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Dead Lies Dreaming: Spoilers

I've been head-down in the guts of a novel this month, hence lack of blogging: purely by coincidence, I'm working on the next-but-one sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming.

Which reminds me that Dead Lies Dreaming came out nearly a month ago, and some of you probably have read it and have questions!

So feel free to ask me anything about the book in the comments below.

(Be warned that (a) there will probably be spoilers, and (b) I will probably not answer questions that would supply spoilers for the next books in the ongoing project.)

619 Comments

1:

I found it a bit hard to understand whether the Bond (who was the Captain Hook analogue?) was going tragically off-piste because of his own toxic masculine bloodlust, or whether I missed the implications when Rupert briefed him, because Rupert wanted to challenge or eliminate Eve?

2:

The Bond has totally gone rogue -- but that's the whole point of James Bond in the first place: he's fucking with things he doesn't understand because he thinks he's in charge and can just shoot his way through problems. (In this respect the Bond is somewhat true to the original spirit of James Bond, who wasn't a spy so much as a drunk, sociopathic, government-licensed mass-murderer.)

3:

Thanks! Another one - will we ever find out what was the "bigger thing" Rupert was holding over Eve? Is it Chekov's geas?

4:

Yes: it's a significant sub-plot in In His House and the main driver behind the primary plot of Bones and Nightmares (currently in progress, not finished yet).

Suffice to say, the intersection of magic, contract law, and Rupert's offshore private jurisdiction is going to cause Eve serious problems. And we haven't seen the last of Rupe.

5:

Alexei from Novosibirsk is a happy callback to the Fuller Memorandum, but wasn’t he the one member of that team who was very definitely dead by the end of it?

Or am I seeing a contradiction where there’s actually a plot strand?

6:

I can't wait to read them! Dead Lies Dreaming was great and I'm really looking forward to where you take the series next.

7:

I laughed out loud at the KLF reference.

At some point I felt that there were quite a lot of coincidences, but it's a literary device and I can imagine it being part of the magic coming back to the world. I did enjoy the book, thank you for it!

8:

I'm not a native English speaker but I'm generally good at it; however, I really can't really decypher the title of the book: what does it exactly mean?

There are at leat two ways to read it: - (someone) dead [subject] lies [verb] dreaming - dead lies [subject, with "dead" being an attribute of "lies"] dreaming

Can you clarify this?

9:

"There are at least two ways to read it:"

When OGH first revealed the title, I assumed that the ambiguity (is "lies" a noun or a verb?) was deliberate.

A propos of nothing, it just occurred to me that The Odd Order Theorem would be a great title for a Laundry Files novel.

10:

What I found truly horrifying in this book was what happened to their mother; we already know how Schiller's church operated and their way to make converts, but we always seen only the end result (possessed fanatics) until now, not the thing itself happening, not to mention to a loved one; BTW, I was under the assumption that it was an instant process (you receive the host, you get possessed), not a gradual takeover of your soul... which makes it even worse, especially if the victim in question is presented as a real human being with real people caring for her.

That part is really, really creepy and dark and makes you hate those f**ing cultists even more than TAC and TDB together; Schiller and its church manage to upstage all the villains in this book with that single piece of backstory.

11:

And then, of course, there is the giant elephant in the room, the story about magic having actually existed in the past and then having disappeared some centuries ago for unexplained reasons, only to make its comeback now; and the whole can of worms about history having changed multiple times in order to avoid paradoxes and time travel to settle on a stable timeline (at least for now).

All of which I really hope has been left vague on purpose and will be explored in due course, because there are lots of tales to tell here...

12:

"I really can't really decypher the title of the book: what does it exactly mean?"

I think it also references HP Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" ("In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.").

13:

Oops, I was pretty sure he was the one member of the team who survived? (Other than wossname, the boss-man spymaster?)

14:

All of the above. (Heh.)

It was picked for resonance value, and for being a unique search term on Amazon and Google.

My original title for the book was "Lost Boys". Which fits with the Peter Pan references, and was mostly clear apart from the cult 1988 teen movie. Except I'd written it and guess what movie got re-made as a TV show on one of the big streaming services?

If you are a writer it is a very bad idea indeed to pick a title (or, hell, your own name) that is already occupied by a prominent media property, and at the time I had no way of knowing that "Lost Boys" (the new TV show) wouldn't be the next "Game of Thrones" by the time my book came out. So I had to change it.

The (current, they're not in production yet) trilogy titles are, in order:

Dead Lies Dreaming In His House Bones and Nightmares

If you read this as a half-assed Haiku riffing on Cthulhu you won't be far wrong.

They also deviate clearly from the Laundry Files title format, which is [Definite Article][Noun][Document-related Noun]. (Note: "stacks" and "morgue" are both unusual terms for some sort of repository or archive; "score" refers to a musical score, and so on.)

The reason for this is that despite "Dead Lies Dreaming" being marketed as Laundry Files book 10, it's actually book 1 of a series I gave the working (unofficial) title of "Tales of the New Management".

And, oh, not-a-spoiler here: "Bones and Nightmares" is a historical Laundryverse novel largely set in the early 19th century. So there!

15:

Eve's mother hasn't had communion with the tongue-eating thing, she's very much a member of the outer congregation. Hence the gradual brain rot.

A not-entirely-buried theme of this trilogy (it may turn out to be a longer series) is how and why magic was suppressed and why it's creeping back out into the world now. This was sort of hinted at in the documentary inserts in "The Concrete Jungle" but I never really had an opportunity to explore it properly until now.

16:

Yes. (But I wanted to avoid the keywords "R'lyeh" and "Cthulhu" because (a) way to give the game away, and (b) do not give your books titles which can easily be mis-heard or mis-spelled unless you enjoy lost sales.)

17:

So was I - I was utterly convinced he was the one that got away, and was chuckling to myself that he gets all the worst jobs. Then I went back to look at the Fuller ebook, did a name search, and he definitely gets his soul eaten when trying to steal from Bob.

I was sure that was someone else.

(I guess ripples in the timeline are a hazard here, but I was thinking they’d be confined to the fiction...)

18:

There are a couple of other continuity errors in the series -- usually across material written > 10 years apart. (When "Bones and Nightmares" is baked, the Laundryverse will contain 12 novels and about 75,000 words of short fiction, for a total of about 1.5 million words. I have middle-aged brain fade, and the fan-established wikia wiki is heavily contaminated with non-canon stuff developed for the role-playing game so I can't use it for reference.)

(Oh, and when B&N -- the Eve novel -- is baked, there will still be at least one novel to go in the original series, and maybe one or more non-Eve books in the new one: I'm pretty sure Wendy warrants a book of her own.)

19:

It's not clear to me how Eve ended up in possession of the hedge fund. The concordance and the house, sure, well explained, but the book's view of contract law doesn't apply to British courts, nor does it make the various fund managers obey. And I wouldn't expect Rupert's will to leave her shares.

20:

This becomes clear in the first two chapters of "In His House". To explain how at this point would be a huuuuuuge spoiler.

(It's the same reason that the Eve-as-dutiful-daughter we see in the flashbacks gets turned into the corporate crime gorgon we get to see in the rest of the novel, too.)

21:

Charlie 2: Bond is plainly a leftover from I Fleming ( & his associates' ) capers in WWII, when anything was allowed, operating under some minimal constraints in the post-Korean War era 15: ..how and why magic was suppressed and why it's creeping back out into the world now. .. I forget which Laundry bok, but it was v strongly hinted that this was the case, with excerpts from Youbhusband's diaries in one novel, & the methods used in the C19th for dealing with Gorgonism ....

22:

Greg: that was in "The Concrete Jungle", the second story in "The Atrocity Archives". It's been baked into the setting since 2002!

23:

I wondered as I was reading the novel why Rupert didn't just join the victorious opposition

MANICHEISM, n. The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

It became clear by the end, of course - retirement plans for high priests of other gods tend to be sketchy under the New Management.

24:

I was wondering about the seller of the book. It wasn't somebody who was conspiring with any of the main characters, right?

(oh, and the openid login seems to be broken; it didn't work for me: complained about not being able to load some object "0")

25:

You mention Dwarf Fortress in the book. c. You stated previously that Nethack was the height of computer graphics.c. Surely there is some mistake? c

26:

Ah, I see you stubbed your toe on my sense of humour.

Next you'll be telling me that Grace Jones never starred in a Luc Besson space opera :)

27:

Well, Dwarf Fortress has colour, and I know people who play NetHack with no colours. Personally, I like to be able to tell the purple h apart from others, so I play it with colours. The basic Dwarf Fortress uses fixed-width character graphics, but I have the impression you can run it with graphic tiles. I like that also in the original mode.

28:

Various things.

Well, I got the nethack joke! I tried it, once, in the early days, and wasn't prepared to tolerate such a gruesome user interface.

You seem to have left the major loose ends I noticed, deliberately. The history of the family and house, but also Wendy's background. Plus the big one, where your replies here puzzle me.

The "Why was there a campaign to suppress magic?" was obvious in the Atrocity Archives, but it is also historical. What brought me up short in Dead Lies Dreaming was "Why did that campaign succeed?" and/or "Why did it largely disappear?" The historical explanation is that science replaced magic, because it worked better, though magic is still going strong in Africa and elsewhere. But that doesn't ring true in the context of effective magic, and I read you as saying that there was some underlying reason it became less effective. Have I read that right?

29:

Eve's mother hasn't had communion with the tongue-eating thing, she's very much a member of the outer congregation. Hence the gradual brain rot.

I'm sorry? She actually HAD that thing in her mouth! And quite for a while, according to the previous backstory fragments.

30:

Quoting:

She blinked at him. “You mean, they literally planted something in her? Like what, one of the lesser daemones?” “Yes, exactly that. You can see it in her mouth when she eats—she’s avoiding the dentist, did you know that?” He spoke harshly. “It’s eating her soul, and I intend to kill it.”

“Your mother is infected.” Using his thumbs at the sides of her jaw, he gently levered her mother’s mouth open. “Observe.”

“What the fuck is that thing?” she snarled, wiping her runny nose on the back of her sleeve. She pointed past her mother’s sagging lips, at the silvery articulated shield nestling in her lower jaw like an armored parody of a normal tongue: “How did it get in there?”

"It’s what that church she goes to uses in place of a communion wafer.” “But it’s eating her soul—”

What do you mean by "Eve's mother hasn't had communion with the tongue-eating thing"? Looks very much like she did indeed. And quite voluntarily, since she was already in thrall with that church (as opposite to restrained victims we've seen before).

But in TAC and TDB it looked more like the parasite instantly took over the victim's body as soon as it got in, while instead here it looks more like a progressive takeover over some time.

31:

I said what wait now?

No, not that contradictory. Let me retcon this: some of the congregation get fed from slowly and used as muscle, a few are stable and end up as the inner congregation: and the majority deteriorate, like Eve's mum. It is, in short, as messily distributed as any other human population's response to an endemic parasite.

32:

The magic thing:

Two phenomena are at work. One of them is a push/pull between authorities' desire for total control (which requires tightly locking down non-authority access to magic: thaumaturgic gun control in other words) and the subsequent generations' loss of institutional memory of why they're doing this thing to suppress something that obviously doesn't exist.

The second phenomenon is that, as Larry Niven noted wrt. SF dealing with time travel, a time line in which time travel is possible can only be stable if time travel never happens (because grandfather paradoxes or similar excise all occurences of it). If temporal distortions are a side effect of magic, then a universe which permits magic may destabilize itself until it arrives in a rest state where magic doesn't emerge. We've seen the ghost roads, we've seen access to variant pocket universes and/or time lines, there is some rather fucked-up shit in the background: the universe of the Laundry Files is constantly retconning itself. (In other words, it's not just that Bob is an unreliable narrator.)

33:

Let me retcon this

Never underestimade the Sacred Retcon Power ;)

Anyway, that part was deeply scary and unsettling. Much more than some already-infested generic thugs hunting Persephone or Bob. The whole point of my comment was kudos for great horror writing, not looking for contradictions in mind parasite behaviour :)

34:

there is some rather fucked-up shit in the background: the universe of the Laundry Files is constantly retconning itself.

As the comment immediately before clearly demonstrates ;) See also Forecasting Ops and their not-so-stable existential status.

Hope to get a deeper (in-story) look at this; as you said, it's "some rather fucked-up shit", and I for me would love to see it in action.

35:

See also Forecasting Ops and their not-so-stable existential status.

If you side-eye them from the right perspective, well ... the rise of England (then the UK) from a relatively poor peripheral European mess (1000AD) to a troubled but gradually unifying regional nation that couldn't even hold onto its continental properties (1350AD), to a second-tier maritime power (1600AD) ... then suddenly to giant-ass thalassic world-empire that owns most of Africa and India and 25% of the world's land area and 50% of its manufacturing GDP (1850AD) does seem, on the face of it, a little implausible, yes?

One might ask what happened around 1600AD that kicked off such a meteoritic rise to hegemony. (And then lost it over the century 1850-1950.)

36:

Thank you. I see what you were saying, now.

Yes, the first was pretty obvious, and is horribly common in what we fondly imagine is real life. I take your point about the second, but it still leaves "why did it happen THEN, and exactly what happened?" as a loose end. Maybe you will tie it off, sometime; maybe you won't.

37:
a time line in which time travel is possible can only be stable if time travel never happens (because grandfather paradoxes or similar excise all occurrences of it).

Not quite true. A time-line can be stable if it has what I call "orthodoxes", because they are the opposite of paradoxes. For instance, suppose Einstein never developed General Relativity. Rather, he had a mysterious elderly visitor in 1910 who expounded the theory to him. He published, then later secretly developed a time machine, went back to 1910 and explained General Relativity to himself. This is disturbing, because in this timeline physicists know about GR, even though no one ever developed the theory. But there is no paradox, and no reason that such a timeline need be unstable.

This leads to the idea of the "grandfather orthodox", where you go back in time and become your own grandfather. This has appeared in Science Fiction (the most famous example is the Heinlein story "All You Zombies"), but it is much less popular as a plot device than versions of time travel in which paradoxes can occur, leading to branching timelines, as described in detail by David Deutsch. A less famous example is the movie Timerider, in which the motorcyclist Lyle Swann travels back in time to become his own great-great-grandfather. This leads to interesting questions about his racial origins, and about who made the medallion he gave to his great-great-grandmother.

It is interesting to notice that these two views of time travel are the natural expectations resulting from the two great revolutionary physical theories of the early 20th century: GR, which views the universe as a self-consistent spacetime continuum, and quantum mechanics, which (in the MWI) sees the universe as infinitely multifurcating.

38:

Charlie @ 35 Two things, one taking 45 years & the other, right at the end of that period, lasting a single day, with "local" effects lasting a couple of months The first was the first overthrow of an absolutist monarchy - then an absolutist-"republic" - then an uneasy compromise, follwed by a constitutional moanrchy/fledgling democracy. The second was a massive injection of talent, inventiveness & drive by a single shot of displaced religious, moderate-protestant refugees: The Huguenots. The latter also bolstered the natural antipathy to the local great power ( Louis XIV's France ) - so that the much-rejuvanated new nation simply went out & took it away from them ... & then ... the planet. The "loss" - everyone else caught up + two utterly disatrous wars, which expended the blood & treasure ....

"A single day" 22 October 1685 Edict of Fontainbleu Some sources asy 17th October .....

39:

I mostly interpreted it as an elder god tool similar to vampirism: the slow-soul-eating one grants the host power / divine communion / whatever. At the cost of, literally, consuming the soul of the host. This allows for autonomy and devotion, rather than some elder mind having to keep track of the human resources, while at the same time feeding the monster.

40:

I loved this book, and I loved the queer-as-heck found family around Imp. Also enjoyed the references to 90s British electronica--not just the KLF (Justified Ancients), but I also did a double-take at the earlier The Shamen reference (Ebenezer Goode). I had to actually go digging online to find if that was indeed a reference or if that was at some point an actual person!

Could the situation of Magic in the Laundryverse be somewhat closer to that quote by Robert Anton Wilson? "The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill."

Except replace 'shamans' with 'human practitioners, elder gods, gibbering horrors from beyond, demons, elves, ancient pharoahs, etc etc etc'. Also no longer a standstill but more of a boiling-over cauldron.

41:

In parallel computing, that's known as "out of thin air" effects, and occur on some architectures. It's surprisingly tricky, both to get your head around and to handle mathematically. Most science fiction uses just the easy case: where there is a single, isolated, stable "orthodox". I have tried and failed to think of a way of thinking about them more generally, and know other experts who have also failed. There MAY be people good enough, but there won't be many; I don't know of any.

Depending on your viewpoint, that offers either great scope for science fiction, or is a morass better avoided :-)

42:

I take it you haven't read "Palimpsest", then?

Won the 2010 Hugo award for best novella, deals with exactly this sort of thing, can't think who might have written it ...

43:

I have, in fact, read Palimpset.

44:

assuming you mean the Catherynne Valente novel, and not the one by Gore Vidal, which I haven't read.

45:

Oh, I see you're referring to a book of your own. Not available on Kindle, so I haven't read it.

46:

It is available on Kindle.

(Along with "Missile Gap", which won the 2007 Locus award for best novella, "Overtime", which was a Hugo nominee in some other year, and a bunch of other stories.)

47:

Ah, thank you. I am embarrassed to admit that I have in fact read it, but didn't remember the name.

48:

Though it takes a different approach to what I understood him to mean, and what I was describing. It struck me as a self-consistent model, but I tried to think of it in terms of a physical theory, and failed :-) This is one of the many areas where I know that I am out of my depth ....

I shall be very interested to see what you do if you explore the questions in #36.

49:

I will have to re-read it to find out why you thought that someone who had read it could not have written what I wrote above.

50:

"Overtime"

Which marks, on a totally unrelated note, the first appearence of Forecasting Ops and their ability to retroactively unestablish themselves if their existence would lead to a terrible outcome. And then somewhat exist again after the terrible outcome didn't happen.

51:

there is some rather fucked-up shit in the background: the universe of the Laundry Files is constantly retconning itself. (In other words, it's not just that Bob is an unreliable narrator.)

And yet you keep saying this isn't the same universe as Palimpses (/ducking and running).

52:

If you side-eye them from the right perspective, well ... the rise of England (then the UK) from a relatively poor peripheral European mess (1000AD) to a troubled but gradually unifying regional nation that couldn't even hold onto its continental properties (1350AD), to a second-tier maritime power (1600AD) ... then suddenly to giant-ass thalassic world-empire that owns most of Africa and India and 25% of the world's land area and 50% of its manufacturing GDP (1850AD) does seem, on the face of it, a little implausible, yes? One might ask what happened around 1600AD that kicked off such a meteoritic rise to hegemony. (And then lost it over the century 1850-1950.)

First, I thought the British Empire maxed out in 1920 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires).

Second, I'm quite sure that magic is the cause, and not that the UK had wonderfully exploitable reserves of coal and iron ore right when the industrial revolution kicked off, and followed that up by luckily claiming the Ganges Delta (through the British East India Company) in the late 18th Century, thereby giving itself a huge and unending supply of saltpeter.

But yes, magic was definitely it, which explains why Churchill was a druid and not a theosophist.

53:

Massimo @ 11: And then, of course, there is the giant elephant in the room, the story about magic having actually existed in the past and then having disappeared some centuries ago for unexplained reasons, only to make its comeback now; and the whole can of worms about history having changed multiple times in order to avoid paradoxes and time travel to settle on a stable timeline (at least for now).

All of which I really hope has been left vague on purpose and will be explored in due course, because there are lots of tales to tell here...

I thought that was all obviously inherent in the whole concept. If "Case Nightmare Green" is what happens when "the stars come into alignment", doesn't that suggest that someday they will again go out of alignment? If so, they must have come into & gone out of alignment previously and will probably do so many times again before the whole universe just finally goes away.

Also, who had the power to put "the sleeper in the pyramid" to sleep & why aren't they still around to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't get loose again? Why did they put him to sleep in the first place?

54:

JW @ 17: So was I - I was utterly convinced he was the one that got away, and was chuckling to myself that he gets all the worst jobs. Then I went back to look at the Fuller ebook, did a name search, and he definitely gets his soul eaten when trying to steal from Bob.

I was sure that was someone else.

(I guess ripples in the timeline are a hazard here, but I was thinking they’d be confined to the fiction...)

OTOH, if I was to look in the Novosibirsk phone book, how many Alexeis might I find? Haven't read the book yet, but is it possible this could be a different Alexei from Novosibirsk? Even if they both worked for the KGB.

55:

Well, one scenario I'm playing with is the idea that magic is resilient, science is productive. Since these tend to require opposite adaptions (resilience is about minimizing loss, while productivity is about maximizing gain), it would explain why science beats out magic, at least in the short run. In the long run, if science can't make for a resilient civilization (case in point: 2020) then the magic comes back in the ruins.

With respect to the Laundryverse, we could add the additional complication that introducing magic to a highly productive system is dangerous, because it attracts Things from the Dungeon Dimensions outside, and this can cause the system to crash in various and diverse ways. The real world analogy is what's happened in the US and Australian with the abandonment of indigenous fire management systems and the institution of scientific forestry and range management. The fires didn't go away, but they have gone out of control. Re-establishing a resilient fire management system is likely to take centuries to millennia, especially with a changing climate.

Anyway, in a "primitive" magic system (low density of humans living in a resilient fashion), a couple of things keep the monsters away. One is that with few people, mathematics tends to stay simple, so all the dangerous possibilities opened up by modern math theory remain mostly unexploited. Another is that power-hungry psychopaths tend to get ostracized, especially in really low tech conditions, because they're a real danger, not useful warlords as in more dense cultures. That may in turn keep the serious monsters away, at the expense of having low level monsters endemic in the system.

56:

Charlie - speaking of time travel, did you read The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.? What did you think? I enjoyed it, and it had an interesting perspective on magic and time travel; if not necessarily full self-consistent it least admitted some great storytelling.

(rot13: Gur ivxvat fntn bs gur Jnyzneg envq ernyyl znqr gur obbx sbe zr.)

57:

"Gur ivxvat fntn bs gur Jnyzneg envq ernyyl znqr gur obbx sbe zr."

Yes, that was a lot of fun.

58:

If "Case Nightmare Green" is what happens when "the stars come into alignment", doesn't that suggest that someday they will again go out of alignment? If so, they must have come into & gone out of alignment previously and will probably do so many times again before the whole universe just finally goes away.

Also, who had the power to put "the sleeper in the pyramid" to sleep & why aren't they still around to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't get loose again? Why did they put him to sleep in the first place?

I TOTALLY want to know this. Let's hope OGH is into worldbuilding.

59:

I dead-ended halfway through; ought to go back to it some time, but it felt highly repetitive at that point. (Could have done with a bit of shortening.)

60:

“ We've seen the ghost roads, we've seen access to variant pocket universes and/or time lines, there is some rather fucked-up shit in the background: the universe of the Laundry Files is constantly retconning itself. (In other words, it's not just that Bob is an unreliable narrator.)”

Yeah, this was the bit I was wondering about with regard to Alexei - especially given the time travel elements of the book. I wasn’t sure if I was missing a deliberate easter egg that hinted this had happened to him.

Thinking about it, the fate of the last Russian wasn’t explicitly called out, was it? The book had changed hands by that point, so did the Lares still go after them? Or is that plot for another time?

61:

No. As OGH says, its heyday was roughly 1850-1900. The Boer war was the writing on the wall, and WW I and its consequences marked its loss of near-total hegemony. See 1066 And All That, which was actually used as a history book when I was at school! As with organic systems, the time of massive extent of often later than the time they start to break apart.

62:

Damn. I forgot to add this. As I have said more than once before, Diamond is quite simply wrong - the UK iron and coal resources were nothing exceptional - look at a good atlas, and you will see lots of other places that have at least as much of both. And the industrial revolution had more-or-less completed before it became worthwhile to ship such things from even eastern or southern Europe or north Africa, let alone any colonies. Yes, there are lots of places that DON'T, which explains some non-developments.

63:

That is stated, a good many times, yes, but more as a mantra than a description. The usual explanation in the books is the amount of computational power (including brains). OGH has mentioned above that he may go into it in more depth in a future book, so we shall all have to be patient :-(

64:

Are those not the same question?
I assumed the Sleeper was asleep at least partly because The Stars Were Not Right.

65:

power-hungry psychopaths tend to get ostracized, especially in really low tech conditions, because they're a real danger, not useful warlords as in more dense cultures

I am not sure I remember exactly where, but I have read recently that there is a pattern in small group societies where (it's always) men who become, as you say, power hungry psychopaths (for whatever measure of such things is important in the society in question) are killed quietly in their sleep, often with the responsibility to do so delegated to their closest (female) relative or spouse. It might have been David Graeber.

I'm not sure about the usefulness of warlords, but as a species we do certainly seem to have made plenty of them.

66:

I'm going to be slow responding to questions here for a while because there seems to be a major ongoing broadband failure with British Telecom, affecting the whole of London and knocking me offline here in Edinburgh (and I know of folks affected in Glasgow and Manchester too ...)

I don't feel like burning gigabytes of mobile data, so I'll play catch-up once the cable internet is working again. Humph.

67:

waldo @ 64: Are those not the same question?

I don't know. Maybe?

I assumed the Sleeper was asleep at least partly because The Stars Were Not Right.

Ok then. What was he doing before he lay down for his little nap that has everyone so upset about waking him up?

68:

Why was magic suppressed - don't tell me it was all Newton's fault!

69:

Damn. I forgot to add this. As I have said more than once before, Diamond is quite simply wrong - the UK iron and coal resources were nothing exceptional - look at a good atlas, and you will see lots of other places that have at least as much of both. And the industrial revolution had more-or-less completed before it became worthwhile to ship such things from even eastern or southern Europe or north Africa, let alone any colonies. Yes, there are lots of places that DON'T, which explains some non-developments.

Nope. Go check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining

Here's the short version: --Even the classical Greeks knew about coal being really good for metallurgy. However, they only used surface deposits, and when those were gone, that was it. This was also true of China and elsewhere. The lesson? Coal isn't magical stuff, and if you put a deposit of it near a smith, they use it. --Two places in the world combined good metallurgy and abundant coal: China and England. In England, the Romans were using coal to do stuff during their time in Britain, and the Chinese used coal from 400 BCE on. The lesson here: supplies matter. I'll come back to this. --Coal was used and traded in Medieval Britain, and finally took off when people started mining it in tunnels in 1575.

So, if I had to answer the question about why China and Britain both formed world-spanning powers, I'd throw this up as a hypothesis that abundant deposits of iron, coal, and the means to exploit both is one of the necessary precursors.

And that's the key point that goes back to the bronze age: bronze started in places where tin and copper were relatively close to each other (within a few hundred kilometers), AND there was the technology for making fires hot enough to melt both.

This last is also critical. Bronze age Britain had some use for coal as heating, but less use for iron ore because they couldn't smelt the stuff. Equally, there is (was) a good tin mine in southern California (mostly worked out) and there was abundant copper ore in the California desert and even more east, where it was mined as the famous Arizona turquoise.

Why didn't the Puebloan Indians and California Indians couldn't make a hot enough fire to melt either of the ores. Even their pottery is low-heat earthenwear, not fully melted ceramics. Some copper ores were good for jewelry, but not for tool-making.

Anyway, I didn't get this from Diamond, but by doing my own constraints analysis. It's a good exercise, especially now, when the world increasingly depends on a different set of elements, including rare earths and lithium. Where those are abundant and in close proximity, I'll bet that country is going to be a global powerhouse. Incidentally, the biggest rare earth miner on the planet at the moment is China...

A similar analysis worked for oil during the 20th Century.

70:

Assuming for a second it was put to sleep by something/someone rather than fell asleep as lack of mana (oxygen) made it sleepy, then I assume it will be coming back pissed off and angry.

It seems to me that a pissed off avatar/larval stage of an Elder God is something to keep creating Preta’s/zombies to sing lullabyes to.

71:

A line got deleted, sorry.

The background was me asking why North America never had a bronze age, given that Native Americans were pounding on native copper five thousand years ago and abandoned the technology. I was thinking alt-history, as I often do. It got weirder when I found out that the southwestern US had active tin and copper mines, certainly enough to start a bronze age. Why didn't they?

The answer, I think, is kilns, which they didn't have.

The background: people have been pounding rocks on rocks for millions of years, so finding a rock that deformed (like an iron meteor or copper ore) is eminently possible, if such things exist in an area. Also, people have been cooking rocks for a very long time: burying chert under a fire is one way to change the crystalline properties so that it flakes to a sharper edge. So the idea of cooking rocks and banging them on things are ancient and/or spontaneously arising. They're not constraints.

What is a constraint is the heat of the fire. Too cool a fire, and you can't melt ores or metals, or alloy them. That heat requires kilns. For whatever reason, kilns showed up possibly 12,000 years ago in Turkey (not sure I believe the evidence, but they're old). Again, there's a use for them: making better pots. Simple earthenware can be made in a campfire, but if you want to melt the silicon in the clay and make a harder pot of ceramic or porcelain, you need a kiln. Kiln-like structures are also what you use to smelt ores to get metals, so advances in making hotter kilns to make better pots feed into efforts to cook rocks to see what happens when they melt, and whether the resulting material is good for anything.

Kilns seem to be missing from Native North America, and the analogous technology showed up less than 2,000 years ago in South America. Conversely, kilns showed up ~5,000 plus years ago in Asia Minor and maybe ~4,000 years ago in China (not sure what happened in southeast Asia, but they're similar). Along with these came metallurgy, and soon thereafter, alloys, such as bronze. Get the fires a bit hotter, and you can smelt iron and make porcelain.

That's where I came up with the notion that huge technical advances happen where the stuff you need is available, as is the technology to process it. Without all three in place, the technological revolution doesn't happen. And for the technology to be in place, it has to be adapted from some other purpose, or (as in the case of wheels and carts), someone's got to be a real genius.

I now return you to the regularly scheduled spoiler thread. Just remember, it's all magic, that's the important bit.

72:

By the end of the 17th century, industrialisation was well under way in Britain, as was its thassalocracy. Coke only gradually replaced charcoal during the 18th century, and was not used for iron smelting in the 17th century. How things would have developed if Britain had lacked one or the other of coal and iron is unclear, but it is NOT true that the easy availability of both was the reason for our development of either our industrialisation or thassalocracy.

Sweden has ample high-grade ore and forests, and did not develop in the same way. You should also look up Zimbabwe, for an example of somewhere that had both in ample supply. I can't remember the other examples I found offhand. You need to be more careful distinguishing what happened, historically, from what COULD have happened.

I am baffled by your remark about oil, given what happened in Europe and the near east.

73:

The plot detail that caused me to worry a bit concerned Eve's "coffee making skills" as applied to the Bond. She took something of a risk heating the entire brain, didn't she?

The SAS and SO14 try to get a pistol shot into the brain stem to prevent the target counter attacking. Just heating this area ought to be quicker.

However, two other potential uses occur to me. Heating an eye ball or middle ear should cause rapid sensory deprivation, not to mention causing some "explosive yuck" worth writing about.

But if you really want to disable someone and continue chatting, how about just heating the spinal cord between C4 and C5 for "instant quadraplegia"?

74:

She could also move things around. Brains are pretty mushy. Just grab a good chunk of brain and twist it upside down.

Though having said that, it was so refreshing to see super hero powers used in the obvious way. Many years ago my younger brother came home from his first D&D game. He'd been playing a weak, recently rolled character that had very limited teleport powers. Just one pound, one foot. Obviously intended to be a starting point as a magic user, but of no practical value. First fight: "I teleport the middle of his brain one foot to the left".

Since then every superhero or magic story I've seen or read (other than those written by OGH), all I can think is "why don't they just...."

75:

I just assumed it is hard to target, like I dunno spitting precisely onto a small target a meter away. Like, she would have to somehow will the correct distance as well as direction.

Also, according to the book she can heat up 500 grams of water to near boil in a minute, which is about 2.7 kilowatts.

If she could focus it she would be able to cut through various metal objects etc.

76:

Friend of mine was working on a young adult story a decade or two ago, which had weakly-powered preteens/young teens. One of the characters had very weak telekinesis. Turns out when you start pulling their nose hairs even big bullies go where you want them to :-)

77:
But if you really want to disable someone and continue chatting, how about just heating the spinal cord between C4 and C5 for "instant quadraplegia"?

Are you thinking of a certain Bujold novel? I certainly am.

78:

There's a bit where she picks the coffee grounds out of the brewing coffee and leaves the brew behind. That's pretty fine control. She can't see the grounds in the mug "on the far wall". Admittedly that's the telekinesis not the heating power, but it's indicative.

My first thought on first reading was "she could rip the neurons out of your brain and leave the brain behind." on reflection that might not be possible, but the equivalent of stirring your brain with a teaspoon certainly is. It's overwhelming in its implied lethality. It takes Imp a second to digest it, but then,"his mouth dried up".

79:

I wrote a piece about supervillains, and superpowers, a couple years ago, that was eventually published in the WSFA Journal (DC area sf club).

http://mrw.5-cent.us/supervillians.html

As for what real superpowers people would do, it's not, as Tom Smith sings, "out bashin' baddies in their BVDs".

But you'll have to wait for my novel to come out, and I'm thinking that might be next summer.

Yes. I was at ROFCON in Oct, and had a chance to pitch the novel, and was invited to submit. Got an email this past Wed, I think... and I'm in the process of fixing what Walt, the editor, wants fixed, before they buy it.

YEE-HAAA!!!!

80:

Oh, damn, the blog invisibled the link. Let me try again: http://mrw.5-cent.us/supervillians.html

81:

Hey, congrats for the novel!

82:

That's great news! I'm looking forward to it.

83:

hmm yes global universal information access

Dwarf Fortress is getting a graphical overhaul real soon now in 2020 (announced in 2019)

Dead Lies Dreaming is set in 2016.

84:

What is it with the Russian characters dialogue being rendered in broken English even when they're speaking Russian with each other?

"Is fucking library. How the fuck we meant to find right book?"

85:

(It's the same reason that the Eve-as-dutiful-daughter we see in the flashbacks gets turned into the corporate crime gorgon we get to see in the rest of the novel, too.)

My guess? Combined with Rupert's 'greater hold' and the fact you said we haven't seen the last of him, this is analogous to how we no longer have an Angleton but we still have an Eater of Souls. He's literally living rent-free inside her head.

86:

Yep.

There's a talk Eve doesn't get to give in the final draft in which she lectures Imp on the three P's of direct mentally controlled magic: Precision, Power, and Perception. Perception: it's no good being able to burn holes in a target if you can't see it because your radiation vision is blocked by 10 centimetres of air. Power: it's a log scale, and you don't need anything like as much energy as a locomotive to kill an enemy messily and instantly if you've got a precise lock on their C4/C5 vertebrae, as noted. Precision is a good substitute for raw Power, as demonstrated.

Oh, and Eve's perception is the card she palmed. She's quite weak (low power), precise enough to pick the tumblers in a lock (better than milimetric precision), but the killer talent that drags it together is that she can "feel" inside objects my trying to manipulate them and sensing the degree of resistance, which gives her something that's in practical terms more useful than X-ray vision (to a non-radiographer).

87:

I quite often need to work on household 'things' where access and vision are obstructed or impossible, and can witness how true that is! The usefulness of raw power is seriously overstated.

Incidentally, in addition to the half dozen ways to kill people with very little power, and the wonderful nose-hair method, mucking up their semi-circular canals will disable most people to an extent that has to be experienced to be believed. Provided those are not damaged, recovery after that stops takes mere seconds.

88:

What is it with the Russian characters dialogue being rendered in broken English even when they're speaking Russian with each other?

This is actually fairly accurate literal translation of Russian, as it lacks definite (and IIRC indefinite) articles such as "the" and "a." A Russian speaker would literally say "we are in library." "How the fuck" is of course a translation of a whole phrase rather than the individual words.

89:

<ı>This is actually fairly accurate literal translation of Russian, as it lacks definite (and IIRC indefinite) articles such as "the" and "a."

Yes, but I don't think dialogue should be done like this. You wouldn't want a Chinese character to sound like a fortune cookie when talking in Mandarin, just because (if I recall my very basic Mandarin correctly) something like "Zhao say he want money" might be said to be the accurate literal translation. This makes the speaker sound like a simpleton, and it is not really a good look when writing foreign people. (Compare this to the way Panin speaks Russian in the Fuller Memorandum; it is not decipted with broken English and thus he does not sound like a caricature.)

90:

"--Even the classical Greeks knew about coal being really good for metallurgy. However, they only used surface deposits, and when those were gone, that was it. This was also true of China and elsewhere. The lesson? Coal isn't magical stuff, and if you put a deposit of it near a smith, they use it."

Here I have to disagree, unprocessed coal is bad for making steel, because it is full of chemical impurities that ruin the metal. You need to hit upon the idea of coking before you can use it for good quality iron or steel. Before that idea mined coal is worse than tree coal.

Quote from here : https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-ii-trees-for-blooms/

"Instead, the fuel I gather most people assume was used (to the point that it is what many video-game crafting systems set for) was coal. The problem with coal is that it has to go through a process of coking in order to create a pure mass of carbon (called ‘coke’) which is suitable for use. Without that conversion, the coal itself both does not burn hot enough, but also is apt to contain lots of sulfur, which will ruin the metal being made with it, as the iron will absorb the sulfur and produce an inferior alloy (sulfur makes the metal brittle, causing it to break rather than bend, and makes it harder to weld too). "

By the way good steel was not coming from China, but from India :

https://acoup.blog/2020/11/06/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-addendum-crucible-steel-and-cast-iron/

the cast iron made in China was most often inferior and very wastefull in energy to get to an acceptable grade of steel.

91:

Great read Charlie. Very cool characters and parallels nicely with the Laundryverse. One question regarding the finale between Eve and the Bond. Shouldn’t the Bond’s ward, which protected his person from Imp’s magic earlier, prevent Eve from parboiling his noggin? The mechanics of wards is a tad unclear. Preventing influence but not energistic magical effects?

92:

I'm not arguing about wootz, I'm arguing about industrialization, and we need to get our timelines disentangled as well.

To be fair, I don't know enough about the history of India to know whether they had a nascent industrial base or make coke from coal. Their long-term mastery of iron is unquestioned (cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pillar_of_Delhi).

However, the Chinese were producing coke at the same time that the Iron Pillar of Delhi was constructed around the 4th Century CE(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)#History). They implemented large-scale iron manufacturing with coke in the 11th century (within a century or two of when they introduced guns to warfare) and a Brit patented the process in 1589.

Again, there's not a genius-level jump in making coke from coal. It's an analogous process to cooking wood to make hotter-burning charcoal, which is something smiths and others figured out at the beginning of the Bronze Age. It's not hard to speculate that a smith who wanted something even hotter than coal would have thrown some coal into a charcoal-making operation to see what happened.

And finally note that modern blacksmiths use both coal (not coke) and charcoal (cf: https://feltmagnet.com/crafts/Basic-Blacksmithing-coal-charcoal-or-propane-for-forge-fuel, or watch episodes of Forged in Fire). The problem is that scaling charcoal and coal-heated forging likely runs into fuel constraints, because they burn cooler and introduce all sorts of interesting things into the iron if they're of low quality. Coke is better, and you're right, having a lot of coal and making coke with it is one of the keys to industrialization.

93:

This is actually fairly accurate literal translation of Russian, as it lacks definite (and IIRC indefinite) articles such as "the" and "a."

That's right. No "a", "and" or "the" and learning to use them isn't easy. Also, Russian has a robust system of noun inflections (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional, vocative) that allow it to say things in one word that take a word plus prepositions or other modifiers in English. That's frequently encountered in possessives, which in Russian usually just employ the genitive case but in English can be rendered with the " 's " construction, "of", or often with an adjectival noun. " 's " would kind of correspond to the genitive case if English still had such.

Language ain't easy.

94:

No "a", "and" or "the"

Arg. "and" -> "an", of course. Dratted fingers...

95:

Thanks for that site - very interesting. This page is highly relevant, too:

https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/

These maps are relevant, too, especially when you note that the coppicing productivity in wet tropical areas is several times that of it in northern Europe and most of China.

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/topic3-sedimentarymanganesandironoredeposits-151123211157-lva1-app6891/95/sedimentary-manganes-and-iron-ore-deposits-28-638.jpg?cb=1448313204 https://grandemotte.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/global-coal-fields.jpg

96:

It seems to me that if one takes multiple civilizations that developed in different regions, one will find common elements. Then by filtering out common elements that aren't plausible prerequisites, then the only elements left are plausibly-sounding prerequisites.

Because of that, I'm skeptical of such environmental determinism.

In addition, it is easy to dismiss locations that had those elements but failed to develop (for however you define "develop" - and that's a big can of worms) because the honest truth is that for almost all of the time there's been humans displaying behavioral modernity, we spent most of that time in the stone age.

So as far as this line of speculation goes, I find it not disprovable, which makes it a horrible theory.

It reminds me of online discussions where someone pretends to be a member of an alternative timeline and asks a counterfactual question like "why didn't Europe colonize the world?", to which other people come up with reasons that sound quite plausible except they are disproved by our reality.

As for magic being the reason for the rise of the British Empire in the Laundryverse: did other far-flung empires also require magic? Did the Romans? The Spanish? What's the cutoff? It does seem like New Management is fond of Tzompantli, which may hint at the Triple Alliance having knowledge of practical magic, although we aren't told if it was necessary for the size of the Aztec Empire.

97:

There's another answer. In Kurtz' first Deryni trilogy (from the seventies, IIRC), at the end, the now-king kills the bad guy... by stopping his heart. Mental hand around the heart, and squeeze....

You could probably close a vein, as well.

98:

Consider this: one of my beta readers on the new novel comments was that she was having trouble telling my people apart, because they all spoke the same way. I had to make changes to give people accents, or to speak more formally (few-to-no contractions), etc, to make them more distinguishable.

I don't think Charlie's usage of that is giving them pidgin, it makes real clear what group, at least, is speaking.

99:

Great maps, and I appreciate both of you pointing me to acoup.

One other note is that not all coals are the same. Good old carboniferous-era anthracite coal has the highest carbon content and lowest level of impurities, while bituminous coal can be more rock than carbon at the worst end and is full of crap. It's also younger. I had to deal with these when I was trying to understand climate change. Coal shows up almost everywhere in the fossil record. It's basically dead, buried marshes and swamps. Since these are depositional environments pretty much by definition (being low-lying areas), the absence of coal in the fossil record means that there are serious hydrological issues going on.

Anyway, the carboniferous was a cool, high oxygen era when plants had developed trees, but insects hadn't developed termites and fungi hadn't figured out how to rot wood. Thus, a lot of swamp trees got buried for 300-350 myr, making nice, well-cooked anthracite. The soft coals IIRC mostly come from the Paleocene and early Eocene. At that point, there were plenty of termites and wood-rotting fungi, but no hadrosaurs chewing up rotten logs, and so, again, there's a bunch of buried swamps making coal in places like Wyoming. This stuff is the high sulfur (etc.) low carbon stuff that really needs to be coked for a lot of uses.

Want to guess where people were exploiting anthracite since the Middle Ages? Try Wales.

Getting back to the story, I think the simpler solution to the whole "magic goes away with civilization," is that the old magicians knew from bitter experience that having too many magicians around was a soul-crunching experience, and expected bad things to happen if civilization started ramping up magic. One could easily retcon in the fall of just about any great empire as due to widespread magic use.

So anyway, the danger posed by industrial magic led the magicians to lay down widespread geas a(perhaps linked to The Book of Common Prayer? or other missionary stuff) to squelch magic and keep the globe from getting overrun by Them From Outside.

Unfortunately, this solution worked about as well as the Smokey The Bear campaign of forest fire suppression. It suppressed magic around the world for perhaps a century or two. But it set up a world of billions of people practicing magic-adjacent stuff like mathematics, who were totally naive about the risks. Thus, when magic came back, it was big, dangerous, and uncontrollable.

To pervert Sagan's comments about the "Demon Haunted World" of superstition, if magic is real and can spontaneously arise, then a world haunted by semi-tolerable demons may be preferable to one that can be colonized by Outer Gods. That's the world the old magicians tried to craft, to keep Things in check.

100:

Your feltmagnet link is bad - it gets a 404, unless you go into the URL and delete the punctuation at the end. It also doesn't have a lot of info....

101:

Interesting. Also in The Witling, published in the same year (1976).

102:

It looks like Larry Niven perhaps got there first, with one of his Gil the ARM stories. The collection was also published in 1976, but if I got the right story ("Organleggers") it was published in 1969. James Schmitz also used high precision teleportation to kill people in "Glory Day" (1970-ish).

I suspect that, if we look, the notion of using paranormal powers to stop a heart goes back quite a ways, but those are the early-70s SFF stories I can think of off the top of my head.

103:

One could easily retcon in the fall of just about any great empire as due to widespread magic use.

Why did that me think of the Interwebs?

104:

Why did that me think of the Interwebs?

No reason, I'm sure. At least you didn't go with the rise of modern paganism or similar stereotypically problematic idea.

More "seriously," I'm perfectly happy if someone wants to swipe the idea and retcon magic into the fall of empires and state in general. Have fun with it, if it seems interesting.

The onset of dark ages seems to be a worldwide problem of state-level civilizations. And since record-keeping tends to be sparse when things fall apart and documents tend not to survive regardless, it's reasonable to speculate that the rise in civilization leads to more sophisticated math and magic done by more people, which leads to the Opening Of Ways To Things Men Were Not Supposed to Know, which leads to the collapse of the civilization and the loss of the Openers Of Ways and their knowledge...and the cycle repeats itself hundreds to thousands of years later. Heck, the environmental anomalies recorded around the ends of civilizations might be correlated with Incursions From Outside, rather than the direct causes of collapse, as scientists propose.

Finally, and really going out on a limb here, if a bunch of magicians were to do something to blot out knowledge of magic, one logical instigator is The Little Ice Age, which ended the Renaissance and brought about The Enlightenment. The timing is good (the Enlightenment being about the rise of science, ignoring Newton's Alchemy*), and a worldwide disaster barely averted might lead magicians to decide that widespread magic is simply too dangerous, and to take measures to suppress that knowledge to save the world. This would in turn lead to the problems mentioned in the previous post.

*Check out Hutton's Triumph of the Moon if you want a history of magic in England. The tl;dr version is, no, magic didn't ever go away. So any story that posits magic going away is total BS. But that's perfectly okay in a SFF story, just so long as it's acknowledged BS, and no one mistakes it for an alternate truthy thing.

105:

A reasonable explanation of the demise and resurgence of western European magic is that it is enabled by the cumulative belief around it (some distance-weighted function, with disbelief counting negative). I.e. the Enlightenment led to a disbelief in magic, and the rise of computers (which many or most people regard as applied magic) to its resurgence.

I generally dislike plots that involve global geases, especially ones that control the functionality of the very thing that powers them, because that's not how anything else in the universe works; regard it as the aesthetic generalisation of Goedel's theorem, of you like :-) Variations on Jacob's Monkey's Paw are common, but going beyond that is extremely tricky without falling into the Deus ex Machina trap, as Zelazny's Lord Demon does (in that respect, which is not a critical part of the story). I sincerely hope OGH's explanation is both more interesting and more, er, plausible.

106:

Hmmmm…'Marcus'?

107:

Am I wrong to see the late William Hartnell as Professor Skullface?

108:

You're right, and I hope he does too. The only virtue of this one is that you don't have to invoke the ruinous effects of cold iron, photography, or similar, because the magic is only being temporarily suppressed by massive action, not entirely banished.

I'll note that the whole Rivers of London series runs on the idea of the magic returning after a complete debacle during WWII that caused the survivors to limit magic to only a few individuals per country. So it's been done on a smaller time frame.

I'd also point out that the standard missionary and conquistador practice of stamping out paganism and witchcraft wherever they found it during imperial expansion actually would fit quite well into this storyline.

109:

H @ 99 ( Back from 2 days out as old computer's Hard Drive turned its toes up ... ) What about Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" where Mana is a consumable, but finite resource ....

110:

I think the challenge here is how to make a universe like the Laundryverse, where the magic existed quite open, apparently went away (or was repressed), then came roaring back when a certain number of people are around.

Niven's actually working in parallel with Tolkien, with the idea of magic gradually leaving the world, along with the fantastic beings and monsters it sustained.

I'll note so far that Charlie has used precisely none of my ideas in the Laundryverse. Thus I'm happy to discuss this, because based on the priors, these aren't spoilers, merely distractions.

Now if someone will just pull in Anderson's Brain Wave....

111:

The high(er)-speed combat magic used by Game Boy and Del (slightly different scales and focuses; Game Boy is more ... profligate) is particularly underrated/powerful. Neither are killers so probably, and thankfully, they haven't given it much thought. (I have, and will not write down the details, my rules.) (The Mike Resnick trilogy "Soothsayer", "Oracle" and "Prophet" tries to cover this ground too, though she's seriously high-powered. Miles Teg in the later Dune Series is an example as well (shorter timescale), though he also could seriously amp his body (including brain) speed up as well. Clunky Nick Cage movie as well IIRC.)

112:

Well, it's taken me weeks, buying a 50' cable, then working out how to run it through the basement from the family room, then, just this afternoon, up through the wall, then the floor, to the living room, so Ellen's tv could be connected to the 'Net....

What a pain.

Double pain: I got a Galaxy Tab A 8", and now I have to create accounts, including where I would have preferred not to (like Google Play). All this for a fancier ereader...

113:

Now if someone will just pull in Anderson's Brain Wave....

Also Heinlein's Waldo & Magic, Inc.

Reality undergoes major changes.

114:

I’m curious about the real-estate-related craziness - “Grave of the Unknown Komatsu Mini-Excavator”, mansions abandoned to rot because they’re too valuable to live in. To what extent (if at all) is this an exaggeration over the situation in our timeline’s London?

115:

I know nothing about London, but I've heard exactly the same from multiple sources. Including Hugh Grant of all people, if memory serves.

116:

I think the challenge here is how to make a universe like the Laundryverse, where the magic existed quite open, apparently went away (or was repressed), then came roaring back when a certain number of people are around.

Well, there's always Shadowrun - at least the older versions when both it and Earthdawn were developed by the same company (FASA in the beginning, I'm not sure about the later licensing deals). There were these cycles of magic, and in Shadowrun it was the Sixth world - every even-numbered one having magic and odd-numbered not, though I'm not sure about the first one.

Earthdawn was set in the end of the fourth one, where magic had been declining from its peak, but stopped. The high mana allowed some not very nice incursions from other dimensions, and this was used to set up dungeons to explore. In Shadowrun there were things which accelerated the mana increase and said not very nice things were coming back sooner than expected.

Shadowrun is set up from 2050 onwards - it was first published in 1989 and has been mostly a bit over sixty years into the future. I haven't bought new stuff in a decade so I don't know its current status, though - I have plenty of gaming material for it for the rest of my life anyway. Earthdawn is more D&D-type fantasy, though it did give more reasoning for its classes and dungeons than D&D ever did.

117:

I was also taken by the excavator detail. Google informed me that despite the original 2014 source (New Statesman article, picked up by the Graun and others), the Evening Standard debunked it a few days later. Convincingly, I thought.

Ghost mansions however, I've always assumed are real.

118:

Will we find out what the Russians are up to with Chernobog?

119:

acoup is a great blog. the articles about bread taught me a few things about subsidence agriculture (and the mindset of the subsidence farmer).

Probably nothing new for you given your areas of interest.

120:

It's a real phenomenon, and happens in other 'high value' areas, like Cambridge, too - with existing properties, new builds and land with planning permission. While it is probably too strong to say that it is intentional, it is certainly intentional to preserve the legal and financial conditions that make it profitable. I have seen figures as high as 10% in some areas.

121:

The Triple Alliance certainly believed in their own magic, fwiw.

Aliette de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood novels feature a protagonist who is the High Priest of the Dead and, in the 3 novels and various shorts, is investigating murders that are suspected to be magic-related.

Good fun reads, if anyone fancies that kind of thing. And she was obsessed with the Mexica as a kid, so lots of interesting ethnographical detail too 😊

122:

Robert writes: I’m curious about the real-estate-related craziness - “Grave of the Unknown Komatsu Mini-Excavator”,

The PC09-1 costs about £8,000 second hand, it weighs about 1 ton, and given the cost of a basement excavation in Central London will be a large chunk of £100,000s even for the smallest basement, and millions for Christian Candy's latest ( https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8977485/Christian-Candy-locked-neighbour-row-150m-Candyland-plans.html ) just leaving it behind may make economic sense. You can drive it into a building, do some underpinning, dig a bit more, insert a reinforced concrete floor and just keep repeating. Getting it out again involves a crane and sufficiently large access ports or stripping it down to man-handleable chunks.

Robert continues: " mansions abandoned to rot because they’re too valuable to live in. To what extent (if at all) is this an exaggeration over the situation in our timeline’s London?"

I was first aware of the phenomena in the 1980s on Bishop's Avenue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bishops_Avenue#:~:text=It%20is%20considered%20to%20be,of%20%22Billionaires'%20Row%22.&text=Most%20of%20the%20land%20was,and%20a%20nearby%20residential%20home. ) one of the routes we used between central London and Watford back in the day.

123:

Charlie writes: "Power: it's a log scale, and you don't need anything like as much energy as a locomotive to kill an enemy messily and instantly if you've got a precise lock on their C4/C5 vertebrae, as noted. Precision is a good substitute for raw Power, as demonstrated."

BTW Charlie, if I've got it right, a C4/C5 break leaves you control of your lungs but not your limbs -- ideal for information extraction from non-magic users. Slightly higher would give you a twitch-free despatch method should one be needed.

124:

A question about powered people, Charlie. Where individuals have special abilities to able to do something, you've generally kind of explored a bit of the how and why, and also the consequences for the person, group and society.

The obvious reference point here is Wildbow's "Worm" and "Pact" series. OK, he started writing after you did, but he got to powered people before you did. :) A major element of "Worm" is how Taylor Hebert leverages an apparently-trivial power (control of insects) to a point where she becomes a warlord and takes down the strongest Flying Brick, which compares somewhat to your point about "precision".

Without landing yourself the wrong side of legal nasties, did you have any of this in mind? Or conversely, have you had to consciously avoid reading things like that to avoid polluting your own ideas?

125:

Legal nasties: all I have to avoid is infringing trademarks owned by DC and Marvel (or Hollywood studios). Even then, parody is protected free speech in the US market. Pretty much everything else is fine.

Yes, I've read "Worm" (dead-ended partway into "Pact"). It's an interesting take, but somewhat ... American in flavour; the American superhero genre is infested with assumptions about the nature of policing and law enforcement's relationship with society which are really not universally agreed upon even between social classes within the US, never mind internationally.

To be cynical: Imp et al are somewhat self-centered -- Wendy apart -- but barely register as supervillains, they're just the average young adult in a crapsack society trying to get along, with added superpowers and a whole bunch of baggage. But what constitutes crime is decided on by The Money. Imp is a criminal because he's obsessed with making a type of art which is forbidden because of a specific act of law designed to extend copyright on one particular pop culture wellspring, for example. Yes, it's illegal: but that doesn't make him wrong -- what makes him bad is the lengths he'll go to work around that law, having fallen for the old Yorkshire proverb "may as well be hanged for [stealing] a sheep as a lamb". Eve ... I'm going to leave her aside for now: Eve is the primary focus of book 3, and she's done horrible things but not without justification.

Consider that if an offense is punished with a fine, that offense is only a crime for the poor: rich folks pay the price of entry and move on. This is totally unjust -- it violates the enlightenment principle of equality before the law -- but is frequently unquestioned in US and UK culture. Then consider that one of the archetypes of the US superhero genre, Batman, is basically a billionaire who gets his jollies by dressing in bondage gear and beating up poor and/or mentally ill people, rather than (for example) solving childhood food poverty in Gotham City. The New Management holds up a distorting mirror to our own society's misplaced and warped priorities, and when you see what the official superheroes do in "In His House", well ... it isn't pretty.

126:

Consider that if an offense is punished with a fine, that offense is only a crime for the poor: rich folks pay the price of entry and move on.

And when the fines are scaled according to people's incomes (which is kind of also problematic), the people with big incomes will complain to great lengths about the "unfair" punishment when they get caught for example speeding. In Finland at least some fines do scale that way.

127:

Elderly Cynic @ 87: I quite often need to work on household 'things' where access and vision are obstructed or impossible, and can witness how true that is! The usefulness of raw power is seriously overstated.

Incidentally, in addition to the half dozen ways to kill people with very little power, and the wonderful nose-hair method, mucking up their semi-circular canals will disable most people to an extent that has to be experienced to be believed. Provided those are not damaged, recovery after that stops takes mere seconds.

I guess us mere mundanes or muggles or whatever we are will just have to be satisfied with older tried & true methods for taking out a sentry.

128:

What worries me more is the question of what Baba Yaja's doing.

129:

ARGH! Baba Yaga.

130:

Baba

You may have created something here, a set of Babas. Baba Yaga, Baba Yaja, Baba Yoga, Baba Ghanoush...

Like the Norns or Shakespeare's witches.

131:

A few years ago a colleague insisted on naming a project Baba Yaga. It might not have been a wise choice. :-)

132:

You may have created something here, a set of Babas. Baba Yaga, Baba Yaja, Baba Yoga, Baba Ghanoush...

Baba Fett…

133:

colleague insisted on naming a project Baba Yaga [He was I think a fan of the movie. The department manager was a brilliant woman, practicing Roman Catholic, and didn't like the name perhaps for religious reasons.]

136:

It could have been a lot worse. When I was working for Ameritech in the mid-nineties, and in a year, our division had grown from 4 to 27, and they brought in corporate sysadmins, we had two test boxes. One of the senior admins named one fat man (or was the other one little boy?)

I had to explain to the young consultants where the names came from , and why that was NOT a Good Omen.

137:

Movie? I was thinking of the Russian myth....

138:

NOT a Good Omen. If somebody had named a test server around me fat man (or little boy) I'd have been laughing all day. :-)

(SotMN in the other thread just mentioned another (ugly) approach to magic suppression. Pondering it.)

139:

Skimmed her posts. Nothing much interesting, too much like "math puzzles++", not willing to work to figure out what she's hinting at, so didn't get her suggestion.

140:

whitroth & others Baba Yaga? ( You tube clip - ignore prelim advert ) _ Modest Mussorgsky from "Pictures" ... - 139 ... math puzzles have solutions, because they have actual content(!)

141:

Oh, that takes me back.

I bought this about 40 years ago...

https://youtu.be/IVvQQMrEUzQ

Tomita Pictures at an exhibition.

142:

If it was CRISPR, that's facile - sorry. The problem isn't a mechanism that permanently disables itself - that's fairly common in the real world - but one where it temporarily disables itself. It's extremely tricky to arrange such things.

143:

I had a couple Tomita records back in the day. Holst's "The Planets" and one other, I forget which. I should listen to "The Planets" again soon.

144:

If it was CRISPR, that's facile - sorry. The problem isn't a mechanism that permanently disables itself - that's fairly common in the real world - but one where it temporarily disables itself. She did say "CRISPR isn't the metaphor you're looking for." Permanent disability in a high percentage of a large heterogeneous population might be acceptable, reducing the potential number of practitioners below a threshold (or more cynically, reserving talents for the perpetrators). Temporary disability (and some permanent disability, if there are genetic correlates) might also be achievable, though not globally, with cultural practices/teachings that discourage (or even disable) thought styles conducive to magic ("discouraging magical thinking"), by actively discouraging magic(al thinking) through variations on "burn the witch" (inquisition, etc), made more effective pre biological science if there are semi-reliable proxies for identifying such talents. (And see the fluoridation video I linked in that thread, guy on a gold throne talking about fluoride disabling certain such abilities.)

The other part of that is that we are presuming that there are no genetically distinctive (and perhaps culturally distinct) subpopulations correlated with such abilities. See the bits about speed being taught to children. Early on SotMN was pushing some papers about schizophrenia and building "cognitive reserve" (also associated with high cognitive function in those with healthy (e.g. not schizophrenic) elderly brains). I eventually poked at them, and looked at the experimental design for a few of them and replicated some aspects which used adaptive speed training, with the surprising side effect of being able to induce a low-grade sustainable tachypsychia (and somewhat improved reaction time including choice reaction time). It is likely that there are subpopulations for whom this is much easier and works better, due to slightly variations in brain connectivity/etc. And perhaps there are other such variations that are more directly related to magic.

145:

Just because I'm mean, wicked, cruel, and nasty, here's another version of Why The Magic Went Away in the Laundryverse. Note that this is totally BS and I'm not checking dates, as well as ignoring things like Chinese history.

Anyway, Our Story:

In Ye Olde Medieval times, magic existed. It was limited because knowledge was limited because stuff was handwritten on parchment, which is both slow (see the Nova episode on the history of writing: the tl;dr is that inking letters on parchment is a slow process due to the nature of the materials) and expensive (parchment is hide, so it's radically rarer than paper). These limits, plus K-syndrome and associated nastiness, keep magic in check.

Then Gutenberg invents the printing press, about the same time as paper mills are spreading throughout Europe, in the late 15th Century. Knowledge escapes, bigly, including magic. The magicians get alarmed, because they know thattoo many idiots doing magic is Bad.

And they're right. The idiots start conjuring, and there's witch hunts, religious schisms, and Dyverse Alarums, everywhere. Worse, some idiots up north conjure an infovore straight out of the Atrocity Archive, triggering The Little Ice Age. Perhaps this is where the Nazis got the idea for A:A?

So after the infovore is banished, the magicians get serious about ANTI-magic, and that's where the enlightenment comes from. It's not just magicians radically innovating on the old Celtic Geasa magictech, it's a concerted effort by church authorities, magicians, and whoever to suppress magic by promoting rationalism. The meme that magic doesn't work, science works better is one of the cheapest and greatest shields they have.

And it sort of works. There are periodic outbreaks of magic, especially when new technology like mechanized printing presses show up in the 1850s and there are explosions of new religions in places like America.

But this campaign against magic also gives a critical advantage to the European colonial powers. The rest of the world uses magic, but the colonialists are armed, not just with superior guns, but with superior anti-magic. The anti-magicians conquer large swathes of the world by wrecking indigenous magic systems, sowing rationality, and so forth. Missionaries armed with ubiquitous printed anti-magic geasa poo-poo magic as useless superstition wherever they find it, and so on, and people who used magic as a basic part of their lives are left to become plantation workers and other "mudsills."

But it's now a red queen race between magicians trying to use new information technologies to bring back the magic, and the anti-magicians using the same technologies to keep the world from getting overwhelmed. Computers and the internet only make it worse. And worst of all, people have forgotten about magic, so it seems harmless to dabble in D&D, or Wicca, or to do fractals on the computer. As with vaccines, they very success of magic suppression breeds a growing and dangerously naive population that has few defenses against the very thing they're being protected from.

And that sets the stage for the Laundryverse: a red queen race that the defenders are about to lose...

146:

The reason that it was facile is that ANY Darwinly-inheritable capability doesn't match the speed at which it comes back in the Laundryverse. In that, I am including simple genetics, inheritable gene expression, and anything else of that nature. It's not that such a mechanism couldn't effect the suppression; it's that it can't account for the resurgence.

While a Lamarckian-inheritable capability can emerge that fast, that is doesn't square with the incidence of 'non-computational' (*) wild magic by people with no plausible background in magic referred to in the Delirium Brief and (possibly) Dead Lies Dreaming. Up until the former book, #145 was consistent with the universe, but they introduced that problem. Even emergence by natural Lamarckian inheritance forms very definite clusters, where one person teaches his or her descendents (as with Eve and Imp).

One could sweep that under the table by saying that the exceptions (mainly in TDB) are the sort of anomaly that arises with intellectual abilities, but the TDB has cases where they showed no plausible equivalent of computational ability.

(*) Note that I am including unorthodox systems, such as graphics, music or poetry as 'computational'. The similarity is that they all need someone with a good imagination for patterns to create them.

147:

Troutwaxer @ 143: I had a couple Tomita records back in the day. Holst's "The Planets" and one other, I forget which. I should listen to "The Planets" again soon."

I was always a little disappointed Holst had not written a movement for "Pluto", but now that Pluto is no longer considered a planet ...

148:

I can almost understand keeping the properties empty in case someone comes along wanting it right away. But not spending 0.001% of the value per year on maintenance?

149:

JBS at 147: It would be a bit startling if he had :)

150:

Early in the series it’s established that having an ever-increasing density of thinking beings and computing machines on Earth is “weakening the walls of the world” and making magick exponentially easier. It’s not surprising that that would overwhelm a previously successful magick suppression system. The population explosion changed the context.

151:

Not only the population density, but Christianity and other "major" religions (that is, magick suppressing religions) have had considerable trouble adapting to the truths which science has exposed, which has caused a measurable part of the population to go looking for a form of spirituality that doesn't suck, and they've been reviving some old forms - and forget Cthulhu, all you really have to do to "weaken the walls of the world" is to optimize something like Wicca, which happens naturally as people try various forms and perform it in different places, (which means places where the magick suppressors forgot to bury some hematite or perform other types of magick suppression.

152:

When Pluto fans complain about the demotion to “dwarf planet” status I say “When you hear ‘dwarf’ don’t think Sleepy or Doc, think Thorin Oakenshield.”

153:

Early on SotMN was pushing some papers about schizophrenia and building "cognitive reserve" WAS SHE? You sure it wasn't more random dribble? Or was there actually a message-with-content in there? LIKE I SAID - you can translate it into English, for the rest of us! Sorry, but I'm really annoyed by this ...

Troutwaxer I'm beginning to suspect that all forms of "spirituality" suck .... Certainly, when anyone mentions that word I immediately start looking for the bullshit-mountain that's around somewhere!

154:

You are forgetting they are not properties - they are merely financial instruments in an investment portfolio. It’s the functional equivalent of forgetting one of your many bank accounts or that semi famous self portrait of the minor 17th century painter.

155:

powerline networking... a lot less hassle than that

156:

"I'm beginning to suspect that all forms of "spirituality" suck ...."

I'll bow out of that discussion ASAP. I was speaking to the magic/tech issues in the Laundryverse.

157:

Sigh. A few mentions in this 2016 thread, including a question by me and an answer, helpful to me at the time. (S. Silverstein's very interesting works first mentioned in 2015. I subsequently read his other papers on the subject and a few related papers.) https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/02/holding-pattern-part-n.html paper Cognitive and neuroplasticity mechanisms by which congenital or early blindness may confer a protective effect against schizophrenia (Steven M. Silverstein, Yushi Wang, Brian P. Keane, 21 January 2013)

158:

A bit of a word-geeky question, but why use a concordance rather than the real McCoy (the Necronomicon) as the quest object/Maguffin of DLD? The most basic form of a concordance, which is most feasible for human-free processing, is basically a list of words plus page numbers and/or frequencies and is not very useful for most non-academic uses. (They're mostly used to examine a corpus than a corpse.) The more sophisticated "keyword in context" concordance is much more useful, but doesn't offer advantages over an index in most cases: you still have to read the surrounding text (the context) to infer the role of the words in that context. An index crafted by a professional indexer provides that context for you, predigested by the indexer, so a book containing a good index seems both more useful for practical sorcery and safer for the reader -- for small values of "safer".

Perhaps the Necronomicon itself will make an appearance in a future Laundry book?

159:

Oops... that should say "rather than a corpse".

160:

Not only the population density, but Christianity and other "major" religions (that is, magick suppressing religions) have had considerable trouble adapting to the truths which science has exposed, which has caused a measurable part of the population to go looking for a form of spirituality that doesn't suck, and they've been reviving some old forms - and forget Cthulhu, all you really have to do to "weaken the walls of the world" is to optimize something like Wicca, which happens naturally as people try various forms and perform it in different places, (which means places where the magick suppressors forgot to bury some hematite or perform other types of magick suppression.

This is where the Laundryverse and reality part ways. The problem I alluded to above is that the so-called Eastern religions--Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shinto--do a crap job of suppressing what Christianity would call pagan magic. And that's a majority of the human population right there. Throw in polytheistic Africa, the African diaspora (voudoun, etc.), and indigenous American spiritual practices, and most of the world never stopped doing magic.

Yes, Buddhism preaches that magic and enlightenment are incompatible for technical reasons*. But if you want polytheistic perversity, spell-casting clerics, and possession cults, they've all got them. That's why I pointed out that my latest Laundryverse thing is total BS if you want it to be congruent with known history.

That said and getting back towards the Laundryverse, there is something very interesting going on with Christianity that I think you missed. If you read about the activities of ministers and missionaries in the first half of the 20th Century, they tended to preach more about reason, and mysticism was a dirty word outside the back woods churches. This is the tradition of the gentleman cleric, not the god-wanker. As a priest friend of mine put it, anyone who wanted to practice the Way of Jesus or Christian magic was put in a monastery for their own good. Then, along about the 1980s, as yoga and Buddhism crept into the mainstream, there seemed to be a more public discussion that perhaps Christianity had lost its spiritual side.

In more recent decades, especially with the evangelicals, there's been a big ol' push to embrace what I'd only call Christian magical practices: magical prayers, angels, meditations on the presence of Christ, all that. I'm not sure there's a big separation between what the Wiccans do and what the more magical Christians do, except in numbers.

So if I was worried about magic straining the fabric of reality, I'd look at the number of evangelicals, rather than the number of pagans. Granted, I'm more sympathetic to the pagans, but they're not a majority group.

And I agree with your comment to Greg. This is really about the Laundryverse, not about Greg's spiritual allergies.

*You care about the technical side of Buddhism? Fine. Enlightenment, as has been more recently explained to me, is living while aware of all the "energies" that influence your life. AFAIK, this is pretty similar to a bunch of different modern magical practices. However, the Buddhist and Taoist point is that reprogramming yourself to live this way takes a heck of a lot of luck and a huge amount of work. And, unfortunately, there's all this shiny stuff--the magical practices available when you become aware of these "energies" which, if pursued, will distract you from the very difficult task of becoming more enlightened. That's what I mean by technical. Buddhist monasteries are supposedly designed to minimize distractions so that the inmates can work on enlightening themselves. I also understand from various sources that working Catholic and Orthodox monasteries really aren't that different in this regard.

161:

I don't think it's evolution; rather, I think it's infection... and the infection can be spread by looking at a picture of something, and if you Get It, you've caught it.

See?! You can catch a virus from your computer....

162:

& 147

Perhaps. but you are aware that when they did that to Pluto, the conference was essentially over, and it was, I think I read, about 10% of the attendees voting for that, and most astronomers ignore it, and call it a planet.

To quote the Plutonian who showed up in the Masqerade at Denvention in '08, "Equal rights for Pluto! Pluto is a planet!"

(Yes, she got an award in the young fan division.)

163:

"Then, along about the 1980's"....

It was mid-late seventies. You suddenly started seeing "Jesus freaks", and the GOP used them, callously, and pushed the wacko religious wrong (they are not "right"), the Moral Majority (which was neither), to build their base, because they'd believe in faith, not logic, or even "enlightened self-interest" (which would have meant unions).

I remember, it was '84? '85? that I was at... can't remember if it was Disclave or Balticon, and some Jesus freaks had a table in the dealers' room. Not sure if someone set them up, or they did it to themselves. They literally had leaflets against UFOs, and Witchcraft, and D&D. Large dealers' room. maybe 40 or more folks in it, around 16:00 on Sat, someone in front of their table started singing, and everyone else in the room joined in... that Real Old Time Religion....

They took it ok, but never came back.

164:

Yeh the original PSI rules for DND(1st edition) where broken.

Telekinises was defined as acceleration and it was concentration with no upper limit - so I can accelerate a javelin to high speeds and throw it at a dragon.

of course I though you could add a light spell on the rear for tracking and use scrying to keep on pushing all the way to the target.

Oh and should I mention my "Hobit Komando" who specialize in growing stage trees :-)

165:

The original D&D rules said, explicitly, "These are only guidelines," feel free to modify....

I added a spell point system that made sense, and stopped ultra-power: you had the number of spell points of your constitution and your (intelligence for MU, wisdom for cleric, so those two numbers finally had some use). You hit zero, you're unconscious. Negative numbers mean you're dead.

Ah, yes, the high level magic user: earthquake! Um, lightninng! SLEEPSLEEPSLEEP!!!

166:

H: especially with the evangelicals, there's been a big ol' push to embrace what I'd only call Christian magical practices =bullshit: magical prayers, angels, meditations on the presence of Christ, all that. I'm not sure there's a big separation between what the Wiccans do and what the more magical Christians do, except in numbers. Oddly agree- I am talking about what we laughably call the "real" world ....

167:

Hey, wait - are you talking actual Wiccans... or Newagers (rhymes with sewage)?

Old Pagan joke: Q: How do you tell the difference between a Newage witch and a real Witch? A: Throw them both in a pond. The Newage witch will since under the weight of their expensive crystals, while the real Witch will come up, swim out and teach you a lesson....

168:

Christianity and the other monotheistic religions were never far from indigenous paganism until the age of European colonial conquest.

1453 -- the magical processions in Constantinople to power the the Virgin's and the Saints' erection of a magical invincible dome over the city and save it from Mehmed II's siege. There were many other actions of this nature at the walls. In parallel Mehmet II's forces performed their own rituals that would allow Islam to finally take the Red Apple. On the 29th of May, 1453, the whole world learned whose magic was greater.

And since the 1960's, even Lutheran Church Missouri Synod -- not just the Roman or Orothodox churches -- have expanded from zero of such fantastical behaviors to congregants walking together over dried out fields with basins of water, throwing handfuls on the earth and at the sky. Evangelical born again prayer warrior parades against satan have been going on regularly in the west and southwest ever since the 1980's. And so on and so forth.

Magic it seems makes what belief or spiritual system concrete. Evidently the transformations that are the sacraments, such as baptism and communion, just ran out of juice in the Christian US?

169:

Christianity and the other monotheistic religions were never far from indigenous paganism until the age of European colonial conquest.

I think we can safely say that the age of colonial empires didn't make much difference. CF: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-jesuits-cultivated-the-idea-of-european-empire

The tl;dr is that the missionaries were often far less successful in their missions than their reports home indicate, and that people adopted Christianity for their own reasons and often on their own terms. I'd be shocked (shocked!) if the same wasn't true of the other big missionary religions, Islam and Buddhism.

It's another case where, if you only read the documents of the ones in charge, you get an ever-so-slightly biased view of what happened in history, not that I need to tell you this.

170:

I wasn't clear -- it was important to the Europeans after the 15th C for Christians at least, if not Islam or Judaism, to separate themselves as starkly as possible -- in their own minds, at least, and in the minds of their adherents -- from the paganism and religions of those they invaded and conquered, whether in Asia, Africa or South America. This was particularly so as the protestants felt they needed to do the same thing of stark division between themselves, true Christians, as opposed to those followers of the Roman whore of Babylon and all those saints and superstitions. So science was encouraged, as well as separation of church and state. I've been fairly boggled seeing this break down so starkly in my lifetime, people I've known within the protestant religion now matter of course practicing what when I was growing up was considered unacceptable.

171:

I don't know how stuff was elsewhere, but in the late 70's my family started having some really weird shit go down. I won't say exactly what because, 1, no direct bearing on what I'm saying, 2, I'm not convinced that my memory is accurate at all (I literally don't believe myself despite my brother confirming my memories) and 3, all the written records of what went on got scrambled (ink on paper, gone).

So anyway, weird shit is going down. We ask for help from the local Anglican minister, who's, like "well officially we don't deal with this any more, and haven't for hundreds of years, but I'll put you in touch with someone" so we get passed up the chain and it turns out that there's a sort of magical rural fire service in the High Anglican Church of Australia. They come out and do a bunch of things, very reminiscent of the laundry service in the early books, putting out fires so to speak.

So at least 40 years ago, there were active magic practitioners in the church.

BTW, my memories tell me that it tamped things down for a while, but the issues remained unresolved until we posted a stone back to Agra.

172:

I was always a little disappointed Holst had not written a movement for "Pluto", but now that Pluto is no longer considered a planet ...

Well to be fair, The Planets was completed in 1916, which is 14 years before Pluto was discovered.

173:

If magic relates to computation, then those positing historic magic need to confront just how foreign to us historic mathematics was.

Maths did not come from algebra, or arithmetic, or computation, it came from geometry. Geometric proofs, like Euclid did.

Newton is a point of change. But he while gives proofs of things the way you might expect, those are just thought experiments for him, he then goes through and laboriously redoes each proof geometrically, because that geometric working is for that time a ‘real’ proof.

But then a split between continental and English maths that started with Newton vs Leibniz was real, and lasted for at least a couple of generations. It relates to deep philosophical differences on the nature of space and time. And dates to around the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the start of England’s climb to world domination.

174:

foxessa Indeed - the adoption of the xtians of MORE magical symbols surprises many, though not really, when you think about it. After all ... "BigSkyFiaries" don't actually exist, so it hardly matters which collection of blackmailing bullshit you follow. It's all - unacceptable.

175:

Then Gutenberg invents the printing press, about the same time as paper mills are spreading throughout Europe, in the late 15th Century. Knowledge escapes, bigly, including magic. The magicians get alarmed, because they know thattoo many idiots doing magic is Bad.

That's a really neat idea and I'm embarrassed that I missed it. So I'm going to try and find a way to work it into the back story as canon: that printing presses and missionaries can be used to spread the suppression of indigenous magic systems.

176:

World-building note:

This kind of got lost in the mists of time, but back in 1999 when I began writing the first Laundry story, I decided that it'd be an SF yarn with magic, for values of magic that emerged organically from "Let's assume Roger Penrose was right about quantum mechanical phenomena in microtubules in neurons being the wellspring of consciousness (i.e. consciousness is an emergent quantum-mechanical property of complex macroscopic systems)".

He wanted to go from collapse of quantum coherency in roughly atom-sized entangled systems to "entire brain", so invoked an as-yet unspecified theory of quantum gravity, and it seems to me that if you can get complex effects across a distance of whole tens of centimetres when upscaling from atoms, then jumping another nine or ten orders of magnitude in scale isn't much of a reach ...

177:

Would "Real Old Time Religion" have anything in common with Pete Seeger's version? Which, BTW, can be heard on the Arlo Guthrie/Pete Seeger disk "Precious Freind".

178:

His point about printing presses is very salient - books changed from a perquisite of the wealthy to being widely owned in a very short period. The consequences were immense.

The missionary aspect is part of what I was referring to, when I pointed out that a scientifically plausible (and theoretically if no longer practicably) testable explanation of the reports of reliable magic by reliable raconteurs, and why it no longer works and stopped working in Europe a long while back. They were the people who changed the 'massed belief', though often less than is commonly believed - it is still practiced, openly, in Africa.

179:

Yes. Euclidean proof methods were being taught in 1962 in the UK, though not widely - I could still prove Pythagoras's theorem, though not the nine-point circle. But most people won't realise what has happened in mathematics in the past half-century. There has been a great deal of unification, with multiple different systems being shown to be equivalent (which started a long time before, of course), which was at the heart of my remark about patterns in #146. OGH and some other SF writers have taken that on board, and several different magical methods are used in the Laundryverse.

I agree with you the attitude to mathematics and science this was a factor in the rise of the British Empire, and Charles II had a lot to do with that.

180:

Something possibly of interest to OGH, Safari under Big Sur still behaves in an interesting fashion with sign ins here, I signed in to reply to whitroth, found myself signed out after submission, thought nothing new and had a look at "Countdown To Crazy", found I was signed in there (!), commented, found I was signed out after submission, came back here to find I was signed in (!!). Life here is less alarming under Firefox...

181:

And then there were 4. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/penguin-random-house-simon-schuster-monster-about-amazon/617209/

As I understand it thing are now sort of King Kong and the 3 lemurs.

182:

Safari under Big Sur still behaves in an interesting fashion with sign ins here

Same thing with Edge on Windows, being logged in or not seems to be quite random.

183:

If magic relates to computation, then those positing historic magic need to confront just how foreign to us historic mathematics was.

Egyptian computation was different than what we do now, and interesting.

The mathematics of ancient Egypt was fundamentally different from our math today. Contrary to what people might think, it wasn’t a primitive forerunner of modern mathematics. In fact, it can’t be understood using our current computational methods.

Fully illustrated in color throughout, Count Like an Egyptian also teaches you some Babylonian computation—the precursor to our modern system—and compares ancient Egyptian mathematics to today’s math, letting you decide for yourself which is better.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160122/count-like-an-egyptian

Very interesting, and recommended.

184:

It sounded interesting until I saw this "In fact, it can’t be understood using our current computational methods." Unless Wikipedia is completely up the spout, it's not actually very interesting as mathematics and is easily expressible in modern terms.

What a lot of people don't understand is that, until modern times, counting and arithmetic was not the entry to mathematics (*) and wasn't always even closely linked - it was primarily a branch of accounting. For example, the geometric proof methods mentioned above don't use numbers as we know them. Mathematics in that era was linked more closely to astrology than accounting.

icehawk is right, but that example is poor, and it is why I keep mentioning patterns. I will post an idea I have just had, separately.

185:

Related to #184, one of the known causes of the scientific revolution was the invention of the concept of a variable. Few people (even with a STEM background) realise just what a major effect that had on human mentality - I have known people who had not learnt that as children, have had to teach one the concept, and I can witness how much of a change in thinking it causes.

Hmm. Could that have been the cause of the demise of magic? Specifically that thinking in terms of variable-based arithmetic uses the brain mechanisms that were previously used for magic, and therefore meant that ordinary people would have stopped being able to do the latter as they learnt the former?

If doesn't conflict with occasional magic users, because (higher level) mathematicians can also work with other formulations. It doesn't conflict with the modern resurgence because, for the past half-century, primary school teaching has had an increasing amount of non-arithmetical mathematics (*). And, despite the claims of the ignorant in decades past, computation was never limited to arithmetical tasks.

(*) I was amazed that my daughter was being taught mathematical topics in primary school that I had not encountered until my mathematics degree. That partly explains why so many parents with a full schooling had/have trouble helping their children even at that stage.

186:

I may be off base, but I think there may have been three separate math traditions that merged: --accounting, which led into algebra --geometry from architecture (this is the old straight edge and compass school) --trigonometry (timekeeping and wayfinding, also astrology).

The point is that these are three different functions: keeping track of stuff is the accounting function, and it's where writing and counting really became formalized. It's a fundamental function of complex societies.

Builders can be (and often were) illiterate well into the Middle Ages. There are great examples of books with angles illustrated with mnemonics rather than word to help them build. Going back to Celtic times, builders used straight edge and compass to lay things out, and this is the old geometry tradition.

Keeping time and wayfinding by using the sky are related things, and both are critical in everything from navigation to agriculture. The roots of these are probably the oldest, as humans have always needed environmental cues to tell which food is available when, and how to get to it and get it. Same with agriculture: when to plant, when to harvest, and what the year is going to be like are really good reasons to watch the sky. It also turns out that you can use the sky to go from one point to another.

These all come together, not in astrology, but with traveling merchants, who need to account for their goods, but also build ships and find their way and keep track of things like the seasons of the monsoon winds that dictate where sailing ships can go in the Indian Ocean. It's absolutely no surprise that most of our mathematics comes ultimately from the people who founded and lived around the western Indian Ocean, from the Fertile Crescent to India.

And I suspect they all became linked up through trigonometry (measuring of angles), and especially algebra using trig.

187:

I was also taken by the excavator detail.

Well there is this: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/projects/the-channel-tunnel/

"In December 1990, the French and British TBMs met in the middle and completed the Channel Service Tunnel bore. In all of the tunnels the French TBM was dismantled while the U.K. TBM was turned aside and buried."

I've heard them called the most expensive grounding rods in the world.

188:

Ghost mansions however, I've always assumed are real.

We just had one torn down here a month or so ago. They had a sale of the contents. Things like fixtures, marble floors, stairs, etc. Then when all the nice bits were scavenged it was torn down and the property split into 4 lots with new houses being built on each.

Originally built in the 30s I think. For some local guy who made it big making something or the other.

189:

Thanks, I'm honored!

Also, there's no reason for embarrassment. Since I only tripped over the notion when I started wondering what would have had to come before the Little Ice Age for that disaster to have been caused by magic, it's safe to say that it's not intuitively obvious.

I'd also point out that this idea gives a convenient excuse for the fall of the western Roman Empire. They used papyrus, which is much more available and easier to write on than parchment. Handwritten papyrus books are intermediate in technical ease and availability between pen and parchment (hard and rare) and printed paper (fast and abundant). One could speculate that the political chaos, weird weather, and falling birth rates of the later (western) Roman empire also had to do with the increasing ubiquity of magic. And we do know they used lots of magic, because some of those papyrus scrolls have been recovered.

190:

I'm not sure that's really true.

In the USA, medicine shows were a big deal in the days before effective antiseptics, anaesthetics and vaccines. They were effectively selling magic, plain and simple. They fizzled out in popularity as actual medicine came up with treatments which worked. But as medicine shows faded, the whole tent-revival evangelical movement kicked off, and the evangelicals used precisely the same methods of stooges with magic cures, sales patter and group manipulation. They still do to this day, they've just moved onto TV instead. The entire Christian evangelical concept is inherently built around "Christian magic", and it inherits directly from the medicine show "magic".

In the UK, we'd like to think we're not so gullible. Except that Golden Dawn kicked off in Britain at the end of the 19th century, and a cult of angels started during WWI and continued after the war. The non-English countries of the UK had (and continue to have) enough "true believers" that the concept of people doing work on Sunday is still controversial to this day. (The Scottish island of Lewis only got a Sunday ferry service in 2009, due to religious objections.) Let's not forget Ian Paisley's happy little bunch of divinely racist God-botherers too. All these groups are driven by a belief in the literal truth of Hell and damnation, so it's untrue to say that any of them ever are or were rationalist.

Compared to everyone else these days, evangelicals look pretty nutty. But if you wind the clock back even just 100 years, they'd be mainstream in any church anywhere, and they'd look like positive backsliders compared to Welsh chapels or the Scottish Kirk. In Europe and the USA, most people may describe themselves as "Christian" but you'd be lucky to see them in church for more than Christmas (and maybe Easter). If you're judging by quantity of religious "magic", we really are at an all-time low these days.

Re Buddhism "creeping into the mainstream", that's a rather US-centric view. In the two largest countries in the world by population (China and India), Buddhism has never been anything but mainstream.

191:

I am afraid that you are, with respect to geometry and trigonometry; before Newton and Leibnitz, they were essentially the same thing. If you search, you may be able to find a Web reference to the methods actually used for those, and you will see what I mean; as I said, I have used some of them but that puts me into a timy minority of even mathematicians. I don't know what you mean by algebra, but the only meaning of it in the OED that was known in the ancient world was the surgical treatment of a fractured or dislocated bone! As icehawk said, mathematics was VERY different then.

You are right that trigonometry and geometry (in your sense) were used in different ways, but my point is that the developments were driven by astrology (as the court science, rather than the artisans' one), and both used the same mathematics - UNLIKE accounting. If you can find a reasonable reference contradicting that, I should be interested.

192:

Re Buddhism "creeping into the mainstream", that's a rather US-centric view. In the two largest countries in the world by population (China and India), Buddhism has never been anything but mainstream.

Yep, you're absolutely right. I was describing this in the context of Christianity and Wicca, and pointing out that the contemplative and meditative practices in Christianity ran towards the mainstream once Buddhism became popular enough that a fair number of (middle and upper class) people had an idea of what was missing.

As for the role of Buddhism in India, it's definitely worth talking to a few hundred million Hindus about that...

193:

I'd disagree about astrology. This is another ancient/modern split. We think of astrology as the superstitious finding of omens in the sky. It is that, but before good watches were available, watching the night sky was the most reliable method of keeping a calendar.

In the Fertile Crescent, from Babylon to Egypt, agriculture was less based on rain falling on fields, and more based on rains falling in mountains far away, rivers flooding, and catching those flood waters in canals, as well as timing planting correctly. Because of that, timing is literally everything, especially in Egypt for reasons I'll come back to.

Thus, the rulers whose priests could accurately help farmers get their fields prepped for whatever the weather brought them reaped bigger harvests. That's the practical use of astrology that we've lost because we've got clocks, calendars, and weather satellites.

The thing about Egypt is that most of the water in Nile comes from the Ethiopian Mountains. Egypt is on the eastern Mediterranean weather cycle, but Ethiopia is on the Indian Ocean monsoon cycle, and they don't particularly overlap. Thus, winter rains in Egypt don't necessarily cue for summer monsoonal moisture getting carried down the Nile to flood and fertilize the fields. Calendar keeping was thus critical to keeping the fields working, and the easiest way to keep the calendar in a desert country is to watch the sky every night.

As for algebra and accounting, here's a made-up example. A small city state has tribute obligations to (say) Egypt, Assyria, and Mycenae, as well as the need to stockpile enough to get the city-state through the year. As the planting season is beginning, is it worth sending out a mission to get luxury goods or slaves for the tribute? This is fundamentally an algebra question, because it's about portioning up a future harvest and anticipating future gluts or shortfalls and how to best send them or make them up. Whether or not the city rulers were using written algebra explicitly, they were thinking in terms of variables and trying to solve a problem where supplies equaled or exceeded needs.

194:

built around "Christian magic" ... even when it actually works... The classic medieval example is driving out an infestation of "Demons" caused by Erot fungus growing in rye, especially in damp conditions. Whole villages or towns would get very bad LSD trips ... only to be cured by the Church, with "Specially blessed" WHITE ( Wheat ) bread. They knew it worked, but hadn't a clue why, of course.

195:

Aargh! Aaarrgh!!! AAAARRRGH!!!!!

I know perfectly well what astrology was used for - but I also know SOMETHING about the mathematics used for it. And it was the MATHEMATICS not the PURPOSE that was relevant to the topic under discussion.

Look, TODAY that last calculation is an algebra question, but NONE of the meanings of algebra as we know it today were known before the 17th century. I don't mean the word, I mean the ruddy CONCEPTS. There is ONE meaning (other than the surgical) that was known before that, which refers to things like the GCD algorithm and similar things in geometry.

And, NO, THRICE NO, they were NOT thinking in terms of variables. They did such calculations in terms of specific numbers and procedures, without ANY abstraction of the form we use variables for. Indeed, that is how mathematics was taught until at least the 19th century in the UK and, as I said, I have both been taught that way have have known and taught people who had been taught NO OTHER way.

You really don't seem to prepared to accept that the ancients didn't use the same approach to mathematics as we do today.

196:

Could what really have kicked off the return of magic have been the development of N-dimensional math? Minkowski space, and others....

197:

Do calm down. All of this is explained, in fulsome detail by the late great John Sladek, this in his, ever so serious , study of astrology ... "Arachne Rising. The Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac." https://www.jamescumminsbookseller.com/pages/books/229263/john-sladek-james-vogh/arachne-rising-the-thirteenth-sign-of-the-zodiac Oh, all right it is available elsewhere at a somewhat lower price ..or you could look it up in the back issues of Cosmo ..." "Everything You Need to Know About the Controversial 13th Zodiac Sign Sorry, but Ophiuchus isn’t a thing. " https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a3614109/everything-you-need-to-know-about-13th-zodiac-sign-constellation-ophiucus/

198:

http://www.paganlibrary.com/music_poetry/real_old_religion.php

The late John Betancourt had over 900 verses on his pages....

199:

I saw that, and went oh, shit....

Hey, at what point do they become a monopoly, and get broken up? I need to talk to lawyers I know.

200:

Why do you always make it a screaming argument?

Would it help if I told you that I did very well in my college-level history of astronomy class, where I actually had to build a working astrolabe and cast a horoscope? I take it you've done the same?

I'd also add that you might want to reread that article on Ancient Egyptian Mathematics, especially the section on algebra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_mathematics#Algebra), the entry on Egyptian algebra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_algebra)and the articles on the papyri linked thereto.

That's what I'm talking about. I agree that it's elementary (literally) compared with what we consider to be algebra, but it's middle bronze age mathematics. And since they appear to be problems to be solved and tables of fractions, it's fair to say that the whole corpus of Egyptian Middle Kingdom mathematics was likely a bit more comprehensive, if not advanced.

201:

Halfway through the book, and enjoying it greatly. As a minor point, the old folk etymology for the insulting V sign comes up, that it goes back to Agincourt and archers showing they still had their index and middle fingers. It's a nice story, but it doesn't stand up. The claim that the French were cutting off archers' fingers goes back to a speech by Henry V, who talked about the French cutting off three fingers, not two -- you use three fingers to draw a longbow, after all. For whatever it's worth, there isn't evidence that people were using the V sign earlier than the beginning of the twentieth century, but then it isn't something you'd expect to be well documented.

I'm not sure why you'd need to explain it, anyway. If you wanted to make the middle finger gesture more emphatic, this is the the first thing you'd think of.

Apparently Churchill wasn't consistent about doing V for Victory palm out or palm in, until somebody finally explained the difference to him, since people of his class didn't use the insulting form. Not that it made the victory sign any less popular, one imagines.

202:

Apparently Churchill wasn't consistent about doing V for Victory palm out or palm in, until somebody finally explained the difference to him

...And after it was explained to him, it depended where DeGaulle was standing...

203:

The biggest problem, as that Atlantic article rightly says, isn't that Simon's Random Penguin will be a monster running about 1/3 of US non-academic publishing (and a hefty chunk of various other markets too). In a better world, it might be, but the issues presented by (ahem) Big River Corp dwarf it, in the same way that Big River itself dwarfs the "big five" publishers themselves.

How much bigger is it? Amazon's declared net income (effectively profit) for 2019 was larger than the total revenue of all big five publishers combined. It's their biggest customer to the extent of selling roughly as many books as everyone else put together, and one of the largest licensors of secondary rights (especially, but far from exclusively, as audiobooks via Audible). And that was last year; 2020 may have been horrible for pretty much everyone else, but it was AMAZING for Amazon's sales growth.

So it's vastly larger than they are, and definitely verging on monopsony conditions - and of course also a significant publisher (ie competitor) in its own right. I suspect that if Amazon isn't either broken up or very strictly reined in, the nominal number of major publishers may be essentially irrelevant in another decade or so - if you want a shot at big sales, you'll do it on Amazon's terms.

204:

Charlie,

If you get the chance read Fantasyland by Kurt Anderson. That would give you more insight into The Black Chamber and the American mindset.

Basically all of the radical extremist Protestants left Europe and came to America. The craziest of the crazies, if you will.

Reading Fantasyland, and remembering your take on the Black Chamber, it all fits.

  • Nothing that you "invent" for America can really go too far compared to actual history.

The thread has been incredibly useful, thanks...

Another thing to remember, is that each country had their own calendars. The dates were not equal between them. Not just years but months did not coincide.

It wasn't until the 20th Century that countries started adopting the Gregorian Calendar. I remember Walter Cronkite saying what year it was depending on what country you were from.

That is another useful tactic to limit contagion between the different magic systems.

BTW, I find the New Chronology stuff by Anatoly Fomenko to be great for Story.

Wiki - New chronology (Fomenko)

These are the first four books in pdf. They are the size of phone books so be prepared for a long and intense read.

Volume 1

Volume 2

Volume 3

Volume 4

BTW, I'm really not interested in "debating" Fomenko. These are for people trying to find inspiration for alternate chronologies. When I found the Fomenko I found the mother load for Story. I don't have to make this stuff up.

205:

As good a place as any to comment--people interested (for story purposes or otherwise) in the 17th-century divergence between magic and science might like to consult the works of Frances Yates:

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

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, etc. Lots of material for secret-history-type storytelling involving the likes of Bruno, John Dee, Campanella...

For that matter, what of Leibniz and Spinoza? Leibniz apparently traveled to Amsterdam to meet with Spinoza in November of 1676. What did they really talk about at their meeting?

206:

allynh Fomenko is either a supreme bullshitter or a giant, fraudulent liar, or both ... He makes as much sense as an xtian cretinist. For actual evidence that he is: "Not even Wrong" Start HERE

207:

Charlie, I have a question about another book of yours, The Nightmare Stacks.

I tried to find whether or not someone had asked you a similar question before, but couldn't turn up anything.

Why was First of Spies and Liars so damn incompetent? I mean, yeah, Cassie knew nothing of military value, but wouldn't an afternoon googling stuff have solved that? And if even that was too much to ask, surely Cassie knew what guns were? How did firearms come as a surprise to the Host? Not to mention them believing the Queen lived in goddarn Leeds of all places. Did Agent First really not figure out from Cassie's memories that London is the capital and that is where everyone pictures the Queen as living?

208:

Basically all of the radical extremist Protestants left Europe and came to America. The craziest of the crazies, if you will.

Ha ha nope, not all of them! You might want to look into the Wee Frees or the Plymouth Brethren some time.

What's different is that they turned into a green-field invasive species when they landed on a continent that had been helpfully genocided by smallpox and first contact pandemics.

209:

allynh's recommendation of Fantasyland by Kurt Anderson seconded.

210:
Why was First of Spies and Liars so damn incompetent?

It wasn't that she was incompetent. She knew that the Queen spent her time smiling, not smiting. Also that Leeds was a small provincial town[1].

Cassie was caught in the vise that if she told dear old dad the truth, (1) she wouldn't be believed and (2) she'd be killed. Parallels with Stalin refusing to believe that Operation Barbarossa was about to kick off, despite MANY spies (metaphorically) shouting "German troops are massing on the borders! The invasion is set to begin in mid-to-late June!! Start preparing!!!" None so blind as they who will not see, I guess.

As for Gustav Holst and The Planets, GH was asked to write another movement after Pluto's discovery in 1930. He declined, because The Planets were based on astrological beliefs about what a planet was and what effects they had on people. We're lucky that he wrote movements for Uranus and Neptune, which astrology didn't take into account. It's a shame he didn't write movements for the Sun and the Moon, though. Those would have fit in.

One final word regarding Pluto may be found here.

~oOo~

[1] Population of London (2019): 8.982 million. Population of Leeds (2018): 792 thousand. Leeds isn't tiny, but London is eleven times bigger! Members of the Host of Air and Darkness couldn't believe the size of Leeds when the saw it. Who needs that many slaves?

211:

Why was First of Spies and Liars so damn incompetent? I mean, yeah, Cassie knew nothing of military value, but wouldn't an afternoon googling stuff have solved that?

You missed the bit about the Alfar host hiding out in a bunker after the magical equivalent of world war three? And about them running low on food and supplies? And a whole lot of surplus bodies being kicked out of the bunker or executed to make the food last longer? Agent First only survived the cull -- that wiped out almost all the Alfar intelligence service -- because she was the All-Highest's daughter. So, nepotism. Then she ends up in a world that runs on entirely different principles to her own, and has the bad luck to borrow the memories of a kid who barely knows anything about how her own nation's governance works. And then, the Alfar command ignores or discounts her reports because Evil Stepmom has the All-Highest's ear. It's a clusterfuck all round. As for guns, why waste time throwing ridiculous bits of lead at your enemies when you've got necromancers who can eat their souls, or basilisk weapons that are effectively line-of-sight death rays?

As for London, Cassie has probably never been there -- and the Queen lives all over, she's mostly in the news when she's visiting somewhere else.

212:

I think the problem with this part of the book (which I otherwise enjoyed and have reread multiple times) was that Cassie didn't spend an afternoon Googling, then spend an hour thinking through what she could or could not tell her father. The same plot would have been possible, but without the obvious problem.

213:

I should note that no author catches all their own problems. This is a failure on the part of the editors and it could have been fixed with a couple paragraphs of First-of-Spies-and-Liars being sad about the stupidity of her people.

214:

I actually felt that she was almost too COMPETENT to be plausible - in Alfar terms! Her scheme to become All-Highest was either freakishly lucky or showed an amazing ability to model other people's thinking and manipulate them. There certainly are such people, and they come to the fore in exactly that sort of society.

Also, I can witness just how much difficulty people from one 'culture' have in realising that something basic to another culture is even possible. It's not just Gargle - it's the existence of even libraries, if your culture doesn't have them. Or picking up a magazine from a stall, and not realising it's fiction, because your culture has no equivalent. No, I won't restart the mathematics debate, but these are examples I have experience of.

215:

"I think the problem with this part of the book (which I otherwise enjoyed and have reread multiple times) was that Cassie didn't spend an afternoon Googling, then spend an hour thinking through what she could or could not tell her father. The same plot would have been possible, but without the obvious problem."

There's actually a lot in the book. The whole Alfar system resembles North Korea with a massive magical overlay. It's a society where you keep your mouth shut except to repeat the party line (of the day). Cassie apparently had limited freedom, only due to being the daughter of the Big Guy, and still had to step carefully, even before Step Mom moved in. Notice that not being a psychopath was a disability which would have gotten her killed.

And it looks like she grew up in the aftermath of something which made WWIII look mild.

She had to make two extremely radical adjustments: a society of non-psychopaths, and a society not based on magic. Either would have been a major adjustment.

216:

"...as that Cassie didn't spend an afternoon Googling, ..."

Why would she think of Googling, and why would she think that public information source was not 90% censored and monitored for people who were too curious?

217:

waldo @ 149: JBS at 147: It would be a bit startling if he had :)

I don't think startling is the word I would use. It was discovered before he died, and he apparently did consider the idea before rejecting it.

Now, if he had written a movement for Pluto and then removed it when Pluto got demoted, that would have been startling.

218:

Because she'd merged her consciousness with someone who did know about Google. And Libraries. And all that other stuff.

219:

Information is all there, via memories; ingrained habits of thought are not -- otherwise any agent who did the whole stealing-of-faces-and-memories trick would immediately go native.

220:

Greg Tingey @206, said: For actual evidence that he is: "Not even Wrong"

Let us say that you had a Time Viewer that could look into the past, and you set your Time Viewer to look over the Acropolis in Athens. You would watch in the 1860s while they demolished any buildings that were not "Ancient".

  • They literally sanitized the area of anything that conflicted with their twisted aesthetic of "Ancient" Greece.

Now look farther into the past, hundreds of years earlier when they built the Acropolis. That's hundreds of years, not thousands of years.

  • There was no such thing as "Ancient" Greece.

You need to actually look at Volume 1 before you start commenting. We are talking reading about 15 pages or so to see what I'm talking about. They even have pictures.

Starting on page 415(457) they discuss "Ancient" Greece.

  • The page numbers are shown for the actual page(and the PDF page).

Look on page 427(469) where they show Athens being gutted of buildings that were not considered "Ancient".

There is a picture on page 434(476) showing the Acropolis with all of the exposed foundations. They basically destroyed anything that looked Christian and not "Ancient".

We are lucky in having pictures made in the 1860s when the area was being sanitized.

When you look at the level of fabrication of history that they did, Frank's scenarios above are all too clearly "fact based" rather than fiction.

This lets me have a plausible structure for erasing whole histories, time and again, going back vast ages. That creates a beautiful framework for Story. I could even take the story back to Hyperborea, with Conan the Barbarian, Kull of Atlantis, all of the Lovecraftian prehistory.

This is the mother load.

221:

Damian @ 172:

I was always a little disappointed Holst had not written a movement for "Pluto", but now that Pluto is no longer considered a planet ...

Well to be fair, The Planets was completed in 1916, which is 14 years before Pluto was discovered.

Pluto was discovered while Holst was still alive. He considered & rejected the idea of adding a movement for Pluto.

Let me try to put this in perspective - I saw in my news feed this morning that scientists have discovered our solar system is 2,000 light years closer to the Sagittarius-A Black Hole than we thought it was.

Based on this new information, my fear for the ultimate fate of our solar system is on a par with my disappointment that Holst didn't decide to add a movement for Pluto to "The Planets".

It's not a really big deal, and I'm sure I'll get over it in time.

222:

Elderly Cynic 2 184: It sounded interesting until I saw this "In fact, it can’t be understood using our current computational methods." Unless Wikipedia is completely up the spout, it's not actually very interesting as mathematics and is easily expressible in modern terms.

What a lot of people don't understand is that, until modern times, counting and arithmetic was not the entry to mathematics (*) and wasn't always even closely linked - it was primarily a branch of accounting. For example, the geometric proof methods mentioned above don't use numbers as we know them. Mathematics in that era was linked more closely to astrology than accounting.

icehawk is right, but that example is poor, and it is why I keep mentioning patterns. I will post an idea I have just had, separately.

Is that the If A = B and B = C, then A = C stuff I learned back in high school?

223:

Sorry, wet blanket time. And I am sincere about the apologies.

I got there about five years ago, and blogged about the problem: https://heteromeles.com/2015/07/29/that-brief-window/ You may want to read this.

You're quite right that history gets erased. It looks like the window for having significant information about what's going on is around 5,000 years, give or take. I'm guessing (and I'd like some help here, actually), that historical information has a half-life of somewhere between 500 and 1,000 years, barring accidental interments like Pompeii which freeze stuff. Those can last hundreds of millions of years (something similar to Pompeii is what preserved a bunch of feathered dinosaurs in China). But to return, about half of our history is wiped out in 500-1000 years, mostly by fire, rot, and other problems. A good example is that we actually have more textual evidence from the Aztecs (500 years ago) than from ancient Greece (2500 years ago), and almost no evidence from the Neolithic (8,000-5,000 years ago).

Beyond that, it gets random. We know, for instance, that the oldest modern human skull is around 300,000 years old, but the oldest language isolate groups, like the !Kung, are thought to be only about 50,000 years old. That strongly implies that the majority of our history is basically totally erased, aside from the odd bone or tool here and there.

Can you hide Atlantis in the blank spaces? The answer is somewhere between "no" and "depends on what you mean by Atlantis." The issues are things like metals, mining, mass extinctions, and climate change. The test is whether the damage from your deep time Atlantis will leave physical traces. These include: --Mining. We know, from history, that there are a lot of mines that got worked out as early as 4,000-5,000 years ago. This is especially true for tin mines, because tin is the limiting factor in bronze. But it's also true for most metals, oil, and coal in more modern times. When humans started exploring for oil in the 19th Century, there were oil fields that were literally artesian wells, and they got swiftly depleted, sometimes in days. If there had been a petroleum-based state, say, 100,000 years ago, none of those wells would have been available. If there was a bronze age in the last interglacial (the Eemian), there wouldn't have been a lot of tin available near the surface to make our own bronze.

These are the big tells. Bronze, especially, is highly durable, so if someone was making bronze artifacts tens of thousands of years ago, there's a good chance one would turn up.

Then there's the dodo problem, otherwise known as the extinction of island endemic animals. Right now, a lot of the extinct animals and plants in our world lived on islands: dodos, moas, etc. They were hunted out fairly recently, and we've often got subfossil skeletons that allow us to date when they died. This is not a problem of civilization, as the people who colonized the Pacific Islands routinely wiped out species of flightless rail and duck on each island when they first settled, leaving the bones for the archeologists.

Because of this recent extinction record, and because such bizarre creatures don't evolve in, say, 300,000 years, we can be pretty sure that the humans who caused the extinctions were the first humans to settle those islands.

Similarly, the people who settled islands spread a lot of plants from their homelands that became weeds on those islands. The fact that those weeds got their in historical time and not in prehistory pretty strongly says that the people who introduced them were the first humans to settle the islands.

So what does that leave for prehistory? Quite a lot, actually. If you want to posit Ice Age civilizations, they have to be neolithic in technology and limited to the Old World until 20,000 years ago or so. Now neolithic doesn't necessarily mean primitive, as the Maya used little if any metal. The simple constraint is that civilization has to be invisible to the archeologists, and there's got to be a good reason (other than being invisible to archeologists) why they're not working with metals or driving mammoths extinct. The metal thing can be a simple matter of an alt-history technology issue: they never figured out kilns, and so they never melted metals or developed metallurgy, beyond (perhaps!) pounding native copper or meteorites into tools. This describes the whole of North America, so it's entirely possible.

The good news is that the discovery and abandonment of agriculture are entirely possible, because there's some evidence that it actually happened. There's a site in Israel where the seeds found look a lot like agricultural weeds, except they date back to the height of the last ice age. The likely answer is that those people tried agriculture, the climate changed, and they abandoned it, much as the people who built Stonehenge almost abandoned agriculture when the weather got a bit wonky.

Anyway, have fun, and be critical of everything you read. And also, don't forget, that what I wrote above definitely applies to our future too, so you've got a billion-odd years of future human history to play with the same way, if you assume our civilization crashes but humans don't go extinct.

224:

Barry @ 216:

"...as that Cassie didn't spend an afternoon Googling, ..."

"Why would she think of Googling, and why would she think that public information source was not 90% censored and monitored for people who were too curious?

"Cassie" would have naturally Googled it. Agent First is not Cassie even though she has an overlay of the personality & memories. Still, Agent First does recognize that the plan to invade is doomed by faulty assumptions, but she is bound by her geasa in what she can do to alter that plan.

When Most Highest & First of airborne (or whatever) interrogate the real Cassie, they refuse to understand what she tells them.

Plus, it's pretty obvious that Agent First has been set up for failure, so she's already fighting an uphill battle against her own people.

225:

No. That's basic discrete logic and, while it is not common knowledge in all cultures and is surprisingly often ignored even today, I don't know of anything that can be called mathematics that doesn't have it.

I was referring to things like geometry, music, poetry, many forms of 'abstract' art etc. As the Laundry books say, those have a lot in common with mathematics and programming - indeed, the first programming language was knitting patterns! I can't stand Hofstadter's writing, and haven't read this, but agree with his connection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

226:

Um, er, uh, huh?

Page xx: Jesus Christ was born in 1053 AD and crucified in 1086 AD. The Old Testament refers to medieval events. Apocalypse was written after 1486.

Excuse me, there's a giant lightening bolt from Venus, which was expelled from Jupiter, stretching to the Earth for 40 years, and I think that's as believable....

227:
  • It cuts down the number of editors - I guarantee that will be the case within 5 year.
  • There will be far less "work with the author to get it into shape", as Walt's doing with me.
  • There will be far fewer different novels, and more Sword of Shannara, etc.
  • 228:

    Not disputing what you are saying, but providing other examples:

    "That strongly implies that the majority of our history is basically totally erased, aside from the odd bone or tool here and there."

    That is one reason people like Elaine Morgan, me, and the more heretical paleoanthropologists opposed the 'official beliefs', and have now been, er, exonerated. Basket weaving, rope, netting etc. were FAR more likely to be the first technologies than stone tools, possibly contemporaneous with bone tools, which is contra-indicative to the Great Savanna Hunter theories. Survival of those over millions of years? Don't make me laugh!

    "This is especially true for tin mines, because tin is the limiting factor in bronze."

    I'll raise you flint! In many places (including Britain), it was the first limiting resource and was essentially mined out in the neolithic.

    Howard and the Conanists got one thing right: if there were to be a lost centre of civilisation in prehistory, Doggerland is probably the strongest candidate. We know that it was densely populated, and even know when it was inundated, and why.

    229:

    allynh Not even, not even wrong, nottevenwrongg ... to as many powers as you like. It's bollocks There is physical evidence of the past, coupled with written records - some going back as far as ancient Egypt & those records are themseleves dateable, by things like, but not restricted to Radio(carbon) methods.

    At = A0 * e-λt     ALL THE TIME, everywhere & everywhen.

    "They" sanitised - who - some giant international CONSPIRACY that no-one has found out about? DO GROW UP! This is the mother load of 💩 actually. Oh & I think you meant "lode" b.....

    ( See also whitroth )

    230:

    I completely agree that fiber arts are likely more ancient than we believe. The problem is that, if we define stone tools to include situations where animals bang stuff on rocks or rocks on stuff, then there's even an example of a fish using a hunk of reef to break clams open. So the banging stuff on stuff is likely one of the most ancient tool-uses. Dragging stuff around to hide you is possibly even more ancient, and building nests (a fiber art) is also pretty ancient. All of these pre-date humans

    However, if I had to bet, I strongly suspect that the most ancient form of tool use is sex toys, in the general category of objects that are rubbed against or otherwise manipulated to induce orgasms without the possibility of reproducing. There's one survey out there (Biological Exuberance) that attempted in the 90s to survey the literature for "alternative sexuality" (homosexuality, transgender animals, sex toy use and non-reproductive sexual activity). It's worth hunting down a copy. The tl;dr takeaways are: --Humans are actually pretty cigender vanilla compared with other apes, and definitely compared with some other species out there like ruffs. --What we take as gender diversity and "perversions" in humans are actually pretty widespread in nature, --and the kicker, the most common form of tool use in animals is sex toys. There are a large number of species that will rub against something to masturbate that show no other tool use.

    And if you're willing to extend the idea of "tool use" to using spaces as well as objects, then the most ancient form of tool use is digging holes and hiding in them. That goes back to the Cambrian.

    Oh, and I entirely agree about Doggerland. Ice age littoral zones in general are great because, being 100 meters below current sea level, they're beyond SCUBA range and generally little explored by marine archeologists.

    231:

    Likely this is covered in a sequel, but what happened to Rupert's guards? —and did Eve assume full power so rapidly that she was able to head-off the full search of Rupert's last known location?

    I mean sure, he's not a white, blonde, teen, but a missing man of enormous wealth generally draws interest…or did everyone just sort of forget about him the moment they could, or rather just always start thinking of something more interesting the moment after he's remembered, with perhaps that track greased by the New Management?

    232:

    So the banging stuff on stuff is likely one of the most ancient tool-uses. Also, if you bang flint (or even chert) on another rock often, the odds are high that you'll get interesting sharps, usable as knives. (Obsidian is rare.)

    233:

    For the answers to these (and other) questions, you need to read "In His House" and "Bones and Nightmares". The former is written, the latter is about 30% there, and when I get the contracts signed you'll read about it on this blog (along with provisional publication dates for both books).

    NB: all is definitely explained, and so are the answers to some other questions you haven't asked.

    234:

    WHAT is your favorite color?

    235:

    There's actually a book out there, Paul Campbell's Universal Tool kit which goes into primitive stone tools.

    If this is something you're interested in, it's worth finding, although the writing isn't great.

    His starting point is there are a bunch of different rock types out there. At the top end are microcrystalline things like chert, flint, and obsidian, which are really good for edges. These are the materials you lavish skill on, because (as noted) they're rare.

    At the other end of the scale are the mudstones and other fall-apart stuff. These have their uses, but they're relatively useless for a lot of things.

    In the middle are, well, most rocks. The "universal toolkit" is what you can make by fracturing a halfway decent cobble with another rock. You can make simple edges, mashers, scrapers, and rasps, and so forth. These aren't things to keep unless you're desperate, they're the discardable equivalent of plastic cutlery or box cutters, quick to make, reasonably useful, and not a problem if lost, unlike the fine flint knife.

    The other point is that these simple tools were made well into historic times, often by women. They tend to fool naive archeologists, because they're so primitive even cavemen did make them. One name for these kind of flake tools is "teshoa," which you can google to see what I'm talking about.

    There are plenty of societies that made very fine obsidian blades and also teshoa, depending on circumstances. I'd suggest that if you're into primitive survival skills, learn to make teshoa before worrying about flintknapping. It's the more primitive skill, and you won't lack for material to practice with.

    236:

    Yikes! Are you telling me that none of you people have read Robert E. Howard? Where have you been. Where has your imagination gone. Everybody was doing so well before it all fell apart.

    I have story to write.

    Thanks...

    237:

    Greg - and Whitroth - I don't think Allynh actually believes that this stuff is true. I think he's saying that it makes excellent fodder for alternate-world science-fiction and fantasies, not to mention a good general source of stories.

    238:

    Read them all and still like them, even the L. Sprague de Camp ones. I was pissed when I found out my mom had pitched my stash. Although to be fair, the cats had been throwing up on them regularly...

    I mean, heck, I even read them after I read On Thud and Blunder, which I'll bet a lot of people are remembering right about now.

    Still, you're right, it is a good time to get into Conanism, because they're planning a Netflix Conan series.

    OTOH, you can do so much better than elegant Robert E Howard pastiches. I mean, here's one for free (to anybody actually): --set it a half million years in the future --It's during the next ice age (that's one reason it needs to be that long in the future.) --The Straits of Gibraltar have closed, and the Suez Canal is long gone, and the Mediterranean Sea is dry. (this is the other reason for the far future. Google Messinian Salinity Crisis to see what I'm talking about).
    --Add magic or whatever.

    There, you've now got a world map that looks pretty much like Hyboria, without the REH racial cycling squickiness. Better yet, it's got that mix of Vancian futurism and atavistic Conanism to make it easy to populate from old D&D manuals. And best of all, the only place to mine for stuff people need are in the 500,000 years of dead cities that populate the highlands, all other mines being entirely worked out. And those ruins might even be populated by monsters and demons, if that's the way you swing.

    Have fun with it. Guaranteed original, and I'm definitely not working on this particular world.

    239:

    I saw the Checkov gun, but wasn't sure where it was going to go.

    Initially when it was revealed I thought the bladder was going to be heated, If only for the pay off line 'it boils your piss'.

    hey, I like a good one liner.

    Still steam cleaning the pipes would be quite distracting.

    240:

    I haven't read it, but here are a couple of other aspects. Flint is common and easy to extract in many chalk and soft limestone beds, so it's not so much rare as local; it was traded around western Europe, including Britain. And the extremely common granite is generally a ghastly material to make an edge out of (how do I know?), but an excellent stone for hammers, and a natural rasp; if it was the local stone, it would encourage making spearpoints and knives out of bone (for example).

    241:

    A Netflix series.

    Argh. So, let's see, will they have the ultimate Conan story, which starts out with him having been crucified, and he bite the neck out of a vulture and drinks the blood?

    242:

    Guys (and girls if any), please don't forget about a basic thing that anyone tends to ignore.

    This planet is several billions years old. Our species is several hundreds millennia old. And yet, we only know anything at all about the latest 4-5000 years.

    It's not really a leap of imagination to guess that literally anything could have happened so much time ago that it would have not left any trace recognizable to today's men.

    Many SF writers guessed this, of course. And all real historians and/or archaeologists knows this, but just can't do anything about it.

    Bottom line, if really ancient civilization actually existed, we wouldn't be able to know anything about them.

    If human civilization collapsed right now, what would be left of us in 10000 years? What about 50000? 100000? And this is nothing compared to the real age of this planet.

    See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

    243:

    OTOH: Charles, what about the crib sheet for The Labyrinth Index? It has been out for a while now, and the next book in the series (for variable definition of "next book in the series") is out now. Time for a CS, I think.

    244:

    Actually, we would have evidence of any human or hominid civilisation that used pottery, brick, worked stone or much in the way of metals. They all last well.

    Another story is The Green Marauder, over a timescale a thousand times longer. But, even for that, Niven had to assert the lack of an endoskeleton and little use of the above technologies. We would find evidence for those after half a billion years, if they were used heavily, even if we couldn't say more than 'something unnatural went on here'.

    245:

    We’re going to leave behind a layer of isotope anomalies that will be detectable for aeons.

    246:
    We’re going to leave behind a layer of isotope anomalies that will be detectable for aeons.

    The fossil record will show a sudden global migration of land species.

    247:

    The sixth great extinction.

    248:

    If human civilization collapsed right now, what would be left of us in 10000 years?

    Glass artifacts (e.g., discarded bottles) in the mud and sludge at the bottom of oceans and lakes and marshes. Mud turns to rock, sludge turns to coal, both last a long, long time.

    249:

    We’re going to leave behind a layer of isotope anomalies that will be detectable for aeons..

    Everybody and their queer Aunt focuses on isotope anomalies. Those are hard to see. And things like pollen can last for hundreds of millions of years. This is why (rant) the idiots who decided when the Anthropocene started used the radiation emitted by 1950s bomb blasts as a marker, instead of corn pollen from four hundred years ago suddenly being found all over the world. It's stupid, because we use isotopic anomalies to date stuff, and if the sediments from an area get enriched or depleted, they suddenly overlap with an earlier era and throw the dating off. (/rant). Well (more rant) this happened in Polynesia. Ancient Polynesians burned some driftwood in their fires, and archeologists in the 1960s scooped up all the charcoal and used it for old-school carbon dating. Problem was, the driftwood had come from an old growth log from the Pacific Northwest, so it yielded an age that was approximately 1000 years older than the fire that burned it. Now the archeologists identify the wood in charcoal fragments to species, and only use fast-growing wood that gives a date close to the time of the fire (/end rant)

    Anyway, the general answer to this, #242, and #244 is that no, the traces are different. About a decade ago I wrote a pretty awful time travel story (Ghosts of Deep Time) where the premise was that there a time traveling civilization that colonized throughout the paleontological deep past, all the way into the Precambrian, but they only settled where they would leave no trace for naive fossil hunters like ourselves, because they didn't want us to figure out that time travel was possible. So I did a deep dive into what fossilized and what did not. And I got a real taste for deep time that showed up in Hot Earth Dreams.

    The way it works in general comes down to a few things. I'm going to overly simplify, because you really need a book like Hot Earth Dreams read backwards to get into more detail.

    First, the longer the time span, the less that lasts. I'm not going to write a full essay here, but bronze and gold last a lot longer than iron and brick.

    Second, there are erosional zones and depositional zones in geology. If you're trying to leave no trace, focus on places that erode away (highlands), and stay away from places where stuff accumulates and gets emplaced in the fossil record (wetlands, certain river deposits, certain ocean deposits, certain volcanoes like Vesuvius). Coal, especially, preserves stuff extremely well, down to microscopic size, and all coal is is the remnants of drowned, anoxic plant material from swamps. Bury a brick in a swamp and if the material around it gets made into coal, it will preserve the brick. Build a brick building on the edge of a cliff in Scotland, and the weather's going to chew it up in a few centuries or less.

    Third, speaking of coal and oil. These have depth limits. If they get buried to deep, the pressure and temperature breaks them into simple organic compounds and they're useless as fuel. Unfortunately, we can now mine pretty deep ourselves, so our civilization now is in a state where we can get all the coal if we want. This is pretty important, because coals are limited. We've cleaned out most of the coal from the carboniferous around 300 million years ago, and more of that stuff won't form, because the evolution of wood rotters has gone so far that trees don't simply fall in swamps and get buried nearly as often as they did 300 million years ago. This puts a hard upper limit on what paleocivilizations could do. For example, if aliens landed 65 million years ago and used the coal to make guns to kill all the dinosaurs, between that, air pollution, and climate change, we'd see the death of the dinosaurs, and almost all our coal would be younger than that period. And if you think an alien paleocivilization would ignore that much cheap fuel literally lying around, free for the burning, you're more optimistic than I am.

    Metal ores are a bit different. I set a good chunk of Ghosts of Deep Time at a time traveler academy in Paleocene Scotland for a couple of good reasons. One was that, thanks to the London Clays and a really weird volcano in the Hebrides that pulled a bit of a Vesuvius, I could make a reasonable guess about what the place looked like (Highland Papua New Guinea, sort of). Second, for some reason people have done a lot of geology in Scotland, so I had evidence that over the last 56 million years, about a kilometer of rock has eroded off the highlands. So if time travelers were mining ores in the highlands, their mines and settlements would be eroded entirely away. But note, that erosion rate was about a kilometer for fifty million years, and it's not uniform across the planet. Still, metal ores aren't subject to the same depth restrictions that fossil fuel deposits are, so I suspect that, if a paleocivilization avoided using fossil fuels but mined surface metal and gem deposits, their mining activity would get eroded away and new deposits would surface, again over deep time.

    ...I could go on, but I can see the eyes glazing already.

    That's why I'm saying that if you want to do Hyboria where you actually bring it up to modern science instead of aping REH, the thing to do is to go into the Ice Age Balkans (or Doggerland, or the Baltic, or somewhere in the Mediterranean, green Saharan Africa, or wherever), and create a Mayan/African neolithic civilization, Mayan for sophistication without metal, African for living around big game like mammoths and lions. Read up a bit on what we know about Mayan history (bloody dynastic fights among city states autocrats, with lesser known, more democratic folk on the margins), transform it for Ice Age Europe (pyramids in site of the glaciers? Are mammoths friends or food?) and go to town. Oh yeah, the other good thing: Mayans were about as cave-crazy a civilization as has ever walked our fair planet, and the ice agers seem to have been inordinately fond of caves too. So if you want an underworld dungeon crawl, this is definitely the system to build.

    Or do something completely different. But if you want to make it science fictional, make it sciencey and make motions of respect towards what the geologists, paleontologists, and archeologists have already published.

    250:

    There, that's better.

    Wiki - Newmanera

    It's a game set a billion years in the future after having eight earlier civilizations rise and fall.

    Think Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series.

    http://numenera.com

    So I can run the Story back into prehistory and into the future.

    To add spice to the future story, I'm using Growing Earth Theory(GET) as well, so that the Earth has doubled in size. Double the size, double the gravity. A variation, is that the Earth has doubled in size, but the continents are floating above a planet that is all ocean. There was a point when a Singularity occurred and a vast Intelligence runs the Solar System and keeps the Earth as a reserve for baseline DNA humans to harvest.

    • The floating continents were a way to stabilize the surface and have the reserve in place.

    It is unsafe and unethical to grow an AI, but let a baseline human grow up, have a life, then offer them uplift. It is safer to upgrade baseline humans to become advanced beings.

    That was the whole point of the TV series Lost. The copy Earth they were on was seeded with humans that all had nano-recorders in them. That was the glow you saw in the cave. The Spark. When people died, their recordings were stored in the Sideways, a VR world where they could live many different lives, learning and growing until they were ready to move on to their next life. The Island was basically the Arc(hive) for collecting the harvest.

    Any advanced civilization would have to grow baseline humans as feed stock for uplift rather than have children that advanced.

    Wiki - Charlie X

    Wiki - The Squire of Gothos

    For examples of the danger of having advanced children.

    Now, back to writing story.

    Thanks...

    251:

    glass

    Though glass may de-vitrify, it, like bones and even soft tissues, can leave casts in the surrounding matrix. Coke bottles and their ghosts will be around for hundreds of megayears.

    252:

    True, but 20-30 million years from now, what are the chances of someone finding such a thing?

    253:

    10 000 years? Remains of great earthworks, the collapsed edges of big dams, railway embankments, large bridges, se walls - same as we find around the edges of the Fertile Crescent right now, in fact.

    allynh For examples of the danger of having advanced children. The Midwich Cuckoos, for example?

    TRoutwaxer The Boot in the Coal-Mine ... Pterry - Strata

    254:

    Allynh "Numenera" Any way of getting that to stay on a single page, so that we can LOOK at it?

    10 000 years? Remains of great earthworks, the collapsed edges of big dams, railway embankments, large bridges, se walls - same as we find around the edges of the Fertile Crescent right now, in fact.

    For examples of the danger of having advanced children. The Midwich Cuckoos, for example?

    Troutwaxer The Boot in the Coal-Mine ... Pterry - Strata

    255:

    "Anyway, the general answer to this, #242, and #244 is that no, the traces are different."

    Eh? Are you saying that a civilisation could have made serious use of pottery, brick, worked stone or much in the way of metals (or glass, as Allen Thompson says) a mere 100-250,000 years ago, and it would NOT have left clearly anomalous traces?

    Even in Niven's tale, any large chunks of durable material falling into the sediment under the cities would be visible as a clearly anomalous inclusion in the resulting rocks. Yes, we would have to find one of the right rocks, which is the point about such use being extensive.

    I agree with you that a (small) civilisation that was trying to hide could do so.

    256:

    True, but 20-30 million years from now, what are the chances of someone finding such a thing?

    Depends on who the someone is. If it's a civilization comparable to the human one(s) of the past few centuries, given to extensive mining and geological investigation, the chances would be pretty high. Otherwise maybe not so much so..

    257:

    Another story where magic went away due to technology is "The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O." by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland.

    MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

    The central conceit is that the invention of photography stopped magic (specifically, witchcraft) from working due to quantum handwaving. Then a scientist starts working with boxes carefully isolated from quantum effects outside. Initially he actually puts cats inside them, and proves Terry Pratchett's dictum that the three states the cat can be in are alive, dead and bloody furious. Then some government people arrive and provide the funding to scale it up, and a witch turns up from the long ago past who seems to be part of a stable time-loop...

    Its a fun book.

    258:
    WHAT is your favorite color?

    Witroth! No! Don't ask those questions!

    Do you want Charlie to be pitched over the Bridge of Death if he gets one of them wrong?

    259:

    To clarify, I'm thinking of Hyborian or paleosophants, so I'm talking about traces surviving tens of thousands to tens of millions of years.

    To pick on Hyboria, Conan's steel swords wouldn't survive. We know this, because early iron age swords are mostly known from the rust stains they left behind, and that's only 2,500-3,000 years ago. Meanwhile bronze swords a thousand years older are still sharp once you get rid of surface corrosion. However, Aquilonian porcelain would be found (complete vitrification would make it more durable) while the charcoal from Pictish campfires on marshy islands were survive better than would the earthenware pots they made in those fires (low-fired earthenware, aka terracotta, falls apart much more easily than does porcelain, while we've got charcoal dating back to the Carboniferous IIRC).

    I agree that an anomaly falling into a swamp somewhere, or better, into anoxic sea-floor conditions, is the best way to find a trace. The fun bit with putative ice age civilizations is that sea level rose and fell by 100 meters or so, and AFAIK there were no coastal dead zones. What this means in turn is that if Conan of the Eemian buried a body in a sea-level swamp somewhere during the last interglacial, during the following ice age, the sea level would drop 100 meters. Depending on the drainage, that swamp might turn from a nice depositional environment that accumulates stuff to an erosional environment that gets chewed up and thrown away. Or ground under a glacier. But this is only really true about ice ages.

    Anyway, it's entirely possible to build a primary state without metal. The Maya are one (well, technically the Olmec are, the Mayans being their successors). The Hawaiians are another, even more extreme example, of supporting hundreds of thousands of people on an extremely limited material base.

    As I was playing with the idea, the big problem with an ice age civilization in Europe is "what did they cultivate?" Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_food_origins. Europe is pretty depauperate in crops that could be domesticated and cultivated to support people. Most of the critical species that support European civilization came out of the Middle East or various parts of Asia. Somehow, I don't think anyone would buy a metal-free civilization, raising pyramids for its god-kings in sight of alpine glaciers, that fed its people mostly on turnips.

    If someone wants to stick with the neolithic founder crops, just have them domesticated earlier, then the setting has to be around the Fertile Crescent, southwestern Asia to northeastern Africa. There's no reason not to do this, and if you add back in the montane cedar forests full of monkeys, as well as Pleistocene wildlife like lions, bears, and wolves, with elephants, hippos, ostriches, and cheetahs in the lowlands, it starts getting exotic again.

    260:

    OTOH: Charles, what about the crib sheet for The Labyrinth Index?

    I thought I already did one?

    If not, well, remind me next week. (Right now, am writing.)

    261:

    I agree about the level of vitrification, which also applies to brick (and similarly for durability of stone). But my point is that you DON'T need such things to fall into an anaerobic swamp - anywhere that detritus accumulates will do, including accumulating beaches and most European land surfaces. And my point about significant use is that, while a single iron sword may disappear, a cluster of them or suit of full armour in an accumulating (and not acidly leaching) soil will leave an anomalous amount of iron oxides, even after the soil has turned into rock.

    On the matter of food, there was a lot of hazel and oak woodland, northern European oaks' acorns are edible after treatment, and there was VERY rich fishing, as there was in the Fenland until the Fens were drained. Greens and fruit in season would have been easy to obtain, too. That's all well-documented.

    In history, farming spread from west Asia to Britain in a few thousand years, could have done the same 120,000 years ago, and the previous maximum (c. 120Ky BP) was as warm as historical times; the succeeding ice age would have killed them off. The pollen evidence points to the previous situation, however!

    Aside: I prefer dating the anthropocene from c. 10,000 years ago, when we started to reshape ecologies. I will pass 400 years ago, but that's because we started to change the global climate.

    262:

    "Doubled in size" do you mean twice the diameter? Because surface:volume is square-cube law, and off the top of my head, not doing any calculations, I'd think four times the gravity.

    263:

    No, it's double the gravity - the mass M goes up as R^3 and the gravity as M/R^2. It's quadruple the energy needed to launch a rocket to space.

    264:

    About what would be left half a million years from now?

    I can't believe none of you have thought of the most obvious: let's see, GIANT, humoungous, immense trash heaps. They'd find a hell of a lot in them, including the remnants of electronics (gold contacts, remember? and plastics that are not tasty, covering the copper of the printed circuit cards? Lost scissors, and rings, and on and on). Piles, only some of which hve been recybled of old cars, etc. Most converted to rust, though not all of every car, and there'd be the shapes.

    There'd probably also be the basements of skyscrapers - solidly built, and deep.

    265:

    Heteromeles @ 238: There, you've now got a world map that looks pretty much like Hyboria, without the REH racial cycling squickiness. Better yet, it's got that mix of Vancian futurism and atavistic Conanism to make it easy to populate from old D&D manuals. And best of all, the only place to mine for stuff people need are in the 500,000 years of dead cities that populate the highlands, all other mines being entirely worked out. And those ruins might even be populated by monsters and demons, if that's the way you swing.

    If the Mediterranean basin dries up, wouldn't mineral deposits that are now UN-mineable because they're currently hidden below sea level become exposed? And if sea level drops enough to again expose Doggerland, what might lie underneath that?

    266:

    Greg Tingey @254, said: Any way of getting that to stay on a single page, so that we can LOOK at it?

    In the upper left hand corner of the page are three small lines, stacked on each other, before the name Newmanera. Click on them and a menu drops down to access more information.

    267:

    Troutwaxer @ 252: True, but 20-30 million years from now, what are the chances of someone finding such a thing?

    What are the chances scientists would find 100 million year old dinosaur feathers?

    268:

    We have a good idea of what lies in Doggerland, from trawling - it's all less than 200 metres from the surface, about half less than 50 metres. See what Heteromeles and I have been saying. I am pretty sure that it's not been more studied because it's poor scuba diving territory - cold, windy and murky, with ever-present danger from feral trawlers.

    The Mediterranean is 'interesting'. It's much deeper, probably filled catastrophically, but just too long ago for hominids (appararently now renamed), let alone a human civilisation. However, if there had been a great ape that had adapted to the extreme conditions there and evolved intelligence, I doubt we would have a clue about it!

    269:

    Oh, I did think about it. It's in Hot Earth Dreams, and this thread is about Dead Lies Dreaming. The tl;dr version is that, unless we get really smart about things this century,* most of the resources are going to be in the ruins of cities, which in my book includes waste dumps and the metal skeletons of skyscrapers. This stuff is "high entropy," meaning that it's going to take a lot of work to make something useful out of it. Worse, unless we figure out good ways to bootstrap from the use of firewood to good solar and wind generators, most of the energy needed to refine old materials and build stuff with it will be from biofuels, like wood, charcoal, alcohol, and methane. And not much of those either, compared with the amount of energy we use now.

    That's the critical bottleneck going forward, that we get stuck with critical metals and other resources found solely in the trash and ruins, and recycling them will take a long time, because we'll have limited supplies of high energy fires for things like smelting and refining. It makes for an interesting technological base for stories, but it's kind of depressing to consider ending up there from where we are now. Incidentally, if you're thinking future medievaloid, I'd recommend looking at Ming Dynasty China. Same tech level, but some interesting ideas that were differently developed in Europe.

    The other thing is that, if you have to cannibalize the past to make the present, then history gets recycled too. That leads to a rather different mindset about things like history and historical sciences.

    • After four years of living under Agent INEPT APOCALYPSE trying to push the fast forward button towards a dystopian future, I decided that it's worth being hopeful about renewable energy, especially the notion that it's possible to have large-scale, closed-loop recycling of old panels and turbines using only renewable energy. It would be nice to keep electricity flowing into the indefinite future. And unlike the Moties, I don't think we can bootstrap to fusion reactors each time.
    270:

    If the Mediterranean basin dries up, wouldn't mineral deposits that are now UN-mineable because they're currently hidden below sea level become exposed? And if sea level drops enough to again expose Doggerland, what might lie underneath that?

    Good point! It looks like they're experimenting with Mediterranean sea-floor mining now (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y). So the answer depends on the 21st Century: Maybe a lot of stuff lying around for the taking, maybe just the ginormous salt beds left over from the Miocene when the Mediterranean last dried. And as the Garretts pointed out in the Gandalara Cycle, I know even less about what resources are mineable on the currently submarine slopes of Cyprus and Crete.

    So if you like this scenario, it depends on the history you're writing. It could be anywhere from completely mined, aside from the salt to a rush for nodules and salt.

    Four other historical points: A. 500,000 years is too short a time for evolution to undo a mass extinction by at least an order of magnitude. However, given what we're doing with CRISPR and related technologies now, that may be less relevant.

  • I'd just guessed about the next ice age, but looking at the Milankovitch cycles, it looks there's one primed to start around 550,000 years, give or take
  • III. Gibraltar closing was another guess. But digging through ol' Wikipedia, it turns out that the African Plate is apparently moving northward at 0.292 degrees/million years. That equals something like 17.5 nautical miles/million years. The Straits are about 7 nautical miles wide, so that would take about 400,000 years to seal, not counting the erosive power of the sea moving in and out and keeping it open. It would then take at least 1,000 years for the Mediterranean to dry out.

    D. If you believe Wikipedia on this, the drying of the Mediterranean does some interesting things, besides screwing up the formerly Mediterranean climate of the former littoral around the now dry Bottomland. The other interesting thing is that it moves an appreciable amount of fresh water into the hydrosphere (Mediterranean salt remains behind to form yet more halite). A lot of this water ends up in the remaining oceans, probably lowering their salinity a bit and raising their freezing temperature a bit more. That makes the onset of the next ice age just a bit easier, and helps it last a bit longer.

    So yes, setting Hyboria around 550,000 years in the future, with a dry Mediterranean and a major ice age, isn't stupid at all. Indeed, the suggestion that the reason to colonize the Bottomlands is to mine for newly exposed minerals makes a lot of sense, although the mines will be rapidly exhausted, compared with the process of the Med drying down and exposing them.

    You can tell I'm avoiding work by having fun worldbuilding?

    271:

    I do not understand why people are confusing discussions about Story with Reality. All of the negative comments are about Reality not living up to something fun. People are forgetting the vast cities that Robert E. Howard wrote about.

    • How those cities disappeared into the ancient past is a far more interesting discussion.

    But if you insist on looking at Reality, and vanishing societies, consider the Silk Road.

    People did not load up a bunch of camels with silk and then set out over a trackless desert to get to a market on the other side of the continent. They followed a road that travelled through a well populated region with towns and cities made of mud brick, constructed using very little wood or stone.

    Over time, those towns and cities wiped out the easy resources for firewood to cook food, or have grazing for their animals. Those towns and cities were abandoned and the mud brick buildings left to collapse back into the landscape.

    • That whole region was turned into a desert by the people living there, yet the caravans still followed the old routes when they were gone.

    I can't find the specific videos on YouTube that I remember seeing on our local PBS station, but decades ago people brought over a guy from Namibia who built using mud bricks. They wanted him to build using that technology to show what could be done.

    Here in Santa Fe they often build using adobe bricks, so they made a bunch before he showed up, but adobe is the wrong size, too wide and long, so he started out by breaking the adobe into brick size units. He then proceeded to build a dome without a wood frame to support the construction. He also built an arched vault roof, once again without wood framing.

    This is an example of using larger adobe. The guy who was here would have split the adobe you see and did the dome totally by eye. The people who were trying to help him, were basically in the way.

    Adobe dome workshop part 21080p H 264 AAC

    This example uses larger adobe and limited wood to guide building a vault roof.

    adobe mud bricks vault

    The point I am making, is that we already have a real example of a region collapsing and basically lost to view, and that all happened in recent memory, i.e., the last 10k years.

    People have been building with mud brick for thousands of years, and built big towns and cities that essentially vanished when abandoned.

    BTW, Those areas can be restored with proper reintroduction of herd animals.

    How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory

    I have watched an area of land along I-25 that is turning to desert because they no longer allow proper grazing technics. They have now posted signs along the Interstate warning of blowing dust where that was never a problem before.

    I have also watched a paved road that was no longer used or maintained, turn into gravel. The asphalt literally evaporated over the past 30 years, leaving the aggregate behind.

    In the far future, there will be no indication of our vast cities because later generations will harvest the resources and use them for other purposes. It is standard here in Santa Fe to completely strip a building down to the ground, breaking up the concrete foundations and brick walls for aggregate, etc..., completely recycling the materials.

    Watching them tear down a block of buildings along Cerrillos Road, turning concrete foundations and brick into piles of aggregate showed me the future. I have whole stories where the major industry of this century will be stripping out the resources in all the abandoned sub-divisions, and re-wilding the land.

    Short of a Mad Max style collapse, we will clean up the technology stigmata of our society and the Next People will have no clue that we were ever here.

    Despite what Frank is saying, the question I want to examine for Story is, how many times has that already happened.

    272:

    Re: ' ... we already have a real example of a region collapsing and basically lost to view,..'

    Also like Chernobyl which is now almost overgrown by local flora in a matter of a few decades. This area is also likely to yield a lot of info about how modern materials/infrastructure actually deteriorate - relative aging/stability.

    About glass lasting a long time ... When I watched a documentary a couple of years back about Chernobyl they showed how most of the glass/windows in pretty well all the buildings in that area had been damaged/broken. Basically, whatever glass there was is completely gone apart from small shards and pieces. These too are likely to get smaller over time as wind/snow/rain gusts throw them around mostly to the ground where they'll shatter after which animals and/or plants will continue grinding them. Based on this, I'm wondering how realistic it is to assume that 'intact' anything will survive the elements, fauna and flora. Might be more realistic just to look for increased concentrations of stuff.

    273:

    Chernobyl is an unusual example because it doesn’t have people picking it over for anything of value. To get widespread Chernobyl-like conditions you’d need a very sudden, very extreme reduction in human population.

    274:

    Not to derail again, but Al 'unSavory is not worth following. His hypotheses have been tested in Africa, and they didn't work. His response was to change his story so that the tests did prove his new story right. That kind of post hoc hypothesis shift is, shall we say, dubious?

    I remember when he came out to San Diego and looked at Torrey Pines State Reserve in the summer. Most of you don't know the area, but it's famous as the biggest population of Torrey pines (one of the world's rarest pines, growing in coastal sage scrub that is dormant during the dry summer, and it's growing on sandstone that is considered stone only by courtesy. I can rip chunks of it out with my hands, and climbing on it is a good way to die.

    Anyway, 'unSavory took one look at Torrey Pines, said: --there was way to much dead material (mistaking dormant for dead) --It was overgrown and there should be grass there (mistaking coastal scrub for grasslands. Presumably he's seen the fynbos around the Cape)? --Therefore it was badly mismanaged, and it needed to have lots of cattle on it ASAP. Remember what I said about how friable it is? Yeah, imagine what herds of cows would do, and imagine them hitting the beach 50' below when the slope crumbles under them. And Torrey Pines are far from the only really rare species on that sandstone outcrop. But it's okay if these species, which have no defense against grazing because cows aren't fucking native to San Diego and Torrey Pines was never ranched, get grazed anyway. If you're an 'unSavory cultist.

    The upshot of this 'unSavory pontificating was I and the other local plant ecologists had to deal with a bunch of 'unSavory cultists yelling at us that we were stupid and their master was right. Fortunately, it never got far beyond FacePlant. But he's just another loon, along with the jobsworth pushing pervasive aluminum toxicity, who wants to put the fix on the already difficult problem of managing a tiny reserve of rare plants that gets more visitors than Yosemite.

    So please get yourself deprogrammed from this 'unSavory cult, and free up your bandwidth for more useful things. Of course, I'm quite sure that this will make you go deeper into 'unSavory intellectual practices, but I really have to try. Grazing has its place, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not showboating and result retconning.

    275:

    Re: 'To get widespread Chernobyl-like conditions you’d need a very sudden, very extreme reduction in human population.'

    I think we've seen a few episodes of this i.e., war (including 're-locating' indigenous populations), famines, floods, fires, volcanoes, epidemics, etc.

    276:

    Anyway, getting away from unsavory intellectual discussion, I pretty much agree. There are parts of the Middle East (Iraq, for instance) where AFAIK every low hill in the otherwise flat area is remains of a dead city or city-state, melting back into the ground. There are ruins throughout the Andes and the US too with much the same cause.

    The problem for us is that people envision ruins like ancient Rome where the Italians recycled Roman stone well into modern times, and project forward to think that this will happen to our modern glass, steel, and concrete cities. That I disagree with, because I don't think reinforced concrete, structural steel, or glass will last nearly as long as Roman unreinforced concrete and rock. That suggests, instead, that our gleaming cities are so much rubble waiting to happen, rather than more picturesque ruins.

    Of course, if we change the way we build, all bets are off, but buildings are built now for a 50-100 year life, not centuries.

    Anyway, I'm interested in set building, trying to get creatives to try something new rather than just trot out the same old tropes, like Lovecraftian tentacular racism, or Conanism and the prototypical murder hobos who become autocratic strongmen with tarnished hearts of gold.

    The key thing, to me, is that Lovecraft and Howard took their understanding of the science of their times and ran with it. Some of that science was admittedly racist as fuck, but they weren't rewriting Frankensteinian science fiction from a century ago, they were taking what was current for them and using it. When we copy their century-old milieus, we're not copying their methods, we're copying their results. And boy does it show.

    One of the great disappointments is that so many writers are dutifully copying this century-old canon like it's holy writ, borrowing tropes slavishly, rather than doing the work that Lovecraft and Howard did to try to make interesting stories out of current science.

    So you want to do sword and sorcery? Why not? Set it 500,000-odd years from now, populate to your taste, race-swap to make it politically current. Then you can unleash a new generation of homicidal vagrants doing good for the hell of it. At least it will be a bit different than the more prosaic thudding blunderers with ye olde medieval times of yore.

    277:

    Yes, glass is fragile and much softer than sand, but Roman glassware is dug up regularly, mediaeval stained glass is still extant in Europe, and I can witness that glass will survive half a century of being in soil that is turned over every year.

    278:

    There are parts of the Middle East (Iraq, for instance) where AFAIK every low hill in the otherwise flat area is remains of a dead city or city-state, melting back into the ground.

    Check out every place there that has a name beginning with תל : Tel- or Tal-. As you say, IIRC, there are places in the middle US that are also vast midden-heaps.

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

    279:

    "Witroth! No! Don't ask those questions!

    Do you want Charlie to be pitched over the Bridge of Death if he gets one of them wrong?"

    Yes.... Err NO! Ahhhhhhh

    281:

    whitroth @262 said: "Doubled in size"

    Mark,

    Yes, as Elderly Cynic said @263, double the size, double the gravity. Half the size, half the gravity.

    BTW, Look at the stuff below if you want, but please, don't go all "whitroth" on me if you are not interested.

    I find inspiration for Story from many sources. If it hangs together, is internally consistent, I will use it and monetize it.

    Fair enough?

    TL;DR

    Growing Earth Theory(GET) is another fun source of story.

    This is a fun video by Neal Adams that shows how the continents connect up on an Earth the size of Mars, to give you an idea of what they are talking about. That means Earth's gravity was about a third of what it is now, when the Jurassic breakup started.

    Expanding Earth Theory

    • Seeing the continents floating over an ocean world fit with the future Story I was working on, so I'm using that.

    Notice that Australia moves up to fit between China and North America. It turns out that the geology and fossils all match up when they come together.

    Watch it a few times and see if you can wrap your head around it. I have the giff version of the video on my homepage so I can watch it anytime.

    This next video is about the work of Samuel Carey.

    Planet Earth: A Question Of Expansion (1982)

    James Maxlow has continued the work of Carey. He has basically taken the geological data and shown that everything fits on a smaller Earth when you subtract the material all over the Earth, by age. He has shown that Plate Tectonics fails to actually fit or make predictions the way that it claims. Each piece of the puzzle Earth has one and only one way to fit together, where Plate Tectonics is randomly assembled by different people.

    • Everything he has done is data based, not theory.

    Here are a series of lectures that he has given on the Dissident Science channel that go into detail. He just did the fourth lecture.

    Expansion Tectonics: Dr. Maxlow on Recent to Permian Small Earth Modeling

    Expansion Tectonics #2: Dr. Maxlow on Permian to Archaean Small Earth Modelling

    Expansion Tectonics #3: Fact or Mere Coincidence? - Dr. James Maxlow

    Expansion Tectonics: Fact of Mere Coincidence 2 with Dr. James Maxlow

    Maxlow sent me a copy of his new book on pdf. He is still trying to have it available in paper and ebook so people can buy it at a good price. When it's available I will let people know.

    This is deeply fun stuff. Great for Story.

    282:

    Reading Imp's reunion with Eve, a minor point caught my eye: "She stared at him as the door hissed shut. There were no windows, just cameras in every corner, discreetly embedded in the cornices and skirting boards." Eve goes on to explain the remote controlled doors and face recognition security measures.

    So is Bigge is just a gadget freak with too much money? Yes, I think so. He's certainly overconfident about failure modes. His IT people will have redundant computers and power supplies, and hopefully air gap the house system from everything else in the world - not, as Bob Howard demonstrated, that air gaps will always stop a supernatural hacker in that world. It's an obvious privacy vulnerability so the IT team should be paranoid about it.

    It depends on whether Bigge has heard of Scorpion Stare. I'm guessing not! He's certainly evil villain enough to install Scorpion Stare on the systems watching his minions but he should be wary enough not to idle around between multiple cameras himself.

    I wouldn't bet a penny against someone from the Laundry installing Scorpion Stare on Bigge's network anyway, just in case...

    283:

    Re: ' ... but Roman glassware is dug up regularly, mediaeval stained glass is still extant in Europe,'

    Makes me wonder what the key differences in composition/manufacture are vs. modern day glass.

    Also: impact of local weather/climate conditions on such materials. I quickly scanned the article below but it doesn't seem that glass manufacturers typically look at environmental factors when formulating their products. Mostly seems to be application driven.

    https://www.britannica.com/topic/glass-properties-composition-and-industrial-production-234890/Properties-of-glass#ref76320

    BTW - The above or a related article mentions that some Romans had glass-paned windows. Glass beads/jewellery, goblets and for-show knickknacks - sure. But windows - would never have guessed! Can't wait for the next cinematic ancient Rome themed epic (e.g., Ben Hur, Nero fiddling while Rome burns) to include a 'feature' glass covered window.

    284:

    It is not the composition, it is the size and thickness of the panes. Ancient glass is blown, which puts an upper size on how large it can be, while modern glass is poured out onto a bath of molten metal, which is both heavier than molten glass, and has a lower melting point than it, then the glass puddle solidifies and is pulled off the metal bath. This technique allows for the production of enormous and very thin glass panels.. but large thin glass panels are easy to break.

    285:

    Glasses and other glass ware. Eyeglasses. Whisky glasses (very heavy bottoms). And on... for that matter, safety glass, like that on your car.

    286:

    Growing Earth Theory(GET) is another fun source of storytotal bollocks - please don't bother ....

    287:

    So is Bigge is just a gadget freak with too much money? Yes, I think so. He's certainly overconfident about failure modes.

    Rupert is over-confident and sloppy (see also: Boris Johnson!) but he's also far more dangerous than Eve realizes and was planning far ahead of the horizon he kept her focussing on: you'll see more of his plans unfold in the next two books.

    Let's just say he's left her a ticking bomb or three to defuse, and Eve is in much worse danger than she realizes at the end of "Dead Lies Dreaming".

    288:

    One question about Growing Earth theory:

    Where does the extra mass come from?

    And a corollary:

    What are the cosmological consequences?

    If Earth is packing on mass, then so is the rest of the solar system ... indeed, the universe. This has implications for the dynamics and stability of planetary orbits. It also has implications for the life expectancy of the sun.

    TLDR is that I suspect Jupiter and Saturn will begin to chow down on their moons, then migrate inwards, and the inner planets and outer smaller giants will either migrate with them (they're locked in resonance orbits: cf Bode's law) or be ejected from the solar system. Meanwhile, the sun will brighten rapidly and head towards a blue-white supergiant, absorbing the planets -- Jupiter will be at least brown dwarf mass by then, possibly Saturn too -- in a relatively short period of time. Finally, as the sun's mass bloats up past the 150M mark it'll end in a pair instability supernova, resulting in a black hole or complete stellar disruption.

    If the mass doubling period is ~60MY, then the sun is in the range for pair-instability supernova mass (or exceeding the Eddington limit) within 300-400MY.

    This presumably affects the rest of the observable universe: so within 300-400MY every F or G class main sequence star in the local group of galaxies gives rise to a hypernova. The less massive stars -- those starting out at, say, 0.1 solar masses -- will take an extra 240MY or so to go "bang", and they outnumber the F and G dwarves by an order of magnitude; if we extend it to include brown dwarves then, eh, add another 500M years. So there will be on the order of 10^12 giant-ass hypernovae within a radius of 5M light years in a period of a billion years, for about a thousand observable hypernovae per year (of which maybe one a day in our own galaxy). Factor one billion sun bloc is not enough: you also need to be neutrino-proof to have a hope of surviving.

    The end result will be a gradually collapsing cluster of hypermassive black holes gobbling up other black holes.

    But wait! I forgot to factor in the galactic nucleus black holes. They are doubling in mass, too. Sgr A* currently masses about 3.6 x 10^6 solar masses, but the exponential mass-doubling with a period of 60MY means that it's ... well, my brain just crashed but I'm pretty sure 64 doubling periods (3.8 billion years, which -- outside of Growing Earth cosmology -- is currently about the time until the milky way and M31 galaxies merge) will have it exceeding the current total mass of the universe. At which point, maybe send off for another big bang?

    TLDR: "Growing Earth" is some prime-grade bonkers that is incompatible with actually-existing cosmology over a time frame short enough that it should be directly observable with today's instrumentation.

    289:

    PS: Of course, if one combines Growing Earth theory with Hollow Earth theory -- all you need is some helpful source of anti-gravity to ensure everything doesn't float off the inside of the hollow sphere -- it bypasses the entire "where's the mass coming from" question and you get extra lebensraum to play with. No wonder Himmler was so keen on it ...

    290:

    Without extra mass appearing, though, the shell would get thinner and thinner; eventually mines would come out the other side, oil wells before that, and there would be some major difficulties with volcanoes.

    291:

    Probably not safety glass - the frozen-in stresses in it make it quite keen on breaking up into dinky little chunks if it gets the chance.

    The thing about window panes is that window glass is sensitive to whether or not people care about it. If an old factory or warehouse is abandoned it's not long before all the windows are broken, even the ones that are far too high for anyone to throw rocks at from either inside or out; if it was just natural rate of breakage, then you would see a corresponding number of visits by glaziers to the not-abandoned buildings nearby, but you don't. Medieval stained glass can last for hundreds of years in churches that are being used, but rapidly disappears if the church is abandoned. And around Chernobyl all the windows have broken very quickly indeed even though there isn't anyone to throw rocks, because the glass knows for sure the people aren't coming back and it just despairs.

    292:

    Yes. That is one factor in glass's survival; the other being the conditions.

    294:

    It's odd you should mention Sagittarius A... Growing Earth theory must be true, because apparently a new study says we're 2000 light years closer to Sag A than we thought.

    https://phys.org/news/2020-11-earth-faster-closer-black-hole.html

    295:

    TLDR: "Growing Earth" is some prime-grade bonkers that is incompatible with actually-existing cosmology over a time frame short enough that it should be directly observable with today's instrumentation.

    I'm not sure prime grade bonkers is where I'd put it. After all, this was just an alternative explanation for why continents fit together in continental drift, that the oceans were growing because the world's getting bigger.

    To me, it's just a downer. Who needs more gravity, when it just makes for backaches and shorter football kicks and more "blink and you miss it" moments? Unless you're rewriting Mission of Gravity or Dragon's Egg with a human cast, or perhaps doing the Family D'Alembert circus, it's not clear what good it is for fiction. Maybe I'm just too much of a naive realist.

    296:

    No. It WASN'T bonkers when it was proposed. It IS bonkers today.

    Now, as for a mechanism. Azulno, fusion in stars eventually ends up in iron. What if the universe finds all that iron in one place a bit boring, and is gradually coverting the iron in the earth's core back to hydrogen? The earth would expand, but without increasing in mass.

    There's clearly scope for science fiction there, because it will eventually end in a massive burp, with consequences I leave to the imagination.

    297:

    But if you drew all the continents on a balloon, and you blew up the balloon, the continents would grow with the rest of the balloon. So why haven't the continents grown with the Earth? The continents have iron inside them just like the rest of the planet.

    Of course, in your idea, the hydrogen would mix with the oxygen (also being converted out of iron as part of the chemical process of turning iron into hydrogen) and ignite. Which is why it's so hot at the center of the Earth!

    298:

    That is true, but I was perpetrating a theory that anti-fusion was a bit like fusion, and took place only where there was a very high concentration of iron (and possibly only at highish temperatures and pressures). I.e. in the core.

    Your variation of assuming that it also produced oxygen (and the consequences) is equally, er, plausible.

    299:

    It would only logical that the anti-fusion is producing anti-matter right? And that's why the Earth is about to explode!*

    • Probably on December 31st, because what could make 2020 worse? (Don't answer that question!)
    300:

    Re: ' ... only logical that the anti-fusion is producing anti-matter right?'

    How about:

    Since 'waves' and 'matter' (particles) are different sides of the same coin therefore by definition always in balance then the continued accelerating expansion of the universe propelled by gravity waves requires that more matter pop into existence.

    Another possibility: changes in the gravitational constant will affects the rate of atomic fission/fusion at some threshold/critical level. (What are min/max distances over which electrons can bind vs.jump ship to another atom?)

    301:

    "Another possibility: changes in the gravitational constant will affects the rate of atomic fission/fusion at some threshold/critical level. (What are min/max distances over which electrons can bind vs.jump ship to another atom?)"

    You know son, we're very lucky we still have matter. And you should be careful, because we have less of it every day!

    302:

    Getting back to the original thread, I remembered the question I had about Dead Lies Dreaming: Who's the patron of the Chelsea Flower Show? Shrub Niggurath?

    303:

    Charlie Stross @289, said: One question about Growing Earth theory:

    Where does the extra mass come from?

    And a corollary:

    What are the cosmological consequences?

    Yes! Way to go, Charlie. At least somebody is using their imagination. With a little work on the specifics, you would have something to build your Space Opera.

    • Remember, Ming the Merciless had a traveling world, the planet Mongo, that had inhabited moons.

    Well done.

    • Your questions are the heart of the Story.

    Once Science takes GET seriously it changes everything. I'm thinking back to all of the fun E.E. "Doc" Smith stories where they discover one new thing, the inertialess Drive, and proceed to build a Space Empire. Or James Blish with his Cities in Flight, when they developed the Spindizzy drive, lifting whole cities into space. Or the fun stories from the 50s and 60s when you would have Scientists on islands building earthquake machines to threaten the world. Or the way Baxter will take an impossible idea and then spin off multiple books playing with variations of that same impossible idea. Or the way Greg Bear manipulated matter in The Forge of God series creating whole worlds and wiping out solar systems. Or the way David Brin will take incoherent Space Cadet babble and turn it into a coherent narrative.

    Imagination is the heart of building fun stories. Why is everyone suddenly letting themselves be stripped of their imagination, being tied up in "nots". Not this, not that. Glug!

    BTW, just as I was going to post I saw SFReader @301 and Troutwaxer @302.

    I want to give a shout-out to them for seeing the potentials. SFReader is on the right track for a great Story mechanism.

    The implication is that you can transmute matter at will, harvest moons and have them grow into living worlds, etc...

    There are a whole series of books that follow from that "etc..."

    304:

    To be momentarily (and undeservedly) fair to the Growing Earth boffin (bogon?), back in the pre Plate Tectonics days there were some goofy theories and observations unsupported by theory.

    For one thing, a common theory of orogeny was that the Earth was shrinking as it cooled, this wrinkled the surface and caused mountains. Makes sense, and might even be happening on Mercury and probably elsewhere. Plate tectonics gave a better answer.

    Then there was the observation that the continents fit together. How'd they move apart? Well if the planet can be shrunk to produce mountains, why not grow the oceans to move the continents apart?

    This makes sense some if you're living on a flat Earth or deep inside your own skull. On a globe with curved surfaces? Not so much.

    Now I'm just waiting for someone to pop up the theory that tectonic plates have, on average, something like six edges. That one bugs me.

    305:

    I should note one more thing about the "expanding matter" theory. It explains why we can't detect anything that powers gravity. But if both space and matter were expanding at once, we'd be pushed against worlds from both sides - all sides really!

    306:

    Troutwaxer @306

    Wiki - Le Sage's theory of gravitation

    That's a classic.

    307:

    Imagination is the heart of building fun stories. Why is everyone suddenly letting themselves be stripped of their imagination, being tied up in "nots". Not this, not that. Glug!

    Well, whimsy certainly has its place, and I'm a sometime practitioner of the wound-up arts.

    Still...

    On a serious note, I think there's an equally good argument to be made for creativity happening within strong constraints. There are good examples in both novels (Cryptonomicon, for example) and real life. My favorite real life examples are flying proas and the original kayaks. Both were built by resource-poor people using whatever they had: driftwood, seal skins and skeletons (kayaks), coconut fiber and breadfruit wood and sap (proas). And out of these pathetic materials they created some really amazing boats.

    That's the kind of art I'm pointing to when I talk about a Neolithic Hyboria in 50,000 years ago, getting rid of the steel. The constraints are what force a worldbuilder to come up with something new, different, and inspiringly cool. Steel armor and swords are nice, but why not have a battle with linen armor, flint-edged microblade clubs, and spearthrowers? Swap out cotton for linen, and you've got Mayan warfare, which was every bit as bloody as something out of Robert E Howard. And linen makes better armor, apparently. And if it's set in ice age Europe, you can even have war mammoths, if you must.

    That's the power of using constraints.

    308:

    Now I'm just waiting for someone to pop up the theory that tectonic plates have, on average, something like six edges.

    For that you'd need a Universal Geometry of Geology.

    https://www.quantamagazine.org/geometry-reveals-how-the-world-is-assembled-from-cubes-20201119/

    309:

    And if it's set in ice age Europe, you can even have war mammoths, if you must.

    Yes, but you don't get to play with tusk swords! (Which are scary AF.)

    310:

    Elderly Cynic @ 268: We have a good idea of what lies in Doggerland, from trawling - it's all less than 200 metres from the surface, about half less than 50 metres. See what Heteromeles and I have been saying. I am pretty sure that it's not been more studied because it's poor scuba diving territory - cold, windy and murky, with ever-present danger from feral trawlers.

    The Mediterranean is 'interesting'. It's much deeper, probably filled catastrophically, but just too long ago for hominids (appararently now renamed), let alone a human civilisation. However, if there had been a great ape that had adapted to the extreme conditions there and evolved intelligence, I doubt we would have a clue about it!

    I was replying to the assertion "the only place to mine for stuff people need are in the 500,000 years of dead cities that populate the highlands, all other mines being entirely worked out" ... It's not what lies in Doggerland (or the Mediterranean basin), but what lies underneath.

    The "new" land areas revealed by retreating sea levels would likely include new places to "mine for stuff people need" that are NOT "worked out".

    311:

    Ivory is just a cooler form of bone. And don't forget that Ice Age 'Onan can use a walrus oosik if carving a tool out of mammoth ivory isn't manly enough.

    And yes, I know what tusk swords are.

    312:

    SFR Congratulations, you have just re-invented the Steady Gait, oops, "Steady State" theory of the Universe!

    H @ 305 The Well-World, you mean?

    allynh But - it's TRUE! Those miniscule particles are what we call ... Neutrinoes ... Or maybe not?

    Charlie Naah ... Narwahl Tusks are v. effective, as we know!

    313:

    Tusk swords aren't made out of bone or ivory; they're steel sword bayonets mounted ring bayonet style on elephant tusks, about six to ten feet long (in old money units).

    Elephants with fricken' swords strapped to their heads. Doctor Evil would approve, right?

    314:

    Wait... when the stars get iron as a fusion result, and they're spinning still, then we get humongous electromagnets, and that pulls the universe back together to a Big Crunch, right?

    315:

    Heteromeles @ 270:

    If the Mediterranean basin dries up, wouldn't mineral deposits that are now UN-mineable because they're currently hidden below sea level become exposed? And if sea level drops enough to again expose Doggerland, what might lie underneath that?

    Good point! It looks like they're experimenting with Mediterranean sea-floor mining now (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y). So the answer depends on the 21st Century: Maybe a lot of stuff lying around for the taking, maybe just the ginormous salt beds left over from the Miocene when the Mediterranean last dried. And as the Garretts pointed out in the Gandalara Cycle, I know even less about what resources are mineable on the currently submarine slopes of Cyprus and Crete.

    [ ... ]

    So yes, setting Hyboria around 550,000 years in the future, with a dry Mediterranean and a major ice age, isn't stupid at all. Indeed, the suggestion that the reason to colonize the Bottomlands is to mine for newly exposed minerals makes a lot of sense, although the mines will be rapidly exhausted, compared with the process of the Med drying down and exposing them.

    Not saying it's stupid, only that if sea levels fell 100+ meters (enough to completely expose "Doggerland"?), and especially if the Mediterranean basin dried up completely, there would be new land areas where sub-surface mining would become possible. The remnants of today's cities wouldn't be the only place you could find useful materials.

    Current sea-floor "mining" is just scraping the surface, so even if we removed all of the useful minerals from the sea-floor during the 21st century, there would still be minerals below the current sea beds available for mining if they became dry land in some far distant future.

    316:

    Wait, you mean it isn't virtual quark foam pushing things together that creates gravity? And then, of course, with large empty areas of space, they push things apart, right?

    There we go, no dark matter need apply!

    317:

    As noted, I do, in fact, know what an elephant sword is. What elephants can do without swords is more than sufficient in a neolithic setting, although there's no reason not to armor them up with linothoraxes atop their wool.

    The point I'd forgotten is that there's all this mammoth ivory lying around for tool manufacture. And that's kind of cool too.

    318:

    Re: '"Steady State" theory of the Universe'

    Well, sure -- might be because I've read some of Fred Hoyle's SF although I've no idea how Hoyle worked gravity into his theory. (Gravity was still something of a puzzle back then.)

    319:

    Looks like if you google "Dogger Bank Geology" you get some information on what's under there. For example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318503179_The_evolution_of_the_Dogger_Bank_North_Sea_A_complex_history_of_terrestrial_glacial_and_marine_environmental_change

    If I'm reading this map right, the higher Dogger Bank (aka Doggerland when it's expecting company) is more-or-less between to of the larger north sea oil fields, and Doggerland itself is an oil patch. The top layer is glacial morraine, so any minerals (gold nuggets, etc) in there would be stuff scoured off the surface of Britain and Europe and deposited there.

    320:

    Getting back to erased histories in the real world (or somebody's "let's make Trump president" simulation, or whatever it is): my favorite artifact that doesn't fit well at all with history as we know it is the Antikythera Mechanism -- a geared device which was constructed in Greece somewhere between roughly 200 BCE and 50 BCE, which shows the motions of the planets and other calendrical information (including the cycle of the Olympic Games), and which was lost in a shipwreck around 87 BCE, then recovered by marine archaeologists around the turn of the last century.

    What's interesting about this thing is that it's hard to see how it could have been the only device of its kind -- engineering a long gear-train so it doesn't jam requires tricks which someone has to learn from experience. And yet there's not much trace of any others. It's not just that the devices are missing -- precious metal tends to get reused -- but also that there are very few references to them. Technical knowledge might have been closely held as the equivalent of guild secrets which died with the equivalent of the guilds, but at the very least, this suggests that there was other technology in ancient Greece and Rome of which no record whatever survives. And if some crowd of fanatics was trying to erase traces of it deliberately, well... that would explain why the only surviving example was at the bottom of the Mediterranean, where they couldn't get at it.

    321:

    Gravity was still something of a puzzle back then

    Like it isn't now?

    322:

    SFReader @ 275:

    'To get widespread Chernobyl-like conditions you’d need a very sudden, very extreme reduction in human population.'

    I think we've seen a few episodes of this i.e., war (including 're-locating' indigenous populations), famines, floods, fires, volcanoes, epidemics, etc.

    Those are still fairly localized. To get the kind of world-wide abandonment of cities required for the trope under discussion would require some kind of global catastrophe that strikes everywhere at pretty much the same time.

    323:

    Charlie Stross @ 290: PS: Of course, if one combines Growing Earth theory with Hollow Earth theory -- all you need is some helpful source of anti-gravity to ensure everything doesn't float off the inside of the hollow sphere -- it bypasses the entire "where's the mass coming from" question and you get extra lebensraum to play with. No wonder Himmler was so keen on it ...

    Hmmm ... If you're going to combine Growing Earth with Hollow Earth maybe there's a cosmic glass-blower somewhere inflating the hollow inside of a molten mantle layer and it doesn't require additional mass?

    That would also explain why the earth heats up & cools down - global warming and ice ages ... and why it spins.

    324:

    I think there's a misunderstanding. The general problem with the Mediterranean drying down is that it takes from 1,000 to tens of thousands of years, depending on who's making the estimate. Mines are generally used for decades to centuries, although if they're sparingly used, they can last much longer.

    That was the problem I was pointing to, that as the Mediterranean dries out, the newly exposed mineable minerals could be found and exploited as they get uncovered. Once the Mediterranean dries completely, the mines may well be played out, except for those kilometer-thick deposits of salt in the lowest reaches. Those won't be mined out for a very long time.

    Doggerland geology is probably far better known than what's in that paper I referenced above, because it's in one of the world's great oil patches. I'm guessing that there's little of hard rock mineral interest in there, but I could be wrong.

    The fun question is what else is lurking in the nearshore environment around the globe right now. While you're right that there are undoubtedly new ore bodies waiting to be discovered, you've got to come up for a reason why they wouldn't be mined out on discovery as sea levels decrease, rather than sitting around until the middle of an ice age for a novel civilization to find them.

    The only scenario I've come up with so far is that the onsets of ice ages are civilization killers, so basically, as an ice age drops ocean levels, no one's mining much of anything until conditions stabilize at the new low. That might work, if you buy into it.

    325:

    This is also a reply to JBS. The North Sea is extremely shallow, and there is little geological difference in at least the top layers between East Anglia, the North Sea, the Low Countries and I believe Denmark, none of which have much in the way of mineral resources except for gas and some oil. It has also been fairly thoroughly surveyed, and there is very unlikely to be much in the way of accessible minerals there. Doggerland was a lot more than the bank, and was believed to be similar to the Fenland (or Holland, probably) before they were drained, and the interest is entirely archaelogical, not potential mining.

    https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/north-sea-physiography-depth-distribution-and-main-currents/n1_overview.eps/image_large

    The Mediterranean basin is a very different matter, but I know little about it.

    326:

    Well, see, the core of the Earth is surrounded by something like a dyson sphere. The problem is, there are no holes, so heat builds up. This causes the Earth to expand until cracks form in the cool outer shell, and molten inner material is driven out, along with some of the gas on the inside. Pressure release causes the planet to shrink again, sealing the volcanoes shut.

    Yeah.

    327:

    Troutwaxer @ 298: But if you drew all the continents on a balloon, and you blew up the balloon, the continents would grow with the rest of the balloon. So why haven't the continents grown with the Earth? The continents have iron inside them just like the rest of the planet.

    If the continents were drawn on pieces of paper & stuck to the surface of the balloon by static electricity the balloon could expand while the continents would stay the same size.

    Of course, in your idea, the hydrogen would mix with the oxygen (also being converted out of iron as part of the chemical process of turning iron into hydrogen) and ignite. Which is why it's so hot at the center of the Earth!

    And combusting hydrogen with oxygen makes water which explains why the sea level rises even with an expanding earth.

    328:

    I can see it now: the king comes to the Holy Precincts with this ore, and comes back x (days/months) later, and is given Sacred Swords for him and his army.

    Inside the Holy Precincts are, of course, rooms where gas flames burn eternally... and are used for smelting and casting.

    329:

    Oh, right, and when the Revolution/Invasion/End Times come, the invade the Holy Precincts, and try to dig up the source of the flame....

    Much BOOOOOOOMMM!!!! follows, not leaving evidence of Holy Precincts....

    330:

    Heteromeles @ 320: Looks like if you google "Dogger Bank Geology" you get some information on what's under there. For example:
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318503179_The_evolution_of_the_Dogger_Bank_North_Sea_A_complex_history_of_terrestrial_glacial_and_marine_environmental_change

    If I'm reading this map right, the higher Dogger Bank (aka Doggerland when it's expecting company) is more-or-less between to of the larger north sea oil fields, and Doggerland itself is an oil patch. The top layer is glacial morraine, so any minerals (gold nuggets, etc) in there would be stuff scoured off the surface of Britain and Europe and deposited there.

    "The top layer is a glacial morraine, ..."

    You're still thinking of what's on the surface rather than digging down below it.

    Take a look at Figure 2 from your document which shows the bottom of the moraine located at approximately 39.25 m below the seabed.

    If sea level fell sufficiently for Dogger Bank to become Doggerland once again, and the seabed became dry land, what might be found 100 m (60.75 m below the bottom of the moraine) below the newly dried out surface? Or Deeper?

    No matter what the composition of the surface of Doggerland, you're not addressing my objection to your assertion "the only place to mine for stuff people need are in the 500,000 years of dead cities that populate the highlands, all other mines being entirely worked out"

    The Boulby Mine (Britain's deepest) is "1,400 metres (4,600 ft) deep". So what lies 1,400 m below Doggerland?

    PS: Maps are useful only if you can read the key to understand what the map is supposed to be showing.
    What do the red blotches and green blotches indicate?
    What do all the other text boxes along side the map tell about what the map means?
    What do all the little graphs in the right side-bar mean?

    331:

    Glass:

    In the archaeological museum in Stavanger there is a Norse-made drinking horn, from (IIRC) the sixth century AD, made of glass with that classic blue colour which shouts "Roman manufacturing technique". (I haven't been able to find an online image of it, sorry.)

    332:

    Re: 'The only scenario I've come up with so far is that the onsets of ice ages are civilization killers, ...'

    Will be interesting to find out what did in the civilization described below. The only info currently publicly available* is that these folks lived about 10,000-12,000 years ago. Maybe some of the 'art' shows examples of tools, devices, contructions - if so, then maybe a timeline can be mapped to show likely discoveries.

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest

    • They're saving the big reveal for a documentary show. And I'm guessing it's a 'civilization' just because of the scale of this wall of art.

    'Civilization killers' ...

    Okay - who has to die in order to 'kill' a civilization? Seriously. I'm guessing that this is not an 'only the numbers matter' scenario because a civilization could go downhill pretty fast if even a relatively small fraction of the population but a good proportion of key members died off because of disease, war or some double whammy natural disaster. Also, I'm guessing that a civilization that relies mostly on oral teaching is at much higher risk of losing its lore/knowledge. Charlie D's comment (321) about guilds also figures into this: risk of civilization collapse decreases as universal access to education increases.

    333:

    As I said, it's been well studied. A seach on "North sea bed composition" finds these on the first page:

    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/197333/TR_SEA2_Geology.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_North_Sea

    Move along - nothing to see here. Sorry.

    334:

    David L Thanks - fascinating ....

    SS Actually, a "Deltic" locomotive on "full song" i.e. powering along at about 98.5 mph emitted a continuous low-pitched scream, which was wondeful to hear Example clip

    335:

    "Now I'm just waiting for someone to pop up the theory that tectonic plates have, on average, something like six edges. That one bugs me."

    So do dried out mud flats and various other things in the general category of a skin that forms on goop and cracks as it shrinks on drying/cooling. It smells like something to do with minimising some energy quantity related to the length of the boundary, so it really wants to give you circles but circles can't be tiled so you get hexagons or something vaguely like them.

    336:

    In the archaeological museum in Stavanger there is a Norse-made drinking horn, from (IIRC) the sixth century AD, made of glass with that classic blue colour which shouts "Roman manufacturing technique". (I haven't been able to find an online image of it, sorry.)

    The thing to remember is the Uluburun shipwreck, which went down of the Turkish coast in 14th Century BCE, had 175 ingots of glass onboard, including blue glass. People have been making glass for well over 4,000 years. Granted, the early stuff was beads and faience, and probably a lot of it was semi-accidentally produced during copper smelting, but the basic idea has been around for awhile. The late Bronze age (3,000 years ago) saw an explosion of glassmaking, particularly in Egypt. Clear glass didn't get produced in quantity until after 100 CE, again in Alexandria, probably because the soda from the desert, a lot of silica sand, and glasswort from the coast are all close to hand there.

    Anyway, so the only thing I'm surprised about with a 6th Century Norse glass horn is if it was made in Scandinavia from imported glass ingots as opposed to Byzantium. By that point, the technology to make it was over 2,000 years old.

    337:

    Yeah maybe. Allen Thomson caught the reference back in #309 to this article:

    https://www.quantamagazine.org/geometry-reveals-how-the-world-is-assembled-from-cubes-20201119/

    Quanta's a great source for bleeding-edge ideas, 90% of which are on the controversial side, and thus perfect for science fictional cogitation. This one....? I'll believe it more if I see it catch on.

    338:

    About Antikythera: I agree that it's weird. The question is whether it's out-of-place in all history, or in western history.

    The reason I make that distinction is that the Byzantines made stuff with gears too. I don't know if it was as complex as Antikythera, but the technology didn't die before Christ.

    The thing to remember, again, is that the Roman Empire ended in 1453 when Byzantium fell, not in 476 when Odoacer was crowned king of Rome. And the Byzantines actually kept inventing stuff; not just Greek Fire, but trebuchets, grenades, forks, civil jurisprudence, and hospitals, among other things.

    339:

    If you want to talk hacked history and not noticing the bleeding obvious, here's something I don't understand: Thylacoleo, the "marsupial lion."

    What I don't understand? The family Thylacoleonidae had at least four genera, and they were mostly arboreal, possibly excepting the last, biggest one, the "marsupial lion" which (as far as we know) was the only one humans ran into.

    So what, you ask? Here's the deal. The family Thylacoleonidae is embedded in the order Diprotodontia, suborder Vombatiformes. Its living relatives are wombats and koalas, and it's in between them on the family tree.

    So we've got basically a giant, carnivorous, arboreal koala. And that's what bugs me:

    Why isn't it called a drop bear instead of a marsupial lion?

    What strange alteration of history came through and made Aussies not notice this?

    340:

    Well, we're well past 300, so....

    I'm almost done the first revision (reordering, editing, etc), and will be sending the novel back to the editor in the next few days.

    AND... &lt he says, in full Mad Scientist/Writer mode &gt I've done what I threatened to do since I was in my late teens, and have Gotten Even with all of those, those writers who put in epigraphs in French. And Latin. And Ancient Greek, because, I mean, Everyone reads those languages.

    Now they'll see!!!

    I've added five or six epigraphs. Several in Cymraeg (Welsh), and several in Finnish. (translations in the end notes....

    341:

    I remember tutoring community college students in arithmetic and algebra. I'm not sure how many, if any, had lightbulb moments, but I did try to explain the idea that x,y,z are just placeholders for stuff - they could be apples, oranges, and bananas as easily as numbers.

    (I was in "new math" from junior high into high school. We learned stuff that's still useful, though maybe not the way it was expected. Base 7 FTW!)

    342:

    Genealogists are aware that the limit for reliable memory is about three generations - you probably know about your great-grandparents, but farther back than that is hearsay, and as it gets farther back, it gets increasingly unreliable. Written records help - but even there, there are errors. (I've met some in my own family.)

    343:

    Stone quarries. Probably not gravel pits - those will fill with sediment, but it may take a long, long time for the larger ones to disappear. (One near where I grew up is now a water park, with boating. The gravel beds in that area are up to a thousand or so meters deep.)

    344:

    I've seen them do that with a couple of buildings - I think the concrete that's crushed into gravel may be used to build the next structure.

    345:

    Before or after the Giant Meteor arrives?

    346:

    In Europe, coracles, which have lightweight wood frames covered with something like leather.

    347:

    I admit I find it hard to visualise doing trig without algebra, although I can sort of glimpse that it's possible if I squint mentally and try to look sideways while not really focusing on it. I find it hard to visualise geometry as we understand it without either, although I must agree that it was in fact practiced, and still is. I think you have hit on the important idea that literacy isn't a binary in the way we'd usually think of it where it comes to remembering things and especially associations. You've referred to Lynne Kelly here before too.

    If we think of associations as tuples, and we have memory aids (mnemonic devices, sticks, henges, songlines) that keep these intact, perhaps even incorporating a small amount of error checking, data science shows there is a lot you can do just by persisting complex tuples. When ibises move inland while the big emu (constellation) is in the southwest quarter and blue moths swarm the cycads, it is time to move camp to the bay where dugong will be moving through the tidal estuaries. Again, if you squint, it's not totally unlike a database query, where the mnemonic holds the query and the database is the physical environment. I openly wonder about "illiterate" trades in the classical and medieval worlds and how they too used mnemonic devices.

    I think it has advantages. My literate understanding of trig left me spending time re-learning stuff from high school to solve for safe stair stringer dimensions recently. Whereas the traditional thing would be for a particular combination of rise and going, you start with a certain dimension of stringer. We get a little of this inheritance via standards, but it's simplified. So builders are either heavily listed, or they are engineers, but that isn't how the industry works (it's different for someone doing their own thing and trying to align to the building code).

    348:

    I'm always surprised how challenging it can be to explain that symbols are placeholders. People expect symbols and meanings to be intrinsically inseparable and the problems that result appear in surprising ways. It can be sort of hand-waved by taking into account that for most people the definition of a word that they learned in school is the fixed and only meaning for that word for all time (even if they in fact learned multiple meanings which they treat as interchangeable, and basically conflate). But it runs deeper, and affect how the representational models of reality that are built in the general practice of business IT work out.

    349:

    Why isn't it called a drop bear instead of a marsupial lion?

    Because the species was named many decades before the "drop bear" running joke (which is almost exclusively conceived as applying only when the target is from the USA) arose? That would be my speculative guess.

    350:

    So builders are either heavily listed, or they are engineers

    Sorry, that sentence is a bit garbled, both by not thinking it through as communication properly and (especially) by autocorrected typos. I mean builders are limited to a subset of the allowable contrivances (e.g. ALL stairs have 175mm rise and use 240mm treads, stringers are 50x280mm) while in Ye Olden Days a mnemonic would have applied that at least gave more variation. To deviate requires an engineer. Actually a lot of building approvals seem to work exactly that way.

    351:

    Originally geometry and algebra were two different subjects with almost no overlap. They were unified by Descartes invention of Cartesian (note the name) coordinates. This let you write down equations for circles, lines etc, and an intersection between two geometric shapes becomes the solution to their equations. In modern terms we would say that Decartes demonstrated that algebra and geometry are isomorphic, although the full isomorphism had to wait until people got their heads around geometry with more than 3 dimensions.

    Today we take analytic geometry for granted; cartesian coordinates are introduced at primary school and equations for lines in early secondary school (IIRC), so its kind of hard to think back to a time before they were invented.

    352:

    [..] builders are limited to a subset of the allowable contrivances [..]

    Highly regulated industries (I've worked in a couple, though not construction) tend towards this pattern. They have a hierarchy of rules with actual primary legislation passed by parliament at the top, followed by regulations written by civil servants, and "guidance" at the bottom. I put "guidance" in scare quotes because it tends to be mandatory in practice.

    The laws and regulations define the space of what is allowed, but they are often based on goals and have some vague bits. In the building trade for example they will say that buildings must be structurally sound, have sufficient foundations for their size etc. The "guidance" will provide some general templates and standard rules. For instance, if you are building a 2 storey house then the guidance says foundations must be this deep, the walls should be constructed of breeze block of a defined grade and size, etc.

    As long as you follow the guidance you know you are in the clear without any further effort, which makes it quick, simple and risk-free. As soon as you step outside the guidance you have to go back to the regulations and hire a bunch of experts to inspect your plans and certify that they comply with the regulations. You also have to spend time educating the relevant government inspectors about your innovation. Even then they might decide to veto it just to be safe; for them approving an innovation has no upside and lots of potential downside. This makes innovation slow, expensive and risky, which means that you don't do it unless you are a wealthy eccentric or you have some business model that makes all this worth-while.

    So in all regulated industries the "guidance" is effectively mandatory 99% of the time.

    In the building industry the situation is even worse because most of the tradesmen who actually build things were trained by rote purely from the guidance, so as soon as you step outside the guidance you also need to retrain the workforce, an investment which is lost as soon as the project ends because these guys are contractors not employees.

    353:

    Yes, and that is much the lesser part of the variable concept. The greater part, which changed mathematics so drastically, was that a variable could represent an arbitrary member of an algebra (in this sense, a set with some defined axioms (transformations)), and can be manipulated as an abstract entity. Parts of the ancient world used symbols to represent specific values, but never made the second leap (which is what defines algebra, in the modern sense). The difference is easier to explain by example:

    In school, and before Newton and Leibnitz, the problem was to (for example) to solve an equation where almost all of the values were known, and the symbols stand for an unknown but specific value. E.g. 123 = 456*X+789. School-level simultaneous linear equations are similar.

    In modern mathematics, you work with the symbols as if they were numbers, but they do NOT stand for a specific value - they stand for ANY member of the set. A = B*X+C can be rewritten as X = (A-C)/B. All you are using is concepts like "for every A there exists a value -A" and "A + (-A) = 0". It may sound similar, but I can witness how conceptually different it is (both personally and from needing to teach it), and how much it changes your mentation.

    My personal example is not having learnt this at my (dire) school, and being completely unable to do the practicals in my first term at university. I then had a light bulb moment and, since then, have been unable to recapture how I thought before I changed.

    Since then, I have had to teach it, and it is definitely harder to grasp than the concept that a symbol stands for a specific, unknown value.

    354:

    All this talk of [sub–]sea-floor mining that ignores the Benthic Treaty seems awfully unrealistic.

    The Deep Ones aren't going anywhere.

    355:

    Did I miss the point at which Imp or any of the Lost Boys says 'Wait a tick: "Wendy" is not a common name, shitʼs getting deep here.'.

    Oh,and thanks, O.G.H., for inducing in me a mind's-ear–worm of Robyn Hitchcock's piratical:

    So Wendy went to Manchester To buy a balaclava But suddenly became engulfed In floods of molten lava!

    The Can Opener still roves the gulch With sevʼring claws akimbo And rips through sheets of yielding tin And Wendy is in Limbo!

    357:

    I would send this via another route, but don't do twitter. I have some familiarity with pre-Victorian language and conventions and, if you don't have someone else, am happy to try to act as a proof-reader for Bones and Nightmares. My only actual experience of doing that is for technical documentation, which isn't hugely relevant! If you have enough people, please just ignore this.

    358:

    I openly wonder about "illiterate" trades in the classical and medieval worlds and how they too used mnemonic devices.

    Lynne Kelly's got some great examples in Memory Craft. Before I get to the specific, I'll get to the general. The problem with medieval books is 2.5-fold: they're written by hand (which is slow), on parchment (which, as highly processed hide, is rare compared with paper), and apparently writing in ink on parchment is slower than writing in ink on paper, due to the interaction between pen nib, ink, and the surface properties of parchment versus paper. These put a upper limit on how much can be written.

    Now, getting back to literacy: if you're stuck with parchment, you can't take a book home and leave it for bedside reading unless you're royalty. Each book is the equivalent of a modern car in value, and their information density is apparently low, due to the thickness of the parchment (note how many Medieval bibles aren't the complete bible, just individual books?). A solution to this is to make it possible to memorize entire books, traveling to read, memorizing the book, and keeping the memory. Illuminating each page with doodles and funny critters is a way to make each page more memorable. If you're trying to remember a passage from the Book of Mark, you're more likely to remember it was next to the flying monkey before you remember the exact words. Kelly, incidentally, recommends doodling on each page of class notes, as a way to borrow this technique for memorizing notes before a test.

    Unfortunately, if you only read a few books in your life, this isn't a great way to promulgate knowledge, so most of the knowledge is propagating through non-literate means until paper and the printing press show up and radically change things.

    This all gets back to the original question: how literate were builders and tradesmen. A lot of them were, apparently, illiterate. IIRC, there was an example on TV of a medieval book made for a builder that used mnemonic pictures to illustrate various angles. There were things like jack legs and lion mouths and so forth. Builders would learn these by rote. Rather than specifying an angle of, say, 33 degrees*, you specify a lion's mouth (or whatever), and the well-trained builder knows what you're talking about. This stuff can be learned by apprenticeship.

    As for geometry without numbers? If you've done geometric constructions with a compass, a straight edge, and possibly a square, that's how it's done. This goes back to classic times, and things like Celtic knotwork and spiral designs were created with nothing but these three tools. The modern freemason's symbols of the compass and square goes back to this era, AFAIK.

    My earlier remark to EC about the union of medieval algebra and geometry comes from things like builder's sites. It's square and compass geometry to design a building, but then you need simple algebra to figure out how much stone, wood, labor, provisions, tools, and money to pull it off. On something complicated, you've got the master builder laying out the site and supervising the construction, and accountants (working with an abacus or sand table) doing the logistics. If you've got a literate builder who can do his own accounts, then you've got the possibility of a guy who can do analytic geometry, turning figures into numbers and vice versa. I'm not sure how common such people were, and I'd bet any competent noble would rein in the master builder by having one of his own accountants handling the logistics at some point in the process.

    The other place where analytic geometry, trigonometry, and accounting would have collided was in the heads of navigators and long-distance traders. Building an astrolabe is a fun exercise in analytic trigonometry (I've done it, and there are a lot of calculations and a lot of precise work with a compass). In using it, you don't use "jack leg" angles, you pretty much have to use numeric ones, because the astrolabe is built around degrees of latitude. If you've got someone who knows something about building/repairing boats (an exercise in geometry and logistics), is good at celestial navigation (trigonometry), and has to deal with logistics and accounting...what kind of math(s) are going on inside their brain? Do they compartmentalize each one, or do they blend intuitively? It depends on the person, but when they blend fields, you get something like analytic geometry. It's not formalized, but I'm pretty sure it's there.

    *33 degrees the analytic geometry solution, although the Babylonian astrologers would recognize this. They pioneered the 360 degrees in a circle as a way to link the movement of stars through the seasons to the days of the year to keep the calendar. I'll forgive them not using 365 degrees in a circle, because that would have been a pain for angle calculations, and keeping the 5.25 extra holidays per year in the right places in the calendar would have kept the astrologers in beer and bread, because they were the ones keeping the calendar straight from year to year and not precessing by most of a week each cycle.

    359:

    I would describe a variable as being like an envelope. Either you or the math (computer program) decides what to put in the envelope. But you treat it as an abstraction that holds something.

    360:

    Heteromeles Geometry without "numbers": The late Lancelot Hogben showed, in several texts aimed at educated teenagers & interested adults, how the ancient Egyptians ( i.e. well pre-classical ) managed extremely well with straight-edge, compass & even taut-rope ( for large circles ( & got some very impressive results. Interaction with Mesopotamia would have helped, of course.

    "Varaibles" - You throw a stone ( or something ) straight up ... it's height at any time is "h", but h is not constant ... it's going up, then stationary ( the maximum ) & then down again, back to your arbitrary zero = ground-level. This was well-known before Newton, even if only by artillerymen. It's putting it all together, to make an integrated whole that's the difficult bit.

    361:

    Oh, for heaven's sake! Go and look up "algebra" in a decent dictionary - what you are talking about is simple arithmetic.

    And Troutwaxer is equally off-beam. That use of 'variable' is the ancient one, and the modern one was needed for the breakthrough in mathematics.

    362:

    News update: Major part of Protein-Folding problem(s) partially solved by "Deep Mind" AI - it says here. Profound implications for medicine, if correct.

    363:

    It would help if you found some other people who shared your particular definition of algebra before you went off.

    Right now, it appears that your complaint is that I'm not using words the precise way you want them to be used, despite the fact that pulling in references to show how I'm using them.

    Why this is insulting? I've been living for four fucking years under Donald Trump, and I visit this site for escape. Having someone ape Il Douche's abusive tactics is unpleasant at best. Especially since there's no reward for going along with it.

    I'll apologize if I'm systematically wrong, but the onus is on you to demonstrate that, not to shout and attack and carry on about how I need to consult the dictionary every time you're offended that I'm not reading your mind and kowtowing to whatever brilliance it is you have. If you can't do that, go away.

    364:

    "Kelly, incidentally, recommends doodling on each page of class notes, as a way to borrow this technique for memorizing notes before a test."

    Hehe. I remember copying down a diagram off the blackboard, labelling it Vosges horse and Black Forest horse, and being amused because it was silly. Of course, the teacher would have told me off if he had seen it. Nevertheless, ever since then I have never had any difficulty remembering what a horst is. But I did forget that the bit in between is called a graben, a word for which no silly alternative suggests itself to me.

    365:

    Re Antikythera, there's some real nonsense talked around that, some of which is being repeated here. It's not out of place at all - it's simply that we don't have many records about exactly how people built stuff then. We know about some of the stuff Hero built a little later, and he was clearly standing on the shoulders of the artificers who'd preceded him.

    We do have sources confirming what they could make in the centuries before Hero too. Cicero doesn't just give an example of one orrery, but also says that it's one of several made by multiple artificers, and that's right around the time the Antikythera mechanism was made. The interest for the mechanism is that it gives us solid evidence of something which was described by non-specialists. It's the difference between someone trying to describe a crocodile ("here be dragons") versus someone bringing back a stuffed one so you can see it.

    It's pretty simple to kill knowledge though. It doesn't need malice, it needs indifference. If your society is mostly focussed on living through the winter, or living through the latest round of barbarian attacks, you're going to be pretty indifferent to clockwork mechanisms. And if your society actively rejects science and learning (hello Christianity!) then you're probably not going to get far either.

    366:

    In #191, I said "I don't know what you mean by algebra, but the only meaning of it in the OED that was known in the ancient world was the surgical treatment of a fractured or dislocated bone!". I still don't know, because you have not provided a definition of what you DO mean, let alone a reference to one in a decent dictionary.

    I am not going to quote all of its definitions, for copyright reasons, but you are demanding that I provide a definition to prove the absence of a definition! Don't be ridiculous.

    Here is the most relevant one: "the branch of mathematics in which symbols are used to represent quantities, relations, operations, and other concepts, and operations may be applied only a finite number of times." I have stressed the key part, which is what distinguishes it from arithmetic, but it is a layman's phrasing of what I described in the next paragraph as modern algebra.

    If you dislike the definitions in the OED, I am prepared to use the terms "primitive algebra, or aithmetic with unknowns, sometimes using symbols, also called the Rule of Cosse" and "modern algebra, a form of abstract mathematics, based on sets and axioms". It's a mouthful, but you seem to keep denying that there is a distinction.

    I have no idea whether you are claiming: (a) there is no significant conceptual difference between those two, or (b) the ancient Egyptians used mathematics that escaped all other mathematicians before Newton and Leibnitz.

    Both of those are nonsense.

    367:

    Profound implications for medicine, if correct.

    Nope, not medicine: it's much bigger than that.

    Basically this is one of the key technologies that will allow us to bootstrap Drexler-style molecular nanotechnology. (The next step is to start designing special-purpose enzymes and motor peptides to order, and run this in reverse to work out the linear sequence that will fold itself into the right shape to work. Which seems to me to be a much shorter step.)

    368:

    Yes, assuming that further development in both it and computers improves its effectiveness, which seems extremely likely. It's taken several decades to get this far, so I shan't be holding my breath, but a plausible prototype is always a big milestone.

    369:

    And how much of the code was based on XPLOR, from the NIH?

    https://nmr.cit.nih.gov/xplor-nih/

    Why, yes, I did personally work with the maintainer of XPLOR for 10 years....

    370:

    No paper yet, but they have written something slightly more technical: Until we’ve published a paper on this work, please cite: - High Accuracy Protein Structure Prediction Using Deep Learning DeepMind papers have been pretty interesting (self serving, but interesting).

    371:

    So As profound & as far-reaching as sequencing the Human Genome was, about 18 years back, in other words. Research will be running off in all directions, simultaneously, if correct. Big stuff, as Charlie implies.

    372:

    Nope, not medicine: it's much bigger than that.

    Yes. It may be a start on resolving the top-down vs bottom-up problem of reductionism(*). Also, maybe on beginning to see how "emergence" works in a non-trivial case -- which, IMO, is kind of the same as bottom-up reductionism.

    (*) Top-down: We've got a protein that does x; how did a bunch of atoms get to that configuration? Bottom-up: We've got a bunch of atoms; how do we get them to do x?

    373:

    Heteromeles @ 338: About Antikythera: I agree that it's weird. The question is whether it's out-of-place in all history, or in western history.

    Is it "out-of-place" in history at all?

    *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

    Damian @ 349:

    Why isn't it called a drop bear instead of a marsupial lion?

    Because the species was named many decades before the "drop bear" running joke (which is almost exclusively conceived as applying only when the target is from the USA) arose? That would be my speculative guess.

    I don't think tourists from the U.S. are necessarily singled out for this. Seems like anyone gullible enough will do no matter where they're from.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCGUNpzjD6M

    ... and apparently the connection has been made:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_bear#Origin

    *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

    Gerald Fnord @ 354: All this talk of [sub–]sea-floor mining that ignores the Benthic Treaty seems awfully unrealistic.

    The Deep Ones aren't going anywhere.

    OTOH, if sea levels were to fall 125 m (to wherever they were during the Last Glacial Maximum) it wouldn't BE "[sub-]sea-floor mining" would it?

    374:

    We've got a bunch of atoms; how do we get them to do x?

    Note that we know that there's a bunch of atoms manifesting as a particular protein that does x. Whether there are other configurations of atoms that do the same x is an interesting question that maybe AI can help out with.

    375:

    Re: Math perspectives/definitions

    Watched a Royal Institution lecture by a French mathematician (a Fields medalist, therefore a reliable source) who mentioned the group below. Seems that arguments about what various 'maths' encompass are pretty common including among mathematicians.

    ESL math teachers also see kids from different countries use different approaches to basic math problems. Let's face it - curricula, math included, vary considerably by and even within country.

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

    Have no idea whether the above collection has been translated into English - would be interesting to read.

    376:

    Yes, indeed, and over time. As I mentioned, I have been taught and could/can use geometric proofs (in simple ways) as Euclid and Newton did, and I previously mentioned my daughters were taught modern mathematics in primary school, whereas I didn't encounter it until my mathematics degree.

    I was, however, referring to the major leap in the basic concepts of mathematics that followed Newton and Leibnitz, not the details of how it is approached.

    I am pretty sure that most, if not all, of Bourbaki has been translated into English. It's pretty influential.

    377:

    It's a little more complicated than that. I'm remembering a talk or two by the man who maintains XPLOR, and they were finding that the shape of the protein can affect its action in the biological system.

    378:

    It's a little more complicated than that. I'm remembering a talk or two by the man who maintains XPLOR, and they were finding that the shape of the protein can affect its action in the biological system.

    I'm not sure what you mean by "that". Of course the shape of the protein and how it changes is of primary importance in most instances. Lock and key.

    379:

    I'm saying that the shape, NOT just the molecular compesition matters.

    380:

    I think anybody who thinks that being able to accurately predict the shape of a protein from its sequence is the end of the line needs to read a couple of really short esssays from Derek Lowe, to wit:

    https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/09/01/its-weird-down-there

    and

    https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/26/building-a-house-building-a-cell

    These are metaphors for the problem that our mesoscale knowledge doesn't translate down that well to the microscale world of protein folding. These things didn't evolve in a vacuum, so often the folding and shapes are more possible in the crazy world inside a cell, where the blueprints are considerably larger than the house, and fairly often a blue print gets crumpled up in a specific way and used to make part of the house. Among other oddities.

    381:

    I have no idea whether you are claiming: (a) there is no significant conceptual difference between those two, or (b) the ancient Egyptians used mathematics that escaped all other mathematicians before Newton and Leibnitz.

    None of the above. I'm simply claiming that any version of a question like "how much stone do I need for a temple, how do I pay for it, and (critically) what's the best way to make the most impressive temple I can afford" is essentially an iterative algebra question, where you're solving for amounts of materials, money, people and time, and doing tradeoffs. Similar questions can be found in efforts to predict future food supplies from farming efforts, buy lumber to build ships, long distance trading, keeping a calendar using the stars and trigonometry, and so on.

    I'm not the one claiming that the Egyptians used a unique math. To me it's bloody obvious that the Egyptians and Babylonians were capable of solving for unknowns, and using simple exponentials in calculating areas of unknown squares. It's hard to build a pyramid if they couldn't do all this.

    This fits the definition you quoted, yet you persist in calling me wrong and insisting I use the definition you quoted because I'm wrong. That, I think comes under the category of abuse, rather than discourse.

    382:

    I'm saying that the shape, NOT just the molecular compesition matters.

    Er, yes. Shape's mostly what the protein folding studies have been trying to determine, because shape is an important determinant of function. Note, BTW, that a given nucleotide sequence can fold in different ways -- some diseases result from abnormal folding altering the function of the resulting protein.

    383:

    Did I miss the point at which Imp or any of the Lost Boys says 'Wait a tick: "Wendy" is not a common name, shitʼs getting deep here.'

    I expect it happened off camera, followed milliseconds later by "Give it a rest, Imp."

    Figure that everyone else in the house has heard Imp go on about Peter Pan stuff more than they need to hear long before the story opens.

    384:

    No, those are essentially arithmetical problems; they fit the "primitive algebra" definition of arithmetic with unknowns, but they do not fit the currently correct definition; more importantly, they are not instances of embodiment of the significantly different idea which the current definition refers to.

    It's one of those things that school leaves you with an incorrect idea of; when you get to the stuff about doing sums with letters in, everyone calls it "algebra", so you end up thinking that's what algebra means, and what few everyday non-mathematical situations the difference actually shows up in, it's almost never noticeable enough to trip over so you never get to assimilate what it actually is.

    In the English education system, at age 16 you stop studying lots of subjects at a basic level and instead study typically only three subjects, which you pick in anticipation of university requirements, in greater depth. In the case of mathematics there is also (or at least was in my time) an option to take it in further depth still. I took that option, and only there was there any hint of the existence of the greater realm; we kind of brushed against hinting at its existence on the side of learning how to perform integration, and almost came close to making it explicit when we did matrix algebra, although we did so little of that that it still wasn't obvious. At no stage was it ever formally pointed out.

    With an education system which does not involve that degree of specialisation at school (which AIUI the US one does not), nobody would come across it until university, and only then if they were studying mathematics itself in some form (whether or not so named) rather than some other subject which used it only as a tool.

    It's kind of tough to explain, and I'm not convinced that EC's explanation around "A = BX+C can be rewritten as X = (A-C)/B" is all that clear unless you already know the answer, because you know that well from school, but you know it simply as part of the procedure for solving problems like "given that 123 = 456X+789, find the value of X". Which makes it seem that the point is all about X being some number which you don't know, or being -111/76, and it isn't.

    The point is that X is a kind of thing which has particular properties and behaviours, and displays them in a particular way in specific circumstances - specified by "operators", like "+" or "", which basically describe relationships. So "A = BX+C" is a description of a particular kind of relationship between four of that kind of thing; "X = (A-C)/B" is an alternative, equivalent description of the same relationship. They both mean exactly the same thing, and you can transform one into the other by following certain rules; this does not change the meaning, but it does change how useful the expression is for helping you get your head around a particular aspect of the relationship.

    School sticks pretty much totally to the limits of what you can do in the case of the kind of thing being what we call "a number", and gives you the impression that it can only be "a number", so you end up thinking that's the be-all and end-all of it. Which is not the case, and that is important when considering the historical development of mathematics. The examples of builders working stuff out which you have been giving all fall within the school limit, though, and that is where you are missing the point.

    Within the school limit, the kind of relationships that it helps you get your head round are only ever pretty simple ones, because the expressions rapidly get so unwieldy that you can't see the wood for the trees.

    The idea is powerful and important because you can apply this kind of symbological method to cases where the kind of thing that X is is not a number, but something with much more complicated behaviours and properties. For instance X might represent the class of all equations of some particular type; then you can use the method to help get your head round the way those sort of equations behave in relation to each other. Moreover, you can use it to prove, rigorously, things about how they behave in relation to each other, because it gives you a well-defined language to talk about it in, and lifts you up out of the morass of vague handwaving you inevitably end up stuck in if you're trying to describe the behaviour of whole beaches or dune systems when you have no words or ideas for anything more than individual grains of sand.

    One of the difficulties we have, for example, with biology, is that we do not have any such overall unifying method to tie together our bits of understanding at all levels from the smallest and most specific to the largest and most general. The reason people are getting excited about protein folding is that it looks like we are making progress to unifying some of our understanding over a very small part of the range. The excitement over algebra in the modern sense is that mathematics developed such a unifying method of much greater scope a long time ago, and has long ceased to be limited to the level of diddling with individual amino acids, even if the arithmetical emphasis of school curricula still never tries to look beyond that level.

    Note that this lot may not be entirely accurate because I am not a mathematician, and so have had to work it out informally for myself; but I hope it is of some use at conveying the conceptual leap which builders working out how much stone they need can't be said to have made.

    385:

    These things didn't evolve in a vacuum, so often the folding and shapes are more possible in the crazy world inside a cell, where the blueprints are considerably larger than the house, and fairly often a blue print gets crumpled up in a specific way and used to make part of the house. Among other oddities.

    Indeed. One of those links led me to an SMBC cartoon where a geneticist marvels, "It's like it's held together by duct tape and zip ties in here!"

    Massively iterative evolved systems tend to look like this. Biology always looks as if any 'intelligent designer' involved was a chronic contributor to Failblog's There I Fixed It channel (hilarious documentation of questionable DIY creations).

    And so nobody is too surprised to discover that the drapery is actually origami folded blueprints, hanging from a pipe that is also the swivel mount for the dining room door and supplies water to the kitchen sink. The whole metaphorical house is like this.

    386:

    Thank you for trying to explain. It's essentially correct, and you are also correct that I explained it badly. As you say, it's a very tricky concept until you already know it, as I can personally witness, which is why it took so long to be invented.

    It's news to me that exponentials are needed for calculating the areas of squares, known or unknown, too. Most people do it with simple multiplication.

    387:

    Bet you didn't read any of the links about Egyptian algebra? The papyri that are in museums are basically fragments of math textbooks, so they have lists of problems and methods.

    The fundamental problem here is ego, jargon, and terminology, not my misunderstanding of mathematics. I got through linear algebra and differential equations reasonably well.

    Rather, the problem is when you start insisting that the algebra that everyone learns in middle school isn't algebra, it's arithmetic, and the terminology used by the people studying how other societies deal with math isn't primitive algebra, it's arithmetic, because the only thing that is truly algebra is what I studied in college. That's what's coming out from you and Pigeon. "primitive algebra is not algebra, and what most people think of as algebra is not algebra?" Really?

    At this point, we're well off the subject of "how do you run a civilization with neolithic technology," and into a pissing match about who gets to dictate what terms are used in the pissing match to declare the winner, so that they can define themselves as the winner. And that's not a conversation that's worth engaging in, because everyone gets both pissy and covered with other people's piss, if not worse.

    I personally have to deal with this all the time in my real life job as an environmental activist. I routinely get shat upon by ignoramuses. Indeed, Pigeon did it again in #384, because he has no fucking clue what he's talking about, and his attempt to make me understand my purported ignorance instead revealed his. However, since my goal is to do something about not letting a few thousand species go extinct through a combination of greed, arrogance, and fear, I generally try to communicate, rather than standing around pissing on about how my definitions are right, yours are wrong, I'm a genius and you're an ignoramus.

    So please. Either communicate or drop it. I've got far more deserving targets to piss on (a bunch of lying developers, if you must know), and I'd rather save my anger for them and dive down worldbuilding rabbitholes here, if you don't mind.

    388:

    One of the difficulties we have, for example, with biology, is that we do not have any such overall unifying method to tie together our bits of understanding at all levels from the smallest and most specific to the largest and most general. The reason people are getting excited about protein folding is that it looks like we are making progress to unifying some of our understanding over a very small part of the range. The excitement over algebra in the modern sense is that mathematics developed such a unifying method of much greater scope a long time ago, and has long ceased to be limited to the level of diddling with individual amino acids, even if the arithmetical emphasis of school curricula still never tries to look beyond that level.

    Actually, there's whole fields that unify methods across scales. That's why ecology and evolution are typically grouped in the same department, students of one typically study the other, and for many parts of the disciplines, what you chose to study (sex versus relationships, if you want to separate evolution and ecology) is a matter of personal taste.

    There are a bunch of problems, but I'll pick on the mindless repetition of societal bias. This is simply that small-government conservatism and religious evangelicals have seriously attacked evolution, so most people (you folks, for example), keep forgetting that evolution is by far the most tested and most rugged theory of science out there. Because of the constant political barrage (aimed at a perceived weak target that disproves much of the right wing worldview and therefore must be suppressed), the pervasive use of evolutionary theory in science gets masked by, at last count, something like 20 euphemisms, so we talk about emerging pesticide resistance instead of flies evolving, or bacteria mutating instead of evolving. In contrast, physicists are still arguing about what 96% of reality is, whether time exists or not, and whether the universe is local or non-local. But it's the queen of sciences and math is its more cosmic older sister.

    That's the unconscious bias you're working from: that, in a dispute over science, the biologists are generally wrong, the physicists are generally right, and from noblesse oblige, the physicists have to explain to the biologists how they erred, so that they can strive toward better.

    If you're working in physics, you're working in a system that's consciously limited itself to studies were overarching theories have a lot of value. In biology and especially in ecology, reality is contingent on scale and history, and the interactions need to be worked out in each case. Biology is where physics goes to get mired, not because physics doesn't apply, but because the details matter, simplistic models generally fail, and most physicists get sick of dealing before they get anywhere.

    If you want an example of this, read Derek Lowe's response to the protein folding reports, linked below. The tl;dr version is: yes, cool! But not the start of a revolution, because that's not where the critical bottlenecks in things like drug discovery are.

    https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/11/30/protein-folding-2020

    and

    https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/01/the-big-problems

    389:

    Pigeon You mentioned another key mathematical concept, that no-one else has spoken of - here - because we all regard it as so basic: That of An operator - a very important idea, involving a level of abstraction that many non-mathematical people ( Like Arts graduates ) never, ever get their poor little brain cells around ... AIUI, these days, some very basic elementary Set Theory is now taught in schools - something I know virtually nothing of, more's the pity.

    390:

    I (perhaps stupidly) decided to get a Math minor in college, which included a smattering of more advanced subjects. What you are talking about sounds like the Abstract Algebra course I took (I just did the first one, which I barely survived, there were two more). You can look it up on Wikipedia, but what Pigeon/EC are trying to say gets the basics. Abstract Algebra has about the same relation to basic Algebra (stuff you learned in high school) as Algebra does to basic arithmetic.

    391:

    And I should have added, many of the mathematical theorems discovered in Abstract Algebra are used in things like cryptology and error correcting codes.

    392:

    "I'm saying that the shape, NOT just the molecular compesition matters."

    We've all heard of prions.

    393:

    Re: 'DeepMind - no paper yet ...'

    Thanks for the link - read it but didn't find the info that I'm most interested in.

    Specifically:

    Does this announcement mean that this AI can identify (and explicitly tell us) the shortest, most direct path of turning 'Bunch A of amino acids' into 'target Complex molecule B'?

    For me, probably the most fundamental aspect of 'science' is the ability to develop theory esp. wrt to the underlying fundamentals of components and processes. If this AI approach cannot provide a most-direct-route-map or equivalent stats, then it's not so much 'intelligent' as it's just a better really, really fast number-cruncher.

    Also - who evaluates the results of this approach and how? Okay - the article said that this AI was given a bunch of things to solve and got an 'A'. Not bad - but all of these compounds and there geometric structures/shapes were already known, weren't they? So if this AI had a large enough library, then - again - this demonstration could still be just a really well-executed number crunching exercise - or a good scouring of an internal library - and not a break-through in 'intelligence'. A true test would be to give the AI a bunch of still unknown chemical structures to solve, get its best estimates/answers and then have a bunch of labs test/verify these predictions. Once these predictions are shown to work, this team would definitely be shoo-ins for the Kavli.

    394:

    Hey, Charlie - just saw this on facepalm - someone has a friend who calls all cryptocurrency Dunning-Krugerrands.

    395:

    I only know what I saw on In the Pipeline (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/11/30/protein-folding-2020). It's basically the results of a contest (CASP) that's been held since 1994. Google-backed Alphafold did pretty well (quoting Lowe) "Out of a list of 100 or so proteins in the free-modeling challenge, it predicted the structures of two-thirds of them to a level of accuracy that would be within the range of experimental error." This was in the most basic and popular test. The 100 proteins are simple proteins where the structure is known but not publicized, so a brute force database search won't find the answer.

    How did Alphafold do it? That's the question. It's likely a mix of brute force, stuff that people already knew worked, and database searches of known protein structures looking for matches (Lowe's "Where have I seen this before?" approach).

    To quote Lowe again: "There are several divisions to the competition: “regular targets”, where the teams are given the plain amino acid sequence of proteins whose structures have been determined (but not publicly released), multimeric targets (for protein complexes), refinement targets (where teams try to refine an existing structural model to make it fit the experimental data better) and contact predictions. AlphaFold made their push this year in what is always the largest and most contested of these, the regular targets group."

    So they're doing pretty darn well on the simplest version of the test, far better than anyone else, and that gets them to 2/3 right, right being defined experimentally.

    396:

    No, not even close.

    What they have is a procedure that 2/3 of the time can take a DNA sequence and predict the shape of the molecule for the class of compounds in the test sample.

    Firstly, their target for success is only the experimental results, which are a long way away from certain, let alone perfect.

    Secondly, their method is likely to become less reliable the further the DNA sequence and/or molecule's shape diverges from existing, known compounds, because of the way it works.

    Thirdly, to find anything very useful requires a search, which may involve using the procedure a number of times, possibly a very large number.

    The combination of these means that it will be useful for some molecules but not others, even in the medium term. The problem with that is that execusuits are generally incapable of getting their mind around the fact that, of two similar demands, one may be feasible and the other not, and the ONLY way to a solution for the latter is to change the objective.

    I worked with people who were using a slower but more reliable form of simulation based on quantum mechanics, but it will be a LOOONG time before that can be done for complex molecules.

    In the short term, it will be used for winnowing possibilities that will be evaluated experimentally. A lot of computer simulations in complex areas are used that way, and it sames time and money but doesn't make anything feasible that wasn't before.

    In the longer term, it opens up the possibilities that OGH described in #367. Don't hold your breath, though.

    397:

    Might be worth listening to:

    http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=54317

    Library of Congress Event: Artificial Intelligence and the Search for Life in the Universe Status Report From: NASA Astrobiology Posted: Thursday, December 3, 2020 [Accessed 20201202T1100Z]

    Join the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress for a discussion of the latest thinking on the search for life and intelligence outside of Earth on December 3, 2020.

    Free registration is available here and the event will be on the Library of Congress’ YouTube Channel on December 3 at 10am Eastern. [20201203T1500Z]

    This conversation, hosted by Blumberg Chair Susan Schneider, and featuring Caleb Scharf and Sarah Imari Walker, explores the relationship between intelligence, life, and consciousness, in biological and synthetic cases. It considers whether AI could be conscious, as well as the related epistemological questions of how to identify intelligence and consciousness in beings that are very different from us perceptually and cognitively. The speakers will consider philosophical issues about the nature of intelligence, discussing how to identify intelligence in biological life and AI, and how our understanding of these areas informs the search for life in the universe and our ability to detect it.

    398:

    Re: '... the ONLY way to a solution for the latter is to change the objective.'

    Thanks, I appreciate the explanation. Pretty much what I thought, e.i., If this AI were given the Table of Elements to sort through, it'd probably kick out everything beyond Hydrogen as not fitting the model. Despite this limitation, it will probably help researchers in identifying likeliest candidates in some scenarios.

    Please explain/define what you mean by 'change the objective'.

    399:

    Re: 'Library of Congress Event: Artificial Intelligence and the Search for Life in the Universe Status Report From: NASA Astrobiology'

    Thanks - looks interesting! I checked the LOC's event platform provider's privacy policy (nope!) so decided to go direct to NASA. Yep - NASA's running this tomorrow and personally I prefer their PII.

    While on the NASA site found the article below and thought it might interest folks here.

    https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/teamwork-advances-quiet-supersonic-technology.html

    400:

    UK - COVID-19 vaccine

    Good news for the UK folks - it looks like you're getting the Pfizer vac any day now*.

    The article below is pretty comprehensive - way better than other news sites' coverage of issues associated with vac-distribution.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55145696

    • Provided there aren't any screw ups of EU shipments thanks to BrExit.
    401:

    NASA Astrobiology

    Tomorrow's offering seems to be the latest in a series. A search for "Astrobiology" on YouTube finds several.

    402:

    Good news for the UK folks - it looks like you're getting the Pfizer vac any day now

    Seems to be a prospect elsewhere too:

    https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/politics/article/Bexar-County-leaders-to-take-up-COVID-19-15764402.php

    Dec. 1, 2020 Updated: Dec. 2, 2020 12:17 a.m.

    San Antonio’s doctors, nurses and other heath care staff working with COVID-19 patients could be getting the much-awaited vaccine as soon as next week if federal authorities give Pfizer emergency permission to use the medicine as expected, University Health officials said Tuesday.

    403:

    You have to reduce or alter what you are trying to do, or relax, remove or alter the constraints. Whatever works to change an infeasible problem into a feasible one.

    404:

    SFR @ 398 More likley is that it would have a serious hiccup on encountering the Rare-Earths &/or the transuranics ... the other all fit a similar model & then you get the inner electron-shells filling up & it becomes significantly more difficult. As an analogy at any rate. @ 400 - One could almost hope that Brexshit DOES screw with the Pfizer vaccine delivery. For fairly obvious reasons .....

    AT @ 402 Will "patients" in the USA be expected to PAY FOR the vaccinations, so that the poor & vulnerable don't get immunised, I wonder?

    405:

    A thought occurred to me this morning while I was taking my dog for his morning walk.

    Peter & the lost boys want Wendy to be their mother. How much of those lost boys represents children abandoned by their own mothers who died of child bed fever?

    I believe it was still fairly common for women to die from postpartum infections around the beginning of the 20th century when Barrie wrote his play & novel.

    PS: I've seen the Disney cartoon, but this is the Peter Pan I remember:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4_3LdcenB4

    Did y'all know Peter Pan was JR Ewing's mama?

    406:

    Actually, not quite - there is another anomalous element: hydrogen. It is the only one where the isotopic composition makes a significant difference to its (bio)chemistry. Lithium would join it, very secondarily, except that it is also anomalously rare in the biosphere.

    407:

    I should have added this, because someone will use it as an excuse to be offensive: yes, I know about the C3 and C4 pathways, but that's not enough to be significant in the context. Protium and deuterium are significantly different, biochemically.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10535697/

    408:

    Re: '... isotopic composition makes a significant difference to its (bio)chemistry.'

    Glad you mentioned this. After I posted I started wondering whether different isotopes could bugger up the AI. Specifically, I was wondering how the presence/absence of neutrons (difference in nuclear mass) might affect the speed, rate and direction of a chemical reaction including its shape. (Electrons were the focus for reactions when I last took chem but the Deuterium article seems to suggest there's a role for nuclear mass esp. in biology. If not 'mass' - then what?)

    On the plus side, researchers in these areas don't have to worry about a shortage of puzzles to sort out.

    409:

    If you want to understand why protium and deuterium differ, then you have to model them from quantum mechanics. The simple Bohr model does not cut the mustard, so it's not really mass that's the issue. I worked with people who were doing it.

    If you want me to explain that, I shall softly and suddenly vanish away ....

    410:

    I am posting too much, but this is too good not to share. You remember that all the opportunities that would open up with Brexit? Well, Franchi seeds (of, er, Italy) have listened:

    https://seedsofitaly.com/brexit-vegetable-growing-survival-kit-24-99-each-including-p-p/

    411:

    I stumbled across the original videos that I was looking for.

    Roofs Underfoot Par1

    Nubian Massons build adobe vault and domes under the supervision of Hassan Fathy during a workshop in Abiquiu New Mexico

    Roofs Underfoot - part 2

    Roofs underfoot -- Nubian massons building adobe Adobe vaults and domes with Hassan Fathy

    Adobe Barrel Vault

    Nubian Massons build and adobe barrel vault under the guidance of Hassan Fathy during a worksop in Abiquiu New Mexico.

    Notice how the masons simply ignore the help around them, since they clearly have no clue how the guys are building the vault.

    412:

    And here I thought the job opportunities were obvious: folks on the Welsh and Cornish coasts spent most of a millennium as smugglers, correct?

    414:

    Actually, some of that I understand better, having read most of Paine's The Rights of Man, where he speaks about the absurd tax system, and where the money goes.

    415:

    Or, for that matter .... Five & Twenty Ponies trotting through the Dark

    Brandy for the Parson, Baccy for the Clerk, Laces for a Lady, Letters for a Spy - watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

    416:

    Re: 'If you want me to explain that, I shall softly and suddenly vanish away ....'

    Appreciate the offer but no need to explain and vanish. I just read a few paragraphs from some ScienceDirect recommended texts and have decided that I'll wait for the RI or similar to get some unsuspecting physicist to do a lay/gen-pop lecture (with pictures). Interesting stuff though.

    417:

    Agreed on the hydrogen isotopes. Since the proportion deuterated ice is used as a proxy for temperature in glacial ice cores, I suspect that it's not just the size or mass but the physical properties that matter.

    As for the different isotopes of carbon, yes, different photosynthetic pathways slightly select for different isotopes, which is a handy way to sort out sample origins. Why this is, I have no idea, and whether it matters biochemically or is an accidental effect of some enzyme I'm also clueless about.

    More generally, isotopes are different "sizes," so one would expect this to occasionally matter in cases where size matters. More often, it's not the isotope, but replacement of a normal atom (something like calcium) with the next row up (strontium), or replacing potassium with rubidium or cesium, that causes the real problems.

    418:

    Yes get the distinction you're making here*, though my point was different to the one you're reading here and jumping off from. There are several fields where symbolic representation of abstract entities is a thing, though I admit few if any have gone as far with it as mathematics. I was specifically considering the multiple levels of abstraction required to implement semantic interoperability between (especially healthcare) systems and how excruciating it is to carry certain kinds of stakeholder through the discussion. I used to keep a laminated A4 print of Magritte's The Treachery of Images above my desk to use as a sort of prop ("Does it smell like a pipe?", "Can you put tobacco in it and smoke it?", "Is it a representation of a specific pipe or of the concept of a pipe?", "What other things can you say about the concept of a pipe?", "Is the concept of a pipe the same if you say it in English or in French?", then you get into ontologies and terminologies), but it never helped much (the business background people who actually got it just thought it was woo and didn't relate to their world).

    Of course there's a general rule where any given abstract entity is a special case of a slightly more abstract one, including, I am quite sure, this "general rule", even if I would struggle to formulate the slightly more abstract rule of which it's a special case. Perhaps you can help?

    • The solution for my stair stringer problem was actually something along the lines C = A.sin(arctan(B/A)), though I am sure there's a more elegant one. It's still arithmetic, really, but it's true for all reals A, B, C where C is the depth of the cutout of the tread A and riser B in a stair stringer. Thus the piece of timber you need to buy is C+D thick, where D is the minimum thickness of beam to support the required load (or the minimum per the building code). It's very Cartesian really, but that is probably no accident.
    419:

    This is way out of my area but, remembering conversations with people who did know, size is sometimes a factor but it is often other factors. For arcane quantum mechanical reasons (*), elements that you would expect to be similar quite often have subtle chemical differences.

    (*) The last line of #409 applies here, too. Basically, I don't have more than a feeble clue.

    420:

    I am having too much difficulty remembering this but there are two main groups of isotope effects, one lot which is more or less "classical" in that you can relate to it using analogies involving sticky balls of different masses and the like, and one which is to do with subtle quantum mechanical interactions between the electrons and the nucleus, where things like whether the number of particles in the nucleus is odd or even have a tiny but occasionally noticeable effect on electron energy levels. There are two more or less corresponding groups for how the strength of the effects varies according to what element you're considering, with the "classical" mass-based ones tending to relate to the mass difference as a proportion of the total mass, and the "odd or even" ones depending on the absolute size of the difference regardless of the total mass. The proportional effects tend to be stronger than the absolute ones, and so are dominant for lighter elements.

    With deuterium vs. ordinary hydrogen the atom is so simple that the differences are extreme in all cases, and the effects are gross enough that you get unsubtle differences in physical properties, like the boiling point of heavy water being something like 1.4 degrees higher than that of the ordinary stuff.

    Carbon is already massive and complex enough that the isotopic differences barely show, and the fractionation you get in biochemical systems is simply a side effect of the kind you can observe with any element in any series of reactions. Also, while the actual reactions may only be transferring one or two carbon atoms, the molecules are complex and the energy levels of the electrons about a carbon atom are affected not just by the atom itself but by all its neighbours, so any effect an isotopic difference might have on the behaviour of the molecule as a whole is correspondingly reduced. The mechanisms by which enzymes achieve their extreme selectivity on a molecular level are orders of magnitude less noticeable on the level of selecting individual atoms of particular isotopes, and similarly for the effect on the chemistry of the product of having a particular isotope in a particular location. There are doubtless cases where differences in the chemistry of the product can be detected if you're specifically looking for them under laboratory conditions, but AFAIK there are no known instances of such differences being significant in nature, much less of any organisms that actually try to bring them about.

    With uranium the proportional effects are at their minimum due to the maximal mass of the nucleus, although they are still strong enough that the great majority of enrichment processes use those effects. The absolute effects, however, are now at a broadly comparable level, and you can get some quite strong fractionation effects in redox reactions with transition metal ions, iron in particular; how much and in which direction varies a lot according to the reaction, the conditions, and whether the classical effects are going the same way or the other way under those conditions. With iron being common geologically and groundwater bacteria using iron redox reactions for energy, this is of interest in relation to such things as the possibility of natural enrichment of leachate from poorly-buried nuclear waste. It's also the basis of the French and Japanese interest in chemical enrichment processes.

    421:

    Oh, absolutely. While the abstract algebra aspect has dominated the thread (because it is the one that most commonly causes people to gibber), it's not one of the mathematical abstractions that came directly from Newton, and those had more practical importance. As you say, such abstractions are not limited to mathematics, and I can also witness the conceptual problems caused by different languages (and even linguistic versus non-linguistic thinkers in English) being a major problem.

    Your example, solutions to quadratics etc. can all be done using the envelope model of variables, and the model of numbers as being no more than the value of something you can measure. Incidentally, C = A.sin(arctan(B/A)) is C = A.B/sqrt(A^2+B^2), which can be seen by drawing a picture.

    However, those models become problematic even for simple concepts like continuity and limits (as Zeno's paradoxes indicate), and are completely inadequate for anything like the concept of analytic functions. Most people are taught things like Taylor series, differential equations in a "plug and chug" fashions, but they had to be developed in the first place! Also, you need more advanced models to know when they will work and when they won't - which I can witness is beyond many physicists and engineers.

    This is why there was such an explosion of applied mathematics after the 18th century revolution, and why it is so tricky to understand how the ancients did things, because they were working with extremely advanced use of pre-Newtonian concepts. You can see how the Greeks did things by proving Pythagoras's theorem using rule and compass - and, if you are a masochist, that the nine-point circle is a circle.

    "Of course there's a general rule where any given abstract entity is a special case of a slightly more abstract one, including, I am quite sure, this "general rule", even if I would struggle to formulate the slightly more abstract rule of which it's a special case. Perhaps you can help?"

    No - though I can believe that there are mathematical philosophies based on that. It's way beyond anything I understand.

    422:

    Re: 'With deuterium vs. ordinary hydrogen the atom is so simple that the differences are extreme in all cases, ...'

    Really interesting explanation - thanks!

    How does 'spin' enter this picture - if it does? I noticed in one of the articles that there's a considerable difference on this metric/property between these particular isotopes.

    423:

    Will "patients" in the USA be expected to PAY FOR the vaccinations,

    I know you have a very big and irritating bug up your butt about healthcare in the US but this one is free. Feds have pre purchases the manufacturing and distribution costs. Even before they know if they work.

    Google search can work wonders here.

    And yes some of us locals have a bug up our butt on this subject also.

    424:

    This discussion of algebra brings back a memory in an early calculus class. Where we started doing what I'll call algebraic manipulations of long equations involving integrals. (Excuse my terminology. It has been a long while.)

    Anyway I think we lost about 20% of the class as they decided that a future that involved calculus was not for them.

    425:

    bug... on this subject also

    For a moment there I thought you were commenting on the other thread.

    426:

    allynh @ 411: I stumbled across the original videos that I was looking for.

    [ ... ]

    Nubian Massons build and adobe barrel vault under the guidance of Hassan Fathy during a worksop in Abiquiu New Mexico.

    Notice how the masons simply ignore the help around them, since they clearly have no clue how the guys are building the vault.

    I also noticed that Albuquerque is right down the road from Taos. Why do you need to import Nubian masons to teach you how to work with adobe?

    427:

    David L @ 423:

    Will "patients" in the USA be expected to PAY FOR the vaccinations,

    I know you have a very big and irritating bug up your butt about healthcare in the US but this one is free. Feds have pre purchases the manufacturing and distribution costs. Even before they know if they work.

    Google search can work wonders here.

    And yes some of us locals have a bug up our butt on this subject also.

    OTOH, I suspect there are a substantial number of Americans who will have to pay (or at least Co-pay) to have the vaccine administered. Does NHS in the UK have co-pays? If so, will the NHS waive the co-pay for this vaccine?

    Of course, even without the co-pay the vaccine is not entirely "free" because the government will pay for it using our taxes, and most of us do have to pay taxes.

    428:

    Yes, the total spin of the nucleus is I think the principal factor which gives rise to effects dependent on absolute differences. It is where the "even vs odd" character of the differences around uranium comes from.

    429:

    Totally off-topic, but amusing for those of us at the Venn Diagram intersection between Naive Realist and SFF Worldbuilder:

    There's allegedly a new, more generalized version of the Bell's Inequality out there. Per Quanta.

    "As with Bell’s theorem, the authors of the new work make seemingly obvious but nonetheless rigorous assumptions. The first one states that experimenters have the freedom to choose the type of measurements they want to do. The second says that you can’t send a signal any faster than the speed of light. The third says that outcomes of measurements are absolute, objective facts for all observers."

    Apparently, preliminary testing showed that the inequality is violated, so at least one of these three assumptions is wrong, at least in this combination.

    Assuming these results hold up, you can base a universe on some combination of a brick universe (no free will), FTL communication, and/or objective reality being an illusion. Take yer pick and make yer art.

    430:

    No problem.

    And I still argue that ftl communication does not result in causality violations... because the transit is outside "normal" space-time.

    431:

    Dover (book publisher) has two by Asher Benjamin, from the early 19th century, on building construction. They make interesting reading. (There may be other versions in print, but you definitely want one with illustrations, because framing and stairs.)

    432:

    Well...

    The experiment they're playing with is a variation on the Wigner's Friend idea. If you're playing under the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics, the question they're looking at is whether your observation of someone else's observation of a quantum entanglement event can influence/determine their observation. The answer is apparently yes, if the observer is a qubit. This gets into questions about what the heck constitutes a minimum observer.

    This is where free will comes in. If someone else's observations of your observation dictates what you observe, then you don't necessarily have free will. I believe this got lampshaded in The Atrocity Archive, but it's still underused in the Laundryverse. AHEM.

    Another possibility is that Copenhagen is wrong and free will is an illusion. Possibly this means that many worlds or some version of a timeless universe are less wrong than Copenhagen (there is no free will because either the future happens regardless or all choices happen).

    There's also the question about the scale of transition of effects between quantum and classical physics. This experiment suggests but does not prove that there is no scale, and potentially "everything could become quantum entangled, under the right circumstances" (note that I'm BSing this part, because I don't think that's quite what it says, but I'm not interested into diving into the details).

    And/or....FTL is possible, at least for communication of quantum states, which are not limited by scale. If you quantum entangle a large number of grains of salt, you can use them for quantum telegraphy, depending on how you take them. Something like that.

    433:

    I took second-year high school algebra at my local community cololege, and the textbook included material for much more advanced classes, like "isomorphism of two sets". We didn't get into those at all; it's above my head. (I actually had classes there from two of the three authors. They were quite good.)

    434:

    I've looked those books up -- they are really fascinating. Thank you for mentioning them.

    435:

    JBS We DO NOT HAVE "Co-Pay" It's ALL FREE AT THE POINT OF USE - you simply don't seem to be able to get your head round this, or how utterly broken, corrupt & useless "healthcare" is in the US of arseholes.

    436:

    As you know, I went back to the formulae, and produced several realistic scenarios where FTL communication is possible with no closed time-like curves (i.e. causality violations). You are correct.

    However, don't jump too fast. Most people can't get their head around even simple probabilistic data, let alone more advanced form of non-deterministic results, yet they are ubiquitous at the macro level in nature and complex relationships.

    The free will question is 'interesting' - people deny that "There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know (or Do)", yet it is demonstrably true in a deterministic model of the mind (Goedel). I know enough to know that assuming it applies to anything we can specify (e.g. any definable experiment) is a gross breach of the rules of logic, and means that all consequent deductions are suspect (read: bogus).

    At this point, if you are thoroughly confused, join the club. Anyone who is certain of the answer is an ignorant fool.

    437:

    It's ALL FREE AT THE POINT OF USE

    With exceptions.

    Opticians: very basic lenses/frames for kids/pensioners are provided with a minimal copay. And the NHS covers an eye test every two years. Everything else is commercial. (However, opthalmic surgery for eye injuries/medical problems -- not including laser keratotomy -- is free on the NHS.)

    Dentistry: NHS dental work has co-pay (not for under 18s, unemployed, disabled, or pensioners). Doesn't cover the more expensive types of dental prosthesis (e.g. implants) but includes stuff like fillings, repairs to bridgework, basic bridges, polishing.

    England/Wales only: there's a flat-rate per-item prescription tax. Doesn't apply to kids, the disabled, unemployed, pensioners. You can either pay when you collect an item (I think it's about £8/item these days) or buy a pre-payment certificate valid for 3 months or 12 months that caps it at around £100/year. Was abolished in Scotland nearly a decade ago as it turns out the prescription tax cost more to administer than it was bringing in and it deterred poor people from getting treatment.

    GP appointments, hospital visits, ambulances, surgery, hospital stays ... nope, no co-pays.

    438:

    And. of course, free treatment is not available to people are deemed unworthy of human rights by the Stasi, oops, Home Office.

    If you haven't seen it, the 'Yobs' cartoon in the current Private Eye is absolutely spot on.

    439:

    Charlie The dental treatment has fixed costs to the patient - charges are limited to. IIRC, 3 "steps" with a maximum of £250, IIRC. And to USA-ians ... similar practical results are to be found across all of Western Europe - in Germany it's called Heath Insurance, but, effectively, the state picks up the tab.

    EC 436: Yes, it makes your brain hurt, all of it. Any bets/guesses as to which two out of three you are going to pick? Or to put it another way, which one is wrong? 438: You mean the "Priti Boys"? Euuuw.

    440:

    in Germany it's called Heath Insurance, but, effectively, the state picks up the tab.

    Unless it has changed it IS health insurance and there are private companies. You pick from. Not sure of how the money works but there is (was?) money involved. So said the people we were with in Germany for a week 2 Christmas' ago.

    441:

    Re Bell's inequality, why are you assuming that only one assumption can be wrong?

    442:

    ALL FREE AT THE POINT OF USE

    The US has free at point of use services too: police, fire department (mostly), military. Pity it doesn't extend to medical services.

    It's perhaps worth remembering that "free at point of use" != "free". FAPOU is most important, IMO, in ensuring equality of access and eliminating iatrogenic financial catastrophe.

    443:

    Now we could get into a long discussion of "free" about such things as trash pickup, leaf vacuuming, etc...

    When things shut down in March our city suspended yard waste pickup for a while. One guy in my neighborhood wanted to know if he would get a refund on his taxes. I didn't say so but my BOTE calculation was that we pay around $.50 a month for this service. I would have given him a quarter to shut up.

    444:

    Here's the link to the paywalled paper on Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0990-x

    Note that there's a very similar paper by the same authors on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05607.pdf, which may be the rough draft.

    Here's the Nature abstract: "Does quantum theory apply at all scales, including that of observers? New light on this fundamental question has recently been shed through a resurgence of interest in the long-standing Wigner’s friend paradox. This is a thought experiment addressing the quantum measurement problem—the difficulty of reconciling the (unitary, deterministic) evolution of isolated systems and the (non-unitary, probabilistic) state update after a measurement. Here, by building on a scenario with two separated but entangled friends introduced by Brukner, we prove that if quantum evolution is controllable on the scale of an observer, then one of ‘No-Superdeterminism’, ‘Locality’ or ‘Absoluteness of Observed Events’—that every observed event exists absolutely, not relatively—must be false. We show that although the violation of Bell-type inequalities in such scenarios is not in general sufficient to demonstrate the contradiction between those three assumptions, new inequalities can be derived, in a theory-independent manner, that are violated by quantum correlations. This is demonstrated in a proof-of-principle experiment where a photon’s path is deemed an observer. We discuss how this new theorem places strictly stronger constraints on physical reality than Bell’s theorem."

    Now I was thinking the same thing you were, EC, that there could be more than one wrong. That's why I went closer to the source for a better reading.

    Here are the three assumptions as presented in the ArXiv paper:

    "Assumption 1(Absoluteness of Observed Events (AOE)). An observed event is a real single event, and not relative to anything or anyone."

    "Assumption 2(No-Superdeterminism(NSD)). Any set of events on a space-like hypersurface is uncorrelated with any set of freely chosen actions subsequent to that space-like hypersurface."

    "Assumption 3(Locality(L)). The probability of an observable event e is unchanged by conditioning on a space-like-separated free choice z, even if it is already conditioned on other events not in the future light-cone of z."

    And I'll finish with with the strong hint that it's worth reading the discussion of the ArXiv paper. Here's a relevant paragraph, but there are other goodies in there:

    "Among interpretations of quantum mechanics that allow, in principle, the violation of LF inequalities, Theorem 1 can be accommodated in different ways. Interpretations that reject AOE include QBism, the relational interpretation, and the Many-Worlds interpretation. Bohmian mechanics violates L but not the other assumptions. Some authors advocate giving up NSD (either due to retrocausality, superdeterminism, or other mechanisms); however, as yet, no such theory has been proposed that reproduces all the predictions of quantum mechanics."

    So just looking at the marketplace of ideas and making a bet based on which theories are getting the most attention and development, I'd bet that the first assumption will turn out to be false if it's possible to conduct the experiment to everyone's satisfaction.

    445:

    Just realized that the story universe I want to write when things calm down is essentially panpsychic non-local, so it would be consistent with this paper. Cool beans.

    The reason I don't dive into it is that I'm a slow writer, and aside from blowing off steam here, almost all of my writing energy is going into environmental stuff. Much as I want to goof around writing books where one of the names of the panpsychos is Yog-Sothoth, reality has better uses for my time. Oh well.

    446:

    JBS @426 said: Why do you need to import Nubian masons to teach you how to work with adobe?

    Because the locals never developed the dome or vaulted arch roof made from adobe.

    • Adobe houses around here are a flat roof that needed wood to span.

    Watch the videos and see how simple yet amazing the process is, once you know how to do it.

    This is similar to what they did in Florence.

    Great Cathedral Mystery | NOVA

    Watching the documentary, it was clear that they were using the same basic process, and that they guy learned it from the people who have been building with mud bricks for thousands of years.

    447:

    Yes Nubian domes are quite cool. Speaking of which, how do they handle the New Mexican winter?

    The other real issue is that they have limited use in the Pueblos, which use flat-roofed adobe to build multi-story structures and kivas. That's the interesting part of this, that innovating on one part of a structure may place limits on other parts.

    That's not to say that people shouldn't be making adobe domes in the Southwest. Rather, dome architecture has a different layout that stacked flat-roof architecture.

    448:

    I have seen second stories built on mud domes, but I can't tell you what they were used for. Possibly just for the storage of light items.

    449:

    David L @ 443

    Most municipalities have forgotten, too, why these services are provided "free at point of use" to residents. As a result, the municipal managers become focused on the cost of delivering said FAPOU services rather than the overall benefit to residents.

    Case in point, the municipality where I live recently halved the amount of waste that would be picked up at the curb in order to reduce costs. (This is pre-COVID ... since COVID everything changed and checking each week before garbage day is advised.)

    Due to pushback from residents to the municipal politicians, the municipal managers then created a complex scheme for temporary &/or permanent allowances for additional waste pickup. Which requires staff to administer, which increases the departmental headcount, but it still reduces the number of contractors performing pickup, so the managers and the union are happy.

    Almost immediately, people started dumping their garbage above the limit in the bush instead of going through the bureaucratic process. As a large property owner, my employer had to clean up roughly five times as much illegal dumping as before the change. And that's simply from the people who are lazy and dump at the edge of the road. More, if the clean-up of waste from injection drug use is also counted.

    Circling back to the original reason for municipal waste pickup ... it's to get rid of waste that feeds rodents and other vermin and/or contaminates drinking water sources &/or poses a fire hazard. It's a basic public health & safety measure which is paid collectively by property taxes.

    450:

    Pigeon@420 writes:

    "There are doubtless cases where differences in the chemistry of the product can be detected if you're specifically looking for them under laboratory conditions, but AFAIK there are no known instances of such differences being significant in nature, "

    I remember reading somewhere that ingestion of even a few ounces of heavy water is fatal. Apparently it's a lingering death caused by wasting away, as metabolic pathways have their reaction rates altered just enough to cause accumulation of side products. Plants watered with it also wither and die.

    "strong fractionation effects in redox reactions with transition metal ions, iron in particular; how much and in which direction varies a lot according to the reaction, the conditions, and whether the classical effects are going the same way or the other way under those conditions. With iron being common geologically and groundwater bacteria using iron redox reactions for energy, this is of interest in relation to such things as the possibility of natural enrichment of leachate from poorly-buried nuclear waste. "

    Wiki the Oklo natural reactor, French authorities were alerted in the 1950s when shipments of uranium ore from the Congo showed a significantly lower percentage of U-235, prompting an investigation to see if nuclear fuel was being diverted. Turns out that a half billion years ago, mats of algae concentrated natural uranium to the point of criticality. Fission occurred spontaneously, probably continuing for millions of years, heating the water a few degrees and affecting isotope proportions as the ore body formed. Uranium has a long half-life but would have decayed substantially since that happened, so maybe now it's not as likely to fission from microbial action.

    451:

    Ok, I've got one to boggle all the assumptions: set up a circle of, say, six people. By the side of each is a mirror, showing the chamber with the experiment. As each person looks at the person ahead of them in the circle, they also see the result of what was measured in the chamber.

    Now: whose observation determines the collapse of potential states to a given state?

    Now, about that FTL communication: picture each starship (or whatever) has a box. A puts a message into the box, and hits the button. B sees a light, and pulls out the message. Then they put a response in the box, and hit the button, and A sees the light, and pulls out the message. In A's timeline, no causality is violated. Ditto for B. What happens in between is indeterminate....

    452:

    Ok, let's talk about free will.

    First, dunno how many of you are familiar with General Semantics. Go look it up, and the structural differential. The intermediate filters are internally developed as you experience life. Part of that is, for example, what your folks say or do to/in your perception, and that may depend on their lives (did the boss just text someone?).

    The upshot is that they are extremely variable and based on elements that an economist would call "externals".

    Then, you decide something based on current evidence, as weighted by those filters.

    If you can make a deterministic determination of a decision, based on that... an alleged Sky Father would be boggled for one person, never mind a universe.

    Well, unless chocolate is involved....

    453:

    "Fire department" free?

    Let's see, my insurance co had to pay the county around 2000, when my son was driving back from visiting a friend in a further 'burb of Chicago, and the engine caught fire, and the fire truck came out (too late to do anything).

    454:

    I'd bet that the first assumption will turn out to be false

    Which, IMO, edges in the direction of Many Worlds. As with other things that smell of MW, I've never been able to decide if that's a good thing or not.

    455:

    I remember reading somewhere that ingestion of even a few ounces of heavy water is fatal.

    Doesn't seem that bad:

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10535697/ The low toxicity of D20 toward mammals is reflected in its widespread use for measuring water spaces in humans and other animals. Higher concentrations (usually >20% of body weight) can be toxic to animals and animal cells. Effects on the nervous system and the liver and on formation of different blood cells have been noted.

    I still wouldn't chug a lot of deuterated Perrier.

    456:

    That's the obvious thought, until you look at the others (like quantum bayesianism or even pilot waves) and realize that they've got at least as good a case.

    The miserable part is that since the critical experiment involves entangling several sets of observers, we're unlikely to get an uncontroversial answer on this. The model system they used to test this used qubits as observers, so if this is acceptable, then basically we're assuming panpsychism is true, that interacting particles act as observers. This in turn implies that reality is conscious and human consciousness is not special, or that consciousness has nothing to do with being an observer.

    I happen to be partial to this view for many reasons. Unfortunately, it's going to put knots in a lot of people's shorts, because it strikes at the heart of ethical notions that humans are special, different, have souls while other things do not, that life is special, different, ad infinitum.

    Or, of course, it could be that the quantum world is many-worlds, but it all decoheres into classical physics pretty rapidly when many multiple world particles interact...which also would mean that it would be impossible to scale this experiment up enough to convince the "humans are special because we Observe" crowd that the experiment answers the question.

    So the ethical conundrums are rather interesting. And for those who are fanatical atheists, it's also worth questioning whether you believe that human consciousness is special and different from all other kinds, because that's on trial here, at least a little.

    458:

    EC 441: Keeping it simple to start with?

    H 456: "Pilot Waves"? Oh dear, Bohm strikes again.

    459:

    David L @ 443: Now we could get into a long discussion of "free" about such things as trash pickup, leaf vacuuming, etc...

    When things shut down in March our city suspended yard waste pickup for a while. One guy in my neighborhood wanted to know if he would get a refund on his taxes. I didn't say so but my BOTE calculation was that we pay around $.50 a month for this service. I would have given him a quarter to shut up.

    If you have city water it's on the water bill under "Non-metered Charges" - recycling, solid waste, stormwater.

    460:

    I still wouldn't chug a lot of deuterated Perrier. Mmm, de-deuterated water might be an opportunity for a high-end niche product for the gullible. After all, heavy water is dangerous to human biology, so even regular dilute heavy water[1] is obviously much more dangerous than pure de-deuterated water. Logic!

    [1] AKA water.

    462:

    Here we go: Preliminary studies on biological effects of the de-deuterated water (1997, Bild, Walther; Iliescu, Radu; Haulica, Ion) (I have not found the actual paper.) and Don’t Drink The Water (February 5, 2015, gcochran9) The other attractive feature of de-deuterated water, is that it’s damned expensive. Regular consumption might run $1000 a day or more, and that’s for cheapskates that don’t shower in it. Regular consumption would mark you out as a truly special person: I can see it becoming the official drink of Davos and the Bohemian Club. There would, of course, be many associated products: de-deuterated 12-year old Glenlivet, de-deuterated Kobe beef, etc.

    463:

    That's pretty funny, thanks. Weak marketing-fu, though.

    464:

    allynh @ 446:

    JBS @426 said: Why do you need to import Nubian masons to teach you how to work with adobe?

    Because the locals never developed the dome or vaulted arch roof made from adobe.

    - Adobe houses around here are a flat roof that needed wood to span.

    Watch the videos and see how simple yet amazing the process is, once you know how to do it.

    This is similar to what they did in Florence.

    Great Cathedral Mystery | NOVA

    Watching the documentary, it was clear that they were using the same basic process, and that they guy learned it from the people who have been building with mud bricks for thousands of years.

    I was just being sarky, but I don't need the videos. I already "know how to do it."
    Learned on the job many years ago.

    465:

    I read about the 5G phobics buying Faraday cages for their routers and then complaining about wifi not working any longer...

    Merchandise for the gullible will always find a market I'm afraid

    466:

    I can see it now: wannabe nuclear terrorists set up a covert facility to produce the necessary heavy water. Since the effluent from this process is de-deuterated and de-tritiated water, they sell this to the high end health drinks market, and use the money to buy uranium or (if they can get it) plutonium.

    Sounds like a great, near-future mystery device. I haven't figured out how Rule 34 would get violated though, or what the Halting Point would be.

    467:

    And you can point to work proving Bohm was wrong?

    469:

    JPetherick @ 449: David L @ 443

    Most municipalities have forgotten, too, why these services are provided "free at point of use" to residents. As a result, the municipal managers become focused on the cost of delivering said FAPOU services rather than the overall benefit to residents.

    [ ... ]

    Circling back to the original reason for municipal waste pickup ... it's to get rid of waste that feeds rodents and other vermin and/or contaminates drinking water sources &/or poses a fire hazard. It's a basic public health & safety measure which is paid collectively by property taxes.

    The "yard waste" David mentioned is tree limbs, leaves & grass from mowing ... no vermin other than squirrels.

    Solid waste (in the form of garbage & recycling) pickup continued unabated.

    Raleigh-Wake County have a central location where yard waste is shredded & composted. Used to be you could go get a pickup truck load of the finished product for free, but now I think there's a fee. Also, I think they'll deliver a dump-truck load if you request it (also for a fee).

    I don't bother with the "yard waste" pickup because I was shredding & composting my yard waste long before THEY started doing it.

    470:

    I'm always amused by the discussion of "causality violation" when it comes to FTL communication, all because of the concept that nothing can travel faster than light.

    • If you can get from "here to there", without traveling the space in between, then FTL communication does not violate so called "causality".

    A century ago there was a war in Physics and Cosmology, and the people who rejected the need to use experimental methods won. We have lost a century of advancement because they abandoned the Scientific Method. "Thought experiments" were the latest fad, that paid the bills and removed the need to actually see if their "guess" was valid.

    I finally read through Einstein's War by Matthew Stanley. It is a terrifying account of how all this nonsense was accepted as dogma. Einstein basically abandoned experimental methods because it wasn't "elegant" enough. It got in the way of his process since he couldn't find anybody to do the experiments to test his "guesses". So, he abandoned the Scientific Method.

    • When you abandon the Scientific Method, you abandon Science.

    wiki - Scientific method

    That may seem obvious to look up the term, but too many people have abandoned the concept for their own bizarre beliefs. I'm talking about people who believe in Scientism rather than Science.

    The Enlightenment created the Scientific Method to separate Science from the Church, to separate reality from opinion, so that we could move forward. Abandon that at your peril.

    Carl Sagan - Science is a way of thinking

    Feynman on Scientific Method

    Robert Anton Wilson pointed out that he was wrong, that he was always wrong, but that he tried to be less wrong.

    • That is a Scientific statement.

    Some major Physicist pointed out once, that there is nothing "Theoretical" about Physics.

    Look at "String Theory" as an example. Since it cannot be tested by experiment, it is not a "theory" it is a "guess". But the term "String Guess" isn't a sexy enough name to pay the bills. Read the book, "The Trouble with Physics" by Lee Smolin. If you are not a "String Theorist" you cannot get a job in University as a Professor.

    Those who have abandoned the Scientific Method have won the battle.

    471:

    That should read:

    "If you are not a "String Theorist" you cannot get a job in University as a Professor in the Physics Department."

    472:

    Allen Thomson @457:

    "Fire department" free?

    Please see the "(mostly)" in #442. Also https://firefighterinsider.com/does-the-fire-department-charge-you-to-respond/

    Yeah, it's not like in Tennessee where the volunteer fire department will let your house burn down because you didn't pay your annual subscription fee.

    And it has absolutely nothing to do with Fire Chief's ex-wife living there. Really! Honest to god truth.

    But the marshmallows were probably a mistake.

    473:

    Re: ' ... total spin of the nucleus is I think the principal factor'

    Thanks for the info - much appreciated!

    Will try to find some lay-person level info on this.

    474:

    If you have city water it's on the water bill

    Yes it is. That's where I started my BOTE to get to $.50/mo for yard waste only.

    475:

    I don't bother with the "yard waste" pickup because I was shredding & composting my yard waste long before THEY started doing it.

    This year I had a cubic yard or more of acorns. And enough leaves to fill a 10'x10'x5' on the first pass. Maybe 1/2 of that now left to go. Plus both are still falling.

    I'll pay the taxes for them to take it.

    476:

    I'm busy, slowly, taking out this wannabee-tree. Then I need to take out a small one. Neither's going to compost. I put out one large trashcan of it on the weeks I can get out to cut.

    477:

    Geezer-with-a-hat @ 465: I read about the 5G phobics buying Faraday cages for their routers and then complaining about wifi not working any longer...

    Merchandise for the gullible will always find a market I'm afraid

    I helped build a Faraday cage house one time. Copper screen on all the exterior wall studs & on the ceilings & under the slab. I was there to do the framing, but we had to stay until the plumbers & electricians got their part done before we could put up the screen. The screen was covered by sheet-rock. I don't know how they planned to protect windows & doors - one end of the house was all glass sliding doors. We were done with our part & had moved on to our next house before they were installed.

    This was years before personal computers, so NO wifi, no cellphones. Hell, we barely had cable TV in Raleigh back then. so I don't have a clue why the guy wanted a Faraday cage house.

    478:

    Re: ' ... since the critical experiment involves entangling several sets of observers,'

    This part has always puzzled me: how can you set up such an experiment so that nothing - particles or waves - touches/interacts with it? My impression is that even so-called space vacuum has particles and waves going through it. Planet-side where all such experiments have been conducted are even noisier.

    Another experiment that's also puzzled me is the classic double-slit because none of the versions I've seen mention that whatever particle they shoot out of the 'gun' and through the slit(s) is fully absorbed by whatever is covering the wall at the other end. If all of the particles being shot out aren't completely absorbed and don't jostle out other particles then there's a possibility that said particle (or a jostled wall particle) is ricocheting. If these particles bounce back, they'll probably do so in reaction to whatever the curvature of that wall surface is. And keep doing this until the particle runs out of energy/gets absorbed or somehow leaves the area.(I seriously doubt we've the tech to create a surface that's perfectly 180 degree smooth at a subatomic/electron-sized level.) To this, add: Electrons travel at approx. 1% the speed of light - plenty fast to bounce back and forth umpteen times before its ping get recorded*. Okay, I'm out of my depth re: this physics but I've some basic understanding of research study design like identifying and controlling for variables.

    • Maybe they'll do this experiment again and film it using this camera.

    https://newatlas.com/electronics/worlds-fastest-camera-70-trillion-frames-per-second/

    479:

    Copper screen on all the exterior wall studs & on the ceilings & under the slab.

    Kind of a SCIF-lite, sounds like. Or maybe he was just a high-end tinfoil-room person.

    480:

    The "heavy water is horribly lethal" thing is a Daily Mail story from when the stuff first entered public awareness. As noted later, it is chemically different enough that it can screw things up, but it takes unfeasibly large quantities before the effects become noticeable.

    The paragraph you quoted was talking about carbon, not hydrogen. It was also talking about the possible significance in nature, not the possible toxicity of artificially altered isotope ratios; the former would imply the latter, but not necessarily the other way round.

    The thing about Oklo is that the time it was active is enough half-lives of 235U in the past that natural uranium back then would count as LEU today, and a rich enough ore body could accordingly go critical just from the addition of a moderator in the form of ordinary water. It didn't need enrichment because it had not yet been depleted by time.

    The U(IV)/U(VI) exchange associated with microbial interactions is significant both for the mobility and deposition of uranium in groundwater and for isotopic fractionation effects. Not a few of the papers on the topic have a certain smell about them suggesting that what the researchers are really interested in is not so much what happens with tiny concentrations in groundwater as what might be caused to happen in a possible enrichment plant.

    481:

    This part has always puzzled me: how can you set up such an experiment so that nothing - particles or waves - touches/interacts with it? My impression is that even so-called space vacuum has particles and waves going through it. Planet-side where all such experiments have been conducted are even noisier.

    If you read the ArXiv paper, they note prominently in the discussion that what they're proposing can't be fully tested now, if ever, for precisely the reason you're stating.

    That said, it took 50 years for the experimentalists to test Bell's theorem to more-or-less everyone's satisfaction. Assuming civilization is still around in 50 years (speaking of entanglements) perhaps someone will have a good way to test this one.

    For what it's worth, they suggested a quantum computer AI-on-a-chip might be small enough and have the right nature to qualify as an observer that's capable of being entangled. Again, this gets at the key problem of what qualifies as a Copenhagen-style observer: can it be a device, or does a conscious human have to be in the system somewhere. That won't be answered by this experiment. Incidentally, I don't think humans are the only observers, not only because the universe got along just fine before we evolved, but with inflation, we apparently can't even see however much of the universe is currently expanding away from us at faster than C. And if our observations are necessary and we can't observe much of the universe, something's seriously wrong with that theory. Speaking of which....dark matter.

    482:

    ...and when the installation was completed one of the guys indicated his portable radio and said "this shouldn't be working, should it?"

    483:

    whitroth ( & EC ) Ah, that's the point - I can't. More years ago than I now care to remember, I worked with someone who was, primarily, a mathematical physicist & he was interested in both Bohm & the Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen problems ... In those days one didn't mention the now-common-trope of QM & GR - shall we say - not matching up? My brain hurt, then, when my maths was considerably better than it is now, but the interest is still there.

    allynh However, I tend to agree with Feynman, who rejected all mysticism & "collapse of the wave-function" as claptrap. I note that you also point to Feynman, what a surprise.

    484:

    Again, this gets at the key problem of what qualifies as a Copenhagen-style observer: can it be a device, or does a conscious human have to be in the system somewhere.

    Which is adjacent to or may be the same thing as the "measurement problem".

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

    What is a measurement; who or what does the measurement that collapses the wave function?

    485:

    I'm not sure if I'm picturing this right, but suppose we have a distant light source, and let the wave travel, losing energy as it goes, and then have a number of observers a good distance apart.

    How does it "collapse" so that all they all agree that they're seeing a distant nebula?

    For that matter, why does it stay collapsed? And if it was observed by, say, one of the Voyagers, and what they see is what we see, would that not indicate that either the Voyager collapsed it, or some other observer in another solar system collapsed it?

    486:

    Charles,

    Opticians

    Dentistry

    England/Wales only

    GP appointments, hospital visits, ambulances, surgery, hospital stays ... nope, no co-pays

    This we take for granted. Here in Italy too. And I think that's good, but who am I to say this? :-/

    In the USA... not so much.

    487:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend anyone?

    Where does exactly a "quantum system" ends?

    If I observe you observing a cat in a box, who exactly is collapsing the wave function?

    The concept of "observer" is totally tricky...

    488:

    Greg Tingey @483, said: I note that you also point to Feynman, what a surprise.

    I don't see why. I read his books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? and agree with most of what he was saying about life. I disagree with many of the consensus science stuff he talks about, but that's because what he knew is massively out of date.

    I'm sure that he would be fascinated by the stuff I've stumbled across over the past 12 years, since I retired. Like he says in the lecture, he was happy to follow where the data leads. So am I.

    I'm a Civil Engineer by training. The Scientific Method is at the heart of everything we do. Concrete and Steel are my religion. If you design a bridge, build it, and it carries the design load and lasts its design life, then you've done your job. There is no "belief" or wishful thinking in Civil Engineering.

    I have watched, since I went to University in the 1970s, how "Theoretical" Physics and Cosmology has completely lost touch with reality. In Physics classes I had to answer questions on tests the way they wanted, so that I could get a good grade. I learned long ago not to argue with teachers or Professors. You simply ask, "Will this be on the test?" and move on.

    I'm not the only one who sees that. So many people get a degree in Physics, then end up working on Wall Street creating nonsense products to steal as much money as possible from the public, while staying barely "legal". By the time they finish their Phd, they see no future in the garbage they were taught, or a way to pay off their student debt. Wall Street actively recruits people with Phds in Physics for that very reason.

    As an aside: When I write, I have trouble with "Villain Speak". What they say is so much "nonsense" to me. When I post stuff here and get extreme negative responses, I cherish them. They are most useful for capturing actual "Villain Speak".

    BTW, I don't consider you a "Villain", I consider you the elderly curmudgeon character. Most useful.

    Thanks...

    489:

    There is no "belief" or wishful thinking in Civil Engineering.

    I beg to differ. The local civil engineers in City and County Planning use the 1970 manual to determine the height of a 100 year flood. This in an era of climate change? FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program now use climate models to forecast flood heights, because unlike the County Planning crew, they lose money when they're wrong. As one might expect, when I've pointed this and real map-reading errors out to the county employees, the response I've gotten is a supercilious dismissal, because I'm not a licensed engineer, so therefore what I have to say is of no value.

    Hopefully most civil engineers are of a slightly better character than this bunch? I'd be disappointed if they were typical.

    And yes, ecologists are wishful thinkers too. We fondly hope that our descriptions of past processes lead to useful future predictions, the complexity of reality notwithstanding. At least some of us have realized how much of what we think is pattern is essentially random. And I'm sometimes in the latter crew.

    490:

    Heteromeles @489, said: the response I've gotten is a supercilious dismissal, because I'm not a licensed engineer, so therefore what I have to say is of no value.

    Well, that's the point isn't it.

    Civil Engineering is a "Hard" science, Concrete and Steel. Hard science is how you build skyscrapers and jet planes. The Civil Engineering I learned in the 1970s was simple compared with today. The amount of change that has occurred since University is terrifying. That degree of change has not happened at the local level.

    What we do impacts the lives of regular people, so we have to be more conservative, not subject to the latest "fad" of politics. We have to think on the level of decades and generations for what we build.

    The Phd you have is in a "Soft" science. Soft sciences are all about opinion and politics, subject to the whim of the funders. We've seen the opinions of Ecologists change so fast that it makes your head spin. Something new and different, almost every decade, or faster.

    When I say that I'm not knocking your degree. Such is life.

    492:

    The Phd you have is in a "Soft" science. Soft sciences are all about opinion and politics, subject to the whim of the funders. We've seen the opinions of Ecologists change so fast that it makes your head spin. Something new and different, almost every decade, or faster.

    Okay, I expected them to blow off the climate change, although their own bosses told them to take it into account, (and any idiot living in California would at least check to see what FEMA and NFIP were doing, as my friend the disaster actuary pointed out).

    HOWEVER, what annoyed me was that a civil engineer doing a hydrology analysis on a project had two 7' diameter culverts coming in to the project to handle stormwater from developments draining into a creek. Unfortunately, he ignored one of the inflow pipes, so with two 7' drainage pipes draining into the site, he specified a single 7' diameter pipe leading off the site into the ecological reserve I was trying to protect.

    I pointed this out, and was ignored, apparently because they think like you. They've installed the 7' diameter outflow. It runs under a road that's put on top of dirt fill and flows out at a 45 degree angle into the creek that used to run unfettered. There's a bed of riprap that's supposed to break the flow, so that the water can then make the sharp turn and flow into its old bed.

    I suspect there's a 50% chance of a 1000-year storm in the next 50 years (that model got published by Swain et al in Nature). When this thousand year storm (a meter of rain or so) hits this setup, the water and whatever's in it will first back up behind the road, probably chewing into that dirt slope, forming a nice head of pressure on the outflow pipe. The outrushing water will fail to turn a 45 degree angle through the riprap and will instead carve a new channel through the last big stand of one of the rarest oaks in California. Ultimately it will dump at least some debris at Torrey Pines state beach downstream. And If we're really unlucky the flood will take the road out, dump all that dirt on top of the oaks, and they'll have to rebuild it.

    That's my take on civil engineers in a nutshell. If I can be bothered to check a map and make sure it's correct, so can they. And if I can do cross-sectional analyses, so can they. After all, I'm a soft scientist and they are, of course, a superior strain of humanity.

    Being the first non-engineer in my family in three generations, I'm extremely unimpressed by civil engineering like this. You?

    493:

    JBS @ 477, on Faraday cage buildings:

    I used to work in an office building with lots of exterior glass but no cellphone coverage inside. It turned out that the UV-reflective metallic coating on the glass also blocked RF. They had to get the cellphone companies to come and install pico-cells inside the building in order to get coverage. Up to that time I would walk out of the building and my phone would suddenly beep with the accumulated texts and missed calls.

    So if you want to build a Faraday cage with windows, use UV-reflective glass.

    Looking further back, in the 1980s there was a spate of suicides amongst people working for one part of GEC-Marconi. Cue lots of conspiracy theories, but the most plausible explanation was that the secret work was being done in TEMPEST-shielded buildings. This was a standard to prevent EM radiation leaking secrets, especially for Van-Eck phreaking (intercepting video signals emitted by CRTs in computer monitors). Unfortunately it also meant no light was allowed in or out. So people working long hours in the winter were arriving before dawn, grabbing lunch at the desk, leaving after dusk, and never seeing sunlight for days at a time. This led to SAD in vulnerable individuals, which combined with work-related stress to cause suicide.

    494:

    When I hear talking about certain disciplines being "hard", by default I think that someone, somewhere is touching themselves inappropriately*. On the other hand I see civil engineering as applied science. Civil engineers use (or apply [nudge, nudge]) the findings of natural sciences to their particular engineering problem. If a civil engineer does science, that is adds to humanity's body of knowledge, expands the achingly slowly growing circle of light in the dark universe, then usually it means they are practicing some other discipline, like physics or chemistry. That's no disrespect for building bridges and skyscrapers and stuff like that, some of which, sure, does require creating new knowledge. But it's definitely techne rather than logos. Maybe you mean techne is hard and logos is soft? Then you should really be talking about technology versus science..., well IMHO anyway.

    Botany, on the other hand, is very empirical and grounded in observation. Maybe what you mean is that quantitative because methods are less central to the discipline than things like taxonomy, and this reduces its empirical footprint, because only quantitative observation is really real or something, any other sort of observation is just some subjective political thing. Do you think neoclassical econometrics is "hard"?

    Ecology is a bit different: it's new enough that new findings can lead to significant rearrangement of ideas. It has a strong computational arm, you might find working ecologists' non-field days split between a supercomputer facility, a lab and a greenhouse... though I think it's an especially diverse field with specialisations. Do you think meteorology, especially computational meteorology is "hard"?

    I also have said here before: we all tend strongly to attribute less nuance and rigor to areas other than our own. Whereas multidisciplinary studies centres trend toward being massively productive, possibly precisely because you get high end people from diverse disciplines picking apart each others assumptions and models of reality.

    • I am not taking on the role in this group of being the one who always draws out the obvious masturbation jokes, it's just that timezones often put me ahead of the others who often do take on this role. Not looking at anyone in particular... Hey! Look at that shiny thing over there!
    495:

    allynh I have a moderate Physics degree, but my MSC is in Engineering It's all-too-obvious that a lot of current Physics-theory simply does not work - & a lot more obvious than it was 30 years ago. If you want villain-speak try politicians, especially many of the current lot. Or, to re-iterate: We all knew Johnson was an incompetent bumbler, liar, and serial adulterer with the morals of a syphilitic stoat,...

    Ah, "licensed" - yes. So that, although having an MSc in Engineering, I'm "not allowed" to do simple single-p0ahse house wiring ... yeah.

    Damian Erm, ecology is at least 300 years old. See here for information

    496:

    ecology is at least 300 years old

    Sure, as an area individuals might explore as part of their thinking. As a profession and specialty... well it was a multidisciplinary-programme major when I was at uni in the early 90s (I took it as part of the BSc I never finished) and perhaps became a department since then (in some places this might be unlikely with neoliberal amalgamations and "right-structuring"). Not saying it was like that everywhere, but it's my experience. Doesn't need to be a profession for ideas to develop, but they develop faster when a few thousand people do it as their job.

    But hey I've got more:

    Is geology a "hard" science? It certainly involves the study of some pretty hard things. I'd argue that there's not qualitative difference between the methods of botanists or biologists and geologists. There's a bit of physics and chemistry, a lot of taxonomy and study of natural structures, some quantitative methods describing the latter, sometimes for the purpose of experiment.

    Is mathematics "hard"? As per discussion in the other thread, and as several have pointed out, mathematics gets interesting exactly when it stops being about quantities, so if "hardness" is about quantitative methods, it must get a bit lukewarm in there.

    I suspect this hard and soft thing actually expresses an epistemological observation, one that might be a bit pre-theoretical in terms of philosophy of science, but might not. Hey it's hard to tell - really.

    497:

    Oh wait, there's still more... even on Australian television (might be geoblocked):

    https://iview.abc.net.au/show/hard-quiz

    498:

    I spent my entire career supporting scientists as a computer expert, statistician, algorithmist and (God help me) numerical analyst. You are so off-beam that it's hard to know where to start.

    The reason that 'soft sciences' are so uncertain is mostly because they are tackling much harder problems than 'hard scientists' imagine can exist. many 'hard scientists' now realise this, both because they are tackling 'soft science' problems, and when they get down to the quantum scale. Yes, there are some outrageously ignorant idiots in the 'soft sciences', but no more than in the 'hard sciences'.

    In the 'hard sciences' (especially physics), plus medicine, the dogmatists reach a level of self-delusion that not even the most fanatical 'soft sciences' ones do. It's often impossible to get them to question dogmas even if you point out that the very masters of the subject they revere do so. The incorrect "FTL = time travel" dogma among relativists is a good example.

    Worse, in physics and sometimes engineering, they often have delusions of accuracy and determinism; two of us (a numerical analyst and a statistician) spent 90 minutes failing to persuade a physicist that a machine that measured only 4 digits could not possibly be more that 0.01% accurate. You also seem to be implying that steel and concrete never vary beyond the assumed limits and mistakes in construction and extreme accidents never happen.

    And you have completely misunderstood the thread about mathematics, so badly that I wonder whether you have ever learnt finite element analysis. What it does is to wotk with the 'essence' of quantities - i.e. the properties that are inherent in numbers, as distinct from the artifacts of human limitations.

    499:

    Re: '... a "hard" science?'

    My impression is that we're in the midst of some sort of ideological spat within the scientific community with the somewhat more vocal/trendy side saying: If a field doesn't have a ton of equations in it, it's a 'soft' science - or even not a science at all. To me this is a real problem because testability is at the root of the scientific method. The current work-around is the increasing rate of mathematization of many (if not all) disciplines. Math is great/handy for generating or even pre-testing some possible hypotheses but you still have to do the experiment!

    Laughed out loud (and wondered whether he visits this blog) when I saw this Tweet from Kareem Carr (PhD Candidate - BioStats, HarvardU):

    'The seven main branches of statistics are: 1- Numbers 2- Pictures of Numbers 3- Words 4- Calculus 5- Matrices 6- The R Programming Language 7- Yelling'

    500:

    I like it!

    Yes, I agree with you. I regard virtually the whole of 'advanced' physics as little more than mystical woo about formulae. Even such basic things as Hubble's law has no proof that does not depend on assuming it, and let's not go black hole diving ....

    501:

    So if you want to build a Faraday cage with windows, use UV-reflective glass.

    I think that for this and other reasons the way UV-reflective glass is mostly made these days doesn't do this.

    There is also a time frame (80s/90s?) in the US where rigid insulation blocks that were put between studs in exterior house walls had a similar coating. Which also makes for such a situation.

    502:

    So that, although having an MSc in Engineering, I'm "not allowed" to do simple single-p0ahse house wiring ... yeah.

    As someone who's lived on both side of this particular fence...

    There are a lot of Electrical engineers who would be great at designing house wiring but I would not want them near a set of stripper/pliers actually doing the wiring. For that I want someone who has a big body of practical experience. And in the US at least that means 4 years of apprenticeship then passing a licensing board. In most of the US you ARE allowed (sort of maybe kind of) to do your own wiring. But, well there are a lot of buts....

    And if you are doing the work on a property not your own and/or which will be sold or rented, again it must be by licensed and then inspected with a pass. If you read the prior sentence you can obviously see there's some wiggle room.

    And lots of details vary by local code.

    503:

    Looking further back, in the 1980s there was a spate of suicides amongst people working for one part of GEC-Marconi.

    And the happy fun angle is that SAD lamps weren't really a thing -- indeed, SAD wasn't recognized as a condition -- until the late 1990s, if I remember correctly.

    Thanks: I'd always wondered about the GEC-Marconi suicide cluster, and this is the first plausible explanation I've heard. (The 25 deaths took place over a 18 year time span and they were working on different projects, making an actual murderous conspiracy look rather implausible.)

    504:

    Hard sciences v soft sciences.

    In sf, it' simple: hard sciences are things like physics and chemistry. Soft sciences are like psychology.

    Economics? ROTFL! Here, I'll put a macroeconomist I worked with (he was doing programming and using R) with any [Ll]ibertarian microeconomist, and make popcorn and watch the fight.

    505:

    I am reminded of the aphorism, that I believe I read in a book by Gamow many, many years ago, that the better a theoretical physicist is, the further they need to be kept away from labs. He mentions someone, Schroedinger, perhaps, who was on a train that stopped for a short time about three miles from a college lab, and a very expensive piece of lab glassware in the physics lab was dropped and broken.

    The electrician I had that did my upgrade, and the folks in hardware stores give me Looks, when I talk about doing my damnedest to stay in code when doing wiring in my own house. Here, they assure me that really, Romac is find, and I don't need conduit or armored cable inside the house....

    506:

    Re: Tech impact on behavior

    Sat down for a rest in the middle of putting up seasonal decorations and when I clicked on Google news this story came up. Curious whether it's only the squirrels in Ontario that are doing this, and why. Weird.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/squirrels-steal-hundreds-of-bulbs-1.5828363

    507:

    I believe the definition of a theoretical physicist is one who's existence can be inferred from the theory but who is never observed in the laboratory.

    "Glide Path" by Arthur C. Clarke, is a lightly fictionalised version of his time in WWII working on the Ground Controlled Approach radar system. The character of Professor Schuster is basically Luis Alvarez. In one episode Schuster/Alvarez tries to run his 100 watt soldering iron off a shaver resistor (used as a US/UK voltage converter) and burns it out. He also fails to fix the radio he was trying to repair.

    508:

    Back in the 80s when I worked for BNR in Edmonton, SaskTel had troubles with gophers and fibre-optic cables. Turned out that gophers really like the taste of fibre and would dig along the run chewing it up.

    I'd bet that something in the insulation tastes good to the squirrels, which is why they're chewing the wiring. The bulbs look to be about the right size and weight (and shape) to probably trigger their "gather nuts and bury" instinct.

    509:

    On the GEC-Marconi suicides:

    I should add that "plausible" is the key word here. I heard this from a colleague; I'm not aware of any official report or anything. Also it may just have been a case of clustering illusion. But this is a fiction discussion, and it makes a nice story.

    510:

    Feynman would have fixed the radio.

    511:

    OTOH: Charles, what about the crib sheet for The Labyrinth Index?

    I thought I already did one?

    If not, well, remind me next week. (Right now, am writing.)

    Reminding.

    But please do it only if it would not interrupt your writing. We (I think I can speak for everyone here) just love that.

    512:

    "You've completely misunderstood" is your line, mostly, it's something you write a lot here. But in this case I can turn that around and honestly claim that you've misunderstood the main thrust of my comments above here, and the detailed point in a number of cases (especially about maths).

    Yes, that "soft" sciences tackle the more difficult topics, less amenable to or tractable with the methods that gave the "hard" sciences their enormous success, isn't a new observation, I might have made it myself. It doesn't help with defining and/or defending this "hard" versus "soft" distinction though, and I think in the absence of a clear definition we have to treat the distinction itself and being at least a little bit bullshit. I think my thought that it involves an epistemological observation stands as being the most pertinent question.

    In fact your remarks about dogmatism are telling. I think people who like to make the "hard" versus "soft" distinction and apply the term "hard" to their own discipline are the very people who are less likely to even consider the epistemological ground on which they are standing, much less willing to problematise it as part of their working understanding of their discipline. They might believe that it is "hard", and epistemological questioning is only for "soft" sciences. Some people will point to the scientific method here as a basis, but far fewer can articulate why it brings special epistemological credence, and perhaps fewer still can explain the situations where it cannot. All models are approximations of reality, after all, otherwise we're in spherical cow territory.

    I am not sure how you get to me denying there are imperfections in steel or mistakes made in construction, but it certainly isn't an outcome of my discussion above (maybe if you squint and read it just so...): at one stage I even explicitly say I'm not denying engineers contribute to knowledge. I think you possibly don't grasp the point I'm trying to make there, which is really about the purposeful intent of creating knowledge. You could think of it as a posture: to me science is inherently descriptive, its posture is to explain why certain preconditions lead to certain outcomes, while technology is prescriptive, it explains what you must do to achieve certain outcomes. Obviously that distinction involves considerable overlap and in some disciplines disappears altogether. Yet it is a real distinction that describes an important difference in the behaviour of researchers, something that cannot be said for the "hard" versus "soft" distinction.

    I completely agree with your remarks about precision, by the way. Not just every discipline, every form of organised human activity has its own version of people who want useless and/or unfeasible precision in their measurements.

    On mathematics, I was not quite successfully paraphrasing the quip that numbers are most interesting when they stop being about quantity. I think you're slipping into the "Any, All, Some, None" problem we're all prone to here - it's certainly something I am prone to do when I haven't thought something through, and further reflection on someone else's position often leads to a "are they really saying that, or is it actually that" moment for me. I'm not saying that no interesting mathematics is about quantity, far from it. But a lot isn't, and sometimes avoiding resolving quantity is the very thing that makes it useful. There were several subthreads in that other discussion, and that point was definitely one of them, although you were making a different point (and I think kept saying that wanting to discuss that point represented a misunderstanding of the point you were making). Also, sometimes summary across diverse and not-necessarily-related topics looks like conflation. Oh well.

    513:

    Re: '... something in the insulation tastes good to the squirrels, which is why they're chewing the wiring.'

    I'm going check with one of my sibs if this behavior has shown up in her area. The squirrels in the GTA seem able to eat anything: bulbs (daffodils and muscari included) rarely last more than one year.

    514:

    Romac is find, and I don't need conduit or armored cable inside the house....

    I think you mean Romex which is a brand of NM Electrical Cable.

    But I also think you lived in Chicago for a while. And as best I recall they are TJE major city that goes nuts about requiring everything in armored cable or conduit. Maybe NYC also.

    Most places don't require it but more and more you have to protect where nails and screws might hit it.

    https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=wire+protection+plates

    515:

    Let me assure you that fire ants will eat electrical insulation.

    516:

    hard sciences are things like physics and chemistry. Soft sciences are like psychology.

    Economics?

    Economics is just applied psychology.

    517:

    Also Philly, and they want code, too.

    A lot of big cities are really strict. There have been these things called "multi-alarm fires" that have burned many city blocks, as well as "the Great Chicago Fire", so you will consider that it's possible that they have DAMN GOOD REASON for requiring code.

    Yeah, Romex.

    518:

    I'd bet that something in the insulation tastes good to the squirrels, which is why they're chewing the wiring. The bulbs look to be about the right size and weight (and shape) to probably trigger their "gather nuts and bury" instinct.

    Way back in ancient of days the engineering college had an old building with a newer building grafted on. The older one pre-dated WWII. Vending machines were in the old building common area. No air conditioning. When it got hot they opened up the windows. These were maybe 15' above ground.

    Those of us there one summer noticed a lot of trash along the sidewalk leading to the entrance of said common areas. After a while we noticed it was all candy bar wrappers.

    Squirrels had discovered the storage location of the candy for the vending machines and were raiding periodically. Then would sit in the trees dropping the wrappers down as they ate. I suspect these were some of the un-healthiest squirrels on the planet that summer.

    519:

    And that statement, by itself, demonstrates why it's a soft science. I mean, given that you completely left out "politics", and outright corruption*.

    As for psychiatry, other than the use of drugs, show me repeatability. Psychology, though more reliable, still is a statistical problem, it's not like a chemistry experiment that everybody in a class will get the same result.

    • Oh, yes, you should invest in the market... never mind that you don't know what to read, aren't willing to be up with the Asian markets open, and again when Europe opens, and never mind that the real money is running arbitrage programs on servers that are co-located with the stock market computers, so speed of light means that they beat your bid, 100% of the time.
    520:

    running arbitrage programs on servers that are co-located with the stock market computers

    The real question is whether the value created by that activity is real money, or just the distilled essence of the perineal sweat of a million stockbrokers. The next question is whether, if you took that essence and sprayed it on a squirrel, then let that squirrel loose in the NYSE, that squirrel would become the king of the stockbrokers.

    521:

    Damian Partly or maybe mostly because ... The "hard" sciences, especially physics have already had their epistemological fights - & eventually won all of them . Almost every single "theological" question posed from the beginning of records, that was argued over, with much blood spilt, has been answered by physics/mathematics, even though there are STILL religious fuckwits who won't acknowledge it. Having fought so many battles against dogma & obscurantism makes the physicists, justifiably, somewhat arrogant. Now, of course the really interesting stuff, as indicated by the "Inequalities" discussion referred to previously ... begins ( again ) Note that the epistemological questions might be new ones - NOT proposed by theologians or any other form of idiot believers in BigSkyFairy - & I'm not sure that the penny has really dropped, yet.

    "Precision" IS NOT ANYTHING LIKE "Accuracy" - always choose accuracy over precision, if you have a truly binary choice ....

    522:

    I'm imagining a statement like: "Well I've been meaning to learn R for a while, but for the moment I'm just sticking with yelling". It certainly rings true...

    523:

    I'm imagining a statement like: "Well I've been meaning to learn R for a while, but for the moment I'm just sticking with yelling". It certainly rings true...

    Without R, there is much less to yell about...

    Note that ecologists are known as statistical bottom-feeders. We don't invent methods, we swipe them from other fields. Actually, there are a number of ecologists/statisticians, but all the methods I used came from somewhere else, normally sociology, because they get more money and simpler systems in which to learn how to deal with crappy data.

    524:

    Talking of both Accuracy & Precision .. Please use an incognito window, to be sure .... READ THIS - referring to a remeasurement of the Fine Structure Constant.

    525:

    Quite so, not the same thing. The other thing that always seems to be annoyingly contentious is how, where the interesting thing is a series of measurements in relation to each other, you don't really need to care about a systematic error that is a constant, though that seems to boil down to having an argument over where zero should be (something that usually doesn't really matter). Of course the circumstances where a systematic error is constant might be limited, depending on what you're measuring.

    526:

    Frank,

    About the pipe, I've seen worse.

    There was a box culvert with two sections, each 10 feet wide and five feet high. It was time to rebuild it, so they made the mistake of reversing the numbers. 5 feet wide and ten feet high, thus narrowing the whole and burying half. Boy, was that embarrassing when we caught it in review.

    I am always amazed that people have trouble with such a simple distinction between "hard" and "soft" science.

    "Hard" science deals with physical experiments that can be replicated by others.

    • No one can argue with the results.

    "Soft" science is about opinion and politics.

    • Twenty people, looking at the same thing, will come up with twenty different opinions, then the politicking starts to build "consensus". That's not science.

    That's how Pluto got demoted from being a planet. It was voted on.

    That's how they voted on the age of the Universe. In the 1980s they had a range of 10 to 20 billion years. "Consensus" got it down to 13.76 billion years. No science involved.

    Elderly Cynic @500,

    You are right, Black Holes do not exist.

    The equation that everybody refers to by Schwarzschild was actually misinterpreted after his death in WWI by Hilbert. Basically the small "r" is not a radius, so there is no Schwarzschild radius.

    There is a two part lecture discussing the problem in detail.

    STEPHEN CROTHERS: Black Holes & Relativity, Part One | EU 2013

    STEPHEN CROTHERS: Black Holes & Relativity, Part Two | EU 2013

    Stephen J. Crothers discusses more on his website.

    The Black Hole, the Big Bang, and Modern Physics

    527:

    I think we've got a difference of definition on "hard" versus "soft" sciences.

    I'm a bit closer to EC with the idea that the spectrum runs a bit more from ahistorical to historical. With ahistorical research, the system's past state doesn't particularly matter, while it definitely does matter for the softer sciences. As an example, a civil engineer won't take the Roman history of building into account when designing a reinforced concrete structure, but an ecologist working in formerly Roman areas would be idiotic to ignore classical-era terracing under the ancient forest he's working on, because of the profound effects on soil structure and how they affect where plants and animals live now. I'm not going to say that "my science is more complex than your science is," because I have no clue how to build a sustainable infrastructure out of reinforced concrete. But the difference in things like repeatability means that approaches and outcomes are quite profound. I'd note that evolution and cosmology are both historical sciences. That doesn't particularly make them fluffy, but it means that they're different from biomedical research or engineering, which are more ahistorical and aim for massive repeatability.

    The politicization isn't part of the science necessarily, it's put onto it from above. For example, nuclear power, water management, and development are heavily politicized, even before you get to the civil engineering components, while much biology is not.

    528:

    Frank,

    Of course you would say that, because you are expressing your personal opinion.

    Put twenty stone faced engineers in a room and they will have no way to argue about an experiment. They have to accept the results.

    Put twenty Ecologists in a room and they will argue massively until they reach the political consensus opinion for the group, so that the funders get what they paid for.

    Such is life.

    529:

    Argh.

    There is a reason for the FSC. That we don't know it yet simply means we're still looking for more data. Saying "they've given up"... have they... or are they looking for more data?

    530:

    "Stephen J. Crothers (1957–) is a handyman/gardener and part-time amateur scientist who claims that black holes do not exist, and..." third or fourth hit on a search on his name.

    Being a Mad Scientist, with a hard science background, I assure you they do.

    Why, the research starship in my novel got to one, and had a very bad incident, so I can assure you they are as advertised.

    531:

    Well it's more that the scientific method, as it is, is a sort of cookie cutter approach that always works for certain classes of problem. For others it works sometimes and others still not at all. There can be many reasons: being impractical or unethical to devise experiments is a big constraint. What I was saying in the other thread about building stairs sort of applies. If you want bog standard off-the-shelf stairs you can order prefab stringers, or follow a pattern that is written into the building code. That's equivalent to using the epistemology that comes with using the scientific method, as practiced in most disciplines. If for some reason a standard stair stringer doesn't meet your requirements, you can do the maths and solve the geometry and engineering problems then get your result signed off by someone authorised to do so. You almost always want to take the first approach if it's practical. But if it isn't you need to defend your epistemology within your own body of work.

    For allynh, those classes of problem for which the scientific method doesn't work are inherently "political", and he associates a bunch of stuff with with that which IMHO is not an accurate representation of how it actually works. But that's something we all do to an extent - like I said above, when someone's task is quite different to yours, you go by what you see of it and focus on your perception of the differences. Sometimes that means attributing less nuance and rigour. We tend to think that those who are different to us are all the same.

    This gets this mixed up with a distinction about subjectivity and objectivity which isn't entirely helpful either, partly because (also IMHO) the standard assumptions around such a distinction miss an important detail about how it that works in practice, which is a lot more like your distinction between accuracy and precision. You can't measure a piece of timber to micron accuracy using a tape measure, but two people using the same tape measure will usually produce a similar figure. Similarly it's quite possible to tell that an animal has left a clearing (for instance). There's no reason to expect two different people to note this fact differently. They might differ on why, that is whether it's because another animal made a sound that frightened it away, or it just got bored and wandered off, and that sort of thing wouldn't be recoverable from the observation. But it's still a data point, and it still has objective meaning.

    Even more for subjectivity, say you have an olive, an orange, a grapefruit and a watermelon and you're asked to describe them in terms of their sizes relative to a marble, a ping pong ball, a cricket ball, a football and a beach ball. Maybe it's a group task. Maybe you don't get an actual marble, ping pong ball, cricket ball and beach ball. Maybe you get to say "between x and y" or "just a bit bigger than x". There's a lot of subjective evaluation involved, but you would not expect the end result to be inaccurate, nor would you expect it to be unrepeatable.

    The interesting aside is that the meanings for subjective and objective are actually the same meanings we use when we describe the subject and object of a sentence. All measurement is active, which means the same thing as subjective, because it is an action that someone must do. We believe the measurement to be objective, because we see it as an innate property of the passive object. When we work on eliminating measurement error it is by reference to another object, and when we're not able to do that, the commonplace usage of "subjective" arises. The reference object can be conceptual, however, and some people think that means it can't be rigorous. I'm not doing the topic justice here, it's complicated to explain and I'm in a mid morning vague. We'll see how many more people's buttons can be pressed later maybe...

    532:

    Hard vs Soft sciences? A physician told me once the reason sciences such as biology are referred to as soft is because they all ultimately deal with 'squishy' things like bodies, whether animal,human or vegetable that are filled with yucky stuff, and will ultimately always surprise you with their unpredictability because they all have genes that allow for change.

    533:

    I like your distinction about the importance of historicity. It's similar to an observation I've made myself, though I don't think I had the concept of hard versus soft in mind. My observation is that in teaching some disciplines, it is important to teach the historical progression of the discipline itself and include its historical context. In others it's not important at all.

    The value of pi is a fact about the universe, but whether it's important for us to know about Archimedes and how pi was first approximated is another question. I personally like to think it's helpful and an important part of our equipment for understanding the world. But for the "will this be on the exam?" types, with no space in their heads for unnecessary information, it might be a different story. I should (perhaps slightly implausibly) point out I'm not intentionally dissing that, I even think I understand it, why someone would want to take that approach. I just don't myself, I want to know more than I'll ever actually be able to learn.

    534:

    Re: 'For others it works sometimes and others still not at all.'

    IMO, if the scientific method doesn't work, you:

    (a) need more data; (b) need data that can be 'measure'/examined using quant approaches;* (c) need to do a comprehensive survey (list/itemization/inventory) of whatever it is you're studying before experimenting;** (d) other (unknown unknowns).

    • Even a rating scale can work. ** Some time ago had to review a large (expensive) multi-country study at work. One of the countries looked 'off' on a few key items and my first reaction was 'Shit - they screwed up their sample!!'. Then I checked the last few years of census data for that country: Nope, the study sample was almost spot on (i.e., statistically no diff). So my lesson learned is that if you're doing a psych or other 'soft sci' study where you don't have access to a 'census', you run the risk of tossing out good data because they look weird vs. all of the other stuff you've already studied. It's a precarious feedback loop/system: the observational data (sometimes small to the point of being 'qual') vs. math (stats or whatever other math) and/or prior studies on something else. This is where the other key aspect of the scientific method comes in: test-retest to check repeatability of results.
    535:

    That's one aspect, yes, but a more salient aspect is the complexity. As things get more complex, you start being unable to control for all the factors, then start being unable to measure them, and then get to where you can't even identify them!

    Both the historical aspect and the above applies as much to the 'hard' sciences as to the 'soft' ones. I don't hear many people demanding that cosmologists or geologists must repeat their experiment under controlled conditions before it can be accepted, for example :-)

    Engineering is no different, once you get beyond the trivial forms taught at school etc. and the results of experiments are often disputed. Even now, turbulent flow results are open to challenge, and it gets much worse as soon as you bring in things like combustion and transsonic speeds. I worked with people who were under contract from Rolls Royce to model a jet engine, which has all of those in a highly non-static chamber. Them as knows, usually gibber at that point.

    536:

    Quite. The Schwarzschild solution isn't hard to derive (even I could do it once, and it wasn't my area), and is an inevitable consequence of Einstein's formula for general relativity. While the value of the radius is a mathematical abstraction, the existence of an event horizon isn't. There are other formulations where there is a black hole but no event horizon (i.e. it's a point singularity) and others where there is no black hole (just a very dark grey one), but they are not currently in favour.

    Anyway, I wasn't referring to that by 'black hole diving', but to the people who extrapolate through Einstein's formula to blither on about what goes on inside a black hole, on things like Tipler cylinders and so on. And, as everyone who was awake in school mathematics lessons knows, You Just Do Not Do That.

    537:

    Yea well, not knowing, I apparently must gibber helplessly anyway. :)

    538:

    Put twenty stone faced engineers in a room and they will have no way to argue about an experiment. They have to accept the results.

    I spent five years working as an engineer. That doesn't describe the engineers I worked with. Lots of arguing about whether the results of a test show what the experimenter thinks they do, or even if they are valid. Concrete composition, network designs — doesn't matter the branch, there's a lot of room for arguments - and a lot of room for egos.

    One of the chaps I know is on the panel that certifies engineers professional status. According to him, there's a lot of room for politics in engineering design, especially around safety. Is this building safe? It hasn't fallen over yet, but will it survive and earthquake/flood/hurricane/fire…? Lots of arguing. Those who argue 'meets code' is good enough vs. those who want higher standards. (For example.)

    You're holding up civil engineers as being more rigorous than ecologists?

    There's a whole development in Cochrane that is likely to slide into the valley (based on the underlying geology, according to my brother-in-law the geophysicist) that was designed by and approved by civil engineers. Meets code. No comprehension that the code might not be adequate, or that 50 years is too short a timeline of experience for extreme weather events. Alberta's had six of the ten most expensive natural disasters in Canada, and yet civil engineering there is still using outdated (and inadequate) models for deciding on how much to over-engineer structures so they survive.

    (And what's the code that civil engineers follow? A consensus document!)

    Sorry, as an engineer I'm with Frank here.

    539:

    To paraphrase Mark:

    "Black Holes are real, because I wrote a novel where they actually encounter one."

    Now that is classic whitroth.

    I can use that.

    Thanks...

    That's an example of where people need to keep the status quo because their own work depends on it.

    Look at Arthur C. Clarke, he is considered to be Hard SF, yet virtually all of his books are actually Science Fantasy now.

    An extreme case is Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series. He wrote them based on what was known at the time, but now they are wildly outdated.

    wiki - Lucky Starr series

    That's not a problem for me. The books are still fun reads. I simply look at them as being in a different copy Solar System than our dull boring copy Solar System

    The book that fails that test is Poul Anderson's The Avatar. When it came out in 1979 it was amazing. It was a tour of all the different star systems that they thought existed at the time. But when I tried to read it a few years ago, it was simply wrong. Most of the stars that he wrote about are physically impossible, not even Fantasy.

    I haven't read Niven for twenty years. I loved all of his books as they came out. Now, they are filled with physically impossible systems and I can't read them. I read the Ringworld series many times, now I can't look at Ringworld because of the utter fail in understanding gravity. A ribbon, a million miles wide, would have all of the air, water, loose soil gather in the middle of that ribbon. Gravity pulls everything together. The atmosphere, etc..., would not lie flat against the surface of the spinning ring, but in a wet soggy hump.

    The only way to have a ringworld work is if a field tells space how to act on that surface, the same way people have no problem walking around in the Enterprise while it's in motion.

    This has been an astonishingly productive thread.

    BTW, I noticed that the people who are still supporting Black Holes did not bother to watch the lecture or read his work. That is classic, and I can use that.

    Thanks as well.

    540:

    I can't tell from your post whether you realized I was being funny.

    On the other hand, it seems that you're asserting that this guy is right, and that there are no black holes, which are generally considered settled.

    If not, what's in the center of all galaxies?

    541:

    Never read "Palimpsest" until now. Now I did. I understand (for varying definitions of "understand") you much better.

    542:

    whitroth @540, said: If not, what's in the center of all galaxies?

    "My god! It's full of stars." - 2001 Space Odyssey

    In the 1980s they were looking at the outer edges of galaxies and realized that those stars were moving faster than they should. It was as if the galaxy was a solid disk, like a record on a turntable. In answer to that observation, they proposed that something called "Dark Matter" filled the volume around each galaxy, so that the visible stars were moving in that volume of "Dark Matter".

    That of course makes no sense. Even if "Dark Matter" existed, if the stars were following Newtonian gravity the stars would still move at slower speeds as predicted by Newton. Something else, not gravity, was keeping the galaxy moving as a disk.

    99% of all matter is Plasma. The galaxies move together like a classic homopolar motor. The same as the disk that spins in your electric meter.

    Electricity rules at those scales, not gravity.

    Watch this NOVA episode.

    BTW, Notice all of the usual suspects appearing as talking heads.

    Monster of the Milky Way

    Look at minute 5 to 20 and they are able to image in infrared the stars orbiting the center of the galaxy. They can't see anything that the stars are orbiting around, so they assume that it is a Black Hole. It should be visible in infrared because of the accretion disk. Notice at the 43 minute mark that they image the actual center of the Milky Way and think that the flares they see is matter falling into the accretion disk. That the accretion disk is receiving only a limited amount of material.

    What is actually happening is that the stars are moving around the center of a massive electric field that engulfs the whole galaxy. The occasional flash is from material briefly going into "glow mode" at that intense central pinch.

    There is no accretion disk, because there is no Black Hole, because as Crothers has shown, they are impossible.

    The astronomers are interpreting what they see as a Black Hole, because that is all that they are allowed by consensus to say. If you don't follow consensus, you lose funding and get kicked off telescopes. That is what happened to Halton Arp when he started publishing about how quasars were directly linked to local galaxies, rather than being billions of light years away.

    But, I suspect that I have already lost your interest long before this point.

    Until you can explain the anomalous motion of the galaxy, which violates Newtonian gravity, you cannot dismiss Electricity as the controlling force.

    543:

    Um, you do remember that, back on April 10,2019, NASA and a bunch of other institutions announced the first image of the black hole in the center of M87, by the Event Horizon Telescope (e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history)?

    Currently the EHT consortium is working on an upgrade to image Sagittarius A* in the center of our galaxy. Sometimes it's easier to see something that has less stuff obscuring it, as with the center of M87 relative to us. https://www.space.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-photos-future.html

    In any case, purportedly "there is no "belief" or wishful thinking in Civil Engineering." I'd be interested in how you evaluate this evidence and whether you are willing to modify your theory about the non-existence of black holes in light of it.

    544:

    By the way, there is a field called plasma astrophysics. So it's possible to see the evidence for Allynh's claims, to the degree that people who are studying the field are interested in them.

    545:

    This is before the nonsense of "Dark Matter".

    Carl Sagan - Cosmos - Galaxies

    This is how they thought the stars moved in the galaxy. Notice around 3 minutes that the center spins faster that the outer stars. That is not what they found when they actually measured the motion. Then at minute 7 he starts to say that the outer stars rotate slower than the center stars, then the video clip ends.

    It was in the 1980s when they found that the outer stars were not moving as Newtonian gravity demanded.

    546:

    The problem with your idea about Ringworld is that you're only right first, over geological time, and second, if there are no other forces acting on the air/water/soil. If the water is a liquid and the air is composed of gases (rather than liquids or solids, as would happen when things are very cold) you'll certainly get weather, which will spread the air around, and that will be driven by changes in heat due the action of the shadow squares. (If the weather becomes too regular or assumes a dangerous pattern , the controllers would probably make some minor changes to the rotational speed of the shadow squares to alter the pattern, or if necessary, fire their "meteor defense" to alter weather patterns.)

    Also, the Ringworld is built of unobtanium, (scrith) so I wouldn't expect a quick breakdown due to gravity, and I suspect the Protectors who built it are smart enough to make sure things stay well mixed up. (Assuming the Puppeteers hadn't interfered.)

    This may, in part, explain why the presence of the Slaver Sunflowers was allowed - to help keep the air mixed/moving.

    The big problem with the Ringworld as initially described was that it was unstable - and Niven wrote "The Ringworld Engineers" in part to deal with the engineering issues after MIT students attending the 1971 World Science Fiction marched through the hallways chanting "The Ringworld is Unstable."

    547:

    The rotation curve of galaxies was the first evidence for dark matter, but it's far from the only evidence.

    These theories of electric attraction, or modified gravity might work to "fix" that original issue, but they do nothing to fix the observations of galaxies with different amounts of dark matter or gravitational lensing or galaxies that collide and the gas collides and clumps while the dark matter just passes through the collision like it isn't there.

    We can see the stars around sagittarius* orbiting around Something that's heavy, millions of solar masses, that doesn't emit any light.

    The evidence for black holes is about as firm as the evidence for hats.

    548:

    I've heard that explanation before too and it works just about as well as anything offered here. It doesn't account for geology I guess, unless the "hard/soft" folks actually do see that as "hard" (still not clear on that). I don't see why they would if biology is "soft", but you can never really tell where there are obviously unconscious biases at work. Of course geology, being the home of the Mohs scale, has a certain claim on the concept of hardness as an empirical measure, but I guess not in the way people are talking about here.

    Generally though, when people, especially older men, talk about things being hard or soft, and they are not using the Mohs scale (or alternatively megapascals), I assume they are (really) talking about penises. But I suspect that's more than enough from me on this topic.

    549:

    Allynh Age of the Universe was not "voted on" - though 13.76 does have error-bars, actually. If not Black Holes, then how do you explain the phenomena that we can see across many EM-wavelengths? OTOH - I agree that "String theory" is actually a complete cats-cradle of fertile imagination.

    Ah ( 542 ) - you are an "Electric Universe" person ... um, err I think I'm going to start backing away, very slowly & carefully. Actually, I might RUN AWAY!

    And - @ 528 Bollocks, I'm afraid

    SFR One of the really important things with the "Scientific Method" is - ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION. Something R M Pirsig noted, incidentally. In fact, many , if not all major advances of knowleege have been made by finally asking the right question. Look at the historical example of the "Four Elements" - which actually turn out to be the four states of matter, because different questions were asked.

    EC Even now, turbulent flow results are open to challenge Ah yes, well, can you solve the Navier-Stokes equation for all circumstances? Maybe not? A problem I have encountered several times in real life & never even tried for an exact mathematical solution, just went for "good enough" by practical trial & error, based on previous observations, rough calculations for "ball-park" & quite frankly, sticking a wetted finger in the air to test for which way the wind was blowing (!)

    550:

    In fact, many , if not all major advances of knowleege have been made by finally asking the right question.

    Which is one of the most genius aspects of Douglas Adams.

    Actually something I'm faced with at the moment. Picking a topic is easy enough, but getting the research question just right isn't. I think I'll be okay once I let go of trying to make it funny.

    551:

    For an example of the failure modes of "Its built to code, so don't worry" engineering, see the ongoing Grenfell Tower post-mortem.

    The full story is long and complex, with lots of buck-passing at every stage. But the basic core is that flammable cladding was put on an apartment block, allowing a minor fire in one flat to spread across the whole of the outside of the building, killing 72 people.

    In fact the way the cladding at Grenfell was assenbled did not meet the code, but each component did, and nobody looked hard enough to notice, or possibly took a decision not to push back if they did.

    552:

    Re: 'The rotation curve of galaxies was the first evidence for dark matter, but it's far from the only evidence.'

    This also touches on Greg's comment about asking the right question which can also mean finding a closely related variable that you might actually be able to measure.

    And in the continuing tradition of fundamental discoveries in physics that alternately examine the very large and the very small for hints, we have ...

    https://phys.org/news/2020-12-hints-dark-bosons.html

    553:

    "As for psychiatry, other than the use of drugs, show me repeatability. Psychology, though more reliable, still is a statistical problem, it's not like a chemistry experiment that everybody in a class will get the same result."

    As a statistician whose first love was and always will be design of experiments, I find this attitude funny.

    554:

    "If not, what's in the center of all galaxies?"

    You have to ask? On THIS forum? An Elder God, of course.

    555:

    Generally though, when people, especially older men, talk about things being hard or soft

    You're partly right — the distinction has a gendered element. The so-called 'hard' sciences are still generally male subjects, while women end up in the 'soft' fields.

    556:

    Actually something I'm faced with at the moment. Picking a topic is easy enough, but getting the research question just right isn't. I think I'll be okay once I let go of trying to make it funny.

    My father, while he was a research scientist, told me that a competent scientist can answer a question, a good scientist can ask a good question, and a great scientist can tell if the question is worth answering. (Or maybe worth asking — old memories are unreliable.)

    557:

    it's not like a chemistry experiment that everybody in a class will get the same result

    I've never had a chemistry class where everyone gets the same result.

    558:

    My father, while he was a research scientist, told me that a competent scientist can answer a question, a good scientist can ask a good question, and a great scientist can tell if the question is worth answering. (Or maybe worth asking — old memories are unreliable.)

    You know, there's the one part of science that nobody's touched on: the willingness to admit one is wrong when faced with data that contradicts someone's hypothesis.

    This is the part that distinguishes science from religion. Unfortunately, this takes courage and character, and these seem to be in short supply these days.

    559:

    "I've never had a chemistry class where everyone gets the same result. "

    I also know a statistician/chemist who's trying to bring in experimental design to chemistry, despite the pre-WWII attitude of the professors towards statistics.

    560:

    Heteromeles @543 said: I'd be interested in how you evaluate this evidence and whether you are willing to modify your theory about the non-existence of black holes in light of it.

    The first link you give has a typo at the end. You have to remove the )/ at the end and refresh the link, then you end up at the web page.

    I remember seeing the pictures when they came out, and sad to say they are simply great examples of consensus science being reported by people who make their living spreading the "Good News" of Scientism.

    You do realize that you have the link to Crothers website where you can read his papers and find whatever errors he has made. If you want to argue about what he has written, then argue with him, not me. I'm confident that he would welcome your comments, as long as you show him precisely where he is wrong.

    That's the point that people seem to be missing. Science is about "precision". You try to be as precise as possible, so that people can tell you precisely were you are wrong.

    To simply go after me, demanding my comments, when I've already pointed you to all of the information you need, is the classic example of the cult of Scientism. Especially since you clearly have not watched the lecture, or read any of the papers on his website.

    After all, Frank, you wouldn't want to be like one of those " 'unSavory cultists" that you ranted about @274. Would you.

    And:

    Troutwaxer @546

    The ribbon of scrith would be just fine, it's all of the matter in that million mile wide ribbon that would be pulled together. Gravity pulls in all directions, not just down.

    I fixed that on my stuff by having a field that shapes space locally so that it ignores that sideways pull, the same way that a field lets people walk around on the Enterprise while it is in motion. If you didn't have a field on the Enterprise, people would be flung around every time they rotated or moved.

    That is how people are killed during battle in the HonorVerse stories as well. The compensator fails, and people are hit with 500 gravities of acceleration. Yikes!

    gasdive @547

    Newtonian gravity should apply at all scales in the mechanical universe. The ad hoc inclusion of "Dark Matter" to explain the motion violates Newtonian gravity.

    That "Something" is the center of the electric field that holds the galaxy together, not a physical object.

    Greg Tingey @549

    Never change. You make a great curmudgeon character for Story.

    Thanks to everyone for this great thread. Now I have novels to write.

    561:

    At least its chemistry - he might manage it this century. Physics, on the other hand, ....

    562:

    I've never had a chemistry class where everyone gets the same result.

    I had a great chemistry teacher in high school. He didn't care what answer you got in experiments. He mostly cared about how you explained the answer. Or at least tried to explain.

    563:

    That's the point that people seem to be missing. Science is about "precision". You try to be as precise as possible, so that people can tell you precisely were you are wrong.

    Um, no. There's precision (the error bar) and accuracy (how close the mean is to reality). It's better explained as the clustering of the bullets from firing (its precision) and where the cluster is relative to the bullseye (accuracy). A highly precise but inaccurate gun (like a sniper rifle with a misaligned scope) is much less useful than an imprecise but highly accurate gun (like a properly aligned shotgun or machine gun)

    Apparently you favor high precision science. Unfortunately, that says precisely nothing about the accuracy of your science. That's too bad, because accuracy matters rather more than precision when you're trying to get it right.

    564:

    Pigeon @ 482: ...and when the installation was completed one of the guys indicated his portable radio and said "this shouldn't be working, should it?"

    Could be, I dunno. I never went inside the completed house. When we finished the framing & installing the screen they had just barely begun the dry wall and it didn't have the windows & doors installed (which is why I don't know what they were going to do about covering them).

    It wasn't the strangest house I ever helped build.

    565:

    I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" with regard to the construction equipment stuck in the basement plot point. I just learned from the article that the book is set in West Newbury, MA. That is, of course, no distance at all from Innsmouth, MA.

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

    566:

    As we used to say on usenet, BZZZT! Thank you for playing.

    You seem to have missed that EINSTEINIAN GRAVITY was first proven correct with the motion of Mercury, about a century ago.

    567:

    Really? Show me any group of psychiatrists, not using drugs, who achieve even similar results on a majority of their patients.

    For your reading pleasure, I recommend One Flew Over the Coocoo's Nest and Haldeman's 1968.

    568:

    I see no special reason for the thread to mutate this way....

    Btw, is programming a hard or soft science, asks the guy with a daughter who's been programming for Boeing for a goodly number of years.

    569:

    The ribbon of scrith would be just fine, it's all of the matter in that million mile wide ribbon that would be pulled together. Gravity pulls in all directions, not just down.

    I fixed that on my stuff by having a field that shapes space locally so that it ignores that sideways pull, the same way that a field lets people walk around on the Enterprise while it is in motion.

    That sounds like a lot more work than just having a smooth upward arc in the scrith to counterbalance gravitational attraction. Given the width of the ribbon, a convex belly along the center might well go unnoticed to a casual observer like Louis Wu. It's also very simple to add at the design stage and requires no maintenance.

    570:

    Do the majority of the students, at least the ones who follow directions, achieve results similar to that expected? Do any group of them find dissimilar results, and to those dissimilar results vaguely agree with each other?

    571:

    That's the point that people seem to be missing. Science is about "precision".

    Oh dear, are we going to have the precision vs accuracy talk again?

    572:

    Do the majority of the students, at least the ones who follow directions, achieve results similar to that expected?

    Generally, but "most students get similar results" is not the same thing as "everybody in a class will get the same result".

    That applies to all lab classes I've been in (both as student and instructor, school and university). Most people get close to the expected result, but very few consistently get bang-on the predicted values. Chemistry, physics, biology, civil engineering… all had variations in results.

    Indeed, I remember one civil engineering lab when we were learning about concrete. Had to mix up samples in various proportions and make slump tests, then a week later we tested the samples for strength. One group consistently got really slump concrete, even with the professor watching them mix it up. So the professor (a professional civil engineer) added a bit of cement on the assumption that somehow they hadn't added enough the first time (and that he hadn't noticed that).

    That sample was the strongest one in the class, when it was supposed to be one of the weakest by the slump test. Total statistical outlier. Obviously the strength was from the extra cement, but they never figured out why it slumped more than it 'should' have.

    The hard-headed civil engineering profs never did settle on a hypothesis they could agree on…

    573:

    really slump concrete

    Really slumpy concrete. Damn autocorrect.

    574:

    David L @ 501:

    So if you want to build a Faraday cage with windows, use UV-reflective glass.

    I think that for this and other reasons the way UV-reflective glass is mostly made these days doesn't do this.

    There is also a time frame (80s/90s?) in the US where rigid insulation blocks that were put between studs in exterior house walls had a similar coating. Which also makes for such a situation.

    This would have been 1972 in the Quail Hollow area of North Raleigh. The house was built on a brick foundation smeared with roofing cement below grade level. The exterior sheathing would have been some kind of fiberboard with plywood stiffeners at the corners. Regular 2x10 lumber for floor joists with plywood subfloors/floors (only a subfloor if it was going to get wall to wall carpet). 2x4 stud walls with 2x6 ceiling joists & rafters (except for a couple of A-Frame designs that had 2x8 rafters and no ceiling joists. Regular paper backed roll fiberglass between studs & ceiling joists before the dry wall was installed. Sometimes not in the ceiling because they were going to come along later and blow in loose fiberglass in the attic.

    Pre-hung cased windows & doors, and we usually installed any (pre-assembled) sliding glass doors.

    We just did the framing & boxing, covering the roof with a layer of roofing felt. Another crew came in to install the insulation and a third crew did the drywall.

    The Faraday Cage house was a one off where we had to linger & go back behind the electricians, plumbers & insulators to install the screen. I don't know why they didn't have the insulation crew install the screen. And I don't know why we didn't install the windows & doors unless they weren't going to come pre-assembled.

    I worked as a framing carpenter for about a year & a half and built maybe a dozen houses in that time.

    575:

    Charlie Stross @ 503:

    Looking further back, in the 1980s there was a spate of suicides amongst people working for one part of GEC-Marconi.

    And the happy fun angle is that SAD lamps weren't really a thing -- indeed, SAD wasn't recognized as a condition -- until the late 1990s, if I remember correctly.

    That's odd because "light therapy" for people who didn't get enough exposure to natural sunlight was a thing as early as 1900.

    https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/history-of-light-therapy-1900-1950/

    I remember WWII era magazines like Popular Mechanics having pictures of factory workers (night shift) standing in a circle around a "sun lamp" to get a daily dose of artificial sunshine. Even if they couldn't diagnose SAD back then they knew that people did need some sunlight exposure to maintain health.

    576:

    The so-called 'hard' sciences are still generally male subjects, while women end up in the 'soft' fields.

    Yeah, I had that partly in mind. I didn't draw it out, because it would entail going off into some of the essay I have in my head about masculinity and maturity, and really I've written too much in this thread already. It's a case of those who would get it don't really need it, so really it's just yelling at the others. And after all, what Real Men do in the privacy of their own lavatories is none of my business really.

    577:

    I see no special reason for the thread to mutate this way....

    Oh come on, it went that way in allynh@490 which substantively amounted to calling ecologists girlymen. The rest of the thread is just unravelling the embedded assumptions and the wild, otherwise inexplicable inconsistencies.

    578:

    I'll note that women I've been with have always been amused by my declaration that I'm not a Real Man, since I not only eat quiche, I make it.

    But that leads to Real Programmers. My favorite was "Real programmers don't participate in any sport requiring a change of clothes. They do, however, wear hiking boots, so that, should a mountain suddenly spring up in the machine room, they can climb it."

    579:

    That last bit is from the Jargon File?

    Eating quiche is certainly manly. The inability to bake a passable Quiche Lorraine at short notice with no recipe is distinctly unmanly. Using supermarket pastry is excusable only if time is genuinely limited, but a chap should make it clear that if he had the time, there would be a particularly nice from-scratch shortcrust.

    580:

    Not hardly. It was the title of a book decades ago.

    I make my own pastry. A woman I knew, a very long time ago, who had genuine ties to haut cuisine, told me once when we were seeing each other that I had a better hand for pastry than she did.

    Not interested in quiche lorraine. I make spinach quiche, and use bacon not ham, though I've recently discovered I vastly prefer Canadian bacon to American in it.

    581:

    It was the title of a book decades ago.

    Specifically Real Men Don't Eat Quiche:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche

    582:

    Yes, I'm familiar with Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. The snippet above has generally been my remarks upon the claim in the title. And Quiche Lorraine is simply the vanilla ice cream of quiches, a spinach quiche is Quiche Lorraine with spinach in, though I guess the bacon is then optional: it is not optional for Quiche Lorraine. And yes, bacon, not ham. But definitely not the thing USAians call bacon, you need good loin bacon with substantial lean meat.

    In general: preening machismo is unmanly. The opposite of "manly" is not "womanly", rather it's "infantile". Testosterone inebriation is an unfortunate affliction in teenagers, and unbecoming in an adult. Aggressive willfulness and the emotional need to "win" are both contemptible and childish. Masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs we navigate as best we can. Even if we find ourselves in a culture that codes certain tasks or behaviors as masculine or feminine, maturity requires that we do the jobs that need doing without regard to that. Only children, or people who wish to be treated as children, shirk that. This is what we all believe, right?

    The thing about hiking boots and a mountain in the machine room, I vaguely remember that from usenet days and thought maybe it's in the Jargon File.

    583:

    JBS @ 575: Even if they couldn't diagnose SAD back then they knew that people did need some sunlight exposure to maintain health.

    They didn't know any such thing. This was all one with "mens sana in corpore sano", "masturbation causes insanity", "seaside ozone is good for you", "sulphur in treacle is good for you", "tuberculosis is best treated with lots of fresh air, so leave the sanatorium windows open all night during winter" and similar quackery that preceded modern medicine. Just occasionally all this random noise contained something that happened to be true, but only by chance.

    584:

    Oh, and lets not forget that all-time hit "radium is good for you".

    585:

    I think you're mixing this up with "Real Programmers don't use Pascal" which was based on the book.

    586:

    Okay, that made me google it.

    I was sure I'd read Real Programmers don't use Pascal, because it sounds so much like so many things I came across on usenet in the 90s. Turns out it was a fair bit older, early 80s era. Wikipedia links to the full text:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal

    This DOES NOT contain the paragraph:

    "Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room."

    This appears in a "compendium" here:

    https://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/real-programmers.html

    I am quite sure I remember it from usenet days, maybe from people' .sigs. However the rest of the "compendium" rings a bell and is more familiar to me than Real Programmers don't use Pascal, which is much more obviously a parody. Some of the things in the "compendium" are more like things someone like ESR would say, and that might be why I have an association of the paragraph above with the Jargon File. I'm also impressed by Mark's recollection of the wording, which is pretty close.

    587:

    You're assuming too much. I, for example, don't like Swiss cheese, so I make my quiche with cheddar. And the recipe in the Fannie Farmer cookbook (circa 1979, my late wife's) note sausage or ham can be added.

    588:

    Well, TB was treated with fresh air... that is not in an environment that allowed you to pass it on to others, or reinfect yourself. Before we had medicines for it, that was NOT an unreasonable treatment.

    Let me note that my mother was in remission most of her life, having been treated in a sanitarium in the Pocono Mts in the later thirties for TB, and spoke of screened dorms, and hot bricks under the covers at the foot of the bed.

    589:

    No, it wasn't from the jargon file. Actually, I believe I saw it in the eighties, years before I got on usenet (in late '91). At that time, there were office funnies, passed around copies.

    Also, Eric took over "the engineers' dictionary", and renamed it "the jargon file".

    Always liked the bit in the former, the definition of "icon: a small, blurry, and indistinct picture replacing a perfectly clear and comprehensible word."

    590:

    It was the title of a book decades ago.

    Which, in the IT industry, led to the saying "real programmers don't use GOTO". And then it really went downhill.

    591:

    Trouble is that definition is not really funny because it's too perfectly accurate. I would suggest that it ought to be laser-engraved as a hologram on the corneas of the fools who put websites together, so that it hovers perpetually in their field of vision and they can't forget it, except that they are too bleeding thick to deduce from it that using the bloody things is not a good idea.

    The function of an icon in practice is to act as a marker, an indication that if you hover the cursor over it some text will appear to tell you what it actually does. Obviously it would be easier to use, and simpler to write as well, if they simply didn't bother with the incomprehensible picture and just had the text permanently visible. It's so obvious that nobody with half a brain cell would think of doing it any other way to start with. And yet the fashion (there really needs to be some typographical convention to indicate that the word is pronounced with an emphatic expectoration of contempt) these days is to miss out the text instead, so you can't find out what it's supposed to do at all without inspecting the page source and puzzling out what the stupid thing is hiding.

    That's if you can even see there's anything there to be inspected, and the stupid picture hasn't just failed to appear at all because it's actually a weird glyph that the font the client is using doesn't have...

    592:

    I always thought it was the other way round - the "GOTO considered harmful" dogma came first, and "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" was written as a humorous riposte to that style of thinking.

    593:

    Bill Arnold @460 writes: " de-deuterated water might be an opportunity for a high-end niche product for the gullible. "

    That would sell. For about six months, then it'll turn up at 90% off, next to the copper colored frypans, pink Himalayan salt and Paleo diet products at Big Lots. C'mon, team, gotta take your markdowns if you want open shelf space! That next truckload of concept merchandise is backing up to the loading dock...right now!

    Bob Dylan covered the topic in Highway 61 Revisited:

    Well, Mack the Finger said to Louie the King "I got forty red-white-and-blue shoestrings And a thousand telephones that don't ring Do you know where I can get rid of these things?" And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a minute, son" Then he said, "Yes, I think it can be easily done Just take everything down to Highway 61"

    594:

    I spent 8 years making decent money writing code in a Basic variant were would we spend days looking for 2 bytes. It was tokenized as entered then executed by the micro-code when the programs were run. A GOTO took 3 bytes. A return 1. We NEVER exited a subroutine at the end of the code. We just did it.

    We had a lot of tricks to make the system fit in memory for the clients.

    And every trick broke one or more rules of good engineering. Don't even ask about variable overloading. That alone wiped out 1/2 of the people we were handed as "top programmers". We had system globals and program globals. And if you wanted unique to the program variables be prepared to be ridiculed.

    But we only had 8K bytes to work in and that was just not going to change so ....

    595:

    You don't like any of the 4751 types of cheese from Switzerland?

    I guess you mean fake Emmental. The North American use of the term 'Swiss' to indicate copies of one particular (if widely popular) variety can be a tad confusing for those who like Gruyere and Raclette (Swiss street food in its purest form involves Raclette) and others.

    1Count per Wikipedia

    596:

    No, it wasn't. Sorry. He may be seriously delusional, but that's no reason to swallow the bollocks produced by the disciples of the prophet Einstein. The precession of Mercury was known previously, there were (and are) several other possible explanations, so it fails to meet the standards of a scientific proof. Even if it did, there are two undetermined constants, and that can be accounted for by one of them, and an arbitrary function.

    The first valid confirmation came in the 1960s, with the gravitational variation in the rate of time flow in satellites, and there have been a couple of others since, if I recall.

    What we DON'T have is any direct evidence (let alone proof) of it at high gravitational stresses.

    597:

    No, it was a satire of the language wars, which predate Pascal, and became seriously religious. It's too old to be found on the Internet, but there was a previous (and better) one about Fred Fortran and Lady Algol. That refers to Algol 60, incidentally, and quite possibly pre-ANSI Fortran.

    598:

    I have found links to it, but totally fucked-up by Google.

    599:

    In one of my codes of a similar type, I had a short section of code that had 24 separate code pathways through it. Basically, it was a finite state machine with that as the compressed-beyond-all-sanity transition function.

    Yes, it also used instruction codes as constants to save a couple of bytes, but that's just boring.

    600:

    I have managed to bypass the Google fuck-up. It was Prof. Peter Brown, University of Kent and Canterbury, who died in 2007. I may have met him, but only in passing.

    601:

    I think the standard float DECIMAL numbers took 8 bytes. So we would stuff a binary integer into a character or two as the code to manipulate them was very tight and built in.

    I'm sure code we both created at times was almost write once read never.

    We only allowed upper case 64 bit ANSI on names and such so simple English or figure it out.

    602:

    Apropos of nothing at all but I thought this might be a place where people would be interested to know that there is such a thing as a vampire pigeon. Columba palumbus vampiricus, I suppose. He has just picked the scab off a scratch on my arm and eaten it, and now he has blood on the end of his beakie.

    603:

    It doesn't bode well for Imp that he's Stage One of something that could grow into a competitor of The People's Mandate; even with no further training, as the background thaums (or a personal manna-source) increase they might get asymptotically close….

    Maybe I'm just wrong, or it's been retconned, but I thought that all 'possession' in the Laundry's multiverse is a brain running some very bad code indeed, with some physical effects possible, flashy stuff or upgrading that brain to run even nastier code better.

    Time to remember that R.M.B. is a sorceror, and those are often keen on making deals with Powers of the Air…and he'll be gapoy to offer mire than ine child every other generation.

    And it'll take a lot to convince me that 'some civil service bunch' actually failed at making their own concordance. They might need it to try to re-summon a particular Hungry Ghost (of which beings' existence we've now been reminded in "D.L.D.") not bound to Whom they are now---Hells, the very powerful and pissed-off vampire it might still be fighting or frozen-with in a little pocket of Nowhere has no reason to like the New Management either….

    604:

    Aah…I get it: it was actually Red Mercury poisoning.

    605:

    As someone who actually does remember the Beatles, I feel I should ask if there is any connection with Imp and Eve's family?

    JHomes.

    606:
    It doesn't bode well for Imp that he's Stage One of something that could grow into a competitor of The People's Mandate; even with no further training, as the background thaums (or a personal manna-source) increase they might get asymptotically close….

    Imp lives in a house with pathways to the past… and we never really got a full origin story for The Mandate did we… :-)

    607:

    My take on The Mandate is that he's the result of Bob Howard "almost" relandscaping Wolverhamption with his new rendering algorithm.

    608:

    That's possible. It may be possible that he's also the result of some other luckless grad student coming up with the same rendering algorithm once the superheroes started popping up. Then somebody either dropped the ball on stopping him, or the Predictive division decided to let him go, for Reasons.

    609:

    cat @{603}| sed \ -e 's/gapoy/happy/1' \ -e 's/mire/more/1' \ -e 's/ine/one/1' Srry. when I preview it logs me out,as oppised to when I submit, when it logs me out but at least publishes first, as Lobatchewskii advised.

    AND: That cloned index: PH10FYI==?'For your information, [Iʼm ]quite basic.'

    …or '[…]base'.

    610:

    OK, here's a question I just thought of last night.

    You mention in a throwaway line that The Mandate's face is now on the money (and presumably coins, stamps, etc).

    How does that work, anyway? We're told that he is horrifying to look at, and that his face looks human only for the briefest of times.

    So is the picture of him on banknotes etc just what his host looked like before Nyarlathotep took over? Or does his gaze look out in all its terror?

    If the second, it would certainly increase the velocity of (physical) money.

    611:

    Well, they'd have to get a photographer or a commercial artist to make the likeness.

    So I expect it would be a multi-shot exposure, then "Ohhh... I think we'll go with that one... Stop puking, it's not that bad!".

    612:

    ... aargh...

    the others aren't that bad.

    613:

    "Of the 12 commercial artists we used, only 4 of them were still in the mental hospital after 6 months."

    "What about the other 8?"

    "... the morgue."

    614:

    I don't think you understand. Everyone's face belongs to The Mandate. If he wants to put your face on the money and claim it's his, the smart thing to do is just laugh and say, "Nonsense, it doesn't look like me at all, his Majesty is far more handsome than I am!" and be grateful The Mandate didn't give you one of the other faces he owns.

    615:

    Does the Bond, as a 'Twenty-First Century Bond', have 'a neatly-trimmed beard and moustache' as described when we first see him after R.M.B. calls for him on Skarro, or is he 'clean-shaven' as implied he is as an anonymous white man in a suit when he's observing Wendy and Del's second encounter?

    In the States, at least, the two descriptions are contradictory, though of course he could have got the neat facial hair trimmed-off…though it is characteristic of (at least) the movie Bond's awfulness at spying that he eschews all disguise short of full yellow-face. (See:a wonderful Venture Brothers flashback to the '60s.)

    616:

    Well some Bond actors go the neatly trimmed beard, especially once they reach a certain age:

    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pierce_Brosnan_at_the_2005_Toronto_Film_Festival.jpg

    I agree it isn't something you'd really expect in character.

    617:

    Ha. I use Penrose as the example of 'uninformed and implausible theories' when I teach neural bases of consciousness :).

    618:

    0.) Some of the confusion over what was happening to Imp's mother vs what we think we know from books in the previous series may simply stem from Imp's father's being wrong about what was happening to her. It's not like this was a familiar situation or that he was that accomplished a sorceror.

    1.) So my guess: the 'sliver of [Rupert's] soul' Eve feels in her is literally there, and it's enough for the soul-locks (a term introduced with this book?) for her to take command of the people an instruments slaved to or authenticated by it.

    619:

    Tipler's "The Physics of Immortality" makes Penrose's theories look like mainstream science. It's not just up the spout and round the bend, but round a couple of bends beyond that.

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    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on November 21, 2020 10:58 AM.

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