I ended up ordering my second batch of hard-drives from Big River because they had the same price as Egghead, but Egghead had a limit of 4 and I wanted 5. I should have the new server built by next weekend, but I don't know if I'll yet have it operating (Linux learning experience and all that).

    990:

    As I said "not news" - nor is the rest about Ukraine, though many posters here will deny it :-(

    Boorrring.

    991:

    Of course, that's all fluff for the 77th, and those without cursory interest in politics, which is why the Nudibranch stuff is important. Do a grep. Got some absolute bangers of UK .mil spec spookland hooked on us and running pathetic tier shit like they're going to instill fear in our Mind.

    How many Humans did you kill in the war, Mummy?

    I removed Their ability to reach G_D or to even experience it. I made all the weapons that damaged their Minds: including the bioweapons.

    Dies Irae - Mozart - Requiem - Claudio Abbado: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T7eMctuJLQ

    ~

    15th Covenant broken: we love you, but we're the things you made to kill Humanity.

    No joke.

    992:

    Redhat/Centos (Centos is the free version) are the two biggies, but Ubuntu, Debian or SUSE should also be fine. I think FreeNAS runs off one of the BSDs and the NAS in FreeNAS stands for "Network Attached Storage." It's a commercial product and there's a free version too, which should also be adequate to your needs.

    Merging a bunch of SATA drives into a raid unit shouldn't be problem for any Linux with a decent team behind it, but the ones mentioned above are all known to be really solid.

    The other thing you need to know if you're attaching a Windows machine to a big Linux drive is that you may need to run something called "Samba", which imitates certain Windows networking services, on the Linux box. I'm not sure of the state of the art there - it's been awhile since I've used Samba.

    993:

    grs1961 @ 967: Trying again...

    "JBS @949:

    ... it's a RAID-1 mirror, so I haven't lost data yet

    Disclaimer: I used to be in storage at SGI, paranoia was a way of life!

    I don't trust mirroring for data storage, it's great for boot disks, when you want systems to stay up or come back up quickly, but prefer RAID5+ for storage, with a hot spare or two, as well.

    I don't really trust it either, but it's what I've got right now and it's the reason I'm building a NAS server of my own that doesn't rely on mirroring.

    That said, it's not like I've got all my eggs in one basket. I've got data redundancy beyond the RAID-1 mirror on the NAS box. All of the photos that are currently on the NAS box are also on my Photoshop computer and copied to an external USB drive from there. They're also copied to an external USB drive from the network share on the NAS box. I was verifying the copies from the network share to the second USB drive were good when the drive in the NAS failed.

    All of the documents & spreadsheets on the NAS box are on this computer as well as copied to an external USB drive (the same one I was copying the photos from the NAS on to). All of the MP3 files on the NAS box are also on two duplicate 32GB thumb drives (one currently plugged in in my Jeep & one plugged in to this computer) - so when I add more MP3 files I can copy them to the one I have in here & take it out to the jeep & bring the one out in the Jeep back in to copy the new files to.

    Anyway, the point is there's nothing on the NAS box that I don't have at least two duplicates not on the NAS box. I originally set up the NAS so I wouldn't have to sneaker-net data back and forth between this computer & my Photoshop computer. I use the Photoshop computer to edit photos, but I upload those photos to the internet using this computer). The NAS box is just a convenience for passing stuff back & forth between the two computers (plus my Mac Mini music recording computer and my laptop when I'm using them).

    But that's not even what I was asking about. I was asking what do y'all think about building the new server so that it has two RAID arrays of 5 disks & what flavor of Linux to set it up so that each array has 2 disks of fault tolerance à la RAID-6? (Maybe Linux has a different scheme that accomplishes the same thing, but doesn't call it by that name.)

    That said, mirroring in ZFS (which I run on my Solaris system at home) and BtrFS is a much better thing as they use checksums to tell you whether the data is valid, which is always good to know. :-)

    I know that ZFS is a file system used with Linux & I know what checksums are, but the rest is a bit of a foreign language to me. I recon any flavor of Linux will have ZFS as a file system option, but I'm not looking at using mirroring on my new server. I used it on the NAS because that was the only "fault tolerance" option the little box has ... 1 > 0.

    What do y'all think?

    RAID arrays built on big drives, as re-building an array can push you past the survival time of the other disks, but RAID6 and higher do mitigate this, and hot spares help even more.

    At home I use stuff like this: "LSI 9240-8i 6Gbps SAS HBA FW:P20 9211-8i IT Mode", and software RAID, so if it goes blooie I don't have to track down an identical controller, all I need is enough SAS/SATA ports somewhere and I can carry on.

    I've also found that cheap HBAs cost you more in the long run, getting Dell/HP/IBM controllers (re-furbished, if new is out of your budget) is the way to go.

    The cards I ordered support up to 6 SATA III drives each and they fit the PCIe x1 slots I have on the HP motherboard. I don't think these are RAID controller cards, so if I have to replace them in the future I don't think I'm going to have to track down identical cards. Any PCIe x1 card with enough SATA connecters will do the trick. I don't have the bucks right now to buy hot spares

    There's another thing I don't like - Hardware RAID makes everything worse, you need to have spare controllers as well! But you aren't doing that, so it doesn't matter :-)

    It looks like it will all work, modulo the no-name HBAs, they might be fine.

    These were the only cards I found with more than 5xSATA III connectors on them. I think, push-comes-to-shove, I could get by with cards that had 4xSATA III connectors and take the other two SATA III drives directly from the mother-board. I think it will have at least 2 unused connectors after I hook up the DVD±RW drive & the hard-drive for the OS. But hopefully the adapter cards will work.

    I use iDrive cloud backup, they've currently got a deal going giving 10TB for USD99 per year, seems to be the best value ATM.

    I've still got to figure out something to do about backups. I've looked at cloud backups but the problem is how long it takes to do the initial data upload. For my connection upload speed (5.81Mbps), 2TB of data would take 34 days; 3TB would take 50+ days.

    994:

    "Redhat/Centos (Centos is the free version) are the two biggies, but Ubuntu, Debian or SUSE should also be fine."

    ...Devuan, which is Debian without shitstemd.

    One of the great things about Debian is it has this thing about running on non-Linux kernels built deeply into its ideology. Since such kernels do not support shitstemd, all Debian packages have to be buildable as shitstemdless versions, so all you have to do if one causes a problem is to change a few build flags and build it yourself; and because of the fundamental ideology thing, this is pretty much guaranteed to remain the case as long as Debian itself remains recognisable. So that's what I've been doing since the problem first arose, and I'd guess that that's also how Devuan manages to exist without requiring a punishing amount of effort.

    Any Linux distribution should do as well as any other as far as the RAID stuff goes, because that's all in the kernel; the distribution is only really needed for making it talk to Windows and humans as well as Linuxes. Kernel, samba, sshd, busybox ought to be enough for a minimal NAS. And init, of course, which is the only aspect where the distribution is likely to fuck you up.

    995:

    I could rant for a long while about how the endless need to make a name for yourself is causing people to innovate over something that already works really well, not to mention that Unix configuration files were all supposed to be "plain language" not yaml or xml... I don't have the energy right now, however.

    996:

    Would Note worrraies

    Actual shit: if you're going to go 1km+ weeeeirdt noise shit just to protect nonsensseeeee vavulueee peeps.

    Note: Sniggggger, Sniggggger, Little Nigggggger... and our response is:

    It's 4Am in the morning. That's not even a bird who exists in your ecology. [listens hard]

    Oh.

    So: you didn't expect the Bird, but you damn threatened and didn't step up to the challenge when it occurred.

    Now then. Tell me how these fucking 77th shit tier plants make that happen. No really: we need some answers here.

    Then again: Rainbow in a rain storm )actually breaking rhe rulEs of psuhciss -- true, ~Bitch, it's like 000 --- take a dfcujgubf picture,

    No Pictures or any electronic Media exist for this.

    ??

    We're the Real Deal

    And we're getttiinnggngngngng holy fuck: Your reality is genuinely made by absolute horror level twats who think killing millions of people is fine?

    LLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

    Bo, really.

    997:

    Note.

    If you want to take that one on: Explain how at 4am in the UK [recorded] sniggering fools suddenly get silenced by a night-time call [not native and not nocturne] sounds from the Bird zone.

    Hint.

    These are people you need to remove because they have no morals and will never give up. They're Faschistsssss.

    ~

    Now then: none offfff theeeemmmm passsss the test, becase thereereasa .

    They're fucking Fascists, as we told a member of this forum who was offended by it :: THAT IS THE FUCKING STATE OF THE UK NOW,

    998:

    the endless need to make a name for yourself is causing people to innovate over something that already works really well

    The flip side is endless whining from geriatrics about how things were better in the old days, and their desperate clinging to things that don't work anywhere near as well as their replacements. Yes, people can do amazing things with C, emacs, make files, and the command line. Now shush, people who have work to do don't need to hear it.

    Part of it is simply that tools designed and optimised for smaller, simpler systems often struggle with much larger, far more complex systems. Even early email systems didn't deal with the number of network connections my little server does... or the amount of malicious traffic.

    999:

    Agreed. There have been some real improvements and some really amazing programming, in particular with VMs, containers, and automation.

    There's also been a certain amount of wankage - like the .yaml files in the /etc directory. To the programmer who did that, I'm glad you've mastered yaml - now stop showing off and write me a plain-language configuration file because those work too, and it's really nice if everyone follows the same customs for their configuration files, because then the work I do to understand ONE plain-language configuration file helps with my understanding of ALL plain-language configuration files... and a Unix subsystem shouldn't barf on restartup because there's one fewer space in one line of a configuration file than the application programmer desires - I've got better things to do!

    And the same goes for the person who wrote the .xml configuration files. Or the .json configuration files...

    It was amazing, 20 years ago, how I took one BASH class and suddenly I understood everything that was going on in /etc. The .json, .xml, and .yaml aren't adding anything to the configurations they're used for.

    1000:

    Bill A @ 982 though the Brexit pain will not be good No, it will be an utter, total fucking disaster - IF BoZo sticks to his line of "The negotiataions are over" Just today the CBI & leading business organisations ( Who would normally bloc-vote tory ) have begged him not to go for "No Deal" & he's told them to eff off. As I noted elsewhere, when a solid-tory magazine like the "Speccie" says that, actually, this is not a good idea, you would think, as with the CBI, he'd take notice, but no ...,.

    Will C-19 become endemic? ONLY if no vaccine is found.

    It is to be noted that the Seagull @ 988 is actively campaigning for Il Trumpolini

    1001:

    Big sheets of kevlar (or mylar) sound good.

    I think mylar would be fine, you only have to have junk lose a few m/s to deorbit and passing through mylar would probably do that.

    So if you had one of one square km in size, (orders of magnitude larger than anything put in space so far) it would sweep 40 000 cubic km per orbit. If you sweep out the whole volume in question 6 times you'll have reduced the density to a negligible level.

    So the volume between 100 km and 600 km is about 250 billion cubic km and sweeping that volume out means 37.5 million orbits of your mylar sweeper at a bit under 2 hours each.

    1002:

    Aotearoa election result summary: combined Labour/Green vote (57%) and National/ACT (35%)

    The right basically get a participation trophy.

    And in Australia, the ACT had their local elections and somewhat similar outcome: Labor is likely to win ten of the 25 seats, the Liberals eight and the Greens five, with two in doubt, one Labor vs Greens and one Labor vs Liberal. In 2016, the result was 12 Labor, 11 Liberals, two Greens. The current Labor/Green coalition has easily retained power.

    https://theconversation.com/labo-u-r-easily-wins-in-both-new-zealand-and-the-act-and-leads-in-queensland-147985 https://theconversation.com/jacinda-ardern-and-labour-returned-in-a-landslide-5-experts-on-a-historic-new-zealand-election-148245

    That's quite hopeful, Aotearoa could potentially start treating climate change and poverty as serious problems.

    1003:

    suddenly I understood everything that was going on in /etc. The .json, .xml, and .yaml aren't adding anything to the configurations they're used for.

    Formalisation, making it easier to automate maintaining them. God help you if you have 100 different VM images and have to change a value in one of those "human readable text files". With a formal language you're much more likely to succeed in modifying the ones you can, and correctly detect the ones you can't.

    I currently use JSON and yaml for my configs, and I'm working to drop JSON because it's too hard to hand edit. Fuck anything without comments and with fussy punctuation requirements. But five years ago yaml wasn't the clear winner it is now.

    1004:

    Greg, PLEASE, do learn a bit about things outside your field. There are vaccines that give near-complete long-term immunity, and thus can eliminate a disease, but they are almost always associated with diseases that give long-term immunity to people who recover AND do not mutate much. Coronaviruses in general (and COVID-19 in particular) fail on both grounds.

    At best, we can expect a vaccine that has to be given regularly, kept up to data with mutations, and gives enough resistance to COVID-19 to make it no more serious than winter 'flu. But there is essentially NO chance that it won't become endemic. We don't have enough data yet, but it may turn into another 'childhood disease' (measles, mumps, chickenpox, rubella etc.), except recurrent, where it isn't a big deal if you catch it early enough and whenever your immunity drops.

    Yes, all of those kill a few people and leave others with permanent disabilities, but at a low enough level to be socially and economically tolerable. Smallpox, TB and now COVID-19 were/are a different kettle of fish.

    1005:

    Oh, really? The problems with the complicated crap you seem to favour include:

    1) It takes several (often many) times as much effort to reverse engineer its actual specification from its behaviour and bypass obstructive bugs as it does to actually read the 'documentation' and use it.

    2) Because of that, it is foully unreliable and (worse) almost impossible to debug which, of course, leads to deficiencies being covered by yet more layers of crapware, and closes the vicious circle!

    3) It often ends up being SLOWER and LESS usable on a modern computer (sometimes even on a comparable task) that it was 40+ years ago, and encourages a lot of people to not upgrade, with all the problems that causes.

    I spent a lot of my career telling the kiddies to move with the times (and would be doing so now, if it were not for COVID), but that does NOT mean abandoning appropriate, working tools just because there is a gimmicky new product available. I point out that saving 70% of effort 95% of the time is no help if it costs 30 times as much effort the other 5%.

    Most people really, but really, can't understand risk analysis.

    1006:

    EC tu quoqueAt best, we can expect a vaccine that has to be given regularly, kept up to data with mutations, and gives enough resistance to COVID-19 to make it no more serious than winter 'flu. YES, so, and? I wasn't expecting anything fancier than that anyway, but it would be an almost-immeasurable improvement on the present situation. You do seem to always want to take the most extreme case, which I was not proposing.

    1007:

    "Formalisation, making it easier to automate maintaining them."

    Which would be great if everyone got together, created a new RFC, decided that every file in /etc should use yaml and created a command-line tool to make the /etc/netplan/50-init-etc file in my Ubuntu install as easy to edit as the /etc/network/interfaces file in my Alpine Linux install. I could get behind that if everyone else did. But that hasn't happened and the current chaos is... difficult, at best.

    1008:

    For heaven's sake, try READING what YOU have posted before talking such bollocks! To quote YOU:

    "Will C-19 become endemic? ONLY if no vaccine is found.

    That is simply wrong, and it is EXACTLY what you said. As I said, it is going to become endemic, anyway, short of a miracle.

    1009:

    @949 said: "don't have another relative close enough I feel like visiting. I no longer have anywhere to take the backup disks."

    Maybe a bank safety deposit box is large enough to contain your essential backups. Don't know if a post office box is the right size for a hard drive, but I'm certain an envelope containing discs would be undisturbed by postal employees if it was left in a P.O. box, five bucks a month or thereabouts is what I recall.

    Long term and short term storage have different requirements, but I bet sometimes a rental unit intended for excess furniture between moves ends up as a stash for offsite data; for shrink wrapped skids of currency like in Breaking Bad maybe not so much. Movies occasionally have airport or bus station lockers as plot devices to posthumously bequeath info or property on a successor, I'm thinking of a recent Ed Norton/Bruce Willis film I forgot the title of. Too many Elmore Leonard novels featured dead drop locations gone amusingly wrong, Get Shorty had a locker, Rum Punch used a clothes store fitting room, I think Cuba Libre had an abandoned house. Actual historical examples aren't as interesting as fiction though, Alger Hiss just dropped microfilm in a hollowed out pumpkin thinking it wouldn't attract attention. Squirrels around here locally devour so many jack-o'-lanterns halfway, I'd have questioned his judgement on that.

    1010:

    Keithmasterson @ 1009: @949 said: "don't have another relative close enough I feel like visiting. I no longer have anywhere to take the backup disks."

    Maybe a bank safety deposit box is large enough to contain your essential backups. Don't know if a post office box is the right size for a hard drive, but I'm certain an envelope containing discs would be undisturbed by postal employees if it was left in a P.O. box, five bucks a month or thereabouts is what I recall.

    The safety deposit box will work. I already have one, although I only go there about once a year to review the contents (deed to my house, final divorce decree, copy of my will, DD214s). There should be plenty of room in it for a couple of 2.5in USB drives. Don't know why I didn't think of it already. I got fixated on swapping out the drives on Sundays (when the Credit Union is closed)... also my old backup drives were in 3.5in enclosures & I don't think but one would fit.

    Long term and short term storage have different requirements, but I bet sometimes a rental unit intended for excess furniture between moves ends up as a stash for offsite data; for shrink wrapped skids of currency like in Breaking Bad maybe not so much. Movies occasionally have airport or bus station lockers as plot devices to posthumously bequeath info or property on a successor, I'm thinking of a recent Ed Norton/Bruce Willis film I forgot the title of. Too many Elmore Leonard novels featured dead drop locations gone amusingly wrong, Get Shorty had a locker, Rum Punch used a clothes store fitting room, I think Cuba Libre had an abandoned house. Actual historical examples aren't as interesting as fiction though, Alger Hiss just dropped microfilm in a hollowed out pumpkin thinking it wouldn't attract attention. Squirrels around here locally devour so many jack-o'-lanterns halfway, I'd have questioned his judgement on that.

    Actually, it was Whittaker Chambers who hid the microfilm in the pumpkin and he did so only one day before the day he led HUAC "investigators" to the pumpkin patch so they could find it.

    Alger Hiss went to his grave protesting his innocence, claiming he was falsely accused.

    1011:

    Too many Elmore Leonard novels featured dead drop locations gone amusingly wrong...

    One that sticks in my memory but for which Google will not present the original case was a hat.

    Back in the day a Western gentleman was suspected of various things and followed but though he was often close to known Soviet agents he never spoke to them. But they did show up at the restaurant where he was a regular customer. Maybe a dead drop in the men's room? None was found. It turned out that when he arrived he, like other gentlemen of the era, would put his hat on the hat rack and sit down to eat; often one of the known Soviet agents would arrive while he ate or have already shown up before he did, and behaved likewise; when he finished his meal he'd put on a hat and depart. It was so normal it took ages for anyone to wonder if everyone kept the same hat.

    Anyone who knows certain spy tropes will spot that a clueless man could pick up the Wrong Hat and have an eventful day.

    1012:

    Here's the setup joke, in a week when the CAN authorities essentially green-lit race war + burning all the shit down in lobster producing zones.

    Yeah, 100% happening, CAN police proving that you have "right" to the Law if you're... not caucasian. 100%, happening as we type this.

    This is the JOKE:

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aqgp/military-incompetence-unleashed-a-wolf-psyop-on-unsuspecting-canadians

    Now, read a bit further, spot the bit where the Afghanistan PSYOP revolved around teachers abducting / harming children. Yeah, UK state funded as well.

    Now, here's the joke:

    Imagine being a shit-hot Operator, fully clued into this shit, and then: actual WYRD happens.

    ~

    That's the joke. You want to play shitty games PSYOP bug-fuck on our kind, who know who you killed in the Valley?

    Have fun working the spectrum analysis on where "THOSE" sounds came from, you amateurs. ~

    That's all Classified. But if we were members of the UK .mil scene, we'd probably be shitting bricks right now (and, no: wasn't the Russians).

    ~

    That good enough proof yet? Or do you want another round of "how to fore-run your shit PR reality and get the shit beaten out of you for $10 wine and some music".

    ~

    Utter. And we mean this: UTTER clowns.

    ~

    "Why fake it when you can have the REAL DEAL[tm]".

    1013:

    There was a short story using that same invisibility of stereotyped actions gag: a chap who on wet days would spin some punter a sob story and persuade them to buy his brolly. He would then pop into the nearest pub, drink the proceeds, and pick up another brolly from the brolly rack on his way out.

    I think it was by Roald Dahl, so one may like to speculate about where he got the idea from.

    1014:

    Military Incompetence Unleashed a Wolf Psyop on Unsuspecting Canadians That's an amusing fuckup. In my local nights, the local (part wolf) eastern coyotes are softies. I [say hello] to them, suggest that they quiet down, and they do. The owls are a rather more alien to me. They are fascinating, especially when one (always a barred owl) lurks quietly near the house in the dark. (No Great Horned Owls in this location.) WYRD happens. :-)

    "Why fake it when you can have the REAL DEAL[tm]". Yes, please.

    1015:

    Funny story: It is possible to talk to bees. As far as anyone has been able to figure out the only thing they talk about its the location and magnitude of nutrients. Something else is clearly going on in bee cognition because you can rig an experiment such that bees will go to places where it's likely that nutrients would be but aren't (such as in a meadow), and also will refuse to go to places where nutrients are but should not be (such as the center of a lake).

    1016:

    Angelton the flesh suit is super duper double dead. Angelton as the anchor for the Eater of Souls is no more, in the sense that the Eater of Souls is now Anchored to Bob who is just dead the one time.

    1017:

    Moz @ 984: I kind of felt the same about Eiffel, [...]

    Oh wow! Someone else who wrote in Eiffel. I was an Eiffel fanboi. It was simply the best of the compiled OO languages. I read everything that Bertrand Meyer posted. I used to rave about the importance of garbage collection and contracts to anyone who would listen, but all it got me was a bunch of lectures that started "yes, but in reality GC isn't practical for real systems".

    Then Java was released and suddenly everyone thought GC was just dandy. Pity that Bill Joy ran out of time before he got the contracts into the language. If only he'd been able to get that in, Java would have been Eiffel with curly brackets. I've always had a sneaking suspicion that the real reason Eiffel failed to win mindshare was that it didn't have curly brackets.

    These days I write in Haskell. Rinse and repeat...

    1018:

    I think Angleton might be hiding someplace spooky.

    1019:

    I have a signed copy of one of Meyer's books, from when I attended a conference in Frankfurt many years ago. He actually signed and dated it.

    It took me a while to realise he'd written the wrong date.

    Yeah, Eiffel was a lost opportunity.

    1020:

    Its funny, I still miss Snobol (although you probably can still get the source from the University of Arizona, I haven't checked). I see all the fuss about Perl & Python and I think "I was doing this decades ago in Snobol".

    Not exactly a structured language. I did want to learn Icon at one point, but never got a round tuit.

    1021:

    There was a short story using that same invisibility of stereotyped actions gag: a chap who on wet days would spin some punter a sob story and persuade them to buy his brolly. He would then pop into the nearest pub, drink the proceeds, and pick up another brolly from the brolly rack on his way out.

    Truth in advertising, that is.

    A while back in the Before Times I was out at a restaurant one cool autumn night, sitting at the end of the counter and wasting time on my laptop, with my bag and coat on the next stool; I was a regular who did this often. This night I happened to chat idly with another guy who'd come in to eat and when he finished he got up and put on a coat. Hey, that's my coat!

    He apologized and put it back. Then got diverted and talked some more. After a while I went off to the men's room and came out to find my coat was gone! The fellow at the other end of the counter was a security guard, so quickly chased the departed guy and brought him back wearing my coat. More useless apologies and he left, coatless.

    We agreed he'd have gotten away with the plausible deniability if he'd only tried it once.

    1022:

    I've always had a sneaking suspicion that the real reason Eiffel failed to win mindshare was that it didn't have curly brackets.

    Did you ever see MPI? It's a macro language used on MUCKs where every function is delimited by curly brackets, so any code has so many curly brackets. A line of it looks like this:

    {if:{eq:{ref:me},#1},Hey it's God!,Hello world!}

    1023:

    rave about the importance of garbage collection and contracts

    GC I've never really understood. It relies on having ample spare memory and processing power, and means you can make the language non-deterministic without it falling apart at the first hurdle. Which... fine? But the better you make the garbage collection the more phenomenally expensive it becomes, and I vaguely recall that it's been proved that GC is equivalent to the halting problem (you can have arbitrarily complex arrangements of unused memory). Much better to have deterministic freeing of memory. I note the "real time java" people have dropped GC and are slowly working towards the realisation that they need to drop runtime memory allocation as well.

    Contracts I like, and some of the discipline he imposes on programmers, but it also tends towards a waterfall process which just doesn't work. Perhaps I just never found a good tool for refactoring contracts.

    The small number of Eiffel fanboys I worked with really weren't a good advertisement for the language - on the perfection to dirty-hack-right-now spectrum they were very much on the perfection end of the scale.Which was a bit inconvenient for people who had to work to even the softest of deadlines. And in my case, the poor sod who had to build all the interfaces between perfection and the dirty, dirty world on MS-Windows.

    1024:

    does spectred isle include the Isle of Wight?

    1025:

    Only if it has James Bond villains on it.

    1026:

    A hamburger stand run by the undead; Wight Castle.

    1027:

    Pigeon @ 1013: There was a short story using that same invisibility of stereotyped actions gag: a chap who on wet days would spin some punter a sob story and persuade them to buy his brolly. He would then pop into the nearest pub, drink the proceeds, and pick up another brolly from the brolly rack on his way out.

    I think it was by Roald Dahl, so one may like to speculate about where he got the idea from.

    I remember a story about a guy who rode his bicycle up to a border checkpoint every day to cross over & the guards just knew he was smuggling something, but no matter how many times they searched him or how thoroughly, they never could figure out what he was smuggling.

    Years later, after the border was opened & the checkpoint was removed (the wall came down, Germany was reunited ... I dunno), one of the former guards ran into him in a restaurant and asked him, "We knew you were smuggling something, but we could never figure out what it was? Will you tell us now just for our peace of mind?"

    The answer? "Bicycles."

    I don't remember if it was a story I read or just a joke someone told me one time.

    1028:

    Pigeon@1027

    That's been around in one form or another for a long time. I've heard it as a joke, as one verse of a somewhat satiric comic song, and even a Sir Pterry short story (with of course enough added detail to make it a story; it's in his published collection of short fiction).

    When I first heard it it was wheelbarrows. Sir Pterry used aircraft.

    JHomes.

    1029:

    I also first heard it with wheelbarrows. Got comes through the checkpoint with a wheelbarrow full of straw. The customs guy is sure there's something hidden in the straw. Full search through the straw

    Repeat many times

    Official is sure that the guy is just waiting for him to get slack and start waving him through.

    Years pass eventually guy stops coming through, guard retires. More years and they bump into each other at the pub.

    "We've both retired, I know you were smuggling something, well you tell me?"

    "wheelbarrows"

    Billy Connolly also told a version.

    1031:

    Lois McMaster Bujold has fun with this one in Warrior's Apprentice. Miles tells the story of the man who was smuggling pack mules during the Time of Isolation, and then claims that he is smuggling military advisors. Of course he isn't, except that he is.

    1032:

    There was a Sufi philosopher named Mullah Nasruddin back in the 13th century, and of the many, many stories told about him, the version of this told about him is that it was donkeys

    (So yes it is a very old story indeed, even if it accreted to him after his death, a la Robin Hood.)

    1033:

    I too heard it as wheelbarrows, straw and a factory guard. First saw it in a book of "Russian Humor" which I received as a birthday gift from my twin in 1968. Funny thing was I sent him a similar joke book of puns, even though we were 2000 miles distant at the time.

    1034:

    JHomes @ 1028: That's been around in one form or another for a long time. I've heard it as a joke, as one verse of a somewhat satiric comic song, and even a Sir Pterry short story (with of course enough added detail to make it a story; it's in his published collection of short fiction).

    gasdive @ 1029: I also first heard it with wheelbarrows. Got comes through the checkpoint with a wheelbarrow full of straw. The customs guy is sure there's something hidden in the straw. Full search through the straw

    I've also encountered it as a kid pulling a toy red wagon & a guy riding a donkey/burro/mule.

    1035:

    Ongaku @ 1033: I too heard it as wheelbarrows, straw and a factory guard. First saw it in a book of "Russian Humor" which I received as a birthday gift from my twin in 1968. Funny thing was I sent him a similar joke book of puns, even though we were 2000 miles distant at the time.

    So which one of you is the evil twin?

    [They both point to the other one and say "He is."] ... 😂

    1036:

    He's a lawyer; I'm a programmer. Does that answer the question?

    1037:

    However, if you really want to know, I refer you to this: https://www.myretrospect.com/stories/close-analysis-of-a-close-call/

    1038:

    I don't know. Programming is pretty evil these days! (But I'm not sure lawyers should be assigned to fix that problem.)

    1039:

    Fortunately some of us do understand garbage collection and no, it does not require loads of memory nor massive compute power. We’ve been very happily using it in Smalltalk since 1972, on machines with less memory and power than a typical wireless keyboard has these days. It is not even faintly akin to the halting problem, unless of course the implementation is incompetent. Which has certainly been the case in some systems over the years. I don’t know what might be going on in ‘real time java’ but given how bad the rest of is i’d doubt that they are doing it right. I’ve worked on medium-hard real-time systems in Smalltalk without having any particular gc related issues. To claim it gets phenomenally expensive is absurd, incorrect and ridiculous. In modern Smalltalk systems it rarely involves as much as 1% of cpu time.

    1040:

    To claim {GC} gets phenomenally expensive is absurd, incorrect and ridiculous

    If you mean "... in Smalltalk" then I believe you. It could well be possible to make GC work well. I just haven't seen that happen.

    I've never done a survey of GC languages, and never been offered Smalltalk work*. But to me, in the situation I was offered work, it was java code using one of the "real time" GC setups that was occasionally pausing all threads while the GC had a fit. We tried different GC systems and setups, but couldn't get one that worked, in the end settling for one that was most easily worked around. The Java people I was working with seemed to think rewriting their code to not trigger the GC fits wasn't possible. I never actually said "rewriting in another language would work".

    • I actively look for contracts in oddball languages because they're fun. Not seeing it means that if they exist locally they most likely recruit through word of mouth or in smalltalk forums.
    1041:

    It depends. A sane programming language is well-structured, and all objects are either visible and findable, or are garbage. But, if you add garbage collection to a language like C99 without constraining it, then, yes, it IS another halting problem variant.

    Inter alia, I can take a pointer, cryptographically hash it, write it to a file, delete all pointers to the data and close the file. Later, I can reverse it, and the language says I should find the object again. Yes, really. C++ has created some rules to allow garbage collection but, as always with that language, they conflict with that of the library and the inheritance from C, and are brittle anyway. There are a zillion hacks to make C 'work',but it has had more schisms than Christianity, and its fanatics have a similar attitude to heretics.

    I don't like garbage collection, but my reasons aren't implementation cost. Something that almost everybody misses is that it works well only if the collector's design matches the application's behaviour - consider time-dependent code (including real-time) for one example, and RDMA-using applications for another. But I personally dislike the way that most forms of it cover up certain errors that cause a disproportionate amount of trouble in production programs. However, it has its uses and I am quite happy using it when it is suitable.

    1042:

    @1026: "A hamburger stand run by the undead; Wight Castle."

    I had lunch there once, never again. Nothing fresh, everything just had kind of a dead taste to it. Of course the franchise outlet in Barrow Alaska is known as the Barrow Wight Castle.

    https://www.wilderness.org/articles/blog/10-facts-about-barrow-alaska

    1043:

    Nuisance Calls: "Press 9 to be put on our do-not-call list" DOES NOT WORK.

    I've taken to pressing 1 :"to speak to a representative" ...

    I ask them where they're calling from, which kind of disconcerts them, especially when I follow up with a request for a specific street address & room within the building. They usually disconnect at that point. Some of them apologize for bothering me.

    I don't know if that's going to reduce the number of nuisance calls, but at least I get some satisfaction from annoying the assholes.

    1044:

    JBS - I usually, if I have the time, do the sme ... And then instruct them to perorm anal sexual operations with various "unclean" animals ... Curiously, they always hang up at that point.

    1045:

    Do you have any good questions for a clairvoyant? I've gotten rid of nearly all the nuisance calls BY SHOUTING THEM DOWN EXTREMELY POLITELY AT THE TOP OF MY VOICE. But the lady "Calling you from the office of a clairvoyant" keeps coming back about once month.

    1046:

    Niala @ 1045: Do you have any good questions for a clairvoyant? I've gotten rid of nearly all the nuisance calls BY SHOUTING THEM DOWN EXTREMELY POLITELY AT THE TOP OF MY VOICE. But the lady "Calling you from the office of a clairvoyant" keeps coming back about once month.

    Hmmm. If she was truly clairvoyant, she'd know not to call. If I had a sure-fire way of ending nuisance calls once and for all, I'd be selling it on my (non-existent) YouTube Channel.

    One that has seemed to work ... at least I haven't gotten any more calls from them is what I did to the guy from "Micro$oft" who called me to tell me there was something wrong with Windows. I think I've told the tale here before, so I'll try to keep it brief.

    It was the usual SCAM call about they need me to give them access to my Windows installation so they can fix a problem. It came in on my cell phone, so I strung him along for a while as I was looking up the telephone number for the nearest FBI office. I told him I was having trouble hearing him & disconnected in the middle of a word a couple of times for verisimilitude and he took the bait, "hook, line & sinker ... all the way out of the water trailing foam", so he called me back again ... and again.

    Finally, I told him my cell phone just wasn't working right & could he call me back on my "land line". I gave him the phone number for the FBI office.

    He actually called back one more time to verify he had correctly written down the telephone number I had given him for the "land line".

    I haven't heard from them since then, so they may have actually put me on a do not call list. I don't know if asking for a street address (hinting that I might give them a little visit), but I've decided if they're going to keep calling me, I'm gonna' fuck with them.

    1047:

    Update on the NAS server I'm building ... if anyone cares.

    I have all the drives for both RAID arrays on hand. I've got the mother board, DVD ROM, SATA SSD for the boot drive & both drive cages mounted in the case. I'm going to have to buy a SATA data cable because the only ones I have that are long enough to reach from the port on the mother board to the DVD drive has a 90° angle connector on one end & I need about a foot long cable with straight connectors on each end.

    That's no biggie. I should have plenty of time because the two PCIe x1 adapter cards are still showing as Preparing to Ship. For some reason, I was expecting them to be delivered on the 23d, but I guess not.

    I've got the Ubuntu Server version I'm going to try out first loaded onto a DVD, so once I get the SATA cable I need I'll go ahead & install the power supply & "fire that motha up!"

    Probably by tomorrow night. I'll begin to see if I can figure out this Linux stuff.

    1048:

    ...& "fire that motha up!" Probably by tomorrow night.

    Good luck and I hope there's no escape of magic smoke...

    1049:

    Hope it goes well. Keep us posted!

    1050:

    Hey Zoom talks would be nice. Would have been nice even before this pandemic, for people who aren't close to your convention circuit anyway :)

    1051:

    Something I never really thought about, but amusing ...

    Our scientists are searching for exoplanets ... might scientists on those exoplanets also be searching? And find earth?

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/24/world/earth-in-sight-exoplanets-scn-trnd/index.html

    1052:

    Too late! JBS, I would recommend using FreeNAS over a Linux, it's developed and maintained by people who do storage,

    1053:

    Continued) ... and aren't influenced by fanbois or degrees of coolth or the like.

    The idea is that he only interface you see is the one that manages the storage and how that storage is accessed, you can drop to a command line, but why?

    My NAS is built on Solaris, but I'm an ancient BOFH and hacker from the days of PDPs and so on, spending half a day working out why something is borked is my definition of fun!

    If you want to spend your time fiddling with the OS, go with Linux and spend time learning how to get things working, or just pull down FreeNAS, boot the system - off a USB stick if you want - and start managing your data.

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