Just a quick note: I am not blogging right now—at least until the end of April, most likely until this point in mind-May—because I am 2/3 of the way through the final draft of Season of Skulls, book 3 of the New Management: it's due in at the end of the month, or in any case some time in May, for publication in May 2023. (It already exists as a book, this is a final polishing pass with some additional scenes adding into it to make the continuity work better.)
After SoS is baked I also have to finish a half-written novella, A Conventional Boy, about Derek the DM; it got steamrollered by two novels going through production in the past year. I can't multitask on writing projects, so the lower-priority job (a novella) got shelved temporarily.
Normal service will be resumed by June at the latest; in the meantime, if you think the last thread on the Ukraine war is getting too cumbersome, feel free to colonize the comments on this one.
Heteromeles @ 1598:
Perhaps this is part of the wisdom in letting Ukraine fight Russia? As for climate change, we're #1! We're #1!
Better than being "number two".
More seriously, I'd say that while Al Qaeda and ISIL are still around, they're not the big shakers that they were in previous years. The US screwed up the Iraqi and Afghani occupations, but global terror networks did take a beating. IIRC this is fairly normal for empires, as shown by the disappearance of sicarii, assassins, KKK (first two incarnations, also White Camellia, KGC, ad nauseum), thugee, and others. It looks like a great power can take on a non-state organization and break them up. Where empires tend to fail is in long-term occupations, especially in places remote from the rest of the empire.
Where we screwed them up was in occupying them in the first place. The U.S. may have had a legitimate beef with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, but if so we should have gone in, captured or killed al Qaeda and got the hell out. Iraq had fuck all to do with 9/11 and invading them was never necessary and was NEVER going to produce anything worthwhile.
PS: Caught me just as I clicked [Submit]
PS: Caught me just as I clicked [Submit]
Sorry!
(However, load times on that last page were getting a bit slow, and it's been up long enough the bots were finding it ...)
Also got caught by the new thread. Hope this still seems relevant:
The most consistently repeated myth in US films goes back to Cincinnatus in the early Roman Republic.
'Noble but humble man goes back to his country estate/farm/woods cabin/retreat to live a quiet life, but gets dragged back in to save the Empire/country/family through the superior use of violence, but only out of a sense of duty'. In Cincinnatus' case this happened more than once (purportedly).
Variations include 'the betrayal by the corrupt elites in power'. The key point in this mythology is that the power brokers are ALWAYS effete and corrupt, probably gay, and the only people who can fix it are the rural honest hardworking folk who also have skills at violence.
I could spend hours listing the movies, tv shows and books that echo this mythology.
This was the dominant myth of the American Revolution, it is the dominant myth of the Qnuts and Teapartiers, it is the dominant myth behind Brexit: "The British people are tired of 'experts' (read: corrupt elites who don't know anything about real life)."
You see this in almost all cultural mythology in the US, and also elsewhere. It underpins the popular (and wildly incorrect) understanding of the 'fall of the Western Roman Empire' as being overrun by barbarians while the elites ate grapes and had orgies.
Robert Prior @ 1616: [Old Thread]
I confess I had to look up Corleone. But I'm (obviously) not American :-/
I knew he was a character in Mario Puzo's novel "The Godfather" & the films based on it. I too had to look him up to determine which character he was.
But I've read Othello (and seen the play ... movie version).
Charlie Stross @ 2:
Sorry!
(However, load times on that last page were getting a bit slow, and it's been up long enough the bots were finding it ...)
No problem. It was funny.
Wondering what I'd done wrong now?
Same here - I tried to post about the US DoE looking at geothermal, using the zillions of oil and gas wells, and nope. Then I tried to respond to "the US's definition of its mandate keeps expanding", and nope, and then I see the new thread, after I'd posted several before.
AlanD2 @ 1630: [Old Thread]
He's probably copying the techniques used by the U.S. government when invading Iraq and Afghanistan. A short, victorious war, with Americans treated as heroes by the natives... :-/
I think y'all are still missing the idea that Putin's reasons for doing what he's doing are probably internally consistent with his frame of reference.
It may look "dumb-arsed" from our point of view, but it's likely NOT from his.
I think it does represent that he's fallen prey to what I'd call Dictator's Disease - a variant of "rich man's disease". He's stifled dissent in Russia to such an extent that there's no way anyone can tell him hard truths he doesn't want to hear.
Robert Prior @ previoua 1672:
That is the Substack from which I pulled the quotes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Whitwroth -- there is absolutely no confirmational evidence that King Arthur ever existed in his popular avatar. For one thing, the earliest literary references are not Latin/Saxon/English, but Welsh.
["The first piece of literature to mention Arthur by name is a Welsh poem named Y Gododdin, which dates from between the 7th and 11th century. In a translated version of the poem, it speaks of a warrior named Gwawrddur and says “Gwawrddur was skilled at slaying his enemies. But was no Arthur." ]For one thing, if there was a King Arthur, who lived the legendary martial life, one might think the name would be far more common in those earlier periods than it is -- in the way that the trauma of Attila on Italy shows up in the number of Italian boys still named Attila.
As for Elderly Cynic thinking there is no place in math for encouraging cooperation in problem solving -- that's a total disaster for any project that demands input from more than one person in a vacuum. Ask my brother, who has been running THE lab that develops and tests all the varieties of every bit that goes into the electric systems of the planes we fly in. The tales he tells of the arrogance of those who won't cooperate, know they are right and everyone else is wrong -- not to mention the poobas who try and wheedle him into 'just filing to make it fit' of parts designed to the wrong specs. He's the one who has to persuade, them, gently, that it cannot be done. Yes, math people need to be people people too, or else all of it really goes off the rails.
1671:
Heteromeles @ 1567: Oh dear, you think we're normal Americans?
Don't know about you, but I am. I'm so normal that when you look for the definition of "normal" in the dictionary, they just have my photograph there.
Congratulations! Please take the little online quizzes and let us know how many of these fit you:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/tom-corley-heres-what-average-looks-like-in-america.html
You can also do this one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/this-is-what-the-average-american-looks-like-in-2018/
And if you're really bored, you can check out this one from last year:
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/12/who-exactly-is-the-average-american/
Again, congratulations on your achievement! (grin)
I'm familiar with Y Gododdin, as well as Nennius, who does refer to Arthur, and Gildas, who does not, but mentions the great battle at Mons Badonicus, which is later attributed to Arthur, though Gildas does not make it clear who led the Britons.
And then there's Geoffrey Ashe's participation (leading?) the archeological dig in Cornwall that found a Romanized Briton style fort built around the time of Arthur, as well as his discovery for that time period of a Procurator of Gaul who pled for the Britons to help, and a leader of the Britons who brought over 10,000 troops....
Do you really want to go into the Matter of Britain? If so, we should take it elsewhere.
I should point out that, if we're going to do a face-first dive into The Matter of Arthur and The Holy Grail, that:
a) We're probably riffing on the equivalent of a top-selling medieval popular fantasy (not that they printed it, but troubador's stories and the like were pop culture). This is sort of like taking the Da Vinci Code as the revelation of a new religion.
b) Britain's not the only place where people have founded religions, like modern druidry and jedism, by spiritualizing well-aged pop culture. Chinese folk religion has quite a lot of this stuff too, and there's always Santa Muerte in Mexico.
As the Church of Eris and others have demonstrated, you can have legitimate spiritual experiences with made-up supernatural figures. I think this is more worth enjoying and playing with, than sniffing about how "atheists are better," because it points to some fundamental ways human brains work that used to be more widely known than it is now.
So perhaps there are better questions than "was Arthur real" and "Was the Holy Grail real?" One better question is, what does practicing Arthur or Grail-based rituals help you do to have a better life? If you don't like those answers, you can always set up a shrine to the White Lady of Caerbannog and see how that goes.
I'm reasonably sure that the current 'Marvel' cinematic universe will be the foundation myth for a future religion. The parallels between 'Superheroes' and mythic gods in places like the Bhagavad Gita are too clear to ignore.
Perhaps in 1000 years there can be a conflict between adherents of the Avengers (US version) religion and the followers of the Jedi. Relics of both religions are already highly prized.
All it would take are a significant enough disruption in civilization (which seems likely), and a few prized documents to be well preserved and 'discovered' by sufficiently charismatic leader types awhile later.
That's not mathematics - that's engineering. I am fully aware of such problems, as well as the converse where expertise is discounted in favour of the majority opinion or kow-towing to 'received wisdom'. If two people claim that mathematics produces two different results, at least one is wrong; it's that simple. But I agree that , when it comes to APPLYING mathematics, there is often a a matter of human judgment in choosing the assumptions and other requirements for cooperation.
As I said, mathematics per se is NOT a social activity, which is one of the reasons that it attracts those of us with Aspergers so strongly.
I won't pass judgement without seeing more of those books, but it does seem possible that they are discriminatory against those of us with Aspergers; that is regrettably common among the politically correct, and is regarded as an acceptable form of discrimination by many of them. That would be grounds for discouraging their use. But book banning is rarely justified.
(Another victim of the thread closure here... 7 minutes of session remaining, click Submit expecting no problems, oh shit what's up here?)
@ whitroth:
"Now Just One Minute. "King Arthur" yeah, Dux Bellorum Arthur has a high probability of having existed, and managed to keep the Angles and the Saxons back for 25 or 50 years, during which the various preachers began getting to them to mellow them, and give the Romano-British time to reform (not to say retreat) to more defensible areas."
There are a few characters from around that sort of time on the border between history and mythology. Gwrtheyrn, for example; started off being a king in an ordinary sort of way (and a bit of a wanker), then wandered off to Wales getting more and more miffic as he went and ended up in a gully on the north side of the Lleyn peninsula doing something frightfully mythological, although I can't remember what.
Foxessa has it right; there may have been some warrior chap and he may have been the one to kick the mythology off, but on the other hand he may only be a myth himself, and that's about as far as we can go. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote all sorts of crap and seems to be about as dependable a source as Susan Cooper, and the idea of King Arthur that "everyone knows" is from the guff that was made up later on as backstory for the "Age of Chivalry" (gah), which is why the Monty Python version is what it is.
In any case, even if there was a real King Arthur, he couldn't have had time to do much fighting, what with all the walking around the country sitting on rocks and treading on things and what have you :)
Please - I did not mention the Holy Grail. No such thing shows up until Cretian de Troyes in 1190.
See, it really was those Feelthy French People....
I'm reasonably sure that the current 'Marvel' cinematic universe will be the foundation myth for a future religion. The parallels between 'Superheroes' and mythic gods in places like the Bhagavad Gita are too clear to ignore.
It's certainly possible, in part because the comic book writers very deliberately riffed on the old myths, much as PTerry did.
The useful thing to look at isn't the "mythic dimension" (e.g. the entertainment value), it's also the utility. Religion does offer entertainment, but properly built, it's a communal work that helps the practitioners lead better lives. What can you learn from ritualizing the life of the Hulk?*
For better or worse, Marvel's rooted in 20th Century consumerist capitalism. So, while the superheroes might last as cool stories (as the Greco-Roman pantheon did), I suspect our successors will be defining themselves against us, not copying us, much as the early Christians embraced competitive asceticism (like canonizing dudes for long-term pillar occupation) against the conspicuous consumption of the pagan Romans. If you think about it, what's Spider Man going to do when there aren't any more skyscrapers to swing from?
*If you know anything about religion or the Hulk, you can actually answer this pretty well...
I like to think there will be a major religion about the Marvel Avengers and a small competing religion about the real Avengers-- Emma Peel and John Steed.
There's a problem with turning them into a religion: there are multiple versions of the old myths, but they all converge. The Marvel (or DC) universe retcon, and retcon, and retcon, and outright change.
And you wonder why I don't care for it?
And boy, are they needed....
He's stifled dissent in Russia to such an extent that there's no way anyone can tell him hard truths he doesn't want to hear.
Sounds like Cheney's and Bush 43's reactions to anybody objecting to their proposed second Iraq war.
Heteromeles @ 9: 1671:
Congratulations! Please take the little online quizzes and let us know how many of these fit you:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/tom-corley-heres-what-average-looks-like-in-america.html
I'm NORMAL, not average ...
You can also do this one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/this-is-what-the-average-american-looks-like-in-2018/
Well, no I can't ... it's behind their STUPID paywall
And if you're really bored, you can check out this one from last year:
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/12/who-exactly-is-the-average-american/
Uhhhhh ... not that bored.
cf the Simpsons version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Burns,_a_Post-Electric_Play
There's a problem with turning them into a religion: there are multiple versions of the old myths, but they all converge. The Marvel (or DC) universe retcon, and retcon, and retcon, and outright change.
Actually I agree. Apparently comic buyers do too, because sales of print comics have been dropping for years, even as the Disney vids have been raking in money.
To get back to the previous thread, the videos are the epitome of squeecore, and when people find something else they like better (or if global fascism wins), they'll probably go out of fashion like Song of the South.
That said, I think figuring out what religion might look like 50 years out is a useful exercise. For one thing, it gets people out of this stupid "we're all gonna die" mindset.
For another, it gets people to think about what the opposite of consumerism might like. Most new religions get a hold when the old ones become severely dysfunctional, define themselves in opposition to the "lamestream" religions, and get a hold by offering what the people left out of the lamestream religions want or need.*
And for a third, if you're honest with yourself, it gives you a way to examine your own ideological hobby horses and see whether they'll hunt or not.
*By that standard, STEM is the religion we need for the future, at least the part that can be done in a dystopian setting.
I'm NORMAL, not average ...
What's the difference?
Or any denial of the Former Guy's whims.
50 years in the future? In 11,000 Years, I was dealing with that; in the novel I'm currently working on, religion is heavily involved, and funnymentalists are not the good guys.
Plus, with my mesh and the mesh-hosts (that's devils to the funnymentals), it gets harder and harder for one to ignore things that don't make sense, or hypocrisy.
Normal is an opinion.
Average is mathematically definable.
Normal's mathematically definable too, but whichever.
It's nice to know that normalcy is a fringe religion like Discordianism: you can belong by saying you belong, no need for tithes or whatever. That's cool.
AlanD2 @ 20:
Sounds like Cheney's and Bush 43's reactions to anybody objecting to their proposed second Iraq war.
Cheney and the shrub ... and Rummy - don't forget Rummy - could force you into early retirement for publicly disagreeing, but they couldn't send you to the gulag or have you liquidated in the basement of the Lubyanka just because they didn't like your advice.
However, Mark, King of Cornwall, really did exist and ruled over what was a fairly large kingdom for the time. Whether he was anything like the legends is another matter ....
Heteromeles @ 24:
What's the difference?
Oh dear! Don't you know?
Maybe THAT explains it.
First paragraph: I was about to say exactly the same thing.
I'm not in favour of such topics being banned but I do object to them being inserted in maths textbooks. If I'd encountered that as a kid my negative reaction would have been off the scale, for reasons some of which probably are Asperger's-related.
At an early enough age - which one of those titles does appear to be aimed at - I would have taken it as something akin to a personal attack, and been programmed from the start to hate maths as a result. I used to receive endless dreary and incomprehensible lectures on how to be a good little social animal, which I saw as nothing more than just one of those random bits of grief grown-ups dump on you every now and then for no reason, and I'd have thought that they were making us use those textbooks as a means of having yet another go at me. I instantly acquired a still-extant hatred for the Mr Men after receiving as a Christmas present a Mr Men book (the first I'd ever seen) with a REALLY FUCKING OBVIOUS MORAL MESSAGE, which was blatantly the reason they'd chosen to make that pairing of book and recipient - this isn't a present, it's a sneaky way to tell me off yet again - and pissed me right off. At the same age I'd have seen those insertions in textbooks in much the same way.
Later, as the demands of school increased, I developed a strong preference for subjects where there was a single unique concisely-expressible correct answer and that was the end of the story with no fucking about; conversely, the more nebulous a subject's good answers were and the more space-filling waffle they expected us to accompany them with, the more I loathed it. I would have been bloody furious to have a subject at the extreme good end of that scale polluted with irrelevant guff from the extreme bad end.
I also had a very strong view that anything that wasn't a "solid academic subject" was something the school had no place wasting our time with at all; that lessons like music, religion, games, art, and so on should have been left out of the timetable altogether, and the time used for teaching us something useful instead. I would most definitely have viewed the topics in the quotes in the previous thread in the same way, and been doubly furious that they were directly encroaching on the time allocated to something that was a serious subject.
Maths was always a subject I "should have liked more than I did"; now that school is long past I am not hindered from perceiving that I do like it (though I did surprise myself a bit when I first did perceive that), and it's definitely the most useful thing I learnt at school, but I never learned it that easily; it always took a gey long time for a concept to percolate through the nigh-impermeable strata of my brain and make the journey from "thing written on the blackboard" to "hey, I dig this", and doing the exercises with the concept still undug was very tedious. It would have been disastrous if it had been interspersed with stuff which isn't mathematics at all, but is the absolute pinnacle of tedium and an exemplar of all the different reasons I had for hating a school subject all gathered together with the gain turned up: I'd simply have revolted against and rejected the whole bloody lot, unable to perceive the good for the bad, and ended up still with much the same set of interests but lacking the principal equipment to pursue them successfully. So I'm jolly glad that our textbooks were not like that.
"*If you know anything about religion or the Hulk, you can actually answer this pretty well..."
I know it follows the standard pattern of a good, honest fellow who becomes enraged at injustice and then commits righteous violence, in this case by 'smashing'. But it's ok because he's a good, honest righteous (white) fellow...
Thereby tying two threads of the discussion together.
Whitroth #18: I don't care for it either. As a former collector of comics, I find it all exhausting now. Doesn't mean it won't be fertile ground for some future Hubbard to build a religion around. Of course, given enough random chance that religion could be built around the Culture, the Laundry, the Da Vinci Code, or Clifford the Big Red Dog.
Some are more likely than others. All of them have supernatural (or at least super powered) explanations for hard to explain phenomena.
17 - No mention of Cathy Gail or Tara King!?
32 - Sorry, but English Literature is a good and valuable subject which happens to be taught extremely badly.
Pigeon
"Matter of Britain" ??
GO TO - Rosemary Sutcliff's "Sword at Sunset" Where Artos is the cavalry leader who enables King Ambrosius (?) to hold the Saxons back, temporarily, at least.
Pigeon
You were wrong ( maybe still are ) about music.
My one really great gap is that I cannot read music, nor play an instrument - & I had the opportunity & fluffed it, SHIT!
Normal's mathematically definable too, but whichever.
Totally disagree.
Says one who almost always was thought of as outside of "normal". And from my point of view normal was almost always defined as "like me, not like you" by those others. And many of those who considered themselves normal had contradictory traits.
Well, of course the Matter of Britain, which is Arthur, as the Matter of France is Charlemagne.
You'll note that what I have spoken of is the historical side, and a Dux Bellorum. And Swords At Sunset was a wonderful read in my teens... and I still think would be good in reread.
The Kingdom of Cornwall has very much been air-brushed out into the background by English and Welsh legend and writers, but it was a distinct entity (covering modern Cornwall, Devon and west Somerset) up until something like 1,000 AD, when everything up to the Tamar was conquered by Canute (Cnut), as I understand it. It would make a very big difference to the reality behind the legend whether Arthur's archetype was Cornish or Welsh.
Given all the sites attributed to him, and Tintagel, etc, I'd assume both, though more "Romanized Briton" than centuries-later Welsh.
you can always set up a shrine to the White Lady of Caerbannog and see how that goes.
We had one of thoise at my primary school. It was called "the school rabbit", and it received regular blood sacrifices in the form of children and parents who were assigned to "look after it" during holidays.
The first time the sacrifices were willing, after that they were assigned to the task. They tried to wear armour. It didn't help.
Nevermind a small breakaway sect who worship Joana Lumley.
@ Whitroth, # 1678 Previous Thread:
"Well, except for the Wild West myth, and the Brave Man (or head of family) going out and building a new life out of the American Indian (to quote Firesign Theater). The Hero who suffers and saves everyone (gee, what other myth sounds like that), except he survives and uses violence."
Someone who brought a giant heap of evidence might be able to convince me that the U.S. and U.K.'s cultures and myths are very slowly moving further apart. In order to do this they'd have to overcome the two British musical invasions of the 1960s and 1980s, Harry Potter, Arthur C. Clarke, H.G. Wells, Dr. Who, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Fink Ployd, Thomas Dolby, etc., as well as the very typical method of making money by shipping media across the Atlantic (in either direction, mind you.)
I don't know about everything that's gone the other direction, but Jazz and Blues definitely went to the U.K. and found fertile ground, as did Rock and Roll, plus any number of Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals, plus any number of U.S. authors... We're doing an excellent job of sharing culture across the Atlantic.
Where "The Man With A Gun" is concerned, the U.K. was colonizing every place with a beach while the U.S. was clobbering Indians and Mexico, so the myth may not be as one-sided as it looks, and there are certainly British tales of people who get angry and kill each other... our cultures share some very deep roots, and proving that's not the case is a rather sticky wicket, isn't it old chap?
Bonus video of the originator of Rock And Roll (not who you think, probably,) exchanging some culture at the disused Chorlton railway station on Wilbraham Road in 1964:
https://youtu.be/5SoZG4yDaJA
Totally disagree.
From my end of the world, "normal" is within one standard deviation of "average," and it implies that something's quantifiable and that the frequency of deviation can be defined as something like a bell curve, which is also called a normal curve.
Neither of us are "normal" in that sense, both because we're far from the crowd average, and also because many of the things that are essential to who we are don't have distributions that fall on a bell curve.
I think anime, manga, k-drama and k-pop are evidence that cultures can thoroughly interact without one becoming the other. For example, I can love BBC nature documentaries without feeling miffed that I don't get to vote for an MP.
I dunno. I think of British imperialism myth as Brave Great Man Leads His Men Into Battle, while the American version is Great Man Beats Them All Himself.
Ok, was that Tharpe? I have tried everything, and cannot get youtube to tell me what's playing. In any case, rock&roll was being talked about 10 years before... (and already fulminated against).
Well...
America and the UK do, unfortunately both have form for destroying indigenous cultures in North America. And I agree that in the early 19th century, both cultures dueled.
Where we split is fairly important, though.
First off, the British colonies that became the US were places where nonconformists who didn't or couldn't fit into the UK came: Puritans, Catholics, Quakers. We're also much more into slaveholding, although the UK upper crust were complicit in that too.
We further diverge after the 1840s, when the US took the castoffs (Irish, for example) from the UK and Europe, because we needed cheap industrial labor and people to settle some fairly marginal lands in the Great Plains. And I want to be clear that we were taking the bottom of UK and European society, not the top. That's what the whole Statue of Liberty is about ("Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...")
Also, our classic dueling culture isn't Alexander Hamilton times, it's cowboys after the Civil War and before ca. 1900 or so. Plus gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s. Similar process, different strata.
Meanwhile, I think a lot of UK culture (correct me if I'm wrong) is shaped by the Victorian zenith, and in many ways is in "Recessional" mode. Meanwhile, the US is at the Peak Smash stage of our empire. While people like me can see our Recessional coming (probably more Mayan than Victorian, sadly), we also look at the other big states: China, Russia, India, Brazil, and see that they have many of the same problems we do, with an unsustainable dependence on oil power and economic growth as major pillars of our society.
So yes, we're similar enough to share almost everything, but we're not identical.
"And don't use Russian culture to excuse Putin or his followers."
Haven't forgotten. Don't bother.
I'm not in favour of such topics being banned but I do object to them being inserted in maths textbooks.
That's not what the Florida thing is about.
As DeSantis administration rejects textbooks, only one publisher allowed for K-5 math classes in Florida
Newspaper article is a bit verbose and badly structured, but the takeaway is: DeSantis has banned all maths textbooks except ones published by Accelerate Learning:
Chances that Youngkin owns no shares in Carlisle Group and/or Accelerate Learning? Your guess is as good as mine (but my guess is "ha ha nope"). Betcha DeSantis is a direct or indirect shareholder, too.
Upshot: it's graft and corruption, business as usual for the Florida and Virginia Republicans.
Nothing to do with "critical race theory", everything to do with locking rivals out of a lucrative school textbook market.
Yup, that's Tharp in 1964, though she (and her band) invented Rock and Roll around 1936 or so.
From the U.S., agreed completely.
Yup, the usual.
It should be noted, in the Republican
demonologyhierarchy, that DeSantis sees himself, and hopes to get other people to agree, that he'll be Trump's successor should that Great Old One fall....they couldn't send you to the gulag or have you liquidated in the basement of the Lubyanka just because they didn't like your advice.
As whitroth alluded to, I'm sure IQ45 was tremendously disappointed about this too...
I also had a very strong view that anything that wasn't a "solid academic subject" was something the school had no place wasting our time with at all...
What could be more useful than being taught how to get along with disparate other people in order to become a functional member of society? It's clear that conservatives of many stripes in lots of different countries have missed this lesson... :-(
The so-called "styrofoam fighters" have been visible via Google Maps for the best part of twenty years. Though not necessarily those particular ones, which are at Lipetsk. That airfield is evidently being used for storing cannibalisable airframes. (If you look, there are even a couple of Mig-23 airframes.)
DeSantis sees himself, and hopes to get other people to agree, that he'll be Trump's successor should that Great Old One fall.
Yup. And if he has to push Trump off a cliff in 2024, I don't see him shedding any tears, either...
What could be more useful than being taught how to get along with disparate other people in order to become a functional member of society?
The way schools go about this theoretically laudable endeavor, utterly fails for us Aspies.
I am personally familiar with Soviet and US schools. I trust Pigeon's experience regarding British schools, but I doubt it is significantly different
Troutwaxer (@42)
Good news about Chorlton Railway Station: it's been recycled as a tram stop on the Manchester Metro! Yay!
Nice!
I can love BBC nature documentaries without feeling miffed that I don't get to vote for an MP.
I'm still miffed I didn't get to vote about Brexit, because although I'm a British subject I don't live in the UK. EU citizens who lived in the UK couldn't vote, Brits who lived outside the UK couldn't vote, yet the "non-binding referendum"* affected us as well.
|*Which magically became a binding mandate after the votes were counted…
"Sorry, but English Literature is a good and valuable subject which happens to be taught extremely badly."
Absolutely. It's taught in such a way as to systematically exclude any possibility of actually getting pleasure from reading the fucking book, thereby negating the whole point of the thing existing in the first place, and causing me to leave school with the conviction that the set of works considered "literature" and the set of works which are tedious boring shite were indistinguishable for all practical purposes. It wasn't until those lessons were well behind me that I discovered any reason to think differently, and that was down to Kate Bush rather than anything "educational".
Greg @ 35: "You were wrong ( maybe still are ) about music. My one really great gap is that I cannot read music, nor play an instrument - & I had the opportunity & fluffed it, SHIT!"
Oh, I'm not saying I was right or wrong about anything. I'm just saying that's how I thought at the time when school was all my experience and I didn't know any better, and that probably at least some of my attitude took some origin from Aspergerial processing.
As it happens, I have that same gap as you and also by reason of blown opportunity. Some bloke appeared in the middle of a lesson one day with an oboe reed, which he passed round to everyone saying "blow this and see what happens" (and he didn't mean "all end up with the same diseases"). I am told (but don't actually remember) that I was the only one who could get any sound out of it, which caused teachers and parents alike to leap to the conclusion that I was some kind of international-class oboeist just waiting to be discovered; "oh, you must start oboe lessons, you'll be so good at it", and basically the decision got made for me. It rapidly became very clear to me that the premise that making a piece of stick make a noise like a chicken being stabbed was a sure indicator of massive latent musical talent was as much of a pile of arse as it ought to be, and I skived and evaded my lessons and practice sessions more and more (aided by inadvertently sabotaging the school's method of telling people to go to their music lessons) until they gave up making me have them in disgust.
The problem was that they tried to shove me into it much too soon. At that time I didn't really have any proper appreciation of music beyond belting out the words to some Jolly Good Tune. I couldn't get into sitting down and just listening to music, and I had less interest in making it myself. So I was being compelled to learn an instrument while basically not giving a toss about whether I could or not, and not seeing why I should give a toss either, once I had understood the prophecy was false. They would have done better to have waited until such time as I had developed a proper liking for instrumental music for its own sake and so had a reason to find some point to the endeavour; and also to teach me the mathematical side of it first, so when the time came to pick up an instrument I had some understanding of what it was supposed to be doing, instead of keeping it as hidden knowledge only to be revealed to the select few who really were young Lloyd Webbers, as was their standard procedure.
BUT - that isn't what I actually meant originally anyway :) I meant the kind of lessons where the whole class took part at once, in the same way as any other lesson. These in fact mostly were just about belting out Jolly Good Tunes, and I quite enjoyed them. But it didn't stop me thinking they were wasting our time with them and ought to be teaching us something proper instead.
the British colonies that became the US were places where nonconformists who didn't or couldn't fit into the UK came
Also, places which chaffed at keeping treaties signed with the Indigenous nations. Not only was it one of the grievances the colonists had with King George, but in the War of 1812 support for the war was greatest in the states that would benefit the most from taking over Indigenous lands (and weakest in states that were most subject to impressment, the reason I see most often in American history textbooks).
What I said on the last thread.
Also note that textbooks typically last at least one curriculum cycle, so a decade or two, with only replacement sales after the initial selection. Which means that sales now (with a new curriculum) are incredible important.
So yeah, grift as usual…
Upshot: it's graft and corruption, business as usual for
the Florida and VirginiaRepublicans.It certainly "utterly failed" for me. Total incomprehension in both directions, and the medical profession hadn't really got any kind of handle on it at the time. I was diagnosed as "semi-autistic", whatever that meant, but never told about it; and I was given to understand, years later, that the only available responses were either to ignore it and carry on regardless, or send me to some kind of nuthouse, which would have been far worse.
"Thomas Dolby"
Uh? Surely he was the son or something of Ray Dolby, the noise reduction guy, who was definitely American. I remember when I first heard of Thomas thinking "naah, can't possibly be a connection", and then I remember being surprised when the internet happened to find that actually there was.
From his wikipedia article:
"Thomas Morgan Robertson (born 14 October 1958), known by the stage name Thomas Dolby, is an English musician, producer, composer, entrepreneur and teacher."
My take is that "normal" generally means "people like me", and "average" means "I don't understand statistics, but I saw a headline that I like".
In practice a lot of people use Excel to make pretty graphs when they'd be just as well off using MS-Paint for all the linkage between their discussion of the graph and the world outside their window.
{countering the claim that there's} no place in math for encouraging cooperation in problem solving
I think there's several different agendas hiding in the one claim.
You have the usual "shoulders of giants" stuff, with a dose of network effects that mean modern STEM researchers do need to at least have some minimum level of social skills. Which, while true, is IMO much less than the agenda folk norm,ally want to admit. Even middling-genius level mathematicians can work as hermits as long as they're capable of being polite in email.
But as an academic in a university, yes, definitely, at least 50% of the job is political and likely even more political than in a non-academic position (I certainly found it so). There seems to be less tolerance in modern academia for the antisocial than there is in industry.
And of course there's the popular notion that since managers need to be people people so does everyone else. This gets back to the notion of "normal is like me", and my long-term response that if someone has excellent social skills they should be more able to work with those not so skilled, than someone with poor social skills. That's definitely true for, say, walking. Someone who is easily capable of walking long distances can more readily walk with someone who has limited mobility than someone else who has limited mobility can. Especially if help is required.
The latter is a bug-bear of many on this blog, and IMO for good reason. No-one has yet explained to me in a way that makes sense stuff like "a four hour meeting is better than a one hour meeting" or "an hour face to face is better than a 100 word email when conveying simple factual statements".
Part of what bothers us is the insistence that diversity cannot and should not be tolerated. Some people thrive off face to face meetings, other hate them. But according to the socialites that means the others are wrong and must be fixed or shunned. It particularly gripes me when those exact people say sequentially "I need you to do this for me because I cannot do it" then "you are defective as you cannot do things that I can do". Well, have fun doing whatever that first thing is without my help.
So why are there so many chemical facilities burning down in Russia? A massive warehouse stuffed with $20 million dollars worth of Russian army gear and weapons. Oligarchs murdered with their families?
Coincidence?
False flag operation Putin can blame on Ukrainians.
An actual rebel underground in Russia?
Higher ups burning down evidence of theft and corruption?
I noticed all that too. Hopefully Ukraine has some special forces in Russia,* but I suspect most of these are signs of a society that's under more pressure than it can deal with starting to fall apart.
I always think it's normal to have a couple of kids. It's average to have 2.4 children, but it's certainly not normal.
If I have to think about it beyond that level I read some wiki pages about poisson distribution and statistical significance and p values and then decide that my opinion is probably not worth much.
Also, places which chaffed at keeping treaties signed with the Indigenous nations.
Keeping treaties with those people? Who were standing in the way of Real Americans™ getting rich? Surely you're kidding... :-/
Duffy said: Oligarchs murdered with their families?
"Murder/suicide" please.
In an interesting turn, the usual "to spend more time with their family" has morphed into "decided to murder their family and commit suicide by shooting themselves twice in the back of the head".
If so, why aren't they attacking Russia's logistics capabilities near Ukraine?
I suspect the Ukrainian high command is at least somewhat worried that Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil will help Putin mobilize Russian support for his war, especially if he has to go to full wartime footing.
... the usual "to spend more time with their family" has morphed into "decided to murder their family and commit suicide by shooting themselves twice in the back of the head".
I've been impressed by the remarkable capabilities of some Russians... :-)
Agreed. Putin will be angry if someone hits him back.
That's common, I recall the USA getting very upset indeed when foreigners dared bring a US war onto US soil. So angry they went for the "pour encourager les autres" approach (which is especially amusing in light of the "freedom fries" nonsense... but then they also rebranded it as "the war on terror" which is so very US).
We were asked this:
In your model, if you care to say, what is the causal connection between fascist symbology and characteristically fascist acts? On what level do symbols translate into effects? Can loyalty to a group or cause have a motivation independent from what a given adherent is compelled - or permitted - to do?
You're parsing this in the incorrect direction: the reality is where one (the subject) "does acts" and then gains entrance to a Symbol is, well: gangs, Government, Sports Teams and so forth.
It is the fundamental aspect of taking a Symbol that one has enacted Agency that said Symbol represents and thus the Symbol embraces you.
This is basis Homo Sapiens 101. Like: fucking hell, do you not even understand your own world?
You want into a Fascist Symbol? You do a Fascist act, however small. However tawdry. However lesser the event is as slapping a badge on your uniform. Or pushing over a Romani woman. Or slapping a negro.
This is how it works. How fucking dare you, in 2022, not understand this.
~
AS for Greg / JBS - we've been tracking at least 500+ accounts (mostly US / UK (77th - one in particular is an absolute bungus JimmySpa nk UK ) all trying to flip the badges thing onto RU Mercs - "Wagner" [note: Wagner doesn't actually exist in that sense but hey].
Here's a big tip: absolutely everyone who isn't a trash fire has noted the badges, and absolutely everyone who isn't a) ignorant as fuck, b) paid Media or c) .mil Propaganda knows the score.
You're old men: as sad as those old men in RU thinking this is about 1949-51 in Ukraine.
Answer: No, you're lying. sonnerad was designed by Himmler. It's never been "an ancient Pagan symbol", it was designed in 1939-41 ish. It's explicitly Nazi. You're fucking muppets for thinking otherwise. It's so obviously Nazi that the Spectator and so on have to lie and subsitute the symbol for another one. You don't do that if it's got a clean back-story.
Ignorant men drive wars, so .... hey. Learn a bit more before spouting shit. Old ignorant Men sending the youth do die - sound familiar?
That's You, that is.
Greg and JBS.
Oh, and that MF woman Cobra or whatever: ex-Republican, active in Iraq, getting +45 upvotes for claiming RU is doing Genocide in UKr.
Fucking hell. We knew you were stupid, but that's taking the piss.
For the record: UKr civilian casualties are waaay under the same time frame in Iraq. By a few thousand.
Americans: MIND WORMS, IT'S ALL BRAIN WORMS.
~
Fires, Fires, Fires. Yeah, baby. We're not pro-Putin either.
But fucking hell: we broke 30+ Covenants: that means the Big-Girls Club takes us seriously. The UKr model is beating up a lone Romani woman, shaving her head and splashing permanent medical dye (green) on her face.
Then you get into the fucking club.
Yeah, you could pretty well write a book about all the ways the U.S. screwed up their response to 9/11.
Anyhow, you should look @ what the SUN THE SUN THE SUN is doing.
Pretty crazy stuff. M9+, X flares incoming.
p.s.
Little Men OSINT accounts and those "in the know" are like all worried that USAF targeting of MOSKVA might become "public knowledge". Like Posiedon AF tracking isn't public these days.
Newsflash, little men: the USAF + Neptun(e) guidance can't hit x2 C-section exact with no other damage, x2, precise.
One in a metre range of the other. 150 KG weps taking that out?
Improbable
Just Sayin.
[Translation for .mil folks]
The Radar section was 100% disabled by two precise strikes within 1 metre of each other with no ammo storage or other hits. It may have been (or not) used some shit 105kg missiles to do it, but it's not the strike you're looking for as .mil types looking to sink ships.
The Live Fire strike Operational instruction was: "Remove said Ship from Theatre, minimum casualties".
At the time of the hit: no casualties were recorded and if the specifications of the ship and crew and abilities had been true to spec then there would have been no casualties.
Everything after that is down to shit humans.
0.001%.
It may have been (or not) used some shit 105kg missiles to do it, but it's not the strike you're looking for as .mil types looking to sink ships.
Ohhh, UK is uppity tonight. 77th annoyed that they're being so spanked in the global propaganda sphere, they're getting silly.
It may have been (or may have not) some shit 150kg missiles used to do it... but as all .mil peeps know:
Over-KG usage in weaponry is a tactical balance to your shit training.
And so: give us x2 150 KG shit Soviet knock-offs, and we'll do things you cannot do with a couple Cruise missles three times the ordinance.
Literally: Your world is ending, and you spend it on this MiM shit? That's the response.
Yeah, you could pretty well write a book about all the ways the U.S. screwed up their response to 9/11.
No kidding. And I bet several people did. What should have been a police / FBI matter (or at worst, a special forces action like the one that killed Bin Laden) got turned into an opportunity for Bush 43 to show up his father, Bush 41, as a war leader. Didn't turn out too well for him... :-(
Hey guys, I'm running for president, and I have daddy issues. Vote for me?
Charlie, Apropos of nothing, I just saw this New Yorker cartoon that seems a pretty familiar (pardon the pun) concept.
so far as burning storehouses and dead oligarchs, I started wondering if it's Russians with personal connections to Ukraine doing a bit of unsupervised sabotage.
That said, has anyone ruled out:
--Corruption (aka "oopsies" with failed equipment upkeep, failed payoffs leading to retaliatory damage, mildly annoyed gangsters, that sort of thing)
--Sanctions biting down, and causing people to try to MacGyver stuff that really shouldn't be MacGyvered.
--Putin loyalists thinking that now's a good time to settle scores.
That's common, I recall the USA getting very upset indeed when foreigners dared bring a US war onto US soil. So angry they went for the "pour encourager les autres" approach (which is especially amusing in light of the "freedom fries" nonsense... but then they also rebranded it as "the war on terror" which is so very US).
I think that falls under the category of never giving a political family with deep ties to the oil industry an excuse to invade your oil-producing areas.
Just as a side note, I was far from the only one who predicted we'd be back in Iraq when Il Shrubbini was elected. Took him about two years to pull it off, and he did. By sheer coincidence, his administration started pushing for the Iraq Invasion right when his poll numbers fell to their pre-9/11 level. What startled me was how many people fell for the "evidence" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction after years of us knowing exactly what they had in the way of weapons.
On "being average":
Here is the story on that.
TL;DR The US Air Force used to build cockpits sized for "average" pilots, assuming that the vast majority of pilots fit comfortably within the averages for stuff like arm length, leg length, waist, butt size etc, and the only issue was not selecting as pilots anyone who was unusually tall or short or fat.
Then a statistician called Gilbert S. Daniels ran the numbers and discovered that actually nobody was in the middle 30% of the distribution on all 10 important measurements, and so the idea of making stuff to fit "the average man" was a losing proposition (literally, if you were in the cockpit).
This has now entered Human Factors mythology: I found that page using Google just now, but I first heard of it decades ago as a slightly garbled anecdote from a HF person.
So no, there is no such thing as the "average American" (or average for that matter), except as a statistical abstraction.
ilya87
The way schools go about this theoretically laudable endeavour, utterly fails for us Aspies.
Tell me again?
I NOW know that the "Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme" is actually a really good idea & helps people get along & explore places & things that they would not otherwise touch, but .....
I was at school when it started & it was deliberately "sold" as MORE SPURTS! JOLLY team
FascismGames! ...I enhanced my reputation as a sissy & cantankerous little member of the awkward squad { the latter is actually true though - I'm proud of it! } to be kept out of the way of the all-important "games" ethos, shudder.
Duffy
Follow the money - the last ( Hiding evidence of graft ) - including, as gasdive notes, the FSB doing it for/to you, or something like that.
OH FUCKING HELL
78, 80, 81, 82.With at least some of the usual insults & lies & claiming HOW CLEVER she (?) is.
BORING.
Oh, yes, is LXXVII meant to mean something?
Then a statistician called Gilbert S. Daniels ran the numbers and discovered that actually nobody was in the middle 30% of the distribution on all 10 important measurements, and so the idea of making stuff to fit "the average man" was a losing proposition (literally, if you were in the cockpit).
For modern US military pilots, and I assume other countries flying high performance jets, there is a non trivial list of body measurements that must be met to allow a pilot to be trained for a plane. Down to things like finger joint lengths.
The way schools go about this theoretically laudable endeavor, utterly fails for us Aspies.
Concur, and ASD wasn't something they were screening for before the 1990s, except among the severely impaired. As long as you were capable of speaking and tying your shoelaces you got lumped in with everyone else.
Things are considerably better for autistic kids these days (per anecdata from parents of kids with autism who I know).
Note for Pigeon: "Aspergers" as a term is not in use these days for two reasons: they changed the DSM-4 diagnostic criteria a few years back to call it "autism spectrum" (because the original described syndrome was hard to quantify), and Hans Asperger himself has been somewhat cancelled -- it appears he joined the Nazi party and was responsible for murdering severely disabled people. (So: a Nazi doctor.)
"a four hour meeting is better than a one hour meeting" or "an hour face to face is better than a 100 word email when conveying simple factual statements"
Oh, that's obvious! To a neurotypical extrovert, social interaction -- and meetings and face-to-face conversations are social interactions -- are 90% positive and fun. And even when they're not, they find the lengthy meetings less unpleasant than the paperwork or (gasp) actual work they'd have to do in the time freed up if they truncated the meeting.
I met and was diagnosed by of Asperger's students in the late 70s. I'm happy to say I didn't get a Nazi vibe from her. Nor did my mother. Also worth noting: yet another generation of students lined the walls in that room that day. It was a weird scene but it changed my life for the better.
BTW, a recent episode (#152) of The Allusionist podcast was all about Hans Asperger. Credit was given to Lorna Wing for coining the term.
The Allusionist itself explores language, so that's the angle by which this topic is approached. However, there's also some unpleasant history (When is there any other kind?) and politics. As the episode's notes warn, "Nazis, eugenics, ableism, child abuse, murder. There is some very grim stuff in this episode."
Footnote to the Seagull's comment, for Greg and the others:
When they mention the "77th", they're presumably talking about 77th Brigade (British Army), whose public remit is fascinatingly vague but who were created in 2015 to carry out infowar, hacking, and disinformation operations (and to counter similar ops directed at the UK).
The Seagull is suggesting that the R-360 Neptun missiles fired by the Ukrainian shore defenses couldn't have targeted the ship so accurately because they're ancient Soviet-era shit. However, IIRC a Boeing P-8 Poseidon was stooging around over the Black Sea and could plausibly have whacked the Moskva at the same time with a Harpoon. And now they're worried that the public might notice a USAF finger on the balance pan tilting the scales in Ukraine's favour.
I think the Seagull may be wrong here: while the airframe and rocket motor may be Soviet vintage, the Ukrainian defense industries have form for upgrading old Soviet gear with modern avionics, and if the Moskva was close enough to shore for someone to light it up with a laser designator the sort of accuracy we see in the photos isn't out of the question.
H: there is nothing like a good warehouse fire for covering up the fact that the contents were sub-standard, or don't work, or were not up to scratch.
And a culture of corruption diffuses from the top down.
Greg@1570: "Military Bands" - yeah, well, see MacDonald Fraser on the fighting qualities of Scottish regiment bands - especially as one of their instruments is often regarded as a weapon (!)
You're confusing two separate constructs...
Military bands have clarinets, conductors, trombones, sheet music, etc, and (until cost-cutting in the late 90s, when they were centralised down to "one per three or four battalions") every infantry battalion had one.
The Pipes & Drums (or, if you were the Gordon Highlanders and being awkward, the Drums & Pipes) are a completely separate group - note that while the Scottish (and some Irish) regiments have a pipe band, the ethnic equivalent for Englishlandshire regiments is the Corps of Drums.
The war role of each is different - the military band were trained up as medics (ours were), while the Pipers/Drummers fought; these days, typically as a Machine-Gun Platoon. As a "for instance", during the 1991 Gulf War, the Royal Scots' pipe band was a rifle platoon (during a peacetime gunnery competition, the Drum-Major's Warrior IFV apparently won "Top Gun"); and during the Falklands War, the newly-formed reconnaissance platoon[1] of the Scots Guards was largely pipers and drummers. Falklands War hint: Guardsmen wear berets, if you see someone wearing a black glengarry (middle row, third from right), they're a piper.
[1] In the 1970s/early 80s, mechanised infantry battalions weren't scaled for a close reconnaissance platoon; that role was filled by the medium reconnaissance regiments of the Royal Armoured Corps. Like a lot of things, that changed after the Falklands War - see also "add back formal establishments for machine-gun platoons and sniper sections".
However, I consider that revisionism discriminatory and harmful. Let's ignore the politically correct aspect of airbrushing a 'syndrome' out of existence because it is named after someone who is claimed to have been a shit.
Yes, there is a gradation from 'pure' Aspergers to autism, but describing those of us with 'plain' Aspergers as dysfunctional is just plain wrong, we don't tick most of the indicators of autism, and we should be treated entirely differently. Yes, we lack a few abilities that most people have, but an equal number of people lack some equally important abilities we have strongly developed. Yet THAT lack is not regarded as dysfunctionality.
For example, is it REALLY reasonable to regard it as functional to have difficulty telling fact from fiction, to have difficulty expressing something precisely, or to expect other people to understand what you mean even if you have said something entirely different?
The point is that ALL we need at school and society is a modicum of understanding, and a preparedness to make slight allowances. Yes, we need teaching about how to interact with people at the opposite extreme, but why don't they need teaching how to interact with us?
There is also a phenomenon often known as "getting lucky".
Putin really, really, not looking at all well, or happy ... - wonder how desperate he is going to get, if he's that close to either snuffing it, or falling over?
Don't like that idea, either.
EC
Because the overenthusiastic loudmouthed moronic bullies who do team spurts are NORMAL - you only have to look at any big football match, say, ooh: Arsenal/Tottenham or Liverpool/Everton or Rangers/Celtic or Charlton/Millwall to see how normal & friendly and sociable they are!
Bugger
Update - from that twitter feed.
(?) Putin has Parkinson's, badly & it's progressing rapidly (?)
Prognoses, anyone?
"However, IIRC a Boeing P-8 Poseidon was stooging around over the Black Sea and could plausibly have whacked the Moskva at the same time with a Harpoon."
IMO, if NATO/US did provide aid to the Moskva strike, it was in the form of initial targeting information that allowed the Neptune missiles to get close enough to the ship that their own radar seekers could lock on.
One of the striking features of the situation since the beginning has been the presence of various reconnaissance aircraft, notably AWACS and ELINT, flying near the Ukrainian border. As I type this, a NATO AWACS E-3A and RIVET JOINT RC-135W are over Romania just south of Ukraine and near the Black Sea. AWACS, in addition to being an air surveillance platform, can also see ships out to several hundred kilometers from its operating altitude of ~10,000 meters.
Greg and Pigeon - Greg and I appear to have agreed about "the arts", even if we've specifically chosen different branches for discussion.
38 & 39 - There are also Arthurian sites in Scotland, for example "Arthur's Seat" in Edinburgh, and "Merlin's Well" near Broughton in the Scottish borders.
48 - The "Carlyle Group", aka the "ex-Presidents' Club". Also know for employing ex British Prime Ministers, including Major Major.
57 - :-)
60 - I tend to agree with your view of a typical Eng Lit syllabus. That said, my actual point was about the tools it gave me for reading fiction, and not the individual works I was dragged though.
96 - See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3oZfXIcO9E for how the bagpipes were actually used (at least by the Lovat Scouts).
IMO, if NATO/US did provide aid to the Moskva strike, it was in the form of initial targeting information that allowed the Neptune missiles to get close enough to the ship that their own radar seekers could lock on.
Yep.
The most likely modernization Ukr might have made to the Neptun missile would be to update its avionics, guidance, and telemetry to enable it to take guidance/navigation inputs from 21st century inputs rather than primitive 1980s Soviet-era electronics. Rocket motors and airframe are relatively unchanging compared to sensors and electronics: the modern missile might be several generations ahead of the 1980s version in terms of accuracy while looking outwardly identical.
The Moskva is at least nominally equipped with the equivalent of the US Phalanx system: six rotary cannons, each pair with an independent target acquisition and tracking radar. These should have been capable of tracking and destroying two Neptune cruise missiles, but obviously didn't. My working assumption is that it was like the USS Stark, where the Phalanx guns were never taken off of standby status.
Elderly Cynic said If the UK had a quarter-competent government, it would be getting ready to lay a damn great undersea cable or three, and negotiating contracts with solar panel companies, Morocco and points east and south for supplying it.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/02/bad-news-day.html#comment-2139284
https://electrek.co/2022/04/21/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cable-will-send-clean-energy-from-morocco-to-the-uk/
A 10.5 gigawatt (GW) solar and wind farm will be built in Morocco’s Guelmim-Oued Noun region, and it will supply the UK with clean energy via subsea cables. The twin 1.8 GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cables will be the world’s longest.
Subsea cable manufacturer XLCC is going to build a factory in Hunterston, Scotland, and its first output will be for the Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project. It will supply four 2,361-mile-long (3,800 km) subsea cables, with the first phase between 2025-2027 connecting wind and solar power generated in Morocco to Alverdiscott, North Devon.
"These should have been capable of tracking and destroying two Neptune cruise missiles, but obviously didn't."
Yes, a lot of the naval commentary has been along the lines "this shouldn't have happened." The common guess is that the initial failure was due to inattention and/or distraction. Other things ensued.
https://gcaptain.com/russias-sunken-warship-warning-to-navies/
Thank you. I am glad that someone is doing the obvious. I don't see any reference to the government in that article, except agreeing to use British steel, which says something :-)
Michael Cain said: These should have been capable of tracking and destroying two Neptune cruise missiles
I read a twitter thread that I now can't find that said that two modern missiles can record the radar chirps, coordinate between themselves, and then play them back in such a way that the two missiles appear to the radar to be one missile half way between the two. As you can tell, I didn't fully understand, and so can't produce an understandable explanation, but maybe some of the more knowledgeable commenters will recognise what I'm trying to say.
I believe the best short description of the American character is "I felt I had to do something". Note the lack of thinking.
It isn't about violence necessarily, though feeling one has to do something can lead to violence.
As for science fiction, Heinlein was more ambiguous about violence than some think, and of the big three Asimov was pretty anti-violence and so was Bradbury.
I'm so far behind on current sf that I wouldn't even try to guess where the tendency toward violence-as-a-solution-rather-than-a-problem is trending.
Yeah, I was more saying that you were right about the cable, and obviously, are right about the government too. This being left up to private industry, rather than being done by a quarter competent government.
"As I type this, a NATO AWACS E-3A and RIVET JOINT RC-135W are over Romania just south of Ukraine and near the Black Sea."
.., and now there's an RC-135 flying up and down and practising procedure turns at FL380 actually over the Black Sea. First time I've seen them venture that far east, but that may just be because of a lack of ADS-B receivers in that area.
For example, is it REALLY reasonable to regard it as functional to have difficulty telling fact from fiction, to have difficulty expressing something precisely, or to expect other people to understand what you mean even if you have said something entirely different?
Throw in swearing at people who disagree with you and constantly pushing boundaries and that sounds rather familiar… :-/
The point is that ALL we need at school and society is a modicum of understanding, and a preparedness to make slight allowances. Yes, we need teaching about how to interact with people at the opposite extreme, but why don't they need teaching how to interact with us?
That does happen, actually, at schools with autism programs. At least here where I taught — don't know about where you are.
I'm so far behind on current sf that I wouldn't even try to guess where the tendency toward violence-as-a-solution-rather-than-a-problem is trending.
Well, mil-sf is a whole subgenre now, so looking at sales figures for that compared to the whole field might reveal something.
Or might not. There's works like Stirling's Nantucket series that contain a lot of non-military ideas and things as well as the loving-written blow-by-blow fighting scenes. Is it mil-sf, or regular sf with a lot of violence? (I once calculated that the battle-and-martial-arts scenes were over half the words, but I don't have those calculations anymore and don't remember the exact number I got.)
That's not really 'current', though. Who is current nowadays? I'm so far behind that I'm not even trying to keep up anymore.
(?) Putin has Parkinson's, badly & it's progressing rapidly (?) Prognoses, anyone?
Yeah. Bullshit.
I've got Parkinson's in my family, and part of the diagnosis is that the constellation of symptoms you're experiencing respond better to drugs for Parkinson's than they do to other treatments. Almost always there's a long and frustrating trail of failed diagnoses leading up to this. It's not a disease that you can diagnose from a video clip, unless it's already late stage.
The only reason I bring this up is to recruit people for the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (https://www.ppmi-info.org/). It's a study that's looking to better define what constellation of symptoms is highly associated with Parkinson's, and what's less so. To do this, they need a lot of people with Parkinson's, and even more people who do not have Parkinson's. So far they've enrolled over 10,000 people, and they're still recruiting. If you enroll, the PPMI sends you a set of questionnaires about symptoms (sleep, tremor, memory, etc.) a few times a year. The questionnaires are each pretty short (5-20 minutes), and the expectation is that you'll fill them out when you have time. I'd urge as many people as possible to sign up. The goal here is to make it easier to diagnose early-stage Parkinson's and to better understand how it progresses, so that people can get proper treatment and not have to go through wrong-drug hell while the doctors rule everything else out.
"I believe the best short description of the American character is "I felt I had to do something". Note the lack of thinking."
... and my default setting is "Old Testament"
I was very surprised when I lived in USA, how often USA defaults to the old testament, from "thoughts and prayers", "... under God" and near-criminalization of atheists.
Thank you, I agree that "murderous Nazi doctor syndrome" is not a particularly appealing tag to have. However, I see the choice of renaming as a retrograde step. "Autism spectrum" covers an enormous range, most of which is far away from the particular area in question, so it's a considerably more misleading thing to call it; it seems to be returning to the time of my original diagnosis when "semi-autistic" was the best they could come up with because that was all they knew. See also EC @97. It has to be said that my present doctor calls it Asperger's quite happily.
Anyway, I do wish they'd check the names for things properly before letting the public get to know them. All this replacement of familiar terms is confusing. I can't catch VD any more, and I want my brontosaurus back.
...but the name is a reference to the noise reduction system and Ray Dolby's son is called Thomas.
Chicken's tits...
Parkinson's doesn't progress rapidly -- some things that mimic Parkinson's progress fast (eg. MPTP poisoning), but the symptoms he's showing in TV broadcasts suggest hemilateral ataxia, which isn't Parkinsonian at all.
On the other hand: he's known to have been treated for thyroid cancer, he's showing signs of high-dose prednisone treatment, and that's consistent with angry outbursts and mood swings.
Also, he's nearly 70, and geriatric medicine is complex because most folks over 70 have 3-6 concurrent chronic health conditions.
Eh? I was talking about what so-called NORMAL people do, which is regarded as perfectly acceptable. Those other behaviours are entirely unrelated, and the latter is actually anti-correlated.
Or maybe the warehouse was insured for an absurdly high amount, and the fire was one more bit of graft.
So, let's just suppose - even if it isn't Parkinson's - that Vlad the Insaner actually does become, clearly & obviously unfit to
pleadcommand - THEN WHAT?Who takes over? Does the war go on, or do they pull back & blame the "former guy"? Or what?
To be noted that there's an unconfirmed report of RU wanting the whole Southern coastal strip, as far across as "Transnistria" - which strikes me as utterly daft ( at present, anyway )
Thoughts - both medical & military { Political is too complicated }
I was trying to stay out of the Parkinson's progression question, but since you brought it up:
Yes, there's a cluster of things that present as Parkinson's. Without getting into the gory details (you have the internet, look up Lewy bodies), some rare flavors will kill in about five years. If you've got basic, fucking annoying Parkinson's, it'll take about one year off your life. So if you're diagnosed at 70, it will progress more rapidly than if you're Michael J. Fox, who was diagnosed in his 30s and is now in his 60s. The tl;dr is that Parkinson's doesn't shorten your life much by itself, but it does make your time on Earth progressively less pleasant.
As for hand tremors in a Russian stereotype, I'd first attempt to rule out alcohol binging the night before, since hangover tremors are a thing for some people. More to the point, I'd ignore talking head video diagnoses in general and concentrate on what he's doing.
"but the symptoms he's showing in TV broadcasts"
Speaking of that, the CIA just posted a new tranche of declassified documents, among which is "VIP Health Watch", a paper from the 1960s (I think) describing the watch CIA was keeping on various leaders.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/06500678
which has a link to
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/VIP%20HEALTH%20WATCH%5B14747229%5D.pdf
https://twitter.com/UA_Institute/status/1517156973245915136
Ten relevant books about the history of Russia and Ukraine.
Also, he's nearly 70, and geriatric medicine is complex because most folks over 70 have 3-6 concurrent chronic health conditions.
And out bodies just work differently. Says he who is nearly the same age.
In just one area, the foods I can eat has changed drastically in the last 5 years. At least eat and not feel like crap.
Off topic: The Atrocity Archives is on the list of Five Books Featuring Shocking Revelations and Forbidden Knowledge by James Nicoll on Tor.com. Surely such a list will provide warm fuzzy feelings and relaxing bedtime reading, right?
No idea what's going on with Putin, but I sincerely hope it is uncomfortable.
If he sheds his mortal coil we can hope that the resultant power vacuum will cause the Russian military to withdraw while they wait to see who the new Czar will be and what he wants.
However, it is plausible and likely that Putin will live long enough to kill a lot more innocent people. Recent articles showing satellite images of mass graves being dug and progressively expanded in Russian held areas of Mariupol are the cause of my morning malaise today.
I don't think Ukraine is going to accept the loss of their coastline or the Eastern part of their country, but perhaps there is an upper limit to how much atrocity they will accept. Any ceasefire that doesn't involve Ukraine's original borders will likely be a short-term thing (in years).
"Greg and I appear to have agreed about "the arts", even if we've specifically chosen different branches for discussion."
Indeed, but do note that you are describing the way you think about things now, whereas I was talking about what I thought while I was still at school.
Also, Eng Lit is not in the same category that I was talking about. I certainly wished that it was on the list of optional subjects so I could avoid them teaching it to me, but I couldn't honestly say that it was on my list of things that they shouldn't have bothered wasting everyone's time with at all.
What I was talking about there was the stuff that was just playing around, kindergarten-level shit prolonged into the lesson time of teenagers. Two years to go to O-level - standing around for half an hour singing "Galli galli galli galli rum sa sa" over and over again, for fuck's sake. One year to go to O-level - playing with plasticine. (OK, it was grown-up plasticine called "clay" that you could put in a kiln and make it go hard, but that was the only difference.) Right through to A-level - chasing balls through the mud. (Fortunately in the last two years you could get away with "forgetting your kit" every single week.) Religion wasn't really the same kind of thing, but I nevertheless included it in the same category because I thought exactly like Greg at the time.
"60 - I tend to agree with your view of a typical Eng Lit syllabus. That said, my actual point was about the tools it gave me for reading fiction, and not the individual works I was dragged though."
Gave me none at all, and on top of that disparaged those I'd acquired on my own.
Typical lesson involved something like the teacher leading us through Juliet doing a speech and pointing out that it starts off grim, then a bit later on there's a light-hearted bit, then after that it gets grim again... Well, yeah, I can see that, but - really, so fucking what? Someone talking about good and bad aspects of her situation says good and bad things. How is this trivial and obvious thing so significant that we have to be led through it slowly and told that we need to know this for the exam? I could get marks for regurgitating what the teacher was saying, but I hadn't learned anything at all; I hadn't the foggiest idea what I was supposed to take away from this and apply to other bits of literature, and when he told us to do the same thing with some other passage I still didn't have a clue what the thing actually was, so my ability to get marks in that case was zero.
So at one point we were assigned a "literature project", which meant choosing our own book and producing n pages of our own waffle about it. So I dived in and found plenty of stuff to discuss and actually managed to produce a reasonable quantity of coherent-ish verbiage. It was returned with comments to the effect that it was fairly good (for me) but it didn't count because the overlap between the things I found significant and the examiners' box-ticking things (which I was entirely unable to identify, as above) was minimal. "By all means discuss aspects of characterisation and style", the teacher had written, "but not at the expense of..." [stuff like whatever the fuck I was supposed to see in Juliet's speech, since that's all I'll get marks for]. I remember that bit specifically because I was so appalled at it.
Labels are a hot topic of discussion amoung autistics on social media. (Wing Syndrome might work, but that's already taken. It's an avian thing.) There's no strong consensus amoung the autistics that I can see in social media. Opinions are as diverse as the people who hold them.
Perhaps a more useful question may be how labels relate to services, rather than the labels themselves. Unfortunately, there's no agreement within the service communities on how labels map to services, so the result remains chaotic. Service users (another term to question/dislike/hate/etc) are poorly served regardless. My observation is that geography plays a greater role. You can only use the services available in your area.
However, there is growing awareness of this issue. Even Spectrum, a news source specialising in Autism research, has covered this. The Autistic community has been discussing this and more on social media for much longer, but its good to see researchers becoming aware of it. So there may eventually be progress.
waldo @ 54: The so-called "styrofoam fighters" have been visible via Google Maps for the best part of twenty years. Though not necessarily those particular ones, which are at Lipetsk. That airfield is evidently being used for storing cannibalisable airframes. (If you look, there are even a couple of Mig-23 airframes.)
In the last week or so Google removed the blur over Russian military bases. Prior to that they haven't actually been visible. Google usually blurs out sensitive installations when a country requests it. If you know where to find sensitive installations in the U.K., take a look for them in Google Maps to see what I mean.
" it starts off grim, then a bit later on there's a light-hearted bit, then after that it gets grim again"
Chiasmus. You should have gone on at length about chiasmus. Guaranteed to have impressed the teachers.
Pigeon @ 65:
Uh? Surely he was the son or something of Ray Dolby, the noise reduction guy, who was definitely American. I remember when I first heard of Thomas thinking "naah, can't possibly be a connection", and then I remember being surprised when the internet happened to find that actually there was."
Wrong "Tom" Dolby. They're not related.
Thomas Dolby the musician was born Thomas Morgan Robertson ... "Dolby" is a stage name
Ray Dolby's son Tom Dolby is a writer & film maker.
Duffy @ 69: So why are there so many chemical facilities burning down in Russia? A massive warehouse stuffed with $20 million dollars worth of Russian army gear and weapons. Oligarchs murdered with their families?
Coincidence?
False flag operation Putin can blame on Ukrainians.
An actual rebel underground in Russia?
Higher ups burning down evidence of theft and corruption?
All of the above?
Troutwaxer @ 70: I noticed all that too. Hopefully Ukraine has some special forces in Russia,* but I suspect most of these are signs of a society that's under more pressure than it can deal with starting to fall apart.
Maybe Russian logistics near the border with Ukraine are too well guarded and the other locations in Russia are easier to get to? IF it is Ukrainian "special forces" and not one of the other mentioned possibilities.
It's more fundamental than that. Consider the simplification of two groups: one is good at building consensus and working together but is not good at facing hard facts or instigating radical change; the other is the converse. Simple statistics shows that the optimal evolutionary strategy is to produce more of the former, for when things are running smoothly, but some of the latter, for when they aren't.
As someone who is partially disabled in several ways, I loathe the term "differently abled", but it IS appropriate for people on the Aspergers spectrum. In particular, a disproportionate number of leading scientists and engineers are quite a way out on it, because it actually helps. I doubt that more than a small proportion of people with it are formally diagnosed, because it is NOT necessarily disabling.
You can see the prejudice with criteria like "preferring to be on their own". When I was young, this was treated as a potentially curable defect, like homosexuality, and that continued until at least 40 years back (it may still do). Er, why?
Totally agree!
"Normal" is the average of the people tou agree with! :)
The word neurofascism is sometimes used for what you describe. I often wonder if that's too strong or not strong enough. It certainly fits Hans Asperger after Nazis invaded and took over Vienna. As we've learned since then (Milgram etc), fascism can arise anywhere the conditions are right.
Some people still see Autism as "curable", i.e. purely behavioral. So we have B.F. Skinner's techniques applied to autistic humans. The results are ghastly.
One recent anecdote I read: A few weeks ago Spectrum ran a feature written by a mother describing her difficulties finding doctors able to treat her autistic child's headaches. She also mentioned how she and the father missed the headaches for years due to ABA. There's so much implied by just that one line.
"In the last week or so Google removed the blur over Russian military bases. Prior to that they haven't actually been visible."
According to Google (as reported by various sources e.g. the Independent), that's not the case.
Since I don't have an archive of old Google Maps images I have no idea what the true story is.
Yes. Skinner's approach was certainly used on me when I was young, usually in a negative way, though that's just because that's the way upbringing was done - in a sense, it 'worked' because I learnt how to live in an alien and often hostile environment (partly due to my intelligence), but it and the hang-ups that resulted weren't something I would wish on anyone. And I am a VERY long way off 'true' autism, which is an entirely different matter, and orders of magnitude less suitable for that approach.
"Google usually blurs out sensitive installations when a country requests it. If you know where to find sensitive installations in the U.K., take a look for them in Google Maps to see what I mean."
Any examples? I've looked at a number of sites that I'm aware of, and they look pretty unblurred from here. Admittedly there's not much to be seen anyway - one building looks much like another, unless perhaps it's an interesting geometrical shape.
Should your brother feel down, please do tell him he is -very- appreciated for his work by this rando.
For me, it was the school playground. I had to "pass" as non-autisic to avoid being bullied. So I learned fast.
However, I've met many autistics who couldn't pass even if their lives depended on it. Actually, in the first years of my life, I wouldn't have passed either. Hans Asperger would've sent me to my death. Maybe you too.
That realisation chills me.
I worked in 'Community Living' for 11 years with one person who was far out towards the end of any spectrum of autism one might envisage.
There was no notion of 'curing' him, but there was a great amount of effort put into helping him manage his emotions and interactions with the community around him. He dealt with a lot of brutal 'treatment' and bullying when he was younger, and had learned that he was most often left alone when he chose to be off-the-charts violent.
Over the years his ability to engage with the world improved dramatically. But our success was largely because we went way outside the approaches promoted by the so-called experts in the field. Holding someone accountable for bad behaviour in a small but meaningful way? Impossible!
Hi life was better, but it was at the expense of >4 full time staff over decades. It also became an incredibly toxic workplace for reasons unrelated to the residents, but that wasn't their fault.
Just for the fun of it, I doublechecked, and yep, I remembered right: guess who else was part of the Carlyle Group? Right in on... Bush, Sr, an W.
"Normal" is the average of the people tou agree with! :)
Yes. And given how much we argue here, there is no normal for this list.
I'm now trying to get my head around whether QNuts are normal because they're normal somewhere on the interwebs. My imagination is gravely impaired, I fear.
Moz@68 writes: No-one has yet explained to me in a way that makes sense stuff like "a four hour meeting is better than a one hour meeting" or "an hour face to face is better than a 100 word email when conveying simple factual statements".
Krugman's recent column,as it frequently does, praised city living over suburban sprawl for ecological reasons, and also for the productivity boost people apparently get from working cheek by jowl, elbow to elbow with close colleagues in a face to face urban setting. I think maybe he's just 'talking his book' unconsciously because he owns a house in New Jersey and wants to promote the value of that investment whether he admits it to himself or not.
An alternative explanation besides the supposed productivity boost could simply be an effect of class exclusivity, in other words, a bank officer or prospective business contact won't okay a loan or swing a contract your way without satisfying himself first that you're either a member or a sincerely aspiring wannabe member of his social set, God forbid he should enable a class enemy by providing financial support to someone who won't share his values, and by so doing bring down the worth of his own investments. If you don't like all the same things he likes, you won't compete for those things in the market and consequently some small quantum of value deflates out of his own material holdings.
So administrative authorities become adept at sussing out a person's "character" (Mad magazine once explained this as an acronym for Car-Haircut-Appearance-Religion-Affiliations-Clothes -and I forget the rest) That's the real point of management seminars in too many cases, especially now since as you say much of it can be handled online. I'm not denying genuine value in getting to know and feel comfortable with coworkers, especially the well connected middleman types, historical example being Edmund Halley discussing an astronomy problem with Newton who pulled the answer out of a neglected pile of papers and that launched publication of his Principia, which otherwise may never have seen the light of day. But this positive facilitator effect gets totally overwhelmed too often by simple clannishness, which in and of itself is not unreasonable if you look at it as somebody trying to boost the value of their own stuff. The downside, however, is buildup of inequality, class antagonism, pressure to conform to nonproductive arbitrary standards, and waste of economic resources on social signalling. Political fragmentation ensues as a result, and the sum of human happiness is diminished accordingly. John Stuart Mill would not approve.
All I can tell you is that I've been using Google Maps to look at Russian (and Belarussian, and [nationality of your choice]) airfields for close on 20 years.
Agree, some countries ask for such things to be obscured - though I was mightily amused to find that Volkel, in the Nertherlands, was carefully pixelated, but the online airshow borocuhre I also found said, almost literally, "the B61 storage areas (allegedly) are in this area" on its map.
As I said, I have been seeing many, many ex-Soviet aircraft in this sort of condition, via Google Maps and a browser, for almost twenty years. It is very clear to me that they are being stored for cannibalisation. Similar things are visible at e.g. the Mojave Spaceport airliner storage facility.
Oops. "brochure" and "Netherlands". Sorry.
To a neurotypical extrovert, social interaction ... are 90% positive and fun.
I admit that I sometimes try to make those interactions less fun, or much less fun, in the hope that an extrovert who won't listen will eventually become conditioned. Another approach is to excitedly welcome the chance to get paid for not working. Especially towards the end when I can say stuff like "can you just explain again why ..." or "are you sure {someone not present} will agree? What should I tell them?"... just obviously trying to pad out the meeting.
The question is more accurately: why is... better for me and the simple, brutal answer is generally: do what I want or I'll fire you.
Also, Charlie, you're talented/privileged by your "speaker for geeks" position in a way that means you have far more insight into the thinking of the geeks than the average manager. Or even the above-average manager.
an effect of class exclusivity
I have definitely worked in companies like that. One was run by people so tightly socially constrained that the pay spreadsheet was on a shared drive, letting me see the gap between peons (under $70k salary) and decent people (over $130k). I left that role after we tried to recruit someone as a peer to me and I told my boss that to keep someone like me they'd need to offer at least $100k and he said "not a chance". When I left shortly afterwards he was surprised and hurt, the idea that I could act so contrary to his desires had apparently never passed through whatever he was using instead of a brain.
And one of the few times I was fired was explicitly because I regarded the management as peers rather than masters. It grated on them in a way that I quickly decided that I liked. Instead of "yes sir, of course sir, immediately sir" I'd say "that seems odd" or "why that way" and ... it's not my place to say things like that. The other workers just did whatever stupid shit management suggested, and the company was accordingly terrible both as an employer and as a supplier. They're the ones who waited until after I'd started to give me a contract to sign, then told me I couldn't keep a copy. I STFU at that point because I fucking love working for people who don't realise that only the legislated minimum conditions apply (things like not having to work overtime and never being on call).
Pigeon said: chasing balls through the mud. (Fortunately in the last two years you could get away with "forgetting your kit" every single week
I did that too. Eventually they started caning me for not having sports clothes. Caning was less likely to have permanent injury, so I got caned every week for a while.
Re the check boxes in English classes. After several years of doing essays and assignments in English and getting useful feedback like 4/10 or 6/10 and literally having no idea what the difference was I eventually asked in the middle of a class (the teacher had said, "any questions", but I don't thing they expected any as no one had ever put up their hand in the past) I asked "in science we learn how the natural world fits together, in maths we learn formulas and how to apply them to solve problems, in modern history we learn about what made people as groups do the things they did, what is it we're supposed to be learning here?
She sent me to be caned.
Re: '... things that mimic Parkinson's progress fast (eg. MPTP poisoning), but the symptoms he's showing in TV broadcasts suggest hemilateral ataxia, '
My mother had non-Parkinsonian tremors aka Essential Tremor Disorder. We were told that the most common culprits for tremors of any type are genetic predisposition, along with Vit B12 deficiency and hypothyroidism (both quite common among seniors), and a shrinking cerebellum*.
*Some viruses have been associated with this - basically any virus that can infiltrate into the brain region. Oh yeah, and gluten sensitivity, and too much of any of: alcohol, coffee, stress, etc.
Sorta related topic ...
Looks like there's a 'murder-suicide' epidemic among Russian oligarchs - four along with their immediate/local families gone in the past few months. The two most recent died within 24 hours of each other.
SF Reader said: Looks like there's a 'murder-suicide' epidemic among Russian oligarchs
Yes a very stressful position. As stressful as being a weapons inspector who says embarrassing things about weapons of mass destruction not existing. Enough to make one open a tiny tiny artery in a hard to reach place on the awkward side of one wrist with a blunt knife that you don't leave fingerprints on and then lie in a field for the many hours it takes to bleed out through such a small vessel and then go somewhere else to actually die, so there's not much blood.
Re: 'Yes a very stressful position.'
And a ton of possible suspects and motives - domestic and foreign.
Although the first scenario/motive that came to mind was this:
'Give me all your money - I need it to pay off national debts/hire more mercenaries!'
'No!' (Stab/shoot - gasp, expire)
Wonder how long it takes for wills to clear the Russian court system because I'm guessing that these people did have up-to-date wills and the last oligarch did have a surviving adult child/heir. Yeah, I know -- an official gov't or internal corporate audit will show that all of these oligarchs committed some sort of fraud and after all the various legal expenses and fines/penalties have been paid, there will be next to zero left in their estates for any surviving family.
given how much we argue here, there is no normal for this list.
There is. It's a pretty broad one, but there are attitudes and viewpoints that aren't represented here, and others that are very under-represented.
getting useful feedback like 4/10 or 6/10
There is a lot of evidence that attaching grades to student work is counterproductive, as (most) students just look at the grade and ignore any feedback the teacher has given. This matches my experience — hand back an assignment with extensive feedback and the question was invariably "where did I lose 3 marks?" or "what should I have written instead?" even what that was answered in detail by the feedback I'd written on the assignment — adding a grade short-circuits any attention being paid to the feedback.
I have colleagues whose schools have gone grade-free. Students get extensive feedback but no actual grades on assignments. Most students like it, except the top keeners who are invested in having the best score and have lost bragging rights. Parental acceptance is mixed; parents coming from more traditional cultures (where rote learning, cramming, and standardized high-stakes exams are normal) don't like it, most of the rest are neutral or support it. What makes it work is that the school administration is also onboard with it, and will not allow parents to bully teachers into 'just giving a mark'.
My administration wasn't that supportive, so my solution was to create fairly detailed rubrics for each assignment listing what criteria I was using and using the language from the Ministry of Education assessment guidelines to rate how well those criteria had been met. There were no numbers to argue with, no half-marks to bargain for, and no overall grade to look at — and I found that students actually read the feedback and learned from it. (Internally, my gradebook app assigned ratings to each item in the rubric so I could track whether a student was improving or not, and most students improved with each successive assignment.) The Ministry language was there because that way my administration couldn't object that I wasn't following guidelines*; the students ignored it and focused on more specific (ie. in plain English) comments like I wanted them to.
*Because I was actually one of the few people who was following the guidelines as they were written.
Re: '... invisible Neo-Nazi Symbology .. . They. Are. Killing. Any. Children. In. The. House. As. Well. ...keep on posting your vapid takes...'
Agree on all three points --- although 'naive' would be more apt. (I have no issues with being considered unknowledgeable on some subjects.)
Unfortunately I don't understand your other points/references ... not a gamer.
The one bad thing I've heard about a non-grading school is what happened to a lab mate who went to such a place and then applied to grad school. Because of the need to meet minimum GPA standards for entrance, they had to go back to every teacher and request a letter grade. Took awhile. Fortunately, no one had left or retired.
My experience with "alternative grading" was positive, albeit I was in the cohort that revealed exploits in one of the systems. Completely gradeless would, as you suggest, rule out entry to most competitive systems afterwards so I have assumed they were used primarily by people not interested in academically competitive education.
In NSW one issue that's being worked through at the moment is the International Baccalaureate system (IB) because their grading is quite different to the usual NSW grading, and the grade output is coarser which results in IB kids getting "rounded up" ion a way that significantly advantages them. I vaguely recall that it's something like IB marks out of 40 rather than 100, and 40/40 is definitely an option. But the mainstream system scales exponentially at the top end so the gap between 99% and 100% is significant (if 100% is even possible). Result: competitive kids switching to IB and things like medical schools crying at the resulting rush of 100% IB kids.
To be clear, I don't object to not grading, and I agree with Robert Prior that it can be useful when the goal is providing feedback and actually educating someone. That's the way getting a masters or doctorate works, of course. When the goal includes things like ranking and hoop-jumping (getting into grad school, for example), lack of grades can be a problem.
I was a real stinker at the end of my teaching career: I not only told all the students precisely how they were being graded, I told them how to calculate how much the next test would shift their grade, and I made sure that I tested (rather comprehensively) on what I taught, no more and no less. They hated my tests, because I simply tested everything, weighting more on the stuff that was important. They knew at at the end how they'd done, which, to be fair, most of them didn't particularly want to know.
The gutsiest student I had took me seriously. He was auditing the class (pass/fail), and calculated that he'd pass whether or not he took the final. So he skipped my final to study for a class in his major that he needed an A in. He got that A and he passed my class too, with the TAs in awe of his sangfroid. Most undergrads don't have that much confidence in their math or their skills.
I took an Alexander Technique class in college. It's a method of improving coordination by a release that lets the head move up and that propagates through the whole body. It improves kinesthesia.
The teacher didn't grade on performance because he found that thinking about grades made people forget Alexander Technique. He wasn't the only AT teacher who wouldn't grade directly. He mentioned one who graded on class notes. He assumed that anyone who showed up would learn AT so he graded on attendance.
Cantina said: If you teach like you moderate
As near as I can tell he does. These are the rules, clearly laid out. Everyone knows the score. You stick to them, you get to be exactly as you wish within those rules.
You've got a 3 post limit rather than the permanent ban any other blog would give. You can't make 10 posts and then complain that the wrong ones got deleted, and then abuse the poor volunteer that's giving up their time to keep order. Well actually you can, you did, but it's on par with abusing the unpaid referee at a kid's kick ball game.
Stick to the not onerous rules and none of your precious words of wisdom will be lost.
Ya dun goofed up
You know what? I'm gonna tell you right now, this is from her father, you bunch of lying, no-good punks! And I know who it's coming from, because I back-traced it, and I know who's emailing and who's doing it, and you've been reported to cyber police and the state police. You better not write one more thing or screw with my computer again, you'll be arrested, end of conversation, from her father! And if you come near my daughter, guess what? Consequences will never be the same, you lying bunch of pricks!
gasdive
The MURDER of David Kelly by US "intelligence", you mean?
161 - also 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172
What a surprise! Arrogantly sounding-off on a subject of which you are ignorant ( Like ALL of them ) & then insulting a poster for shits & giggles.
How about a POSITIVE contribution, just to shock us all, eh?
{ See also: gasdive @ 166 }
- Can you tell we do not respect you? - you don't respect ANYBODY AT ALL - that's the problem, your overweening arrogance & self-centredness.
Do we really, really have to put up with this?
{ I trust skulgun @ 173 is a spoof/sarcasm/rejoinder to the above listings? }
151 - That I can agree with. What Eng Lit teaches in Scotland is "how to pass Eng Lit" with a side order of "useful tools for analysing English prose and poetry" (fact, fiction, poems and lyrics). Having achieved my university entry grade pass in Eng Lit, the tools are the only things that mattered for the next 43 years.
156 - I see your point. In "Fuzzy Studies" (anything where there isn't a right answer) what the teacher is actually teaching is "gaining Uni entry grade in Fuzzy Studies". OTOH, if the subject was Accounts and the question a variation on "describe the main systems of deprecation" marked out of 20, you would score 4 marks for knowing the 4 main systems, 8 for defining them, and 8 for correctly worked examples of each. The lesson plan should now be obvious.
159 - As per the above, N/N may or may not be possible, depending on how well $subject deals with facts and marking schemes.
paws
Precisely.
Since the subjects I used to teach were & are "definite" - general science / Physics / Maths, then the grading was actually easy, almost all of the time.
Done it again ..... ( I forgot something )
Given Zelensky's warnings & the spoutings from the Kremlin, what's the odds that Putin will try for not only Transnistria, but Moldova, as well?
Lots of "Russian-speakers" ( about 1/3rd of the population ) there, what a wonderful excuse ...
Or have they already got enough on their plate, or can't they tell, with all the belief in their own propaganda?
Greg said: The MURDER of David Kelly by US "intelligence", you mean?
Let's just say that people who are an inconvenience to powerful people seem to become strangely suicidal and choose strange suicide. Living in other countries doesn't seem to afford protection from the sudden suicidal urges that involve stabbing themselves multiple times, or beating themselves up before hanging themselves.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/worldnews/18343407/putin-purge-four-suicides-top-russian-gas-executives/
Greg said: what's the odds that Putin will try for not only Transnistria, but Moldova, as well?
Well Russia has said their plan is to take Transnistria, and Moldova considers that to be their territory. Moldova is ex soviet so, yeah, seems like that's their plan. If you watch the Russian equivalent of Faux, they're certainly trying to work themselves into a righteous frenzy of going to war with the whole world.
Russian tv
https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/1517043310069702661?s=20&t=8BYjr6PEzeRxGOKJSngSQg
gasdive @ 179/180
That is "merely" an extension of the spittle-&-foaming that's been going on for some time, but, even so, it is really scary.
I suspect they are looking for a "valid excuse" to set off nukes, which even they have not yet got.
I see that the shitgull is using a different nym in this same thread, along with the usual insults & dissing of anyone & everyone who does not grovel to the "superior intellect" of the gull. { # 181 & 182 }
"I suspect they are looking for a "valid excuse" to set off nukes, which even they have not yet got."
Why do you suspect that ?
P H-K
Because it fits the pattern of past behaviour - threatening, making increasingly aggressive statement, whipping themselves up in classic playground-bully fashion, until they have convinced themselves that it is "now" justified. This is what they have done, every time, so far & I see no reason to believe that they should abandon what they see as a "winning" modus operandii
I also suspect that, of course, it will be an evil smuggled Ukrainian or even "NATO" nuke, so as to self-justify their actions, against the hundreds of thousands, not to say millions of "nazis" hiding in Ukraine & all across the EU & NATO.
In other news - unverified & possibly untrue, but RU enlistment offices burnt -- maybe.
I see that the shitgull is using a different nym in this same thread
Yes, slightly less obvious than usual. Normally it takes me 1 second to recognize her and to click "hush" link; this time it may have taken as long as 4 seconds.
"This is what they have done, every time, so far"
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that bit.
But how do you get from there to "set off nukes" ?
Greg: you are so ignorant you missed the bits that were deleted and why.
i think bill has something set up to scrape the current page at regular intervals but otherwise anyone is going to miss bits that were deleted
"why" is probably more because ur professed respect for our host does not extend to listening to him asking u to limit ur posting (and namecalling) rather than being due to any sinister machinations on the part of heteromeles
you sure as fuck ain't getting on the small bus labelled "Beautiful Ones Surviving the Gigicide".
oh dear
i hope it wasn't the vax
I'll drop a moderation note in here.
None of the Seagull's 21 comments were deleted. They've all been unpublished. If they'd been able to stop at 3, I would have left the comments up, per Charlie's policy.
I deleted one comment of my own that I realized was inappropriate.
The only comments I delete as a moderator are my own when there's a problem with them, and duplicates when people ask a moderator to delete duplicate posts.
Again, please don't fall for the Seagull's drama. Their comments are not being deleted by a moderator, just by Charlie.
Re: 'Lots of "Russian-speakers" ( about 1/3rd of the population ) there, what a wonderful excuse ...'
Yeah - considering that Russian is still one of the official languages across all former SSR states if this is the only criterion needed for an invasion/genocide, Putin is likely to try to steamroll across a dozen more countries.
A couple of questions ... take with a large dose of SF/F salt but could be useful to think about:
Given that compared with either mRNA vax the Russian COVID-19 vax didn't show as good a level of protection against the original strain and that they were clinically tested on military personnel (instead of a cross-section of the gen pub), how vulnerable are Russian military personnel to current super transmissible strains (that have more or less equivalent odds of serious illness/death)? I'm guessing that fear of newer strains might be one of the reasons their military personnel is not mixing with civilians in 'occupied/freed' areas.
Also wondering whether any donated mRNA vax shipments to other nations have gone missing and/or have been redirected. Do UN authorities keep track of stuff gone missing? Also wonder where the major distribution/redistribution locales are and whether any weird goings-on that could disrupt supply-chain tracking. (My impression is that this type of scenario has been seen many times with various endemic virus vax shipments in Africa.) I'm guessing that any Russian POWs would be tested by international medical aid personnel for COVID just as a public safety/health precaution - but wonder whether such tests could also identify all the different types of COVID vaxes and infections/re-infections.
Greg:
On the previous topic thread you asked whether it was getting safer to resume a 'normal' life.
Charlie answered 'no'. (FWIW, I concur.)
This is a weird virus - and the experts still actively studying it keep repeating 'we don't know what's next'.
FYI - re-infection is very possible - something like 20% of new cases are re-infections and one person got re-infected within 20 days of their initial infection. (Re-infection rate was approx. 7% in Jan 2022 before Omicron surged.)
Also - in one individual who had been tested repeatedly, this virus hung around for over 500 days. (The article I originally read about - but unfortunately didn't save/tag - also mentioned that some mutations within this patient were quite similar to variants of concern that arose in the world at large.)
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2022/04/348532/patient-in-uk-remained-covid-19-positive-for-500-days-before-death
Not trying to be morbid or getting any jollies from trying to scare you, but please be careful!
Followup on moderation:
The Seagull's latest 'nym is banned. Reason: attempting to evade an earlier ban and getting totally up their own arse.
Seagull, commenting opaquely on comment affairs is okay. Repeatedly monopolizing the conversation to complain about other people here: not okay. Ignore them and move on, when you come back (hint: not before Tuesday at the earliest). Unless you've got solid evidence that they're part of a troll farm, in which case provide unobfuscated details, traceroutes, etc.
whether QNuts are normal
Well THEY think they are and everyone else is just to dumb to see the truth of the situation.
Re: '... unverified & possibly untrue, but RU enlistment offices burnt -- maybe.'
That link went to some other story. Here's a different news source -- not sure this source verified its info. (I'm guessing that verifying any story coming out of Russia would be pretty hard to do considering internet lock-outs, etc.)
https://hindustannewshub.com/russia-ukraine-news/russian-regions-set-fire-to-military-registration-and-enlistment-offices-in-protest-against-war-the-moscow-times/
The amusing thing about conspiracy theorists on the subject of 77th Bde is that they give it so much more credit than the rest of the British Army does… cynical, moi?
Another example is the hangar at Macrihanish which the loons were convinced was a seKrit fAciLity fOr hyPerSonIC AurOrA!! Eleventy!!!, but in reality was a boring old wriggly tin shed
Ah, but the boring old wriggly tin shed contains the remains of an alien spaceship shot down over Scotland. Using a boring shed is clearly just misdirection. After all, everywhere else has such things ....
As I recall, 77th Brigade was a political charade to imply that TPTB were Doing Something - not that they hadn't been doing the same things for ages, just in several organisations and not with a fancy label. I can't be bothered to look up the 77th's staffing level or budget, which would be useful measures of how seriously it is being taken.
Re: '... 77th Brigade was a political charade to imply that TPTB were Doing Something'
Looked this up on Wikipedia - says that the entire UK military is being re-org'd/reshuffled per 'Future Soldier' plans finalized Dec 2021. (No budgets shown although a few details on this reshuffling on forces.net.)
Sputnik-V was a very well designed vaccine.
Far superior to sinovac, and the numbers out of Italy indicate it is probably better against omni than the m-RNA vaccines. - 2 doses, each using a different vector to invoke immune response, so broad cover.
Perfectly good vaccine if you get it from the Italian or other licensed producers. There were.. incidents with the supply from Russian manufacturers.
Regrettably Russia has absolutely abysmal vaccine uptake.
Presumably, the soldiers dont actually get to say no, tough, so as long as nobody sold the army a million vials of salt water, not going to have a great war trench flu event.
Pfizer and Moderna spent a great deal on propaganda, and that included disinformation against the Astrazeneca and Sputnik vaccines. There was no evidence that any part of the UK gummint (including 77th Brigade) took action against that disinformation, though. Surprise, surprise!
There was a lot of wild stuff flying on the internet when the Moskva was sunk. Still seem to be.
Assuming it was a missile strike, the ship was more than 50 miles offshore when it sank (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61103927), so I'd be surprised if a laser designator was involved. There was some noise about how a NATO AWACs or P-6 was near enough to tell when the Moskva turned its radar away from the coast and then told the Ukrainians that they were clear to launch. If so, that implies some really good signal operations run by people with brass gonads, because if the signal had leaked, NATO being directly involved in sinking the Black Fleet flagship is WW3-level provocation, at least in my opinion.
Since a Neptun anti-ship is reportedly subsonic and they had to fly over 50 miles, the missiles were inbound for 5-15 minutes. That's where the whole NATO launch (or, for that matter, drone distract) storyline gets weird. Counting on your ability to distract a ship for 5 minutes? I dunno. I'm not a soldier, but I'd start wondering why a drone or a plane was stooging around for that long and maybe look behind me to see if I was being set up.
Probably the simpler storyline would be: drone spots ship, drone pilots relay location information to Neptun launchers, they fire two missiles and bug out (the Neptun launchers are truck-mounted) The missiles get lucky and both hit, sinking the ship. Russia is pissing themselves in anger and fear, and they quickly level the Neptun factory to try to save the rest of their Black Sea fleet from being similarly sunk. So far as I can tell, the other ships in the Russian fleet are all smaller than the Moskva, so if it could be missiled and sunk, they all could be.
Now, if it wasn't two missiles...I direct you to the 2020 burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard which was totaled and decommissioned after the fire. Note that this was likely sabotage by a disaffected sailor (note, trial is still pending, this is speculation). For the Moskva, sabotage by a disaffected sailor, coupled with firefighting deficiences on par with those described for the Bonhomme Richard, could conceivably have led to the Moskva sinking. Personally I favor the missile theory, but this is the best alternative I could come up with.
177 - If I notice, I will explicitly ask a moderator to "delete duplicate posts, please". If I don't, the moderators have my permission to delete all but one instance of a duplicated post.
178 - Likewise. I have just decided that I will probably not attend, and certainly won't co-run the games room, at Satellite 7 next month. Sorry guys, and I'll miss you too. ;'-)
182 Para 2 - Using aerial view, you can presently see a variety of "tin sheds" (age and style) and some WW2 and Cold War era dispersals at Macrihanish airfield.
187 - I can't comment on the capabilities of Neptun, but you would not easily spoof Sampson or S1850M; I am almost equally certain of the capabilities of Aegis.
"Since a Neptun anti-ship is reportedly subsonic and they had to fly over 50 miles, the missiles were inbound for 5-15 minutes."
... and the russian seamen had been on alert for 50 days on a geriatic ship with kit from the 1980'ies.
If the Neptun maintains a low trajectory, there is a very good chance that the occasional blips on the radar would be interpreted as sea-clutter.
Spotting such missiles with radar is hard for many reasons, you have to cover 360 degrees around the ship, you can only detect it by reconstructing what might be a hostile trajectory of doppler reflections and so on.
It does not take much creativity on the part of the missile designers to make things harder. For instance, nobody says you /have/ to fly a straight line trajectory, randomizing it, even just +/- 50 meters from straight will make it much harder to correlate the echos.
Likewise, radar-stealth is old hat, so the Neptune probably did not have a bit radar return in the first place.
But the main factor has undoubtedly been sailors eyes glazing over.
"the ship was more than 50 miles offshore when it sank "
On that, some developments. There are reports that a recovery operation of some sort may be in process:
http://www.hisutton.com/Russian-Navy-Moskva-Cruiser-Wreck.html
And one of the AIS services, https://www.vesselfinder.com , shows a ship stationary at 45.3557 30.9128, about 20 km from Moskva's last reported position.
https://www.vesselfinder.com/
The bottom is only about 40 meters down there. If that's where Moskva is, I wouldn't be totally surprised if it could be seen from a satellite on a clear day. Unless the water there is very turbid -- IDK.
Since a Neptun anti-ship is reportedly subsonic and they had to fly over 50 miles, the missiles were inbound for 5-15 minutes. That's where the whole NATO launch (or, for that matter, drone distract) storyline gets weird. Counting on your ability to distract a ship for 5 minutes?
Don't forget the curvature of the earth, Heteromeles. It seems obvious to me that any missile would be flying at close to sea level to avoid the ship's radar for as long as possible. And even when the missile finally gets above the ship's visibility horizon, it's still where the radar will be getting a lot of clutter from waves. So it's likely the ship would have had the missile on radar for well under a minute before being hit. That's not a lot of time for a crew that was probably distracted and not expecting an attack.
" any missile would be flying at close to sea level to avoid the ship's radar for as long as possible."
Yes, that's what they do and for that reason. But the converse applies: at low altitudes the missiles sensors can't see the ship until it gets close, and that's why good initial targeting data(*) is important. The missile can fly at low level and be confident that when it gets close, the ship will show up on the missile's sensors.
(*) Or a data link to the missile, which I don't think Neptune has.
From the Grauniad: Two Russian generals have been killed near Kherson, the Ukrainian ministry of defence’s intelligence directorate has said. Another is in critical condition.
The Ukrainian military on Friday hit the command post of Russia’s 49th army near occupied regional capital Kherson
ALSO:
A New anti-Colonial Struggle { If only the global left could see it }
"The Ukrainian war has made clear, if clarity were needed, how Russian nationalists view eastern Slavs with the impertinence to reject them. Russian official media explained that Ukrainians (and by extension) Belarusians were really Russians. If they rejected Russian identity and said they had their own cultures and histories that existed before the Russian empire, they proved only that they were “Nazis”. No form of human life could be lower. The Russian state had a duty to kill them or send them to labour camps; to take their children from them and crush their country and their culture."
Yuck - but true.
Coming to a country or region with any Russian-speakers in it, or that was once part of either the Tsarist or Soviet empires.
Unless they are stopped, of course.
Macrihanish?
Like this do you mean? - cough
Lots of sheds for that!
Richard H @ 140:
Any examples? I've looked at a number of sites that I'm aware of, and they look pretty unblurred from here. Admittedly there's not much to be seen anyway - one building looks much like another, unless perhaps it's an interesting geometrical shape.
Google denies it blurs locations at government request, or has recently UN-blurred sites due to the war in Ukraine, but Wikipedia has some examples. Sometimes they're currently blurred out, sometimes they're not blurred any more.
Also note that some of the blurred areas are NOT sensitive military installations. Sometimes they're blurred because a homeowner or a business requests it (this is particularly true in Google Street View).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_with_missing_or_unclear_data
They give coordinates so you can see for yourself. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_censorship
PS: Here's something different: Have you ever tried to find yourself in Google Street View. There's a certain location here in Raleigh (approximately 3810 Atlantic Ave) where I remember passing the Google Street View car going the opposite direction (Feb 2016).
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8359882,-78.6019229,3a,75y,320.42h,85.87t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1soqVpTMUZFfkzDCAvCIfedw!2e0!5s20160201T000000!7i13312!8i6656
That's me in my little, silver Ford Focus Station Wagon (about 18 months before I got my Jeep) ... if you ever wondered what I look like. It's a fairly normal for Google Street View to blur people in passing cars.
Heteromeles @ 145:
Yes. And given how much we argue here, there is no normal for this list.
Except for ME! 😛
waldo @ 147: All I can tell you is that I've been using Google Maps to look at Russian (and Belarussian, and [nationality of your choice]) airfields for close on 20 years.
Agree, some countries ask for such things to be obscured - though I was mightily amused to find that Volkel, in the Nertherlands, was carefully pixelated, but the online airshow borocuhre I also found said, almost literally, "the B61 storage areas (allegedly) are in this area" on its map.
As I said, I have been seeing many, many ex-Soviet aircraft in this sort of condition, via Google Maps and a browser, for almost twenty years. It is very clear to me that they are being stored for cannibalisation. Similar things are visible at e.g. the Mojave Spaceport airliner storage facility.
At least some of that is the Open Skies initiative to verify compliance with various disarmament treaties between the U.S. & the U.S.S.R (inherited by the Russian Federation).
Also there doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason behind what gets blurred and what doesn't ... or when Google decides to UN-blur something.
"But the converse applies: at low altitudes the missiles sensors can't see the ship until it gets close,"
But does it need to ?
Unless the ship maintained radio-silence, you could home in on its radar, or possibly even what the ship does to the thermal balance of the atmosphere above.
"None of the Seagull's 21 comments were deleted. They've all been unpublished."
I would point out that as far as everyone reading this blog without admin privileges is concerned, "deleted" and "unpublished" are the same thing. Therefore both as a response to La Polynomielle in person and as commentary on the episode for everyone else's information, to rely on the distinction is to rely on an irrelevance.
Note that I did see at least most of it: an extended series of short and repetitive posts calling you personally all the cunts under the sun for what from this end looked like her own damnwrongbuttonery rather than any deliberate action, yours or anyone else's. I think their disappearance was entirely justified. I'm just pointing out that whether the disappearance was by deletion or by unpublishing is entirely irrelevant to anyone reading (except Charlie, and he knows anyway), and consequently relating your action with emphasis on that distinction as a factor of primary significance is likely to wind her up more, rather than less.
It's kind of a shame that this blog platform does not provide some kind of facility that one might call "semi-unpublishing", where "semi-unpublished" comments are still visible to people who have checked the "do not hide semi-unpublished comments" checkbox on their profile, so those people could still read them without any special privileges being involved. Some of us at least do want to be able to read La Polynomielle's posts without having to happen to be here at the right time (at least when they're not like last night's lot); I'm sure Bill would appreciate such a facility, and I would also. However, I am fully aware that the appropriate bug-report tags for this paragraph would be "wishlist wontfix" :)
"Google denies it blurs locations at government request, [...]"
But their suppliers of imagery do.
Normal is people who like arguing, obviously :)
"It's kind of a shame that this blog platform does not provide some kind of facility that one might call "semi-unpublishing""
One of the most efficient implementations I know of, simply removes all vowels in the posts in question.
Strictly speaking the post is still published, but reading it is so hard, and what happened so trivial to see, that nobody does.
I wrote a program once that did disemvoweling, and if I can write a program to do something, it's trivial!
The one bad thing I've heard about a non-grading school is what happened to a lab mate who went to such a place and then applied to grad school. Because of the need to meet minimum GPA standards for entrance, they had to go back to every teacher and request a letter grade.
We are required to provide grade on report cards at the end of the year, so that isn't a problem here.
The assessment guidelines actually say that the teacher is supposed to look at the body of the student's work, with emphasis on 'most recent most consistent' performance, and assess within the achievement guidelines rubrics, then convert that to a percentage grade for the report card.
The percentage grade is then used in all manner of inappropriate ways, such as deciding that because student A got 93% while student B got 92% then student A is a better student, when we all know that grades are nowhere near that precise.
191 - That would still be around 16NM with a true sea-skimmer, and a deck level radar about 20 feet ASL. Wikipedia gives the vessel as carrying several radars around 50 to 80 feet ASL, pushing the radar horizon to more like 19NM without use of the helicopter as a radar range extender.
They also suggest the last known location of the vessel to be more or less due South of Odesa at 45°10′43.39″N 30°55′30.54″E.
193 - Macrihanish Airport has its own pages, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Machrihanish .
198 - Correct as far as it goes, which for the radar horizon is about 1,1* the optical horizon.
202 - A process often known as "disemvoweling".
o rely on the distinction is to rely on an irrelevance
The distinction is that if I decide they're worth reading I can re-publish her comments (if they're unpublished). Whereas if they're deleted, they're gone for good.
I don't have an awk manual or interpreter handy, but I think it's something like 5 lines to write a basic disemvoweler for *nix.
Since the subjects I used to teach were & are "definite" - general science / Physics / Maths, then the grading was actually easy, almost all of the time.
Not necessarily, unless you are grading right/wrong with nothing in between.
If a student makes a simple math mistake (say writes "15" as "51" when copying information) how many marks do you take off when they've done everything else correctly? (Assume the question is worth 10 points out of 100 in a test intended to take 60 minutes, so most students will take 5-6 minutes to solve the problem and write out the solution.)
How much work is a student required to show to prove that they know how to solve the problem? What if they use a non-standard, inefficient, but valid approach? What if they make two mistakes that cancel out so they get the correct answer?
Grading is a lot fuzzier than many people assume.
My (imperfect) solution was to scaffold the required steps with specific part of the page for each aspect of the solution and separate marks awarded to each step. (A single problem might be seven "questions" on the test.) So the first question would be extracting relevant information, both explicit and implied, from the written description and writing out a 'given' section using standard variables, and it would be worth a certain number of marks. The next question might be drawing a labelled system diagram, or sketching a qualitative graph representing motion, or something else to demonstrate that they had some idea what was happening — and so on. This mirrored the process we followed in class for solving numerical problems. My attitude was basically an engineer's*: you need to document your solution or it doesn't count. When starting out I would often provide the correct answer so students could check their work; I told them to think of themselves as lawyers proving a case in court**, convincing a judge that their argument was correct.
I would evaluate each 'question' by the achievement levels*** without worrying about how many marks it was worth. I had a scanning app for multiple choice questions that I extended to handle this (which also let me analyze class results to see how many students had problems with particular skills/concepts)****. Useful and enlightening (and sometimes humbling, when I realized that what I thought was a good lesson wasn't reflected in student performance).
The results were that more students attempted problems even if they couldn't finish them, and more students actually got at least part-way to a solution. Really brilliant kids complained "I know this is the correct answer, why do I have to show all that work" (including some whose 'brilliance' was more good eyesight than academic ability, as demonstrated by different test versions with different numbers on very similar problems on otherwise-identical pages, but academic honesty is a separate rant).
Another trick (in the UK sense of the word) was that the period before a test I would hand out individualized bubble answer sheets (pre-printed with student numbers) and allow them to write anything they wanted on the back. Formulas, diagrams, solved problems, definitions — whatever fit on the page. I collected those at the end of the period and used them the next class to assign seating (alphabetically). Worked much better than a review class, as students were now much more engaged and had responsibility for making sure they were complete. They thought they were getting a break; I knew they were actively reviewing and studying. It was great for the kids with anxiety, as anything they thought they might forget they could write down. They also knew the test outline — xx multiple choice, yy problems, zz explanations, etc — ahead of time. This was especially helpful for the kids in the autism program: fewer surprises meant fewer meltdowns.
*Based on my experience working as an engineer, anyway.
**Lots of TV/movies meant everyone knew about lawyers in court; very few knew about engineers and designers.
***As specified by the Ministry of Education.
**** http://newsletter.oapt.ca/files/marking-tests-faster.html
Wikipedia gives the vessel as carrying several radars around 50 to 80 feet ASL, pushing the radar horizon to more like 19NM without use of the helicopter as a radar range extender.
But at that extreme range, sea-clutter would almost certainly not allow the ship to be able to distinguish the missile. I'd guess perhaps half that distance, depending on how low above the water the missile could safely fly.
So we're still talking on the order of at most 1 to 2 minutes between the detection of the missile and when it hits the ship.
I've been looking into the Moskva incident a bit more.
First, the Neptun has the ability to accept mid-course correction. It will then use its active radar for the final run to target -- hence the accuracy at the end. I've not yet found out whether it is able to do a "pop-up" as it hits the ship -- like Harpoon and unlike Exocet.
Did they use the drone to give mid-flight course corrections or was that done by the US plane? Or did they launch it almost blind? I doubt we'll get to know any time soon.
As to why the ship sank: I think the reason is that there were one year conscripts on board. Just as the Russian Army relies on conscripts, I was shocked to discover that they make up a fair proportion of the sailors. If there are a lot of panicky teenagers running around a ship that's on fire, then organising damage control is that much more complicated.
Just think about the time a Royal Navy or USN crew takes to shake down in war time. Six months, say? Now, apparently Russian conscripts are posted in April, so maybe they were in good shape and well-trained when the ship went down.
Like Robert, I’m from UK, in Canada but via a fifteen years stop-off in Silicon Valley.
During my school experience in uk I had the no-grade thing for my degrees & postgrad - all I ever got told was whether I was being welcomed back after each summer break. About half the class didn’t make it to the 2nd year, for example. At Imperial it was generally held that nobody outside MI5 & the KGB saw our grades.
I’m not sure which I prefer after all that. School tests and grades... well it’s a bit of a distraction from actually learning but then I suspect that is what many govt. want if we really get to it. I always quite enjoyed doing exams and finding out what I really remembered but the score never seemed very interesting.
When I did the USA green card thing I just told them they’d have no luck getting anything like the ‘college transcripts ‘ they wanted. For the Canadian immigration stuff I actually found an office that could provide a bit of paper to suit them, and that was the first I’d ever seen of any grades (which were pretty decent as it happened). The RCA simply wrote “Sir Tim obtained a masters degree. We do not provide any further details”, and several past employers just said “national security laws preclude any further information “. I suppose that was effective intimidation
Yeah, that entirely fits a model of my own memories combined with what you've posted previously about your excuse for a school. The school that I was at during the period in question didn't use the cane, but I have certainly used the calculation "nothing they can possibly do to me for skiving this will be as bad as the expected consequences of not skiving it" where the first factor was predictable, and if I had been able to depend on them regarding the cane as their nuclear option rather than some unpredictable choice from the set of all things which are not the cane, I would have been able to apply that calculation to a larger set of circumstances.
"getting useful feedback like 4/10 or 6/10 and literally having no idea what the difference was"
Also familiar, but although it did apply to certain lessons it reminds me more strongly of my perception of "crime and punishment" around the age of 5. Tellings-off and (rarer) congratulations were like the weather: they just happened for their own unknowable reasons, and you just had to put up with it.
One time at that age the teacher spent one summer afternoon taking us for a walk in the countryside surrounding the school. On our return, she addressed the entire class with the words ("you" plural) "Your behaviour this afternoon has been so... im... PECCable, that I'm going to..."
At that point, I had never heard the word "impeccable" before, but she had used exactly the kind of tone and emphasis that one would expect if she'd said "so... ap... PALLing", so I was expecting the rest of the sentence to be along the lines of "...do something horrible to you". It was quite a surprise to me when she said "...do something nice to you" instead.
The point is that the only information I had to go on to understand what the word meant was the tone she said it in. I couldn't make any part of the guess by reference to what our behaviour had actually been like: I had no fucking idea whatsoever what it had "been like". To be told that it had been really bad, and to be told that it had been really good, would both have been identically unsurprising interpretations.
Similarly with a bit of unsubtle behavioural conditioning I remember from the same age: be good for seven days in a row (as recorded on a chart) and be given a spacehopper. I accepted the offer with some reluctance because I was aware the premise was fallacious and the outcome would be nothing but a pure gamble with little chance of winning, and as each evening came round I would ask "have I been good today?" with no bloody idea at all whether the answer would be "yes" or "no". Looking back, that I did get the spacehopper in the end I now attribute to some undeclared lack of rigour in the assessment rather than to chance, but even at the time I didn't think it was related to any difference in anything I'd done myself.
I am guessing that that last is what is meant by the "Skinner approach" above, though since I know nearly nothing about Skinner beyond his box, it is only a poor guess. But it doesn't seem to me to be about the pigeon learning that when the light comes on at random it can peck the button to get food. It seems to me that in this case the pigeon already knows that, and the idea is for it to learn how to make the light come on by following instructions given in human speech. And to the pigeon of course this is just so much noise, and the light continues to just come on at moments which are as random as ever.
"but reading it is so hard"
Surely that depends a lot on what language it's in. I would imagine that it would kill Finnish stone dead (though I don't know how Finnish actually works, so I could be wrong), but with many languages the meaning is all in the consonants and the vowels don't do much more than keep the consonants apart, so reading it is still reasonably easy. Prsnlly, dn't hv mch f prblm rdng nglsh wth th vwls tkn t, nd 'm bt srprsd f Dnsh sn't smlr.
sed -e 's/[aeiou]//ig'
This is true, but it still does not affect the outcome as seen from her end at the time, which apparently was what initiated combustion last night.
"I would hand out individualized bubble answer sheets (pre-printed with student numbers) and allow them to write anything they wanted on the back. Formulas, diagrams, solved problems, definitions - whatever fit on the page. I collected those at the end of the period and used them the next class to assign seating (alphabetically)."
Sorry, I don't understand this. I don't know what a "bubble answer sheet" is, but if it is related to what I'd call an "answer sheet" without the "bubble", it sounds like you were giving out the answers before the test, which surely can't be the case. If you then collected them again at the end of the lesson I don't see how people were supposed to make use of the aide-memoires they'd written on the back. And surely "(alphabetically)" implies a seating order unrelated to and incompatible with one based around whatever criterion you derived from the sheets.
Once upon a time the standard conscription period was two years in the army or three years in another service, largely due to the extra training required. Many years ago I had a lad from Ukraine renting my spare room for a while, he'd done the three year option in the Ukrainian police. Apparently the basic training was less oppressive and the deployments tended to be better, so enough conscripts volunteered for the extra year. This was after the Soviet breakup, but at the time he'd done his service Ukraine was still following the old process. He had a Russian friend who was older and had done his time as two years in the army, and been posted to Afghanistan towards the end of the occupation.
The distinction is that if I decide they're worth reading I can re-publish her comments (if they're unpublished). Whereas if they're deleted, they're gone for good
I'll add to this only that I've taken to counting Seagull posts, not reading them any more than I absolutely have to. So I noticed they were starting to insult me, but I didn't stop to read the posts, I just unpublished them.
I did see that they wanted to save the first three. My take is whatever. If they're worth reading, Charlie will republish them and I'll look bad.
The only reason I'm pointing this out is as an incentive: Keep to three posts, I ignore it. Keep to civil conversation, I ignore it and there's no limit. Start cranking out serial posts, whatever they say, they get unpublished. Doesn't matter whether they're attacking me, praising me, or giving out winning lottery numbers in advance of the drawing. They go to Charlie. Hopefully they are winning lottery numbers, because then he can be a millionaire, write what he wants, and we all benefit.
So if the Seagull wants to make a game out of it and win, it's not by painting me as a monster, it's by posting stuff that Charlie always republishes, so that I look like a rule-bound twit for unpublishing it. The win-win of keeping to three posts and dialog is a possibility too.
First, the Neptun has the ability to accept mid-course correction. It will then use its active radar for the final run to target -- hence the accuracy at the end. I've not yet found out whether it is able to do a "pop-up" as it hits the ship -- like Harpoon and unlike Exocet. Did they use the drone to give mid-flight course corrections or was that done by the US plane? Or did they launch it almost blind? I doubt we'll get to know any time soon.
Hmmm. That's a really good point.
We won't know, but we can guess. There are some probabilities. One is the probability of the US being able to better guide in a missile, versus the probability of the Russians detecting the guidance and escalating towards WW3. Don't forget, whoever guided that missile sank probably the biggest warship in the Black Sea. The US isn't formally at war with Russia right now, and sinking a big warship is an act of war. So if the US did provide guidance, they have a communication system that they're quite sure Russia can't detect or hack. That's pretty scary, if true (for example, we civilians couldn't detect it either, so if the US goes fascist and cracks down on people like me, we won't hear them coming)
The second problem is that Ukraine is currently a US ally. However, they've been our enemy in the past (USSR) and there's no guarantee we won't be at odds in the future. Worse, we're technologically superior to them in things like missile guidance systems. This being the case, would they want to let us know how to redirect their top-line missile in mid-flight? That's keys to the kingdom kind of stuff. Maybe the missiles are password protected or something, but the simplest way to protect the system is to keep the US out of missile guidance, and keep that system entirely within Ukraine. I don't know how Ukraine runs their drones, but if it's from the back of a truck, they could have the drone pilot and the missileer sitting close to each other and sending course corrections down a wire or out the drone.
As for inexperienced crewmen on the Moskva, I like that. Thanks!
There was an interview published by the UKR of a Russian soldier. He said he'd been conscripted for a year but he'd been given the choice to sign up for two years which he'd taken because he'd get paid for the whole time rather than being basically unpaid for a year.
The story seems to be that conscripts are treated very badly, does anyone know if contracted solidiers are treated better? Perhaps that's also an "incentive" to sign up.
where I remember passing the Google Street View car going the opposite direction
You made me look. A few weeks ago as I was getting the mail I looked up and saw a strange car going by. Then I realized it was a Google mapping car.
So just now I looked and there I am standing in my driveway looking at the car go by.
Unless the ship maintained radio-silence, you could home in on its radar, or possibly even what the ship does to the thermal balance of the atmosphere above.
Or just start looking when it gets near the GPS coordinates of the ship when launched.
Sorry, I don't understand this.
"Bubble answer sheet" = piece of paper with bubbles for students to mark answers for multiple choice questions. Like "Scantron sheet" without the trademark.
Because I tracked student performance between assessments, I wanted all the data stored in my app to be linked to individual students, so I had it print sheets pre-printed with their names and with their student numbers pre-bubbled. I started this because it was faster for me than manually linking scan results to students in the app when they forgot to bubble their student number (or even write their name*).
I usually have students sitting/working in small groups (2-4). For tests I rearrange the desks into rows, and have student seated alphabetically.
On the day of the test I lay out the bubble answer sheets alphabetically, separating students as much as possible given classroom limitations, before students enter the room. When they come in they leave any backpacks/coats at the side/back of the room**, find the desk with their sheet on it and sit down. Once everyone is settled I hand out tests turned so only the front page is visible*** and, when everyone is ready, give the signal to open the test booklet and begin. When the test is over they tuck the bubble answer sheet into their test booklet and pass it up to the front of the row where I can collect it.
it sounds like you were giving out the answers before the test, which surely can't be the case
Actually, sometimes I do, not before the test but right on it. Given that I'm assessing "do they know how to solve the problem" and requiring them to show their work, including the answer lets them quickly check if they are right. It reduces anxiety. Students who are clueless don't really get any benefit, because in this case the right answer isn't worth anything. Students who have mastered the subject don't need it. Those in between tend to do better. I started doing it with college-stream students, but the results were so positive I tried it with the university-stream classes as well.
*A surprising number of students don't write their name on things they hand in. In the last decade it got so bad that I quickly check the hand-in pile within a couple of minutes of collecting it to catch that (and also call out students who didn't hand in something that was due, so they can't claim later that they handed it in and I lost it).
**The same procedure that's used for exams, to get them used to it. Has the added advantage that I don't break my neck tripping over backpack straps dangling in the aisle between desks.
***Front page has name of test, useful formulas in case anyone forgot one, table of contents expected time for each section, and a space for them to write their name. I format my tests as booklets.
Sounds a bit like being a bartender dealing with an argumentative regular who's a friend/relative of the owner. They get more latitude than everyone else, and they know it and are always pushing boundaries because they go to the bar to start fights rather than enjoy the company.
Thank you. It sounds very strange to me by reason of unfamiliarity, but at least I think I get what you're doing now.
I wrote mine in Ruby, but definitely not difficult, even for an amateur like myself.
Once upon a time the standard conscription period was two years in the army or three years in another service, largely due to the extra training required.
Back in the late '60s, I signed up for four years in the U.S. Air Force. The alternative was two years, but I would likely have spent them carrying an Army rifle in Vietnam, and the odds of a 140 pound introvert surviving it didn't look too good...
But the training I got in the AF was worth it - the beginning of my computer programming career. And now that I've retired, my veteran's health care is a real blessing!
"First, the Neptun has the ability to accept mid-course correction."
Could you provide the source for that, please? I've been looking into the question of how the Neptuns homed in on Moskva and the existence of a data link would make an important difference in how to understand that.
sed -e 's/[aeiou]//ig'
But what about w (rarely) and y (fairly often)?
Re: 'Pfizer and Moderna spent a great deal on propaganda, and that included disinformation against the Astrazeneca and Sputnik vaccines.'
No idea how well Sputnik has performed because the only articles I could easily find didn't have links to the actual studies. The below says that at least one of the not-yet-peer-reviewed when the below article was published showed much better results vs. Omicron than either of the mRNAs. (Takes a couple of days longer to ramp up but doesn't fade anywhere as fast.)
There's more info including some on-going reports comparing the two mRNA vs. AstraZeneca vaxes on effectiveness for reducing serious disease (hospitalization) and death. The mRNAs are about 95% effective vs. AZ at 85%.
My impression is that the more traditional vaccines (AZ and J&J) had lower uptake mostly because of cardio-related side-effects among teens (esp. males). Not good when there's already a culture of fear being stirred up by screaming rt-wingers/anti-vaxers.
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-comparison
Considering that independent bodies of health care pros and scientists in every country ran separate analyses on the submitted clinical trials data, I'm wondering why your comment about PR.
I'm also thinking about how a few countries went so far as to 'ignore' the mfg's suggested roll-out schedules and instead decided to stagger roll-outs to much longer intervals based on a bunch of factors as well as pretty lengthy in-house data analyses. (Turns out they were right about extending intervals between jabs.)
Re: '... when the below article was published'
Arggh! Missed copy&paste of the relevant article link.
BTW - the below article was published Nov 2021 therefore I've no idea whether the clinical results paper finished the peer review process and got published before the invasion, i.e., when communications between Russia and the rest of the world stopped. (If you have a link to the final peer-reviewed published paper, pls post - thanks!)
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/russia-sputnik-v-vaccine-effective-mrna/
I would have enjoyed being in your class. I was lucky to have some great teachers, along with the not so great. The better ones tended to have a system, not all the same, but process-oriented with clear goals. The toughest class I was ever in, the teacher graded strictly on the subject, and made sure we really learned it. 90% of the class earned A's. Unfortunately for education he left teaching to go for better pay as an actuary.
for ys, if u assume a final y is a vowel and an initial one is a consonant u should get most of them
i like disemvowelling, it muffles rather than censors, and gives the party concerned an incentive to get their anger (or in some cases ideology) under control
giving intemperate posts an image background of cute puppies or kittens might also be fun
...my perception of "crime and punishment" around the age of 5. Tellings-off and (rarer) congratulations were like the weather: they just happened for their own unknowable reasons, and you just had to put up with it.
I remember observing much the same thing in junior high school, so around age 13. By that age I was able to reflect that this didn't seem like a very effective way of rearing and educating children, or of getting whatever behavior the adults wanted.
If kids that age are noticing that the professionals around them aren't very good at handling kids, that's a bad sign.
As to why the ship sank: I think the reason is that there were one year conscripts on board. Just as the Russian Army relies on conscripts, I was shocked to discover that they make up a fair proportion of the sailors. If there are a lot of panicky teenagers running around a ship that's on fire, then organising damage control is that much more complicated.
Let me offer an example from Russian military history. About a century ago was the voyage of the Second Pacific Squadron (BTW, nothing that happened on this trip was a shining glorious moment in Russian history - there's a video here by a naval historian), and about the third disaster of the voyage was the Dogger Bank Incident. I'm going to skip over details, because the whole thing is stupider than you can imagine, but it's illustrative of how conscript sailors can act when under fire; the TL;DR is that idiots mistook fishing boats for enemy warships and 'returned fire.' Confusion, darkness, and stupidity lead some of them to 'return fire' on the only visible warships, which were also Russian vessels. Sailors on the ships taking fire sometimes did things like shoot back - but others were seen donning life jackets and laying on the deck moaning and awaiting death. Others grabbed cutlasses and ran to and fro around the ship to repel boarders.
So yes, I can imagine that the crew of the Moskva was less effective than someone used to standards of the Royal Navy would expect.
It's not as if the crew: * stockpiled spare binoculars because the CO threw them at things that offended him * rammed other vessels * allowed the ship to become overrun by chameleons * stocked up on cigarettes and then at sea discovered them to be opium joints * brought a poisonous snake aboard, which then bit the captain * found winter uniforms where their ammunition was supposed to be * gave their admiral a parrot prone to screaming obscenities * loaded a live shell instead of a blank for a funeral salute and shot another Russian ship
(Imagine that the last paragraph is a correctly formatted bullet list. I accidentally hit submit after fixing other formatting issues.)
It's for English, it isn't for Welsh, so I don't count those as vowels. Simple :)
You could add "-e 's/y\b//g'" per Adrian Smith @ 233 if you cared enough, though, and do the same for w if you can think of a rule for it.
Heh heh. Off topic, but I can use this in another context. Thanks!
"Or just start looking when it gets near the GPS coordinates of the ship when launched."
I would be very surprised if GPS works anywhere near Russian military in action.
Answer: No, you're lying. sonnerad was designed by Himmler. It's never been "an ancient Pagan symbol", it was designed in 1939-41 ish. It's explicitly Nazi.
Assuming that was meant to be the German word Sonnenrad, that one is ambiguous: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenrad
can be the following symbols:
The word means "sun wheel". The ambiguity seems to exist for the English language version as well.
HTH
Heh heh. Off topic, but I can use this in another context. Thanks!
No matter how screwed up one imagines the Second Pacific Squadron to have been, there's almost always more incompetence to be found.
"...and then there was the Kamchatka..."
208 - According to my teachers, if you show working but make a transcription error like that, you should lose 1 of the possible marks for that question as long as you use the correct method. Which is pretty much what you said, but is honestly how most of my teachers got us to accept we should show our working in tests and exams, by explaining that if we did so then we would score higher when/if we made a mistake in an intermediate step.
209 - Levels of sea clutter are variable, depending on weather conditions, particularly wind wave and rain if present.
210 - I'm not saying how "good" Neptun is(n't), because I've never had access to the actual data, just to the sorts of values published in sourced like Jane's or Wikipedia.
214 - And seeing that I know it's right, although I would have used "aeiouy" as the search string.
218 - H noticed that Seagull posts were starting to insult him. Now, as a moderation exercise, work out why I rarely read S posts, and never engage with them.
226 - My main issue with regexps now is lack of "recent" (say last 15 years) practice with writing them.
229 - See number 214 upthread and upcomment. This is because 'y' is sometimes used as a vowel.
230 - Not that this particularly matters in Scotland, where AZ has not been used as a 3rd or later vaccine dose.
SS
Ah the fleet/voyage of the damned ...
B T W - everybody: Any (almost any? ) video by "Drachinifel" on Naval Histroy is well worth the watch & listen. Some of his longer expositions ( Up to an hour ) are really educational.
Where will THIS Russia's Tsushima be?
SPZ @ 240
She was completely wrong, as usual.
Just outside Guildford town centre is a Buddhist temple - I've seen a flag over it - a classic "swastika", except back-to-front compared to the nazi version & in red on a white ground, with small insigniae in the corners, also in red.
The Manx triskelion is also a version of the sun-wheel ...
Quote from wiki: The triskelion is an ancient symbol, used by the Mycenaeans and the Lycians.
Also, from "Britannica": The Manx triskelion is one of the oldest continually used government symbols. It is a version of the sun symbol or swastika used by many ancient civilizations. Common in Scandinavian lands, it may well have been introduced to the Isle of Man when the Norse ruled the area prior to 1266. Its use is confirmed from the late 13th century by a medieval document and by the sword of state carried in ceremonies of the Tynwald Court, the Manx parliament. The symbol became the basis for the local flag after the Scottish earl of Moray, Sir Thomas Randolph, was made the ruler of Man in 1313.
I would be very surprised if GPS works anywhere near Russian military in action.
Took me 5 minutes to find a source for GPS chip sets that work on all the available sat systems plus some also do inertial positioning.
Plus you can always do the trig and figure out when it should be in sight of the targeting radar and set it to start looking for "big thing on water near flight path" at that point.
"Took me 5 minutes to find a source for GPS chip sets that work on all the available sat systems plus some also do inertial positioning."
Yeah, but did you check the max speed, height & accelleration specs ?
It is actually pretty hard to get a GPS receiver that works in a rocket or missile.
That said, UA certainly have the skills to make their own.
In perl it's just one line, and not a terribly long one:
perl -pe "s/[aeiou]//gi;"
Use this as a UNIX filter. eg:
cat >>sample.txt
this is some text to be disemvowelled ^D
perl -pe "s/[aeiou]//gi;" <sample.txt
ths s sm txt t b dsmvwlld
GPS can be and almost certainly is being jammed and spoofed by both sides in Ukraine and nearby areas such as the Black Sea coast. Jamming is simpler, flood the local area with radio noise in the various frequency bands of the four global systems in use (US Navstar, Russian GLONASS, Chinese Beidou and the EU's Galileo) to bollix any receivers nearby. There are ways around that though, using directional antennas that reject more local signals and some other tricks.
It is spoofing that's the real threat -- a much smarter system receives the ephemeris data transmitted by the satellites and broadcasts a much stronger signal locally with a modified data set that tricks the receivers nearby into returning a false position result when queried. This is possible and, given enough smart people, not too difficult to achieve today. It's thought to be how the Iranians hijacked an American reconnaissance drone a while back, feeding the drone with defective position data until it flew into Iranian airspace and ran out of fuel.
Commercial GPS receivers have limits on how fast or how high they will return data for but amateurs have used the published specs of at least one satellite constellation to build their own unlimited receivers. They don't fit on a single chip and cost five bucks quantity ten thousand but they work, reportedly. Any nation-state will be capable of doing the same and probably better.
Inertial navigation systems for missiles are now cheap enough (thanks, Apple!) to implement as a no-brainer. A missile can use GPS while it's in "friendly" airspace, updating the INS continuously and then when it gets closer to its target where GPS might be unreliable it switches over to using the inertial system's position data for the last few minutes of flight to target. Absent black-hole engineering or gravity generators inboard INS is unspoofable.
English has approximately 5-fold redundancy, so that's not surprising, but it does introduce ambiguities.
"My impression is that the more traditional vaccines (AZ and J&J) had lower uptake mostly because of cardio-related side-effects among teens (esp. males). Not good when there's already a culture of fear being stirred up by screaming rt-wingers/anti-vaxers."
Yes, and that was the propaganda. The phenomenon exists, but it is very rare and probably less common than similarly serious side-effects of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Vaccination is always a risk, but it should be (and, nowadays, is) MUCH less risky than not vaccinating.
You're assuming I religiously check for unpublished comments every day, then read them in context.
Spoiler: I don't do that. (If I did, I'd never get anything else done.)
Y is not simple. Yes, it's (almost?) always a vowel in the final position, and usually (in modern English) a consonant in the initial one, but it also occurs in middle positions as either a vowel or consonant. Yclept. Yggdrasil. Pyx. Chyle. Steelyard.
As you say. The fylfot (swastika) is ancient, and the sun cross is much older; only the black sun was invented.
As you say. And, the more you are teaching concepts rather than plug-and-chug procedures, the harder it gets.
Found references to a documentary I watched with the lodger from Ukraine. "Soldat" is from the Channel 4 series "True Stories" first broadcast in 2001 and is a 90 minute programme following a group of new conscripts in Russia. He thought it was accurate and was surprised that similar things didn't happen (so blatantly anyway) in the UK military. I haven't been able to find an online copy but it's well worth a watch if it turns up.
About a century ago was the voyage of the Second Pacific Squadron
See also a space opera titled "Singularity Sky" by some guy who occasionally posts around here. (Premise may have included "what if the Second Pacific Squadron in Spaaaace arrived at the Straits of Tsushima only to run face-first into a couple of Astute-class submarines?" Because the author was kinda bored with reading the same-old "Napoleonic broadsides in space" narratives in which the adversaries are evenly matched.)
230 - Not that this particularly matters in Scotland, where AZ has not been used as a 3rd or later vaccine dose.
Am in Scotland. Vaccinations to date: first two doses AstraZeneca, booster shot half-dose Moderna (mRNA). So they're mixing it up a bit.
I believe I'm likely to be scheduled for a second booster some time in June, but policy is liable to change within a time scale of months.
The phenomenon exists, but it is very rare
Yup. And the real issue is that the cardiovascular side effects from the vaccines are a few orders of magnitude rarer than the exact same effects from the virus itself.
It's a nonsensical reason for refusing the vaccine that makes emotional sense to folks who don't have the statistical numeracy to realize that a 1 in a million chance of dying from the vaccination, plus 1 in 10,000 of dying from severe viral disease even if vaccinated, is far safer than a 1 in a hundred chance of dying from the virus (unvaccinated).
Quite. I looked at the data, and the evidence was inadequate to distinguish the relative risks of the vaccines (whether for teen or other), even ignoring the detail that AstraZeneca were more open than the USA vaccines, but Pfizer and Moderna had the propaganda, er, marketing departments. The Sputnik issue was more complex, because the Russians had cut corners and had not provided enough evidence to the WHO; but then the politics cut in, and it was actively obstructed by the usual culprits.
With regard to your previous post, the evidence is that mixing the vaccines seems to work slightly better, and there is no evidence of problems. My wife had Pfizer as a booster; I had Moderna.
Kardeshev (@228) asks:
I thought I'd read it somewhere on the internet, but the best I can do now is the following from minnews (whoever they are?):
(Link here https://min.news/en/military/1531f6c86a806ec6af77ed0672ebe84a.html )
However, the ability to input mid-course corrections would make sense. A typical range for surface to surface radar would be limited by the (radar) horizon, so it might be about 100 miles or so. If the missile has a range greater than the radar horizon -- which I think Neptun does -- then having a mid-course correction facility would be almost obligatory.
Thinking more about H's musings in @219, I'd say that the NATO plane might have been acting as a spotter, passing on the location of the ship, with the drones acting as "plausible deniability", and with the course corrections being input by the operators back on shore.
(This is roughly how the RAF sank Rommel's fuel supplies for the Afrika Corps. GCHQ in Bletchley obtained the cargo manifest, then a spotter plane was sent out, which in turn called in the attack aircraft. Sometimes the spotter or the attack planes missed the target.)
And finally, a big thanks to Vulch (@217) on the details of Russian Conscription practices. I think a two year posting makes more sense and makes things much better. Nevertheless, a ship's company has to be "one for all, and all for one" since you sink or swim together, as the saying has it. And I am not getting a good vibe from what I'm reading about Russian military practice -- it all too frequently appears to be based on bullying.
Premise may have included "what if the Second Pacific Squadron in Spaaaace arrived at the Straits of Tsushima only to run face-first into a couple of Astute-class submarines?"
<sarcasm> Because the Second Pacific Squadron did so well against an equivalent-tech naval force... </sarcasm>
In both scenarios the superior technology is overkill given the targets!
(Speaking of targets, I've heard claims both that the cruiser Aurora was hit during the funeral fiasco and that the shot just missed her. Does anyone have a good source on that?)
"Commercial GPS receivers have limits on how fast or how high they will return data"
In any case, the limits, AFAIK, are not a problem for a subsonic missile like Neptune that flies at low to modest altitude.
[[ changing markup links now to work with updated markup version - mod ]]
The issues with the Sputnik V vaccine treatment was mostly that it wasn't actually developed specifically to provide targetted immunity to SARS-COV-2, it was a two-shot combo of two different existing coronavirus vaccines intended, AFAICS to provide a boost to someone's general immunity against any coronavirus. It worked somewhat as a stopgap but it was way less effective in the early days of the pandemic compared to the AstraZeneca modified adenovirus vaccine and the Pfizer/Moderna mRNA vaccines which replicated specific parts of SARS-COV-2 spike proteins for the immune system to detect and develop targetted resistance to.
The "propaganda" you claim was actually the published results of multiple efficacy tests of the mRNA vaccines conducted in several different countries around the world, most of which matched each other generally. For Sputnik V the claimed results of providing immunity against original SARS-COV-2 viral infections were obscure and the published data incomplete and, to put it bluntly, untrustworthy.
You're assuming I religiously check for unpublished comments every day, then read them in context. Spoiler: I don't do that. (If I did, I'd never get anything else done.)
Good to know. I'm just pointing out to everyone here that I'm not reading the Seagull's productions, because spending the end of my Friday evenings unpublishing stuff is tedious enough as it is.
RE: Covid, I just spent the last week or so self-isolating, because my wife had lunch with a friend at work who tested positive later that day. The friend was symptomatic at the time. The kicker is they're both vaccinated and boosted hospital workers, and I'm vaxed and boosted too. The friend's fine, but has no clue where they got infected. My wife and I are fine so far too.
This isn't an argument against vaccines, it's just a point that vaccines alone don't provide full immunity, any more than they do against the flu (for different reasons!). I'd suggest that adopting the East Asian habit of masking up when you get sniffles or a cough is probably the better way to limit spreading viruses to others.
Yes, I'm an American saying that. The odd thing is that, when I explain to some mask skeptic that I'm not worried about getting sick from them, I'm trying not to give them what I have, they're considerably more polite about me wearing a mask. Too bad mask wearing got framed as an act of fear, rather than an act of politeness.
No matter how screwed up one imagines the Second Pacific Squadron to have been, there's almost always more incompetence to be found. "...and then there was the Kamchatka..."
You know, I think we may have stumbled onto something like the Russian national myth. Perhaps that myth is that all Russians all disposable tools, and the powerful are mostly idiots who waste people. That might explain a lot of the paranoia, alcoholism, abuse, etc., and help fuel the rage at those who are struggling to do away with this myth. Ukrainians for instance.
Apparently US Republicans are hell-bent on instantiating that myth throughout the US too.
256 - Most of the people I know (double figures I can speak for) had first 2 AZ, 3rd Pfizer, but I don't know what was used as the 4th dose for the one person who's had that.
263 - Similarly, subject to the note that since I don't have to read the Seagull's text, I don't.
I would be very surprised if GPS works anywhere near Russian military in action.
But what about Russia's GLONASS system? Would they disable their own version of GPS?
Charlie, have you ever heard this saying?
Dungeons & Dragons players take COVID seriously because they know that 2% chance occurs much more often than you would think
GLONASS is a military positioning system with encrypted super-precise options not available to the five-buck four-system GPS chip in smartphones and Garmin-type receivers. The Russians can switch off or mess with commercial GPS data from GLONASS satellites in certain areas of the world while still providing good data for their military receivers in Ukraine and environs.
It's more likely the Ukranians will be brute-force jamming GLONASS by broadcasting mush on the frequencies the military GLONASS channels use in their areas of control. The Russians may be doing the same in their areas of control to GPS, Beidou and Galileo frequencies since the Ukranians might be using them against Russian forces. Whether the US is giving the Ukraianians access to Navstar military capabilities (which have improved resistance to jamming, spoofing etc.) is another matter.
Don't you just love an arms race?
The propaganda I referred to was NOT that - it was the way that Pfizer and Moderna hyped up a very few (serious) reactions to the Astrazeneca vaccine, implying that the mRNA vaccines had no such problems. But, at that time, they had NOT published the reactions to their vaccine (only disclosed them to the FDA 'in confidence'). When they later disclosed their data, it turned out that they have a comparable incidence of some equally serious problems. Something like pulmonary embolism, but I can't remember what. The propaganda was against Astrazeneca, which was a serious competitor to them.
W.r.t. Sputnik, that wasn't the result I saw. There is definitely misinformation about Sputnik, but I haven't checked deeply enough to be sure whose; quite probably both. There MAY have been an efficacy trial not done by the Russians (please post a link if you have one), but the claims of low efficacy that I have seen appeared to be based on no evidence whatsoever (i.e. were pure propaganda). HOWEVER, let this one pass, unless you can provide some solid data; you might be right. I am disinclined to search further; the politics were as I said.
Note: All four of my vaccine doses have been Pfizer - as a datapoint, anyway.
Not Charlie, but I've played the game long-enough to once roll three natural 20s in a row, so I know, to quote Sister Rosetta Tharpe, that "strange things are happening every day!"
Too bad mask wearing got framed as an act of fear, rather than an act of politeness.
It is the culture war, with a side-helping of blaming the messenger. Don't fight the virus. Fight the doctors and scientists and liberal politicians who are trying to tell you what to do.
There were definitely adverse reactions to all approved vaccines, in very small numbers and these reactions only became clearly observable after millions of doses had been administered -- an adverse reaction rate of one case in two million doses wouldn't turn up in the vaccine-makers Phase III tests which had, at best, forty thousand volunteers with half of them receiving a placebo. Those adverse reaction reports were not collected by the vaccine manufacturers, they were collected by the national health services like the NHS, CDC et al. as part of their broad-reaching ability to monitor vaccine rollouts.
The vaccine makers had no control over the publication of information about adverse reaction to other maker's vaccines after the rollouts. The AstraZeneca vaccine was first out of the gate with approval and deployment in the West with the mRNA vaccines following along shortly. The first public notice of adverse reactions was with AstraZeneca, that's all and no conspiracy needed.
As for Sputnik V, it was and still is a technically inferior vaccine to the genetically-engineered Western vaccines which produced proteins matching the genetic fingerprint of the spike proteins of the original Wuhan strain of SARS-COV-2 to confer specific immunity to the disease. The Russian efficacy data was, as I said, incomplete and poorly sourced according to some knowledgeable commentators I read in passing and the raw data was not available at all to independent observers. That may be down to a difference in how such things are dealt with in Russia compared to the West, it does not automatically mean that the West denigrated an adequate or superior product simply because it was Russian.
Don't you just love an arms race?
From a purely technical and historical viewpoint, yes. I love reading about such things. However, I'm not so fond of living in a period where I can to read about it as it happens. Of course, we're always in such a period.
Last year I read several news articles on GPS spoofing from the same source, The Register. A simple search just now produced two articles from last year and another from 2012. Russia spoofed AIS data to fake British warship's course days before Crimea guns showdown was an article from last June. The second article, in September, was an "embedded" account of an exercise on HMS Severn.
Am in Scotland. Vaccinations to date: first two doses AstraZeneca, booster shot half-dose Moderna (mRNA). So they're mixing it up a bit.
I'm in Ontario (Canada)*. I had a first dose of AstraZeneca, second of Moderna (because mixing doeses seemed to give better results), and third a full-strength Moderna because that was what was available at the only appointment I found in two months.
*Health care is a provincial responsibility here, so we've had a variety of approaches to vaccination. Ontario's was a Hunger Games-style lottery of trying to find clinics with openings and book appointments. Kinda like finding the free rapid tests — they are available but usually not in stock, so you pretty much have to show up to grocery stores every day and hope you're there within the 3-4 hour window between them being unboxed and running out. (The stores don't known when the next shipment arrives — sometimes several days in a row, sometimes weeks between shipments.)
I should add, for anyone unfamiliar with the site, that The Register is a general IT news source. They also cover a few topics also of interest to their readership. So the two articles have some small significance, but are obviously far from the most authouritive sources available.
So I think the number of "arms race" articles from last year may be suggestive only. It primarily suggests to me that this isn't a big secret. Even mainstream news media, like the Guardian, are covering this. (Well, they are now.) El Reg still has the edge over The Grauniad for technical details, but that's not saying much. It just means I can enjoy comparing them and judging^Wassessing the assumed technical knowledge of their readerships by their journalists.
You impugn El Reg? Jail for Rodgers, jail for one thousand cycles! May BOFH scramble your mariadb (autocockup suggested ‘marinade’) tables!
"But what about Russia's GLONASS system? Would they disable their own version of GPS?"
GLONASS has a military encrypted signal and much more robust signal, just like GPS. Without the keys, you cannot receive them.
I doubt UA is on the distribution list any longer.
Of course it is theoretically possible that USA has slipped UA some receivers with a time limited key, but integration etc would take time, so I doubt it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X2100639X
Hungary used every vaccine they could get their hands on, and also had a mediocre overall uptake so made for a near-ideal natural experiment. Sputnik-V is indeed as effective as the m-RNA vaccines. There is also some in-vitro work out of Italy suggesting it has better efficiency against omnicron than any other vaccine. But well. Petri-dishes.
Certainly not! I would never impugn the publisher of the late Lester Haines and his prolific punning.
On speed limits for GPS modules: some years ago I read a piece by someone who programmed a Raspberry Pi to act as a GPS receiver with a bit of RF circuitry to drive an input pin. I don't know how accurate it was, although I do know that the exact calculations are hairy. But for even a small nation-state weapons program a decent GPS receiver capable of operating at supersonic speeds would not seem to be an obstacle.
Ahh, here is a more modern link that is up to date: GNSS-SDRLIB. Doesn't run on a R-Pi, but close enough.
Yes, writing a decoder for good, strong, un-jammed GPS signals is not the big deal.
But once you need to deal with jamming, you get into phased array antennas and then things get hairy fast.
One particular relevant issue in context of Neptune is that the power budget is very limited in such missiles.
And I am not getting a good vibe from what I'm reading about Russian military practice -- it all too frequently appears to be based on bullying.
There's a story I heard (so take it with a grain or two of salt) that Eisenhower was appalled at some of the Soviet practices when they met up in the summer of 45. Supposedly the way the Soviet Army cleared a mine field was to have the lower ranks walk through it.
Which fits with all of these other stories about the bottom end of the Russian fighting forces.
On a more optimistic topic, there have been discussions here on the possibility of generating solar power in sunny countries south of the Mediterranean and then transporting it north using HVDC transmission.
This is a project to do exactly that, providing 8% of the UK electricity demand using solar power in Morocco and a large battery.
It's a nonsensical reason for refusing the vaccine that makes emotional sense to folks who don't have the statistical numeracy to realize that a 1 in a million chance of dying from the vaccination, plus 1 in 10,000 of dying from severe viral disease even if vaccinated, is far safer than a 1 in a hundred chance of dying from the virus (unvaccinated).
There's a large group of people in the US and I assume on most of the planet who feel that DOING SOMETHING and something bad happening means it is their fault. But doing nothing and having something bad happen is fate.
This is not the thought process in their brains, but this is the way they get to a decision to not do something. Like not take a vaccine.
Here's an article on the trolley problem that also notes this.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/universal-ethics-testing-the-trolley-problem-around-the-world/
"One particular relevant issue in context of Neptune is that the power budget "
Also relevant is that it has a maximum range of 300 km and "subsonic" speed, which I'll asssume is like 1,000 kph. That means that the nav system only needs to work for 20 minutes at the most(*). I suspect that available INS will do the job, which is to put the missile where its seeker can acquire the target. So GPS in this case is in the "nice to have, but not strictly necessary" category.
Note that "where its seeker can acquire the target" benefits from pre-launch data on where the target is likely to be. Which gets back to those NATO ELINT and AWACS planes.
(*)Looking at the map, I think the Neptunes that hit Moskva flew between five and ten minutes, depending on the launch position.
Still waiting for the western oligarchs to contract this disease....
After I went back to college (I'd been out nine years), I finished (eventually) my AA, then my BSc. all part time, mostly at community colleges. In the years I went, I only had three lousy teachers. The rest - let me assure you that anyone taking college courses at night, while working full time, is not going to put up with bs - the students will eat the bad teachers alive.
And then there was me: all three bad teachers, with no planning or forethought, I wound up intimidating. And everyone in the class knew I was getting an A in those classes. The real mind-boggler was the stat teacher: during the first exam, I finished pretty much first, and stepped out, and he was out there. He commented on my calculator having a lot of stat functions... and I said no, but mentioned I'd just finished, the term before, intro to diff eq... and that seemed to intimidate him. But then, for some unknown reason, the class was listed as having no math prerequisites.
Yes! I really, really dislike the Napoleanic broadsides in spaaaace.
Anyone who's read my first novel saw that a) I'm really not into space war (esp. with broadsides), and that I did my best to reflect modern, and far futuristic battles (two? three? launches/blasts and it's over. As I think of it, more like a fight between actual samurai. (position, position, position, draw/swing/oops, you're dead).
There's a large group of people in the US and I assume on most of the planet who feel that DOING SOMETHING and something bad happening means it is their fault. But doing nothing and having something bad happen is fate.
That's cat logic.
Years ago I had an elderly rescue cat who had been morbidly obese when I adopted her: we eventually got her down to a vet-approved weight, but it took a couple of years for her to shed the 2/3 of her body mass that was basically flab, and thereafter she had osteoarthritis in her tail and three out of four legs.
A cat with osteoarthritis does not enjoy using the litter tray: it hurts. But cats are creatures of habit who associate activities with places. Hunting, eating, shitting: the association is "this place makes me hurt, therefore I must avoid it", and suddenly you find yourself scooping up their turds every morning from whichever new place they've found to dump them overnight.
(It's not the cat's fault, and strong pain killers helped ... but then she got bowel cancer and it stopped being a problem permanently.)
Anyway, it's the correlation != causation narrative again.
I don't know where to start, but will try :-(
I was NOT talking about post-rollout. In the UK, at least, all post-rollout adverse event reporting is optional and completely unchecked (so massive reprting bias), and is confounded by a huge number of relevant factors. Rarely, some organisation gets permission to access the data, and does some data mining, but few results are more than indicative, for the previous reasons.
Phase 2 and 3 trials are run by some organisation (often a university or similar) under a contract that includes the manufacturer, but who does NOT have any involvement with actually running the trial. Interim results (including adverse effects) are required to be reported to the regulatory authority, but there is NO requirement to publish them until (some time after) the trial is complete. Indeed, that usually happens well after approval.
The trials for COVID cut corners, and approval was given (for all of the vaccines) very hurriedly. Astrazeneca were very open with their interim results; Pfizer and Moderna were not. At the time I am talking about, such results (including adverse effects) were available for Astrazeneca but not Pfizer or Moderna.
The adverse events I was referring to were a few (2-3?) in young adults, where only 0.1 or so were expected (*); no, they were NOT deaths, but could lead to deaths when untreated. There was a hoo-hah, and even the UK put a hold on Astrazeneca for young people (which is still present). Pfizer (I think) was hyping its safety and was asked "we know Astrazeneca's risks; what about yours?" and got the response "we have disclosed everything to the FDA". Once the data were published, it became clear that Pfizer and Moderna were no safer than Astrazeneca, probably not even for young adults.
(*) But where more like 100 were expected if an unvaccinated young adult got COVID.
270 - What Charlie and I refer to is actual vaccinations administered without side effects beyond short term headache, muscle pains or chills (up to 24 hours, easily treated using paracetamol and/or ibuprofen).
276 - I'm not sure about Ingurlundshire regions, but healthcare in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is devolved to the national assemblies, and from there administration is usually further devolved to regional health boards (for example I'm in a different RHB to Nojay and Charlie, and until I got renal failure last February was in a different RHB to the one I am now; all 3 RHBs being in Scotland).
288 - Wikipedia gives performance for Storm Shadow (France and UK) of range 350 miles at ~1_000kph, guidance system Inertial, GPS and TERPROM.
"I'm not sure about Ingurlundshire regions, but healthcare in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is devolved to the national assemblies, ..."
Policy is not devolved; implementation is. Roughly.
That's cat logic.
Yes and no.
Cats and humans seem to have place-based memory. Words, for example, are not learned in some "word part of your brain that suddenly evolved 70,000 years ago," they're associated with memories and places. This is why, when you deal with government (go on a jury, testify at a meeting, whatever) you start spouting bureaucratese--you've learned that's what you're supposed to do, and you're using this whole clunky polysyllabic language with too many verb modifiers, even when it's inappropriate. Or in America, you practice loving your neighbors when you're in Church, you practice tyrannizing the wait staff when you go to a restaurant after Church, you practice killing your neighbors later on the gun range to prepare for the collapse of society. It takes real work to not compartmentalize, to not be essentially an incipient multiple personality case, who's made no effort to port the lessons learned in one place to the rest of your scenes.
Hospital professionals are notorious for this: they're taught to compartmentalize in school and at work so they can do their jobs without becoming overwhelmed by the suffering around them, but then when they get home, they make egregious health and sanitation errors. They've come to think of themselves as medical professionals where they work, they've learned to not bring work home, and they have to be reminded not to be slobs. And typically, the words pouring out of their mouths excuse their behavior, because otherwise they'd have to do the even more difficult work of decompartmentalizing some parts of their lives, while compartmentalizing others.*
Cats seem to do this even more than humans. If a cat's hungry, you can have some pretty sophisticated interactions with them around food. Talk to them about that poop they left lying around, they have no idea what your words mean. That's not where their heads are that moment, and the noises you're making aren't perceived as words, because they're not part of their internal "food scene."
THAT'S NOT WHAT'S GOING ON WITH ANTI-VAXXERS. You have to remember that we've been in an infowar for years with people who are trying to create Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They're not trying to create an alternative narrative that favors them, they're trying to splinter narratives that oppose them, because that's easier. Anti-Vaxxing is just a random shard resulting of this decades-long effort to shatter a society based on progressive values, so that they can install themselves as the powers in the resulting pieces.
You can test this pretty easily. If someone's antsy about you wearing a mask (are you a sheeple? Are you scared of them?), tell them you're trying to be polite and not infect them with something you think you have. It breaks the scripts they've learned, and in my limited experience, they default to politeness and leave you alone.
*Why do I notice this? Ecologists get taught to decompartmentalize more than most people. We have to deal with so many different things at once that we're taught (and learn) to constantly shift perspective and pull in plausible models from elsewhere to help us try to make sense of whatever mess we're working on. Being a decompartmentalizing ecologist married to a compartmentalizing pharmacist has been a really interesting trip.
"There's a large group of people in the US and I assume on most of the planet who feel that DOING SOMETHING and something bad happening means it is their fault. But doing nothing and having something bad happen is fate."
I suspect that's not just a large group, but a majority, albeit in a somewhat more complex form. People tend to emotionally process perceived cause and effect based on active versus passive.
for some unknown reason, the class was listed as having no math prerequisites
Prerequisites are as much political as they are pedagogical.
"GLONASS has a military encrypted signal and much more robust signal, just like GPS. Without the keys, you cannot receive them."
GPS was originally designed to be receivable using the kind of processors that were available at the end of the 70s, ie. at the time when you had to have an analogue front end chewing on the received carrier and feeding the processor with extracted data that came at a rate slow enough for it to follow.
By the early 90s processors had got fast enough that you could track the carrier directly, without bothering about the coded signal. Doing this, it no longer made any difference that there was an encrypted military code and a not-so-good unencrypted civilian one, since you could now get a better result than either without even looking at the code. This was part of the reasoning behind the US switching off the encryption on the military code during the first Gulf war so the troops could use civilian GPS receivers because they'd run out of military ones: it might have been a big deal 15 years before, but it wasn't any more, because the original security no longer existed anyway so they weren't really losing anything.
With GLONASS being basically the Soviet version of the same idea, I'd be rather surprised if much the same didn't also apply to that.
It does seem though these days that people are now so used to using GPS for everyday personal purposes (or probably in most cases something that calls itself GPS but uses non-satellite sources as well, I'd expect) that they see it as the be-all and end-all of positioning systems and forget that it's only one input of many that are available. It actually isn't all that suitable as a primary reference, and is better considered as something that needs checking by reference to other sources and can then be used to improve the accuracy of the aggregate position output as long as you are careful: natural conditions can cause it to give the wrong answer as well as deliberate interference. But in personal use, with a human brain doing all the post-processing, you almost always have lots of other positional information, and you very rarely need it to give you an accuracy better than a few hundred metres (even if you think you do); so you just apply the required corrections automatically without realising you're doing it, and end up thinking that your successful navigation is all due to GPS and not to you.
For something like a missile, in particular, people seem to forget about inertial navigation (though a couple of posters have mentioned it briefly) and/or regard it as a bit flaky and inaccurate compared to something like GPS. In fact it's very good; never mind bloody Apple, the military have been working on it hard since the days when it was all mechanical and even decades-old implementations can produce staggeringly accurate results. It's an oversimplification to suggest that a missile keeps track of itself using INS and just uses GPS to check the INS for drift and dropped bollocks, but it's closer to the truth than the apparent perception that it's more the other way round.
Having said all that, I'm still not sure why we're spending so much time discussing exactly how the particular wave patterns at the moment of firing perturbed the trajectory of the shell the Bismarck sank the Hood with and how it came to hit in exactly the worst possible spot.
That could have been me, with the note that I'm more likely to say something along the lines of "this missile uses multiple guidance methods including GPS, inertial navigation, and some form of laser or tv painting, as available."
Dungeons & Dragons players take COVID seriously because they know that 2% chance occurs much more often than you would think
My D&D groups (in Portland OR) are still masking, whereas only about 1/3 of Portlanders I see in the grocery store are.
"since you could now get a better result than either without even looking at the code"
I dont want to all all time/gps-nut on you here, but that is simply not correct.
For Carrier-Phase-Tracking to be useful, you still need to know the gold code epoch, otherwise you cannot measure the time difference between the satellites.
That is under normal circumstances quite easy, and under competent jamming near impossible, unless you have a steerable narrow beam antenna and know where the satellites are.
In practice that means phased-array antennas and many more RF frontends, but given a stable local clock, you can also do it with a single steerable dish. (There's on on top of the USNO for instance.)
"This was part of the reasoning behind the US switching off the encryption on the military code during the first Gulf war"
Also wrong. They turned off "Selective Availability", which was a deliberate distortion of the "CA" signal.
The "Coarse Acquisition" signal is only there to make it faster to acquire the "real" encrypted P ("Precision") signal.
Brute-force search for the P signal code is impossible, because you need to figure out the time, the satellite position, the propagation delay, the doppler shift, the (very long) "gold code" and the encryption. Time, gold code and encryption are interconnected but it does not reduce the search space very much.
Brute-force search for the CA signal took maximum 15 minutes (= the period of the almanac), because the gold code is almost trivial and the chirp frequency only a tenth of the P signal. If you already had the "almanac" and knew time to within a few hours or position to within 15 degrees, it could be done in a minute or less.
Once you have locked to the CA signal, you have the satpos, time and the gold code epoch and you can find the P signal in tens of seconds.
To their horror, DoD found out that the CA signal was almost as good as the P signal, the main difference being that CA was only on L1 where P was on both L1 and L2, allowing a very precise modelling of the ionospheric delay.
Therefore "Selective Availability" was added to the CA signal, basically randomizing things so that your position would be up to 300' wrong, so that "enemies could not use it to precision bomb back".
All existing GPS systems don't just "track the carrier signal", they need the precise ephemeris of all of the satellites they're using at any given time i.e. exactly where each satellite is in space and its velocity. That ephemeris is transmitted by each satellite. The military and super-high-precision signal ephemeris data of all GPS systems is encrypted and the keys are not generally available, the ephemerae on the general-use channels are less accurate with larger error bars resulting in a spread of ground location positions reported by the receiver. From speaking to someone who used to be an artillery observer in the British Army the US NavStar military system changed keys about every two weeks in "peacetime" (he was one of the guys who went around with the crypto "gun" to reset the key suites in various bits of kit for his battalion). In a shooting war the key replacement tempo would probably ramp up.
BTW the EU's Galileo system is the only one of the Big Four that is not military-oriented but it still has a "justified requirement" for access to the highest precision channels which is pretty much indivisible from military use.
The days of GPS-only terminally-guided weapons like free-fall bombs is pretty much over unless it's being used to blow up grass huts (AKA "w**-stomping"). Any conflict between two technically ept forces today both sides will face GPS jamming and spoofing up the wazoo and even if it isn't actually happening at any given location the attackers can't be sure their GPS-guided weapon won't be spoofed. Inertial navigation systems have taken over even for cruise missiles and other loitering munitions which spend long times from launch to target. They may well be initialised using GPS before launch but it may be the launch teams use very accurate paper maps (why do you think they call it the Ordnance Survey?). Both methods would work. Once the missile is in dirty air where GPS cannot be trusted INS will function well enough (accumulating errors on the way, but only gradually) until the terminal guidance systems find the target and deliver the good news.
From various sources I understand that NavStar has been progressively upgraded to try and get around the spoofing and jamming problem, how successful that effort has been no-one is saying. The current GPS satellites flying today are a lot smarter and a lot bigger than their predecessors and are designed to be updated more thoroughly than before.
As for the Moskva attack with the Neptune missiles, most reports I've seen on this event suggest that the ship was being shadowed by a couple of Ukranian TB2 drones. That would provide enough intel to get the truck launchers into position and fire the missiles at a likely intercept point with the ship given its heading and speed (warships don't sit around dead in the water much even when there's no perceived threat, and with enemy drones buzzing around...) Updated track and speed data from the drones could have been used for an in-flight correction of the Neptune missiles in flight, if they do possess this capability, to refine and correct the intercept location to the point where the final attack sensing systems of the missiles took over.
Some time after this clusterfuck is well behind us the truth will be revealed, probably in a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie where it will turn out that the whole thing was orchestrated by a passing US Navy ex-SEAL Delta Force Ranger SpecOps CIA operative on holiday in the area. Honest.
In fact it's very good; never mind bloody Apple, the military have been working on it hard since the days when it was all mechanical and even decades-old implementations can produce staggeringly accurate results.
See, for example, nuclear ballistic missile submarines with ICBMs. IIRC, by 1980 an Ohio class sub with Trident missiles had a circular error at the target of less than 400 ft. Call it a bit over 100 meters.
"Trident missiles had a circular error at the target of less than 400 ft"
And a lot of that came from the weather at the target.
A very large reason for the B61 mod12 upgrade, is to get the new steerable tail-kit, which uses INS and GPS to correct for that.
I'm trying not to give them what I have
Apparently Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox as he was going to Gettysburg to make his famous speech.
As he was recovering in the White House, he remarked that what he had was every politician's dream: he could give something to everybody! (Not sure whether this is something he actually said, ought to have said but didn't, or would never have dreamed of saying, but got attributed to him anyway.)
I was driving around on errands today around southwestern Ontario. I saw a couple of portable billboards with demented anti-vax / 'COVID is a hoax' crap on them. Plus, yesterday I saw someone driving around with three big flags hanging off their car: Canadian flag, American flag, and the yellow 'don't tread on me' flag. With their car plastered with anti-vax crap.
There must be something in the water. Or perhaps the air.
"the yellow 'don't tread on me' flag"
You mean the signal flag for Q, the quarantine flag? Do you think they knew that's what it was? Would it be worth trying to give them a present, in the form of a flag with a diagonal arrangement of black and yellow squares?
"Also wrong. They turned off "Selective Availability", which was a deliberate distortion of the "CA" signal."
Yeah, I got mixed up. What I said didn't make sense, since de-encrypting the military code would not have made any difference to whether boggo civilian receivers could be used or not.
"Talk to them about that poop they left lying around, they have no idea what your words mean. That's not where their heads are that moment"
Cats seem to see things in a way that has a fair resemblance to me aged 5 as described above. Similarly to me asking "have I been good today" without having any idea whether I had or not, cats have no idea of the answer to "will my food ape be nice to me" having anything to do with whether or not they have done a big shit in the middle of the draining board. It doesn't even occur to them that they have done a big shit in the middle of the draining board. If they could converse well enough that you could make them an offer like "if you can go seven days in a row without shitting on the draining board (as recorded on a chart), I will give you a pen of live mice to play with", they would not have any idea whether or not they would be able to comply with the condition and would regard it as a pure gamble whether they got the mice or not.
There must be something in the water. Or perhaps the air.
Well, Fox News is definitely in the air... :-)
It's thought to be how the Iranians hijacked an American reconnaissance drone a while back, feeding the drone with defective position data until it flew into Iranian airspace and ran out of fuel.
This technique shows up in Greg Egan's recent novel, Perihelion Summer.
AlanD2 @ 209:
But at that extreme range, sea-clutter would almost certainly not allow the ship to be able to distinguish the missile. I'd guess perhaps half that distance, depending on how low above the water the missile could safely fly.
So we're still talking on the order of at most 1 to 2 minutes between the detection of the missile and when it hits the ship.
Y'all are still assuming the radars were operational and hadn't fallen prey to lackadaisical maintenance or failures in operator training. Every bit of information I've been able to locate on the incident shows ALL defensive armaments still stowed. My best guess is the whole thing came as a BIG SURPRISE! The missiles weren't "detected" until they impacted the ship.
Prerequisites are as much political as they are pedagogical.
Uh, not in Electrical and other Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, etc...
After 2 years of Engineering we (electrical especially) realized that no mater what the name of the course, many were Calculus 8, 9, 10, ...
Pigeon @ 216:
Sorry, I don't understand this. I don't know what a "bubble answer sheet" is, but if it is related to what I'd call an "answer sheet" without the "bubble", it sounds like you were giving out the answers before the test, which surely can't be the case. If you then collected them again at the end of the lesson I don't see how people were supposed to make use of the aide-memoires they'd written on the back. And surely "(alphabetically)" implies a seating order unrelated to and incompatible with one based around whatever criterion you derived from the sheets.
Pre-printed answer sheet for "multiple guess" tests: Use number 2 pencil only.
https://tech.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20-Question-10-choice-3-essay-box-blank-space.pdf
If they could converse well enough that you could make them an offer like
People who study such things basically say dogs and cats don't really have the concept of tomorrow. They mostly think about NOW and a few minutes into the future.
Which is also why those folks who spend fortunes keeping decrepit animals alive (to be nice to them) are deluding themselves. It is all about the people's feelings and desires.
"Use number 2 pencil only."
https://xkcd.com/499/
THAT'S NOT WHAT'S GOING ON WITH ANTI-VAXXERS.
It is with some. But in the vaccine case not the majority.
There are a lot of folks out there who don't want to have a medical checkup (they might find something needing serious care), get their car serviced (they might find that if not repaired will cause a wreak), call the bank as to why their card was declined (they might discover they are out of money / at their limit on that card), and so on.
In their minds bad things aren't real until they poke them. They live in a totally Schrödinger world never wanting to open the box.
And when the bad news is forced on them, well it wasn't their fault, it was fate.
I need to point out that the majority of anti-vaxxers in the US apparently get their information from Faux News and voting red. If it was just people being too poor for a doctor's visit, or too in denial, the vax/anti-vax divide wouldn't correlate so well with US political divisions. Which it seems to, even in Canada (cf JReynolds at 306).
Ivan Ilyin has been getting some buzz recently, with references to this 2018 Timothy Snyder piece, which is paywalled:
Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism (Timothy Snyder, March 16, 2018)
Ivan Ilyin provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. Today, his ideas have been revived and celebrated by Vladimir Putin.
Here's what may be a non-paywalled copy (it is what I read), perhaps stolen (on an Albanian site? US Cloudflare ip addresses):
https://politiko.al/ivan-ilyin-putins-philosopher-of-russian-fascism
The Russian looked Satan in the eye, put God on the psychoanalyst’s couch, and understood that his nation could redeem the world. An agonized God told the Russian a story of failure. In the beginning was the Word, purity and perfection, and the Word was God. But then God made a youthful mistake. He created the world to complete himself, but instead soiled himself, and hid in shame. God’s, not Adam’s, was the original sin, the release of the imperfect. Once people were in the world, they apprehended facts and experienced feelings that could not be reassembled to what had been God’s mind. Each individual thought or passion deepened the hold of Satan on the world. And so the Russian, a philosopher, understood history as a disgrace. Nothing that had happened since creation was of significance. The world was a meaningless farrago of fragments. The more humans sought to understand it, the more sinful it became.
...
One current of thought that is coherent over the decades, however, is his metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state.
...
Though he died forgotten, in 1954, Ilyin’s work was revived after collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and guides the men who rule Russia today.
"A very large reason for the B61 mod12 upgrade, is to get the new steerable tail-kit, which uses INS and GPS to correct for that."
I'd always assumed that the B62-12 was going to use GPS/INS and strakes to give it the glide-bomb-like capabilities of JDAM. But it seems not. No GPS, no strakes, just INS and tail fins. I asked around about why that and the opinion is that, more than the possibility of GPS jamming and spoofing, the object is to limit how far the bomb could go astray. INS-quality is good enough for nukes if it receives a pre-release GPS update from the carrying aircraft.
If you search for "B61 Mod 12 Life Extension Program Tail Kit Assembly" and look at the 2020 version, it says
The link is bizarrely long and I don't understand it completely:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwil1-P_5q33AhURm-AKHffkCJYQFnoECAgQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dote.osd.mil%2FPortals%2F97%2Fpub%2Freports%2FFY2020%2Faf%2F2020b61.pdf%3Fver%3Do2y_8no8vy14EtWUm_0hVw%253D%253D&usg=AOvVaw3RgAw-8rFifDoeoMkakteY
Similarly to me asking "have I been good today" without having any idea whether I had or not, cats have no idea of the answer to "will my food ape be nice to me" having anything to do with whether or not they have done a big shit in the middle of the draining board.
In my limited experience, the cats I currently have know damned well when they've made a protest (pooping on the draining board here). They're pissed about something and they want me to know it. Even a rescue pigeon I had decades ago was perfectly capable of trying to piss me off if he was angry with me, and pigeons aren't unusually brilliant.
That's a different problem than a cat hating the litter box because they associate it with pain, or even having a poop that lands outside the litter box by accident. There the cat doesn't see that it's doing anything wrong, so it's much more difficult to figure out how to persuade the cat to not do that in the future.
As for future, cats don't count above two or three, so seven days is probably meaningless even if they do understand future. On the other hand, they're exquisitely good at both setting up and messing with schedules, so they get cyclic temporal patterns. I suspect that if someone went on predictable trips of a few days and you videoed their cat in their absence, the cat's behavior would show they had a sense of duration and were preparing for the human to arrive at the normal time.
It's just bloody google trying to pretend they're the only thing on the web. And then it got fucked by markdown on top of that.
This worked for me:
http://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2020/af/2020b61.pdf
It's an oversimplification to suggest that a missile keeps track of itself using INS and just uses GPS to check the INS for drift and dropped bollocks, but it's closer to the truth than the apparent perception that it's more the other way round.
Yes, it's the age-old "dispute" between dead reckoning and celestial navigation, and rolls up all the debate about the use of chronometers in the 18th century. Cook reached Tahiti with around 20 miles difference between his observed position and his dead reckoning track, which was exactly his estimated error for the ship's log line. The story goes that because dead reckoning was mostly seamanship, learned on the ob so to speak, it was somewhat shunned by clever-pants Royal Society types with their ephemera and log tables. I think in practice people who liked to use things that work tended to succeed more often, that there's always a mixture and interplay.
And of course INS has been a thing since the gyroscope was invented, now that you can haz hundreds of tiny gyro-in-a-chips, all working at once, it would be amazing if it turned out that great accuracy could not be achieved.
"This worked for me:"
Oh. Thanks. This stuff still baffles me on occasion.
I'm sure Bill would appreciate such a facility, and I would also.
I would appreciate not having to stay up (on the US east coast) until Het's California sleep time to catch potential deletions, yeah.
After seeing three inoffensive and interesting comments (which I may or may not argue with here eventually), then two more (that I could interpret as a call for Smiting some Scum in the US) that might trigger a deletion spree, I finally quick wrote/tested a bash script to poll a thread for changes and record them.
Disemvowelling would be rude, though fine as a personal choice in a killfile approach. (If not a personal choice, akin to DJT's habit as POTUS of ripping up meeting notes knowing that the archivists will have to tape the bits back together.) Another approach that is slightly less annoying (though still rude) is to shuffle the interior letters of words 4 characters or longer. Interesting trick that; one can also pack more text on a page by keeping the first and last letters at a normal font size but reducing the size of the (unshuffled) interior letters. Takes some practice to read the result, though.
France was uncomfortably Fascist-friendly, but the electorate came through:
Live updates | Ukraine leader congratulates Macron on win
(For the 2019 election, the far right parties in Ukraine combined to try to exceed the 5 percent threshold for proportional representation, and failed with 2.15 percent (they got 1 constituency seat).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_parliamentary_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics_in_Ukraine)
[[ changing markup links now to work with updated markup version - mod ]]
A bit of reading this afternoon -- Inventing accuracy : a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance -- tells me that 400 ft accuracy for the late model Tridents required doing a star fix somewhere along the trajectory, and wasn't available until about 1990. The "Beryllium Baby" and surrounding parts in the silo-launched Peacekeeper missiles, accurate to about 500 meters, seems to have been the best purely inertial system small enough to put in a missile ever built. 19,000 moving parts and ridiculously expensive.
Interesting the political arguments back and forth about accuracy. There was concern that if the ICBMs were too accurate, so could take out even hardened silos, the Soviets would interpret that as a first-strike capability.
To be clear, I agree that Anti-Vaccine in the US is not the "hiding from what I don't know" issue. My wording may not have been clear.
But Faux News is not the source. They are late to the game. I have relatives in the anti-vaccine movement and they've been there for a decade or more. (I didn't know my niece in law before then but my brother and I think she and her family are the source of most of it. Or at least the big amplifier.)
Facebook was the big source prior to 2018.
Did you know that measles isn't all that bad? It can even suppress some cancers. And the FDA lies about the stats. Just look at the VAERS. This proves vaccines are worse than the disease. And those retracted anti-vaccines papers, well the conspiracy runs deep. And on and on and on. Fox News was late to this game.
"This stuff still baffles me on occasion."
Oh, I see, at least partially.
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ascii-table-hex-to-ascii-value-character-code-chart-2/
At one point in time decades ago I could "read hex" and translate to "normal" on the fly. Thank goodness I don't need to do that all that much anymore. Every now and then to deal with embedding a string in a scrip or similar. But I now mostly look it up. You can go far if you know 20, 30..., 41..., and 61...
David L @ 285:
There's a story I heard (so take it with a grain or two of salt) that Eisenhower was appalled at some of the Soviet practices when they met up in the summer of 45. Supposedly the way the Soviet Army cleared a mine field was to have the lower ranks walk through it.
Which fits with all of these other stories about the bottom end of the Russian fighting forces.
I've heard the same stories, although instead of lower ranked Russian soldiers they used German POWs.
Ah, I see where you're going with this. I was thinking of the covid19 anti-vaxxer/ivermectin and oxidizer chugging crowd.
I still stand by the original claim that current anti-vaxxer popularity is a FUD campaign. Anti-vaxxers have been around since forever as a fringe movement. They were against smallpox vaccines in the 19th century*, against influenza masking in 1919, so that's kind of normal. The rapid spread of the Qnuts, however, isn't just Faceplant, it's more deliberate than that.
But while I do disagree, I see what you're trying to get at. There is something inexplicable and knuckleheaded about anti-vaxxing, and it's always tempting to try to make sense of it.
*I tripped over a smallpox anti-vaxxer in the current project I'm goofing on. Alexander Milton Ross is Wiki'ed as "a Canadian botanist, naturalist, physician, abolitionist and anti-vaccination activist. He is best known as an agent for the secret Underground Railroad slave escape network, known in that organization and among slaves as 'The Birdman' for his preferred cover story as an ornithologist."
Apparently he and his children had been vaccinated, but he was anti-vaxx. Go figure. In this, he's like a bit like Zero Population Growth advocate I knew, who had four children and I don't know how many grandchildren, but was staunch in his view that the rest of us shouldn't breed.
Disemvowelling would be rude, though fine as a personal choice in a killfile approach.
Here's an approach that stashes the vowels with enough metadata to recreate the text:
Not useful or for serious consideration, just for fun really.
Pigeon @ 307:
You mean the signal flag for Q, the quarantine flag? Do you think they knew that's what it was? Would it be worth trying to give them a present, in the form of a flag with a diagonal arrangement of black and yellow squares?
No he means the Gadsden Flag from the American Revolution that has been universally adopted by selfish bastard "Libertarian" fascist assholes who don't know shit about American history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_flag
Nah, the specific source of the Covid Anti Vaxx thing is not the general anti vax movement. The Covid Anti Vaxx movement is purely political, couched sometimes in pseudoscience, but the pseudoscience is not the reason.
They're owning the libs.
This is indeed mostly propagated by Fox News.
It being past 300 I’m going off on a tangent. In a discussion about colony sizes on the previous post Charlie said:
‘600K is "can sustain the 19th century industrial revolution technologies if given a hospitable biosphere as a starting point".’
That gives me an idea for a CliFi/Steampunk mashup setting.
Future earth, only the polar regions are habitable. That’s not a lot of total land area, the land is crap (former muskeg at best, former subglacial rock at worst) and the total solar energy per unit area ~10x less than the tropics. This will limit the maximum possible human population, to where peak Empire can just barely manage steam, and then only if they get lucky in how many geniuses are born in a given generation.
By the way, with no easily reached coal or oil left, running your steam-powered war machine means chopping down a forest. (Preferably someone else’s)
Damian @ 311:
This technique shows up in Greg Egan's recent novel, Perihelion Summer.
Iran claims they lured it off course. The US claims it malfunctioned. I have yet to see definitive proof either way, but note that IF Iran did it, they don't appear to be able to repeat the performance.
Re: 'Rarely, some organisation gets permission to access the data, and does some data mining, but few results are more than indicative, for the previous reasons.'
The 'some' organization in this case was the WHO, CDC, NIH, and equivalent national health agencies in about 180 different countries.
Given how much time was spent on reviewing the data before approvals here in NorAm (USA & Canada), I'm guessing that the reviewers did not rush their analyses. Also, my impression is that the vaccine submission data encompasses more than the clinical results - it also includes various technical info like how the vaccine is supposed to work.
About the rush to vaccinate and collect data plus lack of detail in the clinical trial results for Sputnik ---
One of the concerns that I heard discussed on TWIV about any vaccine was the rare but possible (and potentially fatal) reaction to the vaccine vector. (Sputnik uses two vectors.) I forget which particular vaccine the TWIV panel discussed but the article below discusses one such event. All of the TWIV panel (mostly virologists but from a variety of different unis/labs) were familiar with this tragedy. So it's really not surprising that the virologists, immunologists and other assorted '-gists' who were charged with examining the various vaccine candidate submissions (meaning complete descriptions of active and inactive components, manufacture, delivery, clinical data, etc.) were damned upset when they didn't get complete data on Sputnik.
'Research shows why 1960s RSV shot sickened children'
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rsv-shot-idUSTRE4BM4SH20081223
PS - One of the senior researchers on the Sputnik vax had finished a post-doc/placement in one of the virology research labs at the NIH sometime before or shortly after COVID-19 happened therefore probably was well aware of the type and level of detail required. However, this could also be the ever-present right vs. left hand screw-up in admin coordination.
From my non-tech perspective one of the biggest screw-ups was the lack of consumer-level info (plain language) about how vaccines work. And then to confuse things further, (in the US) the gov't decided to let these same uninformed consumers choose the 'brand' of vaccine they'd get. Just plain nuts!
"Disemvowelling would be rude, though fine as a personal choice"
I wouldn't consider it rude, provided
While I'm here, there is a strict mathematical definition of Normal. In fact there are two, depending on whether you are doing algebra or geometry.
JHomes.
Michael Cain @ 326: A bit of reading this afternoon -- Inventing accuracy : a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance -- tells me that 400 ft accuracy for the late model Tridents required doing a star fix somewhere along the trajectory, and wasn't available until about 1990. The "Beryllium Baby" and surrounding parts in the silo-launched Peacekeeper missiles, accurate to about 500 meters, seems to have been the best purely inertial system small enough to put in a missile ever built. 19,000 moving parts and ridiculously expensive.
Interesting the political arguments back and forth about accuracy. There was concern that if the ICBMs were too accurate, so could take out even hardened silos, the Soviets would interpret that as a first-strike capability.
I'm pretty sure when you're talking about Megaton warheads a C.E.P. of 500m is probably "close enough for government work!"
Nah, the specific source of the Covid Anti Vaxx thing is not the general anti vax movement. The Covid Anti Vaxx movement is purely political, couched sometimes in pseudoscience, but the pseudoscience is not the reason.
Yes. But it was built on a foundation of anti-vac craziness that existed before 2018. Or even 2016. I didn't realize how crazy my relatives were before 2016. I think they were hiding it. (In my case till my mother died.) But they are part of a vast US clump of people who just believe anything the government does is a conspiracy to turn them into mindless communist droids.
If you dig into it the Tea Party folks had a lot of overlap with these early anti-vac anti-government, anti-"freedom" folks.
Covid just lit a match to the pile of petrol soaked wood.
Seems apropos. Only 3 minutes long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKK2W7iTmu4
The few I've met in Australia are very much part of the "alternative (to) medicine" movement, with covid being a big dramatic thing that in a few cases kicked them back to sanity, but in others showed them they they can live as hermits if they want to... so they are.
But it is very much a piece of the Montessori, organic vegan crystal homeopathy movement here - Byron Bay being notorious as a savagely gentrified hippy hangout and centre of the anti-vaxx movement. Both in general, and for the covid vaccines.
There does seem to be a correlation with income independent of work, but I suspect that is very much a class effect (viz, I know people who are 50+ and well off, so no surprise that some joined the hordes choosing early retirement during the pandemic). Most, though, being anti-covid rather than pro-covid... it's just that the exceptions stand out.
There appear to be a lot of {ahem} "government employed anti-vaxxers" who get whatever income they get via government benefits. I would not be surprised to discover that political pressure was applied to the benefit system one way or the other, but since there was also scientific pressure being applied much more loudly it's hard to tell (viz, making people queue at the dole office during lockdowns was tried in Australia but IIRC abandoned fairly quickly.
Here's an approach that stashes the vowels with enough metadata to recreate the text:
I'd also forgotten about rot13.
echo "I'd also forgotten about rot13." | rot13
V'q nyfb sbetbggra nobhg ebg13.
Reversible:
echo "I'd also forgotten about rot13." | rot13 | rot13
I'd also forgotten about rot13.
I'm not familiar with cats that have that much ability at forward planning. They have the idea of trying to piss me off on purpose as a means of communication, but they do it interactively, not by setting up a situation for me to react to later.
Pigeons are more socially oriented than cats, and they are a different matter. Both wood pigeons and town pigeons understand that kind of forward planning just fine, and think it's tremendous fun to fuck something up when I'm not there and then laugh at me swearing over it when I get back and find what they've done. They even do the flying from where they're sitting to the thing they're going to fuck up, and then back again afterwards, as quietly as they can manage so I don't hear what they're up to. The one bit they haven't figured out is how to wipe the cheeky smug grin off their beak before I come back into the room, so even though they're still in the same place I left them I still know from the first sight of them that I'm going to find a pile of electronic components that has been stirred violently with a beak and flicked all over the room, or my browser rendered unusable by activation of all the secret keyboard shortcuts to functions I don't even know it has, or (in the case of a town pigeon; wood pigeons aren't really into toilet humour) a conspicuous turd in the middle of what I was doing before I left the room, etc.
I get the idea of cats that avoid the litter tray due to arthritis etc, but I don't think "the cat doesn't see that it's doing anything wrong" applies only to that kind of motivation; I think it applies no matter what their reason is. All the cats I've ever known have learnt standard cat toilet procedure from their mothers and from instinct before I met them, and then carry it out robotically as a pure rote procedure executed entirely open-loop. They derive zero feedback from the results, and don't really even know what they're doing: if they've positioned themselves too close to the edge of the tray so the turd falls outside rather than inside, they don't see that as a failure, they simply don't see it as anything. In the same way, they do not learn to "bury their turds" as popular belief has it that they do: they merely learn to perform a preprogrammed sequence of scraping movements on the surface around it. This automatically has the desired effect on a surface like sand or soil; on a surface like newspaper or stainless steel, though, it does sweet bugger all, but they are entirely unaware that nothing is happening and don't make the slightest attempt to modify their actions to try and get some result, not even trying to scrape harder or performing any more than the regulation number of strokes.
So a cat doing a shit is simply executing a routine of pure automatism in a habituated spot. It's not even aware that the routine has any results as far as anything outside its own body is concerned; the only result it thinks exists is that it feels better afterwards. So if it feels some motivation to choose a different spot, it makes no difference whether that motivation is arthritic pain or just that it seemed like a good idea at the time to whether the cat does or doesn't think it's "right" or "wrong". It's not thinking "I know I'm not supposed to shit here but I can get away with it because I've got arthritis for an excuse", or "I'm going to shit here knowing fine it's wrong deliberately to piss my food ape off"; it's just thinking "I feel happy here to do my little dance for making me feel less bulgy", and having achieved that internal result it thinks no more about it.
Certainly my own draining board shitter didn't have the foggiest idea that she was doing something I might react to. I walked in on her once while she was in the middle of doing it, and she simply expected me to completely ignore her same as I usually did when I walked in on her having a shit (ie. in the litter tray). She didn't even expect to be yelled at for being up on the side in the kitchen (which she just about had managed to learn not to do when I could see her doing it). I suspect that that was the only connection she made when I did react, and it was never even a tiny bit possible to get her to realise any connection between the presence of a turd on the draining board and what she had been doing up there.
As regards cats' sense of time and "seven days", yes, I know conversational ability is not the only requirement, but I didn't see much point in giving a detailed description of the sphericity of the cat when surely everyone could see it had to be round anyway :)
My best guess is the whole thing came as a BIG SURPRISE! The missiles weren't "detected" until they impacted the ship.
No argument from me. Russian taxpayer rubles at work! :-)
And in a bit of serendipity, tonight's US PBS episode of "Call the Midwife" (a UK import) was about people avoiding medical issues because they were more comfortable with the current suffering than being told what the issue really was and how to deal with it.
And in a similar vein to your comments a few years back someone wrote an editorial rant about "Whole Foods" customers.
This WF shopper talked about how the typical WF customer was proud to be a knowledgeable science believing D party aligned liberal. And yet the book section of the stores was/is mostly about homeopathy, crystals, and other anti-science based food and health topics.
Basically their point was that the typical WF customer was not who they wanted their image to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Foods_Market
So I wonder where this will go. Last time it was directed at me my son was a secret agent of Israel. Or some such.
Oh well.
Anyone bring the popcorn?
Oh, right, thank you. I hadn't heard of that.
I'm now thinking I ought to be finding something significant and witty to say about Scotland having the thistle and "Nemo me impune lacessit" :)
Looks like time for another seagull expunging...
Speaking of things that can't count... one, two, many?
Anyway, it is the happy time when the ANZAC day shop closures are over and I can wander of the the supermarket. I leave you with this happy article about the war memorial "proudly brought to you by Boeing, makers of the finest weapon systems"
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2022/apr/25/an-australian-war-memorial-sponsored-by-weapons-dealers-is-no-place-for-quiet-reflection-on-anzac-day
Me: Prerequisites are as much political as they are pedagogical.
You: Uh, not in Electrical and other Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, etc...
Actually, yes. Many universities are eliminating physics as a prerequisite for engineering. They are doing this not because it isn't needed but because girls tend not to take high school physics, and the universities want to encourage more women to study engineering. So they decided that they would rather teach high school physics in first year than have a student body dominated by guys.
At a conference a few years ago I had a conversation with a prof pleading with the high school teachers there to encourage students to take physics, because 80% of the students entering her program without a high school physics class dropped out. (Should have been an easy sell — we were all physics teachers, after all.) I asked her why the university didn't make physics a prerequisite, then, and she said that they were afraid if they did they wouldn't get enough students and the program would be cancelled. I told her that I was pleading with students (and parents) to take physics but they were focused on having a high average in the required subjects, as recommended by the guidance counsellors, and that if the university was serious they needed to have a dean or someone higher communicate with guidance counsellors.
When I was taking my specialist additional qualification course (required to be a department head, which I'd gotten a position as contingent on passing the course over the summer) I ended up having to take two simultaneous AQs because the Registrar decided that a course in Microprocessor Design had nothing to do with computers. The Dean of the university I got my EE degree at was willing to talk to her personally and explain that it had everything to do with computers, but she insisted that all that mattered was it was an EE course on my transcript, not a CS course, and so I didn't have enough prerequisites and so had to take a dual specialist course. No appeal possibly until September, so I paid double tuition and pulled 80 hour weeks to complete two courses simultaneously. My father wasn't surprised – apparently that university has a reputation for not recognizing prerequisites and transfer credits from other universities even when they have signed agreements, forcing students to pay to retake courses they have already completed elsewhere.
So, I'm not disputing that there is prerequisite knowledge, but I know that up here those prerequisites are not just pedagogical in nature. Possibly American universities are different — but that's not the impression I get reading EdWeekly and Inside Higher Ed.
Which is also why those folks who spend fortunes keeping decrepit animals alive (to be nice to them) are deluding themselves. It is all about the people's feelings and desires.
My father said one of the hardest things about being a vet was keeping some poor animal alive in as little pain as he could manage, because without it the widowed owner would die of loneliness and/or guilt.
Faux News is not the source. They are late to the game. I have relatives in the anti-vaccine movement and they've been there for a decade or more.
If you haven't read it, this report might be of interest:
https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen
girls tend not to take high school physics
The reason isn't simply that most physics teachers are male. At my school we had about 1/4 of the senior physics classes being female, despite all but one of the physics teachers also being female. Math and the other sciences both tend to be 50% female.
I'm not certain what the reason is. I rather suspect multiple factors at work, but don't know enough sociology to guess what. Implicit bias, portrayal in the media, poor advice from guidance counsellors…
http://newsletter.oapt.ca/files/tag-diversity.html
My D&D groups (in Portland OR) are still masking, whereas only about 1/3 of Portlanders I see in the grocery store are.
I don't know if you were at the last GameStorm last month (I wasn't, due to work), but vaccinations were mandatory and masks were required in many areas and strongly encouraged everywhere. From what I saw in the con photos there were very few bare faces outside the hotel restaurant.
And yes, I'm one of that third.
Pigeons are more socially oriented than cats
As are chickens.
I've had everything from "really wants to be friends" to "just leave the food and fuck off" relationships with different chickens. The guy who got my last lot has trained them to be much more social, to the point where even Ms "fuck off" is willing to be handled. A couple of them will happily sit on his shoulder and even refrain from shitting on him.
That lot were absolutely committed to living outside the pen most of the time, and a mere 2m high fence was not going to stop them. They took a certain delight in sitting on the boundary fence and if I approached them would of course fly off into the neighbours place. Luckily the kids on one side loved chickens and would chase them around until they could pet them. Chickens preferred to fly into the other neighbours place :)
But interestingly I managed to persuade them that the vege bed was out of bounds... it had a ~1m fence around it but any chicken I caught in there would be chased, dangled upside down, then locked in the sleeping shed until dark (when the rest of the chickens came in). Even the chicken who preferred to sleep on top of my shed decided that the vege garden fence was an insurmountable barrier.
They all learned really quickly that clicking my tongue meant treats. Sometimes official junk food ("grain mix"), but mostly grapes, watermelon etc from the dumpsters behind the local greengrocers.
Normally I'd suggest you dial it back a notch, but after the last few days I think you need to dial it back many notches. Maybe turn some things off entirely and come back in a few days.
At my school we had about 1/4 of the senior physics classes being female, despite all but one of the physics teachers also being female.
I didn't realize you were talking prerequisites for college from high school. I went to high school in a far from the big city area of far western Kentucky in the early 70s. And to get into the engineering program at the primary state school, you needed a pulse and a high school diploma or GED from Kentucky.
As to females. In high school we had about evenly split in chemistry and advanced math. But top heavy boys in physics. But in a graduating class of 235 we only had 11 in physics. And 5 of us with the same first name for a statistical oddity.
But given the state of Kentucky school high school systems back then, the state run universities had to assume no one had a decent back ground in chemistry or physics when they got to college. So my college freshman year the chemistry and physics were a repeat of high school but with calculus for the math.
I've mentioned before around how my senior year of high school we got some amazing new teachers for STEM. So my trig skills meant I didn't have to repeat that in college.
When I got to the big state university after a year and half at a local community college there were over 900 students in the engineering college. About 1/3 of them were in the civil program with most of those planning on a job with the state highway department. 9 women total. 5 were in Chem E so most of their classes were in the chem/phys building. Of the remainder 2 or 3 were in grad school so us peons never saw them. The one we saw regularly at the peon level was in civil and planning to work for the state. She was a minority and was upfront about being headed for a quota job.
Things HAVE changed a lot for the better. Of my kids friends about 1/2 headed for STEM careers in engineering and such. Of course those numbers tended to be skewed by the close friend of our family who re-took the SAT so she could have a perfect score.
As a side note, Comp Sci in those days was still new. Lots of discussions about how to make it into a real science and engineering oriented fields. And in the US there were two flavors of the degree. The ones that grew out of university math programs had a distinctly different flavor from those that grew out of the engineering programs.
Anyway the best programmers I ever saw were a few ladies in college. Off the charts brilliant. And with personalities that could function in public. Not like so many of us engineering / comp sci male slobs.
And yes, I'm one of that third.
Here in central North Carolina it varies hugely by what part of the area you are in. My local stores are 2/3s masking. 10 miles south maybe 1/10 or less. I suspect there's a interesting correlation with how the local voting went back in 2016-2020. But it is just a guess.
Anti-Vaxx ... exists here, but it's tiny.
Why that should be so compared to (say ) the US or some regions of France or Hungary would be interesting from a social "sciences" p.o.v. perhaps.
I mean, what's the actual advantage for the proponents of anti-vaxx? They aren't going to be making money & their followers, by definition (almost) will diminish ... Uh?
Along with ( Thanks, Moz! ) * Montessori, organic vegan crystal homeopathy* - Sectionable, the lot of them.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Meanwhile:
338, 339, 341, 343, 346, 348, 351, 354, 356, 358, 359, 360, 361, 363, 364, 368, 370, 371, 373, 374, 376
... and the not-so subtle rootin-for-putin digs against ""blue/yellow" - Tankie. ... and the personal attacks, too.
... And - didn't Charlie { @ 179 } specifically suggest waiting until TUESDAY?
Like - TOMORROW?
zephvark @ 378
😍
I mean, what's the actual advantage for the proponents of anti-vaxx? They aren't going to be making money & their followers, by definition (almost) will diminish ... Uh?
I used to look at them this way. And so did the news in the US. But now I think differently.
Some of it was the mindset of WHAT DID I DO TO CAUSE THIS. My mother wanted a reason that she or my father did something to cause my sister to die at 4 from kidney disease in the early 50s. She could not deal with it just being the luck of the draw. And it seems that much of the anti-vaccer sentiment of a few decades ago grew up out of this kind of thinking. If my kid has an issue at 2 or 3 or a bit later, but was fine for the first year or two, what was done to them to make the issue happen. It could just not be the luck of the draw. It HAD TO BE SOMETHING WE DID TO THE BABY.
Then in the US this merge with the libertarian anti government groups to go totally off the rails. This was chunks of my grandfathers family tree starting around 2000. Obama's election just amped it up. Then Trump took it to crazy levels in 2020.
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Besides smartphones my experience of GPS is for landscape mapping purposes, measuring field sizes and crop areas. The kit used was a backpack reciever linked to a laptop with the mapping software on it. The results were accurate to less than 1m. It recieved regular updates (at least every hour or so IIRC) for corrections without which it would refuse to work as it couldn't guarantee accuracy. Apparently there are various known locations (lighthouses are popular) which regularly check where the GPS satelites tell them they are and send out the required correction based on where they really are. Don't know any more technical details, unfortunately, but thought people might be interested/able to expand on this.
Also, my father taught Physics at a UK university for over 40 years, retiring about 10 years ago. Latterly he was running remedial maths and chemistry for first year students who nominally had the required qualification but couldn't actually understand the application of things they supposedly knew.
I’m sure litter tray use is ore than just a habituated location. I once found cat paw prints on the tray of my barbecue. In the now cooled disturbed coals there was a tiny, burnt sausage-like object. There was plenty of loose soil in the borders of the lawn so a good choice of defecation sites. But the cat chose a high object filled with hot coals. The paw prints suggested a calm beginning and a frantic end to the exercise. There were always urban foxes close by so the elevated litter tray could have been seen as a defensive convenience. But it was still a bad choice for the cat.
I was at Eastercon last week, at a hotel in Heathrow, London. Vaccinations were required for attendance, masking was enforced and complied with 90%-plus by con members. The hotel staff wore masks, the other non-con hotel residents sometimes wore masks (not being racist but the Asians wore masks 80%-plus, the Westerners generally didn't.)
I came home on Tuesday with "con crud", tested negative for COVID-19 that night, tested positive the next evening. Oh joy. A followup PCR test on Thursday confirmed it.
Basically attending a plague mixmaster event like a convention or whatever, masks will not save you. All they can do is knock a few percentage points off the chances you'll get infected and after that you're rolling the dice again and again.
I am of course vaccinated and boosted and the past few days has been, for me, about as bad symptom-wise as a moderate cold. I've had worse, literally. I'd rather not have had it at all though.
I see, as others have noted, that Macron won over Le Pen.
As Charlie mentioned in Twitter:
Le Pen was like necrotizing fasciitis. Or perhaps necrotizing fascists?
I was at Eastercon too and also came home with con crud (non COVID bronchitis). Apart from being triple vaccinated I also had COVID after Novacon last year. It could have been flying ABZ <-> LHR that did it though as Heathrow airport was probably worse than the con for catching things.
If you've got foxes around, are you sure it wasn't one of them? They will poo on high points as a territory marker. Back in the autumn for a while there was a large mushroom in my lawn with a neatly deposited fox turd sitting on top.
Differential GPS has been in use for a long time. Depending on what exactly is being looked at it can be as simple as a fixed GPS unit in the corner of a field broadcasting the difference between where it thought it was when it started and where the latest fix thinks it is, and the mobile unit wandering up and down the field (eg archaeology geophysics surveying a site) applying that offset to its own fixes. In the days of selective availability and deliberate jitter, DGPS could restore the accuracy over a decent sized volume as the offset would be the same for all nearby receivers. Also handy for GPS assisted auto-landing of aircraft at a couple of steps up in cost, the unit at the end of the runway knows where it should be and can tell the approaching aircraft with sufficient accuracy to not bend the undercarriage too far.
"Besides smartphones my experience of GPS is for landscape mapping purposes, measuring field sizes and crop areas. The kit used was a backpack reciever linked to a laptop with the mapping software on it. The results were accurate to less than 1m. It recieved regular updates (at least every hour or so IIRC) for corrections without which it would refuse to work as it couldn't guarantee accuracy. Apparently there are various known locations (lighthouses are popular) which regularly check where the GPS satelites tell them they are and send out the required correction based on where they really are. Don't know any more technical details, unfortunately, but thought people might be interested/able to expand on this."
Differential GPS (DGPS) is the search term, also Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) and Ground-Based Augmentation System (GBAS). The same approach can be used to improve the accuracy of other navigation systems such as eLoran. Accuracy depends on your distance from the lighthouse, so it's not a universal solution.
There's also WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System), where multiple DGPS measurements are combined and rebroadcast via another satellite to give a wide-area correction, which is less accurate but better than nothing.
btw I'd have expected something faster than hourly updates, given that the total electron content (TEC) of the ionosphere varies on much shorter timescales, being driven by fluctuations in the solar wind. (Military GPS operates on two frequencies, which allows it to correct to first order for changes in TEC; civilian kit using only the CA channel can't do that.)
David L @ ( what is now # 362 )
Thanks - that makes some sort of sense, but why is it so bad in the USA - is US society really on the point of fracturing, as many have suggested?
An almost-fascist minority are in far too many postions of power & we know that a majority of the US population do not support them ... which is always a bad sign.
Here, having made a worse, permanent error ( Brexit ) there are signs that rowing back is beginning, but not in the US ????
Nojay
DAMN! - Missed you - I was there too ....
( No C-19 though, but another friend, who lives locally did get it there ... )
Vulch
Allotment foxes will do it on your Pak Choi plants (!)
It's likely a lot of French people held their nose and voted for Macron against the fascist Le Pen and the same probably happened in the opposite direction. That doesn't mean the same numbers did so on each side though.
This was a straight runoff competition, no other candidates were in the race so no protest votes or write-ins were reportable. I've not seen turnout figures though.
I think the updates were continuous, it was just that there was a timeout that allowed for a short break in recieving them if there were signal issues but shut things down if it's been too long. I remember being told it was an hour, it might have been less of course. It was described as using multiple known location installations across the country to generate the updates. Apologies, but this was some years ago and the person explaining it wasn't up on the technical details, just how to operate the kit.
DAMN! - Missed you - I was there too ....
Well, I was wearing a mask. Mostly. Except at breakfast and in the Real Ale bar which was, I understand, Ground Zero for most cases including, I suspect, my own case. The rest of the time I mostly spent at the Art Show helping out as is my wont.
As far as the original anti-(measles-)vaxx movement (the one that falsely connects vaccination and autism) is concerned, there is hbomberguy's informative and entertaining video essay from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc
Summary in one sentence: It all comes down to a single grifter spreading false information for his own personal gain, and scores of people quasi-religiously following him even decades after he was exposed as a fraud and grifter.
It would be funny if it weren't so depressing (or maybe it would be depressing if it weren't so funny—is there even a difference?).
312 - That was me, not AlanD2. As for whether or not the radars were stowed, several of the antennae are fixed, and I'd like to know how you tell whether the others were rotating or not from a still picture.
325 - My only mention of disemvoweling was over the intellect question of how hard it is or isn't (not very).
Back in 2008 I happened across a geophysical location marker on top of a mountain in Nagasaki. I used my (by modern standards quite dumb) Pocket PC's GPS receiver to compare what it was telling me and what the more accurate marker's sign reported. My GPS, with solid locks on about eight or so NavStar satellites was out by about 12 seconds north and about 8 seconds east and altitude was out by about 5 metres. This was after Selective Availability had been disabled (which happened during the Clinton administration).
According to a Great Circle converter online my GPS was reading about 430 metres "off" during this rather unscientific test.
I'm pretty sure when you're talking about Megaton warheads a C.E.P. of 500m is probably "close enough for government work!"
Maybe not.
Remember, CEP of 500 metres means that 50% of warheads land more than 500 metres from the target. (I'm not sure what kind of statistical distribution they'd get, but I think a Poisson curve is likely, maybe squished along one axis because RVs come in at an angle.)
A megaton sounds like a lot, but hardened silos ... the contents are in a prestressed concrete capsule with walls over a metre thick, sitting on shock absorbers inside another deep bunker, surrounded by earth. A 1Mt ground burst may dig a crater on the order of half a kilometer wide, and ground coupling means the shockwave will probably wreck most buried structures close by, but most ICBM warheads are designed as airbursts, to maximize their damage radius: less ground shock, more radiation and air shock.
" It was described as using multiple known location installations across the country to generate the updates. "
In and around the US, NOAA has the Continuously Operating Reference Stations network that does something like you describe. Probably similar arrangements exist elsewhere.
www.ngs.noaa.gov/INFO/OnePagers/CORSOnePager.pdf
https://geodesy.noaa.gov/CORS_Map
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I find that odd. GPS is much better at position than altitude. The Garmin I have (and rarely use) claims to be +-10 metres horizontally and +-30/100 metres vertically (I can't remember). Certainly, when I tested it, its altitude was completely useless for my purposes. My tablet's GPS (which I use, occasionally) is certainly about +-10 metres horizontally.
Er, no. In order to get more than a guess at side-effect (or even efficacy) figures, you need access to the complete medical records for each patient; those are rarely disclosed and the WHO does not deal in data at that level. Even with access to that data, it's damn hard to get reliable estimates. I could explain the statistical issues in detail, but this blog is not the place for such a lesson.
"I find that odd. GPS is much better at position than altitude."
That depends critically on your latitude.
At Equator the difference is nearly nil.
At my 56N it near maximum, because there are no sats north of me, but I am not far enough north to spot them on the far side of the "hole in the constellation".
"Pocket PC's GPS receiver to compare what it was telling me and what the more accurate marker's sign reported."
It is very doubtful that the position on the marker were in WGS84 coordinates, that that's the first error-source right there.
Most local coordinate systems differ a LOT from WGS84 in height and less in lon/lat.
It was an old Pocket PC with an old GPS module inside (probably manufactured around 2000, maybe earlier). I always had problems using its GPS functionality "natively", probably due to case design and radio noise from all the other components inside so I added a high-gain external antenna which improved things significantly. IIRC it could only receive 12 satellites at a time whereas today's commercial GPS receivers will handle many more signals from multiple constellations simultaneously.
"It's likely a lot of French people held their nose"
As Paul Krugman quipped on Twitter: Maybe this time the Sword were mightier than Le Pen.
:-)
why is it so bad in the USA
I'll hazard a guess that religion plays a significant role.
America is a far more religious country than Britain.
I could explain the statistical issues in detail, but this blog is not the place for such a lesson.,/i>
Well, if you find a place, please share the location. That's a lesson I'd show up for.
The foxes were wary of humans. This was 1980s Leeds not 21st century London. Nobody fed them. We only saw them when we came back home in darkness and they were usually on the lawn, or occasionally we could see them hiding under a hedge. And the tray and barbecue were about 40 x 15 cm and 70 cm high- too small and high I think for foxes. But it was quite common to find a squirrel leg, lots of feathers or fox droppings on the lawn. These droppings were bigger than the offending item in the barbecue
The Wilbraham Road stop, of Tharpe etc fame, was on the line which is now the Fallowfield Loop, not the one which is now the tram line. It's near the junction of Alexandra Road South and Mauldeth Road West. See here. Last time I was there you could still see remains of the platform and station buildings.
Thanks. I tested it at 52 and 57 north.
Yeah, airports themselves are scary for that. Aircraft are fine - the ability to use the air nozzles to keep you in properly filtered air is great, but those horribly congested checkin queues are nasty.
I (we) got CV at Novacon too, but happily we didn't catch anything at Eastercon (or at least not that has revealed itself to testing). However I was unhappy by the number of staff I saw there that weren't masked, starting with those behind reception.
My Covid app has been bitching every couple of hours for the last few days that I was been in close contact with someone who has since tested positive, on both Sunday and Monday.
Why yes, I did spend quite a bit of time in the Real Ale Bar
Thanks guys (you know who you are) for the reports of Eastercon related Covid.
Nojay
So I walked right past you several times - I chatted to 1/2R - as I've known him for years & also Queen Ynci, who bought something.
I was wearing a full-face transparent mask, as I have problems with the usual sort, if wearing one for more than about 15 minutes ...
GPS personal account - I was handed a hand held GPS to check the calibration of at work. I had a table of local OS triangulation pillars in the office, and could see one of them through the office window. So I went out and put the GPS on the pillar, and checked the location. The Lat and Long were both good, but I had a sink rate of 30m/s, which is a lot when the concrete pillar is on top of a hill which is 300 feet of Lewisian Gneiss.
That gives me an idea for a CliFi/Steampunk mashup setting. Future earth, only the polar regions are habitable. That’s not a lot of total land area, the land is crap (former muskeg at best, former subglacial rock at worst) and the total solar energy per unit area ~10x less than the tropics. This will limit the maximum possible human population, to where peak Empire can just barely manage steam, and then only if they get lucky in how many geniuses are born in a given generation. By the way, with no easily reached coal or oil left, running your steam-powered war machine means chopping down a forest. (Preferably someone else’s)
You rang?
Looks like I missed an interesting Sunday night.
Anyway, I literally wrote Hot Earth Dreams as a sourcebook for creating settings like this, and it includes a section on living at the poles. It's a bit dated now, but it's still more than good enough for what you're proposing.
The two things I want to clear up.
A big one is that if the Earth gets that much atmospheric CO2, the latitudinal gradient goes away, mostly because a lot of clouds at higher latitudes go away. Scotland and Seattle go from stereotypically gray skied wet places to places somewhat more like Hawai'i in terms of the skyscape. But the polar forests do not mean that the rest of the planet is completely uninhabitable. As we're seeing now, the poles warm considerably more (and faster) than the rest of the planet does.
As for fuel, the whole wood or charcoal for steam was a bi problem in Mark Twain's day, meaning that riverboats had to switch to coal after a few decades because all the riparian forests had been cut for fuel. Industrial scale steam just doesn't work on wood power, because wood doesn't regenerate fast enough. This was a known problem in Medieval England, where glassmaking guilds owned whole woodlands (in the original sense) that they cut on rotation for charcoal, just to keep their glass furnaces hot.
Wood captures (at a really rough guess) around 10% of incident solar energy. That's a crude guess compiling 30% photosynthetic efficiency plus 20% of what the plant gets going into the soil, plus a bunch being respired, plus all the photosynthate caught in roots, leaves, and bark. If you're running on charcoal, the normal way to get it (going back to the Bronze Age, IIRC) is to have coppiced woodlands. You're not waiting a century and spending a huge amount of human work chopping it into pieces small enough for the charcoal kiln, you're cutting branches and leg-diameter trunks on willowsand similar fast-growing trees, leaving the basal burl to regrow and produce more. Heavily managed woodlands are an essential part of the Medieval Industrial Complex.
The additional problem at the poles is that there's not much sunlight during the summer, and no sunlight at all during the winter. That hasn't stopped polar forests from growing in the past, but they're not going to be giant rainforests, and certainly not on the PNW scale of redwoods and doug firs (which take ca. 300-500 years to get that big anyway). Anyway, I went into this in Hot Earth Dreams, and it's still selling on BigMuddy if you want it.
So yeah, that word Medieval kept popping up. Not quite so steampunk, I'm afraid. I'll end by simply pointing out four things: One is that if the north pole is habitable, Antarctica will be too, and it hasn't been mined out. Another is that Europe is far from the only high culture that's been "Medieval." There's also China (particularly the Ming Dynasty) and India. Check out the blog "Great Ming Military" if you want to expand your vision of what's possible in the way of medieval cold arms and low-tech fire arms. I'd also recommend reading up on Tiwanaku and their agricultural systems around Lake Titicaca. I suspect their system would work at the poles too. And finally, the north pole has the world's great peatlands, so wood is actually a bit of a distraction. They're likely to get into managed peatlands for fuel and managed woodlands for building materials. Check out Struzik's Swamplands if you want to get bogged down in worldbuilding.
Have fun!
I suspect the real ale bar at Eastercon was a bad place to hang out: people don't mask while they're drinking, and their voices get louder as they get more inebriated (shouting/singing/laughter are extremely infectious activities).
I just went out food shopping today in an FFP2 mask and was deeply unhappy with the way masking in Scotland has fallen apart in the past week: my regular supermarket went from about 80% masked shoppers to 80% unmasked, and I won't be going back again.
No, the wood supply wasn't a big problem until well into the 18th century, except during periods of mismanagement. Despite the common myth, seacoal didn't start replacing charcoal for industry (including ironworks) until the industrial revolution was well under way. Most people don't realise how fast coppices regenerate in suitable conditions, even at 50-56 north.
I can't say whether an overheated north-western Europe would have such a coppice-friendly climate, nor whether the warmed-up areas of Siberia would be.
Man, between comics and cats the 'I am very certain about things I don't actually know that I don't know a lot about" tendencies around here are coming out strong lately.
I'll end by simply pointing out four things: One is that if the north pole is habitable, Antarctica will be too, and it hasn't been mined out.
Russia has put a lot of effort and money into developing infrastructure to extract oil and gas from northern Arctic waters over the past ten years or so (one reason I find the people who claim that they only invaded Ukraine for the gas to be laughable). They're not saying how much oil and gas they've already found there but I imagine they wouldn't be industrialising their northern coasts and building floating power plants like the Akademik Lomonosov if they didn't think there was a lot of fossil carbon there to exploit. Most of that will probably still be available to fuel the northern Polar civilisations for at least a few centuries, assuming their populations remain in the low millions.
As for Antarctica I expect most of the countries that have carried out geophysical surveys there have a good set of maps of fossil fuel resources on the supposedly-inviolate continent tucked away at the bottom of their filing cabinets. For later.
Sorry. I forgot to add that it was not and is not trash woods like willows; inter alia, they produce a God-awful charcoal. Also, the dry weight per hectare per annum is almost the same for almost all trees in the UK, because the limit is insolation. It was chestnut, oak, ash, beech, hazel etc. (see Rackham).
The general problem with offshore oil drilling is that you need a huge global infrastructure to get it going. Even steampunk can't produce that much cheap steel, let alone everything else. Long story short, even if they leave an oil deposit in place, it's not going to be reachable by somebody relying on coppices or peat for industrial fuel. As a comparison, if I wanted to run a car on ethanol, a hectare of sugar cane is enough to power a car for a year, very roughly (depending on car, latitude, etc.). Biofuels just aren't that plentiful or energy dense.
As for coal in Antarctica, the published reports from West Antarctica said that what they found were small deposits of low grade coal that weren't worth the trouble to mine. East Antarctica is mostly under 3 km of ice, and just a few years ago they finally finished the radar mapping of the land beneath the ice. Whether there are coal deposits that would survive the massive erosion of the glaciers melting I don't know, but I don't think they have good survey data for most of the continent.
It doesn't matter anyway, since CliFi fiction set in a future we won't see. For Antarctica, posit what you like. The big treasure there is the glacial till making highly nutrient rich soil anyway (look up the origin of loess).
America seems a far more religious society than Britain, but it's a bit like Ireland in that respect -- religiosity in Ireland crashed a few decades ago, but nobody dared admit it in public until the Church shot itself in both feet with the child abuse scandals. Then public discourse shifted in a landslide.
In the USA, religious belief is incredibly stratified generationally: old folks (over 70s) are almost all churched (FSVO church) but under 25s are about 30-40% "no religion" on polling ("atheist" is a dirty word, like "communist", so they don't use it).
An additional factor is the First Amendment to the US constitution, which not only established freedom of speech as a right, but also freedom of religion. Which has been interpreted weirdly by the courts: on the one hand, there's no RE in schools (unless they're private religious establishments), but churches are exempt from tax. So every grifter and their dog sets themselves up as a preacher with their own goddamn church ...
No, the wood supply wasn't a big problem until well into the 18th century, except during periods of mismanagement. Despite the common myth, seacoal didn't start replacing charcoal for industry (including ironworks) until the industrial revolution was well under way. Most people don't realise how fast coppices regenerate in suitable conditions, even at 50-56 north.
Agreed, but steampunk is 19th century, and the idea of raiding other people's forests for fuel implies mismanagement. I completely agree that you can use charcoal to make steam. Charcoal just has less energy density, and there's less of it to be had, compared with a fresh coal seam in Newcastle or Wales. So if a scenario is running on charcoal or peat, they really need to be energy efficient and crafty, rather than industrial and brute force. Beyond that, imagination is the only limit.
Seacoal was used in Britain in Roman times and thereafter. Even the classical Greeks used coal when they could get it, because it's really good fuel for blacksmithing. The problem all along was that there wasn't much of it (no big coal seams in Greece, for instance), so people had to make do with wood and charcoal for most things.
I do agree on the good English charcoal woods. I just grabbed willow out of the air. Rackham's books are a great source, with the small caveat that his really good books are out of print, and getting them often requires an interlibrary loan or a fair bit of cash.
Back when I was an Engineering student, I did a summer course in surveying. One of the days my partner and I spent using theodolites to pinpoint a set of survey points round a few acres of soggy Cambridge. We did a closed circuit, and all was good except that one of our points was a couple of centimetres out, even though our final position matched our starting point almost perfectly
We maintained that the one that was out was starting to float
(Yes, it was a concrete block, but even so, soil can swell under the right conditions. That was our story anyway.)
his really good books are out of print
which are those? i've only got the history of the countryside
One is "Trees & Woodland in the British Landscape", which is in print.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Trees+%26+Woodland+in+the+British+Landscape
Michael Cain @ 326: A bit of reading this afternoon -- Inventing accuracy : a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance -- tells me that 400 ft accuracy for the late model Tridents required doing a star fix somewhere along the trajectory, and wasn't available until about 1990. The "Beryllium Baby" and surrounding parts in the silo-launched Peacekeeper missiles, accurate to about 500 meters, seems to have been the best purely inertial system small enough to put in a missile ever built. 19,000 moving parts and ridiculously expensive.
Interesting the political arguments back and forth about accuracy. There was concern that if the ICBMs were too accurate, so could take out even hardened silos, the Soviets would interpret that as a first-strike capability.
I'm pretty sure when you're talking Megaton warheads a C.E.P. of 500m is probably "close enough for government work!"
Oh, yes, charcoal doesn't scale up to energy-intensive (19th century) use, though it does have the benefit that coppiced woodland is useful for some other purposes as well. Few are relevant nowadays, though they were in earlier centuries. It doesn't fit well with steampunk, which I would quite happily lose, but does with some forms of semi-technological neopasturalism.
Some coals are good for blacksmithing, but others contain too much sulphur etc. I think that you posted earlier than we have mined out almost all of the anthracite outside Antarctica.
Nick @391,
Thanks for the correction. I'd seen some other photos of Wilbraham Road station and it looked quite like the layout in Chorlton.
It was Cambridge. Anything there that isn't floating has already sunk out of sight.
My favorite Oliver Rackham book is The Nature of Mediterranean Europe, which I was lucky enough to get new (check out the prices on the link. It's cheaper on Alibris by a bit). This is basically two ecologists who really know the Mediterranean taking dead aim at the thesis that the Mediterranean is a landscape despoiled by millennia of civilization, and trying to categorically disprove that notion. For a while it was one of Yale Press' best sellers, at least at scientific conventions. It's really good for Mediterranean coppicing, pollarding, and shredding practices, among many other things.
The one I'm thinking of for Medieval English coppicing is Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and Uses in England. I read this in the library as a grad student and loved it.
If someone else (EC?) has another book where he goes into English coppicing practice, by all means link to it.
Charlie,
I'm open to correction from your other contributors, but the usual model for bomb hits is a two-dimensional Normal Distribution.
This is transformable into polar representation in which r is a distance which is exponentially-distributed, and an angle theta which is uniformly distributed. Look up Box-Cox transform.
For the more general case, you squish the axes.
trash woods like willows; inter alia, they produce a God-awful charcoal.
Willow charcoal is a specific product, even today.
Energy-wise anything with lignite that can be partially combusted can be turned into charcoal. Wood gas as a side-product is a bonus if the engineering is there[1] but coppicing and charcoal-making is a labour-intensive affair for not much return on energy. Its only advantage is very high temperatures with little contamination from sulphur and other chemicals in the furnace blast.
[1]Classically charcoal was made by setting a wet bonfire and then covering the smouldering pile with sod and dirt to restrict oxygen. The pile would be poked with sticks occasionally to keep some combustion happening then cover the pile again and wait for days or weeks before breaking the pile apart and harvesting the charcoal.
Some coals are good for blacksmithing, but others contain too much sulphur etc. I think that you posted earlier than we have mined out almost all of the anthracite outside Antarctica.
I think I posted that too, but the US series Forged in Fire occasionally used coal for smithing, so it can't be that impossible to find yet.
For those who don't know, Forged in Fire is a bladesmithing competition that's sort of Iron Chef meets swordsmithing. Four smiths compete in three elimination rounds making various historical and modern weapons, two blades in the studio, one at their home forge. The materials they use, designs they make, tests the blades undergo, etc. all change every episode. Every once in a while they make the smiths work with a coal forge rather than gas. I don't recall ever seeing them use charcoal, but it's certainly possible to forge with charcoal, and you can find videos online.
AlanD2 @ 349: Looks like time for another seagull expunging...
Just get the "Blog Killfile" extension for whatever browser software you use and ignore he, she or it.
You're right. I had forgotten its use for drawing, where it is THE predominant wood. But, for burning, no.
Here in the US at least, the anti-vaxx grifters make fookwads of moola peddling their bs on Youtube, twit, fb, etc. They also often sell quack nostrums as well as receiving 'donations' from the idiots.
Other anti-vaxxers are like those who voted for le Pen throughout the French Caribbean because it is White People stuff and due to long history regarded with at best vast suspicion. We see this in Jamaica particularly strongly among the Rastafarians, for multiple reasons that include their own concepts of physical health related to spiritual health, as well as vaccination being regarded 'white evil.' And certainly in the US among these various African heritage populations. Haitians who have been living here for at least a generation aren't vaxxed by and large, because they are convinced it's a plot to kill them -- and this is believed even more strongly in Haiti itself.
Black Cubans are a big exception to this.
It may well be the usual one, but I would be flabberghasted if it were a good one; I would expect far longer tails.
lignin rather than lignite, but otherwise I agree.
...
One thing for those reading this with less technical background: I don't think EC, Nojay, or I are implying stupid or primitive when we're talking about Medieval. If you're thinking about committing clifi, what we're talking about is how much energy you get to work with (not a lot), how much muscle work you need to do (a lot), and so forth. In this scenario, you can do decent analog computing with a slide rule, abacus, and books of nomograms. Or you can run a Classical Greek slave state with a few steam toys. A lot is possible.
"Wood captures (at a really rough guess) around 10% of incident solar energy. That's a crude guess compiling 30% photosynthetic efficiency plus 20% of what the plant gets going into the soil, plus a bunch being respired, plus all the photosynthate caught in roots, leaves, and bark."
I managed to look up some figures for this once. Can't remember what the source I found was, but it was something to do with people doing actual science rather than just regurgitating their own guesses on the web. Apparently plants capture something between 3% and 11% depending on what plant they are. It didn't say whether woody plants mostly clustered at any particular part of that range or not, but even so, it looks like your guess is more or less confirmed.
Which has been interpreted weirdly by the courts: on the one hand, there's no RE in schools
In theory, but I keep reading of places where religion (ie. evangelical christianity) has a huge impact on public education, including kids being required to attend supposedly-optional services and classes. Seems to be a red-state phenomena.
Note that this is based on what I've read in education newletters/blogs and the news, as well as heard from Canadians who've visited/lived in America.
steampunk is 19th century
Steampunk also seems to imply (or actually require) some sort of colonial/exploitative society for the 'punks' to be opposed to.
Unless you're talking about steampunk as a fashion, which seems to require brass gears and fittings glued to vintage-style clothing that exposes a lot more skin than was common in Victorian times…
I don't think you'll mind me posting this, but if I am wrong please delete.
Offer to La Polynomielle: if you want a platform to post your pronouncements on without being subject to the restrictions of Charlie's blog, email me and I will set something up for you. It will be a "pinboard" thing rather than a discussion platform, it will probably operate by automatically displaying correctly-formed emails sent to a specific address (because that's easiest for me to set up), and of course it will have nothing whatsoever to do with Charlie's site.
I expect you will be well able to find your way to my email address from my previous posts on here (hint: keyword "goggles") but if I am wrong, Charlie has it.
At least for the UK in good conditions, you could find out the calorific value of wood and production per annum and compare that to the insolation. I have seen all of those, but am disinclined to search.
Globally, it's tricky because plants are often limited by lack of water, lack of nutrients or poor growing conditions. Few trees like boggy conditions, for example, and relative growth on well-drained and poorly-drained locations (even feet from one another) is very obvious at least in the UK and NZ. Similarly, in arid terrain, the growth near watercourses is much more vigorous.
Energy, it always comes back to energy. Medieval energy was provided by animals, humans, some wind and hydro and fire from wood and coal for processes such as pottery, iron-working etc. Steam was a way of using fire to produce useful work i.e. turning shafts and wheels which led to non-animal-powered land transport and eventually non-wind-powered sea transport too.
The issue with transport is that the vessels need to carry their fuel with them and that requires density and high energy value per kilo of fuel carried hence the use of coal, specifically anthracite but by the 1930s the engineers were reduced to burning whatever black crap they could get out of the ground. By that time oil was making its way onto the stage, displacing coal in the same way that gas (and gas-generated electricity) is displacing coal in its turn. Give it another century or so and maybe nuclear will displace gas as mankind's primary energy source, I don't know (and probably will never know).
Thanks - that makes some sort of sense, but why is it so bad in the USA - is US society really on the point of fracturing, as many have suggested?
Sadly, yes. I think there's a positive feedback loop involving conservative politicians, conservative voters, and Fox News. It's a closed loop with no outside feedback, so they're all going increasingly crazy.
People who deny facts should have no place in a sane society... :-(
My understanding of commercial grade GPS and satnav systems such as those used by Garmin is that they had/have a 'differential' programmed in to INCREASE the error range by up to 100 m (Horizontally) and possibly more vertically.
The reasons given to me at the time were to prevent it from being used to steer missiles etc. A 'good sailor' would be using GPS alongside charts and visual bearings to navigate. Of course, most of the fishermen and sailors I knew would chug along blindly, glancing at the GPS every so often.
I do recall that some of the fish boats I worked on in the 90s had somehow paid to have their 'differential' reduced to 10m. The general understanding was that military level GPS was down to the decimetre in accuracy, but unavailable to the general public.
I see no reason the US would not have provided Ukraine with that high level of accuracy, if it is possible.
That was me, not AlanD2.
Actually, it was both of us - which can be confusing.
Nojay
RU planning to exploit more oil & gas .....
ANOTHER reason to shut the bastards down, in fact!
- and
Um. - "Queen Elizabeth" class battleships, launched 1913-15. Oil-fired turbines.
EC & also H
Actually, serious quantities ( for the period ) of coal were being shipped from the Tyne & to a lesser extent the Tees to London by the middle of the 18thC. Wooden & plated waggonways were already common - it's absolutely zero coincidence that Geordie Stephenson came from there - ditto the Cornishman Richard Trevithick, operating in S Wales )Pen-y-Darren), about 1804.
- Re: O Rackham: "New Naturalist number 100 - "Woodlands" - still available - a masterly work - & yes I have a copy. I've got a copy of "History of the Countryside somewhere in the pile, too.
...but most ICBM warheads are designed as airbursts, to maximize their damage radius: less ground shock, more radiation and air shock.
Can the bursting elevation be dialed in just before launch? Given that a lot of the warheads will be aimed at known enemy ICBM sites, this would seem to be desirable.
That's why I favour technological neopasturalism. You don't NEED a lot of iron or a lot of near-slaves to run even an early industrial revolution technology, if you are smart enough about it. Steel used to be handed back to the blacksmith when it was past it's initial use, and copper and brass to the coppersmith. Wood (done right) is a damn good structural material, lasts a long time (if wanted), and isn't as time-dependent to make or use as is often believed. For example, I have a wooden block plane (with a steel blade) that works as well as a modern steel plane (and is over a century old). Wattle and daub sheds last as well as the steel equivalents in the UK, with a bit of maintenance. And so on.
Yes, that needs a bit more effort, but my estimate was that we currently waste almost all of people's potential working time (at least 75%). The social changes to avoid that are beyond radical - I can't even imagine how to get there and stabilise the society on a large scale.
I'll hazard a guess that religion plays a significant role. America is a far more religious country than Britain.
I concur. Evangelical Christians, in particular, are especially aligned with Donald Trump, the GOP, and Fox News (the unholy triumvirate). Despite knowing (or denying) that neither Trump nor the GOP espouse any Christian values. :-(
Fox News, of course, has no values of any kind. (Can we blame this on Murdoch's Australian upbringing?)
"Can the bursting elevation be dialed in just before launch? Given that a lot of the warheads will be aimed at known enemy ICBM sites, this would seem to be desirable."
Almost all deployed warheads have some kind of "dial-a-yield" functionality.
With respect to buried targets:
The original reason for air-bursts were simply that the warheads were not trusted to land and function, therefore bunkers needed tens of megatons.
Later "parachute lay-down" where the warhead is in contact with the surface, reduced the necessary yield to single megaton range.
These days ground penetrators where the warhead ends several meters below the surface can do the job with with less than a third megaton yield.
With more precision the necessary yield drops further, few bunkers will handle a 20kt direkt and well-coupled hit.
Intellectually this increased precision is assumed to lower "the nuclear threshold", but so far it has held, and there is still no evidence that Putin is that stupid.
The location error in the original NavStar system (the US military GPS which was made available to the public) was called Selective Availability. This was a variable random error in the ephemeris data broadcast by the satellites which reduced the accuracy of the position reported by commercial receivers. This is probably what you're thinking of, it was not something built into the receiver itself.
Selective Availability was temporarily disabled during the first Gulf War to allow US troops to use off-the-shelf GPS receivers at the squad and individual level and it was decided to remove it completely around 2005 (possibly because battlefield use of GPS for weapons targetting was becoming problematic due to jamming and spoofing and there were other non-US GPS constellations in use by then).
Differential GPS (DGPS) is something different (no pun intended). It uses GPS plus fixed land-based stations located at very accurately surveyed points such as lighthouses to refine the result a receiver will return, but only over limited areas such as around a harbour and its approaches. It costs more to implement and the receivers are more expensive too but the benefits can easily offset the ticket price.
" [...] any Christian values."
Most of the rabid "Christians" in USA really only care about the first episode, eye for eye, tooth for tooth and all that. Episode two they dont care for, and they are perfectly willing to stone or cruxify any bloke, who insist the must be nice to "those people" - no matter who his father might be.
... One is that if the north pole is habitable, Antarctica will be too, and it hasn't been mined out.
If Antarctica is habitable, its glaciers will likely be gone (as will those in Greenland) and sea levels will be ~100 meters higher. A lot of current resources will be under water... :-(
In the USA, religious belief is incredibly stratified generationally: old folks (over 70s) are almost all churched (FSVO church) but under 25s are about 30-40% "no religion" on polling...
Yes. Gives me hope for the future of the U.S.
As I have said in other forums, when kids grow up, they stop believing in Santa Claus. When adults grow up, they stop believing in God.
I agree with you, with some strong caveats.
If we're dealing with a Hot Earth Dreams PETM scenario, or even the now more-likely Middle Miocene climate scenario, a lot of the Earth would be some flavor of tropical: tropical savanna (equator), tropical desert (north of equator), paratropical rainforests (the old temperate zone) and so forth. These conditions normally also grow termites and fungi, not just wood.
What this means in turn is that stuff doesn't last as long. Clearly what you're proposing would work in such an environment (cf civilization in South China, India, Ethiopia, or East African coast, or West Africa, for example), but with changes. Things have to be replaced more often, so elaborate buildings that can't be easily repaired are problematic. Libraries are problematic too, in warm, humid climates. I suspect that one reason some African kingdoms ran on the memories of "mentats" is that this was more durable than writing (but see South China).
The two other points: most resources will be mined out of dead cities, not primary ores. This will foster a different relationship with past and future: past needs to be recycled, and your life and works will in turn be remade and recycled by those who come after you.
The other is that, unless we get our heads out of our asses, most large animals on the planet will be the descendants of current domestic animals and various vagrants like raccoons and foxes. If you know about how wildly domestic animals were bred in the 1900s and you know a bit about adaptive radiations in wild species, you'll have an idea of the diversity that's possible. But it's still going to look weird. Similar things will go on with plants (a plethora of domestics and weeds), but it's going to be a real struggle to keep useful, slow growing trees like oaks, apples, and redwoods around. The early stages of recovery from an extinction event are going to be rather strange and sad, at least from my perspective.
This is the kind of situation where coppicing rhododendron for charcoal and loading it up on a pig-drawn cart may be as good as it gets for somebody somewhere.
Just get the "Blog Killfile" extension for whatever browser software you use and ignore he, she or it.
I'm really good at scrolling past her stuff... :-)
Scott Sanford @ 355:
I don't know if you were at the last GameStorm last month (I wasn't, due to work), but vaccinations were mandatory and masks were required in many areas and strongly encouraged everywhere. From what I saw in the con photos there were very few bare faces outside the hotel restaurant.
And yes, I'm one of that third.
So am I. But I just realized I forgot to wear a mask while going into at least one store yesterday.
Haven't had my SECOND booster yet, but otherwise fully vaxxed and usually masked in public ... although I always worry somebody is there to rob the Glendale train.
Almost all deployed warheads have some kind of "dial-a-yield" functionality.
I knew about "dial-a-yield". I was asking about "dial-an-elevation".
I know that the U.S. (and presumably other countries) have conventional ground penetrator bombs. I would think the weight for penetration armor would be an issue for nuclear ICBM weapons.
If Antarctica is habitable, its glaciers will likely be gone (as will those in Greenland) and sea levels will be ~100 meters higher. A lot of current resources will be under water... :-(
More like 70 meters, but otherwise yes. It will thousands of years to get there, because melting a couple of kilometers of ice takes awhile.
That said, IIRC, the more recent models suggest that not all of the Antarctic ice sheet will melt, even under the worst current scenarios.
The bigger point is that we're kind of at an equal-suffering point: how much we suffer adapting civilization to this (rather more and faster that buggies to cars), is probably less, but getting closer, to radical depopulation, severe climate change, us being totally forgotten as worthless, and adaptions to whatever's next.
I've always thought of the variations on the form "berropunk" as meaning a setting in which the development of the means of production of energy (and with it the nature of devices which produce or use energy, and some proportion of the associated infrastructure, along with the related work practices and other bits of society) has bizarrely come to a crashing halt at the berro-power stage and all subsequent developments somehow haven't happened, while all the other exercises of human ingenuity we are used to have proceeded more or less unhindered. So we get all kinds of devices whose impracticality ranges from mild to wild, from gramophones driven by a little berro engine with berrovian amplification instead of electronic, up to berro-powered FTL interstellar spaceships.
Such settings naturally lend themselves to somewhat dystopic narratives, because everywhere is full of all the muck and crap that results from exclusive use of berro power, and everything is more difficult to do than we are used to; also the oppressive labour conditions which were common in the historical berro-power era tend to still apply, at least for the berro workers themselves, as do a selection of other historically contemporary political factors (such as the colonialism of the time). However, I don't think a dystopic narrative is a necessary result of such a setting - after all most authors who were writing during the historical berro-power period did not produce an oeuvre massively skewed towards dystopianism.
I don't really think you can separate berropunk as a genre of fiction from berropunk as a fashion involving sticking bits of old clocks to your jacket. I think the whole concept of berropunk is a fashion, and the fiction and the clocky jackets are both expressions of the same thing. The fiction is very much like the clothing, in that the setting makes it easy to produce stories which are highly "decorative" (lots of work for costumes, props and special effects if you make a movie out of them), but (since it's basically a fairly daft idea anyway) it isn't a particularly practical setting, and may well be rather impractical, for the purpose of producing a story which actually makes sense.
I'd hazard a guess that the development of such genres arises from people reading things like "Pavane" (Keith Roberts), and then skimming the obvious and spectacular aspects off the surface while ignoring the deeper and more complicated parts of the setting that make the story plausible and consistent with common sense. (Not an uncommon kind of developmental path.) Dystopianism is of course another obvious feature of "Pavane", so it's fairly natural for that to be carried over also, but if you were so minded it would not be any more difficult to come up with another alternate history that leads to the same kind of technological development as in "Pavane" but without the dystopia, than it was for Keith Roberts to come up with the alternate history he did come up with.
First: I don't hang out here on weekends as much as I do every weekday, so I missed the bunch that people are talking about. However, based on comments... I'm wondering what's happening wherever they live, if there's some real personal stressor right now on She of the Many Names.
And if she reads it, and cares to say something non-obfuscated, and not based on reddit usage, she can certainly find my email, given that I've mentioned my website with email links is mrw.5-cent.us
The US allowing users to "choose"... only for certain values of "choose". In most cases, people who wanted to get vaccinated got whatever their provider had.
"(Can we blame this on Murdoch's Australian upbringing?)"
Can probably blame it on his dad, who was much the same kind of arsehole but with less capability for expressing it.
… coal, oil, gas, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and then something black hole related is what I expect for the future of energy.
Small black holes evaporating via Hawking radiation (mass a few hundred kilograms, supposedly they don’t form under 8kg) is one possibility. I expect you’d push it around with magnetic fields. Oddly hard to control - toss in more matter to slow down energy production!
Larger black holes where you toss in stuff to get energy radiating from the hot crushed matter rotating through the hole’s magnetic fields. Lots more energy, but hard to move and I guess less efficient for converting mass to energy.
The ultimate would be antimatter, but that’s not available as a natural resource. Still could be useful for energy storage and transport.
So, a story could be about a ship’s small black hole running out of fuel and making the ship go faster, until the hole explodes with Hawking radiation when it gets too lightweight. Then you’re out of luck until you find another light black hole.
I finished reading NEVER, by Ken Follett, last night. This 800 page book deals with increasingly severe international incidents that snowball to the start of World War III.
In the last two pages, after China destroys Pearl Harbor with a nuke, U.S. President Pauline Green authorizes the launch of an all-out nuclear attack on China. The final sentence of the book is "And then, at last, she began to weep."
This struck me as what all of us may be about to endure as a result of Russia's war with Ukraine. :-/
The ultimate would be antimatter, but that’s not available as a natural resource.
Wasn't it Larry Niven who posited an antimatter planet? :-)
I suspect the whole "that's a guy thing", and it doesn't help that many work extremely hard to make it boring. My physics teacher in high school did... and that was in the sixties, with amazing stuff going on.
Small black holes evaporating via Hawking radiation (mass a few hundred kilograms, supposedly they don’t form under 8kg) is one possibility.
Eek, nope!
IIRC the release of Hawking radiation increases exponentially as the mass diminishes, and the last 10,000 tonnes goes "poof" in under a second.
That's 10^6Kg, and each Kg gives you an explosive-equivalent yield of 21.6 megatons.
You don't want to be in the same solar system as that, let alone on the same planet ...!
The whole (alleged) culture in the US makes people feel that they have to say they are, or they're attacked as "not good Americans". We're decades behind Europe in de-religionizing, but the Christianist extremists shoving through "Christian" sharia law is doing a great job at turning people against it.
Nojay #437: "Differential GPS (DGPS) is something different (no pun intended). It uses GPS plus fixed land-based stations located at very accurately surveyed points such as lighthouses to refine the result a receiver will return, but only over limited areas such as around a harbour and its approaches. It costs more to implement and the receivers are more expensive too but the benefits can easily offset the ticket price."
That tracks with my experience on the trawlers. Their livelihood was predicated on catching the right amounts of the right types of fish in a particular season. 80 miles offshore the only way they knew what was below was from experience and memory- their fishing sites and charts were the fiercely guarded secrets of the Captains - and if they went to a different boat they took their knowledge with them.
In those circumstances dropping the trawl net 100 m off course could mean the difference between an $80k catch and nothing at all (or worse, losing the $35k net). Typically the skippers would have satnav, GPS, Loran-C and a variety of charting programs and software on the bridge, and would check with all of them when selecting where to fish. Travelling from harbour to the grounds was a different thing altogether - any of the crew, myself included, would sit up there on watch while the boat chugged along the programmed route. They had all been in and out of all the harbours and inlets so much they could have done it blind and half asleep.
The very skilled and experienced captains had their fishing timed to the tide, moon cycles and season. If we arrived on a particular site an hour late it would be too late to bother dropping the net. As was explained to me at a high and sustained volume over a series of days by a skipper when my car broke down on the way to departure.
The very unskilled, unscrupulous and inexperienced captains would go to a general area, drop their nets down and drag them across the bottom, killing everything and throwing out whatever they couldn't sell. Most of them ended up on shore when individual vessel quotas were imposed (a long and fraught story in itself).
In the mid-Atlantic, the fastest growing and most widely-spread trees are poplar (which some folks consider "trash trees").
In theory, but I keep reading of places where religion (ie. evangelical christianity) has a huge impact on public education, including kids being required to attend supposedly-optional services and classes. Seems to be a red-state phenomena.
Note that this is based on what I've read in education newletters/blogs and the news, as well as heard from Canadians who've visited/lived in America.
This is nuts. Outside of private schools.
Not common and would even start a lawsuit within minutes of someone trying.
Says he who has lived in KY, PA, CT, and NC with time in TX, IL, TN, MO. And I have friends with kids in other states.
Just not true.
That anti-matter planet was a real hypothetical! They won’t last very long in our part of the universe, or at least the part swept out by our normal matter galaxy. Though Niven had the nifty idea of the anti-matter ablating the otherwise indestructible ship hull.
And let's not forget corsets worn outside the dresses, instead of inside.
Doc Smith, Lensman universe, or rather after Thorndyke gets them into alternate universes.
Biofuels have atrocious efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency 3-6% and further losses in conversion to char.
Trying to use them in arctic regions is. Uhm. Not happening.
And again, I must question the strange conceit that a post-apocalyptic society would somehow forget about electricity.
Dynamos and alternators are vastly easier to build than steam engines. For one thing, they dont explode if you get it wrong. This means the shortest industrialization path is to find a good spot to build a dam and just use electricity for everything. Including fuel production! Electrolysis is not a complicated technology.
Hey. This also means you get a setting where air-ships actually make sense. If hydrogen is the standard fuel for anything that requires combustion, well, the lifting gas is also your fuel tank.
Keeps happening. https://www.wsaz.com/2022/02/04/mandatory-attendance-religious-assembly-called-mistake/
paws4thot @ 378: 312 - That was me, not AlanD2. As for whether or not the radars were stowed, several of the antennae are fixed, and I'd like to know how you tell whether the others were rotating or not from a still picture.
You don't know the difference between an antenna and a missile launcher?
Not having the radar turned on doesn't require the antennas to be "stowed". If they are turned on, someone has to be paying attention to them. And anyway, rotating antennas are usually not "stowed", they're parked. The Moskva was equipped with rotating antennas as well as phased arrays.
Be that as it may, I wasn't referring to the antennas. "Defensive Armaments" means the defensive missiles those radars are supposed be used to guide, which DO require the launchers be deployed into firing position. The available photos show the missile launchers are NOT deployed; they are still "stowed".
Convert to char(coal)? Not sure what you're suggesting, says the guy who's seen a number of biodiesel cars....
Implicit bias, portrayal in the media, poor advice from guidance counsellors…
Everybody and their dog including random old women on the bus feeling compelled to opine that physics is not a proper subject for a girl / young woman .. the less they know about physics the worse.
That much energy, so quickly? That suggests pulsed very small black hole creation and subsequent destruction, adding a bit more matter each time than what’s needed to create the next black hole.
The drawback is that you now have to lug around the black hole creation hardware (fusion explosions around a hollow sphere to collapse it past neutron density?) The advantage is way more power than a heavier black hole that merely dribbles Hawking radiation.
Biodiesel produced as a primary product is an affront to the planet. If you have a bunch of plant material in a handy pile as a side product of food production, sure, might as well ferment it. But growing corn for this purpose... ugh.
Charlie Stross @ 380:
Maybe not.
Remember, CEP of 500 metres means that 50% of warheads land more than 500 metres from the target. (I'm not sure what kind of statistical distribution they'd get, but I think a Poisson curve is likely, maybe squished along one axis because RVs come in at an angle.)
A megaton sounds like a lot, but hardened silos ... the contents are in a prestressed concrete capsule with walls over a metre thick, sitting on shock absorbers inside another deep bunker, surrounded by earth. A 1Mt ground burst may dig a crater on the order of half a kilometer wide, and ground coupling means the shockwave will probably wreck most buried structures close by, but most ICBM warheads are designed as airbursts, to maximize their damage radius: less ground shock, more radiation and air shock.
I think you overlook the meaning of "close enough for government work" in American (USA) English slang, i.e. it ain't all that close, representing a rather lackadaisical attitude towards doing a job correctly.
OTOH, if "50% of the warheads land more than 500 metres from the target" it also means 50% of the warheads land LESS than 500 meters from the target ...
Either way, if you're near the target "area" and are not privileged enough to be INSIDE of a deep, hardened bunker, it's gonna' fuck up your whole day.
Me @ 410:
I didn't realize that was the last thing I posted last night. When I got here in the afternoon today I found that in the document I use to keep my reply templates & thought I hadn't yet replied ... hence a duplicate post.
If the mods want to delete the duplicate, I would appreciate it. You'll probably want to delete this one too since it will no longer make any sense.
OTOH, leave it if you need further evidence I'm not perfect. 8^)
The overall conversion efficiency is pretty rotten for them as well, though. Seems to be not entirely straightforward to get more energy out of the diesel you grow than you need to put into the tractors you grow it with.
Of course, when you're converting to food rather than fuel the overall efficiency is even worse. We'd be better off synthesising at least carbohydrates and fats, and probably proteins/amino acids also, directly from oil instead of using the oil to run farms with.
Growing corn for it? No, the ones I saw, 15 years ago, they were collecting used cooking oil from fast food restaurants.
Montessori, organic vegan crystal homeopathy movement
are you mixing up Waldorf schools and Montessori schools?
Montessori shouldn't come with any belief system except that children are curious and learn fastest when you arrange the lessons as play opportunity.
Waldorf, OTOH, comes with "spirituality".
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You have to have a totally reliable system for feeding them with matter that you can be really really sure isn't going to break down or run out of stuff. Otherwise they put out energy faster and faster until it ends with an absolutely fucking massive bang like nothing on earth.
You could certainly use the idea as a basis for a story like that movie where they can't stop the bus or else the bomb will go off. Only in this case it destroys your entire solar system.
He also seems to be of the notion that there's oodles of places in heavily glaciated terrain where abundant hydropower can be generated. While there are some, most of the Arctic seems rather flat-adjacent. Guess he's pining for more fjords, or something.
Late breaking news: in a frantic bid to help one Charles Stross write and blog more, Twitter and Elon Musk have reached a deal for the latter to buy the former for $44 billion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61222470
In other news, IQ.45 observed drooling for some reason, possibly related to this news, possibly because someone currently holds him in contempt: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61221860.
And here, too. The point is that, whether as dry wood or charcoal, they (and willow) burn out very fast (and at a lowish temperature) because they have such a low dry matter density. That's a real pain in a stove or open fire, and NBG for ironworking. Woods like yew and hawthorn (at least ours) fail in the opposite way - they burn very hot and for ages, once got going, which makes control difficult. That's why the woods used were all the intermediate density ones that I mentioned (plus lime, elm and a few more).
"I knew about "dial-a-yield". I was asking about "dial-an-elevation"."
Yes, there generally is at least three fusing options, one of which may be laydown.
"I would think the weight for penetration armor would be an issue for nuclear ICBM weapons."
The B61 has at least two earth penetrator mods, and there are pictures from successful tests on national lab homepages.
I suspect it can work because even though the fairing is busy getting crushed by the geology, that happens on a millisecond timescale, whereas the physics-package only needs microseconds to do its trick.
Poul-Henning Kamp @ 436:
Almost all deployed warheads have some kind of "dial-a-yield" functionality.
The answer to AlanD2's question is, "Yes, height of burst is programmable right up until the time of launch".
With respect to buried targets:
The original reason for air-bursts were simply that the warheads were not trusted to land and function, therefore bunkers needed tens of megatons.
Later "parachute lay-down" where the warhead is in contact with the surface, reduced the necessary yield to single megaton range.
Originally, "parachute lay-down" was simply a means of delaying detonation until the aircraft escaped beyond blast range.
These days ground penetrators where the warhead ends several meters below the surface can do the job with with less than a third megaton yield.
With more precision the necessary yield drops further, few bunkers will handle a 20kt direkt and well-coupled hit.
Resurrect Barnes Wallis's Grand Slam design & stuff the warhead from a Davy Crockett (W54) inside instead of the Torpex
Intellectually this increased precision is assumed to lower "the nuclear threshold", but so far it has held, and there is still no evidence that Putin is that stupid.
The problem with that is that IF/WHEN we ever do get evidence that he IS that stupid it will be too late I think. If he's not, how do you prove the negative when he says he is?
When I was young, we lived in a converted water mill and had some land along the river, on which land grew decent sized willow trees. And willows are quite fast growing, meaning we had lots of tree limbs that we'd cut in order that the trees didn't just split under their weight.
There's FA you can do with the wood. It's no good for fencing, you can't do proper carpentry with it, and if you're going to burn it indoors, you need to do it in an enclosed stove because you will get embers trying to launch themselves in all directions.
On the other hand, goats really love to eat the leaves
We did the math on "Health and Safety of advanced SF energy sources" many years ago.
Most of the energy would be delivered as radiation at inconveniently high energies, which we have no way to direct, or realistically contain, for any reasonable service period.
(The bit about "direct" is relevant, because a isotropic radiation is no good for propulsion unless you can mirror it.)
Robert Prior @ 425: Unless you're talking about steampunk as a fashion,
Steampunk is what happens when goths discover brown.
Jess Nevins.
Steampunk also seems to imply (or actually require) some sort of colonial/exploitative society for the 'punks' to be opposed to.
Not necessarily, though I'm not the expert. AFAIK, there are a bunch of flavors, from Girl Genius' "Gaslight fantasy" (magic as mad science), to "What if 19th century tech was right (Space:1889), to straight alt-world SF (which I'm working on) to even the old TV series Wild Wild West. Per KW Jeter (a California SF author) who coined the term in 1987, "Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like “steampunks,” perhaps." Shortly thereafter, Gibson and Sterling published The Difference Engine and the goths started thinking gears, dusters, and outerwear corsets looked cool together. So we're talking something in the strange attractor that holds Anubis Gates, Difference Engine, Girl Genius and others around it.
"Biofuels have atrocious efficiency."
At current efficiencies, if you decarbonize farming, all the biofuel that can be theoretically be produced would barely sustain the fuel requirements of farming.
If hydrogen is the standard fuel for anything that requires combustion, well, the lifting gas is also your fuel tank.
Problem (a): Hydrogen leaks like crazy.
Problem (b): as you burn it, you lose lift. Much better to have a double-walled gas cell with the outer bag full of blaugas, a buoyancy compensating fuel, and the inner bag deflated at first. As you burn the blaugas you inflate the inner bag with air, and the overall buoyancy remains static.
Actual blaugas is produced from mineral oils, but it ought to be possible to come up with something not too dissimilar using terpenes from pine plantations. Takes a lot of 'em to fuel one zeppelin, though.
Yes, with reservations. The Benin empire did remarkably well, but that climate rots damn-near anything in timescales most people can't believe; there is even a fungus that secretes hydrofluoric acid and etches glass (I have evidence). So let's ignore that one.
But savanna climates aren't too bad. Termites are the main menace, so the durable material for buildings is mud brick, and removing their runs every day is needed to protect roof timbers and equpiment. However, there are usually some woods that are fungus and termite-resistant (just as there are fungus- and woodworm-resistant native to Britain), so tools can last quite a long time.
The savanna is not really any worse than British conditions, with our nightly condensing atmospheres at ground level, and damn near no evaporation for half the year. But I am talking about back before central heating, and I can witness how fast wood and paper could rot without that. But those WERE preserved, with some difficulty.
Last time it was directed at me my son was a secret agent of Israel. If you're curious, remember that other David L that appeared in a book thread months back that you were wondering about? I know him (well, someone with the same first name/last initial, at any rate, and the tone/cadence seemed similar), worked with him for like 15 years (haven't kept in touch), big and voracious and discerning science fiction fan including of cstross, if you poke at me a bit (e.g. internet searches) you'll see his name, and he is Jewish. It is possible that SotMNs conflated the two (she/they absolutely P==0.999999 looked at me, maybe 2014/2015ish at least); it took me a while to convince myself that you were not he.
Actually there are three problems with hydrogen:
1) Leaks yes, but in ye olde days of 100 years ago, it wasn't just hydrogen out, it was other gases seeping in. After 5-7 days, Hindenburg had to be reinflated with fresh hydrogen. Using more modern plastics, there's a bit less leakage.
2) Airships need to be properly ballasted with something ranging from non-lifting gas (airbags, which are normal in blimps) to liquid fuel in tanks along the keel (Hindenburg and others) to maintain trim. Screw up the ship's trim, you get a replay of that famous picture of the USS Akron with its tail high in the air. That's why all the airships have multiple gasbags inside an outer envelope. As in a submarine, being able to independently vent bags to maintain trim turns out to be fairly critical if you don't want to float helplessly. Usually airships take off with a lot of gas and a lot of ballast, and shed each over the course of the flight to maintain trim and elevation. After a week or so (Hindenburg) they're short on ballast (water) and lifting gas (hydrogen) and have to tank up on both to continue.
3) The explosive fun isn't with the hydrogen in the gasbags, it's with the hydrogen-air mixture that builds up in the envelope around them. Have to be rather careful there, which was why the smoking room on the Hindenburg was such a gutsy move.
Another fun factoid: after hydrogen (lifting balloons since before 1860) and helium (commercialized in the 1920s), the next best lifting gas is...steam. Lifts about half as much as hydrogen (he says, fudging from memory). Steam lifts a lot more per m3 than does hot air, and it's safer than hydrogen. In some ways. Flying kettles never really caught on in our reality though. Pity.
Did I mention that I was committing Steampunk in my off hours?
Willow shoots can be used for wickerwork and thicker branches woven into hurdles for fencing and stock control, same as with lime and hazel (I've made hurdles with lime shoots myself, in the past. Not very expertly, I admit...).
Was that the same event when she mistook Illinois for Israel because they have the same two-letter abbreviation? Way to spoil your all-knowing superintelligence impression...
448 - Pretty much the same in the UK; other than AZ (for reasons of easier storage meaning it could be made available at more sites) you turned up for your shot and you got what they got. I mean my second shot had to be AZ because I walked into my hospital room (Feb 2020) and found a nurse looking for arms to put a shot of AZ into.
452 - Edward E "Doc" Smith wrote the Lensman series, published between 1948 and '54, which includes planetary mass antimatter bodies.
456 - Nojay, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_(TV_series), which may suit your accent better.
468 - There are companies in the UK who collect used cooking oil specifically for the purposes of running road vehicles and generation plant on it.
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Methane is slightly better than steam at the same temperature and pressure, has rather more energy content by volume than hydrogen, and leaks at somewhere around a fifth of the rate (I can't remember "by what" though), so it's an excellent choice for the burning-your-own-lift trick.
The advantage of steam comes from you having to keep it hot to make it stay steam, so comparing it with lift gases that work cold isn't really comparing like with like.
If you have a combustion engine for propulsion, you can line the envelope with a few millimetres of aerogel insulation and use the exhaust heat from the engine to provide lift.
It is possible that SotMNs conflated the two
She claimed I had stated that my son had traveled to Israel and I to Canada during the travel bans. Which proved we had 007 type connections. Or some such. And for me to deny it made me a liar as I had said it was so earlier on this blog.
And that her eidetic memory of my comments topped my later comments.
Total rubbish. Total. Complete.
Maybe s/he is schizophrenic. I don't know. The rantings at time are more than obscurification. They are just rantings.
But enough of this topic. I only read he/r comments when they reference me and my web page search shows them up. Aside from that I just skim past them. Others can have fun figuring out what the deeper meanings are.
which was why the smoking room on the Hindenburg was such a gutsy move.
I wonder what they did about electrical sparks from switch contacts and motor brushes? It would make sense to have a lot of fans. Or maybe lots of ducting with fans on the edges?
Creating black holes is ridiculously far beyond current engineering. Even proton-boron cycle fusion is beyond what we can do (and that's the holy grail for energy, in my opinion -- aneutronic, clean, runs on readily available elements rather than Helium-3 moonshine).
Willow shoots can be used for ...
Weeping willows can be trivially transplanted. Just grab small limbs and jamb them into the ground. If there's much water around they seem to grow explosively.
They are also great at finding sewage drain fields and their roots filling them at a prodigious rate.
There are companies in the UK who collect used cooking oil specifically for the purposes of running road vehicles and generation plant on it.
Ditto the US. If you suddenly seem to be in a McDonalds Fries festival you might be standing next to a bus running on such. The exhaust oder can be strange with those.
I think the problem with steam is that it takes a godsawful amount of energy to heat a given volume, unlike air. After that, it's got a bit more lift than CH4, but energy and the problem of having large volumes of steam near humans are the big problems. Otherwise, I'm not sure I'd want to deal with CH4 at 100oC. Too exciting for my blood.
Weeping willows
Oh, yeah. In the US since these seem to be concentrated where the area is damp, they seem to be mosquito magnets during the summer.
Nojay wrote in part:
Basically attending a plague mixmaster event like a convention or whatever, masks will not save you. All they can do is knock a few percentage points off the chances you'll get infected and after that you're rolling the dice again and again.
I view a 95% risk reduction as being more than "knocking off a few percentage points".
Don't know if it was other gamers' hygenic practices, the three Moderna jabs, or the 95% risk reduction provided by my $25 respirator, but I emerged from the aformentioned plague mixmaster sans COVID-19, as per post-con testing, despite a risk profile similar to that of OGH.
But, then, the convention management was very diligent at ventilating whenever possible, encouraging safety as much as possible, allowing masklessness only in spaces they did not control (i.e., restaurant), and in the Hospitality suite (which was beverage-only, no food, a very major departure from years past, as GameStorm and Orycon historically really put on the feedbag). You could not even reach Registration/Pre-Reg without first having your proof of vaccination scrutinized and acquiring The Purple Wristband Circlet Of Safety.
As noted at https://microcovid.org and explained in https://www.microcovid.org/paper/14-research-sources#masks here's your risk reduction when wearing various mask types:
Your Risk
Reduction Mask type
none Thin single layer cloth
33% Multilayer cloth mask
50% Surgical mask or cloth mask with filter insert
67% N95, KN95, FFP2
88% Sealed N95 respirator
95% P100 respirator
which was why the smoking room on the Hindenburg was such a gutsy move.
I wonder what they did about electrical sparks from switch contacts and motor brushes? It would make sense to have a lot of fans. Or maybe lots of ducting with fans on the edges?
Other than the radio room and the galley, IIRC they used as little electricity as possible. Also IIRC, the only open flames were in the smoking room. All this stuff was in the gondola, well under the hydrogen gas bags. The motors were diesel powered and sat on outriggers outside the ship in the airstream, and the diesel gas was part of the ballast.
What they did with the smoking room was that it was a room with an airlock that was kept over-pressure somehow (can't find details on how the air was pumped in. link. As noted in the link, the real trick with the smoking room was to have it on the lowest level of the ship and to make it the only place where open flames were allowed on the zeppelin. The hydrogen was all well above this level. What they really wanted to avoid was people starting a fire in the gondola (say in their berth) that could catch the hydrogen mix around the gasbags on fire. For obvious reasons.
Until Bambi totalled my biodiesel Jeep (two miles from home on I-5 within Portland's ring road), it ran on 99% biodiesel, commercially extracted from used cooking oil & grease, bought at a local garage.
Much as I like oaks for many purposes, including charcoal, if one is committing clifi on the dystopian edge--meaning there are a lot of extinctions--it's worth contemplating the charcoal and firewood value of weedy trees such as tamarisk, blue gum, black locust, brazilian pepper, rhododendron, and so forth. So will likely fare well, some will suck for multiple reasons (oleander, for instance).
Also, I'm not entirely joking about managing peat. The current hotness for carbon sequestration is peat, so if people can figure out low-tech ways to first, grow bogs, and then second to manage them so they don't dry out and become fire menaces, that might turn out to be both the reason people colonize high northern latitudes and also how we keep the worst of climate change at bay. "Bogmasters saving civilization" might turn out to be the main hopepunk story of the later 21st Century.
coppicing and charcoal-making is a labour-intensive affair
In Australia the coppicing is highly mechanised, they basically mow* at a topping height, clear the slash then mow at ~200-300mm above ground and collect the sticks. There are various levels of cunning because some of the coppiced trees get left with a central trunk and others just with sticks but I've mostly talked to one of the people making the machines so what I know comes from their sales brochures. Main point is that it doesn't have to be manual.
I vaguely recall that they make fence posts and firewood, with the latter suggesting that wood gas+charcoal would be one easy alternative output. I suspect that some kind of synthetic liquid fuel could be made from the wood gas, allowing people to use existing fossil engines to power the coppicing.
(* using the sort of saw blades on an excavator arm setup used for trimming shelter belts. Sadly the search terms I've used are dominated by harvesting machines that take the whole tree off at ground level and some university folk)
fungus that secretes hydrofluoric acid
Can you give us more details? Because this is pretty astonishing.
So we get all kinds of devices whose impracticality ranges from mild to wild, from gramophones driven by a little berro engine with berrovian amplification instead of electronic, up to berro-powered FTL interstellar spaceships.
In Asimov's "Foundation" Anacreon had lost nuclear technology, yet still has FTL spaceships. When I first read it (as a teenager), I could not help wondering how these spaceships were powered -- and Salvor Hardin sort of answers this question: "Back to oil and coal, are they?" Coal-powered FTL ships, apparently.
So Isaac Asimov came THAT close to inventing steampunk.
"The advantage of steam comes from you having to keep it hot to make it stay steam"
So maybe a Venus steam balloon probe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
@441
[ "...coppicing rhododendron for charcoal and loading it up on a pig-drawn cart may be as good as it gets for somebody somewhere." ]
Just for fun, while Genghis Khan's sons were conquering the rest of China, including Beijing -- a long and horrific campaign that included massive numbers of killed in battle, then in massacre, then in punishment, as well as massive starvation and famine -- the Chinese during the battle for one of the capitols, employed 'cannon' made from multi layers of paper and glue, fired via a mixture of charcoal made from willow specifically, that shot out ammo composed of porcelain shards and many other things. The Mongols retaliated with their own 'cannon' made from tubes of bamboo. Citation is from Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy (2015) by Frank McLynn, Chapters 7 - 8, "The Invasion of the Jin Empire; "The Conquest of Northern China".
"The advantage of steam comes from you having to keep it hot to make it stay steam" So maybe a Venus steam balloon probe?
That's a nice thought, but then you have to fly the water to Venus and heat it before the balloon gets too deep in the atmosphere.
The Soviets did it nicely. Their Vega program launched two "aerobots" flying on helium-filled balloons, high in the Venusian atmosphere. The balloons flew for 46 hours straight before their batteries died. Not too shabby.
Yes, Thanks!
If you're into medieval murder cutlery (aka cold arms) and a plethora of low-tech firearms, https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/ is a good spot to browse. It's about the Ming, rather than the Jin, but they hadn't entirely stopped with wooden projectile launchers even four hundred years after Genghis conquered.
Part of the "Ming problem" (quotes deliberate) was that they didn't really have a central imperial armory. When generals went out to fight the Mongols, Wako, or whoever, they had to recruit a good chunk of their army locally, and they had to either source their weapons locally, or get them made locally. So while there are a lot of Da Vinci-style crazy weapon designs, there's also a lot of low tech gunpowder weapons, from weaponized fireworks and simple grenades to low-pressure guns that most likely wouldn't burst when fired. They also kept using fire lances, and apparently these were used as incendiaries, not projectile throwers. As a result, at least one of their military tactical manuals has ways to calculate how many firearms will fail/explode in use (quite a lot).
Despite this, they did defeat the Japanese (wako) and make some defenses against the Mongols, mostly with really good combined arms systems. So despite their "problems," they did pretty well. At least until they didn't (cf Qing Dynasty).
Yeah, I guess that would work. Having looked it up I find that the density of steam under Venus-surface conditions is about 30kg/m3, whereas the atmosphere itself is about 65kg/m3, so that looks OK. I was a bit worried that it would have gone past the critical point and stopped being useful, but apparently not.
The mandarin duck and similar is a melee implementation of the "Crew served weapons do basically all the killing" concept. One or two persons with a combat rake/trident thing to yank or pull the enemy in front of you off balance, at which point everyone else in the kill team stabs them. Very quick to teach people to do, and since it is a group effort, also diffuses responsibility and makes the relevant thought "Dont let the team down" rather than "I have to stab people?`"
Ukraine question.
Does anyone know of a source for a SWAG estimate of how many tactical missiles Russia might have left?
In the US the purchased numbers tend to show up in appropriation bills. But for Russia I suspect not.
I'd rather deal with CH4 at 100°C than H2O at 100°C. It's not noticeably more likely to catch fire than it is at room temperature, and it's less likely to burn you from its plain thermal energy content. Also since you aren't in the region of a phase transition, your system is less able to store up unexpectedly large amounts of energy and then release it all very fast and break things.
"Creating black holes is ridiculously far beyond current engineering."
But using them can be as simple as a pocket laser pointer thanks to the Halo Drive developed by Dr. David Kipping.
For mind blowing science I'd like to recommend his "Cool Worlds" YouTube channel.
AFAIK Kipping's "Halo Drive" paper has been peer reviewed and can be found here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.03423.pdf
His original paper focused on binary black holes orbiting each other (because the "math was easier") which would seem to address your concerns. The use of frame dragging by a single spinning black hole is someone else's idea (AFAIK, it has not been peer reviewed).
In particular I would recommend his proposed Halo Drive, wherein a starship the size of a planet could be propelled to relativistic speeds by means of a hand-held laser pointer and a sufficiently large black hole rotating at nearly the speed of light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqL9CkNxXw
Which is what a black hole does, because the stars that collapse into black holes always have some kind of spin to begin with and spin faster and faster as they get smaller and smaller due to conservation of angular momentum (like an Olympic figure skater who pulls her arms in and spins faster). In fact, they spin nearly as fast as the speed of light:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/08/01/this-is-why-black-holes-must-spin-at-almost-the-speed-of-light/?sh=5c219e487735
Which results in frame dragging of space time in the region around the spinning black hole. Space-time itself gets warped and resembles water spinning down a sink's drain pipe.
So, take your hand-held laser pointer (only make it computer held for sufficient accuracy) and point to a region just outside the black hole's event horizon and the laser beam orbits around the black hole and emerges on the other side and heads back towards your spacecraft. The encircling laser beam forms a “halo” around the black hole, hence the name of the drive system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC2pB29HHnc
The action is similar to what happens when one of our space probes (like Voyager) get a gravity assist from a close encounter to a planet (like Jupiter) and gets a "free lunch" increase from the planet's gravity (not really free of course as Jupiter loses a tiny, tiny bit of momentum that gets transferred to Voyager - but it is "free" from Voyager's POV).
Laser light however cannot go any faster than light. So instead of gaining speed it gains energy (blue shifting as it does). Send a few joules of energy around a massive enough spinning black hole (or binary black holes orbiting each other) and you get billions of joules coming back at you from the other side of the black hole.
The momentum of this powerful laser beam can propel your laser sail craft to 20% of c or more. There could be up to a billion blackholes in the Milky Way. Engage the Halo Drive at the right location to propel your craft to another black hole where the Halo Drive can be used again, this time to slow the space craft down. When you have mapped the locations and movements of black holes throughout the galaxy you can use the Halo Drive to create an interstellar railroad to any location in the Milky Way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZevUW__aMZE
We still have to get to a convenient nearby black hole. The video mentions that statically the closest blackhole could be about 40 light years away (though there is probably a much higher density of black holes near the galactic center with fewer out here in the spiral arms). Getting to the black hole would require other means (laser light sail powered by a Dyson Swarm of solar powered satellites around the sun seems to be the most practical – a larger version of Project Starshot) to get you there.
Then take your laser light pointer out of your pocket and start cruising the galaxy.
And it turns out the black holes are perhaps the best places in the galaxy to colonize.
So, when you are done with “Cool Worlds” I strongly recommend Isaac Arthur’s “SFIA” YouTube channel, like the one where he talks about colonizing black holes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxa0IrZCNzg
Because the same trick used by the Halo Drive (or by simply dropping something into the black hole can be used by a civilization constructed on habitats or rings orbiting the blackhole at a safe distance. Unlimited, nearly infinite and essentially free energy for trillions of years. A galactic black hole civilization could survive long after the last star has burned out.
And of course could also be turned into the largest possible bomb we could build.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY
However....
The biggest problem I see is all of the crap in the black hole's accretion disk scattering the laser beam.
Also the return beam is going to pack a punch. The resultant acceleration my be on the order of 100s of gs - which turns the crew into meat jam.
All of the above an be engineered (super intelligent AI for aiming the laser, shooting just above the black hole's equator and avoiding the accretion sic and calculating the resultant spiraling exit of the laser beam, slowly deploy the sail while the beam is on the allow from more gradual acceleration, etc.)
However, in principle, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the approach.
But 180 degrees is very hard to achieve, and it requires a laser hugging the event horizon so that it is likely to be scattered by all of the material in the accretion disc.
And as an engineer, not a scientist, my first instinct is to tinker with the proposal to make it work.
Suppose we modify the Halo Drive by separating the laser pointer from the space craft and aim it at a location outside of the accretion disc. Instead of rounding the black hole a full 180 degrees the laser beam is still bent (say 90 degrees?) to a point where the space ship is ready to receive its accumulated energy.
Scattering by the accretion disk is avoided and the problem of too much energy and too great an acceleration can be avoided. In fact, the separated laser can operate continuously providing steady amounts of lower energy for smooth acceleration that doesn't squash the crew. In fact, the laser can be left in permanent orbit around the black hole to to service multiple space ships.
Maybe the space ship can only go a mere 5% to 10% of the speed of light, but this arrangement seems to solve a lot of other problems.
I believe "Seetee Shock" and "Seetee Ship" by Jack Williamson aka Will Stewart may predate those books although did the Lensman content get serialised in magazines before being published as books? (I am on;y aware of the books).
So despite their "problems," they did pretty well. At least until they didn't (cf Qing Dynasty).
Speaking of the Qing Dynasty, I just finished watching the 70th (and final) episode of the Story of Yanxi Palace yesterday. Incredible scenery, clothing, food, conflict, and people. All 70 episodes are free on YouTube. Highly recommended.
Had to share
"@Zeddary Oh my god. Russians planting fake evidence of a Ukrainian terror plot were clearly given orders to include 3 SIM cards in the haul and instead planted copies of Sims 3."
Being an unchurched boomer, I'm a bit of an exception, but the denomination I was formerly a member of gave me a push... congregations were expected to contribute according to membership numbers and for those with infrequently attending members it was a pain point, so I, and others received letters stating we were no longer members. And by "goddamn church" did you intend to imply heretical, or is that just a bonus?
https://mobile.twitter.com/Zeddary/status/1518641354401886209
(tapped submit by mistake)
See also the signed book with the "signature illegible" and the tee-shirt with the packing creases still visible.
But using them [black holes] can be as simple as a pocket laser pointer thanks to the Halo Drive developed by Dr. David Kipping.
I ran into a Halo Drive article last week. It sure looks sweet, but the problems I see are (1) getting from earth to the launching black hole, and (2) getting from the docking black hole to where you really want to go. And lots of technical issues, of course... :-)
Re feeding tame black holes.
https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator
If the hole is small enough to make useful energy, it's too small to push much, if any matter into. Particularly as an enormous amount of high energy matter and radiation is streaming out of it. A one mm radius BH is colder than the CMB. One that's as hot as the sun, producing mostly visible light is only 30nm radius and makes only one millionth of a watt. To get 1 megawatt, the radius is 0.0000280297 nanometres. I don't know how you'd push anything down a hole that narrow, let alone against 1 MW coming out.
Indeed, getting matter into black holes at all is a bit of a mystery. Galactic centre black holes tend to heat up gas and throw it out of the galactic centre, which makes it hard to have gas drop into them. Just how they got so big so fast is an area of ongoing investigation.
The mandarin duck and similar is a melee implementation of the "Crew served weapons do basically all the killing" concept. One or two persons with a combat rake/trident thing to yank or pull the enemy in front of you off balance, at which point everyone else in the kill team stabs them. Very quick to teach people to do, and since it is a group effort, also diffuses responsibility and makes the relevant thought "Dont let the team down" rather than "I have to stab people?`"
That's the basic concept. The execution is a bit more versatile. Qi Jiguang (the inventor of the formation) is considered China's foremost general. I wish that someday we get English translations of all volumes of his book Jixiao Xinshu.
Anyway, you can see some of his tactics at https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/search?q=Qi+Ji+Guang or https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2015/03/mandarin-duck-formation-p1.html
Space 1889 is definitely colonial. Mars is a combination of British India and the Belgian Congo. Venus seems to be German East Africa.
The original GDW version didn't seem 'punk' enough to be considered steampunk, at least in the sense that cyberpunk was punk. It certainly had more the feel of Professor Challenger and other period literature than Gibson & Stirling's Difference Engine. (I thought that a key aspect of anythingpunk was that the street found uses for the anything that the inventors/powers-that-be hadn't considered. Could easily be wrong, of the term could have shifted in meaning since I learned it decades ago.)
Can't really speak to the newer edition. I have the PDFs, but they load slowly and I'm not about to print them (full-colour) so I haven't done more than skim. I did notice that unlike GDW's original, which showed male and female characters in equal numbers, the artwork had mostly male characters.
there is even a fungus that secretes hydrofluoric acid and etches glass
It's hell on camera lenses.
Halo Drive: How do you slow down? (I'm not a physics type, but if you tell me it uses a mirror to reflect the gigantic plasma beam from the black hole at another mirror attached to your craft I'd have to suggest you check your math.)
Maybe you could fire a second laser pointer at a second black hole and tack? Or simply use the system to travel from one black hole to another?
This might make a good start:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3864060/
That's a nice thought, but then you have to fly the water to Venus and heat it before the balloon gets too deep in the atmosphere.
Naw. Steampunk Venuses have swamps. Lots and lots of swamps. :-)
That substrate would at least explain where it gets the fluorine from.
I thought that a key aspect of anythingpunk was that the street found uses for the anything that the inventors/powers-that-be hadn't considered. Could easily be wrong, of the term could have shifted in meaning since I learned it decades ago
Well, I quoted KW Jeter, who's the originator of the term, from one of the GURPS Steampunk manuals.
From Wikipedia 9https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk): "Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.[1][2][3] Steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the Victorian era or the American "Wild West", where steam power remains in mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power.
"Steampunk most recognizably features anachronistic technologies or retrofuturistic inventions as people in the 19th century might have envisioned them — distinguishing it from Neo-Victorianism[4] — and is likewise rooted in the era's perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art.[5] Such technologies may include fictional machines like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.[6] Other examples of steampunk contain alternative-history-style presentations of such technology as steam cannons, lighter-than-air airships, analog computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.[7][8] "
It looks like others are using similar meanings, I'm afraid.
That substrate would at least explain where it gets the fluorine from.
Lens glass, plastic coating, or the plastic body of holding the lens?
Nope, I thought Waldorf/Steiner is usually older kids, and there are fewer schools than pre-schools.
Montessori kicks in at the critical age for a lot of vaccinations, which means that's where unvaxxed kids often first come to the attention of authority figures. They can avoid doctors but it's really hard to find a preschool that will "overlook" kids who don't even have MMR shots. The less mainstream ones are more likely to do so, and Montessori apparently makes a convenient search time.
No one thing is definite evidence of antivaxxerism, but there's a whole lot of associations. And Montessori is one of the signs.
(I'm going off some of the comments from my ex-gf whose kid is at a Steiner school and there have been issues around the covid vaccination. The Montessori teacher across the back fence suggested that if she thought a high school was bad she should try preschool)
Here we have camphor laurel which is actually not bad for woodworking, it's just a pest species because it seeds vigorously and is flexible about where it grows. And it grows fast. My neighbours have one which means I have to keep murdering its babies. Especially since its the neighbours to the north and I don't want a 20m tree shading out my solar panels before it falls on them (which I also don't want).
https://weeds.dpi.nsw.gov.au/Weeds/Details/28
Neil Paskin has his "scrapwood challenge" where he gets a trailer load of camphor laurel offcuts from a nearby manufacturer and makes stuff with them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx4aVdqrbWc
Fluorite lens elements are relatively common in higher end lenses, but mostly it's an ingredient in coatings. I assume it does something funky to the refractive index, but it may just be that it makes for chemically stable coatings.
Lens coatings are very often made from calcium fluoride and/or other fluoride-containing salts. They are insoluble in water, and can be applied in a series of layers of precisely-controlled thickness of the same order as the wavelength of light. At the optical discontinuities between the layers, you get partial reflections, and you end up with a whole pile of wavefronts separated by precisely-known delays bouncing back and forth through the stack of coatings and interfering with each other in a frequency-dependent manner that by using enough coatings and the right thicknesses can be made to give a wide variety of responses. So for instance you can arrange for all the reflections at UV wavelengths to add up to 1 on the incident side of the coating and to 0 on the other side, so the overall effect is that all UV is reflected and none makes it through the coating, and also have the opposite happen for visible wavelengths, so there are no spurious reflections off incident surfaces to bounce around from one lens surface to another and degrade the image.
I’m sure litter tray use is [m]ore than just a habituated location. I once found cat paw prints on the tray of my barbecue...
Off topic but, hey, cats. I agree, cats can generalize and make educated guesses about appropriate places to do their business.
Your story reminded me of a tale James Nicoll passed along years ago, involving one of his many cats. Eddie featured in many bizarrely clever cat stories, and several bizarre cat stories.
***********************************************************************Eddie the Precision Bomber
Woke up. On the way to the office, which takes me by one of the litter boxes, noticed olfactory evidence someone had not bothered to bury their deposit. On closer examination discovered that I had apparently left the lid off the kitty litter bottle and Eddy had decided to take a dump in it. The opening is too narrow for him to reach in and bury.
Pretty good aim for a three legged cat. I can't visualize how he managed to, ah, position himself correctly, given how the bottle is designed.
***********************************************************************
I am surprised any trees grow in mid-Atlantic. (Hides and resumes lurking)
502 - Well, that's 3 of us now, living in different areas, testifying to the manufacture of biodiesel from used cooking oils.
516 - My dates upthread refer to novelisation, not pulp serialisation, of the yarns.
The Lensman short stories predate the two short stories which became Seetee Ship by a few years.
Regrettably not. It was what I was told, so it might have been some other chemical (even though glass is hard to etch, chemically), but I have (or had) half a pair of binoculars with clearly visible etch marks that look biologically caused.
Think of the millions/billions of black holes in the galaxy as railroad stations (statistically, if there are a billion black holes we should have one as close as 40 light years away).
You have to drive your car to the nearest railroad station to board the train, right? So you use some sort of nuclear pulsed Orion drive to get to the black hole. From there you deploy your laser sail (as large as a continent) and engage the Halo drive. Head towards the known location/direction of another black hole and use the Halo drive again this time to slow down.
If the laser fails to slow down the space craft (hurtling towards a Black Hoe at relativistic speeds can be rather disconcerting) use the secondary Orion drive for an emergency slow down.
Upon arrival in a safe orbit around a black hole, stow the light sail and fire up the Orion drive to explore/colonize neighboring star systems. All courtesy of the "free" energy stolen from the Black Hole's angular momentum. It's a "simple" low cost way to explore the galaxy.
What is most fascinating is the idea of using a version of a Halo drive to extract enough energy to power a civilization on megastructure ringworlds and habitats in orbit around black holes that would survive and thrive trillions of eons after the last star has burnt out. It would be a civilization that would survive the heat death of the universe. And since a single large black hole could generate more energy than the rest of the stars in the galaxy combined, we are talking about a Kardashev IV, V, VI or higher level civilization.
Thanks. It needs only 70% humidity? Port Harcourt is MUCH worse!
Most trees and larger shrubs that grow in Britain make good firewood, and would make good charcoal - definitely including rhododendron. I have used a good many (including buddleia!) when they needed pruning. Our oaks are weedier plants than you might think, because they grow surprisingly fast in their youth - they are long-lived because they have a very long life after maturity and beyond. But, for a really weedy tree that makes excellent firewood, look no further than ash.
Slow down by using the Halo Drive around a destination Black Hole. But aiming is going to be a problem. Coming or going a ship will be a moving target at relativistic speeds so the aimed angle of the laser has to be beyond precise and constantly adjusted.
Or use a secondary nuclear pule Orion drive to arrive at any destination you choose.
Or a drogue chute made of heat resistant boron that uses the impact of interstellar atoms and dust to slow down.
Or the magnet field of a modified Bussard ramjet that piles up interstellar dust and atoms in front of it.
When it comes to interstellar travel we are talking about engines the size of small planets
Yes. It's short-lived (hazel and lime are better), but that's not always a problem. However, that's the shoots. Bellinghman's point was that the WOOD was damn-all use, though I suppose we need to mention cricket bats :-)
On surviving the heat death of the universe.
If a black hole represents the maximum entropy state of a gravitational system, and if a post death universe consists of nothing but cold gas atoms evenly spread throughout space AND trillions of black holes, the Halo Drive offers us a way to extract massive amounts of energy from a maximum entropy source.
It could power a civilization that lasts.....
..... forever?
If you're willing to sacrifice a little bit of lift for convenience, adopt the concentric-balonets fire prevention design from the Hindenberg -- inner hydrogen bags surrounded by an outer baloon full of helium to keep it away from the air -- that wasn't actually flown because the USA had a global helium monopoly and refused to sell any to Germany.
But instead of an outer helium blanket, use nitrogen (of roughly neutral buoyancy with air) surrounding an inner balonet full of methane (a lifting gas at STP).
If the methane doesn't get mixed with oxygen (or air) it doesn't get explodey, and it doesn't need heating. Not as efficient as hydrogen, but much less leaky and you can probably use it as fuel.
So maybe a Venus steam balloon probe?
Unnecessary.
Perfectly ordinary terrestrial breathing-air is a highly efficient lift gas on Venus! And there's a band in the stratosphere, about 30km up, where ambient pressure is around 1 bar and the temperature is in the range 30-60 celsius.
Indeed, if you can figure out some way to extract resources at ground level and loft them into the stratosphere, Venus might well be the most promising colonizable planet in our solar system.
(Roughly Earthlike gravity, jet streams that would give your sky-cities a roughly 100 hour "diurnal" period by blowing them around the equator in ~4 Earth days, enough air to shield your cities from cosmic and solar radiation, intense insolation to power the PV panels on the roof, and the entire lifting volume of your zeppelin-shaped city is shirt-sleeves inhabitable as long as you keep the external atmosphere out and don't lose lift.)
I am surprised any trees grow in mid-Atlantic.
Well, we Mericans do claim to be able to do exceptional things.
I don't buy it.
Even granting that your laser-near-black-hole comes back blue-shifted with a gigantic powerup, that's not going to be useful, because to be useful for propulsion it's going to have to come back at you as very hard gamma radiation. Oops: if you kick the energy of those photons up high enough you're going to get spontaneous pair production (as it emits virtual electron/positron pairs) which are unstable and decay randomly. So the beam energy will very rapidly end up being re-radiated in all directions.
A general problem with photon rockets (and light sails) is that photons have very little momentum individually: IIRC 1 newton of force requires about 3GJ of photons. That's not a problem when you're using a sail with a couple of hundred square metres and can wait around as it provides 1 micro-newton of "thrust", but for interstellar travel ... let's just say, any live cargo had better be shipped in a very effective suspended animation form. Tardigrades, maybe, with a genetic payload that unpacks over yay many generations to produce tool-using mammals as an end product.
I am surprised any trees grow in mid-Atlantic. (Hides and resumes lurking)
He was talking about getting granite from the mid-Atlantic the other week. I assumed at the time that he meant the Azores, but it still seems like a funny place to go for granite. Or poplar trees.
It could power a civilization that lasts.......... forever?
Eh, no: the black hole evaporation epoch -- for galactic-mass holes -- only lasts about 10^64 years (the stelliferous epoch, in contrast, is about 10^12 for star formation and 10^18 for radiative cooling of red and brown dwarves -- that is, until they're down to CMB temperature).
10^64 years is at least an exponent (viz: 10^10^64) short of getting us through to the Boltzmann Brain epoch.
(I have been thinking about this because, well, I am still noodling with the idea of writing the other two-thirds of Palimpsest.)
I assumed at the time that he meant the Azores, but it still seems like a funny place to go for granite. Or poplar trees.
To us Mericans, the mid-Atlantic region consists of the states south of New York and north of Florida. Roughly. Sort of.
"Other anti-vaxxers are like those who voted for le Pen throughout the French Caribbean"
This is the reason I think we are doomed.
These islands are between 95% and 99% black (with, because they are island, a lot of people on welfare), and they voted for Le Pen (60-65% on the second round), after voting for Mélanchon (55% first turn). This is a vote that is incredibly self destructive, when you know the racism of Front National, and the social policies they intend to implement.
All this because they did not like the compulsory vaccination and wanted to punish Macron for is arrogant attitude (which is by the way mostly a reflex of trying to see all sides of all questions, not simply lash out with emotional responses. He speaks funny with big words ! (as the democrats in US do)).
This is the century of emotion above reason. In all countries, all regimes.
I'm pretty sure Trump will be reelected next time and everything will go to hell. Because poor and middle whites will want to punish someone, never mind that they are next in line to be victimized.
NuScale SMRs.
Apparently money is now committed to building the molds and tools that will be used to make the pressure vessels.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Full-scale-production-of-NuScale-SMR-to-begin
Making parts is still a long way from pouring concrete on site to build an SMR of this type, never mind achieving first fission and commercial operation.
SMRs are being built, they're just not the type of SMR set in Sylvan dales with solar panels on the roof as shown on the "gimme money!" PowerPoint slides. The Chinese first-of-a-kind ACP100 (100MWe) currently under construction is going to take about five years from first concrete to first fission and that assumes everything works out. Their HTR-PM pebble-bed reactors (2x105MWe) took even longer, about eight years.
Rolls-Royce just said that if they get the go-ahead in 2024 for their own SMR design (440MWe) they could have the first prototype up and running by 2029. Hah ha ha ha coughcough.
I think given the energy shock of the current Ukraine clusterfuck that Sizewell C is going to go ahead, that's another two EPRs probably with first concrete once most of the groundworks and structural build of the first two EPRs is complete at Hinckley Point. Wylfa is likely to get the go-ahead, that might be CAP1000s or perhaps the Chinese Hualong 1 design (aka ACPR1000 as revised) in a two-reactor plant. The financing still has to be sorted out on that one but the Government is not applying their usual hands-off "the market will provide" attitude now. Thanks Mister Putin!
Nice idea, that Halo Drive, until the black hole stops spinning from over-use.
But I want to convert matter into energy as efficiently possible. And with less equipment mass than a Dyson Sphere around a sun or around a heavy black hole with mass thrown in.
Creating a black hole and then letting it evaporate could do that, except for the difficulty in the creating part. And the difficulty in capturing the resulting energy, some of which is in gravity waves (the pollution of the future!). But theoretically…
The practical bet seems to be the harvesting of energy from tossing mass into a heavy black hole and storing it as easily transportable antimatter. I vaguely recall some stories that use that method. The general ideas out there https://www.google.ca/search?q=harvesting+energy+from+a+black+hole are rotational energy, Hawking Radiation, and throwing in matter.
Anyone know of other ways of converting matter to energy more completely?
Well, I looked up "Atlantic Ocean" and have listings for Parking, Restaurants, Petrol (Gas) Stations, Hotels, Coffee and Transit, but not for trees or stone quarries!
Re: 'I'm not familiar with cats that have that much ability at forward planning.'
Not sure how much forward planning this demonstrates but this video (originally posted on Reddit in Feb/22) shows a mom cat making a bed that her unruly kitten messed up. Maybe back-and-forth/looping with intermittent reassessment rather than just forward (one direction) planning is the key here.
Like humans, cat abilities vary by individual critter.
https://www.petsradar.com/news/cat-makes-the-bed-like-a-human
Lakes of liquid zinc, eh?
Perhaps with icebergs of zinc near the poles?
If you're willing to sacrifice a little bit of lift for convenience, adopt the concentric-balonets fire prevention design from the Hindenberg -- inner hydrogen bags surrounded by an outer baloon full of helium to keep it away from the air -- that wasn't actually flown because the USA had a global helium monopoly and refused to sell any to Germany.
I recommend reading airships.net, or getting a copy of Grossman's Zeppelin Hindenburg, if you want to get an idea of just how nuts airship engineering is. I've seen pieces. My local air and space museum has a case of airship relics, including some outer envelope material and aluminum alloy spars from the Hindenburg. Basically, the airships have an outer surface of doped cloth like a WWI plane, around spars made of u-cross section aluminum alloy a few millimeters thick (like the handle on a cheap soup pot), and tensioned with piano wire. Very long piano wire. The gas bags were silk gas-proofed with gelatin, but they were the size of apartment buildings (ca. 40 meters in diameter).
The reason to go into this detail is to realize just how extreme the need to minimize weight is in an airship. And they still had to have 50 crew members, most of whom spent time fixing tears in the gas bags and outer skin. That's why they needed to have breathable air around the gas bags: to keep them repaired, and also to keep the weight down by not double-bagging and doubling the weight of the gasbags. Even a rip a meter long in a silk gasbag 40 meters in diameter isn't going to deflate the bag very fast, so climbing up and sewing and sealing it is perfectly reasonable.
They also had to be able to vent the gasbags, because they inflated when heated by the sun. Airships thus normally vented gas during the day to keep from rising too high, and dropped water ballast at night to keep from dropping too low. Their ranges were limited by how much ballast and gas they carried.
If someone wants to commit semi-realistic steampunk (oxymoronic as that is), it's worth diving into the construction details on airships, because they are freaking insane to people like me who are more used to boats and planes. Ultralight doesn't even begin to cover it. But at the same time, you could spray a zeppelin with ordinary machine gun fire, and assuming you missed the crew or any vital structures (which you would, if you just went after the envelope), they'd just patch the holes and keep flying. Bringing them down with bullets required specially made incendiary bullets, and then tearing enough holes in the bags to get the gas in the envelope into fuel-air range. Which took a lot of bullets.
if you want a platform to post your pronouncements on without being subject to the restrictions of Charlie's blog
i suspect having this particular somewhat weary target/audience for her output is part of the attraction, and getting periodically [redacted] is just the price to be paid
i suspect having this particular somewhat weary target/audience for her output is part of the attraction, and getting periodically [redacted] is just the price to be paid
I suspect that provoking reactions, pushing boundaries, and getting to feel victimized when finally facing consequences are all a big part of why they keep coming back. Their behaviour maps quite well to classic adolescent attention-seeking behaviours.
~Sighs~ Someone who never grew up.
I refer you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodetic_airframe and particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R100 .
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So "punk" isn't a required element of steampunk?
Sounds like it really is a fashion term then, that happens to include literature as well as clothing.
Basically, the airships have an outer surface of doped cloth like a WWI plane, around spars made of u-cross section aluminum alloy a few millimeters thick (like the handle on a cheap soup pot), and tensioned with piano wire.
I'd suggest using some sort of tensegrety for the structural components. Having personally seen some real-life examples of tensegrety, I can attest that it has some nice flexibility, which should be a plus in an airship exposed to turbulence. From Wikipedia:
"Tensegrity, tensional integrity or floating compression is a structural principle based on a system of isolated components under compression inside a network of continuous tension, and arranged in such a way that the compressed members (usually bars or struts) do not touch each other while the prestressed tensioned members (usually cables or tendons) delineate the system spatially."
Someone who never grew up.
A lot of people don't, in the sense of continuing childhood behaviour patterns into adulthood. Look at Trump, Greene, and many other Republicans, for example.
Decades ago I knew a psychologist who worked in prisons, trying to rehabilitate inmates. He sometimes said it was like dealing with teenagers. His descriptions of their thought processes (often accompanied by hair-pulling) reminded me a lot of my troubled students (or even good kids on a bad day).
Which leads me to a speculation. A large part of 'growing up' and 'being an adult' is accepting both consequences and responsibility. If someone is in a position where they can constantly evade both, is it surprising that their behaviour will seem adolescent?
Making parts is still a long way from pouring concrete on site to build an SMR of this type, never mind achieving first fission and commercial operation.
Someone has committed $millions to the effort. To start building things based on approved engineering drawings. That's way past power point.
Which was my point.
What is most fascinating is the idea of using a version of a Halo drive to extract enough energy to power a civilization on megastructure ringworlds and habitats in orbit around black holes that would survive and thrive trillions of eons after the last star has burnt out. It would be a civilization that would survive the heat death of the universe. And since a single large black hole could generate more energy than the rest of the stars in the galaxy combined, we are talking about a Kardashev IV, V, VI or higher level civilization.
(a) Black holes themselves, by definition, no longer exist by the time of the heat death (because Hawking radiation is an energy gradient). Galactic-mass black holes will evaporate in around 10^100 years, whereas low-grade photon/lepton interactions continue for much longer than that.
(b) If protons decay, then they will all have done so long before stellar-mass (or larger) holes have evaporated (and the heat death is somewhere around 10^1000 years), so it's unclear what your hand-held laser pointer is going to be made of. If protons don't decay, we get iron stars which then decay into black holes, etc etc, and so the heat death is much further off (10^10^100+ years).
(c) Your Kardashev scale must be different from mine. I've seen extensions to Type IV and V, but never VI. What is that supposed to be? Of course, type IV and above is invisible to slime molds such as ourselves.
Like humans, cat abilities vary by individual critter.
When I got married my wife came with two German barnyard cats. Who though they ruled the universe. She said you can't train cats. I disagreed. In about a month I had them sitting on command. It required a box or two of treats to get my point across to them and I didn't try for anything more complicated but getting them to sit I did do.
565:
Yup, they're all geodetic beam skeletons, whether or not they're called that. The part that you can't see is that the Zeppelin beams had a U-shape cross section -u-. In the USS Akron, the beams were flat in cross section. Good German engineering. We won't talk about how well they managed static electricity though. That apparently was a bit of a problem.
567: As for air tensegrity, yes it's a thing. JP Aerospace is considering just that for their "Airship to orbit" concept. Turns out, if you want to fly above the stratosphere, a flying wing over a mile long that weighs less than the Hindenburg is a good thing. Their preliminary plan calls for a V-shaped ship with wings a mile long, a minimal bottom space frame of carbon fibers, gas-beam frame for the top, polyethylene gas bags, MHD propulsion (electric rockets, basically), ultra-thin solar cells for power, etc. All to carry 20 people to LEO. The extreme realms of the upper atmosphere are extreme. Getting the above monster to orbital speed by flying through the Mesosphere is just part of the plan.
Yes, it's okay to gibber and snort. Thing is, the mesosphere's so poorly known that it's hard to say it can't work. The US military took a balloon flying wing to mach 10 in that region, without harm to the balloon.
Decades ago I knew a psychologist who worked in prisons, trying to rehabilitate inmates. He sometimes said it was like dealing with teenagers.
My sister in law is a retired parole officer in the Oregon desert area. Small towns and thinly populated counties.
She said it was very frustrating to get through to them that the could not just talk their way out of breaking the rules. It just wasn't going to happen. If they broke the rules they'd be back in jail. For many of them they just couldn't comprehend that rules were rules, not guidlines in a negotiation.
She said it was very frustrating to get through to them that the could not just talk their way out of breaking the rules.
Possibly because they have often/usually been able to talk or otherwise finagle their way around rules most of their lives?*
I read somewhere that the deterrent effect of a law has less to do with the severity of the sentence and more with the perceived chance that someone breaking the law would be caught and convicted.
*One of the least effective vice principals I knew could be reliably manipulated by the kids into giving them a last chance to behave. Repeatedly.
What gives me pause about this particular project is that there's a Memorandum of Understanding between Doosan and NuScale and that's usually the Kiss of Death for any sort of a nuclear project. However, reading the Fine Article, Doosan is planning to make some forgeing dies that might be used to make a particular part for the NuScale reactors (the upper reactor vessel), there's no actual contracts to make the parts themselves or indeed the rest of of the reactor structures. This is a little farther than the point NuScale reached with Sheffield Forgemasters back in 2016, after which crickets. I think there was a Memorandum of Understanding involved there too.
Show me a hole in the ground and concrete and rebar and I'll consider it a real reactor build start. Saying that, the Summer AP1000 reactors got that far and farther and then the builds were cancelled (the nearly-complete Vogtle AP1000 project is continuing for the moment amid commissioning delays due to screwed-up documentation, shades of the KEPCO fiasco previously). I'm wondering if there's any new interest in completing the Summer reactors now after worldwide energy supply issues reared its ugly head recently.
Unfortunately, examples like Boris Johnson show that (with enough money and/or influence), you CAN just ignore inconvenient laws.
Re: '... you need access to the complete medical records for each patient; ... statistical issues...'
Good to know - thanks!
I did a quick look at an active COVID clinical trial just to get a sense of what type of medical info they might collect. Mostly it's screening (out) prospective participants on a bunch of medical/demo bases. Was surprised to see that the spleen is included in the screened-out category - makes sense but I don't recall seeing the spleen mentioned before as a risk factor in any mass media reports.
I was wondering whether countries that had universal healthcare also automatically had universal healthcare record keeping. If yes - then such countries' local scientists/docs should (theoretically - with appropriate privacy protocols) be able to pull up in-depth longitudinal medical data on any patient. Do any of the UK, Australia, NZ, various EU countries' universal health schemes have set ups like this? People travel, relocate, etc. - it would make sense that they should be able to maintain access to their own medical records. (Hmmm. do patients actually 'own' their medical data? If not - why not?)
Anyways ... here's the study I looked at - study description is on a US data base although being conducted in Turkey, n=13,000.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04582344
The stats testing ...
Considering the level of medical screening as well as the expectation at the outset of a study that maybe 2-3% of participants will develop anything serious enough to note/study/follow-up that means at most something like 250-400 people in the final sample for drill-down and subgroup analysis. However, considering that the ACE2 receptor can be found on every major organ, that can mean very small sample sizes per organ assuming equal distribution/risk per organ/site, etc. - which means the stats testing could be meh. (Unless you ramped up study sample size - unlikely - too many studies competing for participants, not enough funds.) Anyways, it would be interesting to know how such analyses are actually done.
So "punk" isn't a required element of steampunk?
Sounds like it really is a fashion term then, that happens to include literature as well as clothing.
To address the question, possibly more seriously than it was asked, no. I remember this question being brought up at a steampunk convention and some attendees hadn't thought of the matter this way before.
As you know Bob, "steampunk" derives from "cyberpunk" - and cyberpunk was very punk in its origins before being devoured by its own commercial success. But it's not the late '80s any more. We've got cyberpunk and steampunk and atompunk and dieselpunk and even clockpunk (for those who can't get enough Tik-Tok of Oz, I guess).
So for a while now -punk has been a suffix denoting a style, much the way Americans use -gate as a generic suffix for political scandals.
P.S.: Or you could pound on someone's door and shout "Steampunk! Explain it!" :-)
Possibly because they have often/usually been able to talk or otherwise finagle their way around rules most of their lives?
In conversations with her it was a problem due to these folks living their entire lives in a somewhat rule free atmosphere. In their life's circle of friends and not friends, rules were more often just guidelines. When they bumped into the "official" system they just didn't have any idea of how to deal. At all. It was very frustrating to her. How do you unwind 20+ years of life in a few interviews?
As an aside she got to see a bigger picture. Her husband was a career cop in the town. And please no comments about right wing R fascists. This couple was about as far from that as you can get.
Did I mention visiting the Zeppelin museum at Franfurt last month? (Not the main one at Lake Constance, but the one at the model village they built to house the crew ...)
I am pretty sure we won't see a revival of airships in warfare, because now we know how to about them, a continuous-rod warhead is the totally obvious way to ruin an airship captain's day. And while the concept only goes back to 1952 it's one of those weapons that could have been invented prior to the first world war, pretty much any time in the 19th century, specifically for wrecking gas bags (eg. observation balloons).
"To get 1 megawatt, the radius is 0.0000280297 nanometres. I don't know how you'd push anything down a hole that narrow, let alone against 1 MW coming out."
Yes, I vaguely remember looking up a similar result. That radius is 30-odd times larger than a proton, so it's easy enough to find things that will fit down it, but it does make the whole "how do you make really really sure it never gets hungry and takes out your solar system" problem that much more exciting. Instead of feeding it with something simple and reliable like a dump truck or random people's bottoms you have to use a particle accelerator, and not just any old particle accelerator but one which is big and beefy enough to shift actual everyday-sized quantities of mass in everyday-sized periods of time. This is not a trivial item, even if it does at least have the advantage of not having to accelerate the particles all that much.
Particle accelerators are also gruesomely inefficient (cf. difficulty of powering calutron farms). So you might (haven't worked it out) end up in the situation where nearly all the energy you get out of the black hole needs to be fed back into the system to keep the particle accelerator going, and then you have to make sure the particle accelerator doesn't melt.
So maybe you end up with a system where all of that portion of the energy you get back from the black hole in an easily-convertible form (charged particles) gets fed back in to keep the particle accelerator going, and your actual output is the rest of the black hole energy plus the accelerator's losses, all coming out as plain old heat. Which you then use to run A STEAM ENGINE.
"Indeed, getting matter into black holes at all is a bit of a mystery."
Yes, for something so supposedly hungry they are amazingly hard to actually feed. I am reminded of a baby with much more food down its front than goes into its stomach. (A human baby, that is; pigeon babies are usually far less messy.)
People keep zincing into the swamp.
Unfortunately, examples like Boris Johnson show that (with enough money and/or influence), you CAN just ignore inconvenient laws.
BoJo knows the rules are there and has figured out how to get around them.
Her point was that for many of the lower end of the scale small time criminals they don't seem to comprehend there even are rules. Even after you tell them about them. It's like speaking Chinese to me. I know there are words there but it might as well be random noise.
So for a while now -punk has been a suffix denoting a style, much the way Americans use -gate as a generic suffix for political scandals.
I didn't know that. All the steampunk I've read has been very cyberpunk in style, so I assumed that punkness was still a significant part of the genre.
FWIW, I don't consider Space 1889 steampunk. It wasn't marketed that way and Chadwick (the author) didn't refer to it that way. (Back when dinosaurs roamed Venus and GDW was in business.) It was, quite deliberately, retro-SF in the style of Verne, Kipling, and Doyle.
So if "-punk" denotes just a style, isn't Bridgerton Regencypunk? You've got the same ahistorical elements at play, with the Regency-ness being a veneer on top of contemporary viewpoints…
Incidentally, fans of Bridgerton and RPGs should take a look at Good Society. The rules are solid and provide a good scaffolding for Regency romances while being diversity-friendly (as should be evident from the character illustrations).
https://storybrewersroleplaying.com/good-society/?v=3e8d115eb4b3
Scene in the first, original Star Trek blooper reel:
Kirk, on the bridge: "Warp seven, Scotty!
Scotty, in a furnace room, with crewmen shoveling coal into a furnace: "We're shovelin' as fast as we can, captain!"
Doc Smith wrote the Lensmen books starting in 1948, and on to about '61. Yes, serialized. I remember reading Skylark Duquesne (which I have issues with) in a serial around '65.
I see. So, putting on my "I fought heavy in the SCA in the late seventies and beginning of the eighties" helm, standard great arms tactics. Sword or other short weapons and shields in front, and you hit the enemy over their heads with the great weapons. Unless, of course, you're using a 3+meter spear, and are facing horsemen.
Did I mention visiting the Zeppelin museum at Franfurt last month? (Not the main one at Lake Constance, but the one at the model village they built to house the crew ...)
You didn't, but now I have another reason to be jealous. Sounds like a lot of fun.
I am pretty sure we won't see a revival of airships in warfare, because now we know how to about them, a continuous-rod warhead is the totally obvious way to ruin an airship captain's day. And while the concept only goes back to 1952 it's one of those weapons that could have been invented prior to the first world war, pretty much any time in the 19th century, specifically for wrecking gas bags (eg. observation balloons).
I've wasted the odd moment trying to figure out if some of the high-end Ming fire-arrow family weapons had enough range to take out a zeppelin. Certainly if you put a large palm-tree style firework in the nose of a sounding rocket or smaller, you'd have a sufficient weapon to make a Zeppelin pilot rather unhappy.
I agree with you about airships as warships. A Barrett rifle would probably be enough to get to the gondola of a war zeppelin (they can hit targets over a mile away on flat ground), let alone simply shooting a missile through it (big hole plus hot exhaust equals major excitement. That said, the US army does use unmanned aerostats for various things, so the days of lighter than air aren't yet gone. Going forward, if we do start a doubleplus ungood Kessler cascade and lose our ability to replace satellites in orbit, then I wouldn't be surprised if high altitude unmanned airships aren't floated as the alternative. While I think JP Aerospace is nuts (in a good way--I support them on Patreon), they are working toward high altitude solar-powered airships, which we need more of. But as weapons systems? Dubious.
As for your retro munition, I don't think it would work so well on an observation balloon, because those pre-WW1 flyers were used primarily for artillery spotting and were flown over the artillery positions to facilitate rapid communication. So if you're in range to hit an observation balloon, you're likely in range of the artillery it's directing, and they'll likely see you setting up before you can fire to take out the balloon. As I'm sure you know, "The balloon went up" as the start of a bombardment came from artillery's use of balloons.
My son was in Montessori when I first moved to TX. It's for little kids, pre-kindergarden.
Drops you from steam-powered dirigible into the North Atlantic (std usage for middle of the Pond).
Considering the vast array of punks that the variety of sf/f genre has attempted, the most ridiculous is the latest floated by a group of fantasy writers, who wish to counter 'grimdark' with -- good grief -- HOPEPUNK.
The thing is that almost all the punks have either forgotten or have never know what the Punk was but which Bill Gibson got right, while all the other genre punks attempting to ride that shiny new coattail ignored.
It was a chaotic explosion of noise by utterly musically ignorant, untrained and talentless guys with guitars, who provided the sonic equivalent of what we were seeing all across the US, and presumably England. It was the utterly hopeless kids who hung out in laundromat parking lots, wearing ripped black t-shirts, black eyeliner and smoking, smoking, smoking, ciggies and when they could scrape together the price, weed. The operative color black, and the black make-up birthed the accompanying Goth. The futures of these disadvantaged kids, as they recognized it already, for all sorts of reasons, starting with dysfunctional families and schools, was WITHOUT HOPE.
Bill Gibson got this from the gitgo, and got it in his fiction. Which is why the creator of cyberpunk still rules the sf/f 'punk' today. The others are all style, sort of like fashion designers taking off from the Islamic world's ancient practice of writing out in Arabic suras from the Quran on walls of buildings, on the bodies of their models. Remember that?
By the way, the previous attempt to counter the popularity -- as they see it -- of 'grimdark' by these fantasy writers was -- o lordessa -- 'noblebright.'
Mid-Atlantic region of the US, comprising the states and commonwealths of NY, CT, NJ, PA, DE, MD, and maybe VA. (Ignore post 553, they're wrong, we don't include most of the South in the mid-Atlantic.)
Or not - if Marjorie Taylor Greene is prevented from running for re-election by the 14th Amendment (a very strong possibility, currently in court), he could be as well.
"semi-realistic steampunk" Phrase not uncommon in 1632 fandom: "the only thing a steampunk dirigible needs is wheels... since there's no way it's getting off the ground."
Note that all tech in the 1632 universe works, yes, including the wooden engine block - someone built a working model.
ObDisclosure: my first two pieces of fiction were published in the Grantville Gazette, the online magazine of the 1632 universe (and a third will be in the next issue).
Yeah, it drives me nuts. I'm writing what is sort of old-style SF, it's hopeful, so it must be (gag) "hopepunk".
Note that I will rip anyone apart at a con who starts babbling the pseudo-word "squeecore" at me, as I'm over 14, and that's the last age anyone should use that at.
I think the "Hopepunk" crowd got it right. Right now, the great and powerful, the Boomers and the Xers who embraced punk when they were kids, are greedily destroying the world--from the eyes of the kids watching us.
Think about it: now that we're getting older, we're being urged to indulge ourselves. Why leave any inheritance for your kids? Why not get an even bigger house, you can afford it? The kids are looking at monstrous debt, horrible future prospects, and waiting for us to die so that they can inherit the mess we're making and try to fix it.
We're the ones who've spent our adult lives learning to invest in pointless, short term pleasures because we have no future. And it turned out we had a future, but our embrace of greed and helpless complicity has made it worse for everyone else, especially the kids.
So if they're going to piss us off by being hopeful about the future? That's punk.
And sister, if hope punk offends you, you just got generation gapped, because the kids on the street are finding new uses for what you thought was hopeless.
I dunno, who trained who? "Oh, good, if we get into this position, our servant will understand us, not try to imitate our speech with all the grammatical errors, and give us treats."
"I was wondering whether countries that had universal healthcare also automatically had universal healthcare record keeping. If yes - then such countries' local scientists/docs should (theoretically - with appropriate privacy protocols) be able to pull up in-depth longitudinal medical data on any patient. Do any of the UK, Australia, NZ, various EU countries' universal health schemes have set ups like this? People travel, relocate, etc. - it would make sense that they should be able to maintain access to their own medical records."
Not England (can't speak for any of the other countries.) The government tried, but too many people realised that the (intended) consequence of consolidating everyone's private and confidential medical data was the ability to sell it to Big Medicine.
NHS data grab on hold as millions opt out
Whoops - previous post was in response to 571.
Let us not forget that in the heyday of cyberpunk in the 1980s there was a kinda-sorta half-assed attempt to position some of the very-much-not-cyberpunk newcomers with attitude as "new humanists". The most notable of whom were Kim Stanley Robinson, whose "Down and Out in the 21st Century" is the best biting takedown of post-Neuromancer cyberpunk I can think of (until "Snow Crash" came along to formally crack the dead pope's skull with a hammer and declare him dead.)
I take offense at your assertion, sir!
Because "Dead Lies Dreaming" is totally squeecore, when viewed from the right angle.
"It was a chaotic explosion of noise by ...."
That is my opinion of almost all steampunk.
Groan.
That pun. What were you zincing?
EC @ 576
However, with both Bo Jon-Sun & IQ45, I think the catchers-up are closing in ( We can hope )
Yeah, it drives me nuts. I'm writing what is sort of old-style SF, it's hopeful, so it must be (gag) "hopepunk".
Depends. I'll admit that the one hopepunk book I read was pretty darn conventional, so you're right on that.
On the other hand, if you don't ignore the mess that is 21st Century Earth, but if you write in a future that grew out of whatever we do to solve this mess, then yeah, you're punking your readers by being hopeful in the face of their fear, learned helplessness, and dive into retro escapism.
Otherwise, if you're writing "far future, problems solved by handwave, welcome to my fantasy world that I want to play in," then it's just retro SF.
Note that I will rip anyone apart at a con who starts babbling the pseudo-word "squeecore" at me, as I'm over 14, and that's the last age anyone should use that at.
The best example of squeecore is basically every freaking Marvel Movie made so far. So if you've got a ragtag band of outsiders who come together to face an outsized menace in Act 3 through rule of cool stunts that just miss deus ex machina and make the rest of us cling to our disbelief with cramping mental fingers...then yeah, it's squeecore.
Everyone has a point at which they squee, but I'm grumpy enough that I need something along the lines of Cryptonomicon-level plausibility to make me squee properly. Vampire flying after Concorde with extricated US president in tow, that's totally Rule of Cool and good use for the Concorde, but it's not jaw-dropping the way Cryptonomicon's paired blowoffs were, at least for me (sorry Charlie).
Note that I don't blame any author publishing right now under the Reign Of MarvelMouse to want to write squeecore and pay the bills thereby. But at the same time, I don't expect it to make my jaw drop.
Speak for yourself, bub. I haven't been buying any house of any kind my whole gdded life, and etc. etc. etc.
Almost all my choices in these areas were made way back then for environmental reasons -- saving the environment was my hope. Which is why no kids -- too many people for the globe to handle already. No television, because it was obviously creating what we've got now. No car, etc. etc. etc.
So ya, speak for yourself, not for me.
While I agree that "hopepunk" is a contradiction of terms and "noblebright" is just cringeworthy, what DO you call optimistic science fiction? Not utopian, but optimistic -- SF which takes place during transitional period from our current unsustainable economy toward a sustainable one?
There is unfortunately little such science fiction, I really wish there were more, and it might help if it had a non-cringeworthy label to call it. (Here is one example: https://www.amazon.com/Shine-Anthology-Optimistic-Science-Fiction-15-Apr-2010/dp/B013ILOFQW/ref=sr_1_1 )
"Possibly because they have often/usually been able to talk or otherwise finagle their way around rules most of their lives?"
In England, at least, the court system teaches people that that is indeed the game they're supposed to be playing - with the added advantage that you have a professional player to play it for you. It takes a few months between being nicked and being sentenced, repeatedly appearing in court for the case to be adjourned for another month due to some administrative niggle, with a free solicitor working on your behalf to use their knowledge of the fiendishly complicated rules to find more niggles to keep putting things off. When they eventually run out of niggles and the sentencing actually happens, the solicitor then bullshits the court from here to China to make them feel sorry for you and give you a lighter sentence. And indeed the sentence they finally do hand out does end up looking like you've got away with it, by contrast with the spectre of the very severe sentences which are theoretically possible that all the discussions of your case over the last few months have summoned to loom over you. So the overall lesson is very clearly that avoiding punishment depends not on not being naughty, but on having a good solicitor to get you off; and if it does happen that you don't get off, it's because the solicitor wasn't good enough and/or everyone knows the judge you got in the end is a complete bastard who shits hard on everyone regardless.
(Note that "getting off" doesn't mean "being found not guilty" or "having the case thrown out"; it means "any sentence short of actually going to prison", or at worst not for more than a few months (and then serving half the time you were actually sentenced to, which is how it works here). This covers a very wide range, and most "petty crime" sentences do indeed fall into that range.)
"I read somewhere that the deterrent effect of a law has less to do with the severity of the sentence and more with the perceived chance that someone breaking the law would be caught and convicted."
Would be caught and convicted promptly. Not being nicked until some weeks after you did it and then not being sentenced until some months after that means that whatever eventually does happen is just a hazard of life, the kind of shit that's bound to happen anyway, and no longer has any meaningful connection with whatever you actually did.
I have trouble believing it, with the curent composition of the supreme court.
On Charlie's Twitter yesterday, he mentioned:
Made me think: you have a time machine not unlike the one in Back to the Future1, and can go back to 1972. However, this time machine is one-way and single-use. How quickly could you bootstrap 1972 factories to build solar arrays (or some other carbon-neutral energy source) as efficient as the ones we have now?
Obviously it wouldn't take as long as it did IRL, because you'd have actual knowledge of exactly how to get from A to B. However, you'd have primitive tools. Plus the whole problem of having to manufacture plausible identities to keep nosy parkers off your back. Unless you're OK to go to the government of whatever country you're doing the time traveling in. Heck, if you took a power broker like 98-year-old (ugh) Henry Kissinger2 back with you, he could talk to his 48-year-old self and convince him that you were the real deal. Of course, then you'd be working for Nixon.3
Fossil fuels were cheaper to extract then, so you'd have to get solar (or whatever) to somewhat better than it is now to make it outcompete fossil fuels. However, if you could get this done by (say) 1982, you'd have 40 years less of CO2 in the atmosphere by the new!2022. So the new!2022 wouldn't be looking down the barrel of climate (and other) catastrophes4, and could thus worry about a completely different set of problems.
~oOo~
1 You'd probably want to put the time machine component into a minivan (or a bus). This would let you take more subject matter experts (and modern equipment and computers, plus stuff you could convert into 1972 money) into the past than a 2-seater DeLorean could.
2 Assuming today's Kissinger is compos mentis. I've no idea of the state of his health.
3 For a Canadian example, you could bring Joe Clark (Canadian PM 1979-80) back with you. He's a comparative youngster of 82 now. He'd probably have some idea as to how to make the Canadian Federal Election of 1972 go to the Tories. Prime Minister Robert Stanfield would be a lot better to work with than Nixon.
4 Make absolutely, completely sure that none of your time travellers have COVID-19 before you set off!
*While I agree that "hopepunk" is a contradiction of terms and "noblebright" is just cringeworthy, what DO you call optimistic science fiction? Not utopian, but optimistic -- SF which takes place during transitional period from our current unsustainable economy toward a sustainable one? *
It's a hard problem. Shine at least tried. As an environmentalist who frequently deals with depression because (waves hand around), I think that pissing off people who are glibly hopeless and use that to justify greedy, short-sighted actions is a very, very, very good thing.
When I wrote Hot Earth Dreams, I ran into a version of that "noblebright" problem. I tackled that HED monster because I realized that no one I talked to could envision a future where climate change happened and people survived. So they, including the enviros, were either doing the "things will be fine, ignore the monster" denial dance, or they wer doing the "we're all gonna die, so why not enjoy everything now" nihilism dance, but either way, they weren't doing all the stuff that they could fucking obviously do to defang the monster. And I was getting messed with every which way, for trying (like Foxessa) to do what I thought was right, which was to sacrifice present greed for future need.
So I tackled Hot Earth Dreams to look at the future after the monster. After I wrote it, I found I had no heart to write dystopian clifi. Rather than profiteer off that future, I'd rather struggle trying to make it less pitiless. And yes, it's a fucking miserable experience, mostly because people are either in denial or nihilistic (or bipolar on both) and don't want to hear it.
So that's what I hope to see out of "hopepunk." Not breezy optimism, but that wonderfully punkish spirit of pissing off every nihilistic and denialistic subroutine the well-hacked brains of my generation are running right now. Probably it won't get us old fucks out from in front of our computers and doing something useful (Foxessa hopefully will disagree?) but done right it will hopefully give the kids reading it a way to define their identities as people who truly give a fuck about the future, even if it's uncomfortable.
And if they're pissing us off, they're starting to do it right.
I'd suggest that, if you want to commit hopePUNK, follow the outrage as much as possible. As even Jesus said in the Beatitudes, if they're not after you, you're not doing it right (a paraphrase, of course).
"It was a chaotic explosion of noise by utterly musically ignorant, untrained and talentless guys with guitars, who provided the sonic equivalent of what we were seeing all across the US, and presumably England."
In England the chaotic explosion of noise sonically equivalent to berropunk was provided by utterly musically ignorant, untrained and talentless guys with computers (the kind that have piano-type keyboards rather than typewriter ones), taking advantage of their audience's extreme fondness for substituted phenethylamines which among their other effects destroy your faculties of musical appreciation so you think the noises emitted by a cement mixer are just as wonderful as the best music you've ever heard. It was a most unfortunate coincidence that the computers and the phenethylamines both became suddenly massively easier to obtain at about the same time.
The actual punk movement was a decade or so before that, and faded out pretty rapidly because with the drugs that were around at the time it wasn't too difficult for people to see that it was nearly all shit. But the computerised phenethyldogshite lasted long enough for its audience to start having kids, who then grew up thinking cement mixer noises were good music not because they were drugged into the middle of next week but simply because they never got to hear any actual music. So we still haven't managed to get rid of it.
"Make absolutely, completely sure that none of your time travellers have COVID-19 before you set off!"
Oh, I dunno. It would be kind of useful if the world now could be one where everyone's immune systems have got used to it and it's just a normal-sized shit rather than a great steaming pile of elephant turds.
Imagine a modern-day "Illuminatus!" remixing all the conspiracy theories on social media in 2022 ...
How is that not 4/8/16Chan or, well, the Global Right? Asking for a friend.
You could almost do an Inverse Illuminatus!, where every conspiracy theory on social media is wrong, those who think they're illuminati and pooling the strings are both fools and tools of underlings who have no greater agenda than personal survival, while those who have any real understanding of the situation are as far away as possible and doing other stuff entirely. Not a new plotline, but I think you could make it as much of a mindscrew as Illuminatus! was.
In England the chaotic explosion of noise sonically equivalent to berropunk was provided by utterly musically ignorant, untrained and talentless guys with computers
I am going to entirely arbitrarily hand you a YELLOW CARD for dissing my favourite musical genre right here on my blog. (Viz. eighties synthpop and industrial, nineties techo, and related categories.)
I have read VERY little of that (and didn't like it much), but my immediate reaction was "and just where are you getting your gunpowder from?"
Musical genres: the new religious sects :-) May I put my vote in for the sounds wind makes in non-built-up areas?
I'll take a yellow card in sympathy on that one too, because (Sorry Charlie) it's my least favorite form of
volumemusic.It's also out of familial competition.
My elderly mother, who listens only to classical and opera, can still hear the ultra-high tones that only teenagers are supposed to be able to hear.
I can hear them too, but my hearing isn't as good as hers, due to an unfortunate infatuation with Oingo Boingo when I was young (went to a couple of concerts without earplugs).
And I'll be darned if I'm going to let my hearing slip still further. She's bad enough about it as it is.
Can someone explain to me what is "berropunk"? And is it something one of you guys just made up?
it looks to me like the seastate was such the Moskva couldnt use its Gecko missiles, the Neptuns fly so low the S300s couldn't engage before they got too close. and the CIWS propably missed. nobody has ever < as far as i know> ever shot actuall hostile incoming down with a CIWS. the grim reapers simulated it on DCS world.. and Slavas design doctrine of wearing bombs as armour, is perhaps a bit 'not clever' after all the Russians never had an HMS Hood incident
Noted. :)
It's any name of a genre that has -punk on the end, for contexts where the bit before the -punk isn't important.
I made it up. I habitually use "berro" as a metasyntactic variable ("gobro" comes next). Interestingly, it seems to be one of those things that people are mostly more likely to understand in text as compared to speech. It's also Spanish for watercress, but I didn't know that until I used it to a Mexican.
I have no idea what the "Spanish watercress punk" genre would look like, but I know it needs to exist.
Know any literary agents who do sf, I ask, looking at the novel I'm trying to sell right now that I guarantee will piss off libertarians, GOPpers, and probably a lot of the milSF types.
I live in the DC 'burbs. I am very seriously considering, when the SCOTUS considers the next anti-abortion case, of going down to the Supreme Court and picketing, with a sign saying that Barret MUST RECUSE HERSELF, because she is biased.
That's an issue that they deal with. More fun is mining and producing enough iron for railroads.
Btw, I'm going to assume you haven't read anything of the Gazette. It's about 15 years old, and every issue is half fiction, and half science/engineering/chemistry/etc (Gernsback himself would be proud). I have seen entire long discussions of where you would mine coal or iron ore, dye chemistry, how to provision a sailing ship in the 1600s, and on, and on.
Pigeon
🤩
^^^^^^^
{ AND "H" } ... when younger I could hear the bottom end of bat's sounding range ~ 32/35kHz ... even now, I can still hear about 20 kHz.
Thusly ....
At the risk of a Yellow Card myself, there is a problem here, namely: "Sturgeon's Revelation" At least 90% of everything is crap
As regards "pop" music, so-called, that climbs to 99%, for any period between 1900 & right now, with the honourable exception of about 2 groups & one artist, all originating in the mid-60's { Beatles, Stones, Bowie & a couple of others } - & the reason that they stand out is that you can actually hear the words (!)
But then, I'm a fully paid-up member of the Awkward Squad, anyway & prefer to listen to Radio 3 - where some modern stuff is surprisingly good - I was really taken with "Akhenaten" by P Glass - amazing singing & performance.
Here: The Window of Appearances
and
Hymn to the Sun
Try those & see what you think!
Oh yes, my favourite opera? Difficult.
Probably Zauberflöte, with Fidelio a close second - because I've been in that one - with Karita Mattila as a red-hot vengeful & resourceful Leonora/Fidelo outsmarting the evil Pizzaro ( Who in that production was a Greek-Colonels/Pinochet character, attempting to overthrow the government for a dictatorship ) brought the house down.
OTOH the production of *Das Rheingold" I was in had the Rheinemädchen wearing blue wigs, which was, erm "memorable".
(Sir) John Tomlinson was a superb Wotan. And the late-lamented Philip Langridge as Loge - really, really creepy & twisted!
IIRC, I saw the Velvet Underground live in a small club in the sixties... and my hearing was fuzzy for a while. But noise? Is that like Blue Cheer doing Summertime Blues?
Also, I'm not entirely joking about managing peat.
like this? https://www.moorwissen.de/en/paludikultur/imdetail/torfmooskultivierung.php
You're making it too small a genre. It needs to be "punk salad".
That's how it would start, but all genres fragment over time. I expect the rocket/lettuce/kale-punk wars would become the stuff of legend.
Tomatoes get no respect.
You left out a lot of San Francisco sound, where, again, you could understand the words. I am Not Happy with music where between the sound board decided that 11 on a scale of 10 is right, and the instruments on top of the singers, and the singers, let me say enunciation, and leave it at that.
"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small...."
Naval-CIWS: you're probably right.
Land-based CIWS is another matter, though: the Israeli Iron Dome system regularly gets a work-out thanks to Hamas, and there's a similar system protecting the Green Zone in Baghdad from rocket attacks.
Your search keyword is C-RAM -- Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar.
I don't think they have entirely failed to address that. I think I remember something about squads going round digging up people's toilets, at least; and I think one of the ones I haven't read is supposed to be about going to South America looking for nitrates. I definitely remember some discussion about what can they do to make primers, and they settled on using potassium chlorate for now (and they definitely got enough chemistry going to be able to make styphnates a couple of years later, though I can't remember if that's actually mentioned). Chlorates are much easier to make than nitrates, and can be used for making ersatz gunpowder as well as primers, so maybe they did.
Your objection still holds, though, because it's part of one of that series's principal failings. Although, as whitroth says, most (though not all) of the individual gadgets and processes they describe do actually work and you can try them for yourself (and discover all the suboptimalities that they somehow aren't noticing...), the various interactions involved in having more than one or two people getting into those things are all fucked to the wide. Supply chains and stuff only work if you are a thoughtless enough reader not to automatically do Fermi estimates of how much they can put in, how much they need coming out, and how much they can transfer from in to out, and observe that nothing even remotely adds up. You also have to ignore anomalies such as this bit as described does actually work now, but it didn't two years ago, which was when they needed it to.
The series does vary a lot from book to book because there are several different authors and some of them are much better writers than others. Some of the glitches you find are obviously the result of the difficulties of maintaining consistency between lots of people writing different lumps of the story, which I don't find too hard to overlook, but the ones which are really obvious but they just haven't tried to address them are more annoying, and there are occasional books where the whole thing is just bloody stupid (bombing around 17th-century Russia in an American V8 gas guzzler with totally fucked steering and a magic fuel tank, being a rude prick to all the nobles who all react with "oh, isn't he cute"...)
I would buy an example just to be boggled :-)
Ireland has peat-fuelled power stations, and used to have peat-burning locomotives. (Some of which, as Greg will know, were... very individual machines.)
You're right. The examples I was thinking of came from the very early days after the event, and there was an excessive amount of shooting for the plausible supplies. Part of the issue is that nitrate collection was a manpower-intensive task when the source was dungpits.
627 - At least 90%... I think. I recently tried listening to a Scottish Opera performance of "The Gondoliers", and didn't last through the overture because the chorus were desperately concerned with hitting their notes and were ignoring their diction in the process of doing so.
632 - But ours go up to 12!
Re: '... too many people realised that the (intended) consequence of consolidating everyone's private and confidential medical data was the ability to sell it to Big Medicine.'
Thanks for the info!
Hopefully there's at least one country somewhere that's managed to keep their public health data secure and is able to use it ethically - for patient health/policy and medical/scientific research. (Some time ago I read that India has been trying to get all of their citizens registered onto their database: if someone is not enrolled, then they have no access to medical services. Not sure what the status of this is - COVID might have changed the timeline.)
It's really surprising that the countries don't see this as a very practical way to save money on healthcare: if they can track health, then it should be much easier to verify which new health policies/initiatives and newly licensed meds are working. And health spending is a pretty big chunk of most countries' budgets - even in the US. (Frankly, I can't think of any good reason to sell patient info to for-profits.)
JReynolds @603
Do you ever get that zincing feeling?
I think it's peat-fuelled power station singular at this point; two were refused permission to continue burning peat and shut down in 2020, and the remaining one (Edenderry) is much of the way through converting to burning biomass instead.
Re: G&S 'The Gondoliers'
Try this one - recorded some 40 years ago and it's the complete operetta.
'The Gondoliers' Stratford Festival Gilbert and Sullivan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7To1E2y5Aq0&ab_channel=AdamBrannon
G&S.... I have a CD around from the early sixties. They actually made a TV special of The Mikado. I saw it on tv, but the idiots did not save the videotape. The audio recording was saved. It was cut to 53 min - yes, that's how long a one-hour TV show was back then, not 38 min as it is now.
And in the role he was born to sing, the Lord High Executioner... Groucho Marx.
I have trouble believing it, with the curent composition of the supreme court.
I don't. A lot of Trump judicial nominees have been rated "Not Qualified" by the ABA, but this hasn't stopped Mitch McConnell and the Senate from confirming them... :-(
Ah, OK. I thought they had some idea of doing it less, but I thought they'd decided to not go as far as stopping doing it entirely (or expecting to).
regards "pop" music, so-called, that climbs to 99% [crap], for any period between 1900 & right now [...]
Allow me to put in a word for the Great American Songbook -- popular and theater music from ca. 1915-1950 (for the most part)-- music by composers and lyricists like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Richard Rogers, etc. Eminently singable melodies, sophisticated harmonies, witty lyrics, who could ask for anything more? Many of these tunes had an afterlife as jazz standards through the rest of the century, though I think that too is fading as jazz itself has become an ever more specialized genre of art music. It's an antiquarian interest, but it is good music and fun to play on the piano or otherwise.
As for more contemporary music, I will mostly go with downtempo, triphop, anything that works for fusion-dance venues (which are only just now starting to re-open around here in the SFBA after the obvious hiatus).
dbp
Tomatoes get no respect.
cough - "We Fruit Fetishists demand a fair crack of the whip!" ...
response ( small voice ) - "ooh! NOW you're talking!"
- from ISERTA, far too many years ago.
Pigeon @ 636
Well .. O V S Bullied was involved - what did you expect?
SFR & others
Regarding "G&S" ... there is a complete recording of "Yeomen of the Guard", done at the Proms, which is pure magic, if I can find the link. Try "iPlayer 2012" conducted by (Dame) J Glover, who is a friend-of-a-friend.
Magnificent.
My son was in Montessori when I first moved to TX. It's for little kids, pre-kindergarden.
It starts then, but also admits older children. Here's one that goes up to middle school (which is just below high school):
https://www.montessoripensacola.com
Over a decade ago I was doing a project with someone who taught at a Montessori school. I swung by her school to pick up her part after work, and was buzzed in to a facility with more security than my bank. While I was waiting for her in the teacher's room I read the list of rules and principles of the school on the wall. Most of them (10/13) related to things like teachers not badmouthing the school, discouraging parents from changing schools, etc. It looked like what you'd expect from a corporate head office, not what you'd expect at a school supposedly focused on students as individuals. I was admittedly underwhelmed. Also discovered that despite the high tuition (4-5 times the per-student grant public schools got) the teachers were paid less than half of what I was paid and had longer workdays (mandatory before/after-school programs so parents could drop kids off early and pick them up late, which the school charged for but didn't pay teachers for).
The school owners were raking it in…
Why is it so hard to find an air conditioning unit that would fit on a car and run off of solar cells when the engine is not running?
Seems to me there are thousands of dog lovers in the U.S. who would buy it so they could take their dogs along & not have to worry about the car over-heating if they had to leave the dog to run into the grocery store.
Make it so it would fit on top of a roof rack and have fold out shades to keep the vehicle out of the direct sun so the A/C wouldn't have to work as hard to keep the car cool enough for the pet to be safe.
if Marjorie Taylor Greene is prevented from running for re-election
I'd say she should be disqualified on one of two grounds: perjury or medical disability.
I mean, she's either lying under oath about not remembering, or she's got serious cognitive impairments that mean she shouldn't be trusted driving a vehicle, let alone the government.
(Yes, I know she remembers and is using this as a legal tactic, as well as a smirky f-you.)
There are some themes you probably need to understand with this line of speculation:
1) the concept you are looking for is "secondary use of medical records for research purposes"
2) it's not (necessarily) governed at the level of countries: the concerns you are talking about align with the concept of "healthcare jurisdictions". In Australia that's state level with a small number of special considerations at the federal level, which also (at least in theory) works on harmonising laws. I think it's mostly federal in the USA (HIPAA is the instrument that comes to mind... I sometimes encounter vendors who think aligning with HIPAA means they automatically pass the privacy requirements over here... sigh). In the UK it's Westminster-level simply because all the NHSs' lines of reporting meet there, I guess.
3) it's not "either-or", "black and white", binary or even a one dimensional continuum. The interactions between public health surveillance, privacy, record sharing and research are very complex. The WHO has a published set of guidelines about data gathering and ethics, the main principle being that if you want access to data the onus is on you to show that you will use it and that the thing you use it to do is a good thing. As an example, researchers today still use data from Nazi-era experiments in hypothermia (in which the subjects were essentially tortured to death): they justify doing so by citing this principle and arguing that making use of the data is a way to honour the victims.
4) it doesn't even align with "universal health care": it's just as much a thing in the USA as anywhere else. I don't know what it is, but I can say confidently there is a process for gaining access to customer medical data from (for instance) Kaiser Permanente for research purposes. It might be prolonged and arduous, and involve aggregation and/or de-indentification, but one undoubtedly exists. There's probably something about it in HIPAA (something you can chase up yourself :)).
what DO you call optimistic science fiction?
I call it "optimistic science fiction".
Seriously, every fashion doesn't need a unique name.
Joe Clark was a good chap. A scrappy fighter, but honest to a fault. Supported women's rights in a constituency that believed in "traditional" gender roles far more than they do today.
He'd make a good choice.
universal healthcare also automatically had universal healthcare record keeping
The Dunedin Study is worth looking at, but it is not an example of the extension of universal healthcare, it's a separate thing.
To be useful those studies need a lot more than "if someone happens to visit a doctor". The Australian eHealth trhing changes its name more often than punks change trousers, but it is sort of an attempt to allow some of the tracking you're thinking about. Mostly it's an attempt to save lives by making medical records available to emergency rooms (the medical view) and save money by tracking resource use (the government view).
We have similar legal restrictions to the US HIPPO system in Australia, and fortunately medical research doesn't count for any of the bypass laws AFAIK.
kiloseven @ 500: Nojay wrote in part:
I view a 95% risk reduction as being more than "knocking off a few percentage points".
Don't know if it was other gamers' hygenic practices, the three Moderna jabs, or the 95% risk reduction provided by my $25 respirator, but I emerged from the aformentioned plague mixmaster sans COVID-19, as per post-con testing, despite a risk profile similar to that of OGH.
But, then, the convention management was very diligent at ventilating whenever possible, encouraging safety as much as possible, allowing masklessness only in spaces they did not control (i.e., restaurant), and in the Hospitality suite (which was beverage-only, no food, a very major departure from years past, as GameStorm and Orycon historically really put on the feedbag). You could not even reach Registration/Pre-Reg without first having your proof of vaccination scrutinized and acquiring The Purple Wristband Circlet Of Safety.
As noted at https://microcovid.org and explained in https://www.microcovid.org/paper/14-research-sources#masks here's your risk reduction when wearing various mask types:
Your Risk
Reduction Mask type
none Thin single layer cloth
33% Multilayer cloth mask
50% Surgical mask or cloth mask with filter insert
67% N95, KN95, FFP2
88% Sealed N95 respirator
95% P100 respirator
Since it's a Science Fiction Con, why not go whole hog and get you a surplus space suit à la RAH "Have Space Suit—Will Travel"?
You two are clearly in zinc with each other.
It was cut to 53 min - yes, that's how long a one-hour TV show was back then
In America. In Britain a one hour programme was one hour. (According to my parents, anyway. I haven't actually watched the telly in England, so don't know firsthand.
When DVDs first came out I knew someone who made crazy efforts to get British DVDs of BBC programmes, rather than American DVDs of the same programme, because the American versions had been cut to provide room for advertisements and the DVDs had those cut versions rather than the original version.
"(Frankly, I can't think of any good reason to sell patient info to for-profits.)"
It's the Tories. The last word is the only reason they need.
We've already got their shitey system for doing appointments and repeat prescriptions over the internet, instead of just using email or something else simple, for which there is a page or two that blithers about how it regards your privacy as the most important thing ever no honest it does, and absolute reams of documentation telling random greedy wankers exactly what they have to do to include it in their own websites so they can punt shit to people based on what they do with it, including suggestions of extra ideas for nasty things to do that they might not have thought of otherwise. The patient records system that's been postponed was just the same thing only ten times more so and with more deliberate holes in it. It's the standard Tory principle that the more opportunities they can create for parasitic arseholes to skim money out of public services the better things will be.
As an example, researchers today still use data from Nazi-era experiments in hypothermia (in which the subjects were essentially tortured to death): they justify doing so by citing this principle and arguing that making use of the data is a way to honour the victims.
One of my great-aunts, who was an 'experimental subject' but survived the Nazis, reportedly agreed with using the data.
My take on punk as punk was that the existing filtering system for extracting pop music from the morass worked fairly well. Yes, there was and still is a great deal of minimally talented noise in the punk scene. But there are also both really old original punks like Wire and brand new ones, most of whom will never get out of the garage or squat they play in now.
I still fondly recall bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Jesus and Mary Chain, and random songs like "American Idiot" that have definite punk roots under their pop sensibilities. Albeit once you're in the Albert Hall with a symphony orchestra your claims to being punk might be more aesthetic than philosophical.
*Also, I'm not entirely joking about managing peat. like this? https://www.moorwissen.de/en/paludikultur/imdetail/torfmooskultivierung.php.*
Ah, there's a useful word, paludikultur, aka paludiculture, which in wikipedia is "wet agriculture and forestry on peatlands". Good to know people are already working on it. It's more than just growing sphagnum for harvest. The trick is to keep the peat from getting oxidized and blowing carbon into the air that way, going anoxic and bubbling methane, or drying out and burning.
Actually doing paludiculture, though, is much trickier. Cultivating intact peatlands degrades them (carbon going into the air), so what they're talking about apparently is creating managed wetlands and using them to both sequester carbon and to produce products ranging from cranberries to reeds to sphagnum, while (importantly!) avoiding the negative consequences that result in blown carbon.
Anyway, it looks a bit like permaculture, a scattering of traditional, non-disruptive paludiculture-adjacent practices, coupled with a bunch of ecologists and agronomists trying to figure out how to make it work in more contexts.
Fun stuff. Thanks again!
I still like the idea of "Bogmasters save civilization," and cranberries becoming an annoyingly ubiquitous edible in the 21st Century, because we need there to be moar bogs! (extra points for knowing how much BS could be packed into this by a certain marketing giant in the US).
Yes, PCEHR which became My Health Record is a solution for record sharing and isn't really useful for secondary use, mostly by design. Most people only heard about it when the fascist bully boys^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcurrent federal government switched from its designed-in opt-in consent model to an opt-out model, based 100% on spurious advice from the sort of stakeholders you probably don't want to be influential in this stuff. So it's currently synonymous with "government overreach, privacy-defiling monsters, anti-trans aaarghhh" and this means it's less available for the communities it will benefit most (older people, indigenous people, people with chronic conditions). Sighissimo.
The worst part is that it really is anti-trans, anti-indigenous etc, and that is by design. More accurately, it was designed by the usual well-meaning white folk who managed to avoid adjusting it in response to concerned expressed by various communities. OTOH much the same can be said of the medical system in general, and I mean no disrespect for the people in that system trying their best to make it otherwise.
From my PoV as a consumer it's almost completely useless, I have yet to attend a GP who has managed to pull up my records using that system (I GP hop because I visit so rarely that remembering where I went last time is hard, and the odds of the GP I saw still being there is low... almost as low as the odds of them remembering me).
But I'm sure it has improved since I worked on it, and will continue to improve until at some point in the future it will work reasonably well... just in time to be replaced by a completely new, incompatible system :)
We have similar legal restrictions to the US HIPPO system in Australia,
Actually it's HIPPA but I like your spelling. It sort of fits with the amount of paperwork required to meet HIPPA. Initial / sign this 6 page form in 23 places. And yes while it looks like the form you did yesterday (or an hour ago) OUR SYSTEM requires OUR FORM.
My fav is HIPPA doesn't allow email of anything detailed at almost any level. Because the wrong person my intercept it or just read it at a shared computers. But FAXing is fine of course because it is a point to point human unreadable stream of bits. Except these days most "FAXes" (including those to and from medical facilities) go via an attached PDF in an email.
But changing this would likely open up a huge can of worms that if not touched can be safely ignored. Schrödinger would be proud/sad?
To me there are obvious communities who should (probably, depending) steer clear of it. DV survivors, especially where the abusive ex is a healthcare worker of some sort, or has a position of power over someone who is. Trans people for similar reasons. In some by not all circumstances, mental health consumers (the paper on this subject I wrote for my masters was about mental health information privacy law, but that is a disparate mess even without thinking about electronic records).
In my mind, indigenous communities, questions of identity aside (the concept of unique, unchanging personal identity is problematic in traditional communities, and that's a challenge for healthcare in general not just record sharing), admittedly mostly through being a large overlap with the "chronic conditions" community, get more benefit than dis-benefit by using and working with the thing.
It's been pretty useful for me. I try not to change GPs often because continuity of care is an important driver of good outcomes if your anything les than perfectly healthy. When I do it's because I've got the hump with the old one for some reason. And the last time I did, when the new GP practice asked for my records from the old one, they basically said "we haven't got any". See why this is almost a perfect retrospective justification for my decision to dump them. Oh that and the GP I was seeing becoming a partner in the clinic, then the clinic being acquired by Smart Clinics, meh. Anyhow, my current GP could and did find all my recent pathology results in MHR. Sometimes the previous GP had helpfully ticked the "don't upload to MHR" box on the request and I had crossed it out and written in "please DO upload". It's just a pity it doesn't go back far enough for a full history and I'm going to need to start from scratch on some stuff. Oh well.
The point is that some of the reasons various privacy advocates put forward as "con" against the MHR are actually "pro" when you work it through properly with real life examples. There are still plenty of negative examples, but they do not apply to everyone.
Actually it's HIPPA
Actually... It's the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
The common confusion of HIPPA and HIPAA by nominees and award winners is a running joke on the Herman Cain Awards Reddit, to the point where there's a bot that corrects commentators who quote the headliners claiming HIPPA this and HIPPA that.
Perhaps the gap in time to the Boltzmann Brain epoch can be bridged by iron stars, forming after the age of black holes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk
Again, I cannot recommend Isaac Arthur's mind expanding videos enough.
<... Barret MUST RECUSE HERSELF ...
The Supreme Court is above any mortal rules. If you don't believe me, just ask them... :-/
One of the funnier parts of Reddit is "best of legal advice" and if you do a search for hippo you get a whole bunch of humour.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=reddit+legal+advice+hippo
I can't bring myself to do more than laugh, hopefully with you rather than at you.
David L said: Her point was that for many of the lower end of the scale small time criminals they don't seem to comprehend there even are rules
It's an out of context problem, far from confined to small time criminals. Try to explain to a politician that there are rules of physics that can't be negotiated with to find a compromise that's acceptable to everyone, even if no one really likes it. They don't even comprehend that there are such rules.
Try to explain to a scientist that there are rules for rulers that mean the rulers are unable to include reality in their decision making process because if they do then they'll be replaced by someone who doesn't. They might nod along to the explanation but they won't really get it deep down.
still seem to be some bits around
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T83W3rgQuXQ
As I live on an island in the South Pacific, I suspect this is an empty threat as I do not believe your steam powered dirigible has the range (based on other recent discussions/comments here), to collect me and travel back to then drop me in the North Atlantic.
It gets the steam from a nuclear kettle
It sits down on the sea to pick up seawater for ballast
Also electrolyses it to get more hydrogen
(trails clouds of chlorine)
Don't put your telescope away yet...
Actually, that sounds kinda interesting. But still wouldn't happen as Aotearoa New Zealand is officially nuclear free (see https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1987/0086/latest/DLM115116.html) so our government wouldn't allow it in/over the country as its against the law here!
Well, to the scientist such rules are bloody stupid and therefore can't be considered valid or worth taking any notice of even if they do exist. (To an engineer they're even worse.)
There is, however, at least one recorded case of a politician who did understand the nature of physical laws - that Danish bloke with the amusing name (even if everyone who repeated the story afterwards got the point wrong). So perhaps it is possible to successfully educate them, if you use the right method. A modification of the original Danish demonstration, involving anchoring them to a bit of seabed that is their own height below the next high water level, ought to solve the problem one way or another.
Well, to the scientist such rules are bloody stupid and therefore can't be considered valid or worth taking any notice of even if they do exist. (To an engineer they're even worse.)
Not necessarily. Talk to a systems engineer. Best summed up as my favourite line from Star Cops:
"People are part of the system. It's dangerous to forget that."
Tell me again about the minimum population required to support a bunch of nuclear power plants... on a collection of active fault lines... at the bottom of the world.
I suggest that Japan isn't doing all that well and they're world-renowned for their high quality engineering and their large number of people. Aotearoa doesn't really have either, and it's largely a circular problem. Small number of really bright engineers trying to survive in a small population = small market, a long way from anywhere.
So if NZ wanted nuclear power it would really need to be imported as a stand-alone unit. But from where? Who exactly do we want to give the ability to turn our electricity off, and who do we trust not to fuck up a nuclear plant a long way from them? The perfidious French? The fickle USA? Maybe the reliable British?
Then there's the problem of low electricity demand. 5GW of hydro is ~80% of the total, so a single 1GW plant would almost eliminate everything else... when it was working. So the gas plants or whatever the backup was would become even more expensive to keep around.
"So if NZ wanted nuclear power it would really need to be imported as a stand-alone unit."
And then the fuel would also have to be imported (by sea, can't run trucks across the Tasman, let alone the Pacific). Nice little opportunity for supply chain shenanigans, from cock-up to blackmail, there.
Wouldn't be a problem for fusion. Let me know when you've got it working.
JHomes
...(trails clouds of chlorine)...
Chlorine? Surely you mean oxygen. Otherwise you have to deal with all that sodium... :-)
Who exactly do we want to give the ability to turn our electricity off, and who do we trust not to fuck up a nuclear plant a long way from them? The perfidious French? The fickle USA? Maybe the reliable British?
Buy a nuclear-powered icebreaker from Russia, obviously. Everybody knows you can trust Putin... :-)
I suggest that Japan isn't doing all that well and they're world-renowned for their high quality engineering and their large number of people.
i dunno, the fukushima buildings could have been tsunami-proofed for pocket change if someone hadn't been overcome by a fit of complacency, and earthquakes don't have much effect on meter-thick rc walls unless u carelessly plop the thing directly on a faultline
japanese high-quality engineering isn't necessarily evenly distributed
Wouldn't be a problem for fusion. Let me know when you've got it working.
There's an election on in Oz at the moment. I reckon if we get some of the really dense politicians in one place then bang their heads together really hard...
This is not a meaningful problem. Nuclear fuel is shelf-stable, and so cheap compared to the reactor that if this an actual worry you have, you can simply buy fuel for sixty years of operation along with the reactor. Eh.. doing so right now might not be well dvised, as U is pretty high, but It is pretty common practice to have a decade of fuel on hand to sit out price spikes.
There are a whole lot of issues with "we only have one" that might make it more economical to run an extension cord across the Tasman and buy solar electricity from Australia. With so much hydro NZ is pretty much immune to "but when is it available" and could even go for pumped hydro if we got really silly.
But if we're living in any kind of economic-based reality we'd just build more wind and solar, possibly even going big on pumped hydro. Cheaper, easier, and possibly even safer (building any big energy store on geologically exciting ground is hard to do safely, even if it's just a big pile of rock).
I ran across an article that reminded me of a saying: "always consider that the outcome of a plot may have been the intended result all along".
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/4/26/2094225/-A-terrifying-look-into-Putin-s-possible-motivation-leading-to-the-invasion-of-Ukraine
That is actually a pretty strong theory, not just for Putins Folly, but also for the "Christians" in USA trying to implement Sharia-law and boomers general tendency to pull the ladder up behind all over the western world.
Moz said: There are a whole lot of issues with "we only have one" that might make it more economical to run an extension cord across the Tasman and buy solar electricity from Australia.
I'd love to see a bidirectional link. The Morocco - UK cable I mentioned earlier is 2.3 times further than the distance between the east Australian grid and the Aotearoa grid. The same effort could mean 9 GW capacity spread over 5 cables. (would need an upgrade to basslink) The potential is there for a grid that's under sun from 5:40 am to 11:30 pm New Zealand time in the summer which might mean very low demand on the hydro for much of the year. Chance to export to Australia some of the time. Would be great for both countries.
One potential problem is that power cables are very much thicker, stiffer, metallic and magnetic than fiber cables.
I dont have the precise geophysical situation between NZ and AU in my brain, but I would not be very surprised if well informed geophysists would start to laugh uncontrollably if you ask them to plot a tracé for such a power-cable.
One particular troublesome phenomena is that many geological fault-lines are highly piezo-electric and will generate very high energies during earthquakes.
For a HVDC cable, that would have two effects.
The normal dissipation through salt-water would generate a magnetic field strong enough to shift HVDC cables around via magnetic coupling.
But worse, the landing inverter could be exposed to very high energy potentials relative to local ground, something the semiconductors are not that good at handling.
(A bridge engineer, specialized in crossing the the Mississippi, told me that until they added insulation, expansion-joints in steel bridges would sometimes weld themselves during even very minor earthquakes.)
The interesting excursion to this line of reasoning is that Putin must be briefed on climate change and pretty thoroughly at that, must be almost as pessimistic on climate as many of us here. Hence an urgency to secure a legacy, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, while there is still any left. Maybe this article explains why he doesn't care that it won't last long.
geological fault-lines are highly piezo-electric and will generate very high energies during earthquakes
As I understand it, the plate boundary mostly passes through Aotearoa, so there's no problem with getting a cable to Aotearoa from Australia without crossing one. Once there, something else.
and boomers general tendency to pull the ladder up behind all over the western world.
I see this on all side of the political debate. MY WAY IS RIGHT and I must ensure it is THE WAY going forward.
Around here at the local level zoning fights are all about people 10 years older than me (mid 70s and up) wanting to keep the young folks from "ruining our city". Things like more apartment high rises, mass transit, less pretending cars and suburbs are the ultimate way to live, etc... (He waives at H.)
But yes, I see this at all levels of society. The in power minority wants to force the new folks coming along to do things THEIR WAY.
The various churches / denominations in the US are creating all kinds of havoc trying to do this. But it is more than just the conservative religious. It is everyone in a power group.
Or else.
OK. Now it gets real for the west.
News reports are that Russia has cut natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria until they start paying for it in Rubles. Poland says they can deal with the cutoff.
But what will Germany do?
This could get interesting fast. For various definitions of interesting.
What near term options do these countries have other than turning down the thermostats? At least this didn't happen in February.
Germany is saying it's not a problem. They're building a floating LNG terminal that should be operational within 9 months. They've found alternatives for the oil and coal.
"Berlin could handle an embargo on Russian oil imports, Germany’s Climate and Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Tuesday, suggesting the country could end its dependence on Moscow within “days.”
Habeck, speaking at a press conference in Warsaw, said that Germany had managed to slash its reliance on Russian oil by two-thirds in recent weeks, reducing the share of imports from 35 percent before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to 12 percent now."
So maybe they're going to be in strife, but they're saying it's fine.
Forgot the link. https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-says-russia-oil-embargo-would-be-manageable/
Weird, isn't it that France doesn't seem to be worrying quite as much as everyone else about losing access to Russian gas and oil. I wonder why?
The nuclear power salesmen are racking up the air miles across Europe right now -- the Koreans have a turnkey six-reactor plant on offer to Poland based on their very successful project at Barakah in the UAE while Bechtel is linking up with indigenous Polish industrial partners to put forward a two-reactor project with more to come. All paper at the moment but the opportunities are there.
What we're not hearing in Europe is that renewables will save us and that nasty Man in Moscow can go fly a kite. Instead we're scrambling to import more coal, oil and gas from anywhere that will supply us at any price, just about. I fully expect to see boats loaded with Australian coal turning up dockside in Bremen any day now.
On the punk movement, from the 70s onwards, the common factor to everything (except businesses misusing it for marketing of course) is that it's a DIY ethos. If you read the accounts of people who started bands in that first wave, their lightbulb moment was that they didn't need to have been formally trained or approved by those who went before, they could just pick up instruments and have a go. Obviously, in most cases the results were terrible. But some of these people were actually talented and would not have been given opportunity to use that talent in the way things worked before. It results in people doing things that haven't been done by those who have been taught how to do things, because they hadn't been taught not to. Mostly there were good reasons not to and the reults were awful, but occasionally something wonderful and new emerged. By keeping going they learned what could be done with their instruments, rather than just rearranging the things their teachers knew how to do.
This applied doubly with the new instruments that emerged, once they got away from trying to make electronic versions of existing instruments and realised that there was a whole slew of other interesting things they could do. Again, a lot of it was terrible and as discussed required serious medication to tolerate, but there were those who produced worthwhile new stuff. Those who get the publicity and the popular attention are not reliably the ones with the best product.
It's just the same with innovation in other areas - you need people who haven't learned not to think outside the conventional box to get remarkable results. So for me the "*punk" genres are about people who are using things in ways that were not intended to produce results which surprise the systems they are within.
Interesting.
Apparently Germany has changed their "crying the blues" a bit.
But 9 months is a long time to go without 40% of the country's natural gas supply. Especially if it is the main source of heating in homes. I wonder if this is also what is used for more residential (and commercial) hot water?
And LNG terminals come in two parts. Sending and receiving. I thought, when I read about it a month or so ago, there also wasn't enough LNG shipping terminals to meet Europe's needs.
Well, as I said, at least it is not still February.
Moaning here for a minute. Got 2 vaccines (not Covid) yesterday evening. Arm starting to hurt. I just have to remember about situations in Ukraine to remind myself, no big deal.
The IEA report in 2020 said that a quarter of German domestic and premises heating was oil and kerosene. The major source for that fuel would have been Russia too.
he Koreans have a turnkey six-reactor plant on offer to Poland based on their very successful project at Barakah in the UAE
Yes. Great but here's the time line per wikipedia.
March 2011 Ground breaking July 2012 Construction started September 2014 First safety related concrete pour 2018 First unit declared complete March 2020 fuel loading complete August 2020 electricity generaton March / April 2021 commercial operation
So let's compress this waaaaaaay down on an emergency basis. We're still likely looking at 3 years.
Maybe the US fires up some to be retired and sitting in port nuclear subs and ships and parks them in some European ports and runs some cables to the docks.
Mods: Please kill off the previous comment with the messed up formatting.
he Koreans have a turnkey six-reactor plant on offer to Poland based on their very successful project at Barakah in the UAE
Yes. Great but here's the time line per wikipedia.
March 2011 Ground breaking
July 2012 Construction started
September 2014 First safety related concrete pour
2018 First unit declared complete
March 2020 fuel loading complete
August 2020 electricity generaton
March / April 2021 commercial operation
So let's compress this waaaaaaay down on an emergency basis. We're still likely looking at 3 years.
Maybe the US fires up some to be retired and sitting in port nuclear subs and ships and parks them in some European ports and runs some cables to the docks.
Another thing I forgot to include, there's a differnce between "Uneducated" and "Ignorant". The first punks were not ignorant of music, they loved it and were fans of a wide range of earlier bands. Playing the songs they loved was how they learned to play their instruments, rather than being taught how by classical musicians. Many were from backgrounds where music lessons or purchase of instruments were not an option for them as children. There was also a lot of sharing of knowledge between punks, some of whom had been trained so there was a synthesis of sharing techniques and challenging preconceptions.
Most changes in "the rules" for anything flow from someone questioning why it should be so and there being no good reason. If you question everything, of course there will be good reasons for a lot of it but there will be things where the original reasons no longer apply but people keep doing it. Such questioning is vital to keep things working well. Now if I could think of a way to ensure that bad actors didn't keep questioning things that have good reasons but they don't personally like......
The IEA report in 2020 said that a quarter of German domestic and premises heating was oil and kerosene. The major source for that fuel would have been Russia too.
But in general liquid energy (not LNG) is much easier to source somewhere else compared to NG or LNG. Not trivial but lots of existing bits of supply chain can be used or re-positioned. Having a tanker truck or train take a new route can be a pain but isn't anything like building new pipelines. Biggest headache that I can see is adjusting refineries to deal with crude from new sources. Those things are tuned to the mix of the crude oil being fed into them. I read that the Russian crude was nicknamed Russian sludge by people in the business.
And this last point may be why the US was buying so much of it. We have all those refineries on the Gulf coast designed to process similar crap from Venezuela.
But to my point. NG is harder to replace in a hurry. Compared to other things.
David L Pipelines from Norway, imported LNG from "The Gulf" & .. "we" have the Summer & Autumn to adjust. Putin is clearly off his head in some way or another, & maybe more than one way, too.
{ See also Transnistria/Moldova }
13 days to 9th May "wictory" parade & counting.
Any odds on a false-flag nuke inside Ukraine?
Oho-oh ... False-flag attack on Transnistria, probably.
As I said. It's great to be dealing with this in April and not February.
But the real question is "base load" requirements. So that people don't die from lack of hot water and/or heating. Moving into summer helps.
But while there is currently a shared feeling of most everyone willing to sacrifice to help Ukraine, what happens if most of the steel and/or auto plants across a country have to close due to lack of energy? At what point do people say, screw it, give me my job back and tell Ukraine to fight it out on their own.
Aren't heating bills in the UK already off the charts high? How high can they go before people start to throw a fit?
Nuclear power can't save Europe from energy starvation in the short-term but it's been a wake-up call to a lot of nations who were muddling along pretending that "green" technologies would be The Future!!! while sucking down gas and oil (and in Germany's case, lignite too) in great amounts behind the Green curtain.
Germany has spent the thick end of a trillion Euros building out wind and solar over the past decade and suddenly they're facing an energy crisis due to external factors. The good thing, I've been told repeatedly, is that extra wind and solar can be added quickly and incrementally to a grid unlike nuclear, but the Germans aren't talking about building an extra ten thousand wind turbines over the next six months or adding a few square kilometres of PV panels by autumn, instead they're suggesting they can build fossil fuel importation facilities in a hurry instead. Let's just hope they don't cut any safety corners or they could kill thousands of people. Fossil fuels are dangerous.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-61216157
The time to build reactors en masse was twenty years ago, that opportunity is gone. Building them now might avoid or at least ameliorate the next energy crisis twenty years from now.
No. People are part of the system, but the 'rules' are NOT like physical laws - they are conventions and custom (habit)! The point is that they can be changed, with considerable difficulty and not quickly, but it CAN be done. Claiming that they are unchangeable (like scientific limits) is quite simply bollocks, and is an attempt to hide "I am not prepared to tackle this one" under the veil of "this is impossible".
David L said: Biggest headache that I can see is adjusting refineries to deal with crude from new sources
I didn't realise, but reading that article I linked to earlier... It seems that Russia owns the oil refineries in Germany and surprisingly they have a strong preference to only refine russian oil and not any other. So it might mean a very heavy handed "adjustment".
"The time to build reactors en masse was twenty years ago, that opportunity is gone. Building them now might avoid or at least ameliorate the next energy crisis twenty years from now."
The primary problem with nuclear power is that it is not even close to being cheap, much less being competitive.
It wasn't 60 years ago, it wasn't 40 years ago, it wasn't 20 years ago, it isn't now, and from all that we know, it wont be in 20 years time.
How much are you willing to pay for your energy, just to satisfy your SciFi dream ?
After many discussions, I think Nojay has answered that question, often and vehemently. He's willing to abandon reality. Which is quite a high price. He's convinced and strongly argued that nuclear is cheaper and more practical than any other source of energy.
[B]ut the Germans aren't talking about building an extra ten thousand wind turbines over the next six months or adding a few square kilometres of PV panels by autumn, instead they're suggesting they can build fossil fuel importation facilities in a hurry instead.
I think that one of the problems with gas especially is that in Germany many things, like warming up houses or cooking food, are built to use gas at the point of usage. That is, they need the gas to go to all the houses. (Well, not all, but a substantial portion of them.) This makes it difficult and expensive to move to electricity generation by other means. Doing that in six months before next autumn is probably out of the question.
In contrast, for example in Finland, we mostly use electricity for stovetops, and not gas. Warming up houses is a different thing here, we still burn (Russian!) coal for much of the district heating, too, but the movement away from that is well underway. I'm not sure how big a portion of single houses are oil-warmed, though. I hope no new ones are.
Doing everything with electricity and just changing the generators when necessary would probably have been the best solution for today when building the system, but was not then, so it was not done.
Somebody else probably knows more about this, please correct me!
They're actually building an undersea Morocco-UK HVDC line?
That's bonkers. It'd almost certainly be cheaper to just go underwater for the Straits of Gibraltar and the English Channel, and to pay for existing grid interconnects in Morocco/Algeria/Spain/France/UK. Where the cables are overland and accessible for maintenance.
OGH said: That's bonkers.
Yes, it probably is, and it's probably that way due to rules that have nothing to do with the physics.
Or, as Mr Gibson says, "The street finds its own uses".
Gas is cheap hence it's better to burn cheap gas than build expensive nuclear power plants.
(War breaks out in Ukraine, European gas supplies become expensive and unstable).
Help! We're running out of energy! What happened to our endless supplies of cheap gas! Let's run around trying to import more cheap gas! Lots and lots of cheap gas! Where is it? Energy must be cheap, we deserve it for being Green!
(War in Ukraine settles down, gas supplies become cheaper and more reliable at least temporarily).
Gas is cheap hence it's better to burn cheap gas than build expensive nuclear power plants.
Step and repeat. Sigh...
France saw this happen during the Energy Crisis of 1973 when a war in the Middle East meant oil supplies were curtailed and energy prices went through the roof. They spent the next fifteen years weaning themselves off the fossil-fuel teat by building lots and lots of "horribly expensive" nuclear reactors, so expensive they generate non-carbon electricity at half the cost of France's lignite-burning neighbour, Green Germany. That forethought and planning means they're not thrashing around, desperate to source fossil-fuel energy at any price from anywhere the way most of the gas-dependent European states are.
Not having energy is a shitload more expensive than having it. The ticket price of nuclear energy is generally quite stable which has value in itself but that's never factored in as a cost-benefit by most short-term thinkers who only see the limited-time bargain price of fossil fuels today and are shocked when that price increases by 3000% overnight (which happened in Texas a couple of years ago).
It's exactly the sort of thing Brexit was intended to encourage. After all, the UK does have to take steps to maintain its energy supplies during the forthcoming economic war with the EU :-) The claim will be that it won't fall foul of the delays and bureaucracy caused by making arrangements with the EU, er, France and Spain.
But it's still a hell of a lot less bonkers than covering much of the south of England with solar panels!
Re: '... maintain its energy supplies during the forthcoming economic war with the EU'
Whatever the renewable/alternate energy source it needs to be secure from attacks. (No points for guessing the hacker.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-wind-energy-sector-hit-in-wave-of-hacks-11650879000?mod=tech_featst_pos1
Maybe we should keep a list of all of the different types of 'weapons' being used in the RU-UA (hybrid) war:
a) Military - machines (death/injury/destruction of property and infrastructure), men (torture, rape, hostage taking, imprisonment/war camps?)
b) Finance - incl. crypto*
c) Energy - direct (pipelines/shipments) and indirect (hacks)
d) Food - wheat
Question for the folks familiar with international law, NATO terms, etc.: Does this hack constitute an attack on NATO?
*I'm not seeing anywhere as many 'buy crypto' emails in my spam filters since the Internet blockade went up between Russia and NATO-friendly nations --- geez, whodathunkit.
On the subject of marsh cultivation, surely people should be looking at salt marshes! On a related note, carbon capture by marine algae:
https://newatlas.com/environment/brilliant-planet-algae-carbon-sequestration/
As for Putin, I believe I said something similar to that article on here a while ago. It makes perfect sense to me.
Perhaps time to discuss energy storage, I still think it'd take an expletive load of it to wholly allow wind & solar to replace methane & coal, but it seems more possible now than it did 20 years ago. I t might be getting near the time to build Flow batteries large enough for serious load leveling, AIUI, this has been done at lab scale with chemicals less toxic than a sulphuric acid based electrolyte. In regions that have class warfare battle sites there should little shortage of defunct manufacturing facilities with existing grid connections, ideal for locating an energy storage facility. A low capacity possibilty for a small coastal community would be an elderly diesel-electric sub, serving as a combination floating museum and peak load leveler, with combination Docent/battery tenders, after all, a lead acid battery also has a post-peak capacity afterlife.
On GPS jamming in Ukraine:
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/04/after-success-in-ukraine-nro-to-pitch-satellite-firms-on-radio-frequency-geolocation/
In particular,
https://sites.breakingmedia.com/uploads/sites/3/2022/04/220426_hawkeye_ukraine_map.png
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My read on Germany wrt. dependence on Russian energy sources is they're saying "good doggie" while backing away hastily and reaching for a stick. This would explain their half-assed approach to arming Ukraine -- it's all very well for the UK or USA to throw missiles into the mix, but Germany (not to mention Poland or Moldova or Bulgaria) are the folks who stand to shiver in the dark (or be on the receiving end of missile strikes).
9 months is a long time to go without 40% of the country's natural gas supply. Especially if it is the main source of heating in homes
You missed the climate effect. Germany gets western continental interior weather. Very cold in winter (snow from November through March), but hot summers and tolerable spring/autumn.
Upshot: that gas domestic heating spends about six months switched off from April through October (then runs for another six months). Putin pitched his hissy fit at the best possible time for Germany to wean itself off his energy heroin.
Sulphuric acid isn't toxic, isn't even particularly corrosive at battery strengths, and even quite serious leaks are only locally harmful. It's the metals in the battery that are more problematic.
I saw that one too, and was amazed at how much it explained about modern politics, not just Putin, but it was a very depressing read!
True, to a point, but I'd strongly suggest not wearing cotton clothing you're fond of when dealing with lead-acid batteries.
Yes. In my youth I discovered carrying a brand new out of the box battery by holding it against the front of my jeans...
Well after the wash there were a few fragments of cloth in the area where the battery had been held.
This was back when a "sealed" lead acid battery was a big deal. You typically bought one dry and filled it with distilled water.
This is probably the worst of what Russia has done in invading Ukraine - making Germany, of all places, increase their investment in war! The number of ways THAT could go wrong... I shudder to think of it!
There are talking heads just now on US cable news saying:
What was he (Putin) thinking?
Poland can handle the gas shutoff. But he just told Germany they'd better get with it before he does it to them.
If I didn't know better (and maybe I don't) it seems like his real motive is to totally unite Europe against Moscow.
The US Government forced the West Germans post-war to continue universal military conscription as well as arming the new Bundeswehr (with 50% less Nazis than before!) to the teeth and pointing it East. For a long time it was just about impossible to throw a rock near the Inner German Border without it bouncing off an armoured vehicle nearby.
So if NZ wanted nuclear power it would really need to be imported as a stand-alone unit. But from where?
Pssst. Wanna buy a CANDU? :-)
Yup. I doubt that we will return to those days, though :-) Household bleach is similar. The one that I am paranoid about is caustic soda.
On the subject of marsh cultivation, surely people should be looking at salt marshes! On a related note, carbon capture by marine algae: https://newatlas.com/environment/brilliant-planet-algae-carbon-sequestration/
It's generally done under the rubric of salt marsh restoration. The general problems are:
--There isn't much in the way of salt marshes compared with peatlands glboally, mostly due to geography
--We've pretty much locked in a meter of sea level rise, and salt marshes are generally within 2 meters of mean high tide. Most of them will be underwater by the end of the century, and the trick is going to be keeping the sediments already in them from eroding.
Where we need to go:
--Mangroves. Yes, these are a version of salt marshes, but they have the added benefit of serious hurricane protection. Give up your farmed shrimp from the tropics and figure out how to finance those shrimp farms planting the mangroves back. Now.
--Seagrass meadows also sequester a lot of carbon, and are already underwater (note, they're not grasses)
--Algae farming (kelp, etc.) is also entirely possible in some spots and should be done more. It pulls in a lot of carbon. Where that carbon goes afterwards depends on what you do with the algae.
But in terms of huge carbon sinks, terrestrial soils and peatlands really are the big ones, bigger than terrestrial forests. In coming years, all versions of no-till gardening and farming are going to become normal, I'm afraid. That great pleasure, double-digging, really should be retired in favor of...well, figuring out which alternative works well enough on your patch.
Heating bills in the UK. I have oil central heating - the forward looking inhabitants of my town in the 1970s voted not to have natural gas. Oil delivery November GBP 513.11 Oil delivery January GBP 671.75 Oil delivery this week GBP 804.24 About 900 litres for each delivery.
It isn't impossible that this will start to be a major political issue in the UK by the time of the next general election, but I suspect the one after. A lot of farmland and some towns (e.g. Boston) are going to become salt marsh whether we want it or not.
https://www.bigissue.com/news/environment/new-map-shows-sea-levels-rising-across-uk/
Nylon clothing is worse. All those peptide linkages just go pop and you don't have to wait for after the wash. Gigantic holes separated by stringy shreds develop immediately, and all of a sudden instead of a manky old nylon shirt and trousers you find you're wearing the kind of outfit where all you have to do is change the labels and you can flog it on ebay as a 50 grand fashion item.
(One 1950s-era answer to the question of "how do I set myself up to weld without paying a year's wages for the kit" was a carbon arc torch with cables to run it off a car battery. What they didn't mention was that sometimes the battery explodes.)
We're not going to make any changes until we've lost a lot of real-estate, then everyone will panic. Can we start with Florida?
No. People are part of the system, but the 'rules' are NOT like physical laws - they are conventions and custom (habit)! The point is that they can be changed, with considerable difficulty and not quickly, but it CAN be done. Claiming that they are unchangeable (like scientific limits) is quite simply bollocks, and is an attempt to hide "I am not prepared to tackle this one" under the veil of "this is impossible".
Never said human considerations aren't unchangeable. They are, however, significant — especially when you don't control the entire system.
I was responding to Pigeon's assertion that to an engineer those rules were not worth taking notice of:
Well, to the scientist such rules are bloody stupid and therefore can't be considered valid or worth taking any notice of even if they do exist. (To an engineer they're even worse.)
A systems engineer doesn't just say "these conventions are bloody stupid so I'm going to ignore them". They take them into account when designing the system.
Consider an engineer designing a consumer drone, for example. Over much of the world drone (and other aircraft) are regulated based on their weight. For drones the lower limit is most commonly 250g: less than that and the regulatory requirements for licensing (of both drone and pilot) are much lower.
Pigeon's engineer who ignores bloody stupid conventions would ignore that limit because physically it doesn't make sense — a drone of 251 g is not suddenly much more dangerous than one that is 249 g. But an actual engineer will design the 249 g drone because that means the operators face less regulatory oversight, which is a selling point*.
Why 250 g? lower weight means less collateral damage when crashing, but why 250 g and not, say, 200 g? Any limit is somewhat arbitrary — Japan set their's at 200 g, for example — and a trade-off. Regulators selected 250 g, and engineers work within that framework when they design.
The same applies to things like voltage of electricity supplies, connectors, etc. — lots of arbitrary decisions and trade-offs are 'baked in' to the system. If you are designing a system from scratch you can ignore them and go with the best purely technical solution, but if you aren't then your design must work with the existing system or you have to change the system. Changing the system may be possible, but the cost required has to be factored into the design just as much as the materials cost.
*There's a reason the Mini series has been a money-maker for DJI. I bought the technically-inferior Mavic Mini a few years ago because it allowed me to fly in places where my much better Mavic 2 was illegal, and many other people made the same decision.
I agree with you there.
On a lighter note, thought I'd share this nice bit of snark:
https://newsthump.com/2022/04/27/man-in-huge-passport-queue-at-malaga-airport-claims-he-didnt-vote-to-leave-the-eu-to-be-treated-like-someone-from-outside-the-eu/
I am Not Happy with music where between the sound board decided that 11 on a scale of 10 is right, and the instruments on top of the singers, and the singers, let me say enunciation, and leave it at that.
This may not be relevant to you, but I recently happened onto a music theorist on Youtube who addresses, among other things, Why Does Metal Have To Be So Loud? The knowledge didn't make me love the genre any more but I understand more of the reasons.
Eh, no.
Germany learned valuable lessons from the previous century of war. (As did Japan and, to a lesser extent, Italy.)
It was the countries on the other side you need to worry about, especially the ones who thought they didn't need to learn or change anything.
My worry is a little more future-facing than this; that Germany will learn the wrong lessons from this war, impacting their behavior from say, 2030 onwards.
"It'd almost certainly be cheaper to just go underwater for the Straits of Gibraltar and the English Channel, and to pay for existing grid interconnects in Morocco/Algeria/Spain/France/UK. Where the cables are overland and accessible for maintenance."
There is not a lot of spare capacity north-south anywhere in EU, and EU is not going to sell what reserve capacity it has cheaply, least of all to UK.
This is also why the proposed UK-MA will not hug the french/spanish coast, but go well outside their jurisdiction: Both France and Spain have "taxes" on transport of electrons.
Regarding Florida, imagine future theme parks built on higher ground, which Florida conspicuously lacks. Given their Governor's desire to be more MAGA than anyone else, imagine theme parks under vast domes in the rust belt.
Oops, long before the current parks flood.
Know any literary agents who do sf, I ask, looking at the novel I'm trying to sell right now that I guarantee will piss off libertarians, GOPpers, and probably a lot of the milSF types.
Charlie is a better person than me to answer this question, but I absolutely would read this novel!
Caustic soda isn't as bad as all that. Of course you don't want to get it in your eyes, but as far as hands go I've had mine in solutions up to around 50% of it without problems (washing it off immediately afterwards). (And of course it is an ingredient in household bleach, at about 5% IIRC, to stabilise the hypochlorite.)
The interesting thing about it is that it usually comes in pure solid form, and has a very large heat of solution. The boiling point of a concentrated solution is also a long way above 100°C. So if you make up your solution the wrong way round you can have it melting through plastic vessels and giving you a flood of very hot, very concentrated solution, which I would be wary of getting my hands in. However it's not difficult to avoid that.
The reason this is interesting is not because of potential accidents but because it makes it a useful material for thermal energy storage that allows you to control the release rate. You can add more water bit by bit until it gets too dilute to work usefully and then recharge it by using your primary heat source to dry it out again. Conveniently, blowing very hot steam through it works, even though steam is water itself. It's also often convenient that it works at a much lower temperature than molten common salt, and doesn't need the semi-exotic ingredients that lower-melting-point salts like reactor coolants do.
Which brings us back to STEAM ENGINES and how to use them in tunnels with poor ventilation and possibly explosive atmospheres, or just with less hassle than all that coal stuff for shunting your factory yard. You have a caustic soda tank inside the boiler and direct the exhaust steam into it to produce heat and boil more water. It runs for several miles and then you squirt your factory's process steam supply through it to recharge. Up to a point you can actually have it producing more heat than it uses, so you get a much more useful discharge curve - flat or even rising - than the sags-from-the-start shape you get from plain hot mass. It's a shame that Fowler didn't have this idea for haunting the Metropolitan, instead of trying it with firebricks.
"Chlorine? Surely you mean oxygen. Otherwise you have to deal with all that sodium... :-)"
How much you get depends on the reaction conditions and the physical layout of the reaction vessel, but electrolysing sodium chloride solution always gives you some chlorine and can be made to give you lots of it. The oxygen and the sodium are quite happy to remain in the liquid and get very friendly with each other, and also with the remaining chlorine. So you end up with a mixture of sodium chloride, sodium hydroxide, and a series of chlorates which skews more and more towards the higher ones the longer you leave it going.
This is why leaky submarines have to worry about not gassing the crew, and it is also why governments interested in stopping terrorists making their own bombs in their sheds are wasting their time if they don't ban electricity and salt.
EC @738: "I agree with you there."
Come to that, so do I. This is why my reaction to VW's method of meeting emissions tests was "well of course they bloody did, so would I, what the fuck do you expect?"
What I was referring to was the concept of a political system which has a rule that people who take note of reality are booted in favour of people who don't. This is the same kind of rule as one which says that bare steel wires are an approved specification for a transatlantic telegraph cable: if you follow it you end up with a system that can't possibly work, so it is bloody stupid and if you want to design a system that does work you have to ignore it.
Here in BC we are an exporter of Natural gas (and coal, and oil), and about 90% of our energy is Hydro.
Still, most houses seem to be heated by gas furnaces. Ours is not, because my town didn't 'get gas' until about 20 years ago. We have a line to the house but it is capped, and I don't anticipate ever installing any gas appliances. Some recently released studies make this a certainty for our house: Link between gas stoves and asthma.
Our house is heated with electric baseboards combined with a wood-pellet burning stove. Said stove is a class A PITA, I've kept it limping along for years but the manufacturer went under a decade ago and parts are becoming expensive and difficult to source. When it finally dies I'll go with a heat pump system.
The carbon impact of wood pellet stoves is apparently neutral because 'renewable' (according to the marketing), and the cost of the pellets is minimal (~$400/annum). Noisy, fiddly stupid thing that it is.
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Link is borked, but are they making a blanket pronouncement based on "how many people with gas stoves also have asthma", or have they gone as far as actually inspecting the stoves of the people in their study and taking account of their state of maintenance? (And the state of ventilation of their kitchens, come to that.) Maladjusted burners can certainly produce a variety of effluvia which are undesirable to breathe, but good ones both produce far less and produce different proportions of the components.
Noting for the community that you live in one of the best climates in Canada, with warm winters and cool summers :-)
Can you recommend any heat pump models and/or local companies? My mother (who lives just up the road from you) is thinking of getting one so she has a bit of cooling in the summer as well as heat in the winter. I've been trying to answer her questions* but a trusted local source of information would be better!
*Which haven't been quite as confusing as "why was the box with the blue lights making a noise last week?" which was the last tech support call I got, but still an expert she could talk to in person would be best.
I'm also in BC. We got a Mitsubishi heat pump in early 2020 (replacing the about-to-die gas furnace just before the pandemic hit) and have been happy with it. The A/C during last year's heat dome was a very welcome bonus. At the time Mitsubishi or Daikon were recommended as the quietest and most reliable brands. But, I'm told by a friend who's been trying to get one for some time that heat pumps are almost impossible to get installed in BC right now between supply chain issues and lack of contractors.
And that should be 'Daikin', not 'Daikon'.
I'm starting to get a tin ear from this.
"cranberries becoming an annoyingly ubiquitous edible" I'm sorry, what? I could have sworn they did that, outside of cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving (US), decades ago. I just picked up yesterday some biscuits, I think they should be called, cranberry-orange.
They are in the UK, too, and we don't even celebrate thankgiving. Our native ones are almost unobtainable, possibly unless you pick them yourself?
That's amazing! Everything I've read said the tapes were reused, and not preserved.
What, my nuclear steam powered zepplin? Hah! You weren't expecting that. No one ever expects....
Crap. That's not at all what I was thinking, but far, far too reasonable, given DeSatanist in FL and Disney.
Btw, from what she says, the way she says it, and the pic, I think I'm in love.
A lot of the rock&rool+ in the later sixties and seventies had really serious musical chops.
Which is one thing that annoys me about a lot of punk, etc - the word kludge means to get something to work, mostly, but you may not know or understand why. A lot of the street are script kiddies, people who buy stuff created by those who actually do know, etc. Yes, there are people without degrees who create stuff... but they've *studied, and understand. I suspect what Charlie likes is a different subset of people.
On the other hand, a) I really don't like Phil Glass, and b) I was never into metal. And you can almost always understand the words in folk rock.
Has absolutely nothing to do with the current topic, but I found this guy on YouTube & he has some absolutely fascinating videos.
Here's one about HMS Unicorn, a 200+ year old WOODEN ship built for the Royal Navy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars that's still in the water (although the charity that operates it hopes to have it in dry-dock before too much longer; see end of the video - last 5 minutes or so).
HMS Unicorn - No Ordinary Ship [YouTube]
Argh - fuel oil deliveries. No - the last house I lived in that had oil delivered was in the seventies.
Obligatory link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98
A very high percentage of folks I know have, or have had, gas stoves (including me again, yay!). I'm trying to remember who had asthma. Note that in the US, stoves normally have exhaust vents above them.
RE: future energy. Here's a link some may find interesting and/or paywalled: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/ipcc-report-climate-change-2050/629691/
Selected quotes, with comments interlaced:
It's an essay titled "There’s No Scenario in Which 2050 Is ‘Normal’" and it's about the latest IPCC report.
"Of the hundreds of scenarios that the IPCC analyzed, all fell into one of three buckets. In the first bucket, every scenario forecasts that the world will soon be removing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Carbon removal is still a bit of a dream. Not only is it technologically unproven at scale; it is extremely energy intensive. But the IPCC report implies that within the lifetime of children alive today, the world might be spending more than a third of its total energy production removing carbon from the atmosphere, according to Zeke Hausfather, an IPCC author."
--Not the first time seeing this. Actively removing carbon and stashing it underground takes a lot of energy. Unless we figure out something cute to do with the CO2, there's no economic gain. It's literally pounding money down a hole to keep things from getting worse. Of course, this describes a lot of capitalism, most addictions, payoffs...But this is one-third or more of global GDP we're talking about, getting buried. That's the FAAFO price for getting the money by lofting CO2 in the first place.
"But now let’s turn our attention to the second bucket of scenarios. They tell a different story, one in which the world rapidly curtails its energy usage over the next two decades, slashing carbon pollution not only from rich countries, such as the United States, but also from middle-income countries, such as Brazil, Pakistan, and India.
"By “curtailing energy demand,” I’m not talking about the standard energy-transition, green-growth situation, where the world produces more energy every year and just has a larger and larger share of it coming from zero-carbon sources. Rather, these scenarios imagine a world where total global energy demand collapses in the next few decades. There’s a good reason for this—as far as the models are concerned, this tactic is one of the best ways to crash carbon pollution within 10 years—but it is not how any country approaches climate policy.
"Take these scenarios’ assumptions about car ownership, for example. Today, there are about 1.3 billion cars and light-duty trucks on the road worldwide. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that this number will reach 2.21 billion by 2050—a 70 percent increase—of which less than half will be electric vehicles. But the low-energy scenarios require the global vehicle fleet to nearly halve during the same period of time, shrinking to about 850 million cars and light trucks by 2050.
"Don’t get me wrong: This sounds fantastic. I’d love to live in a world where most people don’t have to own a car to make a living or participate in society. Yet it also does not strike me as particularly likely, and it is not the only life-altering shift imagined by the low-energy scenarios. These scenarios envision a similar revolution in energy-efficiency technology sweeping through other aspects of society, such as building construction, residential heating, and manufacturing. Historically, energy efficiency has improved by about 2 percent a year; the low-energy-demand scenarios require much faster shifts.
"Oh, and by the way, these low-energy-demand scenarios require a huge amount of carbon removal too—something like 3 billion tons of it. “Even with low-energy demand, there’s still a fair amount of [carbon removal] deployed. It’s just in the three-to-five-gigaton range rather than the five-to-15-gigaton range,” Hausfather, the IPCC author, told me."
--This is the lower demand and bury less carbon. In economic terms, this is utter revolution, trashing business as usual to drastically lower energy consumption. And still burying trillions of dollars of carbon. But instead of 30% of global GDP, it's 10%. Maybe less.
Both these scenarios limit warming to 1.5oC, so there's the whole thing about keeping the world as we more-or-less understand it.
The third bucket is, of course, we blow past 1.5oC and spend at least as much GDP adapting to the new world. And probably watching global GDP decline by 30% or more, so instead of pounding it down a hole and keeping the world more-or-less the way we're used to, we lose that revenue and the world we're used to.
Bottom line is, we're in for a revolution, regardless.
"The first and the most significant is that humanity must invest more in carbon removal as quickly as possible. So far, most of the money spent on carbon removal has come from the private sector...But the funding to remove billions of tons a year can come only from the government. Many climate thinkers hope that the federal government will step in and administer carbon removal as a public waste-management service, at least in the United States. There’s currently little bipartisan political will to do so, but it is beyond past time to begin implementing that.
"The second is that coping with climate change will require disruption on a scale that our political system has yet to comprehend. In some cases, that disruption will come beforehand and prevent the damage; in others, it will result from the climatic damage. But it will come nonetheless. If I asked you, Forty years from now, will only about 5 percent of Americans own a car, or will the world spend a large share of its energy production sucking carbon from the atmosphere?, you would rightly respond that neither sounded particularly realistic. And that is the point: We have been backed into a corner. The scale of change headed our way is unimaginable. And it is also inevitable."
korydg @ 646: regards "pop" music, so-called, that climbs to 99% [crap], for any period between 1900 & right now [...]
Allow me to put in a word for the Great American Songbook -- popular and theater music from ca. 1915-1950 (for the most part)-- music by composers and lyricists like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Richard Rogers, etc. Eminently singable melodies, sophisticated harmonies, witty lyrics, who could ask for anything more? Many of these tunes had an afterlife as jazz standards through the rest of the century, though I think that too is fading as jazz itself has become an ever more specialized genre of art music. It's an antiquarian interest, but it is good music and fun to play on the piano or otherwise."
As for more contemporary music, I will mostly go with downtempo, triphop, anything that works for fusion-dance venues (which are only just now starting to re-open around here in the SFBA after the obvious hiatus).
Before Covid came along and fucked up everything, I participated in a weekly folk music circle.
For a couple of hours each week we'd gather in an actual circle, someone would pick a song, we'd all play & sing and then the next person along to either left or right would choose another song and again we'd all play & sing ... repeat as many times as we could in two hours. Bluegrass, "folk" music [Child ballads, 40's Depression music, 50's Folk Revival], Rock 'n Roll, Country, Gospel, Jazz ... you name it. If you had words (& chords for guitar) & had a notion of the tune we'd try it.
It wasn't all guitar players, we'd occasionally have actual musicians join us.
I'm not a very "social" person, I do well with mechanical things, but I'm not very good at small social interactions. The circle gave me a framework that I could relate to.
Anyway, the basis for the group, the starting point, was a book called Rise Up Singing
Very cold in winter (snow from November through March), but hot summers and tolerable spring/autumn.
When I was a child. Climate change makes it more "snow a few days in November, then the Christmas thaw, then snow in January and February".
Another factor is that there's been effort (regulatory pressure) to get housing insulated, which shortens the heating period of the respective dwelling yet again.
So the "large" boiler is off except in winter, and the hot water boiler uses a lot less of whatever energy source (the house I live in has solar thermal backstopped by gas (the gaseous one, not gasoline) and is thus typical for middling old.)
"Another factor is that there's been effort (regulatory pressure) to get housing insulated, which shortens the heating period of the respective dwelling yet again."
And almost always overlooked: Reduces the need for A/C during summer.
Robert Prior @ 650:
I'd say she should be disqualified on one of two grounds: perjury or medical disability.
I mean, she's either lying under oath about not remembering, or she's got serious cognitive impairments that mean she shouldn't be trusted driving a vehicle, let alone the government.
(Yes, I know she remembers and is using this as a legal tactic, as well as a smirky f-you.)
I believe the challenge is based on 14th Amendment law that disqualifies anyone who previously took an oath to the Federal Goverment & then participates in an insurrection from subsequently holding Federal Office again.
Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina faced a similar lawsuit but the Federal District Judge tossed it out.
The challenge to Taylor Greene is based on the same 14th Amendment language, but she's in a different state & the Federal judge in that district allowed the challenge to proceed.
Cawthorn has since imploded (complaining about not being invited to GQP orgies on Capitol Hill & photos of him in women's underclothes)and looks like he's going to be primaried out.
It doesn't matter if Taylor Green is lying through her teeth or cognitively impaired or just plain Nuckin' Futs ... only whether or not she participated in an insurrection AFTER having taken the oath of office as a Congress Person.
Robert Prior @ 657:
In America. In Britain a one hour programme was one hour. (According to my parents, anyway. I haven't actually watched the telly in England, so don't know firsthand.
Probably not. The ORIGINAL Dr Who episodes broadcast by the BBC had an average run-time of approximately 25 minutes ±. So figure a one hour BBC program was actually 50 minutes.
The BBC didn't do commercial advertising, but they did run promotions for other programs and maybe some public-service announcements between programs, much like the BBC still does today. They just didn't interrupt the programs for "commercials".
When DVDs first came out I knew someone who made crazy efforts to get British DVDs of BBC programmes, rather than American DVDs of the same programme, because the American versions had been cut to provide room for advertisements and the DVDs had those cut versions rather than the original version.
Maybe something like Masterpiece Theater, but even PBS didn't insert commercials during programs. All of the BBC programming I have purchased on DVDs has the ORIGINAL BBC run-times (again Doctor Who).
One problem with bringing BBC programming to American (and other audiences around the world) back before DVDs is the different broadcast formats - PAL in the U.K., NTSC in the U.S. and SECAM or PAL/SECAM in much of the rest of the world. The BBC mainly relied on on 16 mm film "telerecordings" for exports.
The other problem with recreating the old shows on DVD is that for some inexplicable reason, between 1967 and 1978 the BBC just wiped old programs without making telerecordings and/or NOT preserving the telerecordings.
Fortunately for Doctor Who fans, some of the telerecordings discarded by the BBC were preserved in other places around the world. Where programs are partially missing, the BBC is making an effort to recreate the missing episodes using animation and fan made off-air sound recordings.
IF I had a TARDIS of my own, one of the things I'd try to do is park it somewhere unobtrusive in the U.K. on certain dates & times to make off-air recordings of the missing episodes.
Been done. I read a decent afro-centric SF novel a few years ago that had nuclear steam engines and airships. Blanking on the title or I'd recommend it to you…
IIRC the 'impossible thing' that made light-weight fission viable was a new shielding material, although I may be mixing memories of a different novel there.
I believe the challenge is based on 14th Amendment law that disqualifies anyone who previously took an oath to the Federal Goverment & then participates in an insurrection from subsequently holding Federal Office again.
I know that. I just think that she should be disqualified for perjury* or medical incompetence.
*Which is a felony, which is a significant enough crime that you lose your vote in many states. Including Georgia.
but they just haven't tried to address them are more annoying, and there are occasional books where the whole thing is just bloody stupid
What annoyed me was how Grantvillers always manage to "find" something or someone who they need for a particular venture, despite near-zero probability of such items or individuals being present in Grantville circa 2000. Like two guys who are into cave diving, and have all diving gear. Or several naval history buffs who just happened to own detailed navigational charts of the Caribbean.
(bombing around 17th-century Russia in an American V8 gas guzzler with totally fucked steering and a magic fuel tank, being a rude prick to all the nobles who all react with "oh, isn't he cute"...)
In all fairness, this did not end well for the rude prick.
Poul-Henning Kamp @ 686: That is actually a pretty strong theory, not just for Putins Folly, but also for the "Christians" in USA trying to implement Sharia-law and boomers general tendency to pull the ladder up behind all over the western world.
While I agree it's a strong theory to explain Putin's motivation, I don't think the general tendency to pull the ladder up behind is unique to our generation. In fact, I think it's more prevalent in following generations - Gen-X, Gen-Y & Millennials. Boomers (at least those I grew up with) inherited the "Greatest Generation's" of making the world a better place for future generations. Obviously we didn't succeed, but we still hope our children and grand-children will have more success.
For all their strident, deafening & tumultuous braying, today's so called "Christians" are NOT the wave of the future, particularly as they stray farther and farther from the message of "Jesus's teaching"
That clip has been taken from a film recording, 1960 was a bit early for any kind of video tape. The standard method of recording a programme for archiving or repeat transmission was to have a (usually) 16mm cine camera pointed at a high quality monitor with a longer than usual phosphor coating. It's a very good version and I suspect has been cleaned up, there's a couple of dust marks or blemishes go through and some artifacts that most people wouldn't spot.
Film recording was still in occasional use when I was working in TV in the 80s and early 90s, although very much on the decline. Even after VTRs were available it was a popular format for overseas sales, every TV network globally had the capability of running 16mm film but many of them couldn't afford something like an Ampex VR2000.
Many of the missing Doctor Who episodes are missing not due to tapes being reused but the master 16mm film recording copies intended for overseas sales being burnt.
Probably not. The ORIGINAL Dr Who episodes broadcast by the BBC had an average run-time of approximately 25 minutes ±. So figure a one hour BBC program was actually 50 minutes.
Actually that's wrong. None of the UK networks have ever adhered to the US style 30 minute or multiple thereof time slot and programmes were made to be the length they needed to be.
eg 6th March 1965, BBC 1 Doctor Who starts at 17:40 and runs to 18:05, News and Weather starts at 18:05 and runs ten minutes, then Dixon of Dock Green starts at 18:15 for 45 minutes.
From memory, a programme would never start more than 30 seconds before the time listed in the Radio Times or later than 3 minutes after. ITV start times were a bit looser and it wasn't unusual for them to start a couple of minutes early.
Things have changed these days and you'll quite often see BBC programmes with obvious spots for commercial breaks to be inserted with recap sections straight after, or have a 3 minute garbage item for things been run as live that may also be simultaneous transmissions in less enlightened locations.
A bit like Swiss Family Robinson, then :-) Ducks.
Ye gods it's a good thing I don't make my living from anything to do with web stuff.
Here is the link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/gas-stoves-air-pollution-1.6394514 . Copy and paste into your browser.
Key quotes: "For example, a 2013 meta-analysis of 41 studies found that children living in a home that used gas for cooking had a 42 per cent increased risk of having asthma."
"Sure enough, they showed that nitrogen dioxide spiked after cooking with his gas stove. That alarmed him.
But there were also spikes between midnight and 4 a.m.
Thomas soon realized that's when his gas furnace was running to keep the home warm during cold nights."
There is more about how they are less (but not entirely) harmful when the hood fan is activated, if it is set up to vent outside (many filter the smoke and release it back into the house). However a lot of people don't turn on the fan because they don't like the noise. I don't have a gas stove, but have a near physical reaction to loud fans and motors, so I certainly understand.
TLDR: Combustion indoors is generally a bad idea. Given that we need to stop burning fossil fuels anyway, here is more evidence. Often people who DGAF about climate change - or don't feel like they can do anything - definitely GAF about the health of their kids and will make a change accordingly.
I'm sure there are many here and elsewhere whose cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias will reject the findings of the researchers, but the results are compelling. Even if, like me, you really like to cook with gas given the opportunity.
[[ link fixed - mod ]]
771 Scheduling - Wrong!! The BBC would schedule Dr Who for, say, 17:20 to 17:45 Saturday, and the mum would have Saturday tea on the table between 17:45 and 17:50. This just allowed time to see the Saturday teatime news headlines before sitting at table and eating.
Telerecordings - Wikipedia is factually correct here, but the programmes were made to be shown once and then deleted so that the (very expensive by the standards of the day) video tapes could be reused.
Parking the TARDIS - Well, there was a real Glasgow Police Box on Great Western Road at the junction with Queen Margaret Drive, about 200m from the BBC Scotland studios.
Robert Prior: I am in the 'thinking that I will go with a heat pump' stage of the process, with a few other items ahead in the queue (as long as the verdammt pellet stove keeps going). That is an evolution from 5 years ago, when I expected to go with either forced air gas burning furnace or a gas burning fireplace.
Other items include boosting the insulation, replacing the windows and doors, and converting our messy yard fully into food production now the kids are done with it. I have started the process of getting our home 'evaluated' to qualify for the various subsidies, so we'll see what they suggest.
If the thrice-damned pellet stove does fail utterly - meaning something breaks that I can't source or machine - then the heat pump moves up the list rapidly. However, at this point I am not an expert. If your mom needs any handyman or home repair type work done (within reason) shoot me an email and I can probably sort it out (either myself or one of the many tradespersons I know around here). The world is small, this community is smaller, and I suspect your mother knows mine through choir or volunteering, so I'd be happy to help.
"I don't think the general tendency to pull the ladder up behind is unique to our generation. In fact, I think it's more prevalent in following generations - Gen-X, Gen-Y & Millennials. Boomers (at least those I grew up with) inherited the "Greatest Generation's" of making the world a better place for future generations. Obviously we didn't succeed, but we still hope our children and grand-children will have more success."
I think the biggest difference we are seeing with the Boomer generation is that they are STILL holding onto power with a death grip. Biden is a near octegenarian, as is Trump. McConnell and Pelosi are both in their 80s. Shumer is 71. Many of the SC Justices are ancient.
There is a lot to be said for the wisdom of age, and at 50 I am delighted that I can reasonably look forward to a fair few years of life yet. But the world's problems are 21st century problems, and the world's leaders learned how to judge and solve issues upwards of 40 years ago. 2022 is very different from 1982, and vastly different from 1962. The compromises and trade-offs that made sense in 1990 are wildly off the mark today.
I don't wish death on anyone, but I'd very much like a few more of these people to shift into 'elder statesperson' mode and let someone under 50 step up to the jobs.
A bit like Swiss Family Robinson, then :-) Ducks.
Also Gilligan's Island
Charlie @ 712:
Certainly not "bonkers". The people responsible for this proposal have presumably done at least some basic research. I haven't, but I expect that the reasoning looks something like this:
Existing grid interconnects probably won't cut it. National grids are sized and scoped for national requirements. That means carrying power from power stations into nearby cities, plus enough redundancy to cope with outages. Adding ~8% of the UK power consumption to the existing system at one side and taking it out at the other assumes a lot of spare capacity in the right places which probably doesn't exist. Also you need lines up in the hundreds of KV without lots of transformers stepping up and down, otherwise transmission losses will eat you alive. Most grid lines aren't that high. This map looks like there would be a HV route across France, and this one for Spain suggests a 400kV route which already connects Algeria to France. The question would be about capacity.
Running new lines is a nightmare, especially if its not for the benefit of the nation in question. You need compulsory purchase of rights of way, probably in the teeth of local opposition. This might happen for national needs, but "the UK needs you to piss off your voters" is probably not going to get very far with politicians in Spain, never mind France.
Undersea cables are a mature technology. If you haven't already seen it, I recommend Mother Earth, Mother Board by Neal Stephenson in Wired. That was about telecom cables, and as someone pointed out above, power cables are a whole lot thicker. But power cables do get laid under the sea, so presumably the engineering problems have been solved. Access for repair is harder, but there are a number of specialist ships kept on standby around the world specifically for finding and fixing breaks in undersea telecom cables. Extending this service to HVDC would not be a big issue for them.
Under the sea is mostly a pretty benign environment for cables. The primary hazards are anchors and fishing nets, which is why I was surprised to see the proposal for a coast-hugging shallow water route. According to Stephenson, cable layers try to get out to deep water as fast as possible to minimise the amount of cable subject to these hazards. Compared to that, land cables have to cope with either weather (for pylons) or cable-seeking backhoes (for underground).
Algeria is not the most politically stable nation. Neither is Morocco, for that matter, but there is no point in stacking risks when you don't have to. (On that note, Stephenson's trip through Egypt is intriguing; lots of international bandwidth runs through Alexandria).
One of the big take-aways from Mother Earth, Mother Board was that telecom cables get laid underwater by preference: they go overland only when they can't avoid it, and generally for as short a distance as possible. The sums for power lines are going to be a bit different, but not by a vast amount.
I'm not convinced either way about which would actually be cheaper, quicker to build and more reliable; that would be a question for a proper feasibility study. But I wouldn't be surprised if the underwater route won.
I don't wish death on anyone, but I'd very much like a few more of these people to shift into 'elder statesperson' mode and let someone under 50 step up to the jobs.
Obama, perhaps?
I agree with your point, but at the same time we do have to avoid ageism. In this case, ageism assumes that one's numerical age is an accurate proxy for one's ability and skill. Since I have some basic sense of what the democratic politicians are doing, I disagree with that: Biden's schedule would probably leave me hospitalized in fairly short order, and I'm substantially younger than he is. For example. Additionally, they've built some pretty impressive political systems of employees who help them, and that's nothing to sneeze at or pitch out either.
That said, I think the real risk is that the bench of competent politicians is quite shallow on both sides. While it's easy to recruit ass-weasel faux-ideologues on both sides to make politics-like noises and govern ineffectually, actually running a country takes a huge amount of skill. We're short on that, and (especially on the right side) there's really inadequate development of up and coming stars.
David L @ 691:
I see this on all side of the political debate. MY WAY IS RIGHT and I must ensure it is THE WAY going forward.
Around here at the local level zoning fights are all about people 10 years older than me (mid 70s and up) wanting to keep the young folks from "ruining our city". Things like more apartment high rises, mass transit, less pretending cars and suburbs are the ultimate way to live, etc... (He waives at H.)
But yes, I see this at all levels of society. The in power minority wants to force the new folks coming along to do things THEIR WAY.
The various churches / denominations in the US are creating all kinds of havoc trying to do this. But it is more than just the conservative religious. It is everyone in a power group.
Or else.
There's a zoning hearing tomorrow evening for a property around the corner from me. Currently a town-home apartment complex, the owners want to rezone it to allow "Residential Mixed Use to a maximum of 5 stories".
In the three blocks that constitutes my neighborhood - a widow, another couple and myself are the only Boomers. Everyone else is younger than you are ... and the widow is probably closer to your age than to mine.
The one person I've talked too who does oppose it (and maybe not all that vigorously) is almost your age, so if not a trailing edge boomer, probably early Gen-X.
I personally have no opinion, but will support the request because I think to avoid Raleigh turning into another Atlanta will require the city to grow vertically. I happen to like Raleigh as it is, but since I know it IS going to change whether I like it or not, changing UPwards is less undesirable than sprawling out. We've already got too much sprawl anyway.
Re: 'heat pump'
I've been seriously considering one ever since moving here almost three years ago. (Assuming I can find anyone to install it.)
Mind if I ask what the model was - for what square footage?
The few videos I've watched about heat pumps didn't get into any detail about installation or real-life operation:
(a) which wall they choose & why (do they put proper and enough insulation around it ... Good grief - I'm paying someone to put a big hole in one of my walls after putting plastic plugs into every single electrical outlet on every single exterior wall!)
(b) how much of a mess outside/inside the house during installation
(c) how far away does it have to be from: appliances, bookcases, furniture, etc.
(d) noise level - does it vary, when & by how much? (Can I listen to my music while it's running - serious consideration this.)
(e) maintenance - any special stuff to be done/bought/cleaned regularly - how often, how much muscle power, etc.
(f) does it leak/drip --- produce condensation?
(g) will my kid's cat jumping on it cause a problem? (I cat-sit regularly and this kitty's a real jumper/climber.)
Any info would be greatly appreciated - thanks!
Greg Tingey @ 704: Oho-oh ... False-flag attack on Transnistria, probably..
And as evidence of the "attack", we have some radio towers that fell down for some reason?
The lying mother-******* don't even have the courtesy to invent a plausible "original" false flag operation.
Troutwaxer @ 736: We're not going to make any changes until we've lost a lot of real-estate, then everyone will panic. Can we start with Florida?
Already have I think. Maybe the reason Florida is so bonkers is all the people with good sense have already been moving away, leaving behind the Id10Tcrats.
Scott Sanford @ 740:
This may not be relevant to you, but I recently happened onto a music theorist on Youtube who addresses, among other things, Why Does Metal Have To Be So Loud? The knowledge didn't make me love the genre any more but I understand more of the reasons.
Funny thing, I started wearing hearing protection when attending concerts in my late teens, long before it became fashionable (and long before the Army issued hearing protection ... long before I joined the Army).
I've never been a big fan of painful experiences, so even though I love the FEELING of some loud music, I prefer to enjoy it without bleeding from my ears.
These days air quality monitors are pretty affordable. GF bought a ~$AU70 thing with a pretty display that does CO2, VOC, particulates and formaldehyde. Putting it next to the gas rings made it go all red lights and the little happy/sad face summary thing started crying. Seriously, it had smile/neutral/sad/crying as the four levels.
Burning gas in the room, using an extractor hood that vented outside, made a meter ~3m away show alarming levels of particulates and VOCs.
The gas heater with external vent was better, but after half an hour the VOCs were still alarming and the particulates were noticeably elevated. I couldn't smell any change, it just felt as though someone had a heater one...
I was a big fan of various punk bands in the 80s and into the 90s, but mostly for listening at home or in a vehicle. It was a very appealing outlet for an awkward outsider teen in a town where any male person who didn't listen to either 'Country' or 'Metal' was probably gay. The lyrics were generally better and more intelligent than mainstream Metal, and I utterly loathed 'Country' at the time. More to the point, none of those assholes were listening to punk, and I didn't want to be anything like those assholes.
I don't like going to loud venues for a variety of reasons. Top reason - I go out with friends to enjoy their company through telling and hearing good stories, which is impossible in a loud venue. Secondary reason - >20 years ago I had a series of about 8 operations on my throat. I can raise my voice for about 30 minutes max, after which I become quite hoarse. If I spent hours in a loud venue - even a large crowd - I am hoarse for days.
Vulch @ 777:
Actually that's wrong. None of the UK networks have ever adhered to the US style 30 minute or multiple thereof time slot and programmes were made to be the length they needed to be.
eg 6th March 1965, BBC 1 Doctor Who starts at 17:40 and runs to 18:05, News and Weather starts at 18:05 and runs ten minutes, then Dixon of Dock Green starts at 18:15 for 45 minutes.
No argument about start & stop times, but the episode in the BBC schedule you link is listed as 25 minutes (actual run-time 25:50
paws4thot @ 780: Parking the TARDIS - Well, there was a real Glasgow Police Box on Great Western Road at the junction with Queen Margaret Drive, about 200m from the BBC Scotland studios.
Damn. Wish I'd known about that in 2004 when I visited Scotland for R&R. It's less than 3,000 feet from the Bed & Breakfast I stayed at in Glasgow and I'd love to have made a "selfie" of myself standing next to it.
I do have a selfie of myself standing in front of the U.S. Post Office in Winslow, AZ that I took during my terminal leave from demob (standing ON the corner ...).
The actual duration of unique acting in each episode tended to be around 20 minutes, then they would pad the total out to the notional 25 minutes by varying things like how much of the previous episode they showed you at the beginning before you found out how the cliffhanger turned out, or how long they ran the theme tune at the end. The former allowed them to compensate for it being impossible to write all the scripts to exactly the same length, and the latter allowed them to make up for Doctor Who having started a bit early or the next programme not being quite ready on time. They did the same kind of thing on the radio; sometimes the ending theme tune for The Archers would play on and on until you'd left Barwick Green behind you and were now sat in the pub.
These days they are not so clever, and seem to prefer to just make the programmes definitely too short and then vary the number of people who die of boredom during the content-free wittering they now put in between programmes. The programmes themselves have also gone down the pan, with far too much substitution of swirly flashy effects and computer-generated bollocks for actual content, and deafening chords taking the place of natural silences.
I've worn earplugs at gigs since I was ~20. Too much exposure to people in the music industry who had industrial deafness.
I go to gigs socially, but the socialising happens when the music isn't playing. And generally with the label management these days, rather than the artists or audiences, because I see new-ish bands rather than paying through various orifices to see major bands from my youth. The last one of those was Sarah Mclachlan in ... 2015-ish?
I transitioned from punk for the lyrics to rap for the lyrics to hiphop and folk for the lyrics. And a whole lot of outside-my-genre stuff for the lyrics - I'm very much folk and pop oriented, but follow people like Te Kupu and Briggs because they sing about things that have meaning for me. But there's lots of crossover, St Bragg of Braking and Chumbawamba for example.
Rocketpjs @ 782:
I think the biggest difference we are seeing with the Boomer generation is that they are STILL holding onto power with a death grip. Biden is a near octegenarian, as is Trump. McConnell and Pelosi are both in their 80s. Shumer is 71. Many of the SC Justices are ancient.
But that's NOT a "difference ... with the Boomer generation". That's been true for EVERY generation before us.
Pelosi's predecessor in Congress was Sala Burton, b.1925 who served 1983 to 1987 & died in office; she in turn was preceded by her husband Phillip Burton b.1926 who served from 1954 to 1983 (also died in office) ... who was in turn preceded by John F. Shelley b.1905 ...
The Queen isn't a Boomer. Why didn't she retire & allow the next generation to take over? Why is she still "holding onto power with a death grip"? ... and the complaints that Charles should step aside and allow the generation after that take the reins have already started & he hasn't even got the J.O.B. yet.
Our heat pump was a replacement for a forced air gas furnace, not a ductless mini-split. The outside unit is on the side of the house, points towards a fence. You can hear it when you're outside and it does blow enough air that it ruffles the plant that's directly between the fan and the fence, but not enough to kill it and the fence stops most of the rest. The outside unit is quieter than the other neighbour's range hood fan.
The inside unit is so quiet we seldom hear it, except if you're standing next to it in the basement. We don't get the 'whoosh' of turning on that we used to with the gas furnace and we can listen to quiet music with no issues. The inside unit is much the same size, and in the same location, as the old gas furnace. The ductwork was reused. We added the insulation around the pipes that go between the units as we had those walls open for other reasons.
The condensation goes into a pipe that goes into the laundry drain. There's a small pump for when there's enough. If you have a drain hole in the floor of the room it's installed in, that would probably work as well.
Apart from that, it's much the same as having the gas furnace with the forced air, but much quieter and the air is cleaner. The filters need replacing in the same way, I do that every few months.
SF Reader said:The few videos I've watched about heat pumps didn't get into any detail about installation or real-life operation:
Dear God.
After endless discussion, to the point that everyone is thoroughly sick of me,(including me), including posting videos that show the installation in detail, right from opening the box to the unit running on the wall. On going arguments that went down to discussions of the price of boring tips for installs in granite houses and just who the "you" was in the phrase "you just drill a hole in the wall".
https://youtu.be/Q8GXcDpyGCE
Ahem. It was a GAMING convention. https://gamestorm.org
The current state of the art for p-suits inhibits rolling dice properly, and if a die rolled off the table? Fuggedaboudit, ain't gonna be able to pick it up.
When a p-suit comes along that's 90% as good as Oscar, I'd think about it.
Re: 'Our heat pump was a replacement for a forced air gas furnace, not a ductless mini-split.'
Thanks for the info!
I'll need the ductless mini-split but one of my sibs has a forced air gas furnace and it's good to know about this option.
It's still borked :) But this time only by having a spurious dot on the end, which is easily dealt with.
I see, so they haven't actually discovered anything about asthma; they've basically checked compliance with the latest guidelines. The asthma thing comes from one of these "study of studies" efforts that took place independently several years before, and the link between the two is created by the article itself. To view it as meaning "they've proved gas stoves cause asthma" is assuming rather a lot of intermediate steps.
There is nothing at all about whether they've inspected the stoves in question and checked how good order they are in. The only mention of anything along those lines is some other bloke picking up the exhaust from his furnace - which means that either the flue is wrongly sited so the exhaust can blow back in the windows, or the furnace itself is fucked, and doesn't prove anything except that he needs to fix his installation. Similarly the linked article about methane leaks doesn't say a word about state of maintenance.
I am generally unimpressed by the rush to freak out about nitrogen oxides. It's a manufactured panic that burst out at a time when the levels actually around the place had been dropping for years and were lower than they had ever been during the lifetime of anyone listening - a point which was carefully never mentioned; instead it was made to look as if the levels were suddenly getting awful, when all that had really happened was that they'd come out with a bunch of new regulations that set limits not only lower than what was found but often lower than was even practically achievable because of technology approaching its own limits, so now the levels were breaking them whereas last week they weren't. Way to convert a problem that was actually mostly solved already into something for people to start doing their nut about.
The tweet they quote half way down the article is relevant: "Because gas stoves aren't just bad for climate change, they're bad for YOU". Governments need bogeymen to frighten the children with to keep them in order. Climate change isn't a very good one because a lot of people just don't care about it and those that do care tend to be a pain about wanting the government to spend money doing something about it, and you also have to worry about them noticing that you could mostly solve it tomorrow by shutting down all the futile crap that the vast majority of the world's effort and energy use is wasted on, which idea fills them with horror.
Nitrogen oxides on the other hand are an excellent one. As that tweet demonstrates, people just love to get their knickers in a frantic twist over the chance of dying from "health risks" that are so minor in effect that they will never actually know whether they are dying from it or not. (See also risk from vaccines vs. risk from the actual bloody disease.) The levels are already too low to care about and nobody is able to observe any difference personally, so they can manage how "solved" or "not solved" the problem is merely by playing with the regulations and don't have to actually do anything. And you can tell people that the answer to their panic is to buy more shit - which is the total opposite of the abovementioned screaming-horrors spectre, so they think this is much better. Of course nobody ever mentions how much additional pollution and energy use people will incur by replacing entire large items long before their time, or tries to work out how much it helps or doesn't when you do consider all the other aspects.
In this town we have a street which they use for nitrogen oxide measurements that never meets the limits no matter what. Fuck knows why since it's just that one street and it's a long way down the list of how much traffic there is; they've probably mounted the sensor above someone's flue or something. So what they've done is bodge in an alternative route over other streets that formerly saw very little use at all (one in particular was little more than an alley and they basically had to nuke it and rebuild the whole thing). The new route is three times as long as the old route and even more prone to jamming up solid, so straight away the pollution from traffic going that way goes up three times. Moreover, the altered flows mean that the junction where the old route used to come in doesn't work any more, while the junction where the new one comes in doesn't work either and is close enough that its own jams meet the jams from the old one not working, so those jams get geometrically worse and the effects spread until something like a third of the town is detectably more badly affected with stuck traffic farting and going nowhere.
But none of this matters as long as they can get this one anomalous measurement down below the limits. Except... now the limits have changed, and it still doesn't pass. Fortunately they seem to have run out of space for more daft ideas, at least so far.
"The Queen isn't a Boomer. Why didn't she retire & allow the next generation to take over? Why is she still "holding onto power with a death grip"? ... and the complaints that Charles should step aside and allow the generation after that take the reins have already started & he hasn't even got the J.O.B. yet."
The Dutch monarchy seem to find things fine doing it that way, but ours never have. Tars and Ars, or something, perhaps.
Perhaps 89-y.o. Putin was sent back in time to convince his younger self to Do Something About Global Warming. Hmm....
Wasn't there a James Nicoll quote, something along the lines of:
"Welcome to the Temporal Patrol. We're sending you back to {YEAR] to fix [PROBLEM] with a tricorder and a whoopie cushion. Good luck."
Re: 'Dear God.
After endless discussion, ...'
"Google it, mate!" - Yeah, that's what I did originally - about 4 years ago - and found very little practical info.
That's changed since ... just spent the last 3 hours watching a slew of YT videos including some for the DIY crowd. I'll be hiring a pro but the DIY versions usually provide more info about what to watch out for as well as maintenance/servicing than the promo videos put out by the manufacturers. So far this guy has the best vids as well as useful viewer comments/discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DHyShrGUXw&list=PLo2iT90zFoYXcl-TWnRHbWYbkdgilEzih&index=1&ab_channel=BenjaminSahlstrom
Kindly delete #799 with the faulty URL.
Here's a working link to audio of THE MIKADO starring Groucho Marx:
https://archive.org/details/lp_the-mikado_groucho-marx-robert-rounseville-stanley-ho
[FIXED - MOD]
[[ changing markup links now to work with updated markup version - mod ]]
It’s kind of like paying back a loan. No economic gain, unless you value the ability to keep on playing the game.
Now, if you bury the carbon in a form that’s useful for low technology (charcoal equivalent), it can be used later by the survivors of the crash of civilization. Making up for the lack of easily extractable oil.
So, just what are they currently burying? CO2 or Carbon? One will be more useful than the other!
they haven't actually discovered anything about asthma; they've basically checked compliance with the latest guidelines.
We know that (eg) higher particulate exposure increases asthma incidence, but the darn Nazi's mean we can only do observational studies and that makes it really hard to prove causation. Luckily we have Volkswagen and the Tories working together to arrange differential exposure across the UK so we can at least get good correlations.
Then we can measure pollution levels inside people's houses, and say "other people with levels of X above Y had a higher likelihood of asthma". Now, that's not proof, and it's definitely not personal. There are definitely many, many factors at play. But statistically, there's correlation. Don't ask me to explain who the stats work, one of the many things I don't have a PhD in is epidemiological statistics. I not only can't explain them, I don't understand them.
So the conclusion is that ideally people shouldn't burn gas inside. Definitely not in the form of open flames as found on gas cooktops, but also probably not as gas heaters in inhabited rooms. A well-maintained gas furnace in a properly ventilated basement? Probably ok, at least in terms of your direct risk right now. Obviously a huge risk to all of us longer term, but for different reasons.
But you're right, there's no direct evidence that breathing the exhaust of a gas cooktop is harmful to you personally. Maybe you should do a study and see?
Yes, it is kind of like paying back a loan. More to the point, it's remaking civilization around the central premise that, unless we use our unique gift as a species as custodians of the lands that sustain us (which, at this point, is the entire planet), those lands will not sustain us as we want them to.
Our unique gift isn't our intelligence, but our coevolution with fire. More than any other species (by far!) we both depend on fire (more generally, on releasing energy embodied in substances) and use it to do things. As literal keepers of the flame, there is quite a lot we can do to take care of the rest of the planet. And I'm not being mystical, but brutally practical. If we're going to get carbon out of the air in any form other than photosynthate, it's going to take a huge chunk of the energy we control to do it.
Do I think we're going to make this massive change without massive suffering? No. I've heard too many preachers, even now, hammer on the message that God meant for the Earth to be used by humans to give a good life, right out of Genesis, and a message common to all the Abrahamic religions. I think most people will listen to these well-meant but problematic messages and choose to disbelieve all three of the IPCC scenarios and go on living life as usual, thereby condemning us to the third bucket of outcomes.
But I'd love to be wrong.
If anyone wants to commit cli-fi and write non-dystopian stories about either the first scenario (where we chunk dedicate one-third of the economy simply to capture and store carbon), or the second scenario (massive decrease in energy use, plus 10% of the economy capturing and storing carbon), please do so. I'd certainly buy it. Hopefully SF publishers will get a clue that we desperately need those kinds of stories and will sponsor them, even if they don't at first make predictable profits.
Heck, make the tortured former billionaire who gets to watch his fortune unravel a standard SF trope. Stop feeding rich villains to monsters at the climax. They deserve to be degraded back to hapless poverty instead. But I'm monologuing.
Changing the subject, carbon can come out of the air in a variety of ways. If it's artificially captured, it gets bound to something that's hopefully really stable, and is then stored somehow. For example, CO2 could be injected into a well bored in basalt to bind to the rock, or injected under a salt dome that previously trapped natural gas.
As photosynthate, it can be trapped as buried dead plant material, either dead roots, submerged sphagnum moss, whatever. Land plants tend to dump something like 10-25% of the energy they photosynthesize into the soil around their roots in the form of sugars to do whatever (google rhizosphere). The more of that you can keep from being broken down and oxidized or respired back into the air, the better the soil is. Double-digging aerates soil and tends to result in a lot of carbon release, which is why learning to garden and farm with as little soil disturbance as possible is a necessary skill going forward. I'm not an expert, but I do know that it has a learning curve that we all need to navigate.
Can you recommend any heat pump models and/or local companies? My mother (who lives just up the road from you) is thinking of getting one so she has a bit of cooling in the summer as well as heat in the winter. I've been trying to answer her questions* but a trusted local source of information would be better!
You really want to find a good local company. They will give you rational good choices. A bad company installing a good system can lead to all kinds of hassles. Says he who's mother in law could not bring herself to ask for help about anything till the barbarian were at the gate. We had to deal with mediocre company who keep messing things up.
It may freak your mother out but get one with something like a NEST so you can get alerts when the system is not running right.
And almost always overlooked: Reduces the need for A/C during summer.
Maybe more north. But in the southern US you can get by without much in the way of heating. Especially along the Gulf Coast. But AC has almost become a necessity of life.
Cawthorn has since imploded (complaining about not being invited to GQP orgies on Capitol Hill & photos of him in women's underclothes)and looks like he's going to be primaried out.
Also the lawsuit against him based on him not being fit for office fell apart when we re-drew the Congressional lines. No one named as a plaintiff was still in the district where he was running. And thus didn't have standing.
*Which is a felony, which is a significant enough crime that you lose your vote in many states. Including Georgia.
Such a thing in the area where she's from would be a badge of honor. Proving "the man" is out to get her.
Our politics is so screwed up these days.
but I'd very much like a few more of these people to shift into 'elder statesperson' mode and let someone under 50 step up to the jobs.
My grandfather was born in 1885. My father in 1925. Our big for the area church burned down 1968 or so. My father was asked to head up the building committee.
We would have Sunday after church dinner at my grandfather's every month or so. Not just us but the extended clan.
Later as I got older my father told me he hated those gatherings. He told me his father's comments were almost all along the lines of "you youngsters are ruining the church".
If you do the math my father was in his mid 40s and my grandfather in his mid 80s.
Some things just don't change.
Adding ~8% of the UK power consumption to the existing system at one side and taking it out at the other assumes a lot of spare capacity in the right places which probably doesn't exist.
Switch yards are a big deal. My father was in on a project where his plant upgraded their switch yard so they could swing 500MW or so of power through their yards on request. With a bit of payment. :)
Back in the 70s this cost a non trivial collection of change.
"More to the point, it's remaking civilization around the central premise that, [...]"
Has any civilization ever managed to carry through a "meta-civilization" transformation ?
Ie: Changing the civilization fundamentally, based on an abstract perception of the civilization, as a civilization, rather than as "How things naturally are" ?
I ask because many of the proposed mitigations of greenhouse-gas pollution sound seriously Seldonesque to me.
Even something as basic as "Get people to use cars less" run into serious cultural baggage, because cars have been marketed and perceived as a component of freedom for about 100 years.
Based on the history I know, it seems to me that most candidate transitions have more to do with lucky trajectories along the catastrophy-curve than with planning and purpose, but there is a lot of history I dont know, so I'm wondering if there are examples of "intelligent civilization design" out there ?
Yeah nah.
The company you go with, assuming they can do up fittings and understand that condensate flows down hill doesn't matter.
The brand you buy and that you pay a fair price matters. There's a huge industry in ripping off heat pump customers. If you watch the videos you'll see installing a system should take less than 2 hours and the mini split should cost between 500 and 2000 dollars for a single head and up to 4000 for a multi head. A single head mini split is a 500 dollar install in Australia and tradies get paid properly.
Quotes for 12000 from "reputable" companies are common. This is not a situation where you get what you pay for.
See the previous video I linked to on this subject from Technology Connections.
The USA doesn't seem to grok split systems and that makes it too easy to steal from customers. They're used to paying for duct work that costs thousands and weeks to install, so charging half that and costing out a week of labour sounds good though it might be 6 times the fair price.
Good brands are Daikin, Fujitsu and Mitsubishi (there are others, but I think they're the main ones).
However it's not a Vimes boots situation. A cheaper unit might last half the time, but cost half to buy.
I'd avoid American made units. They're expensive and poor quality. You might find parts easier to get, but you'll need parts.
Beware of systems sold as heat pumps that are actually cooling only air conditioners with resistance heaters added. They're illegal to sell in most countries, but... Freedom! They're free to sell to you and free to advertise as heat pumps in the USA.
That example doesn't give a clear feel for the costs.
When you connect a load, it's really just wires transformers, maybe some power correction gear.
When you connect two grids running at different frequencies (asynchronous even where the frequencies are nominally the same) it's a whole other kettle of fish. You have all the wires and transformers malarkey, times 2. But then in the middle you have to convert it to HVDC and then back to AC at the other grid frequency. There's a few further wrinkles but that's the gist. It's basically a HVDC link, but with a very short cable.
If you want power to flow both ways it costs more as you need a second set of gear. The machine that turns AC into DC is not the same as the machine that turns DC into AC.
P H-K
Has any civilization ever managed to carry through a "meta-civilization" transformation ?
Depends on how you define it, but I would have thought the period from the Boulton/Watt engine to the invention & production of steam turbines would qualify, surely?
No argument about start & stop times, but the episode in the BBC schedule you link is listed as 25 minutes
I said nothing about it not being 25 minutes, my point was that it was made as a 25 minute programme to fit a 25 minute slot in th schedule, not a 30 minute slot.
785 - Bozo is 57, Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy is 44...
794 "standing in front of the U.S. Post Office in Winslow, AZ" - I'm almost sure I know that song...
795 - No arguments here; just great pleasure in having remote controls with a sound "mute" function.
797 - Lillibet claims that being the "Queen of England (and Wales; Elizabeth 1 was not queen of Ireland or Scotland)" is a duty, not a job, and therefore she can't resign. I will just note that the last several generations of the Belgian and Netherlands royal families have resigned, usually at their national retirement age.
820 - And was normally made for a 25 minute slot per episode from 1963 to 1989 inclusive.
Any lengthy HV distribution link these days is DC with conversion stations at each end, including any undersea ones. HV AC is limited now mostly to national grids of various types, transmitted at the nation's regular grid frequency with the various sources kept in sync.
Since we are talking about meta history, we should look at theories of meta-historical cycles like Toynbee's "Study of History". Granted, SoH has a lot of critics but in broad strokes it does provide a useful framework for historical analysis and even prediction.
According to Toynbee there are only remaining "civilizations": Western, Islamic, far Eastern and Hindu. Each existing and extinct civ goes through a predictable cycle of growth and decay:
Challenge and Response- causing the birth of a civilization. For the West that would be the “stimulus of new ground” caused by barbarian volkwanderung at the end of Hellenic Civilization (fall of the Roman Empire).
Cultural growth – led by a creative minority that spurs a civilization to greater heights of artistic, scientific, cultural, economic and political advancement. The majority willing emulates this creative minority. For the West, this stage stared in the so-called Dark Ages and really gathered steam during the Renaissance, Age of Exploration and birth of Science.
A Time of Troubles – when war and the struggle for power leads to destruction of cultural creativity as the leading minority stops being creative and becomes a dominant minority which forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience. The West has seen a time of troubles since the Napoleonic Wars through the World Wars and the Cold War. We can see the continued mutation of the new dominant minority as the uber rich establish an oligarchy which controls the economy and the political process.
Creation of a Universal State – as one competitor (like Rome) achieves total dominance and defeats all rivals to create an empire encompassing its civilization. In the West that is obviously the United States (for good and bad).
Cultural decay – the establishment of a Universal State creates an alienated internal proletariat resentful of being under the thumb of the dominant minority and an external proletariat of barbarians.
You are here.
However, there really is no external proletariat of barbarian hordes waiting to descend on the American empire. Such hordes would have to be created by catastrophic climate changes turning those now living within the borders of the American empire into hordes of refugees (which was what may of he barbarians migrating into the Roman empire were). The refugees from Syria entering Europe to escape ISIS and war, which was caused by a prolonged drought, which in turn was caused by climate change may be the first of many.
A Universal Church – created by the alienated internal proletariat as an outlet for its dissatisfaction with its political and economic lot under the dominant minority. It’s no accident that Christianity spread through the Roman Empire via slaves, the poor, women and other oppressed minorities and disenfranchised.
Fall of the Universal State – As Toynbee noted, a universal state empire is not a golden age so much as an Indian Summer, a brief rally in an inevitable downward spiral. As the empire finally unravels politically, militarily and economically the external proletariat launches another volkwanderung and the internal proletariat creates a Universal Church which then forms the chrysalis of the next civilization.
Would dispute that a church leads to any civilisation, of course (!)
Off topic, but a reference to OGH by someone whose views I generally find respectable: https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2022/04/thinking-about-elon-musks-purchase-of.html
A church can be a positive thing, if the semi-evolved simians in the pulpit choose, it's just that they seldom do. The scripture to support a positive course exists, but it doesn't fill the offering plates as efficiently as Hellfire and brimstone does.
A question re seagrass: How sensitive are seagrass meadows to changes in water depth?
I would have thought the period from the Boulton/Watt engine to the invention & production of steam turbines would qualify, surely?
That was driven by "we get rich if we do this", not "our descendants won't be as poor if we do this". The benefits accrued to those making the changes (and they were able to outsource a lot of the misery).
The Queen isn't a Boomer. Why didn't she retire and allow the next generation to take over?
The Queen is a historic anomaly -- one of just three over the past thousand years of English/UK monarchs (the other two were Elizabeth I and Victoria).
Being the monarch, like being the US President, tends to age the incumbent prematurely. Also, most of them were male (shorter life expectancy). And none of them before QEII had access to post-1940s modern medicine.
Normal British monarchs lived into their 50s or 60s, maybe early 70s -- Prince Charles' current age -- and be in office for 20-30 years if they had a good innings. Then they'd have a stroke or heart attack or cancer or an infectious disease which were effectively incurable and untreatable before the aforementioned 1940s medicine came along, and that was that.
(And that was from the post Game of Thrones era, and assumes they weren't king for a week aged 12 before their wicked uncle went backstabby on them, or that they didn't die "of a surfeit of lampreys" or something equally mediaeval.)
Anyway: to understand QEII you need to understand two things:
(a) Her whole life has been dedicated to securing and stabilizing the monarchy as an instution, after the battering it took from her uncle Edward VIII, the only British monarch to abdicate in recent history (i.e. since the American Revolutionary War). To abdicate would be to copy the man who brought the institution into disrepute and nearly wrecked it for her.
(b) She never imagined she'd live this long. Sure, her mother made it to 104. And Victoria made it to 82. But ... they were both flukes. A combination of good genes (probably from Queen V, once the haemophilia got weeded out) and really good advanced medical treatment boosted her and her mum's life expectancy an entire generation over their predecessors. I've seen it with my parents too: they lived to 93 and 90 respectively, but 2 of their parents generation died in their 50s, one made it to 62, and the last one barely made it past 70.
Anyway: QEII's insanely long reign is an unforced fluke outcome of converging factors. And she's already handed a huge chunk of her public duties over to Charles, which if anything is going to increase her life expectancy now she's not as overworked. (She used to do more than one public event per day, 7x52, all year round.)
I don't expect her to abdicate now for anything short of terminal illness (Alzheimer's would do it, but doesn't seem to run in the family).
Which is probably just as well, because the moment Charles takes over could well be the starting gun for the race (well, stroll) towards a republic -- her death has the potential to trigger a constitutional crisis because barely anyone now alive can remember what it was like when the top spot on the totem pole was occupied by anyone else.
"The Queen is a historic anomaly -- one of just three over the past thousand years of English/UK monarchs (the other two were Elizabeth I and Victoria)."
Um, No. Sorry, you said that in front of a history pedant!
Depending on how you count it's between six and eight for England. The first two aren't always counted but the last six definately qualify: Matilda, Jane Grey, Mary, Elizabeth, Mary II, Anne, Victoria, Elizabeth II.
Scotland kind of has Margaret, maid of Norway and definately has their own Mary.
https://royalcentral.co.uk/features/opinion/an-overview-of-the-eight-reigning-queens-of-the-british-isles-125676/
From context I think OGH was refering to how long they reigned not to their gender. QEII is coming up for 70 years, Lady Jane Grey managed 9 days. That's more than a slight difference :-)
In that measure, Elizabeth comes in at number 6, after three men :-)
https://britroyals.com/reigned.asp
The Queen is a historic anomaly -- one of just three over the past thousand years of English/UK monarchs
You're telling me Jane Grey lived into her 70s?!?
(I wasn't talking about her being anomalous because of her gender, but because of her age.)
George III I'll grant you lived a long time, but whether it's reasonable to say he reigned for a long time is ... arguable. And the other two were both pre-Game of Thrones era, so more than somewhat outside the immediate time frame: limit it to the past 500 years and we're down to the three queens I noted, and George III, who spent most of his kingship being indisposed.
A question re seagrass: How sensitive are seagrass meadows to changes in water depth?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030437709190081F
For the depths we care about, they're not sensitive. What they are quite sensitive to are water clarity and water chemistry. To a first approximation, intensive coastal development and big seagrass beds are mutually incompatible.
The company you go with, assuming they can do up fittings and understand that condensate flows down hill doesn't matter.
Yes it does. Modern heat pumps are also electronic control system which need to be set up correctly and EXPLAINED to the home owner.
Got to deal with a company that had made a wiring mistake and just kept replacing blown circuit boards instead of fixing the wiring issue. Till my wife and I threw a fit with them. (This was on a system 5 hours from us at my mother in law's.)
Also, some companies will do an install that looks like my first attempt. On their 500th. You want an installer who doesn't switch brands monthly, has a staff who knows more than which end of the wrench to us, and understands the newer electronics.
"More to the point, it's remaking civilization around the central premise that, [...]" Has any civilization ever managed to carry through a "meta-civilization" transformation ?
Um, ours? Look at this blog, for instance. Aging nerd from around the world, hanging out virtually to write on a first-gen social media site hosted by a Scottish SFF writer? In what previous age was that ever possible?
I'd say that everyone who clutches their man-pearls (or just pearls, depending on preferred gender stereotype) about the lack of historical precedent has to realize that there's little historical precedent for what our species is doing to the planet. I mean, sure, we've got cyanobacteria and Archaeopteris as previous models, but they took millions to billions of years to screw things up, not decades.
So dump precedent. What's possible and what's not possible?
This is literally a classic SF what-if. It's like Star Trek, which, for all its faults, was originally a what if. What if, after a nuclear war (!) humanity managed to join other species in a federation of multiple sentient species?
Here, we've got the IPCC scenarios (classic SF raw material), and we're dancing around a field that was built around what if questions of social import. Questions like, oh, how do we not crash civilization this century?
So the writing challenge is to posit a world where one of the IPCC scenarios is implemented and actually does its job making civilization more sustainable. Now you've got to write a story. Making it grimdark is stupid unless you take money from the petrochemical industry, so it has to have a believable happy ending, for some value of happy. The IPCC scenarios very definitely have winners and losers, and the losers are almost certainly going to be rich and powerful, so you've got a built-in conflict generator. Go to work.
If you want a model, flip the vampire-hunter script. Instead of staking the powerful undead, have scrappy teams of lovable outsiders unmaking billionaires and scrapping their wretched excess, with the climax in Act 3 being when the team does a heist style take-down of the relevant wealth management system as the lawyers and hitmen close in. Or something. Sky's the limit. Want to figure out how to get rich vacation homes off coasts so shallow bays can revert to seagrass? That's a conflict right there. Want to posit a SF electric-powered warfare system that can take on and beat a heavy metal military industrial complex incursion? That's another story. Want to posit a world where people abandoned most social media as it became the plaything of a handful of billionaires? Oh baby.
And so on.
Snark aside, you're right, most people need precedents to believe that something is possible. Our saving grace as humans is that those precedents don't have to be real.
Apologies, I missed the unwritten "lived into their 70s" and took the sentance on face value. Just too used to people forgetting about the not-famous queens who ruled in their own right.
And the next longest after Liz 1 was Henry VI, who was right in the middle of what I guess you mean by the "Game of Thrones era" (never read/watched any of that myself)... but spent much of the time being king of somewhere inside his own head instead, and had a nine-year holiday before his final appearance.
GoT is allegedly just George re-running the Wars of the Roses, with added dragons and ice zombies. (I say "allegedly" because I failed to get past page 100 of the first book a few times before I gave up.)
But I'll still raise you George II over Elizabeth :-)
I agree that Edward VIII was completely out of order. Yes, you have the most outrageous collection of nitpickers on this blog. Your point was quite clear; she is an extreme historical anomaly.
That almost makes me want to try doing it, but it is VASTLY in excess of my abilities. On the other hand, if Charlie finds himself in want of an idea I reckon he'd make a corker out of it.
Ah, OK, I see.
The impression I'd picked up was that it was a re-run of the battle for Minas Tirith, considered as a spectacle and dragged out to tremendous length, and without any of the surrounding story or foundations that Tolkien spent most of his time on. Hence not being interested in checking it out. It sounds like this impression and yours are probably more or less just different variations of the same thing.
That almost makes me want to try doing it, but it is VASTLY in excess of my abilities. On the other hand, if Charlie finds himself in want of an idea I reckon he'd make a corker out of it.
It exceeds my abilities too, of course. Since one of the things I do in the mundane world is take on the wealthy and powerful and another thing is endless meetings about decarbonization, my escapist/therapy fiction isn't set in anything like this*. Hopefully others will pick it up and run with it. I think that even Foxessa might consider the result hopepunk.
*I'm just imagining a more multiracial, more integrated US at least partially taking the place of Jim Crow and its sequelae. Steampunk? Yeah kinda. At least it's helping me learn more about my own bigotry, which is turning out to be a surprisingly worthwhile exercise.
I have read all of the books published so far. The Wars of the Roses is closer, but with a LOT more complication and FAR more brutality (often described in loving detail) than that. I am not surprised that he has not finished it, because it introduced so many complex and interacting threads that achieving anything like closure is probably impossible. It makes the Laundry Files look like a simple, almost linear, story arc.
Normally, I reread books a lot, but that is a series I have no desire to.
I think you reading that as 'not needing AC' rather than 'you use less power for the AC' and the latter was the intended meaning, I think.
Off topic, but a reference to OGH by someone whose views I generally find respectable: https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2022/04/thinking-about-elon-musks-purchase-of.html
I don't see any mention of Charlie in there
I have also read all the GOT books. The first is a hard slog until about page 200. By the 5th I was becoming vastly irritated at the introduction of new characters and plotlines. The likelihood of him ever wrapping it up grows slimmer with every passing year.
To be honest the series has turned me off any number of other sf/fantasy series unless they are already completed. Far too many book series start out promising and engaging and devolve into incoherence as endless plot threads get introduced and the actual writer ages and (quite reasonably) loses interest.
OGH is one of the few who seem to be able to keep things coherent and manageable over large chunks of book, but despite that I remain a fan of the one-off books (Glasshouse was my favourite) as much as any of the series.
The shelves at the bookshop and library make it quite clear that my distaste for 'epic sagas' is a minority position.
As for GoT, I kind of bounced off it, and I don't think GRRM is ever going to finish it. My gut instinct is that he missed the window for finishing it a decade ago. Now, epic fantasy with ice zombies feels a bit outdated, sort of like those Ringworld books that still occasionally come out to please the fans. "Winter Is Coming" was a great slogan when climate change denialism was the in thing and bacon made every dessert better. Now, who wants to read about an ice age? Turns out Summer Is Coming for us, and that's actually scarier.
Anyway, I bought most of PTerry's books, so not all "long series" are bad. Not that those were a series, exactly.
I don't see any mention of Charlie in there
The New Management is mentioned, with a link.
Gas heaters in inhabited rooms? Argh! And they tell you on the cans of Sterno that the room must be ventilated. I object to them as vehemently as I do to electrical radiant heaters (that is, ones with red-hot heating elements visible to the user....)
And - I know I've asked this question before - when are we going to get the next Chtorr book?
I'd say the external proletariat (very lumpy proletariat at that) is here - in the US, it's called the GOP and its adherents.
bing Your post just rang the bell - now I know why I enjoy this blog so much... let's see, I could call it rec.sf.stross (moderated). Someone mentioned nit-pickly, yeah, this is a lot like the high days of usenet (and that's a very good thing).
I've been thinking for days of an alternative to hopepunk or (gag) noblebright. (Not into nobility, either, so what, proletariat-bright just doesn't trip off the tongue.) I've long since declared sf to be the last, best hope of the 1920's, where the future can and will be better, or at least definitely not worse.
And "what-if" sf is what I'm writing, and what I want to read more of. "What-if" doesn't imply happy endings, but it leaves it open.
Unmaking billionaires... now, if I just get a bite from an agent for the novel I'm trying to sell, "Becoming Terran" (as opposed to American/British/Ukrainian/Russian/etc/etc/etc for 192 names) And, like my first book, complete in one novel.
Glad to inspire.
And I want to thank Poul too, because having to try to convince skeptics is what makes this kind of thing work.
Anyway, if anyone can come up with a better term than hopepunk for annoying, inspiring, trope-spawning stories about a future that isn't hopeless, please do so.
As I said, "what-if" makes me happy. If you need more, well, Gernsbackian is overly heavy on possible science, and people who demand that humans almost a century ago have 2022 sensibilities would scream at Campbellian.... Future fiction? There, we get that as a next-gen "speculative fiction", and it implies that we do have a future.
Oh, here we go: squeecore fiction is stories about Gollum strangling immature goblins.
Re: 'The Dunedin Study ...'
Yes, that's the type of data and use that I was thinking of. Thanks! This particular longitudinal study has become invaluable in understanding human development. Cross-sectional studies miss a lot of potential cause-effect relationships.
Thanks to all for info on this!
Gas heaters should obviously never be used in a poorly ventilated room. One of the reasons I am deeply suspicious of these claims is that gas (or coal!) room heating was common almost to the point of ubiquity in the UK until recently, and the 'asthma epidemic' is new, almost as if a LACK of such fires causes asthma. It's not simple, whatever the causes are.
Incidentally, I looked at that meta-analysis, and was unimpressed. I could see no sign that it had done any checking on the robustness of the analyses it used, except for some unreliable tests for publication bias.
Charlie @ 829
Although I agree with everything you've written about the Queen, I think you've missed the most important reason she's not going to abdicate: religion.
Don't forget that as well as being the Head of State she is also Head of the State Religion -- the Church of England.
Now, in the normal run of the mill way of these things that wouldn't matter very much (many of her ancestors were not very religious), but -- second hand, from one of her confessors (who ought to know better than to splurge) -- she actually takes her religious obligations seriously.
And one of those obligations is the set of vows she took when she was crowned. Look 'em up. She has vowed to stick with the country through thick and thin, in much the same way that she did when she got married.
So suggesting the Head of the Church of England abdicates is very much like suggesting the Dalai Lama kicks off his shoes and retires. In both cases I don't see it happening unless they lose their marbles.
How serious are these mad bastards, or is it more empty threats? - "WW III more likely than accepting defeat in Ukraine" ....
Rbt Price
Strongly disagree. It also involved decent safe water-supplies, a precipitous drop in infant mortality, the ability to travel, which included ESCAPE, of course & the start of universal literacy.
"GOT"
Is a great shame, because GRRM has shown himself capable of writing really good imaginative stuff.
I particularly liked one of his earlier series, involving Haviland Tuf & lots of cats ...
But "GOT" sells & makes GRRM loadsamoney!
Apropos of nothing, but if one wants to write a story about unmaking billionaires, there are some models:
--Gibson's "Burning Chrome," for one. Also some 007 stories, Arsene Lupin, Raffles, The Saint, heist stories in general... Setting it up in a 21st century where their money's needed to pay for sequestering carbon so we don't all starve? That's new.
--Given the way the financial management industry works to obfuscate lines of ownership and control, I'd suggest that the whole Russian fairytale trope of Koschei the deathless is relevant. After all, a billionaire these days is as much a paper construct of trusts, corporations, and charities as a legal person, and the thing that most defines them--how much money the own--is the hardest thing for an outsider to actually determine. Unmaking such an entity would be a story in itself, especially if said entity controlled resources equivalent in scale to a mid-sized country, and the key documents and people are scattered across the world.
--Finally, if your theme is "getting billionaires to pay their taxes" (against their credo that all tax is theft), you've got some natural protagonists: the Criminal Investigations Division of the IRS. Seems to be I've seen combat accountants somewhere before.
The Franmingham Heart Study. Was 500? 5000? people, and is now on a third generation of descendants. Major, big name project.
No. Not overlooked, but irrelevant to the discussion, because this was about Germany, not the US or Australia. Newsflash: generally speaking, there is no such thing as A/C in housing in Germany. German houses, apartments, or flats don't have A/C and never had, because there is no need for it. Our climate requires heating, not cooling.
So suggesting the Head of the Church of England abdicates is very much like suggesting the Dalai Lama kicks off his shoes and retires. In both cases I don't see it happening unless they lose their marbles.
Oh dear. To be clear, I completely agree that she's going to hang on to the end.
That said, remember the precedent of Pope Benedict retiring to make way for Francis...
As for the Dalai Lama, he's actually gone farther, and said he is the last Dalai Lama, that he plans to reincarnate in a form that won't be found. To be fair, the reincarnating leader thing that's peculiar to some Tibetan schools is apparently seen as problematic with Buddhism in general. Even before the conquest, outside leaders (Chinese emperors, Mongol Khans), sometimes had an outsized say in who was chosen as the reincarnation of the previous lama.
The phrase you want is "forensic accountants".
And I've got a way to get a lot of them to, well, open (Schroedinger's box): I'm wondering when some tenants in a building in, say, NYC, who've been complaining for years about lack of maintenance, and call in the city inspectors, and the company running it says "sorry, we don't know who owns it" and shrugs their shoulders.
And the city then declares that the owner or owners are unknown, and seizes the building by eminent domain.
Yeah, I seem to recall a forensic accountant in Rule 34. And weren't there combat accountants in Neptune's Brood?
I've actually seen what you described in action. It took 20 or so years for LA to turn an area into parkland, and most of that was apparently trying to figure out who, if anyone, owned the shell companies that owned the shell companies that owned the land. I'm not sure whether they ever found the owners or not.
To be clear, I don't know much about the US Treasury Department, of which the IRS is part. I do know there's a CID within the IRS because I just Wikiwalked that page. What I don't know is whether any heavily-armed doorknockers in the Treasury are within the IRS, or whether they're in the Secret Service. If it's the latter...
Still, if the fictional unmaking of a powerful billionaire involves a far-traveling sociopath getting into offices located on resorts around the world (Cook Islands, Cayman Islands, Mauritius, City of London, Jackson Hole...), I think we're talking more about a combat accountant.
SFReader @ 8012:
Thanks for the info!
I'll need the ductless mini-split but one of my sibs has a forced air gas furnace and it's good to know about this option.
I've been looking at the hardware to build a "ductless mini-split" to solve my solar-powered A/C for the Jeep problem. They make them for BIG TRUCKS. So far I just don't know enough to figure out what parts I need to make one of my own ... or how to mount them. But some ideas are beginning to percolate ...
I particularly liked one of his earlier series, involving Haviland Tuf & lots of cats ...
I like Haviland Tuf stories when I first read them, but in retrospect I no longer do. They rely too much on "the protagonist is a Chessmaster Supreme, and everybody else NEVER LEARN" trope.
I realized how much I hate this trope after reading "Time Enough For Love"; actually, I never finished it. That Lazarus Long is a Chessmaster Supreme, I can swallow. That over thousands of years trillions of people not named Lazarus Long keep repeating same errors over and over, and in fact his long-term plans rely on them to continue doing so, I cannot.
May I throw in a couple of thoughts of my own, then?
Seems to me that the first thing to know is how much cooling capacity you actually need. The smaller a unit you can get away with, the easier it gets. It might work to see how many trays of ice you need to put inside to keep it cool enough instead, and having determined that, see how long it takes for them to melt and calculate the amount of heat absorbed.
The other thing that immediately strikes me is how are you going to cope with the solar panels. You probably don't want to leave them on the roof all the time for reasons like fuel consumption and risk of damage/theft, and I'm guessing you want this thing for keeping it cool while you're not actually driving so can't use whatever engine-powered thing it has already, which means you get the arseache of deploying them when you park up and stowing them again when you depart: big clumsy heavy things that are fairly easy both to damage, and to accidentally bash the car with. So it might be worth checking out whether some simple passive idea like an aluminised-plastic reflective car cover might not also keep it cool enough for long enough while being a lot cheaper and making the fucking about to prepare for use less onerous.
I reread Haviland Tuf last year, and I agree with your general assessment, for different specific reasons.
To be fair, I don't mind the "chessmaster" aspect of the repeating stories, because, yes, most people really are that stupid in real life (cf: climate change). I'm dealing with a situation where a few reasonably sane leaders are trying to solve problems most of their constituents actively don't want to acknowledge, like climate change, homelessness, and racism. So sad to say, GRRM kinda got it right.
Where the Tuf stories screw up is in the actual science implementation. I don't blame GRRM particularly, because these are (with one exception) all stories that appeared in Analog, so you'd expect the quick technical fix for the intractable social problem, which was a common trope in their stories. Trouble is, some of his solutions are on order of shipping cane toads to Australia or eucalyptus to California. Great in theory, hellish in practice. Also, super-fast growing giant plants just don't happen, for the same reason that solar powered passenger jets don't happen: there simply isn't enough energy in sunlight to support growth on that scale. And hacking together genes from species from different planets? Don't make me giggle. That's like compiling books with words in Irish, Chinese, English, and Inuit, and assuming they'll all make sense together. They won't, because interpretation depends not just on translating the word, but also in the syntax it embodies (which in genomes, are the epigenetics and controlling factors, among many other things).
Vulch @ 820:
I said nothing about it not being 25 minutes, my point was that it was made as a 25 minute programme to fit a 25 minute slot in th schedule, not a 30 minute slot.
Yet, you phrased it that I was "wrong" responding to a comment about the length of BBC programming in comparison to U.S. programming.
"Super fast giant growing plants just don't happen"? May I introduce you to kudzu, the weed that ate the South? And "a yard a week" means not 3 feet, but all of your yard. My late ex swore a few times that she felt it growing against her butt.
She has vowed to stick with the country through thick and thin, in much the same way that she did when she got married.
Yeah, I missed that, not being religious myself. (Snort. Actually more like anti-religious, and coming at it from a non-Christian background to boot.)
Oh, I've seen plants grow, including kudzu. That said, you need to read the last Tuf story to understand what I'm talking about. Five meter tall freestanding stems with a considerably wider vining canopy, 14 days after germination from a spore, on any soil, without fertilizer or water.
This doesn't happen, even with kudzu. The simple reason is that plant cells are 80% water, so no additional water limits them to whatever they can extract from the soil, minus the water they have to transpire from their stomata.
Charlie Stross @ 829:
The Queen is a historic anomaly -- one of just three over the past thousand years of English/UK monarchs (the other two were Elizabeth I and Victoria).
[...]
Anyway: to understand QEII you need to understand two things:
(a) Her whole life has been dedicated to securing and stabilizing the monarchy as an instution, after the battering it took from her uncle Edward VIII, the only British monarch to abdicate in recent history (i.e. since the American Revolutionary War). To abdicate would be to copy the man who brought the institution into disrepute and nearly wrecked it for her.
[...]
Well, FWIW, I was NOT criticizing the Queen; I was disputing the suggestion that Boomers have some obligation to "abdicate" in favor of Gen-X, Gen-Y or Millennials so that they can take over ... at least, no more than preceding generations had any obligation to move aside so Boomers could take over.
When the new generations DO come to power I hope they'll do a better job and be more successful at solving the world's problems and making a better life for everyone than my generation managed to do ... but I don't expect they will.
And hacking together genes from species from different planets? Don't make me giggle.
Ahem: this is the detail that trips you up, in a space opera with FTL travel?
847 - My bookshelves say that I like continuing series where volumes have some sort of "ending", and I like standalone novels. I do not like "high fantasy".
859 - The operative word in "Church of Ingerlundshire" is "Ingerlundshire", not "Church".
"So figure a one hour BBC program was actually 50 minutes."
That was the wrong statement I was referring to.
Er, no. She is the head of the Anglican Communion, which includes the Church of England as one church among many. In fact, there are more members in Africa and England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_Communion
I should have mentioned that she has no formal role in the other churches, and it is entirely their choice whether to recognise her as nominal head. The last I heard, most did, but that probably won't continue after her death.
And hacking together genes from species from different planets? Don't make me giggle. Ahem: this is the detail that trips you up, in a space opera with FTL travel?
Oh, you mean a series that has FTL, chronowarps, giant spacecraft with escalators, dinosaur DNA, biological Niven-style monofilament that cuts super-metals, humans fitting into alien four-armed combat exoskeletons...um...force fields, telepathy, psychic powers directed by eyeless, sessile aliens that mutate jellyfish analogs into hydrogen ballooning aerial predators in a matter of months, and yes, deus ex machina plants that grew super-fast and were genetic chimeras from multiple biospheres? (That was from memory, I'm sure I missed a few).
Yes, yes that last is what I tripped on. SF writers generally know so little about plants that their designs for monster plants make even less sense than HPL's byakhee design. I mean, inventing in the face of ignorance is fine and all, but Little Shop of Horrors has been done, and if that's the primary trope for botany in SF, that's actually quite pitiful. Giant hogweed can do considerably better than that. So can manchineel, for that matter.
I will give GRRM credit for one thing: his creature names are quite inspring. Kudos on that.
concerning unmaking billionaires:
Ever since you explained the difference between ownership and control to us, I have this hypothetical going around in my head: If I were supreme leader of the world, I wouldn't recruit an army of forensic combat accountants to go after the billionaires and their tangled web of shell companies. I'd do it the other way round: let them do the legwork! Every corporation, company, shell company, trust fund or other legal entity has to prove who its owners are. Failure to do so (for instance if they only could point to a never-ending chain of shell companies instead of an actual owner) would result in immediate nationalization and/or liquidation (with the assets going to the state coffers). The billionaire at the end of the chain of shell companies would have the right to contest that, but the only way to do that would be to claim personal ownership by proving it with the appropriate paper trail and thereby accepting his personal liability for taxes and everything else.
Pigeon @ 869: May I throw in a couple of thoughts of my own, then?
Seems to me that the first thing to know is how much cooling capacity you actually need. The smaller a unit you can get away with, the easier it gets. It might work to see how many trays of ice you need to put inside to keep it cool enough instead, and having determined that, see how long it takes for them to melt and calculate the amount of heat absorbed.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to learn now. Part of designing a system is figuring out how much of a system you need.
The other thing that immediately strikes me is how are you going to cope with the solar panels. You probably don't want to leave them on the roof all the time for reasons like fuel consumption and risk of damage/theft, and I'm guessing you want this thing for keeping it cool while you're not actually driving so can't use whatever engine-powered thing it has already, which means you get the arseache of deploying them when you park up and stowing them again when you depart: big clumsy heavy things that are fairly easy both to damage, and to accidentally bash the car with. So it might be worth checking out whether some simple passive idea like an aluminised-plastic reflective car cover might not also keep it cool enough for long enough while being a lot cheaper and making the fucking about to prepare for use less onerous.
I'm currently thinking about making the solar panels part of a top cover for my existing roof rack. That would put the panels 6 ft+ off the ground and they could be permanently mounted. I'm thinking hinged at the rear so that I could tip them up at an angle for best power, (which obviously for North America means always parking with the vehicle facing north.
Most of THAT problem is already solved via searching YouTube for "solar power" + "van life".
The whole purpose is to have a way of keeping the interior cool so that it's safe to leave a dog inside the vehicle whenever I'm someplace the dog can't go with me and has to stay in the car.
I won't be able to travel with my dog until I can solve the problem of keeping him safe in the car. But travel is why I have the Jeep and having the dog for a traveling companion is why I have the dog. I just have to figure out how to make the two compatible.
I have some other ideas for making an integrated reflective awning that will shade the vehicle that would attach to the roof rack & fold out when I have vehicle parked.
I might even have found an A/C unit that's adaptable via the "solar power" + "van life" YouTube search. It's made for vans & battery power, but I think I might be able to make it fit.
The other problem to be solved is how to make the system demonstrably safe for the dog (probably large garden thermometers visible through the windows) so I don't have some well meaning idiot breaking out my windows to "rescue" the dog.
Ahem: Little Shop of Horrors dates to 1960 (before even The Day of the Triffids). GRRM was writing the Haviland Tuf stories 1976-85. While both of them came along after DNA was identified as the hereditable information-carrying medium in our biology, LSoH was basically dark ages stuff, and GRRM can plausibly be described as not that much later on; all the real breakthroughs happened after the late 1970s and unless he was reading the literature in biochem he wouldn't have had much to go on. (IIRC the first real work on recombinant DNA engineering gained traction after 1977, right?)
To be honest the series has turned me off any number of other sf/fantasy series unless they are already completed.
You might like James Alan Gardner's Dark vs Spark series. Only two books (out of a hoped-for four) so far, but they stand on their own so the only reason I'll feel disappointed if he doesn't write more is that I enjoyed them and am looking forward to reading the others.
https://jamesalangardner.wordpress.com/books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Those_Explosions_Were_Someone_Else%27s_Fault
I had to read them just from the titles: All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault and They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded.
Vulch @ 878:
That was the wrong statement I was referring to.
But you're still wrong.
Strongly disagree. It also involved decent safe water-supplies, a precipitous drop in infant mortality, the ability to travel, which included ESCAPE, of course & the start of universal literacy.
The ability to travel meant that the industrializing British imposed themselves all over the world. This was not a happy event for those imposed on.
Look at the Indian famines under British administration, for example. Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts would be a good place to start.
The British government believed in free-trade and non-interference in the market (Siddiqui, 2016) and did nothing to check the huge hikes in foodgrain prices. The government policy encouraged households to sell surplus foodgrains to central depots using recently built railroads and most of it was exported to Britain. Relief funds were scant because the government was eager to finance overseas military campaigns. The administration firmly believed in the Malthusian idea that famine was nature’s response to Indian over-breeding. Millions of people perished when severe droughts turned into famines due to the government policy of exporting food, while adhering to laissez-faire and non-intervention policies. In contrast, during the per-colonial period, in the famines the Mughal rulers clearly recognised that their legitimacy would be tested, and charity works such as distribution of food to the poor was seen as the most common response. They were local rulers and in order to rule, the perception of their subject was seen as crucial to stay in power.
https://worldfinancialreview.com/the-political-economy-of-famines-during-the-british-rule-in-india-a-critical-analysis/
German houses, apartments, or flats don't have A/C and never had, because there is no need for it.
Really? Even during heat waves?
There is limited data on heat-related mortality in Germany. But during each of the previous heat waves – in 2003, 2006, and 2015 – more than 6,000 deaths were attributed to heat. Limited data from 2018 shows that almost 500 people died of heat-related causes in Berlin alone.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/01/germany-inaction-heat-plans-threatens-health#
Even before the conquest, outside leaders (Chinese emperors, Mongol Khans), sometimes had an outsized say in who was chosen as the reincarnation of the previous lama.
If you're a believer, shouldn't that be "outside leaders sometimes had an outsized say in who the previous lama reincarnated as"? :-)
It's a good point. I really do recommend reading Harrington's Capital Without Borders for a better understanding of this.
The short answer is that wealth management isn't a static system, it's a dynamic system, very analogous to cyber warfare, with backdoors written into complex legislation and red queen races between regulators and the wealthy. What Harrington described a few years ago is already somewhat dated in detail, even to my cursory reading, but I don't think the fundamentals have changed.
There are a couple of general problems with what you propose. The first one is you didn't step back and ask how it can be hacked. And it can be: for example, you simply pay someone to own the company for you (which is one thing wealth managers already do). There are quite a few reasons you'd want to do this legally anyway. For instance, if you're a developer who has local activists attacking one of their projects, which normally happens, you'd spin that project off into a separate business and pay people to run it for you. That limits your liability to only what's actually involved in the project, and I think most people would agree that only the development should be at risk for what it does wrong, not some investor's life savings, when only a percent is involved in the development.
Speaking of life savings, one of the common "bad actors" is CalPERS, the pension system for California state employees. It's billionaire-scale because it manages the funds for so many people, and it has to make money just to cover inflation costs and to make sure it can support the retirement of loyal servants of the public good and other bureaucrats. One of the developments I fought was, at one point, owned by CalPERS, because California real estate pays higher returns than ordinary savings do. Other IRA and 401k managers, such as T Rowe Price and Vanguard, occasionally get stuck as major shareholders in problematic companies too. They own(ed) major shares of power companies (like PG&E and SDG&E) whose equipment caused multi-billion dollar fires that killed people. Yes, investors should be on the hook for company losses, but we always forget that our retirement funds might be those owners we want to penalize for bad corporate decisions.
This complexifies the issue, because in addition to getting caught in a Red Queen race between bureaucrats lobbying legislators (or you, O Supreme Ruler), and financial advocates pushing for new rules to benefit the wealthy, anybody making rules to rein in the billionaires also have to make sure that the rules promulgated don't accidentally nuke everyone's retirement savings by making ownership disclosures so onerous that no one wants to pay into a 401k or deal with pension paperwork.
On the flip side, if you're writing this in fiction, you can take a rudimentary understanding of these issues (like Harrington's Capital Without Borders and Hughes' Family Wealth: Keeping It In The Family), apply a bit of creativity to what you know, as William Gibson did in a different venue, and end up with the fintech version of Gibson's cyberspace, complete with self-programming slow AIs masquerading as financial management systems. Gibson reportedly knew jack about computers when he sat down at his typewriter and wrote Neuromancer. Forty years later, Zuckerberg's just the latest guy to try to make Gibsonian cyberspace actually work. An enterprising author could do the same with fintech, in creating a world where governments get serious about fighting climate change and attempt to claw back all the money and control that's been looted from their economies, billionaires and their vassals* fight back, and activists try to keep ordinary folk from getting soaked or crushed. All to keep the Earth habitable.
Why am I not writing this? Well, for one thing, I'm on the fringes of it in real life, and I like to keep my escapism separate from my activism. For another, I have to make sure I honor confidentiality agreements. That thing about CalPERS and the other financial companies is public knowledge if you spend a few minutes with Google, but other stuff very much is not.
*Many financial managers see their relationships with their wealthy clients as feudal, vassal to lord, with personal loyalty as the primary value on both sides. Managers also are fairly often female and earning in the mid-hundreds of thousands, less than stockbrokers do. It's an interesting world.
The simple reason is that plant cells are 80% water, so no additional water limits them to whatever they can extract from the soil, minus the water they have to transpire from their stomata.
Game recommendation: Cellulose published by Genius Games.
https://www.geniusgames.org/products/cellulose-a-plant-cell-biology-game
For instance, if you're a developer who has local activists attacking one of their projects, which normally happens, you'd spin that project off into a separate business and pay people to run it for you.
Or if you're a right-wing provocateur being sued for …
https://abovethelaw.com/2022/04/alex-jones-pays-himself-18m-declares-bankruptcy-offers-sandy-hook-plaintiffs-change-he-found-in-couch-at-infowars-studio/
Rbt Prior
NOT fucking Mike Davis AGAIN ...
Wrong & "Not even wrong" - for a variety of reasons - mostly incompetence & an actual inability to "do stuff" with the resources then available. Also - people who did what little they could to mitigate or avoid said famines were very publicly rewarded ... something Davis very carefully ignores.
Also: CORRECTION: "The
British governmentall contemporary governments ... believed in free-trade and non-interference in the market" - there, fixed that for you.Yeah, assembled in a book called "Tuf Voyaging." Great stories. And my wife is a fan of Windhaven.
I seem to recall that Tuf got tricked at least once - when the opposition brought a cat in heat aboard his ship to distract his attack cat.
Have to disagree on Little Shop of Horrors. The Roger Corman movie was released in 1960, but The Day of the Triffids was published before it, in 1951.
Which makes its premise of "satellite weapons system goes very wrong" backstory all the more prescient, since Wyndham's novel was published 6 years before Sputnik flew.
Has any civilization ever managed to carry through a "meta-civilization" transformation? Ie: Changing the civilization fundamentally, based on an abstract perception of the civilization, as a civilization, rather than as "How things naturally are" ?
In other words, has any civilisation changed its organising principles based on a self-conscious understanding of where its members think it is heading, and a preference to go in a different direction?
It turns out that there's evidence quite a bit of this sort of thing has in fact happened, per a lot of the discussion in Graeber and Wenslow's book mentioned by Frank a few times here (published posthumously for Graeber, so definitely his last major work), The Dawn of Everything. A bit like the way that Debt set out to turn over some unacknowledged assumptions about the nature of money and exchange, Dawn explores the whole 'state of nature' schemozzle and finds some interesting things. Basically the evidence suggests people have been self-conscious about how they run their societies pretty much as long as there have been societies, there's no teleological arc to history, neither toward justice nor away from it. Every possible form of social organisation has probably been tried somewhere, some very long-lasting by our standards but long forgotten. This might seem like a "well duh" kind of statement to many here, but it's really helpful when review the epistemology of these claims in light of new empirical evidence is presented all in one place.
Agreed. Also, IIRC, Tuf's ship had some kind of design software dedicated to creating creatures. He didn't have to figure out how to combine alien DNA, just tell the computer what he wanted and (probably) do testing.
Thanks. There are seagrass meadows near me, but it's not the sort of question the tourist-promotion people like.
Ah, it's for your dog... who I think you have described as a "little dog" in previous posts, yes? (And he sounds like a pretty decent character.)
This makes me wonder if you could adapt one of those mini-fridges that you put in your lounge to keep beer in. Take it apart as much or as little as is useful and rig a couple of fans to blow air over the heat exchangers. It might not be enough to keep the entire interior cool, but I'm thinking if it blows out a stream of cold air that the dog can lie in it ought to do fine to keep him happy.
(This is all pretty wild guesswork of course because I've never seen your dog, your car, your climate, or even a beer fridge in the metal, so it might be a useful idea or it might be completely shit.)
It might also help with the "demonstrably safe" bit, if people can see him sitting by something that has fans and stuff. Although I do worry that the way people usually are they will simply categorise what they see as "dog", "car", and "something I've never seen before so I'll ignore it", and consequently respond inappropriately, even if it has COLD AIR BLOWER painted on it in big red letters, there is visible frost forming on the dog's fur, and you have a loudspeaker rigged to yell THIS DOG IS AIR-CONDITIONED at anyone who comes too close.
Another thing that strikes me is that no matter what you do you'll need some way to dump the waste heat outside the car, which means getting either an air duct or a fluid circuit out of the car without leaving windows open or having to cut holes in it. Sometimes cars do have various holes already present which are hidden under trim or carpet or something, and which you could then design your thing to use if your car has such. Otherwise... there is nearly always some kind of vent system to let air out of the interior somewhere at the back, although its exterior outlet is often very well hidden and its interior inlet doesn't even seem to exist; so if it's possible to find that and tap into it on your car that's another thought.
Actually (thinking as I post here) you might be able to avoid it if your journeys allow you to rely on the availability of other refrigeration at night. If you can get enough cooling from a bucket or tank of ice with a water/air heat exchanger (car heater matrix) plumbed into the bottom of it and a fan to blow air, and then make more ice overnight, you could do it dirt-cheap and with extreme simplicity: two items from a junkyard, and some computer fans which your existing car battery will run for weeks without assistance.
Pension funds are billionaires too (I'm a fractional-billionaire since one of my pension funds is worth 82 billion quid and I'm one of a million or so pensioners who "own" that fund).
Vilification of rich people for becoming rich because, generally, they got out with the buckets when it was raining money (Gates, Bezos, Jobs etc.) is another matter and labelling "billionaires" as EVULL! is just the easy way out for a lot of people who are looking for someone to blame for everything (see also "Big Oil" being held responsible for seven billion people wanting cheap energy on the basis that if Big Oil/Coal/Gas didn't exist somehow all that fossil carbon would stay in the ground because... uh, reasons). Scapegoats are always in demand.
Generally the individuals like Gates etc. aren't cash-billionaires, they own valuable property like any mortgage holder does but with a lot more onerous restrictions on how they could convert it to other properties or cash it in -- the SEC and other national regulators would take a very dim view of things if, for example, Elon Musk attempted to sell all his shares in Tesla in one go. At least if someone decides to sell their half-million-dollar house, absent entailments, there is very little legislatively speaking that will get in the way of them being homeless next week but with a six-figure sum in the bank.
David L said:Modern heat pumps are also electronic control system which need to be set up correctly and EXPLAINED to the home owner.
Got to deal with a company that had made a wiring mistake and just kept replacing blown circuit boards instead of fixing the wiring issue. Till my wife and I threw a fit with them. (This was on a system 5 hours from us at my mother in law's.)
If you've been sold a system that needs wiring then you've already made the basic mistake that I was talking about. Being upsold to some rubbish that you don't need for several times the right price with an install that takes days or weeks instead of minutes. A modern system needs no wiring. You can't make a mistake installing it. The only wires that you "install" that could lead to a "mistake" are the two actives and the earth. If you swap an active for an earth you'll kill the installer so they won't bother you with any further mistakes. Everything else only plugs in one way.
No one needs it explained. You pick up the controller. Click mode and the display cycles through a picture of a snowflake (make it cold) a sun (make it hot), water drops (make it dry), a fan (make it windy) and sometimes the word Auto, which means holds it at this temperature. Next to the picture on the controller of a thermometer, there's an up and down button. Push the up, the temperature goes up, push the down, the temperature goes down. If you want to get fancy, there's a picture of a fan on the controller with a button. Press once and a small fan appears, press again and a medium fan appears, press again and a big fan appears, press again and a fan with the word "auto" appears, press again and the small fan appears. You can guess what that's about. You can set up delay start or to run at certain times of the day, or to run for a number of hours and then shut off, but the instruction book will tell you how to do that and it's not needed for basic operation. It will work fine even if it's flashing 12:00.
You do not need to give someone 12000 dollars and a service contract to work this out. If you can't manage that then the person feeding you will work it out.
Twice a year you pull the filters and wash them in the shower. The instructions will have pictographs to explain how. Again, you don't need a 12000 dollar install and a service contract. If you forget for a couple of years then it won't hurt anything and most systems will remind you anyway.
Ahem: Little Shop of Horrors dates to 1960 (before even The Day of the Triffids). GRRM was writing the Haviland Tuf stories 1976-85. While both of them came along after DNA was identified as the hereditable information-carrying medium in our biology, LSoH was basically dark ages stuff, and GRRM can plausibly be described as not that much later on; all the real breakthroughs happened after the late 1970s and unless he was reading the literature in biochem he wouldn't have had much to go on. (IIRC the first real work on recombinant DNA engineering gained traction after 1977, right?)
This is where it gets technical.
Even if DNA is a universal data conservation system (and I suspect it is), it's not a universal code. Similarly, about half the amino acids cells use are probably universal, because they're extremely simple chemicals. But about one-quarter (the most complex ones) are probably idiosyncratic to this planet. The stuff known in the 1970s was the triplet codon code.
Anyone who thought about it a bit would realize both that the translation code was arbitrary, and that to some degree the amino acid panoply was arbitrary. IIRC, Asimov said something about that in one of his pop science books? Anyway, on that very basic level, mashing up codes from different planets involves some fairly fugly universal genome resequencing (have to create a common code that accommodates all amino acids in use in some sort of codon system), and set up all the subsystems to process those amino acids. That probably would be impossible, but even at 1970s level genetics, the problems are there if you're paying attention.
The problem with monster plants in fiction is that they're too animalistic. Plants do all sorts of things to mess with animals, to the point where Pollan's question of whether we domesticated plants or they domesticated us does ring true. What SF writers need to do, and mostly do not do, is write superplants as super plants. Almost everyone instead writes super-plants as alt-animals, and that they are not.
No one needs it explained.
You haven't tried to provide tech support to my mother, have you? :-)
Works the same way in Britain. Some dwellings in particular areas and with unfortunate thermal circumstances do need some form of cooling in regular operation, but nearly everywhere all you ever have to do when the weather gets warm is open the windows. Maybe you get a week or two when you might think you'd like it if you did have it, but it is only a week or two and it's not the case most years. Installing an air conditioning system would be nothing more than a waste of a large amount of money on something you'll never use anyway. Those few hundred people in Berlin might well have not been any better off if they had installed air conditioning; most of them would probably have found it didn't work when they did switch it on because of all its refrigerant disappearing and/or its fans seizing up all unbeknownst in however many years it was since they last used it.
Providing something that later turns out to be dangerous is fairly normal. See a lot of pharmaceuticals. The moral response to this is to pull the product when the problem is discovered, and try to do something about the damage. The EVUL response is to evade responsibility, blame the consumers who bought it, and actively manipulate the system so that they can not just not pay, but sell more of it.
That's what oil companies are doing, and they're also trying to make everyone complicit in their actions to make them harder to fight.
So yes, I think it's perfectly appropriate to claw back profits from these guys. When you're talking about luck, you're not. What they did was find a river, dam it, and sell the water at ruinous rates, to the point where the farmers who need the water can't grow enough food to support anyone other than the dam owner. What I'm talking about is breaking the dam and restructuring the water distribution so that everyone had enough water to live on, if they were careful.
There's this mob who make 12v AC for classic cars where the owner doesn't want to add a belt driven compressor.
https://www.classicretrofit.com/collections/electric-air-conditioning
But really, looking at your requirements, air conditioning, clearly visible to the outside that the dog is OK, long duration battery power... I can't see a better solution than a Tesla. They have "Dog mode" and a battery big enough to run that mode in any weather for days.
https://youtu.be/FFx1YHEzreY
Plus they have a camper mode that is designed for you to sleep in the car.
Heteromeles said: Oh, you mean a series that has FTL, chronowarps, giant spacecraft with escalators, dinosaur DNA, biological Niven-style monofilament that cuts super-metals, humans fitting into alien four-armed combat exoskeletons...um...force fields, telepathy, psychic powers directed by eyeless, sessile aliens that mutate jellyfish analogs into hydrogen ballooning aerial predators in a matter of months, and yes, deus ex machina plants that grew super-fast and were genetic chimeras from multiple biospheres
I try to limit myself to believing no more than six impossible things until I've had breakfast.
What I'm talking about is breaking the dam and restructuring the water distribution so that everyone had enough water to live on, if they were careful.
That's ascribing too much rationality to humanity en masse. Fossil fuels got their start to a large extent because of folks "restructuring the water distribution" when mill owners using water power found their competitors upstream were damming "their" water and preventing their mills from operating. A coal-fired engine in the millyard kept the mill shafts turning and the spinning jennys spinning regardless of the water supply. The rest is history.
Seven billion people want energy. Fossil fuels provide energy, renewables not so much. Pretending that Big Oil is somehow forcing that energy consumption on consumers who don't want it and who will not steal it, fight for it and go to war for it is, well, inane to be charitable.
A million Small Oils will produce and supply fossil fuel to consumers at similar amounts (ca. 88 million barrels per diem) as a handful of Big Oil companies does today, but with less regulation -- see for example the recent accident in Nigeria where an illegal oil distillery refining stolen crude blew up and the resulting fires killed at least a hundred people. When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up a decade ago and polluted the Gulf of Mexico BP was expected to fix things and got prosecuted and fined for being responsible. When a refinery owned by a Small Oil business leaks a thousand barrels of crude into a river will there be enough lawyers and inspectors to ensure things are made good by the Mom-n-Pop family firm and that it won't happen again?
Doing without energy isn't an alternative. Telling the people on the lowest incomes and lowest quality of life that they can't extract and burn energy under their feet because the West has already pushed CO2 levels well about 400ppm is not going to work. Blaming Big Oil doesn't fix things, it just makes people feel better. Scapegoats are always in fashion.
It has to be said that out of FTL spaceships and interplanetary chimaeras, I too find the latter bugs me far more. FTL is just everywhere, and always has been, since it's (nearly always...) a requirement if you're going to have an interstellar setting with relatable timescales at all; it's something I basically tolerate automatically, and even expect. (Though I do strongly prefer the "modern" versions which do make some attempt at having found a plausible loophole in current physics, over things like the Skylark-style "Einstein was wrong, just keep shoving" (which that book also manages to extend to "Newton was wrong", although without being explicit about it), or the even earlier approach of just ignoring the scale of interstellar distances completely.)
The alien genetic compatibility idea though has been basically bloody stupid ever since DNA was discovered, and wasn't great even before that. Whereas FTL relates to a situation that is outside everyone's experience because none of the things in it, FTL or STL, exist at all, AGC goes against common knowledge: everyone knows a bull and a mare can copulate neither with pleasure nor with profit. Same for pretty much any other pairing you care to name, except horses and donkeys since a donkey is a kind of squashed horse anyway, and even there the result is kind of fucked up. The idea of interbreeding working between species from different planets, that share absolutely no trace of common ancestry at all, makes less sense than expecting anything to happen from using elephant sperm to fertilise frogs' eggs.
It got worse when inheritance ceased to be just this weird thing that happens and it became known that it worked by a randomly-originated but highly specific chemical code. We can now understand that there are a vast number of interacting factors, at all levels from atoms up to entire organisms and possibly even beyond, which all are what they are because they randomly didn't happen to be something different, and which all do have to be exactly that thing for it all to work. Even on Earth there are organisms that use an incompatible forked version of the DNA microcode. The probability that an alien biology's inheritance mechanism would not have taken a different branch at one of the innumerable forks in the tree is so minuscule that the plausibility of finding even one instance of it is zilch, let alone having it be the rule and applying on a galactic scale.
And then computers came along and seeing even codes of different origins that were intended to be compatible actually not being due to some fractional disparity became an item of everyday experience. Probably indeed one that more people have encountered personally than have encountered a bull and a mare trying to have it off.
The problem here is we've got three scenarios per IPCC:
Commit 30% of global GDP in perpetuity to carbon sequestration: pumping it into rock, growing bogs, entirely redoing how we manage soil. The rest of the world will then run on the other 70%
Or we can devote 10-15% of global GDP in perpetuity to carbon sequestration and drastically limit our energy usage.
Or we can stay the course, and watch the climate ultimately wreck our entire GDP, because that's the most convenient option.
Now, what's your position again? Dying for convenience, especially someone else's convenience, is probably not what most people want to do. This is especially true because the wealthy will do their damnedest to make sure other people do the dying for them.
So our job, basically, is to rebuild systems that accumulate power--which billionaires are about, and which first world countries are also about--so that we can devote the power and resources we've monopolized to keeping them alive (if no longer rich) along with the rest of us.
None of this is convenient to anyone. If we'd wanted to be convenient, we should have started to switch to renewables and nuclear in the 1990s when it became freaking obvious we should do so. Instead out politicians listened to the oil companies, oil demand climbed, and here we are. Oh well. Can we at least try to be hopeful about it?
Robert Prior said:Really? Even during heat waves?
I was about to draft something describing how Europeans have the unshiftable idea that you can escape from lethal temperatures by opening a window, but Pigeon provided a worked example of the idea that you only die from heat if you're too stupid to open a window.
It's an out of context problem. Inside is, and has always been, and will always be warmer than outside. They've never experienced anything else. If it's too hot inside, let some outside air in. They can't imagine the situation where you're sheltering inside from the lethal heat outside, in a building that's heating up, and you're faced with the decision of staying put and dying if the weather doesn't break, or putting on some clothes, venturing out into the heat (and direct sun), doing exercise (walking) to a place like a shopping centre where you can shelter and probably dying on the way there.
All while not thinking straight due to heat and lack of sleep.
News reports of 56000 Siberians perishing from the heat a couple of years ago just bounce off. "silly fools should have opened a window then" or "probably not used to it, we ruled India, we're made of sterner stuff" (we'll just ignore the fact that the British fucked of to Darjeeling every summer so they didn't die).
I've been battering up against that sure knowledge for years.
"You can guess what that's about."
I don't want to guess what it's about, and I don't want to guess my way through some half-arsed imitation of a full-scale GUI. I want separate controls for each function, labelled in English. If they can manage to stick a ratings label in the right language on the back, they can manage to stick a label for the controls in the right language on the front.
Your summary does not convince me how simple it is; it convinces me of the opposite.
Re the billionaire/pension thing it is worth remembering that not everyone does things like the US. Not all pension systems work by having special businesses pretending to be Mr Burns.
And when you make the law you can, well, make the law. It doesn’t have to be ‘fair’ to rich bastards in order to not harm everyone else. Reclaim the money they’ve appropriated.
And whilst I’m on the subject of making the law, I think I’ve worked out why we see ex-RCP operatives working with the fascist... Tory... party - by infiltrating so deeply they are creating conditions for a bloody revolution and, obviously, their ascent to power as the natural leaders of the proletariat. The latest successes are quite brilliant; no protests allowed, lose citizenship for holding your mouth wrong, gerrymandering at the deepest level, total power in the hands of a deranged kleptomaniac clique.. you wouldn’t tolerate it as the plot of a bad ersatz-bond movie.
"but Pigeon provided a worked example of the idea that you only die from heat if you're too stupid to open a window."
That wasn't actually what I was intending to convey. The point was that people don't have air conditioning because opening a window always works. Times when you have opened all the windows and you're still too hot just don't happen, except maybe for a week or two at intervals a few years apart, and even then it's no more than unpleasant. People don't install air conditioning systems because there's no point, just as people who live somewhere you can sleep naked outdoors all year round don't install heating systems.
Charlie apparently tweeted:
Really?
Care to justify?
There is one "book" I've read (well, it is part of the series) which knocked down the "why do they need that much money?" crowd. It required a god-like computer and an alien invasion, but hey, weirder things have happened, right?
https://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/82363551272/fall-of-doc-future-contents
Just so you know, it is super hero fiction, but with the twist that the author is really trying to make it plausible. Doc Future keeps getting "messages" from the future and is stupendously smart (he made himself that way), and his daughter Flicker who is a speedster. And, yes, the physics is sort-of believable.
There are also Norse gods, witches, mind controlling telepaths, and Aliens! Lots of Aliens! Great fun.
If I was going to try and make the Tuf stories believable, I would use this approach: The creatures that he creates are not merging the actual DNA from different planets, rather creatures (& DNA) from different planets are analyzed to determine how they get their different attributes (growing fast, huge leaves, etc.). This data is then used to determine if there is an equivalent DNA sequence in the target planets native DNA (if it has one) that can lead to the same attributes.
Sort of like translating a Cobol program into C++.
It sounds far-fetched, but I think the stories are far enough in the future that tech advances might get us there.
Maybe more north. But in the southern US you can get by without much in the way of heating. Especially along the Gulf Coast.
Well, more like 'only along the Gulf Coast'.
For Memphis, Tennessee, for example,
Average high about 9C, average low about 1C.
https://www.weather-us.com/en/tennessee-usa/memphis-weather-january
Oops. Didn't make clear that those temperatures were for January.
https://duckduckgo.com/air+conditioner+remote+control
They make universal remotes that expose the four important buttons, and usually under the sliding cover are a bunch of more complex functions (like choosing between auto and heat/cool/dry). I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the manufacturers intend it that way.
If your mother can operate a toaster, she can operate this. At least at the basic level. A button for on and off. A button to make the air warmer. A button to make it colder. A button to change how much air comes out.
My toaster has a lever to turn it on, but I have to just know that you have to put the bread in first and there's no instruction, word or pictogram to tell me that I push down the lever to start toasting. The lever doesn't latch unless the toaster is plugged in. There's a dial with numbers, but the numbers don't explain what they're numbering. There's a button labelled "Reheat" but no afterburner. There's a button labelled with a snowflake but you have to just know that means frozen bread. There's no obvious way of getting the bread out or stopping the toasting while it's running (you push the knob with the numbers that don't mean anything)
Compared to a toaster, a split system is a miracle of straight forward UI. I struggle to think of something more straight forward that has moving parts. A light switch? (though they're generally not labelled)
Pigeon said: but nearly everywhere [his emphasis] all you ever have to do when the weather gets warm is open the windows
I said: I was about to draft something describing how Europeans have the unshiftable idea that you can escape from lethal temperatures by opening a window, but Pigeon provided a worked example of the idea that you only die from heat if you're too stupid to open a window.
Pigeon said: The point was that people don't have air conditioning because opening a window always works [his emphasis].
And now I'm saying... WTF? You're saying that Europeans don't have an unshiftable idea that opening a window always works because opening a window always works.
Right. Glad we cleared that one up. That must be of huge comfort to the tens of thousands of families of Europeans who've died from the heat in the past couple of years. If only they'd known that.
I think you reading that as 'not needing AC' rather than 'you use less power for the AC' and the latter was the intended meaning, I think.
I'm one of those who feel that much of the first and near first world has become acclimated to controlled indoor environments.
I'm OK with sleeping when the temp is 90F/32C or a bit higher. With a fan I can normally deal with higher. And when it gets colder I just dress differently. My wife will not let this happen so we're somewhat AC'd in the summer. In the winter I keep the general temp in the house at around 62-65F/17-18C and we head individual rooms with oil filled electric heater if needed. And keep doors closed.
My power/gas bills come in near the supposed amounts for efficient homes. And efficient mine is not.
I should have mentioned that she has no formal role in the other churches, and it is entirely their choice whether to recognise her as nominal head. The last I heard, most did, but that probably won't continue after her death.
I would have thought there would be a split in the Anglican communion by now. This may explain why it hasn't yet happened.
Ahem: this is the detail that trips you up, in a space opera with FTL travel?
When I first saw Independence Day (movie) it was somewhat entertaining. Then they created a computer virus in a few hours to infect and shutdown the IT systems of an ALIEN civilization.
That was my finger nails on the chalk board moment in that story.
Many financial managers see their relationships with their wealthy clients as feudal, vassal to lord, with personal loyalty as the primary value on both sides. Managers also are fairly often female and earning in the mid-hundreds of thousands, less than stockbrokers do. It's an interesting world.
And of course for many of them they get a door into early access to investments. So that mid-hundreds of thousands may just be the base.
Sort of like top of the line US (other countries?) pro athletes. They don't really cash their paychecks. The teams they play for really employ an LLC which gives them the services of the player. The player's financial advisers put that money into trust and such plus the endorsement income (often more than the $millions of pay) and the trusts pay them a salary. Plus trust and other financial deals tend to be the real owners of the various houses and such they control.
If you've been sold a system that needs wiring then you've already made the basic mistake that I was talking about.
Modern Heat Pumps and most any other HVAC system needs electronics to make it efficient. Without it you're basically saying burn more coal. We just disagree. Totally.
As to training, not everyone is as skilled at every aspect of modern life as you. So they need service and training.
Again, we totally disagree.
"there's no teleological arc to history, neither toward justice nor away from it."
I've always heard the "bends towards justice" thing as "If you're lucky my grandchild may be less of an asshole than I am."
Newsflash: generally speaking, there is no such thing as A/C in housing in Germany.
I just asked my daughter who spent a year in Germany for school and she concurs.
This was in the Harz Mountian area but still I didn't see much in the way of AC in the AirB&Bs we used. (But it was December so I didn't look all that hard either.)
About the need for AC in Europe: at least in my experience it would help us, but the apartment is old enough that figuring out where to install it would be a pain. This far we've managed without one, but summers are getting annoying.
We live in a flat built in the 1960s. Double-paned windows, whereas the standard for all my life has been three panes, but that's more of a problem in the winter. No AC, and not really a good place to install it. At least we have windows to West and East, so there's always some windows in shade, and no Southern windows. In the recent summers it has been quite hot in the flat - even though the district heating is off from April to maybe November, the people living there and the devices give off enough heat that it's warm from April to maybe November, again. When there are more people it gets hot fast, and often we can open the windows to cool.
However, during the last few years now, from maybe the start of July to the end of August, the outside temperatures have been high enough that getting the flat to cool needs some work. For example, we keep the windows open during the night (though occasionally the temp is about 25C during the night, too, so not very cool) and close the windows and shades for the day so that the inside temperature doesn't get too high during the day.
So it's not like we can just open the windows and let the cool air in from the outside. It can well be that the outside air is hotter than what we have inside - it might feel cooler when moving, of course.
We're coping - but we are not old and no chronic stuff hindering us. It's still not fun when nothing we can do lowers the inside temperature below 28C or so - it feels hot and is much more difficult to try to cope with clothing than being cold.
For Memphis, Tennessee, for example,
As someone who grew up in Paducah KY, midway between Memphis and St. Louis, I disagree.
Both are a good thing. But I remember when AC showed up. And central head was needed. But not to the comfort levels we want today. The generation ahead of me grew up with a wood stove in the kitchen and main room of the house.
Central heat and air are fantastic. But not absolutely required.
"opening a window always works because opening a window always works."
I think you're misreading Pigeon rather badly. Possibly he wasn't all that clear, but I took him as saying that opening a window has always worked in the past, in Europe, and that is why A/C has not been a thing in the past, in Europe.
Things are changing, but it can take time for the change to be recognised, and more time to do something about it.
And, of course, there are other parts of the world which have always been different.
JHomes
I think you're misreading Pigeon rather badly
There have to be limits, though. When Pigeon is vigorously disagreeing with a point it's kind of harsh to assume that they actually agree but are for some reason writing the opposite of what they mean.
I would probably put the original point more as: in the olden days Europe just accepted that people would die during heatwaves. People died all the time of all sorts of things, heat was not an outlier in that regard. But these days we get a bit upset about excess deaths.
So while in the past a few weeks of unusually hot weather every decade or two that killed a few thousand people was just part of life, these days we're both more upset by deaths, and what used to be "occasional" is rapidly turning into "annual".
As I read it:
Gasdive is saying: to reduce the death toll some form of active cooling is going to be necessary.
Pigeon says: nope, we never needed it in the past and we're never going to need it.
For example, we keep the windows open during the night (though occasionally the temp is about 25C during the night, too, so not very cool) and close the windows and shades for the day so that the inside temperature doesn't get too high during the day.
A window fan is a great investment (and usually cheap, too). Use it to exhaust hot air from your place - from the top floor if you have more than one.
That's during the night, of course...
Question: We know that cruise missiles can be brought down, before they reach their targets. Why/how is this not happening in Ukraine?
Is it simply that they do not (yet) have the correct kit for this, or is it something else?
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in this, so mostly guessing.
Question: We know that cruise missiles can be brought down, before they reach their targets. Why/how is this not happening in Ukraine? Is it simply that they do not (yet) have the correct kit for this, or is it something else?
I think it's a combination of many factors. To shoot down a flying thing, you have to have basically two things: * You need to know where the thing is * You need to have something to shoot at it
My understanding is that cruise missiles often fly relatively low and fast, so it's kind of difficult to know where they are, and even when you find them out, you need to have the air-to-air capability already where it would be useful. The A-A needs to also be of the type that can shoot at the range needed.
I think this makes shooting cruise missiles down somewhat difficult. It's the old thing that the attacker can choose when and where to attack whereas the defender needs to defend in many places.
Reading wikipedia, there are also high-flying cruise missiles and those have slightly different problems.
Please somebody with real knowledge, point out my errors.
"Question: We know that cruise missiles can be brought down, before they reach their targets. Why/how is this not happening in Ukraine? "
Because the entire point about cruise missiles is to make that hard.
Ballistic weapons are easy, figure out the physics parameters (pos, velocity, accelleration) and you'll know where they are at any future time.
Cruise missiles are for all practical purposes drones with an embedded computer deciding where they go, so their trajectory is decisively non-newtonian.
To a first order approximation, they fly so low as possible, so that any particular ground based weapon will have a very short radius of engagement and very, very little time to try to exploit it.
In practice it is only feasible to shoot them down from above, and modern cruise missiles will randomize their path and attempt evasion if they detect radar lock-on.
Then they created a computer virus in a few hours to infect and shutdown the IT systems of an ALIEN civilization
Yes... my thought was that this would inevitably fail because no-one would have the right cable. But then I never actually saw that movie.
Moz said: As I read it:
Gasdive is saying: to reduce the death toll some form of active cooling is going to be necessary.
Pigeon says: nope, we never needed it in the past and we're never going to need it.
Pretty much, but I'd say that I'm saying not only is it now already required (as witnessed by more deaths in 44 days in Siberia than deaths on both sides in the first 44 days of the UA-RU war), but that the people who need it literally can't even comprehend that it's needed.
To which Pigeon is amply demonstrating that he can't even imagine it.
And of course, the subtext that comes out of hashing this subject for years: you can't keep burning things, and to have any hope of decarbonising heating, you have to have cheap to buy, cheap to retrofit heat pump heating, which at this point means window/wall or mini split ductless, and you get AC for free of you install that.
One thing that frustrated me was that the better mini split systems here are "qualified installer only". You can "buy" one but you can only have it actually delivered by someone properly certified and either the installer or the supplier won't allow it to be installed in my shedroom. So I still have the window mounted one that feeds through a suitable hole in my insulated wall. Bah! CoP ~3 rather than 5+ and it has many other problems.
I expect there are much better window mounted and portable units on the market, but I bought that one during the Melbourne heatwave a decade ago when there was not a lot of choice. That was exactly an "opening the windows does not help" with overnight lows over 30 degrees and lots of nice hot daytime to heat up the uninsulated double brick walls of the house we were in.
FWIW the partial solution there was to wake at ~4am and run round opening all the windows and doors, turn on fans to push air through the house in a downwind direction (the land breeze meant there was usually a barely perceptible air movement). That got the inside of house down to more or less ambient by the time the day started heating up again. Meanwhile four of us were sleeping on the floor in one room with the window mounted aircon cooling us. Not fun. But much less fun for anyone too poor to drop $500 on an aircon... and there were a lot of those.
"Pigeon says: nope, we never needed it in the past and we're never going to need it."
If Pigeon is actually saying the bit I've bolded, he's so far wrong he can't see right with an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.
But I don't read what he's said so far that way.
Perhaps next time he's on, he could clarify whether he is actually saying that or not.
JHomes.
Yes, that's super annoying, particularly when there are systems on the market that are designed to be installed by a handyman.
On the plus side, installs are cheap compared to where many of the commentariat live. A population that's familiar enough with the fact that it's only a couple of hours to install one won't stand for paying 10,000 AUD for 2 hours work by a tradie and a TA.
And window units are pretty efficient now if you're desperate.
If you want carbon sequestration to be a thing you need energy, lots of it, way more energy than just providing everyone with what they need for a comfortable life, and not from fossil fuel sources. How many billionaires are around isn't going to affect the non-carbon energy production capacity of the world.
Going after the intellectuals as in Cambodia in the Year Zero period didn't help the locals, massacring the Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1980s or persecuting the Muslims in Myanmar today hasn't really made the lives of the inhabitants of those places better and "going after" billionaires isn't going to magically reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It IS "doing something" and would make a lot of people feel better much as persecuting Jews for the last millenia did. Forcing a few dozen billionaires to somehow cough up their supposedly ill-gotten gains is not actually solving the problem since it will take at least a quadrillion dollars to actually fix things (probably more in the long run). When do we start?
David L said Modern Heat Pumps and most any other HVAC system needs electronics to make it efficient. Without it you're basically saying burn more coal. We just disagree. Totally.
I'm not saying that modern heat pumps don't have electronics. I'm saying that modern systems have built in electronics that are installed and tested in a factory by skilled workers who do that job hundreds of times a day. Not installed by a minimum wage worker who has done it twice before, stuffed it up both times and then managed to stuff it up several more times after blowing up the first few boards. If they've sold you such a system they're stealing.
As to training, not everyone is as skilled at every aspect of modern life as you. So they need service and training.
Well, if you get service and training for a toaster, sure, go for it. It's not my money. Cleaning the filters on my system is almost exactly the same effort as cleaning the crumb tray. I can press the "on" button! I guess that makes me skilled at every aspect of modern life. Kewl!
But advising other people that they need an expert to set up a system that has 4 buttons...
Jesus. I agree with every word.
Is this a sign that the end of the world has arrived?
"Bah! CoP ~3 rather than 5+ and it has many other problems."
First, COP is a game of diminishing returns.
If you need 1kW of energy moved, COP=1 will take 1kW of electricity.
COP=2 will take only 500W of electricity.
COP=3 will take 333W of electricity
COP=4 will take 250W of electricity
COP=5 will take 200W of electricity
The going from COP=3 to COP=5 therefore only saves you 40% electricity.
Second, even though the sticker says "COP=5" you are unlikely to see much more than COP=3.5 in real usage, because the optimal working point where COP=5 was measured, will be pretty far from the actual condition about 70-80% of the time.
Meanwhile from the USA
Christianity at work Euw.
And from Ukraine:
Aid workers being kidnapped - for either exchange or parading, presumably after torture, how nice.
"Forcing a few dozen billionaires to somehow cough up their supposedly ill-gotten gains[...]"
I would be content with preventing them from using their illgotten gains to make things worse, with respect to greenhouse-gasses and human rights.
Billionaires have paid to have our response to greenhouse-gasses delayed for approx 30 years now.
Wyndham was a drinking companion of Clarke (see Tales from the White Hart), so it's not all that surprising.
"I'm OK with sleeping when the temp is 90F/32C or a bit higher. With a fan I can normally deal with higher. And when it gets colder I just dress differently. My wife will not let this happen so we're somewhat AC'd in the summer. In the winter I keep the general temp in the house at around 62-65F/17-18C and we head individual rooms with oil filled electric heater if needed. And keep doors closed."
How's the humidity in the summer where you live? It matters a lot.
People's heat and cold tolerance vary. I'm not sure whether you're offering yourself as one data point or saying that people ought to be able to handle what you don't mind or what.
Billionaires have paid to have our response to greenhouse-gasses delayed for approx 30 years now.
Really? I don't think so... Billions of poor people (and some commentators on this blog) demand cheap energy and lots of it and the cheapest source of energy available to them is fossil fuels. Renewables are a promise for the indefinite future, like fusion energy that will be too cheap to meter as a salesman once said.
Billionaires can afford energy at any cost, see Bezos and Musk's extravagant expenditures of energy pointlessly firing off rockets into space for example. It's the poors that are burning over twelve billion tonnes of fossil carbon every year for a better life, not the billionaires. Put all the billionaires up against a wall and shoot them and total fossil fuel consumption will not fall by much, if at all. It would make many people feel good for a while, perhaps but that's all. They'd have to find someone else to blame after that, just like the Khmer Rouge did back in Year Zero.
That is correct, with reservations. In the UK, it's almost always true in well-ventilated, multi-story dwellings, with any weather we have had in my lifetime. There are some substandard dwellings where it is not true, but few of those could install it, anyway. We don't have it, and would have turned it on for comfort perhaps 5-10 times in 44 years in this house - in one of the hottest parts of the UK.
My suspicion is that the majority of deaths attributed to heat in the UK (and probably Germany) are people who were at death's door, anyway, and it didn't shorten their lives much. And many of the rest were simply ignorant of what to do, or just plain stupid.
"Really? I don't think so..."
The please read the last 30 years of Murdochs rags ?
Please watch the last 30 years of Faux News ?
Or follow all the money which the Koch Brothers have spent ?
You couldn't make it up. Roman Catholic bishops siding with the DUP's knuckle draggers, leaving Sinn Fein wondering what the fuck to do.
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/northern-ireland-assembly-election-2022/assembly-election-catholic-bishops-urge-voters-to-protect-rights-of-unborn-41596179.html
God in in a mood tonight.
Poul-Henning-Kamp said: Second, even though the sticker says "COP=5" you are unlikely to see much more than COP=3.5 in real usage, because the optimal working point where COP=5 was measured, will be pretty far from the actual condition about 70-80% of the time.
You're talking to a Kiwi living in Australia. Aotearoa and Australia share standards for heat pumps. The COP is measured at 7C dry and 6C wet. No month in London has an average maximum temperature below 9C, so you'd have to say that most days the performance will be better than measured under the shared Australian and New Zealand standards. So rather than it being "pretty far" [below] "70-80% of the time", it's going to be above the standard measurement temperature more than 50% of the days. Only 3 months of the year does the average minimum fall below the 6C wet in the standard, and only by 2C. So there's probably only a few hours of the night when you'd be even slightly under the standard more than 50% of the time.
That's very parochial of you, assuming that America somehow controls all of the world's fossil carbon extraction and consumption everywhere and a handful of news sources and rich people have managed to add eighty ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere over the past thirty years purely by their propagandistic efforts and for no other reason other than they are EVULL!! Bwahahahaha!.
Meanwhile over in China where Fox News and the Koch family hold no sway they extracted and burned over four billion tonnes of coal in 2021 to provide their people with a more comfortable living energy-wise, with lights and heating and washing machines and clean water and transportation and hospitals and all the things we consider a right here in the West. India, with a similar sized population is lagging behind China energy-wise but trying to catch up and it burned about a billion tonnes of coal last year. If you can put the blame for that carbon consumption on American billionaires and Australian emigres then you are a much better hater than I am.
"Meanwhile over in China [...] to provide their people with a more comfortable living energy-wise,"
Sorry, nice spin, but in terms of CO2-pollution-per-capita USA is quite outstanding, and therefore any argument along the lines of "Ohh, see al those brown faces in Asia!" is utterly bogus.
Re: dealing with heat in Germany (to both Robert Prior and gasdive):
Yes, we do have the occasional heat wave and yes, people do die during heat waves. However, universal installation of air conditioning units in tens of millions of homes is not a solution for that. Evidence: we also have the occasional cold wave and people do die from the cold, despite heating units in homes actually being universal.
Also, as (I'd think) everybody knows, when you live in a well-insulated home, opening the windows to let air in is not how you deal with a heat wave. It's actually the polar opposite of what you should do. What you do (what I do during a heat wave, and my flat isn't even that well-insulated) is this: very early in the morning you close all windows and—even more importantly—all the window shutters, in order to keep the cooler inside air in and—more important—the sun's infrared radiation out. You preferably do this before dawn. When the sun has set in the evening and the outside air has cooled a little, then you open the shutters and the windows to exchange air. You may leave them open overnight if you find that the outside air is now cooler than the inside air, particularly if there is a light breeze going on. But you lock everything down again at dawn. This will help you to survive the 5-10 days of temperatures above 35 degrees just fine. Also, it helps to remain well-hydrated and to avoid strenuous physical activities during the heat wave.
And before you ask: please remember that we're talking about Germany here, not the US, Canada or Australia. Therefore yes, unlike A/C-units, shutters (or actually in most cases roller shutters) are a standard item in practically all homes (just as at least double glazing is, and has been for decades).
Yes, I agree that CO2 emissions per capita in America are very high but the US is on a big renewables bender with glossy press releases and news coverage of every Green initiative, every Gigafactory opening and every Amazon warehouse roofed with solar panels. It's just that CO2 emissions in the US aren't falling as fast as the green boosters would want because, frankly, renewables are not all they're made out to be as substantial sources of deliverable energy (unlike the N-word which is Evil Incarnate and cannot be mentioned in polite company).
The Chinese and Indians and Africans consume a lot less energy per capita than the US or the West in general because energy poverty implicitly means general poverty (no clean water, no hospitals, no data centres, no washing machines etc.) but those countries don't want to be poor any more. The easy fix for their energy poverty is to extract and burn fossil fuel because it's cheap and affordable, and if half the world's population is doing that then what some Western billionaires do or don't do isn't going to stop CO2 levels in the atmosphere from rising at two to three ppm a year for the foreseeable future.
Blaming "People Who Are Not Me" is fun and easy, doing something substantial to stop fossil fuel burning and furthermore actively reducing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere requires hard work and a lot of hard decisions and lots and lots of non-fossil energy. After you've put all the billionaires up against a wall and shot them, then what will you do? Start looking for millionaires to blame?
"So rather than it being "pretty far" [below] "70-80% of the time", it's going to be above the standard measurement temperature more than 50% of the days."
The problem is that while the laws of thermodynamics of course set the upper limit, heat-pumps are optimized only for benchmark performance, not for real world performance, and they get away with this, because COP is almost impossible to measure on installed units.
The exception is liquid/liquid systems, which, by a staggering coincidence, generally seem to be advertised as having lover efficiency.
For air/air units, proper attention to where the air comes from and goes to, and regular cleaning of filters, will save you more money than the difference between manufactures claim of COP=3 vs. COP=5.
"but the US is on a big renewables bender"
... Which will take around 30 years to get USA down to per-capita levels alongside the rest of the western world.
But to return to the original subject: Dont take my word for how much money billionaires have spent preventing their hydrocarbon-cashcow from being harmed by "greenies", Read Michael Mann's latest book instead.
Apparently I am one of very few people who do not mind sleeping while drenched in sweat. I am literally incapable of feeling humidity -- the only difference between 90 F dry and 90 F humid is how much water I need to drink to stay comfortable; the fact that this water leaves my skin as fast as I swallow it, does not even register.
And I utterly hate air conditioning. It actually makes me sick (that is, causes respiratory distress). As far as I am concerned, the only legitimate use for AC is to lower 110 F down to 90 F.
How's the humidity in the summer where you live? It matters a lot.
Yes it does. But in many ways it is what you are used to. We have acclimated ourselves to a narrow range of temps except between our front door and the car. At least those of us not on the bottom edge of the money scale.
I grew up in Paducah KY (20 years). Within about 50 miles the Cumberland, Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers converged. Well also the Clarks River but it was basically a creek compared to the others. Plus the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers were dammed there to create 2 massive lakes. At times in August you could feel the water in the air you breathed. (I have no plans to every live in New Orleans.)
So yes I know humidity. And I have also lived in central Kentucky, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, and now North Carolina. My wife had an apartment in the DFW metro area for 11 years. Plus frequent trips to other areas at various times of the year.
Each with its own range of temps and humidities.
I've put roofs on houses when it would get to over 100F mid day. So we started at 6am and broke from 11 till 4 then worked till dark. I've hauled mortar and blocks for a foundation in similar weather. You keep a couple of shirts around so if you're a "sweater" you can change out when the one you have on gets to the point of "splat" when toss on the floor.
Yes. Humidity makes a difference. Especially if you've hidden from it all your life.
926 - Easy explanation; the aliens used MacOS, and had never heard of anti-virus software.
928 - Quelle surprise; you're arguing with the man who said "everyone can afford a new Tesla" upthread.
938 - I've nothing to add, certainly nothing that isn't headed "terces".
952 - I pretty much agree, although I've yet to experience a peak temperature above 30C.
Ilya187 said: the only difference between 90 F dry and 90 F humid is how much water I need to drink to stay comfortable
Pardon me while I make scoffing noises.
https://www.calculator.net/heat-index-calculator.html?airtemperature=90&airtemperatureunit=fahrenheit&humidity=100&ctype=1&x=73&y=25
Heat Index Temperature: 132°F (55°C or 329K)
Extreme danger: at this condition, heat stroke is imminent.
I pretty much agree, although I've yet to experience a peak temperature above 30C.
30C/86F. I think I've spend 10% to 20% of my life at temps above that. :)
"And I utterly hate air conditioning."
Us too.
"As far as I am concerned, the only legitimate use for AC is to lower 110 F down to 90 F."
There can be secondary considerations. In and around the Panama Canal, the temperature F and relative humidity are both generally in the mid-80s. That's well within our comfort range, but mold likes it too. Mold is a real problem there, in a variety of ways.
Paws, good to see you haven't changed.
Weighing in on an argument that's based on something I didn't say (heat pumps don't need electronics) by adding a claim I haven't made ("everyone can afford a new Tesla").
Please never change.
Which will take around 30 years to get USA down to per-capita levels alongside the rest of the western world.
The US uses a lot of fossil carbon fuels maintaining its global military domination status and that consumption is not going to get displaced by renewables any time soon. Saying that the US is not that far off the rest of the West such as lignite-burning Green Germany in terms of CO2 production per capita, although both nations have noticeably higher CO2 emissions than nuclear-rich France for some reason (can't think why, can you?)
The 2050 date when suddenly everyone will be "carbon-neutral" is simply that, a date far enough in the future that the problem can be safely ignored by the populace here in 2022, just as the "Carbon neutral by 2030" announcements were back in 2010. Two-Minute Hate sessions vilifying billionaires is going to do bupkis regarding that situation, sadly.
Yes, though the problem in the UK is that people are thoroughly NOT adapted to even mildly hot conditions. However, I can't remember a single night where a simple fan wasn't enough for even people like my wife (who can't take heat) to sleep. At present, air conditioning is needed only in misdesigned buildings, and it can't be fitted to most of those.
Having lived in both, I agree with you.
So if not for DoD the rest of USA is as green as EU ?
Dude, you're delusional...
In post 907, did you or did you not say looking at your requirements, air conditioning, clearly visible to the outside that the dog is OK, long duration battery power... I can't see a better solution than a Tesla.?
On the assumption that you will accept that I copied your text from the referenced post number, do you really not see that a Tesla is only an available solution if you can afford one?
If you want carbon sequestration to be a thing you need energy, lots of it, way more energy than just providing everyone with what they need for a comfortable life, and not from fossil fuel sources. How many billionaires are around isn't going to affect the non-carbon energy production capacity of the world.
Sure it is. Check out https://theconversation.com/rising-authoritarianism-and-worsening-climate-change-share-a-fossil-fueled-secret-181012
Or there's this headline from Fortune World’s richest people now own 11% of global wealth, marking the biggest leap in recent history, the wealthiest being the 520,000 people at the top. The full report is at https://wir2022.wid.world/
To be blunt, if you want to raise money for a massive shift in how civilization operates, you have to go after the rich.
Going after the intellectuals as in Cambodia in the Year Zero period didn't help the locals, massacring the Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1980s or persecuting the Muslims in Myanmar today hasn't really made the lives of the inhabitants of those places better and "going after" billionaires isn't going to magically reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
A) Now you're shilling for the fossil fuel industry? You're saying it's a GENOCIDE to make the super-rich ordinary people again? Bullshit. This is in line with the absolutist rhetoric you find in books like Family Wealth: Keeping it in the Family, which is a guide for how the super-rich can keep their descendants from spending the fortune and becoming ordinary again. The dirty little secret is that most rich families end up ordinary again after a few generations, because it's easier to spend money than make it.
What I'm talking about is straight out of Picketty. When wealth accumulates too much (as it has now) there is political instability. The two ways out of that instability are redistribution of the wealth (a jubilee or something more complex), or revolution.
I'm advocating for redistribution, while you're adopting the authoritarian rhetoric of any attempt to redistribute wealth needs to be met with lethal force, because depriving someone of their billions and helping them live as an ordinary person is rhetorically assumed to be worse than murder. This is not only total bullshit, it's the ordinary fate of all wealthy families.
It IS "doing something" and would make a lot of people feel better much as persecuting Jews for the last millenia did. Forcing a few dozen billionaires to somehow cough up their supposedly ill-gotten gains is not actually solving the problem since it will take at least a quadrillion dollars to actually fix things (probably more in the long run). When do we start?
I flagged that little bit of stinking antisemitism for Charlie and others.
To be very clear, this is not a pogrom. It is taking a drug lord's fortune and using the money to help the people he addicted start working the program to get sober and hopefully stay that way. The drug lord gets to survive too, but not as a drug lord. Religion and culture do not enter into this, since drug lords, and billionaires, arise in many cultures and faiths.
The point, if you read the stats, is that the top 1% of the world's population owns 38% of the world's wealth. So if you want to fund a system that uses 30% of the world's wealth to sequester carbon, who do you hit up for funding? Half the world's population owns 2% of the wealth, and the top 10% minus the superwealthy own 37% of the world's wealth. So start at the very top, break up their holdings and realign the businesses to either do the sequestration or fund it, and work down from there.
This will, incidentally, also help deal with other currently intractable problems, like wealthy financing wars, deforestation for Big Ag, and the wealthy bending politics to suit them and not everyone else.
And yes, I agree this is massively oversimplistic. But if you want to avoid the worst of climate change, this is, unfortunately, the easiest route.
nearly everywhere all you ever have to do when the weather gets warm is open the windows
Um, no.
That may have been the case once, but things are changing. Heat waves, bringing sustained heat for long periods, are hard on vulnerable populations. Europe will get more heat waves in the future — possibly annually.
When the outside temperature is higher than inside then you do not want to open a window. When the outside temperature is too high for too long the inside will warm up despite thermal insulation. When nights are too warm people can't get rest, which is when fatalities start to spike.
It's not just heat but also humidity. In summer I pay more attention to humidex than I do to temperature, because that governs the precautions I need to take. (And yes, I take precautions. Heat stroke is no fun.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_heat_waves
Pardon me while I make scoffing noises.
I should have said "subjectively".
I had been in 90-95 F, near 100% humidity environments, and as long as I kept drinking (and swallowing salt), I did not feel any worse than in drier heat.
"When the outside temperature is higher than inside ..."
On thing which is a huge factor here is architecture.
If you look at Hamburg, sunshutters in front of the windows are if not the norm, then at least 50/50. In Denmark: None.
The difference is climate. Nobody in Denmark has more than 60km to the coast, and therefore temperatures higher than 30 degrees are extremely rare and the highest temperature ever recorded in Denmark is 36.4°C.
In Denmark we have an official meteological condition called "tropical night", which means the temperature did not drop below 20°.
Denmark is precisely one of those places where "just open the window" always took care of heat.
Our traditional beach-houses, barely more than wooden shacks, at most 50mm thermal insulation, are increasingly getting fitted with air/air heat-pumps, and A/C is the major selling point.
Why ?
Because we have had several heat-waves over the last decade, some lasting almost three weeks, where it was uncomfortably warm (for Danes), also at night, and in particular for older people.
So before the "I can stand XY°C no problem" pissing contest gets too far, please consider that both habitual climate, location and architecture matters.
I had been in 90-95 F, near 100% humidity environments, and as long as I kept drinking (and swallowing salt), I did not feel any worse than in drier heat.
Hmmm. You were working in a greenhouse? I swear I came near those conditions when I worked in a greenhouse, but I never checked.
The thing is, 100% humidity is fog, so unless it was foggy and 90s, the humidity was lower.
The worse problem is that when it's that hot and humid, you can't shed heat by sweating. So being active and not overheating gets really hard in those conditions. I did it in the greenhouse by only spending a few minutes under glass, then getting outside, where it was considerably cooler.
If you were outside and experienced such conditions...so far, the only places that have reported such conditions are parts of the Iran and Iraq coast, when the Gulf heated up in the middle of summer, along the coast of Djibouti on the south side of the Red Sea (the ocean surface was near 90 at the time), and Shanghai about five years ago, quite briefly. So where were you when you experienced the conditions?
Acclimation matters, but for me it has serious limits. I live in Philadelphia without air conditioning.
If it's humid, my upper limit for comfort is 85F. With stoicism, I can kid myself that 90F isn't that bad, but I feel a lot better and am more clear-headed when the temperature drops.
If the humidity is relatively low, I can go up to 90F or 95. For no reason I can understand, the past three summers have been lower humidity. I have no idea what this summer will be like, or whether this surprisingly chilly spring means anything.
I've got some acclimation-- 50F is warm at the end of winter and chilly at the beginning of fall.
I tend to hear "you'll get used to it" as "put up with being hurt for my convenience".
It's not money per se that will decarbonise the world if it happens at all, it's wealth and that's a very different thing (i.e. a significant fraction of world GDP for decades). Linking "rich people" to fossil fuel extraction and sales is rather broad-brush -- Bill Gates didn't get rich from fossil fuel operations but the House of ibn-Saud on the other hand is a valid example. The House of ibn-Saud is a government though, not simply a group of very rich individuals so good luck with trying to take their ill-gotten gains from them by legislative means. Jeff Bezos started a business in his garage, no oil industry connections I can see. Indeed most of the prominent billionaires being vilified today don't seem to be in the fossil-energy business which, I am assured is dying on its feet and will be extinct any day now, really!
Elon Musk has made a lot of money from Tesla electric vehicles which are, at first glance not dependent on fossil-fuels and indeed may be a step on the road to decarbonising transport generally. Should he be lumped in with the rich owners of oil companies? Well, actually there don't seem to be many billionaire owners of oil companies, their shares are mostly held by investment organisations, pension funds etc. so there's few billionaires you can target in that regard.
Billionaires make a nice distraction, they are not the cause of the problem and the effort expended to go after them may be counter-productive. We may eventually find that the current public rage against billionaires is a carefully-crafted result of fossil-fuel industry manipulation of the public and outright psychological warfare.
And an air-conditioned, uninsulated beach hut is clearly a necessity of life.
In Africa, we slept on the veranda. Perhaps Danes should try sleeping outside their beach huts.
Put all the billionaires up against a wall and shoot them and total fossil fuel consumption will not fall by much, if at all.
But it sure would help with the distribution of wealth... :-/
"Perhaps Danes should try sleeping outside their beach huts."
Lots of people do but usually in tents because of the mosquitos.
We have acclimated ourselves to a narrow range of temps...
Not me. My indoor temperatures have ranged from 40° F (4° C) to 100° F (38° C) over the last 16 years. :-)
But it sure would help with the distribution of wealth... :-/
Upwards or downwards? There's some evidence that that nice Mister Putin has been bumping off rich people in Russia for quite some time now and, funnily enough, he's richer than ever. Puzzling, hey?
I flagged that little bit of stinking antisemitism for Charlie and others.
I read that Nojay's comment about the persecution Jews in the last millenia is a statement of fact.
To cover a lot of posts here, about the need for a/c: the first problem with every one of you is that first, in at least the US, many building have SEALED WINDOWS with HVAC. Let me assure you that many of us older folks have been bitching since the eighties about not being able to open a window, and recirculating bacteria and viruses.
Second, all of you apparently live in a spherical house of even density. A room with an 8' or 10' ceiling (that's 2.43m to 3m ceilings are definitively cooler (esp. with an open window, ESP IF YOU CAN OPEN THE TOP OF A VERTICAL WINDOW) than one with a lower ceiling. For that matter, a ceiling fan, using a lot less energy than a/c, even at a relatively slow speed, with such a ceiling is livable. (We tend to have the a/c in the summer come on at 79F/80F.)
We have acclimated ourselves to a narrow range of temps...
Not me.
OK, well, not me either. But now at 68 I avoid outdoor work from noon till 3pm most days from May through Sept. At least if it is not shaded.
How about "we" being much of the "first world's economies".
Yup. Now, I've got FTL (and I'm trying to sell a short story, one that bounced from the Baen short story competition), on the invention of the drive (and complete conversion of matter to energy). And as far as I can tell, and I've run it by a physicist, no one's screamed in pain yet).
But... the novel I'll get back to working on after I finish the first draft of the one I'm hot and heavy on, has exactly this problem. Sure, this planet's got life... recognizable. Except... it uses only right-handed proteins and sugars.
Let me assure you it's not easy, trying to figure out how advanced, but not technological aliens can manage a graft even.
There's some evidence that that nice Mister Putin has been bumping off rich people in Russia for quite some time now and, funnily enough, he's richer than ever.
Hey, I'm all in favor of putting Putin up against a wall too... :-)
But more seriously, I'm in favor of restoring the US's post-war (WWII) 90% marginal income tax, and I think that our marginal inheritance tax should be 100% for any estate over a billion dollars. Unfortunately, I don't have any lobbyists in Washington, D.C. :-(
"I said: I was about to draft something describing how Europeans have the unshiftable idea that you can escape from lethal temperatures by opening a window, but Pigeon provided a worked example of the idea that you only die from heat if you're too stupid to open a window.
And now I'm saying... WTF? You're saying that Europeans don't have an unshiftable idea that opening a window always works because opening a window always works."
The argument began with MSB pointing out that when one is discussing Germany rather than the US or Australia, air conditioning doesn't come into the picture because nobody has it because nobody needs it. Robert Prior then expressed incredulity, so I supported MSB's point by saying that that's also normal in the UK; the climate isn't that much different and correspondingly nobody has air conditioning because nobody needs it.
I didn't say anything about people being "too stupid to open a window", nor did I say anything about Europeans having an "unshiftable idea that you can escape from lethal temperatures by opening a window". People simply don't have any thoughts about "lethal temperatures" at all. Occasionally it gets uncomfortably hot in summer, but people already have working methods of coping with it, and if it does happen that those methods don't quite cut it, you just get a bit pissed off for a week or two. So people do not go to all the expense and hassle of pulling their house apart to install a system that won't even be switched on most years and even when it is switched on is still nothing more than a luxury item, nice to have but perfectly possible to do without.
Items like the 500 people dying of heat in Berlin in 2018 which Robert Prior referred to do absolutely nothing to alter the general view of air conditioning as a luxury item that's not worth the trouble. I don't know how such things are reported in Germany, but in the UK they get something like 2 column inches in the bottom corner of a double page spread about how much everyone is enjoying themselves in the heatwave, with pictures of packed throngs of hideous bodies broiling themselves on beaches and splashing in the sea. The presentation is such that most people either don't notice or don't give a fuck, and those who do register it put it down to things like pre-existing debility, negligent care home staff etc.
From a quick search I find Berlin has a population of 3.7 million; Germany as a whole has 83 million, and about 950k deaths per year, so if Berlin is "average" you would expect about 42000 deaths per year. So 500 deaths is about 4.3 days' worth, and doubtless spread over some days itself. It's doubtful if that even counts as scientific evidence that "lethal temperatures" are occurring in Berlin; it certainly doesn't just as a bald figure without any consideration of exactly what they died of, what kind of conditions they were living in, what their existing state of health was, what fluctuations in the death rate you get anyway, what proportion of the population you expect to peg out during any kind of extreme event, etc etc.
It also certainly doesn't count as a reason for anyone in a normal state of health and with a normal amount of money to think it's necessary to install air conditioning. Nor even as a reason to think that universal air conditioning would make much difference - as MSB points out, heating systems are universal and yet similar numbers of people also die when it's unusually cold. That's also the same in the UK as in Germany, and the combination of poor existing health with not having enough money to run the bloody system anyway is the usual reason cited in the UK for most of it.
JHomes @ 933 and @ 943: Thank you, and indeed you are correct; I'm not talking about what conditions are predicted for the future or how people might respond to those, I'm talking about how people do respond to the conditions we have now.
EC @ 954: Thank you also, and indeed I have lived in one of those substandard dwellings myself. Also in the "hottest part of the country", specifically Bedford, which additionally seems to be prone to the air going totally stagnant and developing a sweltering humidity. Old house converted into flats, single leaf walls, no insulation, and my flat was in the one position in the layout that made it turn into an oven. I had a nominal 3kW of cooling capacity running continuously, and was still seeing temperatures like 35°C and eating handfuls of salt. None of the other flats in the house were that bad, nor were most other people's houses, and nowhere else I've lived has been as hot as Bedford.
I also got to find out at first hand that even if you do want or need air conditioning all you can get is dogshit. The only realistic option was what you can get in domestic appliance stores, ie. a portable heap of junk with so many design flaws that I had to begin modifying it as soon as I got it out of the box, and ended up rebuilding everything beyond the sealed circuit and the fans, both to try and make it a bit less wretchedly ineffective and to disable its self-destruct feature. The next step up would have meant thousands of pounds and drilling holes to run pipes through walls, another wodge of money for a vacuum pump to evacuate the plumbing before the refrigerant went in, and figuring out how I could even get hold of the refrigerant at all. (Or else paying someone else to do it for me, at a vast increase in both hassle and expense.)
MSB @ 960: that's a point that does differ between Germany and the UK, then - nobody here has shutters on their windows. (And roller shutters are only used for theft prevention on commercial premises.) I don't know why. I suppose people got to thinking they didn't do anything so there was no point having them. Of course the climate in the UK isn't exactly the same as Germany, and yours is a bit more continental, so that probably has something to do with it.
I get the occasional burst of cognitive dissonance reading old novels when I have to figure out that the author hasn't bothered to mention that there are shutters on the windows because they expect the reader to assume that automatically, and this is why people are saying things about the windows that appear not to make sense. But even then, working class city dwellings wouldn't have had them, and these days the very idea is just weird; and on the handful of old houses you see that do still have them they are very obviously a purely decorative feature, never actually used and probably can't be any more because there's a hundred years' worth of paint in the hinges.
Consequently, your method of temperature regulation doesn't generally work here, unless you are lucky with the way your windows point. It's effective early in the morning, but as soon as the sun gets round far enough to start coming in the windows it ruins the effect. (The abovementioned oven in Bedford was an extreme bad example: the outside air didn't begin to get bearably cool until about 5am, and the one window in the place was a huge thing facing due east, so the instant the sun peeped over the horizon it was roasting again.) You can stretch things out for a bit longer for parts of the house by juggling doors and things, but sooner or later the house will cook up and the inside air will be warmer than the outside. The exact pattern that works best varies between one house and the house next door, but everyone ends up with all windows open eventually.
Ok, I'll offer the defense that I've been giving since I first saw the movie: he didn't write a virus. Remember, they had the lander for decades, so they could figure some thing out. But what he wrote was one of two of the oldest hacks: either he wrote a script that does nothing but create a directory, cd into that directory, lather, rinse, repeat, until the system runs out of directory table space. The other possibility is that he wrote a program that forks, and it and the child both fork, creating new processes... until the o/s runs out of table space for new processes.
Um, yeah. Growing up in Philly, on the third floor of a block-long apt building, with a large box fan in one window of a bay window bedroom, and before the EPA existed, so the annual inversion layer, I can remember it being so hot I couldn't sleep for hours after going to bed.
First, what is this "pointlessly launching rockets", other than a complaint that governments should be doing that, rather than rich people like Harriman, er, Musk?
And no - the US is the second most polluting nation on the planet next to China... with almost half as much pollution, and less than a quarter of the population.
The rest of the world wants energy, yes... but show me where they want to drive with one person in a car two hours a day to commute to work, on massive highways.
I get the occasional burst of cognitive dissonance reading old novels when I have to figure out that the author hasn't bothered to mention that there are shutters on the windows because they expect the reader to assume that automatically, and this is why people are saying things about the windows that appear not to make sense.
The shutters on older buildings weren't just there for heat retention on cold evenings, they were an anti-burglar device. Charlie's previous flat (dating from maybe 1860s) was on the ground level and the original-fitment wooden shutters on the rear kitchen window had a large iron strap measuring maybe 5cm wide as a locking device. The ground-level windows at the rear of the place I live in have iron-barred grilles set into the stonework around the windowframes for similar reasons.
Wait... is your counterargument that Earth is not a Desert Planet? (Yes, I'm playing on the trope of a planet with one climate everywhere.)
Remember, they had the lander for decades, so they could figure some thing out.
It only had power for a few days. The systems didn't turn on until the "mother ship" showed up.
You're thinking everyone (in the universe) does things the way we do NOW. But whatever.
Posts crossed; see above: I do understand the theory you're expounding, but its application to UK conditions is distinctly limited. "Outside air warmer than inside air" is not in general a condition that applies for most of the day, and "outside air hot enough to worry about heatstroke" is something that most places never experience. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions, and they may also be highly localised. So when the sun starts coming in your windows and making the house hot inside, you open the windows to let cooler air in. See also PHK @ 979.
Manned space flight is a pointless exercise that wastes energy, and energy is fungible i.e. some or all of a manned space launch's energy budget is derived from fossil fuels and contributes to global warming. Space exploration is a pointless exercise, including the JWST, the Voyager probes, the Apollo missions, the first Falcon Heavy flight carrying a Tesla car etc. Earth observation satellites for weather monitoring and other purposes are maybe not pointless but all space launches are carried out at a cost of adding CO2 from fossil fuels just as much as airline flights to holiday destinations and fuel-hog SUVs rolling coal.
Sure, you and I and most folks on this comment section have a hard-on for space exploration but it's not something the human race absolutely needs to do and our guiding principle going forward to combat increasing levels of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere should be "only burn fossil carbon when we absolutely have to". Not going to happen though.
Yes I was in fact in a greenhouse, in Texas in August. But I was not exactly "active" -- I made sure to move very slowly.
When I went to boarding school at the age of 7, they demanded two things: that I could tie and untie my shoelaces without help, and I could use and tidy away a mosquito net without help. Unlike tents (and beach huts), they have excellent ventiliation. I am sure that most adult Danes could do the same.
Sigh. Let's break this down and use entire sentences. Here's the entire paragraph:
It IS "doing something" and would make a lot of people feel better much as persecuting Jews for the last millenia did. Forcing a few dozen billionaires to somehow cough up their supposedly ill-gotten gains is not actually solving the problem since it will take at least a quadrillion dollars to actually fix things (probably more in the long run). When do we start?
Here's the breakdown:
It IS "doing something" and would make a lot of people feel better much as persecuting Jews for the last millenia did.
--This equates breaking up the holdings of the super-rich with antisemitism. Antisemitism exists, alright, but this dog-whistles a standard trope that Jews Are Greedy (https://antisemitism.adl.org/greed/). Why not use African slaves or Mormons as the persecuted minority? There are ultra-rich African Americans (Oprah) and the Mormon Church is worth more than the Catholic Church. I'm pointing to the dog-whistle here.
Forcing a few dozen billionaires to somehow cough up their supposedly ill-gotten gains is not actually solving the problem
--There were 56.1 million (56,100,000) millionaires on the planet at the end of 2020, and the global wealth was $418.3 trillion (source:https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html). Nojay BSed the "few dozen billionaires" when I've been talking about the top 1% or the top 10% of the global population, which is not a few dozen but 79,000,000 people. incidentally I'm probably including myself as a target here, depending on what the SoCal housing market is doing to the price of homes at a particular moment. I don't feel rich, of course, but compared to most humans I am.
since it will take at least a quadrillion dollars to actually fix things (probably more in the long run)
Yes, probably a quadrillion eventually, but that's the wrong figure, because that's an amount. We want cash flow per year. Global GDP is around $84.7 trillion, of which the richest 10% get 58% (https://wir2022.wid.world/). The IPCC is talking about diverting 30% of $84.7 trillion, which conveniently is $25.4 trillion (round to $25 trillion) per year, in 2020 dollars. So if we're talking about a quadrillion dollar expenditure overall, they'd get there in...40 years, which is "in perpetuity" in political terms.
Note I'm not talking about liquidating the billionaires and somehow turning that all into cash. I'm talking about making them ordinary people again by destroying the systems they use to control that much wealth and power. The pieces of those systems then have to be repurposed to either directly sequester carbon or support carbon sequestration.
Nojay's bottom line is that he's trolling this for whatever reason, by not engaging in a true debate of ideas, but rather slathering on statements that range from dog-whistle to BS. Since he's technically sophisticated, I'm quite sure he understands what he's writing.
My bottom line is that I'm trying to inspire SF authors to write what-if stories where something like this is portrayed as possible, because it sure as hell beats reading yet another dystopian story where 99.9% of humans died because we listened to the BS and did nothing.
I really shall have to visit Edinburgh some time just to check out the architecture. The number of interesting things that have been mentioned on here is getting to be quite an argument.
People sometimes do use mosquito-nets in Denmark, but usually mounted tightly to windows or open doors, instead of "just keep them out of my bed" canopies.
But thanks for making my point: You clearly have no idea what climate we have here in Denmark :-)
Incidentally, my way of checking whether I needed salt -- I would lick my mustache, and if the sweat on it did not taste of salt, I would eat some. Probably not the best indicator in retrospect, but I was 19 and did not know better.
Re Bedford rabbit hutches: and that's assuming that your landlord will let you, the outside wall is not on the property boundary, yada, yada. One of the reasons that I disapprove of unthatched bungalows is that they are much trickier to keep cool than thatched ones or two-story buildings.
Hehe, yeah. We're nearly down to variations between one square km and the next now.
You are now channelling your inner Farage!
That's not how I read Nojay's comment. I didn't even understand quite why you were objecting until you mentioned the "greedy Jew" stereotype, which until that point hadn't crossed my mind.
I read it as an (implicitly condemnatory) reference to the way ordinary bottom-level people have treated Jews for much of history: as an outlet for their feelings when stricken by events outside their control and/or understanding. Crops fail or babies die or cows abort and don't give milk - must be the Jews' fault for not being Christian, let's go and clobber all the local Jews. Same way that Gypsies get blamed for the same things, depending who there's more of around locally. I understood Nojay to be saying that attacking billionaires to solve climate change is an example of the same kind of reasoning, and is therefore wrong, since even though the billionaires aren't a persecuted group in general, the moral logic is equally faulty in both cases.
I understood your point as being that a large percentage of the world's effort is currently wasted on directing a large amount of the world's money into secret piles for a few tens of people to sit and wank over, and if you can clobber that mechanism the question of how to find the resources needed for massive-scale CO2 removal has a straightforward answer. It has to be said that I find that view more congruent with my own alignment.
My original point was that the "I can easily manage XY°C" discussion was silly, because factors like the actual climate (that you are used to) and architecture (that you occupy) matters a LOT for that precise question.
You more or less immediately illustrated that point, by starting to comment on my example of A/C take-up in Denmark, very clearly, without knowing anything about Denmarks climate, architecture etc.
If anybody was channeling an narrow-minded tosser, it was certainly not me.
But yes, we can use mosquito-nets in Denmark, but the reason sleep in tents is not just the mosquitos, it is mainly because the typical summer night is pretty damn cold in Denmark.
As anybody who knows anything about Denmarks Climate only knows too well.
Well, it depends on how the organisms you're grafting work. If you want to graft bits of a human onto another human, there's a heck of a lot of fiddly difficult wiring and plumbing to hook up, you have to do some detailed and intricate chemistry to make sure you've got one of the very rare pairings where it stands any chance of working at all, and even then you have to switch off big chunks of the receiving human's protection mechanisms and it quite often still goes wrong. But if you want to graft bits of a tree onto another tree, you just hack the second tree with a machete to make a crack to stick the bit of the first tree into, and wrap sticky tape around it. All the difficult plumbing sorts itself out automatically, there's no fiddling, no chemistry, and not even necessarily any need for the trees to be the same species.
(And then there are things like human blood transfusions, which look like they work like grafting trees but have failure modes that work like grafting humans, to help you start to learn how to transpose more complicated bits.)
So I guess you have a choice between how much you want your aliens to be surgically skilled, and how much you want them to just naturally have the kind of bodies that make it easy.
nice Mister Putin
Mister Putin. Is. A. Fossil. Fuel. Billionaire.
He is one of the wealthiest on the planet. (He controls that wealth, which means it is his by modern standards.)
MSB is a fossil fuel billionaire.
These men and many others (all men, AFAIK) have spent, and continue to spend, large (relative to their opponents) amounts of money to influence both public opinion and politics, both globally and locally, to neuter any shifts away from fossil carbon usage, to attempt preserve their long-term wealth(/power). Wealthy fossil-carbon corporations (including some countries) have spent/spend significant (aka effective) money over decades on pro-fossil-fuel propaganda/influence operations/lobbying(/bribes) as well.
That includes stealthed (to varying degrees) efforts to ramp up opposition to nuclear power; much anti-nuclear-power activism is not (or is partially not) organic/grassroots, though such activists will scream at one for saying this. (Same for cheaper-than-fossil-carbon renewables, which are also a threat to fossil carbon wealth.)
and elsewhere:
No. His (and my) argument ist that not everywhere on Earth is the continental USA. We were and are specifically discussing conditions in Germany and the UK respectively, and we repeatedly expressly said so. None of us claimed that you personally shouldn't have A/C, and I'm even willing to believe that in the continental USA having A/C is indeed a necessity.
But we were expressly not discussing life in the USA. So your point of sealed windows in the USA is entirely irrelevant for the discussion. And it's not a "problem with everybody of us" that you were either missing or deliberately ignoring this very obvious fact.
I'm sorry to have to point this out, but I'm a little tired of US'ians (mis)taking their own particular—and sometimes very peculiar—frame of reference for the global norm. Please be aware that it may come across as rather arrogant (and more than a little ignorant).
I repudiate this allegation!
(I'm assuming you refer to Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi de-facto ruler, who is usually abbreviated as MBS.)
Nojay's bottom line is that he's trolling this for whatever reason, by not engaging in a true debate of ideas, but rather slathering on statements that range from dog-whistle to BS.
I am fairly sure that Nojay has not read the available scientific literature on masks (both for source control and personal protection), most of which has been written 2020 or later, but it has not stopped him from opining on the utility of community masking in a respiratory virus pandemic.
Oooops. Sorry about that.
I repudiate this allegation!
Oooops, sorry about that.
"The shutters on older buildings weren't just there for heat retention on cold evenings, they were an anti-burglar device. "
Also anti-weather devices, aka "storm/hurricane shutters." All three applications are more or less compatible.
Overall, the arc of Russia's leadership has been bending downward.
Иван Грозный
Петр Великий
Владимир Неумелый
The shutters on upper storeys of 19th century homes in Edinburgh and around Britain are generally a lot lighter and less burglar-proofed than the ground floor window shutters. The shutters are also inside the glass, not outside where they'd reduce storm damage.
There was a term, cat-burglars, who were the sorts who would break in to houses above ground level or even via the roof, also "second-storey gentlemen" because ground-level access was often blocked by very stout doors and intimidating locks. I think the common deployment of keyed locks on interior doors was for similar reasons, to deter the ability for a burglar to move around a man's castle if they did gain access.
"I repudiate this allegation!"
The usual form is
I abjure the allegation! Nay, I abnegate the alligator!
My suspicion is that the majority of deaths attributed to heat in the UK (and probably Germany) are people who were at death's door, anyway, and it didn't shorten their lives much.
That sounds a lot like arguments over here last year for not taking Covid precautions: the majority of those that died were old and would have died soon anyway, so why inconvenience the rest of us?
If you look at the lives of people who were rescued from heat (over here), many of them didn't 'die soon anyway'.
Really? Even during heat waves?
I have never lived in a house or flat with A/C. Up to now "open all the windows before sunrise until you've got rid of as much heat as possible, then close the windows and the shades when it heats up" was sufficient to be well, if not entirely comfortable, and it got that bad for a week or two in August usually.
I do believe that when/if I get to buy or build a house I'll make sure that at least the bedroom has A/C, because frail old age and a heat dome do not combine well.
I was about to draft something describing how Europeans have the unshiftable idea that you can escape from lethal temperatures by opening a window
Not all Europeans are British. As a German I have the in-baked expectation that it will cool down enough™ at night (but for Pete's sake don't open a window in the day), I bet Spaniards or Italians will further differ.
A heat wave in Germany is ~30 deg C maximum temp in the day, and that tends to be a dry heat. Hitting 40 deg C used to be a "twice in a century" event; the two hottest measurements to date were in 2019 and the third-hottest in 2015.
I think that you will find that the climate in most parts of Denmark is almost identical to some parts of the UK.
But I find the idea you need to sleep in a tent because the nights are too cold AND you need air conditioning in your hut because the nights are too hot, to show a definite Farage-like logic.
Please don't be silly. Firstly, you live in a continental climate; the UK has a maritime one. Secondly, I looked at some of the overall death figures in 'heat waves', and could see no increase; my suspicion is that a lot of the deaths were attributed to heat just because it was hot. The increase during the COVID waves was VERY marked.
Translating that into English slang, you can make the horrible pun "Vladimir the wally".
even though the sticker says "COP=5" you are unlikely to see much more than COP=3.5 in real usage
I venture to suggest that if the sticker says "CoP 3.06" you're unlikely to get that in actual use. Especially on days hot enough for me to need air conditioning inside my insulated box.
But my guess is that a cheap window mounted aircon will be less efficient than a decent split system if only because there's a lot of metal and air in the giant hole in the wall where the window mounted aircon goes. The difference in heat transmission between a 0.25m2 hole and a 0.0001m2 hole is significant when the temperature difference is 20+ degrees.
What stops me just buying a cheap mini split is that those typically have a minimum power input of 500W or more and are not inverter (brushless?), so they'd be cycling on and off all the time just like the window mount does. It's money and hassle for minimal benefit.
I abjure the allegation! Nay, I abnegate the alligator!
One of my favourite t shirts has a quote from an Australian politician and a picture of an alligator.
"I deny the allegations and I want to question the allegators"
It's pretty similar in Cambridge, though it's more like "don't open the curtains on the south side in the day" (*). Our average high is about 1.5 Celsius cooler than Berlin in July, and the heat record is a bit higher (weatrherbase.com). The 30 Celsius is rarely dry, but very rarely humid, either. I can remember one day when I was disinclined to do moderate exercise (like digging), but that's ONE day in my 50 years of living here.
(*) This is my point about multi-story buildings. There is enough height even in two stories to get a decent chimney effect. There isn't in one-story ones without a roof vent.
Looking at graphs like the one in this article I wonder what you're not seeing.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-mediterranean-heatwaves-excess-deaths-climate-change-cop26-glasgow-ipcc/
Looking further it appears that heat sensitivity is dropping which suggests (to me) adaptation in progress. Unlikely to be evolution given the timescales.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652641/ https://journals.lww.com/epidem/Fulltext/2008/09000/Heat_Effects_on_Mortality_in_15_European_Cities.13.aspx
link bludgeoned by the blog
Pigeon @ 900: Ah, it's for your dog... who I think you have described as a "little dog" in previous posts, yes? (And he sounds like a pretty decent character.)
He's a black & brown Shih-Tzu. Never going to be a show dog, but I THINK he's the worlds greatest cuddle-puppy. He's my little buddy now. So:
Priority #1 - Dog
Priority #2 - Travel
If I can't SAFELY take the dog along, I'll just have to stay home ... or limit our travels to day trips to places I know he'll be welcome so he doesn't have to stay in the car while I get out.
[...]
It might also help with the "demonstrably safe" bit, if people can see him sitting by something that has fans and stuff. Although I do worry that the way people usually are they will simply categorise what they see as "dog", "car", and "something I've never seen before so I'll ignore it", and consequently respond inappropriately, even if it has COLD AIR BLOWER painted on it in big red letters, there is visible frost forming on the dog's fur, and you have a loudspeaker rigged to yell THIS DOG IS AIR-CONDITIONED at anyone who comes too close.
That's the BIG problem, how to keep him safe from well intentioned people who can't (or won't) THINK about what the real situation is.
I can solve the A/C problem to protect him from the heat (or give up my travel "plans"). It is, after all, just engineering. And even if I'm NOT an engineer, I know how to hire one if I run across a problem I can't solve for myself.
But people ... !!!
Another thing that strikes me is that no matter what you do you'll need some way to dump the waste heat outside the car, which means getting either an air duct or a fluid circuit out of the car without leaving windows open or having to cut holes in it. Sometimes cars do have various holes already present which are hidden under trim or carpet or something, and which you could then design your thing to use if your car has such. Otherwise... there is nearly always some kind of vent system to let air out of the interior somewhere at the back, although its exterior outlet is often very well hidden and its interior inlet doesn't even seem to exist; so if it's possible to find that and tap into it on your car that's another thought.
It's a 20 year old car, so I'm not worried if I have to cut a hole or two to route wires or hoses or maybe even something bigger. I'm pretty sure this is going to be the last vehicle I ever own1; it's going to be what I drive for the rest of my driving life, so I'm not worried about damaging the resale value or anything like that.
Since I first posted, I've run across this roof mount 12V A/C. It's a unit designed for mounting on top of a Semi-Truck to keep the sleeper cab cool, but the RV Van Conversion community has gone for it in a big way. It's not very expensive (less than $3k USD) and I think it would work for my Jeep ... which leaves only the SOCIAL ENGINEERING problems to be solved.
Actually (thinking as I post here) you might be able to avoid it if your journeys allow you to rely on the availability of other refrigeration at night. If you can get enough cooling from a bucket or tank of ice with a water/air heat exchanger (car heater matrix) plumbed into the bottom of it and a fan to blow air, and then make more ice overnight, you could do it dirt-cheap and with extreme simplicity: two items from a junkyard, and some computer fans which your existing car battery will run for weeks without assistance.
I already know there's no way to cool the car down so much overnight that it would remain safe for the dog to be in there during the day. It's going to require some kind of ACTIVE A/C cooling that can operate while the car is parked.
I also know, from experience, the existing battery (even though it's a fairly NEW one, in good shape) won't be enough. I have a little 12V cooler (about the size to hold a six-pack) & it ran the battery down over-night while the dog & I were in a motel room. It's gonna' take additional battery power & a solar panel or two to keep them charged.
--
1 Although I have given some serious thought to getting a Schoolie to tow my Jeep & just using it as a runabout when the bus is parked.
But that entails a whole host of other issues I'd have to solve. It would definitely mean selling my house to get the money and IF I did that, where would I register to vote? Where would the VA mail my prescriptions to? ... Where would I live while I was building the bus?
Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 938: Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in this, so mostly guessing.
I think it's a combination of many factors. To shoot down a flying thing, you have to have basically two things: * You need to know where the thing is * You need to have something to shoot at it
My understanding is that cruise missiles often fly relatively low and fast, so it's kind of difficult to know where they are, and even when you find them out, you need to have the air-to-air capability already where it would be useful. The A-A needs to also be of the type that can shoot at the range needed.
I think this makes shooting cruise missiles down somewhat difficult. It's the old thing that the attacker can choose when and where to attack whereas the defender needs to defend in many places.
Reading wikipedia, there are also high-flying cruise missiles and those have slightly different problems.
Please somebody with real knowledge, point out my errors.
I do not claim to be either an expert or to have found any errors ... so.
Basically you need a system that can detect and track the cruise missile and you need some kind of weapon that can hit the cruise missile. Compared to the size of a cruise missile, Ukraine is a large place and there is a finite limit to how many of the required systems you can deploy. I'm sure the Ukrainian military is deploying the systems they have to where they believe they'll do the most good, but there is simply no way to predict where the Russians are going to target next - other than it will probably be "civilian", since the Russians seem to be using them as terror weapons rather than going after military targets.
Even if NATO were to strip itself bare of anti-missile systems, and ship them all to Ukraine, it wouldn't be able to defend every possible terror target the Russians might choose to attack.
Nancy Lebovitz @ 952:
How's the humidity in the summer where you live? It matters a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raleigh,_North_Carolina#Climate
You may have to expand the Climate Data table. I live in the same city as David.
People's heat and cold tolerance vary. I'm not sure whether you're offering yourself as one data point or saying that people ought to be able to handle what you don't mind or what.
Surely it's two data points since he says his wife won't let it get that hot before making him turn on the A/C. 8^)
Third data point ... I prefer the room to be cool enough I can sleep under some cover (even if it's only a cotton sheet), so I prefer it around 65°F (18°C) when I'm trying to sleep. I have a 5,000 BTU window unit in my bedroom that I'll run from mid May to mid October.
Paws: On the assumption that you will accept that I copied your text from the referenced post number, do you really not see that a Tesla is only an available solution if you can afford one?
No, I didn't say only. Nor did I say everyone can afford a Tesla as you maintained on the previous post.
I said I can't see a better one. There may be better ones that I can't see.
Here are the ones I could see and why I rejected them.
Don't worry. When the dog dies, put it in a roadside bin and pick up another one at the next shelter you're passing. This is the cheapest option, there are no modifications to the car. Rejected because it's a bit stomach churning.
Modify the car. 3000 pounds for the aircon, 1000 for the batteries, 1000 for the panels, 1000 for the electronics mounts and wiring, 1000 for the racks, cutting holes in the car to fit them, 2000 pounds devaluation of the car from the holes. All wild arse guessed. 9000 pounds, about 11000 USD. Issues that lead me to reject it. All that money is dead. You've not added to the value of the car. You'll spend a hundred hours or so removing the seats and head liner of the car, installing racks for the batteries, running wiring, making mounts for the air conditioner, and then putting it all back. You'll give up a big chunk of luggage space to batteries etc. The solar panels will make the already terrible fuel economy of the jeep even worse. It will probably run for only about 2 hours on a reasonable battery size. When you actually come to leave the dog in the car, you're hoping that all the untested home built, layman designed, high amperage DC (60 amps in normal operation) doesn't start a fire and burn the dog alive. Which is slightly stomach churning and may impact on the primary goal of the trip which is enjoyment. I wouldn't enjoy anything if I was wondering if flames were peeling the skin from my dog trapped in a burning car. YMMV
Buy a car that does this as a standard function, designed, and tested by the factory. I think car loans in the USA are about 5% so the 11000 would pay the whole interest on a 50,000 dollar car loan for 4 years. However, if you sell the jeep and buy a Tesla, your out of pocket is only the interest on the difference. So maybe 8 years. With the factory dog mode you get a display that shows the internal temperature that can be read from outside the car. You get a free Internet connection and so you can see the internal temperature of the car from anywhere on earth. The battery lasts for several days, so if you have an accident or something, your dog will be OK even if you're out of action for a few days. If you're really stuck in hospital or something, you can let a trusted person enter and drive the car remotely so the dog can be taken home. You're not giving up any internal volume to batteries. Plus all the obvious advantages of a Tesla over a jeep.
Buy or build a 4wd van. By far the most expensive option. This might be the best option, but JBS is familiar with vanlife and has presumably already rejected this option for some reason. There are some fantastic builds out there and a man and his dog would be very happy in one.
https://earthcruiser.com/vehicles/earthcruiser/
Firstly, you live in a continental climate; the UK has a maritime one.
I thought we were talking about Europe? That has both maritime and continental climates, as does Canada.
Well, it depends on how the organisms you're grafting work. If you want to graft bits of a human onto another human, there's a heck of a lot of fiddly difficult wiring and plumbing to hook up, you have to do some detailed and intricate chemistry to make sure you've got one of the very rare pairings where it stands any chance of working at all, and even then you have to switch off big chunks of the receiving human's protection mechanisms and it quite often still goes wrong. But if you want to graft bits of a tree onto another tree, you just hack the second tree with a machete to make a crack to stick the bit of the first tree into, and wrap sticky tape around it. All the difficult plumbing sorts itself out automatically, there's no fiddling, no chemistry, and not even necessarily any need for the trees to be the same species.
Oh dear... Here's the background: my wife, the pharmacist, often works the transplant wing, and I've been helping her study for an additional certification, by being the idiot who asks her dumb questions to help her explain stuff at the level of detail she needs to know for the test.
To keep this very simple: yeah, a lot of what you think is impossible gets handled routinely in just about every transplant, a lot of things that you haven't thought of get handled too, and the general outcome is that transplants have lifespans until the transplant fails. In the case of islets for diabetes, mean time to failure is a few years, no one knows why. For hearts it's a decade or more.
The biggest failure mode is that the organ isn't suitable for transplant (e.g. too long out of the body) by the time it gets to the recipient. Recipients can get prepped multiple times before they get an organ. The waiting list locally is about a decade from what I hear for various organs.
It turns out there are strategies for how to work this. For example, someone I know who received a kidney waited a decade to get to the head of the line, barely made it, and got a new kidney. They could have used a kid's kidney, but when that failed, they'd be 10 years older and less likely to be eligible for the list for a stranger's kidney. Instead, when the stranger's kidney they have now fails, they'll ask their kid for a kidney, hoping that the kid hasn't developed anything that would make a donation impossible.
paws4thot @ 966: 952 - I pretty much agree, although I've yet to experience a peak temperature above 30C.
The highest I've ever experienced was 58.9°C. Humidity was VERY low so I didn't notice the sweat because it evaporated so fast. You have to be very careful about hydration under those circumstances. You can become dehydrated in minutes if you don't replace the fluid volume ASAP.
Probably would have killed me if I'd had to stay out in it more than a few minutes at a time. I do understand it was an EXTREME record setting day for that place & time. Even the locals said it was too damn hot.
You can become dehydrated in minutes if you don't replace the fluid volume ASAP.
Dehydration often leads to heat stroke, which is insidious because one of the first things to go is your judgement so once it starts you don't think clearly (kinda like hypoxia).
Repeated dehydration is also linked to kidney damage. Apparently coffee farmers in Central America often skip drinks while working in the field (or run out of water) and this has resulted in an "epidemic of chromic kidney disease".
I can't find the article I originally read, which was more epidemiological, but this one has details on the biochemical mechanisms:
https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/381239
ilya187 @ 978:
I should have said "subjectively".
I had been in 90-95 F, near 100% humidity environments, and as long as I kept drinking (and swallowing salt), I did not feel any worse than in drier heat.
The dryer heat has its own dangers. If you can't FEEL the sweat because it evaporates so fast, you lose some awareness of the fluid loss.
Extremes of heat & humidity have their perils in both directions. Hot & humid you have trouble shedding excess body heat; hot & dry you can rapidly dehydrate without noticing until it's too late. BTDT-GTTS.
Worst I experienced was a humidex in the upper 40s. Was definitely slow and stupid.
Worst I worked through was in a classroom with large windows with no blinds or curtains and the heat on*. Temperature was upper 30s, so humidex probably in lower-mid 40s. VP refused permission to take the class outside**, so we took turns using the eyewash stations and cold water from the sinks to cool down. Next day a student brought in a kiddie pool and they took turns soaking their feet in cold water.
Nowadays I would have simply moved the students elsewhere and made a formal complain to health & safety, but I was younger and more easily overawed by administration then.
Interestingly, in labour law there is no maximum temperature for a classroom. There is for bakeries, and classrooms have a minimum temperature but no maximum.
*Valve was broken so the pool heating system was also heating my classroom.
**Officially on the grounds that he had to be able to reach us on the intercom if necessary. (Which also meant he wouldn't have to leave the air-conditioned main office.) When the hiring/transfer freeze was lifted the school lost 14 out of 80 teachers — 12 left because of him.
Add electrolyte imbalance to the perils of extreme heat. Too much sweating also sucks salt out of you which leads to heat cramping.
When I was working as an ag-tech in a tyvek bunny suit in 30-35° weather we were warned to eat a bag of chips (crisps) while drinking water to replace the salt we were sweating out.
At present, air conditioning is needed only in misdesigned buildings, and it can't be fitted to most of those.
I live in a modern loft-conversion, built to modern UK building standards. Fully insulated, all electric, poor ventillation. As a result, I'm totally dependent on AC during summer. Opening a window only lets in even hotter air (and dirt, if there's a wind blowing).
From my perspective, I'm seeing a lot of irrelevant arguments and false assumptions. With AC, I survive. Without it, I die. Moving elsewhere isn't an option. I suspect I'm far from unique. I may even be far from unusual.
I still see a lot of new homes being built. When the current UK Prime Minister was merely Mayor of London, he authourised the building of 18,000 new flats in London. I saw many of them go up. I've seen many more built since the one I live in was completed.
That's a lot of "misdesigned buildings", with or without AC. However, the local standard for this label would have to be Grenfell Tower, in North London. I've been following the inquiry into the fire very closely. Industry failure featured heavily in Phase 2. Recent months have revealed the complicity of elected politicians. Some of us can recall the speeches made by a former PM, but the inquiry has yet to reach that height of the kakistocracy. He and his speeches, however, been referenced by one of the lawyers representing the bereaved and former residents.
That's a lot of death for one residential tower block, but I wonder how many more deaths have occured in isolated incidents - the kind that don't make big, headline news. They won't get a public inquiry.
While I can admire Germany's policy on shutters etc, I know the argument that'll be used to not do anything like that in the UK. I've heard it before. "We're a democracy, not a technocracy." Actually, minister, the correct word is kakistocracy.
Oops, something ate several hyperlinks. Nevermind. Here's the important one: Grenfell Tower Inquiry.
RE: Heat and humidity.
In my first year in Wisconsin for grad school, someone tried to convince me that the Midwest was worse than L.A. Cause it gets into the 90s in Wisconsin (30's oC, if you're from civilization). I was skeptical.
"It's not the heat, it's the humidity." I was told.
"Does 90s and humid beat 120 and smoggy?" I asked.
"What?"
"Yeah, that was the worst I experienced in LA growing up."
No one ever tried the "it's the humidity" on me again.
To be fair, LA didn't officially get up to 120oF until 2020. But cheap thermometers left out in a sunny yard certainly got that hot even in the 1970s, and with smog it's pretty uncomfortable.
Poul-Henning Kamp @ 979:
[ ... ]
In Denmark we have an official meteological condition called "tropical night", which means the temperature did not drop below 20°.
Denmark is precisely one of those places where "just open the window" always took care of heat.
Our traditional beach-houses, barely more than wooden shacks, at most 50mm thermal insulation, are increasingly getting fitted with air/air heat-pumps, and A/C is the major selling point.
Why ?
Because we have had several heat-waves over the last decade, some lasting almost three weeks, where it was uncomfortably warm (for Danes), also at night, and in particular for older people.
[Emphasis added]
In the southern U.S. A/C has been a boon to life expectancy. It may have done more to help people live longer than any of the modern medical advances.
Here in the south you may not have access to adequate health care, but unless you're homeless, living under a bridge somewhere, you probably have A/C, even if it's just a puny little window unit.
I've been around here long enough I remember the time before A/C became commonly available. I was already in my teens before my parents got A/C - a BIG honkin' window unit that replaced half of a side window in the Living Room (that faced out on the carport so it was always in shade on the outside), so I'm also VERY familiar with "open a window", which I'm gonna' tell you ain't much of a solution when the outside temperature is in the 90s (°F) and the relative humidity is approaching 100%.
I remember SWELTERING in church on Sunday mornings when the only way you had to cool off was paper fans from a local funeral home. And I remember movie theaters were AIR CONDITIONED and they were one of the few businesses exempt from Sunday Closing (Blue) Laws.
In Denmark we have an official meteological condition called "tropical night", which means the temperature did not drop below 20°.
In Brisbane it's not that unusual in summer to get nights that don't drop below 30ºC. While I can say by experience it's something that you can learn to live with, also by experience, once you have air-conditioning in your bedroom, you always use it when the outdoor temperatures are like that.
It's also not unusual for the daily maximum not to be that hot, possibly just mid-30s, when it's like that. There are just conditions that compress the diurnal variation a lot, and those conditions are generally hot humid weather, with cloud cover that doesn't rain but might create fog in the morning (dew point reached only at the coolest, or least hot, part of the night).
Heteromeles @ 980:
Hmmm. You were working in a greenhouse? I swear I came near those conditions when I worked in a greenhouse, but I never checked.
The thing is, 100% humidity is fog, so unless it was foggy and 90s, the humidity was lower.
No it's not. One-hundred-percent humidity is when the air is completely saturated with moisture and can't absorb any more; right before it starts precipitating. In the summer that may be because thunderstorms come through. Sometimes as the humidity approaches 100% it MAY form fog, but I've never seen fog when the temperature was above 90° F. I have seen water just start falling out of a clear blue sky without any thunderstorms and without it forming fog.
At Ft. Hood, TX during July & August I regularly experienced days with temperatures 95° - 107° F with humidity approaching 100% ... when it got to 100% some kind of weather phenomena came along to wring all that water out of the air (usually thunderstorms), but I never saw it break out into fog. All of the fog conditions I remember took place at much lower temperatures, and often without the humidity reaching 100% ... usually Oh Dark Thirty when we were trying to do PT before it got too hot.
[ ... ]
If you were outside and experienced such conditions...so far, the only places that have reported such conditions are parts of the Iran and Iraq coast, when the Gulf heated up in the middle of summer, along the coast of Djibouti on the south side of the Red Sea (the ocean surface was near 90 at the time), and Shanghai about five years ago, quite briefly. So where were you when you experienced the conditions?
Ft. Hood, Texas. Have I ever mentioned that I am not a big fan of the State of Texas? Mainly because of Ft. Hood. Actually, there are other parts of the state I remember fondly.
Nojay @ 987:
Upwards or downwards? There's some evidence that that nice Mister Putin has been bumping off rich people in Russia for quite some time now and, funnily enough, he's richer than ever. Puzzling, hey?
He may be robbing the rich, but he sure ain't giving any of it away to the poor.
it's not that unusual in summer to get nights that don't drop below 30ºC. While I can say by experience it's something that you can learn to live with {it}
IME once you get past 35 degrees it's hard to sleep, and over 40 basically impossible even with a fan.
One aspect of central Australia that I actually enjoyed was the wide temperature range. Sure it's over 40 degrees in the hot part of the day, but it gets below 10 degrees at night. Nights are quite survivable just with a cuddlepile of people, or a fire, or a decent sleeping bag.
But when you get to the north coast, especially at the tail or the wet season when it's just hot and humid even when it's not actually raining, it seems to stay hot all night and unless you have an aircon set to suck water out of the air as well as cooling it it's just bloody awful.
(cheap and underpowered airons struggle to regulate humidity, so the post-condensing air will still be close to saturated and the air in the room can be 80%+ humidity even if it's under 30 degrees)
Heteromeles said: To be blunt, if you want to raise money for a massive shift in how civilization operates, you have to go after the rich.
If the rich were hoarding phosphorus instead of money, and no one had any phosphorus then yeah, I can see that. If the rich were hoarding currency and noone had any currency (think middle ages church) and noone could trade, or get a job because there was nothing to pay them with (ala Picketty) then yeah, break them up and get the currency back into circulation.
But they're not. They're hoarding control of companies.
So what does "go after the rich" mean in a practical sense? I don't know what you mean. My guesses are, make them (billionaires) sell control and take the money they make from selling it. What does that achieve?
Well you've pulled a heap of money out of circulation. (all the money that millions of people spent to buy the shares) So people can't get money for projects, workers don't get paid, unpaid workers can't buy stuff. People who make and sell stuff can't sell, so they can't pay workers. Unpaid workers can't buy stuff. Brilliant work, you've created the problem that the church caused in the middle ages, you've sopped up all the currency and no one can work or trade.
Or you could make them sell their control and keep their money. Now the companies have different (more) shareholders controlling the companies and the billionaires have giant piles of cash. They can lend out the cash to keep the economy rocking along, but this doesn't build any solar panels. The companies just run as before, but with somewhat more quarter to quarter focus and less long term planning and much bigger venues for shareholder meetings.
Or you could take control of the companies under the state. Just nationalise them. They're now state owned corporations. So what do you do with them? Close them? So you've now stopped making stuff, thrown a couple of 10s of millions out of work, who now can't buy stuff, so millions more lose their jobs because the companies they work for can't sell stuff.
So don't close them. They're now state owned and run. Brilliant, now every company is like Gazprom. If the state owned company ignores environment laws, you can fine then and they won't even fight the fines in court because they are owned by the government. So the government will fine itself if it does something bad, and have to pay itself huge fines. I'm still not seeing where this takes any CO2 out of the air though. Income inequality looks better because you've financially destroyed the 0.0001% (and everyone's pension). But you've done it by destroying the wealth rather than spreading it around.
Money isn't phosphorus. It's imaginary. If the government wants to tackle climate change, they just create more money out of nothing to pay people to make solar panels and capture carbon. Turning every company with more than 100 workers into Gazprom and ruining every entity worth more than a few million might give you a warm feeling, but it doesn't do anything useful.
Opening a window only lets in even hotter air (and dirt, if there's a wind blowing).
Ideally you would only open windows at night, when things are cooler. After cooling off the interior at night (window fans help), close up everything again during the day.
"Does 90s and humid beat 120 and smoggy?" I asked.
When I lived in the LA area in the '70s and early '80s, I don't remember the heat ever being a major problem. (Nothing like the 115° temperature we had here last year in Portland, Oregon!) In fact, I once ran 17 miles in a sunny early afternoon with temp around 95°. I do remember lots of days with the humidity under 10% in the summer, which doubtless helped make the heat bearable.
Smog, on the other hand, was a major issue for me, leading to my move to Oregon in 1985.
I've been around here long enough I remember the time before A/C became commonly available.
As a kid in the middle '50s, my family lived in Oklahoma for 3 years while my dad was getting his PhD. We lived in 2-story student housing, with bedrooms on the second floor. The next-door neighbors had a swamp cooler, but not us. Our final summer there, we had 30 straight days of 100°+ temperatures, and we slept on the floor of our downstairs living room.
Those were the bad old days, for sure... :-(
Have I ever mentioned that I am not a big fan of the State of Texas? Mainly because of Ft. Hood. Actually, there are other parts of the state I remember fondly.
I lived near San Antonio for 4 years while serving in the Air Force. I have fond memories of Canyon Lake and the Hill Country near New Braunfels, where we did scuba diving and river rafting.
But in general, Texas would not be on my top-10 list of places to live.
gasdive (he, him, ia) @ 1039: [ ... ]
Wrong!
Wrong!
Wrong!
and Wrong!!!
How do you breathe with your head stuck up there? And doesn't the smell bother you?
PS: I have got more common sense than you appear to have, and I'll thank you not to impute that I am as stupid, incompetent and inconsiderate as you.
Schiesskopf.
You're making too many problematic assumptions, sorry. If you want to understand, you need to read something like Brooke Harrington's Capital Without Borders. I'm not screwing with you, it's actually quite a readable book if you're interested in the subject.
One example of how this works is a trust. A trust is a relationship, so it can't be taxed. Only things that are owned can be taxed, and you can't own a relationship. A trust is a relationship where a trustee looks after financial affairs for the beneficiary of the trust. Trusts have many positive uses. They originated in England during the Crusades, where a crusading knight would leave his property in trust to a trusted friend, so that if he died on crusade, his friend would look after the properties held in trust until his children were grown and could manage it themselves. They did this because there were no inheritance laws, and properties were often seized by the king on the death of the owner.
Coming up to modern times, an overly simple example is a billionaire parking all his wealth in a trust. Someone sues the billionaire and wins. They go to collect their judgment and find out he has no money. So they go to the trust and find out one of the rules of that particular trust is that they don't cover their beneficiary's legal loses. So the litigant gets nothing.
This is what I mean by billionaires controlling billions of dollars, not owning billions of dollars. Ownership can be taxed or attacked in court. Relationships are harder to attack.
In this example, you don't buy out the trust, you rule it illegal and seize it. This is what I mean by breaking the billionaires' ability to control his finances.
Of course any half-decent financial manager or lawyer would see such an attack coming decades ago and make it hard to seize, perhaps by having the trust set up in a country that didn't honor the financial laws of the country the billionaire resided in. More generally, this is where you get the layers of shell corporations, non-profits, and trusts scattered across multiple countries, just to make it as hard as possible for an attacker to establish who owns what and seize it. Offshore financial havens have often been set up so their legal systems favors the financial managers at the expense of anyone attacking their financial systems, and so forth.
This is why I compared the job of taking down a billionaire and restructuring their assets to old monster slaying stories, and also to a cyberspace run. Systemic complexity is the defense of the financial castle, the knightly defenders are financial managers who work on the basis of personal loyalty (seriously, some think of themselves as modern knights defending their lords), and all this has to be overcome for an outsider to seize control.
And remember we want their systems transformed, so that they are working to sequester carbon and save global civilization. How? It depends, of course. Since, again, I'm advocating for science fiction stories here, not an actual revolution, I'd say that the transformation is a central part of the story.
Remember, again, this is a thumbnail, and it's about on the level of saying that a stock market is where people go to buy and sell things. Since complexity is the primary defense and innovation is continual, I doubt either of us can even guess all the possibilities.
Hope this helps.
Robert Prior @ 1046: Add electrolyte imbalance to the perils of extreme heat. Too much sweating also sucks salt out of you which leads to heat cramping.
When I was working as an ag-tech in a tyvek bunny suit in 30-35° weather we were warned to eat a bag of chips (crisps) while drinking water to replace the salt we were sweating out.
All of that was included in my training to become the Safety NCO for the Brigade before we deployed to Iraq. Part of my duty was to go around and remind everyone else to take precautions against heat injuries. I just happened to have to do that duty on a day that was apparently the record setting hot day in Diyala Provence back in 2004.
In addition to reminding everyone else what they needed to do, I always heeded my own advice.
We had plenty of water available along with Gator-Ade to replenish electrolytes. I can't stand Gator-Ade, but I could take a 1-qt canteen and fill it with half Gator-Ade & half water and I could choke that down. I'd carry several liter bottles of water & Gator-Ade around with me. I'd drink half a canteen before I left my building & walked over to where I had to check on soldiers and drink the other half after I got there. I carried 4 canteens plus the liter bottles I had in my ruck, & I'd have enough water & Gator-Ade I could leave some if it turned out someone didn't have enough.
I also had to take Combat Lifesaver training and learn how to do an IV in the case anyone became dangerously dehydrated & I always had my bag with me.
I'm thankful I never had to use it; that carrying extra water & Gator-Ade and paying attention to those around me meant it never got that bad while I was around.
Sorry for the second answer, but I forgot a potentially useful point: Charlie's been putting some of this stuff in the New Management Series.
By analogy, what I'm arguing is for a story where, instead of killing Rupert over a powerful artifact, you get to Rupert before CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN goes live, appropriate all his magic assets while leaving him a muggle, and use what used to be his magic as part of your effort to try to prevent CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. In this case, the best way to prevent CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is to use 1/3 of all Earth's magic to do nothing but thicken the walls of reality and keep the greater monsters out.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it might help.
Brutal, glad that was you keeping people safe and not me.
Me, I'm a wimp. When I was doing desert surveys awhile ago, I finally clued in and started carrying a black umbrella. Walking in the shade cut the amount of water I had to carry in half, while the umbrella got too hot to touch.
Obviously this doesn't work if you've got to use both hands, but I recommend it for hiking. The nice thing is, unlike a hat or clothes, the umbrella is nowhere near your skin, so no matter how hot it gets, it can't do much to transfer the heat to you.
Incidentally, I looked up the number of black flag days at Ft. Hood, and yeah, that's a good place to train people for action in the Persian Gulf, I guess. Looks like climate change is set to make those lovely days about four times more common. What fun.
Heteromeles said: Hope this helps
Not really.
You explained about trusts, which I already knew about. And about control rather than ownership, which was integral to my post.
What you didn't get to was my questions:
what do you do with the control once you've wrested it from the billionaires?
How wresting control of an online shopping mall, a flatpack furniture store, a bookstore, a car company and an exploitative discount store is related to removing carbon?
Why would you bother to take control of these companies? To close them, to sell them, to turn an online shopping company and bookstore into a solar panel factory? (do they keep selling books?)
Why would you, as a government, bother when you can just magic money into existence and build solar panel making machine factories? Wouldn't that be easier than trying to turn a discount store into a solar panel machine factory?
You explained about trusts, which I already knew about. And about control rather than ownership, which was integral to my post.
Since all you could think of was selling control or nationalizing, I'm not sure you get it. Reconstituting a for-profit oil drilling operation as a non-profit carbon sequestration well drilling operation that takes government and commercial contracts might be useful. Instead of making money for shareholders, it invests in making the world more livable while paying its workers.
Why would you, as a government, bother when you can just magic money into existence and build solar panel making machine factories? Wouldn't that be easier than trying to turn a discount store into a solar panel machine factory?
Hyperinflation is the result when a government simply prints money to cover debts. That's why you don't do it. You could issue bonds instead of printing money, but since you're shrinking the economy rather than growing it, I'm not sure anyone would buy in, at least at first.
Global infrastructure is a largely fixed commodity, unlike money. As you noted, we're running short on phosphorus, but we also seem to be running short on building sand to make concrete and cement with. We also have to be careful about how much energy we pour into new tech. Long story short, we need to repurpose as much as we can.
Now I agree that a lot of stuff can't be repurposed, but there's nothing wrong with keeping a bookstore or a discount store open as a co-op or non-profit, instead of requiring it to turn a profit to feed a billionaire's follower's son's drug habit.
carrying a black umbrella
You can get umbrella hats if you do need both hands. Sadly I never found a good solution like that for wearing on a bike helmet.
Ideally you would only open windows at night, when things are cooler. After cooling off the interior at night (window fans help), close up everything again during the day.
Ideally, yes. I've done that in other flats. It doesn't work here. Too much heat is absorbed during the day, then released during the night. All night long. It takes forever for a city like London to cool during summer.
Also, there's too much nightlife around here for a single open window. You're lucky if nobody has an all-night, outdoor party. The kind that can be heard and felt from many streets away.
Last summer was the worst around here for years. The local council went full kakistocracy, closing their "party patrol" and bungling an organised daytime event. Hint: they booked too many DJs. Multiple noise-clowns in vans. Let's just say there were a lot of complaints from local residents. In their defense, one of the councilors did eventually turn up and witness their failure.
However, the Grenfell Tower fire puts this incompetence into proper perspective. That was one of many hundreds of similar buildings around the country.
A lot of people are now very sensitive to gaslighting. I may be one of them. So I ask you, please take care not to victim-shame. There are problems that can't be solved by opening a window. They're deep, structural problems. Some are literally structural, like the standards for buildings.
Yes, the failure modes of the human brain. Millions of years of evolution have not prepared us well for the world we now live in. I realised that in the early 80s, just from reading a little history, science and observing current events. Then I looked at the people running the country. Whoops.
Four decades later, I have a lot more history and experience to support my teenage conclusions. I hoped to find evidence that I was wrong, but not only have I found more evidence supporting those conclusions, I'm also finding people who support them, or similar conclusions. You may be one of them. I'd still like to be proved wrong, of course, but the evidence is still mounting.
Since all you could think of was selling control or nationalizing, I'm not sure you get it.
Maybe I don't. I'm pretty sure I don't.
Reconstituting a for-profit oil drilling operation as a non-profit carbon sequestration well drilling operation that takes government and commercial contracts might be useful. Instead of making money for shareholders, it invests in making the world more livable while paying its workers.
That sounds a lot like nationalising. You just tell the company that it's now a non-profit by fiat. All the shares instantly zero out in value. The government can then offer a penny on a million, buy all the shares and then vote that the company take government contracts to drill sequestration holes in the ground. You can call it "restructuring" if you like.
I said: Why would you, as a government, bother when you can just magic money into existence and build solar panel making machine factories? Wouldn't that be easier than trying to turn a discount store into a solar panel machine factory?
You said: Hyperinflation is the result when a government simply prints money to cover debts.
Yes, but not these sort of debts. Hyperinflation happens when a big powerful country comes into a powerless country, does a bit of "restructuring" on their arse, makes them borrow money to pay for a company from the big country to take over their agriculture or water supply, then demands that the debt be paid in the currency of the big powerful country. So the little country has to sell their currency to buy the currency of the big powerful country. Which causes the value of the currency to crash. Now imports are all too expensive and no one can trade, so the tax base collapses. Now the government of the little country hasn't got any pesos in their coffers, so they print money and try to sell it to get dollars to pay the debts. No one wants them, so the value falls further. Printing money is the last gasps of an economy killed by a predator. It's no more the cause of the hyper inflation than broken bones and seatbelt burns cause car crashes.
That's why you don't do it.
Countries do it all the time. Every western country did it in 2008 and the countries that did it earliest, and hardest did best economically. The amount they did would have easily paid for a pretty complete decarbonisation.
You could issue bonds instead of printing money, but since you're shrinking the economy rather than growing it, I'm not sure anyone would buy in, at least at first.
You get your reserve bank to buy the bonds. It's the same as printing money but it doesn't make the people who don't understand money think they're living in a Banana Republic.
Global infrastructure is a largely fixed commodity, unlike money. As you noted, we're running short on phosphorus, but we also seem to be running short on building sand to make concrete and cement with. We also have to be careful about how much energy we pour into new tech. Long story short, we need to repurpose as much as we can.
Yeah sure, I agree, but I don't see how this does that. How do you repurpose a website that connects school friends into infrastructure? Most of the companies that drill holes aren't even owned by billionaires. They're owned by pension funds and banks and small investors.
Now I agree that a lot of stuff can't be repurposed, but there's nothing wrong with keeping a bookstore or a discount store open as a co-op or non-profit, instead of requiring it to turn a profit to feed a billionaire's follower's son's drug habit.
Well, that serves a sort of moral purpose if you squint, but frankly I don't care who takes drugs or how much they take. I care how many ppm of CO2 there is. If the government wants a non profit bookstore, and voters agree that this is the sort of thing that the government should be involving itself with, Start one. Get the USPS to sell books. But is this the fight we should be fighting?
For those of you thinking about economics Brian Easton is interesting and accessible. His latest bit is explaining "Reductions in effective productivity, largely as a result of events overseas, require reductions in real incomes. Ignore that and you cannot defeat inflation"
Final para: "The Governor was making the same point as this column. This round of world price rises – even inflation – is not a simple monetary or aggregate demand phenomenon. So it cannot be addressed simply by central banks. It involves an economy-wide response of which fiscal policy is a major contributor."
https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/what-is-really-causing-the-sharp-price-rises
He's writing in the context of NZ house prices spiralling up last year then dropping back to where they were 18 months ago. People are suggesting all sorts of economic fixes, but they're different people with different solutions to the ones who were talking about the problem a year ago. And he also likes to poke at the crowd for whom lower taxes and less government is always the solution regardless of the problem.
H BE VERY CAREFUL
A "trust" in the US is nothing remotely at all anything like a "trust" in the UK.
Identical word, two utterly different meanings - OK?
I'm assuming you are using the US meaning - i.e. corrupt money-&-resources-hoarding EVUL corporation, rather than: " A mechanism for safeguarding resources for other people - often minors or will beneficiaries or a charitable foundation. (etc )
Martin Rodgers
Which particular collection of Local Authority wankers are you living under at the moment?
I'm with the London Borough of What The Fuck ( The initials should tell you which one that is )
"That sounds a lot like nationalising."
Here's an idea:
Your prototypical trans-national oil-company has all the traits that we normally assign to intelligence.
The fact that it is a sort of hive-intelligence is not really relevant, any CEO will tell that the company "has a mind of its own" and is incredibly difficult to persuade to change.
If these oil-companies had been human, what they are engaged in would be called "looting", and they would be punished for it.
So please explain why isn't it totally appropriate to reign in these oil-companies, strip them of their ill-gotten gains, and sentence them to 50 years of community-service ?
1045 - "in labour law there is no maximum temperature for a school or further education classroom. There is for bakeries, and classrooms have a minimum temperature but no maximum".
Edit inline, italic. Bizarrely, there actually is a maximum temperature for a "vocational training" classroom though.
1047 - Having looked up kakistocracy, I'll agree the term regarding the likes of Scamoron, Mayhem, Bozo, Demonic Raaaab, (much too) Richy Soonak... I'm less certain it can be applied even as late as Tory B Liar.
1049 - Thermometer in direct sunlight doesn't count; to get a meaningful air temperature, the thermometer needs to be in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen .
1051 - Brisbane has a humid subtropical climate; Denmark has a temperate climate (source Wikipedia). I'm not entirely sure why, given its West coast being on the North Sea, Denmark isn't classified as maritime temperate climate.
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"I'm not entirely sure why, given its West coast being on the North Sea, Denmark isn't classified as maritime temperate climate."
It's pretty much all UK's fault :-)
Because UK blocks wind from west, the overall wind pattern in the North Sea is more from NW than W, through the hole between Norway and Scotland.
Therefore the temperature on the Danish west coast is lower and the air drier, than it would have been without UK in the way.
Poul-Henning Kamp said: So please explain why isn't it totally appropriate to reign in these oil-companies, strip them of their ill-gotten gains, and sentence them to 50 years of community-service?
I think that's a great idea, but that's not what's being proposed.
I'll give you two clues, Greg. This is the arse-end of London, and there was a major riot here in 2011.
I like your clue but the only answer I can come up with at this early hour (and on my first coffee) is somewhere northwest of London. While I hear worse things about Rxxfxxx, I have no direct experience of either locality.
Greg, they’re the same thing. You’re talking about different examples of existing trusts, that is different uses for the laws about trusts. There’s no difference in the concept of what a trust is, which in itself is pretty morally neutral. The existence of benign trusts in the UK doesn’t change the fact the aristocracy has been using them to fuck the living bejezus out of the peasantry since the Middle Ages. There are, as you may have noticed, benign trusts in the USA too.
When I lived in the LA area in the '70s and early '80s, I don't remember the heat ever being a major problem. (Nothing like the 115° temperature we had here last year in Portland, Oregon!)
That was bad all right. I've said before that nobody on this blog is more than one step removed from someone who's died of heat. And of course, lots of science fiction fans in Portland knew Mary.
Re: way back at 591: “Hope punk” This is news to me and it sounds great. I could really use an alternative to grimdark sff. More books at a Scalzi or Aaronovitch level of fun and entertainment would be most welcome!
with smog it's pretty uncomfortable.
I'll just say that smog at any temp is likely to be miserable.
"I live in a modern loft-conversion, built to modern UK building standards. Fully insulated, all electric, poor ventillation."
And that is NOT misdesigned? Yes, there are a lot of such abominations, but it isn't possible to fit air conditioning to most of them, for reasons described early. In most northern European conditions, all that is needed is decent ventilation; air conditioning is (in addition to being harmful in other ways) a kludge to cover up the misdesign.
IME once you get past 35 degrees it's hard to sleep, and over 40 basically impossible even with a fan.
Yes. About 4 or 5 years after buying the house our central air died. Replacing it would have cost from $5K to $20K depending on how many upgrades to the heating and electrical service would have been required so I passed. We went 5 years without AC. Lots of window openings at critical times, screens, and a whole house fan that exhausted air via the attic made it uncomfortable at times but it was mostly OK. More so for me than my wife. We also were surrounded by trees so most of the time little direct sunlight. The highest highs most summers were around 35C and for less than 10 days a summer.
Then we hit that summer where it got to over 38C five different days and near there a lot. Window AC were demanded buy wife and put in.
Continental climates can reach right to the sea, as in almost all of the USA, but north-western Europe is not the same, and largely maritime climates extend far further than you might expect, because the prevailing winds are from the south-west. This map gives an indication of how some climatologists indicate what is going on.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6b/f1/28/6bf128aebd8c8b878402d43ac0397ed7.jpg
Humidity and (above all) air flow is the key, but (as you say) there comes a point where even that fails. I have slept comfortably at above 40 Celsius, but it was bone-dry, there was a slight wind, and I was outside under a sheet.
Thermometer in direct sunlight doesn't count;
I think he was poking at all the folks who set a thermometer in sunlight then talk about how hot it is.
That's my point. Yes, it is misdesigned. I'm slowly discovering just how badly. A recent discovery: a leaking shower, slowly flooding a flat below mine. A trusted plumber fixed it in a few hours.
So why was it not done correctly in the first place? Well, this is not an isolated failure. The electrician who worked on the flat failed so badly, he didn't even complete the job before he betrayed his wife and father-in-law. As the latter was also his employer, he'd destroyed both his marraige and his job.
My relatives find my cynicism baffling. Its as if they have no memory of these things. They see no patterns of cognitive failure, while I've been seeing them all my life. My relatives seem also baffled by the distinction I make between trust and trustworthiness. If they were programmers, I could explain it to them using Ken Thompson's famous 1981 paper and Alan Turing's 1936 paper. (Nevermind the Trojan Source paper from last year.)
Ahh, well. Fundamentals, eh?
Victim shaming has nothing to do with what I post. I am damning misdesign, and trying to counter the myth that air conditioning is essential in places like north-western Europe (at present). I accept that some people are buggered because it is not in their powers to fix the misdesigns or use one of the (usually better) alternatives. The London heat buffering problem is definitely an issue, I agree, but the temperatures are STILL not high enough at night that decent ventilation and air-flow wouldn't be enough.
High enough in this flat. I didn't ask for AC. If I had, and if I'd known how bad it would get, I'd have insisted on AC in the kitchen too. I can't imagine anyone using the oven in that room during heatwave without AC. Fortunately for me, I don't use the oven at all.
I have slept comfortably at above 40 Celsius, but it was bone-dry, there was a slight wind, and I was outside under a sheet.
Now you're getting to JBS Ft. Hood examples. I was in Texas more than a few days that summer 10 years ago when the temp got to over 100F more than 40 days in a row. But, as has been said, it was a dry heat in the DFW metroplex and nearby. So it was tolerable. Mostly. If you did things right. Go for a swim and ignore towels. You were bone dry within 5 minutes of getting out of the water.
But I'm glad I wasn't out laying concrete block or similar.
Then there is Houston. See me next comment.
Yes I was in fact in a greenhouse, in Texas in August.
The Houston area? A swamp in one of the hottest areas of the US. Let's build the 4th biggest metropolitan area of the US there. Heat and humidity are two of it's best know products.
Why not?
Oil.
4 buttons
Only is the simple cases of housing design and simplistic living arrangement.
If you don't get how modern system save energy via zoning, dampers, multiple speed blowers, and variable cooling, and deal with people being gone for large parts of certain days and there all day other days, and large outside weather swings during various seasons, well so be it.
Oh, and even with 4 buttons, you'll find a non trivial number of homeowners just can't cope.
And that is very roughly what I expected, after considering the effects of mountain ranges (not shown). I was questioning the point where Denmark was not described as "maritime" as well as "temperate" by Wikipedia.
"A mechanism for safeguarding resources for other people - often minors or will beneficiaries or a charitable foundation."
Such trust funds are common in the US. I looked into setting one up for the grandkids a couple of years ago -- it's not that hard to do. Didn't actually do it for technical reasons.
Just an omission. The continental/maritime/oceanic classification is a separate one from the tropical/temperate/polar one.
To clarify, Greg's gotten snagged on a US law term "antitrust." It dates from 1890 and was used to break up the Standard Oil Trust, which was a monopoly. Laws promoting business competition in the US is known as antitrust laws due to this historical precedent.
Otherwise, we're all talking about the same trust, invented in England, which is a relationship set up to safeguard resources for other people.
I completely agree that they're common. Here they're becoming a common ways for middle-class families to deal with end-of-life issues while avoiding probate. I know they're also common in the UK for non-profit ownership (a trust that maintains a historic building).
Things get different with the more esoteric trusts set up for wealth management. The most complex I know about (showing my ignorance here) is a Cayman Islands STAR Trust. These are also known as "dynastic trusts" for a reason. For awhile, I played with the idea of an interstellar polity whose central structure was a STAR Trust, because I think you could almost use it as a basis for governance. After playing with that for awhile, I got creeped out and dropped it.
That sounds a lot like nationalising. You just tell the company that it's now a non-profit by fiat. All the shares instantly zero out in value. The government can then offer a penny on a million, buy all the shares and then vote that the company take government contracts to drill sequestration holes in the ground. You can call it "restructuring" if you like.
The US has quite a few firms (Halliburton, for example) that are for-profit corporations that get most of their money from the government. The notorious "revolving door between Wall Street and DC" is a good example of this. They more run the country than are run by it.
Non-profits in the US have to be set up to do the public good, so any profit that gets made either gets plowed back into the company or gets returned as some benefit to the public. If you're setting up systems to save civilization that collectively are one-third of the global economy, IMHO they really need to be set up on a not for profit basis. If they're set up as a for-profit system, I'm pretty sure you end up with a global plutocracy of those who got ultra-rich (trillionaires, not billionaires) owning the means of saving civilization , while the rest of us get immiserated paying them for it and become their serfs. This is supposed to be about hopeful SF, not global grimdark.
The major reason to seize assets is that money is a form of power. If you buy out a billionaire who's a major source of global woe, that billionaire still has all his power (in the form of money) and now has a grievance against those who took away his preciouses. That's a really dangerous, unstable situation. Better to disempower the troublemakers as much as possible. I'm not saying that the government seizes their assets and owns them in perpetuity, I'm saying that the government restructures the assets and sells or gives them away. This is done routinely when banks fail (government swoops in, grabs control, restructures, and sells), and something like that could be done here.
A trust in the U.S. can also be for the benefit of a minor. At least in the U.S. they're general-purpose legal tools, which can be used for both good and bad purposes.
Sigh. Let's break this down and use entire sentences. Here's the entire paragraph:
Heteromeles, you're beating a dead horse.
(I know Nojay quite well IRL -- like, going back 25-30 years: his flatmate is my regular cat-sitter. I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed any swastika armbands before now. Obviously you had no way of knowing he's one of my neighbours and, in the absence of a pandemic, drops round for tea quite regularly. But I think you're mistaking the usual sixty-something-on-the-spectrum debating style for anti-semitism, and ... just, don't.)
Billionaires and tax:
Tax doesn't do what 99% of you seem to think it does. In particular, "your tax dollars at work" do not fund government expenditure. If the government wants to fund expenditure, it can print more money. Tax is there to take surplus currency out of the circulation to prevent the money supply bloating up.
My preferred solution to the billionaire problem would be: governments bring in a universal basic income, index-linked against inflation. They then begin ramping up social housing and infrastructure construction programs, building new state-owned accommodation (with very low rental fees), available to anyone on a low income -- homeless, students, pensioners, unemployed, and low income workers. Throw in roads, sewers, and all the infrastructure that will be needed to address climate change. Allow inflation to rise a bit. And bring in a wealth tax targeting real estate, shares, stocks, and bonds.
The objective is to deflate the housing market bubble and savings bubble while ensuring nobody goes homeless and the low-income folks can keep up: the billionaires will be hit harder by this progressive strategy than the working poor.
Yeah, I'd get to say goodbye to my retirement nest-egg, but I shouldn't need to have accumulated it in the first place.
Why yes, this is socialism. Or rather, it's a socialist-adjacent corrective to the past 50 years of maladministration and corruption which have brought us to this quandary.
If you visit, be sure to go around some of the older graveyards (especially the one at Greyfriars kirk) and look at the graves and crypts with the iron grilles sunk into the ground! To protect the freshly-interred against Resurrection Men.
"past 50 years of maladministration and corruption which have brought us to this quandary."
This is one of the things about this refeudalisation I have a really hard time understanding:
Some of the Fortune-500 ilk must, almost by definition, have some failed off-spring, who one way or the other ends up reading Karl Marx, even if by accident, and still be bright enough to go back home and say "Uhhm, maybe we should think about where this goes for a moment ?"
An alien could easily mistake the billionaires for the real Marxists on this planet, seeing how closely the hew to his text-book...
Heteromeles, you're beating a dead horse.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
Please apologize to your cats for me.
To be clear, I don't think he's a Nazi. But I do think it's uncool these days to deploy tropes that imply all Jews are greedy and billionaires tend to be Jewish, because antisemitism is on the rise globally again.
If we're going to discuss doing away with billionaires, I don't want what's supposed to be a hopeful idea to mutate into a pogrom in any way, shape, or form.
IME once you get past 35 degrees it's hard to sleep, and over 40 basically impossible even with a fan.
See, this is why I live in Scotland: for me, the equivalent temperatures are 17 degrees and 21 degrees.
Ideally you would only open windows at night, when things are cooler. After cooling off the interior at night (window fans help), close up everything again during the day.
I did that for almost two decades in my current house, while I was paying off the mortgage, because I was too cash-poor to pay for air conditioning. (Or more accurately, pay the electric bill that would have resulted from using the central A/C.) Frequently slept in the unfinished basement because the top story (where bedrooms are) was still too hot to sleep in the wee hours of the morning.
Leaving windows open didn't get much cross-breeze, as the winds usually died down after sunset. Open windows did mean that I heard all the neighbourhood teenagers having drunken street parties and raging about their parents* — often right outside my house. It's bloody hard to sleep when the temperature is 35° and you have someone ranting at full volume right under your window. Sometimes they would lie on my front lawn** and rage, sometimes they'd stand in the driveway.
I now have a much more efficient central air unit and I run it during the summer, set to 27°. Upstairs is still hotter but not absolutely baking, so I can keep the windows closed to keep the noise out. (Not to mention pollution; on hot days we usually have air quality warnings as well and I can notice the difference when I stop outside.)
When the outside temperature drops below 25 I'll turn of the A/C and open all the windows, assuming the air quality is reasonable. Being older means I'm getting up to pee anyway, so I don't lose sleep doing this.
*One boy I mentally called "Fucker" because that was every second word. "My fucking mom is fucking pissing me off. Fuck! She fucking won't leave me the fuck alone!" and so on and so on.
**That eventually stopped. I discovered a very flat smear of dogshit right where they usually lay down, and they never came back. For once I was happy someone left a large pile of dogshit in the middle of my lawn!
When I was doing desert surveys awhile ago, I finally clued in and started carrying a black umbrella.
Every trip to China I bought an umbrella to use for it's original purpose* (rather than rain). Got strange looks as among the Chinese only women used umbrellas to keep cool, but I was a strange foreigner anyway with my shorts and sandals so one more look didn't worry me!
I sometimes do the same thing here in Canada. Much more comfy.
*All in the name: literally 'little shadow'!
Some of the Fortune-500 ilk must, almost by definition, have some failed off-spring, who one way or the other ends up reading Karl Marx, even if by accident, and still be bright enough to go back home and say "Uhhm, maybe we should think about where this goes for a moment ?"
It's apparently so normal for the Offspring to not want share the Founder's zeal for financial gain that there are global tropes (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, the first generation makes the fortune, the second generation spends the fortune, the third generation loses the fortune, etc.) about how hard it is for the wealthy to stay wealthy. Hughes Family Wealth: Keeping It In The Family was explicitly written to educate founders and heirs about the proper mindset for staying wealthy across the generations. It's worth reading, to see what these people are hearing. It's more a little creepy.
Anyway, it isn't Marxism for the super-rich, it's anarchy. If you're rich enough (like Rupert of the New Management) you set up situations where the law only applies to you when it's to your advantage, and you ignore it otherwise. An example from Harrington's book is where a financial manager got taken to meet their boss's big client. Who lived in another country. And because they were meeting him, they simply got onto his private jet, flew to the other country, were picked up at the private airport by one of his limousines, and went straight to the meeting. No need for passports, customs, etc., not because they weren't legally required, but because the client simply ignored that stuff.
A final note. Cayman Islands STAR Trusts can be set up to enforce the wishes of the founder of the trust for multiple generations. So if a beneficiary doesn't have children (or possibly even a male heir), he stops benefiting. Apparently they were (are) quite popular with Chinese oligarchs for precisely that reason. Such great and powerful geniuses are quite aware that their offspring are unlikely to live up to their august standards, so they can use a STAR trust to regulate the lives of said offspring to force them onto, erm, more appropriate paths, if they're disinclined to do so by themselves.
To be clear, I don't think he's a Nazi. But I do think it's uncool these days to deploy tropes that imply all Jews are greedy and billionaires tend to be Jewish, because antisemitism is on the rise globally again.
I tend to take that kind of thing personally because I'm Jewish by descent and upbringing: by belief I'm an atheist, but that's not something Nazis tend to take into account, just so you know where I stand on identity politics.
I'm not sure of locations in Edinburgh, but another common thing in Scottish graveyards, particularly over the older lairs, is a horizontal rather than vertical stone (for stability rather than protection against exhumation (legal or otherwise)).
My preferred solution to the billionaire problem would be: governments bring in a universal basic income, index-linked against inflation. They then begin ramping up social housing and infrastructure construction programs, building new state-owned accommodation (with very low rental fees), available to anyone on a low income -- homeless, students, pensioners, unemployed, and low income workers. Throw in roads, sewers, and all the infrastructure that will be needed to address climate change. Allow inflation to rise a bit. And bring in a wealth tax targeting real estate, shares, stocks, and bonds.
Yeah, about all that. Gasdive went into the looming phosphorus shortage. I think we need to be concerned about a looming shortage of building sand. It's not just the research that went into World in a Grain, it's local sandmining operations. I recently reviewed an environmental document that was for a proposed local sand mine that would only be active for ten years. A friend who was also reviewing it pointed out the oddity: most sand mines in their experience operated for 50-100 years, but this company was willing to do a lot of work to get 10 years.
Everybody's getting a hard on for massive building projects to house everyone and prepare for climate change (hard for the concrete to be poured and money to be made, of course...). I'd suggest that if we're going to cut back emissions, we can't really do this, absent some real materials breakthrough like practical mycoconcrete. We may also simply no longer have the resources to do another massive building spree, either.
So it's worth thinking about how to house the world and cut emissions while retrofitting the buildings we have. And try not to go down the "We're all doomed!" road when you do so. Hopefully we can be like the Kiwis, and do amazing things with Number 8 wire and properly doped muds.
I used to use ironic hyperbole a lot, but it doesn't work on the modern Internet - and we Aspergers people are supposed to be the people who take words literally!
Martin Rodgers
Haringey? - or - Croydon? { I remember the "Reeve's Corner" fire }
For me the initials are LBWF - not too far across the Lea from you, in fact ( IF you are in Haringey ) ...
H
"antitrust" - yes, you have got it in one - thanks.
What works a lot better is all internal doors open, some venting at the bottom, and at least one window open, so the chimney effect causes quite strong air flow.
I tend to take that kind of thing personally because I'm Jewish by descent and upbringing: by belief I'm an atheist, but that's not something Nazis tend to take into account, just so you know where I stand on identity politics.
Yup, and I'm an environmentalist. This means that I get labeled as anti-human and grouped with supervillains like Thanos, who in the last two Avengers movies unmade half the people in the galaxy because he was an environmentalist out to end over-population. And those two movies grossed over $4.8 billion globally. All I'm actually trying to do is keep some weird oaks and other cute plants alive a bit longer. So yes, about identity politics...
The Houston area? ... Heat and humidity are two of it's best know products.
How could you forget hurricanes and flooding? :-)
Four seasons in Los Angeles: wildfire, mudslide, drought, and smog.
Four seasons in Houston: Flooding, humidity, heat, and hurricanes.
What works a lot better is all internal doors open, some venting at the bottom, and at least one window open, so the chimney effect causes quite strong air flow.
Three-story house ('basement' is actually at-grade, so you have to climb up a flight of steps to get to the front door). When I open windows, I open all the windows, and the interior doors are always open. (Main floor is one open area except for a small washroom. Second floor has doors for bedrooms which are never closed, and a bathroom ditto. No doors on stairs.) House has windows on three sides: each bedroom has one, each bathroom has one, kitchen has then, living room has them.
There may be a chimney effect, but it isn't a strong airflow. What happens is there's a definite boundary between hot and not-so-hot air that moves upwards during the night, and if I'm lucky actually gets to the second floor but sometimes doesn't.
No external shutters, and I suspect they would really help. Would be expensive as none of the windows are designed so you can lean out and do things (as is usual for windows over here).
Thank you - that's exactly the sort of cool and interesting thing I'd be wanting to see; the bits left over from when ordinary life (and death) was quite a different matter from what it is now. I knew about the corpse trade but that's not the same as actually seeing some of the things people did about it still in their original places.
(I'm unlikely to do anything about it for quite a while, though, because I don't fancy sitting in a virus-laden train for several hours and fuck driving all that distance.)
Edinburgh is very lucky that people understood the value of preserving it from so much earlier than in most other places. Here they've been more into gleeful destruction most of the time, and what you can still see mostly remains by chance. For instance the old area of river trade, supporting trades, and housing for the people who worked in it - which is the bit where the town basically began - basically no longer exists; they started by driving the Mayor's tank through the pub the police didn't dare go into to make a Ruined Flanders Village, and carried on bit by bit for the next 80 years or so until now there is nothing left of the area except one house... but there is one particular spot, one square metre where you can stand and see that house, and then let your mind go a bit free in time and still see all the old street.
Too many windows open is likely to spoil the effect, on the same principle as those flap vent things you get in stove flues a metre or two above the stove to break the convection column and stop the draught getting too strong for the stove. The air flow coming in the bottom windows and going out the top ones is supposed to pull that boundary between hot and less-hot upwards inside the house, and raise it higher than it is outside so more of the house is cool. Having windows open part way up tends to bugger that and keep the boundary at the same level as outside.
To be sure it works differently for every house, so it may well be that you've already tried it like that and found that as far as your house is concerned opening windows part way up actually does make it better. In that case this post is redundant. But if you haven't, it's worth a crack.
Definitely south of the river.
If you use an aluminised umbrella instead of a black one, it still works just as well at keeping you in the shade, but also means that when you stop walking you can use it upside down to cook your dinner with. You can also adapt it to send distress signals by heliograph if you break your leg out there.
It sounds like you live in (probably a slightly more recent version of) the kind of crappy bodge effort that I used to live in in Bedford, located in the same kind of infelicitous local microclimate. I am sure the conversion of that house into flats was carried out in accordance with building regulations, but when the basic idea is a crappy bodge to start with, all that means is that you get a soundly-constructed crappy bodge. They could probably also even claim that mine was "fully insulated" because the walls had studding and plasterboard on the inside and there was a couple of inches of fibreglass in the roof, but after all "fully" does not mean the same as "well" or "adequately", and can still be compatible with the actual results obtained being more along the lines of "badly" and "not".
That's another deficiency it shares with my old place, then: shitty plumbing that leaks into the flat below. The drain pipe for the washing machine turned out to have a hidden run of a couple of metres sloping upwards, so it had filled up with coagulated sludge and when I tried to use it the machine ended up draining over the floor. Then there was the stupid tiny hot water cylinder that couldn't handle a bath unless you nearly boiled it and left it for long enough that the even tinier cold water header tank mounted on top of it heated up as well (other flats had proper-sized ones, don't know why mine didn't). The thermal cycling would eventually cause the float ball in the header tank to start blowing out air and sucking in water vapour, which would then condense, until it either imploded or filled with water, and sank. The water level would then rise high enough to submerge the entire float valve, muffling it so there was no sschschssccchhh to tell you something was wrong, and then submerge the entire overflow outlet before there was enough head to make it run out as fast as it was coming in. And since the nut for the overflow outlet was not fucking properly tightened, it also dribbled down the outside of the tank underneath the jacket and then disappeared through the floor.
Three-story house... When I open windows, I open all the windows, and the interior doors are always open... There may be a chimney effect, but it isn't a strong airflow.
It sounds like one or more window fans exhausting hot air from third story windows would be a real help here. But I'd recommend closing other third story windows and most (all?) second story windows - you want cool air coming into the first floor and working its way upstairs.
Definitely. In a three-story house, all that open second-floor windows will do is to (seriously) harm the chimney effect; you want to maximise the height between the inflow and outflow, and absolutely not have intermediate vents.
The Houston area?
No, San Antonio. I was in USAF, not Army.
The shower leakage didn't just damage the flat below. Water was briefly leaking up between gaps in the floor tiles (yes, I know). This eventually stopped after the leak was fixed, but I now have a problem with my bathroom floor. I'm hoping one good thing will come from a long, hot summer: whatever dampness might remain under the floor will be dried out.
For now, I'm opening the bathroom window, and several other windows in the flat, during mornings and sometimes afternoons. The trusted plumber suggested that colder air would be better than warm, but cool morning air will have to do.
At least tile is has become a little loose. If it gets worse, it could prevent the bathroom door from opening. The door frame is also wonky, preventing the door from fully closing.
If I had the option, I'd want to move out and let someone else deal with the problem. However, I'm stuck here, so it'll be my problem whatever happens next. My neighbours may have similar problems.
I've seen worse. The building I lived in before this was heavily hit by a storm a few years before I moved out. Several top floor neigbours lost their roofs. Rain water did the rest of the damage. It took a year of extensive repairs to fix everything.
Other people were hit even worse by that storm. I heard of one woman who's house overnight acquired a moat. A very deep moat.
All I got was a puddle in my kitchen, so I was lucky.
I've mentioned this story before... after I moved to Austin, TX from Philly, we wound up building a deck, er, porch, um, I mean room. I was sealing the roof to the top of the immobile home, and my late wife told me to make sure to come down and have something to drink, and took our son somewhere. Three hours and more she got back, looked at me up there, and asked if I'd been down. (Note that there was a nice breeze blowing about 90% or more of the time, always). When I answered no, in no uncertain terms she ordered me down, and made up a pint mug of Gatorade and ice. That, and a second one, were what I had for dinner. When I sat on the couch and started to drink, I was already starting to shake.
Never did that again.
He sounds ace. I've just seen the couple of them that are my friends round here - they always say hello and wag like mad when I go past their yard.
And yeah, I quite agree: the "showiness" of a dog is irrelevant, it's what they're like as good buddies that counts.
sigh
First, I'm going to disagree with Charlie's later post, and at least in the US, taxation is how the government is funded. Just running the printing presses is a bad idea.
But you don't seem to understand how the ultrawealthy work, gasdive. They spend immensely less of their money on goods and services than the rest of us do. Instead, they're playing musical chairs, and getting stock options, and manipulating the market... and THEY are taking money out of the economy. They are why we allegedly can't afford this, that, or the other (except for the military, which is another place they drain money out of the economy).
Look, when Musk is "earning" many thousands of dollars A MINUTE (yes, really), and a good percentage of the people in the warehouses are earning not much more than US national minimum wage of $7.50/hr, where's the money going, to the employees... or to him?
Apologies, Charlie.
You could pick up my first novel, 11,000 Years, from Ring of Fire Press, or big river. I guarantee I'm not writing grim/dark.
Um, I assume you're talking about a new system, or one that has actually been maintained.
As opposed to the building I worked in for 10 years, with maintenance underfunded, built in the early sixties (at the latest). Zones? What is this "zone"? They set the temp, and the folks on the sunny side were ok, and the rest of us freezing. A thermometer in one manager's office didn't go lower than 66F....
In a three-story house, all that open second-floor windows will do is to (seriously) harm the chimney effect; you want to maximise the height between the inflow and outflow, and absolutely not have intermediate vents.
There are no windows on the ground level (the one I think of as a basement, even though it's not underground because of the layout of the street).
So three levels: * ground level has a garage and semi-finished laundry area/workroom, as well as furnace and water heater * first floor has kitchen/dining/living room (basically open area) plus small washroom * second floor has three bedrooms plus full washroom
No windows that open at ground level; indeed only one window at all.
So I only have windows open on two floors, not three.
Ah. That's functionally the same as mine, then. I agree that the airflow is not strong, and takes ages to replace all of the air, but it does make a hell of a difference to the comfort. The trick of closing windowd in upstairs rooms you don't care about does make a difference.
I agree that the airflow is not strong...
Only if you're not using window fans.
Good. Grief.
Were this my blog, which it isn't, I'd forbid a discussion of international tax policy by anyone who wasn't already involved in it as an economist, banker, or financier, so that the rest of us could learn how an insider sees things. But this ain't my blog and I'm not an economist, so please ignore me and have at it. Lack of expertise never stops me from posting, after all.
Yes, the US prints money. That's where the stimulus money came from, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's where our current high inflation is coming from.
Yes, the US needs tax revenue flowing through its system to work properly.
Yes, a lot of the money we need in our system ends up overseas, especially in parts of the Commonwealth. Where it can't be taxed (ahem).
Yes, a huge wad of that stimulus ended up in billionaires' control (cf record corporate profits and follow the money), so the US government doesn't have great control about where the money it prints ends up.
Yes, the US uses taxes to implement social policies in the face of partisan opposition.
Yes, other countries do taxes differently. Of course, everybody else does it better than the US, even though none are anywhere near the US population (unless someone from India or China speaks up).
Did I miss any points? Oh yeah, the important science fiction point, which is that none of these national, international, or transnational finance schemes are sustainable over the next few decades. Therefore, if you're trying to imagine a hopeful transition to a sustainable future, you've got to invent something plausible that isn't a tired retread of century old political theories.
For example, let's posit that the UN Secretary General gets a free wish from a genie, and as a result, the UN is empowered tax all international money transfers over a certain threshold amount. Since everybody's going to scream about it, the UN empowers member democracies that meet certain standards (like a low quartile gini coefficient) to tax farm--collect the taxes on international payments for it and keep a portion. The UN uses the tax money it receives to help fund itself and to do international assistance. And to go after international tax cheats, which most of the super-rich are.
Yes, this won't work, because it makes international remittances problematic. So do better The trick is to figure out (a) believable economic system(s) that actually can reliably tax the rich, without starting a war, without the system getting corrupted, and without it putting the funds collected right back in the hands of the rich.
It's an interesting puzzle to consider.
OGH said: Tax doesn't do what 99% of you seem to think it does. In particular, "your tax dollars at work" do not fund government expenditure
Exactly
Money isn't phosphorus. It's not a thing.
I'm completely incapable of explaining it to anyone. Zero people take modern monetary theory seriously, they just repeat the lie they've been told that printing money causes economic collapse, so it's bad and you can't do it. That's despite ample evidence that governments do all the time and in fact that's the place where governments that issue their own currency get money from.
If only someone would write a police procedural about investigation of a theft inside a video game that explains what money is, where it comes from, where it goes when it's taxed and use a worked example in a MMORPG. At least then every one of the fans of that author would get a clue.
I utterly despair.
*I'm completely incapable of explaining it to anyone. Zero people take modern monetary theory seriously, they just repeat the lie they've been told that printing money causes economic collapse, so it's bad and you can't do it. *
That's a strawman argument based on false absolutism.
Too much printed money does indeed cause problems, as the Chinese discovered when they first started to print money. The simple reason is that money's given in trade for other things, and the more money is available, the less any single unit of it is worth compared to other things, so you need more money to buy stuff than you used to. That's the definition of inflation.
Getting back to the original problem, we're talking about IPCC's cure #1 for climate change, which is to take 30% of global GDP in perpetuity and use it to sequester carbon. Your solution is to make this problem go away by printing 30% more money (approximately $25 trillion US in current dollars) per year in perpetuity. With the amount adjusted for inflation, of course, growing every year.
That's probably not going to work very well for carbon sequestration, but it will likely cause high annual inflation, which will immiserate a lot of people and put elected politicians out of office in favor of those who will stop the inflation.
The issue with billionaires and why we have to get rid of them is that they are unelected, unaccountable engineers of political discourse that for the last six decades have been engineering political discourse to boil the planet, just in order to let them die with the maximum score possible (money is score for them, the survival of humanity isn't).
They own the media and they bought themselves the politicians, and the "but China and India pollute, so it's not the US fault" line completely ignores the fact that in WTO and IMF power is not proportional to population, but to GDP, so if the US and EU wanted to really ram through mass decarbonisation programmes, they could have done so and China and India would have to toe the line or suffer immensely.
But nobody wanted to do this, because billionaires made sure that the system they profit off stays intact.
And the larger problem is that the existence of billionaires requires the existence of capitalism, and capitalism is a system that breaks down without exponential growth.
And, as a famous economist once said, anybody who believes in an exponential growth that goes on forever on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.
So billionaires are going to keep the pedal to the metal, maintaining exponential growth for as long as possible, and it's going to kill them and kill us. But they are going to die later, because poor people are crumple zones for billionaires.
So billionaires are going to keep the pedal to the metal, maintaining exponential growth for as long as possible, and it's going to kill them and kill us. But they are going to die later, because poor people are crumple zones for billionaires.
Since the best we can do here is to mess with people's imaginations through science fiction, what would the alternative, better scenario look like? CASE EFFERVESCENT UNICORN, as it were.
Presumably the poor and the middle class would unite with democratic leaders around the world to fight for massive carbon sequestration (IPCC scenario Type 1), while the ultra-rich and authoritarians would fight for creating a two-class world of the few powerful at the top and the many poor at the bottom, thereby massively cutting energy usage and minimizing the need to sequester carbon (IPCC scenario Type 2), where they survive, along with whoever else can make it.
How do you tell this kind of story so that the democracies win, without it becoming a pot-boiler (IPCC Scenario type 3)?
Firstly, the IPCC is as wrong about that number as every other committee created number they've conjured up in the past.
If governments decided to actually do this, the cost isn't going to be anything like that. Those are the costs if you multiply the cost of removing a tonne of CO2 from the air, multiplied by the number of tonnes you need to remove. Which is fine, if your goal is to move as much money as possible into the hands of billionaires.
I've run the calculations on this blog before, but the short version is that the government prints money to pay workers to build factories. Because workers aren't billionaires, and don't have the mechanisms in place to make that money vanish, it gets taxed, so a third goes straight back to the government. The remainder gets spent on goods and services that makes the economy run, and each time it's spent, that's income, and it goes back to the government. Within a couple of cycles, it's all back, having simply driven the economy, produced solar panel machine factories and given everyone a job.
This is no different in anything but scale to a king creating a tax that means locals have to give him a coin, then minting a coin, giving it so the solidiers and having them buy supplies on the way to the war rather than stealing as they go to war. The tax created the value in the coin that had no value before.
Your idea of going after the rich to pay for the war is essentially sending the troops out to kill the farmer's animals and burn the crops in the hope that this will pay for solidiers. It might be fun if you hate the landholders. Watch them cry as their cattle rot in the burnt field. That's all it is though.
Re: '... so the US government doesn't have great control about where the money it prints ends up.'
Partly because international trade is considered the bestest thing you can do to stimulate your economy! Money flows and its flow can be directed.
However, that's not really why I'm contacting you ...
Just read a non-sci/plain language bit about an experiment to improve plants' ability to grow/thrive in higher CO2 conditions. When I did a quick search to get some background info most of the articles seemed to suggest that actually plants are growing faster becuz of the higher CO2. My question/request: What types of plants should we be monitoring for CO2 die-off or excessive growth?
Here's the article that prompted my search/question/request - thanks!
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220418164926.htm
Here's the actual sci article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm6871
'Improving the efficiency of Rubisco by resurrecting its ancestors in the family Solanaceae'
Sorta related to some of your comments about alien-human cross-breeding: how about convergent evolution to explain why there are so many of the same traits that appear in completely different/unrelated species? Then once you figure out which genetic bits do what in which species you design your progeny to have those particular traits. The how the trait is made is irrelevant - what matters is that that trait is there. This would require some pre-amble about what constitutes progeny in those societies/species but quite a lot of SF/F has already used and made mundane the notion of test tube/designer babies. Which 'species' should then be as relevant/irrelevant as which 'gender'.
About the billionaires ... I think the ability to anonymize trust fund holdings is what protects their wealth. Also, most modern billionaires start selling off their shares shortly after their IPO that way they diversify and are better able to hold on to their total wealth. (Musk sold off $8.5 billion of his Tesla shares immediately after inking the Twitter deal. Twitter shares have been a lot more stable than Tesla so I'm not buying that he wants to democratize social media. Nope -- he's just upped his odds of making more money with a side of maybe getting the cult-seeking 'free-[hate]speech' goons on his side. Nope - I'm not a fan.)
About the heat etc. --- no one's mentioned taking a cool/cold shower as a way to cool off before bedtime so that your body can activate the it's-time-to-fall-asleep biochems in your body/brain. Or how about drinking a cold glass of milk - dairy or substitute - to cool down as well as help maintain the calcium/magnesium/potassium balance? (Really helps prevent muscle cramps in the middle of the night.) BTW - it appears that part of the reason why men/women differ in their sensitivity to temps has to do with hormones overall and especially during their menstrual cycle. (And it appears that elderly women are more likely than men to die during these heat waves. Lastly - kidney function tends to decline with age in both men and women and is mostly controlled by hormones.)
They set the temp, and the folks on the sunny side were ok, and the rest of us freezing.
At least you can add layers.
At my school one of the teachers complained she was too cold and made such a fuss that caretaking adjusted the temperature. My classroom was over 30C so she could be comfortable wearing a summer dress in January, when the temperature outside was -20. (She wanted, and got, her classroom at 25C.)
the UN is empowered tax all international money transfers over a certain threshold amount
At which point those rich enough start channelling Carl Sagan and use billions and billions of microtransfers, each under the limit, to move money…
Your hopepunk novel is going to need a better gimmick than that. Unless you skip the boring details and take it as given that there is a gimmick that works…
Stray thought: is hopepunk what happens when goths discover bright colours? And would hopepunk cosplayers still wear the leather harnesses that seem de rigueur for both cyberpunk and steampunk? Is it the leather harnesses that make it punk?
+1
Oooh, Rubisco, the world's most plentiful protein. Yes, let's talk about that.
You can look up the details in this Wikipedia article. I'm trying to not get verbose and stick to the important stuff. So far as I can tell, here are the important things:
--Our current ice age era has unusually low levels of atmospheric CO2 compared with the last 300 million years or so, which is one reason glaciers form. It's only been that way for the last few million years, so it's a reasonable bet that no plant has adapted its rubisco to the current conditions. It's a really fundamental, chloroplast protein, so it's usually maternally inherited, and its genes don't get recombined. While rubisco can certainly mutate, doing it non-lethally is probably difficult, because it's been around for a billion years or more.
--Researchers love to think about how to dink around with rubisco, because as an enzyme it is suboptimal (both this and the preceding statements are true, not conflicting), and plants have evolved a bunch of systems to deal with the suboptimality. I'm not going to go far into the problems here, but rubisco evolved in the precursors to cyanobacteria in a reducing atmosphere, so it has problems when a lot of oxygen is around. Since then, anything that uses rubisco has opted to add proteins to regulate its peculiarities, rather than dink around with rubisco's structure. And not so oddly, it's turned out to be really hard to re-engineer rubisco in lab plants, although it can be done in bacteria. So articles like this do pop up, but it's not clear they signal any major change in plant science.
--The third issue is that it's in the chloroplasts, which in flowering plants are maternally inherited. Even if someone created super-Rubisco and got it expressed by a chloroplast in a plant, it would take awhile for it to get expressed by all the chloroplasts in the plant (The super-R chloroplast would have to kill off and replace all the normal chloroplasts. Then you get the super-R chloroplast to other plants either by breeding (the super-R carrier and its daughters are the carriers) or you do some really careful microsurgery to extract the super-R chloroplast, inject it into another plant, and do the same thing.
Given these limits, how long do you think it would be before you'd have enough super-R plants to make any difference in agriculture? Long time. Unfortunately. The analogy would be if some research dinked with human mitochondria and turned them into midichlorians that could handle black flag weather with a giggle. And the researcher manages to get midichlorians into the ovaries of a female fetus (neat trick, that). How long before all humans would have midichlorians? The answer is that it won't happen until all living humans are descendants of midichlorian Eve. And that might be awhile. This example assumes that there are no down-sides to having midichlorians instead of ordinary mitochondria, which is highly unlikely. The same down-side issue almost certainly holds true for any super-Rubisco anyone manages to engineer.
Hope this helps.
Tax doesn't do what 99% of you seem to think it does. In particular, "your tax dollars at work" do not fund government expenditure. If the government wants to fund expenditure, it can print more money. Tax is there to take surplus currency out of the circulation to prevent the money supply bloating up.
My preferred solution to the billionaire problem would be: governments bring in a universal basic income, index-linked against inflation. They then begin ramping up social housing and infrastructure construction programs...
I'm going to chime in with my two bits, as perhaps the only one here who's been a central bank.
Years ago I had to design and code an economy for a small MMORPG, and I'll tell you up front this was educational. The biggest user worry during the design phase was fear of a high Gini coefficient, though they didn't use the phrase; they'd seen how a few very rich users could distort a game's economy. So taxing high wealth was planned from day one.
So was a universal basic income, because being broke is no fun. (Side note: being broke isn't just having no money; being out of money at the moment, or even being in debt, can be fine and even healthy, assuming you've got an income. Being broke is having no money and no way to get money.) We also had gambling and borrowing systems coded but hardly anyone used them.
Note that the central bank just created money as necessary to pay the UBI, and didn't accumulate money users lost to taxes. It was never necessary or desirable to have a constant money supply.
An unsurprising lesson that it taught me is that there is always complaining when financial rules have to be adjusted - especially when the rules have to be patched because someone's figured out a clever scheme to make themselves rich. You'll always hear protests when someone's scam gets cut off. Grumbling about trivia like tax onset levels is usually minor.
I won't claim this monetary system was perfect or universal; instead I'll point out it ran just fine for over two years and was a healthy economy as long as the system running it lasted.
For all these SF readers, we should point them at some near-future novel involving financial shenanigans on a MMORPG. They'd probably enjoy reading that.
gasdive @ 1138
Um, err, wasn't "Rule 34" something along those lines? ( ish )
the only one here who's been a central bank
Fascinating story. I remember there was a lot of controversy around the fungibility of in-world currency (as an avenue for money laundering and other hijinks) and gambling in virtual worlds back when there was a lot of energy going into them. To me it seemed like MMORPGs at least tried to design for more sanity at the time.
I guess Stephenson (REAMDE) does a parody of this (to do central banking, according to some, you need gold, so you simulate gold mining and to do that you need to simulate a million years of geology producing the gold seams).
still be bright enough to go back home and say "Uhhm, maybe we should think about where this goes for a moment ?"
I guess you haven't met this lady.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_Disney
Failed? No. But while you might not agree with everything she does, she is definitely closer to Heteromeles' thoughts on billionaires than most of those billionaires.
Here's a 17 minute interview of her discussing her views on rich families and how the are bad for democracy.
https://www.pbs.org/video/abigail-disney-dynasties-are-very-bad-democracy-ztv7oa/
1133 - If that were my office, the temperature there would suit me nicely; shirt sleeves when I'm at my desk, and fleece over shirt when I go anywhere else.
1138 - I can't quote it properly, but there's a passage in "Time Enough For Love" where Lazarus Long has been bank owner for a colony, and some of the colonists find him burning bills of exchange. They accuse him of "burning money" and he responds that what they think of as money is "just waste paper" to him, at least as long as he keeps track of how much has actually been issued by the bank, and how much has been destroyed by him.
I know this is an incomplete explanation, but am I thinking along the same lines about "what money is" as you are? If so, just say yes.
Frequently slept in the unfinished basement because the top story (where bedrooms are) was still too hot to sleep in the wee hours of the morning.
I use my semi-basement (split level house) as my summer time heat sink and run the fan to circulate air through it to avoid the AC for maybe 20% to 30% of the time most people would just turn on the AC. My slab floor does not have the current design trend of an insulation layer covered by a finish floor.
If you're rich enough (like Rupert of the New Management) you set up situations where the law only applies to you when it's to your advantage, and you ignore it otherwise.
This is where it doesn't seem that Trump spent enough effort and let his ego get in the way of staying out of the legal headlights.
(to do central banking, according to some, you need gold, so you simulate gold mining and to do that you need to simulate a million years of geology producing the gold seams).
A quarter-finished didn't-know-where-it-was-going novel I was writing a while back had a Kardashev-level civilisation of crazy techbros who had mined out their planet's core to make computronium. The reduced gravity was causing problems so they simulated the missing mass instead using a small Matroshka brain. It worked on the basis that a sufficiently detailed simulation is indistinguishable from reality...
What works a lot better is all internal doors open, some venting at the bottom, and at least one window open, so the chimney effect causes quite strong air flow.
There was a form of AC that was around for a while after NG became available in some areas. The really rich would make a small decorative tower at the top of a building (mostly a rich person's mansion). Put in a NG powered burner ring or similar. And really encourage the chimney effect. Required a bit of design and interesting controls plus a system to light it off.
Burn NG to cool off. Yippee.
Four seasons in Los Angeles: wildfire, mudslide, drought, and smog.
California Dreaming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk
(under 3 min)
the bits left over from when ordinary life (and death) was quite a different matter from what it is now.
In Madrid there is a walk into the center of Parque de El Retiro (I this is it) where there are a dozen or so statues of famous historical Spaniards. I found it interesting they all had dates before the founding of my country (US). Several of the dates only had 3 digits in the years.
I assume you're talking about a new system
The thread started about someone buying a new HVAC for themselves and their mom.
I was actually thinking about Halting State which if memory serves had a didactic passage explaining how the mmorpg bank/economy worked. (the bank creates money out of nothing, it's sucked back out and destroyed through players having to buy things (think VAT) to stop rampant inflation and to give the in game money value). It was also a theme in Neptune's Brood. It was those books that prompted me to look at what money actually is, where its value comes from and why people want it. Scott Sandford describes how it works incredibly well, and it captures how real money works as far as I understand it.
At which point those rich enough start channelling Carl Sagan and use billions and billions of microtransfers, each under the limit, to move money…
The US has rules to try and stop such things. $10K or more in deposits or withdrawals has to be reported to the IRS is one that's been around for a few decades. And like you save, anyone with a brain now does multiple transactions. So there are rules about how much per day. So the split it up across days and to various intermediaries.
So now we have "know your customer". Which the big boys with lawyers figure out how to deal. While I get to go in to the banks I deal with and sign more paperwork to attest I'm not doing nefarious things.
David L
Back in the 1950's Gas-powered refrigerators were A THING - "the flame that freezes". My aunt had one.
1162
Russki trollbot alert - even if it's only the shitgull .....
gasdive
My bad, you are correct - it was "Halting State" - oops.
Yes
I spoke too soon! Please ignore my middle comment @ present #1165?
1930's British Pathe expose on flame-fridges - though, apparently, you can now get propane ( gas-bottle ) powered ones as well - a quick google shows several models
MODERATORS: Present numbering # 1167? { Please delete this comment as well, perhaps? }
1158 - Canadian relatives visiting. Reaction to learning that my parent house was built in 1914CE "This would be a historic building back home!"
1161 - And we also agree that OGN has some sort of understanding of economics, yes?
One day someone might answer the question "why me". But in a rational manner.
Halting State and Rule 34 are in the same series (that I know isn't going to be revisited, but boy I loved it, real mind expanding literature that made me look at the foundations of reality differently). The names aren't really much of an indicator of which story is which, and I had to look it up.
Yes
(I feel like I'm in a horror movie and the audience is screaming "don't open the door!" while the scary music swells. But the worst that will happen is I'll find out I'm wrong and I like that because I'll learn something.)
"$10K or more in deposits or withdrawals has to be reported to the IRS"
Point of detail, but the reports go to FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in the Treasury Department. I'd guess IRS might get copies of at least some of them.
https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/CTRPamphlet.pdf
Some time ago I had occasion to watch this in action when a small US business was paid for its quite legitimate services with a literal bag of money (> $10,000) delivered by a literal bag man for a foreign official. The business owner was understandably nervous, but it turned out that all the business had to do was have its bank fill out a FinCEN form when depositing the money.
dude (unisex dude, this is not misgendering unless u trans), u been banned from this thread, y u so reluctant to show respect to charlie, this is not evidence of an adult level of impulse control
Water and Power.
South western US is short of both.
Lake Mead and Lake Power are both nearing a low level where they can no longer generate power.
So feds are going to meet in May to decide how much water delivery, power, or both to cut back.
Water cut backs will likely hit agriculture as empty taps in homes will soon lead to nasty outcomes.
Phoenix is getting close to 120F (49F) at times in the summer. Already there are days each summer where long distance flights can't take off during the day as they can't carry enough fuel to make it to their destination. So canceled domestic flights and delayed till cooler night time temps for overseas flights.
The Phoenix area seems to be appears to be approving 1000+ housing development every week or so to handle all the people showing up. And business are headed there due to the "great environment" for business.
TSMC will soon open a semi fab plant in the Phoenix area and I thought fab plants were prodigious users of water.
A big reason the D's may loose control at the national level is due to high inflation. Cutting water to farms is a great way to help keep inflation going in the food supply which, along with petrol at the pump, is where most people notice inflation.
Just when does something "break"? Or is considered a crisis that cannot be fixed with a few "adjustments"?
Any thoughts from the area, Heteromeles? (The water and power issues will impact his San Diego area, if a little indirectly.)
Adrian Smith
Your ( & other people's ) attention is recommended to Charlie's post @ 364?
Meanwhile ...
8 days & counting down.
Ukraine - is Putin going to "Declare war on the "nazis" - meaning all of us?
Is he going to declare "Wictowy!" ??
Is he going to move against Moldova via Transnistria as a flanking move against Odesa?
Certain it is that he's going to pull some very unpleasant rabbit out of the hat, if only because, like Imperial Germany in 1914 & Adolf in 1939, he has "First mover's advantage" - until, of course, the greater resources of the Allies in both the previous slaughters & also this time, begin to take their serious toll.
How far & how bad will it have to get before even he, or his minions finally realise that they have lost - & - of course: how many more people are going to get killed & maimed, physically & mentally, because of this monster's ego & madness?
David L
That bodes very badly for this year's US mid-terms & possibly for 2024.
Even from this distance, the utter madness of the "R's" ( GOP ) is scary - driving the car right over the cliff.
"literal bag man"
TBF, I believe his actual job title was "Executive Assistant." Undoubtedly he performed other services when not carrying bags of money.
well yeah, that's what i was referring to when i said "u been banned from this thread"
she's putting charlie in a position where he has to permaban her (and then play whackamole with each new nym)
this is not respectful
The UK is different. I needed to transfer 100,000 from one bank to another, and had to take the most ridiculous documents in, explain where the money had come from (other than sitting in a UK bank for 5 years!), etc. If I had wanted to do that for 10,000,000, I could have used one of the zillions of exemptions and do it much more easily.
The UK is different. I needed to transfer 100,000 from one bank to another, and had to take the most ridiculous documents in
A friend who runs a small business (architect) got so fed up with his bank he went in and told them he wanted to completely close out his account with them. After they couldn't talk him out of it they asked who to make the check out to? He said he didn't want a check from them but cash.
Say what?
Cash.
There will be more paperwork and it will take a while to verify/count out the amount. Are you sure?
I'll wait.
It was north of $10K but not $100K. But he left with a big bag of money. And copies of a lot of forms he had signed.
(The new bank he was switching to had a branch only 2 blocks away.)
Wow.
SoMN: "It's been 6 days. That Red Card doesn't apply to me any more!"
Even from this distance, the utter madness of the "R's" ( GOP ) is scary - driving the car right over the cliff.
My point was that while the R's may be crazy. The D's are in denial. Take your pick.
Back to H's points. While the R's may be in total denial, the D's want to come up with fixes that don't require much pain. Full body casts are needed after major surgery. The D's are proposing arm slings and a cane while the R's are talking Ace bandages and band aides.
Neither is going to talk about Phoenix just may not be able to exist in the not too distant future.
If he says "piss off, done now", there will be no repercussions and we'll simply leave.
well u haven't given him much choice, by clearly and deliberately violating the conditions he laid down
and he thinks u have worthwhile things to say occasionally despite ur insistence on obfuscation for reasons
You would have us believe that you didn't post for six days, right after Charlie told you to buzz off because you didn't notice him saying so?
Pull the other one. It's got bells on it.
However, you are correct in that ignorant muppetry is getting you banned. It's that the ignorant muppet may be not who you think it is....
You know, I've been considering these problems recently, and I came to a conclusion: I think that, in the long run, there may be no set of rules that generate a system that can't be exploited by the system's natural winners so that they reduce the competition for the top, crystalize their winnings and give their inheritors an unfair advantage, if not an outright graft scheme.
Whether it's wealth-holders in our capitalistic system, the "nobility" of old-school monarchism, uber-bureaucrats in the USSR, warrior classes in ancient empires, or even the over-educated elite in what many would like to call "pure meritocracy"... If the rules are stable an exploit will be found, and the winners will make damn sure they stay on top and their kids too - by training them in a way the bottom rung simply can't afford, by forcibly limiting lower classes' access to tools that might take them up, and sometimes even by developing intricate caste and belief systems that state that the rabble must conform to their lower positions so that they have a shot to be higher in their next life / in heaven.
So maybe a preferred solution might be to have a clear goal, and continuously adjust rules and policies when flaws get discovered that hinder that goal.
In that sense, I'd favor a goal I'd call "the sticky middle": rules should make sure that social mobility is higher the farther one is from the societal median wealth. So the top of the pyramid should be a competitive and maybe even cutthroat place from which most billionaires would fall, through a combination of taxes and pre-designed competitive disadvantages. The very bottom should be heavily supported so that most can recover quickly. And the middle should be sticky, but not so much that it decreases overall societal dynamism - by (whatever society deems important) one should be able to move up, knowing that moving up means moving to a place of higher competition; and through bad decisions and/or luck one could also fall down, but knowing that in falling they'd be supported in their efforts to recover.
No idea how to get there from here, though.
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/water-intake-pipe-pokes-above-surface-at-lake-mead/
Primary water intake pipe for Las Vegas water supply is now above the surface of Lake Mead.
Neither is going to talk about Phoenix just may not be able to exist in the not too distant future.
If you think it'll be bad when we're forced to deep-six Phoenix, wait until rising sea levels wipe southern Florida off the map... :-/
This is where it doesn't seem that Trump spent enough effort and let his ego get in the way of staying out of the legal headlights.
For his whole life he's been able to manipulate the legal system. Even when bankrupt it hasn't affected his opulent lifestyle. I suspect his view of the legal system isn't the same as ours…
The really rich would make a small decorative tower at the top of a building (mostly a rich person's mansion). Put in a NG powered burner ring or similar. And really encourage the chimney effect.
A decade ago I watched a PBS documentary series on architecture and urban design. In one episode they featured a church in (I think) the Philippines designed like that, but without the burners. Apparently solar heating on the metal roof of the tower was enough to create a chimney effect.
Nine postings under one pseudonym, four under another, on the same day. Directly contravening 3/day limit, only one nym limit, banned from this thread limit, and wait to be invited back limit.
New hypothesis: Seagull is Trump.
Think about it. Can't stand being told "no". Is always right even when wrong. Is always an expert at everything. Goes on the attack when thwarted. Delights in crude insults. Makes everything about them. Is often incoherent. Breaks rules just to show they can. Claims to respect hosting entity but actions don't show it.
ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE
Seagull: I just blocked both your new 'nyms and unpublished all your comments. You got red-carded from this thread.
David L
What are the "D's" in de Nile of, precisely? This is what, from across the pond, I don't understand/get/grok at all.
Rbt Prior
We've been here before.
Can I remind you of the Solar Updraught Tower and similar, entirely practical schemes?
New hypothesis: Seagull is Trump.
Definitely a lot of resemblance. Although you forgot sucking up to Putin.
aluminised umbrella
My current "utilitarian" full size umbrella is silvered on both sides. Great for keeping the heat off, and I suppose it's usable as a reflector/diffuser. It's a match for the hiking pole that doubles as a monopod...
"Back to H's points. While the R's may be in total denial, the D's want to come up with fixes that don't require much pain. Full body casts are needed after major surgery. The D's are proposing arm slings and a cane while the R's are talking Ace bandages and band aides."
At this point watering your lawn in California, Arizona or Nevada should be illegal.
Any thoughts from the area, Heteromeles? (The water and power issues will impact his San Diego area, if a little indirectly.)
Yeah. LA's already doing massive water cutbacks in some water delivery areas, down to 80 gal/day (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-04-30/can-you-get-by-on-just-80-gallons-of-water-a-day). That's not because of the Colorado River, but because of the northern California drought affecting water deliveries through the aqueduct. Neighborhoods that aren't yet doing this have some other supplies for now.
San Diego, so far, hasn't started cutbacks, because (heh heh) we're using nothing but Colorado River water. (https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/04/27/l-a-s-historic-water-shortage-wont-affect-san-diegans/). Insert facepalm here. San Diego does have a fair amount of water in our local reservoirs, but that's our emergency supply. Once it's gone... I suspect we're going to see cutbacks in our near future.
In the longer term, hopefully we won't see an American version of the Syrian civil war, which did in fact start with Turkey curtailing water deliveries to Syria. It's worth remembering that ISIS/ISIL got its start in the areas worst-hit by the drought, which in turn was caused by Turkey damming rivers to give more water to the Kurds to stem that insurrection.
It was also caused by Syria having craptastic water and especially groundwater regulations. Regulations which look like those of California, in fact. California's trying to get sanity in groundwater basins statewide, and in the meantime, Big Ag is busy sucking all the groundwater out so they don't have to share, to water export crops like almonds for China. Many of these farms are owned by multinationals, billionaires, retirement funds, etc.
Long story short, I expect sensible Arizonans and Nevadans to leave (for Houston? There's water there), and everyone who remains to turn teh crazy up to 12 because that's worked for them in the past. Ditto with rural California and other parts of the Red Desert. On that note, have a suitably anxious May Day.
What are the "D's" in de Nile of, precisely? This is what, from across the pond, I don't understand/get/grok at all.
Let's say that what Heteromeles thinks we need to so is a 30. And let's say he has over estimated by 2/3s. So the real problem may only be a 10.
The R's are discussing if we really need to do more than 0.5. The D's are all frothing about us not doing a 2 or 3.
And most of the general public (in the US) thinks we need to do somewhere between 0 and 2 or 4. But maybe not.
And if Heteromeles is right, well, bend over, tuck you head between your legs, and kiss ..... Cause we just ain't gonna do what's needed.
Discussion about abandoning Phoenix, Miama, New Orleans, etc... are off the table for both parties.
PS: Miami is nothing yet. It's just more visible in the media than Phoenix. Just now their problem is a few street floodings in a few spots a few times a year. And their drinking water source is getting a bit salty. And a very small number of their buildings have fallen due to just maybe kind of sort of salt water intrusion into the ground water near the coast. These are all things that seem to most people to be fixable as individual issues.
Phoenix is already at airplanes can't take off due to heat (for several years), water rationing, and discussion of where to get electricity before the end of the year. And they keep importing people who need all of these things.
I've said my piece about New Orleans. The Mississippi River is being forced to go where it doesn't want to go. All it takes is one instance where we (US) fail and the lower third of Louisiana becomes a march with no real river to run on. In other words the US Corp of Eng must have a 100% success rate forever to keep New Orleans alive.
New hypothesis: Seagull is Trump.
Cute, but Trump doesn't have nearly the vocabulary of SoMN... :-)
And if Heteromeles is right, well, bend over, tuck you head between your legs, and kiss ..... Cause we just ain't gonna do what's needed.
that peter zeihan seems to think america is going to be largely fine (especially tx) but everyone else is going to be cornholed beyond mitigation
Simple fact, and you set your watch by it: The US won't do anything until we lose Florida.
The US won't do anything until we lose Florida.
i was gonna say u need to build a lesbian but the seawater would probably just seep under it
In other words the US Corp of Eng must have a 100% success rate forever to keep New Orleans alive.
Which can't be done forever. Right now, the Mississippi River runs higher than the surrounding land in New Orleans, penned in by levees. The Corp of Engineers can only build levees so high. And to increase the levee height in New Orleans, they must also increase the height of levees upstream from New Orleans for many, many miles. They may have to build new levees upstream, too.
At some point, levees would have to extend north all the way to St. Louis, which has got to be expensive...
Discussion about abandoning Phoenix, Miama, New Orleans, etc... are off the table for both parties.
It's not just Americans. I tripped over this while looking at water news from Phoenix. This January, a Taiwanese company that produces high quality hydrofluoric acid for the production of microchips broke ground on a new plant in Phoenix (https://ktar.com/story/4850893/another-company-involved-in-semiconductor-production-comes-to-phoenix/). Bets on whether that plant gets built? Wonky water supplies and high grade chemistry are not natural allies.
The biggest problem is that people don't naturally see environmental threats. It's learned, not innate*, and most education seems to focus on "get a good career so you don't end up in the street," rather than "learn to see the world of wounds, so you have to struggle with finding an appropriate job and the mental burden of dealing with people who are in deep, vicious denial, but who'd love you more if you'd just change to be like them."
If you want to know why I'm pushing a what if scenario where people actually start doing the IPCC work, it's because most people kind of know we're in trouble, but have no idea what a solution might even look like. Neuromancer is a comparison. Virtual reality is, IMHO, a freaking waste of resources for most tasks, but that hasn't stopped computer nerds from trying to make cyberspace happen like Gibson and WJW described for the last 40 years. Why? Ultimately, it's because cyberpunk literature made it seem cool and possible. So I can at least hope that some artist reading this will inspire more people to do the freaking obvious and fight for a livable future, instead of finding yet another excuse to do nothing and wait to die.
*For 300,000-odd years, humans learned to see environmental threats in part because they were less shielded from the consequences of not seeing them. We're losing the shielding civilization gave us for a few decades, but it takes time and training to develop such skills.
i was gonna say u need to build a lesbian but the seawater would probably just seep under it
As I have mentioned here before, southern Florida is basically limestone - filled with cracks, caves, sinkholes, etc. Seawater can easily use these underground geological features to get inland.
So there is no way to build a barrier that would keep rising seawater out of Miami or other parts of southern Florida.
Cali has an enormous water infrastructure which is paid for by the cities, and mostly delivers water to the farms.
It is a cross subsidy in effect, even if it is all couched in terms of "Water rights" One consequence of this is that California urban areas are already paying prices so high that they could switch to desal and Not Notice.
Well. Except that the need for rationing would go away.
So no, Californias cities will not be abandoned. There is no way to drink the pacific dry, after all.
The more interesting effect of this transition is, what happens to the agriculture when the cities go "You know, you can have the Colorado river and the aqueducts. The water rights are yours. Not fighting you over them. We are not paying premium for the dripples you see fit to leave us though, we can get our own water from the sea". Certainly, ag is not going to be able to finance any further mega projects themselves.
"...build a lesbian?"
Autocorrect failure?
by no means
Presumably there will be lots of cheap ex-agricultural land to put solar farms on, to power all the desalination.
a dutiful but possibly unnecessary expansion of "would probably just seep under it", indeed
A question for all:
Is the term "vril" too contaminated by far-right fruitloopery for use in fiction?
Thanks.
At some point, levees would have to extend north all the way to St. Louis, which has got to be expensive...
My point is those levees are just a symptom of the problem. They are side skirmishes on the big fight. The real problem is the Old River Control Structure. Which is north of Baton Rouge and all those industrial sites on the Mississippi.
A flood in Nawlings is big news. A big dam in the middle of nowhere that might have issue during a big flood is boring.
The real problem is that for well over 100 years the Atchafalaya River has wanted to become the final leg of the Mississippi River. Bizarrely an accidental log jam slowed it narly 200 years ago. Now Congress has passed a law telling the Corp of Eng to basically do whatever is required to hold at least 70% (from memory but I think the number is correct) of the flow of water down the old channel.
If you want to read more here's a somewhat recent series on the issue:
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mississippi-Rivers-Old-River-Control-Structure
You can find a wired article from the 90s which also goes into details.
Anyway, the world's food supplies and economies WILL notice when this happens.
Definitely a lot of resemblance. Although you forgot sucking up to Putin.
Has the Seagull been doing that? I only read enough of a new nym to realize who they are and then add them to the filter list…
(So I confess I was just assuming the crude insults based on past behaviour. Presumably we're all still fucked, both collectively and individually?)
Regulations which look like those of California, in fact.
On a gaming note, what do you think of this one?
https://www.californiarailmap.com/cawater
California Water Crisis is print-and-play, although you can also order a good-quality printed version from The Game Crafter:
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/california-water-crisis
We've had this discussion years ago, but most of the people who had it are no longer active here, so let's bring it up.
There are a bunch of things to realize. One is that food is basically concentrated water. If you've got a choice between moving water to people to grow food, and growing the food and shipping it to the people, the latter is often cheaper, which is why Russia supplies so much of the world's wheat. It's easier to grow wheat in Russia than to send Russian water to Egypt to grow wheat.
That said, different foods embody different amounts of water. Grains are quite water inefficient, because you water the entire plant throughout it's growing season, but eat only a tiny fraction of it--the grain. Lettuce is much more water efficient, because you eat the entire plant. Grapes are more water efficient still, oddly enough. So if, as in parts of California, you see a progression where the farmer starts by growing grain, switches to vegetables or fruit trees, then plants wine grapes, the hidden story is they're running out of water.
The second third thing to realize is that the primary purpose of the California water system isn't to supply farms and cities, it's to keep the state from going bankrupt. That actually happened in the Great Flood of 1862, which turned the Sacramento Valley into an "inland sea" 10' deep in Sacramento, destroyed towns throughout the state, flooded the LA basin, and bankrupted the state quite handily. There's a 50% chance of a similar storm hitting by 2050. While yes, the system later became about watering farms in the drier San Joaquin Valley with water from the wetter Sacramento Valley, and still later (1950s-1960s) became a way to concentrate urbanization in southern California, that first purpose, holding back the floods so that they don't bankrupt the state, still matters, even if most don't realize it.
Remember also, with climate change, the extremes become more extreme. Even a century ago, 1862 was a record flood, 1863 was a drought. California has a wild climate.
Then there's demand hardening. Yes, if you rip out a farm and put in a subdivision, the subdivision uses less water. However, farm water demand is soft. If you don't have water, you don't plant, or you rip out your trees or vines when they die. If a suburb runs out of water, that's a crisis, because you're not supposed to kill people through careless water management.
This is the downside to watering cities even as the farms that should feed them dry up and blow away. It not only hardens demand (the water has to flow), but all the former ag workers migrate to the cities, driving up demand for housing, food, and water.
It's a politically volatile situation. This is what happened in Syria in the first decade of the century, and it was the fuel that caught fire when the Syrian Civil War started. While I think it unlikely that California will descend into anarchy very soon, I should point out that a billionaire developer is trying to become mayor of Los Angeles by promising he'll fix the housing and water crises. To put it nicely, I'd be shocked if he could, and I'm pretty sure that's not the primary reason he wants one of the most powerful posts in California.
My bottom line is that I don't think southern California is a good place for tens of millions of people to live in perpetuity. Over the next century, I expect the total population here to drop radically, especially when big storms and earthquakes destroy infrastructure that will be increasingly hard to repair. Will the decline start in my lifetime? I have no clue. The biggest likely triggers (storms and earthquakes) are basically rare, random events. The later they happen, though, the less likely California will have the resources to recover the losses. This has happened many times before, to former cities throughout the world, and I see no reason why it can't happen here.
On a gaming note, what do you think of this one?
Not something I'd like to play (I'm not really gaming anymore), but it looks like fun for a kid or an outsider. For people who are trying to understand what's going on, it looks like a good place to start.
Is the term "vril" too contaminated by far-right fruitloopery for use in fiction?
Probably. Use Axe (ash-aye) if you want to be exotically fruitlooping. Or awen.
"So now we have "know your customer". Which the big boys with lawyers figure out how to deal. While I get to go in to the banks I deal with and sign more paperwork to attest I'm not doing nefarious things."
We have similar shite in the UK, with the same result that the big boys are essentially unaffected while ordinary people doing nothing illegal get fucked.
Personally I am now in the position where the only "buying stuff over the internet" I am able to do is getting stuff from Amazon. It's incredibly rare to find any site that lets you put an order in without also insisting on taking payment at the same time, instead of waiting for it to arrive later via a postal order in the mail; but the stupid fucking regulations, as far as I can discover myself, have now blocked me from using any of the methods they expect me to use instead. So I'm limited to Amazon because in that specific case I can go into a shop and buy a gift card to pay for it. (Not even ebay: you can't get ebay gift cards in the UK. One or two sellers are still clued in enough to realise that postal orders are the one method of payment that guarantees they can't be fucked around with, but none of the generally useful ones and certainly none of the Chinese ones).
Fortunately it makes no difference for anything that's actually necessary, since that's all stuff that existed long before the internet and I neither need nor want either the internet or the awkward methods to pay for it. But it is a pain in the arse for any kind of engineering supplies, especially non-mechanical engineering, which on Amazon tend to be impossible to find or horrendously overpriced. So it seems I'm going to have to grit my teeth and pay a lawyer myself just to carry on doing the kind of perfectly legal things I've been doing without problems all my life up to now.
And as far as "money laundering" and tax evasion are concerned, the regulations supposedly intended to prevent it are instead making it an essential feature of all my transactions. Because the only option is Amazon, and they do it officially on a massive scale. They do business in the UK, but they pretend they're doing it in Luxembourg so they don't have to pay UK taxes. Talk about counterproductive...
Ha, which neatly ties it into the more general economic theme that's going on. Because of course Spain turning itself into a machine for stealing gold from the South Americans was the cause of there ceasing to be any proper Great Spaniards, and buggering their economy was one of the ways it took effect.
It also helped people keep their houses cool when everyone was using open fires to heat them. 90% of the heat going straight up the chimney and convecting huge amounts of air with it, thereby pulling in huge amounts of cold air through all the gaps round doors and windows to replace it. So you all sit as close to the fire as possible in chairs with high backs to keep the draught off. But it did mean places were always very well ventilated. Which returns us to the asthma discussion, since one of the reasons that has been suggested for the rise in the incidence of asthma is the fall in the incidence of fires that chuck large amounts of the room air up the chimney causing places to be considerably less ventilated than they used to be.
Using the same effect with naturally-supplied heat is also a good principle for helping to keep the inside conditions reasonable in very tall buildings. ISTR finding some discussion about that mile-high penis in Dubai, which apparently could have saved multiple tens of megawatts off its energy consumption if it had been designed to make use of the natural convection effects its height makes it so especially suitable for, but instead they did it the stupid way by simple brute-force multiplication of the standard methods for smaller buildings because they couldn't be arsed.
(Also in Dubai: artificial snow slope on the roof, instead of in the basement. An idea like Martin Rodgers's flat only worse. In fact everything I ever read about Dubai seems to be about stupid designs that rely on massive energy extravagance to make them work (including building it there to begin with), which is why even the mention of the place makes me grind my teeth.)
Oh, aye, absorption fridges. How to keep a fridge running on a boat. Can't use electricity because you can't make enough: can't use solar panels because there are too many interruptions in the deck from other bits of boat gear getting in the way, and anyway they would have to withstand being walked on and having tons of salt water crashing into them; can't use wind because anything bigger than a trickle charger gets in the way of using the sails, and also has similar robustness concerns. But you can use an absorption fridge and run it off a gas bottle and it keeps going for weeks.
They're still around for caravans and stuff. Often you get a choice of heat source: 240V resistance heater, 12V resistance heater, or gas flame. You can also get (or could get) 240V-only ones for domestic use. They don't use that much more juice than compression/expansion fridges, and they are a lot nicer to have around if you can't shut them away - no annoying compressor noise annoyingly starting and stopping, all you get is a gentle bubbling sound every now and then.
The absorption cycle seems like it should be a natural choice for solar-powered cooling, too. None of this buggering around with incredibly pure silicon and other high-tech things with all their production and supply-chain difficulties, all you need is a reflector and some plumbing. And you have plumbing anyway, only in this case it's not filled with "artificial" chemicals that damage the ozone layer if they leak out. No batteries either, you just make it big enough to make extra ice in the day to keep you going overnight.
"Has the Seagull been doing that?"
No, but she is frequently misinterpreted as doing so merely because she reports some of the things the propaganda machine carefully doesn't mention.
A new and exciting way of tracking your spouse/children/mistress/staff/whatever - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001988656858.html Flexible chip to go under nail decorating stuff. Does it work? Should it? Should we nuke the manufacturers from orbit just to be sure?
After reading the web page, I am at a loss as to what is that chip's intended purpose. It can only work while in the vicinity of a smartphone with a matching app, and as far as I can tell, the smartphone alone can do everything the chip does.
"That said, different foods embody different amounts of water. Grains are quite water inefficient, because you water the entire plant throughout it's growing season, but eat only a tiny fraction of it - the grain. Lettuce is much more water efficient, because you eat the entire plant. Grapes are more water efficient still, oddly enough."
I wonder how it works out, though, if you define "water efficient" not as "amount of water a farm of this plant needs to produce a given amount of money", but "amount of water a farm of this plant needs to produce a given amount of fuel". After all, grain and grapes are using fairly opposite approaches to the difficulties of distributing seeds and having animals eat them. Grain more or less simply produces its concentrated little packages of nourishment for bootstrapping new plants in sufficient profusion that hopefully enough of them will chance to end up somewhere useful without being eaten. There is some water in them, but mainly they are the important ingredients of a whole wee plant all scrunched up small, so a large proportion of the whole thing is useful food if you eat it. Hence British pigeons are able to spend a great deal of their time sitting around. Grain is an example of "food is water" in the sense of it taking a lot of water to grow it, in the same way that food is oil.
Grapes want their seeds to be eaten, and then deposited in their own blob of fertiliser, so they produce seeds in numbers a lot fewer per unit area of plant coverage, and then wrap them in bait that tastes nice while using as little of the plant's resources as possible to make it; you may get a lot of stuff, but most of it is flavoured water. Lettuce is kind of the same thing - you eat the whole above-ground part of the plant, but it's mostly cellulose bubbles inflated with water, and when you take away those two there's not all that much left. They're examples of "food is water" in the sense that water is what you're putting in your mouth. Fruit pigeons, which live in places where something is fruiting all the time, gobble constantly and shit for their national team.
I wouldn't be surprised if when you work it all out this turns out to be yet another case where "doing X" to make money with the actual X merely being a side effect is giving the kind of shitty results that "doing X" to do the fucking X would not produce.
I am at a loss also, because the morons who wrote the web page forgot to put any textual content in the HTML.
Is the term "vril" too contaminated by far-right fruitloopery for use in fiction?
Coined by Bulwer-Lytton in the 19th century for one of his more SFnal books, picked up by various theosophists, acquired common currency sufficient that "Bovril" is still a thing you can buy in British supermarkets ... the far right connection seems to be that some post-WW2 esoteric neo-Nazi goofballs decided to role-play it as a Thing. But I think it's pretty obscure, and if you want to use it in fiction you can distance yourself by explicitly disparaging the nazi idiots in a throw-away. It's not like, say, the term "master race" or swastika armbands.
I am at a loss as to what is that chip's intended purpose. It can only work while in the vicinity of a smartphone with a matching app, and as far as I can tell, the smartphone alone can do everything the chip does.
In principle you could use it as an anti-theft security device -- the phone is unlocked by physical proximity to your finger, it won't unlock for anyone else.
If the chip's in nail varnish it'll grow out or wear off after a week or three, but if it's that cheap you probably get a bottle of fifty and some clear lacquer with your new phone.
ISTR that between its water content and its fibre bulk being mostly cellulose, lettuce, to a human who can't digest either, actually has negative calories (you use more energy chewing, heating, digesting and excreting it than you derive from the protein and carbohydrate in it).
After reading the web page, I am at a loss as to what is that chip's intended purpose. It can only work while in the vicinity of a smartphone with a matching app, and as far as I can tell, the smartphone alone can do everything the chip does.,/i>
Authentication? Less intrusive than having a chip implanted in your hand…
Lettuce actually has positive calories (aside from iceberg lettuce), because there's sugar in the photosynthate and protein in the nuclei.
That said, you obviously are not a rabbit, so you can't live on lettuce. Water efficiency is just a way of looking at water going in and edible plant material going out. If you don't have enough water to grow beans and some grain for the people who need to eat those, you're in trouble. Speaking of California...
"Authentication? Less intrusive than having a chip implanted in your hand…"
Single/few use authentication would be my guess. Maybe for social and sporting events.
It's interesting that one of their claimed uses is quickly escaping a groper. It's sad that there are enough such jackasses that such a device might actually be useful.
Re: Vril and magic energy.
Ignore this if you just want to have a word for magic stuff in a story.
If you want to mess with people's heads, the following is my (undoubtedly incorrect) understanding of how yin, yang, and chi work, from some lessons I'm getting from a tai chi teacher. I'm deliberately distancing this from the teacher on the assumption you're trying to do fantasy rather than martial arts with it.
The teacher is adamant that chi is energy: it's light, heat, vibration, or movement. Acupuncture is trying to move chi around in the body to warm up places that are too cold, cool down places that are too hot, and so forth. Chanting and mantras cause vibrations in the body that can increase chi, and so can the movements of chi kung (literally energy work).
Now we get to yin and yang, the classic duality. Turns out taoism works a bit more on a version of ternary logic: yin, yang, and wu wei, which can be coded as 0,1,?. Wu wei is undefined "nonduality" that becomes yin (relatively negative) or yang (relatively positive).
There's a whole practice for what we might call identifying gradients: finding things that are relatively yin and relatively yang to each other. Taoism is all about change, so these gradients arise and disappear.
Now, going into the fruitloops section of your mental store, I'd posit that one good way to generate chi is to find unknown wu wei, observe it until you find the yin and yang in it, and if there's a big enough gradient between the two, set yourself up within the gradient. As chi flows from yang to yin to dissipate the gradient, harvest some of that chi and use it.
The final fillip is that in Taoism, this finding of yin and yang, and feeling chi, is done with the nonverbal parts of your brain. Focusing on your tan tien (center) activates all the complex nerves associated with your guts, which are all nonverbal, and that's one reason why there's a lot of training to get you out of your verbal head and into your nonverbal body intelligence. The Taoists do not see intelligence as confined to the brain, and given how thoroughly your brain penetrates your body via your nerves, they're kind of right.
Anyway, what I wrote is at least half BS, so if you want to use it as the basis for a fantasy magic system, go right ahead. If you'll notice, it explains how the motions and sounds of ritual connect via your nonverbal body to ways of finding energy and moving it around for various uses.
Um. I have never seen a good analysis of this. You need energy for chewing and digestion, and it is very unclear which leafy vegetables are energy-positive and which are negative, overall. Cooking makes a big difference, of course. We know that many are positive (cooked), on anthropological grounds, but we know that some aren't (e.g. most grass leaves).
The descriptions on that page makes it pretty clear, at least to me. You (most likely female-presenting, judging by the photos) are in a bar or an evening business meeting, some dude (perhaps your boss) is hassling you. This is a way to trigger a phone call so you can make your excuses and leave without angering him. Or you want to let someone know so they can help, again without letting the dude know. Consider it a back-up safety mechanism for when you can't let someone see you dialing a number or texting.
Seems to be just a bog-standard though very small NFC tag that's intended to be paired with a program that handles triggers. There's no tracking ability in the chip itself, and no power supply either. It relies on the normal externally supplied power and it's the app running on the phone deals with location and everything else. Same principle as having an NFC tag on your bedside table, car and work desk that triggers the phone to switch to the appropriate mode.
This is a way to trigger a phone call so you can make your excuses and leave without angering him. Or you want to let someone know so they can help, again without letting the dude know.
After re-reading the web page, I see it now. But these eminently practical uses were buried in the mound of fluff.
I dare you to open the "Season of Skulls" (or whatever it's going to be called) with:
"It was a dark and stormy night; [...]"
Naah.
Current opening (not set in stone yet) is:
One is that food is basically concentrated water.
Your bias is toward water because it's rare and expensive in a lot of places such as large parts of southern California. My bias is energy and that's what I see food is, concentrated energy that humans and other animals need to consume to survive. Supply people with water, lots of it and no food and it's called a famine and many will die. Supply people with food and a little water and it's likely many will survive.
Russian and Ukranian grain is exportable solar energy and there isn't a lot of solar influx per annum at the latitudes where it's grown which limits its production. I don't know exactly why there's a lot of it produced on those locations, perhaps there's just large tracts of land dedicated to monocropping grains plus tonnes of energy-intensive fertiliser dressing each hectare (probably produced from fossil fuels).
I misread it as "elect a lesbian" for some reason.
Thanks, folks. Appreciated.
Close enough!
Yes. I have repeatedly banged on that the limit in the UK (and almost all of northern Europe) is insolation, with temperature and water only occasional limits. There have been experiments that show that watering considerably increases the mass of (say) vegetables, but doesn't actually make that much difference to the dry matter, unless there is a long, dry spell at a critical period. So it's done for supermarket sales ....
It's interesting that one of their claimed uses is quickly escaping a groper. It's sad that there are enough such jackasses that such a device might actually be useful.
That makes sense. Sadly, there is a need for that kind of thing — look up "safeword drink".
What happens if the Russian invasion of Ukraine becomes a "long war"?
The Price of War - Can Russia afford a long conflict? The Long War Part 1 [YouTube] Perun "An Australian covering gaming in the good times, and the military industrial complex and national military investment strategy during the worse ones..." 1:09:25 Also some good thinking on how Russia's invasion of Ukraine could affect the broader world beyond Russia, Ukraine and NATO (and the E.U. & U.S.) & what the West needs to do about it.
Ukraine vs Russia - Who wins a war of hardware attrition? The Long War Part 2 [YouTube] Perun Well presented; everything a PowerPoint presentation SHOULD be, and none of the crap that ruins them.
I did not find anything in them that I knew to be untrue.
Also Russians stealing Ukrainian farm machinery & several hundred thousand tonnes (metric tons? - what the U.S. calls Long Tons - 2000Kg/2200lbs) of grain.
Russians plunder $5M farm vehicles from Ukraine -- to find they've been remotely disabled
I wonder if this is theft because they WANT the farm machinery or because they don't want Ukrainians towing off their tanks with it?
Ukraine says Russia stole 'several hundred thousand tonnes' of grain
AND
Russia abducting civilians as hostages Freed captive explains why Russians are taking civilians [YouTube] CNN
You are right on all the origin and usage of “vril”. I think one of its latest outings in Iron Sky 2 : The Coming Race may make using it in anything but comedy SF a bit difficult as searches will get to reptile nazis and Sarah Palin.
I don't recall this option having been mentioned, and since I like dogs (and worked in the Jeep plant in Toledo to get through uni), let me invest a few moments: Get a bag of ice at Food Lion (nope, too spendy, go to the ice plant instead), put it in a ceramic jug, and blow through the crock to let the phase change of ice to liquid absorb the heat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
Doesn't use a lot of power, so one small 12v gel-cell lead-acid battery would run that fan all day long; recharge the battery from the Jeep's engine at your convenience, or mount a small photovoltaic panel on its roof to float the battery.
Yeah, you're buying a bag of ice a day for the pooch. 1) Pooch is worth it. 2) Over your life, how much are you going to spend on ice at the ice plant http://sunnysideice.com/ice.html vs the cost of the engineered perfect solution? Perfection is the enemy of good enough.
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I finally figured out he meant, "erect a dyke..." I wasn't having a great morning.
Moz @ 1068:
You can get umbrella hats if you do need both hands. Sadly I never found a good solution like that for wearing on a bike helmet.
G4Free 62 Inch Windproof UV Protection Golf Umbrella Extra Large Silver Coated Automatic Open Silver Coated Stick Umbrella
Sorry I don't have any idea how to make a hat from it that would fit on a bicycle helmet.
Second purchase - we did this on a trip once - get a styrofoam cooler. Make two small holes. Put a computer fan over one of the holes and run it off the cigerette lighter. We didn't have a dog, so maybe add backups to taste!
Note that when I say "small" I mean "slightly smaller than the diameter of the computer fan."
I often see ladies in Japan riding "mama-charis" while wearing large shaded hats and/or tinted visors to protect their complexion from tanning in the summertime. The two kids in the front-and-back seats of the mama-chari will be wearing head protection, the ladies not so much.
here in japan they still use what we must presumably no longer call "c**lie hats" in the fields, but i imagine they would catch the wind a bit on a bike.
If only that was legal here. I've been talked at by cops in a remote part of NT who were concerned that without my bike helmet if I got run over by a road train I might not survive.
Sadly I couldn't persuade them that the helmet wouldn't help, even though I offered to put my helmet in the middle of the road so they could run their police car into and show me how the car would bounce off and leave the helmet undamaged... surely their police car is less likely to flatten the helmet than a road train? But perhaps they were afraid the car would be damaged? Oh well, I wore the helmet like a good little moppet. With a slightly sketchy sunhat thing over the top. Rather than my proper sunhat and no helmet. Sigh.
Heteromeles @ 1097: To clarify, Greg's gotten snagged on a US law term "antitrust." It dates from 1890 and was used to break up the Standard Oil Trust, which was a monopoly. Laws promoting business competition in the US is known as antitrust laws due to this historical precedent.
Otherwise, we're all talking about the same trust, invented in England, which is a relationship set up to safeguard resources for other people.
I completely agree that they're common. Here they're becoming a common ways for middle-class families to deal with end-of-life issues while avoiding probate. I know they're also common in the UK for non-profit ownership (a trust that maintains a historic building).
Things get different with the more esoteric trusts set up for wealth management. The most complex I know about (showing my ignorance here) is a Cayman Islands STAR Trust. These are also known as "dynastic trusts" for a reason. For awhile, I played with the idea of an interstellar polity whose central structure was a STAR Trust, because I think you could almost use it as a basis for governance. After playing with that for awhile, I got creeped out and dropped it.
The most notable characteristic of modern wealth management schemes, corporate & nation state governance is the complete disappearance of the concept of Noblesse oblige; "a moral economy wherein privilege must be balanced by duty towards those who lack such privilege" ... "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."
our bias is toward water because it's rare and expensive in a lot of places such as large parts of southern California. My bias is energy and that's what I see food is, concentrated energy that humans and other animals need to consume to survive. Supply people with water, lots of it and no food and it's called a famine and many will die. Supply people with food and a little water and it's likely many will survive.
It's a bit more than that, because you're conflating air temperature, day length, and growing season with light. To be fair, they're related, but especially with climate change heating up the poles, your intuition will increasingly lead you astray.
The tricky thing is that ordinary, C3 photosynthesis is limited indirectly by Rubisco. Because of this, it peaks at about 30% of peak sunlight (what hits the Earth at the solar equator at noon). Sunlight additional to that just gets wasted. It's one reason why plants can grow in forest understories. If you do the trig (it's the cosine relationship) you'll find that, on the equinoxes, the latitude that get 30% full solar energy is...72 degrees. A bit north of you. Even adding in a generous 50 percent albedo from the eternal Scottish cloudscape (so 60% full light) is at 52 degrees north.
So the short answer is that high latitude sunlight is barely limiting your crops in Scotland. Cold air is a bigger problem, since plants are mostly ectothermic and metabolize more slowly when it's cold.
Otherwise I agree. You can look at water use with crops, which is smart, because droughts in major farming areas are a perennial problem. You can look at nutrient use, which as Gasdive pointed out, get short when you have to mine them (phosphorus and potassium especially). Energy use is a bit less of a problem. Energy excess (too much sunlight) is actually a bigger problem than too little is, because plants have to dump energy to avoid overheating or frying their chloroplasts, and IIRC, that takes energy too.
Son of a psychologist here, and he has explained this. The helmet isn't about keeping you from dying. It's about making sure you that if you do survive, you don't get brain damage, which can happen even in an otherwise minor accident.
When I last discussed this with my father, back in the 1990s, he told me the average case of brain damage cost a million U.S. dollars, not to mention what it does to your ability to think, plan and act, plus possible personality changes. So wear your fuckin' helmet.
Excellent idea. I wish I'd thought of it.
I think I had some idea that his trips were to bet remote places over several days, so I might have subconsciously been thinking "off grid solution needed" or maybe I'm reconning. Either way, better than anything I could come up with.
ilya187 @ 1127:
No, San Antonio. I was in USAF, not Army.
AFAIK, Houston has no Army bases nearby. There is a Coast Guard Air Station there and a Joint Reserve Base serving the Naval Air Reserve, Air Force Reserve & Air National Guard. I think NASA also uses it because it's only about 5 miles from the Johnson (Manned Spacecraft) Space Center.
There are a number of Army facilities in the San Antonio area (primarily the Sam Houston Institute of Technology), but the major Army installations in Texas are Ft. Hood & Ft. Bliss ... the reason things are blissful at Ft. Bliss is because it's not Ft. Hood.
I wear my helmet, always have. But pretty much everyone here is on their late 50's and up. We die instead. In your 20's you can be quite massively injured and survive. In our age group someone with a hard enough knock to get a brain injury is probably going to die of their other injuries. As I said, I still wear mine, but it's more of a talisman than anything else.
David L @ 1161:
The US has rules to try and stop such things. $10K or more in deposits or withdrawals has to be reported to the IRS is one that's been around for a few decades. And like you save, anyone with a brain now does multiple transactions. So there are rules about how much per day. So the split it up across days and to various intermediaries.
So now we have "know your customer". Which the big boys with lawyers figure out how to deal. While I get to go in to the banks I deal with and sign more paperwork to attest I'm not doing nefarious things.
The IRS also has a thing called 31 CFR § 1010.314 - Structured transactions.
It's against the law to break up transactions into sub-$10k chunks for the purpose of avoiding reporting requirements. That would apply to those "billions and billions of microtransfers" as well.
Troutwaxer @ 1197: Simple fact, and you set your watch by it: The US won't do anything until we lose Florida.
What makes you think the U.S. will be able to do anything then? Gridlock don't care what sea-level is.
A greenhouse in central Antarctica is not going to grow much even with heat and very long days in the summer despite elevated temperatures and as much water as a kilometre-thick icesheet can provide. The productivity of agriculture in the far north and south of the planet is much lower than the Equatorial regions where energy-rich plants like sugarcane can be cropped and harvested repeatedly in a single year thanks to a fivefold or tenfold difference in annual insolation levels.
Troutwaxer @ 1203:
Autocorrect failure?
Maybe not. 🙃
I can attest to a bike helmet being substantially cheaper than the treatment for an ordinary concussion. Got the concussion by a branch falling and hitting me, not riding a bike.
The helmet isn't about keeping you from dying. It's about making sure you that if you do survive,
That's a strong argument for shower helmets, less so for putting helmets on recumbent trike riders.
There are two largely unrelated questions: do individual cyclists benefit from wearing helmets? And does anyone benefit from mandating them? In Australia the latter question dominates because our government performed the experiment and is reluctant to stop despite evidence that it's unhelpful.
I'm still saddened that the reduction in head injuries to cyclists when they mandated helmets came from a reduction in cyclists, slightly compensated for by more head injuries to the remaining cyclists (viz, a 50% reduction in cyclists gave a 45% reduction in head injuries... the remaining cyclists were more likely to be hit by motorists). Amusingly in The Netherlands cyclists who wear helmets are more likely to suffer head injuries... because helmets are overwhelmingly worn by cyclists who are doing unusually dangerous things. So they wear them for downhill mountain bike racing but not for commuting and the injury rate reflects that.
Robert Prior @ 1242:
That makes sense. Sadly, there is a need for that kind of thing — look up "safeword drink".
What wasn't clear to me is how they would share the necessary information to women so they can use it without the creeps knowing it?
Oh my dear sirs, what is this cash transaction of which you speak?
It is simply not done! If one wishes to move a billion dollars across international lines between consenting adults, there are so many ways to do it.
For example, one may simply transfer ownership of a holding company. That company's sole asset is another company, so it's a document that can be encrypted and emailed. The second company holds assets worth a billion dollars. An art collection, an office building, a yacht or two, something of the sort. Perhaps the M&A division could find a division to divest.
All that goes across international lines from me are some requests to trust managers. Because, after all, I don't own any of these corporations. The trusts do. It's up to them to do the rest.
After all, my dear sirs, all taxation is theft, so one must work hard to keep those vultures away from the good things it took so long to build!
Actually, at the solstice, the sun is at 23o, so the poles are at equivalent 67. The greenhouse glass cuts a lot of light, unfortunately.
However, Alaska's known for the giant vegetables they grow (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFF7tODO4hk), so it's worth considering that the problem might be Scotland, not latitude.
kiloseven @ 1246: I don't recall this option having been mentioned, and since I like dogs (and worked in the Jeep plant in Toledo to get through uni), let me invest a few moments: Get a bag of ice at Food Lion (nope, too spendy, go to the ice plant instead), put it in a ceramic jug, and blow through the crock to let the phase change of ice to liquid absorb the heat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
Doesn't use a lot of power, so one small 12v gel-cell lead-acid battery would run that fan all day long; recharge the battery from the Jeep's engine at your convenience, or mount a small photovoltaic panel on its roof to float the battery.
Yeah, you're buying a bag of ice a day for the pooch. 1) Pooch is worth it. 2) Over your life, how much are you going to spend on ice at the ice plant http://sunnysideice.com/ice.html vs the cost of the engineered perfect solution? Perfection is the enemy of good enough.
The cost of the ice wouldn't be a problem. I'm not looking for perfection. I'm living proof that "good enough" is good enough.
The problem I worry about is that it would NOT be good enough; could it provide enough cooling for a long enough period under the maximum worst case conditions that I'd want to trust it with my little buddy's safety? I don't think it could.
If I might inject a new topic, what do y'all make of Nancy Pelosi's surprise visit with her all-Democratic CODEL to Ukraine and Poland? It strikes me that it might fence in the US actions going forward, particularly in regard to GOP options to back away from support for Ukraine.
It will be interesting to see how Fox et al. deal with the visit. So far nothing has appeared.
Re: 'Rubisco'
Appreciate your explanation --- will have to do a lot of basic reading though before I feel I have a good notion of what it really is and does.
Thanks for the link! Really like this paragraph from the Wikipedia article. Guess we'll be seeing more articles on rubisco.
'Since photosynthesis is the single most effective natural regulator of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere,[46] a biochemical model of RuBisCO reaction is used as the core module of climate change models. Thus, a correct model of this reaction is essential to the basic understanding of the relations and interactions of environmental models.'
About your comment re: how quickly one genetic change in the female line can translate into a crop that takes over. You said a very, very long time!
'Even if someone created super-Rubisco and got it expressed by a chloroplast in a plant, it would take awhile for it to get expressed by all the chloroplasts in the plant (The super-R chloroplast would have to kill off and replace all the normal chloroplasts. Then you get the super-R chloroplast to other plants either by ...'
I was thinking that a change to the genome in a few seeds would suffice. Plant those seeds, let them grow and reproduce seeds, repeat ... Depending on how long this repro cycle takes and number of viable seeds produced, could be less than a decade. (How long does it take BigAgra to come out with and market new crop seeds?)
BTW - I still think that cereal grasses (esp. wheat) should be shortened. Their stalks/stems were lengthened to make it easier/faster for large harvesting equipment and not for any nutritional reason. Would save a lot of water.
Water for human 'consumption' in LA, Vegas, Phoenix - Been a while but the last time I visited these cities it seemed there was a pool in every backyard. Wonder how fast it evaporates these days and how much chlorine gets into the local (breathing) atmosphere.
Banks - in the US depending on how you count, there are something like 4,900 to 6,000 different banks. And it's no problem to have more than one account per bank* or to have a bank account in states other than where you live. And, and, the US does not have one centralized 'Bank' authority overseeing every aspect of banking - the responsibilities are divvied up across a bunch of regulatory agencies. And, and, and although there is a Federal 'Central Bank' sorta, banking fine print - like everything else - varies by State. Therefore in theory it would be possible for one individual to make very many $9,999 transactions, i.e., stay under the radar. Final 'and' - increasingly more people are 'self-employed' therefore also have biz bank accounts in addition to private bank accounts. Add in crypto - with something like 18,000 different 'currencies' (as of March 2022) being traded mostly not under any gov't regulatory/oversight body - and the possibilities for monetary/financial hi-jinx are very likely beyond the ability of gov't agencies to oversee and/or catch wrong-doings or help out the poor sods who might get scammed. (Not a crypto fan.)
*The Feds will cover/protect up to $250K per account - key reason people with lots of cash opt to maintain more than one bank account.
My understanding is that most other countries have far fewer banks - feel free to correct/educate me.
The drink safewords for a given establishment are usually on a poster in the women's restrooms.
Twenty-two million refugees spreading across the country, screaming that they've been lied to? I think it will change our politics profoundly. (If it doesn't... shrugs.)
"And don't use Russian culture to excuse Putin or his followers."
Haven't forgotten.
I was going to suggest a solar to electricity converting umbrella would look less out of place in your visit to China.
However, the technology hasn’t evolved much from a 2011 student project where they tried various techniques and ended up Velcroing panels to the umbrella. The bigger commercial ones do that, or they give up and glue a garden lamp cell in a small round hub on the top of the umbrella.
Maybe an umbrella with a print of an early satellite solar array on it would work for defusing social opprobrium. And someone in China may see it and try to clone it :-)
*heat pumps
Bloody autoincorrect
...and gambling in virtual worlds back when there was a lot of energy going into them.
I didn't go into it, as it was off topic, but while I didn't see people actually using the gambling system much, there was a constant dribble of users who were sure the gambling system was broken and they could use it to generate infinite money. After a while I gave up on disagreeing and opted for an answer along the lines of, "Sure, have fun."
As it happened, nobody ever showed up with a huge pile of gambling money.
build a lesbian
Presumably making a pun on dyke/dike?
Around here dyke is generally considered an offensive term, unless used by a lesbian. Kinda like the N-word. Is it different where you are?
I've been talked at by cops in a remote part of NT who were concerned that without my bike helmet if I got run over by a road train I might not survive.
Run over, no, but if you were, say, blown over and fell off your bike at speed the helmet might well help.
In our age group someone with a hard enough knock to get a brain injury is probably going to die of their other injuries.
Not necessarily. Concussions are surprisingly easy to get — one of my neighbours gave herself one by standing up and hitting her head on a mantlepiece. We joked that she'd have been OK if she'd been wearing a bike helmet.
What wasn't clear to me is how they would share the necessary information to women so they can use it without the creeps knowing it?
Usually a sign in the women's washroom.
Context is everything. Talking about dykes holding back large bodies of water is perfectly reasonable, talking about throwing dykes into large bodies of water not so much.
There are also situations like seeing "Dykes on Bikes" where it's rude not to use the word. I'm sure there are more reclaimers around but that's the one that sticks with me.
Context can also be deeply personal - me calling my partner a "fake asian" relied on it being a response to someone getting us mixed up. She's the "fake Asian, real Australian", unlike me who's as fake Australian as they come (I arrived here in ~2000 and only became a citizen ~2010). Not helped by many Australian-born-Asians not feeling that they belong anywhere, they go to their parents home country and feel out of place, then come back and feel out of place.
Which is very different to my experience, where I feel deeply "at home" at Sydney Marae* as well as random places around Aotearoa.
Where ya really from? is one of those stupid questions that's hard to ask nicely, and you can't use those particular words to do it ever. Well, maybe if you're a white guy asking a white guy, to make a point. But the sort of person who asks that question often can't understand how anyone would ask it of them.
(* a reddit-controversial thing, since some people view it as expressing tangata whenua = "we are the people of this land", rather than mana whenua = "we have been given some authority over this land". And, in case it's not obvious, the local traditional owners welcome the marae and the colonial government recognises their right to use that land)
if you were, say, blown over and fell off your bike at speed the helmet might well help.
The sort of wind event that will tip over a tandem recumbent trike is unlikely to be survivable, helmet or no. I have driven it off the road and vaulted a ditch to avoid two opposing road trains and the major upset was the passenger dropping his book.
My main point is is that the rule is both overbroad and simultaneously far too narrow. "high risk activities require helmets" is all very well, but the law does not say that. Instead it picks a single variable-risk activity and requires that everyone wear a helmet when using public paths. Five year old riding with trainer wheels on the footpath... must wear a helmet. 80 year old man riding a recumbent trike on a shared path in a park... must wear helmet. Teenage daredevil riding down a cliff face at 100kph? Legally does not have to wear a helmet. 90 year old stepping over the lip of the bath? Does not have to wear a helmet. Middle aged man crossing icy road... does not have to wear a helmet. Elderly Dr H walking under a tree... does not have to wear a helmet.
Worse, people are not even encouraged to wear helmets in most high risk situation, and where helmets are encouraged it's often instead of trying to improve safety.
It would please me if some of the pro-helmet people could refer to these two questions and try to work out which one they're addressing.
Do individual cyclists benefit from wearing helmets? Always, or just when riding a bicycle?
Does anyone benefit from mandating them? Is there a net benefit at all?
Condescendingly telling me that I should wear a helmet while riding my bike in a country where I'm legally required to is not entirely pointless, it does irritate me. So if that's your goal have at it.
Maybe everyone should focus on explaining to Heteromeles that he should wear his pedestrian helmet at all times so he does not suffer another concussion from a falling tree branch? At least I wear a helmet when I think it's advisable, unlike the average pedestrian.
[The legal system] is where it doesn't seem that Trump spent enough effort and let his ego get in the way of staying out of the legal headlights.
Oh dear, yes. It's likely no blog readers outside the US remember a thing called the United States Football League, so let me give a very TL;DR synopsis of the story.
Years ago some speculators noticed that Americans loved watching (American) football but the big commercial league, the National Football League, only played for about half the year. They figured there was a half-year demand gap they could fill.
By this time the NFL had already told Donald Trump to get lost, on account of being a shit businessman, and he was grumpy about it. The USFL didn't want him either but a year or so into the project one of the original investors had to sell and was bought out by Trump. He reported made himself very noisy in league management.
Eventually Trump got the USLF (small, with a tight budget) to sue the NFL (very big, astronomical budget) for playing football in the fall as it always had and getting in the way of the USFL playing in the season it never had played before. When all the dust settled the USFL was awarded damages of $3 (not three million; I really mean three dollars); Trump blew $163 million dollars on this suit, bankrupting the USFL.
I'm not a sportsball fan but the original USFL plan to play hand-egg during the spring sounds reasonable; they probably could have made this work if they'd kept Trump out of it.
I totally forget the context, so there nothing whatsoever I can cite and I don’t feel particularly google-fu-competent right now to find one, but I remember seeing articles where the numbers had been done for comparison, in quite thorough detail. The number of lives saved and brain injuries averted by mandating cyclists to wear helmets is utterly dwarved by the potential for the same outcomes by mandating all motor vehicle occupants to wear “bicycle” helmets. This was not just in absolute numbers (where the disjunction is obviously enormous) but also proportionally in terms of lives and brains within each cohort.
If I might inject a new topic, what do y'all make of Nancy Pelosi's surprise visit with her all-Democratic CODEL to Ukraine and Poland?
It strikes me as a bad sign that no Republicans were with her. I doubt Biden is going to get any GOP votes for his proposed $33 billion Ukraine aid. He might not even be able to get Manchin's and Sinema's votes. It may be time for some creative accounting... :-/
Run over, no, but if you were, say, blown over and fell off your bike at speed the helmet might well help.
I've biked down hills at 45mph, and this is not something I'd want to test...
We were not talking about the tories, but somehow, raw sewage seems appropriate ...
H & Troutwaxer
Since I got an electric bike late last year ( Wiley E Bicycle ) I have always worn a helmet. Mainly because I am now, usually, moving significantly faster & the concussion/damage risk is correspondingly greater.
SFR
You are correct, the multiplicity of microbanks & the lack of central regulation seems to be a unique "feature" of the USA.
It certainly looks bonkers to outsiders.
Rbt Prior
I prefer the usage: Dike - but it means something like this
Note that a dike can be both a barrier ( A "berm" ) or a water-channel, just to confuse. As Moz says - it's the context.
Oh, motorist helmets are a very well known thing in the "mandatory bicycle helmet community", on all sides of the debate. Usually as a strawman since the idea of mandating them or even wearing them is so clearly ridiculous. That's why I was more interested by Heteromeles implication that he should have been wearing a pedestrian helmet if he'd wanted to avoid his concussion. It's the old addition "BICYCLE HELMETS SAVE LIVES (so wear yours in the shower)".
The issue for some of us is that after 40 years of mandatory bicycle helmets we're a bit tired of the subject. Yes, they save lives. So would banning guns... but we somehow don't have anyone suggesting that, even though in the USA it would save about as many lives as banning private cars (and either would save many, many more than any possible mandating of bicycle helmets).
I like Chris Rissel's argument that mandating helmets costs lives. His study suggested that the lives (well, QALYs) lost by halving the number of cyclists was greater than the QALYs gained through fewer brain injuries and deaths. It's not just loss of exercise, there's a safety in numbers effect visible even at very low cycling numbers... so halving the number of cyclists by itself endangers the remaining cyclists. Viz, even if you just legislated that people under 18 needed a license to ride and that halved the number of cyclists, it would result in extra cyclist deaths. That's why the "50% fewer cyclists, 45% fewer deaths" number is so important.
Around here dyke is generally considered an offensive term, unless used by a lesbian. Kinda like the N-word.
hence the pun, innit.
and not quite in the same league as the n-word
if u feel only lesbians should be allowed to make such puns, i guess i will...defer to charlie, if he has an opinion
Is it different where you are?
in japan? i haven't asked but i suspect of what they do not know, they do not speak
And thus mandating helmets also contributes to global warming, by discouraging cycling. It is particularly discouraging to the idea of hopping on a bike for a short trip (to the shops etc). When you need a helmet, and then also all your other cycling gear it becomes more of a chore, and encourages you to use the car. Switching from car to cycling for these local trips is going to get you big savings in car use, and what's more may lead to a change of attitude towards cars. I think helmets are appropriate for road racers and for mountain bikers, but not for ordinary cyclists going to school, work the shops or down to the local park or beach. I like the way it happens in Holland (and I have lived there). So many people on bikes, in ordinary clothes and no helmets, doing all there local errands. I don't think there is a big problem with head injuries there. No helmet laws, but lots of good quality cycle paths - and cyclists are required to use them - and the law will always hold the car driver responsible in a collision with a bicycle. I am not a sport cyclist. I ride fairly slowly (20 - 25 kph max) and ride on cycle paths whenever possible (even it they're bumpy). I'm not in a hurry after all, I just want to get there comfortably and safely.
I looked pretty closely at the data at one stage. The papers that stated they would save anything up to 97% (sic) of lives were a mixture of statistically dubious, bogus and just plain propaganda. The evidence was fairly clear that they make essentially no difference, except that mandatory helmet laws increase the risk. But the data were and are not good enough to be certain of more.
The main reason was probably this. Wearing a helmet probably increases your risk of being in an accident, but it is unclear whether that is risk compensation, drivers being more aggressive (there is good data for that), or what.
Helmets DO help somewhat for high speed riding and things like parcour (including off-road riding at speed across rocks and logs).
There were some other possibilities.
In an accident, you are slightly more likely to hit your head on the ground if you wear a helmet (basic physics). Your head is protected in most accidents (just being knocked or falling off) by the shoulder and neck muscles; it and the hip, elbow and knee and the usual damage locations.
Helmets were (and mostly still are) designed to protect against half-bricks falling on your head, not the typical sliding impact. Because of their extra diameter (and higher friction than hair) they MAY increase the risk of rotational brain damage. Some modern helmosts claim to do better, but there are no tests.
In the light of this, I decided that I was safer to STOP wearing a helmet (because I was very vulnerable to aggressive drivers), and subsequent experience confirmed my view.
MODERATION NOTE
Gasdive and JBS:
Just stop it.
I've unpublished your most recent sweary comments.
Name-calling and abuse is a violation of the moderation policy; you get some slack for being regular and productive commenters so I'm not going to ban you yet, but you should consider this a Yellow Card.
Strong rec: do not reply to each other's comments unless you have something positive/constructive/agreeable to say.
Re: Bicycle Helmets...
Just ask the poor bastard of a neurosurgeon who is on-call at the nearest emergency hospital how much more time they've spent with their family since the helmet laws came in.
Oh, and while you're at it, ask the osteo how many recumbent users they've had to rebuild after they've gone under something.
Wearing a helmet probably increases your risk of being in an accident, but it is unclear whether that is risk compensation, drivers being more aggressive (there is good data for that), or what.
i suppose u could think of those as internal and external risk compensation
Well, I guess I was drunk when I posted that because it didn't come out anything like how I meant it.
What I was trying to say was more like:
I can't imagine how anyone could describe Macron as a "horrible, bad, no-good President".
He's pretty shitty at communications -- likes the sound of his own voice to much -- but that's a common failing in people who want the job.
He's too much in hock to the economically liberal wing of the French right wing.
But "horrible, bad, no-good"?
1237 - Ukraine, Capital Kyiv at 49N, 32E. So what was that about "solar influx" again? When answering, bear in mind that most grain crops are planted and harvested once or twice a year, and once is very possible at 49N.
1238, 1247, 1278 - I know the software as "auto second-guess you and get it wrong".
1243 - Yes, a tonne is 1_000kg, known in some nations as a "long tonne" because the word tonne contains 5 letters, not 3 as in an (imperial) ton (which is heavier and known as a "short ton" in those nations.).
1255 - I quoted you as saying "get a Tesla" and explained why that is not a valid solution for most people. And now you're saying "I didn't say that as an only solution".
1286 Does anyone benefit from mandating cycle helmets? Cycle helmet manufacturers do, as politicians who say "Something must be done. This is something therefore we must do it". ;-)
Got the concussion by a branch falling and hitting me,
So does this make the number of things you and Greg Abbott have in common exactly ONE?
You're in Japan?
It was a genuine question. There are words that have different meanings and/or connotations in different parts of the world. The classic example being "fanny" referring to different parts of the anatomy.
Or, I suppose, "pedo" having a different meaning to wealthy South Africans :-/
I've spent three decades working as a mandatory reporter in a sometimes-quite-political multicultural setting. Not as bad as current red-state schools with parents and third parties able to sue for feeling uncomfortable, thankfully, but charged enough that I've learned to be very aware that words mean different things to different people, and different cultures have different rules for what's acceptable.
Sorry, I was completely out of order.
paws4thot@1296:
"a tonne is 1_000kg, known in some nations as a "long tonne" because the word tonne contains 5 letters, not 3 as in an (imperial) ton (which is heavier and known as a "short ton" in those nations.)"
My understanding is different:
long (imperial) ton: 2240 lbs, ~1016 kg
short (US) ton: 2000 lbs, ~907 kg
metric (neither short nor long) tonne: 1000 kg.
"Long" vs "short" distinguishes the two anglophone tons, not the length of the words.
There are words that have different meanings and/or connotations in different parts of the world. The classic example being "fanny" referring to different parts of the anatomy.
Not just words and not just different parts of the world.
At a tech conference in Miami 3 years ago the evening's entertainment was a cruise around Miami Beach in a somewhat large boat laid out for such things. Due to engine issue we never left the dock but the party went on anyway. Just about dark a collection of ladies wearing bikinis covered in fruit (Carmen Miranda style) and on 2 foot tall stilts came out dancing to the music. Most of us were wondering if we would should self report to HR about this the next day. The locals (men and women) didn't see the issue. At all.
But then again, I guess Miami is as much South American as it is a city in the US.
I don't think there is a big problem with head injuries there. No helmet laws, but lots of good quality cycle paths - and cyclists are required to use them - and the law will always hold the car driver responsible in a collision with a bicycle.
And that is the key difference. Lots of paths, cyclists required to use them, etc. And also, from what I remember when I was cycling there*, a lot more politeness from drivers.
Using the Netherlands to argue that helmets are unnecessary seems to be leaving out a big part of the picture.
Arguments about how helmets are so uncomfortable, inconvenient, etc sound an awful lot like what I heard about seatbelts when seatbelts became mandatory in the 80s. Everyone who called in to the radio knew someone who had drowned when their car rolled into a river and the seatbelt jammed, or who had been raped because they had to fasten their seatbelt before fleeing and those 1-2 seconds let the rapist catch them, or…
Most of us aren't in the Netherlands. Our social and legal landscapes are different.
This wouldn't happen in the Netherlands, for example:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-bc-cyclist-icbc-insurance-no-fault-1.6403817 Or this:
https://www.cp24.com/news/man-suffers-life-altering-injuries-after-being-struck-by-cyclist-in-downtown-toronto-1.5884169
*In the 80s, so it may have changed.
It strikes me as a bad sign that no Republicans were with her. I doubt Biden is going to get any GOP votes for his proposed $33 billion Ukraine aid. He might not even be able to get Manchin's and Sinema's votes. It may be time for some creative accounting...
Actually support for aid to Ukraine polls a majority of both parties in terms of voters. And in general is considered a go once the details are written into the legislation for the House and Senate.
But some D's want to attach some Covid spending to it that will not pass stand alone. And if they do that the feeling is the total will not pass either.
And while I didn't check multiple times per day or even daily about what military flights were showing up on tracking site, I have been for the last week or so.
LOTS of large cargo transport planes all over Europe. Landing and taking off from various bases in UK, Germany, Poland, and Romania. (I even caught a New Zealand flagged C130 IIRC one day.) Plus there seems to be at least 3 strato tankers in the air at any one time. One headed to the air over Poland and Romaina, one flying racetracks, and one headed back to a base in western Europe.
One of the more interesting types of planes... Apparently Sweden has some elint planes that if in passenger service would carry maybe 50 people. They are flying long loops just east of Ukraine.
I've assumed that Russians hauling Ukrainian wheat and farm equipment away is with the intent of killing Ukrainians by starvation. I'd rather be wrong. What are arguments one way or the other?
A short ton is the name used in the UK and elsewhere for the US ton (2,000 lb). An Imperial ton is 2,240 lb and is very close to the 1,000 kg metric tonne. An Imperial ton is about 1,016 kg.
i'm originally from the uk (though i grew up in america for the sake of confusion), and certainly calling someone a dyke there would not be a thing i would condone
wordplay on a homophone doesn't seem like it would be that bad, though i would probably refrain from presenting it for contemplation in a work situation such as the one u describe
I have seen several flights by RNZAF C-130s in the last ten days or so.
Also, and rather odd, a drone at about 19000 feet 50 or 60 nm north of Istanbul. I guess this might be Turkish, watching for vessels trying to pass through the Bosphorus.
Most of us were wondering if we would should self report to HR about this the next day.
bless me HR, for i have sinned
Looting is the obvious one; they may be better (and would certainly be cheaper) than buying the equivalent in Russia. It may also be that Russian logistics are even worse than we know.
It's not obvious that this is policy; some of it is almost certainly poorly-disciplined and under-supported soldiers.
Oh, motorist helmets are a very well known thing in the "mandatory bicycle helmet community", on all sides of the debate. Usually as a strawman since the idea of mandating them or even wearing them is so clearly ridiculous. That's why I was more interested by Heteromeles implication that he should have been wearing a pedestrian helmet if he'd wanted to avoid his concussion. It's the old addition "BICYCLE HELMETS SAVE LIVES (so wear yours in the shower)".
Yeah, let's talk about this. See I've had some bad luck in my life.
I have taken a header off a bike after hitting a slick spot during the rain. Got a new helmet IIRC and a few scrapes. No big deal.
The concussion wasn't from walking, it was because I was camping when I was in college. Hung food from the wrong branch at night, and got medevac'ed out. Not fun, rather expensive, being in the USA.
And I've even slipped getting out of a shower. That cost some rib damage.
And then there was my father. When I was small, he was too busy working to treat a minor eye infection. Said infection went into his brain, caused encephalitis, and left him bed-ridden. That was the dad I grew up with, so I can tell you that minor slips can change the course, not just of your life, but of the lives of your entire family.
So I'd very gently suggest that you may be mistaking your good luck for a combination of talent and skill that you actually don't have. If so, you're in good company with people like Donald Trump and George W. Bush.
One of the huge problems we in the developed world face is that so many people don't realize that catastrophic, life-changing disasters can arise from trivial decisions. Those of us who've lived through them know that no one wants to hear from us, for fear that bad luck is contagious, which it isn't.
That's what went into my calculation of wearing a helmet when I used to bike. I don't ride a bike anymore, because the local cyclists are so arrogant and destructive that I spend my spare time mending their trails, so they won't kill too many rare plants and animals. One of the things I occasionally pick up are piece of bike helmets, where riders failed to duck when going under oak branches at speed, and their helmets took the damage. This is not a group I want to belong to.
Hope this explanation helps.
What are arguments one way or the other?
Bear in mind Russia relies on the conscripts to help bring in the harvest (I wish I was making this up) -- it's why nobody expects Russia to start a war between July and September.
Stealing Ukraine's wheat harvest probably relieves some of the domestic pressure from not sending the kids to help bring in the domestic harvest. It's a sign that they're settling in for the long haul.
(Also obviously: (a) they're stealing everything that isn't nailed down, (b) it's food, and (c) starve the "Ukrainian nazis" into submission like back in the 1920s/1930s. It doesn't have to be just one thing.)
If the local news sources are right, the stolen equipment can be, and has been, remotely disabled. I am not sure if this can be bypassed by someone with computing skills, but the local (by which I mean North American) news sources imply that it can't.
Is there an echo in here?
Re: Multiple accounts and '... microbanks & the lack of central regulation seems to be a unique "feature" of the USA.'
There was also this major scandal involving a major bank. First press coverage was in 2016 probably with various spin-off court cases/investigations still on-going. (Yeah, another c. 2016 slogan with 'great' sound-alike at its core. Yeah - another scam!)
This is a longish read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal
The body that actually flagged, investigated and pursued this problem is not part of the 'US central bank' group - it's a separate agency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau
And how heuristics/metrics become ends in themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogation
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JBS @ 1256:
I have no idea what Army installations are near Houston, if any. You mentioned Houston and Ft. Hood in the same post, so I assumed they are close together.
One of the things I occasionally pick up are piece of bike helmets, where riders failed to duck when going under oak branches at speed, and their helmets took the damage.,/i>
I assume you've seen this? I found it amusing…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m-c4GixUpg
If the local news sources are right, the stolen equipment can be, and has been, remotely disabled. I am not sure if this can be bypassed by someone with computing skills, but the local (by which I mean North American) news sources imply that it can't.
Given the current conflict between a farmer's right to repair equipment with the manufacturer's right to force them to pay the manufacturer to repair it, I can see a powerful North American lobby that doesn't want people to know how to unbrick agricultural equipment…
Am I the only person who makes decisions on analyses of the available data? It seems so.
Sorry. I wrote the answer, logged back in, checked to click reply to the answer about short tons then replied to you by mistake.
Actually support for aid to Ukraine polls a majority of both parties in terms of voters.
So? If politicians listened to their constituents (instead of their campaign donors), we'd have gun control, immigration policy changes, and lots of other stuff.
But Mitch McConnell wants to make Joe Biden a one-term President... :-/
Apparently Sweden has some elint planes that if in passenger service would carry maybe 50 people. They are flying long loops just east of Ukraine.
Flying over Russia? Seems unlikely. I bet they're just west of Ukraine.
Seagull is a smarter Qanon.
What, you think leftists prefer marmite?
Re: Bike helmets. When attending UBC I was crossing a major road on my bike and saw a vehicle approaching me at speed. I had just enough time to think 'Glad I have my helmet on' before I was hit. As it happened it hit my rear wheel just behind my foot, and spun me around 180 degrees.
I remained upright, the bike was a wreck. Then the driver leaped out of his car and yelled at me for scratching the front of his car (he had run through a stop sign at a blind intersection).
My takeaway from that half second was that I prefer a helmet when riding. I commuted for >20 years in Vancouver and Ottawa after that, always with a helmet. It is more comfortable for me. To be honest I find the people whinging about them to be somewhat childish. Find one that fits comfortably, it just isn't that big a deal. I leave mine hanging on my handlebars, it takes 3 seconds to put on my head. In the rainy season I have a cover that goes on and keeps the wet off my head.
My kids will avoid wearing a helmet whenever they can. Last summer my eldest managed to crash his bike and get a huge gash in his head (among other things). Now he also wears his helmet whenever he rides.
Hadn't seen that, thanks.
My local bike-interaction area is a preserve set aside to protect some of the rarest oaks in the US. These oaks happen to be rather low and have extremely hard wood. So mountain bikers built illegal trails under the oaks, got them retroactively approved by the city, and go bombing down them at 30 mph (I'm pretty decent at jumping out of the way). Occasionally one doesn't duck fast enough, and there's a debris trail. In a couple of cases, it was pieces of helmet for several hundred meters. Usually it's just the outer plastic shell.
Anyway, their solution is to sneak in with saws and cut down the offending oak branches, so they can ride faster. In a place set aside originally to protect said oaks and other endangered species.
But yes, I think wearing a helmet in there is a good thing, if only because it makes my cleanup easier. Mind you, this likely won't save many lives. One of the trail builders died after going off a jump wrong and impaling himself on the stump of an oak branch. Fortunately I didn't see that. He's the only death I know of, but that event may be why some of them wear armor.
Read almost any US based news service. Aid is very likely to pass with no problem. Almost a must pass situation. Which is why some are looking to hang a few ornaments on it. Which might scuttle it.
On low-power airconditioning vs "just open a window":
Take a look at the windcatchers of Persia (now Iran). The basic idea is to have a tower with a vent facing into the prevailing wind. This funnels cool air downwards through the building, cooling it. Two things boost this:
Optionally, put an indoor pond at the bottom or run the air through an underground water conduit for evaporative cooling.
During the night the temperature drops, so the cold air cools the masonry of the whole house, creating a cold space that lasts through the heat of the day.
Neat, although it rather depends on low humidity. I don't think its going to help on Black Days.
"Is the term "vril" too contaminated by far-right fruitloopery for use in fiction?"
Or just simple obscurity? Until Charlie posted his comment I thought it meant a kind of small furry animal like a mouse, only a little larger and with coarser, more dog-like fur. And more vicious.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any more bizarre: Russia's Foreign Minister claims Hitler was part Jewish.
It seems he was being asked to explain how Ukraine can be "nazi" when its Prime Minister is Jewish. So he explains that Hitler was part Jewish, and "Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews".
Israel is predictably a bit brassed off over this, which is going to be an issue for Russia because up until now the large number of ex-Russian Jews who migrated to Israel has meant that there was some sympathy for Russia there, and Israel was trying to play a mediating role. Probably not so much now.
"Take a look at the windcatchers of Persia (now Iran)."
But before you build one, make sure you have the right micro-climate.
Building one in Denmark would not be a good idea...
Scott Sanford @ 1275:
I didn't go into it, as it was off topic, but while I didn't see people actually using the gambling system much, there was a constant dribble of users who were sure the gambling system was broken and they could use it to generate infinite money. After a while I gave up on disagreeing and opted for an answer along the lines of, "Sure, have fun."
As it happened, nobody ever showed up with a huge pile of gambling money.
That's 'cause over the long term, the house always wins. You might win a little bit, but you'll just keep coming back & losing until you've lost your "winnings" and more
If one wanted to have fun with Vril, one could get rather silly with it. It's obviously a play on "virility," which makes you wonder what's in the meat extract labeled "bovril" (bovine virility?)
Anyway, if you're writing for young male fiction readers, could the yin and yang phases of vril be usefully labeled "oh" and "yeah"? Maybe it has a third, nondual phase known as "baby"? The reader can figure out how "up the yin-yang" might be phrased in Vril terminology. And finding that point where "oh" becomes "yeah" could be a fundamental meditation exercise. If nothing else, top 40 hits could become the sacred liturgical music of Vrilism.
Moz @ 1282: It would please me if some of the pro-helmet people could refer to these two questions and try to work out which one they're addressing.
Do individual cyclists benefit from wearing helmets? Always, or just when riding a bicycle?
Does anyone benefit from mandating them? Is there a net benefit at all?
Condescendingly telling me that I should wear a helmet while riding my bike in a country where I'm legally required to is not entirely pointless, it does irritate me. So if that's your goal have at it.
Maybe everyone should focus on explaining to Heteromeles that he should wear his pedestrian helmet at all times so he does not suffer another concussion from a falling tree branch? At least I wear a helmet when I think it's advisable, unlike the average pedestrian.
The answer to your second question is undoubtedly yes, even if the benefit is not readily apparent. For one thing it slightly reduces the demand for emergency services to treat head injuries. Which in turn (at least here in the U.S.) presumably minuscully reduces the cost of health care.
Such laws are overly broad because it's difficult to draw them with pinpoint accuracy and would really be unenforceable if they were. How do you expect a legislature to write a law that says "All cyclists must wear a helmet unless they're riding a recumbent tricycle that won't tip over." ... and do you really want the police deciding whether your recumbent tricycle is one that will tip over or not? ... because you KNOW they're not just going to take your word for it.
Now one response might be adding a clause to the law that says "Helmets are optional, but if you get a brain injury when you're NOT wearing one that's your problem, don't come to the emergency room (A&E), 'cause you'll be refused!" ... much like I think anyone who doesn't have a vaccination certificate for Covid should be refused admittance to Intensive Care, saving those beds for people who need them through no fault of their own. Give 'em a tube of horse-paste and send 'em on their way.
Not gonna' happen though and anyway, how would you determine "no fault of their own" for the others? Whose fault is it when someone who lives on CHEAP "junk food" has a heart attack?
Apparently there was a market for cracking the DRM on John Deere farm equipment. Run from Ukraine.
AlanD2
You forgot or omitted the most important one of all ...
Keeping the GOP-Nazis OUT of women's reproductive systems. "The Handmaid's Tale" is NOT a guide ...
Paul
I think it's something in the Kremlin's water-supply, maybe some of Putin's special poisons are leaking out ?
There's a, umm, "story" probably covers it, in the Mail claiming Putin is due for cancer surgery and will temporarily hand power to an ex-KGB chief.
Note this is the same Daily Mail that Wikipedia banned from being a source for citaions.
In the novel I'm currently looking for an agent for (hmm, it's about two months, I can probably ping this one), the wealthy have gone so far that they, themselves, are effectively non-geographical countries... and have an undeclared war with nation-states. This does not go over well with the latter, who are forced to Do Something that the 90% of us want....
(This also includes 1315) When I retired in '19, with all the not-taken PTO, I wound up with a stupid amount of money in my non-interest-bearing checking account. (My account being at Wachovia, oh, sorry, I mean Washington Mutual (WaMu? Are you joking?), oops, I mean... Wells Farrago). I moved more than half of it into an interest-bearing savings account, and a relatively short-term CD, and they did a direct transfer. It took almost a weeks, since both moves were over $10k.
Nancy Lebovitz @ 1305: I've assumed that Russians hauling Ukrainian wheat and farm equipment away is with the intent of killing Ukrainians by starvation. I'd rather be wrong. What are arguments one way or the other?
I don't know if it's an "official policy" to starve Ukrainians. I think it's just hooliganism; looting on an industrial scale ... an extension of how Russian soldiers stole food & consumer goods from the areas they occupied in the attack on Kyiv. Rape & murder appear to have been encouraged by "official policy", but the looting appears to be the older soldiers showing initiative.
Now, one thing that I started trying to get a large-scale conversation started since the early/mid-nineties is on how all of us live in what I refer to as a post-Adamic society (you no longer have to earn your living by the sweat of your brow). It finally started a few years ago, after Very Important People started realizing where we're going, but it's not gotten to where I am yet.
I do deal with it in both the novel I'm trying to sell, and the one I'm writing, set about 250-300 years from now.
Think this through with me: with most productive (of goods) jobs automated - the most in-your-face example being agriculture - and BMI, what do we do when we don't have to have a job?
Really, think about it: if you can live above what is currently called the poverty line, what would you do? I guarantee most people will get real tired, real fast, of sitting on the couch watching sportsball. As evidence, let me point out that for people who define themselves by their job, those that retire with nothing else to do last about 18 months (this is the case, for example, with retired miners, and yes, I can come up with the numbers if you need proof).
Human society will change.
He literally apparently views the world as though it were a tv show, with the same rules for law, and physics, and chemistry....
Ed Seedhouse @ 1313: If the local news sources are right, the stolen equipment can be, and has been, remotely disabled. I am not sure if this can be bypassed by someone with computing skills, but the local (by which I mean North American) news sources imply that it can't.
Somewhere down in the article I linked it suggests whoever was able to disable it remotely could also tell someone was already trying to hack the system to undo it.
True. And the Former Guy apparently cannot utter a complete sentence without the word "I" in it.
I was puzzled by "lesbian", unless you were speaking of building a Colossus of Miami as a woman. The pun thread, though, is amusing.
To me, one major point of the world of Neuromancer is that the RW is so miserable and fucked-up that a lot of people would rather live in a virtual one, that offers them the chances, and sometimes the life, that they have no chance of in the RW.
You forgot or omitted the most important one of all ... Keeping the GOP-Nazis OUT of women's reproductive systems.
Agreed. I'd also like to keep them out of the U.S. educational system (book banning, etc.).
Dubai - yeah, I really dislike most of it. Trouble is, at the local Indian importer, I've found a treat that everyone really likes... imported from Dubai. Pitted dates, with a slice of candied orange peel in it. It's not that I want to support them, but....
Interesting. Let me note, by the way, that Chinese is a tonal language - level, rising, falling, rising-level, and falling-level (I think I've got those last two correct). That would work perfectly with this.
Now, one thing that I started trying to get a large-scale conversation started since the early/mid-nineties is on how all of us live in what I refer to as a post-Adamic society (you no longer have to earn your living by the sweat of your brow).
By the end of this century, we will all live in a post-work society - where there is literally nothing that we now do that can't be done better by robots / AI.
Human society will change. No kidding! Distribution of wealth becomes a big issue. Without jobs, nobody has money, so nobody can buy all those things produced by robot factories, and the owners of the factories go broke too! End of civilization...
Ha! Just kidding. Everybody will have some sort of basic income, supported (with taxes?) by those who own the means of production. I predict some vicious fights as we try to figure out how to equitably divide money between the poor and the wealthy.
I see this, instantly, in someone being kidnapped, who sends a message from her fingernails (and what kidnapper's going to think of them?).
ilya187 @ 1316: JBS @ 1256:
I have no idea what Army installations are near Houston, if any. You mentioned Houston and Ft. Hood in the same post, so I assumed they are close together.
I think someone else mentioned Houston in response to my kvetching about the weather at Ft. Hood.
Anyway ... From Randolph AFB in San Antonio, Ft. Hood, just north of Killeen, is about 115 miles NNE - I-35 north & take I-14 west at Belton (I-14 didn't exist when I was there). Joint Base Ellington in Houston is about 187 miles due east - mostly I-10
I've been through Texas a couple of times (in addition to my brief sojourns at Ft. Hood) and I can tell you there ain't nothing "close together" about the place. It's taken at least two days to get across even the times I stuck strictly to the Interstate Highways.
There are some great things about Texas, but July & August weather at Ft. Hood ain't one of them ... especially if you're the Chemical NCO and are going to spend a lot of time in that suit.
I will make one, and only one comment here. If I were riding a motorcycle, I would wear a helmet, period. (I've heard of someone going over his handlebars and skidding down the road on his head.).
An electric bike, ok, maybe I would wear one on that.
On a regular bicycle, I don't want one. For one, show me a single one that is a) comfortable; b) has a brim to block the sun shining right in my eyes, and one with a brim on the back, to keep rain, or water from the rear tire, from going down my back.
Biking gloves might have helped, once or twice, of the three times I've gone down over the decades.
Robert Prior @ 1318:
Given the current conflict between a farmer's right to repair equipment with the manufacturer's right to force them to pay the manufacturer to repair it, I can see a powerful North American lobby that doesn't want people to know how to unbrick agricultural equipment…
OTOH, I'm pretty sure "Right to Repair" legislation has been passed recently in the U.K. and in several U.S. states, along with something in the U.S. Congress ... also Canada's Parliament & maybe in the E.U.
I will make one, and only one comment here. If I were riding a motorcycle, I would wear a helmet, period. (I've heard of someone going over his handlebars and skidding down the road on his head.).
I once got to example a motorcycle helmet where someone did a faceplant onto a freeway at full speed. He was fully covered up, so he was the one handing me the helmet, with the face shield scored about 5mm deep by the pavement. He would have lost his face otherwise. As it was, his armor saved him and he was just badly bruised. The front fork was torqued about 15 degrees.
Paul @ 1330: Just when you thought it couldn't get any more bizarre: Russia's Foreign Minister claims Hitler was part Jewish.
It seems he was being asked to explain how Ukraine can be "nazi" when its Prime Minister is Jewish. So he explains that Hitler was part Jewish, and "Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews".
Israel is predictably a bit brassed off over this, which is going to be an issue for Russia because up until now the large number of ex-Russian Jews who migrated to Israel has meant that there was some sympathy for Russia there, and Israel was trying to play a mediating role. Probably not so much now.
Hitler may have been "part Jewish" under NAZI race laws ... except the NAZI era German laws that defined "Jewish Ancestry" specifically exempted Jesus Christ and DUH Führer because some newspaper in England had come up with a photo of a grave in Eastern Europe for one "Adolph Hitler" that had come Hebrew writing on it.
More likely, "Wise Jewish people say" 'Sergei Lavrov is full of stinky brown stuff!'
"level, rising, falling, rising-level, and falling-level"
Is that the language or the shipping forecast? :)
And, the other lo-tech solution (inspired by discussion of umbrella hats) is a sunshade to erect over the Jeep when parked, preferably one on legs to allow air flow beneath the sunshade. White or aluminized fabric is best. Drill through the legs to attach a cable so it can be locked to the Jeep to reduce theft risk.
It's a tonal language. The meaning of a word changes with the tones used.
I once spent about five minutes with a Chinese co-worker, trying to pronounce her first name (transliterated as Jue, I think). We finally gave up, and just used her last name like everyone else.
In re claiming that Hitler was Jewish:
So if you commit atrocities, you end up saying absurdities.
Sorry... UK joke ;)
Let me note, by the way, that Chinese is a tonal language - level, rising, falling, rising-level, and falling-level
You appear to be thinking of the Mandarin languages/dialects, most of which which have four tones plus unvoiced, which is almost a fifth tone (to my ear at least).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
普通话 is a Mandarin dialect, based on the Beijing dialect.
Other languages/dialects have differing numbers of tones: Cantonese, for example, has six tones (dark flat, dark rising, dark departing, light flat, light rising, light departing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese
Well, yes, Mandarin. However, since that's China's official language, and pretty much the folks I worked with spoke it, should I not think in those terms? I mean, I shared a cube (really tiny) with a programmer from India in '06. He told me his wife was a translator, who translated books from Hindu into twenty other Indian languages. Which should I think of, in referring to the Indian language?
Ya gotta pick and choose, unless you're a linguist, and then you get to specialize.
That's like I speak fluent C, COBOL, awk, less perl, and a few others you've not heard of (really? Quickjob?), but what should I pay attention to?
I think wearing a helmet in there is a good thing
It's not so much whether you think it's a good idea, it's whether you actually wear one.
I'm aware of the various arguments about bike helmets, and I'm quite happy to hear people say that they personally choose to wear one when they're riding a bike. I'm less happy about the idea that I should be penalised for not doing so, especially from people who aren't also demanding the same penalties be applied to them. Or that their arguments apply only to cycling, rather than to all activities that can result in head injuries.
I also think there's some worthwhile discussion to be had about your feelings towards cyclists travelling too fast and disregarding various rules and regulations, contrasted with your feelings about motorists who do the same thing. Somehow once again it's cyclists need to change their behaviour.
For those of you interested in facts there are some useful links in the answers and comments with this question: https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/42936/is-cycling-in-the-netherlands-without-a-helmet-safer-than-cycling-with-a-helmet/42940
The answer to your second question is undoubtedly yes, even if the benefit is not readily apparent.
You say "undoubtedly" when doubt has already been expressed. And you're only talking about benefits, not costs. Which means the answer will always, necessarily be yes.
In my world it's beyond question that the introduction of mandatory helmet laws halved the number of cyclists. If cyclists has any benefit at all, halving the number therefore reflects a cost. "if I was giving you $10 a week, but switch to giving you $5 a week, have you lost anything?" kind of question.
There's a nice discussion of the consequences of helmet laws: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221825605_Evaluation_of_New_Zealand's_bicycle_helmet_law (note the "51% reduction in hours spent cycling)
This article assumes the halving of numbers: https://theconversation.com/make-helmets-optional-to-double-the-number-of-cyclists-in-australia-4578
I trust you can all see the very careful use of statistics here: "45% drop in cycling fatalities per 100,000 population"... not per cyclist, per total population. Combine that with 51% reduction in cycling and ... ooops. https://www.unsw.edu.au/science/our-research/health-sciences/health-sciences-research-impacts/mandatory-helmet-laws-halve-cycling-fatalities
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221825605_Evaluation_of_New_Zealand's_bicycle_helmet_law
The amazing link-eating machine strikes again
From Randolph AFB in San Antonio...
My old stomping grounds (late '60s). Not a terrible place, but not one I'd like to go back to, either. I'm much happier on the West Coast...
catastrophic, life-changing disasters can arise from trivial decisions. Those of us who've lived through them know that no one wants to hear from us, for fear that bad luck is contagious
Also sometimes you just reach a point where reliving via retelling is something you don't want to do much of anymore, so you save your energy for when it's really required to explain. Not unrelated to my general dislike of explaining myself: people can mishear, make stuff up to make sense of their poorly conceived judgement, whatever, I don't get paid to put them right and I'm learning not to care what they think.
That's like I speak fluent C, COBOL, awk, less perl, and a few others you've not heard of (really? Quickjob?), but what should I pay attention to?
Smalltalk!!! :-)
I also think there's some worthwhile discussion to be had about your feelings towards cyclists travelling too fast and disregarding various rules and regulations, contrasted with your feelings about motorists who do the same thing. Somehow once again it's cyclists need to change their behaviour.
In a place where mountain bikers are supposed to be making way for pedestrians by their own, frequently voiced principles, I'm jumping off the trail to avoid them? On trails that are multiply signed keep out? Those are the people you're defending. Own them.
Then we can talk about the damage they're causing, which has compromised every single preserve set aside for endangered species in urban and suburban San Diego County. And own the fact that their advocacy organization complains bitterly that there are only 1500 miles of trails open to bikes in the county, because they're not all single track and set aside for the use of mountain bikes only. And so they make their own trails on land they do not own, because we're not sufficiently accommodating. Those are your fellow bikers.
Note that I always make room for cyclists on the road, because I remember being a bike commuter and getting run off the road. So yes, I very much can talk about this. Bikers are not a persecuted minority in this part of the world, much as they pretend to be. Most of them are male, white, and middle class or richer.
Well, yes, Mandarin. However, since that's China's official language, and pretty much the folks I worked with spoke it, should I not think in those terms?
The actual name is pǔtōnghuà or Standard Mandarin. The preferred term when I was studying it was pǔtōnghuà.
As a language designator "Chinese" is ambiguous — do you think of Romance as a language (as opposed to a language group)?
Which should I think of, in referring to the Indian language?
If you're talking about the official language of India, that would be Hindi.
Hit submit too soon...
That's like I speak fluent C, COBOL, awk, less perl, and a few others you've not heard of (really? Quickjob?), but what should I pay attention to?
I notice that you didn't say you speak fluent computer!
It helps to think of "Chinese" as analogous to "European" (for both language and culture). Lots of commonality, but also significant differences.
Getting back to your original point, pǔtōnghuà is actually pretty easy to get your ear used to, compared to some other tonal languages — some use 12 tones!
Those are the people you're defending. Own them.
I do. I have been doing that and I will keep doing it. I've said before that I agree that those riders shouldn't be there, and that if they are there they should wear helmets, and they should also give way to pedestrians.
Meanwhile you're insisting that people like you should wear helmets for their own safety. Doesn't matter the rights or wrongs, what the costs are and who pays them, there's a benefit to helmets so they must be worn. That's your opinion... own it.
Wear the damn helmet.
"Smalltalk!!! :-)"
Well, duh. The only actually well designed language.
妈骂马吗 means "did Mother scold the horse?" with each of the four characters pronounced MA, but in different tones, level, falling, low and unaccented respectively. Each character also has the 'horse' radical included, first one combined with the 'woman' radical, captures the meaning of female with the pronunciation ma meaning the same as our English word for Mom, second one has two mouths over the horse component meaning scold, third one is just the uncombined horse component by itself for horse, and the fourth has a mouth left of the horse as a sentence particle indicating it's a question. This shows three separate instances of a component used in a character strictly for its phonetic value without lending any meaning, although the second one might be suggestive of the harsh cursing horses were subjected to during the taming process. That's my guess anyway. All pretty arbitrary stuff, and at multiple millennia of usage, the etymology is obscure enough to invite conjecture.
Far as bike helmets go, I rode for thirty years without one, then in June 2012 a pedal snapped off on the downstroke, I lost balance and bonked my head on the pavement hard enough to open a bleeding cut. Two months later I was dropped and dragged ten feet from a stop sign by an inattentive motorist who missed seeing my headlight, again my head bonked and bled. Then that winter another pedal snapped off, my head bonked and bled again. So I've worn a helmet ever since, I may be a slow learner but I'm not crazy. Yet. Although I do still ride cheap bikes, and I'm sure the helmet's saved my life at least once. I also quit riding in shorts and sandals, my ankle swelled up and ruined a whole weekend for me from that one accident, so it's boots and slacks or I don't ride.
I can attest to a bike helmet being substantially cheaper than the treatment for an ordinary concussion. Got the concussion by a branch falling and hitting me, not riding a bike.
This is what set you off? You're mocking me for not wearing a helmet in a shower because I said that. I was comparing a $20 helmet to several thousand dollars in medical fees.
Please point to any place where I said you should wear a helmet. I made it clear why I wore a helmet, and I made it clear why I think people riding under oaks should wear helmets.
You took it personally.
In the meantime, look at the behavior you proudly support because you think I'm telling you to wear a helmet. You're okay with mountain bikers destroying our ability to keep about a dozen species from going extinct, because you're so upset by the mistaken notion that I said you should wear a helmet.
Is this what you truly value? Pointless destruction if you don't get your way?
Yes the Netherlands is different. They have recognized that the main cause of death and injury to ordinary cyclists (excluding mountain bikers and racers) is cars. Instead of doing something about that (serious cycling infrastructure, laws that put the onus on the motorist) we (in NZ and other places) have helmet laws. They may prevent some brain injuries, but do nothing to deal with all the other injuries and fatalities from bike vs car. BTW I don't believe anyone here approves of hoons on Mountain bikes destroying the environment!
>>As it happened, nobody ever showed up with a huge pile of gambling money.
>That's 'cause over the long term, the house always wins. You might win a little bit, but you'll just keep coming back & losing until you've lost your "winnings" and more
Oh, it wasn't even that reasonable. Users loved reinventing the Martingale system without noticing that it does not, in the long run, work.
Also, despite being on an open source system, nobody ever looked at the code to check if the odds were always constant. They weren't. Betting favored poor people and users trying to get just a little more money during a busy auction (because that's when people need more money). The odds got worse for people who were already wealthy or just passing the time (who don't need more money). It wasn't coded to favor the house, since the house was also the central bank and didn't need to run a profit or even balance the books; it was coded to favor drama. This wasn't a secret or anything - but they didn't ask.
My attempts to suggest the Martingale scheme itself was a problem were rarely listened to.
Looks like the released the trailer for "The Civil War(II)" in USA today ?
Leaked news that the USA is to step proudly into the 19th Century - it's going to get legally & otherwise { As in "On the streets" } very messy indeed. Expect lots of christianity.
- see also P H-K @ 1380
Pigeon
No. That goes:Humber Thames Dover ( Wight Portland Plymouth ) SW 3-4, fair, good.
Rbt Prior
Erm, NO
"Hindi" = Hundustani is/was a combination of two very closely-related Indo-European ( cough, Aryan, cough ) languages of the Gangetic plain. Actually, the Lingua franca of India is English - if only to stop vicious language wars inside the country.
I mock you for not wearing a helmet when you think you should, yes. And as for the selective quoting to pretend I said the opposite of what I actually said, that's on you.
Instead of doing something about that ... we have helmet laws.
Oh hush, you. A 50% reduction in total number of cyclists gave us a 45% reduction in total injuries. The obvious response is to completely ban bicycles because that 100% reduction in cycling would give us a 90% reduction in injuries. The remainder could be dismissed as scofflaws.
(yes, this has been suggested both satirically and seriously in Australia. I'm not sure the serious people understood that the other side were being satirical. I'm going back to campaigning to reopen White Bay Power Station)
Well, duh. The only actually well designed language.
I used to believe that. Then I discovered more languages. At various times, I held similar beliefs about some of them.
However, regarding Smalltalk, I can admire the two year cycle the PARC folks used. Each cycle had three phases: design, build, use. The experience gained from the use phase of each cycle fed into the design phase of the next. They applied this process for a decade before their "release" programme.
Yes, I bought and read the August 1981 issue of Byte. I did the same with the official Smalltalk books.
Now, four decades later, I believe just one thing about programming languages: You don't truely understand a language until you've implemented it, ideally more than once, using different techniques and styles.
Until you do that, you may have opinion, but little evidence to support it. It's amazing what running code teaches us. I find it humbling.
"However, regarding Smalltalk"
Little known fact: Tektronix TDS7xx series of Oscilloscopes run SmallTalk.
Even littler known fact: Reverse engineering SmallTalk in a Tektronix TDS7xx oscilloscope is ... interesting.
I mock you for not wearing a helmet when you think you should
Well I mock myself for wearing a big straw hat walking this morning, when we were out before dawn and home before the sun was high enough to need it. I find these inward spiral arguments distressing, because it's a question of people who mostly agree with each other drawing out excruciating fractal disagreement in a sort of inherited lockstep pattern. There's never an easy resolution, because obviously everybody's right and should not back down under any circumstances, and also everybody's wrong* which means it's even more imperative that backing down is totally unthinkable.
How about I mock myself for dithering so long in electrifying my elderly MTB, having overcomplicated it by wanting a centre motor and a rohlhoff hub, which puts the conversion up around the price of a small car resulting in something the value of.... well, of a 25-year-old bicycle with a go-box added on. Could we maybe take a moment to laugh about that in lieu of arguing about helmets? I'm sure there's even more silliness to be found somewhere here...
* Yeah, now that you mention it, I do have that Buffalo Springfield song stuck in my head and so do you.
I learned Smalltalk in 1985 while working one year for Xexox PARC, managed by Adele Goldberg (co-author of the three Smalltalk-80 books and a contributor to Byte Magazine's 1981 Smalltalk edition, which you mentioned). I spent most of the remainder of my programming career using Smalltalk.
I later worked several years with Ward Cunningham (who - among other things - wrote the wiki used by Wikipedia). He told me that he had spent a lot of time earlier in his life learning and trying different languages, but once he found Smalltalk, he no longer felt a need to try anything new. I feel the same way.
Little known fact: Tektronix TDS7xx series of Oscilloscopes run SmallTalk.
Another little known fact. Around 1988, a new Tektronix division manager ordered all programmers to stop using Smalltalk. This pissed off all of the Smalltalk programmers there, many of whom then left the company (as did I).
The oscilloscope division gave him the finger and continued to use Smalltalk anyway. :-)
Little known fact: Tektronix TDS7xx series of Oscilloscopes run SmallTalk.
Oh, yes. I remember reading about their participation in the release programme. Bare metal programming FTW.
HP coded up their "virtual machine" in C running under Unix. Lightweights!
Later Smalltalks fixed a lot of issues, like allowing the nesting of blocks. JIT compiling and caching at each method call site improved performance.
Decades of hammering and polishing can produce wonders. A small number of languages have benefited in this way. Many more have fallen into obscurity, neglect, and in some cases, slow moving standards. A few languages can be found in multiples of the above sets, e.g. hammered, polished and standardised.
Meanwhile, implementation techniques keep improving. As I've said elsewhere, I have close to a thousand computer science papers cached on my computer. Almost all of them relate to language implementation.
This personal interest was initially sparked by Basic, Forth and Smalltalk. I cut my teeth on Basic, but I've never written code in Smalltalk. I not only wrote code in Forth, I wrote several "homebrew" systems for myself. I can't describe the feeling of writing, running, and developing new code entirely within a software system you've built yourself, booting from a disk and running just above a BIOS.
So maybe I can appreciate a little of what the Tektronix Smalltalk team achieved on their bare metal. Maybe.
Even littler known fact: Reverse engineering SmallTalk in a Tektronix TDS7xx oscilloscope is ... interesting.
I bet it is!
Haha. Well played, that division.
BTW, the Lisp programmers at Harlequin did something similar in the 90s when the company pivoted into the web era and ditched all their development tools. The LispWorks team left and started their own company, which still exists.
So LispWorks survives, but MLWorks and the shortlived DylanWorks did not. While I could, I used versions of all three, with much joy.
I noticed a similar pattern occur in other companies during the "Internet boom", but I had no experience of their products.
Smalltalk's story is one of a transition from "ivory tower" research to industrial quality tool. It may also be a story of survival in a hostile environment.
"It's a tonal language. The meaning of a word changes with the tones used. "
Not exactly. Tones are not modifiers any more than vowels or consonants are. Changing the tone of a syllable produces either a completely different and often unrelated word, or nonsense.
Yes, the ideas behind Smalltalk are radical. I particularly appreciate her introductory article in Byte, explaining the 7 ideas and how they inter-relate. I've not found any other language that has that conceptual beauty.
So I naturally gave serious thought to implementing Smalltalk. My main obstacles were a lack of graphics hardware and sufficient time.
By contrast, I got my first Forth compiler working in just two weeks of evenings. From there, I only needed to add disk access so it could bootstrap the rest of the system. I was using a machine with an ICL terminal by that time.
So the nearest I got to using Smalltalk was Actor, which was heavily influenced by it but used a different syntax and compiled to threaded code. Unfortunately, computers began to hit the "memory wall" at that point, so threadted code - whether Actor or Forth - was becoming a performance killer.
Modern Forth sytems compile to bytecode or native code. Some may even use dataflow analysis. (I have a CS paper about that somewhere in my archive.)
Likewise, modern Smalltalk systems. I've read about Squeak with great interest. That's a proper meta-circular way to do it! Self-hosting all the way down to the machine level, if I recall correctly. This has been done in other languages, too, but I love that Smalltalk is also in that club.
"Expect lots of christianity."
So, at the risk of being a bit controversial, The Roe vs. Wade thing is not as clear-cut as most people think.
In the end, it is all about opinion and beliefs, and let there be absolutely no doubt, that I am firmly and definitively of the opinion that abortion is a decision to be made by the pregnant person, however they prefer to be identiied, and however they decide to make that decision, subject only to a scientifically defined deadline.
With that out of the way:
Alito's proposed opinion boils down to: "This kind of contentious issue should not be decided by us. If you want equal rights for women, a right to abortion, same-sex marriage or whatever: Pass an amendment, that's how we do it in USA."
And he is not wrong.
For the last 50 years, all sorts of groupings have been trying to use the SCOTUS to enact policy, some got what they wanted, from Roe vs. Wade to Citizens United, others didn't.
Some of the judges have repeatedly and increasingly vocally expressed concern, about the division and distrust of the judicial system these kind of decisions foster, (see for instance Stevens' in Bush vs. Gore.)
The fundamental problem is that the entire power-structure of USA is rigged to benefit rich(er) white(r) men.
That is why USA never ratified the "Equal Rights" amendment, which was introduced first time 99 years ago and why USA still have the death-penalty and why police are protected by "qualified immunity", why people of color er much more likely to live in "Industrial" zones and so on.
And the racism is not just confined to one side of the political spectrum, Tom Lehrer's observation was pretty precise: Up to around the seventh decile of USA is clearly racist, but against different targets.
It is therefore no surprise that minorities have tried to use the Supreme Court as a Hail Mary pass, and it is also no surprise that the justices of the court have become increasingly weary of it, and want to get out of that business.
But whatever hopes Alito holds for strong medicine, overturning Roe vs. Wade with a 5-4 opinion, where a lot of the country considers three of the five votes illegitimate, is not going to make anything better.
We are witnessing the first shot in the second inning of USA's civil war, and it is far from given that the union, or the judges, survives this time.
I can't describe the feeling of writing, running, and developing new code entirely within a software system you've built yourself, booting from a disk and running just above a BIOS.
Try writing a BIOS. I still recall that time I wrote a BIOS in Assembler while the Hardware Guy was still wire-wrapping the first prototype. I had a set of candidate BIOS EPROMs ready for him (68000, 16 bit bus so two 8-bit 27256s) for the first power-on test and we got a working terminal control screen first try. The BIOS had a long way to go but it had basic functionality including R/W to the SCSI controller which gave us access to the boot sectors and eventual OS startup.
Lost track of the [solar-panel, RV air-con, Jeep, dog] discussion, but there is a quantity issue to explain that means the answer is most likely: no, that isn't going to work and will probably harm your dog. The reason is just in the numbers. If you were towing a caravan it could be a different story. Explanation follows.
You would never be able to run the aircon direct from solar anyway. To work reliably, it is solar panels -> DC-to-DC-boost/regulator-charger -> batteries -> RV aircon. Note that the vehicle 12V is also a possible input to the charger. You've done this trick with a car fridge (I seem to recall from up above somewhere), so you know this. The thing is that car fridges draw up to around 50W (3A at 12VDC), while the smallest RV aircon I can find draws 600W steady and 1.7kW at startup. The steady draw can be met with a 50A cable from the battery, but you would need a heavier one for the startup load (150A). With a big enough battery bank that's still sort of achievable, if you're willing to cut a hole in the roof of your Jeep for the vent for the rooftop aircon. What I'm not seeing is where there is room for 600W of solar capacity once you've done that: a single 100W mono-crystalline panel is about 40"x20". So we're leaning harder into the battery bank, you would be after 100Ah of battery for every hour you plan to leave this setup running, reduced by how much solar capacity there is room for. It also means that DC-to-DC charger needs capacity to handle the charging current, which would be large if there's solar capacity, raising the price and size a bit. You'll also be leaning on your alternator, potentially reducing its life significantly.
Towing a small caravan would help. First you avoid devaluing your Jeep by cutting a big hole in the roof. Second, there's probably room for the aircon and enough solar panels on the roof, and there's certainly room for more batteries. Tradeoff you're not going to get much current into the batteries from the car over a trailer hookup cable, though you could run some heavy gauge cable with Anderson connectors. And you'd have room for more solar panels on the car roof I guess. Even a small caravan could be converted into a pretty nice doghouse, though you'd need something with enough roof space. An alternative would be a simple box trailer with a cage and a roof: natural airflow and (probably) no need for air conditioning, similarly convertible into a fairly nice dog house.
For me, such adventures include my wife so there's less need to leave a dog unattended for routine things and we generally avoid going places that are not dog friendly.
The first computers I knew all allowed direct access to the bare metal. So it wasn't unusual for my generation of programmers to bypass any ROM code and write directly into video memory etc. I did some of that myself, but I met and befriended many other programmers who did much more.
I also knew people who built their own hardware. Industrial control hardware was not unusual for them. So I was rare in that community, being mainly software-oriented, but still welcome.
So I first saw a 3.5" floppy drive in a 3U rack system someone was holding in one hand. A bare drive was held in the other. Of course he was selling the drives, and they were all sold in seconds. I imagine some, maybe all of those buyers writing their own drivers or adapting existing code.
My own hardware-controlling code was more modest. Twiddling bits in a printer port doesn't really count, even if there's a DAC on the other end.
"The first computers I knew ..."
Had no built in code. You toggled the bootloader in from the switches on the frontpanel, and considerable time were spent to figure out ways to reduce the necessary number of instructions.
This personal interest was initially sparked by Basic, Forth and Smalltalk. I cut my teeth on Basic, but I've never written code in Smalltalk.
I use Cincom's Smalltalk, which is free for personal use if you (or anyone else) wants to learn it. Most people can learn the Smalltalk language in a single day. Learning to effectively use Smalltalk's class library takes years (if not decades). From Cincom's web site:
Cincom Smalltalk is a commercial Smalltalk option for application development, software, web applications, development tools, and deployment.
Cincom Smalltalk adds value and simplicity to application development software, web application development tools and deployment environments.
Instantiations is another commercial Smalltalk vendor, but as far as I know, it doesn't have a free version.
So LispWorks survives, but MLWorks and the shortlived DylanWorks did not. While I could, I used versions of all three, with much joy.
I've programmed in AutoCAD's AutoLISP. Lisp is a nice language, but only if you have a decent editor to manage all those nested parenthesis! :-)
It is therefore no surprise that minorities have tried to use the Supreme Court as a Hail Mary pass, and it is also no surprise that the justices of the court have become increasingly weary of it, and want to get out of that business.
Yet this is exactly what conservatives are using the Supreme Court for right now - to achieve by court decisions what they could not possibly do by legislation. Abortion, gay marriage, school prayers, partisan redistricting - the list is endless.
You might also note that today's Supreme Court is very selective in its weariness... :-(
The first computers I knew all allowed direct access to the bare metal.
Me too. After learning to program an IBM 1620 in college, I moved on to work with Burroughs B2500 / 3500 computers. I could write machine language instructions directly into those computers' memories using buttons on the console. What a blast! :-)
Mine was the Ferranti Mercury, which did not so much allow access to the bare metal as require it. There really wasn't any other form of access.
Statements on subjects:-
Abortion - I am pro-choice. This follows from believing that I have no right to tell a woman whether she should bear a child or not, under any circumstances.
Programing Languages - There is no "best language" for all functions. All languages make compromises, and sometimes this language has better compromises for a specific program functionality than any of the others. It will almost certainly not have the best compromises for some other functionality though.
But the answer is never "visual BASIC" unless the required functionality is just "rapid prototyping".
"Programing Languages - There is no "best language" for all functions." : YES! Generally complexity cannot be removed, it can only be moved around to a place where it is less annoying (with the exception of libraries, if the "angle/opinion" of the library is suited to your domain).
"Yet this is exactly what conservatives are using the Supreme Court for [...]"
You did notice that I explicitly said "minorities" and also gave "Citizens United" as an example, right ?
ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE
Further discussion of the just-leaked US Supreme Court decision is banned from this thread.
I will start a new topic for discussion of the USSC flame-fest in the next couple of minutes.
Michel2Bec: I unpublished your comment because there's a new topic for that.
But the answer is never "visual BASIC" unless the required functionality is just "rapid prototyping".
I have to disagree to a certain extent. Although retired, I recently spent a year writing VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code in Excel for a friend who owns a small mail-order business. VBA has a pretty decent class library, and you can drill down to almost all of Window's APIs. It works pretty well for creating GUIs, too.
"Direct Write" to computers, with no written code.
PDP-11, anyone? That was a LONG time ago.
In the late 90s I saw a commercial development environment advertised for sale ...
It was called "Visual COBOLScript for CGI Programming on Windows 98/NT".
I believe it is now deservedly extinct!
(I can see a use case for it if you're dealing with a bunch of legacy cruft on AS/400 or mainframes and want to add a web interface to your Windows client app, but otherwise ...?)
(I can see a use case for it if you're dealing with a bunch of legacy cruft on AS/400 or mainframes and want to add a web interface to your Windows client app, but otherwise ...?)
Small computer company selling systems to automate the Independent P&C insurance agency. The 80s. I was the tech development lead. We were bought by a top 10 US insurance company. In general they left us hands off at the details. They knew mainframes and really didn't get small computers in small offices.
Periodically a VP or similar would ask use to do something like add mouse support to the 327x terminal emulation on the 25x80 characters screens we used. (At the time our systems didn't ever use mice.) Or switch to "better" leased lines at $10K per month instead of the slow bad dialup. The line for which only cost $50 per month. Others were better at deflecting than I was.
"That was a LONG time ago."
Yes, it is a bit disconcerting when you realize that more than a third of your professional life has become candidate for museum exhibits :-)
I think the last computer I have worked with, which had no code, was the "Membership Card", a RCA 1802 computer which fit in a throat-pastil tin:
http://www.sunrise-ev.com/1802.htm
Thanks to a creative abuse of DMA, you can boot-strap it from a dozen of toggle switches.
Yes, it is a bit disconcerting when you realize that more than a third of your professional life has become candidate for museum exhibits
And another 1/3 is lost to the land of vanished (or swallowed) companies.
Prime, Compaq, DEC, Interdata, Data General, Wang Labs, Tandom, Memorex, CMS, etc... and a few 1000 PC based companies.
"Michel2Bec: I unpublished your comment because there's a new topic for that."
too bad, but I certainly get the reason, this will be a 2000+ comments subject.
Is there any way for me to recover the text ? (probably not, never mind.).
Is there any way for me to recover the text ?
u could try asking bill, he may have scraped it
"Prime, Compaq, DEC, Interdata, Data General, Wang Labs, Tandom, Memorex, CMS, etc... and a few 1000 PC based companies."
Or, as the song goes: "Oh IBM, DEC and Honeywell; H-P, D-G and Wang; Amdahl, NEC and NCR; they don't know anything; they make big bucks per system; so they never want it known; that you can make a mainframe from the things you find at home"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9887joVqT7c
*Prime, Compaq, DEC, Data General, Wang Labs, Memorex, * - Companies from David L's list of 9 that I have used hardware from at work/college.
The dude's been giving everyone hell for the last couple weeks. The dude has already lost one friend over his current bout of ugliness. The dude needs to understand that other people live in a different countries with different laws/politics than his own. The dude needs to understand that some of the people he's addressing in his current round of angry bullshit have ancestors that left Ukraine due to Russian pogroms.
The dude needs to calm the fuckity-fuck down.
(And you should wear a helmet, because it's easy to lose fifty IQ points in one instant of inattention, or due to a badly paved road, or another motorist/bicyclist's errors.)
If I had enough money the first thing I would do is produce a TV show which put the current Supreme Court on trial, because starting with the Senate's treatment of Merrick Garland (and all the business with Thomas not recusing himself from issues which involve his wife) I think the court is no longer legitimate.
If you're in the U.S. you might write to your Congresscritters and tell them to impeach Thomas, at the very least.
I'm only an amateur programmer, but these days you should use Ruby for rapid programming (and it may scratch the "smalltalk itch.")
Sorry. That should read "rapid prototyping" not "rapid programming."
I don't like pissing contests.
I knew how to build computers like that. I could've done that on a breadboard, I'd wanted to. Of course, being a teenager in an age of second generation off-the-shelf microcomputers, I didn't bother. Neither did any other teen I knew. Presumable somewhere there were teens who did, but I never met them.
Now I wonder which would've been cheaper, building or buying. People did that and I sometimes saw the results. It wasn't always pretty, even if the machine worked. One builder told me his first build was so bad, he had to remove everything from the PCB and resolder it. I didn't need to say that it still looked bad, so I didn't. That wasn't his point. It wasn't a contest.
So I quietly wrote code and rarely showed it to anyone. I wasn't competing, and I knew there would always be someone doing better. I knew people like that. That's why I prefered to lurk in the background, quietly listening and watching. Sometimes learning.
If this is a place for pissing contests, I may go back to lurking, or just read something else. After all, reading books (yes, obviously including those books) is what brought me here in the first place. If I'm annoying anyone, I may just shut up. I really don't do conflict.
Ooops! Sorry. Unpublish if necessary.
I have quite a lot of experience with the pro-helmet fanatics. If you point out what I did in #1291, that it is unclear whether helmets actually offer any practical protective effect for most cyclists, and extremely clear that it's close to negligible if they do, and back it up with the actual data and statistics, they do one of two things:
Become abusive.
Completely ignore you and cannying on mouthing their dogmas.
We have seen examples of both in this thread.
If this is a place for pissing contests
we used to have to whittle babbage engine registers out of popsicle sticks
but we were happy, though we were poor
If you do use Ruby, might I recommend reading a book called Metaprogramming in Ruby? Just a small disclosure: Yes, that's me quoted on the first page of the intro. No, I've never written a line of Ruby code. Lisp, yes. Scheme, plenty! Even a little Python.
However, I recall a fun talk at a Ruby conference some years ago. The speaker (Avi Bryant?) claimed to be a time traveller from 20 years in the future. He talked about the features Ruby has in his world, like JIT compiling and method caching at every call site. Then he explained that he wasn't a Ruby programmer at all. He was in fact a Smalltalk programmer, and these were all the features of a modern Smalltalk. However, Ruby was on the same path as Smalltalk, so he was predicting that it too would eventually have these features.
Ruby 3.1 has an experimental JIT compiler, so its not enabled by default. Nevermind, the prediction is becoming reality.
You're absolutely right for most of that - Ruby inherits a lot of stuff from Smalltalk, and does so quite deliberately.
Well, he was mostly right. I make no such claims myself, but I can see the point being made.
Paul Graham has made a vaguely similar point about various languages regarding Lisp. He listed 9 features of Lisp, and suggested that many other languages have the first 8. Feature #9 was the punning of code and data.
However, I think at least one other language also puns code and data without being Lisp. That language is Prolog.
Someone years earlier made the joke that Prolog is a contraction of "Probably the language of God." I couldn't possibly comment.
I mock you for not wearing a helmet when you think you should, yes. And as for the selective quoting to pretend I said the opposite of what I actually said, that's on you.
You know, I actually went back and searched what I said, and I'm still trying to find where I said you should wear a helmet. Did I miss it? So far as I can find, the statement I made about a bike helmet being cheaper than a concussion was my first comment about bike helmets.
What I have found is you telling me I should wear a helmet in the shower and other offensive garbage. And that started when I said that, from personal experience, a helmet is cheaper than a concussion.
You forgot the barometer history reporting conventions in the weather reports from coastal stations. Rising/falling/falling more slowly, etc, with the latter indeed being equivalent to "falling level" in the original post.
Hey, folks, fun news, esp. for you folks from OZ: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/03/flood-and-cyclone-prone-areas-in-eastern-australia-may-be-uninsurable-by-2030-report-suggests
Guy, asking about "Romance languages" and comparing it to what I said is clearly a straw man... that is, unless you can show me on a map where the country of "Romance" is. I spoke about the government-says-so language of China, period. (And, for that matter, ditto for the country of India.)
Yes, it is a bit disconcerting when you realize that more than a third of your professional life has become candidate for museum exhibits :-)
Yup. When I was born in 1944, there was one electronic digital programmable computer in the entire world (thanks, Brits!). Now my digital wristwatch is thousands of times more powerful, and I own probably a half a hundred kinds of computers (everything from my PC to bike computers, oven, refrigerator, scales, microwave, TV, etc., etc.)
"...the smallest RV aircon I can find draws 600W steady and 1.7kW at startup.... First you avoid devaluing your Jeep by cutting a big hole in the roof"
JBS has already explained (replying to me) that he doesn't care about cutting holes if need be, and has also provided a link to a unit he is considering. That unit is said to draw between 20A and 60A (rounding up), depending on how hard it's going (= 240W and 720W @ 12V), to provide up to 2.25kW of cooling capacity (exactly in line with the usual 3-to-1 rule of thumb, haha).
A very quick poke on Amazon suggests that if you trust the ratings it ought to be possible to cover that using around a grand's worth or a bit less of kit (albeit at UK site prices), including panels, frames, cables, and box of tricks, and need about 4m2 of panel area. Of course "Jeep" is a category rather than a single item and the subcategory of that category which you get in the US is probably not the same as the subcategory I'm used to seeing over here, but even the ones here seem to come big enough that such an area would not be out of the question, especially as it's for stationary use only so it can do things like overhang the edges and/or tip up at an angle to catch the sun better. (They are also big enough to carry one man and his dog plus as many extra batteries as the suspension will cope with. And also of course the panels will act as a sunshade and themselves reduce the cooling capacity needed.)
Meanwhile I have now done my own numbers on the ideas I and others have had involving ice, and basically it comes out to be so shit it's not worth typing any mo
So given the aspects that JBS does and doesn't care about and the amount of engineering he's prepared to do, it looks like he's pretty much at the stage of making sure all the bits do actually do what they say they do, and if that works out OK then cracking on with it.
I have to agree. I have never had a pedal snap off, not even when I was a bike messenger, back in the seventies, riding Korean-made bikes that my manager told me cost $80 for 10 bikes! And they came with aluminum cotter pins on the cranks (which lasted two weeks).
Here is Doctor Pigeon's peerless prescription for whatever it is that seems to keep descending on this thread.
Wait... design, build, use? Not Agile? Not whatever, but... waterfall? Oh, how terrible .
Actually, sitting here, I realized how to finally explain why I dislike Agile: it strikes me that it's a great way... for management to change their mind constantly, and never have any pushback to the effect of "that will cost $x more budget, and take x more weeks to do".
Once I started working (and one of the two languages I used at that job was... PL/1), I worked long and hard, until I finally got C, and I was happy.
So, no, you're wrong, smalltalk isn't it, neither is anything else... I LIKE C, and trying to tell me I shouldn't rates "bzzzt, thank you for playing".
I didn't really feel like a sysadmin till I had two things under my belt: for one, for several years, I had to hack a vendor's code (Rocket seomthing was the controller card), because they stopped updating it, and I had to make one or two changes and recompile.
Every time that system got updated.
The other was when I had to hack an 8000 line or so .ppd file, to get our new 44" poster printer to work with Linux.
Lisp... y'know, about 20+ years ago, someone (it might have been on usenet) announced that they'd hacked into the Pentagon, and found the code for SDI (aka the misnamed "Star Wars"). They said it was all written in Lisp. Now, for national security, he couldn't post the entire code, but he did post the last five lines of the whole thing.
(You know what they were, right?)))))))))))))))))))
I wouldn't touch ruby. We had one project where I worked the last ten years before retiring, and they'd written it in ruby. For one, it was amazingly fragile. For another, I could only use ruby on rails 1.91 (IIRC) compiler, and NO OTHER COMPILER.
In the early days of aluminium replacing steel, broken cranks were common, and broken stems, seatposts, brake levers and brakes not rare. I avoided as much of that as I could, but broke a steel crank once; on inspection, it had a flaw that covered 50% of the area.
The official language of China is pǔtōnghuà, or in English Standard Mandarin. The PRC doesn't refer to it as Chinese.
Similarly, Mandarin is the official language of Taiwan.
Similarly, the official language of the national government of India is Hindi.
"While Hindi is the official language of the central government in India, with English as a provisional official sub-language, individual state legislatures can adopt any regional language as the official language of that state. The Constitution of India recognizes 23 official languages, spoken in different parts of the country, and two official classical languages, Sanskrit and Tamil."
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Languages_of_India
The point I was trying to make is that people don't 'speak Romance' — they speak French or Spanish or Italian or… (ie. one of the Romance languages) — which you obviously know. Similarly, people don't speak Chinese, they speak one of the Chinese languages.
Hey, folks, fun news, esp. for you folks from OZ... [re: flood and cyclone prone areas in eastern Australia may be uninsurable by 2030]
Sounds like the same problem that Florida will be having around that time.
From Wikipedia "The Romance languages, less commonly referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the 3rd and 8th centuries. They are a subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language family. The six most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (489 million), Portuguese (283 million), French (77 million), Italian (67 million), Romanian (24 million), and Catalan (4.5 million[citation needed]). Among all the Romance languages, including national and regional languages, Sardinian, Italian and Spanish are together the least differentiated from Latin, and Occitan is closer to Latin than French. The most divergent to Latin is French, which was heavily influenced by Germanic languages. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin."
In short "the Romance languages" are a group of languages with common linguistic roots, not geographic roots. End of.
So, no, you're wrong, smalltalk isn't it, neither is anything else... I LIKE C, and trying to tell me I shouldn't rates "bzzzt, thank you for playing".
I've used C, and I avoid it whenever possible. I dislike the weird ways it converts one data type to another - without any warnings! - and I've read that C programmers typically spend about half their time tracking down memory leaks (Smalltalk has no pointers, so no memory leaks).
paws
Did you forget Romansch ??
Is there any way for me to recover the text?
I'm posting it as a comment, attributed to you, in the next thread (about 90 comments in).
I recently read a biography of John von Neumann, so this info is still fresh in my memory.
While Colussus was a programmable digital computer, it wasn't a stored program computer. The first two such machines were built in 1952 (US and UK) and were operational within months of each other. Alan Turing and John von Neumann had been in communication for many years, needless to say. Von Neumann's wife, Klára Dán, wrote the first code for the US machine.
Going back to something earlier, I got the 1949 "HOW AND WHY IT WORKS" from the U.K..
It's smaller than I remember, but I've already found the two illustrations that I can absolutely tell it IS the book I remember.
I don't remember who posted the link, but Thank you whoever you are.
Ahh. That's very old code now. However, that's a poor excuse for releasing fragile code. Most unsuitable for serious work, but maybe recent versions have improved.
"broke a steel crank once; on inspection, it had a flaw that covered 50% of the area."
Hehe. Halving the area that carries the load is also what was behind me breaking something "unbreakable": split the sun-wheel of a Sturmey Archer in half, because the pin that holds it to the axle was too short and only engaged the gear on one side.
The Smalltalk development cycle is closer to research (which makes sense considering where they were) than software development. They designed, built and used running code. Each phase was distinct. AIUI each cycle was distinct - and named. Smalltalk 72, Smalltalk 74 etc. That's nothing at all like I understand agile programming.
Note also Dennis Ritchie's history of the development of C, which was much closer to the Iterative and incremental development approach. I recall Ritchie making this point on Usenet, talking about how they tried different things until they found something that worked well enough. The result wasn't perfect and they didn't reach it immediately. (I remember this point being particularly important to Ritchie.) They seemed to be using a process that comes from research, which makes sense considering where they were.
I'm with whitroth on this one; I use C for preference, unless I'm writing for some platform that compels something else (eg. browsers/javascript).
I don't find there to be a problem with "weird type conversions"; I'm probably more likely to want to make use of them, and what I do despise are the modern "try and make C into not-C" attempts/proposals to change things so you can't. EC has in the past posted various examples of simple operations such as everyone does all the time which according to the standards are not actually defined to give the answers everyone expects, and these are certainly weird, but nevertheless those operations still do get done all the time because on a given platform you do know what answers to expect, so in practical terms it's not a big deal. It certainly doesn't do anything as annoying as javascript needing to be bashed over the head with a hammer every other statement to stop it doing fucking stupid things like turning numbers into strings when you're trying to do arithmetic on them, or treating 8-bit character data as 16-bit.
I don't spend much of my time chasing memory leaks. Having to handle all the memory allocation yourself can be a pain in the arse at times, but it does also mean that you always have in mind where memory is coming from and where it's going away again, so you know what's going on and it's not too hard to find what you've done wrong if one of the going-away bits is missing. You also don't get problems like memory usage ballooning because the garbage collector is keeping things alive that it doesn't yet realise you're not going to use any more, so you have to code around its behaviour without any actual documentation on what that behaviour is, or the garbage collector suddenly realising it's about time it cleaned all the mess up and everything else grinds to a halt while it does it. Since I started writing C on DOS and optimised for keeping the data flowing in an uninterrupted stream (because it made the disk and tape drives so much faster), such things were important; and I still think that way even though I've now got gigs instead of K.
Keeping track of pointers going astray is often cited as a difficulty with C, but I don't think that not using C would help with the underlying problem. They go astray because I've cocked up the logic in my head. I can still cock the same things up in other languages, so the result is still an error. Both C and other languages permit the error to manifest not as the program halting with an error message, but as it continuing to run and producing an answer based on wrong data; but languages which try to "be helpful" are more likely to have a variety of interesting ways to achieve the latter in place of the former and make it harder to figure out where things are going wrong.
And then very often I find myself wanting to do things like bit-twiddling, or crunching lots and lots of numbers in a loop, so C is more suited to it than anything except assembler while being easier to write. (And it's easy to mix the two for the bits that really matter.)
kiloseven @ 1358: And, the other lo-tech solution (inspired by discussion of umbrella hats) is a sunshade to erect over the Jeep when parked, preferably one on legs to allow air flow beneath the sunshade. White or aluminized fabric is best. Drill through the legs to attach a cable so it can be locked to the Jeep to reduce theft risk.
I've had a similar idea in my original "design" ... https://www.harborfreight.com/11-ft-4-inch-x-18-ft-6-inch-reflective-heavy-duty-silver-tarpaulin-47676.html
Attached underneath the roof rack so I can just roll it out when I need to. That should solve the theft problem. Looking at the AirCon unit, I'm probably going to have to elevate the roof rack in order to fit it in underneath (and achieve the required clearance. I don't think there's enough room for the roof rack to sit forward and have the AirCon unit mounted behind it the way they do it on those high-top van conversions. I'm going to have to fit the AirCon and then install the roof rack so it clears the unit.
PS: My new silver sunshade umbrella just arrived.
Yer whaa? The Manchester Baby and Edsac I were stored-program computers and came online in 1948; even the Lyons Corner House (*) LEO came online in 1951.
(*) Yes, really. The only computer ever made by a chain of tea-shops. You couldn't make it up.
I don't spend much of my time chasing memory leaks. Having to handle all the memory allocation yourself can be a pain in the arse at times, but it does also mean that you always have in mind where memory is coming from and where it's going away again, so you know what's going on and it's not too hard to find what you've done wrong if one of the going-away bits is missing.
This may be true for small programs, or even some medium-sized programs. But for large programs - with millions of lines of code - memory leaks can be a real nightmare. Somebody leaves an invalid pointer dangling around (in a global variable, for example), then hours (or days) later, somebody else tries to use it, corrupting some pieces of unrelated data. Finally, hours (or days) after that, a third person tries to use the corrupted data and the program crashes (or even worse, spreads the data corruption to other pieces of data, and keeps on running).
I have dealt with this kind of problem in a large assembly program (a 1970s main-frame operating system), and I can tell you from personal experience that it's not fun! :-(
No, I copied and pasted the paragraph from the Wikipedia original, without editing it other than removing reference markers.
You also don't get problems like memory usage ballooning because the garbage collector is keeping things alive that it doesn't yet realise you're not going to use any more, so you have to code around its behaviour without any actual documentation on what that behaviour is, or the garbage collector suddenly realising it's about time it cleaned all the mess up and everything else grinds to a halt while it does it.
This may have been true decades ago, but it's certainly not true for today's commercial Smalltalks, which typically use generation scavenging backed by mark-sweep.
This isn't true of all object-based programming languages, of course. I know nothing about Java, for instance, but I can easily crash some Visual Basic systems by creating circularly-linked objects and then destroying the pointers to them, leaving them to accumulate forever in memory. Apparently there was no mark-sweep capability in its garbage collector.
You would think that the polished garbage collectors in Smalltalk would have served as a shining example for later object-oriented languages, but I guess not invented here still rules the world... :-/
If the assembler was competently written, and you have a decent programmable editor, it's no harder than for moderately decent C or C++. I have done all of them. Don't get me started on memory leaks in LISP ....
AlanD2 @ 1367:
My old stomping grounds (late '60s). Not a terrible place, but not one I'd like to go back to, either. I'm much happier on the West Coast...
I've visited San Antonio since I retired. The times I was at Ft. Hood I didn't have time for a visit. The farthest I got off post was Kileen.
I liked San Antonio & I'd like to visit again ... probably a brief stop-over before heading further west. Most of the places in California I'd like to visit are along the eastern edge (excepting Palomar & Mt Wilson).
Some of the west coast places I'd like to visit further north are out on the coast itself, but mostly my travel plans for the south-west range within 400 miles of Grand Canyon Village in Grand Canyon National Park (Yellowstone being about 600 miles). There's so much I want to see and I have so little time left.
There used to be magazines articles that taught programmering, passing on insights, recommending books etc. The K&R C book was one of those books. The 1st edition, I mean.
The issue of holding onto objects after they're no longer needed isn't strictly a GC issue. Consider when a C program uses a conservative GC. The C programmer must still take care to ensure objects can become garbage. Storing link to a 'dead' object in a 'live' object will always prevent that.
Compilers can address this issue using region analysis, closure analysis and other techniques, but no GC can solve the halting problem. That's always a problem for the programmer.
This bites undisciplined programmers even when there's no GC anywhere in a program. I'm not saying anyone here is undisciplined, but such programmers certainly exist. When shared online, we can even read their code.
The Manchester Baby and Edsac I were stored-program computers and came online in 1948;
Ahh, yes. I just checked the biography, "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann", Ananyo Bhattacharya. Apologies to the author; I clearly got the date mixed up with the later MANIAC machine. Thanks for the correction.
even the Lyons Corner House (*) LEO came online in 1951.
Oh, I know. It gets endlessly talked about in the UK. ;) Rightly so.
Scott Sanford @ 1379:
Oh, it wasn't even that reasonable. Users loved reinventing the Martingale system without noticing that it does not, in the long run, work.
Even with my poor math skills that sounds like a dumb idea.
There are some very crude compilers, interpreters and GC implementations out there. The high quality implementations tend to be commercial, but there are some exceptions. Different markets, different users, different prices.
The same has long been true for C compilers. ISTR the first C compiler had to run on a machine with only 8K of RAM. The B compiler generated 16bit threaded code. Threaded code will perform very poorly on modern hardware, but so will any code written before we began hitting the memory wall. This applies to compiler technology, like closure analysis, code generation, and of course all memory-based storage management.
BTW, 8K is the low end of a modern L1 cache. Any working dataset larger than that will suffer. Modern code generators arrange code around cache pages, but can do nothing about your data. A lot of work can go into runtime library quality, but a library can do very little to address the problems in the code that use it.
This bites undisciplined programmers even when there's no GC anywhere in a program. I'm not saying anyone here is undisciplined, but such programmers certainly exist.
No undisciplined programmers exist on Slashdot, where everyone is a much better than average programmer and they never make mistakes. Ever.
Everyone fucks up. Accept that and instead of just saying "memory leaks and buffer overflows happen, oops.", look at ways to prevent them happening to begin with. There are some second-generation computer languages that have as a core premise that programmers are stupid code-monkeys thrashing at a keyboard at random and shipping code when it compiles with all the safety switches disabled. Rust is one I've heard good things about although a lot of "disciplined" programmers don't like the idea of a mere compiler-slash-dev environment telling them their perfectly written code is a fucked-up mess and a danger to humanity if it ever got released into the wild.
AlanD2 @ 1401:
I own and maintain (since 1978) the last operable 1620. Here's a DropBox link to a video excerpt of it assembling a program.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nd0l739l9c8144k/20160716_1620_Lights_Assembling_SPS_Deinterlaced_Slower.mp4?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xwf961vxkw5v8zy/About_20160716_1620_Lights_Assembling_SPS.txt?dl=0
I can't convey how tasty it is that your post mentioning the 1620 is post number 1401.
I will not get on a bicycle without a helmet. Even so, I've lost some IQ points. I shudder to think what state I'd be in if I hadn't worn it.
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Everyone fucks up. Accept that and instead of just saying "memory leaks and buffer overflows happen, oops.", look at ways to prevent them happening to begin with.
Thus languages like Smalltalk, which don't have pointers... :-)
Damian @ 1395: Lost track of the [solar-panel, RV air-con, Jeep, dog] discussion, but there is a quantity issue to explain that means the answer is most likely: no, that isn't going to work and will probably harm your dog. The reason is just in the numbers. If you were towing a caravan it could be a different story. Explanation follows.
One thing to keep in mind is this is all at the gedankenexperiment stage: Schrödinger's A/C. I'm not going forward with it UNLESS/until I figure out a way that satisfies me I am keeping my dog safe.
People leaving dogs & small children in cars is a BIG problem and I think we need solutions that don't involve "educating" stupid people about the dangers. Because there will always be stupid people who just won't get it.
I'm trying to come up with a Murphy's Law resistant solution. Maybe if I can, then someone else will take the idea and make a better solution.
All good considerations and I've already thought about most of them & how I can solve them.
You would never be able to run the aircon direct from solar anyway. To work reliably, it is solar panels -> DC-to-DC-boost/regulator-charger -> batteries -> RV aircon. Note that the vehicle 12V is also a possible input to the charger. You've done this trick with a car fridge (I seem to recall from up above somewhere), so you know this. The thing is that car fridges draw up to around 50W (3A at 12VDC), while the smallest RV aircon I can find draws 600W steady and 1.7kW at startup. The steady draw can be met with a 50A cable from the battery, but you would need a heavier one for the startup load (150A). With a big enough battery bank that's still sort of achievable, if you're willing to cut a hole in the roof of your Jeep for the vent for the rooftop aircon. What I'm not seeing is where there is room for 600W of solar capacity once you've done that: a single 100W mono-crystalline panel is about 40"x20". So we're leaning harder into the battery bank, you would be after 100Ah of battery for every hour you plan to leave this setup running, reduced by how much solar capacity there is room for. It also means that DC-to-DC charger needs capacity to handle the charging current, which would be large if there's solar capacity, raising the price and size a bit. You'll also be leaning on your alternator, potentially reducing its life significantly.
I wouldn't say never. Those are the numbers I'm trying to work out. How much battery do I need? How many panels? How big do the wires need to be? How do I charge the batteries? ... How do I fit the installation into my Jeep? CAN I fit it into my Jeep?
The best information I've been able to find so far suggests the system would provide 2-3 hours of adequate cooling off of a 200aH battery system. (Not including the protection offered by a sunshade as suggested by Kiloseven ... which I'm already designing to add to the Jeep whether I do the auxiliary A/C or not.)
I know the current alternator/battery in the car isn't adequate to run such a system, but there are high output replacement alternators available for my Jeep & DC/DC chargers to isolate the "cooling" batteries from the car battery. Initially, I'm thinking of running the "cooling" batteries off such a system.
My current roof rack is 50"x38", so I think I could design a lid to fit that could hold enough solar panels. Four 40"x20"-100W panels can be hinged or fitted with a slide so that they shrink down to 40"x40" in the stowed position.
The unit I discovered when I began researching this almost fits into a standard 14"x14" roof vent (actual footprint is 14"x14.5" with a cutout on the side (3" hole saw) for the power cables). Cutting the hole in the roof of the Jeep isn't that big of a risk. It's already 20 years old and depreciated about as much as it's likely to get. A working "solar powered" air conditioning setup might even in fact IMPROVE the resale value (not that I care, because resale value is a problem for whoever inherits the Jeep whenever I die).
Towing a small caravan would help. First you avoid devaluing your Jeep by cutting a big hole in the roof. Second, there's probably room for the aircon and enough solar panels on the roof, and there's certainly room for more batteries. Tradeoff you're not going to get much current into the batteries from the car over a trailer hookup cable, though you could run some heavy gauge cable with Anderson connectors. And you'd have room for more solar panels on the car roof I guess. Even a small caravan could be converted into a pretty nice doghouse, though you'd need something with enough roof space. An alternative would be a simple box trailer with a cage and a roof: natural airflow and (probably) no need for air conditioning, similarly convertible into a fairly nice dog house.
That's another alternative I've investigated; particularly the DIY "teardrop" styles. I haven't yet found a design I want to build, but it would include A/C, possibly run off of "shore power", although the same solar + battery setup 4x100W panels & 200aH along with an AC/DC charger would work ... that's really all just engineering the parts to work together. What I'm not looking to do is build a "doghouse" where I'd leave him alone all day long. I just need something that would keep him safe if I needed to be out of the car for an hour or so (photographing a sunset in a National Park ... or going into a museum.
I'm also thinking about finding an old work van and fitting it out for camping; tow the Jeep to use as a runabout while the van stays parked for several days. But I'd still need a way to keep the dog safe in the Jeep when we were away from the van.
For me, such adventures include my wife so there's less need to leave a dog unattended for routine things and we generally avoid going places that are not dog friendly.
I don't have a "wife", so it's just me and the dog. I do try to avoid NOT dog friendly places as much as possible, but it's impossible to do it 100%.
I own and maintain (since 1978) the last operable 1620.
Wow!
I can't convey how tasty it is that your post mentioning the 1620 is post number 1401.
Yeah, I noticed that too. IBM's main business competitor to the scientific 1620. :-)
But I could do some nice stuff on the 1620, with its 10-bit (if I remember correctly) addressable entity (Byte+ :-). In college, I wrote programs to compute Pi and E to 1,000 digits, which was impressive on a machine with only 20K of memory. The 1620 did arithmetic by table lookup, and the division of one 1,000 digit number by another 1,000 digit number took about 5 minutes. I later wrote a base-3 lookup table, so you could do any kind of arithmetic from binary to base-10.
The real pain in the rear was the slow typewriter and the extremely slow paper tape reader and paper tape punch. Not a system I'd want to go back to - that's for sure!
> I mock you for not wearing a helmet when you think you should
You know, I actually went back and searched what I said, and I'm still trying to find where I said you should wear a helmet.
Let me re-write that without using the ambiguous "you":
"I mock Heteromeles for not wearing a helmet when Heteromeles thinks Heteromeles should".
This comes from you saying you've had a concussion from a falling branch, but not confirming that you wear a helmet when in your favourite oak forest. Forests being notorious sources of branches and all that.
Yes, clearly many programmers are denying the obvious: we're all animals with finite cognitive abilities. (Put another way, we're fallible beings). That may also be a part of how so many of us fail to see the problem. Our brains are not good at dealing with this level of complexity.
Those are the numbers I'm trying to work out. How much battery do I need? How many panels? How big do the wires need to be? How do I charge the batteries? ... How do I fit the installation into my Jeep? CAN I fit it into my Jeep?
The brutal answer is: it depends.
Air conditioners vary a great deal between models, and the specs are rarely entirely accurate. Cheaper ones have significant startup demands and that can easily determine the minimum possible size of the rest of the system. Which means your power demand is basically unknowable.
I suggest starting with the aircon and buying one that looks plausible, then measuring the inrush current and peak power once you have it. If it's 12V power it off the Jeep while the engine is running. Buy either a plug in power meter (AC) or a clamp meter (DC, one with power measurement) and measure away.
The other thing to keep in mind is your maximum run time. If you're prone to going shopping for 4-5 hours at a time you'll need more energy than if you just want one hour. Either way balance the battery storage vs the panels, because you won't have enough panels to power the AC so the longer it runs the more battery you need.
I'd suggest LFP batteries and a Victron 12V battery charger (designed to buffer between the alternator/starter battery and the storage battery). Initially buy enough battery for the startup surge into the AC. That might mean 200Ah or more just to get the hundreds of amps it takes to start the compressor in the aircon.
Then fit your panels and install the MPPT charge controller.
Once you have that basic system working you can sit the Jeep out in the sun and watch it do the thing. Turn on the AC and see how much net current it draws when it's running flat out. That tells you how many amps you need for whatever your maximum shopping trip + delays time is. That amps time hours is your required battery capacity.
Cable size comes from currents and there are calculators online telling you what voltage drop you get from a given length of various wire sizes at the current you care about. Find an imperial one that gives you inverse inch sizes. You're probably only going to pull 50A or so out of your alternator so 1/4" diameter wire (4 gauge) is likely fine for a couple of metres. Same from solar panels to MPPT and MPPT to battery. If you need 200A to start the AC that's going to make the wire from battery to AC thick, and thus expensive. So you want those two things close together. Also, crimping lugs onto that wire is a semi-skilled job and really requires a proper crimping tool ($US100+) so you likely want to just buy those wires with lugs on them. Smaller wires you can crimp with a $20 tool.
Also, fuses to protect your wires. Cheap car audio style thermal circuit breakers are OK for small currents, but for the battery-aircon wires you will be better off with a proper fuse and just suck up the pain of replacing it if you ever do that (or pay ~$US100 for a proper pair of DC circuit breakers). But the ~$20 breakers for up to 50A are usually fine, if they don't work you're going to burn the wire out without killing your battery. Or, you know, just use fuses and be done with it.
If it's any help here's a shot of my little off grid playground. Note that the bus bars and car circuit breakers you won't really need because you're only running one thing off your setup, where I'm running the inverter plus a pile of small random DC loads (USB chargers, lights, fans etc).
Note that the fat cables are ones I bought, made to length. You can't see the actual 200A fuse under the strip of packing tape, but it's bolted to the battery terminal and then the cable bolted to the other side.
A dog cooler would probably not have the inverter (assuming 12V AC), just a cutoff switch for the solar panels, the MPPT, another cutoff, the batter, then some fat cables with fuses leading to the AC.
https://imgur.com/a/1HVVcyN
The shunt is a "smart shunt" that is wired into a little display panel that tells me state of charge, power in/out and so on. It's a couple of hundred bucks from Victron, or you can use an app that talks to the MPPT instead.
Bottom right of the MPPT is a little pair of wires leading to the inverter. That's the "programmable relay" that is set to turn off when the battery voltage is low. That connects to the "remote switch" input of the inverter and turns it off when the MPPT thinks the battery is low. The inverter also has a low voltage disconnect, but I figure two cutoffs is better than one, and I have 20cm of wire lying round so why not.
You can also see a USB-C lead, that's for charging my phone off a 12V USB charger thing that's above the photo. They're cheap enough and have PD (power delivery?) out so I can get 30W into my phone via USB rather than the 5W it gets from the USB-A connector on the computer.
Let me re-write that without using the ambiguous "you": "I mock Heteromeles for not wearing a helmet when Heteromeles thinks Heteromeles should"This comes from you saying you've had a concussion from a falling branch, but not confirming that you wear a helmet when in your favourite oak forest. Forests being notorious sources of branches and all that.
This is getting amusing, so let me explain why your mockery still hasn't landed.
First, google "Quercus dumosa." (Quercus is the genus for oaks). If it were a eucalyptus, it would be a mallee. I'm working around some of the giants of the species, which get upwards of 8 meters tall. It's chaparral, not forest (think tall kwongan or short mallee scrub). When I walk under it, the clearance from the ground is about 2.5 meters plus or minus most of a meter.
Quercus dumosa wood is hard enough that the local Indians make their equivalent of boomerangs out of it.
So do I need a helmet? No, it would just get knocked back into my neck if I didn't duck far enough, so it actually increases my chance of injury, turning a trivial head scrape into a helmet-mediated rabbit punch to the base of the skull. Branches could only fall a matter of centimeters, but in over a decade of frequent visits, I've never seen a fall. The mountain bikers are the major threat, because line of sight is on order 10 meters or less and on the downhills, they're moving fast.
Do bikers, traveling under these oaks at up to 30 mph downhill, need helmets? Yes, but they're hitting the branches horizontally, not vertically. If they don't duck far enough, contact with a branch shreds the top of their helmets.
Do I need a helmet when I'm walking under taller trees? Not really, because I now know what most of the widowmakers look like, and I'm actively look for dangerous branches and avoid them. I got a concussion about 30 years ago, not in San Diego, when I tried to hang about 40 lb of food off a tree branch at night. I was new to camping. Branch broke, in part from me hauling a rope up and over it without a pulley and doubling the strain. A helmet might have helped a bit, but being less completely clueless would have been safer and weighed less.
Now, please modify your mocking attempt accordingly.
Visited San Antonio once. Loved the River Walk. The Menger Bar was cool.
Seeing the Alamo in downtown San Antonio was kind of weird.
Moz @ 1474:
The brutal answer is: it depends.
That's why I'm still in the "figuring things out stage. Measure twice, cut once (or measure three times just to be sure ... make that four times just to be damn sure).
Air conditioners vary a great deal between models, and the specs are rarely entirely accurate. Cheaper ones have significant startup demands and that can easily determine the minimum possible size of the rest of the system. Which means your power demand is basically unknowable.
I suggest starting with the aircon and buying one that looks plausible, then measuring the inrush current and peak power once you have it. If it's 12V power it off the Jeep while the engine is running. Buy either a plug in power meter (AC) or a clamp meter (DC, one with power measurement) and measure away.
Actually those are numbers I can determine BEFORE I start buying equipment. There are YouTube videos where someone has done that test & posted it, so I can work things out on paper to see if they're feasible BEFORE I start trying to assemble the system. And I can get specifications that tell me how much room I need inside the vehicle for the components and I can figure if I have enough room.
Charging the battery bank off the Jeep while I'm driving is part of the "plan". I've already mentioned after-market high power alternators are available. Also the A/C doesn't need to run when we're both out of the vehicle, but the panels can charge the batteries whether the A/C is in use or not.
The other thing to keep in mind is your maximum run time. If you're prone to going shopping for 4-5 hours at a time you'll need more energy than if you just want one hour. Either way balance the battery storage vs the panels, because you won't have enough panels to power the AC so the longer it runs the more battery you need.
As noted I'm looking at about 2.5 hours run-time with about half an hour reserve and the 200aH battery bank does appear to have sufficient capacity for that under even worst case conditions.
I'd suggest LFP batteries and a Victron 12V battery charger (designed to buffer between the alternator/starter battery and the storage battery). Initially buy enough battery for the startup surge into the AC. That might mean 200Ah or more just to get the hundreds of amps it takes to start the compressor in the aircon.
Then fit your panels and install the MPPT charge controller.
I'm currently looking at a pair of 100aH LFP batteries vs a single 200aH LFP battery (cost, physical size ... what happens if a battery goes bad - one of the batteries or the ONLY battery) and various charging solutions to integrate the vehicle alternator with solar panels so that I get solar when I'm parked (whether the A/C unit is running or not) and charging from the alternator when I'm driving. Again it's just a matter of learning what's going to work together and how to connect it up correctly.
And I've got a lot of experience LEARNING how to do that sort of work both from my years in the military and the years I worked for the alarm company.
Once you have that basic system working you can sit the Jeep out in the sun and watch it do the thing. Turn on the AC and see how much net current it draws when it's running flat out. That tells you how many amps you need for whatever your maximum shopping trip + delays time is. That amps time hours is your required battery capacity.
Cable size comes from currents and there are calculators online telling you what voltage drop you get from a given length of various wire sizes at the current you care about. Find an imperial one that gives you inverse inch sizes. You're probably only going to pull 50A or so out of your alternator so 1/4" diameter wire (4 gauge) is likely fine for a couple of metres. Same from solar panels to MPPT and MPPT to battery. If you need 200A to start the AC that's going to make the wire from battery to AC thick, and thus expensive. So you want those two things close together. Also, crimping lugs onto that wire is a semi-skilled job and really requires a proper crimping tool ($US100+) so you likely want to just buy those wires with lugs on them. Smaller wires you can crimp with a $20 tool.
BTDT-GTTS. Again, I'll have already worked out needed wire gauges before I begin acquiring components. The thing I will need to test (and I WILL test them) is whether the components meet specification.
And again wiring things up is something I have YEARS OF WORK EXPERIENCE doing & I still have my tools (sufficient up to 1/0 gauge wire).
Also, fuses to protect your wires. Cheap car audio style thermal circuit breakers are OK for small currents, but for the battery-aircon wires you will be better off with a proper fuse and just suck up the pain of replacing it if you ever do that (or pay ~$US100 for a proper pair of DC circuit breakers). But the ~$20 breakers for up to 50A are usually fine, if they don't work you're going to burn the wire out without killing your battery. Or, you know, just use fuses and be done with it.
So down to cost ... Here's the thing. It's like "Sam Vines Boots". I learned long ago to INVEST in good quality components, tools & equipment because they will last longer & be safer in operation than the cheap shit. So I'll usually use the $100 breakers even if I COULD get by with the $20 breakers.
I say "usually" because there have been circumstances when it turned out the $100 component was not better than the $20 component. Somebody tried to fool me into paying $50 for a $20 pair of boots ... so you have to do your research and make sure you're getting the quality you're paying for.
Mainly I'm kind of irked this problem (car gets too hot when parked and is dangerous to dogs ... and/or kids) hasn't already been solved and I can't just buy a turnkey solution.
Only happened to me twice, ten years ago, never since. It was actually the metal arm (crank I guess it's called) that the pedal connects to, for transmitting force to the big gear that the chain rolls on (sprocket?) Anyway I looked at the broken off part expecting to see a clean, possibly jagged but nevertheless sharp metallic fracture and instead saw what appeared to be an irregular, mottled surface that must have been made out of smelted powder. What probably should have been a part cast from liquified metal left to cool and solidify seemed to have been pressed and formed like particle board out of metal filings that were sintered together by heat or high current. The fact I got two different cheapie bikes where this happened likely means it happened to others as well, and quite possibly led to product liability lawsuits against the retailer. That would have gotten their attention in time to correct the specifications for their next season's order.
I think you're on the right track, actually. I'd suggest instead of one 200Ah battery, 3 x 100Ah batteries will give you extra capacity for startup load. It would have an implication in specifying the DC-to-DC charger, you'd want one that can manage the charge across 3 batteries in parallel. Most 100Ah batteries support 50A loads. If money isn't the issue I'd go with LiFePO4 instead of AGM, because lifting AGM batteries gets old fast and you get more or less twice the running capacity for the same numbers. You'd want 1/AWG cable with 150A (probably Anderson) connectors (and a 150A breaker) from the battery bank to the AC. Then 8/AWG with 50A connectors (and 50A breaker) between the solar panels and the charger, and 8/AWG cable from the charger to the batteries. You could also wire a voltage-sensitive relay and 8/AWG cable from the Jeep's 12V if you wanted to do the high output alternator thing (assuming the alternator just does a steady 14.4V). That would ensure the batteries are charged after any longish driving leg. Note that's straight into the vehicle's battery circuit (add the positive to the clamp at the battery and the negative to the chassis)... you can only get 10A from a cigarette lighter socket.
Even if you can't supply the entire load from solar, in that case, you still get a few hours.
I'd go for plain old lead-acid batteries, because you pay four or five times less money for the same capacity. Also, it's probably easier to find half-decent charge controllers and things to go with them.
" what happens if a battery goes bad - one of the batteries or the ONLY battery"
And I trust you are also thinking, hard, about what happens when (don't say if) one of the other components goes bad.
JHomes
I've found the chargers that do AGM* these days also seem to do LFP for no extra cost. It's not a 4x factor with price versus capacity, because you can only run the SLA batteries down to around 50% discharge, so a 100Ah SLA battery only carries a usable 50Ah, while with the lithium types you get what it says in the box. What is a 3x factor is weight, roughly: 100Ah AGM batteries are around 30kg, while 100Ah LFP batteries are around 10kg. For price, it's I don't know how to get exact equivalences... I can find a high quality AGM battery for around A$400, though there are cheap ones starting around A$200... a 100Ah LFP starts at around A$800, but I'm not sure which AGM to compare it to. I think that performance-wise it's probably at the higher end.
*That's Absorbed Glass Mat... most deep cycle/marine SLA batteries are AGM these days.
JBS, possibly a dumb question, and sorry if its answered up-thread, but why not just get a collapsible dog cage and leave your dog in it outside the jeep under a sufficiently robust sun shade? Lots fewer failure modes to worry about, and simple to arrange.
So, on the Smalltalk thing, some responses to a few messages...
I've been using, teaching, and creating Smalltalk for nigh-on 40 years now. I helped to start the IBM Smalltalk product group when I was an IBM Research fellow, and I managed the engineering department at ParcPlace Systems, long before it got bought up by Cincom, when it was still CEO'd by my old friend Adele Goldberg. I worked for Alan Kay several times.
The Smalltalk-72/4/6/8/80 cadence of release was not any deliberate master plan by the way, it was just the result of how long it tok to cycly through worthy new versions when the same group were making the hardware as the software. In later years, Smalltalkers devised the fairly interesting Extreme Programming idiom, and a colleague at ParcPlace pretty much started Agile. Not quite my favoutire approach, but still.
AlanD2, we must surely have met?
I've developed 5 different virtual machines; these are the runtime support systems for languages like Smalltalk, java, javascript, Ruby, Python etc. Mostly that involved a great deal of very tricky C code, with some sneaky assembler included. I learned to really dislike C. I mean, dead text in a gazillion files, run it through a tedious compile/link/retry process, rinse and repeat endlessly? Ptui. These days in Squeak Smalltalk we write the bulk of the VM code, including all the machine instruction generation and cache management, in Smalltalk, so we can simulate it and prove that it works before exporting to C code to create the VM executable. When that runs it generates the object code on the fly, an advanced descendant of the original scheme Deutsch & Schiffman developed for ParcPlace circa 1983. It's much, much, faster now. Probably the most developed VM around right now is the javascript one, partly because a huge amount of money gets thrown at it, and partly because it is developed from a VM originally meant for a version of Smalltalk that supported type-hinting as a performance booster.
I had a Tektronix Smalltalk machine in the very early '80s; first a 4404 (a 68k sorta-unix box with a massive 1Mb of ram) and then a 4406 which was a vast, heavy, 1980s 21" monitor device. I had to buy a car to be able to schlepp it around to teach courses. The performance of those was around 25% of the then benchmark machine, the Xerox Dorado. That was a mind boggingly expensive research machine based on ECL chips custom made by the group at Xerox that made the Alto - the same small group that invented Smalltalk. When I started working with ARM to make a Smalltalk for that, the first ARM machines managed maybe 35% Dorado, which was significantly faster than any other commercial machine at the time. The ARM3 (which introduced a huge 4Kb cache, whoopee!) hit a fantastic 85%. We also made the Active Book (http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/53902/Active-Book/) as a Smalltalk machine.
After that I joined ParcPlace, moved to silicon valley and managed the engineering team for a while. Then assorted research labs, making three more generations of proto-iPad and writing a medium-hard realtime OS in Smalltalk. So, yes, I've written BIOS level stuff and worse. And no, garbage collection does not inevitably stop and block you for seconds at a time; in particular for Squeak that would have been a disaster since it had to support Alan Kay's very dynamic media systems.
After dear ol'GW ruined things I moved north to VI and carried on making Smalltalk. I have several systems up on the ISS, and a couple of other satellites. Smalltalk runs the machines that make most chips. Major financial systems are Smalltalk. Scottish Power uses my implementation of MQTT in Smalltalk to run... something or other that controls the grid, apparently in some US states as well.
Several languages have claimed to be 'Smalltalk good bits without the problems' without ever actually being better, nor really even articulating what exactly 'the problems' were. Java is an excellent example of totally failing to get the point, almost as much as C++. Ruby... just no. Almost as nasty as Python, which I have had to spend some time fixing up a bunch of code in recently. Blech.
Performance wise Squeak Smalltalk benchmarks at sometihng like 1000X Dorado for $50 these days. On a nice new Apple M1 ARM system it hits more like 20,000X apparently - I don't have one yet. Sure, if your application is crucially bound to the speed of looping over integers, C is probably faster. In 40 years I haven't met many cases where the overall performance is so constrained to one activity.
Apologies for a rather tall wall of text, but no apologies at all for enthusing about Smalltalk.
If money isn't the issue I'd go with LiFePO4 instead of AGM
That's changed in the last couple of years, especially in the US. I think you'd only go lead batteries if you can get them for free, and in a mobile application like this where you have to pay to move them you probably shouldn't accept them even if they are free.
The (possible!) up front price premium is compensated for by the reduced size and weight (the whole "you need twice the capacity of lead" means twice the volume as well as however many times the weight). LFP also derate less with increased temperature, and efficiency is much higher and less affected by temperature. When you're charging off dino squeezings efficiency matters. Especially if JBS has to buy a bigger inverter to power the thing.
If money isn't an issue the obvious answer is lithium titanate, more expensive up front but 20,000+ cycles rather than the pitiful 2,000-odd you get from LFP (or 200-500 from AGM if you really want to go there)
Most 100Ah batteries support 50A loads.
LFP you can expect a 2C discharge these days if that's your priority. They'll almost all do 1C, and generally will charge at least half as fast as discharge.
One useful resource is Will Prowse on youtube grinds through this stuff and his DIY Solar Forum. Very US centric but for JBS that will work just fine.
Actually, might be worth looking at a plug-in charger rather than an oversize alternator. Depending on your use case even overnight charging using a high-efficiency power station rather than a portable infernal combustion engine might do 99% of the work at much less cost (up front and ongoing). It's just a question of whether you really need those 1-2 hour drive+charge cycles.
(bigger alternator, not inverter. Sorry for the thinko)
And even in Australia LFP at retail is roughly the same price as lead. But it's much more variable and right now the global supply chain problems mean that if you can get LFP here it's priced to reflect a shortage on top of the price increase from China (more or less doubled in the last 6 months I think)
Well my thought on loads is that you can scale the batteries and cables to handle the inrush current, and still come out even with the inputs scaled to handle average load current. IF 2 x 100Ah LFP can handle 150A inrush, then it can support a 50A load, indefinitely if you have 50A charging input and for an extended period if the input under reaches a bit (with those numbers matching the supplied specs on the small Dometic AC I had in mind... if it handles 200A all the better, 1/AWG and big breakers all the way).
The sort of charger I had in mind supports both vehicle and solar inputs (i.e. has a built in MTTP), like this one, which falls a little short at 40A.
And thanks for the link, looks quite handy :).
If he only needs 150A surge then I'm pretty sure most 150Ah LFP will do it, and many 100Ah. But he's not going to get 50A for 2.5h that way :( So 200Ah or 300Ah of whatever seems most reasonable... and that's C2 starting surge.
The real win here is JBS being able to find the exact unit he's looking at in the hands of a youtuber with a meter. That answers a whole pile of questions that us peasants in Australia normally can't, because the stuff we get here is usually a special Australian edition and we just don't have enough population to pay people $100k+ a year to play with random gadgets in front of a camera. Will Prowse is at the "I bought a new car because it looks cool" stage of youtubing... meanwhile Alan (Off Grid Garage) is getting the occasional BMS for free but not a lot of actual money.
The US seems to have got to the point where rack mount batteries are cheaper than DIY for home use, and the boxed "12V replacement" style ones have been there for a while. But stacking those to make a home setup is more annoying than just slotting 5kWh/48V units into a rack and bolting connector leads to the bus bars.
Apologies for a rather tall wall of text, but no apologies at all for enthusing about Smalltalk.
Hey, I enjoyed it! I doubt we ever met, as I worked exclusively for Xerox PARC NW, in Beaverton, Oregon, 1985-86. My mentor there was Paul McCullough, who had worked earlier on the Tektronix implementation of Smalltalk. (We had worked together in the '70s for Burroughs Medium Systems in Pasadena, CA, and later around 1990, we worked for Wyatt Software in Portland, Oregon, with Ward Cunningham.)
When I left PARC, Paul was working on a project to dynamically move Smalltalk code (or possibly bytecodes) around the internet as needed, sort of an early version of Java. I think Smalltalk could have kicked Java's rear end if that project had been pursued.
No apologies for me, I appreciate it all. Thanks.
Question: We know that cruise missiles can be brought down, before they reach their targets. Why/how is this not happening in Ukraine? Is it simply that they do not (yet) have the correct kit for this, or is it something else?
An isolated data point.
Russia fired 18 missiles at Ukraine electrical sub stations 2 nights ago. 8 were shot down. 10 hit targets.
A side comment on an msNBC story yesterday.
One useful resource is Will Prowse on youtube grinds through this stuff and his DIY Solar Forum. Very US centric but for JBS that will work just fine.
Now that I look at it, very much so. This thread looks (superficially) very pertinent.
However, I think at least one other language also puns code and data without being Lisp. That language is Prolog.
Someone years earlier made the joke that Prolog is a contraction of "Probably the language of God." I couldn't possibly comment.
Someone wrote and sang a filk song about God coding in Lisp.
I've got a copy somewhere but apparently not on this machine, so I can't tell you much more or share a link.
Going back to something earlier, I got the 1949 "HOW AND WHY IT WORKS" from the U.K.. It's smaller than I remember, but I've already found the two illustrations that I can absolutely tell it IS the book I remember. I don't remember who posted the link, but Thank you whoever you are.
And thank YOU for reminding me of The Way Things Work, which I've finally reacquired. As memory told me, Volume I was the good stuff and Volume II was mostly superfluous - but it's nice to have them back on the shelf.
"Question: We know that cruise missiles can be brought down, before they reach their targets. Why/how is this not happening in Ukraine?"
This is happening. Latest statement by the Ukraine's armed forces says that they've shot down 87 cruise missiles. I've even read about a cruise missile being shot down by a MANPAD. It's just that there are a lot of cruise missiles being fired at targets in Ukraine and a limited amount of air defence systems available.
"Just ask the poor bastard of a neurosurgeon who is on-call at the nearest emergency hospital how much more time they've spent with their family since the helmet laws came in."
This is an excellent example of a base rate fallacy.
For every neurosurgeon that gets to spend more time with their family because of helmet laws there are five cardiosurgeons who have got more work to do, because of all the guys who are riding around in cars and getting heart attacks.
Commuting to work by bicycle reduces all-cause mortality by 20% compared to commuting by car (for cardiovascular diseases, it's a 24% reduction), according to a cohort study by Patterson et al in Lancet Planetary Health. There are plenty of other studies which indicate a similar relationship, with varying effect strenght (I remember one with 40% of reduction in all-cause mortality).
Therefore, a reduction of bicycling in favour of sitting in a car for one to three more hours a day kills fuckloads more people than bicycling accidents. And if you mandate helmets to lighten the workload of a single neurosurgeon, you give a lot more cases to multiple cardiosurgeons.
But then, to our primate brains "bicyclist hit by a car, bicyclist had no helmet, bad bicyclist!" is an obvious connection to make while "lazy guy in a car had a heart attack" is not an obvious connection to make.
Which is why we have science. It's a pity it has not caught on yet.
Moz, do you plans include a monitoring system so that you can keep track if anything starts to go wrong in your Jeep and you can hurry back, or possibly have some features so that you can fix things remotely?
It's JBS building the system, I'm just making suggestions.
My system doesn't have a remote monitor because it doesn't run anything important when I'm not here. If the fans and lights in my bedroom don't work when no-one is home it doesn't really matter.
I don't have a car, or a dog, or even a goldfish (there's a bin chicken that spends a lot of time in my garden if that counts?)
whitroth@1439
"I don't speak Mandarin. Nor any other dialect of Chinese."
Nor do I. My point was simply that in languages that use them, syllabic tones are an intrinsic part of the word, just like its consonants and vowels. Changing the tone doesn't just slightly change the meaning, it creates a totally unrelated word.
When I taught about self-checking programming, I pointed out that it can save time (as well as increase reliability) and that, in such programs, most of my errors were picked up by MY checks.
The longest essentially error-free program I ever wrote was c. 200 lines, back in the days of 8-hour turnaround for jobs (and testing).
Sigh. Can we drop this (preferably not on someone's head)? The statistics are quite clear - the only activity for which bicyvle helmets would almost certainly be a benefit are working up ladders. All others are marginal, and they might even be harmful. Even for that, you need a bicycle helmet that is more than just a skid lid - i.e. the first, not the second:
http://sambatop10.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/71CIxac3qXL._SL1500_07.jpg
https://green.harvard.edu/sites/green.harvard.edu/files/field-feature/explore_area_image/bikehelmet_0.jpg
[[ changing markup links now to work with updated markup version - mod ]]
BTW, the Lisp programmers at Harlequin did something similar in the 90s when the company pivoted into the web era and ditched all their development tools. The LispWorks team left and started their own company, which still exists.
So LispWorks survives, but MLWorks and the shortlived DylanWorks did not. While I could, I used versions of all three, with much joy.
Weeeeelllllll.... I worked at Harlequin from 1990 to 1997, and my eye-witness testimony is that it was sadly the development tools which killed Harlequin, not a pivot into "the web era".
Basically the boss (Jo Marks) bet the firm on DylanWorks, which took too long, cost too much, and for which there was basically no demand (because Dylan missed the opportunity to become Java). More and more of the company's resources were poured into DW, until it killed the whole business. So the company went into administration and was re-formed as Global Graphics around the long-standing cash cow product (ScriptWorks, a PostScript "RIP", i.e. interpreter/renderer, very widely used in the high-end commercial printing world). Global Graphics is still going strong, and still employs many of the ScriptWorks people from the Harlequin era.
At the time, LispWorks was making enough money to pay for itself, so two of the LispWorkers (Martin Simmons and Dave Fox) formed LispWorks Limited, acquired the rights, and continued to develop and market it. LispWorks Limited is also still going, based in the same building where I work.
I spent approximately 1994-1997 at Harlequin working on the Memory Pool System, building garbage collection and other memory management components of various company products. Two of us from that group left Harlequin a few months before the implosion to form our own consultancy firm Ravenbrook. We were intrigued to be approached by an ex-colleague, a year or so after the wreck, who said that Global Graphics had been approached by somebody at a Swedish firm called Configura who was interested in using the MPS in their language system, but Global Graphics didn't want the business. So we bought all the rights to the MPS for £1, made a deal with Configura, and have developed and supported it ever since (well, not me since 2019 because I've now moved on again).
MLWorks had not ever paid for itself, but had no meaningful value to Global Graphics, and the two of us at Ravenbrook had also both worked on it at Harlequin, so - mainly for nostalgia purposes - we also acquired the rights to that, also for £1, and put it out as open source. Maybe one of these decades I'll get around to doing a 64-bit port of it. So in some sense it does survive. I'm glad you liked it!
I have seen memory leaks in languages without pointers :-) In Fortran (before 1990), you had to emulate them for problems that were inherently pointer-based. SNOBOL was written in Fortran 66, for example.
My point was simply that in languages that use them, syllabic tones are an intrinsic part of the word, just like its consonants and vowels. Changing the tone doesn't just slightly change the meaning, it creates a totally unrelated word.
An analogy I heard when studying Mandarin was to change the vowel in an English word. So bed/bud/bad/bod/bid are all different words, just as má/mà/mǎ/mā.
Many thanks for the detailed inside story. That's fascinating.
ISTR Harlequin also had some print tech. Am I recalling that correctly? If so, do you know what happened to it? I'm always sad to see anything lost.
Everyone I know who hates Ruby mentions Ruby on Rails... maybe the programming language itself isn't the problem.
I'm not suprised that there are memory leaks in pre-90s Fortran code. More modern Fortran is another matter entirely.
The first CS book I read, "Fundamentals of Data Structures", mostly ignored dynamic memory allocation. There was a chapter on it, but most of the algorithms were written in a Fortran-like language, so references to record "fields" looked like array references.
You can no doubt imagine the effect this had on memory usage. If this was typical of the coding style in Fortran, it raises the question: "Why wait so long before fixing the language?" I'm guessing the answer is political, but I don't know. My generation mainly learned and used very different languages.
As for that book, apparently the authors later revised it, producing C, C++ and Pascal versions. The ACM blurb suggests there may be other revisions, so perhaps the code was updated to use the dynamic memory features of these languages.
I don't know if you can still buy a new copy.
Para 3 - Disclaimer: I have never written a FORTRAN program.
By the time Fortran 77 was a thing (actually April 78) there were literally hundreds of specialist libraries for use with the base compilers. "Fixing the language" would have taken until after the Fortran 90 standard was published in 1991 (ISO) and 1992 "ANSI).
Update: I found a free PDF version of the original. Hurrah! (Warning: Google Docs.)
BTW, this is the only CS book I've found with anything to say about ethics. "APPENDIX B: ETHICAL CODE IN INFORMATION PROCESSING" is the ACM Code of Ethics.
This is now available on the ACM website, of course, but where could you discover this document four decades ago if you were a clueless teenager? How many schools taught this? How many teach it now? How many globally?
The Fortran language and Fortran code is very definitely not my world. I have some small knowledge in the compiler tech. E.g. the lexical issues, the aliasing issues etc. I also aware of some libraries, like BLAS. I've even read some of that code. However, my interest is purely academic. So I appreciate any additional information.
Regarding the 77/78 thing, I've noticed a similar pattern with some language reports, where the number in a name may be more of an aspiration than publication date. Unless off-by-one errors can creap into document names? ;)
Thanks.
I've read Fortran(77) too, mostly with the intent of re-writing the functionality In Ada 83.
That said, my point about the $languageYY dates and slippage was mostly about how hard "fixing" a programming language with a library base is going to prove.
Leszek Karlik @1497:
Commuting to work by bicycle reduces all-cause mortality by 20% compared to commuting by car (for cardiovascular diseases, it's a 24% reduction), according to a cohort study by Patterson et al in Lancet Planetary Health. There are plenty of other studies which indicate a similar relationship, with varying effect strenght (I remember one with 40% of reduction in all-cause mortality).
That's interesting, and no doubt perfectly correct, if people are encouraged to exercise, and do exercise, a reduction in various morbidities would be the expected outcome.
[SNIP]
Which is why we have science. It's a pity it has not caught on yet.
So what sort of "science" are you envisaging that equates, "Being required to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle", with, "I will not wear a helmet, I will only drive my car"??? Inquiring minds long to know!
Maybe in a culture where both drivers and cyclists aren't equally feral - such as the Netherlands - it would probably have a great impact, indeed may already have had such an impact.
Not happening here in Oz, though. Too many cyclists think they are a protected species, and too many drivers aren't sufficiently aware of what is happening outside the cabin.
And it's only gotten worse since both mobs returned to the roads post-COVID.
Although I haven't yet this year had an unlit black bike being ridden by a rider dressed in black try to run me off a cycle path, and abuse thoroughly-illuminated me for the privilege, but it is only May.
Of course, it wasn't even January 3rd before a Toorak Tractor decided that the lane my car was travelling in was completely empty, and, what are indicators for, anyway??
On another note entirely, has anyone else noticed that Teslas seem to have taken over from BMWs as the, "Car least likely to have indicators installed"???
The language definition might be printed in 1977. But it could take a while for the first compilers to come out.
For example, ALGOL 68: a draft report was published in February 1968, the official Report was published in January 1969 and the first compiler (for a slight subset of the language) was available in July 1970. The first "full" implementation of the language came out in 1974.
Martin Rogers@1508:
"Why wait so long before fixing the language?"
One reason would be hardware, or the lack of it. Mainframes of that period simply didn't have enough physical memory for it to be worth using dynamic allocation. Most of the processing time would be spent swapping data in and out of a few static structures containing individual database records, and the external storage would quite likely be tape, not disc. For an illustration of the horrors, Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" volume 3 has a 4-page fold-out spread illustrating 10 kinds of sort on six tapes.
Also, not just data but chunks of program were being swapped in and out, while keeping track of which COMMON blocks each subroutine needed. IBM put a lot of work into the OS/360 Linkage Editor IBLDR to support this.
@ 1486 & @ 1487: "That's changed in the last couple of years, especially in the US. ... And even in Australia LFP at retail is roughly the same price as lead."
Strange how it apparently varies so much from country to country. In the UK lithium is a lot more expensive, and if anything it's got worse over the last couple of years.
My own use for high-capacity rechargeable batteries is for my mobility scooter, and with mobility scooter batteries they seem to be keeping lithium ones down to about the same price as lead-acid by making them a quarter of the capacity (so they then go on tiddly indoor-use scooters rather than "long-distance" outdoor road ones). My motive for occasionally looking at them is basically the thought "it's lithium everything these days, surely they ought to be getting cheap by now", but so far there's no sign of it happening.
For a mobility scooter, there's no point getting them unless they are cheaper than lead-acid. The ability to accept charge rapidly would make it possible for me to build a replacement motor controller that would give better energy recovery going down hills, but I doubt I'd seriously notice the difference. On the other hand, smaller size and weight for the same capacity means I'd be using the extra space to put ballast weights in. The cornering stability is marginal as it is, and less weight down at chassis level is definitely Not A Good Thing.
It has to be said that the upright bipedal posture does make the design of personal vehicles an extra pain in the arse. The kinds of resting positions it makes available and the expectations it causes for height of eyes above the ground are in opposition to the requirements for going round corners. A properly personal vehicle - ie. one that's of similar size to you - needs to have two wheels and lean into bends, or else have you sitting with your upper body much closer to the ground than most people are happy with to get the C of G height down. Both of these are particularly unsuitable options for the typical mobility scooter user, and "tell people to be careful they don't tip it over going round corners" isn't really much better. And even people not in the "mobility scooter user" category don't want to lean, so the usual answer is simply to make the track wider, and making it wide enough makes the vehicle two people wide so it isn't personal any more. The result is that everyone uses cars because people are the wrong shape.
What "period" are you talking about?
Lisp had been using garbage collected dynamic memory since 1958.
ATLAS had paged virtual memory in 1962.
ISTR Harlequin also had some print tech. Am I recalling that correctly? If so, do you know what happened to it? I'm always sad to see anything lost.
Harlequin had two main divisions: SP and EP. SP was "Symbolic Processing", which started out with just LispWorks and then added MLWorks, DylanWorks, and an assortment of related technologies. EP was "Electronic Publishing", which was ScriptWorks, the PostScript raster image processor (RIP) - and, again, an assortment of add-on and spin-off systems. ScriptWorks was the cash cow, as it could render high-resolution full-colour PostScript faster and cheaper than the Adobe products, and rendering PostScript was (and still is) at the heart of a trillion-dollar industry. So Global Graphics rose from the ashes of Harlequin with ScriptWorks and a lot of the EP engineers. Today they will still sell you a variety of print technologies under the "Harlequin RIP" brand, which is ScriptWorks in a different dress.
ATLAS had paged virtual memory in 1962.
To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, just because you COULD page didn't mean you really wanted to do so. Given the disk drives back then and for a few decades performance was abysmal. But at least you COULD do big memory things.
The alternative to paging wasn't not paging.
The alternative to paging was doing it by hand.
Or just not running the program.
Oh, I appreciate the hazards of changing an existing language. There are claims that the Fortran committees have made great effort to avoiding breaking existing code.
Without doubting or commenting on these claims regarding modern Fortran, we might still acknowledge that this is not always the case with language designers. Based on public comments, there seem to be painful memories in some other language communities. Perhaps the programmers complaining are a minority. Perhaps orphaned libraries are rare exceptions. Some issues may still be contentious.
A passive voice is used here to indicate an extreme lack of partisanship. ;)
Agreed re: biking. To merge it into the current conversation, I'll note that a skid lid, being basically a ventilated chunk of styrofoam, is probably most useful as head insulation on hot days.
It also repels cops who are looking for cheap tickets to write, at least in some jurisdictions, and virtue-signals that you're just a duffer trying to go somewhere on a bike, rather than a daredevil to watch out for.
In the latter regard, a skid lid is sort of like the Chevy Bolt, a blocky little car that signals "middle-aged nerd," unlike the Teslas, where the Elon Musk cultists faddishly uninstall their turn signals and drive like they used to own BMWs.
Now I want to reread some documents by C.A.R. Hoare. Thanks.
"What "period" are you talking about?"
Very roughly, 50s to mid-60s. The period when FORTRAN was being developed. By IBM, for use on IBM hardware - which didn't even support a hardware stack, let alone dynamic memory.
The first computer I ran Fortran on was an IBM 1130, which had (IIRC) 16k units of memory, though I can't remember whether that was words or bytes.
"Lisp had been using garbage collected dynamic memory since 1958." "ATLAS had paged virtual memory in 1962."
But there weren't many ATLASes around, and IBM (maybe because they were obsessed with the overlay-linker concept?) didn't offer dynamic address translation until 1965.
Yes, there were better things around, but I was suggesting an answer to the specific question "Why wait so long before fixing the [FORTRAN] language?" which can't be answered without reference to IBM politics.
ISTR reading about a Fortran compiler that used overlays for the different kinds of statement.
There's also that old self-modifying code trick used on machines lacking stack hardware. The CS book I mentioned earlier shows how an array could be used as a stack when traversing a tree.
This may then be another source of memory "leaks", but perhaps it was easier back then for programmers to look at all the code in a program and tune it to the machine. Programmers were still doing this in the 90s on DOS machines.
I consider Knuth's CS books essential reading, but I may be in a minority.
Programmers were still doing this in the 90s on DOS machines.
Ugh. Context: tuning code for limited memory space, on personal computers.
The practice continues today in the embedded world, of course, for obvious reasons.
Excellent! I'm very happy to learn that.
Thanks.
You really HAVE misunderstood! All arrays in Fortran up to 77 were static, with an explicit number of elements; no leaks at that level were possible. The memory leaks were in programs that got around those restrictions to do their own memory management (including pointers, garbage colection and more).
Fortran 90 has a low number of memory leaks mainly because you don't have to use pointers in many important cases where most languages do. But it is as prone to them as any other language when you DO write-pointer-based code.
The point here is that a certain proportion of such leaks are due to errors in the logic of the code, and it doesn't matter WHAT facilities the language does or does not have.
"But there weren't many ATLASes around, and IBM (maybe because they were obsessed with the overlay-linker concept?) didn't offer dynamic address translation until 1965."
There were plenty of other virtual-memory computers shortly after ATLAS, too, IBM blew luke-warm on virtual memory intil the late 1970s, but that's not the reason; it was partly an outdated view of memory efficiency and partly because of (real) RAS concerns.
"Yes, there were better things around, but I was suggesting an answer to the specific question "Why wait so long before fixing the [FORTRAN] language?" which can't be answered without reference to IBM politics."
Spot on.
Paul @ 1484: JBS, possibly a dumb question, and sorry if its answered up-thread, but why not just get a collapsible dog cage and leave your dog in it outside the jeep under a sufficiently robust sun shade? Lots fewer failure modes to worry about, and simple to arrange.
Not a dumb question at all. He's an adorable little fellow & I think it's likely someone would kidnap him if I did that.
I always thought of Smalltalk as a kind of insular language but from your comment it looks like I missed a lot of stuff where it is connected to the outside world. I seem to be using python & Labview for everything but Smalltalk would be an interesting option. If you just wanted to connect, say a stepper motor, is there any information out there to do some simple test like that?
Nancy Lebovitz @ 1498: Moz, do you plans include a monitoring system so that you can keep track if anything starts to go wrong in your Jeep and you can hurry back, or possibly have some features so that you can fix things remotely?
I think Moz has mentioned he has solar at home, but I'm the one who's trying to configure a system for my Jeep.
I don't know what form the "monitoring system" will take yet because I still don't know what equipment configuration I'll be using, but most of what I've looked at so far has smart phone apps for monitoring & remote control.
Also understand I'm nearing the end of the "Can I even do this?" phase in my planning, just at the beginning of the Ok then, HOW do I do it? phase.
... and there's still the real possibility it will be so overwhelmingly difficult I'll end up not doing it at all & just give up on the idea of traveling.
Another setback: I just found out that Currituck County will not be issuing season passes for the 4WD beach north of Corolla, NC (where wild Spanish Mustangs roam free on the beach). They're only issuing "10-Day" passes & you have to apply on-line for the 10-day segment you want a pass for ... and there will be only 300 passes for each 10-day segment. Looks like the first few 10-day segments are already sold out.
Summer is the best time to photograph the horses. I've always bought the season pass because I don't know when I'll be able to go down to the beach.
So it looks like I won't be photographing wild horses this year, at least not until after Labor Day (although I maybe could squeeze in a trip before the season starts on Memorial Day Weekend).
There's also that old self-modifying code trick used on machines lacking stack hardware.
This reminded me of Cobol's ALTER statement, which was used to change the target of a GO TO statement. A real nightmare to debug - almost as bad as using corrupted pointers... :-(
The point here is that a certain proportion of such leaks are due to errors in the logic of the code, and it doesn't matter WHAT facilities the language does or does not have.
But any language that permits these kinds of leaks makes it difficult for programmers to debug those inevitable logic errors. Programming productivity in languages without pointers tends to be a lot higher...
1513 - Look up "Toorak Tractor" on Wikipedia and it auto-redirects to "Suburban Useless Vehicle" (SUV). Have I translated the 'Strine correctly?
1521 Para 1. I believe that to be entirely true.
1533 - ? The only time I ever used a GOTO in COBBLE was to force it into letting me have subroutines.
The first computer I ran Fortran on was an IBM 1130, which had (IIRC) 16k units of memory, though I can't remember whether that was words or bytes.
Words. Of real live CORES. And you could tell if your program complied with our without errors by the sounds of the 250K hard drive head stepper system.
But there weren't many ATLASes around, and IBM (maybe because they were obsessed with the overlay-linker concept?)
Fred Brooks talks about this. He was in charge of the IBM 360 software when that was done. He was not happy about it. At all. But marketing made memory the profit add on for the 360 line so all IBM software had to be able to run in very small memory configurations (which the customer could then upgrade later) which led to the link loader hassles that lasted for decades.
Check out this amazingly cheesy and upbeat music album release by Apple Computing in 1987.
https://boingboing.net/2022/05/04/listen-to-the-deeply-cheesy-apple-boogie-music-cassette-released-by-the-computer-company-in-1987.html
The only time I ever used a GOTO in COBBLE was to force it into letting me have subroutines.
I used Cobol for 4 years in the Air Force. I can't remember ever writing a GO TO statement.
Eh? ALL Turing-complete languages permit the sort of memory leak I am talking about. It is also not about the absence of pointers but about suitable features to implement requirements that do not inherently require pointers but are usually implemented that was (Fortran ALLOCATABLE arrays, for example).
I don't know how many algorithms/programs that were inherently pointer-based you have implemented in languages that do not have them, but it's a Right Pain, and you end up making more mistakes than if you had pointers. Consider an updatable graph structure (i.e. with the ability to add and delete nodes and links).
I've worn a cycle helmet since the late 1980s, when a friend managed to break his helmet during a road accident... and survived without significant injury. That was early-twenties me convinced (a work colleague tried to persuade me that helmets were pointless - but he cycled with earphones plugged in, so I didn't take his opinion seriously).
It's surprising to see assertions that the evidence doesn't support helmet efficacy, because there's plenty of evidence which states the opposite (BMJ article link). Here's a decent contradictory summary, although I quite agree they're unlikely to include anything that doesn't support their argument:
https://www.headway.org.uk/news-and-campaigns/campaigns/cycle-safety/#cycleHelmetEvidence
Youthful me also learned to ski bare-headed - well, woolly-hatted - and now I wouldn't ski without a helmet (in some places, you're not allowed to). It does have the advantage of keeping your ears warm, although after this January I can vouch for it being a PITA to get a mask on and off for cabin lifts / trains... (Switzerland, so there was a railway to the top of the mountain).
No, I'm not going to insist that every cyclist wears a helmet. Their head, their choice. But I reserve the right to laugh at anyone who tells me that I'm foolish to do so.
Yes. But the link-loader hassles were a symptom, not a cause; the whole morass of that (and the overlay supervisor) was an attempt to do what was, frankly, poor man's virtual memory. Yes, it's beneficial, overall, despite what IBM believed then.
What people unfamiliar with virtual memory's early implementations often miss was that it brought in a lot of undesirable consequences, too. Tuning memory-access limited programs (most of them) became a foul job (think banking). TLB thrashing was a serious problem, and enabled unprivileged code to crash systems in easy ways that were not possible before - both by accident and design. Those problems have become less important with modern hardware, but still exist.
Look at the population statistics. They are the only ones that avoid selection bias.
Hopefully I'm not being "hlepy" but have you considered having the dog designated a service animal? That won't solve the issue of going into the wilderness, but might help with places like museums and restaurants.
Hopefully I'm not being "hlepy" but have you considered having the dog designated a service animal?
The rules for such have gotten much tighter after the airlines had to deal with all kinds of nonsense and complained mightily about the situation a few years back.
Something else which might help (on the bureaucratic end of things) is a switch which will turn the AC on when someone touches/rocks the car, or maybe when someone tries to open a door. Thus:
PERSON: "Oh, the poor dog has been left in the hot car." (Tries to open door.)
AC: (Beeps!) Oh, someone touched the car! I'm turning on now. Hear my noisy fan and feel the vehicle vibrate. Notice the signs in the window which note that the vehicle is air conditioned, with backup circuits in case the first circuit fails.
No undisciplined programmers exist on Slashdot, where everyone is a much better than average programmer and they never make mistakes. Ever.
I've grown to love smart pointers over the last two decades, to the point that I get twitchy when I see raw C++ pointers (outside the obvious cases)...
Yes, I've written complex C systems without the benefit of such (without any libraries, for that matter), but $DEITY it's so much easier and safer just to use the STL. I know I'm going to screw up at some point, and in the period between "create a whole new, subtle, and interesting flaw" and hopefully "fix said mistake", it's nice to believe that I'm not going to kill the whole system :)
(The only fault-free system I've ever written, in over thirty years of trying, was a ~3KLOC library to import IP block metadata into our tool; two months to write, and after three years in service across x00K users, there had been zero changes to the source, with the code profiler declaring near 100% unit test coverage of lines and branches... it's still running, unchanged, albeit with fewer users)
Consider an updatable graph structure (i.e. with the ability to add and delete nodes and links).
I don't know the specifics of what you mean by an an updatable graph structure, but I suspect this would be a simple operation in an object-oriented language such as Smalltalk.
A node object could have many attributes such as previous node, next node, parent node, child node, etc. Under the hood, so to speak, these attributes are nothing but pointers to other objects. The programmer, however, has no way to directly access these internal pointers, eliminating one category of memory leaks.
Good grief,no, Smalltalk is a long way from ‘insular’.
Every version I know of has ways to call outside libraries and most have ways to handle callbacks. Http requests are trivial to either send or handle - my current day job is making low-code website stuff in Squeak, for example.
When I was working for the raspberry pi group I made a nice easy way to talk to the pigpio library in order to drive the GPIO pins of thePi. Simple to run steppers from that. Even better to use a stepper driver HAT though, avoid the hassle of protecting your inputs etc.
A colleague has made a system to drive tensorflow/elasticsearch /Kerala(?) directly without having to involve python. An acquaintance in Germany used the Pi camera connection and some image processing and my gpio driver to detect a neighbour’s cat crapping on his garden and aim a water gun at it.
Take a look at www.squeak.org as a starting point
Yup. Graph structures are trivial in Smalltalk. The entire system is essentially a giant graph!
Quite why anyone would imagine otherwise beats me. You most emphatically do not need pointers (in the C sense) for any of this.
AlanD2@1533:
"Cobol's ALTER statement, which was used to change the target of a GO TO statement."
and the Fortran equivalent, the assigned (not computed, that was something else) GOTO. Though ALTER looks worse.
Elderly Cynic@1541:
"[overlay loader as] poor man's virtual memory"
BTDT. Using BBC Basic's built-in assembler to generate the complete contents of a 16k EEPROM. The source was (obviously) longer than the binary, so wouldn't fit in memory. A Basic program (taking care not to overwrite itself, and some liberties) swapped the assembler into memory in sections and then executed the assembler source to generate the binary. It's probably as well that I can't remember the details.
Martin@1546 :
"I've grown to love smart pointers over the last two decades"
me too, though the need to write C++ has evaporated since I retired. Unfortunately I was coding before C++ introduced 'var'.
“My mentor there was Paul McCullough, who had worked earlier on the Tektronix implementation of Smalltalk. “
I worked for maybe 10 years with Paul, at ParcPlace and later at Interval Research. Lovely guy, lost too soon.
Lovely guy, lost too soon.
Agreed...
So what sort of "science" are you envisaging that equates, "Being required to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle", with, "I will not wear a helmet, I will only drive my car"???
Ok I'll bite. I commute by bike (when I commute, these days).
I do not wear bike clothing for commuting but what I intend to wear at work. I do not shower when I get to work. Of course that means commuting by bike is not brisk exercise, because I do not want to arrive all sweaty.
When I wear a bike helmet for the usual ~30min ride my hair is plastered to my head afterwards and I look as if I'd forgotten to wash it for a week. Now my workplace is pretty easygoing but there are limits (also for what I feel comfortable with, myself).
My personal rule of thumb is that when I bother to put on bike shorts, I'll also wear bike gloves and a helmet.
By the way, I once did a Contra Dance with Adele Goldberg in one of Paul's dance classes. (He was also a great dance teacher!)
Adele had brought all of her Palo Alto people up to Portland for a group meeting.
Back on the almost-original subject. Lots of rumours / misinformation / propaganda concerning Vlad the Insaner's health & whether he will even be at the "Victory Parade" on Monday.
A smokescreen for something really nasty, or an indication that things are really falling apart - or, worst of all - both of the above??
S.P.Zeidler Said: I'll also wear bike gloves and a helmet.
Gloves are more important to me than a helmet (though I wear a helmet). Hands are full of really small, really complex dodads. Even at 20 km/h, grinding them away has a big impact on quality of life. Motocross/enduro gloves are cheap, light and very breathable. At my age a whack that is hard enough to impact my quality of life is going to probably end my life, so a helmet doesn't make much difference. Gloves on the other hand...
Yes, it does. In general, you also need an arbitrary number of sibling nodes. There are also (many) algorithms where you need to link those to other objects, usually of different types. Removing the explicit pointers removes some of the errors common to C programs, but does sweet Fanny Adams about the logic errors.
Fortran version numbers weren't publication dates until very recently, and weren't intended to be.
At my age a whack that is hard enough to impact my quality of life is going to probably end my life, so a helmet doesn't make much difference.
I am coming from the motorbike side of things rather than cycles but the road's abrasiveness is the same if you face-plant into it regardless of the speed you are going.
My brother was a worked example, coming off a scooter at speed, helmetless and ploughing face-first through roadside gravel when he was a teenager. It took the medics a couple of weeks to get all the gravel out of what was left of his face, grain by grain before they could start several months of reconstructive surgery that left him with a permanent sneer and lifetime issues with breathing through what was left of his nose. He was sort-of lucky, no actual bone fractures although the skin abrasions did go bone-deep in places. Brain damage, well, that wasn't for me to judge...
Cycle helmets won't necessarily save your life or even your brain if enough energy is applied to the tarmac but they will cut down on skin and scalp damage as well as reducing skull fractures and severe concussions on average. Roll the dice.
You really HAVE misunderstood! All arrays in Fortran up to 77 were static, with an explicit number of elements; no leaks at that level were possible.
That's exactly what I understood you to mean, but we're using a very imprecise language to talk about a hairy CS subject: language semantics and storage space complexity.
Language specifications often take care to rigorously define semantics, and more than one specification language exists for doing this. They tend to be very formal and some may be mistaken for maths. In practice, its the only way to talk about this subject and for everyone to understand everyone else (and for compilers to give equivalent meaning to programs). Even language committees have difficulties when they use less formal language.
Put more simply, we're in violent agreement.
Bicycle helmets are a design optimisation exercise with two main barriers: as lightweight as possible while also just barely meeting the very specific impact standards for bicycle helmets.
Almost no bicycle helmets will save your face in that situation. They're designed to expose your face, not protect it. They're also not very abrasion resistant, they're designed to help a conscious person save their head while they slide own the road for a very short time.
They also won't save your brain in a high-energy collision, again because they're not designed to do that. They mitigate a very specific type of low-speed impact, best described as "pedestrian falls over".
The problem is that for many of us the law DGAF about the details, we have to wear an approved bicycle helmet (not a motorbike helmet, or a construction helmet, or a beanie) when we're riding a bicycle on the road regardless (the exact list of places is slightly tedious to describe, "road related area" comes up a lot). And as noted, some of the places I definitely do wear a helmet are places where helmets are optional (off road MTB tracks).
Finally, there's a gulf between "I will ride my bike anyway" and the population effect of both advertising campaigns and legal mandates. I keep posting the "four types of cyclists" because it's key to understanding the effect that stuff like this has. Someone who will ride regardless is almost entirely irrelevant to the discussion of helmets. What matters is the 50% or so in the middle who might ride, occasionally, if they feel safe. For the a campaign emphasising the dangers of cycling will stop them cycling to almost the same extent as it does anything else, so advertising "wear a helmet or die" will mostly reduce the amount of cycling that group does. Mandatory helmet laws have a bigger effect in the same direction. Again, this isn't my empty opinion, this is my recalling academic studies. As linked above...
Talking briefly on the subject of COBOL and GOTO's reminds me of another "war story". By the time I got involved in programming in COBOL, GOTO's had sort of gone out of flavor with "structured" GOTO-less programming being all the rage - and for good reasons.
But I had to track down a bug in a 1960's vintage COBOL program that had been successively ported across many different COBOL hardware environments (from IBM to ICL to ... to DECsystem10 under TOPS-10 where I encountered it).
Said program used the COBOL's PERFORM paragraph-1 THRU paragraph-n construct (sort of poor-mans subroutine). Somewhere between paragraph-1 and paragraph-n, it sometimes encountered a GOTO where the destination was outside the range of paragraph-1 to paragraph-n.
And then later in the execution, the code would sometimes then GOTO back somewhere within the range of paragraph-1 to paragraph-n, and when it got to the end of paragraph-n, the implied "return" end of the original PERFORM range was encountered and it would return - very much an edge case. Ack - I still have nightmares about that code, and took a bit of solving, that did. (Same code also used ALTER statement quite a bit - don't get me started on that). On a more positive note, it also caused be to choose a career path that wasn't as a maintenance coder on COBOL.
On a more positive note, it also caused be to choose a career path that wasn't as a maintenance coder on COBOL.
It sounds like you made a good decision back then. :-) Although you could have made some big bucks just before the year 2000!
People sure wrote some nasty programs back in the "good old days", didn't they? I was an advocate of GOTO-less programming back in the late '60s and after. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible when coding in assembler! :-/
A few years after I retired, I got hooked into helping a friend rewrite a bunch of Excel code using Visual Basic for Applications. I found to my sorrow that there just wasn't any way to avoid using VBA's On Error Goto statement. Sigh...
And none of those algorithms are in the slightest manner problematic for Smalltalk. You do not need pointers to arbitrary memory addresses to make a language work.
I understood the claim to be more along the lines of "it's impossible to build a language that has dynamic memory allocation that cannot leak memory".
Which as I understand it is correct. I'm pretty sure even Rust lets you build circularly (strongly) linked structures where the reference counts never drop to zero. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55553048/is-it-possible-to-cause-a-memory-leak-in-rust
Also, these days I'm pretty sure no language on common general computing platforms allows arbitrary pointers, the OS's all have some form of restriction. And even embedded systems generally check for null dereferencing :)
I understood the claim to be more along the lines of "it's impossible to build a language that has dynamic memory allocation that cannot leak memory".
Which as I understand it is correct.
I know nothing about Rust. But I do not know of any way to create memory leak in Smalltalk. And Smalltalk certainly has dynamic memory allocation.
Now if you're talking about running out of memory during execution, that's a whole different ball game (not what I'd consider a memory leak).
“I understood the claim to be more along the lines of "it's impossible to build a language that has dynamic memory allocation that cannot leak memory".” Well I’m sure somebody could make much argument over the precise definition of both “cannot” and “leak” but I’m confident that one can assert that Smalltalk defeats that claim.
We have quite a lot of empirical evidence gathered over 40 years to bolster that assertion, along with a non-trivial number of Ph.Ds on the matter. Whilst I never got Ph.D (yet) I did a modest part of the work over the years.
Smalltalk memory systems have to be very robust against leaks; the code allocates and frees memory extremely frequently and often runs for very long periods. I think it would be widely agreed that it is the most demanding memory system around. 10/100s of millions of objects per second and up-times of years are not uncommon.
Oh, and the code can be updated while running, without stopping anything - in fact is has to be since the process of updating requires it to run. The joy of advanced live-coding :-) Why, it’s almost like something out of an SF story...
Just out of curiosity, has anyone played with a language called Julia, and if so, what did you think?
Raspberry Pi + camera looks like a nice and cheap starting point. I'm trying to reduce flakiness in my i/o stuff and this looks worth the experiment.
Troutwaxer @1568:
Just out of curiosity, has anyone played with a language called Julia, and if so, what did you think?
One of the seconded-to-a-recently-purchased-data-science-company managers (who is really a programmer, but let them know he has people skills) from $ORK has mentioned it to me a few times, and Ph.D.-student-I-skate-with-whose-family-don't-grok-it has also mentioned it, in the context of, "Like R, but on steroids, viagra, and multivitamins".
Seems to be another, "If you like languages like that you'll like it", things. (I liked SNOBOL back in the day, but never found anything I could point it at, not even sure if I still have a copy of the source, or what it was written in, possibly Interdata assembler???)
Why not use PERFORM?
PERFORM paragraph1 THRU paragraph22. A thing of beauty.
This was back at college (used advisedly) and "Perform" was a command that either didn't exist or we weren't taught.
Hum. ICT COBOL had PERFORM in 1966 (maybe earlier, that's the oldest version of the manual I can find).
https://icl1900.co.uk/techpub/tl1588.djvu
StephenNZ@1562:
"COBOL's PERFORM paragraph-1 THRU paragraph-n construct [...] sometimes encountered a GOTO where the destination was outside the range [...] then GOTO back somewhere within the range [...] and when it got to the end of paragraph-n, the implied "return" end of the original PERFORM range was encountered and it would return".
Again, FORTRAN had a parallel - the "extended range of a DO-loop".
And nobody has yet mentioned the FORTRAN concept of "behaviour undefined at the second level" - any program which can detect (by tricks with aliasing) whether the implementation is passing parameters by reference or copy is illegal.
And then there was the ENTRY statement, allowing you to call into the middle of a subroutine...
"PERFORM paragraph1 THRU paragraph22. A thing of beauty."
I prefer InterCal's "COME FROM", in particular in the calculated version.
The IBM heads might already be across this, but appropos of the IBM/politics thing mentioned upthread, there's a very interesting (old) book 'Big Blue' by Richard Delamarter, all about the anti-trust case he worked on for the US guvmint, their shenanigans blocking competition through hardware design (and arbitrary re-design among other things) and inflating their prices accordingly, and a case what was kiboshed by the Reagan administration on their arrival. Heaps of fun if you want to get angry about the 60s and 70s.
Yes, briefly. The specification was crap, but it didn't look that exciting. It did support n-D arrays, though.
It's more than dynamic allocation but, no, it CANNOT defeat that claim and remain a Turing-complete language.
You all seem to keep missing my point about logic errors. This is not where the language has lost track of things it should know about, nor whether it has failed to free dead junk, but about whether the programmer has made an error telling it what to do. Usually not nullifying or updating a reference when it should have done.
... and the "alternate RETURN" which goes to somewhere it didn't come from ...
I didn't miss your point. I fully appreciated it and agree.
Instead I was trying to make a point (poorly communicated, I admit) about static allocation of memory. These can exist in any Turing-complete language with static storage. I.e. storage for entities which last the entire runtime of the program.
No language can eleminate this problem, but compiler techniques exist for mitigating the costs (like region-based memory management) in many cases. The limits to their effectiveness are obvious.
Language features, like Fortran's EQUIVALENCE may allow a programmer to explicitly address the problem, but this adds to a program's complexity. In other words, there are also limits to the effectiveness of EQUIVALENCE.
AFAICT this has long been an area of open research. I'm not sure if we're progressing fast enough to deal with the rate at which the problem is growing.
So I'm still in agreement with you. I'm simply making a point about how far back this goes. At least in the early days of computing, code size was small enough to tackle. Either the code could run on a machine or not!
"And then there was the ENTRY statement, allowing you to call into the middle of a subroutine..."
I sometimes find myself wishing for something like that (though not hard enough to make me want to use FORTRAN). It's not all that uncommon to have some operation A that requires doing X, Y and Z, and also some other operation B that requires doing W first, in the same scope, and then doing X, Y and Z. It would be less messy than the alternatives if you could simply write one function to do B, and then define an additional entry point that comes in after the W bit so the same code is used for doing A as well. And after all, you usually can leave a subroutine in the middle - do X and Y, then do or don't do Z - so why not also have the same thing the other way round?
There was a routine in the ROM of the Commodore PET that did this, which was the only time I've ever seen the 6502 BIT instruction used in actual code, and even then it wasn't being used to actually do what BIT does, it was being used because BIT does so little you can treat it as a three-byte NOP. And since the second and third bytes don't matter for that, you can make their values code for a two-byte instruction, such as LDA immediate. So this bit of code had two or three repeats of this at the start, with the entry points being the operand bytes of the BIT instructions; jumping to one of those points would find an LDA instruction, followed by zero or more effective-NOPs. The subsequent code would then be executed with a specific fixed value in the accumulator depending on where you had jumped into it, or with a calculated value if you had run on into it from the code that came before.
It sticks in my mind particularly because first the disassembly puzzled me by not making sense, then when I worked it out I was struck by how neat it was - both faster and using less program memory than doing it "conventionally" - and finally because use of the BIT instruction was so very rare. I can't remember quite what the BIT instruction did do, now - it was some kind of nondestructive test, but what it could test was so limited it was a bit of a puzzle why the processor designers had bothered to include it at all, and apparently apart from this one instance nobody would have cared if they hadn't.
Typical Web cross-purposes. Yes. Language facilities can definitely be designed to minimise such errors - modern Fortran with (only) ALLOCATABLE arrays gives a hell of a lot of power, high efficiency, and makes it easy to avoid almost all leaks. That deals with well over 95% of array-based requirements, and it's only the ones like dynamic graph structures that need functionality equivalent to pointers. I did once design how to deal with that problem, but it's complicated, you can't start from any existing language, and it wouldn't deal with absolutely everything.
...only the ones like dynamic graph structures that need functionality equivalent to pointers. I did once design how to deal with that problem, but it's complicated, you can't start from any existing language, and it wouldn't deal with absolutely everything.
I suspect that object-oriented languages like Smalltalk could easily handle dynamic graph structures.
When we consider static allocation for arrays together with the usage of those arrays during a program run, we see some variations.
In an ideal program, each and every array will be fully utilised throughout the running of the program. There are plenty of real world programs that behave in exactly this way. Perhaps many, perhaps even all of the earliest Fortran programs had this property.
However, later Fortran code sometimes had more complex patterns of array usage. Consider how many compilers were written in this language. You likely already know (or may guess) how much set and graph structures play in compilers, at least by the 70s. Without language support for records, like Algol, set and graph code in Fortran must use parallel arrays (the CS book I mentioned earlier has many examples of this technique).
Looking closer at memory usage, and the relevant CS literature, we may see how this can introduce memory fragmentation effects that nothing in the language can fully eliminate. Careful coding may mitigate many of these effects, particularly when EQUIVALENCE is used at the array level. Scalar variables may then share storage with parts of an array, while smaller arrays may also share storage.
When using a seperate process for each compiler phase, totaly static storage for that phase will be reclaimed for reuse by the next phase when that process ends. At some point, however, the limits of this technique may be reached, and external storage must be used. Recall the techniques for external sorting, then apply them to sets and graphs. (Even today, we can do this for truely huge data using SQL. I'm not recommending this for every problem, of course, only that it can used.)
This extreme form of memory management was still being used by the 70s. E.g. a fully usable multiuser, multitasking OS running in only 4K of memory, using tape and sorting. Today we face memory management challenges on the terabyte scale, and in the most extreme domains, way beyond that.
We also see some epic failures - they tend to make headline news, and there are examples from decades ago. So it appears there are programmers in almost every generation who underestimate the complexity of this problem.
None of the above contradicts you. The point is simply that the problem goes far beyond dynamic memory allocation within a single process. We can find it at every level in the memory heirarchy. We can only ignore it by only creating and using programs with predictable memory usage patterns, and we lost any chance of that many decades ago.
Just been to vote. Happily, no problems regarding demands for extra rubbish this time (ref. comments passim) - procedure exactly the same as it always has been.
That's a rather bizarre looking instruction, but if the BIT instruction was really that rare, we might wonder how it was justified in a CPU using a few transistors as the 6502. Apparently it can used for interrupt handling with the 6520 PIA, which would certainly be a strong justification.
I wasn't talking about handling them - that's easy in most modern languages - but of putting appropriate attributes and constraints into the language so as to avoid almost all memory leaks caused by faulty logic.
Right. There is no fundamental difference between a single application and a complex operating system, and many of the programs we use every day are intermediate: browsers, some mailers etc. Predictable memory usage pattern programming is still around in some embedded areas (and decreasingly few of those), but died in mainstream programming some 40 years back.
I haven't; I got a permanent postal vote some years ago, so actually voted around April 17th.
Finland, Russian, & USA.
Our local pro hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes, who are on a roll this year, have 4 guys from Finland and 2 from Russia. One of the Russians came to the US from Russia in February and is only 22 plus he speaks very very little English.
But I wonder how the locker room talk is these days.
Then there is Alex Ovechkin. Who may be the best hockey player in NHL history. Plays for the Washington Capitals (yes in DC). Outspoken fan of Putin. Actually outspoken about every topic under the sun or so it can seem. I bet that makes for some tense moments in that city at times.
I can't find the comment but to whoever talked about refusing to get their hopes up that the Maple Leafs might actually win the cup this year, well maybe the Canes can help you keep your hopes in check again this year.
Looking it up and reading between the lines a bit, I get the feeling that there was probably also a significant influence in the original idea of making the 6502 hardware-compatible with the 6800. So the 6520 used 6800-derived bus conventions, which meant using positive logic for those interrupt flag bits; had they used negative logic it would have been possible to scan a bunch of 6520s to see which one the interrupt came from with only one extra instruction, executed once, compared to using BIT, and the case for including BIT would then look rather weaker.
There is another couple of features of FORTRAN (also come across whilst debugging a mature FORTRAN program - again in late 1970's) - you didn't need to pre-declare variables. Anything starting with letters I - N were deemed to be integers, and the remaining variable names defaulted to REAL. Combine that with the fact spaces were ignored in the syntax.
The offending construct was of the nature "IF (X.LT.) THEN X = 0" (where X is a variable). That looks to be quite innocent doesn't it?
The intent was that if a number was sufficiently small, it was deemed to be zero, rather later used as the denominator in a division calculation used to determine radiation dosages for radiotherapy treatment planning. The program was considered quite mature and had been around for many years and we were porting it from a PDP-11 to said DECsystem-10 environment. (Incidently, the program was riddled by such constructs - someone had apparently gone thru it with a fine tooth comb to try and find and eliminate lots of these boundary issues).
The issue was that FORTRAN didn't have a "THEN" clause, so all it did was create variables called "THENX" and assign it the value 0, which of course meant the checks for the boundary conditions were never actually checked.
The colleague of mine who found this issue apparently had a few sleepless nights afterwards wondering how many people had been incorrectly radiated over the years due to this lack of active boundary condition checking.
Mind you, FORTRAN was not all bad (and the first computer language I ever used). It also had some nice features I enjoyed playing with - by default it had a COMPLEX variable type - which sort of appealed to my maths background. And all the built in math functions correctly(?) worked with them.
Unfortunately, I never used them since leaving university in 1978.
Darn - I also see some of my "example" IF statement code code got eaten by markup 'cos (I guess) I put something in angle brackets. Example code should been something like "IF (X.LT.lower-bound-boundary-condition-value) THEN X = 0"
Back to Russia and Ukraine.
I'm decluttering and just came across the small transistor radio my father bought back in November 1962. 12 cm wide, 5 tall, and maybe 2 or 3 thick. Worked last time I tried. For years I would use it to listen to sports. US AM only.
I have a memory of it costing $20 or $40 back then. ($200 to $400 today.) For the first 10 years we had it my father got mad if it wasn't treated with respect.
I'm guessing everyone here can figure out why he bought it.
Fortran has had IMPLICIT NONE since 1977.
I'm guessing everyone here can figure out why he bought it.
Yup. Did he have a metal tin to keep it in, or was he unaware of EMP? (Few people knew about it, back then)
I'm getting less nervous about little drops of instant sunshine as the likelihood has shrunk of "just three or four tactical nukes, and the road will be open to Odessa and Transnistria in time for the Victory Day parades!". If they still haven't resorted to "mix up some new nerve agents for use on those holdouts in Mariupol", it doesn't seem likely to escalate into NBC warfare [1]
Perhaps there's an awareness that Russian Army CBRN equipment and training is likely to be just as poor as their basic tactical training, and that they'd kill more of their own than of the Ukrainians...
[1] If the Ukrainians look as if they're likely to break through and deal a heavy defeat to the Russians, that logic may change.
The current US tactic to signpost things it looks like Russia looks (to US intelligence) like it's about to do, then calling these things out when it does them, seems to be successful as far as it goes, if success means incrementally improving US credibility at Russia's expense. I'm not sure Russia has any sort of response other than sticking to its lines, but it's possible a response would involve using better opsec for genuine surprise tactics (if it's even capable of pulling off any meaningful opsec at this stage). I guess IRBM launches and some conventional air strikes could be done by surprise given that limited capability to prepare and concentrate undetected with most conventional forces.
That's the broader question I'm skimming around: What (remaining) capacity for surprise does Russia really possess?
I bought a similar thing for $50 or so a while ago, but being modern it's all IC based and has a LiPo battery, tiny solar panel, crank generator, multiband reception... and a uSD card slot so I can play MP3s etc. Because these days everything plays MP3s.
Your comment reminded me that I need to see whether it will read the 512GB uSD card I just bought. And no, I don't expect that it will still work in 60 years time, I'd be pleasantly surprised if it lasted 10.
(I have a proper portable music play that has two card slots, and if it will read the 512GB cards I can fit almost my entire music collection into the portable)
Battlefield tactical nukes were for situations like the Third Red Banner Army racing through the Fulda Gap, and that's not a situation that really applies in Ukraine or probably anywhere else today, given the ability for a modern top-level military to snipe armour and support vehicles one by one with Brimstone 2, Storm Shadow etc. from well beyond the range of mobile AA guns, MANPADs etc. which would have previously kept the fly-boys from interfering in the Soviet's road race to the Channel ports.
Tactical nukes are more for smacking the Other Side's supply lines, ports, railway yards and big motorway intersections and the like, wasting them in one hit and limiting the ability of the front lines to get the supplies they need to fight. The bad news is that the Other Side's concentration points worthy of a tactical nuke are in the Other Side's territory, generally and nuking someone's personal turf when the Other Side has a strategic nuclear capability is an escalation step that's kinda offputting unless the Other Other Side is really desperate. As the old joke went, "What's the difference between a battlefield tactical nuke and a strategic nuke? About three days."
Chemical weapons, that's another matter. Assuming non-persistent agents to pacify a location rather than denying a line of advance and time will substitute for poor NBC equipment and training. If the Russians were willing to use chemical warfare in a Moscow theatre I don't see them being that concerned about using similar agents in Ukraine if they are pushed.
That's the broader question I'm skimming around: What (remaining) capacity for surprise does Russia really possess?
I'd contemplate whether the Russians are messing with the elections of coalition partners, myself. I have no idea how it would work. Some version of Hawala? The only reasoan to bring this up is it's the kind of operation Putin demonstrably understands, unlike what's happening in Ukraine.
whether the Russians are messing with the election
Kind of hard to pull Russian efforts out of the noise in the current UK and Australian elections, IMO. There's so many far right billionaires pushing things towards chaos and kleptocracy that I'm not sure Russian efforts would be necessary, or indeed whether they'd help.
Doesn't stop the racist right here saying "the Chinese COMMUNIST PARTY wants Labor to win!!" and similar stuff. I mean, they're probably right, if only because they've spent the last few years telling the CCP to go fuck themselves, so I suspect the Chinese government is hoping for an outbreak of sanity here.
I'd contemplate whether the Russians are messing with the elections...
I don't think anyone seriously believes Russians aren't messing with elections in other nations. How effective their efforts have been varies and is often hard to prove, but it's no secret they're meddling.
I should point out that Damian was asking about surprises. While, yes, he was talking about battlefield surprises, the normal surprise comes from the direction you're not monitoring.
Since none of the Republicans joined the democrats in Ukraine, which was kind of surprising, perhaps they're planning on backstabbing Ukraine come next January if they return to power. Which would kind of suck.
The interesting question now is, if payments are moving from Putin's orbit towards western influencer systems, how's that happening? Clueless me, I'm not sure anyone would do stuff for Putin on credit at the moment, so is he using off-shored funds, trading properties, FSB, or what?
I believe the FORTRAN 77 standard - which was ratified in 1978 added the IMPLICIT NONE feature (along with a bunch of other new features). It then took some elapsed time for every software vendor to implement FORTRAN 77 compliant compilers for each of their hardware platforms and operating systems.
I don't believe the FORTRAN 77 compiler was available for our DECsystem-10 under TOPS-10 until a few years later, and if it was, it certainly wasn't installed on the systems we used. (The government department I was employed by at the time also typically did not install every new software version as they came out).
Remember, we discovered this issue in late 70's (1979 if I recall correctly). Also, as the code we were porting was written in FORTRAN 66 and we were porting it to the DECsystem10 using the FORTRAN 66 compiler installed on that system.
I agree that if IMPLICIT NONE had been available for us to use it should definitely have picked up this issue.
The currency issue probably isn't that much of a handicap. It certainly wasn't when the Soviet Union's central bank was effectively Philip Morris. State actors always have intrinsically valuable commodities at hand that can be liquidated (SWIDT) in any market. Sure it might be a probably at certain scales (isn't that what the Holomdor was really supposed to be about?) but at the micro level where the stuff you're talking about lives, I think it's pocket change for a petro-state, even one as serially looted as Russia.
But even in this space, I'm not sure I see room for some sort of breakthrough surprise. Well other than the anglosphere turning grimdark, but that seems to be happening anyway, with or without help.
Until recently (in these terms), Fortran was the only language that handled complex numbers even half-competently. It still is probably the best for that. C is appalling beyond belief.
Another popular Fortran gotcha on the same lines was this: DO 10 I = 1.100 ... 10 CONTINUE
I recall that John Larmouth's "Serious Fortran" papers were a valuable source for how not to fall into the many traps.
Given who Putin is buying, gold. Rightwing loons are almost invariably goldbugs
Self-correction:
The same has long been true for C compilers. ISTR the first C compiler had to run on a machine with only 8K of RAM.
Actually, it was the B compiler that was 8K. Ritchie described it as "BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain."
Apparently machine it ran on had 24K of memory. Source: UNIX: A History and a Memoir, Brian W. Kernighan. I've just purchased this book, so I can validate this info when I read it myself.
He also wrote a book called Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers. <cough>
In the context of modern cache sizes, my point may still stand, but that's a poor excuse.
Did he have a metal tin to keep it in, or was he unaware of EMP? (Few people knew about it, back then)
I suspect not but I was 8 and not very aware of such things myself. [grin]
One thing I wish I had a copy of was of some "danger" maps we had. I don't know if they came from his job or were just available in general. We lived 10 miles from the gaseous diffusion plant where he worked so it might have come from there. We were a "likely 3rd strike target". Important but way down the list from military targets and large cities. It was a 2 hour or so drive to Fort Campbell (101st Airborne) but the prevailing winds would blow fallout from that away from us. But we were downwind of SAC bomber and missile basses in northern Arkansas so even with no bombs, not a good long term life plan.
Kind of hard to pull Russian efforts out of the noise in the current UK and Australian elections, IMO.
Why leave us (USA) out? Our current election cycle just started and will drag on until November. Ugh.
But with Peter Thiel helping elect people who will help with the destruction of democracy, who needs Russian help?
Track down the WaPo article titled: "Why a secretive tech billionaire is bankrolling J.D. Vance"
Since none of the Republicans joined the democrats in Ukraine, which was kind of surprising, perhaps they're planning on backstabbing Ukraine come next January if they return to power.
I suspect it had more to do with the only R that would make sense to go with Pelosi would be McCarthy. And I suspect she can't stand the thought of being in a plane or on a podium with him just now. Or maybe is afraid he'll start lying about what was said while they were in Ukraine.
1602 - (~06:00 BST. At least in Ingurlundshire, the Liberal Democrats (aka Lemmingcrats) are "winning", or at least scoring more seats than Liebour, and the Con party are "losing" to both.
1605 - "Implicit declaration" or equivalent should see the language developers hanged, drawn and quartered!!
But with Peter Thiel helping elect people who will help with the destruction of democracy, who needs Russian help?
Is it the right time to Thiel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Jo-djilvo
:
Vaguely interesting, perhaps indicative of how Hungary is playing the politics, is a fast round trip a Ukranian An-124 (UR-ZYD, Hex 5080B3) made from Burgas, Bulgaria to the logistics point at Rzeszow, Poland and back on May 4. On the outbound leg it flew on a very circuitous path that went to the southeast over Albania, then up to Austria before turning north-east to Rzeszow, just skirting western Hungary. On the return leg, however, it took a direct route which passed for a short way over eastern Hungary.
I suspect this was caused by Hungary's position that it will not allow military hardware to be shipped to Ukraine across the territory of Hungary. But empty aircraft? No problem.
W.r.t. the last, I agree, including in most of the dynamically-typed languages. But it is important to remember that it wasn't known what was good or bad in the 1950s, and it is precisely the experience with the early languages that educated us. Since COBOL has been frozen, the only remaining active languages from then are Fortran and LISP, and possibly RPG.
Actually, I stand corrected on the no republicans refusing to go to Ukraine with Pelosi story. That was from earlier reporting. It turns out only one Republican was invited, and he couldn't make the trip for legitimate reasons. McCarthy wasn't invited, because apparently he and Pelosi don't get along. Shocking, I know.
Welp, that's actually a good thing, I suppose. Not the bad blood and partisan grandstanding, but that the Republicans aren't obviously signalling that they'll swing towards Putin if given a chance.
Getting back to the whole surprise thing, what might be surprising is if the Russian army starts making combined arms maneuvers work, because apparently that's something they haven't drilled on for years. I'm not sure they could pull it off as a surprise attack, though. Have to see if Martin has an opinion on this.
We've had Hindley-Milner based type systems for a long time now, so I prefer the hard-typing/soft-typing distinction to static/dynamic. For clarity: hard = explicit type declarations, while soft = optional or no type declarations. Another useful term is polymorphic.
Soft-typing by itself isn't a major obstacle to high performance. Where obstacles exist, we find them in the compilers. The solution has always been: write better compilers - and we still do. We now have compilers that can do extraordinary specialisations, and even compilers which can do this on the scale of whole programs.
"Implicit declaration" or equivalent should see the language developers hanged, drawn and quartered!!
Truly spoken like someone who started programming when a 128K was a decent amount of memory.
For fun find a flight or two between mainland Russia and Kaliningrad. They have a very long flight to get from here to there.
David L
Yes - down about a 1-km-wide "corridor" along the middle of the Baltic, whilst the Swedes, Finns, Estonians, Latvians & Lithuanians watch them like hawks ...
Has the Russian navycarelessly allowed another ship to catch fire?
Until recently (in these terms), Fortran was the only language that handled complex numbers even half-competently. It still is probably the best for that.
The standard version of Visual Works Smalltalk does not handle complex numbers. But the Cincom Public Store Repository does have a package called SYSEXT-Complex. From its documentation:
Last published: April 24, 2022 by 'nice'
This package brings complex numbers (formed from imaginary square root of -1)
(3 + 2 i) is the complex number with real part 3, and imaginary part 2.
(3 i: 2) is another notation of same Complex, which is preferred for efficiency: it generates less dispatching.
Complex are capable of arithmetic, and mixed arithmetic with other ArithmeticValue, by using double dispatching They also respond to the main mathematical functions (exponentiation, exponential, logarithm, trigonometry, hyperbolic,...).
Disclaimer: I have never used this package, so I have no idea if it handles complex numbers even half-competently. But I'm guessing it does... :-)
Smalltalk (have I mentioned Smalltalk before? :-) ) has handled Complex numbers perfectly well since about 1972. Along with proper handling of Fractions, which I think is rather uncommon.
For example (42 + 5i) * (12i) / (17 + 99i) -> (24438/5045) + (7254/5045) i or if you really prefer floating point (42.0 + 5i) * (12i) / (17 + 99i) -> 4.84400396432111 + 1.4378592666005947 i
1605 - "Implicit declaration" or equivalent should see the language developers hanged, drawn and quartered!!
Agreed. I especially dislike Visual Basic, which requires you to declare Option Explicit to disable implicit declarations. :-/
Oops, message cross-over!
'nice' is Nic Cellier, who does lots of clever numerics stuff for the Squeak project as well. Like for example neat implementations of some very sneaky fast mulitply/divide code for multi-million digit large integers.
1623 - I see no tractors! ;-)
1626 - When I am forced to write VB(A), you can usually spot my units because they start Option Explicit".
Damian @ 1606: But even in this space, I'm not sure I see room for some sort of breakthrough surprise. Well other than the anglosphere turning grimdark, but that seems to be happening anyway, with or without help.
There does appear to be a reluctance in the west to accept that Putin may not be bluffing in his threats to use nuclear weapons or to escalate the war in other ways (Transnistria & Moldova or the Baltic States?). I think many in the west are in denial, so it would come as a surprise.
I hope he IS bluffing, but I don't KNOW that. It might depend on who gains power in the anglosphere. I think it would have been more likely if Macron had lost his election bid or if Putin perceives cracks in NATO's unity.
Putin's best "hope" { i.e. total shite for all the rest of us } is a breakthrough in Serbia or Orban really breaking ranks - or long-term, the return of IQ 45.
Except I don't think he's got that long.
Transnistria/Moldova might seem a "cunning plan", except that RU seems to be losing far too much equipment & quite a few troops to make those moves effective.
For something really nasty: A false-flag nuke in Mariupol & blaming it on all the evil fascist Ukrainian defenders ( all conveniently dead, of course, as well as any civilians or other witnesses ) &/or "evil NATO" smuggling it in ...... AND, then ... demanding everybody surrender, before he starts openly throwing nukes around.
Let's face it he's a brutal authoritarian dictator, with nukes, who has painted himself into a corner, much thought of as suffering from increasing & possibly fatal illness.
Russia will not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, foreign ministry spokesman Alexei Zaitsev said on Friday.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-will-not-use-nuclear-weapons-ukraine-foreign-ministry-2022-05-06/
Believe it to the extent you wish.
14 years after Fortran. But you (and AlanD2) seem to have missed "semi-competently". Plenty of languages have 'supported' complex numbers from the 1960s onwards. I have not used Smalltalk, so I am not saying that it doesn't, but my experience of over a hundres languages from 1972 onward is that most don't, and that is especially true for any language perpetrated by 'computer scientists'. Note that this is as much about the implementation as the language but, unless the language attracts competent people who write serious programs using complex numbers, the former is almost always dire.
It includes things like generating EFFICIENT code for complex and mixed-mode arithmetic, conversions, and the basic functions (and even ensuring they exist!) And ensuring that division and the basic functions give accurate answers, do not produce errors when they shouldn't, and DO produce errors when they should. If you have never done that, I doubt very much that you know what is involved.
But you (and AlanD2) seem to have missed "semi-competently".
I note that you have never defined "semi-competently". Give me some examples and I'll run them through Smalltalk to see what happens.
David L
Unfortunately, that does not preclude a false-flag operation - yes, I'm both cynical & seriously bothered.
defined "semi-competently"
As someone who aspires to (the dizzying heights of?) "semi competent" I'd say it means: can get the job done, eventually, without any fatal mistakes along the way.
It's almost an expression of the 80/20 rule, you want something that does the job but it doesn't have to be great, just adequate. Or "minimum viable product" as the software and startup kids like to say.
For floating point probably meeting IEEE 754 (IEC 559 is the matching ISO standard) would count, but that appears to be a rabbit hole of WTF and I suspect the 2019 "clarifying" edition still leave enough holes that fun can ensue.
This dodgy-arse SO question definitely suggests both that people do dub stuff, and the standard doesn't stop them:
If a literal genie wrote you a terrible compiler, and made float = binary16, double = binary32, and long double = binary64, and made is_iec559 true for all the types, it would still adhere to the standard.
Mind you, that same personal also says
I trust Wikipedia entirely for all topics and refuse to do any further research.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58308042/if-stdnumeric-limitsfloatis-iec559-is-true-does-that-mean-that-i-can-extr
I almost kind of believe that Russia won't use nukes. While we can play all the Cold War doomscrolling games we want, the point I'm trying to make is Russia seems to be having both reliability and coordination problems with many or most of its forces.
So they decide to nuke Kyiv for example. What could possibly go wrong? Here are some wild-assed guesses:
--The nuke's a dud.
--They don't evacuate their forces far enough and kill a huge number of their troops.
--They slowly evacuate their forces, everyone realizes a nuke is coming in soon, and either evacuate or really dig in.
--They know something we don't about Soviet Cold War bunkers in Ukraine, and realize that an airburst probably wouldn't kill anyone important.
Probably the worst problem for everyone is if they fire a nuke and it fails to deliver (blows up on the pad, goes off course, whatever). At that point, Russia's major threat to world security is put in question. Why shouldn't say, oh, China annex the eastern half of Russia and dare them to nuke Beijing? While I don't think NATO would invade Russia for a single blown nuke, that failure could have massive consequences.
There would also be consequences for a massively fratricidal nuclear strike, or for nuking Kyiv and not killing anyone important.
Do I think Putin wouldn't consider going out with a nuclear kamikaze, a la Khan in Star Trek? No, I think it's possible. As for nuking Ukraine, I suspect he's less likely to, now that he's seen that his armed forces are in disarray. But I wouldn't put any money on this bet.
Oh, well, gosh, producing correct answers. Never thought of that. Dang.
It’s done well enough to run sophisticated machines like the world’s chip-making machinery and the CanadArm, to operate power grids, to make billions of buckaroonies for banks, so I’m going say we got the maths decently correct.
And as mentioned previously, if your usage is utterly bound to looping around billions of operations on the same type of simple arithmetic then probably Smalltalk won’t be the fastest choice. And I simply don’t care, because I can call a library to do that if needed and stick with Smalltalk for all the more complicated stuff. And I’ll always win because I’ll be having fun doing it.
More evidence that inequality is preferable to most people (or at least most people in the USA).
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-ideals-people-dont-inequality.html
False-flag cyberattacks a red line for nation-states, says Mandiant boss
Tl;DR Proxies get the job done well enough.
The article has quotes from Kevin Mandia and Rob Joyce. Standard disclaimers apply. Standard questions, too, like "Who benefits?" and "What's different this time?"
Try reading the last paragraph of the post you replied to.
I was not aware that those applications used complex numbers heavily. As I said, complex was typically misimplemented in the 1970s and 1980s, not least because almost no 'computer scientists' understood it, even then, and that is based on experience with many dozens of languages. As I also said, I did not use Smalltalk and so cannot comment on it's support for them; from your response, I doubt that you have written serious applications that depend on complex arithmetic in Smalltalk, and almost certainly not in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, since 1980 is 'recent', for technical reasons that I could explain if needed.
"It’s done well enough to run sophisticated machines like the world’s chip-making machinery and the CanadArm, to operate power grids, to make billions of buckaroonies for banks, so I’m going say we got the maths decently correct."
I doubt that any of those computations require complex numbers, which is what EC is talking about.
Plain floating-point calculations are hard enough to get right, mostly because what floating-point data types model is not the field of real numbers but a finite subset of them, which among other things is neither associative nor distributive. Also the "true" results of most computations are not in the set of possible numbers and have to be rounded.
Complex calculations are still harder, even if the implementation doesn't make gross errors[*]: again, "complex" data types don't model the field of complex numbers, and the interaction between real and imaginary parts complicates the rounding operations.
[*] I have seen a production "complex" C++ library that did something like this (in pseudocode,to avoid C++ template syntax):
double abs(complex x) { return sqrt(x.re * x.re + x.im * x.im); }
Working out what's wrong with that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Someone who understands! I thought of posting a challenge: write some pseudocode for complex division that gets the answer fairly accurate, and doesn't generate too many spurious errors on the hardware used in the 1970s and 1980s. Working out why that would be maliciously sadistic of me is left as a more advanced exercise for the reader ....
I did.
It includes things like generating EFFICIENT code for complex and mixed-mode arithmetic, conversions, and the basic functions (and even ensuring they exist!) And ensuring that division and the basic functions give accurate answers, do not produce errors when they shouldn't, and DO produce errors when they should. If you have never done that, I doubt very much that you know what is involved.
Not much there in the way of examples of test cases I could run.
AlanD2@1644: Looks like a summary of the specification of a test suite for a complex library, so all you have to do is find the source of the suite.
Smalltalk and complex:
I just found this: GNU Smalltalk Users Guide
"One can reasonably ask whether the real and imaginary parts of our complex number will be integer or floating point. In the grand Smalltalk tradition, we’ll just leave them as objects, and hope that they respond to numeric messages reasonably. If they don’t, the user will doubtless receive errors and be able to track back their mistake with little fuss. "
If the code there really is how it's implemented and not just a simplification for didactic purposes, it is not "semi-competent" for the same reason that my example above isn't.
Thanks. I also tried to stress "until recently"; since about 2000, a lot of languages have adopted competently-written libraries that were written for multiple languages, and use them under the cover. Provided that the language also generates efficient code for the basic operations, mixed-mode arithmetic etc., that's ENTIRELY different from the ghastly crap that was usually perpetrated early.
Let's ignore C99 (and hence C++), which dragged the ghastly crap into the 21st century. But anything based on that is likely to be ghastly.
It looks very much to me like a simplification for demonstration purposes. However, we've seen demonstration code with bugs in it for decades. So why be suprised when we find similar bugs in production code?
There used to be books that taught programmers the basics. (One was Elements of Programmer Style.) E.g. how to write a boolean test correctly. I call this basic potty training for programmers. Of course, many programmers write code that defecates everywhere, and it gets used by countless users. Worse still, sometimes lives depend on that code, and wrong results can kill.
How many schools teach computer ethics? How many programmers get hired straight out of school? How many employers teach computer ethics? How many employers employ qualified specialists (in the relevant fields) to review the code their programmers write?
Zero-sum thinking, mentioned a few posts back, is just one of them. How many schools teach game theory to students?
I note that the guide is from 2017, so it's fairly recent.
Worse still, sometimes lives depend on that code, and wrong results can kill.
I used to work in robotics research and the stories we told each other over cups of lukewarm symposium coffee, of the many times our creations attempted to maim and kill us, the dropped decimal points, the unexpected bit shifts and the barely-tested error conditions... Oh, how we laughed. Well, the survivors did.
Nobody should take the GNU Smalltalk system too seriously. It is most definitely not a production level implementation- for a start it is not a proper live image system. It’s basically the back-of-magazine type-it-yourself Space Invaders equivalent. Don’t even begin to imagine it is in the same world as gcc and so on.
I certainly don’t care what might be done with 70s hardware. I had to put up with that back then and I’m not I need the least interested in going back. Unlike SCOTUS et al. What I have available in Squeak is good for my purposes. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t use it.
Perhaps there's an awareness that Russian Army CBRN equipment and training is likely to be just as poor as their basic tactical training, and that they'd kill more of their own than of the Ukrainians...
Oh good grief yes: all the plastics and rubber will have degraded from decades in storage, just like those crappy truck tires!
I suspect that's why we're hearing all the ranting and threats about nukes, rather than staring at our geiger counter displays and shitting ourselves.
Which leads me to wonder what language those competently-written libraries are written in themselves, given the way "everything's in C if you look deep enough".
And then to wonder how difficult it would be to use those libraries with C instead of the crap it comes with as standard. Since C basically doesn't handle complex numbers itself at all, but just typedefs a "complex" type and then relies on library functions to do anything with it, it sounds like it ought to be reasonably straightforward to make it use a better library instead, as long as that library is itself written either in C or in something you can link with C (like Fortran, perhaps, at least with Gnu tools).
What seems an obvious likely difficulty to my mind at least is the chance that the good library's "complex" type is not a simple (re,im) pair like C gives you, but some other representation that makes it easier to be both accurate and efficient (for instance using a (mag,phase) pair would trivially unfuck Richard H's example code, but I cba to work out how it compares overall since I am not going to be writing a "good complex library for C" myself). No doubt there will be others as well.
Of course there would remain the problem on a different level that even the way C gives you a "complex" type at all is also a fucked-up mess that makes it difficult and confusing to use regardless of how good the code that works with that type is.
"I certainly don't care what might be done with 70s hardware. I had to put up with that back then and I'm not I need the least interested in going back."
No need to "go back" - it's still in mass production. The main difference between the experience of writing code for a PIC microcontroller and writing code for a Commodore PET is that you don't have to swear at that fuck-awful cassette storage system.
The experience would have been even closer for whoever wrote the firmware for a PS/2-to-USB converter I've got. The processor in it is a 6502.
It's an interesting point. My first reaction was "how'd they get a paper in Science for quantifying the bloody obvious?" But it's not that bad.
The one thing that's worth discussing is that they're conflating at least two different problems. One is that, yes, a lot of well-off people really do see life as a zero-sum game (IQ 45, for instance), and so they tend to miss positive-sum games because they think they're scams. So that part's bloody obvious.
The less obvious part is one of the under-appreciated failure points of democracies, that they don't often keep their promises. Yes, it's not limited to democracies, but it's on full display in the US and elsewhere. It's obvious at the moment that the US government can't be counted on to protect the rights of most non white male groups, not because the liberal governments don't deeply want this, but because right wing creeps are always trying to grow their power. I suspect the same thing happens in most democracies?
In these conditions, do you make a deal to increase equality, or not? It's not just minorities who have made deals with local governments, only to have different administrations renege on those deals, it seems to happen to everybody sooner or later. If you're stuck in a system with lack of trust, treating negotiations with others as zero-sum is understandable, even if it's not optimal in all situations.
Now if you really want to get ugly, there are things like climate change, which is in some ways a negative sum game where we should be trying to limit our losses. Treating this as a zero sum game seems just as problematic, but in different ways.
The first ones were mainly in Fortran, the later ones mainly in C - but using that as a high-level assembler, as God (oops, Ritchie) intended. Been there - done that.
Incvidentally, many of the problems I mentioned were still extant in the 21st century. I just get a little pissed off with the fanatics (a stronger word fits) who compare 1970s Fortran with 21st century versions of their One True Language.
Squeak: I downloaded Squeak50.sources and so far as I can tell it is using the same naive algorithms for Complex / and abs() as my examples.
There are things called absSecure, divideSecureBy and divideFastAndSecureBy, which scale their calculations to avoid the problem, so clearly the authors are aware of it, but that implies that the default "abs" and "/" are really absInsecure and divideInsecure.
Also, many of the comments talk of "Possible implementations" so it doesn't exactly look like a finished implementation.
However, I'm not a Smalltalk user so I may be missing something.
"using a (mag,phase) pair would trivially unfuck RichardH's example code".
yes, but it introduces a coordinate singularity and requires lots of imprecise sines and cosines to convert back to a Cartesian representation, which will still be needed. Rescaling (just divide everything by the largest value in the algorithm) will avoid unnecessary overflows but it doesn't fix everything.
Reading ‘Squeak50.sources’ won’t tell you anywhere near the whole story. First problem is that it is the sources of the Smalltalk code as of when we released the 5.0 version, which was quite some time ago. If one were to insist on reading the code in a dumb text editor for some strange reason, you’d also need to read the ‘Squeak5.3somethingsomething.changes’ file and essentially read it backwards to see the latest versions of any method. It’s a bit like reading an ePub file with edlin. Smalltalk systems (except for that gnu thing) are not built each time you ‘compile’ like C code, they persist y saving a memory dump and reloading it and simply continuing from where it left off. “Smalltalk is saved, but not born again”.
So, don’t do that; use the tool as intended and read the up to date code in the code browser.
Then you need to be aware of the hierarchy and uses of double dispatching and the implementation of the primitive code where it is used. I’m not a numerological expert so all I know is that it works for me, and for assorted people that claim to be knowledgeable.
If you’re really into that stuff, please join the Squeak mailing list and ask about it; better yet, if you’re expert please help to improve things!
Can squeak be run from the command line, or in windows that match the rest of the GUI's windows?
Can squeak be run from the command line, or in windows that match the rest of the GUI's windows?
I have never use Squeak, but Visual Works Smalltalk is just another thing you download and install into Windows. When you run it, you get some useful windows, just like most other Windows applications.
There are a great many advantages in a polar representation, not least because it gives automatic support for winding number. The claimed reason of IEEE 754's unspeakable signed zeroes are for contour integration, but (a) that means you have to program in a style no higher than a pseudo-assembler, (b) it fails in any optimised language (including C) and (c) it fails if the winding number exceeds 1. Numerically, whether cartesian is better than polar is moot. In terms of exception handling, polar leads cartesian by a country mile. In terms of performance, cartesian wins, but the advantage is much smaller than usually claimed (if done right). I once wrote some code for both and experimented; the results were interesting and not at all what 'received wisdom' said.
The executive summary is that it's going to be cartesian for the foreseeable future because it always has been.
“Russia will not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, foreign ministry spokesman Alexei Zaitsev said on Friday.” So, they’re going to use them then.
Reading ‘Squeak50.sources’ won’t tell you anywhere near the whole story.
Visual Works: I downloaded SYSEXT-Complex package by 'nice' (Nic Cellier) from the Cincom Public Store Repository. I noticed the use of double dispatching there too. I also installed and looked at his test case package for complex numbers. I can't claim to understand most of it, but it does look fairly comprehensive.
I would think that somebody, somewhere, has a comprehensive list of tests that could be evaluated to verify the correctness of a complex number arithmetic implementation. That is what I was asking EC about.
No, it is a statement entirely void of informational content. That is, the Russian spokes person would say that literally regardless of Putins intent. And would not even be informed of what that intent is.
This is one downside of habitual political lying. If you cultivate a habit of speaking the truth, your statements have actual weight, but at this point, what Official Russia says is just noise, signifying nothing.
RvdH
“Russia will not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, foreign ministry spokesman Alexei Zaitsev said on Friday.” So, they’re going to use them then. - but it will be a false-flag, won't it?
Charlie Stross @ 1651:
Oh good grief yes: all the plastics and rubber will have degraded from decades in storage, just like those crappy truck tires!
I suspect that's why we're hearing all the ranting and threats about nukes, rather than staring at our geiger counter displays and shitting ourselves.
WE have that awareness, and by now maybe some of the surviving Russian Generals have that awareness, but does anyone have the nerve to explain it to Putin?
And would he believe them if they did ... or care about what it would do to the Russian military? ... or the Russian people?
Consider the news coming out now about Trump wanting to bomb Mexico and shoot protestors Is there anyone in Russia who could talk Putin out of it the way Esper & General Milley did with Trump?
You might well be right. At this point one of two things is purely true: The Russians understand exactly how much trouble they're in and they're trying to walk it back, or they're gonna use nukes. There's certainly no middle ground at this point.
I imagine you are asking if Squeak is used via typical terminal window, as opposed to simply being launched that way?
The answer is, no, and yes, and kinda.
No - the general way to use pretty much any Smalltalk is to run the system as the comprehensive tool that it is. It is after all the whole deal; IDE, development system, playground, application, the lot. You open it up, you use the browsers to read and write code, you use tools to load/save code to repositories , you build new applications, run web servers, mail stuff, musical stuff, 3D environments, networked 3D, whatever. I spend much of my life in there. There is a sorta-terminal kind of window we call the Workspace that you can write arbitrary Smalltalk in and evaluate/print right there.
Yes - you can if you really want run from a terminal and specify a file of code and commands to run. For example, load file with a Fibonacci method and a command to calculate & print the first fib needing a million characters to display it, writing te result out to the terminal. Or you can set up to run as a headless server from systems etc - that’s what my production systems do. You can even use some neat Unix system stuff to make files with the same hashbangbinbash first line trickery that typical shell scripts do. Or even cleverer unixery to define your own equivalent header line.
Kinda - if for some weird reason you want an experience like python etc, well you could load an RMW loop text interface but why? You could do it with a socket connection too, I suppose. It would be like operating your car with strings to pull the ends of the steering rack and a knitting needle to push the carburetor butterfly.
Windows - Squeak chooses to open a single OS window and display its own UI within that. This is partly historical and partly because nowhere near all UI is possible in the tragically limited world of typical OS windowing systems. Squeak can open multiple OS windows - I wrote the code to do that 20 years ago because somebody paying me said it was critical and .... crickets. Nobody has found any reason to use it outside a few demos. On Unix it really is much nicer to open a Squeak window, maximize it and never see that awful gnome stuff. You can actually to open that main window and write directly to the OS canvas/display in some systems.
Other varieties of Smalltalk do other things. As AlanD2 mentioned, VisualWorks does the whole OS window approach, a change we started back when I was the engineering manager of VW. I really don’t like it. OS window systems are really not very good at handling the dozens (or more) of windows I typically have in use. Gnu Smalltalk is trying to be a ‘scripting Smalltalk’. Dolphin Smalltalk is a very tight Windows based system. Gemstone Smalltalk is a big heavyweight object database system. Horses for courses.
It's possible that we may know within the next few days. According to the talking heads of the papers of record and other media, Putin may declare war on Ukraine on V-E Day, so that he can issue a general mobilization and send a lot more soldiers in. Or he may declare victory and go home.
Either way, of the force he sent in, about 25% are dead, and about 25% are incapacitated for a variety of reasons. If he doesn't get anywhere with this last big surge, that force is (per the talking heads and others) done.
Since I'm not sure what he gets from nuking Ukraine on V-E Day (this is my ignorance speaking), perhaps he has a decision tree?
The current decision is double-down or leave. Once he makes that decision, either way the next decision is whether to nuke, because his people are out of the way (for the reason of...?), to rearm and try again if he withdraws now, or keep doubling down if he declares war until either he wins, loses so bad it ends his government, or declares victory and goes home.
...to rearm and try again if he withdraws now...
Difficult to impossible, in my opinion. Sanctions against Russia have virtually cut off access to key materials Putin would need to rebuild his military.
they don't often keep their promises.
There seems to be a bit of that going on in Aotearoa right now. The right wing have finally selected a less-offensive leader and are busy regaining vote share according to the polls.
There also seems to be quite a lot of "we don't do green left things because the people who vote don't want them" from the left party, which is being met with quite a lot of "we voted for you because we wanted those things and you didn't do them", with some mutual incomprehension about the mechanical details that led to the result.
The history being: Jacinda Ardern led Labour to a parliamentary majority in a proportional system. Which is very rare. The right wing party (National) did most of the losing, with the libertarian party (ACT) also gaining at their expense. Labour took this as a cue to move to the right in an attempt to keep all those borrowed right wing votes, while whining that the youf didn't appreciate their lefty and greenie "thoughts and prayers". In the last month those life-long National voters have largely returned to the fold, at least as far as people are telling the pollsters.
Much as in the US, the humanitarian voters are faced with an invidious choice between getting fucked gently by the centre-right party or hard by the far right one. Just with everything shifted a few steps to the left compared to the US, and with significantly more competence than either the US or UK. We will not compare Aotearoa to Australia except to say that Ms Ardern was for a while the least hated favourite politician in Australia.
Meanwhile someone at The Guardian suggests that if Murdoch was Russian he'd have had his assets frozen by now as an obvious enemy of the people.
Sigh. I feel your pain.
The one thing I disagree with is the lack of competence among US politicians. There are actually quite a few competent ones, they just don't get much press. Things could be much, much worse.
Difficult to impossible, in my opinion. Sanctions against Russia have virtually cut off access to key materials Putin would need to rebuild his military.
I'm confused. I don't understand how Putin would support a full–on war if he's not able to rearm the smaller force that's already in Ukraine.
How long would he have to wait after withdrawing before others would ease sanctions to get Russian gas or other investments going again? Once they ease sanctions, he can rearm and try again. Unless he's running out of time for other reasons.
... which is being met with quite a lot of "we voted for you because we wanted those things and you didn't do them", ...
This is the same problem facing President Biden and the Democrats in November, Moz. It results from the intransigence of Republicans, of course, but the party in power always seems to get the blame... :-(
I'm confused. I don't understand how Putin would support a full–on war if he's not able to rearm the smaller force that's already in Ukraine.
Remember, the invasion was supposed to be a cakewalk to Kyiv, with grateful Ukrainians throwing flowers at them all the way... :-)
I've read that Russia's tank factory has shut down because they can't get critical parts from the West. If you think we have problems getting computer chips for our stuff, Putin's problem has got to be a thousand times worse. Other than bullets and dumb bombs, I don't think you can make any piece of military equipment without chips these days.
How long would he have to wait after withdrawing before others would ease sanctions to get Russian gas or other investments going again?
I don't see this happening until Putin is dead or out of power. Even then, I think it is likely to be a slow process.
Sanctions are tools of political pressure. If you comply, they get lifted. If they did not, they would be useless.
So if Russia leaves Ukraine, the sanctions go. If they leave except for Crimea, the sanctions get rolled back to pre-war levels.
Also, Ukraine would get enrolled into the EU and Nato as fast as possible, to prevent resumption of hostilities.
Fairly sure you can't, at least for values of "bullet" that include all forms of gun launched unguided projectile irrespective of calibre. So you can make a HEAT round for a tank, but not a base bleed round for a howitzer.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/05/earth-science-education-climate-change/629761/
The idea that Earth science barely counts as science is so woven into the educational landscape that it can feel like a truism instead of a choice. {...} But as far as I can recall, I was never taught that the climate system—and by extension, the weather system—is based on temperature gradations.
That seems bizarre to me, to the point where I'm questioning whether it can be true. Surely they can't leave basic physical geography out of high school - how would people even understand weather forecasts (what's an isobar, daddy? ... You'll understand when you're older).
But it would possibly explain some of the extra weirdness around climate change. People in Oz seem to understand what it is and how it works, even if they deny that it's happening or run round kissing lumps of coal (which makes me wonder what some of them got in their christmas stockings)
"So if Russia leaves Ukraine, the sanctions go."
After an unprovoked attack on a western aligned nation, featuring systematic war crimes and massive economic devastation, there is no way EU and USA is going simply say: "Let's forget all about this then..."
Once RU troops leave UA, negotiations about the sanctions can begin, and those negotiations will get absolutely nowhere, until RU convinces EU and USA that nothing like this ever happens again.
Speculating how that will play out, is firmly in the realm of fiction at this point, Science- or otherwise.
Iranians would laugh hollowly. Yes, they can be used for that, but they can also be used for warfare, and they can be used to prevent competition.
An isobar is the sort of thing you find in airports - i.e. a drinking place that meets all international regulations.
This might explain some things I found puzzling, because I had always thought of "Earth Science" as another name for Geology, which is among of the "hardest" modes of science in several respects.
The big picture — the Field Marshal view, if you will — of the problems the Russian Federation faces can be found on the population pyramid website here: https://www.populationpyramid.net/russian-federation/2020/ As you’ll see (by hovering over the areas of the webpage) there are only 3.6 million 14-19 year old boys at the moment; or about 750,000 potential conscripts each year. And it doesn’t get much better over the next 15 years either. (You can have fun looking at other nations as well, but that’s not my point today). This is putting concrete numbers to Peter Zeihan’s thesis that population determines economic destiny.
So, what’s the state of play with respect to the forces Russia can amass today? Well, they’ve mostly completed a transformation away from a Divisional Organisation to one that emphasises the Battalion (a division is about 20,000 men, a battalion is about 800-1,000 men). One suggestion is that these smaller units are more suited to the typical low-level skirmishes that the Russian Federation currently fights: Chechnia, Syria, Georgia, etc, etc.
Here’s the RUSI description of the organisation and equipment wielded by a Battalion Tactical Group: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/getting-know-russian-battalion-tactical-group (you need to click through each figure to get the full picture).
About 120 BTGs were sent in to Ukraine. It’s thought that a further 40 might be found by scraping the barrel in various barracks around Russia. But, such units will have little experience fighting and training together; they’d be the personnel and equipment that had previously been left in barracks to train up conscripts in the basics. So a tank barracks might have some tanks to train on, and some instructors. An infantry barracks might have mortars and RPGs, and some training staff. And so on.
If you look through the TO&E you’ll see that the BTG is light on practically everything except tanks and artillery, but especially light on infantry. To make this up, a BTG is supposed to operate with a partisan or resistance movement to provide sacrificial infantry eyes and ears on the battlefield. That’s one of the reasons things went wrong around Kiev: there was no large-scale partisan organisation. Things in Donbass are different: there there is a “partisan” component to the population.
Another point worth noting is that a BTG is equipped for about three days heavy fighting, after which it’ll need resupply from elsewhere.
About casualties: this is very hard to judge reliably. (I just know this link isn’t going to come out right: mods please fix) Wikipedia gives range of numbers and their sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine If we go with Russian (and their allies) confirmed casualties, it looks like about 14,000 killed and injured, with the Donetsk partisans bearing the brunt.
Now let’s discuss the terrain of Ukraine. First off it’s mostly flat. This means that around rivers the going gets muddy very quickly. During WW2 there were two seasons when fighting was possible in Ukraine: January (when everything was frozen) and August (when everything is bone dry). In 2022 the winter was unseasonably warm, so everything off-road was a boggy, muddy, morass. Now in Western Europe you’d not need to go off-load so much. In England the ancient (Anglo-Saxon) field boundaries permit you to drive around obstacles on tarmac-ed roads if you don’t fancy taking the direct route. In Ukraine — and Russia — roads link towns and cities, but there’s not a west European superabundance. In fact railways and their bridges are probably more useful.
So, in conclusion what’s going to happen if things go on as they are at the moment, in a conventional way? My guess is that the outcome will depend on who has access to the most ammunition, and at the moment that looks to be Ukraine. Will expanding the conflict into Transnistria and Moldova do any good? I don’t think so: Transnistria is practically surrounded, so it fights with what it has and that’s the end. Admittedly it has 20,000 tons of stock-piled equipment and ammunition, plus about 1,500 soldiers (against Moldova’s 3,000). I wonder if the kit in Transnistria has been kept any better than that in Russia?
Oh, well. I wonder what Putin brings to the table tomorrow?
[[ fixed/unfixed markup link - mod ]]
Irans situation is due to Trump.. not giving a shit about the good name of the USA nor about keeping diplomatic levers useful, and being an evil troll instead.
It rather demonstrates my point, actually, because Iran has very limited incentives to budge on anything to get the sanctions lifted at this point when the next republican president will just tear up any deal and arbitrarily sanction them again.
It is merely the clearest example, not the only one. My point stands.
That seems bizarre to me, to the point where I'm questioning whether it can be true. Surely they can't leave basic physical geography out of high school - how would people even understand weather forecasts (what's an isobar, daddy? ... You'll understand when you're older).
It's true.
“What is where, why there, and why care?” The Grade 9 geography courses provide students with opportunities to explore these three aspects of geography as they investigate geographic issues in Canada. In these courses, students will examine issues relating to interactions between physical processes and people living in Canada; changing populations in this country; economic and environmental sustainability; and interconnections between Canada and the global community.
Students will work towards:
• developing an understanding of the characteristics and spatial diversity of natural and human environments and communities, on a local to a global scale;
• analysing the connections within and between natural and human environments and communities;
• developing spatial skills through the use of spatial technologies and the interpretation, analysis, and construction of various types of maps, globes, and graphs;
• being responsible stewards of the Earth by developing an appreciation and respect for both natural and human environments and communities
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/canworld910curr2018.pdf
From my experience, the compulsory course is taught as human geography, other than simple map-reading (eg. locate and name the Great Lakes). If you look at the curriculum document I linked above, you'll see way more packed in to the grade 9 course than can be covered in 90 hours (minus interruptions), so something will get left out and that something is usually physical geography because humans are more interesting. :-/
Most of the optional senior courses in physical geography are almost never offered. The two senior courses that my school ran were "Travel and Tourism" and "World Issues", both of which focus heavily on human geography and take the physical world as a given or an act of god. (Hurricanes happen — why is not part of the course.)
Guidance counsellors push geography as an easy subject for kids who don't want to do much work. Teachers work with what they get, and when what they get are students who've been promised an easy course with no homework…
Also, remember that there's a huge gap between what is in the curriculum and what gets taught. In Ontario grade 10, for example, 1/4 of the compulsory science course is supposed to be about climate change, and yet every time I talk to other educators I discover that my school is the only one teaching it, or teaching it fully (as opposed to giving it 1 week instead of 4)*.
*Now that I'm retired, it may no longer be covered as well at my school. When one teacher moved the others teaching grade 9 said "now that xxx is gone we don't need to spend so much time on space science" — they wanted to spend more time teaching biology, chemistry, and physics to "prepare the kids for senior courses" (as if the only reason to take a subject is to get ready to study at a higher level).
Sanctions are tools of political pressure. If you comply, they get lifted.
Not always. Sometimes you comply and the countries applying sanctions add more conditions. And more…
Iran, for example.
It results from the intransigence of Republicans
And two Democrats. Or DINOs.
Reminds of of the sailors definition of "bar": a long narrow object covered in old wrecks. At sea made of sand, on land of polished wood…
" Even then, I think it is likely to be a slow process."
Yes. One of the things that current events have revealed is that the Russian military is lacking in training and, critically, seasoned non-commissioned officers. Materiel replacement aside, getting the people side fixed would be a matter of years at best. And who would train the trainers?
EC @ 1680
🤩
Dave Lester
One horrible but non-nuke possibility is that Putin actually declares a WAR, to whip up patriotic fervour ( Yeah, right ) & symbolically calls up all the conscripts he can scrape up. Which will then lead, in about 6 months to a situation like 1917, where it will implode, dramatically.
We must always remember that Putin is KGB & doesn't really understand actual war, whereas it seems that his opponents do understand. The longer it lasts, the worse & more dramatic & "orrible" the final crash will be. See my long-ago-reference to the mutiny scene in Dr Zhivago.
I just know this link isn’t going to come out right: mods please fix
If you put a link inside standard HTML paragraph tags it seems to survive intact — no need to individually escape each underscore.
It would be nice if the Marksideways interpreter was smart enough to realize that URLs often include underscores* and therefore shouldn't be treated as formatting tags. I guess scanning a block of characters and recognizing a URL is too difficult a task for a bit of modern software. Maybe it causes memory leaks? Or needs complicated imaginary matrices? Maybe it should have been written in Smalltalk?
(Partly sarcasm, partly frustration.)
*And have since before Marksideways was invented.
National standards and communication in bars: A German standard-compliant bar is very noisy, and you can't hear what anyone's saying. A British standards-compliant bar isn't, but you can't believe what anyone's saying. An American standards-compliant bar lets you talk to people faster than light, and you hear all kinds of weird paradoxical things.
A Markdown-compliant bar is full of people randomly leaning sideways, and you can't follow what anyone's saying.
(What's really stupid is that the Markdown parser does recognise URLs. We know this because it wraps them in <A></A> tags so they come out as links. It just fucks them up anyway. Basically, it's shit.)
That's the source of my frustration.
It's an obvious problem, and the solution seems to be "force users to use escape characters in URLs, because that is more readable* than processing URLs properly".
*Supposedly a design goal of Marksideways.
Few programmers learn how to write parsers correctly. (See my comments on this in 1647.) My generation mostly learned via Basic, which encouraged the misuse of LEFT, MID and RIGHT string operations. Today's generations are taught to misuse regex tools. More bad habits and bug-ridden code are the result.
Now couple this problem with the ability of programmers (and apparently also engineers) to misread a formal specification.
Update - apparently - Israel is now supplying Ukraine with "iron dome" + anti-tank "spike" NLOS missiles)
So if Russia leaves Ukraine, the sanctions go.
As I said above, I don't see this happening until Putin is dead or out of power. Russia has done too much damage to be forgiven.
You don't need a goddam parser (or even regular expressions) to solve the problem! All you have to do is to run through the characters looking for ones that need escaping.
And two Democrats. Or DINOs.
No, it really does result from the intransigence of Republicans. In the Republican party of the '60s and '70s, lots of Republicans would have supported at least some of Biden's agenda.
We are now in the era of Mitch McConnell: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. I'm sure he feels the same way about President Biden, and his opposition to everything Democrats want to do continues... :-(
Since I'm not sure what he gets from nuking Ukraine on V-E Day (this is my ignorance speaking), perhaps he has a decision tree?
One of the hardest things for most everyone on the planet to do is see things from the point of someone who utterly disagrees with you. Which means you have a lot of trouble filling the decision tree with likely responses. Which leads to, ugh, "oh crap" moments.
1691 - Or even just realised that lots of web addresses start "httpscolondoubleslash". Which is a variation on the "Scunthorpe" issue.
1698 - I agree; see just above but treat it as a comment on how (not) to write Nannywear. Yes, there is a potentially "rude string" in there, but only if the "c" is prefaced with a spacebar or a percentile20.
There are actually quite a few competent ones, they just don't get much press.
Yes. Crazy tends to get the headlines. Sound policy wonkiness is a boring news story.
I'm confused. I don't understand how Putin would support a full–on war if he's not able to rearm the smaller force that's already in Ukraine.
His best success has been with cruise missiles and such. The throw a big bang over the hill stuff is wreaking Ukraine but not doing much to let him win.
He can re-arm most of the throw a big bang things without western tech. But the smart stuff will be harder.
And there IS a LOT of Russian armor not yet committed to the battle but now I have to wonder if it is anywhere near battle ready.
ADS-B Exchange is showing a higher level of NATO air activity over Poland and Romania than I've seen before. Probably associated with nervousness about what the morrow may bring.
Checking, sunrise tomorrow in Kiev is at 05:21 local (02:21 UTC, 22:21 EDT tonight). Presumably a new offensive would start then, with preliminary softening up of some sort in the preceding hour or so. Victory Day parade in Moscow starts a few hours later, so time enough for Putin to have an announcement to make.
but the party in power always seems to get the blame... :-(
They hold power by a width of a finger nail. I'm still trying to figure out just what the AOC and compatriots side of the D thought they would do to get Joe Manchin and a half dozen other quieter similar Senators to go along with them on everything they "promised".
We are now in the era of Mitch McConnell
The US CBS Sunday Morning show had a decent interview this morning with David Gergen. He agrees with you and hopes things change soon.
Once again, we are in violent agreement.
Please note my reference to 1647 in 1695 (basic potty training). Learning to write parsers correctly teaches many useful skills, like how to test and branch correctly, and how to read a specification without defecating outside the potty.
Hmm. I see that Justin Trudeau and Jill Biden are currently in Ukraine. I wonder if they'll remain for a day or so.
Yes, it's not limited to democracies, but it's on full display in the US and elsewhere. It's obvious at the moment that the US government can't be counted on to protect the rights of most non white male groups
The problem is it also swings the other way. NAFTA decimated the southeastern US textile industry. But those rural small town people who saw their factories shut down were told "don't worry, other jobs will show up". Then 10 years later they still hadn't. Which contributed to the rise of the Tea Party movement. (Yes, astroturfed but still it gave them a way to direct their anger.)
And now 20+ years on the jobs for many still haven't shown up. Yes there are new auto plants and such around but they didn't pick up many of the then 40 years old now 60 years old textile workers or those with no education past the age of 14. So they are wide open to a populist claiming to help them out. (Trump anyone?)
Not that many of them aren't tailholes. Like a large number of my relatives.
But those rural small town people who saw their factories shut down were told "don't worry, other jobs will show up". Then 10 years later they still hadn't.
Same thing happened to West Virginia coal miners...
Use the preview mode below your post. When you see the spot where your URL stops being a URL, that's where you insert an escape character.
You might find The Incredible Shrinking Russian Army a fun read. Is it strictly accurate? I don't know, which is why I'm labeling it "fun". Some basic facts check out though.
Anyway, Russia has multiple problems that sheer numbers of tanks won't by themselves help. One is the relative lack of combined arms training, specifically working tanks with infantry. Another is losing tanks to infantry weapons like the Javelins. Without a heavy infantry presence to keep the Javelin squads away from the tanks, they're vulnerable. Without tanks and artillery, the infantry is vulnerable, and so forth.
The Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) they're predominantly using in Ukraine are chopped-up brigades, with a couple of tank companies supported by a few artillery, anti-aircraft, and around 200 infantry, for 600-800 total fighters if fully staffed. Supply line protection is provided by paramilitaries, with whom the commander may be communicating using a cell phone or walkie talkie. Even if they could do combined operations well, if the tanks get broken, the infantry is vulnerable, and apparently they don't have enough infantry to do things like urban combat very well. The ones currently in Ukraine aren't fully staffed either (average size below 600).
This is unlike the Brigade Combat Team of around 4500 soldiers that NATO and Ukraine use. That's the minimum size is 4500 soldiers in full combined arms, and it's considered the minimum size necessary for fully independent operations. Even the battalions within each brigade are bigger than what Russia is currently fielding, although there are fewer of them.
Now it's entirely possible that Putin will declare war on Ukraine in a few hours, and that's what I actually expect him to do (the Trumpian double-down, basically, using brutality rather rather than skill). That declaration gets him a lot more soldiers and equipment, but if he keeps using BTGs...they're kind of fragile.
Whether the war gets rolling before summer is another question, due to logistics and training. Another question is whether the current rash of Russian Army recruitment center bombings will continue.
But...nuking Ukraine this week? I don't see what that gets him.
I'd welcome actual military comments on this. As Kardashev noted, NATO forces apparently have beefed up their monitoring.
But...nuking Ukraine this week? I don't see what that gets him.
The YouTube commentator Perun has done a deep dive into Russia's nuclear weapons doctrine. It may be beyond his pay grade as an economist but his PowerPoint presentation (no, really it's PP on YouTube) references actual published documents and public statements by Russian military commanders and political executives.
Perun's analysis is basically, no nukes. Using nukes doesn't mean the Russians suddenly win in Ukraine and the backlash from the rest of the world would be immediate and total with the resulting economic effects making North Korea look like a member of the G7 by comparison.
Trudeau in Kyiv. Biden in Uzhhorod, within easy walking distance of Slovakia, a NATO/Article 5 party. Still, a significant presence.
Not that many of them aren't tailholes. Like a large number of my relatives.
Friend's brother regularly dealt with a company in Alabama*. Friends with the owner. Hated the area — lots of Confederate and some Swastika flags hanging on houses. CEO was open about his hatred of f--s and n-----s. (Brother is not obviously gay, but…) Offered a job by owner, turned it down because of CEO. Owner apparently could understand that — but didn't see a need to do anything about the CEO.
As Peter Watts said: "Edmund Burke once said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. I think that begs a question. If you do nothing, what makes you any fucking good?"
*I think. Somewhere in the American South, anyway.
Just so everyone knows. Not all of the crazies are in the south. In other parts of the country they are a sizable minority or just keep their mouth shut. But they are there.
Wisconsin and Michigan seem to have a fair number, too.
But I get the impression that the rural South has a significant concentration.
Wisconsin and Michigan seem to have a fair number, too. But I get the impression that the rural South has a significant concentration.
So does rural California, for that matter. It's the state that produced Nixon and Reagan, after all. Wisconsin produced both the modern progressive movement and Joe McCarthy.
But I get the impression that the rural South has a significant concentration.
Just like desegregation into the 60s, the south was out and proud. The north just did it (segregation) but didn't admit to it. Then we got the South Boston Busing riots, err, fights.
Your problem is with the roughly 10 year old Markdown parser in this obsolete and unsupported Movable Type installation; if you've used Wikipedia or Reddit, you'd know that Markdown works just fine for links. Something's broken in this one and I have no energy for debugging it.
(I just handed in another novel. I assume you'd rather have more books than fewer trivial obstacles to commenting on the blog.)
I'm surprised that complex numbers are a problem in computer languages. Isn't algebra a mechanical process at that level?
Yes, it can easily be done by machine, question is: when is this done correctly? Sadly, the answer is: not always.
Not all of the crazies are in the south. In other parts of the country they are a sizable minority or just keep their mouth shut. But they are there.
Oregon sure has its fair share. Most are east of the Cascade Mountains, but they sure like to roll into Portland to take part in anti-protest protests and riots... :-(
I'm surprised that complex numbers are a problem in computer languages. Isn't algebra a mechanical process at that level?
Perhaps, but it's sure not a mechanical process for programmers. All kinds of things to worry about - error handling, limited numerical accuracy, things that depend on trigonometric functions which have their own boundary problems, etc., etc., etc. A few days ago, I looked at an add-on for complex number implementation in VisualWorks Smalltalk, and there's a lot of really weird stuff there!
And as EC points out, you then need a comprehensive test suite to make sure everything works, and continues to work after you find and fix bugs.
Given that complex numbers are rarely used in everyday programming, it's not surprising that it is never (rarely?) part of a formal computer language. It's a complex process (pun intended!)...
Heteromeles @ 1672:
I'm confused. I don't understand how Putin would support a full–on war if he's not able to rearm the smaller force that's already in Ukraine.
Near the end of WW2 in the Führerbunker, Hitler was ordering counter-attacks by armies that no longer existed. The high command around him had difficulty explaining reality to him.
Does Putin have anyone who can explain the reality of Russia's current difficulties as they affect Russia's logistics? And if he does, does he believe them? How congruent with current reality is Putin's own mythos?
How long would he have to wait after withdrawing before others would ease sanctions to get Russian gas or other investments going again? Once they ease sanctions, he can rearm and try again. Unless he's running out of time for other reasons.
I don't know how long the sanctions will persist after then end of hostilities, but I think he IS "running out of time for other reasons". But again, does he know that or give it credence if it contradicts his beliefs?
I think he's suffering an extreme case of Rich Man's Disease; his power means he's been able to surround himself with "Yes men". There's no one to tell him no.
What happens if Putin orders a nuclear attack?
"Something's broken in this one and I have no energy for debugging it."
Hehe, guess what I was doing at the same time you were posting that...
Look in the file plugins/Markdown/Markdown.pl for the line
$nested_tags/ix; # nested tags
(should be around line 12xx depending on version, in a subroutine called TokenizeHTML).
Insert immediately before that line:
(\bhttps?:\/\/\S+) | # URLs
Reasoning:
Turns out the Markdown plugin does not recognise plain URLs. It processes URLs which have various kinds of guff wrapped around them, but plain URLs with no guff it simply ignores, and passes through untouched (unless they have certain characters in them, in which case it fucks them up).
It's the rest of the Movable Type installation that subsequently generates the HTML to turn those plain URLs into links. Markdown only generates HTML for URLs wrapped in guff.
Markdown has a crude and rather dodgy bit of code for parsing HTML with regexes and labelling bits of it as either "tag" or "text", so that it then knows to leave anything labelled "tag" untouched. This is how it manages to leave the href attribute in URLs posted in HTML tag form (as opposed to plain text) uncorrupted, while still fucking up the link text if the URL is used for that too.
The above insertion adds "piece of text that looks like a URL" to the things this piece of code considers to be "HTML tags", so now it passes anything that looks like a URL untouched whether it has certain characters in it or not. Therefore they will be converted into links by the ordinary Movable Type code, in the same way that plain URLs are at present except that with the modification it's no longer being fed pre-corrupted text. Meanwhile URLs that are posted in Markdown's own format or in HTML still work as intended, but now they also do not show corrupted link text if the URL was used for that.
Tested by reinserting the code which allows the plugin to be run from the command line into the version of it which is included with Movable type (since said code has been excised from that version, although the README still thinks it's present), and then running text with URLs in various formats through it.
According to http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ the latest version of Markdown is from December 2004, and it still has the same bug in it. The READMEs and the comments in the code strongly suggest that the author simply hasn't bothered to consider that people might want to post URLs as raw URLs at all, and the code itself seems to go to any lengths to avoid recognising URLs by what they are, instead relying on inferring that something is supposed to be a URL purely from what's around but not part of it. So it looks extremely unlikely that there ever will be an upstream fix.
Heteromeles @ 1712: You might find The Incredible Shrinking Russian Army a fun read. Is it strictly accurate? I don't know, which is why I'm labeling it "fun". Some basic facts check out though.
I didn't find anything during a quick read that went against my experience (regarding a U.S. BCT), so maybe the part about Russian BGTs is good info too?
[ ... ]
But...nuking Ukraine this week? I don't see what that gets him.
The point I keep coming back to is "What does Putin think it gets him?". That's what will determine what he does.
He's misjudged the situation almost from the beginning. Is he still misjudging it? He doesn't seem to have changed any of his stated views in light of the Russian Army's difficulties on the ground.
Maybe he understands how using nuclear weapons against Ukraine (or anyone else) would ultimately backfire on him ... or maybe he doesn't. How can you tell from his rhetoric?
It does seem like every time western commentators have discounted Putin's rhetoric because "Surely Putin understands this and won't follow through on his threat" ... they've been wrong. Whether Putin understood or not, he did follow through on his threats.
I just handed in another novel. I assume you'd rather have more books than fewer trivial obstacles to commenting on the blog.
Congratulations! I'm looking forward to reading it. If only I had a time machine to pop forward 10 months and buy a copy.
[JReynolds is given a time machine. He pops forward 10 months, but can't make anything out over all of the screaming. He leaves without the book.]
I think there's a thing for us to be careful about with respect to Putin, Alito, Trump, Johnson, or the other bogeymen on this list.
That thing is assuming that they're, to deliberately use a bonkers analogy, Lovecraftian alien gods, powerful beings whose cognition is so alien to our own that we should project our worst nightmares onto them as a way to understand them.
I'm getting at a bunch of things with this bonkers analogy:
--One is that most of us here get a charge out of reading about HPL's gods.
--To the degree that the buzz we're getting is from fear and adrenaline, that makes us vulnerable to things that give us that buzz. Some of those things include scary politics.
--Because of this, it's easier for us in particular to treat the politicians like Putin as insane monsters in comparison to us. This feels right to us, even though we don't really have evidence that it is objectively correct.
--Most importantly for us on this list, we have little or no means of affecting these people with our fear. But our fearful reactions to them do affect us.
What that adds up to is that we can juice ourselves with fear and adrenaline until we make ourselves sick. That, in turn, blinds us to other things we can do to take care of ourselves and those we care about.
I drew this out instead of writing, "you're making yourself sick with fear. Why?" because I wanted to see if I could get past an instantaneous rejection and help you to think about whether anything I just wrote is useful to you.
Getting back to Putin, if WW3 starts next week, is there anything you can do right now to help you survive it? If not, then if you're worried about Ukraine getting nuked, is there anything you can do to help them survive it? If there's nothing you can do in either case, then is worrying about it helping you or hurting you? If worrying is helping you do a thing, do that thing. If it isn't, maybe see if you can spend that same energy letting go of the worry, so that you don't hurt yourself, and so you can do other things.
If this is useful to you, use it. If it's not, ignore it. That's all.
JBS
What happens if Putin orders a nuclear attack? - THAT is one of the many surprising things we might or hopefully might not be finding out tomorrow morning .....
Greg,
It looks like Putin's big surprise is a mobilization. I've seen call-up papers on twitter, but I don't know how reliable that is, nor how widespread the call-up will be. Everyone from 18-40? Or just the 18 year olds?
I guess we'll wake up and find out.
(I've been reading Norman Friedman's naval history of WW1 recently. He comments that Kitchener's Million Man Army drew resources away from the industries -- like ship-building -- that needed men. And this loss of industrial capacity persisted in both England and France for another two decades. Will Putin's call-up do the same? I think it will, if it is too indiscriminate.)
Perhaps, but it's sure not a mechanical process for programmers. All kinds of things to worry about - error handling, limited numerical accuracy, things that depend on trigonometric functions which have their own boundary problems, etc., etc., etc.
That's why I took care in 1722 to say "it can easily be done by machine" rather than "by programmers", and emphasised the difficulty of getting it right. So perhaps using "easy" there was misleading. Floating point is a always compromise - just take a look at IEEE 754 - and even engineers sometimes get this wrong.
This is why I talk about education and employers. Apart from 1647, I've deleted several short rants on that subject before posting. Now I'm resisting writing another.
So I'll limit myself to pointing out the errors programmers can make with integers alone. E.g. confusing a finite domain with an infinite domain. So many newsworthy bugs result that way. Why expect all programmers to get anything as hard as complex numbers right when mere integers defeat so many?
I would find it not at all surprising if part of the reason for the multiple foreign dignitaries visiting Ukraine is to make it obvious that firing off any nukes would be a bad idea. Today the list included the U.S. President's wife, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, and the German Bundestag President.
Yeah, I'm seeing the mobilization rumors too. My impertinent question is whether Russian draft dodgers will be welcome in China, Mongolia, or former SSRs, or whether they'll have to try their luck with NATO countries. Or North Korea.
Your question is rather more pertinent, I think.
Very slightly off to the side of discussions about complex numbers on computers, I was recently pointed to https://herbie.uwplse.org which claims to help with optimising (for accuracy) equations involving floats. It might even be useful to a few people.
looks like Putin's big surprise is a mobilization
The theory being that Ukrainians won't be willing the machinegun thousands of unarmed Russian conscripts so they can just march through the country doing whatever they like (until they die of starvation)?
One response would be to welcome them with open arms then ship them off to refugee camps in the US until they can be taught useful skills and integrated into society. Obviously very much a long game strategy so would face resistance from Putin's Puppets in the US government, but terrifyingly effective if they could bring themselves to do it.
I think you're probably right. But my question is whether a declaration of war by Putin will be meaningful in any real sense?
First of all, who does he declare war against? Ukraine? If he does that he loses the semantic battle over whether Ukraine actually exists. So does he then declare that a state of civil war exists, with the Ukrainians as "rebels?" This is a minefield all by itself, and whatever he does, typical shitty Russian propaganda isn't going to advance his case at all. So what then? Does he declare war on a NATO country? Or maybe Sweden or Finland?
Second, how's he going to equip these soldiers? His tank factory is shut down, Russia is under sanctions, which will probably get worse if he declares war, so both raw materials and manufactured goods are unlikely to be available for incorporation into tanks, airplanes, heavy weapons, etc. Does a declaration of war give Putin the ability to dictate what will be manufactured and how the materials will be procured? If so, this might help him a little bit despite the sanctions, but I'd still expect typical Russian corruption to kill any effort to rearm.
With what he has now Putin can probably give every soldier a helmet, a gun, a uniform and reasonable amounts of ammunition, then move them to someplace close to the Ukrainian border, but what happens when this green infantry goes up against Ukrainian veterans armed with tanks and heavy artillery?
Third, let's assume, (I can already hear JBS laughing at this) that Putin can train a soldier to do something militarily-useful in only three months. What will happen in Ukraine by then? I don't expect the Russians to make any military progress in the upcoming three months, and wouldn't be surprised if, by the time any draftee is ready for war, the Ukrainians have kicked the Russians out of their country and the war is effectively over.
If this is all Putin has for tomorrow he's essentially admitting defeat (but I'm not sure he knows that.)
"One response would be to welcome them with open arms then ship them off to refugee camps in the US until they can be taught useful skills and integrated into society."
You speak of Texas.
Has lots of mostly empty, mostly habitable space and a population already about 30M. Also a right-wing authoritarian state government that shows a preference for light-skinned people.
Pretty much a perfect match.
First of all, who does he declare war against? Ukraine? If he does that he loses the semantic battle over whether Ukraine actually exists. So does he then declare that a state of civil war exists, with the Ukrainians as "rebels?" This is a minefield all by itself, and whatever he does, typical shitty Russian propaganda isn't going to advance his case at all. So what then? Does he declare war on a NATO country? Or maybe Sweden or Finland?
Here's my guess (For i pennies): Putin declares war against "the Nazis who have taken over Ukraine," which apparently include the "Jewish Nazi" running the country. That would be somewhat consistent with his rhetoric so far.
Precedent? The US authorization for the use of military force against the terrorists who caused 9/11 and their supporters.
Way back in the 1890's the USA decided that their inches were not like those pesky UK ones and progressed with a new improved updated standard inch of exactly 25.4 and a bit millimetres. An actual manufacturer decided that they were pissing about and made his gauge blocks 25.4mm and that was the end of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch#History
The imperial system of units is an endless source of entertainment. It's not just measuring gravity in furlongs per square fortnight, or water in barleycorn-acres, it's the arguments over whether that's a Scottish Acre or an English ones.
This morning they declared war against Elon Musk.
From the testimony of the captured chief of staff of the 36th Marine Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Colonel Dmitry Kormyankov, it follows that Elon Musk's ground-based subscriber equipment of the Starlink satellite company was delivered to the militants of the Nazi battalion "Azov" and the Marines of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to Mariupol by military helicopters. According to our information, the delivery and transfer to the Armed Forces of Ukraine of PO boxes for receiving and transmitting the Internet from Starlink was carried out by the Pentagon. Elon Musk is thus involved in supplying the fascist forces in Ukraine with military communications equipment. And for this you will have to answer in an adult way, Elon, no matter how you turn on the fool.
Which they probably think is picking on an easy target that can't strike back.
There's not really much difference between a "mass simulator" and a kinetic energy kill weapon. Which they'd know (in the words of a Ukrainian infantry man) "if they weren't so fucking stupid"
You're referring to the "turn my Falcon Heavy into a giant fucking kinetic energy weapon" option? I think that runs extra!
I wonder if these presages an attempt to clean up a bunch of the crap that litters low earth orbit? Not just StarLink, but I wonder if the Russians care?
My impertinent question is whether Russian draft dodgers will be welcome in China, Mongolia, or former SSRs, or whether they'll have to try their luck with NATO countries. Or North Korea.
Russian already has a big brain drain of younger tech workers. They started leaving as the tanks first rolled.
I wonder if most of those left are smart enough to leave.
Way back in the 1890's the USA decided that their inches were not like those pesky UK ones and progressed with a new improved updated standard inch of exactly 25.4 and a bit millimetres.
Come on. Anyone with any sense knows an inch is the distance between the 2 knuckles of your pointer finger. Although a ruler says that distance on my finder is 1 3/8 inches when my finger is bent. I guess I'm supposed to use the center point of the knuckles.
Oh well. Close enough for government work.
Troutwaxer
BBC radio report, just now ( Well, approx. 07.20 ) - rural Russia - completely brainwashed ( just like rural US Repubs ) "Ukraine was going to invade us!" / "They're all evil new nazis!" / "Amerika was going to invade!"
Getting that mindset changed could be an uphill struggle
Moz
That monumental, um "Screw" up was part of the saga of the "Enfield Inch" - just don't go there ...
"Getting that mindset changed could be an uphill struggle"
The most succefull historical model was West Germany and Japan:
50 years of colonial rule while force-feeding them a diet of Sesame-Straße, McDonalds and Coca-Cola.
Problem is, if anybody tries, it will probably be more West-Bank than West-Germany
Putin's speech just ended .... NOTHING. However: One hopeful sign ...
And, from the same source ...
Something familiar & very nasty
Oh & RU "smart" TV was openly publicly hacked today ...
Can't see (yet) how well / stable / trembly / wobbly Putin looked. Don't doubt we will get analysis later
That's good news. Nothing is better than something.
Second link has the same url as the first link.
Nancy Lebovitz@1721:
"I'm surprised that complex numbers are a problem in computer languages. Isn't algebra a mechanical process at that level?"
Yes, but algebra and numerical analysis are different things.
The complex (and real) numbers studied by mathematicians comprise fields, in the mathematical sense (roughly, a set of numbers and add, subtract, multiply, divide operations.) They are continuous (everything between two real numbers is also a real number) and go all the way to infinity.
True fields behave nicely in various ways: A(BC) = (AB)C, A+(B+C) = (A+B)+C, A(B+C) = AB + A*C, and the result of every calculation is another element of the set. That's what enables the mechanical process to work.
Computer floating-point and complex numbers aren't any of those things, only finite approximations to them. The order of operations changes the result, and frequently the result isn't a number in the set, so has to be approximated.
the latest version of Markdown is from December 2004, and it still has the same bug in it.
Yeah, the original version of Markdown via Daring Fireball is like the original C compiler by Ken Thompson in UNIX System 7, released 1983 or thereabouts.
If this leads to a weird wikipedia sub-page then the fix works. (A whole bunch of third-party markdown parsers have come out since then with variant supersets of the original features: it's what wikipedia edits run on, for example, and Reddit.)
Let us not forget the horror that was the pre-revolutionary French Foot, which IIRC was the distance from the king's nose to the tip of his right index finger when his arm was extended, and changed every time they had a coronation. (Or, presumably, a guillotining.)
And then there were Russian pre-revolutionary units, such as the pood and the funt.
There's a reason everyone except the USA and Liberia went metric!
As SpaceX had eaten most of Roscosmos's market for foreign satellite launches even before sanctions got started, there may be an economic motive at work here.
NB: if Roscosmos hadn't succumbed to the galloping corruption endemic in Russian industrial production this century, they wouldn't be in this mess. World's smallest violin, etc.
Charlie @ 1753 ... Less than a week back, some arsehole on the Weather forecast gave a temperature in Fahrenheit ( As well as °C )
You really ARE a hangover from the 16th century, aren't you? I don't think that giving both measures should be treated as heresy.
Actually, OGH's point is a bit misleading. We standardised Imperial units for that very reason a long time back - long before we partially metricated. You don't HAVE to go metric to get stable units, but I agree that the zoo of them I had to learn at school is unnecessarily confusing.
The problem was that a lot of the imperial standards were the subject of disagreement and alternative standards.
We're not really talking about how many poods to the stong, or whether it's a dry acorn or a fresh one here, we're talking about Greg's "can you fit bullet A into gun B" stuff, where some people get quite upset if it won't (and others get upset if it does... sometimes you really can't please everyone).
I'm sure originally the inch disagreement was the gap between 1/36 King James Yards and the decimal equivalent, which is why I brought it up in response to "but pure maths is exact". Per wikipedia, anyway. My interest is more with stuff like leap seconds and the various astronomical times where words like sidereal become important and who cares how long a year is anyway.
Er, no. Yes, that was true in mediaeval times and for time thereafter, but the major units were standardised much earlier than people think (*). The yard (and hence the inch) was fully standardised in 1758, and it was done to modern standards from 1878. The pound was similar. We didn't really metricate until the second half of the 20th century, and then only sort-of. The yard has been defined in terms of the metre since 1898, but that gave the old size of inch; the modern one dates only from 1959. Yes, the older one was in terms of fractions, but they are as decimal as anything else; that's not the reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)#Avoirdupois_pound
(*) It's things like gallons and land and sea measurement that were truly baffling.
MediaWiki and its wiki syntax predate Markdown by a couple of years. It looks somewhat similar because they both came out of the same primordial stew of people trying to figure out ways to write markup with a different trade-off between simplicity and power from that chosen by HTML, but it is not true to say that Wikipedia uses a Markdown variant.
(Citation, for example: Markdown announcement in the comments to which you can see one of its creators discussing differences between it and Wikipedia markup in a way that makes it clear that the latter already existed.)
Well, Musk has bragged about Starlink supplying the brave Ukrainians with base stations, consistently failing to mention that SpaceX received a USAID subsidy for a fair number of those.
It does appear like SpaceX did make a significant charitable donation to Ukraine. USAID told the Post in a statement that the “delivery of Starlink terminals were made possible by a range of stakeholders, whose combined contributions valued over $15 million,” and its original press release said that SpaceX donated $10 million worth of equipment in service. But, as with many other SpaceX projects, the company does appear to have gotten a significant amount of public funding for the project.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/8/23016670/starlink-spacex-us-government-terminals-funding-usaid
So in part this looks like the Russians taking him at his word. He wanted credit for tweaking the Russian Bear's nose, and he's getting it.
EC
It merely encourages the reactionary, stupid & ignorant to carry on using °F, when we have been publicly using &dec;C for well over 30 years ... why?
... later - "Land Measurement" - don't (!)
Allotment areas are STILL measured in fucking "rods" ( 272.25 sq ft = 30.25 sq yds) - it doesn't even make sense in Imperial Units, does it?
I started using what were then called "mks" units in 1960/61, so everyone has had 62 Years to get used to them, so why are they being bandied about, except for the two "special exemptions" { Miles & Pints } Uh?
blockquote>Allotment areas are STILL measured in fucking "rods" ( 272.25 sq ft = 30.25 sq yds) - it doesn't even make sense in Imperial Units, does it?
Oh yes it does!
Ask yourself: "Do I want to have my allotment re-gridded in metric?" Because -- of course -- making the new grid on 5m would be pretty close to what you have at the moment which is a pole squared.
My guess would be that proposing this at the next allotment holders meeting would be a dangerous suggestion, but may be you have a different sort of allotment holder where you are.
(For others a pole, rod, or perch is an Anglo-Saxon measurement of 16.5 feet, and most ancient streets are laid out on that grid. My house (built 1882) has a frontage of -- yes, you guessed -- one rod.)
Dave Lester
I know ... a "Metric Rod" would be 30 sq metres, so a ten-rod allotment would be 10x30 ... which is damn close to what they are ...
I'm fairly certain my street frontage is 33 feet ( Built 1893 ) f'rinstance.
(For others a pole, rod, or perch is an Anglo-Saxon measurement of 16.5 feet, and most ancient streets are laid out on that grid. My house (built 1882) has a frontage of -- yes, you guessed -- one rod.)
This made me wonder how long is one staff or one wand, if one rod is 16.5 feet.
I might have broken out my D&D 5e books because of the recent announcement of Spelljammer coming to 5e in August. I did play in some Spelljammer games back in the day, so it's... nostalgic. Not good, mind you, and WotC can mess it up, but it could be fun for just the gonzo factor with the right players.
To make life even more fun, an American fluid ounce is not an actual fluid ounce. “The US fluid ounce is 1/16 of a US fluid pint, and 1/128 of a US liquid gallon, which is equal to 29.57 mL. The imperial fluid ounce is 1/20 of an imperial pint, and 1/160 of an imperial gallon, which is equal to 28.4 mL.” That’s a 4.1% difference. Madness.
My point, really, Greg, was that these ancient measurements feature in land deeds and purchases. Or renting, like your allotment.
And that usually no one wants to surrender "my land" to someone else. Even if the total land area were to remain the same.
I can hear it now: "But my plot has better drainage/better sun/less wind/better soil" etc bloody etc!
Similar in Australia, leading to fun planning rules like "you can't subdivide if you have less than 12.14m of street frontage". Is that the result of a GM saying "2D20 wide"? No, it's 186 times the diameter of King Henry the 7th's arsehole or something equally meaningful in 15th century Englandshire. But 100 years ago they divided Australia up into acres, then 1/4 acres, and then 1/8th acres, and somewhere along the line the standard house section became 24.28m wide by about 50m long, and if you cut that lengthways you get 12.14m wide. And then you sell the result as 621 square metres, because we're all metric now.
Worse, the original paper survey drawings from ~1950 are all we have to tell us where the sewer pipe is. And I am almost certain that the actual sewer pipe is not where the new computerised system thinks it is, because I'm supposed to build 6 feet from the pipe and by my reckoning the computer says yes to about 1m. Even I know that 1m is less than 6 feet. Once it's approved and we did a hole we'll find out...
Have you tried to find the sewer clean-out and work from there. (You're pretty handy, so I'd assume you've done so, but it's the first question that came to mind.) In California, at least, there's a hotline for digging and they'll send someone out, at no cost, to mark the sewer/water/electric/gas/phone lines.
I have approximately three different maps (one appears to be the oldest one with a couple more pipes added), I have a sewer vent poking out of my lawn that I have stuck a 3m camera-on-a-wire down, and I have the guess of a plumber who knows a bit about the old clay pipe systems. Who basically said "it's probably ... but the only way to find out is to dig a hole".
I plan to dig the hole :)
Nojay @ 1713:
I don't either. But I don't know that HE knows that.
The YouTube commentator Perun has done a deep dive into Russia's nuclear weapons doctrine. It may be beyond his pay grade as an economist but his PowerPoint presentation (no, really it's PP on YouTube) references actual published documents and public statements by Russian military commanders and political executives.
More than that, it's actually GOOD PowerPoint, which is nothing short of amazing.
Perun's analysis is basically, no nukes. Using nukes doesn't mean the Russians suddenly win in Ukraine and the backlash from the rest of the world would be immediate and total with the resulting economic effects making North Korea look like a member of the G7 by comparison.
I hope he's right and my worries are unnecessary. I'd feel better about it if I knew Putin believed the same thing.
Greg Tingey @ 1730: JBS
What happens if Putin orders a nuclear attack? - THAT is one of the many surprising things we might or hopefully might not be finding out tomorrow morning .....
Dave Lester @ 1731: Greg,
It looks like Putin's big surprise is a mobilization. I've seen call-up papers on twitter, but I don't know how reliable that is, nor how widespread the call-up will be. Everyone from 18-40? Or just the 18 year olds?
I guess we'll wake up and find out.
(I've been reading Norman Friedman's naval history of WW1 recently. He comments that Kitchener's Million Man Army drew resources away from the industries -- like ship-building -- that needed men. And this loss of industrial capacity persisted in both England and France for another two decades. Will Putin's call-up do the same? I think it will, if it is too indiscriminate.)
Well, so far all he appears to have done is whine and moan about how unfair it is that "the west" started a war with Russia over Ukraine.
Which is fine by me.
David L @ 1745:
Russian already has a big brain drain of younger tech workers. They started leaving as the tanks first rolled.
I wonder if most of those left are smart enough to leave.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Russia closed its borders to emigration round about the second week of the war. If they didn't already get out, they're kind of stuck for the duration.
Charlie Stross @ 1752:
Yeah, the original version of Markdown via Daring Fireball is like the original C compiler by Ken Thompson in UNIX System 7, released 1983 or thereabouts.
If this leads to a weird wikipedia sub-page then the fix works. (A whole bunch of third-party markdown parsers have come out since then with variant supersets of the original features: it's what wikipedia edits run on, for example, and Reddit.)
Looks to me like it worked.
FWIW, looking at the source, it looks like the way I was doing hyperlinks before Markdown was introduced here. I never did figure out how to "escape" the underscores, but I put all my replies inside italics or paragraph tags and I haven't had much trouble with Markdown screwing up the links.
I think the only time I've had broken links was when I was adding a link to an original post where I didn't use italics/paragraph tags.
Yep - just run a set of test cases of that URL in various formats through it in Preview and it gets the same results as it does this end. Cool! Thank you.
I'm happy to attempt other such modifications or bug fixes on MT if you can give me a comparably clear idea of what you want done, so you can concentrate on writing books.
Charlie Stross @ 1753: Let us not forget the horror that was the pre-revolutionary French Foot, which IIRC was the distance from the king's nose to the tip of his right index finger when his arm was extended, and changed every time they had a coronation. (Or, presumably, a guillotining.)
I believe that was the pre-revolutionary French YARD.
And then there were Russian pre-revolutionary units, such as the pood and the funt.
There's a reason everyone except the USA and Liberia went metric!
Actually the U.S. DID go metric, just no one knows about it. Authority to determine standards of measure are part of the enumerated powers of Congress. They put the U.S. on decimal currency in 1792.
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson proposed a plan to Congress in 1791 for weights & measures "to reduce every branch to the same decimal ratio already established for coin, and thus bring the calculations of the principal affairs of life within the arithmetic of every man who can multiply and divide plain numbers". A Senate Committee recommended adoption of this plan in 1792 and in 1793 Jefferson requested artifacts from France to to establish metrication in the U.S. Unfortunately, the courier bringing the artifacts to the U.S. was captured by pirates and died in captivity.
Lacking those "artifacts" Congress adopted the U.S. "customary" system in 1832. But the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, the government's surveying and map-making agency, was already using a French Mètre des Archives purchased from Switzerland at that time.
In 1866, Congress protected use of the metric system in commerce with the Metric Act of 1866 and provided each state with a set of standard metric weights & measures.
Additionally the U.S. is one of the original seventeen signatory nations to the Metre Convention of 1875 which refined the metric system and established the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (Bureau international des poids et mesures, BIPM) in Sèvres, France
The U.S. has been on the metric system a lot longer than most people know.
"Getting back to Putin, if WW3 starts next week, is there anything you can do right now to help you survive it?"
Build a Geiger counter from what are probably mostly junk box parts?
The RS part number for the clicky bit has been superseded by http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/piezo-buzzer-components/5117642/ which seems to be the same component, but there are loads of these things and any of them should do.
The Geiger tube type STS-5 (CTC-5 in Cyrillic) is a Soviet part.
Bouncing back a week. We were having a discussion about governments taking control of various businesses and transforming them into green energy projects.
So this story came on TV during that week, and it's just been released online (it says 8 days old, but it was unlisted for the first week). I would have written this post then, but it seemed better to hold off until the video in talking about its viewable.
https://youtu.be/4uFhG3Nzym0
The whole thing is interesting, though it's a fluff piece, but the significant part is at 12 minutes.
(Narrator) in february mike cannon brooks made a takeover bid of agl our biggest emitter of greenhouse gases promising to close its three existing coal - fired power plants 15 years sooner than scheduled backed by 20 billion dollars of foreign investment mike planned to transition this site into a green energy hub continuing supply and promising to keep and create jobs
(Billionaire) agl has more emissions than the countries of sweden new zealand or ireland it is more than every single car on the road in australia more than every single airplane in our skies international or domestic and we can change it by 2030 in a meaningful meaningful meaningful way if we can do that and show its economic show that there is money to be made in doing that then around the globe we'll have 50 copycat projects and that will be fantastic
(Narrator) agl thought otherwise rejecting the bid without even taking the offer to its shareholders
(Interviewer) so dead the deal is done it's not going to happen
(Billionaire) put our pens down we put our offer to the board the board didn't meaningly feel engaged and said no
Now what's significant about this is that it's illegal to fail to present a takeover bid to shareholders.
Your idea is that to save the world "we" (presumably meaning governments) need to take the stuff from billionaires in order to fund the work. Yet here is one of the 197 governments of the world. A billionaire is trying to take over the largest emitter in the country in order to stop them emitting. The government has done nothing to enforce the existing law that requires the billionaire's offer be presented to shareholders. The government is actively working to keep the emissions going.
Not one of the 197 governments of the world have taken any real action on climate change. A tiny fraction of billionaires have, yet they're blocked by governments.
So not only is there no real plan for how you go from taking their companies, to removing CO2, not even in broad brushstrokes, you'd be handing control of the henhouses to the foxes. It's the governments that are standing in the way of action. Why would we give them a bookstore and expect them to use it to remove CO2? Not only is it very hard to convert a bookstore into calcium carbonate, they don't want to.
Oops, posted the "before" proofreading rather than the "after". Hopefully it's readable despite me using a gestural keyboard that likes to substitute similar but different words.
For a work of fiction to inspire people to do something about climate change? Absolutely. That was the context for this whole freaking comment thread. I know it's harder than that. So do you.
If you believe a billionaire will save you, I've got a slightly used president to sell you. He's the greatest, and furthermore, his makeup will help hide the outback dust when he goes to court the kangaroo votes.
I don't think a billionaire will save me, but there are a couple trying.
However I can see that there's 197 governments that without exception are trying to kill me and everything else.
If you have a magic wand that you can wave and transfer all the resources from billionaires to some government green action department, you've got to then overcome the fact that the government could have started the green action department without the wand, had all the resources needed, and didn't. They don't want green action.
Even in a work of fiction, that's a tough nut to crack without snapping everyone's suspenders of disbelief. The 197 organisations together currently subsidise fossil fuels 5,000 billion dollars a year. 50,000 billon by 2030. Grabbing Elon's 500 billion and giving it to the people who are funneling that much public money into fossil fuels is going to make them shout "thank, God, we have 1% spare resources!... Let's save everyone!"? Hmmm, probably not.
They are fighting a proxy-war, against an enemy supplied by another super-power, which they cannot afford to provoke into full-on war, and they are not winning and barely holding, and doing so at an unsustainable cost to their own national economy and morale.
Quiz:
[ ] USA in VN [ ] RU in UA
"the west" started a war with Russia over Ukraine. - Big Lie; the trouble is that lots of Russians seem to believe it!
Part of the reason for the mistaken belief that Napoleon was short is that French and English inches aren't the same length. I believe this is evidence that God is trolling us.
I don't have evidence handy, but I believe one thing that can go wrong in fiction is translation between English and metric units or vice versa. Precision can be added which just doesn't go with the story.
OK, this is very interesting: it seems that UA artilllery has created themselves a distributed targeting platform that makes their artillery a much harder nut to crack for Russian counterfire (because Russian counterfire doctrine assumes the enemy is firing entire batteries, and their counterfire radars look for battery-sized targets) and enables time-on-target barrages from multiple directions.
Also, Starlink is proving to be extremely useful for military communications (some excessive fanboyism present at the end, but still a worthwile read).
https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1523791050313433088
Wikipedia says that Napoleon 1 was 1.57 metres (4 ft 14 in), which is about average for a Frenchman of the period, but short for an aristo.
Otherwise known as 5ft 2 ins, yes?
I don't have evidence handy, but I believe one thing that can go wrong in fiction is translation between English and metric units or vice versa.
Not just fiction. A Canadian airliner ran out of fuel in mid-flight after ordering a quantity of fuel in gallons but getting that quantity delivered in liters. Luckily it was able to make a safe dead-stick landing.
I don't have evidence handy, but I believe one thing that can go wrong in fiction is translation between English and metric units or vice versa. Precision can be added which just doesn't go with the story.
There was a period in the 1980s and 1990s when this happened a lot. A particular victim I recall was [the UK paperback edition of] Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books. My copies are in storage, but as I recall PJF wrote everything in miles and maybe feet (?) and it's all translated into exact numbers of kilometres and/or metres. A real shit-show.
However I can see that there's 197 governments that without exception are trying to kill me and everything else.
This seems like an overstatement to me. Denmark? Costa Rica?
The Gimli Glider.
I rather like Petter Hörnfeldt's (Mentour Pilot) video on the subject, but there are many documentaries and explanations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZkKFSqehN4
This is one YouTube video where the comments are interesting. Air Traffic Controllers, pilots, and locals involved in the incident chime in to add their perspective.
Worse, the original paper survey drawings from ~1950 are all we have to tell us where the sewer pipe is
Large areas of the US were surveyed years ago (1800s) with chains and sights. GPS has been upending things for years now. Everyone tends to leave the lot lines intact but recently a non trivial slice of north eastern South Carolina became a slice of south eastern North Carolina. Changed around a few school attendees and some other minor things. But the biggest thing it did was move a gas station from SC to NC. SC has MUCH lower gas taxes which was the reason people stopped at this station. Oh well.
but I believe one thing that can go wrong in fiction is translation between English and metric units or vice versa.
So just how much does a ton weigh?
And yes I know the circular problems in that question.
A Canadian airliner ran out of fuel in mid-flight after ordering a quantity of fuel in gallons but getting that quantity delivered in liters.
I now that story. I keep wondering why no one up front looked at the fuel gauges. Before or during the flight.
Not even translation. Consider the heroine of David Weber and Steve White's "Insurrection" who was something like 1.2 meters tall. I don't think they intended her to be less than four feet tall.
1783 - I don't have more than the anecdote to hand, but you may remember seeing news footage of an Ariane launcher that started tumbling shortly after launch, and was promptly terminated and destroyed by Launch Control (for which my heartfelt congratulations). The base issue there was a trans-Atlantic software development team, some working in Imperial and other in SI units.
1792 - Which sort of "ton" do you mean?
Which sort of "ton" do you mean?
My point.
paws
Didn't one of NASA's Mars probes come to a sticky end for the same stupidity over units?
The imperial/metric issue was a mars lander.
IIRC the Arianne 5 failed because it reused Arianne 4 software designed for a different flight profile, and suffered a 16 bit integer overflow in a horizontal velocity calculation.
I double checked. It was the mars climate orbiter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
The first such spacefuck I remember hearing of was due to somebody mispunctuating a DO statement in some Fortran code.
My recollection is that the V7 C compiler, which came with Version 7 Unix, was available separately and that was around 1978. It had a lot of improvements on the V6 (or was it V5?) compiler. You no longer said '#define unsigned char *' because unsigned was now in the language for real. Long ints, etc., also came in for real at that time. If I remember it correctly! But definitely earlier than the 1980s, and worth the couple of thousand dollars it cost.
Greg Tingey @ 1786: Otherwise known as 5ft 2 ins, yes?
Only if he had blue eyes.
Nick Barnes said: This seems like an overstatement to me. Denmark? Costa Rica?
Denmark. Announced plans to stop paying for some of the costs of fossil fuel extraction this year, except not stopping the support this year, but really stopping the support in 2025.
https://cphpost.dk/?p=129101
Which according to Denmark (and who am I to argue?) makes them the first country in the world to stop financing fossil fuel extraction abroad. So they're still financing it locally. Just not abroad.
But they promise to stop doing it locally in 2050. So there's that.
Costa Rica, the latest data I can find is that they spend 1 billion USD on Fossil Fuel subsides each year, 2.2% of GDP. Which is technically "shitloads". Enough to build a giant battery factory, and a giant electric car factory in 2 years, and then pay to run them and give out free electric cars to everyone.
https://greenfiscalpolicy.org/policy_briefs/costa-rica-country-profile/
Maybe Bhutan? They only subsidised fossil fuels at about 800,000 USD last year that I can find figures for.
Costa Rica, the latest data I can find is that they spend 1 billion USD on Fossil Fuel subsides each year, 2.2% of GDP. Which is technically "shitloads". Enough to build a giant battery factory, and a giant electric car factory in 2 years, and then pay to run them and give out free electric cars to everyone.
Though even those battery factories or electric cars are not completely for 'not killing everybody' - they still need resources and in many places (not sure about Costa Rica, though) private cars are a problem without considering their power mechanism. At the very least, we cannot really give 'everybody' an electric car.
Kind of a small thing, though. Here in Finland, we have really quite lax mining laws. This means international companies can basically come here, establish a mine, mine all the stuff and export it out of Finland, pay very little taxes, and when the ore runs out, bankrupt the company in Finland and leave cleaning out to the Finnish people. The laws are being revised, but the other day the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (usually one of the less-biased news channels) had a piece of news basically how there's a lot of undug ore in Finland and we'd all be just better if the companies could come and mine it up. The local people talking about 'nature' and 'conservation zones' are apparently hindering this fabulous process.
Of course we have all kinds of environmental plans because of the climate catastrophe, but the Needs of the Economy must be met, so... mining and greenhouse gases it is.
So, we're not doing that well in the 'not killing everybody' department. Also annoyingly our forests are often touted as something great, but they're mostly just tree parks for growing wood for pulping, not real forests. I'm somewhat miffed about all this stuff, if you can't tell.
Well substitute "give everybody a bicycle" if you like. The significant bit was the 2.2% of GDP being given as subsidies to fossil fuel companies rather than exactly what that is in terms of opportunity cost.
If I say "he spent 10,000 dollars on a hit man to kill his wife, when he could have just divorced her for much less" the significant part of the sentence is the bit about hiring a bit man, rather than all the better things he could have spent the money on.
Oh, and Australia has the same perplexing attitude towards mining, where we prepared to pay foreign companies to come and relive us of all those annoying minerals.
Apparently there are plenty of foreigners willing to do so.
I hear Germany is looking for some coal just now.
Ask us about the cost of removing our native forests!
Don't forget the priceless historical artifacts primitive scratchings by mindless savages that we're getting rid of to make sure the climate catastrophe happens ASAP.
The good news is that Australia is covered in equivalent artwork. 50,000 years of continuous habitation leaves a lot of evidence behind, just about anywhere that can have art applied has had it, and some of it survives to the present day. It's a worked example of "where is art likely to survive for more than a couple of millennia". Which... maybe those "long now" people should take note?
I don't know how long resource extraction in Australia has been a glorified work-for-the-dole scheme, but it has been for as long as I've been in a position to understand it.