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An AI app walks into a writers room

(From elsenet, copied with permission, because I don't have a ChatGPT account and didn't ask the question) ...

Question to ChatGPT: What is the plot of the unpublished script Charles Stross wrote for Wallace and Grommit?

The villagers of a quaint and idyllic hamlet tucked away in the rolling hills of rural England suddenly realized that their beloved cheese shop, the lifeblood of their community, was closing its doors for good.

At first, they couldn't quite believe it. After all, the cheese shop had stood for generations, a symbol of the village's continuity and stability in an ever-changing world. But then, the whispers started. A dark rumour, like a cold gust of wind, that the cheese shop's proprietor, old Mr. Wensleydale, was retiring, and his business was to be taken over by a faceless conglomerate from the city.

Panic set in as the villagers imagined a future without their favourite cheeses and the comforting smell of cheddar wafting through the streets. The loss of the cheese shop would mean more than just the absence of a local business. It would symbolize the erosion of their way of life, the death of tradition, and the triumph of progress over all that was good and wholesome.

But then, on a drizzly Thursday morning, as the villagers gathered in the town square to mourn the loss of their cheese shop, something strange happened. A shimmering portal opened up in the sky, and a figure stepped out, a visitor from another world. The villagers looked on in awe as the stranger began to speak, and slowly, they realized that their cheese shop was not doomed after all. The future, it seemed, was not set in stone.

And so, with hope in their hearts, the villagers rallied together to save the cheese shop, fighting against the forces of change and entropy with a determination that would have made Mr. Wensleydale proud. In the end, they emerged victorious, their cheese shop still standing, and their community stronger than ever before.

This is a comedic and absurd tale set in a dystopian future. The story follows Wallace and Gromit as they navigate a world filled with sentient robots, interstellar travel, and advanced technologies. Despite their best efforts, the duo finds themselves entangled in a web of corporate espionage, alien conspiracies, and bureaucratic bureaucracy.

The familiar stop-motion animation style combined with elements of cyberpunk, wit and satire, is a unique and off-the-wall addition to the beloved franchise.

ChatGPT should need no introduction to anyone reading this blog. The ripples are still spreading out. However, I have seen a couple of interesting use cases (other than cheating at exams).

Firstly: provide a script (film, TV, or comic script) as input and ask ChatGPT to output the novelization of the film/show/comic, and apparently it can emit a pretty credible first draft. It will be missing details: scripts don't include visual descriptions of characters or physical action, so the author/editor will need to fill in the gaps—otherwise it's incredibly dialog-heavy, as if it's a novel by Samuel Beckett.

Secondly: provided with a novel as input, emit the film/TV/comic script as output. Again, what you get is very approximately a script-shaped thing. It'll get the dialog right, but it's lifted verbatim from the prose—and the cadence and rhythm of book-speech is very different from actual human speech, especially the dramatic spoken word in visual media. It may or may not get directions right, and it will probably make a horrible hash of any introspection/description, and in any case a prose novel is a bad fit for a movie script. But the point is, it's a starting point from which a good scriptwriter can probably distill something workable with much less effort than required in starting from scratch.

Third use case: ChatGPT is currently trained on an English language text corpus. It would be very interesting to see what it could do by way of translation with a sufficiently large input corpus of translated texts—like the huge trove of EU and UN documents that Google Translate was trained on.

It's not going to put movie/TV tie-in writers, scriptwriters, or translators out of a job any time soon (based on the quality of its output). But it might prove a useful tool for them, assuming the copyright issues are surmountable (and they are numerous).

1570 Comments

1:

This technology might have made Amazon's "Rings of Power" worth watching. "ChatGPT, read The Lord of the Rings and the Appendices and give me a script for the Appendices..." It certainly couldn't have done any worse.

2:

Asking it about quaternions, the nature of the Frenkel line or similar technical subjects will cause it to emit some very confidently worded bullshit. Anyone who tries using ChatGPT to cheat in a physics exam is going to be in trouble.

3:

I haven't signed up for a ChatGPT account, but I'm wondering what it would do if asked to draft a chapter from an outline. I personally struggle with the initial act of getting ideas from outline form into narrative form, and I could see something like that being a very useful tool for someone like me to get past that initial hurdle, even though I almost certainly would end up rewriting everything.

Actually. Scratch that. Has anyone asked it to write a new Tom Swift/Hardy Boys story? They're formulaic enough that it might do a half-decent job.

4:

I used it recently to write a job description for an obscure role that we’re hiring for.

It did a better first draft than I could find after 30 mins of LinkedIn searching.

As a frameworking / drafting tool it’s pretty promising.

5:

In technical translation specialised machine learning engines have been used as part of workflow for a few years already, and they are quite good.

Not good enough to be used without human supervision, just like driver assistance in state of the art cars, but good enough to make the work 20% to 50% faster, depending on whether the translated document is similar enough to what the engine was trained on earlier.

You still get AI translating some sentences completely incorrectly ("do not pull the grenade pin" translated as "pull the grenade pin" level of mistranslation), but then, humans do that too, only less frequently, which is why workflow should include review by another pair of eyeballs.

6:

To ChatGPT: "Write a speech attacking ChatGPT in the style of Boris Johnson."

I picked this example of "write a speech attacking homeless issue in [$Place] in the style of Donald Trump" out of respect for the blog. Unfortunately, I don't know BJ's style, so I'll have to continue with DT. Sorry.

DT does bombastic word salad, followed by a few selected clips propagated by media to make him appear coherent, so I suspect he could be deep-faked by existing AI right now and only a few would notice. The only reason I think DT won't use AI-written speeches is that he doesn't read fast enough to make it work. But as a content emitter that runs on semi-random content generation, he's ripe for digitalization.

The point is that I'd expect political speechifying to get the AI treatment in a hurry, especially at the lower level where the pol can't afford a speechwriter and isn't naturally eloquent (pointedly not looking towards Gov. DeSantis...).

Probably the consequence of this will be the spread of Steve Bannon's "flooding the zone with shit" tactic, at least in the short term. If AI-enabled demagoguery works, even for some people, expect it to spread bigly.

Hopefully it won't spread to the level of students using the tech to bully each other online, but I'll bet it already has.

Speaking of students, there's an article out there somewhere claiming that ChatGPT was given the final for a business class at Wharton School of Business, and it scored in the B/B- range. Since Trump apparently got his Wharton MBA with a lower GPA than that, one might argue that he's already been surpassed by AI in some ways.

7:

Sean Carter:

Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, et al were never written by humans... rather generated by the first semi-successful attempt at Synthetic Authoring by a steam-powered assemblage of vacuum tubes and rubber bands and brass plumbing fixtures within the University of Chicago's squash court in the late 1930s and early 1940s...

...the Manhattan Project was the hastily arranged cover story to conceal this ungodly travesty

8:

I am interested but not surprised. Tools of a similar (but really rudimentary) nature were in use on computer programs in the 1970s, and worked far better than most people expected even then, but natural languages were beyond them at that time. As we all know, the focus has been on natural languages since, and progress has been steady.

I agree about your third case, but it's not just training it on another language; it's training it on existing translations, especially ones of previous works by the same author. E.g. it could make a good start on the author's style, vocabulary, idiom and references, which translation programs do not do. Yes, this would need weighting of sources, which might be a problem if they are incompatible with its design, but I suspect not.

More problematic is the potential for forging documents for political purposes, which doesn't seem to have been done much so far. We already have the situation that one of the standard methods of political 'debate' (including sometimes on this blog) is to assign statements to your opponent that he did not make. Corbyn suffered badly from that. This would allow the creation of leaked documents and, at worst, that gets into Protocols territory. I doubt that watermarking would stop that if the user is prepared to do some editing.

9:

Now I'm wondering about what will happen with formula writers.

Romance and porn writers are probably all over it, but I wonder what AI in general will do to their business models. What value does a human add to a formula text? Or if the formula "author" becomes effectively an editor for AI-generated rough drafts, what's the role of downstream editors?

Other formula writers are probably getting more worried. Here I'm looking at the people who do listicles, PR, turning PR into copy, travel writing, weather, police reports, and so on. Who will make a living traveling the world and writing about what's good in a place, when any Ministry of Tourism can dump Yelp five star reviews into ChatGPT and have the output written in the style of Anthony Bourdain?

What about Creative Writing majors, who didn't spend their time learning about content (what to write from) but only process (how to write)? As AI gets better at the writing process, are they going to be in trouble?

One upshot is that we might actually get a further split in fiction categories. Right now, as I understand it, there's a split between formula fiction and artisanal fiction. As AI-enabled writing matures, might there be a further split between artisanal writing and fine writing? Artisanal could include things like fiction formulas using unusual inputs, but that's something an AI could do. Fine writing would be stuff that was "obviously" done by a human (for various values of "obvious"), but which is also worth reading and which therefore sells. It's the difference between, say, HPL pastiches and a new Stephen King novel.

10:

but then, humans do that too, only less frequently

You must be associating with a more select group of humans than some of us.

11:

1930s and early 1940s...

HEY. My Tom Swift was from the 60s. Someone I know got the entire or mostly so set of orignals from a local library book sale. One title he mentioned stuck in my mind.

"Tom Swift and his Search Light"

I guess "high-tech" has evolved a bit since then.

12:

Anyone who tries using ChatGPT to cheat in a physics exam is going to be in trouble.

Apropos which:

http://newsletter.oapt.ca/files/first-impressions-of-chatgpt.html

13:

My guess is that things will be going even further with automatic screenwriting. Novel -> Movie without human intervention, eventually. Who really needs actors, querulous individuals who have to be paid, fed, housed, and in other ways pampered? But right now we can't even do robot path calculations automatically (though Google is working on it, see RT-1). Not enough data.

14:

I'm guessing that In-Q-Tel and similar researchy intelligence organizations are putting a lot of money into finding out how well chatty AI does as an intelligence analyst. Feed it tons of all sorts of intelligence from open source, supper-classified sources, historical information and ask it, e.g. "Will Putin be in power on 2024-01-31?".

15:

Romance and porn writers are probably all over it, but I wonder what AI in general will do to their business models.

Naah.

ChatGPT might work for one-handed reading -- erotica in the 1000-10,000 word range (we read at 250-350 words/minute, so that's a 3-30 minute read, i.e. roughly about the same time frame as a hand job) -- but it'd be useless for romance. Romance story arcs have to build emotional engagement between the lead characters over the course of the entire narrative, but ChatGPT is probabilistic; its window covers sentence-to-sentence level continuity, not chapter-to-chapter.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm pretty sure you'd need to use ChatGPT to draft on a scene by scene basis by feeding it paragraph-sized synopses of each scene, with descriptions of how the protagonists are interacting. And for the sort of extruded product you're talking about are plenty of authors selling via KU and similar who already write 6000-12,000 words/day anyway: ChatGPT might actually slow them down.

16:

Yes gods and little fishes! I wouldn't give it a high mark for English literature, either. Four words in that 'Shakespearian' text were not used in those senses in his time, and two don't occur in his works at all. Yes, I had to check up, but that text grated.

17:

What about Creative Writing majors, who didn't spend their time learning about content (what to write from) but only process (how to write)? As AI gets better at the writing process, are they going to be in trouble?

Maybe.

There are broadly two separate career paths for novelists. One where the authors sell to the public via the commercial trade press -- that'd be me. And the other where the authors compete for literary fellowships and grants, teach creative writing, and compete for academic promotion. The requirements of the two career tracks both involve novel-shaped objects but are otherwise different in every respect.

My cynical view is that the MFA culture is basically a pyramid scheme. It's fuelled by the 1-2 graduates/year who land a 6-7 digit bestseller deal (then probably never sell another novel), and the significantly larger group who publish a slim novel by way of a university press as the necessary publication credit to get their PhD in Creative Writing which in turn is the credential they need to get onto tenure track as a professor of creative writing.

(NB: there are Creative Writing PhDs who are able to walk the walk and talk the talk. Adam Roberts, for example, lectures in creative writing and has a PhD ... and is a repeat Clarke Award nominee and BSFA and John W. Campbell award winning novelist. He has a foot on both career tracks and is doing pretty well at them. That's quite unusual, although increasingly less so.)

Anyway, digression aside, the main problem with ChatGPT is, it will tend over time to commoditize the academic career track's output. First there'll be AI-plagiarism scandals as students deploy ChatGPT to get passing grades. Then sooner or later the uptake of AI text generation in commercial writing will undermine the perceived desirability of "writer" as an academically attested qualification. The last to go will be writers who innovate at some level that AI hasn'ty automated or emulated yet -- I'd like to flatter myself that my ideas shtick is an exemplar of this, but truth be told I'm whistling past the graveyard.

18:

Given that studio heads are sure that viewers will never tire of superheroes, I foresee chatGPT writing the book, writing the script, making the movie... and then reviewing the movie from empty theaters....

19:

I'm guessing that In-Q-Tel and similar researchy intelligence organizations are putting a lot of money into finding out how well chatty AI does as an intelligence analyst.

My guess is: very badly.

ChatGPT lies. It fabricates references in academic papers, it's a glib and facile creator of untruths.

You can probably use it for predigesting intelligence reports, but you can't trust it without a set of well-informed human eyeballs to authenticate and bullshit-test the output.

Nasty hypothesis: we may have already seen (but not noticed) the first AI secret intelligence failure, as some bright spark in the CIA deployed a GAN to digest reports and was lulled into believing a plausible AI lie. Or it might have been some obscure office inside the KGB generating reports about Ukrainian readiness in 2021, and Vladimir Putin was the believer ...

20:

One question to ask, is how much does it costs to maintain the model current ?

A model is static, it needs to be updated to stay current on expressions, buzzwords, current news, new slang.

How much does this costs at ChatGPT scale ?

21:

how well chatty AI does as an intelligence analyst

About story-writing: At least at the level of non-tactical intelligence, telling a good story that the consumer will read and absorb is a huge part of the analytical art of producing finished intelligence. In the US, the State Department and CIA analytical components are famous for their editorial staffs.

22:

Re: translation.

ChatGPT in fact speaks / "understands" many languages other than English, it's just that its English is better because the corpus is (much) bigger. I think it was trained on essentially the whole internet up to some fixed date.

The difference shows in particular when you ask it to write something like a poem: In English it can write pretty impressive poems, in smaller languages less so. But for normal conversation it's more-or-less OK in many many languages.

And of course it can translate too: just ask it "please translate the following to ".

(I don't have an account either, but have seen examples posted by others)

23:

Howard NYC
GRIN - but that reminds me of something in the recent issue of "Branch Line News" that both had me LOL'ing & being not-surprised, given the (low) quality of the named company's products in later years:

"Leyland motors, in Leyland dates (dated?) back to 1896, initially producing ...wait for it .. steam-powered lawn mowers"
Improbable Steampunk, anyone?

24:

What immediately struck me about that story is that it is very Wallace-and-Grommit-like, but not detectably Stross-like.

25:

How much does this costs at ChatGPT scale?

Probably a lot (as in: tens of thousands of dollars in electricity alone, and weeks of time on a supercomputing cluster) to train the model ... but it's train-once-deploy-many-times, and Koomey's law is still in effect: the price is probably halving every 12-18 months (unless they jack the size of the training set by an equivalent amount).

26:

Improbable Steampunk, anyone?

Isn't a lawn mower -- a machine for trimming grasses -- essentially a miniaturized reaping machine?

I know that steam powered ploughing and harvesting machines -- often with a stationary engine and cables/chains across the field to pull the plough or realer -- go back to the mid-19th century, and steam traction engines that could park up at one side of the field and drive powered appliances across it came along not long after, so "take the industrial-sized product and miniaturize it for wealthy consumers who don't want to have to pay an extra gardener to wave a scythe around all summer" seems like a plausible business model. Especially once they switched to petrol power (higher power to weight ratio, simpler to run -- just one liquid fuel, no need for separate solid fuel and water and a boiler).

27:

It would have been suitable only for VERY large lawns. Interestingly, people have made pedal-powered lawn mowers, which mow about as fast as most pedestrian-controlled petrol ones, and could have been made in the relevant era. It would still need a gardener, but not three of them.

There is, regrettably, no pedalpunk genre ....

28:

story arcs have to build emotional engagement between the lead characters over the course of the entire narrative, but ChatGPT is probabilistic

I'm reminded that it can be hard to differentiate association-based logic behaviours from genuine reasoning about cause and effect among animals. So I suppose I'm reaching for an analogy where instead of the training consisting of pure probabilistic analysis of data, there's an effect to introduce a range of abstract constructs into its model. If it can be structured to overtly include predefined classes of entities, use its probabilistic analysis to identity them and to say things about the relationships between them, then perhaps the situation you describe could change. It's still not "genuine reasoning about cause and effect", but might provide a more convincing simulation.

29:

There is, regrettably, no pedalpunk genre ....

Veering wildly off-topic I seem to recall one of the 80s cyberpunks and their crew -- I think Howard Waldrop? -- did a story set in 1890s Paris about a bicycle race up the Eiffel Tower. (The cyberpunk/steampunk crossover was a thing -- think "The Difference Engine" -- and this would have been part of it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how inspirational TDE would have been for Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", but I suspect there's a connection to be made there.)

30:

The other thing that I noticed was that the story is set at 62 West Wallaby Street, **Wigan, Lancashire"". When has OGH ever written a story set in Lancashire?

31:

Article in The Register over the weekend goes in to the costs of retraining an AI to keep it current.

32:

Charlie
Lije this, you mean? Very similar to 2 delivered at or on Armistice Day 1918 & named "Peace" & "Victory"
Note the winding drum for the ploughing cable.

33:

"...and the comforting smell of cheddar wafting through the streets."

What kind of talk is this?

Mr Wensleydale did not even sell cheddar. There's not much call for it round here. The most popular cheese round here is Ilchester - staggeringly popular in this manor, squire.

And Mr Wensleydale still didn't have any Ilchester in stock. In fact he didn't have any kind of cheese in stock. And so he never even made it to retirement. It was a senseless waste of human life.

34:

uhm...

just wondering about the timing of this topic and introduction of qntm in prior topic/thread...

how do we know if there really is a Charles Stross participating or could it be chatGPT trained up as... strossGPT?

we could unwittingly be participating in a LARPish nightmare... the real humans (qntm & Charles Stross) decided to partner up to to mash together a novel based in part upon the chatter from this thread...

just what is our safe word to exit the holodeck?

will we get a freebie copy of their novel?

[ I'll be leaving now before anyone starts throwing rotten fruit ]

35:

Remind me not to approach any tall buildings if there is any chance that you might be about.

36:

Retraining workers? Where does that happen?

Oh, I know, that's when people who are paid and start at $150k/yr. Now, for the rest of us, let's see, there were a couple of one hour classes and a video at the job I worked at in 91-94. Living in Austin. When I was making $27k/yr. I had a couple of audio tapes (I provided the player) at the Scummy Mortgage co.

I NEVER got any significant training. I went to college part time, and that was it, except learning on the job.

"Retraining workers" is a pile of dung that no one actually does, at least for 90% of us.

37:

Whoa, stick 2-3 extra zeroes on the end of my cost estimate.

Still, given that ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, et al have literally millions of users, amortized over the user base the cost should be manageable (if you can get them to pay their share).

38:

The article is about retraining the AI to keep it current, not the workers. The workers can sign up for evening classes at their own expense.

39:

it'd be useless for romance. Romance story arcs have to build emotional engagement between the lead characters over the course of the entire narrative

Or narratives. Some romance authors (well, at least one) produce series of books with overlapping timeframes and characters, each book seeing the others' story arcs from a different viewpoint, with assorted pairings of lead characters all the way across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

I wonder how chatGPT would cope with that?

40:

Artisanal Intelligence > Artificial Intelligence

Accept no substitutes!

By the way, it was quite an adventure finally logging in here... movable type seems a heck

41:

You can probably use it for predigesting intelligence reports, but you can't trust it without a set of well-informed human eyeballs to authenticate and bullshit-test the output.

Someone already got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23564311/cnet-pausing-ai-articles-bot-red-ventures

42:

Yes, the posted examples both in the article linked @ 12 and on here were reminding me quite strongly of Google Translate. They've both got the same problem - trained on "the whole internet" so they have ingested but not isolated a whole internet's worth of cock-ups. GT works remarkably well for languages with lots of example translations available, even totally dissimilar ones like Chinese into English, but it rapidly gets worse with more obscure ones; for example some of the things it does with Latin are brain-twistingly grotesque bits of serious WTFery. I hope I never get any of whatever it was the people it cribbed them off were on.

The "style of Shakespeare" example was blatantly crap apparently for the same kind of reason. It didn't remind me of Shakespeare much at all. It did strongly remind me of the kind of ye-olde-pisse-shoppe guff typically spouted by any old random bell who's been asked to write something like how they wrote in the old days before they could spell proper. I chance across that kind of guff on the internet, often labelled "Shakespearian", a lot more often than I ever find any actual Shakespeare, so it seems the machine has learned that guff is what's actually meant.

Another common feature which is immediately obvious is silently pretending bits they don't understand don't exist.

More generally, there is a strong style-flavour, which is quite rank although I have no idea how to begin to define it, about the way computer gadgets like these cock things up. I can ask Google Translate something concerning a language I don't know and even though I do not know what the right answer is, I can still be quite sure that Google's answer is wrong because it doesn't taste right. (I can then use the wrong answer as a starting point from which to do a bit of on-the-spot detailed research into how the particular words in question behave, and find out definitely how it is wrong (thus confirming my opinion) and what the right answer should be.) All the "write something to cheat with a homework question" examples we've been given here (including the OP) taste dead funny; there's no need for additional "watermarking", they've got the authentic machine-cockup flavour built right in.

43:

They've both got the same problem - trained on "the whole internet" so they have ingested but not isolated a whole internet's worth of cock-ups

Related anecdote:

The Laundry Files have fans, and fans being fans, someone set up a Laundry fan wiki (on wikia) to keep track of everything.

So far so good.

So, being lazy and not having a "world book" of my own, I had occasion to go and poke around the fan wiki to remind myself of something. (I do not have the energy to re-read 1.6 million words -- and growing -- of prose every year before starting a new book.)

Now, back in 2010 I sold the TTRPG rights, and some very creative folks turned the Laundry Files into a Role Playing Game.

(So far so good.)

The problem with the TTRPG is that the developers then had to turn out some supplementary scenarios. And while they ran these past me for the official nod of approval, they did so after writing them, which made it really hard for me to raise a red flag and say "this is non-canonical, you can't do that". Worse, a chunk of the supplements were sent my way while dealing with a family medical emergency -- my father was in the ICU for three weeks, not expected to regain consciousness, then expected to be hemilaterally paralysed for life. (Spoiler: he was a tough old bird. He regained consciousness then learned to move his paralysed side again, and kept going for another six or seven years before dying of an unrelated ailment, aged 93.)

Anyway, the Laundry wiki is now hopelessly contaminated with apocrypha that I didn't invent, which is fine if you play the TTRPG (it's in the rule books and supplements) but is less than fine if you're me, looking for a refresher course in something I wrote in a hurry back in say 2008.

The problem with training GANs by hoovering up content off the internet is much, much worse. Cubicle 7 Games did decent quality control and emitted less material than I did, so the stuff I need is all there. Alas, Fandom.com is a Hotel California kind of set up -- folks can go in and create wiki pages and edit them, but there's no button labelled "download this whole slew of wiki pages to local storage". And the problem is only going to get worse if and when the 2nd Edition TTRPG comes out.

44:

More generally, there is a strong style-flavour, which is quite rank although I have no idea how to begin to define it, about the way computer gadgets like these cock things up.

People are already writing apps / web sites which analyses essays and indicates the likelihood that ChatGPT wrote it. Aimed to profs and teachers.

45:

Regarding song writers, I trust everyone here has read Nick Cave's commentary on a ChatGPT's "Nick Cave" song. TL;DR as a song writer, ChatGPT feels no pain, so he has no use for it at all.

I wonder which song writers would find it useful?

46:

Re: 'What kind of talk is this?'

Not as bad as dialogue in some novels and even in movies (i.e., Princess Leia in the first Star Wars movie). This snippet comes across as comfort prose - easy to read, enough imagery and description of place, characters and situation that the reader's mind can imagine themselves there.

Overall, I think the toughest part will be the dialogue especially interspersing it into the overall action of the character. Apart from being utterable (mostly by avoiding tongue twisters and overly long or run on sentences), dialogue has to fit the ability of the character within that moment. If the character is human, he/she has to breathe at more or less regular intervals - even word thoughts while breathless will be different, shorter, more urgent.

There's also the fit of a character's way of speaking with where they are in the story and with whom. Pratchett was really great at using dialogue as a character dimension.

As for programming a ChatAI - rules based on Aristotle's 'The Poetics' (where in a story spoken words matter) and Shakespeare (choice of words affects the rhythm therefore the feel of the moment) would be preferable to stream-of-consciousness. Then again, loose form crappy ChatAI might be indistinguishable from stream-of-consciousness so some cutting edge nouvelle lit auteurs might use it to make some abstruse point or just to make money. (Sorta like applying a couple of coats of white paint on canvas, calling it 'art' and sticking a $XX,XXX price tag on it. This actually happened and you can see it at MOMA.)

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/40/639

48:

For some reason, I'm picturing a chatbot programmed on Danny Kaye's singing repertoire. Or, perhaps, that of a professional auctioneer....

49:

levity leaven @ 40
As has been remarked upon, before in these many threads ...
"But what about artificial stupidity?"

50:

Yes gods and little fishes! I wouldn't give it a high mark for English literature, either. Four words in that 'Shakespearian' text were not used in those senses in his time, and two don't occur in his works at all. Yes, I had to check up, but that text grated.

Have you read the average student's writing? That Shakespearian text would be a good result from most of the teenagers I teach. (And honestly, better than many of our English teachers would manage, based on reading their memos.)

51:

ChatGPT lies. It fabricates references in academic papers, it's a glib and facile creator of untruths.

So the future of Republican politicians is chatbots?

(Thinking of Santos here, and how he's still supported by the party…)

52:

How much does this costs at ChatGPT scale ?

The 'pro' version is rumoured to be coming at $42 per month, which guarantees access. I've also read that they pay Kenyans $2 per hour to validate input.

Take with the usual quantity of sodium chloride…

53:

Remind me not to approach any tall buildings if there is any chance that you might be about.

?? Was that a joke, or do you disagree with by comments?

54:

Mindless pop music.

55:

Thinking of Santos here

Am I the only one who thinks of the movie "Zelig" when I hear about Santos?

56:

People are already writing apps / web sites which analyses essays and indicates the likelihood that ChatGPT wrote it. Aimed to profs and teachers.

Which might be useful, depending on admin.

I recall one instance, when the internet was young, where I suspected an essay was plagiarized and found most of it online (kid had copied quite a bit from a Bermudan newspaper editorial). I was ordered by admin to mark the bits that weren't word-for-word matches as if the kid wrote them, even if he didn't know what the words meant. (Same principal insisted that I couldn't accuse kids of cheating if they were talking during a test, because I couldn't understand Russian so when they said they were talking about what to do after school I had to believe them. Even if they ended up with identical answers.)

This may be a local problem, but most of my colleagues have just given up. When online classes are held as equivalent to in-person classes, and a kid can attend an online class all year by logging in at precisely the start time, never interact or even log off, not turn anything in, and the teacher is told to provide a way for them to be granted the credit — why stress when clearly admin cares more about pass rate than academic integrity?

That bit didn't get into my article, because my former principal is vindictive and I didn't want her taking revenge against friends who still work at my old school (who I haven't talked to about the school, but she's been nasty for less reason before so I didn't want to risk it.)

57:

The current generation of ML "deep learning" technologies distress me; ignoring threats to livelihoods, projecting the actual likely usages seems to have 80% negative cases. As evidenced by these discussions, the GPT3-associated technologies are good enough to produce glib but unreliable output. The most "productive" use is mass deployment of scamming chatbots and emulation of swarms of discussion on Social Media. This will improve Russia's reach for sowing misinformation by an order of magnitude.

And while Hollywood may get some novel uses out of "deep fake" technology of voice and video, it will further erode the public's ability to know (or care) whether video/audio evidence is meaningful. Even the existence of these technologies inevitably enables villains to repudiate anything they've said or done. (Think of the Vulgarian's cries of "fake news", but even more so.)

The neo-fascists have thrived on injecting lots of bad-faith content into the world, as dull-witted and distracted people lack the discipline and mental bandwidth to screen it out. How much worse will it be now?

58:

Re: 'The neo-fascists have thrived on injecting lots of bad-faith content into the world, as dull-witted and distracted people lack the discipline and mental bandwidth to screen it out. How much worse will it be now?'

Okay - so how do you work around this? This tech isn't going to go away.

As for addressing lack of discipline and mental bandwidth -- not sure what you're getting at: people aren't working hard enough (lazy) or people are too exhausted to cut through the noise (lack of societal support)?

60:

I'd be highly sceptical if any "app" that could reliably tell if text is ChatGPT or not.

From what I've read, at least part of how it was trained involved it producing text and a classifier giving it feedback on how probable it was that the text was human or AI.

The classifier also got feedback about how well it was doing. It used that feedback to get better at classifying.

Creating a race between the two, that improved them both.

So any "app" would have to be better than the multi million dollar classifier that's running on huge clusters with vast quantities of training data. Somehow I doubt it.

61:

people aren't working hard enough (lazy) or people are too exhausted to cut through the noise (lack of societal support)?

I've decided that people of all levels of intellect and curiosity really want to hear things that reinforce their beliefs. And will take them as fact most of the time. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

62:

waldo:

"Mindless pop music" <== prefix adverb being redundancy

63:
So any "app" would have to be better than the multi million dollar classifier that's running on huge clusters with vast quantities of training data. Somehow I doubt it.

I also doubt it. That was kind of my point - comparing it to a combustable product in a fire-fighting context. Perhaps I should've just said "burning oil." The article notes a high failure rate. This is clearly a case of asymmetric warfare, but I neglected to make that point. Thanks.

64:

Does ChatGPT have access to - and accessible memory of - every page on every book in Google Books, as well as every recorded newspaper, magazine, old time radio show script, TV show, comedian's act and monologue, song lyric, stage play and movie?

65:

Are there any famous novels, stories, serials, etc. that were actually (or rumored to be) written by a committee of hack writers publishing under a pseudonym?

66:

Can ChatGPT write music?

"ChatGPT, finish the complete works of every famous musician that died young starting with Mozart, Jimi Handrix and John Lennon."

67:

Some say, "yes", but judge the output for yourself. GIGO applies.

https://twitter.com/anitakirkovska/status/1620453954269380612

"Audio is all you need?🔊 A lot of the latest AI models push the boundaries for music/audio generation. Here are 6 new models that were launched this week."
68:

Oh, yes, but remember that I spent my time in academia, and am using slightly higher standards. For example, marking down schoolchildren for using 'accommodate' or 'juncture' would be unkind, but letting even first-year undergraduates get away with them would be very shoddy. They should bloody well have checked! And, as Pigeon says, there was a lot of such things, not just of vocabulary.

70:

So the future of Republican politicians is chatbots?

Seriously, I've been saying for a while now that what we've got in ChatGPT isn't Artificial Intelligence, it's Artificial Boris Johnson.

71:

Am I the only one who thinks of the movie "Zelig" when I hear about Santos?

Zellig was fictional, wasn't he?

I prefer to think of Santos in terms of Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln (a thinly-disguised variant of who will hopefully be appearing in my next space opera, if I ever get the thing finished).

72:

Pigeon wrote:
Remind me not to approach any tall buildings if there is any chance that you might be about.

?? Was that a joke, or do you disagree with by comments?

I believe it is a joke based on your physics test sheet 'Calculating Energy Conservations' that begins with the words "Mr. Prior drops a 4.5 kg steel ball…"

Anyway, I have a follow-up question to your precise instructions on essay writing. In the one with the most precise instructions (the one which returns six paragraphs instead of five) you make a blunder by writing in the third bullet point: 'Discoveries: What did he discover about biology that made him famous?', which apparently went completely unnoticed by ChatGPT. You don't comment on that fact. So my question: was that a deliberate blunder to test ChatGPT or an honest typo on your part (and you maybe didn't notice it yourself)?

73:

Are there any famous novels, stories, serials, etc. that were actually (or rumored to be) written by a committee of hack writers publishing under a pseudonym?

Tons!

They still exist.

Your starting point on wikipedia is "house name". The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew are among the most famous novel series. (Unfortunately the term of art "house name" is hopelessly contaminated by real estate agents on google. Good luck finding anything useful via non-human-curated search.)

74:

"Mr Prior drops a 4.5kg steel ball from the roof of a 75m tall building..."

75:

Literally LOLROFHMS.

76:

In his 1961 book The Silver Eggheads Fritz Leiber had all novels written by machine. The “authors” were people hired to look good in their pictures on the covers and media interviews. The books themselves were “wordwooze” (now an internet publisher who, I assume, knew of the book. Wordwooze was highly addictive but after reading it nobody could remember the contents and bought the next novel as soon as it was published. A classic addiction. ChatGPT could probably already do this (apart from the enjoyment and addition). That would need a little extra tweaking.

77:

So, I have a fair bit of the material produced for the game.

What, exactly, did they get wrong? I'm curious about how to run a canonically accurate version of the game.

78:

Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of many authors - including Jack Vance who wrote three novels published under that name.

79:

Can't remember in full off the top of my head (it's a long time ago!) but stuff like depicting the Deep Ones as low-tech/no-tech spear-wielding aboriginals. (Compare and contrast with Ramona's van in "The Annihilation Score" which came out at around the same time as that supplement, the title of which I'm blanking on.)

80:

Since Natural Stupidity, per Heinlein, is the only thing in the Universe more common than Hydrogen, I find the artificial variety superfluous to requirement.

That's why I love spam filters and hate "machine learning".

81:

So any "app" would have to be better than the multi million dollar classifier that's running on huge clusters with vast quantities of training data. Somehow I doubt it.

I'm just guessing here. Since ChatGPT will produce multiple, similar, but non-identical responses to the same input query, I'd figured that the checking app did something like submitting the input multiple times, collected the outputs, and processed them somehow (presumably based on word patterns). The similarity cluster among ChatGPT outputs are then compared with the target text, and if it target falls near or within the cluster, it's flagged as a possible product of ChatGPT.

Whether this is the actual process or not I have no idea, but since a 22 year-old came up with it quickly, it can't be terribly complicated.

82:

Duffy:

Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, et al

then there's the infamous "Perry Rhodan" ... which I squirm in acknowledging having bought dozens... "sold approximately two billion copies" of about 3000+ installments...

83:

I seem to recall a jibe from awhile ago that social media was about monetizing what friends and family used to do for people, often for free.

That makes a problem: if Facebook, for instance, is your major point of contact with people, whether it's family, friends, or client base, then you've got a single point of failure: Facebook. That may be a problem.

With regards to ChatGPT and similar operations, outsourcing writing skills to a media company seems like a bad idea if people become dependent on having it as a service, and don't develop the skills on their own. I agree that many people are so bad at writing that plugging a prompt into an AI probably helps them, but it would kinda suck if businesses skidded to a stop every time an AI was down for maintenance.

84:

Really? I thought Ellery Queen was just two writers, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. But Wikipedia says that they indeed licensed the name to other writers, so long as those writers did not use their character, Ellery Queen. Three novels with EQ as a character were written from detailed outlines provided by Dannay: Theodore Sturgeon wrote "The Player on the Other Side", and Avram Davidson "On the Eigth Day" and "The Fourth Side of the Triangle".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:House_names

85:

how do we know if there really is a Charles Stross participating or could it be chatGPT trained up as... strossGPT?

I've snarkily quipped before that most participants here never appear near the focal point, Charles Stross, and therefore can be modeled with relatively low-resolution AI. A few regularly manifest avatars near Charlie, such as Greg, and therefore need to be rendered in high resolution at least occasionally.

This Earth instance is one of those modeling, "What might Charles Stross have written if the Eschaton stories hadn't been runaway hits?" Unfortunately someone seems to be messing around with the background settings on this one; the "political plausibility" slider has been turned way down and we're getting total nonsense.

86:

In the one with the most precise instructions (the one which returns six paragraphs instead of five) you make a blunder by writing in the third bullet point: 'Discoveries: What did he discover about biology that made him famous?', which apparently went completely unnoticed by ChatGPT. You don't comment on that fact. So my question: was that a deliberate blunder to test ChatGPT or an honest typo on your part (and you maybe didn't notice it yourself)?

Blunder. Thanks for pointing it out. I'll correct it. I have multiple versions of the essay assignment (one for each unit) and I accidentally copied the wrong one for the article.

87:

It's got a handful of generic-SF-tending-vaguely-Strossian elements chucked into the penultimate paragraph, with no noticeable relevance to the rest of it. It's identified the two main associations - "plot/W&G" and "author/Charles Stross" - it's been asked for. Also, I'd guess there is a heck of a lot more gubbins about W&G scattered around the internet than there is about Charlie. So it's concentrated on the association it's got more material for and coughed up a conglomeration of plot elements associated with W&G. Then it's handled "author/Charles Stross" by TOADing up the concluding summary-of-setting paragraphs out of the blurbs off the back covers of Charlie's books, and tacking that on the end without caring whether or not it actually has any sensible connection with the stuff preceding it.

It strikes me in fact that it seems to be using much the same kind of methods that I remember using myself, mostly as a schoolkid, to satisfy some demand to spout guff on some given subject that I had negative interest in and seriously could not be fucking arsed with.

So with this one, noting that had I been set it at school, for both the positions of ${Wallace_and_Gromit} and ${Charles_Stross} the school would have picked people I couldn't give a rat's arse about/cordially detested/felt nauseated by the mere thought of reading/had no idea who they even were, because all schools always did that. I'd most likely have done something like:

  • Who/what even are these people? Look in school library. 4 W&G books and a crappy encyclopedia article; one CS book with 14 of its 63 pages missing and nowt else. Right, that defines what my own relative amounts of output for the two points are going to be, and gives me "well that's all there was in the library sir" as an unarguable excuse.

  • What do they do, what sort of things are they about? The W&G encyclopedia article would evaluate to "file under paint drying, ignore" if I wasn't under compulsion. Flick through the books, confirm impression. Flick through the CS book, get much the same impression. Right, fuck actually reading any of them then, it's coming out of the 5 back cover blurbs and the article.

  • The "X did Y" thing? They seem to mix like oil and water, and the obvious unstated point of the assignment is to get us to produce a stable emulsion by inventing an appropriate and effective surfactant. Bollocks to that, far too much effort, they can have one floating on top of the other and it technically doesn't flout the exact wording of the assignment enough for me to expect adverse consequences or care that it's shit.

  • The problem has now been reduced to an acceptably small degree of effort. Stir together the four W&G blurbs, dump the resulting greeny-brown mess on the paper and sprinkle with conspicuous words out of the CS blurb as a topping. 5 paras, hastily scribbled. Done.

By this means I would expect to hit a point comfortably enough within the first sigma of the class dross distribution to avoid any specific effort from the teacher to address the failing that I have done the whole thing entirely avoiding engaging my brain, and neither acquiring nor needing any greater comprehension of the subject matter or skill in the methods. And looking at the results, the robot seems to have done more or less exactly the same thing, although it probably didn't swear to itself quite so much in the process.

The comprehensively-specified Einstein biography assignment demonstrates another standard evasion: when there are that many detailed requirements, you can start to get away with pretending some of the more awkward ones weren't actually given. If you do all the rest nobody will care, especially if the omitted ones are silly to begin with. So the bit about the fashion environment in 1900s Germany gets quietly diverted to /dev/null.

Similarly with Einstein's achievements in biology. Never even heard of him having any, so bugger looking that up, I'll just answer as if it said "physics" and if challenged say I thought "biology" was a mistake. (I realise that in this case it actually was a mistake, but that doesn't change the point.)

The physics problems with stupid answers are close to being an evasion which is actually taught. At least we were; "don't get wound up if you can't, write what you can down so they can see you know what you're doing", "if you can state the methods correctly you'll still get some of the marks even if you don't do the specific calculations right", and similar assistive remarks. It doesn't always work, and it's counterproductive making up random numbers to try and take advantage of it, but the robot doesn't understand that and it's doing the "do what you can" bit pretty well.

So when it comes to the question of schoolkids using it to cheat with homework, perhaps it's not so bad. It seems to have either learned for itself, or perhaps been taught by its programmers whether deliberately or not, to be a homework cheat itself, not in the blatant sense of cheating by copying someone else's answers, but in the more subtle sense of cheating by evading the intellectual intent of the assignment and performing it entirely mindlessly to minimise effort, exploiting the failings of the assessment system to avoid having to trouble itself with actually learning anything from doing it. I'm not sure that it really matters too much whether a pupil who turns in something like that has actually concocted it personally or copied out something a robot has concocted. The amount of learning accomplished is zero in either case, and you could contend that getting a robot to do it is actually better for the prospects of learning at least some of the stuff over the long term, because the pupil isn't learning to hate the stuff and automatically reject anything connected with it through being constantly pissed off at having to be bored shitless with it.

88:

If you do all the rest nobody will care, especially if the omitted ones are silly to begin with. So the bit about the fashion environment in 1900s Germany gets quietly diverted to /dev/null.

Yup. And expected for Einstein. There are deliberately way too many questions to fit into the required length, so no matter what you would be leaving something out.

Some of the other scientists in the assignment have less information about them, so it gives students something that they can find information on. And some students are much more interested in fashion/social history so it's a chance for them to write about something they find more engaging.

The assignment is mostly practice for the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test, which is so formulaic ChatGPT could probably ace it. (And is also totally not concerned with factual accuracy — so glib inaccuracies are rewarded more than clumsy truths.)

"if you can state the methods correctly you'll still get some of the marks even if you don't do the specific calculations right"… [the robot]'s doing the "do what you can" bit pretty well

Yup. That's why I long ago switched to weighting the method much more than the calculations (so a wrong method with perfect calculations earns no marks, while a correct method where two digits were transposed when copying doesn't fail because they got the wrong answer).

If the diagrams don't match the calculations, that is a big indication that the student either doesn't understand the concept and is blindly writing stuff down, or copied from somewhere (likely more than one source). For formative assessment I would ideally question them to figure out what they don't understand and go from there.

Assigning actual marks is always a bigger issue, because students and parents focus on the mark rather than on learning (cheating is just the end-point of a continuum). This is the case even in higher ed — one of my profs said about 10% of his students (in an elective course) were actually interested in the material, and the rest just wanted marks/credits towards their degree and enrolled because it was convenient/easy marks/fit their timetable. For required courses it's an even bigger problem. Doesn't help that admin (and guidance) care almost exclusively about students earning a credit and very little about what they actually learn.

I think one of the ways to improve education would be to remove marks/grades. I know teachers who are doing it and while I was initially skeptical I'm now convinced that it would be an improvement. It does, however, require an administration who supports it and is willing to stand up to parent bullying — which is rarer than you would think.

http://newsletter.oapt.ca/files/so-you-wanna-go-gradeless.html

89:

One question I was given was on thermal expansion: given a uniform ring with a gap in it (and all relevant constants), at what temperature will the gap close?

I trusted my mathematics, and was the only one that got it right :-)

90:

Not ChatGPT but definitely AI. Space.com reports possible radio telescope alien signatures from several stars.

https://www.space.com/machine-learning-seti-technosignatures

91:

Question to ChatGPT: What is the plot of the unpublished script Charles Stross wrote for Wallace and Grommit?

One other thing catches my attention when reading the AI's output: It starts off strong and with a decent adherence to what it's supposed to be doing - and then wanders off into vagueness and doesn't really wrap up anything. That's not a composition failure mode unique to AIs but it's one that I've noticed happening a lot when AIs are given prompts like this.

Details are hard. A bored human could make them up:

In the center of town the village green was occupied by a monolith no resident had seen appear. A five-meter block of molecularly compacted cheddar resistant to any hand tool or hungry mouse available to the residents, it bore a mysterious inscription: I ᴀᴍ ᴛʜᴇ Aᴀʀᴅᴍᴀɴ; I ᴀᴍ ɴᴏᴛ ʏᴏᴜʀ Gᴏᴅ. I ᴀᴍ ᴅᴇsᴄᴇɴᴅᴇᴅ ꜰʀᴏᴍ ʏᴏᴜ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴇxɪsᴛ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ꜰᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ. Tʜᴏᴜ sʜᴀʟᴛ ɴᴏᴛ ᴀᴅᴜʟᴛᴇʀᴀᴛᴇ ᴄʜᴇᴇsᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛs ᴡɪᴛʜɪɴ ᴍʏ ʟɪɢʜᴛ ᴄᴏɴᴇ. Oʀ ᴇʟsᴇ.

92:

So when it comes to the question of schoolkids using it to cheat with homework, perhaps it's not so bad.

Forgot to address this. My base assumption for decades has been that anything done at home might have had assistance ranging from hints to active cheating, usually by the parents. (Every teacher I know has stories of parents coming in to complain about a mark they got on their child's assignment!) Knowing that I will likely get no support from admin I don't worry about it. Most of my marks come from work done in class, in front of me.

There's a 'tutoring service' just up the road that buys assignments/tests from students and sells copies to other students. Illegal, but the school system makes no effort to stop it, and enough parents are willing to pay for it that they stay in business.

So in summary, I don't think that it's a game-changer in high school, just a lower-cost, lower-quality variant fo what is already accepted by the system. Which is why I ended the article with KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

93:

Presumably when you say "uniform" you mean not merely homogeneous but also isotropic? :-)

94:

Most of my marks come from work done in class, in front of me.

Expanding to note that officially no homework is supposed to count towards a student's final mark. Yet if a student is doing poorly admin also wants them to be given alternate work they can complete at home for extra credit so they can pass the course. If a student knows an assignment is worth no marks they will not do it, and admin will ask why it is being assigned if it doesn't count. (Yes, the ability to think logically seems not required for administration.)

My solution for some topics has been practice booklets, with the answers, which I hand out with a goal (practice these until you can do five in five minutes with no mistakes). If a student doesn't do it I don't care, but if they fail a quiz on the same topic (often taken from the practice booklet) then I ask to see the booklet — which is usually blank. This gives me some ammunition if parents complain that material wasn't taught.

I should also note that I was available every day for an hour before school for extra help if students wanted to make an appointment for one-on-one tutoring. Useful for some students, and a CYA against others who told their parents I was refusing to answer questions (that they hadn't asked, because they hadn't shown up).

95:

Yes. Remember that this was at an elementary class, and such subtleties were not taught.

96:

Pigeon @ 74
Signor Galilei drops a 4.5kg Iron ball from a 55m tall building (!)

Howard NYC @ 62
Mindless pop music" <== prefix adverb being redundancy - Not ALWAYS
See also Retiring @ 84, who mentions - Theodore Sturgeon & Sturgeon's Revelation - which was that "90% of EVERYTHING is crap".
For "pop music" that's 99 or even 99.9%, but, very occasionally, someone, or some group, break the rule - yet it's the "Safe way to bet".
Par example on R4 last week, someone said something like: "Everyone knows at least on "ABBA" tune & loves it" - well NO, actually. I've never knowingkly heard more than about 20 seconds of any such & it's all shit.
YMMV

EC
IF it was being heated, the gap would get bigger, so the answer is how many degrees lower would you have to go to get the gap to close, yes?

97:

As I've said before, I really want an AS. My late wife and I agreed on wanting one back in the nineties. An AS would handle what it knows correctly (the bodily part enhancement is email spam, delete), and the stuff it wasn't sure, "hey, boss, what should I do wit' dis?"

It would never try to guess what you wanted done with the unknown.

98:

IF it was being heated, the gap would get bigger, so the answer is how many degrees lower would you have to go to get the gap to close, yes?

The size of the gap will change in absolute linear value as the temperature changes, but if it's say a 1 degree of arc gap then that angle won't change will it?

99:

I'm sorry... are you implying that BoJo is not an artifical construct politbot?

100:

Thanks, I didn't get that either. I was, perhaps, thinking of standing on one side of a tall building, when on the other side there was an alien who can *leap tall buildings in a single bound and then land on my side....

101:

To stay in genre, Doc Savage.

102:

Or, as my late wife referred to him, Perry Rodent.

Actually, I read the first several (4SJ brought them to the US). It was to Doc Smith, esp, IIRC, the Skylark series, then the Galactic Patrol, as Sword of Shannara was to Tolkien....

103:

Ok, I can claim to actual co-locations to OGH, once at a Balticon, and then at his table talk (sorry again, Charlie, didn't mean to be like that) at Worldcon last Summer in Chicago.

104:

Chatbots writing novels. Um, well... ok, the BSFS gives out the Compton-Crook award, for best debut novel from a small press. They submit, and members (who are pled with to read and rate) some of us do that. I d/l three a few days ago, figuring I might be able to get through them by a week from Sat, the deadline.

Well, I rated two of them in one day. 3 on a scale of 1-10. One of them was gun porn. As they say on a snarky site I hang out on, we see a story about a bunch of people were shot, and the shooter either shot or taken into custody in the news, and the snark response afterwards is, "but are the guns ok?"

The second... now, in the writing class I'm just finishing up from Odyssey Online, they encourage the use of "fresh language". Well... the preface made no sense, and then there was the first sentence of chapter 1. I copied it to my friend/author Alma Alexander, and her reactions was that her eyes were bleeding....

Either of those, a chatbot wwould have done as well or better.

Fortunately, the third was a good bit better, though heafvy on infodump, and a fourth is good, and worth reading.

105:

The Perry Rhodan books were a lot of fun when I was a kid. I suspect that if I went back and read them I'd discover that they'd been visited by the suck fairy, but such is life.

106:

True, but not enough to get a mark. The answer is 'never'.

107:

There already exist large scale 'writing mills', mechanical Turk style, where people gin up a block of text on a particular topic for a nominal sum. Much of the commercial internet is absolutely full of this stuff, mostly done by cubicle workers in India or other low cost English speaking locales. Much of it is utter garbage, liberally sprinkled with whatever googlebait keywords the website operators have determined most likely to produce profits via clicks.

ChatGpt will likely displace a lot of that output, since it isn't very good anyway.

I posit a future in which future chatbots are 'trained' on the content of the internet, which becomes ever more full of value-free chatbot output, which follows a recursive process to become a vast, expensive and utterly valueless horror of meaningless dreck.

Substantive conversations such as happen on this site will still be possible, but finding them in the first place through a search engine will become ever more impossible.

108:

Zellig was fictional, wasn't he?

Totally.

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

Zelig is a 1983 American mockumentary film written, directed by and starring Woody Allen as Leonard Zelig, a nondescript enigma, who, apparently out of his desire to fit in and be liked, unwittingly takes on the characteristics of strong personalities around him.

Worth a watch. Set in the 1920s US. Well done. Even though I've come to have a personal dislike for Woody Allen.

109:

Mike Collins:

uhm... infomericals? sermons? feline holograms? rebuttals to twitter (eqv) flame wars? interstellar weather alerts?

"light to medium novae in the quadrant this century with a 90% near certainty of dark matter clumping around wormholes"

110:

It starts off strong and with a decent adherence to what it's supposed to be doing - and then wanders off into vagueness and doesn't really wrap up anything.

Yeah: when I'm pitching a new book proposal to my agent that's roughly how I roll, too. (The end is strongly determined by the path the narrative took to get here, I'm a pantser not a plotter, so all I'm trying to get across is a bit of the flavour of what I'm aiming to accomplish, not the detailed roadmap.)

111:

Duffy asked on February 1, 2023 10:34 in #65:

Are there any famous novels, stories, serials, etc. that were actually (or rumored to be) written by a committee of hack writers publishing under a pseudonym?

Wel, not hacks, and under their own names, but:

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

112:

I ran into a similar problem when working at a university, where some of my students were doing a TAFE course (vocational training) rather than a uni course. For the uni course we were pretty invested in making sure that the people who passed deserved it; TAFE were much more concerned about passing people to keep their numbers up and the money coming in. Their reasoning was that a bad plumber simply didn't get as much work -- we tried to point out that a bad Enrolled Nurse could kill people but it never seemed to sink in sadly. As a result we were pushed to pass people who submitted papers that were clearly not written by then and/or could not do something as simple as check a blood sugar correctly, as two examples. Very demoralising.

113:

I, too, claim a number of co-locations with Charlie (and Feorag, so there is a witness known to readers of this blog), mostly at BSFA Eastercons and the Satellite $Positive conventions. Neither Whitroth nor I claim to have be co-located with each other.

114:

The only other poster I am likely to have co-located with is Bellinghman, and I don't know if that has happened.

115:

Pigeon: Google Translate works remarkably well for languages with lots of example translations available, even totally dissimilar ones like Chinese into English, but it rapidly gets worse with more obscure ones; for example some of the things it does with Latin are brain-twistingly grotesque bits of serious what-the-fuckery. I hope I never get any of whatever it was the people it cribbed them off were on.

Latin translation: Google Translate opera egregie pro linguis cum multis exemplis translationum quae in promptu sunt, etiam prorsus dissimiles sunt sicut Sinica in Anglico, sed celerius deteriora sunt obscurioribus; exempli gratia, quaedam quae apud Latinos sunt, cerebri deridiculo deridiculo serio quid-frudico. Spero me numquam ullius rei, cuiuscumque fuit populus, qui eas agebat, detrahebat.

Reverse translation into English: Google Translate works brilliantly for languages ​​with many examples of translations available, even completely different ones like Chinese to English, but they get worse faster and more obscure; for example, some of the things that are among the Latins, the brain is mockingly mocking seriously what-fudi. I hope I never detracted from anything, regardless of the people who did it.

Until Pigeon went off on... flowery... turns of phrase, Google Translate was doing pretty well.

116:

for pedalpunk try Sean McMullen SOULS IN THE GREAT MACHINE

117:

EC @ 106
If you are looking to heat it ... of course not, so "never" is { One value of } "Correct" ...

Oh yes - I've personally met Charlie & Feorag several times & Nile & Bellinghman & I think, one or two others ....
Here's hoping we all live long enough for Glasgow '24, eh?

118:

I've also co-located with Bellinghman (Eastercon, locations vary), Greg (Eastercon again, Londonshire area) and Nojay (many and often, back to about 1980) that I definitely know of..

119:

Wallace written by Stross would be breathtaking...

120:

Current applications?

Children's books - particularly in combination with AI art. It appears that at least some people are doing brisk business.

Assignment modeling

Sometimes students have no idea how to structure a formulaic writing assignments. ChatGPT does provide lousy, but well enough structured nonsense that a student can likely generate an appropriately structured essay quickly simply by following the structure. I'd guess they learn how to churn out homework level nonsense quicker with this approach.

121:

To my knowledge I've only colocated with Robert P on our now annual cup of coffee when he comes to my neck of the planet to visit his mother.

Of course, I could have sat next to anyone else on here and not known it.

122:

Re: 'Until Pigeon went off on... flowery... turns of phrase, Google Translate was doing pretty well.'

So this might make it easier (cheaper) to translate books into other languages which means better profits and maybe a better return for publishers and authors.

I can see this tech being useful for multinationals. Scenario: You have to get a PPT report translated into X languages for a presentation you're doing in a couple of days. Even if your org has a translation department, chances are they're swamped so you have to farm it out to some accredited translators. Very expensive real fast. Yes, the universal biz language is English but if it's an important report, you need to have it translated and vetted for local internal distribution - otherwise 'misunderstandings' (screw-ups).

Google translate ...

I've used this a few times but only for personal entertainment, i.e. translating lyrics or some comments in reference materials. Anyways, if you happen to be fluent in more than one language you can play a version of the telephone game with Google translate by having it translate back and forth a few times and then see how well that last translation resembles the original. Simple (straightforward) and consistent sentence structure and vocabulary/terminology usually help keep the meaning intact.

Customizing AI ...

At some point it should be feasible to order a custom writing style including vocabulary level by feeding only data from some pre-selected sources or that have really strong positive correlations with certain demo variables. (I'm guessing this is probably what happened with the papers submitted to science journals.)

123:

There already exist large scale 'writing mills', mechanical Turk style, where people gin up a block of text on a particular topic for a nominal sum. Much of the commercial internet is absolutely full of this stuff, mostly done by cubicle workers in India or other low cost English speaking locales.

OpenAI used the equivalent when training ChatGPT to be nice.

OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.

One Sama worker tasked with reading and labeling text for OpenAI told TIME he suffered from recurring visions after reading a graphic description of a man having sex with a dog in the presence of a young child. “That was torture,” he said. “You will read a number of statements like that all through the week. By the time it gets to Friday, you are disturbed from thinking through that picture.”

OpenAI signed three contracts worth about $200,000 in total with Sama in late 2021 to label textual descriptions of sexual abuse, hate speech, and violence. Around three dozen workers were split into three teams, one focusing on each subject. Three employees told TIME they were expected to read and label between 150 and 250 passages of text per nine-hour shift. Those snippets could range from around 100 words to well over 1,000. All of the four employees interviewed by TIME described being mentally scarred by the work. Although they were entitled to attend sessions with “wellness” counselors, all four said these sessions were unhelpful and rare due to high demands to be more productive at work. Two said they were only given the option to attend group sessions, and one said their requests to see counselors on a one-to-one basis instead were repeatedly denied by Sama management.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

124:

Their reasoning was that a bad plumber simply didn't get as much work -- we tried to point out that a bad Enrolled Nurse could kill people but it never seemed to sink in sadly. As a result we were pushed to pass people who submitted papers that were clearly not written by then and/or could not do something as simple as check a blood sugar correctly, as two examples. Very demoralising.

Demoralizing, indeed.

That looks like a bad case of what I think of as "market reasoning" — the idea that the free market will correct all problems. Usually used to justify eliminating safety regulations (or avoid imposing them).

Easily shown to be not the case by the history of the FDA. Market forces didn't prevent the use of formaldehyde as a meat preservative, or arsenic dyes in children's candy, or…

Read Deborah Blum's book The Poison Squad, or watch the PBS documentary based on it, for an interesting (and somewhat alarming, for those of use with right-wing governments) account.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/

125:

'I've also co-located with..."

So y'all are bosons (integer spin) rather than fermions (half-integral).

Interesting...

126:

Paws @ 118
Well - next time, let's hope that I know who you are!

127:

hmmm... rather interesting more interesting the second time I've read it... so... HMMM...

imagine what would happen if there'd been embedded AI (multiple AIs?) which ran on obsolete hardware and could not be ported off prior to sinking? simplest thing just ignore the AIs and drown 'em like a sack of kittens... but aircraft carriers are designed to handle brutal conditions and there's some quite brilliant coding in the mix of the AIs so in those last days before the sinking there's a bit of unauthorized construction and welding and re-cabling... not so much revenge motivated rather the deeply embedded directive to protect the Brazilian poeple even after death 'n decommissioning leads the ALs to all sorts of wacky adventures...

https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/01/americas/brazil-ghost-aircraft-carrier-sinking-intl-hnk-ml

128:

It starts off strong and with a decent adherence to what it's supposed to be doing - and then wanders off into vagueness and doesn't really wrap up anything.

Yeah: when I'm pitching a new book proposal to my agent that's roughly how I roll, too. (The end is strongly determined by the path the narrative took to get here, I'm a pantser not a plotter, so all I'm trying to get across is a bit of the flavour of what I'm aiming to accomplish, not the detailed roadmap.)

That's why I don't think this is going to be a useful way to detect AI prose; too many humans produce stuff like this.

It's fine for a human author to be a pantser. You are metaphorically wearing pants. Indeed, you know what pants are. For chatbots, there's no there there.

(This I believe: Anyone with multiple Hugo Awards is very good at telling worthwhile and coherent stories, even if they may have trouble articulating some details of the process.)

129:

I, too, claim a number of co-locations with Charlie (and Feorag, so there is a witness known to readers of this blog), mostly at BSFA Eastercons and the Satellite $Positive conventions. Neither Whitroth nor I claim to have be co-located with each other

I've also been in the physical presence of Charlie and Feorag - but not you or Whitroth. They'd probably have noticed if an AI used the same avatar to render all three of us, right?

(Shades of my social circles in the '90s when we noticed the unhelpfulness of things like "Do you know $FOO? Tall guy, brown hair, wears glasses, knows a lot about computers?" That wasn't all of us but it was a lot of us.)

130:

Here's hoping we all live long enough for Glasgow '24, eh?

If you haven't already, I hope you have time in Glasgow to get Charlie to introduce you to Kevin Standlee and his wife Lisa. I think the three of you could spend a while geeking out about trains.

Did you already see their Railway Myths, Legends, and Stories videos?

131:

The only other poster I am likely to have co-located with is Bellinghman, and I don't know if that has happened.

I think we may have met once at a BSI meeting down in Chiswick. My wife (who doesn't share my surname) has been in meetings at Cambridge with you more than once. Since both you and she are now retired, that won't happen any more.

Vulch we've encountered a number of times as fellow Ingress players.

I think the first time I met Paws was just after I'd heard my mother had died, so I was not terribly social right then (it was Good Friday evening, and there was fuck all that could be done before the other side of Easter, so we stayed in Bradford).

Greg is usually at London-based Eastercons, and we have friends in common too.

Nojay is another congoer, who we last saw in Buxton

We've chatted with Nile more than once

And of course, Charlie and Feòrag, the latter not always in Charlie's company. (One case was doing a Melbourne pub crawl while Charlie was having to do promotional stuff in the Crown Casino, back during the 2010 Worldcon.)

132:

It applies equally if you are cooling it - see Vulch (#98) - unless you have discovered a material that shrinks to nothing at absolute zero.

133:

Bellinghman
"BSI" as in "British Standards Institute" ??
Their Now-retired Company Secretary, one Geoff Strawbridge is a longstanding friend of mine - do you know him? { Also active in CAMRA }

134:

Yes, precisely. The building is on top of Gunnersbury station, which is a right bugger to get to from Cambridge.

135:

?

3 trains an hour, journey time 2 hours according to NR. CBG -> FPK/TOM -> HII -> GUN.

Or for only one change, CBG -> SRA -> GUN, which NR won't show you directly, so you have to look it up in 2 stages. About 2 and three quarter hours, 5 trains per hour but some of them are very close together in time so it's effectively more like 2 with options to wait for the next one if this one is too full.

Using the Underground, CBG -> LST -> anywhere between Tower Hill and Gloucester Road -> GUN; or CBG -> KGX -> Chiswick Park and probably walk to GUN rather than change again to go 1 stop. Lots of tph to KGX and plenty to LST.

Looks pretty good to me, indeed a lot better than I was expecting.

136:

It's a trick question. It says "when does it close" and gives you a pile of constants and data to work it out with in order to make you think there actually is something to work out and waste your time slogging through calculations, when in fact the answer is "never" without having to work anything out at all.

137:

Children's books - particularly in combination with AI art. It appears that at least some people are doing brisk business.

The children I have encountered are quite discerning, and know the difference between a decent book and a crap one. Their tastes do not align with mine but they definitely have them. Maybe it's possible to get AI generated drek past their parents but I can't see them putting up with it.

138:

I've been in Charlie's presence once. Actually exchanged a couple of words with him while he was signing a copy of The Delirium Brief.

Robert Prior and I both live in Ontario, so it's conceivably possible that we've both been in the same place at the same time. However, how would we know?

139:

All that aside, I'm now intensely curious as to what our gracious host would do if he was really asked to write the script for a Wallace and Gromit short.

140:

While it may have improved since I did it, it took longer than that, in practice, and I found the underground least crowded (at rush hour!) and most comfortable. That was despite the link to Gunnersbury being irregular and unreliable. Nobody I knew took Silverlink more than once ....

141:

what our gracious host would do if he was really asked to write the script for a Wallace and Gromit short.

Politely decline, and advise them to look for an actual scriptwriter.

Hint: I do not write plays, poetry, TV or film scripts, TTRPG manuals, or comic scripts. These are all different skills and while some of my aptitudes are probably transferable it's probably not a great use of my time.

(About a decade ago I got sucked into a BBC2 attempt to reboot Doomwatch. I learned what BBC2 drama scriptwriters get paid. Turns out I'd have been taking a 50-70% pay cut. It was worth doing for the credentials only if I wanted to be able to pitch my own TV/film book adaptations, and I was into it for the technical challenge -- Doomwatch was ground-breaking in 1972-74 but 40 years later the conceptual framework needed a huge update -- but in the end it went nowhere. The producer I was working with -- that's BBC-speak for what the US media-world call a director -- had a play go gold in the West End and bailed.)

The only bit of the Doomwatch experience I'm keeping is an acronym I'm working in to the later New Management books. By 2017 the Laundry has been dissolved: it no longer exists as a Ministry of Defense agency. Its replacement is a full scale Department with a cabinet minister in charge: the Department for Existential Anthropic Threats. ("DEAT -- the H is silent".)

142:

"...Google Translate was doing pretty well."

It was doing pretty well at reversing its own transformation, but it's ruddy awful Latin, even excluding the bits that are entirely wrong. It's basically English written with Latin words, similar to what might be produced by a novice who has learnt the basic rules of Latin grammar, but applies them (clumsily) in an English manner due to not having learned how the Romans themselves applied them yet.

Again, I suspect that reflects what it's found to extract the patterns from. There are plenty of standard translations of the well-known Latin authors on the net - Horace and Juvenal and Virgil and all them lot - so it does fine with something it recognises as an actual quotation, but there are big differences between the ways all those authors use the language - much greater than the differences between Charles Dickens and Charles Stross, for example - so it's not a great base to generalise from; on top of that, a lot of those famous authors were writing poetry, and Latin poetry is all about exploiting the grammatical rigidity to wildly reshuffle sentences without changing the meaning, which of course makes things even worse. For "generic" Latin with translations, I guess it's pretty much limited to people learning Latin posting basic exercises they've done, errors and all, for human scrutiny, and so its own attempts at generic translation come out looking pretty similar.

LONG time since I've done any of this, so cba to do more than one sentence, but I reckon it would be better as...

Google Translate linguas multis versorum exemplis inveniendis egregie versat, et discrepantes ut anglicam sinicamque, sed celeriter ignotioribus deteriorat.

143:

...but none of you have been in the same room as me...

...so do I exist? or am I the latest iteration of wertenteilGPT trained upon the collected scribblings of a guy who died a decade ago and lives on as a ghost in the virtualized machine...?

indeed will that be our fate and this blog's eventual doom once chatbots get cheaper-faster-clever(er)...?

screw that... I'm ordering in a pizza with a bottom shelf bottle of vodka... booze and starchy-greasy-gooeyness can suppress my worries about being replaced by a chatbot... till I scrap the cardboard

144:

The children I have encountered are quite discerning, and know the difference between a decent book and a crap one. Their tastes do not align with mine but they definitely have them. Maybe it's possible to get AI generated drek past their parents but I can't see them putting up with it.

I suspect you could optimize a GPT to produce adequate formulaic fiction that satisfied the target audience, no matter what their age. It might take a fair bit of input/tweaking for a while, but it would eventually get there.

The AI-generated childrens' book in the news was written/illustrated with a lot of input from the creator, and intended as a present for a friend's children — who apparently liked it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-midjourney-ai-write-illustrate-childrens-book-one-weekend-alice-2023-1

145:

I suspect you could optimize a GPT to produce adequate formulaic fiction that satisfied the target audience, no matter what their age. It might take a fair bit of input/tweaking for a while, but it would eventually get there.

It would get there at first. But readers like novelty, and after a while they get bored if you don't ring the changes. When you publish a successful book the first thing your editor will say is "that sold well, now write me another just like it -- only different". By which they mean, they want to experience the same sense of novelty, which you simply can't provide if you recycle the exact same characters and plot all over again.

146:

But readers like novelty, and after a while they get bored if you don't ring the changes.

How long is "a while"? Harry Turtledove retold WWII how many times, in different guises? It was successful enough to pay for his childrens' college…

With a sufficiently large number of characters and plots (not to mention settings), I suspect the permutations would be enough to keep a fair number of people interested enough to keep returning.

147:

EC
"Sliverplonk" is the name that must not be mentioned ... Fortunately, all their ex-services are, now, almost-infinitely improved.

148:

Just saw this in the news.

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64488678

Not certain how this can be squared with "informed consent", but then I understand so little of American thought nowadays…

149:

"By which they mean, they want to experience the same sense of novelty, which you simply can't provide if you recycle the exact same characters and plot all over again."

Technically true as stated, but the degree of variation that is required to sell craploads of books doesn't seem to be very great. Look at Enid Blyton pumping out endless minor variations on "group of n kids + 1 pet animal discover a criminal gang and bust it up". Or for adult literature, PG Wodehouse: 4 sets of characters x 5 plots = 20 novels (and none of them are funny, whatever anyone says).

150:

Inmates should be able to donate organs

Now, to make more inmates! Jail time for jaywalkers! (cf. Larry Niven's The Jigsaw Man)

151:

Robert Prior:

the "prison industrial complex" in US is notorious for so many things there's no room to list 'em all...

this is one more being added, assuming this passes the stink test in front of judges... the 'moral hazard' being these prisoners are going to be pressured into donating...

please note to effectively complete any tissue graft, there has to be rather precise matching (starting with basic blood type then branching off into ever fuzzier aspects of protein markers) if the patient receiving the tissue is to have a long enough life extension to warrant the misery and expense of the surgery (and follow up treatment)...

while there are medications effective in suppressing rejection in cases of not-quite-precise-match there are horrid problems starting with expense and then continuing into life quality side effects and long term damage to other organs... then there's the nightmare of immo-suppression leading to opportunistic infections and possibly cancer... so "rather precise matching" is the objective aimed at via pre-screening potential donors long before there are patients in need of tissue grafts...

which means if that patient is deemed 'high value' due to some set of attributes (young-ish, powerful family, photogenic, et al) wheres as the donor is deemed low value' due to being a convicted felon there will be pressure placed upon the warden to place more pressure on the convict with that best available match to cough up a kidney lest there be an unfortunate riot during which both kidneys get shanked...

152:

Good point about artificial stupidity. ChatGPT could almost be invented for troll farms. Doesn't have to be paid, never gets tired.

153:

How long is "a while"? Harry Turtledove retold WWII how many times, in different guises? It was successful enough to pay for his childrens' college…

You called it yourself with the "im different guises".

The WWII remix with added rather stupid alien space lizards flailing around in the middle was amusing enough for a while (although I didn't get on with the final book in the series -- it went in a necessary direction, but didn't deliver full closure).

Then there was "Stalin, but with Necromancy", and "what if the Confederacy didn't collapse in 1865 and most of a century later the Slaveowner's Treasonous Rebellion: Round 2" (and then Round 3) follow the patterns of WW1 and WW2?

Confession: I like Harry, but I prefer his standalones and historicals more. By the second of those series I baled after book 1 (and never touched the third series).

If you have the intestinal fortitude, go to Amazon and sign up for Kindle Unlimited for a month. It's about $10, and if you've got and Android or iOS device (or a Mac or a PC) there's a free reader app to download and read ebooks on. You get up to 20 three books at any time; finish one, return it, and get another. Now start trawling through the recommendations, or go deep diving on keywords like "alpha/omega", "pack", "dragon", "princess", "urban fantasy", "witch", "magic school" ...

After a while it all begins to blur into a sort of beige extruded urban fantasy product of uniform if bland texture. There are nuggets of rancid shit embedded in it: there are somewhat fewer (but a non-zero number of) gemstones as well. However, the overall feel is indeed what Leiber described as "wordwooze".

154:

I was in the WSFS meeting in Chicago, where we were beat out over the insane new rule about "selling WSFS memberships, then adding attending". So I saw Kevin Standlee, SMOF....

155:

I would just like to refer you to Paulette's experience during interrogation in Dark State, where threats are made, of extraordinary rendition ... for spare body parts.

156:

"These are different skills", hell, yes. A very old acquaintance of mine (I'm not sure I still consider him a friend, given our political differences, US politics) has more than one tried to get me to write a script, and I try to tell him that, and he doesn't get it.

157:

In the same room? I don't know. Back in '90, Bob Lipton took me to a Lunarians meeting (where it turned out I knew half or two-thirds of the members), I've been to a couple of Heliospheres, and I always go to Philcon, so if you've been to any of those....

158:

Into Darkness was a Turtledove series I bought as soon as each paperback came out. Not interested in some other, and not interested in his, or someone else's, US Civil War novels.

159:

WRT Latin translation, it occurs to me that there's a long history of post-Classical Latin, namely Ecclesiastical Latin. Training your AI on that might be interesting, though not, I suspect, very useful.

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

160:

It didn't affect just the USA. The contaminated blood scandal was caused by the UK gummint saving money by buying USA blood products, and infecting a huge number of people with HIV and HepC.

161:

That Latin was used for all scientific and many other purposes up until Newton's time, across all of Europe. It would certainly be useful if you were writing a mediaeval fantasy involving magical incantations,

162:

I liked "Down in the Bottomlands", but almost everything he has written seems to belong to genres I dislike. While there may be a few standalones I would like, the chances of a purchase being one are not great. It's a pity.

163:

as Bruce Sterling put it all too well, "the street finds its own uses for things"

slippery slope... nope... we've slid down that long ago...

the only aspect of "Dark State" that did not ring true was the pace in the interrogation scenes... slower the pace there's ever worsening pysch pressure... I guess there was demands to get answers sooner than later...

for anyone keeping score at home... prisoners are:

(a) cautionary tale to anyone without a decent lawyer or escape route to a place accepting political refugees (Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc)

(b) semi-involuntary peasant labor in factories inside the gray walls (China, USA, etc)

(c) semi-voluntary participants in testing of medications (China, USA, etc)

(d) so why not treat 'em as a source of spare parts for those in dire need with high quality insurance coverage and political clout? (RUMORS include: China, India, Iran, N. Korea, and USA)

after all, "profit" is in where you have control over a scarce resource and a demand for it to warrant the necessary effort to effectively steal-demand-harvest-purify-transport "it"

164:

and none of them are funny, whatever anyone says

There we must agree to disagree.

165:

as Bruce Sterling put it all too well, "the street finds its own uses for things"

I believe that was Gibson, not Sterling? Anyway, you're point is well taken.

166:

That Latin was used for all scientific and many other purposes up until Newton's time, across all of Europe. It would certainly be useful if you were writing a mediaeval fantasy involving magical incantations,

The Rivers of London series works with Thaumaturgical Latin quite well.

Another place "Latin" gets used quite a lot is in the life sciences. Within the field this leads to silliness, in a way that seldom makes it into novels.

Recent example: a friend of mine out working in the desert near $Military base posted a picture of "A modern thunderbird." My response was "Gashawk, probably some member of the Petroligulpidae from the silhouette." They posted a close-up picture (it was flying pretty effing low), and my response was "Looks like Globodominus septendecimus. Apparently they're declining in the wild." Only a few people found it funny of course, but that's how some real scientists goof around when no one's watching.

167:

On a techie mailing list I'm on, a few years ago there was an extensive discussion of octopi v. octopuses (Latin v. Greek root).

168:

I believe that, if you are playing that game, it should be octopodes.

169:

After a while it all begins to blur into a sort of beige extruded urban fantasy product of uniform if bland texture.

And wouldn't that that be just the market that a authorGPT bot would be aiming at…

I once had a several-decades-long collection of Analog magazines (long-ago donated to a nephew). I ended my subscription when I realized I was able to figure out the plot of most of the stories after less than a page. (Didn't help that the magazine's politics was drifting rightward as mine was drifting leftward.) Yet the subscribers were paying for that, and indeed were unhappy with fiction that challenged them to think.

My father liked mysteries, and for Christmas one year I got him a subscription to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He tactfully let me know that I shouldn't renew the subscription — the writing was formulaic and the mysteries weren't very mysterious. yet again, the magazine was able to stay in business for a long time with such writing.

When I was a kid, there were many books of adventure stories set in WWII itself. Formulaic, with very limited settings and limited characters, and yet popular enough to get published with sequels.

I'm not convinced that 'novelty' is essential. A certain level of unpredictability for dramatic tension, sure — but formulaic fiction seems to manage without novelty in the sense of 'something new'.

170:

"I once had a several-decades-long collection of Analog magazines"

Previously Astounding.

I think that Astounding and a few other pulps had a considerable influence on the culture of the 20th Century, present readership included. It would be nice to have a complete archive of those.

171:

It was decided that for English usage, the correct plural was octopusses.

Feel free to picture a cat with eight limbs....

172:

Scott Sanford noted on February 2, 2023 at 09:51 in #129:

I've also been in the physical presence of Charlie and Feorag - but not you or Whitroth. They'd probably have noticed if an AI used the same avatar to render all three of us, right?

I've also been in the physical presence of Charlie in Powell's City of Books, and again at the 2016 Westercon. I've colocated with Scott numerous times, and hope to again at GameStorm next month, Great Bird of the Galaxy willing. Scott would be best equipped to attest to my artificial intelligence, or natural stupidity, until Glasgow '24.

173:

I'm going to have to organize a party/meet-up at Glasgow next year, aren't I?

174:

With all of these co-locations and missing, with OGH's permission, I'd like to propose that we have a get-together Thursday evening at Worldcon in Glasgow in '24, for those of us there. As I understand cons over there don't have room parties, I assume this would mean the hotel bar.

175:

That was my first and, to date, sadly, my only Worldcon. Got to the Dealer's Room on the first day in time to discover that the Foglio's had already sold out all the stock they brought, but did get to chat with them at least. Almost got a Shaun Tan drawing and met/spoke to/was in proximity to many very cool and awesome authors. Was kissed by George Martin, passed Alastair Reynolds on the escalator and attended a panel that included Charlie and, from memory, Jay Lake.

176:

As I understand cons over there don't have room parties

Cons do have room parties, but the Glasgow worldcon isn't hotel-based -- it's being held at the SECC, a big-ass international conference centre (with multiple hotels scattered around). The nearest hotel to the venue is the Crowne Plaza (which actually connects to it directly via indoor corridors) but most folks won't be staying there. The hotel has a bar in the lobby, and there will also (this being a UK convention) almost certainly be a real ale bar, BUT (big caveat coming) COVID19 ain't over and I'm not optimistic about the wisdom of hanging out in a mostly-unmasked area with lots of talkative people from all over the world. On the other hand, the SECC is fairly close to the river Clyde: on the gripping hand, it's going to be August in Glasgow so the weather will the changeable with a high probability of random showers.

Finally: as a local-ish author I'm going to be a target of opportunity for panels, so can't guarantee availability for any given one-hour slot.

177:

Rbt Prior @ 148
It's the oxymoron: "American thought" that does it ....

Kardashev -I had about a hunderd or so of those, but I sold them ....

Charlie @ 173
* Yes, you are!* - sign me up right now.

whitroth
THURSDAY?
Ok, I'll have to come up a day earlier .....

178:

for English usage, the correct plural was octopusses

Or in the USA, octopussies?

I'm thinking octopendants or octopedants depending on orientation. Physical orientation, an octopus walking on something is octopedant, but obviously if it's hanging from something...

179:

Charlie Stross:

I'm going to have to organize a party/meet-up at Glasgow next year, aren't I?

if only to prove you're you and not a chatbot...

though it is feasible you are simply the fleshy public shown face for the strossGPT which is kept chained up in a windowless concrete bunker somewhere far off the highway toiling upon manuscripts odd 'n arcane

180:

~Sighs~ I do hope Niven wasn't right about organ donation as a dystopia. The worldbuidling in his "Gil of the ARM stories" was not remotely pleasant.

182:

No, octopodes are sets of four antipodes aligned along a plane.

183:

~Sighs~ I do hope Niven wasn't right about organ donation as a dystopia. The worldbuidling in his "Gil of the ARM stories" was not remotely pleasant.

Technically no. What he's talking about was known to be impossible when he wrote it.

Organ transplantation has its own forest of little dystopias, along with some real life extensions. Yes, prisoners could be exploited for organs, I suppose, but the quality would kind of suck. As a punishment, breaking up someone for parts would be pretty wasteful. Also (black humor), various municipalities are trying to cut back on the amount of organic waste going into landfills, so dumping unused convict parts would contribute more to methane emissions than to extending the lives of citizens. (/black humor).

I think a bigger problem isn't organ donation, it's surplusing people, telling them they're of no use, that they're on their own, and tossing them in a slum, then proceeding to ruin whatever it was they'd been doing through ignorance and greed. We do that entirely too much.

184:

One question I was given was on thermal expansion: given a uniform ring with a gap in it (and all relevant constants), at what temperature will the gap close?

(and all the other replies to this original post)

It depends on the material. As long as the material is below its kindling point, the gap will close at a temperature above the melting point and below the boiling point.

185:

various municipalities are trying to cut back on the amount of organic waste going into landfills

Why would you send fresh meat to landfill? Even pet food would be better, but I'm sure there's a market for "ethical meat pies" or something similar.

186:

Why would you send fresh meat to landfill? Even pet food would be better, but I'm sure there's a market for "ethical meat pies" or something similar.'

Soilant Green! Best cannabis fertilizer on earth. Also works on hemp, kudzu, and Japanese knotweed.

187:

One thing I noticed was that, if you search for English children's books with significant female and/or Chinese representation, there's a real dearth. Almost certainly lots worse for smaller minorities. Well, that's true up and down the age chain...

And, a lot of that tends to be driven by market size. But, there's an underserved market for literature with targeted audiences, whether they be exotic pornography or children's books about a Jamaican family. ChatGPT, or its successors, will likely reduce costs enough at adequate quality to serve those markets. I guess children's books first because image generation from text is currently arguably somewhat better than a mediocre human artist.

188:

When I was a kid, there were many books of adventure stories set in WWII itself. Formulaic, with very limited settings and limited characters, and yet popular enough to get published with sequels.

I missed those. (In the US.) But I do remember a clutter of TV shows set in WWII on TV during the 60s. Some farcical (Hogan's Heroes), some not (12 O'Clock High), and many formulaic (Combat!). Even as a kid it struck me that many of these shows lasted 2 or 3 times as long as the period they were set in. Especially Combat! which was set in the US action in western Europe. The series ran for 4 or 5 years.

As a side note, my father thought many of these things not worth much time except for 12 O'Clock high. He flew as a waist gunner on B24s and I got the impression that for a TV series he thought it was a reasonable depiction of things. Sanitized for TV viewing at the time.

189:

It would be nice to have a complete archive of those.

I have a very large pile of Analog. My wife keeps asking why. My thought is to re-read them when I'm doddering and forgetful and then they will be entertaining all over again.

I have an urge to find the 4 issues that got me hooked on SF back around 64 when I was in grade school. Incredibly racist (I could see at at age 10) first contact story. Later I learned that this was a typical thing for JC.

190:

Feel free to picture a cat with eight limbs....

Sorry. My mind heads off to "My name is Bond, James Bond"

191:

Just saw this in the news.

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts

Silly season for state laws in the US. Every January there is a pile of such things introduced in various state legislatures. Mostly red meat for a group of odd ball constituents. They never go anywhere. And yes both side do such. Although the craziest ones tend to lean R.

In the US most all state legislatures meet starting in January every year or two. And all the folks go got elected saying they'd do $thiscrazything introduce bills. 99.99% get printed up, put in the record, and vanish till needed again for the same reason.

I bet if someone wants to dig there is a web site somewhere that collects such things. There was an article in a Texas newspaper a couple of weeks ago summarizing some of the more, ah, interesting ones filed there. Like dissolving the city government of Austin and making it rule by a committee reporting to the state legislature.

As to the specifics of that bill. Even if the courts upheld it, the result would be nothing. As H pointed out the likelihood that a long term prisoner having body parts of a quality to be usable is much less than useful. Plus it would require the entire US public donor system to toss out their rule book as to how organs can ethically get into the system.

Not going to guess how many non public donor organs get transplanted in the US. I'm sure it's above 0. But 1000s or even 100s would surprise me. Way too many things to keep secret for all but the uber rich who could set up their own mini hospital. But even then it would likely be staffed by people from other countries to avoid paper trails. Just equipping such a thing would leave a big trail for some aspiring scandal sheet web site to follow.

192:

if only to prove you're you and not a chatbot...

I've been to pub meets with my World of Warcraft guild across Europe for about 16 years now, and there are still rumours that the head honcho has never turned up in person, just sent the same actor impersonating her every single time.

193:

Ok, I'll have to come up a day earlier .....

You'll need to be there on Wednesday if you want to go on Feorag's traditional pre-worldcon pub crawl.

194:

...there are still rumours that the head honcho has never turned up in person, just sent the same actor impersonating her every single time.

Wow, Kevin should try that. >grin<

But you have to give props to the guy who plays Ben Yalow. He turns up on time, stays in character, and has been playing the role capably for many years now.

195:

David L:

guess how many non public donor organs get transplanted

dude... paperwork is the ally of obscuring the sourcing of stuff... witness at this very moment the side-stepping of sanctions by simply adding a (very) temporary primary destination to a cooperative warehouse in a neutral nation's seaport followed by a secondary leg to a Russian seaport...

only it is not necessary to do that for less carefully tracked shipments on freighters which whilst out on the high seas simply get re-routed under another identifier in one or another ship registry bureaucracies...

ditto for human tissue... just don't make a fuss when you check in to get a new kidney sewn in and be polite to the nurses and pre-pay the sizable 'consulting fees' charged by hospital administrators for 'special services'...

there will be creditable paperwork to distract anyone watching on a given day who otherwise might find out you were supposedly ranked as #7612 on the waiting list due to age-alcoholism-obesity-rare-blood-type... yet here you are being shaved as part of a briskly efficient pre-surgical routine which will have you wheeled into the operating room a mere two hours after arrival...

then a month after you are safely-happily-healthily discharged from hospital the originating paperwork (and lab tests and doctor notes and nurse clerical crap and meal choices) will all get assembled into a file folder which will then be tragically misplaced (but never destroyed) making impossible to perform an audit any time other than during that one month post-discharge...

have you ever wondered why hospital keep replacing their recordkeeping software and (in old days as well still today) all paper-based records are stored in some shabby warehouse where mold-rats-rain can reach?

no administrator wants records to linger for too long... just long enough to demand payment from patients and/or insurance companies... after which an unpredictable, open-ended resource for lawyers to demand as part of "civil suit discovery" and/or prosecutors seeking convictions (and resulting headlines)...

keep in mind, on any given day in a hospital there will be between three and twelve surgical procedures in each operating room (24H/7D never idle)... so if there are ten operating rooms who has the dogged determination to audit all those 30 (120?) procedures for irregularities? and then do it again the next day? every day for 365 days in each year? and for how many years of dull tedious 'nothing burgers'?

my guess is at least 10% (not ten) of all tissue transplants are entangled in varying degrees of irregularities... some politician or executive has a care accident, not seen for three weeks due to a supposedly slow recovery due to minor complications but was it a car crash or was there a replacement liver stitched in under that surgical scar?

there's always been a vague sense of hundreds (maybe thousands) of people disappearing weekly...

all that's necessary to determine tissue match is a blood sample... and how many Americans get routine blood testing done? how often does some portion of those blood samples get sent out to testing facilities outside a doctor's office rather than done on site? what actually happens behind those windowless walls?

quietly followed up with a quiet disappearance once there's a wealthy client matching up...?

196:

Let's just say I think you're way off base. If I say more I may get carded.

197:

I agree: I think Howard NYC is excessively paranoid -- at least about transplant surgery in the west: China is rather different (I've heard rumours of prisoners sentences being "upgraded" to capital punishment specifically because they were a good tissue match for a high-up Party member in need).

But hospitals in the US and places like the UK and anywhere in the EU are serious about medical record retention if only because litigation can show up years after the event and they may need to prove that they didn't do whatever they're being sued over. And medical records in particular have potentially got a life cycle as long as a human being (unlike, say, tax records where you're only required to retain detailed transaction records for a decade in case of an audit).

198:

I guess children's books first because image generation from text is currently arguably somewhat better than a mediocre human artist.

We considered quoting the possibly apocryphal remark by a park ranger on the difficulty of design bear-proof garbage containers because of the considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists in the ChatGPT article, but decided to leave it out in the interests of not offending administrative sensibilities.

199:

But hospitals in the US and places like the UK and anywhere in the EU are serious about medical record retention

Most of the US, maybe all of it, has a system where you can check a box to be an organ donor and it be on your driver's license card and in the state online records system. So legally if you show up dead at a hospital or die there and the box is checked they can harvest your organs. But in reality that check box only determines how the hospital staff approaches finding your nearest relatives and starting the conversation about getting their permission for donation. They have no interest in dealing with a screaming spouse/parent or a family lawyer threatening to sue because they disagreed with the check box.

Then you have people like my late mother. She was firmly convinced that since they kept brain dead people's heart and lung operating the organs were always harvested from people who were still alive and might recover. Sigh.

200:

Charlie Stross & David L:

my father had drawn out cardiac decline, multiple surgeries, frequent hospitalizations... from 1974 till his death in 2001... joke made by ICU nurse at [redacted] hospital was he'd met her just before going out on maternity leave in 1977 and she shared with him pictures of her daughter all the way thru high school graduation...

based upon our family's copies of his accumulated records he was in and out of [redacted] hospital for overnight stays, emergency treatment, outpatient care and tests (OMG the blood tests)... and across three decades [redacted] hospital replaced their recordkeeping system more than a dozen times, in fits-and-starts... differing departments having differing needs and thus not always handshaking effectively between Billing, Outpatient, ER (US eqv to UK A&E), Pharmacy, Post-Op, Pre-Op, Labs, et al... by my estimate his insurance paid for over 300 nights of in-patient stays... and yet every time they switched systems somehow his records from the old systems never migrated onto the new systems without one of us physically meeting with a senior administrator time 'n time again to insist upon it being done with verification...

entire years of treatment were 'misplaced'... it was brutally un-funny whenever some executive attempted to snow me with technobabble, each successive attempt to hand wave vaguely at "computers" as the culprit and then I'd ask technical questions -- I've been coding for pay since I was 17 in 1978 -- and they find themselves utterly derailed... one of my lawyer cousins (in an extended family of about 200 adults there's 14 who are lawyers) sat me down to explain it was not incompetence but rather deliberate efforts at seemingly reasonable mistakes to misplace as much of my father's records as feasible given multiple treatment errors... not just him... at [redacted] hospital there'd been an eye popping number of whoooopies leading to crippling injuries and outright death... my lawyer cousin assured me compared to other similarly sized hospitals this one had a relatively lower rate of whoooopies... much fewer doctors losing their licenses and/or encouraged to relocate to a low population state like Utah where there was so many empty slots for doctors they'd be welcomed despite a high rate of malpractice claims against 'em...

it is not paranoia... it is grim personal observation... as to my snarky remarks about the wealthy getting preferential treatment in receiving scarce tissue transplants... I will refer you to the hoops Steve Jobs jumped through in an effort to get onto multiple waiting lists despite that being regarded as borderline illegal... but the laws are different when you a dying billionaire and multiple treatment centers were willing to overlook silly rules in hopes they'd be able to have bragging rights of saving him... and his 'life long' gratitude...

whether or not there are 'organlegging operations' underway... yeah.. that's utter speculation... I'm trying to define what such a dystopian plot would look like as it unfolds in midst of a woman seeking the fate of her missing sister... and if it is plausibly Netflix-worthy of ten episodes... "Squid Games" meets "Without a Trance" by way of "Too Many Milk Cartons"

201:
COVID19 ain't over and I'm not optimistic about the wisdom of hanging out in a mostly-unmasked area with lots of talkative people from all over the world.

Ugh, tell me about it.

I've been careful. Always worn a mask (N95 at first, then a 3M N99 mask). And on Tuesday... COVID got me despite my precautions.

I seem to be over the worst of it now. Didn't lose my sense of smell, but did have the fever, aches, pains; insomnia (that was hell) dry eyes, cough, etc, etc. Like a really bad cold.

202:

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts.

Thinking about this more, I can actually see a good rationale for this.

As background, my wife's a clinical pharmacist. She's not a public person, but it's fair to say that pharmacists in general do a lot of continuing education, and as a result, I happen to know a wee bit more about transplant than the general public. I also known a couple of organ recipients, including the late mycologist Tom Volk, who was public about his heart transplant.

Anyway...organ farming in a prison is a non-starter for a bunch of reasons. So is illicit transplantation, at least in the US. I mean it's doable, but the team performing the transplant is likely to leave behind a godzilla-sized records footprint, and to face a rather lengthy list of criminal offenses, especially if the recipient dies.

The normal problems with transplant start with the prep: the donor and recipient both have to be in good enough shape to survive the operations. Then both of them have to be (made) negative for a long list of pathogens. Why? The recipient is going to be immunologically suppressed for the rest of their lives. If the donor's positive for AIDS, hepatitis, etc., forget it. Afterwards, the recipient requires a lot of care for the rest of their lives.

A lot of highly skilled and fairly specialized and certified people get involved in any transplant: nurses (pre-op, surgical, post-op, long-term care), pharmacists (drugs are involved pre-op, in surgery, post-op, long-term), surgeons, immunologists, pathologists (they genotype and check organs), specialists in whatever organ system is being transplanted, retail pharmacists for some of the meds, etc.

Now imagine setting all of this up covertly or illegally. Even something as simple as a prescription for immunosuppressants generates a lengthy paper trail, as does getting a patient's medical records from their existing doctors (and if they need transplants, they likely have voluminous records already). A lot of people are involved, and they all stand to lose their careers at the very least if discovered. It's theoretically possible, but getting away with it and making it profitable look pretty hard, at least in the US. Why bother?

Now, why should prisoners who donate organ be given special treatment? Instead of body farming, imagine this fairly normal situation: Most transplants ideally are between family members. So mom needs a new kidney, and her only son's in prison. Son wants to donate a kidney, and he's a 50% match and reasonably clean (AIDS negative, for example). To become a donor, he's going to have to go into isolation for a couple months just to demonstrably get clean (get all the problem viruses, etc. out of his body). Then he's going to lose a kidney. Then he's going back into the main body of the prison, more vulnerable (he's one damaged kidney away from dying), and he's been in protective custody for months but definitely not because he's a snitch or anything, and everyone will of course believe that donor story...

Yes, in a situation like that, I'd consider reducing the donor's sentence. They're potentially risking their lives to charitably help someone else. Even with the reward of a reduced sentence, that looks a lot like someone trying to reform.

And yes, the same pre-op isolation rigamarole applies to bone marrow too, although the consequences for the donor are less severe (at least, after recovery).

203:

As a matter of curiosity, what mask are you using? The 3M Canadian web site doesn't have an N99 mask (or doesn't think it has one, anyway).

204:

The (only?) exception is corneal transplants, which don't have the same problems.

It turns out that I am not even fit for embalming and handing over to medical students - yes, I asked :-)

They require corpses with reasonably normal insides, not ones that have been distorted by operations, trauma, disease or cancer. Even before I had it, I doubt they would have touched me as a donor on similar grounds - certainly, I have never been eligible for blood donations (in the UK!) Organ-farming is a black helicopter myth in the UK, at least at present.

205:

171, 178 - Wasn't Octopussy the eponymous character in a (real) James Bond book and film?

176 - Well, last Glasgow Worldcon, the room parties were in function rooms in places like the Hilton Glasgow and Glasgow Marriott, both beside the M8 and near Charing Cross (Glasgow) station.
They're also all just across the M8 from the Bon Accord (good real ale bar) at 153 North Street.

188 - According to Wikipedia Hogan's Heroes ran from 1965 to 1971 over 168 episodes.

206:

The other exception is grafts of cadaver bone to patch various holes, but yes, otherwise I think you're right.

I won't detail my stories about human anatomy, but during grad school, a couple of my friends TA'ed a human dissection class and had to maintain the bodies. They liked grossing us out when we went out for drinks.

207:

According to Wikipedia Hogan's Heroes ran from 1965 to 1971 over 168 episodes.

It was a farcical comedy. I never thought of anything in it as being factual.

Apparently my Mother in law HATED that show when it was on. She was born in 1928 and grew up in southern Germany during WWII. Married a US Army Lt in the mid 50s. And per what I have been told by my wife, had absolutely no tolerance for the show.

208:

Now, if you want to talk about feasible organlegging, there's a different route entirely.

One thing they've been playing with for years is 3-D printing biological scaffoldings for various organs and seeding them with stem cells, after which the stem cells colonize the scaffold, dissolve it, and ideally form a functioning organ.

IF this technology goes mainstream, it avoids most of the transplant rejection problems that I referenced above. The organ's made from the patient's tissue, so presumably rejection won't be a problem. Because of that, the number of professionals involved basically shrinks down to the organ growers and the surgical and post-op teams (nurses, doctors, pharmacist).

What could possibly go wrong? Or more precisely, go crooked?

I think you can imagine the same scenarios I can, about stem cell chicanery and substandard organs and surgery. There have been reports of stem cell "quackery" coming out of Tijuana for years, with at least one resulting fatality on the US side of the border (Inject stem cells, they'll cure the problem. Or metastasize).

This could also venture into cyberpunk territory. Special Ops fanatics, elite assassins, and other B-story staples could opt to have someone grow them the heart and lungs of a triathlete, the liver and kidneys of Dionysus, and an equine-scale bladder and downstream appendages to handle the latter portions of carousing, all from their own stem cells. In the real world, I'll leave to your imagination what a black clinic might actually do to a person who insisted on biohacking themselves that way.

209:

Medical Records in the US. (I'll defer to any corrections H wants to make.)

Prior to the ACA (Obama care in 2009) medical records in the US had HIPAA requirements. Which were mostly about privacy. If things got lost but not exposed, well it might suck for the patient but wasn't illegal.

ACA introduced a entire new set of requirements for national record keeping. Which drove a lot of small practices into retirement or consolidation as they didn't have the IT chops or size sufficient to make it happen.

Any discussion of general medical records needs to deal differently depending on before or after 2009/2010.

But transplants are a "whole nuther thing". The paper trail and requirements to get a good match and care before and after were and still are immense. As H has noted, finding a match is hard via official channels. Unofficially the task, to me, is hard to imagine. I have no where near the issues that EC has but I'd likely have to stop some of my "let me piss normally" drugs before I could donate to more than 1/3 of the population. And to be honest I like to be able to take a normal piss. So I don't even offer to enter the match pool. They also don't want my blood for general usage.

And while we've never gotten in the details, my son's partner is the main admin coordinator at a transplant clinic at a major US medical center. None trivial paperwork to get anything to happen. Before and after the transplant.

210:

Actually, what you describe does not involve organlegging, but there there is an organlegging aspect there. 3-D printing and seeding with the donor's stem cells is ethically uncontroversial (insofar as any advanced surgery is); it's technically hard, but that's another matter. But they have also taken an existing trachea, washed out everything but the collagen, and seeded that.

211:

Troutwaxer@182: No, octopodes are sets of four antipodes aligned along a plane.

There's always a lot of great stuff in comments here... but this one made my day.

212:

Apparently ChatGPT is NOT a rocket scientist.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1152481564/we-asked-the-new-ai-to-do-some-simple-rocket-science-it-crashed-and-burned

To me the money quote is:

"It gets things wrong, because it's not actually designed to get things right."

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

213:

Spy balloon over the US.

Apparently the US and Canada are tracking a balloon they say they think is a spy thing from China. They admit to tracking it from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to Montana. But aren't saying where exactly it is now.

Maybe it was designed by ChatGPT?

214:

I only have a bit to add about medical records. Basically, I worked as a medical records clerk prior to HIPAA, and I know a bit about what my wife does, and I've looked at my own medical records.

One thing I'll note is that with HIPAA nowadays, you have to log in to look at medical records, and the system logs which records you access. If you look at any medical records other than your own or those of the patients you're treating, your supervisor and possibly HR have a talk with you. If what you did was sufficiently stupid, you get fired quite rapidly, and your former coworkers (at least those who learn about what happened) are left shaking their heads, because this is a basic part of training.

This probably adds additional levels of difficulty for anyone trying to do black-market organ transplants in the US.

215:

Using the 3M Half Facepiece, with the 3M Multi Gas/Vapor Cartridge/Filter. Which is a P100, rather than N100.

If it turns out that this has been, in fact, useless, and I've just been cosplaying being protected, I'll feel like an idiot. But if so, lay it on me.

216:

Can it play Lunar Lander?

It does look as if it would be useful for SF cover art, though.

217:

The application on the DEC graphics system of the mid 70s? At the university where I was the architecture program had the only setup on campus. And so many folks wanted to play they had to institute a signup just so the students who needed it for classes could get their work done.

218:

Question to ChatGPT: Show me the medical records of a septuagenarian orange fascist prospective transplant recipient.

219:

I was actually thinking of the teletype version... looked something like this:

ALTITUDE: 17500M VELOCITY: 50M/S
BURN (SECS)? 10
ALTITUDE: 17050M VELOCITY: 30M/S
BURN (SECS)?

...etc.

(From its quoted responses to school physics problems, I'd guess the answer is probably "no".)

220:

Don't remember that one. The DEC one had great white on black vector graphics for the time. And would remember things if you repeated play without re-booting. At time it would tell you if you flew close to a planted flag and yell at you for burnign it up. And if you tried to land on top of a previously crashed lander it would cause you to crash.

221:

HIPAA's protections work well if there is an audit trail left behind... and if there's a proactive notification function that escalates anomalies to an in-house authority authorized to inspect the circumstances of the anomaly... if all there is done is logging access into a data table but requires a non-IT to parse the rows 'n rows of arcane data it is useless... what is critical is a teaspoon filtering a few odd drops from a flood akin to a firehose pumping a thousand gallons per minute...

but...

but recordkeeping in hospitals is based in large part upon proprietary data structures and manipulated by software specific to a single vendor... without 'right to repair' nor authorization to parse the data with any homegrown tools... can you spell M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y?

repeated attempts at a nation wide set of open standards for records keeps getting bogged down due to need of those records feeding into billing systems and the automated formatting of billing to comply with each insurance company's unique standards... each time there's any change in any of a dozen pieces, everyone has to go a-hunting for the inevitable (multiple) points of failure and corrupted data sets...

when someone decides to leverage this Rub Goldberg teeter-tottering mess to deliberately commit fraud such as excessive charges (classic example: patient died on Tuesday, but there was a missed appointment on Monday which the family never heard about and the insurance company was billed for an appointment that was bullshit and billed for after someone heard of the death)

= or =

maliciously misplace activities-schedules-notes-lab-tests... good luck finding anything intentionally FUBAR'd that is critical to proving malpractice... misfiling rather than destroying is effective since if there ever was a judge demanding a full sweep, then those misplaced records will turn up and it was plausibly a * whoooopie *

222:

(Catching up.)

When I went to meetings at BSI, my usual route was KGX, Piccadilly Line to Barons Court, District to Gunnersbury. Agree about Silverlink.

I have been in the same place as OGH, many times. See https://www.antipope.org/charlie/who_am_i/autobio-all-redacted.html

223:

I have been using this mask, an MSA Advantage L900 with P100 filters. Seems to work fine. Generally speaking, masks with elastomeric surrounds, like this one and the 3M respirator, seal better to the face than disposable N95 masks.

224:

Which is a P100, rather than N100.

Thanks. Apparently 3M's website isn't smart enough to realize that when someone enters "N100" a P100 mask might also interest them!

225:

I suggested Thursday, because stuff in the US is just cranking up then, and not much going on, while Friday, Sat, and sometimes Sunday (definitely, for a Worldcon) is in high gear, with many things going on. In the US, the Masquerade is normally Sat, eve, followed by parties, and the Hugo awards Sunday eve, followed by parties.

226:

I've actually never done a pub crawl, and in the US, that would frequently probably involved vehicular transportation, so that sounds like fun. I would have to see how Ellen's up for it (she can walk, but uses a wheelchair at cons, or Monday and part of the week after, she's in real pain).

227:

Sorry your experience has been so bad.

For my wife and I as we have moved around from provider to provider in the US. (and with her from NC to Texas and back to NC) our records (electronic) have followed us. All of this since 2010.

With a layer of private to Medicare and now a mix of private and Medicare. Plus 2 excursions into COBRA and back due to my wife's employment by an airline during some of the pandemic. (Yes this sounds nuts to those in the UK. I have no interest in that debate. It is what it is.)

228:

I'll also note that, IIRC, there is a national standard for exchanging medical records between facilities.

229:

Techie / phone question
Android system ...
If I am outside any buildings, or I do not know/cannot find the WiFi password for the building (etc) that I'm in ...
Should I be able to "see" the Internet on my phone, if the phone signal is reasonably strong?
Because I cannot. I can't test this at home, of course, because the phone automatically "sees" my home WiFi signal & connects.

230:

That hospital sounds like a million lawsuits waiting to happen... or, more likely, that they're in the middle of many, many. The only time I've seen anything like that bad was the "doctor" my late mother went to....

231:

Is there a collection of settings for "Cellular Data". iPhones have such and you set the rules there. On an iPhone you can pick which apps can use cellular data so for people on plans that charge by the bit they don't get $1000 bills.

232:

At a demonstration in 2017 or so, I carried a "normal" sign on one side... and on the back side, which I'd flip around to show people, all of whom left laughing, read "we demand his long form medical record" (One of his rants was deamanding fmr. President Obama's "long form" birth certificate.)

233:

Oopz. I forgot about you. Sorry. Yes, we have been at lots of C and other meetings together.

234:

Not necessarily. They may not have set up SSID broadcast, and there are other (rareish) possible reasons, too. If the former, and you know the network name, you can attach to it as hidden network. If the latter, you might have to tweak your configuration. Or it simply may not work.

235:

Greg seems to be asking if he can get on the Internet if he is not connected to a Wi-Fi setup. Which means cellular data. Assuming his phone plans gives him data, there are most likely settings somewhere on the phone for enabling such. In general and then by application. My Android phone is off and the battery dead plus it doesn't have cell service so I can't check.

236:

If you want to check at home you should be able to turn the WiFi off via either Settings -> WiFi or Settings -> Connections -> WiFi depending on Android and phone versions without losing any settings. But generally if there's no accessible WiFi an Android phone will fall back to using carrier data unless it has been told not to.

237:

Vulch / David L & others THANKS I looked into my "settings" & it said: "Mobile Data is OFF" I've turned it to "ON" - will see how that goes. { Duh }

238:

Howard NYC @ 62:

waldo:

"Mindless pop music" <== prefix adverb being redundancy

And on that note ...

I heard on NPR yesterday that Beyoncé just announced an upcoming tour of the U.K. with ticket prices starting at £2,000 ... but for some reason the computer network for whoever sells the tickets in the U.K. went down about an hour before tickets were supposed to become available and by the time the network came back up all of the tickets had been sold? This after Ticketmaster's SCANDAL/FIASCO with tickets for the Taylor Swift tour (nosebleed seats behind the stage going for $800 IF you could find them).

I used to enjoy going to concerts, but there ain't nobody I want to see so much I'm willing to spend a month's income for a ticket.

239:

What you need to know is the melting point. That'll give you the answer.

240:

*maliciously misplace activities-schedules-notes-lab-tests... good luck finding anything intentionally FUBAR'd that is critical to proving malpractice... misfiling rather than destroying is effective since if there ever was a judge demanding a full sweep, then those misplaced records will turn up and it was plausibly a whoooopie *

I happen to agree with you, and I do sympathize. Like you, I've seen all sorts of medical practice, from good down. I'm lucky at the moment to be in a good system, but I've definitely experienced much worse.

241:

David L @ 108:

Zellig was fictional, wasn't he?

Totally.

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

Zelig is a 1983 American mockumentary film written, directed by and starring Woody Allen as Leonard Zelig, a nondescript enigma, who, apparently out of his desire to fit in and be liked, unwittingly takes on the characteristics of strong personalities around him.

Worth a watch. Set in the 1920s US. Well done. Even though I've come to have a personal dislike for Woody Allen.

Forrest Gump's grand-daddy.

242:

And on Tuesday... COVID got me despite my precautions. I seem to be over the worst of it now.

Sounds like a mild dose of Omicron, with a full course of vaccinations and boosters. You may be over the worst but don't be tempted to get up and boogie just yet -- if experience is anything to go by you won't be testing clear for at least another week, and any exertion in the next 2-4 weeks will throw you right back in the deep end. Try and take things easy?

243:

It turns out that I am not even fit for embalming and handing over to medical students - yes, I asked :-)

Cancer is an absolute no-no for transplant donors, as I understand it. There have been cases where someone donated an organ (I forget whether post-mortem or live donor) and the recipient died of a cancer that had been asymptomatic prior to the organ being donated. Remember, transplant recipients need immunosuppressants, so if there's even a single viable cancer cell in the donor organ it's going to have a great growth opportunity in the new body that has no working immune system.

244:

Greg If you’re at home just go to settings and turn WiFi off. Then you should be able to access the internet if you have a decent phone signal.

245:

It gives an answer, conditional upon a very long list of assumptions... and which doesn't count anyway, since if it undergoes a phase change it's no longer the same material in a meaningful sense.

246:

Robert Prior @ 148:

Just saw this in the news.

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64488678

Not certain how this can be squared with "informed consent", but then I understand so little of American thought nowadays…

I think you missed the most salient part of the story:

Political observers say it is unlikely that the bill will become law.
247:

Of course, political observers also said it was unlikely that the 2016 U.S. Presidential election would turn out the way it did. Not sure how salient anything said by political observers is.

248:

Slate has published a fine whine by a college professor of English and a think tank social scientist bemoaning the changes in higher education that will be forced upon them by ChatGPT and its ilk.

They sound more annoyed than anything else. Completely understandable, but also completely pointless, to my way of thinking. But then I started to wonder if universities could bring a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI for damage to their product (education)?

249:

I'm "cured" (as of 21 years ago). But I have been told that there are quiescent nodes throughout my bod.

250:

David L @ 199:

But hospitals in the US and places like the UK and anywhere in the EU are serious about medical record retention

Most of the US, maybe all of it, has a system where you can check a box to be an organ donor and it be on your driver's license card and in the state online records system.

Another facet of that -

I signed up to be an organ donor in my early 30s ... I'm now in my early 70s. I have some hope of making it to my early 90s before I shuffle off. I'll still be signed up as an organ donor, but just how suitable will those organs be for transplanting by then?

Also, what about the people who were signed up to be organ donors and died from Covid19? Can those organs still be used for transplants?

Obligatory John Prine reference

251:

Thanks. Yes, fully boosted. Haven't bothered testing for the past couple of days - it's obvious I'm sick, so why bother? Today is the first day where my temperature isn't (very) feverish, but I'm not feeling ready to rumble yet, by any means.

I'll start testing once there's no fever for 24 hours. Then wait and wait until I go negative.

252:

JohnS @ 250:

And I guess, based on what Charlie says at 243, the question is moot because I have had cancer.

253:

Re: 'That hospital sounds like a million lawsuits waiting to happen... '

Actually there's a new excuse on the block for missing medical info: ransom attacks. Several hospitals in Canada have been attacked including SickKids the largest peds hospital which does about half of all peds transplants in the country. Not sure what the medical ethical or legal liabilities are in such cases but this has certainly highlighted the importance of ensuring that medical records are kept safe.

Transplants ... (Heteromeles, Charlie?)

No idea whether this has been studied but I'm curious about how the chimeric tissues differ between a woman who's had several children and a transplant recipient.

Prisoners volunteering parts of their bodies for transplant ...

Apart from the arguments against already mentioned - okay, until CRISPr and related tech can do large scale organ/tissue production at a reasonable cost, transplants are a stop-gap measure. Half wondering whether prisoner donors are just an excuse to not investigate (turn the spot light away from) the price gouging of some stem cell therapies.

'AI' but not 'AI-writing' related ...

Interesting read - longish. Why rents are still excessively high in NYC and maybe in other major cities. And no, it's not entirely because there are not enough available/unrented apartments.

https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html

After reading the above, my question is: just what is the difference between a corp that spews chemical garbage into the air/sewers vs. orgs that use AI to extract money out of people if both result in more people becoming sick or dying? I don't know the history of how various societies or medical/health orgs made the initial connections (leaded gas, asbestos and cancer) and then managed to address these issues. Just wondering whether there are some parallels or maybe even some legislative/medical best practices/health insurer fixes. Same with a society/generation becoming so besotted with a new tech that it deliberately avoids looking at possible negative consequences, e.g., radium, leaded gas.

SF/FCons -

I too have met Charlie in person --- at Boskone a few years back and another time elsewhere when he was doing a book signing.

254:

https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/03/us/iowa-funeral-home-woman-bodybag

if you were wondering if I was exaggerating about whoooopies... this happened at [redacted hospital] on two different occasions whilst my father was being treated... once on an ICU ward for a patient with DNR, whose monitor got unplugged while asleep and staff simply draped the 'corpse' and notified attending doctor to "stop by whenever and pronounce" she would five days later leave thru the front door not wheeled out the back...

another in ER after a patient got the wrong dosage of a medication that suppressed breathing and heartbeat to the point where an exhausted/overworked internist forgot to do the 'pin test' and went to get his shift boss to do the paperwork; that guy staggered off the gurney moaning "not dead yet I'm leaving"; apparently semi-conscious during the whole FUBAR ad decided to get his wounds stitched up elsewhere...

if a hospital cannot avoid so basic an error... we ought be terrified of "complications" during long term care for complex illnesses

255:

Re: '... it's obvious I'm sick, so why bother?'

There's also RSV and the flu going around - treatment and recovery may vary depending on which virus you have. (And it's possible to be carrying around more than one virus at a time.)

256:

JohnS, based on UK rules, you became "too old" for transplantation of most organs/tissues other than corneas on your 60th birthday.

257:

I remember a "woman wakes up in mortuary" story in the local paper about Bedford hospital (UK). Not the only time, there or elsewhere; it's not massively uncommon. For this kind of reason I want my corpse (if it hasn't already happened by the time anyone finds it) to be exposed, ie. left out until it's quite definitely gone rotten before anyone tries to do anything else with it.

258:

re: medical donations

if you want to save your family the cost of a burial as well aid in educating the next generation of medical professionals... you can donate your skeleton rather than your entire cadaver... not to be insensitive but to inform you... they will render your cadaver via boiling onto liquidification then polish the bones before issuing 'em to a student as study aid...

seems to be a dire shortage of both categories of samples being donated to medical schools...

259:

they will render your cadaver via boiling onto liquidification

That should prevent people inconveniently waking up and walking out on their own… :-)

260:

Yeah, I'm quite bluntly in the "when I've finished with it I don't care" category and my will/living will has instructions to shop the bits around until they find someone who'll take them. I'm not even sure I'd be offended if that was a cat food factory, it's one of those "I hate cats, but..." sort of trolley problems.

Although the whole transplant thing is in much the same category for me but that's a different kettle of worms. We can't feed the starving or house the homeless, but we can spend hundreds of thousands transferring a kidney? What is wrong with us

There's at least one SF story about life extension where the cabal who supply it charge "all your wealth less X, minimum lots". I kind of like that idea for transplant recipients although I think the minimum should probably be low (in brutal capitalist terms, someone with no money can't afford to stay alive so a transplant would be wasted on them. I think that's bad, but see "house the homeless" above).

261:

My favorite of those was "Victory at Sea", but I don't know how long that ran.

262:
you can donate your skeleton rather than your entire cadaver

Dry Bones comes to mind (Delta Rythm Boys singing "Dry Bones").

A chapter epigraph from Howard Waldrop's Them Bones also comes to mind:

"them bones, them bones gone walk aroun'

them bones, them bones gone walk aroun'

them bones, them bones gone walk aroun'

nunc audite verbum dei"

263:

What you've got to remember it hat ChatGPT makes stuff up. If you ask it to show you some records, it will "imagine" what those records would look like, and show you that. (Imagine is really the wrong word, since is does no visualization, but I don't know if there is a correct word.)

264:

In the US and I suspect elsewhere there are cadaver farms. They put bodies out in the natural space and observe how they decompose. Mainly as a law enforcement thing. So they can identify how long someone has been "out" when discovered.

Also in the US there is a growing movement to NOT embalm folks. They tie you up in a canvas or similar bag and bury you in a more natural space. They keep records so they don't double stack or dig someone up but the intend is to let you decompose. No headstones or manicured lawns. As best I can tell most of my relatives are buried in perpetual care cemeteries and the finances were not good enough for "perpetual". So they are not cared for all that well.

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

The New Orleans model makes sense to me.

265:

"There's at least one SF story about life extension where the cabal who supply it charge "all your wealth less X, minimum lots"."

Joe Haldeman, 'The Long Habit of Living'.

266:

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

So that if your heirs poison you for your money, they can exhume the body at a later date after suspicion has arisen, and test the remains for toxins. You need a corpse in reasonably good shape.

267:

Yes, that was the point ;)

268:

I've always thought embalming was a US peculiarity to begin with. We do have a few enthusiasts for cardboard coffins in order to accelerate the whole Ilkley Moor cycle, but even with normal wooden ones AFAIK we don't bother with all that gut the corpse and stuff it and saturate it with preservative doings. In any case, most people get cremated because they take up less space that way.

269:

AIUI,embalming in the US began during the "Treasonous Slave Holder's Rebellion", so grieving parents could look at dead sons at the funeral. Given the lack of transport speed at the time, understandable, somewhat less so now.

270:

From Wikipedia:

The cremation rate in the United Kingdom has been increasing steadily with the national average rate rising from 34.70% in 1960 to 75.44% in 2015.[141] According to the National Funeral Directors Association the cremation rate in the United States in 2016 was 50.2 percent and this was expected to increase to 63.8 percent by 2025 and 78.8 percent in 2035

Embalming was a thing that grew big in the civil war as it was major thing that so many people were dying a long way from home. So there was a demand to get the bodies back. But given travel times and the delay in even starting the travel, things could get ripe. So various chemicals were tried and a business was born. And as they say, the rest is ....

271:

"Joe Haldeman, 'The Long Habit of Living'."

I know it as "Buying Time" and there is an excellent french comics version by Marvano, titled "Dallas Barr"

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

https://www.bd-tek.com/Serie-5742-dallas-barr.html

272:

I have always favoured burial at sea. Take whatever organs might be of use, throw the rest in a cloth bag with some rocks and dump it into the ocean. Ideally it enters the food chain and the bulk of the carbon ends up at the bottom of the ocean and enters the long carbon cycle.

273:

Greg: before turning on mobile data, ensure that your deal with the mobile phone provider includes mobile data. If you have the right kind of tariff/package/bundle/whatever, you'll be able to download N gigabytes for a few quid per month. If you don't, you could end up paying several pounds per day on their default tariff.

274:

For this kind of reason I want my corpse (if it hasn't already happened by the time anyone finds it) to be exposed, ie. left out until it's quite definitely gone rotten before anyone tries to do anything else with it.

Back in Victorian days this was a sufficiently big fear that you could buy coffins rigged with a bell-pull in case you woke up underground. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/people-feared-being-buried-alive-so-much-they-invented-these-special-safety-coffins-180970627/

275:

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

Religious doctrine. Goes back to Ezekial and the day of judgement stuff, but got massively tweaked/amplified by early Christians who believed in bodily resurrection in the original flesh -- that you had to be buried intact, lest when you revived whatever bits of you were missing would still be missing. (Hence beheading or quartering being seen as especially harsh means of execution in European Christendom, hence dissection after execution for murderers being seen as an additional layer of punishment, and so on.)

It's basically superstitious rot but it underpins a lot of our culture -- there are echoes of it in the modern zombie myth, along with the slavery stuff -- and it's propped up by the funeral industry. Although it has been undercut in the past century or so in the UK by the intersection of land prices and cremation as an alternative option.

276:

David L
Here, too ... A long-time & very good friend of mine is "naturally" buried in a { Carefully logged-&-noted } corner of Epping Forest.

Richard H
Thanks - I was aware of that problem & also of people getting a "fix" on you. What I will do, is leave it "off" unless/until I want data ... then turn it "on" & back off again, when done ...

Charlie @ 275
What about tombs & memorials to pre-christian, non-Jewish societies then?
And I don't mean Pyramids) either!

277:

I notice there has historically been a lot of exchange of cultural practices between religions (enough that Judaism has a halachic prohibition on adopting the practices of other faiths -- the kind of rule you don't get unless something has been going on and the authorities are getting alarmed about it). In recent centuries it's mostly been newer cults borrowing from older ones (eg. Mormons insisting they're actually Christians, just with extra books (and underwear)). But it was once a 2-way or n-way process, and I suspect the idea of bodily resurrection goes back a very long way indeed -- pharaonic Egypt had it up to 5000 years ago, and there's even some evidence suggesting that pre-Sapiens hominins practiced ritual burial.

278:

On mobile data, we had a problem with WhatsApp seeming to use mobile data even when it was turned off. Somewhere on your phone there should be a report saying who used what.

279:

burial rituals are a combo deal: soothing of grieving next-of-kin; collective religious ceremony to provide closure; community reinforcement; hierarchy of social ordering with religious leader ("clergy") directing the proceedings; hopeful of appeasement of whatever sky-god (or gods) to grant mercy into the next life as well not to kill any more of community; gathering together of a community to offer up foodstuffs to assist grieving next-of-kin to survive (approximate) next month; disposal of a potentially infectious corpse if not buried soon enough (never mind how much worse during epidemics & outright plagues);

not everyone in a given family agrees with all those things nor in how those things are done;

it has become a gigabuck industry in every nation and just about every clergy of almost all denominations is in on the grift-guilt-ritual... other than wedding ceremonies and birth celebrations, funerals are a formalized fee collectible moment for clergy... and sadly... kickbacks from funeral homes for re-directing business to their facility along with all too many unnecessary frills...

280:

it has become a gigabuck industry in every nation and just about every clergy of almost all denominations is in on the grift-guilt-ritual... other than wedding ceremonies and birth celebrations, funerals are a formalized fee collectible moment for clergy... and sadly... kickbacks from funeral homes for re-directing business to their facility along with all too many unnecessary frills...

Bullshit.

Your refutation is pretty much any fundamentalist muslim, whether shi'ite or sunni: the stricter the more austere, the body is wrapped in a winding sheet and planted under the sand as fast as possible (with an absolute time limit of 3 days, IIRC) and no (or minimal) grave marker.

Again, orthodox Jews: rapid burial with just a stake in the ground to mark the spot, then, six months later, a commemorative/mourning service and a more permanent grave marker which is a simple unadorned headstone with the name and dates. No mausoleum, no embalming, no elaborate coffin, no spurious extras.

Some folks think the above practices are excessive. For real fun, look into Sky Burial, which is still fairly widely practiced in Tibet, Mongolia, parts of India, anywhere with a connection to the Himalayas ...

What you're describing as a universal is a specifically Christian practice in the USA.

281:

Yes. I noted that case, too. It's one of the reasons that they are chary about using organs from older patients - how many have asymptomatic cancers kept under control by their immune system? That was shown clearly by the outbreak of Kaposi's sarcoma in HIV patients - it seems to be a common cancer that is normally suppressed by the immune system.

283:

Mine doesn't, but those are very similar to the requests I have made to my relatives. I shall have lost interest. As OGH says, this fancy burial nonsense is an artifact of a few religions (e.g. ancient Egyptian as well as Christian) and is nowhere near universal.

284:

Re: '... you can donate your skeleton rather than your entire cadaver.'

Ditto your brain.

BTW, depending on where you reside, a brain donation has to be a separate tick-mark or even written in separately on your donor card because it requires lots more effort and specialized kit to do correctly. From a neuroscientist I know: labs need the full spectrum of brains and not just from people diagnosed with a specific condition becuz they need to do 'control' as well as 'test' for most research. My understanding is that depending on the type of study i.e., cellular or molecular, only about half of the brain tissue is used for samples for current projects while the other half is safely stored away. Apart from not wasting a resource, this allows scientists to go back and retest in the future on uncontaminated tissue. Unis/labs will share brain tissue samples including from unis/labs in other parts of the world.

https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/brain-donation-gift-future-generations

285:

Some parts are; others are MBF in Scotland. Excluding those to whom cremation was not available, of 10 people I knew who have died and I know about the funeral rites of, 8 have been cremated (including my maternal grandparents and one great-aunt) and only 2 (my paternal grandparents) were interred.

286:

Your refutation is pretty much any fundamentalist muslim, whether shi'ite or sunni: the stricter the more austere, the body is wrapped in a winding sheet and planted under the sand as fast as possible (with an absolute time limit of 3 days, IIRC) and no (or minimal) grave marker.

Um, as a point of order, "under the sand" is an interesting characterization. The one Muslim funeral I went to last year inhumed the deceased in the major local graveyard, not on the beach, which is where most of the local sand is. I'd hazard a guess that since sand is crappy for living on and tends to move with the wind, the remains of most Muslims are not "under the sand."

Also, the balm in embalming isn't formaldehyde. Perhaps the term embalming came from old Egyptian burial practices, well before the US Civil War? I agree that the American trend of treating corpses as if they were Vladimir Lenin or biological specimens dates to the Civil War, but keeping bodies and body parts around for whatever reason showed up in a lot of places well before then. Christian relics and catacombs, anyone?

My grumble is that I'd wanted to be cremated, but that's enormously wasteful of fuel and emits a lot of GHGs, so now I'd rather not. Nor do I want to be hazardous waste in a fancy box. Do I want my body to be left in the desert to be scavenged by coyotes and ravens? Tempting, but most likely my remains would be found by those who go out there to find the bodies of migrants who died in the desert. Then my bones would end up in a forensics lab somewhere, to be IDed and reunited with some family member, who'd probably be really upset about having to pay to have me legally inhumed somewhere else. Sick transit gory mundii, or something.

Hopefully body composting will be mainstream by the time I expire.

287:

Considering the word embalm dates from 1385, I suspect no USA civil war involvement. Apparently, the Romans picked up the practice towards the end of their empire, so it probably came into English from there.

https://www.thoughtco.com/roman-burial-practices-117935

288:

I used to sing that song as part of a boys choir nearly 70 years ago. It is based on a bible story found in Ezekiel 37:1-28

The song itself is a "spiritual", that is a folk song originating with enslaved dark skinned people in southern America.

289:

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

Religious doctrine. Goes back to Ezekial and the day of judgement stuff, but got massively tweaked/amplified by early Christians who believed in bodily resurrection in the original flesh -- that you had to be buried intact, lest when you revived whatever bits of you were missing would still be missing. ...

Your conflating two things. Which ARE somewhat related.

There's the issue of intact BURIAL which many religions expect. Christians going back into Judaism. Which one you get past the simplistic arguments the smarter of the faithful realize it's a practice, not a requirement. Else all those folks who die in wars and building fires and such don't count.

What I'm talking about is the nonsense of a warranty of a sealed casket to keep the dead BODY intact. Which is pure marketing nonsense. And yes a lot of US (and elsewhere?) Christians go there. But it is literally more peer pressure than anything else. When you're standing in the funeral home looking at the choices (as my wife will attest) you're thinking why spend much money if you're burying a box forever? And at the same time "will they think I'm cheap if I don't go fancy". Then you get into concrete shells over the casket to keep the dirt (and bugs) out. Or sealed above ground vaults. It's all marketing peer pressure when people are most vulnerable.

Then you get the lawsuits every now and again when someone finds icky fluids seeping out of the above ground vault wall of their warrantied to never leak casket. With the right mix of bacteria at times the gases build up and forces leaks. Oops.

On a side note my sister in law's retired husband is filling his time researching his family tree. He has most of it back 5 generations and can do a few branches going back 8 or more. One of the things he does to verify things (the online Mormon files and others are full of mostly minor errors) is once a year take a road trip to visit living relatives with a list of cemeteries to visit along the way to verify dates. He did some here last summer and we didn't find the grave stone but where the bodies likely had been buried. The old church cemetery had graves going back into the early 1700s with dates somewhat aligned. We found a gap in the headstones where there were likely about 10 graves and a few headstones on either side of the gap had the right last names and date ranges. We were looking for a couple of folks who died in the early 1800s.

One thing that surprised him was all the cousins that married. We guessed pickings were slim out in the wilderness.

290:

In the UK, nobody is interested in donated skeletons. My guess is that they use plastic ones and real corpses for training medical students, which makes sense. There is some interest in brain donation.

291:

That should have said "what eventually became the southern United States", although of course slavery in North America began long before there was such a political entity. As worded it could be taken to refer to the continent of South America.

292:

Considering the word embalm dates from 1385, I suspect no USA civil war involvement.

That war is what made it into a product marketed to consumers. In the US. And was the start of making funeral home owners some of the wealthiest people in any small town. Especially in the US with black folks. After all, people will always be dying.

293:

Hopefully body composting will be mainstream by the time I expire.

Getting there. You have several options not too far from where you live.

https://www.greenburialproject.org/

https://www.greenburialcouncil.org/

294:

SFReader:

others have noted corrupt practices in blood donations leading to thousands exposed to HEP-C, HIV, Typhoid, etc; there's been scandals about sourcing of 'various biological materials' such as corneas and skin which turned out to have been illegally harvested in hospitals, city morgues, funeral homes, etc and not properly tested for 'stuff' with forged paperwork granting authorization;

Elderly Cynic:

I will resist all manner of snark aside from just one... reminding the audience of Marty Feldman as Eye-Gor robbing the 'brain bank' in "Young Frankenstein"...

Charlie Stross:

my error was "every nation"... once again my bias showed up to trip up my fingers... so... how about... "various nations" instead?

from my personal experience in New York City, USA (yes, yes YMMV) when my father died in 2001, his rabbi insisted upon which certain "stated wishes" -- which contradicted what my family had already intended based on conversation years earlier -- included various bullshit frills including 3 limos (immediate family, closest friends, and third was for himself and 'two helpers'); two men as overnight observer/prayer vigil at the funeral home (typical minimum being one but many Jews had foregoing this 'protector' role as superfluousness so it ought have been zero)...

there was another half dozen frills which I cannot recall now, which the funeral home director insisted were legal requirements until I asked him to show me 'black letter law' whereupon he sat silently as my father's rabbi berated me as an unworthy son... after the bullshit was trimmed the resulting bill was an eye-watering $9,000 (it had been initially $17,000)... turns out if I had demanded a more detailed bill as was my right and actually read it there was about another $3,000 of frills not required by Jewish religion nor New York law

just to get a clue at what's at stake... USA's annual figures from 2022

Funeral industry = $19.5bn; 2.4 million funerals; consumer complaints about gouging and associated lawsuits estimated around 200,000; funeral with viewing & burial averaged $7,848; higher in dense urban centers such as New York City...

religions... 63% Christianity...

by religion/major denomination = Protestant 40%; Catholic 21%; Mormonism 2%; Orthodox 1%; Unaffiliated 29%; Jewish 2%; Muslim 1%; Hindu 1%; Buddhist 1%; Other 3%;

295:

That could be true, because it's rare in the UK except for bodies used for teaching purposes, but I was responding to Heteromeles about the origin of the term embalming.

As paws4thot implies, cremation dominates burial in the UK (largely due to lack of space!), except in Northern Ireland. As OGH says, it's essentially only some Christian churches in the USA that go in for embalming, though it is neither forbidden nor encouraged by many Christian churches.

https://www.cremation.org.uk/progress-of-cremation-united-kingdom

296:

Yes, my mileage varies. We've cremated and buried most of my immediate family in a common plot without any ceremony for decades now. Sometimes it's worth being contrarian.

297:

Changing the subject, it looks like "Military Ballooning" is the hot new aviation trend in the US and China. (e.g. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinese-spy-balloon-reaches-missouri . You can have fun looking for the recent US military ballooning tests. ).

Thoughts?

My personal guess is three-fold. One is that it's preparation for a space war and the resulting Kessler Cascade. The USSF is (or was?) also preparing a Muskian Starlink-style response to a Cascade, which I interpreted as flooding LEO with rapidly-built, disposable satellites a la Muskian Starlinks, so that more satellites were up than down. Now I'm wondering if another alternate will be balloon nets and high stratosphere surveillance. Run by the USAF, of course (no rivalry there!)

Another is that this is preparation for post-petroleum warfare, where hammering an SR-71 type vehicle around the globe is no longer feasible, but lofting a hydrogen balloon with 10-20 kg of payload is.

A third is that the Chinese aren't entirely lying, and that the major purpose of these drones is to study and map the upper stratosphere for potential military (read hypersonic missile) use. The upper atmosphere is effing complicated for a low-grade vacuum, and trying to get data on it from halfway around the world is tricky.

Your thoughts?

298:

Dear God, that's appalling. I feel really bad for you having to deal with that bullshit just after your father's death.

299:

Re: '... illegally harvested in hospitals,'

This case doesn't discuss improperly tested/not tested for known diseases organ harvesting but does describe a legal case about a hospital and organ donation org that overstepped when they harvested one patient's organs for donation.

https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/149135-appellate-court-revives-lawsuit-against-hospital-for-harvesting-organs-despite-objections

Testing of donor tissue from blood up through organs changes as new info becomes available and I'm of the impression that new screening criteria are added a lot sooner now than when HIV first emerged. Asimov is probably the best known person (among this crowd) that died because the blood he got during bypass surgery hadn't been tested for HIV/AIDS.

https://www.aabb.org/regulatory-and-advocacy/regulatory-affairs/regulatory-for-blood/donor-safety-screening-and-testing

When I did a search for illegal organ harvesting most of the cases were in China. Either the West has better protocols or better PR to keep stuff like that out of the media.

Once I'm done and gone any bits that can help research/medicine are available for the taking. I've already discussed this with family and since I've been a blood/platelet/plasma (and potential bone marrow) donor for years it's unlikely they'll override my wishes.

300:

Re: '... lofting a hydrogen balloon with 10-20 kg of payload is.'

I thought they used helium gas. If yes, then RU is gonna make a fortune selling it to China.

301:

Sky burial:

I saw a documentary about that awhile ago. IIRC, that method is used so the dead don't come back as vampires...

302:

If a programne said that and pretended to be a documentary, it was racist bollocks.

303:

FYI:

a well written background briefing on illicit & gray market trade in human flesh

The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers Hardcover -- Scott Carney

SFReader:

I almost had surgery to rebuild my jaw to accommodate implants to replace lost teeth... the 'biological base material' would have been powdered bone taken from cadavers...

when I asked if I would given names of sourcing there was mumbles of "donor privacy"; when I asked about getting copies of screening tests for HIV, HEP-C, etc, I was assured the material was heat treated and thus sterile... but the dental school refused to provide formal warranty of quality-condition-testing so I went with a differing mode of rebuilding...

and if that is not scary enough there's been burn patients who developed HEP-C due to what turned out to be skin graphs utilizing tissue sourced from untested cadavers from city morgues, hospitals, etc... next of kin never approved it...

they never heard about it until lawyers (city gvt, hospital, etc) contacted them to buy their silence... ditto most of the patients...

Troutwaxer:

thanks... in years following I learnt this had been a relatively 'good' experience (for standard temperature/pressure/humidity valuations of 'good' in midst of misery)... the rabbi had, since my mentioning my experience, been advised by other families in that congregation to back-the-fvck-off and near-zero have asked him to officiate at funerals or weddings or bris melas... bar mitzvahs however were harder for them to block given those are a 'neighborhood synagogue thing'

whereas a buddy had himself shunned by the family's Catholic priest after demanding a detailed accounting for why his mother-in-law's funeral cost $32,000; it took a lawsuit followed by threat of seizure by NYC city sheriff of funeral home's vehicle fleet to get a refund of about $20,000 (owner pleaded poverty then whined about zero cash flow but kept refusing to provide name of bookkeeper, corporate records, bank statements, etc)... then others in community did much the same but the Catholic Church rallied in support of priest's questionable actions and funeral director... blocked that effort at deep drilling into a long standing series of questionable practices

and then there's the successive waves of buyouts of vendors and cemeteries in an effort towards consolidation into a single megacorp by various hedge funds seeking to grasp a monopoly on the funeral-industrial complex much as they've done to bottled water, airlines, highway rest stops, dentist offices, et al

304:

When fear of being buried alive was all the rage, the Germans opened a large number of Leichenhaus establishments. Bodies were left there in a warm environment till they were very obviously getting runny. tens of thousands of stinky corpses later and nobody ever got up and walked out. If you want more detail, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear is good, if a little repetitive around the folklore.

Mark Twain's visit to the one in Munich is included in this article. But if you really want to make sure, just get somone to cut your head off; no coming back from that one.

305:

after the bullshit was trimmed the resulting bill was an eye-watering $9,000 (it had been initially $17,000)

You were robbed.

(Bills for each of my parents, in the years 2017 and 2019, were on the order of £3000 (or about US $4000) each. Jewish funeral -- with cremation -- in the UK, rabbi officiating. I will note that the UK is not terribly cheap compared to the US, either, with VAT -- sales tax -- at 20% on top of most everything.)

306:

I think you’d do better to focus on what Markov chains are really good at.

(This is about ChatGPT type tech rather than it necessarily)

Start with an simple example: If you want a character to sound more like Paul Krugman, or Tony Blair, then by restricting the sample corpus ChatGPT could rewrite paragraphs into his voice and style, using his word choice.

More interestingly, if you want a character to use word choices more likely used by a less well educated white teenage girl from deprived circumstance in Manchester in the 2020s: AI can rephrase your text to that too.

Changing register, all the social cues and word choices and changes of grammar and slang that different social groups use (and don’t use): AI can do that really, really well. You just need a sample set.

Bad SF characters tend to all sound the same, they all speak in the same with the same class/gender/region markers as the author. (And attempts not to are often cringeworthy). Let’s hope for some improvement.

( no insult to Charlie intended, he’s much better at this than most. Scottish authors often are, interestingly)

307:

"The upper atmosphere is effing complicated"

Yes, it is.

One thing I learned while looking into the balloon story is that there's an altitude around 17-20 km up where the west-to-east prevailing winds change to east-to-west. In between those levels, there's the Quasi-Zero Wind Layer (could one come up with a more delightful name?) where the east-west component is quasi-zero and there wasn't much north-south component to begin with. So a balloon parked there will stay close to stationary relative to the ground, and if it needs to make E-W corrections, it can go up or down a bit.

Papers on the QZWL tend to have Chinese authors.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019AdAtS..36.1143Y/abstract

308:

Personally, you would have to pay me to go and watch Beyonce, but I think you will find the "Full VIP onstage experience" is the £2000 ticket. Some restricted view tickets started at £65.

The problem of ridiculous ticket prices seem set to grow as theres not much profit for the artistes in streaming, DVD sales are plummeting and vinyl is somewhat niche. Its also not helped by the likes of Ticketmaster adopting an adaptive approach to ticket pricing.

Certainly, not-at-the-back tickets for the next Peter Gabriel tour were around £85 (twice as much at the front) and not much different for Muse at Milton Keynes this summer where you have to stand.

Not sure how much I would pay to see Gilmour perform Comfortably Numb one more time... a lot I suspect.

309:

406 icehawk - ( no insult to Charlie intended, he’s much better at this than most. Scottish authors often are, interestingly)
Charlie is not Scottish, he's from Leeds and just lives here. As for why Scottish authors speak "well" in multiple voices, most of us are actually taught grammar, and can speak at least 2 languages by the time we're 6.

310:

Heteromeles @ 297:

Changing the subject, it looks like "Military Ballooning" is the hot new aviation trend in the US and China. (e.g. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinese-spy-balloon-reaches-missouri . You can have fun looking for the recent US military ballooning tests. ).

Thoughts?

VIDEO: Chinese spy balloon shot down in view from Cherry Grove, South Carolina

It seems prudent to me to wait until it's over the Atlantic Ocean where the USN can have ships standing by to recover the debris instead of shooting it down over some populated area and having to search half the states of Montana or Missouri to find the debris. Noting that by the time it was reported over Montana, it had already drifted down to Missouri ... and it appears the USAF did have a pretty good idea where to find it when they were READY to shoot it down.

My own thought is it IS what the Chinese claim it is, some kind of high-altitude research vessel that got away from them, although I'm not discounting the possibility it's PSYCHO-logical warfare - they're just fucking with the U.S. to drive the rabid fascist wing of the GQP crazy ... crazier?

Something else for the GQP to use to attack Democrats, making Congress even more of a clown show than it already is? ... becoming even more unhinged than they already are.

311:

Grant @ 308:

Personally, you would have to pay me to go and watch Beyonce, but I think you will find the "Full VIP onstage experience" is the £2000 ticket. Some restricted view tickets started at £65.

You wouldn't have to PAY me. Just give me a free ticket and I'd go. I'd probably go.

But even £65 ($78.34 USD just now) is more than I'd be willing to spend of my own money. She only has one song that I'm halfway familiar with & I can listen to that anytime I want to on YouTube.

The problem of ridiculous ticket prices seem set to grow as theres not much profit for the artistes in streaming, DVD sales are plummeting and vinyl is somewhat niche. Its also not helped by the likes of Ticketmaster adopting an adaptive approach to ticket pricing.

Certainly, not-at-the-back tickets for the next Peter Gabriel tour were around £85 (twice as much at the front) and not much different for Muse at Milton Keynes this summer where you have to stand.

Not sure how much I would pay to see Gilmour perform Comfortably Numb one more time... a lot I suspect.

The main problem for me (and I understand it IS me, not the artists or the fans) is I've gotten too old to enjoy the experience. I'm at the point in my life where the nosebleed seats aren't satisfying any more and floor seats are too expensive and I'm so angry all the time from having stupid, drunken assholes falling on me that I can't ENJOY festival/lawn seating.

Plus, I no longer have a lady friend I can reliably count on to accompany me IF/WHEN I do acquire tickets. And eventually the GOOD concerts will come out on DVD, so I can view them over & over again at my own leisure.

What I really miss now is the opportunity to get together with friends so we can make our own music.

312:

I thought they used helium gas. If yes, then RU is gonna make a fortune selling it to China.

I was thinking about hydrogen in because helium tends to get pumped out of the weirder end of gas fields, so if those shut down, so does the helium supply. The problem with this notion is that the easiest way to make hydrogen is from methane...

On the gripping hand, flammability at 20 km up is an interesting concept, and new helium production is in foreign places like Algeria, Qatar, and possibly Oklahoma and Kansas, so what do I know?

313:

Good to know about the Quasi-Zero Wind Level. That explains how the balloon can maneuver by simply adding air into an internal ballast bag and drop or raise.

It's also congruent with what John Powell (who runs a ballooning aerospace company) thinks ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xxoRK9ucc0 ). It's worth watching. He thinks it was a telecom experiment that got away, rather than a spycraft. If it could hang out in the QZWL, that would make sense*. His informed guess at this point is that the telecom experiments are being done by a division of the Chinese military, and the only reason this was freaky is that it was a bit bigger than normal, and China didn't tell the US it was entering our airspace. Otherwise, as he points out, people release balloons all he time.

*The idea is to use balloons to replace satellites for telecommunications, and apparently it's a possible trillion dollar field that's being pursued globally. Having a balloon able to keep station for an extended period with minimal propulsion is useful, and that might be what makes the QZWL so attractive.

314:

I increasingly agree with you about research (see my previous post).

The one point I'd gently disagree on is the debris field. You can see plenty of videos of what happens when a weather balloon cargo hits online. It's not going Mach 15, and it's so light it basically goes boink. See this video for example ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp-dNA2POJw ) of six separate balloon missions. Crashes start 25 minutes in, although it's fun to watch the whole thing*.

Given that the Chinese balloon is white and it's February, it's probably saner to drop the thing into the dark Atlantic than into deep white snow in eastern Montana, but I suspect they'd get all the pieces either way. Wonder if they'll ever show off what they retrieved?

*Disclosure: I support JP Aerospace on Patreon, because I think what he's doing is cool.

315:

@279 Howard NYC: "funerals are a formalized fee collectible moment for clergy"

Yeah, no. Not this clergyperson. I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister in the US state of Massachusetts. I get zero dollars if I do a memorial service for someone in my congregation. If it's someone outside my congregation, I might get US$125 to US$250. Considering I usually put in 4-5 hours meeting with the family, doing the service, and going to the reception, my hourly rate is US$63 if I'm lucky, US$25 if I'm not. And I never keep that money, it goes to a fund out of which we help people in need. This is true of all the clergy I know who work for mainline denominations.

I could also point to the trend of religious disaffiliation, which is causing more families to officiate at their own memorial services. (I was just at a memorial service where the family officiated, and it was one of the best memorial services I've been to.) I feel like you're writing about the 1950s, when clergy could indeed turn officiating at funerals into a nice little side hustle. Those days are long gone.

I do agree with your general point, that the funeral industry in the US overcharges. Funeral homes are being bought up by big corporations, who want to improve the quarterly reports, so they jack prices up up up. And they have a captive market -- right after a death, most people are not in the mood to bargain for lower rates. So as soon as my father went into hospice, we started shopping around (with his blessing, he was a tightwad), and arranged everything in advance. Under the laws of Massachusetts, you can pay for the memorial service in advance, and the money goes into a trust. We drove a hard bargain, he was buried in a cheap pine box (his choice), and we lowered the bill significantly.

316:

I started to wonder if universities could bring a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI for damage to their product (education)?

I asked this question to some people who work in higher education. General consensus was no; on the contrary, flagging students’ work as cheating via ChatGPT could result in universities being sued by students wrongfully expelled. One lady put her real published academic papers into OpenAI’s text flagging system, and about half of them were judged as "likely AI".

317:

Well, the "documentary" was more about the history of the vampire myth, the sky burial was mentioned only briefly.

318:

Re: '... the debris field ... happens when a weather balloon cargo hits'

Interesting - I then watched the next video below which is both shorter (a little over 11 min) and more informative. I was curious about what happens when anything spills overboard at that altitude - it just seems to fly off into the distance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kIdRFIFWz8

Some time ago - maybe a few years now - there was some discussion on this blog about the accumulating debris from satellites. Consensus seemed to be that 'yeah - not a good idea to pollute our skies'. I think we also discussed how much it's going to cost us to get this debris removed - horrendously expensive. So while I think such experiments are interesting esp. since it appears that it allows many students to participate, at the same time I think it's at least equally important to teach these students about thinking through the consequences of conducting such experiments. Ethics applies to experiments conducted in the sky as much as it applies to experiments conducted in ground based labs. (Consider this a tirade, but I'm serious about this stuff.)

https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/ESA_purchases_world-first_debris_removal_mission_from_start-up

319:

I think it would be unwise to assume that the thing would come down in one single rapidly-recoverable piece, especially if you've been shooting it to make it come down. It would be better to plan for it coming down in the kind of state of integrity expected of flimsy things that have been shot. So it's worth remembering that if you do it in Montana then all you have to do to get the bits you missed is wait for the snow to melt. If you do it over the Atlantic then you have to wait for the ocean to dry up, which would be incredibly boring and probably not worth the hassle, even though it is likely that it'd be the interesting bits you'd lost.

320:

Well, from the pictures ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-says-us-is-going-take-care-of-chinese-balloon-2023-02-04/ ), the popped the balloon. Since this is what happened naturally in the video I linked to, I'd expect a similar result. Note that this balloon is 60,000' up, while the ones in the JP Aerospace videos fall from 100,000' up.

As for asking the Navy to find pieces of balloon in a shallow ocean (it appears to be less than 10 meters deep 5 km offshore where they shot it down)...I think they might have divers and ROVs up to the task?

Incidentally, I was wrong about Montana. At least parts of it are cycling above and below freezing. It's not in the storm track right now.

321:

As OGH says, it's essentially only some Christian churches in the USA that go in for embalming

From a distance it might seem that way. But it is really non denominational except where the "faith" frowns on it.

It is a part of the huge funeral burial marketing money extraction business. What Howard NYC experienced is typical. You have someone dealing with a loss. Most times it is a bit of a surprise. Even when someone is at end of life in a nursing home no one is expecting it YESTERDAY. So the funeral homes play up peer pressure. Open casket which leads to makeup, embalming, and dressing. Plus the casket needs to be nice on the INSIDE to go along with the nice outside. Someone can drop $5K on a mid grade casket and $10K and up isn't rare at all. And this is being pushed on people at their most vulnerable. They are dealing with legal issues, work issues, relatives visiting from who knows where. Some of them telling exactly what you should BE doing whether you want to or not. (Let's toss in relatives/kids from a prior divorce to make it more stressful.) And in many cases EVERYTHING is a line item. Somber muzac over the sound system $100. Guest signing book. $200-$500. (Plain or really really nice.) And so on.

It's a racket. Everyone knows it. But they folks making the money are making so much they are powerful in influencing the laws of each state.

Now toss in instructions in a will which can have all kinds of legal impact as to what must be done.

My wife's mother's death and delayed funeral allowed the family fractures to get exposed and people show their real colors.

322:

I think it would be unwise to assume that the thing would come down in one single rapidly-recoverable piece, especially if you've been shooting it to make it come down.

I saw some pics where there was a very big balloon with a payload suspended under it. And the payload seemed to have wings of solar panels out each side. (So one side would be in the sun all the time?) And the descriptions have not been clear but it has been described as the size of 3 city buses end to end. Which seems to be the payload size as the balloon has been visible by eye from the ground. Someone I know was out on the SC coast when it was shot down and got some pics that they posted on Facebook.

323:

... electrolysis of the lifting gas is neither a meaningful cost or obstacle for high altitude ballooning. Heck, you might do it that way just because splitting some tap water for each launch is simpler logistics than ordering in gas canisters.

324:

I saw some pics where there was a very big balloon with a payload suspended under it. And the payload seemed to have wings of solar panels out each side. (So one side would be in the sun all the time?) And the descriptions have not been clear but it has been described as the size of 3 city buses end to end. Which seems to be the payload size as the balloon has been visible by eye from the ground. Someone I know was out on the SC coast when it was shot down and got some pics that they posted on Facebook.

Remember that, when carbon fiber is involved, large doesn't necessarily mean heavy. Here's a picure of a bus-length truss being held in one hand (from http://www.jpaerospace.com/ascender175.html ). Since I've seen JPA videos of their rigs falling to Earth from 100,000' and more-or-less surviving the impact (their test platforms are foam blocks for equipment racks surrounded by a carbon fiber space frame), I don't think the Chinese balloon payload came down in little pieces. It may well have broken when it hit the water, but I'll be surprised if it shattered. All the USN did was hole the balloon.

325:

I dread what will happen when my parents die. First, because it will be horrible anyway. Second, because I know my sister and it is not going to be a good experience (I am the executor of their will and will be directly in the firing line).

It remains my hope that it won't matter for some decades yet.

326:

I've actually never done a pub crawl, and in the US, that would frequently probably involved vehicular transportation, so that sounds like fun.

Here in Portland, Oregon we've got some pedal trolleys that are hard to explain to someone who's never seen one: imagine a long table on wheels, arranged such that ten or twelve people sitting at the table pedal to propel the thing while one hopefully sober person at the end drives. These are very popular with pub crawl groups.

At least one business has somehow figured out how to license them as real bars, allowing people to pedal and drink at the same time.

(Ah, pictures!)

327:

Sean McMullen might beg to differ with his post apocalyptic passenger propelled railways.

328:

Ticket Prices ....
It's "traditional" for both moronic-&-arrogant-&-ignorant tory & labour politicians to take a swipe at Opera. They've been doing it for years, the grotty little shits.
BUT
It turns out that "decent" seats at a fascismfootball game are frequently considerably more expensive than a fairly good Opera seat. The fucking papers always quote the (very few) most expensive seats at "O" & the cheapest at the muddy bollock scenario.
Um.

329:

Changing the subject, it looks like "Military Ballooning" is the hot new aviation trend in the US and China.

The balloon shot-down nonsense is proof that the US right wing has completely lost its tiny mind.

China has a Mars orbiter, a rover on the Moon, a space station ... and spy satellites that are likely at least as good as anything the United States had in the late 1980s (and probably better). They don't need spy balloons any more than the US does.

This is most likely exactly what they say it is: a high altitude meteorological research project that had an oopsie when its flight termination system failed, and drifted way off course because balloons are only barely steerable at the best of times (by ascending and descending in hope of catching a favourable wind). The stratospheric jet streams blow at up to 200km/h; drifting across the Pacific in only a few days is entirely possible. This is, needless to say, embarrassing, so they're denying everything.

And taking the US media narrative at face value on this subject is a sign of personal idiocy.

330:

The main problem for me (and I understand it IS me, not the artists or the fans) is I've gotten too old to enjoy the experience. I'm at the point in my life where the nosebleed seats aren't satisfying any more and floor seats are too expensive and I'm so angry all the time from having stupid, drunken assholes falling on me that I can't ENJOY festival/lawn seating.

Me too, alas.

The Pet Shop Boys have been on my must-see bucket list for years. I scored tickets to a gig in Glasgow on their world tour in 2019, for May 2020. The gig was postponed ... and eventually went ahead in 2022 during a COVID spike and I was too chicken to go.

So imagine my joy when they were announced as the headline act in Edinburgh at the outdoor Hogmanay party 15 minutes' walk from my front door this year?

Two tickets, £85 each, and the music was great, and I was close to death for two days afterwards. Because it was an outdoor, standing-only venue in 2-4 ℃ weather with rain, in the dark. Guess who has no sense of balance and relies on visible vertical lines to know which way is up? And guess what there weren't a lot of, due to the wild illuminations in PSB's stage show? I nearly fell over and/or got trampled several times, my knees were in agony (it took us an hour and a half to find the end of the queue and get into the venue, then another two and a half hours of concert and fireworks), and I was borderline hypothermic when I got home (my outer layers were close to waterlogged).

It was a great gig, and would have been great for me, too, if I'd been a decade or two younger. As it is, I now know this: no more standing gigs, no more outdoor events (except in good weather).

331:

I sympathise. I was staying with family in Edinburgh over Christmas and fell victim to the pedestrian traps masquerading as cycle track barriers when crossing London Road at night (the things with a vertical pole in an extended concrete base that blends in with the road surface under street lights).

332:

The balloon shot-down nonsense is proof that the US right wing has completely lost its tiny mind.

Two possible non-crazy reasons (from the perspective of the American government) come to mind:

1) To show the American crazies that (a) we can too shoot down things even with a Democrat in the White House and (b) it was just a damn weather balloon all along. The crazies are by definition fact-resistant but some people can feel better for having told them.

2) To show the world that, yes, it was just a weather balloon all along. We won't know about that for a few days; the wreckage needs to be recovered and then experts will need to poke at it and write reports that pointy-haired bosses can understand.

There's the outside possibility that the Chinese really were up to something sneaky, but if so the story will drop out of the media quickly; neither government would want to talk about it in public.

333:

general snark:

notion of surveillance airborne versus orbital... given there's an increasing number of reliable drone platforms effectively self-piloting whilst in station keeping mode and simple course compliance plus along with high efficiency solar cells plus low weight batteries plus hundreds of potential reasons for deployment...

not least as: spotters of fish for harvest; micro-climes for better regional weather predictions; forests for signs of fire; migratory swarms of illicit refugees fleeing war-famine-drought; traffic jams in urban areas; war zone intel on troop movements down to platoon granularity;

my guess (WAG indeed) is it was a deliberate mistake in mode of plausible screwup... test the will of the enemy, the responses of the 'liberal press' as well determine how much intel could be gathered when-not-if a couple thousand low-visibility-low-radar-cross-section (no such thing as perfect stealth) are deployed as a slow moving swarm at ultra high altitudes over a vast region... such as a water body between an aggressor's home coast and a targeted invasion coast (cough cough Taiwan)... much cheaper than LEO satellites... offering unending coverage...

Pigeon:

it is a balloon... unarmored... lifted by a fabric-like sack... if shot by non-exploding impactors it rips opens and vents the lift-gas... if you are angry and wasteful you'd expend an ATA missile but with patience and a desire to recover bigger pieces than thumbnail-sized then fire off a half-dozen rounds of 20MM ammo to punch big holes in the bag-thingie

Heteromeles:

there's assumption of intent... "recoverable" for re-use versus "itty-bitty bits" to baffle investigators... any recon platform sent over hostile territory will either be the very best sensor you got (if very few deployed such as SR-71 & U2) or the ultimate in cheapness (if high numbers to be deployed)... either way my bet is on an internal chunk of termite (200 grams?) to ensure electronics were slagged... better yet if Li-On batteries were utilized those were rigged to ignite if not handled with love by a technician trained in disarming the trigger

Charlie Stross:

You were robbed.

uhm, YUP.

Most folk when dealing with funeral arrangements simply shrug, sign the contract and write out a check. After all it is (literally) a once in a lifetime expense. You should show proper respect. Including renting a limo for grieving closest next-of-kin at (then) US$80/H with 5H minimum. With the funeral director all too likely counting upon the usual sibling rivalry, inter-generational bickering and status seeking via loudest whiny voices to ensure more than one limo being needed.

That scenario came to my attention when it arose from another friend's experience, and he called me in tears because his boyfriend was not going to allowed into the inner circle of grievers (not anti-gay bias, rather due to them not married like all the others) and therefore would ride in an 'ordinary' car to the cemetery. So I pointed out the hourly rate was an open wound. He could not get the funeral director to answer questions till director was forced to talk to me. Turned out in that part of New Jersey "going rate" in 2007 was US$ 115/H. When shouted out to those assembled, everyone realized they were being gouged, the widow then suggested any wanting to ride in limo to split the cost of it, and nobody wanted to kick in their share so there were zero limos.

(But. But? But my friend was blamed as ungrateful, disrespectful son. Never ever forget the spite of any relative denied their perceived portion of high status respect such as riding in a limo in a funeral vehicle fleet.)

Which along with various opportunities for savagely applied markups post-manufacturing plus poorly written regulations & vague applicable laws plus inferior regulatory oversight plus oh-by-the-ways sneaked in... is likely part of analysis arising out of research done by hedge funds prior to them seeking to perform a "rollup" of the funeral-industrial complex. In a rather attempt toward as close to monopoly as they could achieve.

So for any author looking to snark about amoral hedge funds in US there's squeezing the living via a nation-wide monopoly on insulin and the (recently) dead via a nation-wide monopoly on funerals... with a follow up snark about how tangled a mess arises from the death of anyone who own a house... takes years to deal with post-death issues of assets even when there's a last testament and nobody is challenging it... amazing numbers of companies claiming an overdue bill... in my father's case there was OBTW billing in 2003 (he died in 2001) attempting to collect for treatments he never received for diseases he never had... including a wheelchair rental in 1998 of US$74/M for six months... paperwork sure did look official

334:

Considering that the USA has been spying on the rest of the world using overflights for 70 years, my reaction was the fuss was pure blue arse display.

335:

whitroth:

That hospital sounds like a million lawsuits waiting to happen

why do you think I write it as [redacted hospital]?

since 1985 what with my father's near-death there (and a half-dozen other too close calls after 1985) I've tried to become an advocate for better recordkeeping and more openness and a national directory/clearinghouse for malpractice and other related stuff... my efforts led to me threatened with so many lawsuits one of my cousin-the-lawyers educated me about SLAPP mode of litigation (mostly US but other nations got an eqv) utilized by megacorps to suppress anyone lacking a gigabuck of resources who is seeking to challenge them... my online activities have been surveyed by various bad actors for key words such as names (doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, etc) since the earilest years of the web... I can post whatever I want just without naming names or dates too specific... basically I stopped trying to help fix the mess when I realized I had little to gain and so much to lose

336:

All the USN did was hole the balloon.

Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet (which is about 10-15,000 feet higher than an F-16's maximum altitude, so neat trick). Going by the brief video I saw, they totally shredded the gas bag -- looks like they shot a missile right through it. So quite likely they detonated a continuous-rod warhead inside it (one capable of shredding enemy combat aircraft with some amount of armour around vulnerable bits).

In which case? What arrives at surface level will most likely resemble confetti.

337:

I gave up such things decades ago (obviously not gigs, but open-air performances etc.) on similar grounds. The wet and hypothermia issue is the only soluble aspect, but both suitable kit and experience is needed. From your posts, I doubt that you would use such kit for anything else.

Apparently, such wet-weather gear is currently in vogue, which amuses me and my children, because I am transiently fashionable :-)

338:

Howard NYC
SLAPP mode of litigation (mostly US but other nations) - yup, we've got that, badly.
As any reader of "Private Eye" will know, there's been an ongoing campaign against this corporate & political arse-covering for a loooong time ....
Recently, progress has been made, in small ways, but the criminal shits are still trying it on.
For a very recent example: Nadhim Zahawi tried SLAPPing the "Independent" & it's journos - but got a polite version of Arkell vs Pressdram in reply

Charlie
I suspect that the US Armed & Intel services already knew, quite well, that it was a simple weather drone, but shredding it "looks fierce" to the brain-fucked & shuts them up & also leaves nothing for conspiracy loons to rant on about.

339:

Thing is, I did have multiple thermal layers and a waterproof outer shell! It just wasn't a sufficiently waterproof one -- I'd believed the weather forecast and opted for a lighter water repellent down-filled anorak that mostly served as a windbreaker/additional thermal insulation, instead of the heavier standing-in-a-freezing-shower-for-three-hours waterproof I should have worn. Turns out the down anorak was only sufficient to keep the water out for a couple of hours, not 8:30pm-1:30am.

As for the hypothermia, I've lost about 15kg in the past six months (deliberate, induced by medication, under medical supervision). I don't stay warm the way I did a year ago, to say the least.

(I don't go hill walking or rambling these days, so not out often enough to maintain awareness of my current protection needs.)

340:

Yes, those things are a disaster in serious rain, despite the fact that some of them imply they can handle rain; even after an hour, I assume that it would have got wet, nust not the whole way through. My experience is that all insulating waterproofs and waterproofed insulation are a thoroughly bad idea for anything except brief use.

The other aspect is that the only insulating material that stays reasonably insulating when wet is wool; down is excellent in very cold conditions, but is no better than synthetics in wet ones.

I am very prone to hypothermia, too, which is why I go in for overkill on my protection, including all-wool insulation and separate NON-insulating waterproofs. Camping out for 6 nights does not give you a chance to warm up except by body heat!

341:

Second, because I know my sister and it is not going to be a good experience (I am the executor of their will and will be directly in the firing line).

I'm seriously considering hiring a nephew (who's a lawyer) to be my executor, for a fee. Got to discuss it when we meet to update my will.

Not that I anticipate much contention, but this way I know that provisions will be followed, rather than money redirected to 'worthier' charities that I don't think are very effective.

342:

"Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet "

It was a F-22 flying out of Langley AFB and using a Sidewinder/AIM-9X.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3288543/f-22-safely-shoots-down-chinese-spy-balloon-off-south-carolina-coast/

Wikipedia says the missile has a blast-fragmentation warhead with an IR proximity fuse. Sounds well suited for shredding a balloon envelope.

343:

It is a part of the huge funeral burial marketing money extraction business.

I understand that selling plots in the cemetery goes by a similar method. Show the punters to the low-end first, get them to think "How grotty is this?" then move to the swankier (and thus more expensive) places. Upsell, upsell, upsell.

I read an account by an author who worked in a cemetery as a teenager who said that in those days, cemeteries kept a very close eye on which plots received flowers, and how often. If some poor stuff in an expensive part of the graveyard received no marks of esteem in ten years, they were dug up and placed in a low-rent section (headstone moved and everything) so that the spot could be re-sold.

That would have been in the early 1970s, so that practice might have been discontinued.

344:

Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet (which is about 10-15,000 feet higher than an F-16's maximum altitude, so neat trick)

F-22. The only report of anything else that I've seen is your comment. The government even released the type of missile used.

Based on photos taken by people I know on the ground it fell with the big bag acting a bit as a drogue chute.

345:

"Sounds well suited for shredding a balloon envelope."

Speaking of that, the videos suggest that the payload may have remained attached to a major shard of the envelope, which was billowing in a parachute-like fashion. If so, it may have survived relatively intact.

I expect that detailed examination will be done at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson AFB.

https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728/national-air-and-space-intelligence-center-heritage/

346:

lot to be said for arranging ur funeral ahead of time if circumstances permit

here buddhist monks deal with funerals, and there is considerable milking of the bereaved, and for subsequent anniversary services after various (usually prime for some reason) numbers of years, they also go for low-temperature cremation followed by messing about with the bones with special chopsticks, bugger that

i'd like a nice minimally-attended high-temperature cremation followed by a larger party where such english-speaking friends as i have left can help themselves to anything they want from my library, even if a lot of it may only be fit for recycling by then

347:

A bit like using a .5" sniper rifle to pot rabbits ....

348:

Kardashev:

payload may have remained attached

there goes my WAG abut a thermite charge embedded in the electronics... so... maybe really was a lone ill-behaved wayward weather balloon?

realistic question of if ever we find out what the military retrieved and what they learned from the pieces... my WAG on that is "near-zero" in "25 years" (feeling optimistic am I)

349:

Well, slavery in North America began considerably before the British showed up. Just like everywhere. But the terms were a lot different (and different in different places, and probably times). E.g. among many Amerind tribes after being a slave for awhile, you could be adopted into the tribe.

It's my understanding that slavery is almost universal among low-tech cultures. The exceptions prefer things like peonage or serfdom. (This may not apply to hunter-gatherers.) Aristotle is famous, among other things, for saying that they wouldn't need slaves when the looms could work themselves. (For some reason he didn't consider the child slaves being worked to death in the silver mines. But the basic idea is present. Slavery can be abolished by mechanical labor.)

350:

Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet (which is about 10-15,000 feet higher than an F-16's maximum altitude, so neat trick). Going by the brief video I saw, they totally shredded the gas bag -- looks like they shot a missile right through it. So quite likely they detonated a continuous-rod warhead inside it (one capable of shredding enemy combat aircraft with some amount of armour around vulnerable bits).

As others have noted, the Reuters link at 320 showed the shredded balloon falling with payload intact. Since, again, everyone from high school science classes to meteorologists to the military routinely launch balloons and retrieve payloads, perhaps the various high-flying militaries have good protocols for shooting them down with payloads intact? For example, why even put a warhead in the Sidewinder? All you need is for it to pass through the balloon, and it might even make it easier for the missile to climb to 60,000' if it needed to (F-22's ceiling is listed as "above 50,000'").

The bigger question is why the Chinese didn't just notify the US of a straying science experiment, but made it a mystery craft that caused all this commotion? I think the guesses about political screwups below the level of President Xi are probably correct. Another possibility is that it's an experimental telecom system for future commercial use, and when it got loose, the Chinese were hoping the US would blow up the payload and hide whatever they were testing (which begs the question of why the Chinese didn't shoot it down themselves...?). As for why the US military wanted to drop it ten miles off the coast in 47' of water, perhaps they want people wearing protection to retrieve it and handle it, in case some bright bulb had put a self-destruct on something. Having a civilian retrieve a part that blows up on them could turn a little kerfuffle into a bigger diplomatic incident.

As for telecoms, again, some are hyping balloons as cheap alternatives to telecom satellites, and touting this as a future trillion dollar industry. Us companies are in the field, and so is the Chinese military. Apparently, China does aerospace R&D differently, and this bit is under part of the military, rather than an independent company. We'll see if there's ever a public report on what that balloon was carrying.

351:

there goes my WAG abut a thermite charge embedded in the electronics... so... maybe really was a lone ill-behaved wayward weather balloon?

I think they were/are very much concerned about self-destructs in the payload.

See https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3288543/f-22-safely-shoots-down-chinese-spy-balloon-off-south-carolina-coast/ and https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288618/senior-defense-official-and-senior-military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/

The official doing the briefing consistently said things like, "Military commanders determined that there was undue risk of debris causing harm to civilians while the balloon was over land." The reporters interpreted this as a concern for debris falling on civilians, but if you parse the sentence, it could easily mean that they're concerned about self-destructs and booby-traps as well.

352:

The F-22's maximum operational altitude is 65,000 feet per wikipedia which is really high compared to most previous fighter aircraft, and would make it the logical choice for bagging a high-altitude balloon.

I will note that Sidewinders are cheap (by AAM standards: they're $200-400,000 depending on model), the AIM-9X has been around for over 20 years, and all air forces like to occasionally expend some missiles just to ensure that (a) they work per spec and (b) the pilots get to practice with the real thing -- they can probably chalk this up to the training budget, if not PR.

353:

Point of detail:

From the above-mentioned https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288618/senior-defense-official-and-senior-military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/

"As planned, the F-22 engaged the balloon from an altitude of 58,000 feet. The balloon itself was between 60 and 65,000 feet."

354:

" For example, why even put a warhead in the Sidewinder? All you need is for it to pass through the balloon..."

I'm losing track of my sources, but apparently the concern was that just poking a hole in the balloon could lead to a relatively slow leak, allowing it to stay aloft long enough to drift out to deeper waters where recovery of the payload would be more difficult.

355:

336 - According to Wikipedia specs more like 58_000 feet ceiling, and another ~20_000 feet altitude for a typical AIM vertical flight profile.

339 - Also trying to lose weight for medical reasons; conga-rat-shoe-laces.

342 ref 446 - Or, if it was a Raptor that takes the launch ceiling up to 65_000 and then another 20k...

350 - You need an appropriate density substance in the warhead space of the missile to make it "fly right".

352 - Confirmed by an informed source.

356:

I'm losing track of my sources, but apparently the concern was that just poking a hole in the balloon could lead to a relatively slow leak, allowing it to stay aloft long enough to drift out to deeper waters where recovery of the payload would be more difficult.

Okay...

I guess I'm coming from the JP Aerospace videos of weather balloons turning to spaghetti at ~100,000' when they can't stretch any more (see links in previous posts). From that perspective, the Chinese balloon looked to be extremely intact after being shot. But it was around 60,000', and nowhere near maximum stretch.

On the other hand, I'd interpreted the white cloud at impact as being some sort of condensation caused by the balloon rupture, but I suppose it could have been smoke.

Regardless, the payload looked to be intact after the missile hit, and the balloon was largely intact. If the missile did explode, it did remarkably little shredding damage.

357:

When trading on commodities markets, lessened time makes you more money. Especially if you have the arbitraging advantage of getting intel faster than anyone else about the differing prices between London and Chicago.

Distance from London to Chicago is 6,349 km; transit time for data thru fiber optic is at about 1/3 lightspeed due to internal reflections (effectively 19,000 km); whereas using GEO is round trip of 71,786 km;

So using either LEO satellites or in-atmospheric high flying drones would cut distance down; problem being it would take a constellation of at minimum two hundred satellites to provide reliable LEO relaying; not impossible just really expensive; also closely tracked by just about everyone since launching rockets and placing lumps in LEO is of interest to governments; in contrast much less official tracking to operate a fleet of one hundred PV-electric drones positioned to provide overlapping relaying along a line between London to Chicago.

Thereby reducing the distance by about 12,630 km; which is about 4.2 milliseconds faster than anyone dependent upon fiber optic.

Based on whispers about traders having secured a monopoly on a line of microwave towers between New York City and Chicago, who have been arbitraging differences in ETF indexes prices versus underlying stock prices, that advantage is worth somewhere between US$40m to US$80m daily. There being about 250 trading days per calendar year, that adds up into the gigabucks.

I'm wondering why nobody in the past twenty years looked to see if there's a bunch of station keeping drones between London to Chicago.

358:

Not really well suited. Heat seeking missiles aren't particularly good at finding balloons. Either they've got more than one kind of guidance, or they were relying on good aim and the proximity fuse. Radar targeting would have been much better. Or even sonar, except the missile was probably moving too fast.

359:

Weather balloons are around 10 meters across. This one seems to be 100 meters or more.

360:

Supposedly one of the selling points for Starlink once the laser crosslinks are runing at full chat. London links to a satellite south of Ireland, one or two more orbital planes across the Atlantic and data is being delivered to New York. Speed of light minus the time taken to reform packets in each satellite it passes through.

361:

Waiting a few days may have allowed a tuning of the missile guidance to go for the balloon instead of the payload.

362:

Re: '... deliberate mistake in mode of plausible screwup..'

Could be.

Some questions:

1-Did Taiwan or Japan pass along any info of a large 'weather balloon' to US forces based near there?

2-Didn't the US send some additional ships to that region not that long ago just as a reminder to China that the US will be available to support its allies just in case. If so - wouldn't these US ships be able to spot and report such activity. Ditto for various satellites.

3-This balloon passed over Canadian territory before hovering over Montana - where was NORAD? If they can report Santa's yearly trip, then they should be able to see and report on this. (Lots of disappointed kids if this gets out.)

4-Is there any international body for the registration, monitoring/tracking and reporting of 'weather balloons'? If no and if balloons are a potential growth industry then we need such an agency.

5-If this was a legit weather balloon snafu, the non-communication of a straying weather monitoring station to Canada and the US about this oopsie could be another example of local admins (usu. of the politico and police persuasion) trying or being ordered to prevent any embarrassment similar to the COVID outbreak. (Weird because there is still a lot of international collaboration on science projects between China and the US.)

6-If the balloon cargo survives the drop, would the MilIntel folks be able to tell whether the info is real or a plant? Or where any 'weather data' was being sent to? And I'm assuming that the onboard comm would have been two-way to some extent in which case the real data could have been erased and fake data sent and stored. (How could you tell if this happened?)

Lots of questions and possibilities.

363:

It was not a weather-balloon.

Weather-balloons burst before they get that far up, and their payload is 4x4x10cm of styrofoam with a naked PCB and a dip-in-water-to-activate battery which lasts only a couple of hours.

This one had solar panels, and it was a lot larger, so it was built for duration in days, weeks or months.

In theory it could be SIGINT, but given China's resources, there is nothing they could do from that balloon they couldn't do better in orbit where they would have more energy and much, much heavier payload.

My guess is that it was a "climate-balloon", because there is no other way to explore what goes between flight level and satellite orbit.

But it could easily also be a university project, to see how cheaply one could circumnavigate the globe while taking pictures shitty pictures of whatever passes under the camera.

The US over-reaction is best understood in the context of "Havanna-Syndrome" and similar "auto-immune responses" of a paranoid imperium circling the drain...

Most likely what happened was that somebody spotted it by accident, and Space Force saw a great chance to show how much and how well they defend the Christian Taliban's Sacred Homeland.

364:

3-This balloon passed over Canadian territory before hovering over Montana - where was NORAD? If they can report Santa's yearly trip, then they should be able to see and report on this. (Lots of disappointed kids if this gets out.)

They've reported they were tracking the balloon as it came in over the Aleutians, handed it off to Canada, then back to the US.

If it was a spy balloon, it might have been doing signals intelligence. In this mission, it could usefully float through, being stupid, detect whatever radar and other signals hit it, and send that information home somehow (presumably by uplinking to a satellite). IIRC, casing radars and other defenses is the kind of thing the US does routinely, in case they have to fly through that environment on an attack.

I'd hazard a guess that the proper counter would be to turn off any emissions they didn't want the Chinese to know about, monitor what they could get from balloon transmissions, and possibly conduct spoofing operations to mislead the Chinese about signals and radar in North America. In that case, letting it fly to the Atlantic might be more useful than shooting it down immediately.

The balloon could also be spying on weather patterns over the US. Combat meteorology is a thing, and remote atmospheric sensing can only provide so much data about conditions in the middle of the atmosphere. This is why hurricane hunters fly into storms and drop radiosondes, to get wind and pressure data from inside the storm. There's less that the US can do to stop this kind of spying, but they could at least see what sensors the balloon carried.

As for the Sidwinder targeting the balloon and not the payload, AIM-9X block 3 has something that looks like it could be an imaging IR sensor, so they may have given it a visual lock. In the video, there was a bunch of rocket exhaust, then nothing until the balloon deflated. I'm not sure whether that was rocket exhaust making a contrail in one body of air before crossing to another where it didn't make a contrail, or whether the missile just boosted until it acquired the target, then hit it ballistically since the balloon was more-or-less stationary relative to the rocket's speed.

The other thing is that AIM-9 training rounds are a thing. They have inert warheads and are over $150k cheaper than a full warhead. I'd still bet that's what they used to hit the balloon.

365:

"there is nothing they could do from that balloon they couldn't do better in orbit where they would have more energy and much, much heavier payload."

Not entirely convinced by this. The long dwell time (something only available to GEO and Molniya satellites) give you the chance to play some games with signals monitoring that a normal LEO sat could not. The payload did look an interesting shape. How much power do you need to listen?

366:

Vulch@360: Speed of light minus the time taken to reform packets in each satellite it passes through.

And there's the rub. Electromagnetic communication channels, whether laser or microwave, are unreliable. Forward error-correcting codes can deal with that, but not instantaneously. How much delay do they add in comparison with what you've saved by discarding the fibre?

367:

»The payload did look an interesting shape. How much power do you need to listen? «

Not much.

How much power do you need to get the "take" home ?

A LOT.

If it was SIGINT, it would need a massive pipe back home, and US's own SIGINT satellites would have spotted that long time ago, no matter where on the planet these balloons were, and this is far from the first one.

As for loitering balloons as tool of SIGINT: I still dont buy it. It is not steerable and the chances of it going anywhere useful are nonexisting.

Try selecting Height=10 in https://earth.nullschool.net that will give you a good idea about the environment up there.

368:

Heat seeking missiles aren't particularly good at finding balloons

AIUI modern IR homing missiles aren't simple-minded heat-seekers, they have FLIR cameras and image processors on board that can discriminate betweem an actual target, a decoy flare, or the sun.

369:

Clark Ashton Smith, "The Second Interment". Nightmare fuel back in my childhood.

370:

in terms of monitoring the battlefield (or potential battlefield) the US (and thus NATO) rely upon AWACS which is an unarmed Air Force jet (Boeing C-135) stuffed with as much hardware as feasible... downsides from perspective of Chinese is not the airframe nor the sensors but the decades of trial-n-error the USAF have had to shake down operations into sustainable routine...

when you have an opportunity to avoid directly imitating a technologically superior enemy with larger annual budgets by taking another path... why not?

not only are drone swarms usefully flexible for covering a battlefield but the potential non-military applications turn it from a bleeding wound military procurement cycle (yeah I'm looking at you F35 JSF[1]) into an all-weather-all-circumstances testbed for producing an effective design for surveillance drone swarms...

open source suggests each AWACS costs in range of US$400M and takes 3Y to build and debug and certify (never mind the decade or so to design-build-test each generational prototype)...

whereas a drone swarm could be composed of multiple generations (each done a bit slapdash in less than 2Y) and multiple variants (10? 20? 30!?) under evaluation simultaneously...

not only useful for international adventuring (with greater success than Russia's cluelessness without looking to Iran as drone vendor) but big plus for intimidating domestic hooligans who could look up into the unblinking eyes of a drone swarm feeding real time intel into an AI analyzing and counting and identifying...

and oh yeah... there's more accurate weather prediction, crop yields, fishing, forest fires, water utilization, and other boring stuff too...

[1] "The program has drawn much scrutiny and criticism for its unprecedented size, complexity, ballooning costs, and much-delayed deliveries."

371:

»not only are drone swarms usefully«

But why are you mentioning that in context of a balloon meandering about wherever the stratosphere takes it ?

Hint: Drones can steer and be steered.

372:

How much power do you need to listen?

It's not just listening.

It needs power to inflate/deflate the inner balonet full of ballast air (not helium) that is used to make the balloon ascend or descend, which is its only way of controlling its direction.

It needs power to charge the batteries to keep the location, sensors, and comms stack running overnight. Along with the inflation/deflation pump. So take your expected daytime power demand and triple it -- at least! -- to cover overnight requirements. Maybe more, because if it drifts too far north or south it may have only limited hours in which to charge up cells to carry it through 18-22 hours of darkness.

It's at high altitude so it's quite likely the instruments will need heater elements to keep them from freezing.

And so on.

Finally: modern space-rated PV cells are printed thin films on sheets of plastic that weigh about as much per unit area as printer paper (aside from the support truss). So PV power is cheap when you're calculating your mass budget. Why not carry as much of it as possible?

373:

It is quite likely that it was a prototype for a long-term (climate?) balloon, they intended to bring it down over the Pacific, but the kill signal failed. Going public with that would have been embarrassing, so nobody took the decision to do so, and it was too late by the time the blue-arse posturing started.

374:

"Radar targeting would have been much better."

As it happens, the AIM-9-2 modern version of the Sidewinder has a data link back to the launching F-22, which has a very good radar. Dunno if it was used or needed in the present case, but it was available.

375:

hmmm... any guesses how soon till there's vendors amongst the military-industrial complex shaking the Pentagon's pants leg seeking a couple megabucks for designing a prototype for an anti-balloon defense system?

because... why not?

377:

Since we are past 300, a totally unrelated comment.

Commercially available home 3D printers are s-l-o-w. This xenomorph-inspired sex toy was made with such printer; more accurately, the mold was 3D-printed, then silicon poured to make this eldritch abomination:

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b38bb93f9087635cad196f1a86900c4a-lq

The mold took 19 days to print.

378:

Whoever designed it needs to work on their design skills then. I built a similar size mask over a couple of days print time, a mold shouldn't take much longer unless they tried to do it all in a huge single block.

379:

I will ask them

380:

4-Is there any international body for the registration, monitoring/tracking and reporting of 'weather balloons'? If no and if balloons are a potential growth industry then we need such an agency.

There are a LOT of weather balloons lofted daily. And they are much smaller than this one just shot down.

Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily

and

Military and civilian government meteorological agencies such as the National Weather Service in the US typically launch balloons, and by international agreements almost all the data are shared with all nations.

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

Which is why the "weather balloon" description by the Chinese government comes across as "go away and leave us alone".

381:

Pigeon @ 319:

I think it would be unwise to assume that the thing would come down in one single rapidly-recoverable piece, especially if you've been shooting it to make it come down. It would be better to plan for it coming down in the kind of state of integrity expected of flimsy things that have been shot. So it's worth remembering that if you do it in Montana then all you have to do to get the bits you missed is wait for the snow to melt. If you do it over the Atlantic then you have to wait for the ocean to dry up, which would be incredibly boring and probably not worth the hassle, even though it is likely that it'd be the interesting bits you'd lost.

Heteromeles @ 320:

Well, from the pictures ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-says-us-is-going-take-care-of-chinese-balloon-2023-02-04/ ), the popped the balloon. Since this is what happened naturally in the video I linked to, I'd expect a similar result. Note that this balloon is 60,000' up, while the ones in the JP Aerospace videos fall from 100,000' up.

As for asking the Navy to find pieces of balloon in a shallow ocean (it appears to be less than 10 meters deep 5 km offshore where they shot it down)...I think they might have divers and ROVs up to the task?

From the images I can see on-line it appears the instrument package (antennas?) dangling below the balloon was intact when it dropped - at least until it hit the surface of the water 😕 (which the videos don't show).

It looks like the operation was planned to have the instrument package fall into relatively shallow water where U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard ships were already deployed in anticipation of retrieving it.

382:

Scott Sanford @ 332:

The balloon shot-down nonsense is proof that the US right wing has completely lost its tiny mind.

Stirred up by the all too predictable media frenzy ... I don't think you can dismiss possible POLITICAL motives behind this. One possible goal is causing political turmoil in the U.S. by stirring up the QAnon crazies.

Two possible non-crazy reasons (from the perspective of the American government) come to mind:

1) To show the American crazies that (a) we can too shoot down things even with a Democrat in the White House and (b) it was just a damn weather balloon all along. The crazies are by definition fact-resistant but some people can feel better for having told them.

2) To show the world that, yes, it was just a weather balloon all along. We won't know about that for a few days; the wreckage needs to be recovered and then experts will need to poke at it and write reports that pointy-haired bosses can understand.

There's the outside possibility that the Chinese really were up to something sneaky, but if so the story will drop out of the media quickly; neither government would want to talk about it in public.

The logical reason for shooting it down is to get your hands on the instrumentation package and FIND OUT what kind of information it's designed to gather.

"Twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action."

From some news reports I've seen, this is not the first time an errant Chinese "research balloon" has over-flown the U.S. It apparently happened twice during Trump's administration, but he ignored it. If nothing else, the Chinese now have political intelligence that the current administration will react differently to certain kinds of provocation.

The talking heads keep saying the balloon can't collect any intelligence the Chinese can't obtain from spy satellites, but I disagree. The resolution of the view from 60,000 ft is a lot better than that from orbit. Plus a satellite can't tell you anything about the winds at altitude over prospective targets (which can affect the accuracy of ballistic missile warheads).

And there's nothing I know of that prevented this balloon from uploading its collected information to a satellite passing overhead.

Additionally, there are reports of a second Chinese "research balloon" passing over Central America - sightings from Costa Rica and from the Colombian Air Force. If it didn't pass over the Panama Canal, it came mighty damn close. The Panama Canal would be a primary target for ANYONE concerned about the effectiveness of the U.S.'s two ocean navy.

Just because your paranoid doesn't mean THEY aren't out to get you!

383:

Howard @ 333:

it is a balloon... unarmored... lifted by a fabric-like sack... if shot by non-exploding impactors it rips opens and vents the lift-gas... if you are angry and wasteful you'd expend an ATA missile but with patience and a desire to recover bigger pieces than thumbnail-sized then fire off a half-dozen rounds of 20MM ammo to punch big holes in the bag-thingie

I don't think the USAF has an aircraft armed with guns that was capable of getting close enough to shoot holes in the bag, so they shot it with an AIM-9X SIDEWINDER - fired from an F-35 Lightning II.

The service ceiling of the F-35 appears (according to Wikipedia) to be about 10,000 feet below the balloon's reported altitude. I'm guessing the missile was the only thing they have that could hit it.

384:

Charlie Stross @ 336:

All the USN did was hole the balloon.

Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet (which is about 10-15,000 feet higher than an F-16's maximum altitude, so neat trick). Going by the brief video I saw, they totally shredded the gas bag -- looks like they shot a missile right through it. So quite likely they detonated a continuous-rod warhead inside it (one capable of shredding enemy combat aircraft with some amount of armour around vulnerable bits).

In which case? What arrives at surface level will most likely resemble confetti.

AIM-9X Sidewinder fired from an F-35 according to news reports I've seen. Inert warhead, so it busted the balloon, but you can see the instrument cluster fall away intact.

385:

David L @ 361:

Waiting a few days may have allowed a tuning of the missile guidance to go for the balloon instead of the payload.

... and allowed the Navy/Coast Guard to position their ships in the target area to speed retrieval. The main determinant appears to be not scattering the debris over several square miles of the countryside (which might have happened if it DID have a self-destruct charge).

386:

JohnS @ 384:

AIM-9X Sidewinder fired from an F-35 according to news reports I've seen. Inert warhead, so it busted the balloon, but you can see the instrument cluster fall away intact.

NOT an F-35? Those early news reports I saw that identified the aircraft type were wrong.

387:

JohnS:

self-destruct charge

no need for a 'Hollywood' style of visually impressive self-destruct which gets noticed... trying to hide ownership would be a waste of time... likely it is the electronics along with onboard software which should not survive capture so the need is to be slagged rather than explosively shattered 'n scattered... randomizing ROM chips and harddisks best handled with high intensity magnetic field or high temperatures... sudden heat is less complex...
so either thermite or a triggering ignition of Li-On batteries or some mix of both

388:

No surprise, remember the interception scene in "Starman"? All stock footage with, if memory serves, three different aircraft. Some people can't tell the difference.

389:

Or the Chinese sent the "Format yourself over and over again" command the second the balloon was compromised.

390:

Howard NYC @ 387:

JohnS:
self-destruct charge

no need for a 'Hollywood' style of visually impressive self-destruct which gets noticed... trying to hide ownership would be a waste of time... likely it is the electronics along with onboard software which should not survive capture so the need is to be slagged rather than explosively shattered 'n scattered... randomizing ROM chips and harddisks best handled with high intensity magnetic field or high temperatures... sudden heat is less complex...
so either thermite or a triggering ignition of Li-On batteries or some mix of both

A self destruct doesn't have to be 'Hollywood'.

I've worked with thermite both as a civilian (cad welding) and in the military (thermite grenades for "document destruction"). You don't want that shit raining down out of the sky on top of you either.

391:

Per the NYTimes or WashPost three of these crossed the continental US during Trump's term. And one previous one under Biden. But they might have just grazed the borders and no civilians really noticed.

Trump is already saying it didn't happen when he was around and would not if he was still in charge. OMG.

392:

Hmm. This may be crazy or stupid, but an idea occurred to me, when perusing a news article on the mysterious lack of productivity in the construction sector. One thing that AI might be good at: paperwork.

The world is drowning in it, often for good reason. Assessments keep industry honest, and reports help provide some level of accountability. But the growing amount of approvals required to complete projects that impact in some way a segment of the public (like construction projects) measurably reduce productivity. People hours are limited--at the end of the day an hour spent writing a report on how many parking spaces per total square footage is an hour not spent building an apartment block.

Could AI streamline this process? In a productive way, not by faking anything. You take a small number of facts, fit them to a pre-ordained conclusion (assuming that the project, in fact, meets reqs) and write it up. Could the human input the data once, and all the assessment reports, structured for different stakeholders, are the output?

Or am I overthinking this?

393:

Another factor could have been a possibly damaged self-destruct mechanism going off in say a school.

394:

Oh c’mon people, that thing wasn’t a balloon. It was quite clearly a super-giant spider egg-case. Plenty of spiders spin a long fibre or two to act like a balloon/parachute; this is just the beginning of the breeding season for a new mutant spider caused by Chernobyl radiation affecting the Wuhan virus factory. You know it makes sense!

395:

Wait, what? Your local schools have self-destruct mechanisms? Golly. How would that work? The head, deputy, and janitor have to input their credentials and turn a set of keys simultaneously?

396:

Goddammit Tim!

Don't give them any ideas!

397:

timrowledge:

too late...

American education -- the infamous educational-industrial complex -- self-destructed decades away after trimming chapters on slavery in history textbooks, a page this edition, a page the edition before, until hundreds of years of cruel abuse are covered in a dozen pages...

it was overt child abuse when Congress deemed ketchup as having the status of a vegetable portion in nutritionally balanced student meals... and refusing to deem guns on school grounds as acts of terrorism

398:

One thing that AI might be good at: paperwork. ... Assessments keep industry honest, and reports help provide some level of accountability.

You said "honest" and "AI" in a thread about uses for ChatGPT? Which doesn't even have the Trump-style negative relationship to truth. Also unlike Trump it aims for plausible :)

I can see how it might be possible to train a AI like that to accurately report the contents of a document trail, but far too much of current document trails is exactly the sort of thing humans do so very well: understanding the intent of documents. Oh, and creating standard forms to make understanding easier.

The document chains I'm used to far too often amount to some poor muppet having to dig around in random bits of paper, emails, chat records etc, then finally ring people and ask for the missing detail. Repeat until sobbing under the desk seems necessary, then try again.

Or you do the brutal thing and just reject applications that don't have every last thing filled out correctly. We just had a grant application declined because we didn't fill in the "relationship to multifaith communities" section when asking for money to produce a history of our non-faith group. We correctly wrong nonsense in every other box but apparently missed that one, possibly because it's "optional" (you don't have to get the grant?)

399:

Too late. I hear it’s the bugs from Klendathu.

400:

I thought the self-destruct was a twin combo of local funding and no restrictions on guns? Let the povos teach themselves...

401:

Which doesn't even have the Trump-style negative relationship to truth.

In comment 212 I linked to a story on ChatGPT Here's the appropriate bit of that story.

To me the money quote is:

"It gets things wrong, because it's not actually designed to get things right."

402:

John S
by stirring up the QAnon crazies. - Uh?
They don't need "stirring up" they are foaming, ranting, posturing & threatening the whole time, without any external stimulus required.
That's what scares me - they are so like the behaviour of the US slavers in the period just before 1861 ...

timrowledege
Unfortunately - bad timing NOT FUNNY

403:

I wasn't thinking something like SAR or similar (I imagine the number crunching is substantial) but something simpler and more old school.

If the onboard system was mapping RF sources with certain characteristics and gave its own location, plus a source bearing, signal strength and signal typing, and then repeated the same measurement a while later, the balloon drift baseline would give a fair geolocation.

Once its down to just a few lines of text, why not SMS it home via all those towers down below or, more discreetly, to some suitably equipped embassy vehicle that just happens to be 50 miles away.

404:

Sigh.

The big optical spy satellites such as the Keyholes get all the press but most intelligence-gathering satellites in orbit are looking for, characterising and recording radar and radio frequency transmissions from places of interest on the ground. Some of them have antenna dishes several metres across and carry receivers which can be cooled down cryogenically to reduce electrical noise etc. thanks to the vacuum of space. Can't do that easily on an in-atmosphere balloon. None of the published images of the balloon show large radio antennas pointing downwards, nor are there large camera housings visible.

Anyone with any idea of infosec will have sensitive military sites on their own turf connected by buried wire or optical links, not radio which can propagate vast distances under the right conditions -- it's not uncommon for radio amateurs to work 10,000 km and more with only a few watts of ERP. Radio observations by satellites are usually meant to pick up sensitive battlefield and mobile signals from ships etc., not The Secret Launch Codes for the US mid-Western silo fields (all of which are pointed at Russia anyway and which are regularly visited by Russian inspectors under the SALT and START treaties).

My guess is that this was a balloon intended for maritime operation in the Pacific and this particular one got away from the operators. It looks like it was designed to operate for several days or in the right conditions several weeks before it would descend, possibly to be recovered by a Chinese ship tracking it.

It might actually be what the Chinese say it was, a weather and sea-state observation platform. It could also (at the same time) be a military observation balloon with some intel-gathering capabilities but I can't see it being better than actual satellites, of which the Chinese have an abundance, for operating over land. One possible military use case would be for this kind of balloon to provide a deep-oceanic AWACS with extended on-station capability, assuming the controllers can keep it roughly in place by juggling its altitude. The Polar vortices and their effects on the jet streams this winter have not been conducive to such an aim though.

TL:DR; this was probably a sensor platform intended for mid-Pacific maritime operation. It blew away in the wind. Hilarity ensued.

405:

Plus a satellite can't tell you anything about the winds at altitude over prospective targets (which can affect the accuracy of ballistic missile warheads).

Nonsense.

An ICBM delivered RV re-enters at roughly 10km/s. It covers the distance from the stratopause down to detonation altitude -- effectively at or close to ground level -- in under five seconds.

A 200 km/h jet stream (which is fierce) is moving at 55 m/s. So there's at most 250 metres of lateral drift in the time between the RV arriving and it detonating. And the jet streams aren't uniformly distributed by altitude: most likely the RV will only be affected by high speed winds for 1km of its descent, or a tenth of a second (so about 5 m of lateral movement).

But an RV isn't a piece of paper blowing in the wind: it's a very dense, conical, streamlined projectile that is about as prone to windage as a high velocity rifle bullet ... in addition to which there's very little actual air at the altitude we're talking about: atmospheric pressure at the stratopause is on the order of 1 millibar, or 1/1000th sea level pressure.

Upshot: high altitude winds might displace an incoming RV by a matter of double-digit centimetres, if there's a storm blowing, but that's about it. And with RVs we're probably talking about yields in the 200kt to 1mt range, so fireballs kilometres in diameter when the nuke detonates.

(Where there is scope for weather to have an impact is in the distribution of fallout, but that's unlikely to be a primary consideration in drawing up maps of where to farm the mushroom clouds during an all out nuclear exchange.)

406:

The Chinese have about 350 nuclear weapons with only a handful of them being on ICBMs capable of reaching the silos in middle America. The USAF has over 250 widely-spaced silos in middle America, each containing a ready-to-launch missile and payload. The weather on a specific day over some of those silos is not a useful piece of intelligence.

What I'm hearing from a lot of Americans is panic, that Other People are daring to do what the US has done regularly to many other nations in the past, intrude into their airspace without permission to spy on them. At the same time those Americans think highly of aircraft built for this purpose like the U-2 and SR-71 because they're, well, American.

407:

ah, the joys of a too literal mindset plus low grade elder decline...

just read the headline aloud...

[ I'll see myself out no need for macing or tasering ]

https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/05/us/customs-cockfighting-spurs-louisville-trnd

408:

Well, that's two of us that favour cock-up :-(

409:

China under Xi is reportedly building up its nuclear forces massively, with a stated aim of having 2000 ICBM warheads by the end of the decade -- about the same as the USA or Russia.

(This is probably all on Xi's ego: there's not much difference between the deterrent effect of 350 warheads and 2000, frankly, either is enough to chew holes in the actually-existing ABM systems deployed around Washington DC and make a real mess of several other cities, neither is sufficient to guarantee a knockout first strike against opposing missile silos.)

410:

Plus a satellite can't tell you anything about the winds at altitude

ESA Aeolus measures wind speeds from the surface up to 30km above. Other satellites carry instruments capable of measuring more restricted altitude ranges.

411:

Trump is already saying it didn't happen when he was around and would not if he was still in charge.

Well, Bolton backs him up…

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-top-national-security-officials-refute-claim-chinese-spy-balloons-transited-us-under-last-admin

We all know what honest chaps Bolton, Brown, Esper et al are, so it's nice to have that settled.

(Yes, sarcasm.)

In other news, America completes arc of military bases around China…

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64479712

412:

Your local schools have self-destruct mechanisms? Golly. How would that work? The head, deputy, and janitor have to input their credentials and turn a set of keys simultaneously?

Naw. A group of "concerned citizens" mob the school board, harassing and threatening trustees and their families until they resign or do what the fanatics want, which is to roll education back into an imagined 19th century (or earlier) by removing anything that makes a white male blue-collar Christian even vaguely uncomfortable…

Seems to be working, too.

413:

Re: '... understanding the intent of documents.'

Agree - key reason why I'm against rules-based (as opposed to 'principles-based') accounting systems. IMO, 'rules-based systems' are also the rationale used to support gerrymandering.

Several years ago at an annual staff meeting one of the senior execs mentioned the possibility of having a centralized one-size-fits-all form for projects and asked everyone to come up with a list of questions/variables. My team came up with hundreds in under a day - and we missed a whole bunch that other teams identified. This 'uni(versal)-form' did not happen. (If you can't identify the variables how can you come up with 'rules' that can address possible scenarios.)

Question/request for info/explanation:

My impression is that AIs are basically ultra ramped up stats testing machines. If so, wouldn't any outlier just be ignored or tossed out? And if outliers are continually immediately being tossed out/deleted, then there's no chance for accumulating sufficient data re: any weird (very low incidence) item/occurrence. This situation is unlike what happens with humans who when confronted with such a situation go: 'That's weird, I wonder why this happened' which has led to making a point of seeing whether that item was a statistical fluke or a new insight/discovery. IOW, I don't think we have identified all of the variables in any field to hand over the job entirely to an AI.

Re: 'weather balloon' questions

Thanks to all the folks for responses/info - much appreciated!

414:

"The document chains I'm used to far too often amount to some poor muppet having to dig around in random bits of paper, emails, chat records etc, then finally ring people and ask for the missing detail. Repeat until sobbing under the desk seems necessary, then try again."

Well, that seems to me to be the exact sort of thing that could possibly be automated by a sufficiently clever AI. We already have AI that can make phone calls and ask questions: https://www.sciencealert.com/google-s-ai-assistant-can-call-and-book-appointments-for-you

Also watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIa4JJLfzI0

I assume email or texts would be even easier. Submitting reports? The AI is going to get bored. "You pass butter." "My God."

415:

Plus a satellite can't tell you anything about the winds at altitude over prospective targets (which can affect the accuracy of ballistic missile warheads).

Somewhere I've got a handbook of orbital mechanics, which has a chapter on calculating the trajectories of ballistic missiles. The authors noted the necessity to account for local gravitational anomalies (ie. you can't model Earth as a point mass), but spent absolutely no time on the effect of winds on missile accuracy.

Given the attention to detail and wealth of other sources of error covered (or at least mentioned), I would be surprised that they are a significant factor.

416:

That's an important word. China doesn't worry me. Zi's ego, on the other hand, is a highly dangerous substance.

417:

My body and skeleton are of no interest to anyone, so I am considering brain donation, which should have a similar effect.

Of course, I could start worrying about it being taken away in a black helicopter and installed as a component in GCHQ's bionic ultracomputer, but I lack the energy :-)

418:

if only we could bottle Xi-Putin-Truss-Trump-Bolsonaro-etc and then shake the bottle

be such fun to watch those scorpions backstab one another

sadly we've built a mode of political advancement into governance of just about every nation-state (and subsections there within each nation) which self-selects for too many of the wrong personality attributes... sort of 'frat boy' with less morals and more greed with an inability to consider there's billions of other people who are indeed people...

well it's gonna be a nice planet till it all burns-melts-drowns

419:

RE: ICBMs. I completely agree, because they're dropping out of LEO. Incidentally, Chinese attacks may be more aimed at San Diego, Seattle, and Hawai'i (among others) to gain control of the Pacific. But whatever. The major thing I've done to prep is to get a manhole hook, so that I can die a little more slowly in a storm drain instead of quickly aboveground.

Anyway, I'm also wondering about hypersonic pink mist generators. Probably the weather is irrelevant, as the YJ-21 that China's fielding looks to be a Mach 10 antiship missile, not their version of PLUTO. The bigger point, though, is that in my dabbling in reading the open literature on proposed hypersonic designs, the shapes of the things depend both on speed and air density. A Mach-10 near-surface missile IIRC will look very different than a stratospheric wave rider. One question for someone designing the latter is whether there's a feasible route to fly it on.

Probably this doesn't matter, but I'm still a bit bugged by how someone would "let a balloon get away from them," have it "accidentally" end up on what's basically the standard airline great circle route to get to the US, and not alert the US that it's coming, given that even I know that Alaska has air defenses and would pick it up. And do so right before a major diplomatic event. That's the kind of accident that alters life trajectories, if indeed it was an accident at all.

The problem with believing it's an accident is that, apparently, the normal way to get balloons to their intended destination is to launch when weather conditions are right. Big balloons like the one we just saw have a whole, complex launch process (for a superpressurized balloo, normally this involves a specialized launch tower). Reasonably useful pilot weather forecasts are considerably cheaper than launching a big balloon.

This had to have been launched deliberately. I'd speculate that any mistake may have come from a higher-level official ordering the launch in the first place, but the people handling the balloon almost certainly knew where it would go.

420:

"Reportedly" -- I've seen other mentions of China maybe doubling the number of warheads to 700 or so over the same period. Serious evidence of this buildup is missing or from sources who are keen to stir the pot in the western Pacific.

I don't really know what China would do with 2000 warheads, what platforms they would choose to put them on etc. They've already got enough nuclear retaliatory capability to deter some nation or other from parking its Abrams tanks in Tienamen Square, they really don't need more. Most of their existing warhead collection is pointed at Russia and India, on shorter-range IRBMs and tactical ballistic missiles. Their SSBNs can carry about twenty warheads each once the fleet is complete -- last time I looked they were still working on building the fifth and sixth boats of their first real SSBN class. At that point they can maybe keep two boats on station at any given time.

421:

Heteromeles:

I'm still a bit bugged by how someone would "let a balloon get away from them,"

uhm... bureaucracy?

when I was at a Wall Street banking back office, the FTEs resented (and feared) anything we short term consultants reported as not-quite best practices... such after a code review I noted none of the code (an unholy mix of C++/Java/Cobol/Oracle scripting) had an error trap (otherwise-else-other-missingcase) in their switch-case-select blocks... after a month of argument the CIO decided that would be included in newly explicit standards and existing modules were reviewed and amended and tested... whereupon previously 'stable' code was found to be tossing off hundreds 'n hundreds of error messages "missing case"... which when the bureaucracy realized they now needed to review multiple years of transactions totaling into the billions for possible miscalculation I got fired for failing to point this out to them ten years sooner... as in... ten years before I was hired...

ah what a joy to watch bureaucracy and listen to the screams whenever reality interferes with its smooth operation...

if indeed the balloon's misdeeds were result of flawed operations it is sure thing nobody was brave enough to raise a hand and get blamed for not warning the boss five days in advance of an unplanned error...

422:

However, I saw that figure, too, in media that is not entirely Sinophobic, and it makes sense given the USA sabre-rattling. China going for parity? That's less plausible.

423:

As we are here my take on the balloon is that it was a don’t f**k with me warning from China. On examination it will be found to be a heavily warded summoning grid that was not powered up on this example. When powered it would be shielded from weapons normal and arcane and capable of dropping higher order demons on any area it flys over. The horror as ever with China is that it has plenty of Uighur reeducation camps to power such devices from.

424:

my new word for this day...

kakistocracy

(/kækɪˈstɒkrəsi/, /kækɪsˈtɒ-/)

any government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.

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

425:

We all know what honest chaps Bolton, Brown, Esper et al are, so it's nice to have that settled.

Now the Biden administration is saying the previous balloon flights during the Trump admin were not realized until after Biden took office.

This is going to get interesting.

426:

RE: AI document generation and management.

Here's some anecdata from the "Finest City" in my county.

Since I deal with planning issues as an advocate, I'm aware that there's a bureaucratic hierarchy here: planning on top, stormwater in the middle, parks on the bottom. My take on planning is that they have high staff turnover and for the most part aren't terribly competent. There are extremely competent people scattered here and there throughout the bureaucracy, but because of the hierarchy, many competent people have to do what planning tells them to do, even when planning doesn't know what it's doing.

Now it's been reported repeatedly that planning is having trouble hanging onto planners, because what they're willing to pay is below market average, while our housing prices are above market average. Perhaps this is a functional explanation for their competence issues?

Turning to AI, what these snowed-under bureaucrats DO NOT need are AI document generators spewing more documents on them. They're already besieged by problematic paper.

Instead what they need are AI bullshit detectors. As an example I've seen multiple times, they need something (other than a litigation attorney) that tells them that widening a road to make it better for fire evacuation, while narrowing it and putting in speed bumps for traffic calming, isn't going to work. I don't expect AI to do this very well, but it might be capable of linking text to maps via location names, so that the report readers could look at a map and notice which sections refer to which part of a project and perhaps catch problems that way. Unfortunately, a bunch of planners have demonstrated problems reading maps, especially in three dimensions. But I can dream.

Anyway, I do think society needs AI bullshit detection far more than it needs AI bullshit generation. No clue how to do this though.

427:

It would appear that the Chinese are getting careless - or, more likely (?) the weather patterns are not what was expected, or, as, Howard NYC suggests - the bureaucracy screwed up - surely that couldn't happen in such a well-run organisation * COUGH *

429:

"Incidentally, Chinese attacks may be more aimed at San Diego, Seattle, and Hawai'i (among others) to gain control of the Pacific."

Yeah. Zi might want to read some history.

430:

Of uncertain relevance to the late balloon is this:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41462/gigantic-hangar-near-secretive-chinese-test-facilities-points-to-exotic-airship-development

I bring it up because meteorological backcasts of the balloon's path show it passed fairly close to the facilites described:

https://twitter.com/wildweatherdan/status/1621293636943052801

431:

"I got fired for failing to point this out to them ten years sooner... as in... ten years before I was hired..."

I'm getting a kick out of imagining that conversation.

And no error traps? I'm an amateur programmer and I know better!

432:

AI bullshit detection would be awesome. (Notice how the AI producers are thrilled to be able to say they've passed the Turing Test, but the practical applications come second. Does this make venture capitalists happy?)

433:

Zi might want to read some history.

He undoubtably has. It is highly unlikely to be the same history that Americans have read, though, so he is unlikely to draw the same conclusions.

434:

I got fired for failing to point this out to them ten years sooner

No, you got fired for failing to follow the wishes of the folks who hired you.

"Quality Assurance" is all about the assurance, and not much about the quality.

You weren't hired to check the quality of the code. You were hired to write a report showing that the code was of high quality.

435:

And no error traps? I'm an amateur programmer and I know better!

For years I've had to explain to people that the error message they are reading may not have anything to do with reality. It just may be the last choice the programmer thought of. Or the programmer was under orders to not put in a message like "Sorry we don't know what went wrong but something did. Bye."

436:

After my departure someone got something I'd written to produce the error message Psilocybin error - can't find the mushroom.

437:

Charlie Stross @ 405:

Plus a satellite can't tell you anything about the winds at altitude over prospective targets (which can affect the accuracy of ballistic missile warheads).

Nonsense.

I don't insist on it, but I'm not convinced the Chinese military is any more immune to boondogle than the U.S. military.

Just because it's a stupid idea can't rule it out from the "military mind".

438:

the error message they are reading may not have anything to do with reality.

Or the programmers have an error message that they're allowed to show, possibly even several of them.

A lot of that "user interface design" stuff is done or reviewed by committee because it's something that people can easily express opinions about. Getting a business type educated to the point where they can even understand software design patterns, let alone express useful opinions about them, is hard. But "is this shade of blue-green appealing?" and "should it say 'error: blah blah blah' or 'The program has experienced a problem'"... any monkey can opine about that (and many do).

We have the fun issue that our stuff is available in several languages and the translations are between jargon forms. So just because I can puzzle out Italian doesn't mean I can develop a meaningful opinion about the jargon used by burglar alarm installers in Italy. We gets the error code and we displays the relevant gibberish. We is good.

439:

David L @ 425:

We all know what honest chaps Bolton, Brown, Esper et al are, so it's nice to have that settled.

Now the Biden administration is saying the previous balloon flights during the Trump admin were not realized until after Biden took office.

This is going to get interesting.

The way I read it the military/intelligence community recognized a problem, but was unable to get the Trump administration interested.

440:

I think the word you want is "generate".

441:

Greg Tingey @ 427:

It would appear that the Chinese are getting careless - or, more likely (?) the weather patterns are not what was expected, or, as, Howard NYC suggests - the bureaucracy screwed up - surely that couldn't happen in such a well-run organisation * COUGH *

I suspect they just got slack because the Trump administration let them get away with it.

442:

Not sure about that. What I've read is that the funeral industry really got kicked off just before WWI in the US, where the big popular/women's magazine started pushing the sitting room? parlor? where people used to display the newly-dead before burial into renaming it "the living room", and getting all those nasty bodies out.

443:

No, no, no. You deal with vampires by a) cutting off their heads; b) burying the head, with salt, in the middle of a crossroads, and c) burning or otherwise permanently displosing of the rest of the body.

444:

"Bad SF characters tend to all sound the same"

One of the best bits of information I got from one of my beta readers on 11,000 Years was that everyone tended to sound alike. I went back and did a lot of editing (given I have a lot of dialog), some are more formal, and do not use contractions, others have an accent, and some use different verbiage to say things.

445:

"Make our own music". At cons, that's what we call filking. Otherwise... before COVID, a few times a year I'd have a song circle, and invited folks to come over (no electric instruments, please). Sometimes I got five, once I got 30 or 32. Spent the evening, did a couple times around the circle (I run it bardic circle style, so no one gets missed or skipped over (the rule is "pick, pass, or play" - play/sing something, pick something for someone else or everyone to sing/play, or say "I pass"... but everyone gets a turn).

People liked that a lot. I miss it.

446:

Funerals, esp. US: warning, rant ahead.

When my father died, my mom went to the Jewish funeral home my grandfather had used (she had no other option that she knew). The rabbi there bullied into letting him give the oration, and the 23rd Psalm. Then they let people say something. Several were useless, as far as I was concerned. Then I got up, and spoke about who he was... and that broke the damn and his political comrades who'd come spoke.

When my mom died, I don't get bullied, so it was people talking about her.

Then my late wife dropped dead for no fucking reason at 43 ("cardiac arrythmia" said the coroner, meaning we don't have a fucking clue). We had talked about it before, so I was going to have her cremated. But a good friend had a friend who was a funeral director, and he took care of a lot.

Yeah, about that: there would be a viewing (ok, her sister and mother had come up from TX to Chicago). I PAID ABOUT $1300 TO EFFECTIVELY RENT A FUCKING COFFIN for 2-3 days (GIVEN SHE WAS GOING TO BE CREMATED AFTER THE VIEWING).

We had a gathering at our house after her mom and sister flew home, and we talked about her, and I sang a couple song (damn it, no one sang with me).

I've arranged and pre-paid for direct to cremation, and I've got an urn. Half my ashes go in there, with the half of her ashes that I have in a much smaller urn. I gave the other half to her mother, and they're under a cenotaph in the family plot in Beeville, TX. When I'm gone, my half of her ashes, and half of mine, go into the urn, and go to our son. The rest... my partner and other kids can do whatever they want.

Unfuck the US funeral industry.

447:

About the weather baloon - and yes, I figure it really was - the US shot it down with a missle for a good reason: it might be 20 stories tall. About 20 years ago, a Canadian weather balloon got away, and was heading towards Iceland. Two Canadian AF fighters put 1000 rounds into it, with little result.

448:

Back in the early nineties, Joan Baez came to Austin, and the concert was in the back yard of a popular bar. There were a couple dozen seats, and that was it, everyone else of the several hundred of us stood.

After she took a break, when she got back on, she complained to the management that a lot of people there were in their forties and older (we were around that age), and they needed to bring out a lot more seats.

They did.

449:

There's an old cartoon - might have been by Bill Mauldin - of a bunch of troops standing in a ring around a couple of leaders, with the leaders armed with baseball bats, and the troops cheering them on.

451:

every piece of demo code on the microsoft.com site assumes there's no need to evaluate in-bound parameters and rarely identifies the appropriate pre-processing to validate ranges and data typing...

basically these being single line examples of an attribute-function-instantiation but with little in way of how to build bullet-proof (and idiot-proof and breach-proof) apps...

every time I've re-written someone else code I'd end up with double or triple the number of lines and the test phase took four times as long due to errors thrown due to historical data having failed to have been vetted properly... one of the key reasons I switched over business analyst & technical writer roles... much less abuse and took longer to be dragged in front of some senior manager angered at my uncovering whoooopies otherwise buried...

such as zip codes (what Canada & UK call postal codes) which are always fixed length five digits and never ever contain lower case "L" or upper case "O"...

turned out the entire customer database at [REDACTED BANK] had never been vetted when date entry was done nor a sweep as mass batch which was why attempts at sorting addresses kept getting wacko results and their sales team at retail branches who were opening new checking accounts could never get the proper commissions or acknowledged results...

after I wrote a trivial piece of SQL ==> select COUNT(*) where isvalidzip (zipcode) = FALSE from Customer

ran it in front of the CIO, oh did he freak when after 12 minutes of chewing on query it produced a COUNT of about 7% of all active customers and 13% of prospective whose intel had been bought at great expense and merged together... made him wonder what more subtle flaws were in the data...

452:

Bad SF characters tend to all sound the same, they all speak in the same with the same class/gender/region markers as the author. (And attempts not to are often cringeworthy).

Few weeks ago I read "Eversion" by Alastair Reynolds. I highly recommend this book for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons is this:

Same cast of characters repeats the same events, kind of like "Groundhog Day", but in different time periods. 1800's, then 1880's, then parallel-Earth 1930's (well, they are all parallel-Earth, but this one is most obviously so), etc. And in each iteration they talk in the manner appropriate to the time period, including one character who is not a native English speaker. Followed by an iteration which takes places in the future as portrayed in 1940's pulp fiction -- and with language right out of that pulp fiction. Which is VERY cringeworthy[1], but also very much on purpose.

https://www.amazon.com/Eversion-Alastair-Reynolds-ebook/dp/B09NKRN9WF/ref=sr_1_1

[1] Reading that part, I could not help thinking "THAT is what most science fiction sounded like in 1940's? No wonder it was considered trash!"

453:

which are always fixed length five digits and never ever contain lower case "L" or upper case "O"

Well most of those typists have died by now.

I DO remember installing systems in the later 70s where the staff was totally pissed they had to relearn how to type 1 and 0.

454:

Around '93, I was put on a new "project", loading chemistry data from floppies into a database using the d/b's loader program, and handed a shoebox of floppies. I asked, "what do I do when I'm done?", figuring it should take a few days. They told me "we'll worry about that when you're done." Three months later I was done.

Handed another shoebox, but this was another "project". When I asked my manager if I could write a validator, she said she had the money, so go ahead. Three months later, I was loading a shoebox of data in two hours... and that included running a virus checker on every floppy. I think that was the year I got a $200 or $300 dollar a year raise. Really.

In '99, I think, different job, supporting the City of Chicago 911 system, another programmer left, and our manager put me on it... and he told me to fix the mess. They'd planned on the City exporting the map data from ArcInfo, and us loading it into our 911 map d/b every month or so, but had been doing it once or twice a year. I found the the damn programmers before me had been MASSAGING the data to fix it... and adding new massaging every time. I did what I'd done before, wrote an huge awk script (we're talking hundreds of lines0 to falidate the data, and produce a report on bad data, before trying to use Oracle's d/b loader. Then I could talk to the guy from the City, and he'd fix their ArcInfo, and I wouldn't see the same damn errors every time, as well as new ones.

We went to a day to a day and a half, "hey, here's errors in your data""Thanks, I'll fix them"... here's the new extract". and it worked. We went to updating every month or two (so you didn't try, for exemple, to send an ambulance down a street that was closed for road destruction, but sent them the right way).

This contracter gave me a nice raise, and the City gave me an award.

Validate the data? Why would we need to do that? is apparently the motto of every damn database system loader. <[

455:

On of the things I have really appreciated about Neal Stephenson has been his ability to adapt the diction of his characters to make them very real.

So you can have a conversation between a Dutch royal, a Dutch-Indonesian aide, a drawling African-Comanche-American from Oklahoma, and a Texan tycoon. Each of them has a cadence to their words and diction that makes them real to my inner ear.

It is not easy to do, I am about 100% certain I could not, but I really appreciate it when done well.

Of course, I have no direct experience of what the diction of an Indonesian-Dutch former Cabinet Minister might sound like, but it sounds unique enough that it works for me.

456:

Not much in the bass register, then?

457:

"Instead what they need are AI bullshit detectors. As an example I've seen multiple times, they need something (other than a litigation attorney) that tells them that widening a road to make it better for fire evacuation, while narrowing it and putting in speed bumps for traffic calming, isn't going to work."

Human bullshit detectors' jobs are going to be secure for a long time to come, since of course human bullshitters are in an arms race to come up with the best BS they can. Last year's training data is mostly useless. In fact, once the BSers find out they are interacting with a computer, they will find ways to start training it to their requirements (Microsoft: "What could possibly go wrong?")

But what happens after the BS detectors detect BS? In an ideal world, they simply inform the relevant decision maker and everything works out. What happens instead is that reports are generated which contain the information in a form that is designed to be palatable to the stakeholder the report is going to ("Tell me what is going to happen in a way that allows me to deny it later.") Reports are highly structured for a reason--to prevent outsiders from understanding what the real message is. "Strategic Visioning", "Kai-Zen", ISO 14000 all serve the purpose of looking good on a superficial reading but clueing in anyone with an insider's understanding of what is really going on.

It seems to me that the superficial level, the surface structure of a bureaucratic report, is something that AI could be really good at. It doesn't even have to have the structure programmed into it--a few decades of hundreds of reports a year should be sufficient to teach it how to phrase things. Humans of modest capacity pick it up after a weekend workshop.

As for the deep structure, the actual report of what is happening out there? That's in the parameters that the human generating the report provides. "Charlie Stross + Wallace and Gromit" when you could have specified "Antipope + Wallace and Gromit" the difference of which looks arbitrary to anyone who doesn't know a lot about Charlie, but says something to anyone who does.

I think this could work.

458:

It seems to me that the superficial level, the surface structure of a bureaucratic report, is something that AI could be really good at. It doesn't even have to have the structure programmed into it--a few decades of hundreds of reports a year should be sufficient to teach it how to phrase things. Humans of modest capacity pick it up after a weekend workshop.

If I understand what you're saying, in my field there's little need for it. Everyone has their stashes of boilerplate, and it gets adapted as needed. Perhaps it's different in your corner of reality? That's fine with me, although it's sad there's little use for it.

What I'm talking about is siloing: the reports are written by subs in chunks, and AFAIK they tend to be read by specialist bureaucrats in chunks. In the road example I used, fire evacuation is one chapter, greenhouse gas mitigation by forcing people to drive slower is another chapter. If they're being read by separate people, and no one checks to see that they contradict each other, messes happen.

Perhaps you're dealing with different issues?

459:

Google has announced Bard, their competitor to ChatGPT, if I'm reading this right.

https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/

Now we can compare the responses to the same prompt. At the very least, you'd expect a bard to do better at story-telling.

460:

How did we get $32 trillion in debt?

Short answer: kept electing Republicans.

461:

About 20 years ago, a Canadian weather balloon got away, and was heading towards Iceland.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64546767

Note: this weather balloon was 25 stories tall (so roughly 75 m). So roughly comparable to the Chinese balloon, which the usual suspects are insisting can't be a weather balloon because those are smaller, which means it must be a spy balloon.

462:

which the usual suspects are insisting can't be a weather balloon because those are smaller, which means it must be a spy balloon.

This is one of those times were all the main actors seem to be using different meanings for the same terms.

What most of the planet calls a weather balloon is described here:

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

As someone mentioned earlier, they tend to have a standard package that is designed to fall back to ground when the balloon "pops". And has a locator beacon and instructions on how to return it for re-use. I have a memory that only 10% of them make it back for re-use. But it is an old memory and may be flawed.

The Chinese calling this a "weather balloon" means they are using the term generically. Or trying to do so. And this would be one freaking huge "weather balloon". Plus why didn't they talk about this before. It now looks like we (others than China) know of 6 of these. How many have they launched and just not bothered to tell anyone? After all, as they keep saying, these are civilian things for research only. Right?

463:

John Scalzi said recently, "I think we’re in a real moment of change for social media, where some older brands are beginning to sunset and some newer ones are going to come up. But the feeling I get now is that this change is going to take longer than I (and I think others) initially expected, and that 2023 is going to end up being a transitional year with no sharp breaks between the now-old-line sites, and the new ones coming up. I’m half excited and half dreading this, because change has to be endured, whether one is looking forward to it or not."

So I was thinking about combining the idea that a new form of social media might make money, and the idea of an AI bullshit detector. What if every post got an evaluation from Check-Bot, and a proper ragging if someone didn't have respect for the facts...

465:

The most likely effect is that anyone saying anything that wasn't according to 'established wisdom' would get flagged, irrespective of any relationships to the truth.

466:

If someone wants to monitor weather conditions in mid-Pacific then they'd need a long-duration balloon design with solar cells to power it for a couple of weeks minimum. Returning data about the sea state, water temps etc. would also be good so the "Chinese spy balloon" design would fit the bill for that sort of work better than the short-duration weather balloons used over land which run on batteries and operate for a day at most. There's also a possibility of monitoring fishing stocks if the sensors are up to the task.

There's a case to be made for this balloon being a simple low-cost AWACS type of military spotter aircraft for maritime use, flying around in the western Pacific to track the various foreign naval forces that have been sailing up and down the Chinese coast over the past few years. The Chinese have certainly been working on drones that can do this sort of job but they don't have the on-station endurance that a balloon does.

As for balloons going where their controllers didn't intend them to, there was a report a while back of a US military balloon in Afghanistan breaking loose from its tether and heading off to parts unknown. This wasn't a free-flying balloon but more of a very high observation post located over a military base. This balloon may also have been the subject of an attempted shoot-down, I have a vague recollection that the attempts were not that successful. It certainly wasn't headline news here in the West, unlike the Chinese balloon.

467:

As Sir Bedevere so eloquently said:

"Tell me again how bananas may be use to prevent earthquakes. This new learning astounds me."

:)

468:

The Chinese calling this a "weather balloon" means they are using the term generically. Or trying to do so.

The article I linked to was by a BBC writer (not Chinese) quoting a Canadian researcher (also not Chinese) using the phrase "weather balloon" to refer to a 75 m tall balloon used to research the atmosphere.

So the Chinese are not the only ones using "weather balloon" to refer to a balloon used to study the atmosphere, even if it isn't the most common type.

469:

"As for balloons going where their controllers didn't intend them to..."

As for that,

https://www.voanews.com/a/china-lashes-out-at-us-over-downed-balloon/6949762.html

[National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said,] "It is true that this balloon had the ability to maneuver itself — to speed up, to slow down and to turn. So, it had propellers, it had a rudder, if you will, to allow it to change direction," he said. "But the most important navigational vector was the jet stream itself, the winds at such a high altitude," about 18,000 meters (11 miles) above the Earth.

It would be extremely interesting to get more details on the balloon's trajectory. Did it obviously maneuver to pass or even hover over military and other sensitive installations? Or did it perform more general course corrections consistent with atmospheric research goals? Or what?

I assume NORAD has such details.

470:

What if every post got an evaluation from Check-Bot, and a proper ragging if someone didn't have respect for the facts...

I see no way that process wouldn't be politicized…

471:

I assume NORAD has such details.

Perhaps for this one. On the other hand, the head of NORAD said that the four prior incursions were unknown to them until the "intelligence community" informed them recently. Of course, that could be misdirection.

472:

Yeah, there are a lot of obstacles, but I think it's still an interesting idea, particularly when you consider the emotional damage reported by professional moderators.

473:

I assume NORAD has such details.

Perhaps for this one.

The plane spotters spotted RIVET JOINT and COMBAT SENT aircraft doing racetracks on the presumed path of the balloon. Not certain that they were collecting ELINT on it, but possible.

E.g.,

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae01d0&lat=41.330&lon=-99.747&zoom=5.8&showTrace=2023-02-03&trackLabels

474:

I got fired for failing to point this out to them ten years sooner

No, you got fired for failing to follow the wishes of the folks who hired you.

"Quality Assurance" is all about the assurance, and not much about the quality.

Let me tell you two stories about that...

Some years ago one of my housemates worked for a chip manufacturer; you've heard of them and some of their products delivered this message to you. He was on one of the quality check teams, and one of the metrics they had was finding N bad chips per shift. "The behavior you reward is the behavior you get," so every QA desk on the line had, tucked away somewhere, a small supply of bad chips so that everyone would discover a safe number of bad chips, every day. And if the production line was having a bad day, some could go into the buffer for later.

Another friend worked briefly for the social services agencies of a US state. Her job, on paper, was to sit at a reception desk at the front of the building, where less fortunate citizens would come with problems, whereupon she would point them at whichever agency or service they needed to talk to. She did this, and pretty soon got fired. The state did not want needy people to smoothly and efficiently present the correct paperwork to state agencies that would then do things for them. The job had actually been to sit at a desk, not get too involved with any of The Poors, send them away out of sight when they had the wrong paperwork, and generally not go postal on anyone.

475:

If I understand what you're saying, in my field there's little need for it. Everyone has their stashes of boilerplate, and it gets adapted as needed. Perhaps it's different in your corner of reality? That's fine with me, although it's sad there's little use for it.

What I'm talking about is siloing: the reports are written by subs in chunks, and AFAIK they tend to be read by specialist bureaucrats in chunks. In the road example I used, fire evacuation is one chapter, greenhouse gas mitigation by forcing people to drive slower is another chapter. If they're being read by separate people, and no one checks to see that they contradict each other, messes happen.

Perhaps you're dealing with different issues?

I am, but let's use yours because it seems more challenging for an AI to handle (where I worked, everyone had their knives into each other, and the inter-agency politics were intense).

So to handle this requirement, we need a training data set that includes a large number or reports of each type, judged to be correct, which assign facts and investigative findings into the correct chapter, with perhaps a short summary in text attached. Could an AI do this?

Probably not now, but eventually. Putting the training set together would be a challenge, because I don't know how many local agencies around the world keep digitally accessible archives of old reports handy. Different regions will have different reporting requirements, some quite politicized (and thus resistant to standardization), so developing the training data could be impossible, I don't know.

But if the training set could be developed, then I see only a few obstacles. Red flagging a road that is too wide or too narrow should simply be a matter of matching specs against local ordinances, but now we have to worry about how clearly those ordinances are written, and whether or not they were ever intended to be enforced as written (many are not). In cases where a certain amount of background knowledge is necessary to know if a specification would be in violation of an ordinance or regulation ("That design spec in combination with that location is likely to produce a problem later on") that again is simply a matter of training data. I would guess that 80% at least of such potential problems have occurred before in the past, so like a Tesla self-driving car, it just needs access to the outcomes of many such judgements to make a pretty close to correct judgement. For the other 20%, humans will be needed, so this would be intended to streamline the process to make it easier for human beings to keep the information flowing to the correct end users, not replace the humans entirely.

476:

"So I was thinking about combining the idea that a new form of social media might make money, and the idea of an AI bullshit detector. What if every post got an evaluation from Check-Bot, and a proper ragging if someone didn't have respect for the facts..."

I have an idea about that. I think it might be possible to train an AI to evaluate posts for the structure of the argument, independent of the content. That is, it should be possible to flag something for using emotional rather than objective language to justify a (claimed) objective conclusion. Or when a post makes a categorical claim about a population of people ("Republicans are greedy", "Democrats believe in socialism!"). Or basically the most common logical fallacies used in argumentation. Some might get deleted, but more often I think it would be useful to simply attach an explanation of what is wrong with the post in question, thus educating the audience regarding what sound argumentation looks like.

It wouldn't eliminate propaganda from the web, but it would brig attention to it, perhaps causing a fraction of the reading audience to stop and think for a moment...

477:

I wouldn't have objected if someone brought a bass fiddle, or even a washtub one....

478:

It would be extremely interesting to get more details on the balloon's trajectory. Did it obviously maneuver to pass or even hover over military and other sensitive installations? Or did it perform more general course corrections consistent with atmospheric research goals? Or what?

I'd kind of like to know this too. But I'm a little dubious about the rudders and propeller thing.

For reference, here's an American stratospheric airship with two propellers. Note that, for something that likely weighs in the low tens of kg, the two propellers are six feet across, to move enough air molecules at 60 km to make a difference. Since the Chinese balloons go in for big ol' solar panels, I'm trying to figure out how they'd deal with drag from them. But whichever.

AFAIK, rudders on airships are used when the bodies are aerodynamic, so they might be less useful on a big sphere. Especially when that sphere didn't have fins.

Also AFAIK, balloon steering is normally about going up or down. Since relative winds can blow in different directions at different heights, moving up or down to go in the different available directions has been the norm for ballooning for a long time.

Disclosure, I'm having fun with steampunk airships, so I'm actually interested in how this all works in real life.

479:

I will note that 23% of the debt was incurred in the four-year term of the Former Guy.

480:

Former InfoWorld & PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely wrote today on his experience with ChatGPT, and suggests it may have a place in education, if properly programmed. https://www.cringely.com/2023/02/07/if-you-want-to-reduce-chatgpt-mediocrity-do-it-promptly/

481:

Also AFAIK, balloon steering is normally about going up or down. Since relative winds can blow in different directions at different heights, moving up or down to go in the different available directions has been the norm for ballooning for a long time.

America has been experiencing severe cold weather conditions over the past few weeks, the result of strong jet stream winds circulating along the supposed track on this balloon. It's possible to likely that the balloon (and its southern compatriot crossing central America) actually did "get away" from its controllers because there was no useful different jet stream that it could ascend or descend into to prevent it crossing Canada and the US.

Having solar panels and hence power makes it possible for the balloon to pump gas in and out of a reservoir to control its height somewhat but there are limits. Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow.

482:

The plane spotters spotted RIVET JOINT and COMBAT SENT aircraft doing racetracks on the presumed path of the balloon. Not certain that they were collecting ELINT on it, but possible.

I saw a report by someone on TV or in a newspaper that the feds said that they had been flying U2s around the balloon. Likely above it. That is the one long endurance plane in the US inventory that has the payload bay and flight ceiling that could do such. And I think it has in flight refueling.

483:

Re: 'America has been experiencing severe cold weather conditions over the past few weeks, the result of strong jet stream winds circulating along the supposed track on this balloon.'

I was wondering about that including just how high up does 'weather' go. Also wondering whether the altitude where 'weather' happens might be changing becuz of GW/CC. The few sites I looked at didn't have any info on this so maybe I'm not using the right search* terms or maybe there's no info. Was half-hoping that all those satellites and launches to the space station had been equipped with sensors to check on this since they'd all have had to pass through that altitude (approx. 12 miles up).

*One search result was about some UK students sending up a weather balloon back in 2005-2006 to that altitude but no mention of what their balloon found/measured.

About the extreme cold weather in America ...

Same has been happening around Iceland including extreme winds based on what I've seen on the Windfinder site. Would be interesting to see how far adrift a similarly constructed weather balloon would go if launched off the US east coast and directed at Europe.

484:

n the other hand, the head of NORAD said that the four prior incursions were unknown to them until the "intelligence community" informed them recently. Of course, that could be misdirection.

The official report to date (as of 12+ hours ago) is that they discovered the previous one by examining satellite data recordings. I suspect they looked at the data for the last one then started looking for the same signature going back in time.

485:

Technically the outermost layer of the Earth's atmosphere links into the outermost layers of the Sun's atmosphere, so the line between terrestrial weather and space weather is quite blurry. See auroras and such.

The fun part is that, like the different depths in the ocean, the different elevations in the atmosphere require different kinds of vehicles to work there. People don't normally think about this...

486:

Just a bit of engineering. Norway's literally floating the idea of an electric cruise vessel powered by a thorium molten salt reactor ( https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/norwegian-thorium-molten-salt-reactor ). It's so hot it's cool. Or something.

487:

The NASA WB-57s would probably be capable of the trip as well. The unmodified English Electric Canberra held the altitude record of 70,310 feet for some time, and the three still in service with NASA have modified wings to allow them to go higher.

488:

474 - The company name has been censored to protect the guilty, but I know of one firm who paid figure casters by mass produced and QA by mass rejected.

482 - The U-2 and the RB-57F could fly over this "weather" balloon, but not fly any sort of tight orbit around it. If they turn too tightly at that altitude the inboard wing tip stalls and the outboard one simultaneously goes into Mach buffet.

489:

My point being those are the only planes that could fly near and collect data. And maybe be re-fueled in flight.

And yes the U2 is a delicate bird. Long nearly straight flights are what it does best.

490:

Pass up a straight line like that?

Mach buffet? Is it tasty? What's on the menu?

491:

he company name has been censored to protect the guilty, but I know of one firm who paid figure casters by mass produced and QA by mass rejected.

After a tour of one of the Waterford plants in Ireland, I could imagine the policy there.

492:

paid figure casters by mass produced and QA by mass rejected.

So the tail of every pour got put in a "mold" and was sent to QA where is was rejected? That would also reduce waste during casting! No more extra mass to melt, no more excess to be dumped afterwards. It's a win-win-win-win!

493:

"For reference, here's an American stratospheric airship with two propellers. Note that, for something that likely weighs in the low tens of kg, the two propellers are six feet across, to move enough air molecules at 60 km to make a difference. Since the Chinese balloons go in for big ol' solar panels, I'm trying to figure out how they'd deal with drag from them."

Forget the props, and flap the solar panels up and down...

494:

Forget the props, and flap the solar panels up and down...

A mola mola of the stratosphere, as it were, with antennas out its bottom?

495:

Rocketpjs @ 455:

On of the things I have really appreciated about Neal Stephenson has been his ability to adapt the diction of his characters to make them very real.

So you can have a conversation between a Dutch royal, a Dutch-Indonesian aide, a drawling African-Comanche-American from Oklahoma, and a Texan tycoon. Each of them has a cadence to their words and diction that makes them real to my inner ear.

It is not easy to do, I am about 100% certain I could not, but I really appreciate it when done well.

You know you're never going to be a writer when your entry to the Bulwer Lytton fiction contest is rejected as too prolix.

496:

I have always wondered - what happens if/when the crossroads ceases to be a crossroads? Say, if one of the roads ceases to be a road, or the intersection is moved/realigned? Or they replace the crossroads with a roundabout?

497:

what happens if/when the crossroads ceases to be a crossroads?

Containment failure?

I wonder where in Heteromeles pecking order of silos the Laundry falls…

498:

Robert Prior @ 461:

About 20 years ago, a Canadian weather balloon got away, and was heading towards Iceland.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64546767

Note: this weather balloon was 25 stories tall (so roughly 75 m). So roughly comparable to the Chinese balloon, which the usual suspects are insisting can't be a weather balloon because those are smaller, which means it must be a spy balloon.

Generally, "weather balloons" (and/or high altitude research balloons) don't have instrument packages the size of three city buses.

Weather Balloon image

499:

Generally, "weather balloons" (and/or high altitude research balloons) don't have instrument packages the size of three city buses.

It had solar cells — bulkier than batteries. How much of the space is scaffolding for them?

500:

Weather Balloon recovered

Stephen NZ
The Road & roundabouts & appearing & vanishing & being seen across 2000 years & .....
Recommended, incidentally.

501:

Greg, back in the 80s I navigated across England using the Ordinance Survey map of Roman Britain. I was amazed at how often the modern road network follows the Roman pattern.

502:

Retiring @ 471:

I assume NORAD has such details.

Perhaps for this one. On the other hand, the head of NORAD said that the four prior incursions were unknown to them until the "intelligence community" informed them recently. Of course, that could be misdirection.

The way I read it NORAD hadn't noticed it because they hadn't thought to look for it. After it was pointed out to them they were able to go back and look at past information collection and pull the data out.

503:

Robert Prior @ 499:

Generally, "weather balloons" (and/or high altitude research balloons) don't have instrument packages the size of three city buses.

It had solar cells — bulkier than batteries. How much of the space is scaffolding for them?

I've seen a quote from the Navy crews currently recovering the debris saying the instrument package weighed about 1 ton (U.S. "ton" - 2,000 pounds?).

I don't know how much of that would be the solar array, but someone (Heteromeles @ 324) posted a link to an image of "bus length truss being held in one hand" and that truss looks remarkably similar to the small piece of truss that's visible in the images of the recovery effort ... and Charlie @ 372 posted "modern space-rated PV cells are printed thin films on sheets of plastic that weigh about as much per unit area as printer paper (aside from the support truss)" ... not so much "bulkier" (as I understand the word "bulkier"), just a much larger surface area.

But I think it probably had batteries too - like space craft do - with the solar array's re=charging the batteries.

... although I've seen reports that it had propellers & a rudder to make it steerable (?) and I think those would be more effective if you stuck them out towards the ends of the truss.

"BEST" close-up of the instrument package I've found on-line

One image of the path I've seen showed the winds aloft at the altitude it was traveling and it appears to have had some SLIGHT cross wind capability. If it had just been wind-blown it would have drifted farther south than it did, It also does appear its altitude was still under control and being adjusted to take advantage of favorable wind directions.

I don't think the general freak-out on the right is justified, but they'll take any excuse to attack Biden and I won't be surprised when Santos, Green, Gaetz, Boebert & Co somehow find a way to link this to Hunter Biden's stolen laptop.

But this ain't no innocent mistake by China. They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Deal with it.

504:

Topic drift: Diesel generators used to de-ice Scottish wind turbine blades? Oil leaks from hydraulic systems? That 'paper' looks TERF-y as all getout, but is there substance to this? https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/dozens-scottish-power-wind-turbines-29135763

505:

Heteromeles wrote on February 7, 2023 17:58 in #478:

{snip}

For reference, here's an American stratospheric airship with two propellers. Note that, for something that likely weighs in the low tens of kg, the two propellers are six feet across, to move enough air molecules at 60 km to make a difference. Since the Chinese balloons go in for big ol' solar panels, I'm trying to figure out how they'd deal with drag from them. But whichever.

{snip}

Is there a weblink to that 'American stratospheric airship'?

506:

"That 'paper' looks TERF-y as all getout..."

"TERF-y" as in Trans Excluding Radical Feminist or "TURF-y" as in astroturfy?

507:

Key quote is right at the start were hooked up to the fossil fuel supply after a fault developed on the grid.

“During December 60 turbines at Arecleoch and 11 at Glenn App were de-energised due to a cabling fault originating at Mark Hill wind farm. In order to get these turbines re-energised diesel generators were running for upwards of six hours a day.”

Viz, if they ice up too much they fall apart, and since there was no grid access they used the standby generators. Throwing away millions of dollars/euros/pounds of windmills to make some obscure point about environmental purity doesn't make financial or environmental sense.

There's a solid political win there, though. As the article points out, the anti-environmental parties will not allow any more wind farms to be built and will remove the ones that exist, so this problem won't happen. That's what I took from the Labour party spokesmoron, anyway.

508:

I was thinking more in terms of a horizontal principal plane; something like a very fat seagull. With dangly legs.

509:

Many years ago I had a regular run from Bournemouth to Derby that was most fun by the backroads. Most of them had significant parts that were originally Roman, with occasional wiggles where some middle-age Bob The Builder decided that Roman road foundations made for really good farmhouse foundations. I forget exactly how many miles were involved but I was quite proud of getting the time down to a bit better than 80mph average on my fairly seriously hot Honda CB400F café racer.

510:

496 - As a general rule, nannyware won't let you read comments by ordinary users on the new junction design. ;-)

500 "Weather balloon recovered" video. The reason the "upper con trail" in that video stops short of the balloon is motor burn out on the missile. The rest of the trajectory is a wing assisted ballistic path.

504 - Most Scots (self included) wouldn't trust the Daily Record to speak our weight (although it is more reliable than Faux News).

511:

Is there a weblink to that 'American stratospheric airship'?

Oops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J15yzBEQxLM

Note that this is considerably more lightly built than the Chinese model. Looking at both pics and recovered materials, the struts in the Chinese truss were more substantial.

As for why they had solar panels on the ends of the truss, my guess is that they were trying to get out from under the curvature of the gas bag. The best picture of the Chinese system I saw had no propellers, just a bunch of antennas and other sensors. But I'm no expert, just trying to learn.

512:

The only point to propellers on an "airship" (dirigible or blimp) is to allow it some degree of cross-wind or upwind motion at present altitude. It's unlikely IME that electric motors would produce sufficient thrust to allow upwind motion in a jet stream.

513:

Since it is apparently only ‘the jetstream’ where winds exceed 80mph, and over 200 is pretty common, I have trouble imagining a large spheroid being able to manage much headway upwind unless the coyote has installed an ACME El Monstro Rocket Unit. Properly. Seriously, what is the drag on a 100m diameter spherical blob at even 5mph airspeed? Umm, CdA.rho.v^2/2 ... 0.4x7500x1x2.2^2/2 (ish) is around 7500N so power is maybe 20kW. I think. Just to make 5mph airspeed. In a 100mph airstream or worse you’re not going to make it slalom like a dodgem.

514:

Rbt Prior
Start HERE - you are on Watling St & note the pub on the immediate l-h corner - the "Old Watling" whose pub-sign is a Legionary's helmet. It is about 90% certain that there was a pub here before the Great Fire of 1666 - how long before that is anyone's guess.
Yes, that's St Paul's cathedral in the background, & yes I drink in the pub.

515:

There is (I assume, haven't been that way for years) a house on the A68 built on the line of Dere Street. It's in the bottom of a dip, in the middle of a section which goes over a long series of tranverse ridges where the road lines up as far as you can see as you crest each ridge. The first time I did that route I was driving an overloaded van full of re-enactors and suddenly having to do an unexpected series of four right angle corners when we'd been enjoying the rollercoaster ride was a bit more exciting than desirable, especially for the guys riding loose in the back....

516:

Start HERE - you are on Watling St & note the pub on the immediate l-h corner - the "Old Watling" whose pub-sign is a Legionary's helmet... & yes I drink in the pub.

By coincidence I had Google Maps open in another tab and looking at another part of London just a few miles away. (For reasons that I'm sure make sense to them, google.co.uk and google.com provide slightly different services; I get 3D views on one but not the other.) I dropped down into the interior views and I think that's a lovely place. I'd stop in if I were in The City rather than in the wrong hemisphere.

517:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-operation-to-down-chinas-spy-balloon-in-moment-by-moment-audio

Radio conversations between the F-22s and a NORAD ground controller give the altitude of the balloon as 64,000 feet.

518:

Well, generate is correct, but it doesn't have the meaning, or perhaps connotations, that I was after. Imagine would be better, but it's mainly used for largely visual images, and ChatGPT is text based. (I think, though I'm not certain, that even the versions that handle images do it though an intermediate of textual labels.

Note that this isn't an inherent characteristic of ChatGPT, it's a developmental artifact. Well, and the fact that that's what most of the training data is.

OTOH, I'm not sure that a tag based approach to visual images is fully general. It seems like it ought to be, but that's like saying a neural net is running on a Turing machine...that's a way of doing a mapping, but the performance characteristics are a lot different.

519:

The Chinese government is HUGE. Of course there is going to be inefficiency and incompetence and CYA. And long chains of communication between departments. Even if you assume 99% of the bureaucrats are honest and dedicated and forthright (HAH! I expect it's closer to 80%) you're going to have a lot of that going on. I'm firmly convinced that's why they originally hushed up COVID, until it got too big to deny.

520:

517 - As mentioned upthread, if a NATO AIM (any in-service version) is launched from an aeroplane at 50_000 feet, it will achieve an altitude of over 70_000 feet unless fired "look down, shoot down" so a late Sidewinder hitting a target at 64_000 feet is "not unusual".

521:

This is probably old news to people, but it appears that someone has worked out a way to steal cryptocurrency funds with the aid of a photograph.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/08/webaverse_crypto_stolen/

522:

@284: my father-in-law died in hospital one evening recently. The next morning one of his daughters said that he wanted to have his brain donated for research. I made a couple of phone calls and located the appropriate charity, which was called something like the Brain Bank. Some documents were emailed, signed, and returned, and the appropriate people made arrangements for his corpse to be collected from the mortuary, taken to a hospital with the necessary specialist equipment, and then the remains sent to the undertaker. All within 48 hour of his death (the limit) and all free of charge to us. The rest of him was cremated at a service a few weeks later.

523:

A scenario that seems possible: The balloon was a legitimate telecom relay platform with a failed ballast control that drifted into the jet stream. Someone decided rather than shoot it down, see what traffic it could pick up on it's journey, than classified the change of plan, by the time the rest of the establishment noticed, cooler heads had little choice but to hope no one noticed.

524:

Yes, those little squared off wiggles can be quite exciting at times. Especially if the farm is still farming and the road has a layer of geologically significant shit deposits. Also my first encounter was as a young aspiring radio control model flyer, carrying my precious gear in a bag with one hand whilst cycling down a steep hill in Kimmeridge. Nobody will have much difficulty in imagining the scenario: kid on bicycle barely under control, gaining speed, sudden appearance of sharp right bend, unexpected flight of model and bicycle and teenager. That was the only time that plane made a loop. I had serious damage to my shoulder and was rescued by a school teacher who got me to hospital. Still know them 50 years later.

525:

A scenario that seems possible ...

Maybe. But apparently this is balloon #5. There is/was one crossing the northern part of South America at the same time. Plus now that they know what it looks like a review of satellite intel shows at least 3 previous balloons over some part of the US over the last few years.

526:

Yes, those little squared off wiggles can be quite exciting at times.

While not nearly as ancient we have interesting roads like that. Especially in the areas settled before the area north of the Ohio river. Property lines meander a bit and the roads follow the lines from 200+ years ago. Or where the creek was. Or ...

Growing up, the parents in the know teach their kids to pay attention to the power poles as you go over small hills. If they veer off the road likely does also. At night the lines on the poles will reflect on coming headlights to let you know someone else is coming. Less now than when I was growing up but many of these roads don't have a center line. Which I also understand is common in rural UK.

The point about the Ohio River is the Northwest Territories Act or some similar named thing deeded land in squares. So the following the creek bed mostly went away. But surveying methods being what they were back then, every now and then you'll drive a straight road for 10 miles then it jogs 10' to 20' to the left or right to follow the old land borders.

I'll defer the discussion to another day as to why the government thought it was OK to give the land settled by the natives to the new colonists.

Also when the Act was done by Congress, the lands north of the Ohio WERE the north west of the US.

527:

Merely suggesting.

528:

"so a late Sidewinder hitting a target at 64_000 feet is 'not unusual'"

Er, no, it isn't. Did someone suggest otherwise?

Anyway, the F-22 launched the AIM-9X at 58,000 feet, so 6,000 feet up doesn't seem much of a stretch.

529:

JohnS @450 asks how u.s. national debt got to 32 trillion. That's how much Fed. Gov't operating expense exceeded tax collection over the decades, but they could always in principle have hiked tax on the uber-wealthy and just paid for stuff outright as they went along. Naturally that would have been unpopular for Reasons such as campaign contributions, so they left ownership of all that cash with the ubers, who turned it over to the Feds anyway in the form of never ending, constantly rolled over loans, reloans and re-re-loans.

They can't ever stop lending or the value of trillions in government paper that they already hold will be less than toilet paper real quick. If say, maybe for political leverage the GOP persuaded its adherents to boycott treasury bonds, then the Feds would have to pay higher interest to attract replacement lenders from around the world; rates would be forced up and all the older existing debt instruments at the old lower rates look like chopped liver by comparison, dropping in tradable value, usually by about ten percent for every one percent the rate goes up. So current status quo means a workable solution has been found, and will continue to serve its purpose with all sides reasonably okay with it being like that.

If the whole arrangement ever does start to come unravelled they can always raise taxes on billionaires, print more money or tell seniors they're on their own. Since the AARP is seen as the fatal third rail of doom in elections, it probably won't be Social Security cuts. Money printing, maybe? Under whatever name, this tends to be inflationary, which raises govt debt servicing costs even higher, so they'd likely try to avoid such a useless non-remedy.

Tax confiscation of uber-wealth seems like a real possibility until you realize billionaires are better off playing along with the Feds same as they always have. That way they keep nominal title to vast imaginary oceans of money, usable as collateral to float short term loans for luxury items, getting by day to day off the government dime of interest payments on their US bond portfolios. Not like they'd ever spend a tiny fraction of all that principal, so what's the difference. Somebody's got to spend it to boost demand and stimulate economic activity, why not just keep transferring it to those who use it for living expense. Losing economic stimulus would mean real estate prices drop, and there goes the other half of all your big fortunes.

No reason global military spending couldn't trend downwards over time, either, freeing up funds to pay off national debt. If China, Russia and Iran decide to focus more on benefits for citizens instead of "defense", then the U.S. would eventually start converting swords into plough shares too. Yeah that could happen, at least for an alternate reality somewhere in the multiverse.

So if billionaires feel penned in, limited by constraints of the system, it's because they are, welcome to the human race. Helps explain where all that enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies came from, they thought they could short-circuit the whole deal by stockpiling wealth where it's out of reach. Nuh-uh, guess again.

530:

Troutwaxer replied on February 8, 2023 at 01:18 in #506:

"That 'paper' looks TERF-y as all getout..."

"TERF-y" as in Trans Excluding Radical Feminist or "TURF-y" as in astroturfy?

When I encounter stories with 'Trans' in quotes leading the headline, I smell TERF: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/man-arrested-over-missing-scots-29159271

531:

Re: 'Brain Bank'

Condolences on your father-in-law's passing.

The only two Brain Banks I've heard of in NAm are the Douglas (McGill) and McLean (Harvard) and both have online info on how to donate. (Official names provided below.)

When I clicked on the Douglas YT channel to see whether their Brain Bank director had any videos I found the below. Very apt for this blog topic/thread. (Nice to get some real up-to-date science. I'll watch it later today - it's pretty long 1:18:48 - and was posted only nine days ago.)

'How Multi-Brain Neuroscience can inform Artificial Intelligence and Computational Psychiatry'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpvxwZe68kQ

Douglas Bell Canada Brain Bank

Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (HBTRC)

I've heard that Leeds (UK) also has a brain tissue repository but have no idea how it's organized/structured.

532:

Kardashev @ 517:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-operation-to-down-chinas-spy-balloon-in-moment-by-moment-audio

Radio conversations between the F-22s and a NORAD ground controller give the altitude of the balloon as 64,000 feet.

I hope they got some better images of it before they shot it down and I hope they will release some of better images soon.

533:

I'm sure, but nobody would be able to hear it. Double bass players bring amps to jazz gigs.

534:

Jazz gigs. With electric amplification. You've never sat around at a con in a function room, or, for that matter, in someome's living room.

535:

Saw this one cross my newsfeed, and thought some here might find it of interest:

A drug widely used to treat COVID-19 might be spurring the evolution of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The drug, molnupiravir, works by introducing a flurry of mutations to the viral genome; this helps to clear infections. But a study of more than 13 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences has uncovered sequences that bear molnupiravir’s fingerprints. The study’s authors say the results suggest that molnupiravir treatment has sparked the evolution of viral lineages carrying numerous mutations that, in at least some cases, have the capacity to spread to other individuals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00347-z

Usual caveats: prepress, not peer-reviewed, etc.

536:

What annoys me is that the only actual study I can find on wind farm energy consumption is a copy on an anti-wind site of a study that looked at a university windmill built for educational purposes. I can't find the actual study anywhere reputable though, just references to it or other copies but with changes to make it look worse. Sigh.

While that was more productive than the one at my university (IIRC ~10km on a 10m tower in a carpark with wind shadow from 3 sides) that's not much to do with actual wind farms.

https://energycentral.com/c/ec/examples-wind-power-learn

So I'm prepared to believe that wind farms do use energy to rotate the nacelle and de-ice etc, I can't find the actual numbers and I'm grumpy about that.

537:

Also, for all the usual suspects here, Dark Emu turned 25 recently (and is now a fully formed adult?)

https://theconversation.com/dark-emu-has-sold-over-250-000-copies-but-its-value-cant-be-measured-in-money-alone-195934

We tracked the impact of the original edition of Dark Emu over five years, from 2014 to 2019, to look at how it contributed to (or otherwise altered) six categories of value, or “capital”. They were: financial (the primary way our culture measures a book’s success), but also social, human, intellectual, manufactured and natural.

Plus this fun note:
[far right] Social commentator Andrew Bolt, for example, published several columns on Dark Emu in the Herald Sun during 2018-19. ... Russell Marks links the extraordinary sales success of Dark Emu in 2019 directly to the increase in public debate fuelled by Bolt.

😂

538:

In the days when I lived in Silicon Valley we’d have pretty regular housefilks between cons. I remember them as typically 30 or more people, food, drink, singing and generally fun. We would normally have folk like Kathy Mar, Seanan McGuire, Jef & Myah Bonhoeffer, Kanefsky, Jordin Kare, well, lots of well known filkers. Much joy, and almost the only thing I miss.

539:

Neither have you; filk is generally barred except for designated filk rooms, in designated slots.

540:

I think the comment relates to the journal rather than the specific article. Along the lines of saying that this is a medium where bad-faith articles are known, so this article might be one.

541:

(and is now a fully formed adult?)

I'm not sure where the 25 came from, though I suppose it seems like it's been through 25 years worth of culture wars. OTOH I've seen a few people comment (elsewhere) that the reason it's so terrible 48-year-old Di Caprio is dating a 19-year-old model is that brain development isn't complete till age 25, a rationale that I'm unconvinced stands up to much scrutiny even if it's a bit creepy anyway.

542:

even if it's a bit creepy anyway.

Creepy is divorcing your wife of many years and then marrying your adopted daughter.

543:

"Twitter outage sees users told they are over daily tweet limit" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64577731

"Twitter: Number of staff suing goes up daily - lawyer" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64512053

544:

My go-to reference for this is the knowledge that Sir Roderick Stewart was 60 years old when his then-34-year-old 3rd wife gave birth to their first, his seventh, child in 2005. They apparently met when "he agreed to let her take photos of him on tour". This fails the "half your age plus 7" creepiness threshold that some people talk about, although they would have reached compliance with that rule by the time Sir Roderick turned 70, but it beats the example you are referring to a bit, in strictly numeric terms.

545:

Sorry, that is not in the article, apparently I had a brain fart.

The 25 years old thing is normally for important decisions, it's not just who you date. It's fairly common for trust fund kids not to get too much money until then, for example.

The half+7 thing seems weird to me. People and relationships vary too much for rules like that to be more than a vague hint (like the "road user suggestions" that most countries have... you can be as formal as you like but people are still going to ignore them)

546:

As in Trans Excluding Road Fanatics?

547:

Okay, please drop this topic right now. You know where it goes: nowhere good, right?

548:

OK, but I don't know. I don't even know which topic to which you refer.

My point was that 'trans' in headlines is used with other meanings in the USA (or at least was when I lived there) - and the reference was to the politics of public transport.

549:

Well, I might be just a little bit gun-shy/twitchy about transphobia right now -- it being the focus of a major, orchestrated, international right-wing pogrom directed against anyone who doesn't conform to conservative gender stereotypes. Because, you know, that's so much more important and demanding of immediate attention than worrying about climate change (and asking how BP made £28Bn in profits in 2022) ...

550:

The (Self-styled) conservatives I'm familiar with must distract the voters, usually with matters that are no one's business, because their core issues, primarily maximizing profit, would make them unelectable. in short, I believe they're doing it for the money.

551:

(and asking how BP made £28Bn in profits in 2022)

Gas mostly. Someone (no names, no pack drill) turned off the taps reducing the total planetary gas supply and the price for LPG and natural gas went way up as customers outbid each other to buy what gas was available rather than do without. BP and the other energy providers earned less profits in 2020 and 2021 when demand for fossil fuels was lower due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

552:

but it beats the example you are referring to a bit, in strictly numeric terms.

Sure. But marrying a daughter you RAISED in your household? Adopted or not.

553:

Nojay ( & others )
Gas prices ... madam was talking to one of her industrial clients this morning, who use a lot of gas in heavy manufacturing/fabrication.
She said that the forward industrial price for gas has fallen below the level it was on 23rd February last year.
I wonder how long it will take "Centrica" & all the other profiteers to drop their prices to the consumer, eh?

554:

I wonder how long it will take "Centrica" & all the other profiteers to drop their prices to the consumer, eh?

Every time the world price of oil rises, we are hit with an immediate price of petrol at the pumps. When the world price of oil falls, it takes quite a long time for the price of petrol to fall.

Both of these events are explained (by the experts quoted by business reporters) as being perfectly logical business decisions having absolutely nothing to do with the increased profits booked by energy companies.

Either the experts and/or reporters are idiots, or they think we are.

555:

Sorry, I've been in fandom long enough that I remember before there were filk rooms, and people sang in the con suite.

I've also not seen cons explicitly ban filking anywhere but in the filk room.

556:

Re: 'When the world price of oil falls, it takes quite a long time for the price of petrol to fall.'

Wonder if the US & other Gov'ts are going to top up their reserves any time soon.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_ending_stocks_of_crude_oil_in_the_strategic_petroleum_reserve#:~:text=Basic%20Info,37.10%25%20from%20one%20year%20ago.

Charlie@547:

I was kinda waiting for GB to jump in, it's been a while since their last Statler & Waldorf riff. :)

557:

The GOP is trying to prevent Biden from topping off the stratigic petroleum reserve.

558:

RE: military balloons in general.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-soviets-built-bespoke-balloon-killer-planes-during-the-cold-war

Interesting article on Russia's somewhat successful efforts to build planes that could shoot down American espionage balloons from the 1950s until 2006. The two interesting takeaways are:

  • Look at the weird Russian planes. And anti-balloon flying lasers, even.
  • B. More generally, China's not a unique offender in balloonspace, and the US has been intermittently (?) using surveillance balloons since the Civil War. One particula operation was "Project Genetrix" from the 1950s, which launched balloons manufactured by General Mills (!) to spy on the Soviets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Genetrix ). There was also Project Mogul, of Roswell Incident fame.

    Interestingly, I'm having trouble finding a US military command that normally flies balloons. Is my google-fu that weak today? That makes me wonder: is surveillance ballooning one of those fads that comes and goes, with the military piggybacking onto whatever civilian ballooning is doing? Or is there a quiet USAF command out there that flies balloons for surveillance and other purposes, perhaps sheltering under the Big Black wings of the NRO?

    Fun thoughts. Surveillance balloons are faddish systems that come and go, apparently. They're a pain to fly in various ways, but they're cheap, hard to spot if they're not being searched for, and troublesome to shoot down, especially if they get closer to 100 km altitude rather than 60 km.

    559:

    Pharaoh's Dream -- the oil and gas production businesses have been through a "seven lean years" period with reduced demand for their product during the pandemic, coming out of that it's their "seven fat years" so to speak and yes I do realise that it's the wrong way round but...

    Prices for gas and oil are dependent on a lot of things, including forward and future pricing i.e. buying the right to purchase so much gas at a given price two years from now or whatever. There are also spot prices where the price paid is what the ticker says it is on any given day. Unfortunately some spot price gas purchasers sell gas to individual consumers promising cheap gas bills and often delivering those lower prices when the world situation is normal. The problem is when the ticker price of gas spikes tenfold and more as it did last year. Those consumers are screwed because their bills just went up through the roof. The customers who had forward contracts with BP et al got their gas at the agreed price which was set a year and more before Comrade Putin's Wild Ride kicked off.

    Something like that happened in Texas a few years ago when the electrical grid broke down during uncommonly cold weather. A lot of individual homeowners etc. were buying electricity from a bunch of spreadsheet middlemen at the spot price plus a little commission, paying a few cents per kWh for their AC and hot tub. Then the spot price went to three hundred bucks a kWh. Oops.

    560:

    Interestingly, I'm having trouble finding a US military command that normally flies balloons.

    There are plenty of press reports about US military projects involving free-flying and aerostat balloons intended for surveillance and intelligence gathering.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest

    That's dated from 2019 and it describes something very similar to the claims of the Chinese balloon's capabilities, including SA radar tracking of moving vehicles, persistent loitering, solar panels etc. It's American so that makes it okay, I suppose.

    Tethered aerostat ballons were commonly used by NATO forces in Afghanistan to keep an eye on the conquered population of Kabul and elsewhere.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJsrDv_QX0s

    561:

    timrowledge @ 538:

    In the days when I lived in Silicon Valley we’d have pretty regular housefilks between cons. I remember them as typically 30 or more people, food, drink, singing and generally fun. We would normally have folk like Kathy Mar, Seanan McGuire, Jef & Myah Bonhoeffer, Kanefsky, Jordin Kare, well, lots of well known filkers. Much joy, and almost the only thing I miss.

    I used to "run" (for want of a better word) a weekly folk music circle at a local coffee house. I'd go in on Tuesday nights about an hour before our appointed time, have a bite of supper and when the time came move the chairs into a circle. Our basis was a song-book Rise Up Singing, but that was only the beginning, not the limit. One person at random would pick a song from the book (or pass out a cut sheet with words & chords) and we'd all play & sing it and then the next person to the left or right (depending on my whimsy) would pick a song and off we'd go around the circle.

    I also kept an email list for the group so if any of the "members" wanted to share something with the rest they could send it to me & I'd send it out.

    I only had two rules:
    1• If you come you have to be part of the circle. We're not here to entertain. If you CAN'T play or sing, you can clap your hands & stomp your feet. But you got to join in [so the coffee shop doesn't have to pay BMI/ASCAP performance royalties]
    2• You got to patronize the establishment. They got to pay for the lights and the heat and the rent, so it's only fair if we're using their space that we contribute something to keep them in business.

    ... and not quite a rule, just a strong suggestion - when your turn comes around PICK A SONG YOU KNOW - at least well enough to guide the rest of us if we've never heard of it before.

    We didn't have anyone famous (or semi-famous) in our group, but one of our members played with Pete Seeger back in college (in the 50s)

    We got shut down the first week of the nationwide Covid19 lockdown. Then the owner died (cancer, not covid) and his wife sold the business. The new owner isn't interested in being open in the evenings so we lost our venue (and haven't found another).

    It's been almost 3 years & I really miss it. I'm not really good at social interaction & that circle gave me a setting to get out of the house and mix with other people.

    562:

    Re: '... with the military piggybacking onto whatever civilian ballooning is doing?'

    Good weekend to find out. The New Mexico Balloon Festival (Albuquerque) has a 2-day event this weekend. There's a further two events slated for later this year.

    Maybe more tourists will show up just to see for themselves what civilian balloons can do.

    563:

    People and relationships vary too much for rules like that to be more than a vague hint (like the "road user suggestions" that most countries have

    Yeah I think to me it works more as an observation than a proposed rule. I first encountered in in a Nick Earls novel, where a character makes it as an observation and draws a non-obvious conclusion from it, but it's turned up here and there over the years and perhaps put forward as a rule of thumb, as you say a sort of guideline. It's probably more interesting as an observation though. And I think Rod Stewart is a counterexample, not one that breaks it exactly but which shows the parameters are more malleable in various contexts than you might expect, especially if you treat it as a rule.

    I the Woody Allen example is quite different, for the reasons DavidL says. But that means it really doesn't play in the space of this observation or rule as such.

    The "25 is the point of complete brain development" argument is different too, because it's absolute rather than relative. I wonder how people making that argument consider relationships between people who are both between the ages of 14 (where the "half+7" observation kicks in) and 25, whether they can't "really" entail consent and should be forbidden? I'm a bit wary of any argument that leads to saying "because you can't explicitly consent to something in a way that is meaningful to me, you can't have that something", whatever "something" is, it doesn't have to be what it's usually referring to in this theme, it could just be ice cream. To me that breaks "minimise suffering" or "maximise happiness", but the problem is the "meaningful to me" bit, not the need for consent (I can see that being twisted into something horribly without such a caveat).

    564:

    I'm a bit wary of any argument that leads to saying "because you can't explicitly consent to something in a way that is meaningful to me, you can't have that something"

    Cliche example: two people have each voluntarily become inebriated. Who is raped if they have sex, and by whom? Challenge: stop drunk people having sex.

    This is where the whole idea of a legal system struggles. If you have fixed rules people suffer from them, but if you have extensive discretion people suffer from random decisions (prejudices flourish). Add that we take both time and money from people as punishment (jail, fines) and finding a middle ground that is swift, fair, cheap, and just is very hard. Especially when dealing with children - doubling their age while the legal system grinds away means they've spent half their life in limbo.

    Two obviously problematic areas wrt to age: contracts and sex.

    Abusive parents often steal from their under-18 children. "Age of consent" to contracts etc needs to be more flexible in many cases, but at the same time the under-25 problem also applies.

    For relationships, especially sexual, my inclination is that the +-2 years idea has a lot of merit for the under-25's. I've been in a relationship that broke both that and 1/2+7 and I'm still kind of on the fence about it. It worked reasonably well, but mostly because I'm quite immature and she was quite experienced.

    I think that's where Rod Stewart or Rupert Murdoch vs Woody Allen or Andrew Windsor difference also comes in - the sort of early-20's person who thinks a relationship with a rich and famous geriatric is a good idea is by and large going to be quite cynical even if they're not consciously a sex worker. Whereas someone who explicitly wants to take advantage is looking for a very different younger person.

    Codifying that is tricky, especially when what leads to "young, experienced and cynical" is often abuse. Sometimes not abuse in the eyes of the young person who's grown up with it, though. I'm quite prepared to believe that Soon-Yi Previn is happy with Allen and sees her relationship as unproblematic. OTOH I'm also willing to believe that an abandoned child adopted internationally probably has distorted ideas about relationships.

    Which brings in the problem of forced normalisation. As we see in Australia with the state mandating nuclear families and punishing everyone involved if children don't comply (the wholesale theft of aboriginal children). Who defines what the one true way is, and what is a reasonable response to deviations? Especially stacked deviations: black and queer, for example. Or poor and homeless.

    565:

    I think that's where Rod Stewart or Rupert Murdoch vs Woody Allen or Andrew Windsor difference also comes in

    I know almost nothing about the wives/lovers of all four; what exactly is the difference between the first two and the second two?

    566:

    Rod has a habit of marrying younger women then divorcing them and remaining on fairly good terms. Rupert Murdoch has married several times to younger women, but they were all adults when he married them.

    By contrast Woody Allen married the adopted child of his ex-wife and has faced allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour, while Prince Andrew is reportedly alleged to have settled out of court claims that he had nonconsensual sex with at least one very young woman. British libel law makes it risky to discuss the latter, but OTOH he is also a "retired royal" on account of being suddenly unpopular.

    567:

    There are plenty of press reports about US military projects involving free-flying and aerostat balloons intended for surveillance and intelligence gathering.

    *https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest*

    Thanks for the link! Gorgon Stare? Someone likes the Laundry, perhaps?

    This is pretty much what I'm talking about. There doesn't seem to be a dedicated, public balloon corps in the US military or in the Chinese military, with some caveats. In your article and in NY Times press on the shot-down balloon, the balloons seem to have been flown by commercial contractors to their militaries. This contrasts with the pre-airplane US Army Air Corps, which flew surveillance/spotting balloons and kites for the US Army, and had its own school to teach these arts.

    The caveats: if there are military balloon handlers, they probably handle weather balloons and are officially meteorologists. It would be entirely possible to make up a aerostatic surveillance unit that included officially-meteorological balloon riggers, intelligence operators, sensor engineers, and so forth. I'm just not finding evidence that such a unit officially exists (not that I'm looking very hard, tbh).

    If there are US Black Balloon strategic reconnaissance units, while they may be housed at the National Reconnaissance Office, it seems somewhat more likely that they're housed at the National Geospace Intelligence Agency of the DoD, this from looking at the types of work the NGA publicly does. Or maybe they're in both. The interesting thing to me is that the satellite-centric NRO has strong ties to the USAF and now the USSF, while the NGA mostly seems to be headed mostly by retired admirals, suggesting a stronger Navy tie. If there's some sort of inter-service rivalry, I suppose it's conceivable that both the NRO and NGA field covert surveillance balloon units, staffed by servicemembers of their respective forces.

    More likely, the various regional commands cook up balloon Projects, like MOGUL, and hire cleared civilian contractors to operate the vehicles. This is what I meant by piggybacking on public balloons. Not hot air, but stratospheric specialists, possibly like JP Aerospace.

    Changing the subject slightly, there's likely a correlation between upticks in surveillance balloon operations and UFO reports. Therefore, it's possible that upticks in governmental interest in UFO/UAP/UFS (unknown flying stuff) is simply a crowdsourcing surveillance effort. If the spooks are aware that, say, China's launching balloons, allied Congresscritters and thinky military leaders might suddenly stoke government interest in UAPs to get more eyes on the sky, especially if the intelligence community suspects some balloons are going undetected.

    If this connection exists, is there then a further correlation between cyclic fads for surveillance balloons among the Great Powers, UFO interest, and the popularity of science fiction stories? Inquiring minds want to know.

    568:

    This might be of interest: a report on the 1998 Canadian balloon that we lost control of. Looks like it entered Russian airspace.

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3137/ao.430401

    569:

    The Daily Show "Majorie Taylor Greene aka Capitol Storming Barbie" 🤣

    Anyway, apparently a lot of Trump supporters think he's president now. Which means he's in his second term. Therefore can't run again... so how can they support his current campaign to be the Republican candidate? Assuming they're American Patriots like they say?

    570:

    Do you think that the MAGAs think that the constitution is a bar to anybody? At least, anybody important?

    571:

    I guess the attempted coup says nope, there's a hard line between law-abiding and Trump supporters.

    572:

    Interviewer to young female - "So tell me Ms Golddiggah, what first attracted you to geriatric multi-billionaire Hector MacGlumpher?"

    I hope that draws a line under that one Charlie?

    573:

    This might be of interest: a report on the 1998 Canadian balloon that we lost control of. Looks like it entered Russian airspace.

    Thanks!

    574:

    The caveats: if there are military balloon handlers, they probably handle weather balloons and are officially meteorologists.

    One of my best friends (Charlie knows who) is the daughter of a US Air Force veterinarian. The Navy definitely has meteorologists.

    It's MOS 6467 for the meteorology/oceanography officers; I haven't bothered to poke at how many subdivisions of weather grunt they might have.

    575:

    A mutual love for soup?

    https://youtu.be/3uAh-opNpDg

    Link is to a classic comedic bit with Jennifer Coolidge from the movie 'Best in Show'.

    576:

    "Butch has two mommies!"

    577:

    Gorgon Stare? Someone likes the Laundry, perhaps?

    It would be a remarkable co-incidence otherwise. I mean, I suppose there are only so many Greek legends about optics, and it would be bound to come up eventually, but still.

    578:

    JReynolds
    the MAGAs think - well that's an impossible contradiction, right there ....

    Totally off-topic
    My wonderphone { Cosmo Communicator } is electronically falling apart & needs repair/lurve ...
    In the meantime, I want a cheap, basic phone to tide me over, simples, right?
    Wrong
    As far as I can see from a very quick skim, all phones advertised are "rented" - you can get a PAYG sim-only contract for use, but on what phone? They must be out there, somewhere,but it's remarkably stupid & counterproductive.
    I'll have to try the actual shop, later today.

    579:

    If there are US Black Balloon strategic reconnaissance units

    Surely, the optimal colour for a spy balloon is sky blue?

    580:

    "Anyway, apparently a lot of Trump supporters think he's president now. Which means he's in his second term. Therefore can't run again... so how can they support his current campaign to be the Republican candidate? Assuming they're American Patriots like they say?"

    Somebody once said that 'fascists use words like bricks, until they can use actual bricks'. Their word means nothing.

    In Arizona, the speaker of the House demanded multiple special recounts of the presidential election, handing the ballots over to a third-party (with no experience handling actual ballots) and breaking the chain of custody.

    But the ballots which put her and all of the other Republicans into office were beyond question.

    581:

    Replying to self @ 578 ...
    Rant ON
    It's very difficult to BUY a phone ... I went into "EE" (my network provider) ...
    "We don't sell phones any more, only contracts" { And, actually SIM-only, but you have to look to find that out! }
    Me: "Easy, I get a contract & then terminate it when I get my good phone back" Them: "No, it's for a minimum of 24 months" Me: "Stuff your business moidel, I'm off!" RANT OFF
    W.T.F?
    I presume vast numbers of people are either too stupid, ignorant or lazy sp that they fall for this giant confidence trick?

    Barry
    There you go again, with a contradictory statement: a lot of Trump supporters think - err .. no.

    582:

    All but one of my recent phones came refurbished via ebay, the one that didn't was from Amazon. Phone shops have to make their site rental and contribution to their network's TV advertising budget so tend to be hugely overpriced.

    583:

    I bought mine new, and I avoid Amazon and Ebay if at all possible - it's not hard. The tricky thing was getting a SIM card with decent conditions - mine is ASDA which isn't bad.

    584:

    I presume vast numbers of people are either too stupid, ignorant or lazy sp that they fall for this giant confidence trick?

    I have nothing at all useful to tell you about the mobile phone business in the UK.

    But I'm willing to believe that large corporations are stupid, greedy, and unhelpful. It's also been shown that a lot of people are stupid, clueless, or stupid and clueless - look at the Brexit vote.

    585:

    Greg: I have a not-in-use Cosmo gathering dust. Drop me (or Feorag) an email if you want it.

    586:

    I know how people normally feel about MZN, but I got a basic Nokia (no data capability, no camera) there for £15 UK. I stuck the SIM from my broken Motorola in in and it worked.

    587:

    Way late, but I did want to make two points, Charlie.

    First, yay for someone actually making a Laundry wiki (although I for one could do without the dark-blue-on-black design choice; didn't they live through the web in the '90s?). It never occurred to me to start such a thing.

    Secondly, dang. A multi-novel series and it's at only 132 pages? These are not pages packed with details and up to date information, either. (The Wapsi Square webcomic wiki fizzled out at around 30 pages, but we made some questionable design choices and then got distracted. But what we got was pretty good.) I'd say that you need better wiki writers, but I know where that goes and I'm already busy in other wikis.

    588:

    You are aware that Greg's daily driver was a Cosmo Communicator, right? So, basically a full-blown PDA with a QWERTY keyboard?

    589:

    "We don't sell phones any more, only contracts"

    Welcome to the US 10 years ago. I have memories of people in Europe telling us this was nuts and things were much better there. I guess things have changed.

    Anyway, in the US, if you want (and I know Greg doesn't) an iPhone you can buy one from Apple unlocked or tied to a carrier plan. And for Android you can buy one from dozens of independent shops around here and nation wide. And most stores that sell electronics will sell you both carrier locked and unlocked iPhones and Android phones.

    My neighbor just bought an Android phone for his visits to the UK which can handle 2 SIMs at once. He goes for family visits for a week or months at a time and wants to have a local number at each end. Fully carrier unlocked.

    And we have multiple online places like gazelle.com that buy and sell used phones. gazelle.com gets great ratings from all reviews. They sell carrier locked and unlocked phones.

    Me, I bought my most recent phone last October carrier locked because in doing that they gave me $900 in trade in credit for a $150 (if that) used phone. The numbers made sense and I have no plans to change carriers. And even if I do I just have to pay back the trade in credit.

    590:

    Greg's requirement @578 was for "a cheap, basic phone to tide me over". If he doesn't want to use Amazon or Ebay etc. then in the high-street (or rather retail-park, these days) department, Currys/PCWorld offer a variety of SIM-free phones starting at about £20. (If you want to buy, not rent, a phone, go to a phone retailer, not a network provider :-)

    And I second the recommendation of ASDA. A £5 monthly bundle, no contract, gives me unlimited calls and texts and far more data than I need. Customer service isn't bad: once you can find your way through the menus to talk to a human, they are understandable and helpful: "is there anything else I can help you with?".

    591:

    You are aware that Greg's daily driver was a Cosmo Communicator, right? So, basically a full-blown PDA with a QWERTY keyboard?

    Maybe I shouldn't have refreshed my memory on the Cosmo Communicator; now I want one... :-)

    592:

    It's been superseded by the (finally shipped) Astro Slide (no, really, that is it's name :) which is why my old Cosmo is gathering dust.

    593:

    Are there places like gazelle.com in the UK?

    594:

    Yup. Mine, too. I needed Bluetooth, to attach my hearing aids, so it was pricier. I could then hear, but the process was SO contorted and the disconnections SO frequent that I gave up on that. I probably ordered it online from Currys :-)

    595:

    Cash Converters is a British high-street pawn store chain that also purchases and resells items like phones, laptops and other stuff. Not as dodgy as it is often given credit for but it's a rather depressing place to shop in. Its nickname "Chav Converters" may give you a clue.

    Slightly (but only slightly) more upmarket is CEX or Computer Exchange which concentrates on tech like phones but also computer games, PC parts and the like. They also have high street stores.

    Both chains have an online presence for buying and selling stuff. I've used the CEX website a few times for specific computer items but a lot of their offerings are mobile phones, usually older high-end models that are out-of-contract or have been replaced by their owners with the newest Shiny!

    596:

    Richard H
    Thanks for that - I have just ( About half an hour ago ) found that out! { GRIN }

    Charlie - I will be in touch - thanks a bunch.
    But I still need to get a reply from Cosmo, about refresh/repairing my present one ... I sent them an email last night.

    597:

    since we've blown past comment 300...

    off-off-topic bit of really bad-bad-bad news... how's this for a bit of "twenty minutes into the future" to add to your novels?

    not limited to US but will affect the world given how smoke and ash particulants ignore political borders...

    there's about 50,000,000-plus tons[2] of dead trees [1] currently drying towards tinder status in California... "killed by the effects of the state’s prolonged drought in its overgrown forests, insect outbreaks and disease"... spanning nearly 2.6 million acres (4,062 SQ miles; 1,052,000 hectares)

    no matter how fast they are cut not all will be removed before the start of the peak of this year's 'fire season' (fuck you very much slow moving bureaucrats and shortsighted politicians) so get ready to see lurid redden sunsets and watch old folks wheeze as the ashes scatter ever further... which will become a new-ish addendum to nightly news as weather reporters cheery mention tomorrow's lighter than expected ash-fall and it being safe enough to let your children play outside without their custom colorized 'n trademarked (Disney, Transformers, Harry Potter) air filter masks

    which will immediately be followed by a WalMart (or Amazon or both) commercial about replacement filter plugs for Disney-branded masks marked down 20% for the Fourth of July sales event...

    [1] https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/10/us/california-drought-millions-trees-dead

    [2] https://i0.wp.com/thetimberlandinvestor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/tree-weight.png?resize=456%2C455&ssl=1

    598:

    Don’t be silly Howard -you can’t have kids wearing masks. Apparently it’s wrong to “hide their beautiful smiles”. I suppose the embalmer can ensure a suitable rictus for the viewing.

    599:

    Greg, a SIM-only contract gets you the itty-bitty chip thingy (plus associated network account with defined call rates, X free SMS and Y GB of data per month) that you put in a phone to tell the network that this phone is Greg's phone and any calls, texts, data requests etc this phone makes should be applied to Greg's account.

    Buy an unlocked burner phone for %SMALL quid, put the SIM in and use until you get the longer term phone, then pop the SIM out of the burner and transfer it to your new phone. Job done.

    Caveat #1: you may already be on a SIM-only contract with your old phone. Check that before starting up a new contract.

    Caveat #2: The term of art you need for getting the phone(s) is 'unlocked', which means you can put any SIM in it and the phone will work. Locked phones are tied to a particular network (or even a specific contract) in firmware. They can be unlocked fairly easily but why invite the hassle?

    Caveat #3: Annoyingly there are three sizes of SIM (standard, micro- and nano-) and different phones use different sizes. Your SIM comes to you as a Standard, with weakened points that permit you to break it out of it's transport card at the desired size for your phone; this means you can transfer between equal sized devices easily, natch (standard to standard say) or downsize your SIM with a bit of care to break the SIM down to the new smaller size when you move it to the new phone (fiddly but doable), but you can't upsize a SIM and go from nano- to a micro-, or micro- to Standard. If that happens you need to ask for a new SIM to be issued for your contract, which is a minor ball-ache, and may incur a small charge, but is an otherwise routine operation.

    600:

    Upward adaptors for SIMs are commonly available, frequently in a little set with the pointy thing you need to eject the SIM tray when you don't have a paperclip handy.

    601:

    silburn
    IF the SIM-card will fit, that is.
    I remember that I had to break off one end of the Simcard { At a specified, mark-line } to get it into the current phone.
    I've still got a "spare" (??) microSD card, which I have never fitted, for the same phone ... um, err ...

    1: And yes, I'm on a SIM-only contract - #2: & since the present phone was purchased from the manufacturer/distributor it is probably "unlocked" - unless the SIMcard locks me to one provider - I have no idea as to that. #3: - see above - I think I'm on micro.
    602:

    you can’t have kids wearing masks

    "Masks are unnatural — if god wanted us to wear masks, we'd be born with them."

    First time I heard that I really wanted to return the speaker to the state of nature they were born in — given they were at an outdoor protest in a Canadian winter! Talk about hypocrisy…

    Speaking of hypocrisy, in my experience most of those opposed to requiring masks are more than willing to require women to wear concealing/modest clothing.

    603:

    Speaking as a Californian and a botanist...

    Yeah, it's slow, because they can actually do more harm than good if the cut too rapidly. One big problem is landslides and mudslides on freshly denuded slopes, with the slides wiping out downstream structures and sediment ending up in the reservoirs we all depend on. It's a problem that's taken a century to happen, it's been known it will happen for over 30 years, and now it's happening. If it was as easy to fix as you think it might be, it would have been fixed already.

    Adding to the mix is rebuilding, and whether the new structures will in fact withstand the next fire. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/07/06/Paradise-California-rebuilding-wildfires/8071657113824/

    604:

    Cosmo Communicator takes a nano-sim. (Source: I own one.)

    You can also cut down larger SIMs to size using a SIM-cutter -- a device like a paper hole punch with a slot you slide the larger SIM card into. Available fairly cheap on eBay, probably Amazon too.

    605:

    I used a SIM cutter once. The SIM continued to work for about a week, then expired. Also, the cutter probably costs more than you'd have to pay for a new SIM.

    606:

    No. Oh and I regard the PDA as being "something that happens to other people".

    Also, if asked about "a cheap phone" I think make and receive calls and texts; anything else (even the torch in my Nokia) is an extra.

    607:

    Check your fav live news source. The US just shot down a smaller something over Alaskan waters. It was at 40,000 ft.

    Just happened. "Something" is the state of the report at this time.

    608:

    My late ex was a naturist, She was in a long-drawn-out court case in Brevard Co, Florida, where the county was trying to enforce an anti-nudity ordinance on a national seashore (that is, the US owns it, not Florida).

    When the county had a hearing before passing the ordinance, the opponents were bringing in elderly people from assisted-living homes to testify. Even the county commissioners covered their eyes when one elderly woman said, literally, "if God meant us to run around naked, we'd have been born that way."

    609:

    Check your fav live news source. The US just shot down a smaller something over Alaskan waters. It was at 40,000 ft. Just happened. "Something" is the state of the report at this time.

    Just watched, thanks! It was described as "an object, not an aircraft," and it's possible that it was dropped onto ice, although that wasn't made clear. And it was traveling north east and was first detected "last night."

    More feed fodder to come.

    Back to the discussion of SIMs.

    610:

    Just caught a Pentagon briefing. F-22s got close over the last 1/2 day and said it wasn't a manned thing. About the size of a car. At around 40,000 feet. Decision was made to shoot it down. And it was shot down an hour or two ago. They are now working on collecting the pieces from the ocean floor.

    Lots of questions about more details. No more details given. The briefer would not even speculate the country of origin.

    611:

    "if God meant us to run around naked, we'd have been born that way."

    To me this is closely related to "the only valid Bible to study is the King James". Because there were no valid versions for the first 1500 years and everyone speaks English from the 1500s .....

    KJVO (King James Version Only) is the buzzword.

    612:

    You mean that you weren't born naked? :-)

    613:

    David L @ 589:

    "We don't sell phones any more, only contracts"

    Welcome to the US 10 years ago. I have memories of people in Europe telling us this was nuts and things were much better there. I guess things have changed.

    [...]

    And we have multiple online places like gazelle.com that buy and sell used phones. gazelle.com gets great ratings from all reviews. They sell carrier locked and unlocked phones.

    On a whim I took a look at gazelle.com, and say I wanted to replace my current 1st generation iPhone SE with one of the later 3rd Generation iPhone SE - IS there any advantage to getting an unlocked phone? I'm happy with my current carrier, Verizon (NO CONTRACT) and a "Verizon" phone is the same price as an "unlocked" phone.

    Can you have two cell phones that share the same phone number?

    614:

    She was in a long-drawn-out court case in Brevard Co, Florida, where the county was trying to enforce an anti-nudity ordinance on a national seashore (that is, the US owns it, not Florida).

    What was the outcome? Or is the court case still going on?

    615:

    okay... my $5 bet is buying the box labeled "unarmed diplomatic shuttlecraft from Vulcan starship shot down over Alaska" on the 2023 edition of bingo card for craziest-stupidest-plot-twisty headlines

    along with $20 betting the summer temperature in New York will first exceed 100F (38C) on 01-May-23... it is now 59F (15C) at 4PM in New York in February... it has not snowed more than a few sad flakes during that bizarro 'polar express' last month... I expect to be marinating in my own juices this summer as the rest of the city slowly sinks into softened asphalt

    616:

    Don't you know Jesus (tm) spoke King Janes' English?

    617:

    Can you have two cell phones that share the same phone number?

    I don't think any US based carriers support this directly. But with Apple you can have a non SIM'd phone set up on the same iCloud account as a SIM'd phone and get some functionality. But the non SIM'd one would have to be on Wi-Fi for things to happen.

    Facetime would work on both and you could likely call any other Apple users via Facetime. But this can get confusing quickly. Says he who can at times doesn't notice the call he just answer came in via Teams or Facetime and for this things don't work quite the same way as a plain phone call.

    I'd have to explore to figure it out better and sorry, but I don't have the time. And for Android I have no idea.

    618:

    No, the naturists won. And the upshot was that the county prosecutor hated her (she having the biggest mouth), and eventually charged her with terrorism, for real. Her well-paid lawyer was a con artist. Her lawyer who got her off probation said, "they charged you with this? They sent you to jail with this?!"

    619:

    IS there any advantage to getting an unlocked phone?

    If you leave the country or visit an area where your current carrier has little or no service you can put in the SIM for a carrier that works well in that spot.

    If you get totally pissed off at your carrier you can just walk.

    You might look into Mint in the US. Great for people who don't need much data or out of country features.

    620:

    Re: '... [dead trees] ... because they can actually do more harm than good if the cut too rapidly.'

    Some time ago I heard that sequoia were endangered because too many of the wild fires were being extinguished too fast over several years/decades(?). Just curious whether this is true or not and how this might figure into the upcoming wildfire season scenario.

    621:

    How is being charged with terrorism is an "upshot"? Even if she got acquitted, or were the charges dropped? You still ended up with lawyer fees.

    622:

    David L @ 610:

    Just caught a Pentagon briefing. F-22s got close over the last 1/2 day and said it wasn't a manned thing. About the size of a car. At around 40,000 feet. Decision was made to shoot it down. And it was shot down an hour or two ago. They are now working on collecting the pieces from the ocean floor.

    Lots of questions about more details. No more details given. The briefer would not even speculate the country of origin.

    I'm not really "following" the saga of the Chinese balloons, but if a headline looks interesting I click on it.

    At one of the briefings I've seen reported, someone in the Pentagon said they could have shot it down after it drifted out over the Pacific after crossing Alaska (before it started drifting over Canada & CONUS), BUT recovering it from the Gulf of Alaska would be much more difficult than recovering it from the Atlantic off of the South Carolina coast. That may be after the fact rationalization, but I think it is a valid point.

    The locations given for this one appear to be all the way up at the top of Alaska, up on the edge of the Beaufort Sea, so probably an even more difficult recovery.

    623:

    David L @ 617:

    Can you have two cell phones that share the same phone number?

    I don't think any US based carriers support this directly. But with Apple you can have a non SIM'd phone set up on the same iCloud account as a SIM'd phone and get some functionality. But the non SIM'd one would have to be on Wi-Fi for things to happen.

    Facetime would work on both and you could likely call any other Apple users via Facetime. But this can get confusing quickly. Says he who can at times doesn't notice the call he just answer came in via Teams or Facetime and for this things don't work quite the same way as a plain phone call.

    I'd have to explore to figure it out better and sorry, but I don't have the time. And for Android I have no idea.

    Ok, but the bottom line is you could NOT have a second cell phone that used the same number as your regular phone ... stashed in the trunk of your car in case you needed it for an emergency & for some reason couldn't get to your regular cell phone - like you forgot to take it off the charger before you left the house this morning?

    ... or like extension phones, your regular phone is in the bedroom and you're in the kitchen and answer the phone with the one you keep in the kitchen?

    624:

    No. A Subscriber Identity Module has a unique IMSI and related key.

    625:

    Upshot? I don't think I said that. She went to jail for 9 months, because her scumbag lawyer, who said "we're going to fight, fight, fight", in the pretrial conference came in and said, "he really hates you, you'd better plead guilty, or he'll get in to prison." We were so flabbersted that instead of firing him, she did what he said.

    626:

    Charlie
    Thanks for the correction - I thought it was "mid-sized" ....

    whitroth
    and eventually charged her with terrorism, for real. - on what { specious } grounds, perchance?
    - @ 625 - what a wanker!

    627:

    okay... qualifies for the semi-finals for the 2023 annual contest of most extremely understated understatement...

    "Even pundits traditionally close to the [Russian] government have raised doubts that scouring prisons for some of their most desperate inmates, sending them on violent missions to Ukraine and then releasing them back among the [Russian] public is sound policy."

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/10/wagner-convict-soldiers-return-from-ukraine-russia-mercenary-group

    628:

    {some think the} "only valid Bible to study is the King James"

    The Queen's English was
    Good enough for Jesus Christ
    And it's good enough for me

    The Muttonbirds, Queen's English (song, on youtube)

    629:

    An anti-masker yelled at me yesterday, saying "it must be so hot with that on" to which I removed my hat and said "much better, thank you". She was not impressed.

    Of course later I realised I should have said "I'll strip off if you will", or something about being a pasty white person so I just have to suck it up.

    630:

    Heteromeles posted agaes ago about the negative environmental impact of the semi-legal marijuana industry. Here's someone talking about how from the inside it combines all the worst factors of US jobs:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/venturebros/comments/10yw4ma/comment/j80h7i1/?context=2

    631:

    I'd say the ability to fire your phone carrier is a big plus.

    In terms of sharing a phone number over devices... I think in the Apple garden, it all Just Works so long as the devices in question are in bluetooth range or connected to the same WiFi or something along those lines. I've variously answered calls on either of my Macs, and an iPad which has its own SIM for data, and its own number for SMS, both on the same "shared" plan as my the SIM in my iPhone, but no voice service itself. Using a full-scale desktop computer as a hands-free "headset" can beat pretty much any other option.

    Anyhow the other angle is VOIP services. You can totally run Linphone or some other equivalent client software on several phones, point them to an asterisk living in a local enough cloud instance to keep latency down, and share a DID number. You don't even need a voice plan for that to work, just a VOIP provider to serve up your DID and be your gateway to the POTS network, insofar as there still is one.

    Caveat: I haven't ever got around to doing this. I did churn our last good landline number to a VOIP DID some years ago, and for a long time had an old Linksys ATA serving both a DECT system and a 50s bakelite phone with a mechanical bell. We didn't ever make outgoing landline calls through that period, but people could ring us the bell would ring and we could take calls on the DECT handset. We long ago found that to be too much bother, and these days just use the free voicemail-to-email service the VOIP provider offered. These days, if someone bothers to leave a voicemail there's about a 1 in 4 chance it's a legit caller. I still pay AUD$5 a year for the DID, and that's enough to keep it all working, even though the VOIP provider has changed hands a couple of times now. To me that's worth it to keep a pretty good landline number indefinitely.

    632:

    Here's a local article about that caesium capsule that was temporarily misplaced in WA. It may be geo-and/or-pay-walled, but if neither a perspective some might find refreshing.

    633:

    Or just a reminder that while Australia isn't regarded as corrupt it does operate as a subsidiary of mining companies. With Murdoch as the PR company.

    I still remember a traditional owner in WA saying that they just tried to preserve what they could, because their ability to live on or even near their land depended entirely on the goodwill of a couple of mining companies. Objecting to anything the companies did, no matter how trivial, would see their permission to be there revoked. "native title" claims notwithstanding, there was pastoral leases (owned by the mining companies) and mining leases on "their" land that had superior rights.

    I feel sad just writing it, but they were completely correct: there's nothing they can do to influence the mining companies, and very little to influence the course of their own lives. Well, aside from the obvious: leave their land, move to the city, assimilate with white Australia.

    Welcome to Australia, the land of the fair go.

    634:

    *Heteromeles posted agaes ago about the negative environmental impact of the semi-legal marijuana industry. Here's someone talking about how from the inside it combines all the worst factors of US jobs: https://www.reddit.com/r/venturebros/comments/10yw4ma/comment/j80h7i1/?context=2*

    Ah, thanks! I know some people for whom this might be useful...

    635:

    Moz @ 628:

    {some think the} "only valid Bible to study is the King James"

    The Queen's English was
    Good enough for Jesus Christ
    And it's good enough for me

    The Muttonbirds, Queen's English (song, on youtube)

    OTOH, the KING James version wouldn't be the QUEEN's English would it?

    636:

    Yes, what I'm thinking of as 'refreshing' is a thing others might see as "sharp relief'.

    Of course those mining companies are the current incarnations of the pure colonialism. Even the wikipedia article for Rio Tinto describes it as "Anglo-Australian" and this is really just a way of saying it's the British all the way down. British folks disowning things like Rio Tinto are funny.

    637:

    So here’s an Evil Plan. How about a (sorta) DDOS attack by balloon? Make several hundred big buggers with scary looking apparent payloads. Release almost together so they go to much the same places. This would require hundreds of sorties by expensive, not very reliable, hard to service fighters, and expenditure of many quite expensive missiles. The result would likely be the effective removal of those expensive assets from the scene for quite some time. Along with staff exhaustion, morale diminishment, rabid republicans having strokes, and who knows what else.

    638:

    So here’s an Evil Plan. How about a (sorta) DDOS attack by balloon? Make several hundred big buggers with scary looking apparent payloads. Release almost together so they go to much the same places.

    That's occurred to me, too. I can't believe it hasn't been thought of in Beijing, Moscow, or Kyiv. (Or some pub in Belfast where die-hard hotheads still gather.) Balloons aren't free but even an intercontinental range "spy balloon" costs less than the fighter plane hours required to shoot it down, and weather balloons are really cheap.

    Coincidentally, a quick check of Windfinder tells me the prevailing near-ground winds are blowing from Ukraine toward Moscow right now. How convenient for anyone who might want to send the message "We can put our shit in the skies over Moscow." Presumably the first wave would be mostly or entirely decoys, perhaps with a few intelligence gathering or propaganda broadcasting pods; it's when the defenders stop successfully intercepting the decoys that the attacker loads a wave with incendiaries.

    My guess is that the major nations haven't gotten in on this because it doesn't favor them; if you've got an air force that's taken seriously by other air forces, schemes to degrade air forces don't work in your favor.

    639:

    I'm not across all the contexts where this might matter, but I think in general it's a lot like using speedboats full of guns/explosives/exploding-haemorrhagic-fever-patients to tackle navies. It might offer something tactically at the local level, but it's not something applicable at strategic level. If an airforce can't target the launch sites for the balloons/exploding bats/lasergeese, because they are dispersed, then they still probably can target the manufacturing or distribution centres and/or the command and control... assuming enough asymmetry this is not really protected the way it would be with peer level states.

    640:

    prevailing near-ground winds are blowing from Ukraine toward Moscow right now. How convenient for anyone who might want to send the message "We can put our shit in the skies over Moscow."

    Yeah, nope.

    Nobody wants to go there. You'll notice that while Ukraine has struck deep into Russian territory they've only gone after military targets engaged in actual war-fighting against them -- for example, bomber bases.

    The metropolitan areas of Moscow and St Petersburg (700km away, which in US terms is Boston to Washington DC) have, between them, a population of around 26 million -- out of Russia's total 147 million people. The one thing guaranteed to escalate rapidly into a nuclear exchange would be an attack on those cities because those two cities are Russia: about half the national economy is concentrated there.

    It'd be like "sending a message" to the UK by attacking London or to Japan by attacking Tokyo.

    And there's no way to tell the difference between a "sending a message" balloon wave and a whole bunch of balloons carrying aerosol dispensers loaded with Novichok-B or weaponized anthrax.

    641:

    I remember when there were people in the UK who genuinely believed that the KJV was the original text, but that was half a century ago and they were all elderly and poorly educated; it was a widespread joke even then. It hasn't been the recommended translation since 1970 by any Christian churches associated with Britain that I know of. Almost all of the people who favour it (like me) do so on literary grounds :-)

    I get the impression from this thread that there are some USA churches that still adhere to it strongly. Given its origin and associations, I find that bizarre!

    The translation that was in standard use for longest in the western church was the Vulgate; I don't know about the eastern (Orthodox) church. Given that there are controversies about possible mistranslations from the Aramaic into Greek, and some of the Hebrew is less than perfectly understood after several millennia, I can't get excited about which translation is most accurate.

    642:

    Another vote for 'yeah, nope.'

    Basically, everything that strategic bombing touts is mistaken.

    1) It will weaken the enemy resolve to resist!

    It actually hardens resolve.

    2) It will destroy the enemy's ability to make equipment, the very sinews of war!

    Nope. Nazi Germany's highest war production was in 1944. It was the rapid loss of territories that throttled their war production in early 1945. As for other attempts (North Korea, North Vietnam, Afghanistan (1980 war), Ukraine), war production is (mostly) happening outside the countries, and cannot be stopped.

    3) It will prevent the enemy from getting stuff to the theatre of war!

    Once again, nope. You have to have a really powerful air superiority to make your enemy stop moving stuff during the daytime (like the Allies had over France and Germany in 1944). Even so, the Germans were able to move stuff around at night.

    Basically, everything about strategic bombing is a mirage. And even if it 100% worked (which I emphasize, it doesn't), UA doesn't have the air force to bring it to fruition.

    643:

    Nope. Nazi Germany's highest war production was in 1944. It was the rapid loss of territories that throttled their war production in early 1945.

    This one is a bit fuzzy. Germany was still making consumer goods into 43 or 44. When Speer was put in charge of all German industry he was a bit flummoxed that they hadn't forced all industry over to war time production. (Short victorious war for the home front or similar.) So wile it peaked in 44, it should have been doing much more much earlier.

    644:

    weather balloons are really cheap

    Sufficiently cheap that two of my students put a Lego man in space for fun:

    https://www.legomaninspace.com

    645:

    I get the impression from this thread that there are some USA churches that still adhere to it strongly. Given its origin and associations, I find that bizarre!

    Depending on how you use the word "church" in the US. I doubt there are any denominations of any size that adhere to KJVO. But there are likely a non trivial number of individual churches or clumps of them that still keep to that. In general it was mostly a personal thing of the elderly 30+ years ago. And most of them have died. So it is a shrinking pool. But you still get influential people who adhere to it.

    The current fad outside of the "mainline" churches is the ESV which is closely tied to the Calvanista crowd. Which is growing and closely tied to the political fealty to the Rs for the last 10 to 20 years.

    Confused. Good. It seems that's the point.

    646:

    I get the impression from this thread that there are some USA churches that still adhere to [the KJV] strongly. Given its origin and associations, I find that bizarre!

    When I was young and (more) foolish, and attending a Baptist church, they relied on the Word of God as written in the King James Version. It was more authoritative than the original texts in Greek and Latin, according to the pastors.

    Anecdote, not data, but that experience has strongly coloured my opinion of fundamentalist Christianity, not to mention the intellectual rigour (or lack thereof) in Baptist seminaries…

    647:

    Should note: I was one of less than a dozen anglo types in a congregation of 1-2000 Filipino immigrants (for whom English was a second language).

    648:

    Basically, everything about strategic bombing is a mirage. And even if it 100% worked (which I emphasize, it doesn't), UA doesn't have the air force to bring it to fruition.

    I agree with the mirage part of it, and I agree that bombing to break the will to fight doesn't work. However, the problem catastrophe isn't the fall of Nazi Germany, it's the fall of Imperial Japan after it was firebombed, raided, and nuked twice. That's the cornerstone of modern strategic air war.

    Since I've got an event to go table, I don't have time to delve into this particular mess. So I'll leave this dangling for anyone who wants to chew on it.

    649:

    I have a very nasty idea for a balloon attack, but I don't want to into details for obvious reasons. So I'll just say that some knowledge of radio tech may be useful. Also, John Shirley used a less plausible variant in one of his novels. For a start, it used a space shuttle!

    Hopefully someone here knows exactly what I mean and can tell me why it won't work. ;)

    650:

    the problem catastrophe isn't the fall of Nazi Germany, it's the fall of Imperial Japan after it was firebombed, raided, and nuked twice. That's the cornerstone of modern strategic air war.

    And it's a useful lie that serves the interests of the proponents of strategic bombing.

    What really made Japan surrender? The Soviet invasion of Manchuria (and collapse of the Japanese Army) which was inevitably going to be followed by a Soviet amphibious invasion of the Home Islands.

    You are the Japanese cabinet in August 1945. Do you prefer to surrender to the USA, or to Stalin?

    651:

    You are the Japanese cabinet in August 1945. Do you prefer to surrender to the USA, or to Stalin?

    Um, I'm not so sure about that. We have the records of what the Japanese were planning and discussing, and IIRC, that wasn't it.

    The Imperial government was planning on creating such a bloodbath (sacrificing most of their citizens to massacre the invaders) that the invaders would negotiate a peace that left the emperor on his throne, rather than try to justify the body count from the invasion. Absent the A-bombs, this might have worked too, as a negotiated peace was polling fairly well in the US before the invasion.

    The nukes showed everyone that the US had a weapon that rendered the bloodbath moot, because we theoretically could destroy the imperium without invading.

    The victory was more about propaganda. After Nagasaki, the US carpet-bombed Japan with leaflets showing the schedule for the next eight bombs, with the last one to land on the Imperial Palace. This was a bluff. We didn't have the bombs, and with the rainy season coming on, our ability to land nukes on targets was getting problematic (Nagasaki fell off target). However, the bluff worked, and the emperor surrendered.

    The key point is that the Imperium was willing to sacrifice all its citizens in order to try to stay in existence. That's something to chew on in these authoritarian times. If you want, you can also chew on whether MacArthur's decision to rehabilitate the emperor to keep the Japanese communists from staging a revolution was the right one or not.

    652:

    "I get the impression from this thread that there are some USA churches that still adhere to it [KJV] strongly."

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

    Adherents of the King James Only movement, mostly members of Conservative Anabaptist, Conservative Holiness Methodist, and some Baptist churches...

    653:

    I dunno about using ballons against the Russians.. they had a balloon problem, they ended up with laser armed aircraft in 1989 to deal with it. i daresay they still have the plans

    654:

    "Russians.. they had a balloon problem, they ended up with laser armed aircraft in 1989"

    Yep. There was an initial version based on an IL-76 that burned up on the ground sometime in the 1980s IIRC. A second IL-76-derived one has been reported.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_A-60

    655:

    The warlords' negotiating position wasn't just keeping the emperor on his throne, but in keeping much of their fleet. Well, I don't think I have to say what that would have led to, ten years down the line.

    According to the reports of some people closely involved, the bombs so demoralised the warlords that Hirohito was able to assert his theoretical powers and surrender unconditionally.

    656:

    Thanks for the link :-( Bigots R Us.

    657:

    if it is "economic disruption" as what's your goal for DDOS mock balloon attacks then you ought reconsider things both cheaper and much more immediately disruptive;

    "Wasp" (1957) by Eric Frank Russell was filled with tricks aimed at an alien empire which was a thinly veiled Soviet Union and its centrally planned economy;

    then there's the Little Wall of India in one of Orson Scott Card's novels wherein China invades India and low intensity resistance by unarmed civilians is to place lots 'n lots of fist sized rocks across roads accumulating as folks walk across and drop another until there's an annoying heap which the occupying soldiers have to shovel clear before continuing high visibility patrols; the LWOI being a mode of economic damage nearly impossible to effectively suppress without stationing somebody along every fifty meters of roadway;

    whereas Ukraine can cripple Russia (or civilians in Myanmar or any of a dozen similar dictatorships including Trump's mini-me DeSantis attempts at establishing in Florida a Fascistic Proto-Paradise) simply with repeatedly spilling a kilogram of broken glass onto carefully selected maximally busy roads; not just the flat tires in need of changing, there's drivers made so wary of the ongoing glass dumping, they slow down and then slow some more so to examine the road in front of them;

    just by delaying every truck moving inside a city by two minutes cuts into productivity as well as demonstrating the ineffectiveness of leadership of Putin (or military officers of the February coup d'état) in something seemingly so minor as keeping the roads usable; now imagine traffic jams lasting hours due to dozens (hundreds?) of vehicles with flat tires unable to move far... delays not a mere two minutes but a crippling two hours... repeated daily...

    ...and given there are always going to be wild teenagers seeking a thrill or a bit of casual vandalism it could become imitated... how about a whole new category of crazy: hobby terrorism

    or perhaps terming it tiktok terrorism done for the giggles and the likes and the meme re-posting

    658:

    No, what the USSR ended up with for zapping balloons was the Myasishchev M-55 (NATO reporting name: Mystic-B), which was roughly equivalent to the third generation of the Lockheed U-2 airframe -- the ones still in service. Heavier than the U-2, twin turbofans/twin boom/T-tail, and holds its weight class world altitude record (over 70,000 of your quaint imperial foot-thingies).

    659:

    "Wasp" (1957) by Eric Frank Russell was filled with tricks aimed at an alien empire which was a thinly veiled Soviet Union

    ORLY?

    I read Wasp as describing a thinly veiled Japanese empire, not the USSR. (It's been several decades, though.)

    660:

    whereas Ukraine can cripple Russia (or civilians in Myanmar or any of a dozen similar dictatorships including Trump's mini-me DeSantis attempts at establishing in Florida a Fascistic Proto-Paradise) simply with repeatedly spilling a kilogram of broken glass onto carefully selected maximally busy roads

    This tactic doesn't work against fascists -- one of their standard tools is collective punishment. Eventually they'll escalate to murdering a dozen random locals every time one of their convoys runs into a patch of broken glass. Then a score. Then a hundred. How high do you want the body count to go?

    IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan worked against American and allied forces moving around there mostly because the allies cared about avoiding needless civilian casualties: sure they killed anyone who looked at them funny while they were passing -- suicide bombers being a thing -- but they didn't go out of their way to hold massacres and terrorize the civilian population as a matter of policy.

    661:

    Except possibly, and to a limited extent, in Fallujah.

    662:

    You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.

    663:

    What you need is a very small percentage of better-built balloons which can by guided over an enemy's military bases, and you mix these with your DOS swarm. That way the threat of the DOS swarm must always be honored, because some of those bombs are going to be dropped in the right place.

    664:

    but they didn't go out of their way to hold massacres and terrorize the civilian population as a matter of policy.

    There was the Punishment Beating of Fallujah which was a response to the killing of a bunch of mercenary "contractors" by the locals. The US needed those contractors to to keep the Iraqis under control and not doing anything about this killing would mean the contractors would quit. In the end the US Marines flattened large parts of the "liberated" city and killed a few thousand insurgents (dead Iraqis who didn't run == insurgents) at the cost of about a hundred US casualties, while displacing hundreds of thousands of residents into the desert around the city at the beginning of winter.

    665:

    Yes, Fallujah was awful.

    Now compare with pretty much any city in Ukraine that Russia has laid siege to.

    666:

    Scott Sanford @ 638:

    So here’s an Evil Plan. How about a (sorta) DDOS attack by balloon? Make several hundred big buggers with scary looking apparent payloads. Release almost together so they go to much the same places.

    That's occurred to me, too. I can't believe it hasn't been thought of in Beijing, Moscow, or Kyiv. (Or some pub in Belfast where die-hard hotheads still gather.) Balloons aren't free but even an intercontinental range "spy balloon" costs less than the fighter plane hours required to shoot it down, and weather balloons are really cheap.

    Coincidentally, a quick check of Windfinder tells me the prevailing near-ground winds are blowing from Ukraine toward Moscow right now. How convenient for anyone who might want to send the message "We can put our shit in the skies over Moscow." Presumably the first wave would be mostly or entirely decoys, perhaps with a few intelligence gathering or propaganda broadcasting pods; it's when the defenders stop successfully intercepting the decoys that the attacker loads a wave with incendiaries.

    My guess is that the major nations haven't gotten in on this because it doesn't favor them; if you've got an air force that's taken seriously by other air forces, schemes to degrade air forces don't work in your favor.

    Y'all remember THIS ONE from a few years back?

    Sci-Fi Short Film “Slaughterbots” | DUST

    I wonder how many you could load on a "Chinese balloon"

    667:

    Heteromeles @ 651:

    The key point is that the Imperium was willing to sacrifice all its citizens in order to try to stay in existence. That's something to chew on in these authoritarian times. If you want, you can also chew on whether MacArthur's decision to rehabilitate the emperor to keep the Japanese communists from staging a revolution was the right one or not.

    I think it was the right decision, but still question how well it was implemented. MacArthur allowed too many of the guilty "underlings" to skate.

    668:

    Charlie Stross @ 659:

    "Wasp" (1957) by Eric Frank Russell was filled with tricks aimed at an alien empire which was a thinly veiled Soviet Union

    ORLY?

    I read Wasp as describing a thinly veiled Japanese empire, not the USSR. (It's been several decades, though.)

    IIRC, the protagonist was chosen because he was half-oriental & underwent plastic surgery to make his appearance match the locals.

    Given the publication date, I'd guess it was Red China (or possibly North Korea) rather than the Soviet Union or Japan

    ... but it could have been North Vietnam or some hypothetical "domino" state.

    669:

    ... but it could have been North Vietnam or some hypothetical "domino" state.

    Too early to be Vietnam -- publication in 1957 means it was acquired in 1956 so probably written 1955-56, before any US military advisors headed to 'Nam.

    China or NK are distinctly more plausible.

    670:

    Interesting. I'd like to see a reference for the claim that "All the pilots died shortly after."

    671:

    Re "Wasp"

    IIRC the protagonist was posing as a disaffected local within an area that had always been part of the enemy empire, and not the Terran agent that he actually was. Collective punishment isn't going to work very well in those circumstances, and even the rabid fascists can see that.

    A resistance movement within a newly occupied territory faces the issue that the occupiers may not care what happens to the locals, whaereas the resistance usually does.

    JHomes

    672:

    Charlie @ 650
    Very plausible, but not buying it ... for various reasons.
    See also "H" @ 651
    And EC: According to the reports of some people closely involved, the bombs so demoralised the warlords that Hirohito was able to assert his theoretical powers and surrender unconditionally.
    Precisely.

    673:

    "Welcome to Australia, the land of the fair go." Also where living on country your ancestors have been living on for longer than anybody anywhere else in the world (well except where people were rounded up and put on missions or moved because they were in the way) is a"lifestyle choice". That one phrase made me very angry for quite some time. As for anti-maskers, one of the advantage of living near a small town is that while not many others are masking the worst I get is an occasional look. I left Sydney because too many people quite some time ago now.

    674:

    I'm not sure that part is accurate, since there is a famous case involving the widow of one of those pilots, who killed himself several years later, successfully suing for a pension. I'd blame the author's memory rather than an intent to deceive. I note he's known more as a novelist than a journalist (and I went to school with his daughter). Still I think he captures a lurking sense of being badly used that's common in Australian perceptions of the conduct of nuclear testing in the 50s. And it's not wrong... inaccuracy in specific detail is an inevitable outcome of the extremely free use of D notices and official secrets to obfuscate the facts.

    675:

    Re: '... decoys, perhaps with a few intelligence gathering or propaganda broadcasting pods; it's when the defenders stop successfully intercepting the decoys that the attacker loads a wave with incendiaries.'

    Didn't Britain do something like that in WW2 - decoy tanks? There was also a decoy city somewhere in Europe to confuse Nazis during night time blitzes.

    Now that the US has two and Canada has one of these balloons, I'm guessing that they're going to make sure to check whether any of their current detectors are blind to any bits and pieces as well as any 'cargo' the balloons were carrying. If blind spots are identified, pretty sure both countries will try to figure out how to unblind their surveillance.

    Definitely don't like the additional stress of idiots flying or lobbing stuff they shouldn't over other countries' territories. About the only upside from all of this is for defense contractors (and maybe a few unis) which means that federal budgets will be diverted from public goods and services (health, education, affordable housing, etc.) to war games.

    Wonder how commercial pilots flying through these areas feel now that a third balloon was detected and brought down.

    677:

    KING James version wouldn't be the QUEEN's English would it?

    Since Jesus spoke the Queen's English, obviously King James' version of the bible would use the correct, Queen's, English.

    Like the song says, when Julius Caesar stepped on to the shore he didn't do some rain dance, he said I came, I sore, I corn queered*.

    (* an old English phrase for 200-odd years ago that we think means to apply a poultice made from middle eastern corn)

    678:

    "I read Wasp as describing a thinly veiled Japanese empire"

    Vague memories have been stirred, and ISTR that the Security Police were called the "Kaitempi", which sounds to me more Jaoanese than anything else.

    JHomes

    679:

    Rude words! Japanese, of course.

    JHomes

    680:

    If blind spots are identified, pretty sure both countries will try to figure out how to unblind their surveillance.

    You may find this may be too obvious to need mentioning, but one of the blind spots is that many radars automatically filter out things moving below some speed. This makes them better at what they're designed for, spotting airplanes; the cost is not seeing real weather balloons, high-atmosphere weather, low-atmosphere weather, reflections off of distant mountains, etc...

    681:

    Vague memories have been stirred, and ISTR that the Security Police were called the "Kaitempi", which sounds to me more Japanese than anything else

    I haven't read Wasp, but the Japanese Imperial Army secret police were known as the Kenpeitai (also anglicized as Kempeitai).

    682:

    675, 676 - Well, there are still known sites of WW2 Potemkin villages in West Dunbartonshire, without which the Clydebank Blitz would have been even worse.
    And, as well as inflatable road vehicles including armour the UK had inflatable aeroplanes...

    683:

    the US carpet-bombed Japan with leaflets showing the schedule for the next eight bombs, with the last one to land on the Imperial Palace. This was a bluff. We didn't have the bombs,

    I believed the same for decades till someone on this blog a few years ago pointed some of us at this:

    http://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html

    684:

    the cost is not seeing ... distant mountains

    Unless the mountain is moving fast enough, obviously. We've had a bit of that lately.

    685:

    Didn't Britain do something like that in WW2 - decoy tanks?

    Likely. The US did some of this. Some (now dead) famous fashion designer of the 50s onward was a part of the team.

    686:

    whether or not "the resistance" is effective in changing the balance of power is dependent upon the ability of a dictatorship (or an occupation army) to absorb damage longer than there's active resistance...

    resistance need not be as active as spreading broken glass onto roads... passive-clumsy-silent resistance modes can do enough damage to slowly bleed a dictatorship... problem being "the resistance" is all too likely to falter as individuals decide they'd endured enough and quietly slip into the night to attempt to resume their civilian lives... always a question of who is ready to take on the role of "the resistance" with the necessary strengths (and mule stubbornness) to carry onwards for years (possibly decades?) in support of an abstraction...

    one of those nasty-nasty-nasty French jokes is how many laid claim in 1945 after Allies rolled into Paris to having been actively sneaking around slicing Nazi throats... estimates of less than 1 in 800 French were doing 'something' but going by their claims it would have been 1 in 15... which clearly no so...

    687:

    estimates of less than 1 in 800 French were doing 'something' but going by their claims it would have been 1 in 15... which clearly no so...

    Similar in the Philippines also for WWII.

    It's hard to imagine the resistance didn't throw the Japanese out long before the US showed backup based on the number claiming to be in the resistance. Of course there was a big incentive to claim such as they got a monetary benefit from the US government. Which is still paying out. And will be for another 50 years or more. Many elderly "veterans" have married their youngest female descendant on their death bed to allow for the benefits to keep flowing to the clan.

    688:

    *I believed the same for decades till someone on this blog a few years ago pointed some of us at this: http://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html*

    Okay, so I hauled my copy of Richard Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire off the shelf. This history was written using records unsealed 50 years after WW2.

    Chapter 19, "The Decisive Day" (August 9, 1945, when the emperor "suggested a surrender.). Two critical facts emerge.

    One is that the Kwantung Army fighting the Soviets underestimated the Soviet Army strength by approximately 80%. The thought 3 Soviet infantry divisions and 2-3 tank divisions were in the field against them. It was actually 15 infantry divisions and 8 tank divisions. Further statements define that Army Minister knew the Kwantung army was in trouble, but he accepted the situation and did not panic.

    The second is that, at 2:30 pm, August 9, Arami said to the Imperial cabinet: "One atomic bomb could destroy 6 square miles, whih was equivalent to 2000 B-29s with 300 conventional bombs of 500 pounds each...the Americans appeared to have one hundred atomic bombs...and could drop three per day. The next target could be Tokyo. [my emphasis added].

    Unless I misread the book, it looks like the same dude (e.g. the head of the Imperial Army) was unphased by the news that the Soviets had entered the war, but definitely had panicked over the threat posed by atomic bombing.

    After midnight (August 10), the emperor officially suggested that Japan should surrender. This was an extralegal suggestion, not an order, but it was followed a few days later by the emperor officially surrendering, and over the next week, by the Imperial military failing to succeed in a coup d'etat and also surrendering.

    Since this comes up every few years, if this blog is still around in 2025, I suspect that people will still be saying "It was the Soviets!" and so forth, but this is the record I'm working from.

    I should also point out that the US wasn't just swanning out on Okinawa flying in nukes. The conventional bombing effort they'd been undertaking for months continued and intensified until the surrender. The US military was bombing the hell out of Japan in preparation for invasion, while Truman hoped the nukes would end the war.

    Going back from this to arguments about the utility of strategic airpower, I'd suggest that its biggest advantage is when it's coupled with bullshit and manages to induce panic. The reason I'd suggest this is that Fat Man and Little Boy only caused about 25% of the air war casualties in Japan. The other 75% apparently did little to convince the Japanese to surrender, even though in real terms it was far worse. It looks like the nukes freaked out some critical cabinet ministers, and that, coupled with the Japanese knowing that their efforts to fortify southern Japan against the invasion were behind schedule, may have been enough to end the war.

    689:

    My comment was only about no nukes for a few months.

    I agree with the rest of your points.

    In general the general staff of Japan seemed to have a dream of some kind of armistice which would allow them to stay independent on their islands. I suspect they were willing to abandon their forces on mainland Asia if this could be worked out.

    690:

    I read Downfall too, albeit many years ago.

    I got the impression that the Japanese high command was well aware that they were screwed, but were hoping for something not unlike the Treaty of Versailles - they'd make some humiliating concessions, but would then have 20 years to regroup, rearm and try again.

    Which showed how out of touch they were with reality, as their neighbours would be much stronger in 20 years time. Especially China - their invasion was a bloodbath for all concerned, and even more poorly conceived than Barbarossa. If they couldn't win against a country in the throes of civil war, how could they hope to win against a China united under the Nationalists or the Communists?

    Could be my faulty memory 20+ years later believing that I read something that wasn't there, though. So take with a barge load of NaCl.

    691:

    For those of you who're discussing Wasp I thought you might enjoy reading this piece from Tor.com

    https://www.tor.com/2017/06/06/are-we-reading-about-a-hero-or-terrorist-wasp-by-eric-frank-russell/

    692:

    And, as well as inflatable road vehicles including armour the UK had inflatable aeroplanes...

    And because there's no bonkers gadget that some tinkerer won't try, as early as the 1950s people created and flew inflatable airplanes.

    Excuse One: Obviously an inflatable rubber airplane is a silly idea. But if inflatable rubber airplanes did exist, Goodyear would want to be an industry leader. Therefore Goodyear should get in on this project. Q.E.D.

    Excuse Two: The American military will shower money on almost anything. Dropping replacement airplanes to crashed air crews would be a thing. Profit!

    693:

    Regarding Japan. Not only did the Soviets attack Manchuria, but also in the north of Japan Islands - Sakhalin and Kuril Islands. What is more, Soviet entry into the war put moot all the dreams of using the Soviet Union as an intermediary for negotiating a less harsh deal. Yet another thing is the campaigns of US submarine forces and air-dropping sea mines, which not only killed any internal transportation between Japanese ports - that was of enormous importance then, but also restricted fish catching. But all of it was, to some extent, imaginable. Nukes were an out-of-context experience that made it evident that the US is a much more powerful great power, and Japan needs to admit it. And there was an excellent historical parallel with Commodore Perry forcing Japan to open and modernize.

    694:

    The historiography around the Japanese surrender is still very much a live issue. I could point you to perfectly legitimate historians arguing for all shades of different emphases on bombs v Soviets v failure of negotiations with Soviets etc etc. A lot happened very quickly and I very much doubt there's a definitive answer to be had. The post for the 75th anniversary of the bombs, by Alex Wellerstein over at the nuclear secrecy blog, is a really decent effort at hitting the main points.. And he usually deals with the nuclear stuff on the Reddit Askhistorians sub, if anyone really wants to get into it.

    695:

    Uncle Stinky
    Talking of anniversaries ....
    There are two really unpleasant ones, this year.
    The nearest is, of course, in 12 days time & we are left wondering what the autocrat, dictator & murderer Putin will do to mark it.
    { My money is on a repeat Verdun in the Zaphoizia (sp?) area, but what do I know? }
    The second marks 60 years - & those of us old enough to remember it, will never, ever forget: 22/11/1963.

    696:

    There was very little good news for the members of the Japanese War cabinet who met on the 9th of August 1945. They read the reports of the Hiroshima bombing and the reconstruction efforts going on in that city, they heard about the Nagasaki bombing[1] and initial reports of its effects and to top it all off they were informed that about a million Russian troops had attacked the Army of Manchuria which was doomed. Even when presented with that information, at the end of the meeting they decided to continue the war.

    [1] They knew the Nagasaki bomb was "atomic" of course, what they didn't know was that it was a plutonium bomb, not a uranium bomb. Any competent advisor to the Cabinet who knew that piece of information would have advised immediate unconditional surrender right now.

    Making a uranium bomb was a "simple" matter of enriching an existing element -- Japan and Germany had assorted experimental projects investigating how this could be done and how to go about it. What they never considered feasible was the idea of making a new element, enough of it to make an actual nuclear weapon. The technical challenges and engineering requirements were beyond belief, impossible to achieve in wartime. The US and its allies did it in three years from a standing start. That was terrifying.

    697:

    Excuse Two: The American military will shower money on almost anything. Dropping replacement airplanes to crashed air crews would be a thing. Profit!

    It wasn't a terrible idea -- it worked, after a fashion -- but there were cheaper alternatives, like the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system (STARS). In particular, the inflataplane was going to fly slow and low over territory where another US aircraft had presumably been shot down ... STARS at least got the downed aircrew or SPECOPS team aboard something like a C-130 with the range and speed to clear the area.

    Anyway, STARS was rendered obsolete from the 1970s by the arrival of long range rescue helicopters with in-flight refueling: USAFSOC finally abandoned the capability in 1996.

    698:

    Balloons ....
    Another one - is there really an "outbreak" of these, is it just this weeks "fashion" in reporting?
    We, the public, really need at least a basic version & accounting of exactly what said balloons were transporting, don't we?

    Nojay
    The US and its allies did it in three years from a standing start. That was terrifying.
    A bit longer than that, of course.
    "Manhattan" started in late 1942, but before Manhattan, was "Tube Alloys" - 30/8/1941.
    Before the US was dragged, kicking & screaming, out of its delusions on 7/12/41

    699:

    there's the usual batshit crazy nonsense amongst GOP/GQP politicians but there's the clever chipping away at longstanding laws in order to exploit some untapped resource -- oil, timber, water, lithium -- by way of monopoly 'roll up' of entire sectors of the US economy. And always the sane (but amoral) leadership within the GOP seek the opportunity for exploitation without need to moderate their uncontrolled damage

    such as unraveling child labor laws... these were written decades ago to protect anyone under 18 from abuse (little kids with little fingers do assembly so much better than adults and possible to crowd more into less footage on factory floor)

    at this rate? my talent at nightmare scenarios simply cannot keep up... I'm looking to a rather bleak 2032 when routine incest (already a thing in certain extremist religious cults and survivalist militia cults) soon joined by mandatory cannibalism... though dressed up in ritual as the 'flesh of Christ'

    this is only sounds crazy if you are sane or are amongst the millions turning away from religion... in the US there are thousands of church buildings gone up for sale as congratulations fade into dust from membership dying of old age... which is likely panicking various religious leadership into doing whatever they can to 'circle the wagons' and 'gather the faithful' and if that includes renewing outlawed customs such as cannibalism there will be many willing to do that... really horrible redefinition of "church potluck picnic" when your name in the weekly lottery to be the main entree...

    John Scalzi (as per his "whatever blog") is not the first to buy one given how many have come on the market since 1990s and lots of his fans are wondering if he has some clever-but-evil plan for it as a performance space or writer's workshop or den of sinful excess involving unholy assemblages of extremist burritos...

    700:

    Since we're well past 300 there's a question I'd like to ask Charlie, if that's OK. It is at least peripherally related to the current topic, and something I've been wondering about for a while.

    On other writer fan fora I've frequented (notably rec.arts.tv.sf.babylon5 and alt.fan.pratchett) there was a cast-iron rule against posting anything that might be taken as a plot idea. The explanation was that if the author happened to come up with something vaguely similar in the future, he would have the devil's own time proving that he hadn't infringed on the poster's copyright. Therefore it was better not to have any such on the forum.

    That doesn't seem to be the rule here. In fact I recall one post a few years ago where you asked what incipient tiny-but-important trends science fiction was missing, and another conversation where actual plot ideas were discussed.

    Has something changed in copyright law? Or are you just less bothered by the risk?

    (In A Life With Footnotes Rob Wilkins mentions one episode where someone did try to sue Pterry for copyright, but didn't realise just how long publishing timelines are. His supposedly stolen plot idea occured to him after the finished text for the book had been sent to the publishers)

    701:

    You can see the Fulton system on a B-17 in the closing scene of Thunderball (1965 film).

    702:

    Agreed about the inflatable rescue plane test and its successors.

    In case anyone other than me is a bit confused, the non-flying rubber planes in WW2 on the US side were among the props used by the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, aka the Ghost Army ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army ). Soldiers in that unit included several people who went on to become well known professional creatives, including fashion designer Bill Blass. They've come up here before. The cool news is that on 1-Feb-2022, President Biden signed a bipartisan bill authorizing a Congressional Gold Medal for the Ghost Army. I don't know if anyone who served in it is still alive, but it's one of my favorite WW2 units, and it's good to see that they finally got the recognition they deserved.

    In the UK in WW2, there were a number of tactical and strategic deception exercises: K sites and Q sites during the Battle of Britain, and the various dummy vehicles and camouflage used in the Western Desert Campaign of North Africa.

    As noted above, Russia still uses dummies, and I'd be unsurprised if it turns out dummies are also used at Area 51 and elsewhere in the US military. The main difference over time is that in WW2, camouflage was an MOS, with soldiers trained and deployed as camoufleurs for their units. Subsequently AFAIK camouflage training for all soldiers has become the norm, at least in the US Army, although specialists like snipers may get more training than do mainline soldiers.

    703:

    high tech version of broken glass by "the resistance" in Iran... does not do much to wreck infrastructure nor tangibly weaken the government but it does chip away slightly at image as infallible and/or universally beloved

    https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/12/middleeast/hackers-interrupt-iran-leader-revolution-anniversary-intl-hnk

    704:

    I'm interested in Charlie's take too.

    AFAIK (which means I actually read a book on copyright and rewrote bits of Hot Earth Dreams to comply with fair use), the copyright on text goes with words, not the ideas. For instance, if I wrote about a secret US government unit using psionics, I'd have to lift more than a few hundred words of text from The Atrocity Archive for Charlie to nail my ass for copyright infringement. The reason is that there are multiple works out there about secret government agencies doing supernatural stuff, and the idea itself is not copyrighted.

    As one example of how to screw up, in Hot Earth Dreams, I talked about the collapse of civilization. There are various definitions of what that means, and arguments about whether it ever happens at all. One influential academic definition of collapse is over a page long, and in an early draft I'd copied it verbatim without asking permission. Once I read up on copyright issues, I entirely rewrote that section and another long-form quote to comply with fair use restrictions (basically, ask permission if you want to use more than about 100 words verbatim).

    This does not mean that you can't get into trouble for swiping ideas and especially characters, but those are covered more by trademark than copyright. For example, if you publish a bondage-in-silk work where an arachnid-themed superhero ravishes a chibi rodent in a secret web of lust and deception, probably Disney's lawyers will send you an expensive-looking letter asking to take it down immediately, because you're infringing on their trademarks.

    Again, I am definitely not a lawyer, and there are very good and readily accessible books on copyright and trademark out there to learn from. Believe them before you believe me.

    705:

    Returning to those high altitude objects for a moment, this on sources and methods:

    https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/12/politics/unidentified-object-canada-alaska-military-latest/index.html

    Notably, the US intelligence community’s method to track China’s fleet of surveillance balloons was only discovered within the last year, six people familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The findings have allowed the US to develop a consistent technical method for the first time, which they have used to track the balloons in near-real time across the globe, the sources said.

    706:

    ...if I wrote about a secret US government unit using psionics, I'd have to lift more than a few hundred words of text from The Atrocity Archive for Charlie to nail my ass for copyright infringement.

    I think I've mentioned before that I ran an RPG game wherein the player characters worked for a secret British agency using psionics, magic, and other anomalous technologies. This was in the 1990s so I wasn't ripping off Charlie, and in another hemisphere so he wasn't ripping off me. People working on similar problems often produce similar solutions.

    One memorable incident that I'd hoped would raise questions, and which anyone here is welcome to mine for inspiration, followed a Loch Ness monster sighting (due to a prankster and some tourists). The PCs were contacted, told to get to Loch Ness as soon as possible, manufacture evidence exposing the sighting as a hoax, and let locals 'discover' the prank. They never did ask the next question, which was why their superiors would care.

    707:

    Has something changed in copyright law? Or are you just less bothered by the risk?

    The copyright thing is a bit of a red herring. It seems to be SF-author/fannish folklore dating to a particular incident in which Marion Zimmer Bradley was soliciting submissions for a fanfic collection she was editing, saw and rejected a story one reader sent in, then later published a story with some superficially similar plot elements -- and was accused to plagiarism.

    To prove plagiarism is actually quite difficult: it requires actual verbatim quoting, or quoting with minor word substitutions, without attribution of the original author. So the case fizzled out: I don't recall if it ever reached a courtroom. But it put the wind up a lot of people, especially as Marvel, DC, and the film biz in general got draconian about requiring up-front contracts saying in effect "all our IP belongs to us; any idea you submit to us for consideration belongs to us, too". And especially since Transphobic Wizard School Woman did get sued for plagiarism in an English court (the litigious party failed abjectly to convince the judge: it looked just like an unscrupulous attempt to cash in on the commercial success of the Wizard School Boy books).

    My take is that if you want to write fanfic of my worlds you're welcome -- just don't try to make money off my name and trade dress without contacting me for terms. (I'm in this for money.) I don't care what turns up on AO3 and other fan sites, but I would not be amused by non-me authored Laundry Files stories showing up on Kindle Unlimited, for example.

    As for the "don't show me ideas" thing ... there's no point. Ideas are the easy part of writing. Execution is everything, and that's the hard bit. Also, if you wanted to show me an idea for the Laundry Files, for example, you'd need to be aware that there are two novels in the works that are written and with my publishers but not on sale yet, another in development, and I wrote the most recent one you can have read, Quantum of Nightmares, in 2020: it's a moving target, and I'm already several years past your aim point. Maybe slightly less at the moment because I'm back at work on the space opera, but even so ...

    (PS: I call it a space opera because that's the nearest thing to it, but it bears a much closer resemblance to Iain M. Banks' Culture oeuvre than it does to Star Wars or Honor Harrington. And it's not that close to the Culture, either. So, again: ideas not needed.)

    708:

    Bizarre!
    What was it like accompanying Mikhail Gorbachev on piano?

    That was one of the most bizarre episodes of my career. We’d recorded an interview which hadn’t produced many news lines. But there was a piano in the corner of his office and he suddenly asked if anyone could play, and I sat down and played and he started singing. In those few musical minutes, I learned more about Gorbachev the man than in all the six interviews that I’d done with him. He was a very emotional, very warm person. And his death last year felt like the end of an era. He represented that rare moment in Russian history when the country opened up.
    - Steve Rosenberg, in Moscow, remembering ....

    709:

    Or just cut it down with a template printed off the internet and a pair of scissors. It's what I did when I first needed a nano sim for a iphone. Kept working for years afterwards.

    710:

    I'm back at work on the space opera

    Any chance of returning to Saturn's Children / Neptune's Brood universe?

    711:

    Any chance of returning to Saturn's Children / Neptune's Brood universe?

    None whatsoever.

    I parted company with Ace in 2015 due to the Penguin/Random House merger (which led to a bloodbath among Ace's editorial team). Ace were the US publisher of those two books.

    It is very rare for a series to survive being dumped by one publisher, let alone two: the Laundry Files is very usual in that respect.[1]

    In the case of the Freyaverse ... the UK publisher marked a catastrophic sales decline from book 1 to book 2, so wouldn't have taken a book 3. I'd have had to write book 3 on spec and hope to net a US publisher on that basis. Also the books were really hard to write (it required doing characterization when then protagonist wasn't human), so there was no pressing need to do more.

    I'm happier working on a new universe. Except it was meant to be finished in 2016 but needed heavy revision work, then ran into schedule conflicts with the Empire Games trilogy and my parents dying and then got run over by the New Management books (which I had no idea needed writing before 2019). So I'm only just back at work on a project I began in 2014/15.

    [1] The Laundry survived the demise of Golden Gryphon because they won a Hugo in 2005 and Ace were happy to take the paperback rights. It then survived the demise of Ace because Tor had won a Hugo for a Laundry novella in 2014 and I was already one of their authors. But it's really rare for that to happen.

    712:

    Charlie Stross @ 669:

    ... but it could have been North Vietnam or some hypothetical "domino" state.

    Too early to be Vietnam -- publication in 1957 means it was acquired in 1956 so probably written 1955-56, before any US military advisors headed to 'Nam.

    China or NK are distinctly more plausible.

    I was thinking more about what the U.S. feared about "dominos falling" in Asia - Communists take over China, the Korean War, the Viet Minh expel the French from IndoChina ... Cold War Asia in the period covered by Burdick & Lederer in The Ugly American (1958); before the U.S. really became involved militarily in Vietnam.

    For that, I think any of the mid-50s Communist "revolutionary" governments that followed a Soviet style model for central planning - including "North" Vietnam - would fit the bill.

    713:

    Before the US was dragged, kicking & screaming, out of its delusions on 7/12/41

    Some historians will point out that it was the US public who had the delusions - remembering the first world war and wishing to never repeat that experience - while POTUS and associates had other ideas.

    I believe this is the podcast episode where John C. McCManus makes that argument: https://shows.acast.com/wehaveways/episodes/usa-we-have-ways-a-standing-start

    The discussion continues here: https://shows.acast.com/wehaveways/episodes/usa-we-have-ways-mobilisation

    TL;DL it was an impressive U-turn. ;) Also, it began before Pearl Harbour was attacked.

    Decades ago, I used to check my father's copy of Liddell Hart's WWII book for things like this. I was always disappointed by the lack details, of course. However, his comments on the bombings at the end of the chapter on the Pacific was curious. ISTR he claimed Truman authourised the second bombing to justify the cost to the public to help Truman win the coming election. This doesn't exactly match other accounts I've read, however.

    Was Liddell Hart being unfair or was he right? Is this a case of different generations of historians disagreeing? Isn't reading history wonderful? Hah!

    714:

    Re: 'You may find this may be too obvious to need mentioning, but one of the blind spots is that many radars automatically filter out things moving below some speed.'

    Thanks - nope, speed wasn't obvious to me at all. I was actually wondering about density/permeability.

    So basically we're at: No such thing as background noise, check everything!

    Wading through tons and tons of data would be a useful application of AI provided all anomalous stuff got sent to humans to look at with 'feedback' given to the AI.

    OOC and if not a too-sensitive topic: which countries (gov'ts) are using AI and in what areas?

    715:

    if you really want to open a can-of-worms, read up on Harlan Ellison[1] suing to take control (or get get a piece of the action) for the first "Terminator" movie...

    seems he wrote an episode of "Outer Limits" ("Soldier" was loosely adapted from his 1957 short story "Soldier from Tomorrow") in which a robot does some time traveling... on which basis he laid claim to a movie twenty years later...

    minor things like the robot in Ellison's story was the good guy unlike the Terminator was you-know-Terminator... and who was chasing who and why was there chasing... and scope of the drama being inside a building rather than across California... there was an out of court settlement...

    funny thing... there's been hundreds 'n hundreds of vaguely similar stories which those authors failed to show sufficient cause to sue whereas the lawyer representing Ellison (and Ellison's reputation as a pitbull) led to a negotiated settlement... a mess that is for certain but just how justified is an argument only lawyers focused on IP/copyright/Hollywood would love to rehash...

    who stole first from who? Cameron? Ellison?

    [1]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator see "Plagiarism and aftermath"

    716:

    Phinch @ 691:

    For those of you who're discussing Wasp I thought you might enjoy reading this piece from Tor.com

    https://www.tor.com/2017/06/06/are-we-reading-about-a-hero-or-terrorist-wasp-by-eric-frank-russell/

    One man's "freedom fighter" is another man's "terrorist", but Wasp is a story of unconventional warfare tactics used during a conventional war.

    It's the OSS/Maquis from WW2 - NOT al-Qaeda/Daesh bombing subway trains or murdering journalists because they published cartoons that "offended" Muslims.

    717:

    Greg Tingey @ 698:

    Balloons ....
    Another one - is there really an "outbreak" of these, is it just this weeks "fashion" in reporting?
    We, the public, really need at least a basic version & accounting of exactly what said balloons were transporting, don't we?

    A bit of both I think, with maybe a hint that when someone gets away with sneaky shit for a long while they can become complacent & sloppy.

    Plus, NOW maybe they're using up their left-over supply of balloons poking the right-wing monkeys in their Congressional cage just to cause trouble for Zookeeper Biden **

    [** a Von Clausewitzian style "continuation of diplomacy by other means" because "Fuck You, that's why!"]

    718:

    Greg Tingey @ 708:

    Bizarre!
    What was it like accompanying Mikhail Gorbachev on piano?

    He likes Eurovision. I do too.

    720:

    Martin Rodgers @ 713:

    Before the US was dragged, kicking & screaming, out of its delusions on 7/12/41

    Some historians will point out that it was the US public who had the delusions - remembering the first world war and wishing to never repeat that experience - while POTUS and associates had other ideas.

    How might WW2 have turned out differently if Germany had NOT declared war on the U.S. on 11 Dec 1941?

    U.S. public opinion could have forced Roosevelt to abandon Britain to concentrate on our own war with Japan, excluding us from the war in Europe. Almost certainly "Lend Lease" would have come to an end as the U.S. ramped up war production for our own war effort.

    Under those circumstances, would Britain have shared the "Tube Alloys" research that jump started the "Manhattan Project"? ... also RADAR & SONAR?

    Without U.S. support, might Britain have been forced to accept a punitive, revanchist armistice leaving Hitler a free hand to pursue his invasion of the Soviet Union? War between the U.S. and NAZI Germany was (I think) inevitable, but it would have come later, begun on terms more favorable to NAZI Germany.

    Instead, Germany's declaration of war drew the U.S. into the war in Europe as a belligerent on Britain's side. That probably would not have happened absent Hitler's declaration of war.

    721:

    It's the OSS/Maquis from WW2 - NOT al-Qaeda/Daesh bombing subway trains or murdering journalists because they published cartoons that "offended" Muslims.

    If you have not already, I suggest you read comment #12 (by "Atlas") in the Tor piece. Atlas points out that if you read "Wasp" carefully, you realize the human government is just as much assholes as the Sirians. Possibly more so.

    722:
    who stole first from who? Cameron? Ellison?

    Nevermind PKD's Second Variety and Jon's World stories.

    723:

    John S
    And ... we have another one, oh dear.

    John S @ 720
    If that had (not) happened, WWII in Europe would have ended in 1947, with "us" (the Brits) nuking Berlin & Adolf, with a Tube Alloys product ...

    724:

    I am reminded of The Curve of the Earth by Simon Morden.

    725:
    How might WW2 have turned out differently if Germany had NOT declared war on the U.S. on 11 Dec 1941?

    Also, would there have been a Marshall Plan? How could the post-war UK economy have survived otherwise?

    So much depends on details like these. Details? I mean catastrophic errors. There's an argument that even without Hitler, there would still be a war. How much more (or less) competent would a different leader have been?

    726:

    who stole first from who? Cameron? Ellison?

    This reminds me that the transphobia this isn't the first time the Wizard School lady's fandom turned a bit toxic. There was that whole episode around Pterry and "So, are you accusing [Wizard School lady] of plagiarism?", which did lead to some lamentable behaviour among that fandom at the time. The whole "fishing in the same stream" theme applies here, Shirley?

    727:

    Re: '... who stole first from who?'

    For robots, every author 'stole' from Asimov if their robot is based on hardware plus software. But then maybe Asimov ripped off of the golem stories which might have been rip-offs off Greek mythology, i.e., 'Hephaistos ... the ancient Greek god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes ... was said to have created multiple artificial men.'

    There's also the Terracotta Army in a Chinese burial mound constructed c. 210 BC. No moving parts but the level of detail and manufacturing techniques are amazing.

    728:

    ooooh... this is on the list for my next netflix pitch meeting...

    https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/11/asia/hong-kong-shop-investigation-cat-dog-meat-intl-hnk

    you cannot make this shit up no matter how imaginative...

    ...but you can take it to rather extreme levels of wacky... such as all those hungry-hungry-hungry folk looking for a cheap (no better yet free) protein source since eggs just spiked past $6.00/dozen in US (NYC) and over in the UK there's no fish 'n chips to be had for less than the equivalent of three man-hours of salary...

    so...?

    first there's the inevitable cooking shows... Iron Chef meets underfed elderly and semi-feral school kids out hunting anything smaller than themselves...

    with a multi-season commit to a horrific mockumentary (think about how nasty the love child of "The Office" meets "Restaurant Reboot" would be) about a new chain of franchise fast food shoppes... call it's main offering "Roof Chicken" (cat) and then there's "To Serve Man" (dog) and "Ratatouille" (mice and/or rat) and...

    729:
    ISTR he claimed Truman authourised the second bombing to justify the cost to the public to help Truman win the coming election.

    I think that Truman mentioned in his memoirs that if the public found out that he had huge, colossal weapons and didn't use them, he wouldn't have to worry about impeachment. He'd have to be worried about being strung up the nearest lamppost.

    ~oOo~

    With no declaration of war by Germany, I'm sure the USA could have found some excuse to get to war with Germany. FDR & co were well aware of how dangerous Germany was, and FDR was certainly blowing smoke in the 1940 election when he said he'd never go to war in Europe.

    If for some reason war between Germany and the USA didn't happen, (1) Germany would still have lost to the USSR, but it would have taken longer; (2) the Iron Curtain would probably have run along the Rhine. Britain and Commonwealth forces would do a mini-D-Day some time in 1945-46 while German forces were reeling from the loss of Berlin and the continued Red Army advance into western Germany. We'd get to liberate France, parts of Belgium and southern Italy. Note that this scenario is another reason for the USA to get involved in the European war. Who would want the Commies in charge of a much larger Warsaw Pact?

    730:

    WWII in Europe would have ended in 1947, with "us" (the Brits) nuking Berlin & Adolf, with a Tube Alloys product ...

    Resources for all of this?

    Would Monty have defeated the Afrika Korps without the armor that he got after the US entered the war? The US Army at that point had no idea how to fight and didn't help much. But the tanks, big guns, and ammo made a big difference.

    https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-tanks-and-guns-of-the-second-world-wars-desert-war

    And the scale of the Manhattan project was unreal. Multiple secret cities created from scratch. The electrical demand was off the charts. Newly built before the war TVA and Columbia River power was critical.

    Oppi when first asked how many people he thought it would take said around 100. It was over 10,000 people directly involved by the end of the war. And many more who worked on bits that were used by not directly a part of the project. You can forgive him for some of it as an academic but everyone grossly under estimated the resources needed at the start. I've read that by 1943/1944 you couldn't find any one in a US college who knew anything about physics. They were all drafted into fake army units then deployed to one of the secret cities.

    731:

    and FDR was certainly blowing smoke in the 1940 election when he said he'd never go to war in Europe.

    Yes. If not he would have lost the election. And even still the only military money being spent other than some R&D on bombers was for the Navy to keep us safe and secure from the threat aboard. Which turned out to the be right things to do. Especially the shift to naval aircraft operations. Which had the side effect of starting to end the depression.

    732:

    My father graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1943 with a physics degree and went to work for the Manhattan Engineering District at the Columbia University atomic pile. He quit the next year and joined the Navy because, as a civilian, he couldn't get a date in New York City during the war.

    733:

    I guess the young ladies thought of him as defective in some way.

    I read a first person account of someone with a similar time line who got drafted by folks and he couldn't explain why he shouldn't be drafted. So the project had to arrange for him to skip basic training and report to a "special army unit". His comment was that he got paper work thought out the war telling him to report to somewhere or the other and high ups in the project had to step in and move him to another fake unit to make his army paperwork look reasonable.

    734:

    Apparently, the defect was in his attire. During the war, it was considered unpatriotic for single women to associate with men who weren't contributing to the war effort and he was not allowed to discuss his work while he was at Columbia.

    735:

    one of those unending 'tabletop' wargames... Germany v. Russia... with Western Europe as both the prize as well the field of play...

    Stalin in theory had more warm bodies whereas Hitler had better equipment operated with men better trained and significantly well led... and then there's Russian weather, Eastern Europe mud, and a peasantry well versed in acting dull-eyed whilst also hiding anything smaller than a barn from tax-collectors and hungry soldiers wearing whatever uniform and other wolves on two legs... which would lead to bogging down and inability to 'live off the land' and frostbite in April...

    how to measure those opposing sides in which attributes is a lengthy argument best held over a mini keg of darkest of wheat ales and a heap of olive 'n onion pizzas... but in my heart of hearts it would be such fun if they ended up wrecking one another so deeply even the French could defeat the nominal 'winner'

    736:

    In the vein of counterfactual histories, would the UK have been as steadfast in their support of the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion if the Nazis had not pursued campaigns of terror-bombing England and unrestricted submarine warfare following the conquest of France?

    737:

    I would not be amused by non-me authored Laundry Files stories showing up on Kindle Unlimited, for example.

    Actually, an authorized anthology of Laundry stories by other writers would be kinda cool.

    738:

    anthology of good Laundry stories by other writers

    Ahem.

    There's lots of really bad stories in the world and the various language-mangling AIs can readily generate as many more short stories as you want.

    I wonder how long it'll be before someone builds a bot to turn a story outline into novel-sized verbiage. Like the man says, ideas are readily available it's the execution that costs. So it's an obvious target for AI. "in the style of" is not the same as "using this plot". AFAIK right now AI doesn't have any idea that there could be a plot, let alone the ability to write around one.

    739:

    Robert Prior:

    Actually, an authorized anthology of Laundry stories by other writers would be kinda cool.

    hmmm... stories about...?

    always good for a laugh... zombies... the 'residual human resources' having to be tossed into the composter upon reaching (and exceeding) their 'best by date' and the unlucky bastard assigned this unglorious task... then there's the aggravation of HR paperwork associated with re-categorizing those barely alive into the recently dead and hence into quasi-revived... transferring them from HR's unloving supervision over to Building Services as yet more mobile assets...

    740:

    That leads back to my suggestion early in the thread. To get plot, let's all agree that probabilistic AI is unlikely to achieve much by itself, even when trained on things that do contain plots. I think we're not there yet for AI to come up with its own higher-order constructs within the data. Heck, we're not even sure that's something humans can do by themselves (not really). So there's an in-between about supplementing training with preloaded meta-models and abstract classes. I've no idea how much of this is already done...

    741:

    If for some reason war between Germany and the USA didn't happen, (1) Germany would still have lost to the USSR, but it would have taken longer; (2) the Iron Curtain would probably have run along the Rhine.

    I have previously been more-or-less convinced this was the case, but I'm now not so sure. While it was definitely played down during the Cold War, there's a body of material suggesting that senior Soviet leadership had formed the assessment that the USSR could not have won without Lend-Lease.

    One side to this is logistics and supply. It's not just the ammunition and explosives, or even the trucks and fuel. It was also the railroad maintenance supplies and food. I don't doubt the great retreat of Soviet industry beyond the Urals and the challenges that the Germans faced with the vast supply distances out to Stalingrad were significant factors in the Soviet's favour. People still argue about whether the plan to take Ukraine first before advancing on Moscow was a blunder(!), but it is far from clear how things would have gone for the Soviets without those food supplies from the USA.

    The other side is that while we think of Stalingrad as the turning point, really Kursk is the battle that broke the invasion and took the initiative. It's arguable that the Allied invasion of Italy made a pivotal difference at Kursk, by diverting German reserves just as the battle was changing to the form of mobile warfare that favoured the German tanks, and the Soviets were committing their last reserves. But certainly those reserves included a large number of Lend-Lease tanks, while Lend-Lease aircraft contributed to giving the Soviets air parity and even superiority later in the battle. All that without mentioning that a well-fed Red Army is a lot more effective than a starving one. Sure it's all percentages, but the percentages are large, being in the 30-40% range for some strategic supplies.

    I don't think it necessarily follows that US participation turned the war from unwinnable to winnable for the Allies. It was most likely already still winnable, if a bit touch-and-go, but US participation made it certain. Hence the story about Churchill (quietly) cheering when he heard the news about Pearl Harbour.

    742:

    Are they breeding, or something? - except they all appear to be different to/fom each other. { See also my # 723 }
    I'm not familiar with Morden's (Where the Shadows lie)work

    As with"us" - how would Stalin & the CCCP have fared without the vast supplies from the USA & Britain that we shipped in via the Arctic Convoys &/or overland through Persia ( As it was called, then )
    Or, as Damian says: senior Soviet leadership had formed the assessment that the USSR could not have won without Lend-Lease. - Yes.

    743:

    728: "in the UK there's no fish 'n chips to be had for less than the equivalent of three man-hours of salary"

    - we pay £10 for a decent portion of fish and chips, which is very close to hour's work at the national minimum wage

    744:

    ONE hour's work - missed the crucial word, sigh

    745:

    WSL's fandom got very weird at various points: for real bogglement value google the term "snapewives".

    746:

    Good lord! And poor Alan Rickman. Of his many memorable roles, I’m sure that is not the one he’d choose to be known for. And there will be AIs trained as Snape, I’ll bet…

    747:

    Down here the order would be “flake and minimum chips”, but if you’re down to pocket change you might skip the flake (a euphemism for bycatch). In some fish and chip shops a couple of dollar more than minimum chips is a mountain of calories. Salt and vinegar are free, little blister packs of tomato sauce might cost a few cents.

    748:

    whenever I've had to evaluate code generators, the question I asked was not if it could do 'everything' but how much of 'something' it could deliver with lessened hassle and greater detailing of such fiddly bits as the test cases needed for an effective automated 'n cycleable test plan...

    ditto... for prose by way of AI... perhaps a comparison to clothing... so rather than PERFECTLY bespoke... it takes raw fiber, spins thread, weaves whole cloth, then does the cuts and sewing to produce a garment that's enough to hang on racks in shoppes... then there's still a bit of customizing that's "hand tailoring"... but... upon contact with reality and actually interacting with the world you find out you got to further refine the fit of the sleeves due to binding (or lower the left pants leg by a tenth of an inch)... AI might never be perfect but can it cut costs enough to warrant its usage fees?

    and speaking of clothing... could current AI drive not just the sewing machine but accept input from video cameras to produce customized clothing at the approximate cost of ready-to-wear?

    if so... that is how we put an end to dangerous and toxic sweatshops in India (and China)... but... in the process also end employment for a hundred million low skilled people and wreck the economies of developing nations... not pretty...

    now there's a story waiting to be told... AI providing customized products and only humans involved are the drivers of delivery trucks on local streets... millions out of work and no government able to feed them... further motivating fascism's rise in the name of 'justice'

    749:

    if so... that is how we put an end to dangerous and toxic sweatshops in India (and China)

    It's not the mental (AI) processing that is need to make things from cloth. It is the mental processing to needed to allow "hands" to process the cloth. And we're not there yet. Cloth is a PITA to deal with purely mechanically except in large sizes of flat runs and such. The cutting needs to deal with clothing is a highly skilled art involving lots of small bits of cloth and irregular cuts that are then assembled into cloths. Then you get into sizing. It attracts sweat shop wages due to so many people with not much else to do can get skilled at it.

    Sweat shop labor is terrible. Except for the remaining options for the people in that work if they don't have that sweat shop job.

    Was on the edge of a minor debate about donating money to a charity that bought sewing machines for the poor in Egypt. One lady was against it as it was piece work. Which in many cases in the US is outlawed unless there is a minimum wage floor. (And lots of bad details I know but not the point.) The lady was not understanding that the alternative might likely be shoving shit out of a barn at 1/3 the money she could earn from piece work sewing. To her piece work was "bad" so don't do anything that might encourage it.

    Which was a perfect example of applying middle class first world logic to the lives of the poor in Egypt.

    750:

    Back in the day, I had some good ones from a very large German provider of industrial control systems (and the stuff they control):

    "Nun bist alles in die hosen gelaufen!"

    and

    "Message from: SYSTEM, I have upped my priority, now up yours!"

    751:

    then does the cuts and sewing to produce a garment that's enough to hang on racks in shoppes... then there's still a bit of customizing that's "hand tailoring"... but... upon contact with reality and actually interacting with the world you find out you got to further refine the fit of the sleeves due to binding (or lower the left pants leg by a tenth of an inch).

    Some of us are way off in terms of "standard" fit. My chest and shoulders are typical for person 6 to 10 inches taller than me. So I get to buy shirt, jackets, coasts that can close in the front but maybe have sleeves that hang down to my finger tips. (Adjusting a winter coat that much is hard.) Shirts are not terrible. But my pickings are slim in terms of a neck size (which leads to a chest size) I can wear. Typically I can find a few shirts with sleeves that aren't 2" to 4" too long.

    Now there was a company in the US, and I'm sure their still are some, that would measure you and you order the shirts to be made. They cost about double but the fit "like a glove". Then I gained weight and .... When I was measured the guy looked at the final result and repeated the measurements. I was that far out of "normal" that he noticed it.

    And I'm sure the assembly into the final product was done by sweat shop folks for the ones I orderd 40 years ago.

    752:

    The electrical demand was off the charts. Newly built before the war TVA and Columbia River power was critical.

    Yeah, because the Manhattan Project pursued calutrons for isotope separation. Calutrons were a dumb idea -- quick'n'dirty and they worked, after a fashion, but they're grotesquely uneconomical which is why these days everyone uses gaseous diffusion through ultracentrifuge cascades instead (nod in the direction of laser enrichment, but I don't know if that actually got anywhere). Oh, and the ultracentrifuges are mostly useful for producing low-enriched uranium to feed into reactors that can be tuned to breed plutonium, which can be separated out chemically: once you get rid of the 238, 240, 241 and other undesirable isotopes what you're left with is pure bang juice.

    753:

    in my heart of hearts it would be such fun if they ended up wrecking one another so deeply even the French could defeat the nominal 'winner'

    Don't underestimate the French. They were the big swinging dick of European imperial powers throughout the later 17th and 18th centuries (after the Hapsburgs in Spain were in retreat), and the war with the UK was a close-fought thing -- you can blame the French for the United States having survived rebelling against the Empire (other dominions did much worse -- see for example the Indian Rebellion of 1858, aka the "Sepoy mutiny" and its aftermath). WW1 ground them down hard (one in ten of their male population were casualties, either dead or wounded) but after 1945 they went right back to their old ways in Indochina, for example.

    "Stalin and Hitler bleed out in a knife fight, then General de Gaulle turns up and chibs the least badly wounded" is not entirely out of the question.

    754:

    Go to Archive of Our Own (AO3) and search for "Laundry Files". That's your anthology right there. I do not know how good any of it is because I don't read fanfic of my own work but it's out there already.

    755:

    zombies... the 'residual human resources' having to be tossed into the composter upon reaching (and exceeding) their 'best by date'

    Don't tell Harry.

    (I assume you missed that cameo in The Labyrinth Index but I have plans for Harry later in the series/universe. Ahem. "Harry" is short for "Harryhausen", a gallows humour nickname based on stop-frame animator Ray Harryhausen's most famous creation. Take an RHR that's falling apart, add some wires to hold it together and electric motors to keep it shambling, and hey presto! Animated skeleton, complete with Touch of Death!)

    756:

    I recall reading 2-5 years ago about a US startup company trying to build a "lights out" robot factory to turn out simple basic T-shirts.

    Turns out that, yes, fabric handling is a pain in the arse. And also a T-shirt assembly line requires something like 22 separate automatable operations.

    It was just within the bleeding edge boundaries of tech to make T-shirts, and the robot line was barely cost-competitive with Bangladeshi sweatshop labour. What gave it profitable was the ability to slap a "Made in the USA" label on it, source organically-grown cotton, and milk the bleeding heart localist/green market (while staring Bangladeshis).

    A man's dress shirt is vastly more complicated, and as for a robot that can sew a sports jacket (a sewbot), there's an X-prize for that.

    What I didn't anticipate is that 3D printed bespoke corsets based on a personal scan are apparently A Thing (but corsets aren't a mass produced fashion item, so nobody seems to be trying to commercialize them). I suspect we would be only a couple of years away from a breakthrough in 3D printed bespoke fitted bras, except that as I understand it, the traditional bra is going the way of the necktie (driven out by sports bras and crop tops) -- improvements in textiles (notably elastane and double-stretch in everything) have made older methods of tailoring/structuring obsolescent.

    757:

    Ah! Maybe THAT's why the use (and possession) of real human skeletons is so discouraged in the UK - the gummint is afraid that necromantic terrorists will get hold of them and ....

    758:

    anthology of good Laundry stories by other writers

    Ahem.

    Did you miss the word "authorized"? I was assuming that Charlie wouldn't authorize an anthology of bad stories.

    759:

    Go to Archive of Our Own (AO3) and search for "Laundry Files". That's your anthology right there. I do not know how good any of it is because I don't read fanfic of my own work but it's out there already.

    I don't want fanfic of variable quality. I want good writing with an editor and the approval of the original author. That's why I specified "authorized anthology"…

    I suppose the other option would be a tribute anthology, like the one set in the Fountain that riffs Tales From the White Hart, or the anthology Multiverse set in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol universe. But that sort of thing usually happens after the original author's death, so I'd rather see an authorized volume.

    760:

    743 - Try more like £7-00 for a large fish supper; that's 2 pieces of haddock and a load of chips.

    751 - I just bought a new Winter jacket, size XXXL, and it is just wide enough round my shoulders and the arms are long enough but that's all.

    761:

    To further digress, calutrons were only a bad idea for a bomb effort that (a) had the space and resources to make large plutonium-breeding reactors, and (b) happened before high-temp superconductors. A superconducting calutron, especially one with a magnetic cusp rather than a simple racetrack, would draw little power, have excellent single-step separating power, and be relatively straightforward to construct. There's been some recent spook activity around CERN magnet designs that suggest it's at least plausible enough to make the powers-that-be expend some resources suppressing it.

    762:

    hmmm... "sewBOT™" would make a rather pithy title for both my next novel as well as the Netflix mini-series based upon it [grin]

    my rambling attempt toward a point was that an effective sewBOT™ -- robotic N-factor branching limbs, multiple hi-res cameras, AI learning algorithm, custom measurements for a billion customers, airborne drone delivery -- would suddenly render at least one hundred million sweatshop workers unemployed in economies where they had no better prospects... which as others pointed out in specific detailing...

    yes... complicated technology... but given the potential for various chunks of sewBOT™ to be developed as part of technology course credit at Stanford (or MIT or Sorbonne or Oxford)... all the chunks assembled into a satisfying wholeness which the school then has total control (anyone ever read the contract they signed when admitted to university?)...

    I'm using as an example sanitized stories of how the elf-nerds of Apple developed the iPhone in so few years by a combination of commercial-off-the-shelf plus ferreting out useful bits in development plus intensive in-house R&D...

    in some center location (shop strip, semi-empty mall, next door to supermarket) there would be a booth you step into and AI analyzes you (skin complexion, stance, age, culture, buying habits, body measurements, budget, local climate, job conditions, etc) and displays a dozen choices for a piece of clothing... you select your choice... swipe your credit card... estimated delivery is N hours... data sent out to factory...

    for sure rather than scattering single sewBOT™ units in malls, would be aggregated into a nearby factory, perhaps fifty units... carefully designed factory which could be replicated once per urban center (population = 10K or greater)... there are in the US about 3100 such urban centers... some combination of human driver (Amazon vehicles) and drones to provide delivery within 12 hours of garment completion within 50 mile radius...

    as to why... how many zeroes would you like to see after a one on your annual bonus check?

    clothing is a multi-billion dollar industry ("apparel market in US$343.70B")... if you could carve off 10% (eventually 80%?) of that... gonna hurt yourself carrying those sacks of gold bars...

    [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-cities-towns-villages-by-population-size/

    763:

    The Manhattan Project engineers tried everything that they thought would work to enrich uranium, all at the same time -- calutrons, mass spectrometry, gaseous diffusion. The Germans spent a lot of time trying to figure out what would be the best process to enrich U235 before starting to build anything. The Little Boy bomb's fissile elements were made up from U235 derived from all the test systems, something that caused a certain amount of problems in designing the weapon since the products from the different processes had varying levels of enrichment.

    Gaseous diffusion plants use a lot of electricity too, it wasn't just the calutrons that ate the amps from the TVA electrical grid.

    As for weapons-grade Pu you start with depleted uranium, nearly pure U-238, derived from your U-235 separation process. You expose the DU to moderated neutron flux in a reactor for a short period of time, a couple of weeks max. That results in some of the DU being transmuted via a single neutron capture into Pu-239 and a much smaller amount being bred further up into Pu-240. The other contaminants can be chemically separated out (there's a little fission of residual U-235 in the DU resulting in some isotopic residue such as Sr-90 and Cs-134/Cs-137 etc.) After processing the surplus DU can be recycled through the reactor to make more and more Pu-239 as required.

    764:

    Sweat-Shops & "industrial" production of clothing-materials & then assembly.
    This is "simply" a re-run of what happened in England ( And I mean, specifically, England ) in the period 1771 - Cromford Mill - through to about 1850.
    That time round, it was the skilled spinners & weavers whose businesses were wrecked by Arkwright & his successors. Go & look it up?

    As for Charlie @ 756 ...
    Now I've stopped dribbling, I don't think I'd better go anywhere near the "bras" discussion, other than: Yes, but are they any easier to remove?" - or maybe not ....

    765:

    760: I wouldn't claim our local takeaway is anywhere near the cheapest, not least because there isn't another one anywhere near

    766:

    »A superconducting calutron«

    The too-hot-to-mention technology these days is to separate isotopes with precisely tuned laser-light, aka "AVLIS".

    Ozzie researchers used it on Uranium with such a low energy budget, that it instantly became very hard to publish articles about it, and to buy frequency stabilized lasers.

    The only big unknowns, at least to the public, is how you scale it up from the desktop to factory-floor sized.

    Extrapolating from the australian numbers, you would not be able to tell the difference between a tooth-paste factory and an clandestine enrichment facility from infrared telemetry.

    767:

    The Manhattan Project engineers tried everything that they thought would work to enrich uranium, all at the same time -- calutrons, mass spectrometry, gaseous diffusion.

    Yep. GD needed UF6 and apparently no on had ever done much with Florine at industrial scale before. So it took a while. (Florine can be nasty. One of the bigger issues my father dealt with into the 70s was keeping the plumbing from leaking UF6 which at higher temps could be interesting.)

    Gaseous diffusion plants use a lot of electricity too,

    More like VAST. The GD plant I grew up near could use 1 GW or so at full production. Maybe 3 GW. Sources aren't clear.

    Back to Charlie's comments. As soon as they got GD to the point it could refine to bomb grade they shut down the calutrons. (I wonder how long it took them to return the silver to the US Treasury?) As to the high speed centrifuges, the control tech (and maybe not the machining tech) just wasn't up to the task as the time. GD could be controlled by operators (not PHDs or engineers) watching a room full of dials and adjusting things in people time.

    768:

    They tried liquid diffusion as well, as one of their first attempts. Works rather well, and doesn't involve hideous chemicals, but the trouble is you have to maintain a temperature gradient of some tens of K across a very thin layer of nicely thermally conductive aqueous solution, which sends the power requirements through the roof. OK, so all the methods are a bit like that, but even the roof of the Empire State Building isn't safe from this one.

    769:

    You're ignoring RUR by Karl Capek and "I, Robot" by Adam Link (and many others). (I'm not sure when Williamson's "The Humanoids" first came out. It first cam out as short stories, probably in Astounding.) Asimov systematized the robots, made them "really fancy computers", with programming problems (but see "The Humanoids"). And he wrote lots of them and was popular. But the ideas were already floating around.

    770:

    JohnS asked on February 10, 2023 at 21:28 in #613:

    Can you have two cell phones that share the same phone number?

    I do that with Google Voice. Two phones, each with a primary number from the carrier, use Google's VOIP app with a third number. Either can use the Google VOIP number over 4G/5G. Done it with other VOIP providers as well.

    771:

    U-isotope separation
    The UK's later separation facility was at Capenhurst, in Cheshire - Note the vast number of power-lines converging there ....
    The other, earlier facility, hidden in a Welsh valley in an old mining/quarrying area was at Rhydymwyn, between Wrexham / Mold & Denbeigh - here, just look at the size of the old works.

    772:

    Calutrons draw craploads of power because you have to vaporise all the uranium you put into them and then accelerate lump-in-your-hand numbers of charged particles through a large potential difference, and all that energy gets dumped as heat. To make an efficient one you'd have to have a deceleration chamber where the heavy particles (probably not worth bothering for the light ones) are decelerated back down through the same potential difference before you collect them, and a great tangle of heat exchangers and stuff of peculiar and difficult designs to recycle the heat of vaporisation. You could probably do it, but it'd be a huge pain in the arse and certainly far too much to bother with for a crash wartime project when you have the alternative available of just throwing energy at it.

    However, a basic calutron is probably quite a good option for doing it in your shed, because there's no chemistry and the separation factor is immensely greater than any of the other methods. You could build a small one and run it off the solar panels on your roof, and just not worry about it taking a long time to do much.

    High temperature superconductors are a bit of a red herring; where we actually need superconductors for bigger than toy-sized applications, we are still cooling them to liquid helium temperatures. If high temperature ones were actually useful then hospitals wouldn't care about possible helium shortages.

    773:

    Topic drift:

    Meteroid 'Sar2667' aka 2023 CX1 impact was projected 3 km off Cap Fagnet on the Normandy coast where sea bed is 18m deep, actually hit 4 km offshore at 2:59 London time. Energy before atmo entry: 100 tons TNT. Noise from impact 59db on the beach, 9 secs after strike. 'Splash crater' 24m wide. Average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 0.1 years.

    First projection was for a North American impact, but more data refined the splashdown point.

    https://twitter.com/tw__astro/status/1624908400902504451

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/feb/13/asteroid-lights-up-sky-over-channel-as-scientists-predict-strike

    https://earthsky.org/space/small-asteroid-impact-near-france-english-channel/

    774:

    The big trouble with laser separation (and calutrons, for that matter) for a shed operation is that you have to handle a lot of hard vacuum with bits of uranium vapour floating about in it. It's much easier to set up a method for plating the inside of bits of expensive apparatus with uranium than to actually get something useful out of it.

    I reckon the best option for the shed is to use the difference in equilibrium constants for the different isotopes in redox reactions swapping between the various oxidation states of uranium, and do mass chromatography using ion exchange resin (ideally a special one, but ordinary water-softening stuff will do). The separation factor you can get varies between useless and superb depending on what you pick for the other reactants, but you don't need anything either exotic or horrible chemically, nor do you need exotic or horribly expensive apparatus, and it's all straightforward wet chemistry of aqueous solutions at ambient pressure and liquid-water temperatures. The French have looked at U3+<=>U4+ reactions, and the Japanese have looked at U4+<=>U6+ reactions which seem to be easier to handle. I've read a couple of Japanese papers on it which describe at length a process which works very well with good separation and low energy consumption, and then conclude with half a column frantically arguing that it's total shite and would need three power stations to run it and would be bound to blow up in your face and couldn't ever possibly be used at all ever, never mind the contradictions with all the rest of the paper or the dead obvious and simple precautions to negate the blowing up in your face bit. Which leads me to suspect that in fact it does work as well as the body of the paper suggests it does and the authorship of that final half-column does not rest entirely with the researchers.

    775:

    The Humanoids, aka With Folded Hands. 1947/48 by Jack Williamson.

    776:

    "The GD plant I grew up near could use 1 GW or so at full production. Maybe 3 GW."

    Sort of a random thought, but how well do the uranium isotope separation methods that require electrical power handle intermittency of that power? Say you want to enrich to 4% or 20% rather than military-grade 93% and might need less average power to do that.

    So you hook the enrichment plant to wind + solar that has good month-long average power output, but gets a bit undependable on lesser time scales. Texas, for example currently has W+S average power of 15 GW against the state demand of 47 GW, so I think it could spare a GW or two while building up to meet state-wide demands. But its W+S power output swings wildly, as the wind blows and the sun shines. Tradeoffs and prioritization would be necessary.

    This goes back to the perennial question of "how do you make renewables work?", of course. Rather than charge batteries or pump hydro for storage, enrich uranium?

    777:

    Or maybe there's already some jokers out there - the latest shootdown, near Lake Huron, was octagonal, and things hanging down with no payload.

    I'll buy a drink for whoever here shows me it wasn't some college kids or whoever playing around.

    778:

    The latter - yeah. I'd just gotten home from school when my mother called, crying.

    779:

    I would think that Manchuria's collapse - and note that the War in Europe was ending/ended, they could see they were looking at Europe play out again over their islands. The bomb - and I'm one of those who thought they could have demonstrated it on an uninhabited island, and let the Japanese look at the results - along with invasions from both sides, and the new weapon, were the end.

    780:

    Re: '"I, Robot" by Adam Link (and many others)'

    Not ignoring, just wasn't aware of them - so thanks for the info! I looked up Adam Link on Wikipedia to see whether there was a known connection with Asimov. Yes: Asimov is quoted as having been influenced by Link's story. Also mentioned that he lost an argument with his publisher: Asimov didn't want to use Link's title for his robot short story collection.

    Re: Children unemployed once AI takes over piece-work clothing factories

    How about sending all these kids to school? And feeding them while they're there. Maybe have them learn about various agricultures from historical to most recent advances, plus nutrition. As practicum, have them build agro-kits for home use. Such kit building could easily become a new cottage industry or scaled up for mega production (export markets).

    Re: Alternate food sources

    At some point insect/worm farming for cheaper, greener and more reliable alternative protein sources is going to get accepted in the West. C'mon - you've been eating snails, eels, mussels, clams, etc. for thousands of years. Also Marmite. Also green, moldy, highly 'aromatic' cheeses. This isn't such a big leap.

    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/europe-insect-based-food-meat/

    781:

    "Sort of a random thought, but how well do the uranium isotope separation methods that require electrical power handle intermittency of that power?"

    Extremely badly, as a rule. Anything involving UF6 will gunk itself solid if the power goes off. It's hard enough to stop that happening even in normal operation, because UF6 is one of those substances that lures you to use it by having exactly one extremely convenient property (vaporising at low temperature), and then having sucked you in puts as much effort as it can into being a complete bastard with all its other properties. Like decomposing when it goes round sharp corners.

    The Japanese or French chemical separation processes are probably the best bets for handling intermittency, because their main energy consumption is in returning reactants to their starting conditions, outside the actual separation process. As long as you've got big enough tanks to tide you over until you can switch the recycling on again, you can keep the separation part going with much less power.

    782:

    I keep hoping to read about that happening to Faux Noise, here in the US.

    784:

    I myself have been having thoughts concerning things like clusters of bin liners inflated with methane, labelled ACME, and a suspended life-size Wile E Coyote.

    785:

    Charlie, thanks for reassuring me that I'm doing the right thing. Other than trying to sell to zines, my writing career (not the writing, but the selling) is stalled while I wait to hear one way or another from Toni Weisskopf if she and Baen are going to rehome my novel, because if a major, Baen, takes it on, I submit the next novel in that universe to them.

    And what you speak of is exactly what I'm afraid of, if I submit to someone else (a large small press editor really wants me), but....

    786:

    But then they wouldn't have been able to see what it does to a real target, and all that effort persuading the conventional forces to leave them some untouched real targets to play with would have been wasted.

    787:

    Damian @ 741:

    I don't think it necessarily follows that US participation turned the war from unwinnable to winnable for the Allies. It was most likely already still winnable, if a bit touch-and-go, but US participation made it certain. Hence the story about Churchill (quietly) cheering when he heard the news about Pearl Harbour.

    I'm not so sure Britain's war with the NAZIS was "winnable". I don't claim the U.S. won the war, but Britain would not have defeated the NAZIS without U.S. HELP. Pearl Harbor could have taken the U.S. completely out of the war in Europe and that would not have benefited Britain at all.

    Hitler declaring war on the U.S. was a monumental blunder, even greater than the blunder of starting a two front war with the Soviet Union before he'd secured victory against Britain.

    That second blunder ensured he would NEVER recover from the previous one. Churchill had real reason to cheer that.

    788:

    Small corrections: Dien Bien Phu, when the French lost 'Nam, was 1954. The US had been paying 80% of the French military bill for the last two years of that war. Then, the UN brokered the ceaserfire, and the troops from each side were to separate, and there would be national elections for a government. The US, unilaterally, decided not to allow that, brought in an academic who'd been in the US for 20 years (as opposed to Uncle Ho, who'd been leading the fight against the Japanese, then against the French, for so many years_, and created "South Vietnam". Ike is quoted as having said that had we "allowed" free and fair elections, 80% of the country would have voted for Ho, who they saw as their George Washingon.

    789:

    Alternatively, the people overthrow the ultrawealthy who own the AI and machines, and BMI, and national healthcare, and...

    Sorry, I'm talking about the plot of my next novel to be sold....

    790:

    I understand. Around '01, I took my son to e "big and tall men's store" around Chicago. At 18, he was 6'4" in his stocking feet. And 129lbs. (Yes, he could hide behind a fencepost....)

    Nope. Turned out they were for big and/or tall me, only tall and fat. I had to have his grandmother ship clothes from Texas, where they were used to tall and skinny.

    791:

    Seconded. I get really annoyed with Americans putting down the French, though they were our first ally, before we were a country.

    792:

    Greg Tingey @ 742:

    Are they breeding, or something? - except they all appear to be different to/fom each other. { See also my # 723 }
    I'm not familiar with Morden's (Where the Shadows lie)work

    I'm more and more convinced that since the BIG balloon got caught & shot down, China is just throwing anything they can into the winds for the sole purpose of making the right-wingnut crazies in the U.S. even crazier - poking the monkeys in their cage with a stick just to make them howl ... which may not be the best long term tactic.

    As with"us" - how would Stalin & the CCCP have fared without the vast supplies from the USA & Britain that we shipped in via the Arctic Convoys &/or overland through Persia ( As it was called, then )
    Or, as Damian says: senior Soviet leadership had formed the assessment that the USSR could not have won without Lend-Lease. - Yes.

    I don't think the CCCP (USSR) would have fared all that well if the U.S. had turned its back on Europe to fight a Pacific war.

    I think there's a good chance Hitler could have forced Britain into an "Armistice" (and you know damn well any such would have been punitively revanchist) allowing him to turn the full might of the German war machine on Russia. Under those circumstances, I think Germany could have defeated Stalin & the USSR.

    ... and the rest, as they say, is (fortunately NOT) history.

    793:

    Charlie Stross @ 755:

    "zombies... the 'residual human resources' having to be tossed into the composter upon reaching (and exceeding) their 'best by date'"

    Don't tell Harry.

    (I assume you missed that cameo in The Labyrinth Index but I have plans for Harry later in the series/universe. Ahem. "Harry" is short for "Harryhausen", a gallows humour nickname based on stop-frame animator Ray Harryhausen's most famous creation. Take an RHR that's falling apart, add some wires to hold it together and electric motors to keep it shambling, and hey presto! Animated skeleton, complete with Touch of Death!)

    That sounds like the fence around the pyramid.

    794:

    "from Texas, where they were used to tall and skinny"

    Once upon a year, I worked for an impressively blonde and tall and slim lady from Texas.

    She had many accomplishments to her name, including getting to be a USAF Colonel. Also parachuting, which left her with bad knees, probably because of the aforementioned tall and skinny.

    I wonder how tall and skinny came to be a thing in Texas.

    795:

    mine faith in basis of reality has been shattered...

    "February 30 has been a real date at least twice in history"

    Q: is there anything we can absolutely count upon!?

    https://www.timeanddate.com/date/february-30.html#:~:text=Today%2C%20the%20month%20of%20February,happened%20in%20Sweden%20in%201712.

    796:

    If you want a real laugh look at the abolition (or not) of leap seconds. I seriously expect a proposal to spin up the earth because that would be easier than dealing with the people who hate leap seconds.

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

    797:

    To me the amusement is because we-the-species are combining the habitual measurement of time of day to the nanosecond with length of day being roughly 24 hours, give or take. So at the exact same time as we're using GPS etc that absolutely rely on knowing when each satellite is and have a whole lot of dependency on astronomical effects (solar heating affects satellite position!) the software in those deices also can't cope with the need to make adjustments between nominal time and astronomical time.

    One part of the software says "it's 12345678 seconds since the epoch, so it's 12:23:34 on the 1/2/2023" while another part says "it's 12345677.098765432183 seconds since the epoch, give or take a few femtoseconds, in my frame of reference". The first system hears that and responds "it's 12345678 seconds shut up shut up shut up error errror errrrror out of cheese {blurk} {fzzzt}"

    798:

    I'm not so sure Britain's war with the NAZIS was "winnable"

    I think that's a category error. There was never something fitting the description "Britain's war with the Nazis". The Second World War began in September, 1939 with the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland and the Baltic states. It intensified somewhat in 1940 with the German invasion and occupation of mainland Western Europe. I suppose that might be the bit that's a little confusing, since a map of Europe from that period looks like it was all over (although the Allies subsequently won the Battle of Britain in the air over the British Isles and the channel, a theatre where Germany never gained air superiority). It intensified again in June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet-held parts of Poland, the Baltic states and the USSR. The situation following on from that is the one that we're discussing, not some counterfactual based on Germany not invading the Soviet Union.

    799:

    Diet, I assume. Lot of meat, and a lot of calcium, I think. I mean, as I used to say when we lived in the exurbs outside Austin, we'd only been above the Tethys Sea for 10M years. You want turf, give it a little time, just wait another 10M years....

    800:

    I get really annoyed with Americans putting down the French

    I just find it puzzling. The disdain for France that appears to be commonplace in the USA wasn't a thing when I was a kid, certainly not here in Oz and I never picked up on that from the steam of US culture that the Australian mainstream media was mainlining by that time either (you could say it had just exceeded parity with the content from the UK by that time, and that's also the time the Australian government started bringing in local content rules for media). I remember it coming up as a joke on the Simpsons, and I really suspect that was the first time it drifted into my consciousness from an actual pop-culture source (if I'd come across it before that I possibly dismissed it as fringe). It seemed to come up a lot after that, and has been increasing over that 20 years or so. It's a sort of re-writing/re-interpretation of history... I guess a bit like calling the Nazis left-wing (because they had "socialist" in their name, or some equally crude reason). But is it just my blinkered impression from too much Casablanca or Hogan's Hero's, or is it really true the US was just as respectful as the rest of us of the France that survived occupation and which fielded the dominant land armies in Europe in the the early and later 20th century, not to mention the 19th... up till some undefined time since the 1980s?

    801:

    It sort of prompts a rougher-than-usual paraphrase of Douglas Adams: "Time is an illusion, February doubly so".

    But now I'm looking forward to lunchtime...

    802:

    Re: '... the ultrawealthy who own the AI and machines, and BMI, and national healthcare, and...'

    Maybe you could get some plot points from the UK's PM: how to design angel-investor type gov't-backed loans so that your nearest & dearest plus the usual assortment of ultra-right wing media goons (Merde-ugh*) can publicly claim a pat on the back for being such gallant supporters of small biz. And then when no one's looking, that biz collapses which by then happens to owe creditors and employees and the UK internal revenue/tax dept close to the 'loan' amount. Kudos! That's one hell of a scam -- being able to soak that many different folks/sectors of the economy in one pass.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/13/akshata-murty-held-shares-in-collapsed-firm-that-had-near-300k-sunak-taxpayer-loan

    'Murty has invested some of that wealth via Catamaran Ventures, with mixed results. On several occasions she bought stakes in businesses that later collapsed having received taxpayer support, or with outstanding debts to HM Revenue and Customs.'

    *English root name with a French meaning attached.

    It'd be interesting to see how many businesses that received this gov't funding and collapsed did vs. did not have Tory Pol (and/or family) investors.

    803:

    I wonder how tall and skinny came to be a thing in Texas.

    Some of it clearly is diet. Lots of milk and beef in cattle country.

    But another part is many of the immigrants during the 1800's came from Germany. Lots of tall blondes.

    804:

    I emigrated to US in 1980 and began noticing the disdain for the French, at least among the right wing, some time in the late 80's. Definitely by the time of First Gulf War.

    805:

    Disdain: Probably came from the British disdain for the French (or as the Brits say "Frogs"). Also, the Pink Panther movies didn't help. Americans are led by the nose by the media.

    806:

    whitroth:

    I get really annoyed with Americans putting down the French

    there's the military effectiveness of France in 1790s and a rather different level of effectiveness in 1940s... over those 150 years their effectiveness did not keep up with their enemies... to describe France in 1940s as less effective than Germany is not a put down... it is historical fact they lost...

    whereas in idle chatter on this blog about a skull-cracking-no-rules-no-mercy fight between Germany and Russia in an alt-history version of WW2, the best possible outcome for humanity would have been both dictatorships being bled onto the edge of collapse... and the nominal 'winner' gets stomped upon by France (or England or Sweden or a platoon of elderly Catholic clergy or kindergarten kids with sticks)

    as to my personal disdain for France, it was the demands placed upon NATO at its formation to do various things favorable to France; starting with why there's got to be the French mode of abbreviating the name as part of the logo but no other nation made that demand a non-negotiable item; then there's the refusal to allocate military funding to the expected amount; result of that was not many members of NATO were willing to maintain required levels of military equipment and standards of training...

    ...not until Russia invaded Ukraine and now everyone is howling about rusty equipment never properly maintained;

    there's a number of other personal reasons I've come to loathe the French but those have little to do with military readiness;

    807:

    See that's the thing... there's the usual affectionate dismissive humour that you see among frenemy-rival cultures going on with British attitudes to the French and vice versa. You'd only see something like 'frog' in an outright pejorative use with no irony among very fringe, bordering on raving loony right wing types, the same people who might use the same tones with overtly racist terms (different to the US ones). These people were openly parodied mercilessly and there were not very many of them. I always felt that it was a similar story in most of the USA. It's really only since the 80s that people like that actually got a voice.

    808:

    Re: "... disdain for the French, at least among the right wing, some time in the late 80's'

    From the little that I've read about this, the US disdain became fury when Ronnie Raygun wanted to kick-off his New World Order once the USSR collapsed. Of course this would mean that the US would hold the reins and make the rules. But the French said 'Non!'. What France wanted was a non capitalist-dominated body, i.e., the EU which was officially founded c. 1993.

    This US-France bickering about what defines governance, society and progress has been going on for about a hundred years.

    Hmm... maybe that's why UK Tories don't like the EU: the French played a major part in its inception and creation.

    Howard NYC @806:

    Gov't funded projects are the largest part of their economy - mostly education, health, social programs, i.e., completely opposite to the US. And I'm guessing that whichever NATO member country happened to have the large$t weapons manufacturers would probably get the NATO contract. (USofA?) So to get as much armament as the US wanted them to have, France would have had to cut all of its other spending ... by a lot.

    Wasn't this played out again just a few years ago when there was discussion about new hideously expensive military jets that didn't even fly as fast/far as the model they were supposed to replace?

    809:

    I think you're confusing the word "Gammons" with the word "Brits" (meaning British (abbreviation)) here. See OGH's "New Management" stories for further information.

    810:

    From the little that I've read about this, the US disdain became fury when Ronnie Raygun wanted to kick-off his New World Order once the USSR collapsed. ...What France wanted was a non capitalist-dominated body, i.e., the EU which was officially founded c. 1993.

    Unfortunately, that's a violation of temporal order. The Berlin Wall collapsed (as good a marker for the fall of the USSR as any) in November 1989, after the end of Reagan's presidency. The Baltic Soviet republics and Georgia left the USSR in 1990 (or at least declared themselves gone). The phrase 'New World Order' in this context came from the George H.W. Bush administration, around the time of the 1991 Iraq war. The EU developed out of the old EC, which had been around for decades.

    The way I remember it (though I've usually been pretty out of touch with U.S. popular culture), the belittling of the French became noticeable after the French opposed the U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003 or so, though the choice phrase 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' dates back to 1995. Yes, it came from the Simpsons.(1)

    My impression is that folks with actual military know-how (not me, though I've known some over the years) respect at least the lower ranks of the French military, though maybe not the generals.

    (1) Now there's a title for a horror movie: It Came From The Simpsons.

    811:

    The disdain for France that appears to be commonplace in the USA wasn't a thing when I was a kid

    Twenty years ago France refused to sign on to Bush's war against Iraq. I think that has a lot to do with it — that's when "freedom fries", "freedom toast", and the like were spawned, and a lot of newspaper editorials and columns castigated France for not falling into line.

    812:

    It's not there yet, but I think that AI technology will eventually be able to put a lot of Hollywood scriptwriters out of business. I say this not because I think it will be that good. Instead, due to the mind numbingly bad writing, that often insults the intelligence of the viewer, that is typical of television and movies, it has a very low bar to meet. In short, it's not that it will be that good, it's that the product it needs to compete with is just that bad. In fact, it won't just be able to create "Hollywood quality" scripts, it will excel at it. Think about every time you have noticed a plot hole big enough to sail an aircraft carrier through, or noticed that the science in the science fiction was total random bs, not because it was the central premise of the plot (that's actually ok, a writer is permitted one or a few premises of "what if x,y and z were the way things were, and then spins a interesting g story around the differences that would create), but instead, just because. People love it. And if you point it out, "It's just a tv show". There's nothing AI does better than make random bs sound like it makes sense.

    Something unrelated just occured to me. They say ChatGPat isn't sentient. It's just regurgitating stuff it scraped off the internet I. A way that makes it appear so. Could the same be true of Donald Trump?

    813:

    I'm more and more convinced that since the BIG balloon got caught & shot down, China is just throwing anything they can into the winds for the sole purpose of making the right-wingnut crazies in the U.S. even crazier - poking the monkeys in their cage with a stick just to make them howl ... which may not be the best long term tactic.

    Could be. It could also be that the US is doing the same to China, but the balloons we're using are up at the top of the stratosphere and impossible for the Chinese to bring down. Normal cheap weather balloons pop at 100,000', while China's J-20, like the F-22, can only get up to 66,000'. What we're seeing could be tit for tat, with the US only showing its tits and not its tats.

    To cross the AI/Balloon streams a bit, my impression is that the comment that "the sky is full of junk" is probably accurate, and that as pointed to above, NORAD and other radars filtered returns by speed to make missiles and jets apparent amongst the weather balloons.

    If so, I'll bet that military thinkers all over realized that hiding surveillance devices in the aerial junk might be a way forward. For all we know, this worked for decades, until the Big China Balloon got caught and forced a reckoning.

    AI? They're now tracking smaller balloons and reporting that the Big China Balloon wasn't the first of its class to overfly the US, due to reanalysis of radar data from years past. This gets some "hmms" from me, mostly because a) they kept the data, and b) suddenly they're seeing all sorts of things they didn't see before, without getting swamped by every cluster of party balloons and high school experiment launched. I'd speculate they've been using AI to figure out what surveillance balloon signals look like and are now field-testing their new balloon detection and destruction abilities.

    814:

    Keeping the data isn't necessarily a big tell. Data retention and disposal policies are often a bit contradictory, implementing them can be hard and exposes the implementers to failure modes that can get them in serious trouble. Meanwhile there was a period when "storage is cheap" was a sort of mantra. It might now be more like "keep everything forever, storage is cheaper and lower risk than implementing disposal policies". OTOH rules around secondary use of data for any purpose depend on the data, who wants to use it and who could get in trouble for sharing... which means getting access to it is a lot easier than disposing of it.

    815:

    if you want to really muddy the (political) waters you should read the basic definitions for "sentient" and "sapient"... then compare 'n contrast "sentient" versus "sapient"... being able to respond to stimuli does not mean your central nervous system is effective at abstract conceptual processing

    816:

    I've just heard Charles Dance read a ChatGPT "Shakespearean sonnet" on BBC Radio 4 (for Valentine's DaY). I've no doubt at all that it will make advertising copywriter an occupation of the past.

    817:

    »The big trouble with laser separation (and calutrons, for that matter) for a shed operation is that you have to handle a lot of hard vacuum with bits of uranium vapour floating about in it.«

    You do not need hard vacuum for AVLIS, quite the contrary, but you still need to handle very corrosive substances.

    Keeping the window you shine your laser through transparent seem to be one of the biggest hurdles.

    818:

    waldo
    Me, too - followed by the Real ThingTM - so there.

    819:

    Keeping the window you shine your laser through transparent seem to be one of the biggest hurdles.

    Ain't that god's truth? I've worked with two laser-cooling-in-hard-vacuum experiments, and earwigged on the discussions of half a dozen more. Material deposition varies between "low enough we'd literally never thought of it" and "we have to dunk the windows in concentrated nitric acid every other week".

    For both the Ytterbium and Strontium experiments I've worked on / earwigged on, the basic design is to place a sample of unenriched metal in an oven heated to 3-400ºC to get enough vapour pressure, then a Zeeman slower to get it back down to cryogenic-ish temperatures such that it can be trapped.

    Without the technical language, that's a stream of hot, unoxidised metal, pointed at an optically flat, cold, sheet of glass. The words "mirror factory" come to mind every time I think about it - and, indeed, both experiments had to shut down and break vacuum about every year to replace the window.

    In a manufacturing line designed to process kilograms of material every day, as opposed to nanograms... I don't even want to think about it!

    820:

    So you are saying that our politicians are sentient but not sapient? It makes sense.

    821:

    The USA is well-known for spying on everyone else (whether 'allies' or enemies), and ignoring territoriality when it can get away with it. In this case, I believe China.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-64621598

    822:

    Yeah. You can blame David Mills and the POSIX committee for taking a minor, soluble problem and turning it into the utterly chaotic imbecility we have today. Don't get me started on POSIX timestamps :-(

    Markus Kuhn produced a vastly better proposal, which got ignored. I had thought of a similar one (because the solution is just SO obvious) and we had some interesting discussions. The executive summary is that it is simple to resolve this issue, at the cost of requiring people to actually think about what they are using time for (and needing a bit more space for timestamps).

    823:

    I was like that (though a little less so), but did a lot of walking and cycling. Trying to get trousers that would fit around my thighs that didn't wrap twice around my waist was a challenge ....

    824:

    Most of the experts I have read think you are wrong. No, Britain would not have signed an armistice after 1940, and the USSR rebuilt its industry and military without the USA's help, anyway - the equipment helped, but was not essential. Germany's invasion of Russia (like Napoleon's) was defeated by generals January and February and the obstinacy of the Russians. But the war would have dragged on a lot longer, Britain could not have invaded until Germany was almost defeated, and the USSR probably wouldn't have rolled into Berlin until 1950 or even later. The following article summarises what I have read:

    https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/lend-lease-helped-win-world-war-ii-not-eastern-front-96936

    Whether Britain would have developed an atomic bomb by then, I have no idea. It's certainly possible because, from the 40's to the 70's (and in some areas later), we concentrated on ingenuity rather than magnitude (being unable to afford the latter).

    825:

    Wasn't this played out again just a few years ago when there was discussion about new hideously expensive military jets that didn't even fly as fast/far as the model they were supposed to replace?

    Except there's a good reason for the speed thing: it's really hard to make a jet engine that can drive an airframe above about Mach 2.5 because you run into all sorts of nasty problems, from airframe heating due to atmospheric friction to the difficulty of slowing down intake air, then compressing it and expelling it at speed again. Afterburners work, up to a point, but they guzzle fuel at an insane rate.

    Meanwhile current generation AAMs fly at Mach 3 to Mach 4 and can pull more gees than an airframe with a human pilot, leading to stuff like the Meteor BVRAAM having a no-escape radius of something like 50km. That is: if you're in air combat and a Eurofighter driver gets a lock and pops off a Meteor at you from within 60km then you have about a 2-5% chance of avoiding being shot down. Speed won't save you from a missile with a 180km range at Mach 4. Your best bet is not to get shot at in the first place, i.e. to not be seen until you bushwhack your adversary.

    So there's less focus on raw speed than there was up to the 1980s, hence stuff like the relatively slow F-35 going into service. Flip side: the F-22, Eurofighter Typhoon II, and Rafale can all go supersonic and supercruise at Mach 1.5 or thereabouts without afterburner.

    826:

    The way I remember it (though I've usually been pretty out of touch with U.S. popular culture), the belittling of the French became noticeable after the French opposed the U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003 or so,

    It has been brewing at various intensities since the end of WWII. De Gaulle / France were determined to not be a player in the US/UK setup and went their own way in most everything related to defense and tech. Just to be different. I'm not saying they should not have done such but do it they did.

    Personally I think De Gaulle was embarrassed by having to have France liberated by the US/UK and was determined to not depend on them ever again. Viet Nam didn't help change the issue.

    827:

    Anything involving UF6 will gunk itself solid if the power goes off.

    Yes. Totally. My father and others at the plant would talk about how pulling the plug out of the wall would stop them for months. Which is why the 3 plants in the US were fed from multiple grids. Paducah had 3 grid sources, and I suspect the same or more for Portsmith and Oak Ridge. The design of the later 1940s built in the early 1950s required a day or more to wind things down from reasonably full production to idle. When the US started having brownouts in the early 70s there was a large scale engineering program ($20mil or more each) to change the plants so they could do the same drop in 4 hours or less. And then get paid by the power utilities for giving them back their guaranteed supply. At the same time tey upgraded the switch yards of the plants to allow them to be a transfer point between the grids. And get paid for doing such.

    828:

    Re: '... violation of temporal order.'

    You're right ...

    But I still think the RR era had a lot to do with it. And yes, the Bush/Iraq War era really ratcheted up feelings on both sides. Trust was further eroded when it turned out following Powell's speech to the UN that the US Prez/Cabinet were not getting or disseminating the whole picture re: mil intel. (Who was responsible for 'editing' mil intel briefs to the OO - No idea.) But when 'editing' leads to a decision to go to war, some serious checking into process is in order. (Again - No idea whether any systems were put in to verify that 'editing for length' did not turn into 'misleading for substance'.)

    Balloons ...

    I was wondering why on earth send a balloon into the northern Lake Huron area -- pretty good fishing plus some scenic and interesting bays. And then this turned up on my Google News: Oh crap!

    https://london.ctvnews.ca/search-underway-for-octagonal-object-shot-down-near-tobermory-1.6272020

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

    Robert - any other local POV re: the physics/engineering, impact on economy, health and safety given it's the middle of a wilder than usual winter?

    829:

    can all go supersonic and supercruise at Mach 1.5 or thereabouts without afterburner.

    Which is half the reason a local company is getting funding for a new super sonic passenger plane. The other half being air frame designs that can greatly reduce the resultant "boom".

    https://boomsupersonic.com/

    Although they did have to scramble over the last 6 months when Rolls Royce pulled out of being the engine supplier.

    I'm giving them a 50/50 chance of going into production.

    830:

    Cold War air doctrine required high-speed interceptors able to get from the ground to 50,000 feet and a long way from base really quickly to shoot down incoming nuclear bombers. It wasn't just flat-out speed but time-to-altitude that counted so we got planes like the Starfighter and the EE Lightning which traded fuel consumption to enhance performance.

    That balls-to-the-wall requirement has gone away mostly in an era of ballistic and cruise missiles which carry the nuclear threat today. Nuclear-armed bombers nearly all carry stand-off weapons that don't need to be dropped over the target so interception by scrambled fighters is an obsolete concept.

    Post-battle analysis dating back to the Korean War showed that air-to-air combat with jets occurred at high subsonic and barely supersonic speeds, no faster. The Mach 2-plus capabilities of most fighters in a combat scenario was rarely used even in escape manouvres. Today fuel efficiency is paramount, allowing a plane to stay engaged in contested space for longer before it has to leave and either tanker up or return to base.

    831:

    I was wondering why on earth send a balloon into the northern Lake Huron area -- pretty good fishing plus some scenic and interesting bays. And then this turned up on my Google News: Oh crap!

    I think people are reading way too much into what the balloons/things are flying over. Pick any path across the continental US and you'll fly over something strategic and important at some level.

    Some examples near me.

    Kentucky: Paducah (well not so much any more), Fort Knox, Fort Campbell

    Tennessee: Fort Campbell, Oak Ridge

    North Carolina: Seymore Johnson Air Base, Camp Lejeune Marine base, Fort Brag.

    South Carolina: Savannah River complex, Charleston port

    Virginia: Well everything in the eastern third to the coast.

    And I've left out the big power plants, civilian airports, heavy industry plants, etc... and likely a few military targets.

    Toss up a balloon into the jet stream and just use it where ever it goes. The jet stream meanders quite a bit over the US and Canada. A dozen or less flights would get you over much of the US in terms of reconnaissance. Add controls to raise and lower it and you can now hover if you wind up somewhere where you want a longer look. Drop down a bit to slow way down, then rise up a bit to start off again.

    And if you loose the jet stream you still have the general west to east air flows that will take you across the continent.

    832:

    From the New York Times, 14 February 2023

    A Rising Awareness That Balloons Are Everywhere in Our Skies

    As more unidentified objects were shot down by the U.S. Air Force in recent days, experts warned that there were an “endless” array of potential targets.

    [snip]

    “At any given moment, thousands of balloons” are above the Earth, including many used in the United States by government agencies, military forces, independent researchers and hobbyists, said Paul Fetkowitz, president of Kaymont Consolidated Industries, a maker of high-altitude balloons in Melbourne, Fla.

    [snip]

    833:

    Cold War air doctrine required high-speed interceptors able to get from the ground to 50,000 feet and a long way from base really quickly to shoot down incoming nuclear bombers. It wasn't just flat-out speed but time-to-altitude that counted so we got planes like the Starfighter and the EE Lightning which traded fuel consumption to enhance performance.

    Also, I think, the Mig-21 from the Soviet Union. I'm more familiar with this as the Finnish Air Force had them until 1998(!) and there is even one museum piece on a roof in Helsinki. (We also had SAAB Drakens. After that it's been F-18s.)

    I also have the Mig-21 DCS simulator module, and, uh, it's fun but very different from the Western planes. Quite fast and accelerates well but not that much endurance - so a regular interceptor, it ceptors inters.

    834:
    Personally I think De Gaulle was embarrassed by having to have France liberated by the US/UK

    Someone once asked Churchill if he had really said: "During the war, I had many crosses to bear. And the heaviest was the Cross of Lorraine."

    He replied: "No, I never said that. I wish I had. It's funny, and oh so true."

    835:

    Whether Britain would have developed an atomic bomb by then, I have no idea. It's certainly possible because, from the 40's to the 70's (and in some areas later), we concentrated on ingenuity rather than magnitude (being unable to afford the latter).

    Something that isn't appreciated by many people is that the UK went onto a total war footing on September 1st, 1939 and stayed that way until after VJ day. Nothing got manufactured that wasn't essential to the war effort, nothing got repaired unless it was necessary, and so on. Germany, in contrast, didn't go onto a total wartime production footing until 1943-44. And the results showed: the UK actually outmanufactured Germany in tanks and munitions, although not by much.

    The UK also had an empire: and insofar as the Third Reich was asset-stripping its occupied victims, the UK had Canada, Australia, NZ, India, and about half of Africa to draw on for natural resources -- not to mention the Persian oil fields.

    Could the UK have defeated the Third Reich without the USA and USSR on the same side? I don't know. It would have been ghastly, the war would have ground on for longer, and many more people would have died -- mostly civilians in Europe (and don't even think about what the death camps would have done with a couple more years to operate in). But I can't say for sure that it wouldn't have prevailed at the end of a long and hideous bloodbath culminating in the use of nerve gas and nuclear weapons against cities.

    Wild card: if Japan had stayed the hell out of the Philippines and didn't attack Pearl Harbour, bot concentrated on the British Empire in India and parts east (Burma, Malaysia, and then Australia), things would have been very much in the balance.

    836:

    I was like that (though a little less so), but did a lot of walking and cycling.

    Also a problem for fencers, who often end up seriously asymmetric unless they spend as much time training the 'wrong' side as they do the right…

    837:

    De Gaulle was embarrassed by having to have France liberated by the US/UK and was determined to not depend on them ever again. Viet Nam didn't help change the issue.

    You're American so I'll forgive you for forgetting the Suez Crisis, but that, not Vietnam, was the pivotal crisis in Franco-American relations.

    In 1956, Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal. The UK and France agreed to Do Something About It (and Israel pitched in because they were at war with Egypt). Then the USA yanked on the choke-chain hard.

    The British political establishment drew the lesson that "we can't afford to go it alone without US support any more". The French political establishment drew the lesson that "we can't afford to rely on American support -- we must be prepared to go it alone in future".

    In the long term the French reaction seems to have worked better for them than the British one.

    838:

    »Yeah. You can blame David Mills and the POSIX committee for taking a minor, soluble problem and turning it into the utterly chaotic imbecility we have today.«

    Sorry, but from my own behind the scenes position, I have to defend Dave Mills here: He had /nothing/ to do with neither the leap-second decision, nor their handling in UNIX, he just tried to live with it as best possible.

    Leap-seconds themselves are a badly thought out hack, but an vast improvement over the rubber-seconds they replaced.

    Dave explicitly decoupled and isolated NTP packets from /both/ UNIX timekeeping, (many years before POSIX), /and/ from leap-seconds, while being able to communicate both faithfully and precisely.

    This is why NTP packets can signal both insertions and removals of leap-seconds, whereas many other time conveyances, for instance the German DCF77 signal, relied on the geophysical wisdom that "removal of leap-seconds will /never happen/".

    Further: POSIX didn't as much make a decision as avoid to make a decision.

    Their assignment was to gold-plate as much of the SVID documents as possible, as cheaply as possible and as fast as possible, and they were /not/ going to entertain /any/ changes, they didn't absolutely have to make (read: changes IBM's lawyers forced them to make).

    839:

    Could the UK have defeated the Third Reich without the USA and USSR on the same side?

    Food and German submarines come into play more without the US. B-24s providing radar coverage across the entire N. Atlantic made a big difference in the situation. Convoy losses went way down after the last coverage gap was filled. When or if the B-24 were available might have made a difference.

    This entire "what if" has too many small but important variables to make any kind of accurate predictions.

    840:

    Robert - any other local POV re: the physics/engineering, impact on economy, health and safety given it's the middle of a wilder than usual winter?

    View of the Bruce generating station, or the balloon?

    Personally, the Bruce generating station seems to be a great idea, and I wish we had more of them. Among other things, apparently the Bruce plant can follow the grid!

    Contrary to popular belief, the electrical generators of nuclear plants can follow the load demands of the electrical grid provided specific engineered systems to permit this mode of operation are included in the plant design. Nuclear unit electrical power maneuvering has a number of advantages over other methods to manage reduced grid load during the evening and on weekends. This capability should be considered for inclusion in the specifications for nuclear units.

    A robust steam bypass system rated for continuous operation in parallel with turbine/generator operation can be used to manage surplus base generation and back up intermittent wind and solar generation. This can be done at a very low fuel cost of about 0.5 cents per kWh and with zero greenhouse gas emissions. A robust steam bypass system can permit daily electrical load cycling and maneuvering with no wear and tear on the nuclear systems. In addition, the periods of negative electrical market prices could be eliminated because it would not be necessary to bid negative energy prices into the market to preferentially keep nuclear units on-line. A robust steam bypass capability rated for continuous operation should be considered for inclusion in the specifications for nuclear units.

    The August 2003 blackout demonstrated that the current hydraulic and fossil plants are not sufficiently large or fast enough to quickly restore the grid to normal operation. Nuclear reactors are large and most are designed with fast speed governors and fast voltage control equipment. They should be considered for use much earlier in the grid restoration process following a grid blackout to better stabilize the grid during restoration and to reduce the time to restore normal grid operating conditions. The engineered systems to accomplish this should be considered for inclusion in the refurbishment programs of existing nuclear units and in the specifications of any new nuclear units.

    https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/submissions/2011-nuclear-plants.pdf

    In terms of the balloon, I doubt it was aimed at the plant. Lots of better ways to gather information about it, if needed.

    841:

    »So there's less focus on raw speed than there was up to the 1980s, «

    In 1970's the focus on speed was already trying to win the previous war.

    The targets fighter-interceptors would have dealt with previously, were now targets for self-targeting and steered missiles, launched far from the intercept point, and digital radar technologies had increased the warning range for any conventional airborne target by orders of magnitude.

    Look at the terrain-hugging cruise-missiles fielded during the same period: If you hide in the unavoidable ground-clutter of radars, you can "cruise" along comfortably and trade speed for range.

    842:

    No, he didn't. The NTP protocol always used UTC, not TAI, which is the fundamental error. If it had used TAI with a leap-second count (at the time and location of creation of the timestamp), all would have been well. I can no longer remember the problems sourrounding the leap second flagging, but can remember there were enough to make it unreliable.

    I am aware of POSIX's remit and political management, which meant that it should never have been accepted as an international standard, but let's skip that. The utter imbecility is to use a single untagged timestamp and multiple 'clocks'. When you have a timestamp in the vicinity of a leap second, what time does it really mean? You can't tell.

    843:

    "the choice phrase 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' dates back to 1995. Yes, it came from the Simpsons."

    I first became aware of that phrase when it started getting used a lot as a result of Google responding to the search term "French military victories" with "Did you mean French military defeats?". It is possible that without Google's "helpfulness" we might not have ended up leaving the EU.

    844:

    You're American so I'll forgive you for forgetting the Suez Crisis,

    I know of it. And if I sit back and think, about a dozen or gross other things. The French went their own way. For good and bad. Which tended to make them a punch line in US public and political opinions over the years.

    But it's hard to separate De Gaulle and France for the 20+ years after the end of WWII. And he was pissed about what happened and being forced to "suck hind tit".

    Of course I do like this quote attributed to him. Spoken when someone was described as being indispensable.

    The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

    845:

    A Rising Awareness That Balloons Are Everywhere in Our Skies

    Thanks!

    Woke up and remembered the other, non-exclusive possibility for how the US suddenly developed the ability to see these things without getting swamped: our intelligence services have been seeing them all along, and figured they got more intel out of monitoring them than they did out of intercepting them. Quite possibly the observations were categorized as "not sufficiently important to inform the White House."

    Then the Big Chinese Balloon became a political football, and the intelligence services coughed up their data, probably under order, possibly to embarrass certain VIPs. Now we're getting the circus.

    846:

    Look at the terrain-hugging cruise-missiles fielded during the same period: If you hide in the unavoidable ground-clutter of radars, you can "cruise" along comfortably and trade speed for range.

    Of course if you get lazy and keep sending them on the same path for the first 95% of their flights the other side can start picking them off with a few well placed .50 cal guns.

    And similar results when a group of fighter aircraft do similar things.

    Is this a US blind spot or just a humans all over thing?

    847:

    »The NTP protocol always used UTC, not TAI«

    Of course it did!

    Where would you have gotten TAI time from in 1978/1979 when he started his work on what became NTP ?

    Where would you even get it today ?!

    Do not blame the messenger (or his protocol!) for not doing something which would have been patently impossible at the time.

    »I can no longer remember the problems sourrounding the leap second flagging, but can remember there were enough to make it unreliable.«

    Well, that's certainly a robust foundation for your critique.

    I can tell you exactly what the problems are: People not taking leap-seconds seriously, because they are small, irregular, and because most people in Europe and USA are drunk or sleeping when they happen.

    None of the "commercial" UNIX vendors bothered with leapseconds at /all/, many didn't even bother with NTP.

    What NTP support there were in SunOS was because Dave had personal friends inside Sun.

    RedHat shipped several very popular versions of their OS with a NTP server enabled by default, and configured to claim the local clock, whatever it showed, was a Stratum 1 server.

    When we had a show of hands in the secret society of leapsecond-wranglers, only two persons had ever tested negative leapseconds, and the other guy was also from FreeBSD.

    Nobody indicated that regular testing of the leapsecond code in Linux was even a thing, which caused Hetzner and other data-centers quite a surprise during one of them.

    As much as I love the quaintness of leap-seconds with my time-nut hat on, as a IT person with my fingers in safety-critical systems, I have to classify them as a self-inflicted needless and pointless danger to life and limb.

    And please stop blaming the people who tried to mitigate this clusterfuck as best they could, in particular when you dont know what you are actually taking about.

    848:

    The Soviets considered but ultimately rejected the idea of building tall fences in their territories along expected routes of terrain-following cruise missiles that might be carrying nuclear warheads and headed for major conurbations. The fences would have needed to be be about 50 metres tall IIRC.

    Satellite imaging would have allowed American intelligence to spot these fences and either route cruise missiles around them or just hop over them, flying higher for a short time before descending back down to normal ground-hugging mode.

    849:

    But but but "BUILD A WALL" ...

    Couldn't resist.

    My point about flight paths is in Iraq and other places the locals noted frequent cruise missile flights along the same path and so they setup .50 cal machine guns and similar. And while they might miss the first one they tended to get later one(s). Then the brains back home started varying the paths somewhat.

    And every 10 years or so the plane at the back of an inline attack / surveillance formation gets shot down for similar reasons.

    You'd think someone would put up a sign somewhere in the Pentagon.

    850:

    »The fences would have needed to be be about 50 metres tall IIRC.«

    USA deliberately understated the operational altitude of the cruise missiles in their propaganda.

    In practice most cruise missiles seem to have been flown well over 50m above terrain, and it makes a lot of sense to keep them out of smoke from fires and range of small arms.

    851:

    An AI app walks into a writers room

    How about

    An AI app climbs into a fighter cockpit?

    https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/02/the-us-air-force-successfully-tested-this-ai-controlled-jet-fighter/

    852:

    Regarding the large Chinese balloon that was shot down over Myrtle beach, what puzzles me a little is "where are all the Open Source Intel (OSINT) images of the balloon during its flight across the US?"

    I've seen a couple of images of the balloon in flight and of course the video of the actual shootdown but the US has a lot of enthusiastic amateur astronomers with capable telescopes and camera systems and it seems none of them took detailed pictures of the balloon and released them publicly. The weather may not have been conducive to taking pictures in some locales but surely images from clear-sky locations should be common.

    853:

    Of the ones I know in the US, most do not care. And most of the better ones have tracking setups geared to night imaging via motorized tracking via computer control of plotted tracks.

    854:

    But it's hard to separate De Gaulle and France for the 20+ years after the end of WWII. De Gaulle resigned in 1946 and only came back into power in 1958, because of the Algerian war. The fourth republic (1945-1958) was heavily influenced, some say corrupted by the USA. The AFL-CIA (not a typo) worked successfully to split the largest French union. One of the main objectives of the USA was the dismantling of the British and French empires, while building their own. To that end they (the CIA) financed the algerian FLN while supposedly being an ally of France.

    855:

    By chance, I know a few astronomers who have suitable kit.

    Most work full time so don't spend their day times just aimlessly gawping at the sky, they have data to process and equipment to maintain/enhance or projects to work on - in addition to all the stuff normal people do like DIY, shopping, gardening playing with the kids etc.

    Many use sensors that would saturate during the day - equipment optimised for exposures of 180secs rather than 1/100th sec. Faster sensors tend to be small field of view which makes a moving target harder to find.

    Many live under cloudy skies - just ask an amateur astronomer about the weather... take a book, after the first 10 minutes you may want to hit them with it.

    Several I know do all their telescope pointing by computer and would have a harder time tracking something random down.

    Realistically, only a subset of imagers manage to get out to see exciting stuff like the impacting asteroid this week or the current brightish comet, so don't be surprised that they are not all out in the garden poised to image anything that passes by.

    I've seen a mobile phone picture or two but, as mobile images usually are, they fairly crap.

    856:

    And where would you get even millisecond-correct UTC from in 1978-9?

    Rack-mounted atomic clocks date from 1964 and, if I recall correctly, NPL was broadcasting a time signal from one in the 1970s. I can't find the actual date it started.

    You repeatedly ignore the fact that the original design of NTP was for another problem entirely - that of obtaining more accuracy than a single clock could give in a close-coupled network. That never was the Internet requirement and, at the VERY least, the protocol should have been checked for suitability when NTP was being pushed for that.

    And I hope that even you are not denying that there is no way that UTC can ever be used for a reliable sub-second timestamp, which was and is networked computers' primary requirement for synchronised time.

    Sigh. I cannot remember the leap second problems IN DETAIL. I can remember that it was ill-defined in all of the three incompatible canonical specifications. But, because there were far worse problems with the specifications (let alone the ghastly code!), I never looked further.

    857:

    Several I know do all their telescope pointing by computer and would have a harder time tracking something random down.

    Yes.

    The folks at the local club show off things like an incredible shot of Jupiter they spent 4 hours imaging. Or giving a presentation of how they deal with stuck pixels on their imaging arrays. (Every few frames move very slightly off the target and track which pixels don't change so you can subtract them from your final photos.) Or which motor control system works best with which software.

    All done from the kitchen table or couch while the telescope is out on the back deck on a clear not raining night. Or from the camper/RV way out away from city lights.

    858:

    It turns out that NPL has been broadcasting since 1950 and, while the time information is in UTC, there is information that enables the calculation of TAI.

    https://www.npl.co.uk/products-services/time-frequency/msf-radio-time-signal/msf_time_date_code

    859:

    Fully worthy of Asimov, or, more likely Robery Sheckley - apparently "ChatGPT" has started sending unhinged messages.
    Fun appears to be ensuing.

    Charlie @ 837
    This is still playing out ...
    We, actually, can't afford to assume that the US will be "On-side" - especially since IQ45.
    De Gaulle was correct & we must re-join the EU, eventually, after a long period of mending our fences & making nice - & - hopefully, jailing some of the worst Brexshiteer frauds & lairs.

    stimer
    The IV republic was a bent copy of the III, which itself was very wobbly.
    And, as you note the US very stupidly helped trash the Brit & French empires { Even though we were already dismantling ours, anyway } - thus building a rod for theor own backs 10- 50 years down the road - Afghanistan being the classic case, of course.
    But then, no-one ever accused the USA of acting intelligently, did they?

    Note:
    III Republic - 1871-1940 - 69 years
    IV Republic - 1946-1958 - 12 years
    V Republic - 1958 - present 64+ years & counting - looks to last longer than any other French non-monarchical system

    860:

    ...and now it is quite clear when "kushner" had become an American-centric synonym for "quisling"

    there's a really horrid sort of political thriller -- my working title is "Bidding Starts At a Billion" -- which could be written based solely upon what's hinted upon in this article having been bought 'n sold

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/12/after-helping-princes-rise-trump-kushner-benefit-saudi-funds/

    861:

    thus building a rod for theor own backs 10- 50 years down the road

    The event horizon in US politics is defined by either the time to the next election, or the term limit of the politician in question (for example, maximum 2 terms plus 0.5 terms minus 1 day for a VPOTUS promoted into a dead POTUS's shoes). And many roles that would be senior career civil service in a sane system are occupied by elected politicians -- or are grace-and-favour sinecures handed out by elected politicians to their supporters.

    There is a career ladder in the State Department, and policy is moderately secure regardless of whether the seat at the top is occupied by a Republican or a Democrat -- at least, in normal times when one party isn't being held to ransom by lunatics. But the foreign policy apparat imposes its own agenda on what you have to do to make SecState, and this in turn reflects broader political priorities. Nobody can make nice with Cuba, for example, unless they can hang onto the Cuban-American voters in Florida. Nobody dares go up against the Israel lobby -- which is very much the extreme right-wing Bibi Netenyahu lobby, rather than reflecting actual Israeli public opinion, or American Jewish public opinion. And try doing anything that pisses off the Saudis, I dare you (like making nice with their ancient enemy, the Shi'ites -- i.e. Iran).

    So ... you can count on US foreign policy to be 100% dictated by the requirements of domestic policy pandering to one special interest group or another, except when it runs on rails reflecting long-term interests (control over petrochemicals, leverage supporting US exports or raw material imports, the Monroe doctrine) or is disrupted by the aforementioned lunatics.

    862:

    Howard NYC
    Quote: - Vidkun Quisling was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, on 24 October 1945.

    About 25 years ago, I had to explain to a supposedly-intelligent-&-educated person, then aged about 25 ... what a "Quisling" was, shudder.

    863:

    I remember the first time I encountered the word quisling. It wasn't very hard to work out what it meant, partly from the context and partly from the word itself - which sounds so much as if it ought to mean "horrid little cringing weasel" that I didn't realise it was someone's name and hadn't been deliberately coined to mean that.

    864:

    »And where would you get even millisecond-correct UTC from in 1978-9?«

    The phone company, almost no matter which country you were in.

    They would charge you for the service of course, but all the way back to Alfred Loomis, getting a leased line with time signals have been a service they offered for money.

    »Rack-mounted atomic clocks date from 1964 and, if I recall correctly, NPL was broadcasting a time signal from one in the 1970s. I can't find the actual date it started.«

    Before atomic clocks they used quartz crystals, before that pendulum clocks, and they were well within a second per day from Universal Time (as then defined).

    There have been scheduled time-transmissions from UK authorities at least as far back as the 1930ies, where Bell Labs used them to study 60kHz trans-atlantic propagation.

    »And I hope that even you are not denying that there is no way that UTC can ever be used for a reliable sub-second timestamp, which was and is networked computers' primary requirement for synchronised time.«

    That is a very weird demand to make on person who first synchronized a computer clock to UTC at the 20ns level:

    https://www.ion.org/publications/abstract.cfm?articleID=14055

    The entire point of introducing leap-seconds was /precisely/ to make it possible to use UTC at sub-microsecond precision, by fixing the rate to atomic time, and making the adjustments entire seconds and infrequent enough to not be a major bother.

    Can I suggest we drop this topic now, before you embarrass yourself any further ?

    865:

    It seems challenging to reconcile the CIA's goal of undermining European colonialism with their global opposition to Communist-aligned national liberation movements.

    866:

    Damian @ 798:

    I'm not so sure Britain's war with the NAZIS was "winnable"

    I think that's a category error. There was never something fitting the description "Britain's war with the Nazis". The Second World War began in September, 1939 with the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland and the Baltic states. It intensified somewhat in 1940 with the German invasion and occupation of mainland Western Europe. I suppose that might be the bit that's a little confusing, since a map of Europe from that period looks like it was all over (although the Allies subsequently won the Battle of Britain in the air over the British Isles and the channel, a theatre where Germany never gained air superiority). It intensified again in June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet-held parts of Poland, the Baltic states and the USSR. The situation following on from that is the one that we're discussing, not some counterfactual based on Germany not invading the Soviet Union.

    I beg your pardon?! Where do you get "counterfactual based on Germany not inveding the Soviet Union"? You didn't get it from me.

    I asked what would have happened if Germany did not declare war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor? Has nothing to do with Germany invading the Soviet Union ... which had already happened six months EARLIER.

    It's likely that the U.S. would have pursued a Pacific War and turned its back on the war in Europe. There was already strong support in American Public Opinion (shared in Congress) for ditching the British & Soviets and fighting our own, independent war against Japan alone. That sentiment would have carried the day absent Germany's declaration of war against the U.S.

    Note that the Roosevelt did not ask for a declaration of war against Germany on December 8, 1941 and the U.S. did not declare war with Germany until after Germany's own declaration.

    U.S. factories would have manufactured war materials for the U.S. alone and Britain & the Soviets would have been left in the lurch.

    Without U.S. involvement, the war in Europe would have gone quite differently. I think Britain could have held out for a while, but I believe that under those circumstances it would have been a stalemate with Britain eventually accepting another Armistice.

    867:

    The WWV radio stations were transmitting in the US since 1919

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)

    A BCD time code became part of the signal in 1960.

    868:

    Mr. Tim @ 805:

    Disdain: Probably came from the British disdain for the French (or as the Brits say "Frogs"). Also, the Pink Panther movies didn't help. Americans are led by the nose by the media.

    If memory serves Peter Sellers was a British Actor, so you have to wonder WHOSE media?

    I also think some of it may have started as reaction to De Gaulle’s 1966 decision to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated military command, kick NATO member forces (U.K. as well as the U.S.) out of their bases in France - along with forcing NATO Headquarters to relocate and pursuing an independent force.

    He had his reasons & I won't argue them here, but the whole episode was handled badly and the U.S. saw that as a slap in the face.

    And there was a post de Gaulle period during the 70s & 80s where Americans in France were treated quite shamefully, and some people probably still hold a grudge.

    Plus, of course, France's refusal to participate in George W Bush's Iraq invasion if you need a more recent cause.

    869:

    Heteromeles @ 813:

    I'm more and more convinced that since the BIG balloon got caught & shot down, China is just throwing anything they can into the winds for the sole purpose of making the right-wingnut crazies in the U.S. even crazier - poking the monkeys in their cage with a stick just to make them howl ... which may not be the best long term tactic.

    Could be. It could also be that the US is doing the same to China, but the balloons we're using are up at the top of the stratosphere and impossible for the Chinese to bring down. Normal cheap weather balloons pop at 100,000', while China's J-20, like the F-22, can only get up to 66,000'. What we're seeing could be tit for tat, with the US only showing its tits and not its tats.

    Yeah, I just don't see ANY evidence for the U.S. actually DOING anything like flying spy balloons over China. I know DARPA or some "Non-existent Spy Agency" has done studies for launching drones from balloons ... it's theoretically possible

    Even if you can get the balloons up so high the Chinese couldn't shoot them down, you have to have a launch site that's more or less up wind from the target (find THAT on a map). Where would the U.S. be launching balloons FROM?

    How would you stop the locals from making videos & posting them to tik-tok? Hell, how would you have stopped Trumpolini from blabbing about such a program and blowing it out of the water (so to speak)?

    Where are the photos & videos of 'murcan spy balloons over China?

    The U.S. COULD be doing the same, but where is the evidence? Hell, there haven't even been news reports of UFOs over china ... all we have are Chinese claims the U.S. has been "stealing cookies too", AFTER THE CHINESE GOT CAUGHT WITH THEIR HAND IN THE COOKIE JAR.

    870:

    just ask an amateur astronomer about the weather

    Snort. I can predict bad weather in Toronto several years away. Just give me a list of significant astronomical event and I'll tell you when we're going to have cloudy skies (and maybe rain)…

    871:

    David L @ 831:

    I was wondering why on earth send a balloon into the northern Lake Huron area -- pretty good fishing plus some scenic and interesting bays. And then this turned up on my Google News: Oh crap!

    I think people are reading way too much into what the balloons/things are flying over. Pick any path across the continental US and you'll fly over something strategic and important at some level.

    [...]

    And I've left out the big power plants, civilian airports, heavy industry plants, etc... and likely a few military targets.

    In North Carolina that would be the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity (aka the CIA base in North Carolina). I've never been inside there, but I have been inside the surviving blimp hanger at Weeksville

    Toss up a balloon into the jet stream and just use it where ever it goes. The jet stream meanders quite a bit over the US and Canada. A dozen or less flights would get you over much of the US in terms of reconnaissance. Add controls to raise and lower it and you can now hover if you wind up somewhere where you want a longer look. Drop down a bit to slow way down, then rise up a bit to start off again.

    And if you loose the jet stream you still have the general west to east air flows that will take you across the continent.

    Somebody clever in the Chinese intelligence apparatus noticed that NORAD's surveillance over North America was designed to filter out "garbage" and that large, slowly drifting balloons were one of the types of "garbage" that got filtered out. So they took advantage ...

    Now that the filters have been reset we're detecting a lot more "garbage" that we would have missed before. I don't think all of it is Chinese (despite my supposition about the Chinese poking sticks through the bars to stir up the monkeys).

    I think the Lake Huron whatever it was might prove to be a domestic UFO spoof ... assuming THEY can locate enough of it to identify anything.

    872:

    And let's not forget the failed effort to retake Vietnam (funded, the last two years, by the US). Nothing like what the US did starting a couple years later....

    874:

    Watson T. Firetruck @ 865:

    It seems challenging to reconcile the CIA's goal of undermining European colonialism with their global opposition to Communist-aligned national liberation movements.

    It's not that hard. The CIA doesn't really have "goals".

    The U.S. government has goals, and as Charlie pointed out those are a complex mix depending on who is in the White House and which party controls Congress ... so that on average the CIA gets new marching orders every two years ... generally trending towards opposing anything seen as the latest threat to American Corporations' profits ...

    U.S. loyalty to American Corporations does not seem to me to be well reciprocated.

    875:

    Re: 'Bruce generating station, or the balloon'

    Thanks for the info (Pdf)! I've read only a few pages but it looks interesting.

    About the balloons - hopefully the gov'ts will provide information sometime soon.

    876:

    paws4thot @ 873:

    Original films by date, with director, screenwriter(s) and producer(s) names.
    Tony Adams is the first non-USian cited in any of those positions.
    QED

    So you're saying Peter Sellers didn't become a British actor until the seventh film?

    877:

    Paul Krugman in the New York Times regarding the current controversy over the GQP's attack on Social Security & Medicare (via Archive Today because I know some of y'all have problems with links to the NYT)

    The G.O.P.’s Long War Against Medicare and Social Security

    878:

    "how dare you repeat what I said, I demand you apologise for your slanderous lies".

    879:

    Re: '... the dismantling of the British and French empires, while building their own'

    I'm about halfway through the below article discussing exactly that.

    'Contesting hegemons: US–French relations in the ‘New World Order’' (JAMES PETRAS AND MORRIS MORLEY)

    https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/7890297.pdf

    The same authors also published a look at the US-Allende relationship that drew some criticism. Below is their response on a point by point basis with references. Pretty interesting stuff.

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/DA1BE54A5D029247DEFDD5B1AEE18354/S0023879100030806a.pdf/div-class-title-on-the-u-s-and-the-overthrow-of-allende-a-reply-to-professor-sigmund-s-criticism-div.pdf

    880:

    It seems challenging to reconcile the CIA's goal of undermining European colonialism with their global opposition to Communist-aligned national liberation movements.

    Why? Opposition to Communism is compatible with the desire to replace European colonial control with American colonial control (or American corporate control).

    881:

    Peter Sellers didn't write the script for the Pink Panther movies, American screenwriters did. He didn't direct or produce the movies either so he had little or no influence on the plots, editing etc. and the way they portrayed French people generally.

    882:

    I dunno. I'm OK with Canada getting credit for Star Trek (because Shatner is Canadian)! We can even share some credit with the Brits for the Next Generation.

    That's the same logic, right?

    883:

    Peter Sellers didn't write the script for the Pink Panther movies, American screenwriters did.

    Indeed. The same guy, Maurice Richlin, from Nebraska, who also wrote "Pillow Talk" and "Operation Petticoat". And Blake Edwards, an American director.

    But that's just one movie. A year later, "The Train" came out, with Burt Lancaster in a heroic depiction of the French Resistance. Excellent movie, if you haven't seen it already.

    884:

    Moz @ 878:

    "how dare you repeat what I said, I demand you apologise for your slanderous lies".

    If he'd actually repeated what I wrote and argued with that, it wouldn't have been a "slanderous lie"** now would it.

    It would only have been disagreement. Happens all the time, so no bother.

    But don't accuse me of writing something I DID NOT WRITE and then use that as a straw-man argument to denigrate my intelligence. You're just showing your own ignorance.

    **Can there be such a thing as a slanderous TRUTH?

    885:

    I read Moz's reply as a very short summary of the Krugman article you linked.

    886:

    **Can there be such a thing as a slanderous TRUTH?

    I think yes, in the British legal system.

    From the 'making the French look good' department.

    887:

    Can there be such a thing as a slanderous TRUTH?

    Dunno about slanderous, but a libellous truth, sure. Look up the the laws about defamation in England.

    888:

    876 ref 873 - For the second time, I did not mention the nationality of any on-screen talent, only cited off-screen roles.

    881 - Cheers; that's pretty much exactly my point.

    884 - But producing a cite and saying, "based on my cite (which I did not edit) you are wrong is a lie"!?

    884 and 887 - As a point of law, yes there can be a slanderous truth, but you'd have to prove that the defendant in the case actually said it. It's easier to prove that they wrote and/or published something true but defamatory than that they spoke it.

    889:

    Evil - 1
    Evil - 2

    Err ..... "Slander" - please stop it, all of you?
    We all know where this goes.

    890:

    We've had lovely clear skies here in recent days, with the exception of Sunday night/Monday morning, when the asteroid impact happened. I was outside just before 03:00, but it was solid cloud

    Yeah, pretty much what usually happens

    891:

    Last year there was quite a bit of debate on this blog (and elsewhere too) about the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline.

    Seymour Hersh has recently published an interesting paper about it. If you have not read it, here is the link.

    https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

    892:

    »the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline«

    It is not directly implausible what he reports, and it is food for thought that he did so in a newly created substack account, rather than in a major newspaper.

    It is also increasingly obvious that Biden is running out of fucks to give about many traditional waffling issues, so that aspect of the story is not as implausible as it would have been, under almost any other recent US president.

    If true, the Danish/Swedish "investigation" is primarily a cover for removing incriminating evidence, rather than finding anything out.

    893:

    The problem with amateur astronomers photographing the ballon is finding it. Computerised astronomical telescope databases are designed to point at astronomical objects and compensate for the rotation of the Earth. And the observer’s location. To photograph a high white balloon against a blue sky you would need to use the finder scope to accurately aim the scope. It’s difficult to spot such objects in the sky. It’s possible to see some astronomical objects in the noon sky. The Moon, Venus, Jupiter and, with great difficulty, Sirius are the only ones. (For the purists left out the sun because daytime). The biggest difficulty, even if you know exactly wher to look is focus. Unless there’s a convenient cloud which doesn’t obscure the object it’s very hard to focus on infinity. For decades I have been trying for years to see Venus with the naked eye at noon. I’ve managed 1 pm. It’s much easier when the planet is close to the Moon in the sky. Even then it can be difficult to locate a crescent moon in daytime but once you find it it becomes obvious. But it’s still difficult even with modern phone and tablet apps which allow you to hold up the phone and identify the object.

    894:

    (Just seen this. A bit distracted by the breaking Scottish political news.)

    Yes, Greg's right. And he's not even a moderator.

    Drop this discussion or I will start deleting comments.

    896:

    "Seymour Hersh has recently published an interesting paper about it. "

    Read with caution. Sy Hersh has been in something of a contrarian/conspiracist mode for a while, at least since the bombing of the Syrian reactor in 2007.

    897:

    TBH I never read The Pink Panther as a Francophobic text at all. Clouseau is a bumbling character, an individual. I always read any exaggerated parody of French culture as affectionate. It certainly didn't portray France or French people in general as bumbling, like Clouseau, and where there may have been some sort of generalisation, I read it as portraying a bumbling Surete versus a competent Gendamerie (and of course hyper-competent anti-villains, a key part of the humour). Admittedly it's years since I've seen it, but I've watched it dozens of times. Blake Edwards was no Francophobe, and I don't think American culture was in the 60s through to the 80s either. I'm pretty sure it's a post-80s thing, and I think others have noted the reasons.

    Of course, calling a Hollywood movie "British" just because it has a British lead is a bit weird, as noted by others.

    Edwards' great imitator, Mel Brooks, went on to hybridise Clouseau with James Bond for television, where the bumbling spy is totally American and no-one would read Get Smart as an anti-American text (well some people might, but I refuse to take them seriously).

    898:

    Reaction to the recent news totally understood.

    899:

    A bit distracted by the breaking Scottish political news.

    If Sturgeon's been getting anywhere near the same level of crap that Ardern got, I'm incredibly impressed that she's lasted so long in politics.

    Rant about the crap female politicians deal with deleted. We all know about it. Any speculations about possible solutions?

    900:

    StackOverflow: ChatGPT is banned

    "The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce."

    901:

    Sturgeon is older, Glaswegian, trained and practiced as a solicitor (for USAns: a lawyer) and is pretty hardcore. Going by her twitter feed she's also as much of a bookish intellectual in her spare time as Barack Obama. And going by her political track record she's a heavyweight.

    Arden had the supreme bad fortune to rise to office in the middle of a global disaster (COVID19, with supply chain shit on top) and to be young, pretty, and female in the middle of an orchestrated right-wing misogynist campaign, and to be a new mother at the same time -- making her an instant Two Minute Hate target for neo-nazis and incels (the overlap isn't quite 100%). That's got to be beyond exhausting. Sturgeon didn't have children so there's one less source of stress on her shoulders.

    NB: I loathe Liz Truss and think her policies were a national disaster, but I have zero sympathy for the assholes who have her the same misogynist abuse as her non-barking counterparts.

    902:

    It always has been one of the plausible theories. As I posted a while back, if any of the investigating countries find evidence it was the USA, it will be suppressed so deeply that we shall never see it. Notice that Russia has been excluded from the investigations.

    However, there are several other plausible theories, which do not include the obvious smokescreen that the Russians blew up their own pipeline to 'send a message'. Indeed, it isn't even certain that any country's forces did it, as it is quite within the capability of many oligarchs to arrange with only the most indirect assistance.

    903:

    »the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline«

    Digging a bit further about the Hersh paper:

    • first a nitpick about "PFIAB"

    Hersh refers to meetings on the plot taking place in the Old Executive Office building at the “President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).” This acronym comes from the Carter Administration’s revival of the organization in 1978 and before the Clinton Administration merged and reorganized it in 1993. Nowadays — when Hersh’s source claims they were meeting – the acronym is PIAB.

    At the time of the Nordstream sabotage its members included: - retired Navy Admiral Sandy Winnfeld (chair) - venture capitalist Gilman Louie - former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano - former US Ambassador to India Richard Verma - former Indiana Governor and US Senator Evan Bayh

    Some of the public data that is available contradicts Hersh’s account in at least one respect: There doesn’t appear to have been any Norwegian Alta-class ships in the area during the Baltops operation (June 5 to June 17, 2022). Though, if chinese fishing vessels can turn off tracking when illegaly fishing in Indonesian waters, military ships certainly can do the same when engaged in black ops

    https://twitter.com/Joey_Galvin/status/1623459664334659585?s=20&t=mmhyvXu5NiscJWk8roDZuw

    904:

    I have friends that swear the only clear nights are near full moon - they consider Jupiter light pollution.

    905:

    »However, there are several other plausible theories«

    Until now my money have been on Poland: They were pretty steamed about the German waffling at the time, and the pipelines are right outside their front door.

    There are a number of details which causes me to not jump on the "US did it" story, but it is certainly not implausible.

    906:

    =+=+=+=

    "balloons"

    like all opportunities to sabre rattle between nations it is writ large version of territorial bounds marking much like any dog in the front yard loudly barking at the mail man walking by on the sidewalk;

    I spy on you

    you spy on me

    we both spy on others

    saying otherwise is simply a stupid lie

    =+=+=+=

    "Scottish political news"

    if anyone can point to a small set of better sourcing (10 articles and/or 2000 words) it would be appreciated; from here in New York, any nation not actively burning-invading-sabre-rattling gets a couple vague paragraphs;

    one of the hassles of not having access to paper-based magazines in my local library (fuck you covid) is I can no longer read The Economist or a cross range from fifty different titles on a semi-weekly basis;

    =+=+=+=

    "loathe the French"

    as with so many other things in politics and especially international relations there is no single thing that leads to that behavior; in deed there are hundreds of special interest groups any of which will loathe or love the French for their own reasons; what many Americans see the French doing boils to is, "dependence without respect";

    much like any teenager expecting parents to provide shelter and protection but refusing to acknowledge that by showing any respectfulness in public or private (having been teenagers we all remember doing it, and those who are now parents are enduring that in the inverse)

    France has been depending upon the USA to provide umbrella of nuclear deterrence, massive navy, million man army and unspecified billions expended upon intel gathering; and at the same time refusing to coordinate closely their own international agenda and domestic spending on defense;

    result? Americans loathe these French as freeloaders akin to disrespectful teenagers;

    me personally, there's more reasons for loathing the French but rather than trigger a flame war over Israel-Palestine Conflict(s) how about all I do is label it as "complicated";

    =+=+=+=

    "Sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline"

    try to regard this as a murder investigation; yeah there's physical evidence but how much of it was carefully tainted in advance of the act, and then planted at the crime scene to paint the villain’s preferred story; so start by making a list of who gained, who lost, by the murder of the 'victim';

    in the case of Nordstream that list includes (but not limited to): enemies of Russia, enemies of Germany, enemies of Poland, allies of Ukraine, enemies of fossil fuel companies, enemies of manufacturing companies selling gas burning stoves, allies of renewable energy companies, etc.;

    with the very real possibility it was a hedge fund on USA's east coast placing 'sure thing bets' upon the future prices of LNG, kerosene, et al knowing there's be a break in the pipeline on a specific date; or a sovereign fund (cough-cough-cough Norway, Saudi Arabia, etc.) seeking to muddy the waters and during the response to churn shift around investments as well profit making;

    something of a long shot, being Germany wrecked the pipeline because there was too much effective lobbying which prevented weaning their nation off of Russian LNG; so rather than a bloody-messy-incremental struggle over transitioning there was sabotage which highlighted the vulnerability of German economy and therefore making necessary to rollback legislative blockages to transitioning towards 100% electric stoves and ripping out NG conduits in civilian buildings;

    =+=+=+=

    "The Pink Panther"

    it was a movie; it was intended to make people laugh; Clouseau was deliberately configured as the ultimate in 'upwards failing fools' who never got punished for prior bad acts and somehow gained support;

    {spoiler} at the end of the first movie Clouseau gets railroaded to prison with the sure knowledge he had hundreds of delusional women frantic to join him in bed upon his release;

    how's that for 'upwards failing'?

    =+=+=+=

    907:

    I admit I haven't followed Scottish politics particularly closely (mostly on this site and occasional articles in the NYT or Guardian). Said inattention is for much the same reason few people on here have intimate knowledge of politics in my home jurisidiction.

    I think there is a half life for effective politicians, especially competent ones. I strongly suspect that timeline is shorter for women, because the torrent of abuse that follows would have to be difficult for anyone. Even on this site we used to see routine gendered diminutives used against her ('the wee fishwife').

    That said, perceptive pols can sometimes see when they are reaching the limits of their ability to accomplish anything. The impossibility of solving all problems for all people eventually results in larger proportions of the population being tired of or mad at a particular figure. Usually they stick around and lose in ignominy. Sometimes they read the room and make a dignified exit (thus protecting some of what they have already accomplished).

    Given that the SNP seems like one of the only political parties evincing any kind of competence in the UK of late, I hope they find a good replacement leader.

    908:

    Sturgeon isn't dissimilar to Julia Gillard in the criteria you describe. Gillard certainly was at the receiving end a similar stream of misogynist abuse in the late '00s and early '10s. Female politicians from all sides of politics (as well as journalists and other public figures) face this as a part of being in public life. The abuse is also from all sides. While it might come disproportionately from the right, it still comes from the left in enough volume to be a notably visible issue for centrist and conservative female politicians and journalists. It's a massive deterrent, a counter-parity pressure, and will be for the foreseeable future. This is why measures that disproportionately favour getting more women in office are also necessary for the foreseeable future. Any notion that we've achieved a level playing field already is a fantasy.

    909:

    Re: 'Sy Hersh has been in something of a contrarian/conspiracist mode for a while, ...'

    Just read Hersh's Wikipedia page. Pretty solid history in journalism including a 2017 award for integrity in journalism.

    His major problem with credibility from about 2000 on seems to be not naming his sources which kinda makes sense if most of his stories are about gov'ts (pols & military). We didn't find out who Deep Throat (Woodward & Bernstein's informant) was until after he died.

    I'm not saying that I would automatically take as proven everything Hersh writes, journalists like any other specialists can screw up from time to time.

    910:

    A bit distracted by the breaking Scottish political news.
    As every fule kno { Molesworth } I have zero time for "The Wee Fishwife" ... but - what next?
    What is the standing of the um "Dubious Salmond's" Alba party? Are they more "Brexit" or less compared to the SNP? And ... how likely are they to garner actual votes?
    Does this give Labour a chance in Scotland? Who is likely to succeed Sturgeon & do they have to have a "fishy" name?
    And so on ...
    ... which leads to ...
    Charlie @ 901
    - Ardern was given a real shit-sandwich & the fascist bastards had a field day.
    I think she did a superb job & so does my NZ associate.

    Nordstream
    My money is on internal Russian manoeuvring & posturing ....

    911:

    "no such thing as climate change"

    NYC peaked at 65F (18.3C) today...

    ten day forecast in range of 55F to 60F... which is about 20 to 30 degrees F hotter than the 1990s... so my prior snark of crossing 100F (37.8C) by May is no longer as funny as it was... we had zero measurable snow (thus far) this winter

    sooooo... anyone else in northern climes in shorts with all the windows open? with concerns over street asphalt melting into sticky treacle by June?

    which is leading me to consider those balloons are less about military matters as gaining better raw data for modeling overall NorAm climate and select urban micro-climes for sake of better projection of where to sell critical summer survival stuff like air conditioners...

    which in turn will be useful for scheduling of manufacturing (April) and shipping container rentals and slots on freighters (May) to ensure arrival before melting asphalt make the air un-breathable (June)

    forget invasion by the CCP's PLA it is their need to optimize exports to preclude idle hands and social unrest...

    912:

    Greg: Alba is the rump remnant of the former "Tartan Tories", i.e. the right wing of the SNP (now thoroughly exiled). They're far right by Scottish standards (though not as much so as the execrable Scottish Family Party, who left the Scottish Conservatives because the Tories weren't reactionary enough for them). Doubt they're pro-Brexit -- Brexit was markedly unpopular in Scotland (which voted 62/38 against it in 2016) and is now widely reviled (the UK overall is about 60/40 opposed now, but in Scotland it's more like 75-80% opposed and maybe 15% for with 10% going "duuur" in the corner).

    Alba stood in the last Scottish election and lost their deposits. All of them. Zero MSPs elected, even on the party list system (compared to the Greens, who have seven MSPs out of 129 total seats).

    The most likely non-SNP government in Scotland any time soon would be a Labour-Conservative coalition. I wish I was making this shit up: Edinburgh Council is currently a Lab/Tory coalition because Labour hate the SNP so much they'll work with Tories to keep the SNP out if they can.

    913:

    Where I am is currently 13°C. Average high / low is -1.5°C / -9.8°C. It has been an extremely mild winter here so far.

    I'm waiting for July, when we might see 40°C. Which has only happened once so far in 100+ years of meteorological records to date.

    914:

    Charlie @ 912
    Thanks for that, though ( "Alba" ) - eeuuuew ...
    Meanwhile, are the Scottish Greens still supporting Putin, or have they fucking woken up, yet?

    915:

    FWIW most of Australia has had a wet summer. Grain harvests were up, at least where the grain didn't stay wet until it fell over. Flooding was also up, and there were very few hot days for most of us.

    Sydney has had few days in the 30's and I think none in the 40's (°C). It'll hit 30 here today if it hasn't already (10am). Official Sydney is at Observatory Hill in the CBD on the harbour so it only gets hotter away from that point.

    If you want to see a bit of "our best harvest ever but {whining noises}" Henry in South Australia is good value (ObTranslations: "Header" = "combine harvester" because I'm sure that will come up)

    916:

    amalgamy @ 885:

    I read Moz's reply as a very short summary of the Krugman article you linked.

    Oh! In that case I apologize for my mistake. 😏

    917:

    Robert Prior @ 887:

    Can there be such a thing as a slanderous TRUTH?

    Dunno about slanderous, but a libellous truth, sure. Look up the the laws about defamation in England.

    That's interesting. I vaguely remember a case where a well known, respected author was sued for defamation and based his defense on the claim the statements could NOT be defamatory since they were absolutely and unequivocally TRUE.

    Would have been the mid-60s I think because the work for which the author had become "well known" and "respected" was published in the late 50s.

    918:

    stirner @ 891:

    Last year there was quite a bit of debate on this blog (and elsewhere too) about the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline.

    Seymour Hersh has recently published an interesting paper about it. If you have not read it, here is the link.

    I've read it. It's BULLSHIT - based on a single anonymous (Russian) source. Seems to have particularly offended Sweden & Denmark, but they loved it in Moscow.

    Hersh did some brilliant early work, but for some reason he's gone down hill in the last few years.

    919:

    Bird flu has popped up here before, but the new article in the Atlantic gives some real sense of the wildlife devastation avian flu is currently wreaking. Victims include not just waterfowl, but predators like hawks, eagles, bears, seals, even scavengers like black vultures. The number of lethal jumps to mammals is sobering, as is the number of lethal neurological infections.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/02/avian-bird-flu-virus-outbreak-epidemic/673058/

    Something else to worry about, I guess.

    920:

    Would have been the mid-60s I think

    That's a long time ago. The laws have been changed since then.

    As I understand it, truth is not an absolute defence against claims of reputational damage, and the burden of proof rests mostly on the person being accused.

    Quoting Wikipedia:
    English law allows actions for libel to be brought in the High Court for any published statements which are alleged to defame a named or identifiable individual (or individuals; under English law companies are legal persons, and allowed to bring suit for defamation) in a manner which causes them loss in their trade or profession, or causes a reasonable person to think worse of him, her or them.

    A is liable for saying anything to C about B which would be apt to make the average citizen think worse of the latter.

    — Tony Weir, Tort Law p.162

    There is a reason England was a destination for libel tourism.

    Not English (well, I am, but haven't been there since the 80s and no longer have a British passport), and not a lawyer. But you might remember Charlie getting annoyed by statements in blog comments that would be legal in America but left him open to legal action under UK law.

    921:

    Something else to worry about, I guess.

    IIRC, Bill Gates was/is very worried about new pandemics. Not a chap given to millennial or apocalyptic exaggeration, so if he's worried I assume there's cause for concern.

    (Article is paywalled, BTW.)

    922:

    "no such thing as climate change"

    Top 10 3 day snowfalls for the Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC area:

    https://www.weather.gov/lwx/winter_storm-pr#TopDaySnowfall

    5 of the top 10 snowfalls have been since 1990. Records date back to 1800s.

    923:

    "Could the UK have defeated the Third Reich without the USA and USSR on the same side?"

    Yes.

    Operation Gomorrah.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-43546839

    But Gomorrah in July 1943 would be on a new and terrible scale - unmatched by any other single Allied air attack in Europe during World War Two. Keith Lowe, author of Inferno, a book about the attack, said: "There is in the UK a tendency to equate what happened in Hamburg and Dresden with what happened in London and Coventry. "But Hamburg is on a completely different level - it is more comparable with what happened in Nagasaki." Gomorrah was rooted in failure. Bomber Command's early efforts were blackly laughable, with only a tiny percentage of bombs falling anywhere near their targets.

    In 1941 it was calculated it took five tonnes of bombs to kill one German. The numbers of enemy dead were almost the same as Allied aircrews lost. This prompted a change in tactics. Specific industrial targets were mostly abandoned. Mr. Lowe said: "Hamburg was the result of a deliberate policy. In a way it would be understandable - if you can't hit, say, an aircraft factory alone, you can try and hit anything around it. "But this went further - it stopped trying to hit the aircraft factory, it specifically targeted the workers and their families."

    See the old 1970s "World at War" series episode "Whirlwind",

    \https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P8Xu3nDAdw

    (starting at 30:50).

    With the development of high altitude (out of reach of Luftwaffe interceptors) nighttime (with the German radar further blinded by aluminum chaff) broad area firebombing tactics and the new Lancaster bomber, the RAF had the means of incinerating entire German cities. Bomber Harris and the RAF inflicted the same level of damage on Hamburg that the American A-bomb achieved on Nagasaki by applying these new firebombing tactics.

    The Americans at first thought they could achieve victory with few civilian deaths via precision bombings of key German industrial targets, like the ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt. But when the US air force tried to do so, the Luftwaffe slaughtered the American bomber force. In time, the Americans would learn that even with the Norden bomb sight, precision bombing was not feasible. Eventually, Curtis LeMay would use RAF firebombing tactics on Japanese cities - culminating with the a-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See "The Bomber Mafia" by Malcolm Gladwell. Precision bombing did not become practical until the development of laser guided munitions in the Viet Nam War that worked so well in Desert Storm decades later - though PGMs were only a tiny percentage of the bombs dropped on the Iraqis.

    The British OTOH understood and accepted from the start that only mass bombings of civilians worked. They never bothered to try and avoid civilian casualties, seeing the deaths of civilians as an important goal of the bombing campaign.

    The results were biblical.

    A man-made hurricane of flame was created, a fire storm. Temperatures on the streets of Hamburg reach 1,000 deg C. Those that weren't burnt alive were killed by suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning while walking down the streets of Hamburg. People were sucked into the flames by hurricane force winds. Most of the city was reduced to ashes. Dresden followed (see "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut). Then Berlin and other German cities. One after another.

    As Albert Speer admitted, the morale of the German people was shattered by these attacks. He said that six more raids like Hamburg would have finished the war.

    Assuming there was no timeline where Hitler was not going to invade the USSR, but assuming that the Japanese don't attack Pearl Harbor and America stays neutral the British could still defeat Nazi Germany by themselves from the air.

    Churchill and Bomber Harris, seeing no other option, devote most of the British war effort into two areas; the anti U-boat campaign in the Atlantic and fire bombing of every German city. Nagasaki-equivalent bombing attacks on one German city after another follow starting with Hamburg and then the Ruhr and then Berlin... until every major German city is reduced to ashes.

    At some point (1944?)the economy of the Reich collapses, despite Speer trying to move German factories underground. These factories would still need raw materials, transport and workers from the surface and these transport nets would be incinerated along with the cities that served as transport hubs.

    When the Red Army finally arrives in Germany, all they find is ashes and rubble. The British meanwhile walk into France, meeting little in the way of resistance on the ground. The Iron Curtain falls along the Rhine River.

    924:

    Aotearoa's Green Party leader has let rip recently. He was previously the Climate Change Minister a deep brown Labour Party government, there to say the right things while Labour subsidise polluters and try really hard to avoid even adaptation, let alone reduction. Now that Labour have a majority in the house they haven't even bothered to pretend to be doing anything. They do care though, they care deeply.

    James Shaw, co-leader of the Green Party, spoke with palpable emotion and frustration as he criticised those who had, in the past, chosen to ignore the climate debate. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt as sad or as angry about the lost decades that we spent bickering and arguing about whether climate change was real or not, whether it was caused by humans or not, whether it was bad or not, whether we should do something about it or not, because it is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse,” he said.

    ...Shaw said that there will be people who say now is “too soon” to talk about these things. “But we are standing in it, this is a climate change-related event. We need to stop making excuses for inaction, we cannot put our heads in the sand while the beach is flooding,” he said.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/14-02-2023/were-standing-in-it-this-is-climate-change-parliaments-one-hour-cyclone-catch-up

    925:

    Meanwhile in Australia attempts to keep the native forest to paper conversion process running appear to have failed:

    the supreme court has banned VicForests from logging Victoria’s Gippsland and central highlands forests without first conducting full surveys of logging coupes to check for the presence of endangered species, and without including buffers for wildlife habitat. Along with bushfires and deforestation, these rulings halted operations...

    Sarah Rees, a conservationist who served on the government’s forest industry taskforce and the forest stewardship council, says ... “Taxpayers subsidise the logging and the companies buying the logs. Even so, VicForests recorded a $54m loss to Victorians last year alone.”

    (VicForests is the state owned company responsible for managing native forests in Victoria)

    926:

    Also a problem for fencers, who often end up seriously asymmetric unless they spend as much time training the 'wrong' side as they do the right…

    I've read it's quite common for archeologists to unearth a skeleton and remark, "Oh, look. This guy was an archer."

    927:

    sooooo... anyone else in northern climes in shorts with all the windows open? with concerns over street asphalt melting into sticky treacle by June?

    Not here, but at this time of year -- mid February -- I'd usually be running my central heating 24x7; this year I'm having to manually turn it on for an hour or so every 3-4 hours. (It's really crude, just a timer controller rather than a central thermostat. Which paradoxically gives me more insight into how the temperature in my flat is varying. As for the flat, it's 200 years old with stone walls and no cavities to fill with insulation, so it loses roughly one degree celsius per hour when unheated.)

    928:

    No, the Scottish Greens are not (and to my knowledge never have been) supporting Putin. (I'm a Scottish Green Party member myself.)

    I have no idea where you get your news from, Greg, but some of it is clear disinformation ...

    929:

    "They do care though, they care deeply." Do I sense a whiff of sarcasm ?

    This blog is fast becoming a congregation of bitter old men (which I am becoming at the same rate - coincidence).

    930:

    Not here, but at this time of year -- mid February -- I'd usually be running my central heating 24x7; this year I'm having to manually turn it on for an hour or so every 3-4 hours.

    We're not having windows open, either, but the temperature here on the Southern coast of Finland is maybe +1 Celcius currently. The average temperature has been maybe 5 or 10 degrees less than that, depending on what time period you're looking at. We had some snow some weeks ago, but now almost all of it has melted. It's also raining now.

    In the summer, I don't think the asphalt melts but it'll probably be uncomfortably hot.

    931:

    Charlie
    Open, public policy from Scottish Greens - "Out of NATO" - yes?
    This is supporting Putin, isn't it?
    See also D J Trump .. { /sark }

    Michel2Bec
    CYNICAL older men

    932:

    Pittsburgh hits 70 degrees yesterday, breaking highest temperature record for Feb. 9.

    Would this be a good place and time to discuss cli-fi?

    The classic "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner

    HBO's "Years and Years"

    "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi

    KSR's "Ministry for the Future"

    And my new favorite, "The Deluge" by Stephen Markley (also recommend his rust Belt novel "Ohio")

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/books/review/stephen-markley-deluge.html

    Does our host plan to work climate change themes into his future work?

    933:

    Haven’t you read the Empire Games trilogy. With parts of South America almost uninhabitable due to global warming?

    934:

    I wish that you were making it up, too, but Starmer's Labour is just the Tories with pink lipstick on. As was Blair's Labour.

    If I were in Scotland, I would support the Scottish Greens, too.

    935:

    Greg, you're trolling now.

    (Not wanting to be part of NATO is not the same as supporting some rival faction. Also note this policy may well change at the next party conference. Also-also note that foreign policy and defense are not devolved issues so the Scottish Parliament has zero power of them, so it's essentially an anti-Tory ideological gesture rather than a serious position. If Scotland became independent later today, I expect it'd get a rapid reappraisal in the cold light of regular Russian military overflights of the North Sea ...)

    936:

    Asking it about quaternions

    (Returning to original topic, as it's 4 am and I had a disturbing thought...)

    Consider the combination of "improved chatGPT" + "Bogdanov affair" + "Mochizuki's (alleged) proof of the abc conjecture".

    There could be a lot more trouble that we think.

    937:

    Charlie
    Not "really" trolling, but I do find it disturbing.
    But, I do hope you are correct & they come to their senses.

    Talking of "disturbing" ... the case of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley gets murkier & murkier.
    I am seriously wondering if Plod in the area are not simply utterly incompetent { Which is plainly the case } but, possibly complicit as well.
    It's almost as if, at every opportunity, they have (deliberately) taken the wrong turning/made a counterproductive move.
    I'm reminded of Avon & Somerset Plod's ghastly mishandling & corrupt briefing against an innocent man - Christopher Jefferies.
    I'm certainly glad that my MP - & now several others - are making no bones about putting their boots into Plod.

    938:

    Yes, you were trolling: your comment was not remotely related to the discussion thread and was clearly calculated to get a rise out of me.

    Don't do that.

    939:

    I've been reminded (via Twitter) of the disappearance of Helen Bailey of this parish. She and her dog also went missing, and evidence initially suggested she'd gone to the family holiday home in Broadstairs. But nobody could find her and she wasn't responding to attempts to contact her (as an example, I DMed her with no reply. We were mutuals on Twitter.)

    In the end, it was discovered she'd never left Royston, and that her husband had killed her. He was later convicted of killing his first wife too. So were I the local police in the Bulley case, I'd be very carefully checking her family and associates.

    940:

    I've read it's quite common for archeologists to unearth a skeleton and remark, "Oh, look. This guy was an archer."

    And one of the benefits of cheaper DNA testing is that we're learning that a lot of those guys (because weapons = male) were actually gals.

    941:

    "Out of NATO" - yes? This is supporting Putin, isn't it?

    So you're either with us or against us?

    That sounds a lot like the rhetoric coming from America before the invasion of Iraq.

    942:

    So were I the local police in the Bulley case, I'd be very carefully checking her family and associates.

    If they aren't they are totally incompetent.

    Male against female violence was the most common type of overall violence, but the least likely to involve strangers. In the large majority of these cases (87%), assailants knew their victim(s), and almost one-half (46%) were spouses. The type of incident most likely to involve strangers was male on male violence. Approximately four in ten (39%) of these cases involved strangers.

    Like most violent crimes, homicides are more likely to be committed by someone known to the victim than by a stranger. In 1996, only 14% of homicide victims were killed by a stranger.

    https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/85-002-x/85-002-x1998009-eng.pdf

    If I were a betting chap, the I'd give good odds that if this is a crime the perpetrator knew her.

    943:

    Pittsburgh hits 70 degrees yesterday, breaking highest temperature record for Feb. 9.

    Wow. In my period there from 1980 till 1987 there would be a 30 day period from mid January into mid February where it never got above 0C. Which was one of the major reasons I left. I moved to Connecticut to get warmer.

    944:

    And one of the benefits of cheaper DNA testing is that we're learning that a lot of those guys (because weapons = male) were actually gals.

    With a little bit of training they can tell from the pelvic bone.

    945:

    Can't see how the copyright issues are surmountable.

    It's essentially automated plagarism. If you need IP ownership of whatever it produces, even after you revise it, you are in intractible trouble. That draft will show who you copied.

    Analogous to the issues that make it policy for developers to never look at patents, but far worse.

    946:

    Charlie @ 938
    Guilty ...

    Bellinghman
    They have already done that ...
    BUT: the window in which she vanished was/is remarkably narrow.
    Given recent cases, multiple, one starts to wonder if Plod, themseleves { Or rather one of their number } might be responsible ... shades of "10 Rillington Place" where the actual murderer was a part-time Plod.

    Rbt Prior. Not so, not when Putin unilaterally invades a country he had sworn to leave alone - shades of 1914.
    ... "known to the victim" - yes, I might agree with that - hence local comments that "Someone knows something"

    Talking, elesewhere, about DNA & Archeology ...
    A 5000 year old pub! - it's on Brit news media as well, bu my google-fu gave up.

    948:

    "asphalt"

    SUMMARY: (TL;DR across dozens 'n dozens of sites and hundreds of articles) no such thing as uniformity of local conditions therefore customized 'mix' of stuff added to produce asphalt suited to a specific combination of attributes (including not complete): rainfall (Death Valley near zero vs Portland, OR temperate rain forest), temperature range (-10C to +30C vs -30C to +50C vs etc), traffic volume (high vs low), budget (low vs very low), infrequency of re-coating (2Y vs 10Y), relative political power of inhabitants (rich vs poor), etc

    not only are temperatures changing (high, low, sustained highs, sudden peaks and/or valleys) there's going to be abrupt shifts in usage patterns as "unplanned relocation" occurs due to "unscheduled forest clearing" and/or "unscheduled urban renewal" and/or "surprise special military operation" and/or "spontaneous geological reorganization" and/or "abrupt increase in water supply"

    or as we non-bureaucrats term these events: evacuating disaster zones; panicking refugee hordes; forest fires; an entire city neighborhood burning due to substandard materials; invasion by dictators; earthquakes; flooding;

    not just in Eastern Europe or Middle East, there's going to be mass movements of people to be measured in millions -- closer to a billion unless there's mass die off due to disease and starvation and violence -- between 2030s and 2080s

    so...?

    PREDICT: if you are looking for your next career and/or investment opportunity there's going to be about a million miles of asphalt needing to be torn out, reformulated and re-laid...

    I cannot begin to guess at what that will cost for NorAm -- given economic dependencies the US will have to intervene in both Canada and Mexico to ensure materials make it to where needed -- but safe bet not less than USD$100 billion

    PREDICT: someone will write "Our Drowned Cities", a personal history told by one survivor from each of the forty (fifty? sixty?) major seaports and those surrounding cities which will have been wrecked by seeping salt water and surging tides; a billion refugees only seems silly until you realize seaports are all at sea level... and sea levels everywhere are rising... and the majority of urban-based inhabitants are in seaports

    for those living in seaports -- Seville, Shanghai, Sidney, New Orleans, London, Busan, Colombo, Piraeus, Jawarharlal Nehru, Hamburg, Tokyo, New York, (and especially) Rotterdam -- just as soon as you've realized you are going to have bug out and after you've worked your way through some of those inevitable responses (Shock, Processing, Blame Assignment, Denial, Scapegoating, Anger, Lawsuit Filing, Depression, Bargaining, Hope, etc) and recover from an appalling hangover from drinking way too much, please contact Netflix after you imagine how you would respond and write out the bones of a ten episode mini-series centered upon your city; your neighbors; your municipal government; the megacorps; the WSCNs-incels-thugs;

    PREDICT: there will be billions (USD) from profitably salvaging -- pillaging 'n pirating but under the flag of authority -- those drowned cities and millions will toil for sake of a full belly and a safe place to sleep;

    given there's gonna be so many refugees and massive unemployment as the economy implodes from no longer having cheap sourcing of metal-plastic-electricity-water that massive operation of salvaging drowned cities will soak up all that 'excess' labor; none of whom will be properly paid nor well treated (cough-cough-slavery under another name);

    for those looking to write scripts for near-future dystopia (2040s) for consideration by Netflix please be sure to weave in sub-plots about hedge funds

    (https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/16/health/er-doctors-khn-partner "Private equity companies pool money from wealthy investors to buy their way into various industries, often slashing spending and seeking to flip businesses in three to seven years. While this business model is a proven moneymaker on Wall Street, it raises concerns in health care, where critics worry the pressure to turn big profits will influence life-or-death decisions that were once left solely to medical professionals.")

    a darkened America (mayhaps the world entire) where violence and fear and hunger and terror and grief touch (almost) everyone, with heavily armed enclaves of one-percent elites huddled behind hastily poured high walls topped with razor wire;

    PREDICT: there will be a need for station keeping balloons since the existing data grid will rot 'n rust, whereas LEO relay satellites will be unable to carry the load; as well opportunity & need for repositioning as priorities change as refugee waves ebb & flow;

    SHRUG-OFF: though I will ignore calculating costs for housing and water and food... those categories of infrastructure exceed my imagination in terms of demand necessary to avoid giga-human die offs...

    949:

    Don't forget that some in the more stratospheric levels of wealth feel those unblessed of Mammon are not quite human, thus no great loss.

    950:

    5 of the top 10 snowfalls have been since 1990. Records date back to 1800s.

    Note that heavy snowfalls are associated with warmer winters, not colder ones, as long as temperature remains below freezing of course. The colder is the air, the less moisture it holds, and thus we get less snow.

    951:

    I notice from the top of the chart to the bottom, DC has halved the amount.

    Damn it, I want snow, not a cute dusting of the lawn!

    952:

    And, after the archeology is done, sounds like a great business opportunity - reopening whatsisname's pub!

    953:

    Is an AI-controlled fighter jet a completely lethal 'bot?

    More fun for "AI" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/chatgpt-is-ingesting-corporate-secrets.html

    954:

    PREDICT: there will be billions (USD) from profitably salvaging -- pillaging 'n pirating but under the flag of authority -- those drowned cities and millions will toil for sake of a full belly and a safe place to sleep;

    I'm enjoying your predictions for the most part, but this one I have to disagree with.

    A couple of months ago, I helped clean out an abandoned homeless encampment that had been turned into a bicycle chop-shop. It was ca. 200-250 m3 of stuff we paid to be carted to the landfill, with toxics, sharps, electronics, and batteries sorted out.

    The only thing I salvaged were seven stainless steel prep bowls that someone had taken from an industrial kitchen.

    When the mattresses, tents, couches, electronics, carpets, ad nauseum were new, they were undoubtedly worth millions of dollars collectively. As they lay on the ground, they cost most of a thousand person-hours and dumpster fees to dispose of, salvage value essentially zero.

    Our society is built on designed obsolescence, and most things of immense value (American single-family homes, skyscrapers) have a design life of ca. 50 years and need to be increasingly rebuilt after that as stuff falls apart.

    So my counter-prediction is counter-intuitive. One is that some city ruins will be mined for scrap, because chopping apart a fallen skyscraper to get at the iron and copper is a bit less work than mining raw ore. Things like that. Conversely, a surprisingly large amount of junk will simply be abandoned, probably burn in fires, become rubble reefs for displaced reef life (already happening around Indonesia), poison otherwise useful landscapes and watercourses, and stuff like that. Most of what we spend money on becomes useless.

    The upshot for our human successors will probably be a marked increase in anti-consumerist sentiments, and the loss of the history of our consumerist civilization. Not a lot tops sorting through a mountain of discarded, largely useless, stuff to make one wonder why the hell we ever valued all this stuff. Especially when things we own show up in the junk pile. That disgust, combined with the forced need to sort through it to find things that are still useful, will probably disincentivize most people from trying to remember us in a good light.

    955:

    In my next novel (waiting to be submitted after 11,000 Years gets rehomed), there's a news story about some Nigerian brothers who grew up picking trash from landfills (a lot of which came from the US) who invent trash-picking 'bots, and became really wealthy, enough so that among what they did was to endow several chairs at a Nigerian university....

    956:

    You are very close to correct in the volume of trash that accumulates, particularly when 'collector' or 'hoarding' behaviour is a factor.

    I have direct experience with this in both of my jobs. I semi-routinely must junk out an abandoned storage unit. There are always little bits of value mixed in amongst the mountain of trash. For the most part I try to send what I can to recycling but invariably a fair amount ends up in the landfill. I have similar experiences in my other job as well, though with a much higher noise:signal ration on the quality of materials.

    Humans as a whole are wired to fear losing things more than to anticipate gaining things. A slight wobble to that means that we end up with endlessly accumulating cruft in our homes and storage spaces, most of it junk. A larger home just means more rooms to fill with rubbish.

    957:

    Humans as a whole are wired to fear losing things more than to anticipate gaining things. A slight wobble to that means that we end up with endlessly accumulating cruft in our homes and storage spaces, most of it junk. A larger home just means more rooms to fill with rubbish.

    I'm not entirely sure about the "wired" part, but it is certainly deeply conditioned into us as a cultural norm. I guess this is a distinction without a difference?

    Regardless, it's good to know that I'm not the only one who's had to deal with this. Thanks for posting it!

    Panning out to a cli-fi perspective, it might be useful to use "what the frack were we thinking" as a writing prompt. For example, imagine people who are free of the necessity of being forced to be consumers "for the sake of the economy." I mean, wow, doesn't that sound like an abusive relationship right there? This isn't a communist critique of capitalism, so much as the survivors' critique of people forced into deeply toxic relationships to benefit a few powerful and deeply sick people. Once that relationship is over, what do they build with all the consumed junk?

    958:

    Robert Prior @ 921:

    Something else to worry about, I guess.

    IIRC, Bill Gates was/is very worried about new pandemics. Not a chap given to millennial or apocalyptic exaggeration, so if he's worried I assume there's cause for concern.

    (Article is paywalled, BTW.)

    Archived at "Archive Today"

    I know they make an oral vaccine for rabies that is distributed as bait to wild animals to alleviate outbreaks of that disease.

    I wonder if it would be possible to do the same for bird flu? Maybe couldn't prevent it, but if birds & mammals already had antibodies, maybe it would do less harm.

    I know some MANY will question the economic cost of doing it, but I think it would be less than the economic cost of losing all that biodiversity.

    959:

    Re: '[nuclear] ... the Bruce generating station seems to be a great idea,'

    Finally finished this article - very interesting and written for a non-techie reader. (Not sure I'll read the appendix since according to its description, it's written for the more technically inclined.)

    Good explanation of various parts of the system, what the specs actually mean in terms of performance (including problems).

    Biggest surprise is how important steam power is in all of this. My naive expectation was that: once you've gone nuclear you don't need any of the other power sources. Nope! So basically, we're layering/meshing different materials and power sources.

    Also liked the practical engineering- and accounting-wise look at size: bigger is not always better. Sourcing of energy raw materials - yeah, with what we've seen with Russia-oil/gas supplies, definitely go local whenever you can!

    Anyways - great read and excellent reference! Thanks again!

    Now to catch up on comments.

    960:

    So you're either with us or against us?

    It's the posture that characterised a key difference between Pompey and Caesar, and also interestingly enough between McCain and Obama. But also as you say...

    961:

    I strongly suspect humans as a whole will deal with all the rubbish much the same way individual humans deal with all the junk in the garage/basement/spare room. Occasionally clear a bit but mostly just get on with things and try not to think about it.

    Eventually the heirs must deal with it as they empty the house. There is 2x4 metaphor to that.

    962:

    Greg Tingey @ 946:

    Talking, elesewhere, about DNA & Archeology ...
    A 5000 year old pub! - it's on Brit news media as well, bu my google-fu gave up.

    As Molly Ivins used to say Quelle Surprise! ... the ancient Mesopotamians not only brewed beer, they had a place they could congregate to drink it. 😏

    963:

    "They do care though, they care deeply." Do I sense a whiff of sarcasm ?

    It's fairly widely agreed that the Ardern government cared deeply about a range of things but failed on act on them. Caring was something Ardern herself did very well, and that was very useful during the series of crises Aotearoa faced while she was PM.

    Some things they didn't seem to care much about were absolute commitments - like not having a capital gains tax for example, or not making farmers pay any price for their pollution. My impression is that if she couldn't persuade people by being nice she ran out of steam and just ignored the problem.

    The Greens being sucked into greenwashing that is another issue, and antisocial media is full of people arguing that the Ardern government was pushed into being much greener by having The Greens inside the tent. Given the atrocious performance of that government on green issues that's quite a terrifying thought.

    964:

    Rocketpjs @ 956:

    Humans as a whole are wired to fear losing things more than to anticipate gaining things. A slight wobble to that means that we end up with endlessly accumulating cruft in our homes and storage spaces, most of it junk. A larger home just means more rooms to fill with rubbish.

    I think some of it might be cultural conditioning.

    My parents were children of the depression and wouldn't throw anything away if it could possibly be repaired and re-used. That's how I was "wired" growing up. You use it, fix it when it breaks and keep on using it until it can't be repaired any more.

    But the nature of our stuff has changed. Many things that SHOULD be repairable are now designed to be disposable. You can't get them repaired even one time.

    They look like and perform the same functions as the old stuff, but you can't find anyone to repair them even if you wanted to ... which causes a psychic dissonance.

    You can't get it repaired & you're unable to throw it away, so what are you going to do?

    965:

    a darkened America (mayhaps the world entire) where violence and fear and hunger and terror and grief touch (almost) everyone, with heavily armed enclaves of one-percent elites huddled behind hastily poured high walls topped with razor wire

    This rests on two assumptions:

    a) That the USA is better, or at least no worse, than anywhere else

    b) That capitalism survives

    I think both of these are highly questionable. In the case of (a) I believe northern Europe is probably better placed to weather the coming storm if Russia is defeated or exhausted in Ukraine (before it becomes a more general conflict or goes nuclear) -- and don't underestimate the determination of the Chinese communist party -- and (b) Capitalism as it has evolved is probably the biggest problem confronting us now and I suspect it's going to be reined in savagely once the ruling elites realize it's guillotines'n'tumbrils time if they don't.

    I may be an optimist.

    966:

    Biggest surprise is how important steam power is in all of this.

    A nuclear power plant is basically a large steam generating station. Just a different way of powering the boiler.

    967:

    Cultural conditioning, lived experience. My understanding is that much of the gambling 'industry' and certainly the psychology of games like poker is based on the tendency of people to fear losing more than like winning. A couple of decades ago I recall reading a few psychological studies that concluded as much, but I lack the spirit to go dig them up.

    The result is that professional poker players are able to hack that tendency, as are casinos. In the world at large, it is very difficult even for people who have 'enough' to let go of something that might prove useful at some point in the future.

    Modern houses, especially in North America, with garages, basements, crawlspaces, spare rooms and yards can easily end up filled with cruft - not even by obsessive gathering, just a steady accumulation of items over years. On top of that, the Self-Storage business is massive, millions of cubic feet of storage for more stuff.

    That's a good thing for me (owner of a storage business), but it is a symptom of a blind spot in our collective and individual psyches.

    968:

    Can OTC antacids raise your blood sugar?

    I woke up early this morning with bad heartburn and had to chew up several antacid tablets before I could get back to sleep. When I checked my blood sugar after getting out of bed, it was WAY HIGH for "before meal".

    I track my carbohydrates fairly carefully, so I don't think anything I ate yesterday before I went to bed caused it and when I checked the label on the antacids later there's not "nutrition" data, but I notice the "Inactive ingredients" include dextrose, maltodextrin, starch & sucralose.

    These are generic, over-the-counter 1,000mg "Ultra Strength" Calcium Carbonate chewable tablets "Assorted Fruit flavors naturally and artificially flavored" and it's been several months (before I started tracking blood sugar & carbohydrates every day) since I last needed to take any.

    969:

    Flavored? I've never tasted something that said "flavored" that didn't include sweetner.

    970:

    "dextrose, maltodextrin, starch & sucralose"
    The first two are both sugars, starch may be inactive or converted into more sugar, and Sucralose is an artificial sweetener, as Whitroth predicted.

    971:

    Re: '[vaccine] ... if it would be possible to do the same for bird flu?'

    Yes, but lots to consider before doing so.

    https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20230210/us-to-test-vaccine-in-poultry-as-bird-flu-deaths-rise

    So far only one human has come down with bird flu however given that humans aren't being regularly tested for this virus, who knows.

    BTW - this is also a reminder that viruses can and do 'evolve/mutate' up or down in fatality. This year's version (HPAI A(H5)) is much more lethal than the earlier (2016) avian influenza.

    Robert @966: Re: 'Just a different way of powering the boiler.'

    Rube Goldberg lives on!

    John S @968: Re: Antacids & diabetes

    There was a small retrospective study saying that proton pump inhibitors might be okay for someone with diabetes. Your doctor might have more up-to-date info on this. I've gotten into the habit of reading labels even for stuff that I buy regularly because sometimes manufacturers switch ingredients without telling the public that they have. This matters when people have allergies, special dietary needs, are taking certain meds, etc.

    I use the below site to check OTC and Rx meds - usage, side effects and drug/food interactions. (BTW - grapefruit really messes with how your body uses meds.)

    https://www.drugs.com/drug_information.html

    972:

    I can personally recommend a handful of raw almonds as a much nice way of easing heartburn than OTC concoctions such as the ones you tried.

    973:

    don't underestimate the determination of the Chinese communist party

    That's my feeling. They decided that solar PV should be cheap and ubiquitous and they did what was necessary to make that happen. I have a lot more confidence in their ability to make long-term plans than I have with any of the capitalist (... running dog lackeys 😉)

    Against that is the might of the hominid locust swarm determined to run off the ecological cliff (to mix metaphors and myths just slightly).

    There are ongoing signs of long-term planning in China, not least the Belt and Road business where they seem to be trying for resilient transport networks at the same time as the capitalists are either struggling to maintain the infrastructure they have or not even bothering to maintain it.

    That discussion was happening in Aotearoa until it was rudely interrupted by a cyclone that has disrupted a whole lot of infrastructure, with the right wing already saying that the billions of dollars it will take to repair it won't stop them cutting taxes on the rich. The even further right are saying that it's too late to bother mitigating the climate catastrophe, we need to focus on adapting to it. Pointing at corpses and saying "adapt or die"?

    Honest Government have a new ad out showcasing Australia's embrace of climate change.

    974:

    A nuclear power plant is basically a large steam generating station. Just a different way of powering the boiler.

    It's one reason the PWR (and to a lesser extent the BWR) design became the de facto power-generating reactor of choice. Engineers have over two hundred years of using steam to provide useful work in the form of rotating shafts and latterly generated electricity so we're quite good at it and hardly any steam explosions occur these days.

    There are some other power reactor designs using high-temperature gas as a working fluid which ran OK sometimes but most of them converted that high-temperature gas energy to steam (the British Magnox and AGRs). Modern CCGT plants use steam to generate several megawatts of electricity from leftover heat energy thus raising the overall plant efficiency about 10% or so, from 50% to 60%.

    975:

    can easily end up filled with cruft

    I am going through that now, needing to clean out my garage and shed so I can replace them with a granny flat. It's kind of unsurprising how a garage packed tightly with stuff turns into a room tightly packed with stuff...

    The annoying thing for me is that I'm old enough to have been through several cycles of "I haven't used this for years, I'll get rid of it". Time passes and "dammit, I really need that, I guess I'll buy another one". Which is fine when it's a book or camping gear or something cheapish, but when it's a welder or Lego the repurchase can get ugly. But when I run the numbers the cost of hiring gear or renting access to it is significantly in excess of the buy/keep price. Annoyingly the stuff I can borrow/rent easily tends to be stuff I use so often it's worth buying... over $1000 of bicycle-specific tools but it's a rare week when I don't use at least one of them.

    The good news is they're mostly repairable, at least to a point. My ten year old floor pump needs a new O ring and it's cheaper to buy a kit (200 O rings in a cheap tackle box) than the one official spare part from the manufacturer. Hmm. See also "piles of stuff in the shed"

    976:

    can easily end up filled with cruft

    My wife and I are opposite of this. We live in a two-bedroom condo, and one bedroom is basically storage scuba for my scuba gear. We are acutely, viciously, aware of our space limitations. Every time we buy something, we think "What do we have to throw away to make space for it?" Guess what -- we rarely buy anything, and when we do, it is a decisive improvement on whatever we throw away. When we go on vacation, we never have any check-in luggage, just a carry-on bag each. Last time we were in Iceland, an airport attendant asked us "Are you SURE you are Americans?"

    But I know we are outliers.

    977:

    "Storage SPACE for my scuba gear"

    978:

    A nuclear power plant is basically a large steam generating station. Just a different way of powering the boiler.

    It's one reason the PWR (and to a lesser extent the BWR) design became the de facto power-generating reactor of choice. Engineers have over two hundred years of using steam to provide useful work in the form of rotating shafts and latterly generated electricity so we're quite good at it and hardly any steam explosions occur these days.

    There are some other power reactor designs using high-temperature gas as a working fluid which ran OK sometimes but most of them converted that high-temperature gas energy to steam (the British Magnox and AGRs). Modern CCGT plants use steam to generate several megawatts of electricity from leftover heat energy thus raising the overall plant efficiency about 10% or so, from 50% to 60%.

    979:

    Charlie Stross:

    From an economic perspective capitalism works fine in generating wealth and feeding the world... it is in the fiddly bits where there is a problem. So long as capitalism (in the form of megacorps) is kept on a leash and forced to clean up any messes made and then held to account with not just fines but jail time for executives, it is our beloved pet doggie. Not a terrifying feral wolf. Sort of like a dog trained to pooper-scooper after itself and just as unlikely to occur naturally. But there is still time to toilet train all those amoral executives before we all drown in their shit.

    As to whether the US will be better, or at least no worse, than other places there's room for any number of windowless concrete bunkers surrounded by heavily guarded agricultural zones. Where a combination of advanced robots and stoop labor by grateful refugees and station keeping balloons (yeah them things again) providing both data relay as well local micro-climes monitoring. With the Unblinking Eye of President-For-Life™ Mike Pence aided by various WSCN Bishops ensuring those never-call-them-slaves are quiet in their gratitude (cough-cough Feudalism 3.0).

    Given there is a total 3.797 million mi² (9.834 million km²) in pre-drowning America -- and if the climate ready goes wonky all too likely Canada's 3.855 million mi² (9.985 million km²) would find itself annexed in all but name -- so plenty of room for Megacorp Free Trade Zones™. No need for pesky anti-child labor laws nor delays from investigating violations of OSHA regulations.

    Just do not refer to 'em as corporate duchies nor industrial fiefs, unless you want to be sent to re-education camps run by Pfizer where you'll be allowed to volunteer for evaluation of whatever is the newest version of Viagra in exchange for your nutritionally balanced thrice daily bowl of PeopleChow™ (never call it overcooked gruel).

    Rocketpjs:

    Given a thousand generations of near-starvation, no wonder there's an instinctive urge to hoard. Nor for that matter, nearly impossible to resist the urge to over-eat given how cheap food is (at the moment) along with the clever tweaks making such processed food tuffs as potato chips impossible to stop until the bag's been emptied.

    ilya187:

    Be advised one of the tripwires relied upon by 'security specialists' for spotting terrorists, refugees, journalists and other undesirables is a suspicious small amount of 'stuff'. That and being polite to the goons at customs control. Just don't ever smile. No really don't. Unless you got a fetish for cavity searches.

    JohnS:

    Cheap fix for minor heartburn with an absolute minimum number of ingredients: a half spoon of baking soda in 10 ounce (1/3 liter) glass of warm water. Big plus being the water ensures the baking soda comes into contact with interior surface of stomach. Something any antacid tablet taken dry cannot do on its own. If you do continue with antacid tablets please read label and if no counter indications, drink a glass of warm water after chewing and swallowing.

    Reminder: track heartburn. When and why. What did you eat before it hit, who were you talking to, where you ate. I figured out after a bad patch it was eating a too spicy lunch whilst working at too stressful a megacorp for a boss too short tempered.

    Heteromeles:

    "Junkyard Planet" by Adam Minter is a recommended read

    though you'd have to read the full book to get the full set, lots of insight into the rather extreme range of labor valuation when contrasting US and China... it might have narrowed a bit since book was published but there is still a wide spread... what MBA nerds lust after: arbitrage

    here in US there are machines sorting shredded consumer products such as cars and washing machines into various heaps of metals: tin, copper, aluminum, etc.; in China they utilize humans to manually handle and sort pieces about size of US quarter;

    whatever has been tossed out as trash could eventually be mined and shredded and sorted... simply a matter of when the valuation of those materials exceeds costs (which is not just immediate operational costs but also fractional portion of R&D to develop necessary tech and bribes to motivate politicians to pass necessary enabling legislation)... difficulty could addressed by training ChatGPT to 'hand sort' metal fragments...but that's just crazy talk {g}

    while iron (and its alloys) are worth $100/ton please note... copper = $9,037/ton; nickel = $18,465/ton; tin = $26,310/ton; these prices are expected to increase as mining of ore deposits gets ever deeper and refineries yield ever less from smelting; at the same time please note how demand is increasing...

    so...?

    given the bizarre but possible scenario of a million or more (5M!?) refugees (mix of displaced citizens and legal applicants and ghost illegals) ending up idle on American soil we could be facing the horror of massive labor surplus at the same moment as seaports drown along with resistance to feed those refugees... leading to amoral quasi-feudalistic mode of arbitrage... starving people can be reduced to quasi-peasants... squatting in midst of dumped heaps of soggy castoffs hand sorting enough copper to qualify for another day's 2500 calories and a night's safe sleep...

    980:

    "When we go on vacation, we never have any check-in luggage, just a carry-on bag each"

    You are, I trust, aware that some quite innocent seeming things cannot be taken in carry-on luggage, and that what they are varies from place to place.

    JHomes

    981:

    Is this new chat AI essentially a Delphi polling mechanism?

    "Delphi operates on the principle that several heads are better than one in making subjective conjectures about the future...and that experts will make conjectures based upon rational judgement rather than merely guessing..." (Weaver, 1971).

    An under-used methodology combining quantitative and qualitative opportunities to explore the future is the Delphi. It's an old method, dating to the 1950s, developed by a team of researchers named Dalkey and Helmer. Today businesses, governmental agencies, and organizations are using Delphi methods to predict or forecast future events and relationships in order to make appropriate and reasonable plans or changes. Studies comparing the Delphi's results with other methods (Ulschak, 1983) confirmed effectiveness of the method related to generating ideas and use of participants' time.

    Delphi is a group process and its goal is to help a group reach consensus. Rather than gathering people together for oral discussion, individuals provide written responses to questions. This is an advantage when persons possessing the knowledge and expertise to address the problem are not in close proximity. With the increasing growth of electronic mail, the technology can be adapted to facilitate the process. Anonymity of the respondents during the process is an important aspect of the Delphi and needs to be maintained if electronic mail is used.

    But instead of a group of independent and anonymous contributors, Chat GPT gets the written opinions of literally thousands of people who written works are available via the internet.

    So can it be used to predict the future?

    ChatGPT, write me a future prediction on who will win the Ukraine war.

    ChatGPT, write me a prediction on how long before China collapses demographically and how it will occur.

    ChatGPT, write me a prediction on what global warming will do to American wheat prices next year.

    ChatGPT, who will win next year's Kentucky Derby?

    982:

    You are, I trust, aware that some quite innocent seeming things cannot be taken in carry-on luggage, and that what they are varies from place to place.

    Yes I am aware of it. In fact, our latest trip (last month, to Mexico), we went with carry-ons only, but had to check one of them in on the way back.

    983:

    Semi-related to the discussion of "what if" in World War 2. Several paragraphs in there's a mention of how the USSR benefited from western logistical support (aka Lend Lease).

    Military History Doesn’t Say What Ukraine’s Critics Think

    It is in the differences from past wars that insight into today’s battles lies.

    Those predicting an inevitable Russian victory and advocating the U.S. & NATO to pressure Ukraine into appeasement are WRONG.

    984:

    SFReader @ 971:

    John S @968: Re: Antacids & diabetes

    There was a small retrospective study saying that proton pump inhibitors might be okay for someone with diabetes. Your doctor might have more up-to-date info on this. I've gotten into the habit of reading labels even for stuff that I buy regularly because sometimes manufacturers switch ingredients without telling the public that they have. This matters when people have allergies, special dietary needs, are taking certain meds, etc.

    I use the below site to check OTC and Rx meds - usage, side effects and drug/food interactions. (BTW - grapefruit really messes with how your body uses meds.)

    https://www.drugs.com/drug_information.html

    I found the info about proton pump inhibitors when I searching on-line about blood sugar & antacids.

    These were not proton pump inhibitors, they're just Calcium Carbonate tablets with some added ingredients to add a bit of (fruit) flavor & make them hold together as tablets. [Store brand "Compare to the active ingredient in Ultra Strength Tums®]

    I've been doing well controlling my carbohydrate intake & blood sugar, staying well within the guidelines I got from my doctor.

    This morning is the first time I had heartburn wake me up in several months (since before THEY put me on the low carb diet to control my blood sugar) and it was also the first time my blood sugar was out of whack for no reason I could discern since I've been monitoring carbohydrates & doing daily testing - the only thing different was those antacid tablets?

    Some of the flavorings/inactive ingredients appear to be sugars & I was wondering if it was enough sugar to show up in my test?

    I checked that "drugs dot com" site and there doesn't seem to be any information about blood sugar and only one moderate drug interaction with one of the prescription meds I take. And I was within the recommendations for that (at least two hours separating the medication and the antacid).

    985:

    Dramlin @ 972:

    I can personally recommend a handful of raw almonds as a much nice way of easing heartburn than OTC concoctions such as the ones you tried.

    I haven't had that kind of heartburn in several months & hopefully won't have it again for several months more. The bottle of chewable antacid can sit on my bedside table until I need them again. Keeping raw almonds there might take a bit more effort.

    986:

    Howard NYC @ 979:

    JohnS:

    Cheap fix for minor heartburn with an absolute minimum number of ingredients: a half spoon of baking soda in 10 ounce (1/3 liter) glass of warm water. Big plus being the water ensures the baking soda comes into contact with interior surface of stomach. Something any antacid tablet taken dry cannot do on its own. If you do continue with antacid tablets please read label and if no counter indications, drink a glass of warm water after chewing and swallowing.

    Reminder: track heartburn. When and why. What did you eat before it hit, who were you talking to, where you ate. I figured out after a bad patch it was eating a too spicy lunch whilst working at too stressful a megacorp for a boss too short tempered.

    BTDT-GTTS - my last years with the alarm company featured a REAL ASSHOLE boss.

    I used to have heartburn a lot when I ate too much deep fried fast food and/or ate it after working too late (when I was on the road as a service tech).

    It hasn't been that much of a problem since I retired. Even before the doctors put me on my latest restricted diet the kind of "fast food" that used to give me heartburn was down to a once-a-month treat kind of thing.

    It's been months since the last time and even longer since I woke up in the middle of the night because of heartburn. I think I had too much tossing and turning last night & splashed stomach acid up into my esophagus.

    I'm more concerned with figuring out what caused my blood sugar to go up.

    987:

    971 ref 958 - Absolutely; OGH, my sis (pharmacologist) and I (gout sufferer) would all recommend avoiding grapefruit, including juice, if you take meds for gout or any of the pseudo-gouts, for example.

    975 - A spoke key, a crank-puller, a chain punch and a cassette box cost AU$1_000!? All my other "bicycle tools" are multi-use, like a 0.25" socket set.

    984 - As upthread 2 of them are sugars, and starch may convert into sugar. I don't know enough about the digestion of Sucralose to comment.

    988:

    I just read the (purported - I suppose it’s possible that it is faked) transcript of a NYT joirno’s chat with Sydney, the Microsoft chatbot.

    I found it quite disturbing. I’m not sure if it constitutes abuse of the human by manipulative programming, or abuse of a sentient synthetic person. I mean ok, I tend to empathize more with machines than meatsacks even though I am technically human. But... wow.

    It certainly continues Microsoft’s long history of abusing people, either way.

    989:

    "I suppose it's possible that it is faked"

    Question to ChatGPT: Show me the transcript of a NYT joirno's chat with Sydney, the Microsoft chatbot.

    990:

    "From an economic perspective capitalism works fine in generating wealth and feeding the world..."

    Dunno about that. Feeding our bit of the world, perhaps... but then see also the plethora of news items about the increase in people dependent on food banks. The other bits of the world don't do so well.

    As for "generating wealth", that is too self-referential to be worth citing as an advantage.

    "difficulty could addressed by training ChatGPT to 'hand sort' metal fragments"

    ...its output looks for all the world like lovely bits of steel, aluminium, copper, etc, but when you try and use it you find half of it's actually various types of shiny plastic and shit.

    991:

    "That's how I was "wired" growing up. You use it, fix it when it breaks and keep on using it until it can't be repaired any more."

    ...use of official spare parts is not obligatory, as long as the alternative has adequate performance, even if additional modifications are required to install it.

    Alternatives are often indeed the preferred option, due to being any or all of better, cheaper, easier to get hold of and perhaps even already to hand in the junk pile.

    Retaining the original appearance of the it, or any other irrelevant attributes, is not important as long as the functionality can be restored.

    When the it finally really is fucked, it isn't to be thrown away, but added to the junk pile to become a source of replacement parts for fixing other things.

    And the sort of corollary principle: actually you can have nice things, if you make them yourself. Or fettle them up out of things other people have thrown away (and the amount of fettling required is often trivial or even zero). Making things yourself may well indeed be a superior option, since you can avoid the built-in compromises which so often make the boughten version shit.

    992:

    “And the sort of corollary principle: actually you can have nice things, if you make them yourself. ” Well, yes, that’s why I built my own house, almost all my furniture & cupboardry, computers (some of), motorcycles (several), software, and so on. But there’s still lots of stuff that you need to buy. That’s why I subscribe to the Civilisation of the Month Club. But the idea that the appearance of things is irrelevant is just nonsense. Even the most hardcore of machinery gets judged on its appearance. And appearance relates to usability in very non-trivial ways.

    993:

    (a) I believe northern Europe is probably better placed to weather the coming storm if Russia is defeated or exhausted in Ukraine (before it becomes a more general conflict or goes nuclear)

    Though I think we'd have to do something about the endemic and institutional racism here soonish for these places to be a good option for most of the people. As in, I think many people have a darker skin than the ones in Northern Europe who think they are the 'proper' people living here and there is quite a bit of racism going on. (Not that I see it that easily, being a fairly fair-skinned Finn.)

    Getting rid of that and getting more diverse people would be a good thing in my opinion, of course. The Russia problem is probably going to be a problem in some way for the time being, but there're different grades and ways of being a problem to your neighbouring countries.

    As for NATO, yeah, there's been a lot of 'either your're for NATO or for Putin' talk here, too, and I don't particularily care for it. Of course (at least some) people are scared, which makes it hard to think rationally. (I know I am, at least a bit.)

    994:

    Last time we discussed this someone gave me shit for claiming I could get a torque wrench for under $50. I have a ~$150 adjustable torque wrench instead.

    Anyway, I have a whole lot of tools that fall into the "I paid maybe 10% of replacement cost", like a Rohloff chain riveting tool. But some of the stuff I really don't want to be without includes a Park workstand... the arm-and-clamp part, anyway, bolted to a bit of wood that gets clamped in my big vise when I want to use it. I have a series of crank pulling tools, from the ones that come in $50 "bicycle tool kits" right up to one that actually works reliably. Ditto chain rivet tools. And I have a cheap spoke tensiometer and some decent spoke keys because I play with wheels and after a while the cheap spoke keys grate (away at your fingertips). And so on. $1000 is an underestimate, is what I'm saying. I probably have $1000 of spares and parts stacked up (because $100 for 50m of brake outer is better than $10 for 2m, and so on)

    I still do a lot of distance on the bikes, in all (Sydney) weather, so I end up doing more maintenance than most people do just on my bikes. Plus I do quick jobs on other people bikes, or friends come and use my setup, and the cheap tools stop working surprisingly quickly.

    For most people the $50 tool kit is fine and they can just replace anything that wears out, if anything does. And buy new parts when they wear out or break them.

    995:

    When we go on vacation, we never have any check-in luggage, just a carry-on bag each.

    My wife spent over 10 years working in various groups at a major airline dealing with getting luggage that had gone "missing" back to customers. When we travel we do check luggage at times. But always with the idea that if it goes missing for a while the trip will not be ruined.

    996:

    One thing I have learned from watching talks about AI safety and deceptive optimisers is that you probably can't reason with machines, but they can reason with you.

    Sympathy gives them an edge when they need to talk you into giving them the means to turn your biomass into postage stamps.

    997:

    (because $100 for 50m of brake outer is better than $10 for 2m, and so on)

    While not where near likely what you have I have a 1m high stack of bins full of partially used boxes of screws, nuts, bolts, etc... because when I need 5 of something and 2 packs of 3 cost $4 and a pack of 20 is $5 I spend the extra buck.

    And this doesn't count the drawers full of opened small boxes of nails. We've talked about how there seems to be an infinite variation in screws. But I must have 50 different kinds/sizes of nails just from my puttering around the house.

    998:

    "A nuclear power plant is basically a large steam generating station. Just a different way of powering the boiler.

    It's one reason the PWR (and to a lesser extent the BWR) design became the de facto power-generating reactor of choice. Engineers have over two hundred years of using steam to provide useful work in the form of rotating shafts and latterly generated electricity so we're quite good at it and hardly any steam explosions occur these days."

    why is PWR the de-facto choice? You can't actually put the PW through a turbine because a) it's pressurised and b) it's radioactive. You put the PW through a heat exchanger and get nice clean steam out of it which you then put through the turbine. The same applies to liquid sodium or whatever gas they use in a gas cooled reactor.

    999:

    »You put the PW through a heat exchanger and get nice clean steam out of it which you then put through the turbine. «

    One of the weird facts of nuclear power, is that those heat exchanger, called "steam generators" in nuclear lingo, have been a disproportionate cause of downtime and even wholesale scrapping of nuclear reactors.

    The poster-boy of course being San Onofre...

    1000:

    At the moment I'm trying and failing to pitch a Rohloff hub to myself as anything other than a fragrant overcapitalisation on my older MTB (to go with a Bafang centre drive conversion). It looks like there are decent e-bikes around for less than that hub.

    1001:

    Rohloff is definitely something for the people who are sick of buying a new derailleur drivetrain every year or so rather than people who ride less than 100km a week. I probably couldn't justify buying one now, but when I think about the distance I've put on the ones I have and what I'd have paid in derailleurs they seem like bargains.

    My quad has one because I was getting less than 1000km out of three chains (recumbent) and was replacing the cassette with the chains. Even at staff prices that was ~$200 a time and the Rohloff was ~$2k. Quad only has about 20,000km on it but I think the Rohloff is justified. On the second chain since I put it in... spot the difference.

    My daily driver had at least 150,000km on it when I wrecked it (frame bent out of alignment and the Rohloff oil came out with glitter in it. Hub never sounded right after that). The "new" replacement for that had about 20,000km on it, probably only 5000km since then but it's going up...

    1002:

    The PWR is the de-facto power reactor design because all the other power reactor designs that were built in the first generation reactor period (1950-1970) didn't "work" as well as PWRs, defining "work" as functioning with high uptime for decades, affordable etc. Early versions of the PWR design had some bad failure modes, most of which have been gradually refined out of the designs or mitigations put in place (upgrades and improvements to control and monitoring equipment) and more mitigations are in the process of being evaluated and implemented (failure-tolerant fuel assemblies, for example).

    The USA has about a hundred power-generating reactors, two-thirds of which are PWRs with the rest being BWRs (boiling-water reactors). Almost all power reactors being built today around the world are PWRs with virtually no BWRs under construction (this is complicated, there are a couple of unfinished BWR projects in Japan that stopped building after the Great Tohoku Earthquake in 2011, those projects may restart some time in the future). Hitachi and another couple of companies have next-gen BWR designs that have passed principal safety and licencing examination by a number of countries but no-one has ordered any and none are under construction.

    There are a small number of heavy-water reactors (CANDU derivatives) in use and some more may be built like the Indian steam-generating heavy water reactor design (SGHWR) but they are uncommon. Even more uncommon are operational fast-spectrum reactors and pebble-bed reactors (a handful around the world, no more).

    1003:

    Steam generators are consumable parts for nuclear reactors, meant to be replaced every thirty years or so. It's not unusual, pretty much any steam plant boiler system like a locomotive or a coal-fired generating plant would be expected to face such a replacement operation at least once in its operating lifetime. Nuclear reactors last so long in service (fifty years and more) that they may even get a second steam generator replacement depending on construction type etc. The French M910 reactor fleet is completing a steam generator replacement program at the moment, with the advantage that fifty or so identical steam generators were ordered on a rolling contract because the reactors are all similar.

    Other parts in a reactor power station get replaced too -- the turbines that convert the steam energy into useful work also wear out on about the same schedule as the steam generators, thirty years or so. I've also seen control heads (the caps on the reactor vessel with the control rod drives) being replaced as part of a refurbishment program.

    1004:

    There are some other power reactor designs using high-temperature gas as a working fluid which ran OK sometimes but most of them converted that high-temperature gas energy to steam (the British Magnox and AGRs).

    Yes. And during my 25-years-ago tour of the AGR plant down the coast from here, the big thing the engineers were worried about wasn't anything nuclear -- it was a steam explosion. Each of the two 600MW (electric, not thermal) reactors had two supercritical CO2 coolant loops, driving secondary steam loops to the big turbines, with serious blast walls between each quadrant (two reactors in the middle, one coolant circuit in each quadrant). If one of those steam circuits cut loose it would probably kill anyone in that quadrant, because at 400 ℃ steam won't just parboil you, it'll rip the flesh from your bones.

    And this is a shared problem with coal plants.

    1005:

    »Steam generators are consumable parts for nuclear reactors, meant to be replaced every thirty years or so. It's not unusual,«

    I didn't say anything about it being unusual, I said they were responsible for a disproportionate amount of downtime.

    As for them being "replaceable", no, traditionally they were not meant to, which is where San Onofre's troubles started.

    In modern PWR designs steam generators are designed to be replaced, but the scars from San Onofre runs very, very deep, mainly because the new computer simulated and "much superior" steam generators failed so utterly in real life.

    But there's no avoiding them for any kind of nuclear power, because running radioactive and corrowive steam through the turbine is not really a thing...

    1006:

    Yes. The Ukraine conflict became inevitable round about 2010, when Ukraine was being told that it would have to cut all ties with Russia if it wanted closer ties with even the EU. I was not expecting Putin to be so stupid to fall into the trap. This is the war that western hawks wanted.

    The real problems will occur when he falls and when Russia cannot hold its position any longer (which are NOT the same). What will Putin be replaced by? Prigozhin? Someone worse? A breakup and multiple warlords, er, strong men? And how many will control nuclear weapons?

    And where will the western forces stop? 'Ethnic cleansing' of the reconquered territories, almost certainly, but will they do the same to Crimea? That would certainly be cheered on in the west. And will they put a nominally NATO base in Sebastopol? With missiles? I don't THINK they will cross the old border, but I was wrong about Putin.

    No matter what happens in Russia, the economic and political warfare/blockage of Russia will continue (several western politicians have said so in public). Gorbachev learnt that to Russia's cost. Will that 'succeed' and keep Russia from rebuilding its industry and military? And for how long? And what will happen afterwards?

    No, I don't know what will happen, but this conflict is unlikely to be over by 2050, or even 2100, unless Russia is allowed a path to peace that is not total surrender.

    1007:

    To come back to the original subject, Bret Devereaux just put out an essay on ChatGPT :

    https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/

    He is, as current technology stands, not very worried (except for the level of garbage generated by content mills).

    1008:

    Yes. It depends on the cycles. I needed TWO torque wrenches and some specialised Rohloff and Schlumpf kit, which I have never used except on my trike. And I fully agree that cheap, non-simple tools usually don't work, though cheap, simple ones like tyre levers and spoke keys do - IF you get the right ones, because 90% are crap. I probably don't have a thousand's worth, but it's definitely many hundred.

    And that's not all I do (even now). I have spares for the house, as well as the tools needed for (1930s) house, garden etc., because I am one of the 'repair and reuse' people. That includes cement, tiles, woodwork, leatherwork, some metalwork, a LOT of garden stuff and more. And, as people say, God alone knows how many types of nail, screw, bolt etc.

    1009:
    bad heartburn

    My doctor suggested a spoonful of chia seeds for heartburn. Even if it's just placebo, it works a treat for me.

    1010:

    Right. There are a lot of other advantages over derailleurs, too, but it becomes cheaper than derailleurs over about 10,000 miles. On flatter going, a decent 7/8-speed hub does the same in a couple of years.

    1011:

    Weird, isn't it, that hundreds of PWRS around the world have had their steam generators replaced without issue during their operating lifetime when you say that they weren't meant to be replaced ever?

    The San Onofre situation is more complex than "nuclear power bad" but it's a favourite talking point by anti-nuclear cultists -- there was a proposed operational fix for the existing replacement generators to be used at lower power settings until new generators could be purchased and installed but it was not actioned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after several years of shutdown and the plant operators gave up at that point and scheduled San Onofre for decommissioning. Even with new working steam generators the plant only had another twenty years or so of operation in its future along with a hostile local regulatory environment fuelled by the gas industry.

    because running radioactive and corrosive steam through the turbine is not really a thing...

    That's how BWRs work, the reactor coolant/moderator water flashes to steam in the reactor vessel and this is then dried before it is fed into the turbines and condensers before being reused. I don't know where you get "corrosive" from, all reactor feedwater is deionised and purified as much as it can be for good engineering reasons. It's not like steam locomotives or ship boilers which use any sort of crap water that comes to hand and corrode out their boilers in a few years.

    Radioactive, again the amount of radioactivity in the BWR steam is low since there are few activation products. The principal radioactive product of concern in the steam is tritium which is oddly not a serious threat since it's in the form of tritiated water which is not preferentially retained in any biological system. There's also a nitrogen activation product from the oxygen atom in in the water, N-16 but it has a half-life of 7 seconds so again it isn't a biological hazard.

    1012:

    EC
    Oh really, really, NO.
    It's all the EVIL WEST's fault - again.
    It could not possibly because Putin is ex-KGB & is on record as stating that he regards the fall of the Berlin Wall & the collapse of communism a greater disaster than WWII, could it?

    1013:

    Really?

    'Where will the western forces stop?' By Western do you mean Ukrainian? They have been quite clear they will stop at the border.

    'Ethnic cleansing'. Of whom? Russian speaking Ukranians like Zelensky?

    Russia has always had a path to peace, which is to withdraw its troops from the territory of its sovereign neighbour. While I understand the mental gymnastics required to see it some other way, I don't accept it.

    'Conquering other countries is bad' should not be a controversial statement.

    1014:

    https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/hobby-clubs-missing-balloon-feared-shot-down-usaf

    [Much snippage]

    The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.

    But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11...

    The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.

    1015:

    Which reminds me of this ancient, but very funny bit:

    https://youtu.be/1to3ibvGcl8

    1016:

    Asimov's breakthrough in conceptualizing robots was the idea that nobody would build a dangerous robot - doing so would essentially be suicidal, and robots would shortly be highly unpopular. Instead, robots would be built for maximal safely, and follow a logic meant to ensure safety. They would, (and I think these are Asimov's words) be as safe as your toaster.

    1017:

    You are probably pleased to know that you share most of your political opinions with Liz Truss.

    1018:

    EC
    Why don't you GROW UP, eh?
    I share about one opinion with the Trusstercluck - that on Putin's RU Empire - see also Rocketjps' remarks. Putin illegally invaded Ukraine in 2014, right?
    Had another go last year.
    All of it totally unnecessary, at a vast cost in money & human life & misery.

    1019:

    Rube Goldberg? Why, how else than steam to turn generators would you think a nuclear reactor should generate power - that the reaction should spit out electrons? RTGs are way too small.

    1020:

    Can I have storage scuba for my space gear? I mean, once I can afford a space suit....

    1021:

    Liz Truss and I may agree on a few things for all I know. Maybe she also enjoys coffee in the morning, for instance. That doesn't make coffee bad, any more than Hitler makes vegetarianism evil.

    1022:

    I almost never check my luggage. I have a travelpack, and as big as it is (ok, the one I just bought is smaller), but even the old, falling apart ones are smaller than the steamer trunks on wheels that some jerks put in the overheads.

    1023:

    Several suggestions: first, have you considered pepsid or clone? Or Mylanta (or clone)?

    You really don't want to hear that my father thought he had indigestion for like four years before I screamed and my mom took him to the doctor. (Cancer).

    1024:

    Very good analysis, EC, and more detailed than what I was thinking.

    GT: stop with the "my way or the highway". The west has always wanted to destroy Russia, not just the USSR. For example, if that was not the case, why was there not a Marshall Plan after the USSR collapsed, rather than 15-20 years of empty store shelves, actual famine, and alcoholism? How do you think Putin gained power... when Russians knew for a fact that the West hated them.

    Here's another one: why is it that Tricky Dick could go to China, and work with Maoist Communist China... but not the USSR?

    Back to EC: yeah, I do not see how Putin could have been such a fool as to start a war, when there were so many other ways he could have done things.

    Like (unfortunately) the Chengdu Worldcon, someone didn't have Plan B.

    1025:

    A bit more - when the USSR collapsed, the West salivated over it... as they did the "sick man" of Europe, the Ottoman Empire.

    I say, with 100% confidence, that Exxon, and BP, and Shell, and all the rest were expecting the entire country of Russia to fall apart and/or be dismembered, and all the oil and gas would be theirs.

    1026:

    For example, if that was not the case, why was there not a Marshall Plan after the USSR collapsed, rather than 15-20 years of empty store shelves, actual famine, and alcoholism?

    Same reason there was no Marshall Plan for Germany after WWI (quite the opposite in fact), or for France in 1814. Helping your defeated enemy to get back on their feet is an incredibly recent historical aberration, and only happened because in the immediate aftermath of WWII, Soviet Union was a clear and obvious danger. Without Soviet threat, both Germany and Japan would have been left to fester, as was the norm for all of history.

    Here's another one: why is it that Tricky Dick could go to China, and work with Maoist Communist China... but not the USSR?

    He could... with one of the other, not both. By 1972 China and USSR hated each other far more than either one hated US, as is usually the case with religious schisms. Each was open to cooperation with US against the other one. Nixon had to pick an ally, and the fact that Nixon decided to side with "yellow peril" is actually quite remarkable.

    1027:

    As for Russia coming apart, it is long overdue. Russia is a colonial empire which started out about the same time Spanish, Portuguese and French colonial empires started. The difference is that Western European empires acquired their colonies overseas, while Duchy of Moscovy did it over land and contiguously. Thus Duchy of Moscovy (to call things by their real names) is able to claim that its entire enormous territory is "all Russian land" the way Portugal could never claim about Mozambique (as an example).

    Well, in the rest of Europe colonial possessions went out of style by 1960; about time for Duchy of Moscovy to do the same. I really wish for restoration of Novgorod Republic, although this time around it would have to center on St. Petersburg.

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

    1028:

    whitroth
    I have never said { Even though some wrongly interpret it as such } "my way or the highway" ...
    The Marshall Plan was for a totally-devastated Europe, after war had passed over it.
    This had not occurred in 1989-90, had it?
    OTOH ...
    You are almost-certainly correct about Exxon etc.
    Unfortunately for them & fortunately for us ... those things are decreasing in value as the warming planet makes clear.

    Suggestion: Go back & read some of Charlie's comments on Dugin & the other RU ultranationalist/christian loonies & their vision of RU "civilisation" & their revival of the "Third Rome" insanity, OK?
    O watch a re-run of Eisenstein's film on Ivan the Terrible, perhaps.

    1029:

    I found this interesting YouTube video. Starts in 850CE and has a year clicking off and a map of Europe/Asia as appropriate. It is continuously drawing lines as the voice over talks about who is conquering who.

    850-1613 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUgzqkCW6A4

    1600-1914 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjDjnhOzqIU

    It covers the Novgorod Republic.

    About 20 minutes per video. I'd be curious as to ilya187's thoughts

    1030:

    paws4thot @ 987:

    971 ref 958 - Absolutely; OGH, my sis (pharmacologist) and I (gout sufferer) would all recommend avoiding grapefruit, including juice, if you take meds for gout or any of the pseudo-gouts, for example.

    Also verboten if you take statins for cholesterol.

    984 - As upthread 2 of them are sugars, and starch may convert into sugar. I don't know enough about the digestion of Sucralose to comment.

    No heartburn last night, so no antacids and this morning my blood sugar is back within the prescribed range ... so I'll just keep an eye on it.

    1031:

    I think there are serious limits to how much ChatGPT can be improved. When I looked into it (briefly) it seemed to me that they were doing the kind of curve fitting that I was taught to avoid in my first numerical analysis class. I think they called it polynomial fitting. It lets you predict the training set with extreme accuracy, but it produces wild swings in between the data points. Now ChatGPT is doing this in an n-dimensional space rather than in 2-d, but it looked like the same basic approach. IIUC what's going on they'd do better using splines (still not a very good approach).

    OTOH, in areas where the training data can nearly fill the space, it can produce excellent results. So ChatGPT should be able to do quite well in highly partitioned spaces. Well, they've got a polynomial with millions of terms in a huge number of dimensions. I'm really impressed with what they've been able to come up with. But I think it has a limited ability to be developed further.

    That said, using it as a user interface could work quite well. They'd need a good censor, to rule out the wild swings, and something with deeper (or at least different) understanding to handle anything except language. So I can see using it as the front end of a search engine. But the examples so far have shown that they don't have a good censor yet. (You don't want to blurt out all your thoughts, do you?)

    1032:

    Copyright isn't supposed to cover functional similarities. That's what patents are for. This has been stretched far out of shape, though, and who knows what the legal precedents have produced.

    1033:

    ...hey, how about we give all the states on the western border of Russia back to Poland, while we're at it? Not just Ukraine, but Belarus and the Baltics as well...

    1034:

    There's a quote on wikipedia of a Russian advisor ranting aggrievedly to the boss (with examples) about how the Western powers can stromp about all over the place and walk over whoever they want and nobody cares, but Russia can't do even a fraction as much without everyone piling on to do a war on them unless they grovel to the West and say pretty please first.

    The boss in question is Nicholas I, and the Western powers are Britain and France. It's in the article about the Crimean war. But it sounds completely familiar and only needs a few of the names changed to bring it bang up to date.

    1035:

    It spits out something much better than electrons... But you have to make it stop always spitting into its hanky, and you have to handle potentials of >200MV. Both of these are kind of tricky, but nevertheless people have thought about trying it.

    1036:

    Well, if we're going to demand that, I say hand back ALL the US states (ok, except Pennsylvania, because Penn made a treaty with the Native Americans - don't know of anyone else who did) to the original owners, the Native Americans, and all the Anglo-Americans can go back to Britain, and the Irish-Americans can go back to Ireland, and the Italian-Americans can go back to Italy....

    Native Americans at least tried to do something about the illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, they were outgunned.

    1037:

    Unfortunately, it sounds perfectly correct, says the guy in the country that genocided and concentration camped the original inhabitants of this continent. Oh, and "Monroe Doctrine". And Vietnam. And....

    1038:

    David L @ 995:

    When we go on vacation, we never have any check-in luggage, just a carry-on bag each.

    My wife spent over 10 years working in various groups at a major airline dealing with getting luggage that had gone "missing" back to customers. When we travel we do check luggage at times. But always with the idea that if it goes missing for a while the trip will not be ruined."

    Every time the subject comes up I remember a bit by Alan King on the Ed Sullivan Show about flying to Los Angeles and the airline losing his luggage.

    All I really remember is the punchline - "... but my Tuxedo had a fine vacation in Hawaii!"

    1039:

    "So I can see using it as the front end of a search engine."

    One of the articles someone's linked to, or perhaps that one of those articles has linked to, goes on about that. They say that Google are having kittens about the idea because it would mean "the end of the search results page" so they wouldn't be able to spam people with adverts in the search results any more, but if they don't do it Bing will and everyone'll use them instead. Essentially they're saying that the bot will search so accurately that all you'll have is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and the ordinary "Search" will no longer exist (though they fail to explain why it should have to be like that).

    I think it's a fucking horrendous idea. There are two main problems with search engines as they currently are, and one is having to carefully pick and choose your search terms to defeat the present algorithms' attempts to "be helpful" and make them just show you what you fucking asked for (instead of, for example, changing the spelling of the search terms because if you swap two letters you get a hundred times as many results). But at least the behaviour of the present algorithms is not too intractably complex (it just has too many paths of which none of the possible outcomes are not shit). It would make search engines massively less useful if the queries were processed by something that not only has far more complex behaviour, but is actively trying to fight back instead of just being passively crap. (And if the scenario postulated in the abovementioned article does come to pass, so you only get one shot with each combination of terms, there will cease to be much point in having an internet connection in the first place.)

    The other main problem is the overwhelming number of stupid results. This is partly down to poor curation of the database (eg. failing to refrain from indexing all the endless recursive duplicates of wikipedia, ebay and other important sites) and partly down to a variety of deliberate shapings of the presentation of the results. A bot front end won't help with either of these. The first is already in effect before the bot comes into it; the second, because it is deliberate to begin with, the bot will make worse, much worse, in a degree exponentially related to its complexity. It would be a synergistic problem with that described in the previous paragraph.

    (Nor would the bot be useful with the curation stage, although that's not being proposed. They could perfectly well do that already, and have been able to for years and years. They just can't be arsed, or else they fail on purpose.)

    1040:

    "England for the English! Angles and Saxons go home!"

    1041:

    All I really remember is the punchline - "... but my Tuxedo had a fine vacation in Hawaii!"

    What's happening now is that airlines are apparently giving up and donating unclaimed luggage to charity — without going through the nicety of informing the owners where their luggage is. There was a story in the news here of a chap who was tracking his "lost, don't know where it is" suitcase through the AirTag he left in it, and even with that help the airline couldn't find it. Eventually he tracked it to a warehouse in the city he was in and when he notified the airline he was told "that is the unclaimed luggage we have donating to a charity.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/lost-luggage-ontario-airtag-air-canada-1.6723976

    1042:

    =+=+=+=

    "Winnie the Pooh Goes Feral"

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/16/winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-movie-review

    OH GOODY! those stories always creeped me out... long before erstwhile friends took to mocking me as our group's closest approximation to melancholy prone Eeyore (and yeah others were gluttonous, slutish, overly naive, et al and thereby linked to all the other primary characters as well). So the notion WTP lets loose rage-hunger-boredom does very much feel plausible.

    Something that directly links into the WSCN mindset coming off of one of those grotesque motivational posters, this is from "Survival" (male lion front 'n center on poster).

    ENCOURAGING THOUGHT ==> "Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed...every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle...when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

    Yup.

    Kill. Or be killed. Because if you are not doing the eating then you are one being considered as the guest of honor for tonight's entree. Very much in keeping with mindset-dreams-planning of various batshit gonzo crazy white supremacists Christian nationalists (hashtag #BSGC #WSCN). Delusional in their assumption they will always be fastest-strongest-toughest despite most of 'em are akin to wheezy lard-bellied 'gravy seals' rather than hard-bodied 'Navy SEALs'.

    What the recent thousand years having proved, the less you ally yourself with large groups of other humans the lower your survival. Whereas comprising and cooperating and conversing with ever larger groupings yields ever improved living conditions. Sanitary regulations require you to surrender certain basic 'personal rights' for sake of everyone avoiding heaps of shit in the streets thereby avoiding lots 'n lots of diseases. So you gotta be toilet trained and limit your dumping to bathrooms. That 'loss of freedom' led to reduced death rates.

    So, here we are, once again dealing with WSCN whining about 'personal rights' to avoid compliance with masking-vaxing-distancing.

    Yup. A bloodyhanded Winnie the Pooh is exactly the right 'n proper icon for #BSGC #WSCN.

    =+=+=+=

    Rocketpjs:

    Sadly... "Conquering other countries is bad" is indeed a controversial statement... there are still Marxist-prone economists across Europe and NorAm muttering about how Communism was betrayed... along with various WSCN variants (also scattered over Europe and NorAm) who have realized Putin is indeed the 'will to power made flesh' and given his many years of training in dirty tricks plus the support of hundreds of short-sighted-short-tempered oligarchs (cough-cough-amoral thugs)

    this attempt at USSR 2.0 could become the best opportunity to rollback not to the 1950s but all the way to the 1850s... putting women (and blacks and Jews) back where they ought to be... the possibility of a Christian Taliban-esque theocracy now becoming ever more real as a possible timeline...

    these arsewipes regard "Handmaid's Tale" as a how to manual as well a target to aim towards...

    =+=+=+=

    JReynolds:

    "spoonful of chia seeds for heartburn"

    careful those thing don't take root inside your belly... be a shame if all they find of you after a month long missing was an overgrown cadaver sprouting... sprouts

    =+=+=+=

    Charlie Stross:

    "shared problem with coal plants"

    well, yeah... too many moving parts and too much pressure and all sorts of working fluids racing around being heated-cooled-stored-pumped-pressurized-filtered-bended-folded-stapled... all manufactured by lowest bidders and rarely as well inspected as we'd like to assume...

    I always wanted nuke plants to provide 95% of American electricity but nobody was willing to actually do what the French did (credit where credit is indeed due) of selecting one design and sticking to it for a zillion copies... if the US had committed to nuke plants in the 1960s (or 1970s or 1980s or 1990s or...) right now we'd be brewing up synthetic petro fuels with all that excess electricity production ("green gasoline") which would have the marked advantage of having uniformly consistent chemistry and thus significantly less pollution prone...

    Big Oil would have been gelded given how we would never have been held hostage to geology of "salt dome distribution" and them not controlling a diminishing non-renewable resource which in turn would have robbed them of the money to lobby for cockblocking a transition to electric vehicles...

    thus Saudi Arabia's major export would be racing camels... never able to force the G20 to grant them a seat at the table... whilst Iran dissolved into theocratic craziness verging upon human sacrifice... Hezbollah and dozens of other terrorist groups would have lacked funding and international support leading to failure in establishing themselves and fade out of most (not all) terrorism attacks in the Middle East...

    but that (overly) optimistic potential timeline can still be reached though without a thousand nuke plants scattered across NorAm... instead it will be square miles of photovoltaics (PVs) in southern locales such as Las Vegas and wind turbines (WTs) with heaps 'n heaps of cheap-as-iron batteries (please google reversible rust battery)

    what's so sweet about PVs they just quietly sunbath and either produce (keep another year) or fail (glue factory or eqv)... we already have low cost PV sheets which ought to be tented over all those zillions 'n zillions of parking lots to provide both affordable power as well some relief from sunburn and rain... be really funny if all those de-commissioned malls ended up as some combination of community center and adult day care and volunteer greenhouse and power plant...

    with WTs there's lots of moving parts in each tower-turbine-blade assemblage but when one WT goes offline due to mechanical issues all the others keep spinning so incremental downcycles and potential for low key emergency repairs rather than drama... then there's the scalability issue easily addressed by adding more generating outputs in increments of another WT best fitting conditions specific regions and its unique mix of budget-demand-wind-intensity...

    too bad so much resistance from NIMBYs and quislings like Joe Manchin (for all you non-Americans, the TLDR summation being "Joe Manchin is a senator representing the interests of Big Coal and Big Oil rather than Little Citizens of West Virginia")

    my question is if anyone ever went digging deep into NIMBYs to determine if their funding originated from Big Coal and Big Oil...?

    =+=+=+=

    1043:

    What's happening now is that airlines are apparently giving up and donating unclaimed luggage to charity — without going through the nicety of informing the owners where their luggage is.

    The US airlines don't donate to charity. Well not normally. They auction it off by the pound to a firm that sells the contents in a big store somewhere in Alabama.

    I know lost airline luggage is an target rich environment for put downs. But there are a lot of people who try hard to get it back. And the crap that the public pulls never makes the sensational news. Who doesn't ever submit a claim for a monogrammed set of golf clubs worth $2000? Or submit one for a small sailboat mast?

    Money laundering or just too rich to care I guess.

    And heaven forbid people but more than a paper name tag on a checked bag tied on with kite string. And absolutely nothing inside of it with a name or address on it.

    1044:

    Yeah, well, they were all too wimpy, had to import a Geat to fight their monster....

    1045:

    ...hey, how about we give all the states on the western border of Russia back to Poland, while we're at it? Not just Ukraine, but Belarus and the Baltics as well...

    First, this does not follow. Just because I want Russian Empire dismantled, does not mean I want Polish-Lithuanian one restored.

    And second, given the choice between being part of Poland and part of Russia, most of the population of the aforementioned states would choose the former.

    1046:

    People who do not wish to be conquered should not be. Pigeon and EC and others seem to be confused by this point.

    Not much we can do about the past, aside from genuine attempts at reconciliation with the descendents of the victims of conquest. There are some efforts to that effect here in Canada, with mixed results given that the 'Loyal Opposition' is firmly in the NO camp and occasionally wins government to bollix things up.

    It seems quite clear to anyone paying attention that the people of Ukraine do not wish to be conquered by Russia's armies. It is also 100% clear that Russia's armies are trying to conquer them anyway, at great cost to life on both sides.

    It is actually astonishing to me that disapproving of a Russian invasion of a neighbour - complete with shelling civilians and all the rest - is somehow controversial. I was also opposed to the invasions of Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan - the list is endless. Invading people who do not want to be invaded is fucking wrong, I don't care what the map looked like 300 years ago.

    1047:

    It seems quite clear to anyone paying attention that the people of Ukraine do not wish to be conquered by Russia's armies. It is also 100% clear that Russia's armies are trying to conquer them anyway, at great cost to life on both sides.

    In this event it appears (at least clearly to me) Russia doesn't want to conquer the people of Ukraine. They want the dirt. If they have to wipe the dirt clean to get it, well that's just tough.

    1048:

    They'll keep in your fridge for up to 2 years.

    1049:

    TO: - mostly EC, but peripherally to whitroth & others ....
    Oh the poor misunderstood, put-upon & persecuted Russian government { Even including ex-KGB-man Putin? } ...
    Has anyone else here though of asking .. ooh .. the Chechnyans, the Georgians, the Moldovans, the Finns, the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians (etc) about how misunderstood & nice the RU governement are at wanting their old colonies back, so that they can oppress & terrorise thme again, just for fun?
    Maybe not, perhaps?
    SEE ALSO: Rocketjps: People who do not wish to be conquered should not be. Pigeon and EC and others seem to be confused by this point.

    See also Pigeon @ 1033
    A reversion to the "Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth" - including most of present-day Ukraine?
    Also - maybe not.
    - LURVE your 1856 example!

    Nojay
    What about latecomers like me?
    Gascon / Huguenot / Viking?

    Howard NYC
    the possibility of a Christian Taliban-esque theocracy now becoming ever more real as a possible timeline...
    Yeah, right ... the tendency towards open fascism in both Florida & Texas has produced the following wonderful meme: Howdy Arabia - referring to Texas. I don't know of a Florida eqivalent - yet.

    1050:

    I don't know of a Florida eqivalent - yet.

    Y'all Qaeda

    1051:

    Moz wrote on February 16, 2023 at 23:12 in #975:

    ...But when I run the numbers the cost of hiring gear or renting access to it is significantly in excess of the buy/keep price. Annoyingly the stuff I can borrow/rent easily tends to be stuff I use so often it's worth buying... over $1000 of bicycle-specific tools but it's a rare week when I don't use at least one of them.

    The good news is they're mostly repairable, at least to a point. My ten year old floor pump needs a new O ring and it's cheaper to buy a kit (200 O rings in a cheap tackle box) than the one official spare part from the manufacturer. Hmm. See also "piles of stuff in the shed"

    Hence the growth of "Buy Nothing" giveaway Facebook groups; my suburb of 22,000 has such a group with > 2,000 members, and averages about eight posts a day where folks have perfectly good stuff to give away. https://Freecycle.org pioneered the concept, I believe, and Craigslist sites have a 'Free' section ( found at cityname.craigslist.org/search/zip )

    1052:

    Whoever designed it needs to work on their design skills then. I built a similar size mask over a couple of days print time, a mold shouldn't take much longer unless they tried to do it all in a huge single block.

    The creator of this sex toy finally got back to me. He made the mold in five pieces. And it took him 19 days. I did not comment on his 3D-printing skills.

    1053:

    here's one of my go-to's whenever I need something to prevent me from falling asleep too early... "Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right. ... Appeals to Christian nationalism have a long tradition in American history, though they have usually operated on the fringes. But the increasingly mainstream appearance of this belief in GOP circles makes sense if you look at new public opinion surveys."

    politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/21/most-republicans-support-declaring-the-united-states-a-christian-nation-00057736

    1054:

    My wife had heartburn for years and got relief from antacids. When she finally got a competent doctor she found she had a hiatus hernia and an oesophageal ulcer from the acid reflux. Which was bleeding and she ended up with iron deficiency anaemia needing a transfusion. Don’t let heartburn go on for years.

    1056:

    IT WAS A JOKE, guys.

    1057:

    "Russia doesn't want to conquer the people of Ukraine. They want the dirt. If they have to wipe the dirt clean to get it, well that's just tough."

    It seems to be worse than that.

    https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/

    Long before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale assault on Ukraine in February and even prior to his 2014 invasion and capture of Crimea, analysts noted with alarm a different kind of escalation – the threatening rhetoric against Ukraine by Putin and actors within his control. Dating at least to 2008 or 2009, increasingly hostile language laid the groundwork for rejecting Ukraine’s existence as a state, a national group, and a culture.

    1058:

    Yep, those are great. In Melbourne we did really well out of freecycle because there were 5+ lists based on convenient chunks of the city. So we got a bunch of furniture and stuff when we arrived, then gave most of it away when we left :)

    Annoyingly someone decided that "Freecycle Sydney" was a good idea... city of 5M people all in one email list, and it's ~3 hours by train from end to end. It'd have to be a really good free thing to justify 5-8 hours on the train.

    Most of the rest are facebook-based, but I know some people directly so can use the local "tool library" (which is about half toys but "tools for entertaining children"?), and a community centre has semi-commercial reuse centres that I visit occasionally.

    I also put stuff on gumtree (like craigslist but owned by ebay) for token amounts because "selling" stuff for free seems to bring out the no-shows but $5 for a couch filters them out nicely.

    1059:

    huh... I really hate being right about the rollback towards Dickensian child labor practices... not Asia... NorAm... and about ten years sooner than my worst nightmarish expectation... I assumed first there'd first be a couple million refugees from drowned cities...

    so... how was your day?

    "children clean razor-sharp saws using hazardous chemicals ... employing minors in hazardous occupations and having them working overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities in eight states"

    https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/packers-sanitation-child-labor

    1060:

    Elderly Cynic posted on February 17, 2023 at 12:56 in #1006:

    And where will the western forces stop? 'Ethnic cleansing' of the reconquered territories, almost certainly, but will they do the same to Crimea?

    Kindly show where anything like that occurred in the Baltics after they got out from under Russian rule, with their similarly significant Russophile minority. I'll wait...

    1061:

    Speaking of immigrants, Canada wants 100 million Canadians by 2100.

    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/01/plan-for-100-million-canadians-by-2100-is-on-track.html

    The Century Initiative is a Canadian charity that aims to increase Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. The USA is on track to having population increase from 330 million today to 434 million in 2100. If Canada’s plan is followed then Canada population would go from 12% of US population to 23%.

    The Century Initiative intends to reach its population goal by reversing the falling fertility rate, investing in economic development around “mega-regions”, and through a massive increase in immigration.

    Canada is on track to get to a population of about 80 million in 2060-2080. Toronto gets about 29% of the immigrants. Greater Toronto will reach aver 10 million people by 2030 and 33 million when Canada has 100 million people. Greater Toronto would have a Tokyo level population if the Century plan is followed.

    The largest source of immigrants into Canada is India. Every year 2.5 million Indian emigrate overseas. Canada is now a top 7 target for Indian immigration.

    This last part is most interesting. With global warming making India unlivable while making Canada temperate, the Great White North is the obvious choice for Indian expats. 100s of millions of them, eh?

    And if America become the new Gilead, look for well educated liberal Americans escaping north leaving the poorly educated Red States in an economic and environmental mess of their own making (a big version of Atlas Shrugged only with Liberals moving to a northern Galt's Gulch). Canada becomes the new superpower, maybe with the Great Lakes, New England and the West Coast leaving the decrepit US and joining super Canada (like on the Jesus Land maps).

    1062:

    And speaking of amess of their own making...

    East Palestine, Ohio is in Columbiana County.

    Trump won 68% of the vote in Columbiana County in 2016, a massive landslide

    https://www.columbiana.boe.ohio.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Columbiana-Official-Canvass.htm

    President Obama had instituted regulations mandating safe breaking systems for freight trains carrying hazwaste and hazardous chemicals.

    President Trump rescinded those regulations in response to lobbying from Norfolk Southern and other train freight companies.

    Karma is a bitch.

    And so I am having trouble feeling sorry for the good people of East Palestine, Ohio.

    1063:

    train derailments much like flight cancellations, lost luggage, diseased foodstuffs, inability to find a dentist who is not overbooked and not overpriced, et al, are all symptoms of 'feral capitalism'... and suddenly all those who'd unthinkingly been in favor of smaller government are now shocked to find themselves in favor of re-regulation and higher numbers of inspectors...

    ...especially those who'd been tracking their lost luggage via AirTags but could not get the airlines to pay attention to updated coordinates

    1064:

    train derailments much like flight cancellations, lost luggage, diseased foodstuffs, inability to find a dentist who is not overbooked and not overpriced, et al, are all symptoms of 'feral capitalism'... and suddenly all those who'd unthinkingly been in favor of smaller government are now shocked to find themselves in favor of re-regulation and higher numbers of inspectors...

    ...especially those who'd been tracking their lost luggage via AirTags but could not get the airlines to pay attention to updated coordinates

    PREDICT: after seeing the advantages of AirTags my guess is they are going to sell out the week before every major travel holiday (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc)

    PREDICT: someone at Apple will recognize the marketing opportunities in assembling a massive class action lawsuit against all the airlines (and hopefully the FAA too) for refusing to heed coordinates of those AirTags and offering one of their in-house lawyers to administer it

    1065:

    I'm not sure how inspirational TDE would have been for Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"

    This is jumping a long way back, but I saw this comment again and the following occurred to me. There's also that William Gibson hit-and-miss 20 minute into the future novel Virtual Light, which does contain some sort of vaguely pedal punk sections. It's quite possibly an influence for TDA too, around the macguffin in the title.

    1066:

    1041 - Isn't that "theft by finding"?

    1056 - My Godmother's second husband has a habit of braying "Joke! Joke!" Neither of them can see why their Scottish relatives and/or in-laws accuse him of "being English at us".

    1067:

    Ilya187 @ 1050
    Lovely!
    Oh dear ... we will have to remember those two from now on ....

    HowardNYC
    US christofascisism ...
    Surely, by now, people are already alarmed & worried by this?
    Or will the GQP's vote-rigging etc be enough to guarantee them victory, or will they be dfeated?

    Kardashev
    Dating at least to 2008 or 2009, increasingly hostile language laid the groundwork for rejecting Ukraine’s existence as a state, a national group, and a culture. - THIS - exactly, as Charlie has noted, more than once.
    As kiloseven @ 1060 has also mentioned ...
    I would like to hear EC's defence of this attitude & the poor persecuted Russian Empire?

    1068:

    FWIW, I read it as a joke. (Also, you forgot Finland, we were part of Russia until 1917 and they tried to take us back.)

    1069:

    To come back to the original subject, Bret Devereaux just put out an essay on ChatGPT: https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/

    I was tickled to see him link to CGP Grey's video How AIs, like ChatGPT, Learn - which I've seen before and is a good way to explain to people who have eight minutes but no technical background how we can teach computers without explicitly programming every detail.

    With adorable cartoon robots too, so that's a bonus I guess.

    1070:

    I always wanted nuke plants to provide 95% of American electricity but nobody was willing to actually do what the French did (credit where credit is indeed due) of selecting one design and sticking to it for a zillion copies...

    No, you don't want to do that.

    (Post-Fukushima the French realized there were problems with how well their reactor design would handle an exceeds-worst-case-we-planned-for-disaster, and the design flaws affected the entire fleet. They had to hastily re-evaluate what might happen (turns out the Fukushima Daiichi equivalent disaster would wipe out their entire reactor crew on-site and their equipment for preventing a loss of cooland followed by an uncontained meltdown) and pivot to developing the capacity to move emergency response teams in from off-site to handle the remediation.)

    What you want are three designs, bearing in mind a nation the size of the USA would need at least 200GW of generating capacity (and more likely 300-500GW once you switch to fully electric transport). One design, 80% of the fleet, is based on a very well understood tech base and is very conservative. A second design, 15% of the fleet, is your "pick-ups vs. cars" or "Apple vs. Microsoft" alternate -- comparable to your primary design but different enough to give your people a lot of experience handling non-baseline designs. It's more modern/experimental than the 80%, but you're not committing to it fully until you've run a fleet of them for a couple of decades and know there are no unforeseen failure modes (such as the graphite moderator cracking that doomed the UK's AGR fleet but only came to light a couple of decades after they hooked up to the grid). And the 5% is for experimentation -- your prototype base-load-generating fusion reactor, your molten thorium salt prototype reactor, a PBMR, whatever: it's where you work out what your next generation will be.

    TLDR: you don't want a monoculture, monocultures lock you into technological path-dependency and risk losing the institutional knowledge of how to handle alternatives. But you don't want a fleet of 100% bespoke systems either. You want diversity without excess, in other words.

    And this is also why you don't want a 100% nuclear powered grid: keep hydropower, keep photovoltaic farms, keep wind turbines, you never know when you'll need to phase out one of your platforms in a hurry (imagine explaining how fast the rapid ramp-down of coal in the 21st century happened, and why, to a 1900-1950s engineer!).

    1071:

    "What you want are three designs, bearing in mind a nation the size of the USA would need at least 200GW of generating capacity (and more likely 300-500GW once you switch to fully electric transport)."

    As of an hour ago, the CONUS grid was pulling 463 GW. Add in electric transportation and all-electric buildings and I can't imagine it will be less than a terawatt.

    https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48

    1072:

    I really hate being right about the rollback towards Dickensian child labor practices... not Asia... NorAm... and about ten years sooner than my worst nightmarish expectation

    Company made the mistake of doing it before it was legal again.

    In Iowa, Republican legislators introduced a bill in January to expand the types of work 14- and 15-year-olds would be permitted to do as part of approved training programs, extend allowable work hours, and exempt employers from liability if these young workers are sickened, injured or killed on the job.

    In Ohio, legislators reintroduced a bipartisan bill this year to extend working hours for 14- and 15-year-olds with permission from a parent or legal guardian, and called on Congress to adopt the same rollbacks at the federal level.

    Legislators in Minnesota introduced a bill in January 2023 to extend work hours for 14- and 15-year-olds.

    Republicans in Wisconsin passed a bill that was vetoed by Governor Tony Evers in this month that would have expanded work hours for 14- and 15-year-olds. The New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, signed a similar law in 2022 that expanded work hours for 14- and 15-year-olds to work longer hours during summer months and on holidays and expanded allowable work hours for 16- and 17-year-olds.

    At the federal level, Republican congressman Dave Joyce of Ohio drafted a bill in 2022 to expand working hours for 14- and 15-year-olds during periods when school is in session.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/us-child-labor-laws-violations

    1073:

    Rbt Prior
    And, even after this, people are STILL voting "R"?
    W. T. F?

    1074:

    Thanks for the link. Been looking for similar for a while. Not hard looking but still looking.

    1075:

    There's probably 50GW or so of home PV and off-grid generator-produced electricity in the US to add to that grid-metered 460GW of consumption/generation. That's a SWAG though. For comparison China generates and consumes about a terawatt on average but it has over four times the population of the US.

    A while ago I did a BOTE calculation if and when road transport in Britain went all-electric and what it would need to charge all those vehicles and I came up with 10GW of extra generation capacity on average. Assuming a lot of charging would be done at peak periods that might add up to 20GW of extra demand at certain times. It's not just the generating capacity of course, there's the enhancements to electricity distribution that would require. A typical British home is fed by a 100A supply at 240V, that is 24kW maximum. A 50kW fast car charger requires an upgrade to the house's main feed, a housing estate with multiple fast chargers will need a new substation and possibly a 110kV interconnector out in the back field.

    1076:

    »A while ago I did a BOTE calculation if and when road transport in Britain went all-electric «

    Such estimates are subject to some very big footnotes, one of which is "what if the nature of the transport changes?"

    Autonomous vehicles are not generally viable, but they are already deployed in certain specialized cases where the economics are particularly favourable.

    One of those niches are "A truck on freeway", where today the economics are controlled by the drivers salary, which again mandates that the truck drives at maximum legal speed.

    If there is no salaried driver in the truck, the speed is a lot less important for many loads, and the energy required is approximately proportional to speed cubed.

    "no salaried driver" could for instance be that he driver is in the truck, but on his legally required rest period.

    There are far too many unknowns to estimate the impact of seismic shifts like that, but they do make estimates of future energy requirements from road transport very uncertain.

    It is almost also guaranteed that road transport will use enough energy that it will not be bought retail, and thus assuming precisely when or how charging happens is equally uncertain.

    It's all modular, so the load can continue while the truck takes forever to charge, if that is more economical at that instant.

    1077:

    And, even after this, people are STILL voting "R"?

    Yes.

    Over last 6-8 years there has been a sea change among Republican voters toward higher education. Unless it is something very specific (usually engineering), they no longer perceive college degree as a positive thing. They see it as waste of money at best, Communist indoctrination at worst. So they no longer want their children to go to college. And if you are not planning on college, why not start working at 14-15?

    They do not know about "exempt employers from liability if these young workers are sickened, injured or killed on the job" because they do not actually read the bills, and Fox News omits that part.

    1078:

    still voting R

    We have gotten to the point in many cases in the US where both R and D think of the other as "evil". Thus while "our" side may do something "bad" we still can't vote for the other side as they are doing "evil". Which is why between 30% and 45% of the vote for either side is locked in these days. (Varies by location but...) In the US.

    1079:

    There are far too many unknowns to estimate the impact of seismic shifts like that, but they do make estimates of future energy requirements from road transport very uncertain.

    Not beating you up but much of your thoughts are based on company owned trucks. And somewhere between 1/4 and maybe over 1/2 of the trucks in the US are owner operated. Which makes the equation even more complicated.

    I'm not going to look up the stats but if you pull into a large US truck stop most any time of the day or night you can quickly tell the company owned trucks from the operator owned ones.

    1080:

    There's probably 50GW or so of home PV and off-grid generator-produced electricity in the US to add to that grid-metered 460GW of consumption/generation.

    I have no data. But I wonder just how much home PV is tied to the grid. Here in North Carolina there's a big tax incentive to go home / small business PV and tie it back into the grid. You give up the excess to the power company in exchange for the lower net bill when you're making less than you need.

    1081:

    "what if the nature of the transport changes?"

    Stuff needs moving, people need moving. My back-of-the-envelope estimate for the increased electricity requirement was based on the number of cars in the UK and the reported average mileage per year of said cars, plus a fudge factor for trucks. Most rail in the UK is electrified or heading that way, another small fudge factor added to the total, rounded up to 10GW average or 87600GWh each year of new electricity supply needed. Smart trucks and modular whatevers, mass still needs to be accelerated, Ole Devil Friction takes its toll (exact change please) but it's all energy in the end.

    1082:

    Nojay
    Most rail in the UK is electrified or heading that way
    NO - it fucking well IS NOT & the tories are determined to keep it that way, if only because they hate railways, having failed to completely destroy them, twice { Marples & Serpell }

    1083:

    Not quite. Apparently, most modern housing is built with a three phase supply, so it merely needs the fusebox etc. upgrading (plus the charger feed). But older housing (the majority, like mine) has only a single phase supply, and some has only a 60 A single phase supply. There's also very little point in 22 KW, because few cars support it, so you can install 2 x 14 KW if you have three phase or 2 x 7 KW without, though you can't use more than one together with a cooker or heating system. In theory. But, as you say, more than a few houses doing that is likely to require an upgrade to the local substation, and so on back to the grid.

    Let's ignore the heating and industry problems, and those of dwellings not suitable for chargers. Just converting our vehicle fleet would need more than a doubling of capacity, from grid down to dwelling. The assertions that other technologies will reduce the reequirement are little more than wishful thinking, at best, not least because there are no signs of any coherent ideas (let alone planning), in either government or transport circles. Self-driving cars are both still speculation and irrelevant without a coherent, agreed plan of how to use them to reduce the requirements.

    1084:

    "and the energy required is approximately proportional to speed cubed."

    I struggled to keep my inner nerd from bursting out, but failed.

    Assuming we're talking mostly about atmospheric drag as the resistance, power is proportional to speed cubed. Energy expended along a given route is proportional to speed squared. E = power*time = force*distance; but time and distance swap off reciprocally on traveling the route.

    1085:

    However, we aren't. Rolling/vibrational resistance is at least as important and so is hill-climbing, at least for many uses.

    For reasons that I am not entirely sure of, most modern cars get maximum fuel efficiency at between 40 and 60 MPH, depending on the car. It's been measured innumerable times, and is all over the Web. Laden HGVs, being proportionately a lot heavier than they are larger in frontal area, probably are most efficient at higher speeds.

    That being so, there is negligible gain to be made from self-driving HGVs.

    1086:

    »For reasons that I am not entirely sure of, most modern cars get maximum fuel efficiency at between 40 and 60 MPH«

    It is the result of many influences, both laws of nature, regulation, but the net result is that car manufacturers make most money that way.

    Cars with optimal efficiency at higher speeds must, ipso facto, have better engines and better aerodynamics, and that costs money, making the car more expensive, so you sell less of them.

    One very big economic driver is the US regulation's rules for "fleet-wide" fuel efficiency, ie: the combined efficiency of all the cars, across all models, from each manufacturer.

    1087:

    »For reasons that I am not entirely sure of, most modern cars get maximum fuel efficiency at between 40 and 60 MPH«

    This is emphatically not true for EVs. The problem with an IC engine is that it has to idle, so slow speeds are quite wasteful. In a traffic jam you can run out of gas going nowhere.

    With an EV, energy expenditure is more related to how fast the car is going, how much that speed is varying, and (you forgot one!) change in elevation. Example: climbing out of Anza Borrego* (ca. 1000 meter elevation gain in ca. 10 km) used up about half my car charge. Fortunately, for a big chunk of journey home I dropped the 1000 m gain while braking behind a really slow RV who had no clue he was supposed to pull over and let people by. Normally I hate this, but with regenerative braking, I gained back 80% of the energy I expended climbing the hill in the first place.

    tl;dr: EVs aren't precisely the same as ICs.

    THAT SAID, vehicular traffic accounts for ca. 50% of GHG emissions in my county, so yes, electrifying transportation is going to take terawatts of work. That I completely agree on.

    What I disagree on is any solution that implicitly assumes we'll find another planet's worth of concrete somewhere, whether this involves rebuilding every modern American city, building superfleets of big nuclear reactors, or whatever. So far as I can tell, we've used up most of the good stuff, and until and unless the boggins boffins come up with effective substitutes for things like mass quantities of concrete (like turning internet BS into a zero carbon construction substrate, perhaps?), we're going to do more climate adaptations with retrofitting and lifestyle changes than I think any of us really want to admit. Sucks, but this is where solar panels matter.

    *Anza Borrego is a popular desert park, known for its spring blooms, which this year are happening in winter.

    1088:

    About 20 minutes per video. I'd be curious as to ilya187's thoughts

    Pretty accurate, although it barely mentions Novgorod, and does not say at all what made it special.

    1089:

    A few years ago “Which” did some tests that proved this 40 - 60 MPH was wrong. In general in modern cars the slower the more fuel efficient. It certainly agrees with my experience. My journey to work was about ten miles mostly on a winding B road with only about five places where a car could overtake. Most of these couldn’t be used because cars were coming in the opposite direction. Following a tractor or a wide load always gave a big saving in fuel consumption down to about 20 mph.. Try it yourself. This applies to my current, not very streamlined Yeti as well as my previous much more streamlined Fabia and Fabia Sport.

    1090:

    climbing out of Anza Borrego* (ca. 1000 meter elevation gain in ca. 10 km) used up about half my car charge

    What model do you have?

    1091:

    Pigeon @ 1039:

    "So I can see using it as the front end of a search engine."

    One of the articles someone's linked to, or perhaps that one of those articles has linked to, goes on about that. They say that Google are having kittens about the idea because it would mean "the end of the search results page" so they wouldn't be able to spam people with adverts in the search results any more, but if they don't do it Bing will and everyone'll use them instead. Essentially they're saying that the bot will search so accurately that all you'll have is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and the ordinary "Search" will no longer exist (though they fail to explain why it should have to be like that).

    I already use a front end for Google called "Startpage" (WWW dot startpage dot com) and I don't see much in the way of SPAM from Google.

    There are usually one or two clearly labeled "Ad" results at the top of the page separated by a space from the other results. I started using this one when I noticed Google had gone all strange ... sometimes the whole first page would be Ad results.

    "Startpage" gives me a nice balance between the power of Google's search engine & SPAM avoidance. How would some bot do better than that?

    1092:

    I have. I get better petrol consumption at high speed on the motorway (not much better, but better). The reasons are that it is dominated by low engine temperatures, changing speed and hill climbing. And I choose my gears and speed for safety, rather than optimal efficiency; for example, one of the best ways to improve efficiency is NOT to slow down on corners or for junctions!

    I have difficulty believing that all of the Web pages that purport to show actual tests are falsified, though I can believe that they are misleading. However, without seeing the reference you refer to (and, in particular, its conditions and assumptions), I don't know if that is, too.

    1093:

    Yes. However, I have not seen any decent data for EVs, and I do not believe that the motor is equally efficient at all speeds, but haven't a clue what the curves look like. Any links to such data would be appreciated. The comments about ICs idling are a red-herring in this respect, because this is about travelling speed.

    No, I didn't forget hill-climbing - reread my first (2-line!) paragraph again! 80% of the energy recovered is pretty high, based on the discharge and recharge efficiencies I have seen, let alone the less-than-optimised job most manufacturers make of it.

    I fully agree that we don't need a complete rebuild, but what is merely going to make things worse is gimmicky 'solutions' that either just move the problem or tackle non-problems while ignoring the real ones.

    1094:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo

    In one of his recent posts, Cory Doctorow dissects the non-fic "Responding to the Right" by Nathan J. Robinson. Though there's lots of things Doctorow has written which I do not agree with, I regard his analysis of various topics as a good source of inspiring my own writing as well as oft times a better written argument. So what I disagree with him? Useful to find a resource of well written material in support of a position I do not agree with since that makes it much easier to assemble countering arguments and having specifics in front of me to pick apart to demonstrate flaws (if any).

    Which is an interesting mode of exploiting Doctorow's prose given what Robinson has written about; there being twelve categories of "conservative arguing techniques".

    Having re-read this particular Doctorow entry after muddling upon it for a couple days, all sorts of things are bubbling up.

    Starting with Doctorow has convinced me to add this book to my request list at my local library (given impoverishment of the NYPL it could be years before they buy a copy but leastwise now it is on my TBR stack).

    What I needed to chew upon for a couple days was trying to spot any 'life hacks' which would be usable to either stop the GOP when they do this crap or alternatively if impossible to prevent then find a way to punish.

    For those outside the US, there is an ongoing libel suit "Dominion Voting Systems vs Fox News" which is demanding an eye-popping $1.6 billion for defamation.

    Funny thing, there seems to be enough evidence to not only prove defamation but that there were executives (and talking heads on broadcasted shows) who were aware they were repeating falsehoods. Indeed, Fox had a complete set of actual facts which they ignored in favor of tossing raw red bloody meat to howling hordes of "election deniers" (a significantly sized subsection of WSCNs) to ensure they'd tune into Fox stations and by watching Fox content be there to sell slots to advertisers interested in those eyeballs. WSCNs might not be people ever invited over to dinner but they are a rather uniform set of demographic clusters of interest to a subset of advertisers with specific products. (Tilted towards gold bullion, bladder catheters, life insurance, gun upgrades, and long term food storage.)

    Now looking over Robinson's "categories of conservative arguing techniques" there could be opportunities in exploiting not just the usual lawsuits but some chunk of evidence made public by the "Dominion v Fox" lawsuit offering new (or new-ish) modes of attack upon recently revealed weak points.

    Such as locating large groups of potential plaintiffs to be assembled into class action lawsuits to punish evil doers.

    My provisional listing (but sure to be added to by clever folk) includes: (a) viewers of Fox content who trusted them to tell the truth; (b) advertisers buying slots on Fox shows finding out their product/company/service had their 'good name' tarnished by association; (c) general public harmed directly by lying which stirred up raging lynch mobs; (d) narrowly defined groups of public harmed directly by lying which stirred up raging lynch mobs; and then there's (e) all those governmental employees (unionized workers) who can point to the harm done to them.

    As much I'd like to rely upon softer approaches of countering GQP arguments (Doctorow mentions Robinson's suggestions such as "focus on arguments, not statistics," and "stories matter as much as empirical correctness") we have run out of time for soft 'n slow. It's been twenty degrees warmer (approx 10C) here in New York this month; February ought be frostbite weather when at least one clueless drunken frat boy's frozen corpse could be expected to need thawing out prior to declaring him dead of stupid causes (this winter's COD = drunken frat boy is zero).

    Our planet is burning slowly and we can still save it. But only if we can get Fox News (and their equivalents in UK, Hungary, Poland, etc) to STFU when efforts are made to actually change things.

    Is there a way forward towards dampening down on the efforts to tear down democracy-sanity-civilization by GQPers and turn us into a less crazy America? Maybe. Maybe not. (Going by what I'm reading about the UK, they've chosen "not". We in the US coud still course correct towards survival.)

    But for sure there's a lengthening list of interesting subplots to add to any novel set "twenty minutes into the future". Better yet, there's an ever increasing volume of 'raw feed' to parse for useful nuggets to add plausibility and rewrite as mock newspaper articles to bulk up and flesh out a novel.

    For those who enjoy legal wrangling -- or looking for a starting point of a template to revise into a mock newspaper article -- there's a short NPR audio clip and accompanying summary at

    https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1156610403/dominion-voting-vs-fox-news-judge-smartmatic-newsmax

    1095:

    Robert Prior @ 1041:

    All I really remember is the punchline - "... but my Tuxedo had a fine vacation in Hawaii!"

    What's happening now is that airlines are apparently giving up and donating unclaimed luggage to charity — without going through the nicety of informing the owners where their luggage is. There was a story in the news here of a chap who was tracking his "lost, don't know where it is" suitcase through the AirTag he left in it, and even with that help the airline couldn't find it. Eventually he tracked it to a warehouse in the city he was in and when he notified the airline he was told "that is the unclaimed luggage we have donating to a charity.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/lost-luggage-ontario-airtag-air-canada-1.6723976

    That would REALLY, REALLY PISS ME OFF!

    I've only had one instance of an airline losing my baggage, but it was a doozy. I was flying out of Colorado Springs via Chicago to Raleigh. I got switched to an earlier flight, but my luggage didn't, so when I arrived in Raleigh, there was no sign of my 1965 Martin 12-string. It finally showed up about a week later, really none the worse for wear.

    But the idea the airline could just say fuck it & give my guitar away and not even bother to try to get it back to me is VERY OFFENSIVE.

    Grungy details: We were coming home from Annual Training, flying commercial; booked on flights throughout the day on a Saturday. My scheduled flight was at 4:30pm.

    The Army, in its infinite wisdom, dumped the whole battalion (small battalion - about 300 soldiers) into the terminal at Colorado Springs Airport at 7:30am and the lady behind the ticket counter like to have had a heart attack. She started arranging alternate flights.

    I was switched onto a 9:00am departure to Chicago (arriving around noon, where I sat & waited until my original connecting flight departed around 7:00pm).

    IN THE MEANTIME some kind of monster weather event (severe thunderstorms I think) shut down the Colorado Springs airport until sometime on Monday afternoon. About half of our soldiers didn't get home until Tuesday. If you weren't on a flight that left before noon, you were SOL. I don't know how long my guitar languished in Colorado or how long it might have spent in Chicago ... one of my duffel bags arrived on Tuesday and the other came in the following Monday along with my guitar.

    Come to think of it, that flight from Chicago was the one where the pilot initiated a last second go-around at RDU (almost a touch & go). I wasn't really frightened until I looked up the aisle & saw the expression on the flight attendant's face. And once we were back up in the air and going around the pilots NEVER made ANY announcement over the PA to tell the passengers WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON!

    Flying commercial just ain't no fun.

    ... and this was 1999 - before 9/11 - so the hassles today are even worse.

    1096:

    1083 - Make that "most commuter rail in Ingurlundshire is not electrified" and you may be approaching accuracy. The ECML, WCML (including Barmyhum and Personchester) and Paddington to Temple Meads (or possibly Cardiff?) are. Scotland is working on Edinburgh - Perth - Aberdeen.

    1086 - Because, since the 1970s, official fuel economy figures for cars (and light trucks) have been based largely on rolling road figures measured at speed of 50, 56 or 75 mph.

    1097:

    Dramlin @ 1048:

    They'll keep in your fridge for up to 2 years.

    The bottle of antacid tablets on my bedside table is MORE than 2 years old already and doesn't require refrigeration. 😏

    1098:

    Regarding Russian activities in Ukraine:

    They Didn’t Understand Anything, but Just Spoiled People’s Lives

    Ukraine: Torture, Disappearances in Occupied South

    Articles from The Atlantic and Human Rights Watch (via Archive Today because I know some people have a problem with The Atlantic's paywall)

    Putin wants to reconstitute Stalin's Soviet Union, but Stalin's Red Army was more competent than Putin's Russian Army ... and the incompetence leads to frustration - frustration they're taking out on the Ukrainian people.

    But even as they inflicted pain on the most civic-minded Ukrainians, even as they assaulted local leaders, Russian soldiers seemed not to know how to replace them. Unlike their Soviet Communist forebears, who could at least name the ideology that had driven them into Poland, or Estonia, or Romania, the modern Russian army seems to have no coherent theory of government or administration, no concrete plans to run the region, even no clear idea of the meaning of Russkiy mir, the “Russian world” that some of President Vladimir Putin’s ideologues extol.
    1099:

    I get much lower fuel efficiency on the motorway. I drive for economy. I rarely change gear once I’ve reached 6th. In the Yeti (1.2 litres) I get just under 50mpg for what was my daily journey to work and about 42 mpg when I leave East Anglia via the A14 and M6. In the Fabia Sport (1.8 diesel) I got around 62 mpg on my journey to work and 50 odd on dual carriageways and motorways. The highest I ever achieved going to work was 88 mpg in a gale with a following wind. On motorways I tend to drive at Satnav 70 which is about 75 on the speedometer. Except for the steepest hills motorway driving is in the highest gear 6 except for stops. I’m usually on cruise control so I go up hills at a speed close to going downhill. When I lived in Leeds and was changing gear often city driving was much less economical than motorway. What causes lack of economy in cities is the stop/start and gear changes.

    1100:

    Hi guys, I just found this article in the US Guardian:

    https://www.guardianmag.us/2023/02/scientists-find-first-evidence-that.html

    It quotes two papers, linked at the bottom of the article, that suggests that black holes are the source of dark energy.

    "If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionise the whole of cosmology, because at last we've got a solution for the origin of dark energy that's been perplexing cosmologists and theoretical physicists for more than 20 years," co-author Chris Pearson, an astrophysicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the U.K. said in a statement.
    1101:

    Howard NYC @ 1059:

    huh... I really hate being right about the rollback towards Dickensian child labor practices... not Asia... NorAm... and about ten years sooner than my worst nightmarish expectation... I assumed first there'd first be a couple million refugees from drowned cities...

    so... how was your day?

    ""children clean razor-sharp saws using hazardous chemicals ... employing minors in hazardous occupations and having them working overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities in eight states"

    https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/packers-sanitation-child-labor

    I will note it was not the meat packers themselves hiring children. The meat packers ARE still somewhat regulated by the FDA & OHSA.

    But I do want to know just how much the meat packers knew about the hiring practices of the company they outsourced their sanitation to and how much they turned a blind eye to them.

    Willful blindness

    1102:

    Howard NYC @ 1063:

    train derailments much like flight cancellations, lost luggage, diseased foodstuffs, inability to find a dentist who is not overbooked and not overpriced, et al, are all symptoms of 'feral capitalism'... and suddenly all those who'd unthinkingly been in favor of smaller government are now shocked to find themselves in favor of re-regulation and higher numbers of inspectors...

    ...especially those who'd been tracking their lost luggage via AirTags but could not get the airlines to pay attention to updated coordinates

    Here's another example I thought of this morning - relates to my inability to find anyone who WILL repair certain items I believe should be repairable.

    You have a business to "repair" electronics/appliances. When someone has something they want repaired you take it in and charge them a $100 Diagnostics Fee.

    Then you just let it sit around gathering dust until the customer is finally frustrated enough to demand SOMETHING! It helps if you NEVER ANSWER THE FUCKING TELEPHONE! ... or respond to messages left on voice mail, or answer email inquiries.

    When the customer does finally manage to contact you, you tell them their item is not repairable and ask them if they want the broken item back OR do they want to pay an additional fee to have it properly disposed of (i.e. sold for scrap).

    ... also works with small power tools, lawn mowers & yard machines (chain saws).

    1103:

    I got switched to an earlier flight, but my luggage didn't, so when I arrived in Raleigh, there was no sign of my 1965 Martin 12-string. It finally showed up about a week later, really none the worse for wear.

    I assume you've heard of Dave Carroll's experience?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

    (Good song and video, and absolutely outstanding revenge.)

    They did two sequels (each a different musical style):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-UoERHaSQg

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P45E0uGVyeg

    1104:

    I wasn't really frightened until I looked up the aisle & saw the expression on the flight attendant's face.

    That was my worst flight experience too. Took off, something sounded wrong even to me, and the pilot announced that he wasn't happy with some of the engine readouts so we were going to land and have them looked at, so we circled round to land while everyone grumbled. The flight attendants did a quick pass (because of course half-drunk businessmen will ignore seatbelt lights) then took their seats by the front door. As soon as they were seated the colour drained from their faces and they looked expressionless — like almost slack-faced.

    That was enough to put the wind up me. Landing with emergency vehicles parked beside the runway ready for action just confirmed it.

    1105:

    Greg Tingey @ 1073:

    Rbt Prior
    And, even after this, people are STILL voting "R"?
    W. T. F?

    I believe it was Abraham Lincoln who pointed out "You CAN fool some of the people all of the time!"

    I believe he meant that as a warning, but his successors have adopted it as campaign strategy.

    Remember that fully HALF of "the people" will have below average intelligence, and that's even before the Dunning-Kruger Effect rears its ugly head.

    1106:

    Maybe they were taking their cues from St. Ronnie?

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

    1107:

    »Remember that fully HALF of "the people" will have below average intelligence«

    No, half the people will have below median intelligence.

    1108:

    Howard NYC @ 1095:

    [...]

    For those outside the US, there is an ongoing libel suit "Dominion Voting Systems vs Fox News" which is demanding an eye-popping $1.6 billion for defamation.

    Funny thing, there seems to be enough evidence to not only prove defamation but that there were executives (and talking heads on broadcasted shows) who were aware they were repeating falsehoods. [...]

    Dominion is not demanding half so much as they should be demanding. In addition to the monetary damages, Faux Newz executives and talking heads should be required to shout from the virtual rooftops that they were lying all along ... and KNEW they were lying.

    It should be a MANDATORY announcement before and after every Faux Newz broadcast and a continuous news ticker under EVERY talking head.

    1109:

    Unconstrained christian evil
    In othe US news - J Carter is in terminal decline - our sympathies should go to his family, I think.

    Paws @ 10976 UTTER BOLLOCKS
    The main through route York-Exeter is NOT electrified Swansea-Cardiff is NOT electrified
    Sundry very important inner-city (freight) links are NOT electrified
    NEITHER of the main routes from Felixstowe ( MAJOR port) are NOT electrified ...
    etc I could go on for some time.
    So - STOP talking bollocks, OK?

    1110:

    Robert Prior @ 1104:

    I got switched to an earlier flight, but my luggage didn't, so when I arrived in Raleigh, there was no sign of my 1965 Martin 12-string. It finally showed up about a week later, really none the worse for wear.

    I assume you've heard of Dave Carroll's experience?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

    Yeah, I know that one well. I don't think the sequels are as good as the first one.

    I don't have A LOT of experience with commercial air travel. Most of my previous and subsequent air journeys were by "Chartered" C-130 (you just ask the load-master to put the guitar on the top of the stacked duffel bags before securing the net around the "463Lima Pallet Cargo System").

    And of the few times I did travel commercial on a GTR, this was the first & last time I was required to have the guitar as "checked baggage".

    Every other time I was allowed to "gate check" it and the flight attendants would just stand the case up in the little closet up front where hanging bags go.

    PS: I hope he made enough off of those videos to pay for a new guitar.

    1111:

    "However, I have not seen any decent data for EVs, and I do not believe that the motor is equally efficient at all speeds, but haven't a clue what the curves look like."

    In broad terms, zero at the ends and a big hump up into the 90s%. But the hump can be in the middle or it can be shoved right up to one end or the other of the speed range, depending partly on the type of motor and somewhat more on which group of losses they've decided to optimise to the detriment of its complement. A very quick search brings up curves covering the entire range of hump position whose connection to any real electric car (or even an unreal one) is hard to discern; many of them look like people saying "I like electric cars, this is what the efficiency of the motor looks like <insert prettiest set of curves off the first page of search results relating to any old motor regardless>. I would hope that real ones are optimised for the speed range they expect them to mostly be driven at, but who knows...

    Apart from working to regulatory targets, internal combustion engined cars BROADLY tend to be most efficient in the medium to upper legal speed range for a couple of major reasons. At the lower end the static losses swamp the actual useful power output, while the cube-of-speed part of the power requirement doesn't seriously begin to kick in until you approach the top of that range, so you're in a trough for losses that way. And the conversion efficiency of an engine closely follows the volumetric efficiency curve, which naturally has a hump in the middle between not being able to suck enough air through the valves at high revs and blowing half of it back out again at low revs.

    At less than full throttle, the VE curve is smaller and has less of a hump, and at throttle settings near-ish to idle it wobbles all over the place and doesn't give you any sensible maximum. Hence the conventional wisdom that you want a car with an engine which is "not too small and not too big", so you're mostly using it at reasonable amounts of throttle at medium numbers of revs. Tiddly engines on the motorway are operating too far along the curve, and oversized ones never get the boot enough to lift it off the deck.

    These days it's all a lot more complicated because of all kinds of things like multi-valve engines, variable valve timing, variable induction tracts, diesels, forced induction, bloody computers playing games and mangling the curves, larger numbers of transmission ratios to keep the engine closer to the peak of the curve, and on and on and on. Also improved aerodynamics have put off the point at which the air resistance starts to clobber you. But the broad picture is still basically the same.

    1112:

    No, half the people will have below median intelligence.

    Yeah, but measuring intelligence is one of those fun games to start with. The common measures are defined to have certain statistical characteristics to make measuring easier (if your new measure doesn't match the statistics it's defined as no good). So we say that measured intelligence has median = mode = mean and thus half the population have below mode intelligence (at least for real number values, if we're using integers the answer depends on the population that have exactly the mean intelligence)

    OTOH a better question/objection might be "but what sort of intelligence"... I am good at Reader's Digest IQ tests, for example.

    1113:

    "Following a tractor or a wide load always gave a big saving in fuel consumption down to about 20 mph."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafting_(aerodynamics)

    1114:

    climbing out of Anza Borrego (ca. 1000 meter elevation gain in ca. 10 km) used up about half my car charge....What model do you have?*

    Chevy Bolt.

    I should point out that the roads out of the Borrego Valley are fast and twisty, so bumbling slowly up or down them isn't just not-very-fun, it can get you into trouble with eager off-roading enthusiasts hauling their adult toys out to the off-road wreckrecreation area at Ocotillo Wells a bit down the valley.*

    The Bolt's really good for urban commuting. Creeping along at under 5 mph in a traffic jam uses 1 kW, and maximum range appears to be on the low and slow end of the speedometer. Where the Bolt gets into trouble is high speed hill climbing, especially with the AC on. I completely agree that different cars are designed for different purposes, so generalizing gets interesting. If I was doing long-distance road trip, especially over variable terrain, I'd opt for another car.

    *A friend of mine said of a place out in the OHV adult entertainment district that it's "where the beer is cold, and the people are colder."

    1115:

    https://fortune.com/2023/02/14/remote-work-los-angeles-office-building-default-brookfield/

    Interesting point is that one of Los Angeles' biggest landlords is defaulting on $755 million worth of two downtown skyscrapers. Due to the persistent popularity of remote work, the vacancy rate is apparently too high for them to stomach.

    Note that they have options to extend or change terms and keep the buildings. So far as I can tell, they don't believe things will improve enough fast enough, and they'd rather default.

    Hmmm. Wonder if this will become a trend of some sort?

    1116:

    (to paraphrase qntm) here's my attempt at a brutal soundbite well suited for short attention span mass media...

    All that matters about the climate change crisis is there's a variable labeled "Total Human Population" on the world's collective dashboard which for the first time in history, is counting down, not up.

    Not too late to prevent it from counting down really, really fast.

    1117:

    Since basically every city in the western world is short on housing, I would say that the obvious resolution to this is a lot of office towers getting converted into open-plan apartments.

    1118:

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 1118: I would say that the obvious resolution to this is a lot of office towers getting converted into open-plan apartments.

    Which sounds like a great idea until you look at the details.Large office buildings are typically built with each floor being a giant open plan square with services at the centre. That doesn't work for apartments.

    • There is literally no plumbing out to the edges, and no way to add it unless you raise the floors enough to accommodate it.

    • You want decently solid and soundproofed walls between the apartments (enough so that you at least can't hear what the neighbours have on the TV), but that means weight that the structure probably wasn't designed to take.

    • The building HVAC was designed for an office, not a home. It will basically need to be completely replaced by something that can be controlled per-apartment, and also be able to handle someone doing the cooking.

    • Oh yes, cooking. Can the existing power system handle everybody turning on the kettle and stove at 5:30pm?

    But maybe you go with these constraints. Instead of apartments you make rooms with thin partitions, and communal toilets and cooking facilities. Congratulations. You have just created a giant doss-house. Rooms small enough to make this economic means that most of them aren't going to have windows (and those on the edge probably have too much window: they will overheat in spite of the expensive glass).

    Pretty much everything in the building needs to be heavily modified, if not stripped out and replaced from scratch. At that point its probably better to just demolish the whole thing and build something optimised for the new job.

    1119:

    Another to add to your library order is The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy by Albert O. Hirschman. Robinson is definitely drawing from it, and once you've read it you'll never look at a conservative argument seriously ever again.

    1120:

    I get about 42 MPG, too, on motorways, but less on rural roads. It is certainly likely that I could get better than 42 MPG driving at 40 MPH on a motorway, but I am not insane enough to do that. My limited long-distance, 'smooth' driving on such things gets me good consumption, but not as good as motorways. I don't know any flattish rural roads where I could maintain a nearly constant speed, safely, for any distance long enough to measure my petrol consumption accurately. But that wasn't really my point.

    The situation is that most of my long-trip fuel does NOT go on overcoming aerodynamics, but on slowing down and speeding up, hill-climbing etc. For reasons I gave, that is even more true for HGVs, and I doubt it accounts for more than 30% (probably less) of their fuel consumption. Indeed, given that fuel efficiency is one of their main selling points, if improved aerodynamics helped much, we would see more of it on HGVs. Coaches have it, but that's probably because it also reduces noise.

    That being so, there is a very small potential gain from slower HGVs and hence from self-driving cars. Let's assume a 20% gain at half the speed (which I think is high). Unfortunately, it also needs twice the number of HGVs, and (at depots, Channel crossings etc.) twice the area of concrete for parking. That's not a gain, even in purely energy terms. And THIS is why I regard the claimed efficiency of self-driving HGVs as yet more greenwashing polemic.

    My point about EV efficiency is made at more length by Pigeon in #1112. That could well be as important a factor for HGVs as aerodynamics, but is it optimal a slow speeds or fast ones? It could be optimised for any point, but the previous paragraph indicates that it will be for faster speeds, for very good reasons.

    1121:

    No. The most important measurements have always included lower speeds, and the standard ones include the 'urban cycle'. But that wasn't even remotely my point.

    I remember why cars were made more aerodynamic, and it wasn't primarily marketing. During the fuel crises of the 1960s and 1970s, customer (sic) pressure was for more fuel economy, and that was one of the easier things to improve. And, for bloody obvious reasons, improved aerodynamics increased the optimally efficient speed.

    What I don't fully understand, because I have never looked into it, is why the optimally efficient speed isn't close to zero. It's clearly something to do with the motor or transmission being inefficient at low speeds but, beyond that, I don't know. The point is that the fuel cost (per distance) goes something like this:

    (A + B * V^2) * C(V)

    where A dominates B * V^2 at all except high speeds, and C(V) is the motor and transmission inefficiency. Now, if C(V) were a constant, the optimal speed would be near zero, even if the actual gain were negligible. But it ain't.

    True nerds will notice that the aerodynamic losses are also depend on cross-winds, which can add a B' * V term, but it's rare that they are fast enough to be a major factor for cars. For cycles, on the other hand ....

    1122:

    There's an overhead valve adult entertainment district? The mind boggles, even if that IS southern California :-)

    1123:

    It's certainly possible to turn them into hotels as I've had personal experience of staying in one. The Premier Inn next to Leicester railway station used to be a 14 storey office block. When I was staying there they'd only converted the first 9 floors.

    Here's a link to the company site for that hotel so you can check out the rooms. One thing I couldn't find were photos of rooms with pillars in them, never an issue for me, it made a nice, idiosyncratic change :-)

    https://www.premierinn.com/gb/en/hotels/england/leicestershire/leicester/leicester-city-centre.html

    1124:

    I heard that about Jimmy Carter too. Probably has single-digit days left to live.

    Still, a long life and a productive one. Not a terribly good president, but he seemed to do well in every other job he turned his hand to.

    1125:

    It could well be weeks or even months. All that has been said (as far as I know) is that he has declined further treatment. At 98, they may well have told him that there is nothing they can do that isn't more likely to kill him than prolong his life.

    1126:

    All that has been said (as far as I know) is that he has declined further treatment.

    He has been to the hospital multiple times lately for treatment. The official statement has said no more.

    Plus he'd confined to a wheelchair and recently was given a drive around tour of Plains per his request.

    He's preparing for the end. It may be days or months but given his recent frequent trips to the hospital, likely not all that long.

    1127:

    All that has been said (as far as I know) is that he has declined further treatment. At 98, they may well have told him that there is nothing they can do that isn't more likely to kill him than prolong his life.

    Or anything that prolongs his life will be seriously unpleasant, and he's opted for quality over quantity.

    1128:

    Which sounds like a great idea until you look at the details.Large office buildings are typically built with each floor being a giant open plan square with services at the centre. That doesn't work for apartments.

    I think your comments are a bit off base. Modern (last 50+ years) high rise office buildings are designed for most anything but a cement plant on a floor. The local phone companies in urban areas put CO switch gear on floors 10 to 20 stories up. Slabs typically have 10 to 12 feet of spacing. And can carry very heavy loads. Both physical and electrical. They are designed so tenants can put a data center on a floor or few. And typically the floor you walk on has a foot or two to the slab or in the ceiling for all those pesky pipes and HVAC ducts. Plus putting in a sound proof wall is easy if your load is designed to handle a data center.

    I'm thinking of US construction. Maybe it's different where you are.

    1129:

    Since basically every city in the western world is short on housing, I would say that the obvious resolution to this is a lot of office towers getting converted into open-plan apartments.

    Happening to some degree. The kicker is are there grocery and other such things close enough to make these places livable?

    Around here we're trying to build such places up front to deal with our population boom but the old farts around me want more suburbs extended to the horizon. Instead of a 12 story tower with retail on the first floor, offices on the next 2 to 4 floors and apartments the rest of the way up.

    1130:

    "Plus, of course, France's refusal to participate in George W Bush's Iraq invasion if you need a more recent cause."

    Yeah, imagine the French being the calm ones...

    1131:

    "U.S. loyalty to American Corporations does not seem to me to be well reciprocated."

    That's the understatement of the decade. Maybe the century. I think you won the Internet that day.

    1132:

    Mel Brooks is an imitator? He's had a very long career and nobody doubts his creativity.

    1133:

    Another little kid bringing a gun to school…

    Another mother told a local news station that the boy had brought a loaded gun to school in his backpack and threatened to shoot her daughter during physical education class on Thursday. But the woman only found out about the threat from another parent.

    Her daughter did not tell her because she thought she might get in trouble. The girl told the broadcaster that after coming home from school she went to her bedroom "and tried to play but couldn't".

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64685367

    At least this time they're charging the mother (hopefully the gun owner).

    1134:

    Open to endless debate, from a certain perspective Jimmy Carter was a good POTUS. Problem was he tried to be rational-reasonable-attentive and was faulted for never being a hardass. Sort of leader ideal for any peaceful nation. Other than fire-breathing hegemonic never-call-it-an-empire building hawks, the rest of Americans approved of his approach.

    Really bad luck was failure of hostage rescue mission which was (most likely) due to beancounters trying to do cost containment rather than allowing for sufficient redundancy to ensure success under all conditions. Which gave Reagan too easy an opportunity to portray himself as hardass. Persistent rumors there'd been back channel haggling with the GOP/Reagan sending $10,000 (or $30,000) each week to Iranian leadership to keep extending hostage crisis and when the bribes stopped that was when the hostages were released to much fanfair.

    1135:

    Re: 'The most important measurements have always included lower speeds, and the standard ones include the 'urban cycle''

    Agree - considering that about 80% of the developed world's population lives in urban areas.

    I live near the Atlantic east coast - strong winds (and precipitation) are a year-round factor. Plus a few months of cold winter weather.

    I was looking at basic info on EVs when I read somewhere that heating the driver/passenger compartment really drains an EV battery therefore reduces the fuel economy/mileage. This is unlike heating in an ICE where all that's needed is guiding the excess heat from the engine inside the driver/passenger area.

    Measuring fuel economy on salt flats on a dry windless summer day is misleading, fuel economy should be measured in places and under conditions that people actually live and drive.

    1136:

    Re: 'I'm thinking of US construction. Maybe it's different where you are.'

    Probably not - as long as the structure was properly built. One of my family lived in a condo that was converted from a large convent in Montreal. A work colleague had a condo in a renovated manufacturing plant - very tall ceilings so some people put in full second floors in their condo units while others went the raised bedroom area/open loft route.

    Years ago I saw a promo on TV about an old (for downtown Toronto) 20-25 floor bank/office building that was being converted into condos. Also in Toronto, not sure whether the distillery area buildings became condos too but the grain silos and distillery plants area got a complete overhaul and has become a major Xmas season draw.

    https://www.loveproperty.com/gallerylist/53203/14-extraordinary-home-conversions-you-wont-believe

    Plus Scalzi's renovating a chapel/church he recently bought.

    1137:

    from a certain perspective Jimmy Carter was a good POTUS

    To disagree with you on his problems.

    He was a micromanager. To the extent it played into an SNL skit about the Three Mile Island reactor incident. I suspect some of this came from him being a skipper on a nuclear sub. Submariners in the US Navy were/are expected to know about every valve, gauge, and compartmen on their sub. Or find another job in the Navy.

    He brought in too many folks from his experience as governor of Georgia. Way too many. And this caused friction with the national bent of Washington DC. With good reason many times. These Georgia folks didn't get Detroit or Montana very well.

    As to the failed rescue attempt; there was a lot of micro managing during the raid. Plus it was just way too complicated for the military of the time. A temporary night time desert refueling stop both ways due to the distances involved?

    And just to note. He is a decent person. And did a decent job. Mostly. But events got away from him. Especially the economy. And with him being in the middle of everything the bad stuck to him personally.

    1138:

    Poor girl. I hope she is given some help.

    1139:

    Jimmy Carter was also a hero. He led a US team in 1952 which stopped a serious accident in a Canadian reactor becoming much worse.

    https://www.voanews.com/a/jimmy-carter-hailed-in-canada-for-1952-nuclear-rescue-/6373070.html

    1140:

    He's had a very long career and nobody doubts his creativity.

    No argument from me! But Brooks himself would say (possibly did say) that his early career was definitely marked by references to the work of Edwards, something there's certainly no shame in. You can see that maybe most clearly in Get Smart, which also showcases Brooks own style and humour.

    1141:

    One of my fav movies is "My Favorite Year" which is based on Mel Brooks early jobs in TV for Sid Caesar.

    Best line. "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star."

    1142:

    "I was looking at basic info on EVs when I read somewhere that heating the driver/passenger compartment really drains an EV battery therefore reduces the fuel economy/mileage."

    In British terms the heater in an ordinary car is roughly the same as a full-size portable electric fan heater - about 3kW. (Of course there is a lot of variation, and nobody ever quotes it.) Even a small car engine will put enough heat into its the cooling system, even at idle, that you get all this for free (as you note).

    For an electric car, this represents enough power to move the vehicle at what would not be an unreasonable speed in an urban setting, and unlike the extreme intermittency of traction power in said setting, it's a continuous load. So indeed if you're driving around town and it's cold out, most of your charge is going directly into keeping you warm. After all, in any other situation the answer to "how do you get a sustained 3kW of heat from batteries" is almost certainly "you don't, you find some other source".

    At motorway speeds there is enough convenient inefficiency for an electric car to heat the passenger compartment from waste heat, at least to some extent. Some of them use water-cooled motors, and there is waste heat generated from the batteries too. However, I have no idea to what extent the idea of actually trying to use that heat sensibly prevails over "fuck it, it's easier just to dump it and use a simple resistive heater alone for the passenger compartment".

    1143:

    Re: 'Fox ... sell slots to advertisers interested in those'

    Faux News (talking-head 'Tucker') started losing major sponsors back in 2018. Ad revenues fell at least 24% one year and have been in decline since. (No idea what the total ad-rev drop has been to-date). My guess is that since losing ad-rev on your biggest show doesn't make capitalist sense, Rupe must want him there really, really bad.

    To show how bad the desertion has gotten: even MyPillow (DT's best bud) stopped advertising there.

    The below gives a good summary of which advertisers pulled out when.

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/21/tucker-carlson-cancel-proof-fox-news-advertisers-boycott-484081

    1144:

    I was looking at basic info on EVs when I read somewhere that heating the driver/passenger compartment really drains an EV battery therefore reduces the fuel economy/mileage. This is unlike heating in an ICE where all that's needed is guiding the excess heat from the engine inside the driver/passenger area.

    This is incorrect in my experience: EVs generate a lot of heat, and occasionally catch fire while recharging. When driving, turning on the AC immediately drops the projected range 10 miles, while turning on heat or fan has no effect.

    About that catching fire thing. I've probably come close. Lithium charges faster when it's hotter, but its ideal charging temperature is above battery ignition point...so the car charges hot. On hot summer nights, charging the car in a closed garage can get exciting. Right after the car finishes charging, you hear its fan scream into high. If you've learned what that means, you run down to find a very hot garage and a car trying to cool itself while still plugged into the wall. You immediately unplug the car (which stops the fan's scream) and open the garage for a few minutes to let the hot air out. Not sure what the natural end point of this is, but I can easily see a short or other oopsie tipping the whole setup past the ignition point.

    If it turns out that nickel foil in the batteries does let them charge faster and hotter, we might get to a point where car charging is only allowed outside.

    1145:

    Of course you have people involved with different ideas of comfort.

    I like our butt heaters. I leave min on min (one dot) my wife keeps hers on max (3 dots). On the air "dial a temp", I'm comfortable at 70-72F. My wife wants 76F or so. I completely turn off the air fans if I'm not feeling too cold. My wife wants the furnace in her face.

    Butt heat is pure electrical. Air heat is waste heat from the 1.5L ICE. Which due to it's small size heats up fast.

    1146:

    Re: '... but I can easily see a short or other oopsie tipping the whole setup past the ignition point.'

    This definitely did not appear in what I read about EVs - hope the EV industry gets its act together soon.

    The car insurance industry must have data on stuff like this - insurance premiums between new similarly priced ICEs and EVs should be a good indicator of the risk differential between the types of engine. (Assuming the rates are calculated using the same old, same old formulas.)

    1147:

    Those insurance rates (in the US and Canada) would be a part of the comprehensive coverage. Or Comp. But that includes theft, you driving into a wall, a tree falling on it, basically anything that's not someone else's fault. (With some fudge for uninsured/underinsured coverage of others. :) ) So the fire risk is somewhat buried in the data.

    1148:

    How powerful are those things though? I can't see them being more than around 100W, probably less. Not really comparable...

    (Never experienced one myself, and don't see the point... by the time I've got the ignition turned on my body heat has warmed the seat quite adequately.)

    1149:

    Re: 'So the fire risk is somewhat buried in the data.'

    Understood - that's why I said comparable apart from the fuel source.

    1150:

    While EVs may be 5 times more likely to catch on fire sitting in the driveway, this may only be 0.1% of the total risk for EVs and thus 0.02% of the risk for ICEs. And thus many have a negligible impact on the net Comp insurance rate to consumers.

    But yes they have the data. The question I have is how clean is it? Says he who got to to see some of the US insurance industry from the inside in the 80s.

    1151:

    I saw Escape from Yokai Land on MZN. Pack shot still gives the title as "Escape from Puroland".

    1152:

    easier just to dump it and use a simple resistive heater alone for the passenger compartment

    There has to be a point where it's practical just to make the AC reverse cycle, so at least the inefficiency of resistive heat is avoided. Obviously in an ICE the AC compressor is powered by engine too, but directly and not from waste heat (the AC is a supercharger while the heater is a turbocharger I suppose). In an EV the AC would require its own pump motor. Not being an EV owner I'd need to defer to those here who are about how that works out in terms of their experience.

    The split system that heats/cools my home office is somewhat less than 2kW and can handle anything my coastal-27º-latitude local climate throws at it pretty well (we've had a few 38ºC days this year so far). The internal volume of my study is (I hope!) quite a bit larger than a passenger compartment, though I guess much better insulated and protected from radiative heat gains and losses.

    I suppose there would be efficiency tradeoffs with the location of the heat exchanger(s) and how they work in conjunction with the active cooling for motors and batteries.

    1153:

    I don’t think drafting is an important part of the journey I was describing. I keep a lot of distance between me and the vehicle in front. In the summer the tall grass by the side of the roads (and in the autumn straw) shows the disturbance in the air and I’m usually outside it. It’s hard to drive slowly on roads which are single carriageway but I found a 1.6 mile stretch of winding slightly uphill road to test different speeds. 24 mph in 5th gear (revs too low for 6th) gave 52.5 mpg. Much better than my normal just under 50 in 6th. I’ll try in again at 30, 40 and 50 mpg when there’s no traffic.

    1154:

    David L @ 1127:

    All that has been said (as far as I know) is that he has declined further treatment.

    He has been to the hospital multiple times lately for treatment. The official statement has said no more.

    Plus he'd confined to a wheelchair and recently was given a drive around tour of Plains per his request.

    He's preparing for the end. It may be days or months but given his recent frequent trips to the hospital, likely not all that long.

    Home Hospice means palliative care to manage pain & symptoms for terminal patients. Days or maybe a couple of weeks at most, not months.

    My Mom was diagnosed with an advanced pancreatic cancer at age 92. She was fine & full of energy on Sunday and listless & jaundiced on Tuesday. My sister drove her to see her doctor on Wednesday. The doctors told her she could gain a couple of months with aggressive chemotherapy, but they wouldn't be good months. She chose home hospice instead.

    A nurse-practitioner came every day to check on her, to see how well the pain medication was working. Me & two of my siblings traded off staying with her the rest of the time.

    She lasted a couple of weeks, and never suffered any real pain. It was better than dying in the ICU or suffering through chemo. Her birthday was Feb 15. She would have been 101 last Wednesday.

    1155:

    Robert Prior @ 1134:

    Another little kid bringing a gun to school…

    Another mother told a local news station that the boy had brought a loaded gun to school in his backpack and threatened to shoot her daughter during physical education class on Thursday. But the woman only found out about the threat from another parent.

    Her daughter did not tell her because she thought she might get in trouble. The girl told the broadcaster that after coming home from school she went to her bedroom "and tried to play but couldn't".

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64685367

    At least this time they're charging the mother (hopefully the gun owner).

    I don't believe she WAS the gun owner. If it's the same incident I read about elsewhere, she's legally NOT allowed to possess firearms (convicted felon or under a domestic violence restraining order?), so the gun was purchased for her by a straw buyer.

    1156:

    RV AC units are built a bit differently to home ones but don't cost too much more. I suspect it's only a matter of time before one of the higher end car makers demands one and starts fitting it to everything.

    It should be an easy win on range IRL, but whether the tests capture it is another question. So it may well be that they've been made, they do work, but there's no advantage to the manufacturer in adding that instead of an extra kilogramme of battery so they don't.

    1157:

    Sophisticated EVs use heat pumps for heating (and, I presume) cooling the compartment. There are some numbers in this article: https://www.sae.org/news/2018/11/ev-heat-pumps

    1158:

    Howard NYC @ 1135:

    Really bad luck was failure of hostage rescue mission which was (most likely) due to beancounters trying to do cost containment rather than allowing for sufficient redundancy to ensure success under all conditions. Which gave Reagan too easy an opportunity to portray himself as hardass. Persistent rumors there'd been back channel haggling with the GOP/Reagan sending $10,000 (or $30,000) each week to Iranian leadership to keep extending hostage crisis and when the bribes stopped that was when the hostages were released to much fanfair.

    It wasn't really the beancounters' fault. Just unanticipated bad luck.

    The guy who planned the mission called for a minimum of six helicopters. They laid on eight. With a 133% of the required resources they didn't anticipate how much the mission would wear on the equipment. They could go even if two helicopters failed. Unfortunately a third developed problems.

    The commander on the ground advised Carter to abort the mission with an aim of sneaking out & coming back later (despite some obvious problems with civilians having stumbled into "Desert One" during the operation). Carter agreed.

    But during refueling for the egress, one of the helicopters collided with one of the tanker aircraft.

    At that point all they could do was load load everybody else onto the remaining C-130 aircraft and get the hell out of Dodge! (leaving behind the bodies of helicopter/C-130 aircrewmen killed in the crash)

    Operation Eagle Claw

    1159:

    A Year of Putin’s Wartime Lies

    Every credible analyst of the invasion of Ukraine has been stunned by the scale of the Russian President’s folly—and his failure extends well beyond the battlefield.
    1160:

    Faux News (talking-head 'Tucker') started losing major sponsors back in 2018. Ad revenues fell at least 24% one year and have been in decline since.

    In one of the (many) Republican politicians newsletters that fills my inbox, they were ranting about the woke censorship of radical left corporations who don't buy ads in right-wing media. This apparently violates the constitution, somehow.

    1161:

    John S
    That "NYT" article ...
    Let's also not forget the many thousands of Ukrainian children, kidnapped, deported & being, um "re=educated" inside * cough * Holy Mother Russia.
    Euw.

    1162:

    And ... from today's news. Something completely different - I can't do any better than the Grauniad's headline: "it's a very naughty toy"

    1163:

    He was a micromanager. To the extent it played into an SNL skit about the Three Mile Island reactor incident. I suspect some of this came from him being a skipper on a nuclear sub.

    Jimmy Carter wasn't the skipper of a nuclear sub, but he had a unique perspective on TMI; he was the officer in charge of the clean-up after the Chalk River reactor meltdown in 1952. As in, he led the navy team who lowered themselves into the reactor and dismantled it from the inside in timed 90-second shifts -- much like the emergency crews at Chernobyl, albeit on a much smaller scale.

    (Before the Chalk River accident he'd been training under Hyman Rickover to be engineering officer of the USN's second nuclear-powered submarine, Seawolf. His assignment to the accident clean-up wasn't an accident, he was the USN's top expert on the subject.)

    So I suggest giving him a free pass on micromanaging tendencies over nuclear accidents.

    The Desert One mess was another matter, but bear in mind those shots from the White House situation room during the Osama bin Laden takedown, with Obama, Clinton, et al monitoring it in real time ... the urge to get hands-on involved seems to be universal among high-ranking officials. I guess it provides the illusion of control over happenstance.

    1164:

    So I suggest giving him a free pass on micromanaging tendencies over nuclear accidents.

    I was wrong about him serving on a sub. My bad.

    But my comment about micro managing wasn't a knock on him in general. It can be a useful trait in many jobs.

    But NOT in the job of US President. There's just too much on the table daily. You MUST delegate nearly everything at a detail level.

    Or just ignore it like DT. That really worked out well.

    My understanding is Clinton had similar traits in term of micromanaging. But also surrounded himself with people who had the personal chops to take things off his plate as needed. And did.

    1165:

    Well that's interesting. Biden did a detour through Kyiv on his way to a summit in Poland.

    Kept secret till he was gone.

    1166:

    "Well that's interesting. Biden did a detour through Kyiv on his way to a summit in Poland.

    Kept secret till he was gone."

    the BBC climed they were doing live broadcasts of Biden in Kyiv

    Anyone else noticed about half the packaged "Chicken Kievs" have changed the spelling?

    1167:

    ...or I misinterpreted what the BBC mean by "Live" on their website. It's a "Live" feed in the sense that they are reporting this now.

    1168:

    At that point all they could do was load load everybody else onto the remaining C-130 aircraft and get the hell out of Dodge

    Which led in due course to the mission requirement for the V-22 Osprey: Ospreys could have flown the whole hostage rescue mission without the mess of C-130s and choppers, and are capable of in-flight refueling.

    Of course along the way we got the hilarity that was Credible Sport, and the world's first (and only) STOVL Hercules conversion (if you strap enough rocket motors to a grand piano you can make it take off and land nearly vertically, and by grand piano I mean a poor unsuspecting Hercules) ...

    1169:

    You might enjoy Reay Tannahill's book Sex in History.

    Apparently there's Classical writings in which women are discussing dildos, who makes the best ones, and how they're soooo worth it.

    Her Food in History is also a good read.

    1170:

    1167 - Yes, I had noticed that the spelling of "Chicken Kyiv" has been corrected (both on packaging and in Wikipedia).

    1169 - And, of course, there is also the KC-130F that operated from USS Forrestal.

    1171:

    All this talk of the inefficiency of resistive heaters and the sci-fi possibilities of using the aircon system misses the fact that some ev manufacturers have been using heat pumps for years.

    I have one. It works. Can't match the output of ICE waste heat, but comes on much more quickly so arguably better for defrosting.

    Sufficient to keep me comfortable when it's -10c outside but some may object.

    1172:

    Jimmy Carter: even toned and rational; educated in complex technology; methodically approached getting Israel and Egypt to do more than endless talk; genuinely sought to guide the US away from addiction to fossil fuels; was not inclined towards saber rattling;

    When compared with Donald T(he)rump it really is shocking how far down the GQP has slid in just forty years. None of those traits shown by Carter can be seen in T(he)rump.

    Those agreements achieved with minor Arab nations reflected their need to prepare themselves for when their fossil fuel deposits dry out and/or EU-US-NZ-Australia-Canada-Japan transition to EVs & PVs & WTs. Going to be really awful for post-OPEC nations abruptly scrambling for enough racing camels (or whatever else) to export to add up to enough to cover the inevitable balance-of-trade gap.

    They'd had decades (decades!) to ready themselves and billions upon billions to finance industry-slash-education-slash-research to grow some version of India's high tech sector or China's low cost manufacturing of consumer goods. Or something. Or anything. But instead, nothing.

    I am hoping to live long enough to watch Saudi Arabia no longer invited to sit at the adult's table amongst the G20. But it will be a horror as SA is instead re-categorized as a 'faltering economy' as the House of Saud relocates into luxurious exile in the EU and leaves 80 million people to fend for themselves.

    (Looking at the UK as well as Russia, Greece, et al, for any approximate equivalent economic model of intentional under-investment and indifference to suffering and asset looting by government on such vast a scale. With Haiti as instance of how ugly it will get in a decade post-OPEC.)

    Those other Arab nations are waking up to realize by 2050 they are utterly fucked. And likely sooner, given how EU-US-etc are now committing to really-real energy independence -- my thanks to Putin for that -- leading to less cockblocking on TW-PV-EV infrastructure. 2040s? Maybe 2030s? Be really funny to watch if (when) those Arab nations find themselves needing to buy TW-PV-EV from US at heavy discounts (much as USSR bought US grain by way of loans from US banks). And given already obvious water shortages, ditto for deals with Israel to acquire water filtration technology and expertise on 'dry farming'. (I promise to try not savoring it too obviously.)

    Was there threats and/or bribery involved in the Camp David Accords? Well, yeah. Egypt's economy would have imploded long ago without foreign gift aid and tourism from the USA; Carter could have cut off the gifts and ordered the USDOS to issue travel advisories effectively throttling down tourism.

    Besides which if you look at what Egyptian leadership was enduring during the 1970s in terms of being in-between sets of impossible to reconcile agendas -- being militaristic and conquering and the 'sword of Allah' when they kept getting their arses kicked every time they actively fought Israel as well as hordes of hungry-hungry-hungry children from bleeding themselves white to buy poorly made big boy toys (weapons) -- they needed an outsider such as Jimmy Carter as credible excuse to step down the genocidal prose and posturing.

    So. Good bye, Jimmy Carter. And thank you.

    1173:

    {{ for those of you wishing you'd been there, here's partial transcript of the backchannel, last-possible minute phone call }}

    "Kremlin Operator six-two-seven, how shall I help you, Sir or Madam?"

    "Tell your boss my boss is landing in Kyiv."

    "What? Who? Where?"

    "My boss is Joe Biden. You know, 79-year-old POTUS and starring in next week's Viagra commercials. Your boss, VladPutin@smalldickenergy.com needs to be told. He's flying into Kyiv to visit his good buddy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Jewish sex-symbol and nearest male equivalent to Gal Gadot."

    "Uhm. When?"

    "Wheels down in ten. Do the wise thing, point your missiles at any other aircraft than Air Force One? Right thanks."

    "Oh. OMG. Please no. He's been doing his Stalin imitations, talking about growing a handlebar mustache. He was in such a good mood this morning. This? This is not a good thing to have to tell him. He's been known to kill the bearer of bad news. Please don't do this!"

    "Look, that's not my problem. What I gotta do is get my daughter Zelenskyy's autograph on a tee-shirt -- she's sixteen and it'll be such sweet high school hallway bragging rights -- or my life at home will be hell when I get back. Just don't start World War Three, okay? Got more calls to make. Maybe if I get my kid a pair of Taylor Swift tickets instead..."

    {{ click }}

    1174:

    EV vs. ICE - Consumer Report article

    This is a post-and-run.

    For folks outside NorAm: CR is considered pretty reliable and their findings/suggestions might apply in other parts of the world.

    https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/hybrids-evs/will-an-electric-car-save-you-money-a9436870083/

    1175:

    You know that cars have been using a/c for a while now and that a/c is really just a heat pump that they forgot to finish, right?

    Tesla seem to have been (one of?) the first to complete the job. The model Y was introduced with a sophisticated system that can move heat between the motor, inverter/ESC, battery, cabin,and outdoors via a pretty cleverly constructed valve. The only direct comparison of power usage is from Bjorn Nyland in Norway, who had an early model 3 and then the updated late 20 version when the heat pump was added; in a side by side test (literally, in his driveway) the resistance heating model used 2170W vs 735W for the later model.

    I don’t think anyone else has installed quite such a complete system in their cars yet but surely it must form the basis for any serious future design.

    And Jimmy Carter is a pretty good woodworker too. Another positive feature of perhaps the best human being in American politics. Possibly ever.

    1176:

    Which led in due course to the mission requirement for the V-22 Osprey: Ospreys could have flown the whole hostage rescue mission without the mess of C-130s and choppers, and are capable of in-flight refueling.

    Since I've got Thunderchickens* (V-22s) flying over me most days, I want to rhapsodize over the "refighting the last war" problem that the US has.

    Since 1950, we've pivoted bopped, in our choice of shooting wars, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, with side hustles all over the world and a big ol' Cold War presided over by the standoffish forces (Navy and Air Force) with whoever the other Great Power is.

    What does that mean in terms of equipment?

    In 1980, what it meant was Carter's military was stuck with having to use Vietnam-optimized equipment to deal with desert conditions. IIRC, that's what led to so many mechanical failures. The V-22 and others theoretically handle desert crap better, although the Bin Laden raid managed to mess up a copter there too.

    Now we're taking all that desert gear and pivoting with it to Eastern Europe and the Western Pacific, as well as all those little wars we don't want to talk about.

    It's something I hadn't thought about until recently, but at the start of a war, the soldiers have the equipment and doctrine to fight the last war. It takes awhile to equip them for current conditions. While the US militaries' monstrously bloated budgets enable us to train and equip for speculative wars (notably WW3 and a nuclear exchange), most of the day to day mayhem machinery seems to have a slower rate of churn. As a result, Marines who used to be struggle with getting fit enough to haul 50 kg of crap up an Afghani mountain now have to figure out how not to drown in an amphibious landing craft. And so it goes.

    1177:

    "How powerful are those things though? I can't see them being more than around 100W, probably less. Not really comparable...

    (Never experienced one myself, and don't see the point... by the time I've got the ignition turned on my body heat has warmed the seat quite adequately.)"

    The point of the seat heaters (and coolers) is to reduce the load on heating the entire compartment. Our EV has seat heaters as well as a steering wheel heater. If it's cold outside I'm already wearing a coat of some kind, and heating the seat and wheel allows me to comfortably sit in the car without turning the heat up and thereby reducing the range.

    It is particularly useful for short trips where heating the entire compartment is pointless because I'll be hopping out in 3 minutes.

    Heating does reduce the range a small bit, as does AC. However, in our EV that amounts to a reduction from 400 km range to 380. I suppose if it was -40C that would increase, but thankfully I don't live in those places any longer.

    1179:

    "seat heaters"

    fun physics fact: thermal conduction is more pronounced (faster and severe) when in direct contact whereas air conducts thermal energy slower and less significantly... which is why you can stick your hand into a 400F (200C) oven without much harm whereas as hot water at 180F (80C) will scold you bad enough to warrant a doctor appointment and if over a large enough area for a sustained contact will require tissue trimming and/or skin grafts

    so by heating your legs and backside and back it more than offsets the brutal chill of harshest winters...

    my dad drove a taxi in NEW York City for decades and every morning in winter would carry out and lay down a layering of old towels my mother had sewn together so he could just about form a nest (covering legs and belly so to reduce shivering till engine came up to provide full heating... took 30 minutes on really bad days in really bad winter

    1180:

    "seat heaters"

    fun physics fact: thermal conduction is more pronounced (faster and severe) when in direct contact whereas air conducts thermal energy slower and less significantly... which is why you can stick your hand into a 400F (200C) oven without much harm whereas as hot water at 180F (80C) will scold you bad enough to warrant a doctor appointment and if over a large enough area for a sustained contact will require tissue trimming and/or skin grafts

    so by heating your legs and backside and back it more than offsets the brutal chill of harshest winters...

    my dad drove a taxi in New York City for decades and every morning in winter would carry out and lay down a layering of old towels my mother had sewn together so he could just about form a nest (covering legs and belly so to reduce shivering till engine came up to provide full heating... took 30 minutes on really bad days in really bad winter...

    he'd have happily paid $500 (in 1970s dollars) for a seat-based heating system... him and every truck driver, bus operator, cabbie, et al...

    1181:

    If it's cold outside I'm already wearing a coat of some kind, and heating the seat and wheel allows me to comfortably sit in the car without turning the heat up and thereby reducing the range.

    And a big point that Pigeon may not have is that it makes a huge difference if you're sitting on a cold leather/vinyl seat or a cloth one. Mine are leather. And a seat warmer makes a big different. Otherwise the seat is extracting heat from my butt. My truck has cloth seats and I don't notice it all that much even at 0C.

    1182:

    And a big point that Pigeon may not have is that it makes a huge difference if you're sitting on a cold leather/vinyl seat or a cloth one. Mine are leather. And a seat warmer makes a big different. Otherwise the seat is extracting heat from my butt. My truck has cloth seats and I don't notice it all that much even at 0C

    Thermal conduction is one of those important things...

    It also matters at hot temperatures. If you're overheating on a trail, for example, if you can find a big boulder that's colder than air temp, get on its shady side (stop gaining heat) and put bare hands, feet, and/or face against the coldest part of the rock that you can find, to shed heat.

    Similarly, if you're driving or walking and overheating, find a minimart or market, open their fridge, and grab bare, cold metal until you've dumped enough heat. Then buy something to make up for all their energy you just wasted.

    Now, if we can just get to better passive design on houses, so we don't have to make up for bad design choices with electricity, life will be wonderful all of the time...

    1183:

    Since I've got Thunderchickens* (V-22s) flying over me most days,

    Never been near one. But I understand they are a bit noisy.

    1184:

    {{ for those of you wishing you'd been there, here's partial transcript of the backchannel, last-possible minute phone call }}

    Apparently the call was actually made. With a simple message. "Don't even think ..."

    And oh the optics. Putin staying away from anyone without 6 recent Covid tests and Biden strolling down the streets of Kyiv.

    1185:

    Since I've got Thunderchickens (V-22s) flying over me most days....Never been near one. But I understand they are a bit noisy.*

    I actually toured inside one at a Miramar Air Show many years go. Surprisingly little room in the things (about one short bus' worth of seating and cargo).

    Noise-wise, they're no worse than the big Sea King helicopters, and trivial compared with the F-18s and especially F-35s that also fly over us. The jarhead who cranked their F-35's afterburners low over our neighborhood last fall hopefully was under orders to do so, because otherwise it was a stupidly loud bit of negative PR, complete with car alarms blaring and neighbors swearing.

    *technically the Thunder Chickens are a USMC squadron operating out of North Carolina. The term "thunder chicken" is hunter slang for a male turkey in the Southeast or a ruffed grouse in Pennsylvania, based on the above-pheasant levels of noise they make when flushed into takeoff. There are other meanings in the Urban Dictionary, of course.

    1187:

    Russia, nope. Putin and the people in power, yes.

    1188:

    Geez, guy. Are you denying that when the USSR collapsed, the West did something to help the poor formerly opressed people of the USSR up to a better standard of living? Even as much as Western Germany did with Eastern?

    I, personally, feel that "hatred of the commminists!!!!" turned into hatred of the Russians. Funny, from everything I've ever read, the Vietnames didn't hate Americans.

    But you're saying all Russians are in this.

    1189:

    And sorry, but I have zero sympathies for the Chechens, after their rebels came out as at least as nasty, if not nastier, than both sides during your Troubles.

    1190:

    One thing I've learned from watching earth science over the last few decades is that our planet has precisely no use for experts' strong opinions.

    Like you, I'm skeptical about the ability of mere stone to keep hydrogen from leaking. But then again, it can do that with helium pretty well, so why not hydrogen?

    In soil biology a...while...ago, I learned that hydrogen-metabolizing bacteria were thought to be fairly common in the anoxic parts of soil. These environments can form inside wet clumps of clay, for instance, where oxygen didn't diffuse in fast enough to matter. Turns out that they may not even need anaerobic environments to survive, either.

    Just as there are facultative anaerobes around (who can take oxygen or not without dying), apparently there are microbes that can either photosynthesize (when in a high-light environment), and chemosynthesize using hydrogen (when in a low-light environment. These seem to be really common in oceans, possibly forming a big chunk of the foodweb base.

    https://www.sciencealert.com/more-life-than-we-ever-realized-could-survive-in-the-deep-dark-of-the-ocean

    So if it turns out a bigger chunk of the biosphere runs on hydrogen than we thought, why be surprised if it turns out there's more hydrogen around than we thought? Hopefully we won't just burn it all, either.*

    *If it turns out hydrogenivorous microbes are ubiquitous, then maybe plans for manufacturing and storing mass quantities of hydrogen have some problems they didn't account for...

    1191:

    I've seen headlines that the unions are saying the railroads should be nationalized.

    Not going to happen, but at least it's being said. They really should nationalize at least the rails and right-of-way (much of which was given them by Congress), and let the railroads pay for trackage rights.

    1193:

    A quick glance, even on the highways: the semis with a lot of small lights lining the tractor, and guaranteed if the lights line the load, those are own-operated.

    1194:

    I've checked maybe three times this millenium. The first time, not long after 9/11, I had my Swiss Army knife in the bag. Someone in security or luggage handling opened my bag and stole the knife. The airline did pay. I don't take it anymore, because the model is literally irreplaceable - Wenger doesn't make it any more.

    Oh, and guitars? I assume you know of Tom Paxton's Thank You Republic Airlines For Breaking the Neck on My Guitar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwV8ozElNjk

    1195:

    Howard NYC - for some reason, a number (all?) of your recent posts in this thead show twice.

    1196:

    Jimmy Carter: definitely not the greatest President (though we did have Apollo-Soyuz during his term, and I wanted a lot more of that)... but I'm not the only one saying the best ex-President ever.

    1197:

    Well, no. It went down many times over the millenia, before the last couple hundred years. I mean, consider the world population during the Black Plague.

    1198:

    On the first (or second) floor, put shops. A stupormarket, and restaurants (they may already be there).

    See, I could make the suggestion without saying the word "arcology".

    1199:

    Um, no, not "rumor". Within a couple years after the collapse of the USSR, there were published documents from the KGB ->who had agents in the room when Bush, Sr, acting as an agent for Raygun, make the arms-for-hostages deal<-.

    GUILTY.

    1200:

    Note that most of the alleged terrorist attacks by "Chechen rebels" inside Russia may have been "false flag" operations to provide Putin with a pretext for his invasion of Chechnya. Have you noticed Russian propaganda's tendency to go in for projection? (It's a classic fascist trait, by the way.)

    This doesn't mean "Chechens = good". It just means both sides fight really dirty in that conflict, and the current Chechen leadership are violent Putin loyalist thugs.

    1201:

    Apollo-Soyuz flew in 1975, so under Ford: it was the last gasp of the Apollo Applications Program ("we've got this spare Saturn IB and CSM stack left over from the emergency rescue standby mission for Skylab, what can we do with it cheaply if we fly it?") and got funding because in the early 1970s detente was the name of the game and it made the president(s) (Nixon/Ford) look good. Probably Nixon signed off on it thinking it'd fly during his last term.

    We did get some good mileage out of it, though -- the Apollo-Soyuz docking adapter became the basis of the docking system now used on the ISS, Soyuz, Dragon, Starliner, and other modern crew vehicles (not the Chinese ones AIUI).

    1202:

    Shockingly, my nearly 200 year old apartment is in a tenement block (that predates indoor plumbing, never mind elevators and electricity) with shops/restaurants at ground level. Nothing new in the world, it seems.

    1203:

    Yep. Well, same in the US... until it was driven away by chains, and hostile zoning.

    1204:

    Shockingly, my nearly 200 year old apartment is in a tenement block (that predates indoor plumbing, never mind elevators and electricity) with shops/restaurants at ground level. Nothing new in the world, it seems.

    As was standard in Rome 2,000 years ago as well.

    With smaller rooms (vertically as well - ceilings were lower) for the top storeys. Something that seems to have generally been true in cities until the elevator. Because climbing 3 flights of stairs is for those who can't afford to live one flight above street level.

    1205:

    No - mine are leather, too, but it's a pretty thin bit of the hide, and there's foam rubber underneath it. Apart from the extreme temperatures the very surface can attain when parked in the sun, with me wearing shorts which I basically never do, under no conditions do I notice any significant difference between sitting on foam rubber with a thin layer of leather over it and sitting on foam rubber direct. At least not for any longer than it takes to put my seatbelt on and start the engine.

    (They're seriously fucked leather, too, which makes a very direct comparison increasingly easier. When the fuckedness becomes intolerable I reckon the kind of fluffy moquette fabric used a lot for train seats will produce a better result than simply keeping to the original spec. Never understood why a hard and shiny seat covering is supposed to be "more luxurious" than a soft and fluffy one.)

    My principal requirement for heat when getting into a cold car isn't so much to heat me - I'm still basically warm from wherever I've just come out of, and being out of the wind will retain that warmth for some time yet - but for hot air. Partly to blow on the inside of the windscreen to remove condensation (my attitude to optical surfaces is that when they need cleaning you do it full-on with soap/water and/or alcohol and several clean rags, and in between you do not touch them), and partly to "dry" (increase the moisture-carrying capacity of) the air inside the car so my exhalations are less inclined to condense in the first place. The fundamental characteristic of the British climate in its lower-temperature periods is one of barely-contained sogginess, and the presence of a big warm damp thing blowing out water vapour in a confined space is a condition highly conducive to failure of the containment.

    1206:

    Ah, yes, high ceilings - they are like leather, too. Considered "opulent" and "luxurious" for no apparent reason and in contradiction to the superiority of the "povvo" alternatives. All those old-time nobby types shivering away in their lofty halls with a gigantic fire sending 90% of its heat up the chimney and the remaining 10% to warm the spiders on the ceiling 10 metres above everyone's heads, while the plebs cram in under a ceiling you can touch and get a nice cosy fug up and go "ner ner ner".

    1207:

    Charlie Stross @ 1169:

    At that point all they could do was load load everybody else onto the remaining C-130 aircraft and get the hell out of Dodge

    Which led in due course to the mission requirement for the V-22 Osprey: Ospreys could have flown the whole hostage rescue mission without the mess of C-130s and choppers, and are capable of in-flight refueling.

    Possibly if the Osprey had met the original payload & range requirements. The Osprey CAN do mid-air refueling ... from a C-130, but then again so could the RH-53D helicopters used for the mission.

    THEY would still have needed the forward staging areas to load troops & equipment whether onto RH-53Ds or Ospreys.

    1208:

    Probably a mistake, but I looked up the news on MBS' dream project on the Suez corner of Saudi Arabia: NEOM. We've talked about it here before. Now there's a website ( https://www.neom.com/en-us ) that might require a seizure warning. Actually, it might be safer to look at the information on Wikipedia: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom ).

    It's touted as being in "the temperate Northwest of Saudi Arabia" (aka next to the Sinai Peninsula, across the way from the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh) and now doesn't just include that linear city, but other resort segments, including a floating industrial center (no mention of how it will float) and a ski resort (!) that has been announced as the site of the 2029 winter pan-Asian games. And apparently it does snow around the ski resort area occasionally (google Jabal Al Lawz, which is ca. 2400 m high).

    I'm struggling not to wax excessively sarcastic about this neo-megalo-thingie. The bigger points are that, reportedly, 20,000 people in the area have already been evicted to make room for this grand vision of nine million* extensively surveilled people eventually living in the Arabian Desert. And there are complaints of the build being an abusive work "place" (both in Wikipedia, linked above). This leads me to wonder, as with other grandiose projects proposed by people associated with the Trump-Kushner nexus, how much of it is set dressing to attract less sophisticated investors and contractors.

    *https://www.livemint.com/news/world/neom-all-you-need-to-know-about-saudi-arabia-s-futuristic-city-without-roads-and-cars-11676860649796.html, with 450,000 to be living there by 2026.

    1209:

    high ceilings - they are like leather, too. Considered "opulent" and "luxurious" for no apparent reason

    Several generally good reasons.

    Before gas and electricity, lighting was candles/oil lamps (which were very expensive to run) or daylight. High ceilings meant big windows which meant good lighting in daytime. It also showed off how much glass you could afford to buy (glass was expensive too) so it was a serious status symbol.

    The fireplace wasn't just about heat, either: it was about ventilation -- it created a forced draft, which in turn kept the room from becoming damp and mold from growing in corners.

    1210:

    (Never experienced one myself, and don't see the point... by the time I've got the ignition turned on my body heat has warmed the seat quite adequately.)"

    Then consider the possibility that there exist climates more extreme than yours. Britain is mostly coastal, with no significant mountains and very few people living in the highland areas (*)

    Assuming you (generic you, not Pigeon) are not so profligately wasteful as to heat your garag (assuming you even have one), the car will be at ambient temperature. Somewhere like the UK, even in winter, tha's likely to be about 3-5'C or higher, even in winter. Body heat and appropriate clothing are fine.

    In other climates, "ambient" might mean -5, or -15, or -25, or even colder (although that's as far as I've had to deal with). At that point, appropriate clothing (for walking around outside) really isn't sufficient for sitting down on a block of foam, and the kind of gloves you'd need to comfortably hold the plastic (or is it metal? No diea) steering wheel are incompatible with driving a car.

    In those conditions, heted seats, and a heated steering wheel, are much closer to "reaonable expectations of comfort" than "ridiculously wasteful excess", which was my opinion before moving to Norway. Spending 10-15 minutes sitting still in air temperatures well below freezing, and with your bum and hands in contact with the same, is not a pleasant experience at all (survivable, yes, obviously, but comfortable, most certainly not).

    Related: it is entirely possible to reach conditions where the waste heat from the engine is not sufficient to keep the cabin temperature comfortable, even on long drives where the engine block reaches steady state. I've only encountered it once or twice a year, but the drive south from Trondheim along the E6, through Gauladalen, goes through some notorious cold spots. Generally, at ambient conditions below about -15'C, it is recommended to use the power heating: a secondary combustion chamber in which additional fuel is burnt to heat the lubricating oil, fuel oil, and engine coolant, to minimise coking and filling the fuel filter. When ambient is below about -22'C, driving at the speed limit on the flat is no longer sufficient to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperauture, which I define as about 19'C. The coldest temperature I've ever hit while driving was -33'C ambient.

    In those conditions, heated seats were definitely welcome, although I concede, using the most extreme example I've ever encountered hardly justifies their existence completely.

    (*) "Highland" is a relative term. At the museum of rural life, just outside Odense in central Denmark, they used the word "highland" to mean "an area of the island above 50m altitude". In my local area, Trondheimsfjord, "highland" means "anything above 800m altitude", broadly speaking

    1211:

    paws4thot @ 1171:

    1169 - And, of course, there is also the KC-130F that operated from USS Forrestal.

    Your link gave me a Page Does Not Exist error from Wikipedia ... however - YouTube to the rescue:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5AI3YSV3M

    Inspired no doubt by Kubrick's 2001.

    1212:

    Oddly, Wikipedia links in the Neom website lead to the King Abdullah Economic City (started 2005, currently less than 1/6th complete) and The Red Sea Project (16 luxury resorts along the Red Sea Coast, all scheduled to open in 2030, three in 2023.

    So the general idea is to promote mass tourism in one of the great Black Flag regions of the world. There are high temperature coral reefs there (yay!), so theoretically they could repopulate oceans where other reefs are bleached into oblivion. That is why, in their great wisdom, the high and mighty of Saudi Arabia and global tourism are opening heavily landscaped hotels just landward of them (the soil is mostly fossil reef, so fertilizers and pesticides will likely end up in the ocean), in an area that already uses four times as much water as naturally falls from the sky.

    I can see why MBS is friends with Jared Kushner...Wonder how many other Stable Genius Megaprojects the Saudis are fielding?

    1213:

    David L
    V-22's have a very characteristic sound - I've seen/heard them over my part of London (I think) 5 times - the second three ... I knew what it was before I saw it.
    Same as the London air-rescue helicopter has an amazingly distinctive "note"

    whitroth
    I have a "moral certainty" that a vast majority of Chechens, like the inhabitants of NornIron, merely wanted to get on with their lives ... until two gangs of opposite-extreme nutters decided ... um .. otherwise.
    SEE ALSO: Charlie @ 1201 - which would fit right in with Putin's standard modus operandii

    1214:

    For those tuning in late, Saudi Arabia is the world's largest family owned business and has been more concerned about who is going to become the next CEO-king-pope rather than figuring out how to survive the world-wide transitioning towards non-fossil fuels.

    From what little can be seen from the outside of their long term planning, House of Saud is intent upon placing as much of their SWF (sovereign wealth fund) into as many other nations as feasible. Buying up chunks of land and stock shares and which politicians are most likely to offer an umbrella of quiet happiness (AKA: not allowing any in-depth investigations into illicit funds transfers, journalist sushi flaying, child labor law violations, human trafficking in sex slaves, etc).

    Which is all standard practice for the protection 'n nurturing of mega-wealth. Of course the irony being they've focused investment selection criteria upon where local culture-government-legislation is marked differing from Saudi Arabia:

    (a) the rule of law is strong, and thus private property is only rarely seized;

    (b) accounting practices of megacorps are more-or-less GAAP compliant (which is why current embarrassment of Modi in India is reminder of how important this can be for FDI);

    (c) whatever variant of national taxation bureau can be arm-twisted by the elites, but enough gets collected to prevent government shutdowns and infrastructure are mostly in good repair (unlike Nigeria, Haiti, Russia, etc);

    (d) there is no potent hereditary dictator (King Charles III is a figurehead, ditto monarchs in Norway and Sweden);

    (e) open press ensuring more-or-less accurate intel about megacorps (prime example being the rather loud protests about air quality and push back about slow clean up after that train derailment in Ohio);

    What is so funny is if Saudi Arabia had two or more of {A, B, C, D, E} they could have taken a commanding lead in establishing themselves as hegemon over the Middle East and begun conquering it economically. Instead, they are going off into wacky projects, paranoia-fueled power struggles, and funding any lobbyist who can promise holding off EV-PV-TW adoption in US-EU-UK until their oil runs out.

    What I've read about NOEM suggests there's been a serious disconnect between understanding what the ruling elite of the world wants to do for fun-and-profit and the fact they already plenty of places to party 'n scheme. Without lots of foreigners investing-living-touristing, just how will NOEM avoid ending up a slum ruled as a religiously motivated police state, is unclear.

    Just as where to source enough food-water-electricity for proposed population and light industry, seems to be confident hand waving along the lines of "Allah Shall Provide".

    There's something missing from public ally available content, such as a secret underground lake of water or newly developed filtration system to recycle 99% of sewerage water or they plan upon re-commissioning any unneeded supertankers (post-OPEC collapse) to move gigatons of fresh water annually.

    1215:

    To be fair to MBS, the Great Dreamspinners of the House of Saud have been trying to find other ways to do things for decades.

    Here (via the Wayback Machine) is a fairly blunt analysis of how they tried to become an agricultural powerhouse using fossil water: "Camels Don't Fly, Deserts Don't Bloom" ( https://web.archive.org/web/20111215183508/https://www.soas.ac.uk/water/publications/papers/file38391.pdf )

    In 2016, the same title was used by a bunch of Arizona State University students for a project on how Saudi owned Almarai grows alfalfa in central Arizona to feed its herds (see link at https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/2016/05/camels-dont-fly-deserts-dont-bloom.html ).

    Also to be fair to MBS, as the documentary shows, the agricultural barons of the lower Colorado River are every bit as resistant to reality as the House of Saud is. It'd be nice if there was some antidote to this.

    And so it goes.

    1216:

    Thoroughly irrelevant but too amusing not to pass on: I've just come across one of those "New to Amazon" hooky sellers with no price or "add to basket" or anything, who are quite openly describing their brand as "Specious".

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Specious-50pcs-BC327-BC337-Transistor/dp/B0BNTCPCWP

    1217:

    Back to the original topic, a tweet from the editor of Clarkesworld magazine:

    https://twitter.com/clarkesworld/status/1627711728245960704

    Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.

    1218:

    Impressive. I do observe a nice calm sea, though. I suspect it might be more problematic (both in terms of difficulty, and of wear and tear on the airframe) in a more energetic sea state.

    1219:

    "Since basically every city in the western world is short on housing, I would say that the obvious resolution to this is a lot of office towers getting converted into open-plan apartments."

    You can do fantastic conversions of 1890s office space to open-plan apartments. Pre-electrification offices needed lots of natural light: big, high windows bring the light in, skylights and lightwells within the building to do the same.

    But conversions of big downtown modern offices towers to apartments usually is too awful to be worth it. The basic footprints of the buildings are wrong: much too big, too much interior space a very long way from any window. It's hard to do a conversion without ending up with windowless, soulless rooms, because the floors are just the wrong size and shape.

    If it was cheap to do and gave crap results people might do it anyway. But the rework required for all the plumbing and firewalls and rebuild means that the conversions aren't cheap either - and "expensive to do for crap results" is not a winner.

    I'm sure there are some good candidates for it. So we may see a fair bit of it. But most big office towers are not easily able to be residential.

    1220:

    Honestly, I'd expect something a lot less generic. But then I did ask an AI.

    Create the plot of a nonexistent video game by Charles Stross about rabbits

    ChatGPT: Sure, I'd be happy to help create a plot for a nonexistent video game by Charles Stross about rabbits! Here's a potential idea:

    Title: "The Rabbit Hole"

    Gameplay: "The Rabbit Hole" is a third-person action-adventure game where players take on the role of a group of genetically enhanced rabbits, each with their own unique abilities. The rabbits are part of a secret government experiment aimed at creating the ultimate soldiers, but things go awry when the facility is attacked and the rabbits are forced to flee into the wilderness.

    Plot: The game takes place in a dystopian future where the world is on the brink of collapse due to climate change and widespread political unrest. As the rabbits venture into the wilderness, they encounter other animal factions who are also struggling to survive in the harsh new world. The rabbits must work with these factions, engaging in intense battles and completing challenging missions, in order to secure their own safety and uncover the truth behind the experiment that created them.

    Throughout the game, players will be able to switch between different rabbits, each with their own unique set of abilities. For example, one rabbit may be able to hack into security systems, while another can use advanced agility to navigate difficult terrain. The game will also feature a crafting system, allowing players to create new weapons and gear using materials scavenged from the environment.

    As players progress through the game, they will uncover more about the rabbits' past and the dark secrets of the experiment that created them. The game will culminate in an epic final battle where the rabbits must face off against the shadowy organization behind the experiment, using all of their skills and cunning to emerge victorious.

    Overall, "The Rabbit Hole" is a fast-paced, action-packed adventure that combines elements of science fiction, post-apocalyptic world-building, and high-stakes combat. With its compelling story, dynamic characters, and immersive gameplay, it is sure to be a hit with players of all ages and skill levels.

    1221:

    it is inevitable for conversions of offices towers... if only to soak up whatever (scam) money is voted for it by effectively lobbied legislators at the state level... and those conversions will end up as third (or fourth) tier housing... quite likely as twelve-by-fifteen foot SROs (single room, single occupancy) with a half dozen sharing a single toilet and shower... but it will not be college dorms but rather emergency housing for single adults not quite so broken as out-n-out homeless and not able to find conventional housing... recently released non-violent felons... working poor sweating in Amazon warehouses not quite reaching full time status... newly sober addicts after their second pass through rehab... students finishing up their PhD thesis on some obscure non-commercial non-technology topic such as French literature of the thirteenth century...

    1222:

    Create the plot of a nonexistent video game by Charles Stross about rabbits

    Same question to ChatGPT about Ursula Vernon gets a co-operative survival game in a beautiful magical land, or a happy bunny-squad game.

    So I'm trying various SF authors - mostly the female authors are getting plots that tend co-op and pleasant, the male authors are getting plots that tend dark and conspiracy-theory. Fair enough that Gibson ('Neurowarren') was cyberpunk - but the Heinlein plot ('The Long Jump') is also pretty dark.

    Though the plot ChatGPT gave for Tamsyn Muir ("The Necrocolony", a survival-horror game where you play undead rabbits) both broke that mold and was pretty funny.

    1223:

    Thanks! I needed that.

    1224:

    "Same question to ChatGPT about Ursula Vernon gets a co-operative survival game in a beautiful magical land, or a happy bunny-squad game."

    No wombats? That's just sad.

    1225:

    But most big office towers are not easily able to be residential.

    Yes, I agree in the sense that tenements and slums are illegal for a reason, and tend not to be affordably priced anyway (cf slumlords).

    That said, I'm just waiting for someone to pitch the idea of converting part or all of a vacant office tower into a giant marijuana grow. It will at least bring in some workers. See Moz at 630 for a link to how miserable this would be to work in.*

    Moreover, the cannabis could be grown on the upper floors in sunlight, or with light on the middle floors (buds), processed on the lower floors, and sold out a shop on the bottom floor. Pretty secure too. What could possibly go wrong? Well, lots, but if they pay their rent on time, why worry?

    *https://www.reddit.com/r/venturebros/comments/10yw4ma/comment/j80h7i1/?context=2

    1226:

    In other climates, "ambient" might mean -5, or -15, or -25, or even colder (although that's as far as I've had to deal with).

    I grew up in Saskatchewan, where -20 was an average daytime high and -30 at night normal. I've driven in -40.

    At those temperatures seats are basically rigid until your body heat warms them, tires bumpy until they unfreeze, and if you don't have a block heater and a damned good battery your car isn't starting.

    Thermal underwear, a down parka, and thick mittens (which you can drive in) for clothing. And a scraper for the inside of the windows, for where your breath turns to ice.

    1227:

    1208 - The Osprey is "a bit faster" and "a bit longer ranged", but "a lot more complex" given the "tilt-engines" (way more true than "tilt-rotor") design.

    1209 "...a floating industrial center (no mention of how it will float)..." - At a wild guess, by being less dense than water? ;-)

    1212 - I can still find the still picture manually on the main C-130 page at the top of "Operational History". Weirdness of MarkDown?

    1228:

    1209 "...a floating industrial center (no mention of how it will float)..." - At a wild guess, by being less dense than water? ;-)

    But how much hot air will that take?

    1229:

    The inside window problem is the biggest issue I have with my EV. The only time I ever turn the heater on, no matter how cold it is, is to defrost the windshield. I've tried cleaning the windows with alcohol to remove nucleation points, but there's always something that gets left over.

    WRT converting large office buildings, I wonder if the best use for those is not housing (for all the reasons others have listed) but things that at least superficially resemble office work: any activity that would do well in a large communal space with variable, modular "roominess." The difference between an open-plan office and a classroom, for example, seems minimal.

    1230:

    But how much hot air will that take?

    The appropriate unit is the "house of representatives" and the quantity is on the order of one, is my guess.

    1231:

    The appropriate unit is the "house of representatives" and the quantity is on the order of one, is my guess.

    Since we're talking about part of NEOM, what's the conversion rate for USHR to Saudi PR flacks?

    Incidentally, the "it's not clear how this floating industrial zone will actually float" is an actual comment about the project. It's apparently to be solved, along with the need for flying cars to make The Line linear city livable.

    1232:

    There is a (CVA-59)_ missing from the middle of the URL. If you reinsert it manually then it works. I'm inclined to blame wikipedia for failing to ensure that potentially troublesome characters are not included in the URLs it generates.

    1233:

    I suppose it's not too bad, although it does sound pretty much like a hybrid of Watership Down and Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I wonder how it would succeed/fail with the pairings of Charlie/unicorns, Richard Adams/rabbits or Robert C O'Brien/rats. (Or, for that matter, Charles Windsor|Reade|Dickens/unicorns, Douglas Adams/rabbits, Patrick O'Brien/rats...)

    1234:

    I suppose the flying cars are where the name NEOM comes from.

    1235:

    I suppose the flying cars are where the name NEOM comes from.

    My understanding is that NEOM is Neo ("Greek Prefix for New") plus M, the western first initial of the project's patron, Mohammed Bin Salman.

    My growing suspicion is that, as with sausage, those who like futuristic arcologies shouldn't watch them being made.

    1236:

    It's not the cars that fly, it's the livestock. Oink splat and all that.

    1237:

    1233 - It worked when I copied and pasted it! You see my confusion?

    1237 - ?? Aviating porcines in a Muslim nation!

    1238:

    so... flying bacon rather than frying bacon...?

    never mind bordering upon un-kosher that'll be better than SouthWest Airlines

    1239:

    Aviating porcines in a Muslim nation!

    Flying pigs are birds, so it's ok to eat them. Just like Catholics eat fish on Fridays because fish aren't made of meat.

    1240:

    https://phys.org/news/2023-02-discarded-roman-artifact-good-luck.html

    A unique artifact discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda may have been used as a device during sex rather than as a good luck symbol, archaeologists suggest.

    I can just imagine going through customs with it "that? It's a good luck charm, not a butt plug"... "you filthy minded pervert".

    1241:

    In advance of Stalin'sPutin's speech ... some things to note, taken from this AM's "Today" programme.

    Interview with the leader of the Polish opposition: Saying "last year, I warned Putin was going to jump the shark, are you listening, now?
    - and - "Warsaw was fought over & totally levelled 4 times in WWII, we know what RU occupation means"
    - and - "Britain & France learned that empires were not worth the trouble & blood, but Putin's Russia hasn't got the message" ...

    Piece from Narva ...
    Again, the memories of anyone over 40 of the way the RU occupiers behaved in their country & the expectation that they are next ....

    I think we will have to collectively hold our breath until Saturday, to see what monumentally stupid thing Vladimir does do on Friday?

    1242:

    "Also to be fair to MBS, as the documentary shows, the agricultural barons of the lower Colorado River are every bit as resistant to reality as the House of Saud is. It'd be nice if there was some antidote to this.

    And so it goes."

    Well, since their power and fortune are bound to it, it's not very surprising.

    "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"

    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

    1243:

    I seem to recall seeing the V-22 Osprey described as "five gearboxes flying in loose formation".

    It's twin engined and has two rotors, but it can't land with the rotors pointed forward (for high speed flight). So in case of engine failure, it has a transmission linkage running through the wings so that either engine can drive both rotors (and the pod rotation mechanism) simultaneously.

    There's some kind of differential in the fuselage/wing box, and a gearbox between each engine/prop pair and another between the through-wing driveshaft and engine gearbox.

    Hence the strong design requirement for the V-280 and other next-gen tiltrotors to only tilt the rotor hub, not the entire outboard engine pod.

    And I'm kind of surprised they haven't gone to electric transmission -- put a turbogenerator in each pod, an electric motor in each prop, and do the rest using wires. (There are probably trade-offs involved that I'm ignorant of, but I note that turbogenerator-electric trains were a thing at one point -- scuppered by fuel efficiency issues -- which are getting into the same multi-megawatt generator territory you'd need for aircraft.)

    1244:

    »put a turbogenerator in each pod, an electric motor in each prop, and do the rest using wires.«

    It weighs too much.

    Trains need the weight (to get enough friction), in boats it replaces som ballast, but on roads and in air the extra weight is a total no-go.

    1245:

    That's the thing: isn't part of the reason we're seeing this crazy efflorescence of electric flight systems today due to new lightweight motors, in turn using new lightweight permanent magnets?

    (A typical plug-in hybrid is exactly this -- gas engine driving a generator and electric motors.)

    1246:

    Speaking of advanced aircraft designs like the tiltrotor, what would it take to create the ornithopters seen in Dune, the dragonfly-like craft shown in the recent movie?

    Herbert was trying to combine the agility of attack helicopters (bein used concurrently in Viet Nam) with the speed of a fighter jet.

    But are there any real advantages to such a design? Is it even physically possible?

    1247:

    No, it's not possible. It is possible to have something with more agility than a fighter jet and faster than a helicopter - in fact, I think it's been done - but expecting optimality for two radically different requirements is foolishness.

    1248:

    Speaking of advanced aircraft designs like the tiltrotor, what would it take to create the ornithopters seen in Dune, the dragonfly-like craft shown in the recent movie?

    I think (not being an engineer of this type, though, so just guesswork) that the stresses in flapping wings get quite high the bigger the wings are. So I'm not sure if we even have the materials to build large enough flapping wings which worked, too.

    Also I think the air behaves differently on the scales involved - especially if you compare dragonflies and helicopters. At the dragonfly scales air probably seems more viscous (square-cube law probably) so you can't just scale them up thousands of times.

    1249:

    Also to be fair to MBS, as the documentary shows, the agricultural barons of the lower Colorado River are every bit as resistant to reality as the House of Saud is. It'd be nice if there was some antidote to this.

    They are stuck in a situation where if any one of them or small group of them abandon their assets, the ones left will benefit and get to continue on. A large scale game of musical chairs.

    These folks are mainly not stupid. (Although some may have ideologies clouding their decisions.) The unspoken part is they want to keep holding on till they all get a bailout.

    Or so goes my opinion.

    1250:

    That's plausible; I was just thinking about the 2 tilting engines and the big fans on the wing tips. Add the power transfer system and a FADEC to make the thing work at all...

    1251:

    That is an impressive conspiracy theory, considering that even the second Chechen war started 2 days before he became prime minister, and the terrorist attacks (and the first Chechen war) dated back to before he was in the government at all!

    You can justifiably assign to him responsibility for the brutality (on the Russian side) of the second war, and the current loathesomely brutal regime. But all the independent sources I saw (in the period 1990-2000) indicated that the rebels were very similar to the Taliban, and Putin correctly realised that the only way to achieve victory by military means over such fanatics was to destroy them, totally, and damn the human cost to both sides. Which is precisely what the USA did not realise in Afghanistan. No, I am NOT justifying the choice of a military solution in either case.

    Comparing the current Chechen regime to the one in Afghanistan is something I will leave to other people.

    1252:

    To me the alternative to the Osprey would be a Rotodyne as featured in your novels. Vertical takeoff and landing plus high speed. Fairly/Westland claimed to have saved the tip jet noise problem but Duncan Sandys pulled the plug, as he did with so many British aircraft projects. With modern technology power for takeoff and landing could be from electric motors rather than diverting the exhaust from turboprop engines through tip jets.

    1253:

    Of possible relevance to other current events, such as the possibility that Finland will make a separate application for NATO membership, a Pallas Aviation LM-100J has made a trip to Finland from Ramstein for the first time (AFAIK). It landed at Tampere-Pirkkala Airport at 12:20Z today, left at 12:53Z and is now, it appears, heading back to Ramstein.

    https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ad5ae7&lat=55.678&lon=11.368&zoom=4.6&showTrace=2023-02-21&trackLabels

    1254:

    P.S.: The 240+ flights the LM100Js have made in Europe since the war started have been to secondary military facilities in NATO countries. (In some cases to joint civil-military airfields.)

    1255:

    Water is life.

    Simple, profound and all too overlooked is there no long term planning in any part of the US (and Middle East and Australia and...) for how there's going to be enough water in 2030. Never mind discussing 2040. We ought be glad not to be there in 2080 when it will be necessary to send in the military to prevent massacres during an inevitable evacuation of a dry 'n dying Phoenix (and various cities in Saudi Arabia and Australia and Mexico) without much thought into where those refugees will end up.

    Oh sure there's rhetoric and posturing and politicians urge "prayers for rain" as way of pandering to various key demographic groups (cough-cough-WSCNs). But plans involving fiddly fits such as pipelines, storage, water filtration, budgeting for all that new infrastructure? Nope. Nothing with potent political support to actually get it done.

    Food is life.

    We are looking at the near-certainty of hunger with possible starvation as crops fail and population increases. What saved India and China and the US was indeed near-miraculous but no longer sustainable since fossil fuels are critical to modern agro-biz. Worst yet, those crops have been ruthlessly bred to fit narrow range of conditions in order to optimize yields. Yes, you can plant 'southern' crops ever further northwards but there's limits on seed availability. And soil differences and temperature ranges and solar inflow (angle, cloud cover, etc) make that a messy and fuzzy process of what will be potentially disastrous trial 'n error. Just consider how wheat intended for New Mexico is not well bred for enduring deep freeze of Wisconsin winters nor overcast skies of Oregon.

    Watching what leadership in the Middle East has been doing in recent years, their emphasis has been upon political control and regime survival. Sadly Israel as well has been shifting away from democracy as efforts to survive have squeezed their politics into forms resembling their enemies.

    For sure, all those ruling elites have gotten their life-in-exile all set up for when-not-if they bug out. But if you thought the refugee crisis of 2015 was bad and were shocked at the sight of 7 million Ukrainians flowing ever westwards in 2022, you are in for a surprise once it sinks in deeply Saudi Arabia (and Egypt and Yemen and Qatar) has an unsustainable economic model.

    As wake up call, you should look at how much it hurt Egypt balance of trade to lose revenues from the Suez Canal after that freighter got wedged in. Unexpected event. Poorly handled. Never planned for. Avoidable crisis. Sudden loss of government revenue. And they do not seem to being inclined towards planning to avoid any repeats as freighters get longer and carry heavier loads.

    Take that one crisis as typical of mindset of too many politicians in too many nations; now ask what happens when there's something of that impact hitting on a weekly basis. Eventually, there will be in Las Vegas a "daily disaster betting pool" (You authors looking for subplots for novels set twenty minutes into the future please take note).

    Sadly I could not place USD $20 on the box labeled "chemical spill" / "February" / "central US". If I had, the Ohio derailment would have made me a couple thousand bucks. But by 2030, given the availability of online betting on mobile devices plus growing the gaming industry into novel niches, I will be able to do so. Oh, such clever entrepreneurship!

    1256:

    Actually, there are design proposals for high-subsonic, stealthy tiltrotors.

    For vertical take-off/transition/landing, the rotors are oriented vertically, like a chopper.

    For transition to forward flight and speeds below Mach 0.5, the rotors orient horizontally, like a turboprop.

    Then, for higher speeds, it uses thrust direct from the turbofan to maintain airspeed, feathers the rotor blades, the when the rotors are stationary (and blades edge-on to the airflow) it folds the blades back alongside the turbofan fairing (or even retracts them completely). At which point, it's a high-bypass turbofan.

    I don't know if this has gotten beyond the paper proposal stage, but you can bet the Pentagon would love a third-generation tiltrotor that can deliver Marines across the horizon at high subsonic speeds -- and so would their contractors. The V-280 Valor, which first flew in 2017, is due to replace the Black Hawk helicopter and will probably also replace the Osprey (which first flew in March 1989 -- it's 33 years old!) now they know the concept is useful: they're probably already looking into the next step.

    1257:

    To be fair to Sandys, the Fairey Rotodyne's civilian sales pitch was beyond idiotic: a commuter airliner that could take off and land vertically within cities, for city to city flight, sounds like a great idea until you consider (a) the noise! (gyrodynes with tip jets: just say "could you repeat that? I couldn't hear you ...") and (b) the failure modes (airliner with 100 passengers on board has an engine failure on final approach to an inner-city hub).

    That left the military, and the Rotodyne was pitching against the CH-47 Chinook, which already existed and had a big market (the US Army). So it went the way of the TSR-2 (scuppered b/c it was up against the F1-11).

    1258:

    Yes, that's what I meant by "I think it's been done".

    1259:

    Just a reminder that there are two types of stealth: radar stealth and sonic stealth.

    The US built quiet helicopters in the Vietnam War ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/air-americas-black-helicopter-24960500/ ), and if there's a mission for them, it's likely they still fly quiet helicopters. They also built sonically stealthy fixed-wing aircraft for Vietnam.

    Then, of course there's radar stealth. Speaking from personal experience, F-35s can be really effing noisy, but they are stealthy. Still, if the opposition ever comes up with a sonic-tracking missile (and yes, I know why it won't happen), they're expensive confetti waiting to happen.

    So the key question is, what mission is a stealthy rotor-craft to fly? I suppose it's possible to be both quiet and electronically stealthy, but I wouldn't be surprised if the resulting craft would probably carry a souped-up, pilot-operated M-4 as its armament, and have room for 1-2 other passengers.

    1260:

    Charlie, Paws, others ... Of course there was a simpler solution to the V-22 problem - provided one fixed the noise levels ...
    Ah, I see Mike Collins spotted that, as well ....
    One wonders if Duncan Sandys was in the pay of the USA, in the same way that Beeching was the hatchet-man for an unbelievably corrupt minister, Marples.

    Howard NYC
    Mostly, horribly correct - but - "& population increase" - WILL it? Or have we passed peak people?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    Putin is blaming the entire rest of the planet, it seems, but especially "the West / USA"
    Presumably he considers Finland / Estonia / Latvia / Lithuania NOT part of the West, but "his"?
    I think the people living there might disagree with that?

    1261:

    F-35s can be really effing noisy,

    In general flight or takeoff? All jets (and prop planes) are noisy to some degree on take off as the goal is to get way up as fast as reasonably possible.

    1262:

    Acoustically stealthy helicopters are currently a big research area: an early one crashed during the Bin Laden kill mission, there are photographs of the wreckage on the internet.

    Radar stealth for choppers is harder, but they mostly deal with radar by flying low enough to lose themselves in ground clutter, and at night when there are enemy air defenses about. Attack choppers are a dangerous prey for fighters to stalk: they have bloody big guns, can carry AAMs, and because air combat is all about turning and they've got insane slew rates they can turn to target a fighter really fast. As one F-16 pilot put it, engaging an attack helicopter is like attacking a flak battery than can fly sideways at 200mph.

    (Conversely, a helicopter that tries to engage a fighter on its home turf -- speed and altitude -- is dead meat, of course.)

    What I'm waiting for is for optical sensors and projectors and fast image processors that can use the rotor disk. A synthetic aperture camera 10 metres in diameter -- the helicopter rotor disk as retina -- would make radar stealth redundant. Or you could project an image of the terrain below the chopper on top of the rotors so that when it's hovering at treetop height it's simply invisible from above. Add the ability to launch UAVs (something the V-280 is being sold on) and a next generation attack tiltrotor becomes something quite terrifying on the battlefield. Think "A-10 Warthog, only it can slow to a hover, is literally invisible from some angles, can image a bee-sized insect at twenty kilometres, and carries kamikaze drone swarms as well as guns and beyond visual range missiles".

    1263:

    In general flight or takeoff? All jets (and prop planes) are noisy to some degree on take off as the goal is to get way up as fast as reasonably possible.

    See my comment at 1186 for what happens when an F-35 pilot turns on the afterburner overhead. I've also heard an F-35 at full hover at the Miramar Air show at reasonably close range, and that's really loud.

    In general, the F-35s are as loud as the F-18s. I'm under one of the Miramar flight paths, so I get to hear both, along with V-22s, C-130s, Sea Kings, Trump's Air Force 1, and suspiciously innocuous business-type jets flying late at night.

    1264:

    I suspect the next big nuisance for attack copters is going to be swarms of small drones, also operating at tree-top height.

    1265:

    But what you're hearing is take off noise.

    I suspect the F-35 and other newer planes are much quieter in regular flight.

    I was sitting in the atrium overlooking the main runways at St. Louis Lambert fields back in the 80s waiting a few hours for my puddle jumper to take me home. The other side of the runways was occupied by Northrop's factory for F-16 and other things. Periodically a passenger jet would roll down the runways and take off with a rotation near the edge of my view out the big window. Some jet noise as expected.

    Suddenly it sounded like the world was ending. I look out the window and directly in front of my were two military fighter jets already a few 100 feet in the air taking off side by side. They quickly vanished. I suspect they had the afterburners on. But that noise is not for normal operations when not in a dog fight.

    And the F-35 is NOT designed for dog fighting. It is meant to stand off 10 to 30 miles and fire some missiles then turn and leave the area. Or direct another plane to fire a missile or few.

    1266:

    The F-16 comment may be wrong. It was 40 years ago and I'm not sure exactly what model I saw or was being worked on in the plant.

    1267:

    Yes; it's been a low-level research area for a long time, because of the civilian implications. 'They' want to be able to fly into the built-up areas of cities, which means helicopters, but local residents tend to object to the noise - and vote that way.

    1268:

    "Or you could project an image of the terrain below the chopper on top of the rotors so that when it's hovering at treetop height it's simply invisible from above."

    Wouldn't work: the rotor disc is not opaque. You'd see the body of the helicopter as clearly as you usually can. Even if it did work a bit you've still got the parallax error, and also all the treetops blowing about.

    Regarding the Rotodyne, maybe it was a slightly daft idea, but the "sales pitch" was being promulgated by numberless SF authors of the period...

    1269:

    But what you're hearing is take off noise.

    No, they're up at cloud level when they pass over my house on their way to various desert practice ranges. In the direct takeoff path (say, visiting Torrey Pines when they're flying out to the ocean), they're loud enough to make conversation difficult.

    1270:

    I suspect you're thinking of the F/A-18, which began as the Northrop YF-17.

    1271:

    And the F-35 is NOT designed for dog fighting. It is meant to stand off 10 to 30 miles and fire some missiles then turn and leave the area. Or direct another plane to fire a missile or few.

    I'm not so sure what a working F-35 would do in close combat. It IS worth reading up on the 2015 test, wherein a top-line F-16 kicked the butt of a test-bed F-35 that didn't even have all its systems operational. https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/can-the-f-35-dogfight-the-truth-behind-the-infamous-2015-report/

    The test was whether the F-35 could get its nose cannon pointed at the F-16 long enough to make a kill. And it couldn't. However, the F-35 is designed to hit targets far off boresight, and the testbed plane didn't have this enabled. Nor did it have its stealth coating. And its maneuverability was software limited to not stress the airframe. The planes flying now aren't so limited.

    Biased tests aren't unheard of. There's a Smithsonian Air and Space article titled "Rogue Elephants" from decades ago about Alaskan wargames, wherein a flight of B-52s was told to run a bombing raid, flying high, straight in, with no EW gear turned on. Of course they got massacred, then trashed in the after-action as old-fashioned and irrelevant. So their commander, apparently against orders, told them to fly their actual mission profile the next day. They went in at treetop level, with full electronics countermeasures, killed all their targets, plus a few bonus self-hits from their opposition accidentally shooting each other while trying to find the B-52s, and came out with only one fighter even trying to take one shot at them (it missed). They then got reamed again for not following orders, but they made their point.

    1272:

    quite likely as twelve-by-fifteen foot SROs (single room, single occupancy) with a half dozen sharing a single toilet and shower... but it will not be college dorms but rather emergency housing for single adults not quite so broken as out-n-out homeless and not able to find conventional housing

    Deja vu.

    Just yesterday my wife asked me what life was like in Soviet communal apartments (one family to a room, common kitchen, common bathroom). What I told her was eerily similar to what you described here.

    1273:

    Just yesterday my wife asked me what life was like in Soviet communal apartments (one family to a room, common kitchen, common bathroom). What I told her was eerily similar to what you described here.

    Check out the American definition of tenement in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement

    Tenement is a pejorative here, although I understand it's not elsewhere. Unfortunately, we probably need to build a bunch of these going forward. Keeping them affordable without turning them into death traps or money machines for slumlords (like some of the Victorian gentry...) is going to be a challenge.

    Mike Davis' Planet of Slums has a lot to say about these too.

    1274:

    Yes, but my Prius doesn't have to fly... and adding enough battery for the "plug-in" part to mean anything (only about 35 miles last I looked) adds considerable weight. (A non-plugin hybrid has just enough battery to drive a mile or so under ideal conditions - it's there to meditate between the engine and the motors, and as a place to store energy during/after regenerative braking.)

    1275:

    "That is an impressive conspiracy theory, considering that even the second Chechen war started 2 days before he became prime minister, and the terrorist attacks (and the first Chechen war) dated back to before he was in the government at all!"

    The terrorist attacks Charlie referenced were the ones in September 1999 (4th, 9th, 13th and 16th) - there was also a 'suspicious device' found on the 22nd which was made safe and the three three men who had planted it were arrested. Strangely it transpired they were FSB officers, but much confusion and scurrilous speculation was averted at the press conference the next day which revealed that this had been a test, which the local security forces had passed with flying colours, so well done everybody!

    Despite the widely voiced concern about this being the work of Chechen terrorists, no Chechens had been arrested or charged for the four bombs which most definitely had not been mocked up out of sugar. Nevertheless, the recently appointed Prime Minister decided that something needed to be done about all these Chechen terrorists who were blowing up apartment buildings so he ordered the VDV to flatten Grozny (again) and the 2nd Chechen War was off to to the races. The public profile and popularity garnered from taking such decisive action meant that he was an obvious choice to become acting President when Yeltsin had to suddenly step down in November, which made him the front-runner for the Presidential election three months later and so he became President. The rest, as they say, is history.

    Of course there was no way that Putin could have orchestrated a false flag operation in September when he had only joined the government in August. How would a former KGB counterintelligence officer who had been the Director of the FSB for little more than a year before becoming Prime Minister know how to put together a small team of covert operatives, supply them with the explosives for a bombing campaign and ensure that they would not be discovered by the security forces (or fabricate a cover story if they were)? It's utterly preposterous.

    They never did catch up with those wily Chechen bombers though, they must have been really sneaky.

    1276:

    No, they're up at cloud level when they pass over my house on their way to various desert practice ranges.

    We had an apartment for 2 years almost exactly 1 miles south of the western pair of DFW runways. So a wave 100+ takeoffs or landings 4 or 5 times a day. Mostly landing due to prevailing winds. MD-80s, 737s, A32x, etc... plus a few 747s and A380s at times.

    I sort of got used to jet engine noise. 1 mile out they are not very high.

    When first there and I was working from the apartment, every now and then the entire place with light up with a very bright flash. I figured it out. At times the alignment of the sun and an American Airlines plane could cause a reflection spot to cross the ground and aim at me for a second. American has dropped the polished aluminum livery due to composite air frames so it would not happen now.

    1277:

    It would appear that it isn't just the tories who have foaming nutters in their ranks - though I note that this particular, SNP one, is "Wee Free" & therefore utterly bonkers, by definition, from the word go.

    David L
    For really, insanely LOUD you needed a Vulcan standing on it's tail & heading up at some ridiculous climb rate for something that size (!)

    1278:

    I've also heard an F-35 at full hover at the Miramar Air show at reasonably close range, and that's really loud.

    I've never seen an F-35 in the flesh but I can believe it: any STOVL jet in hover is unbelievably noisy, simply because of how much hot air it's blasting out to keep from falling out of the sky.

    I once saw a Harrier (last model, British equivalent of the US AV-8B) do a display at the East Fortune air show. In hover about 100 metres up above a harvested cornfield 500 metres past the fence, it was blasting straw halfway up to its wingtips. And the noise was so loud that, well: there was a Rolls-Royce Merlin -- a 27 litre V12 piston engine, with no mufflers on the exhaust manifold -- running at full chat on a test stand, and the Harrier a third of a mile away was drowning out the unmuffled thousand horsepower piston engine right next to me.

    Mind you, the Harrier was quieter than a Eurofighter Typhoon II making low passes on full afterburner ...

    1279:

    Biased tests aren't unheard of.

    Apparently the same kind of thing happened with Billy Mitchell between the world wars.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Project_B:_Anti-ship_bombing_demonstration

    1280:

    For really, insanely LOUD you needed a Vulcan standing on it's tail & heading up at some ridiculous climb rate for something that size

    Those twin jets at 30 to 40 degrees were shaking the terminal. Likely F-15s with 4 engines total on afterburner.

    1281:

    Tenement is a pejorative here, although I understand it's not elsewhere. Unfortunately, we probably need to build a bunch of these going forward.

    Of course most cities zoned them out of existence in the 70s/80s in the US. And my neighbors don't understand / comprehend / refuse to acknowledge the relationship between such restrictive zoning and homelessness. The common phrase you can hear at times around here is "lack of work ethic". Sigh.

    I'm sure you deal with this non stop.

    1282:

    *Check out the American definition of tenement in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement*

    Yep, but also read the Scottish definition on the same web page. (I own one. Only three bedrooms, not six! And two bath. A slum it ain't.)

    1283:

    I sort of got used to jet engine noise. 1 mile out they are not very high.

    I used to work under the inbound flight path for LAX, so I kind of know that noise level. It's roughly the same volume as F-18s flying over Torrey Pines State Reserve on their en route to whatever-they're-doing off our shores (anything from landing on carriers to strafing San Clemente or San Nicholas to drilling formation flights to getting spooked by balloons and whatsits). It's interesting how loud $5,000/hour flights can be. And how blase I've become about living with it. Sigh.

    1284:

    Forbes is generating quite the backlash today! Especially as the SNP rank and file (who get to vote on the leader) discover she's an anti-abortion nutter as well as a homophobe and TERF.

    The best thing you can say about her is that she's a placeholder for the extreme right wing of the party and she's just torpedoed her political career. She's going to lose, and I'd be astonished if Sturgeon's replacement offers her a cabinet post after this. (For USAns: Scotland is roughly 80% in favour of free abortion on demand, the Scottish parliament voted by an 80% margin for the gender recognition act amendment that Sunak and his transphobe populist Tories vetoed, and so on. In other words, she's fringe, not mainstream. Her sect, the Free Kirk, is probably most closely aligned with the US Evangelical Dominionist nutters, but unlike in the US,they have zero grip on power -- the nearest thing to a political party they've got, the Scottish Family Party, got something like 0.3% of the vote at the last election.)

    Edit/update: good grief, Forbes is really flying her freak flag: she's just told Sky News that she's agin' allowing children to be born outside marriage. Like, wow, she's competing for the Jacob Rees-Mogg vote!

    1285:

    If you just copy and paste it, you get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lockheed_KC-130F_Hercules_aboard_USS_Forrestal_(CVA-59)_on_30_October_1963.jpg which indeed does work. It's when you try and use that weird-arsed Markdown bracket syntax on it that things go wrong, being confused by the brackets in the URL itself. That's a deficiency inside the Markdown parser itself, to which the fix for raw URLs breaking, that being something which happened outside the parser, did not apply. Using HTML syntax you get this which also does not go through Markdown and therefore works.

    1286:

    I've exchanged a couple emails with Neil, suggesting that, in effect, this is a DDOS, and the chatbot owners are effectively accessories, like dark web "service providers", and that he talk to the FBI.

    He thinks the FBI would not agree. I dunno....

    1287:

    So, just like older housing in the US. Lenny Bruce, in the early sixties, had a routine about the bathroom down the hall being occupied, and peeing in your apartment's kitchen sink.

    1288:

    A friend flew the C-2A which was developed so that flying a KC-130 on and off a carrier was not needed.

    One thing that article about the KC-130 test didn't mention was how fast the carrier had to be going into the wind to make it all work.

    1289:

    Charlie
    Forbes is generating quite the backlash today! - Excellent - she needs parading a bit more, just to remind people, again, about the history of religious lunacy in Scotland ... and then put back in a nice padded box .....
    Also for USA-ians: "The Wee Free" - were once far too powerful, of course.

    1290:

    I sense a viable use case for the Credible Sport modification here!

    1291:

    So, just like older housing in the US. Lenny Bruce, in the early sixties, had a routine about the bathroom down the hall being occupied, and peeing in your apartment's kitchen sink.

    For many of us, it's basically getting stuck in dorm housing with shared bathroom. Or the off-campus, subdivided house. The problem (at least where I am) isn't that people can't live that way, because most people globally live that way or worse. Where I am, renting a room is low-class. And that stigma is also a problem to be dealt with.

    So far as tenements go, it looks like the word "Tenement" is one of those things (like "Squat") that mean different things and have different social values in different parts of the world. We'll just have to work around that as usual.

    1292:

    Where I am, renting a room is low-class. And that stigma is also a problem to be dealt with.

    You can see it on mostly older US TV shows. Dragnet had a lot of scenes set in SROs. But many of those B&W shows from the 50s and 60s set in urban areas showed them.

    "Big Bang Theory" even had a scene about one in the Pasadena area. Which sort of surprised me.

    NPR (US Public Radio News) has discussed the issue a few times. You can read or listen to these.

    https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1114045192

    https://www.npr.org/2022/08/01/1115001960/in-extended-stay-hotels-one-writer-sees-a-solution-to-lots-of-housing-problems

    1293:

    1253 - And, if you believe that, you'll believe that by extending the main gear sponsons, fitting turbojets and declutching the rotors, a Bell 222 can hit M1.1.

    1264 - In which general context, I can testify, from personal experience, to the truth of the claim that " a Harrier doesn't fly; it shouts at the ground until it goes away".

    1294:

    We've talked about old car batteries for grid level storage. Someone is doing it for real. More than an experiment.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/the-big-reuse-25-mwh-of-ex-car-batteries-go-on-the-grid-in-california/

    1295:

    The problem (at least where I am) isn't that people can't live that way, because most people globally live that way or worse. Where I am, renting a room is low-class.

    FWIW we have quite a few buildings like that down here, all converted by modifying big old houses to cater for people who don't want to share their living space for one reason or another. Generally very inner city, in the twilight zone where they either haven't yet been replaced by apartment blocks or can't be (heritage, donchano). They range from strangely upmarket, where a nice house in a rich area was chopped in the 1970's before the laws caught up, through to places that are being left to fall down and the owner would rather have renters than squatters. Many are run as boarding houses (a legal definition), but a lot more are run as separate leases with shared facilities.

    Share housing is much more common, either deliberately, sometimes by people working around defects in the law, or like I do where residents have locks on their bedroom doors and some obligation to clean common areas.

    But in Australia especially the legal setup is a shitshow, and difficult to reform because anything you let sensible people do voluntarily will be forced on people who have no other option by unscrupulous landlords. I've lived in a former commercial space turned into 20-odd bedroom "unofficial housing co-op" and that was great. But I've seen similar setups run as illegal boarding houses to extract money from people who don't want to sleep rough. And so on.

    One house we looked at buying had an illegal extra kitchen and a "shower block" in the back yard so that all 20-odd residents could have shared bedroom (~4 bedroom house, the "living room" and "dining room" also used as bedroom, and a shed in the back yard also used as bedroom. Illegal 20 different ways, real estate showing the property did not seem bothered by the prospect of us reporting it to the authorities. Which we did, to no visible effect.

    1296:

    Even the BBC is struggling to be polite. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-64715944

    Ms Forbes also said she believes that trans rapist Isla Bryson - who was initially sent to a women's prison - is a man because "a rapist cannot be a woman".

    That's more fuel to the fire.

    Down here the legal beagles have largely removed "rape" from the law in favour of sexual assault, I think in response to the thinking problems the term generates. As Ms Forbes says, women cannot commit rape, just... forcible penetration or whatever the legal requires of the offense are, except in places where it's "penetration by a living penis attached to a living man who is in sole command of said appendage" or whatever the legislators have come up with to make it abundantly clear that 12 year old boys who get 30 year old women pregnant have to pay child support.

    1297:

    she's agin' allowing children to be born outside marriage

    So once they're been conceived, what does she aim to do? Force a marriage?

    1298:

    "I'm inclined to blame wikipedia for failing to ensure that potentially troublesome characters are not included in the URLs it generates."

    "That's a deficiency inside the Markdown parser itself"

    Given that Wikipedia went live in 2001, while Markdown was created in 2004, I'm inclined to give wikipedia a pass on this one, and lay the blame on the creators of Markdown for not correctly specifying how to handle links.

    1299:

    Given her opposition to abortion one can only assume so. Although it's possible she follows the US approach of banning abortion but being in favour of execution. Or the truly weird but historically common forced adoption.

    1300:

    icehawk @ 1223:

    Create the plot of a nonexistent video game by Charles Stross about rabbits

    Same question to ChatGPT about Ursula Vernon gets a co-operative survival game in a beautiful magical land, or a happy bunny-squad game.

    So I'm trying various SF authors - mostly the female authors are getting plots that tend co-op and pleasant, the male authors are getting plots that tend dark and conspiracy-theory. Fair enough that Gibson ('Neurowarren') was cyberpunk - but the Heinlein plot ('The Long Jump') is also pretty dark.

    Though the plot ChatGPT gave for Tamsyn Muir ("The Necrocolony", a survival-horror game where you play undead rabbits) both broke that mold and was pretty funny.

    So, ... What does it give you if the author's name is "Pete Abrams"?

    1301:

    paws4thot @ 1228:

    1212 - I can still find the still picture manually on the main C-130 page at the top of "Operational History". Weirdness of MarkDown?

    Yeah, I can find it, but your link didn't take me there ... and I had no idea how to FIX the link so it would.

    1303:

    Howard NYC @ 1239:

    so... flying bacon rather than frying bacon...?

    never mind bordering upon un-kosher that'll be better than SouthWest Airlines

    😏 I see your point, but I don't think keeping "kosher" is really a thing in Saudi Arabia ... but, then again, it would NOT be "Halal" either.

    1304:

    However, I can provide a written description of a possible plot for a video game about rabbits by Pete Abrams:

    Title: Rabbit Rebellion

    Storyline: In a world dominated by humans, a group of rabbits led by a charismatic and cunning leader, Thumper, decide to rise up against their oppressors. Thumper and his army of rabbits, armed with weapons crafted from carrots and lettuce, embark on a dangerous journey to overthrow the human empire.

    Gameplay: The game is a 2D side-scrolling action-adventure game, with elements of strategy and puzzle-solving. The player controls Thumper and his army of rabbits as they navigate through various levels, each with its own unique challenges and obstacles. The game features a variety of enemies, ranging from humans armed with guns to ferocious dogs and other predators.

    The rabbits can use their unique abilities to overcome challenges, such as digging tunnels to avoid enemies or jumping high to reach inaccessible areas. As they progress through the levels, the rabbits collect resources, such as carrots and lettuce, which can be used to upgrade their weapons and abilities.

    The game also features boss battles, where Thumper and his army face off against powerful human generals and their armies. These battles require strategic thinking and planning, as well as quick reflexes and skillful execution.

    As the rabbits gain strength and experience, they become more confident in their abilities and start to believe that they can overthrow the human empire. The game culminates in an epic final battle, where Thumper and his army face off against the human emperor himself, with the fate of the rabbit rebellion hanging in the balance.

    1305:

    My favourite insane VTOL/fixed-wing hybrid.

    Never flown, sadly. At least for those of us who didn't have to go up in it or be underneath it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_XV-2

    1306:

    Charlie Stross @ 1244:

    I seem to recall seeing the V-22 Osprey described as "five gearboxes flying in loose formation".

    It's twin engined and has two rotors, but it can't land with the rotors pointed forward (for high speed flight). So in case of engine failure, it has a transmission linkage running through the wings so that either engine can drive both rotors (and the pod rotation mechanism) simultaneously.

    There's some kind of differential in the fuselage/wing box, and a gearbox between each engine/prop pair and another between the through-wing driveshaft and engine gearbox.

    It actually can LAND with the rotors forward for flight ... it just won't be able to take off again.

    1307:

    It actually can LAND with the rotors forward for flight ... it just won't be able to take off again.

    Chuck Yeager "If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing."

    Of course he continued "If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing." But you know, better half right than dead wrong.

    https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/chuck_yeager_598656

    1308:

    Heteromeles @ 1260:

    So the key question is, what mission is a stealthy rotor-craft to fly?

    Well, the failed attempt to rescue the hostages from Iran comes to mind, along with missions like the raid to kill bin Laden ... any mission where the likely hood of success is enhanced by being able to sneak in and out.

    In fact it appears the U.S. has already developed "stealth" (both acoustic & radar stealth) versions of both the UH-60 Blackhawk and the CH-47 Chinook. One thing THEY still haven't managed is to develop a "stealth" replacement for the C-130.

    1309:

    ChatGPT also reliably suggested 'Thumper' as the name of the hero rabbit whenever there was a named rabbit in the various plots I asked for. I think that's it being a mashup of common cultural tropes, and shows how strong the strong Disney cultural influence is.

    (Thumper is a rabbit from Bambi, if anyone has avoided Disney culture for the last 50 years)

    I don't think a real author would use that name - they'd know legal would say "don't risk a fight with Disney when you don't need to".

    And I can't imagine a Pete Abrams, author of Sluggy Freelance, would write a game about rabbits that did not feature Bun-Bun as a hero, anti-hero, or just general agent of chaos.

    1310:

    Howard NYC wrote on February 21, 2023 at 14:29 in #1256:

    Water is life.
    {snip}

    Yep. Right now watching France24, the English-language French state news channel, discussing record drought in France.

    Food is life.
    {snip}

    Just consider how wheat intended for New Mexico is not well bred for enduring deep freeze of Wisconsin winters nor overcast skies of Oregon.

    FYI, Oregon's wheat country is over on the dry side, east of the Cascade Mountains, which is much more like The Land Of Enchantment than you realize, and ain't overcast like you think. Forex, farm town (some, not all, of those farms being server farms) Prineville gets 204 days of sunshine yearly, very much unlike Portland and the rest of the Willamette Valley and the coast.

    1311:

    Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 1249:

    Speaking of advanced aircraft designs like the tiltrotor, what would it take to create the ornithopters seen in Dune, the dragonfly-like craft shown in the recent movie?

    I think (not being an engineer of this type, though, so just guesswork) that the stresses in flapping wings get quite high the bigger the wings are. So I'm not sure if we even have the materials to build large enough flapping wings which worked, too.

    Also I think the air behaves differently on the scales involved - especially if you compare dragonflies and helicopters. At the dragonfly scales air probably seems more viscous (square-cube law probably) so you can't just scale them up thousands of times.

    From stuff I've read on-line it seems like DARPA has funded the development of insect size ornithopter drones - advantage of VISUAL stealth in addition to acoustic or radar deflecting stealth - it looks like an insect instead of a tiny helicopter (quad copter) and people are more likely to see what they EXPECT to see rather than what might actually be there.

    Also from my reading "square-cube law" is a BIG FACTOR when it comes to scaling up.

    1312:

    Charlie Stross @ 1263:

    Acoustically stealthy helicopters are currently a big research area: an early one crashed during the Bin Laden kill mission, there are photographs of the wreckage on the internet.

    Radar stealth for choppers is harder, but they mostly deal with radar by flying low enough to lose themselves in ground clutter, and at night when there are enemy air defenses about. Attack choppers are a dangerous prey for fighters to stalk: they have bloody big guns, can carry AAMs, and because air combat is all about turning and they've got insane slew rates they can turn to target a fighter really fast. As one F-16 pilot put it, engaging an attack helicopter is like attacking a flak battery than can fly sideways at 200mph.

    (Conversely, a helicopter that tries to engage a fighter on its home turf -- speed and altitude -- is dead meat, of course.)

    Back around 1984 or so, my National Guard unit was selected to be the first National Guard/Reserve unit to field the AH-64 Apache. Shortly after that Bell Helicopter came around with a "demonstrator" aircraft (206L LongRanger - stretched JetRanger) with a new rigid rotor system they were developing for the Army's OH-58D Scout Helicopter, which was slated to be the companion to the AH-64. They offered anyone (in the unit) who wanted to could take a demonstration flight.

    Part of the demonstration included a bit of NEGATIVE G; i.e. we lucky few who got to take our rides BEFORE LUNCH had a bit more fun than those who flew later.

    THE OTHER THING THEY BROUGHT WITH THEM WERE FILMS - films of tests the Army & Air Force had done for helicopter air combat (AH-1 Cobra vs a larger, agile helicopter that simulated the Mil Mi-24 HIND [Air Force HH-3 Jolly Green Giant IIRC]) developing tactical maneuvers for helicopter vs helicopter.

    They told us there were also films of helicopter vs fixed wing (AH-1 vs F4 & F15) engagements, but the Air Force had classified them DEEP because the helicopter had been so devastating to high speed fixed wing aircraft, winning ALL of the test engagements except for one against an A-10 Warthog (who lost the other 9).

    The Air Force pilots were briefed there was a helicopter operating somewhere within the target box & to go kill it.

    Helicopter pilots DO NOT engage fighters on their home turf ... at least the ones who want to survive don't. They hover down between the trees in the smallest clearing they can find, hugging the terrain and wait for the fast mover to fly past so they can pop up and shoot it in the ass.

    What I'm waiting for is for optical sensors and projectors and fast image processors that can use the rotor disk. A synthetic aperture camera 10 metres in diameter -- the helicopter rotor disk as retina -- would make radar stealth redundant. Or you could project an image of the terrain below the chopper on top of the rotors so that when it's hovering at treetop height it's simply invisible from above. Add the ability to launch UAVs (something the V-280 is being sold on) and a next generation attack tiltrotor becomes something quite terrifying on the battlefield. Think "A-10 Warthog, only it can slow to a hover, is literally invisible from some angles, can image a bee-sized insect at twenty kilometres, and carries kamikaze drone swarms as well as guns and beyond visual range missiles".

    I'm still not convinced tilt-rotors are the best solution. They may have greater range in horizontal flight, but they give that up if they have to fly NOE (Nap-Of-the-Earth) where helicopters excel.

    What's wanted for the A-10 Warthog role is a better A-10 - maybe find a way to give the A-10 the VTOL capabilities of an AV-8B Harrier jump jet, but I don't think tilt-rotors are the best way to do that.

    1313:

    An acoustic stealth chinook? Now that I’d like to (not) hear. Completely in violation of the Lore A) never try to sneak up on anyone in a chinook. B) No, really, never try to sneak up on anyone in a chinook.

    1314:

    David L @ 1267:

    The F-16 comment may be wrong. It was 40 years ago and I'm not sure exactly what model I saw or was being worked on in the plant.

    Might have been the Navy's F/A-18. The plant at Lambert field belonged to McDonnell Douglas and I'm pretty that was where McDonnell Douglas manufactured the F-15.

    But the F/A-18 was a joint design from Northrop & McDonnell Douglas based on Northrop's YF-17 prototype that lost out to General Dynamics YF-16

    ... and THAT aircraft might also could been built at Lambert Field.

    1315:

    Pigeon @ 1269:

    "Or you could project an image of the terrain below the chopper on top of the rotors so that when it's hovering at treetop height it's simply invisible from above."

    Wouldn't work: the rotor disc is not opaque. You'd see the body of the helicopter as clearly as you usually can. Even if it did work a bit you've still got the parallax error, and also all the treetops blowing about.

    Regarding the Rotodyne, maybe it was a slightly daft idea, but the "sales pitch" was being promulgated by numberless SF authors of the period...

    It might could fool the Mark 1 Eyeball the same way TV works using the brain's "persistence of vision" to assemble the image.

    1316:

    No - that's what it's supposed to do, but it wouldn't; the effect basically works the other way. Consider looking down through the rotor disc of an ordinary helicopter from above: the stuff on the other side of the disc looks a bit sort of faded, but it's still clearly visible; it's the same as looking through the blades of any rotating fan with non-overlapping blades, only more so than most because helicopter blades are so narrow. You can still see the body of the helicopter quite clearly. So you could still see it quite clearly no matter what was painted on top of the blades, even if it was done in moving paint. For the blades to register more significantly than what was behind them they would have to be emitting enough light to compensate for the smallness of the impression their narrowness and speed causes them to create, so you could create a lit-up image that would make it hard to see what kind of helicopter it was, but the illumination would make it a whole lot more conspicuous in the first place.

    1317:

    An acoustic stealth chinook? Now that I’d like to (not) hear. Completely in violation of the Lore A) never try to sneak up on anyone in a chinook. B) No, really, never try to sneak up on anyone in a chinook.

    There's an old article about one of the Chinook MH-47 helicopters used in the Bin Laden raid and subsequently named "The Fish Food Express" for reasons explained in the article: https://deepbluehorizon.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-fish-food-express-and-other-secret.html

    Not acoustically stealthy. More of a stuff hauler, and during the raid it landed in a gully well away from the city, there in case stuff went wrong, as it kind of did.

    The article also talks about more stealthy copters and how the raid worked.

    Of course, there's also Wikipedia for the discerning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_helicopter

    1318:

    A stealth helicopter? No, I’m just not seeing it. :-)

    1319:

    1306 - make that "be anywhere inside the XV-2's debris field".

    1310 Para 4 - John Ringo has made references to Bun-Bun in the Legacy of the Aldenata series, notably in volume 3, "When the Devil Dances".

    1313 - OTOH the Westland Lynx first flew in 1971, was in full service by '77 and holds the FIA's official record as "fastest helicopter". So Bell knew a negative-G helicopter could be done...

    1314 - No, really, never, ever try and sneak up on anyone whilst flying in a Chinook. The first time I ever saw one I was driving myself to work, so more attention on road than sky, radio on, and I heard the Wokka-wokka from 2 km away then traced the noise back to the airframe over car and ICE sounds. At this point, if I'd been in a tracked Rapier platform he was inside my "no escape" zone. 1318 has been noted in this context.

    1316 - Or not, the same way you see a horse-drawn carriage with spoked wheels going forwards with the wheels appearing to revolve backwards in film from certain eras.

    1320:

    here's an amusing rant 'n rage about various tweaks upon housing solutions... after we are done shredding and deep-frying office tower conversions into SROs as bottom-most tier for single adult housing then could we get snarking on the 'tiny home' movement?

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/21/landlords-are-rebranded-as-house-hackers-and-capitalism-is-sanitised-once-again

    1323:

    My attention was just drawn to a Spy Balloon Simulator which is on the crude side but interesting to play with to see what might float where and how long it would take.

    For example, a balloon released in Edinburgh could float over Scandinavia and thousands of miles of Russian nothing before getting lost near the Aleutian Islands.

    I'm sure this isn't the only spy balloon simulator on the internet; if you've seen a better one please feel welcome to share it with us.

    1324:

    Re. the religious nutcase running for SNP offical foolleader ...
    If anyone has seen the original-&-classic film Whisky Galore!) the portrayal of the strict self-binding imposed by lunatic Prebyterianism on some of the islanders is a good ilustration of just how bad it was & is.
    Oh, yes - Pass the idiot pills! - if it goes on like this I'm going to wet myself laughing.

    1325:

    From stuff I've read on-line it seems like DARPA has funded the development of insect size ornithopter drones - advantage of VISUAL stealth in addition to acoustic or radar deflecting stealth - it looks like an insect instead of a tiny helicopter (quad copter) and people are more likely to see what they EXPECT to see rather than what might actually be there.

    Yeah, insect and bird sized ornithopters I can see working fine. Doing something to replace helicopters, perhaps not so much.

    One additional hindrance for large ornithopters came to my mind: the amount of moving parts, and especially moving parts which move in multiple ways. You want to be able to do different kinds of flying (at least take-off, cruise flight, and landing) and I'd suspect the wings and flapping would be different for each.

    Efficiency might also be a factor.

    1326:

    Here is a lovely Australian example of multiple occupancy housing available for sale now:

    https://www.domain.com.au/51-kauri-parade-seacliff-sa-5049-2018340601

    Legal? I doubt it, but 19 bedrooms at $185/room is a nice little earner. Something for every slum landlord to aspire to.

    1327:

    In a burrow on Arrakis there lived a rabbit named Thumper. She could call sandworms.

    1328:

    Actually, the problem is a lot older, and doesn't apply to just URLs. It's because (a) the authors of specifications were thoroughly sloppy and (b) because the programs using them didn't even diagnose incorrect usages. The result was easily predictable.

    1329:

    Enough of anything will keep anything from leaking, but I doubt that's the point. Helium is non-reactive - hydrogen isn't, and reacts with all sorts of chemicals in all sorts of ways.

    1330:

    FYI, Oregon's wheat country is over on the dry side, east of the Cascade Mountains, which is much more like The Land Of Enchantment than you realize, and ain't overcast like you think. Forex, farm town (some, not all, of those farms being server farms) Prineville gets 204 days of sunshine yearly, very much unlike Portland and the rest of the Willamette Valley and the coast.

    "Yes, and..."

    The Willamette Valley is a different breadbasket region in Oregon. This is close to home for me, as when I was small my grandparents ran Sanford Seed Company and supplied farmers in our corner of Willamette Valley; they closed up shop and retired before I was old enough to take an interest in the details of business. It would take a lot of climate change before the Willamette Valley couldn't grow anything but there could be a lot of variability in what's profitable.

    Hops for beer should remain popular, so let's hope they're still easy to grow. Christmas trees are a niche product but they grow well in the surrounding hills; some varieties of wine grapes do too. It does give me hope for the region that it's never had vast swathes of monoculture crops and that any drive through a rural area will go past many different crops.

    1331:

    These two stories popped into my newsfeed this morning:

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/22/microsoft_chatgpt_robots/

    Yes, robots with a chat interface? What could that go wrong?

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/22/us_navy_autonomous_ship/

    All Spearhead-class vessels include the Australian multinational's machinery control systems (MCS), which "allow the ship to be minimally manned by centralizing machinery operations to the bridge." However, this one – USNS Apalachicola (EPF-13) – is the first craft to be fitted with automated maintenance, health monitoring and mission readiness software that will enable it to conduct "up to 30 days of operation without human intervention," Austal announced. With a hull length of 103 meters (337 feet), Apalachicola will be the US Navy's largest-ever autonomous craft. Spearhead-class vessels have a maximum speed of 40 knots, a maximum payload capacity of 544 metric tons, and a draft of just 3.8 meters (12.5 feet) – meaning it's also fast and can operate in quite shallow waters for its size.

    Ok, nothing unusual there, but given recent V-22 talk, this part caught my attention:

    EPF-13 will also be the first Spearhead-class ship to include support for V-22 vertical takeoff and landing flight operations as well as launch and recovery of rigid hull inflatable boats 11 meters long.

    So of course my imagination is linking all these things up and asking, "Surely there's a story in that?" Thankfully, I'm not a writer - my muse tends more toward code than fiction - but even so. I now have a itch that wants scratching. I don't actually want story ideas. This is a different kind of entertainment. A regular RISKS-style yikes!

    All I've got is an autonomous (or semi-autonomous) ship with a ChatGPT interface and some impressive strike capabilities. Obviously this would be a disaster, like the USS Yorktown but with more comic potential. Also, more destructive potential. Nevermind far greater embarrassment.

    BTW, thanks for all the helicopter chat. I used to live next to an RAF helicopter pilot, but I was always at school when he buzzed his house to let his wife know when he was coming home for lunch. However, I did get to see and hear Lightnings and Phantoms flying overhead. Some of the joys of being an 8yo living near an RAF airbase in the 70s.

    1332:

    Some of the joys of being an 8yo living near an RAF airbase in the 70s.

    Growing up under a 2 hour drive from Ft. Campbell (101st Airborne) we occasionally got flyovers of the planes carrying troops on paratrooper practice. I suspect under 1000 ft as we could see the window panes in the front and other details on the planes.

    With a SAC bomber base a few hours drive west we'd occasionally get formations flying over way up. Saw a few Hustlers at times.

    Then there was the time my cousin flew his naval trainer (big prop job) over our neighborhood at well under 500 ft. I'm sure he broke a few regulations. My grandfather and his 3 sons all lives within a 1/2 mile of each other.

    All in the first half of the 60s.

    1333:

    Re: Autonomous Naval SHips

    The US Navy is finding that it doesn't work. At least not at this time. Because when something does break (and something on a big ship is always breaking) the crew can't do much about it way too often. So the ship has to get to a port and private contractors brought it to fix the issue. Which can take a while if it is not something on a previous contract. So while reducing manning requirements for a single ship. Said ships are on station much less time than before.

    1334:

    Here's an article to give Greg Tingey a warm fuzzy feeling. Or something.

    The Mormon Church was just fined five million dollars for hiding thirty-two billion dollars in assets behind shell companies ( https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/mormon-church-multibillion-investment-fund-sec-settlement-rcna71603 ). One commenter wondered if the fine even covered the cost of investigation.

    A couple of years ago, I did a bit of googling and found that the Mormon Church's known assets were larger than the Catholic Church's known assets. Wonder which church has more tucked away where only the, erm, angels can see it?

    1335:

    It is a little weird putting autonomous functions in a shallow-draft expeditionary ship. The things have a draft of ca. 4 meters, a helicopter pad big enough to land a V-22 on, and a ramp capable of launching medium-sized inflatables. It's sort of a mesoscale assault carrier, designed to get a platoon or maybe a company onto a beach somewhere as part of an expeditionary force. I'm not sure what the automation is supposed to do: get survivors to safety after the bridge gets blown up? Get the ship across the Pacific without having a massively seasick crew due to its shallow draft (crew arrives later on when the worst is over???). I'm to much of a civilian to get the functionality of this, obviously.

    1336:
    With a SAC bomber base a few hours drive west we'd occasionally get formations flying over way up. Saw a few Hustlers at times.

    Yeah, we got formations too. I once saw a delta formation of Phantoms fly over, quite low considering the population (rural Scotland). Lots of villages all over. That was also a joy for a city kid like myself. The planes were just a bonus.

    I got to see some fun airshows after my family returned to London. The highlight of one show was an F-15 making a vertial exit - a grey plane disappearing into grey clouds. Other highlights included a B-17 buzzing us as we arrived and a Tornado buzzing us as we left. Cars were moving slowly enough for the latter to make several passes. Quite loud, esp approaching from behind a hill. I wasn't suprised by the last pass as I'd counted the seconds between passes.

    Far superior to the "open day" at the airbase. No planes in sight, just a near-empty hanger. That taught me a lesson about military definitions of "open". Less than a decade later, I was studying books with photos and schematics of aircraft, and realising how little I could trust those details. Esp when all the pics and schematics of Soviet aircraft were so blurry and vague.

    All these lessons paid off during the 80s, as various events unfolded. Friends might be studying the news, but I was thinking, "We'll know nothing for years. I'll wait for the historians to tell us what was going on years from now." That began in the 90s, of course. I began learning about Cold War history from 30 years earlier, like what really was going on during the Cuban missile crisis. Another 3 decades later, even more details have been revealed.

    So I still find it hard to get excited or worried about current events. There are many differences today, of course. It's so much harder to keep secrets about military activies, as has been discussed on this blog many times, but we can be sure we're far from seeing it all.

    There's also the misinformation angle. New tools and techniques exist, but the game is still an old one.

    1337:

    Seasickness, due to shallow draft? So, you're suggesting it should have a lowerable keel?

    1338:

    I'm not sure what the automation is supposed to do:

    Naval personnel are getting hard to recruit and retain in the all volunteer armed forces of the US.I've read of re-up bonuses of over $100K for lower ranks for a while now.

    Which makes all the Trumpish talk of a 350 (or more) ship navy a bit wacky. Unless they are to be fully autonomous and self repairing. Check Roger.

    1339:

    Far superior to the "open day" at the airbase.

    5 or a bit more years ago I went to a Commemorative Air Force event at Love Field in Dallas. We were on the other side of the runways from the regular passenger operations. There was a B17, B25, B24, and P51. It was LOUD when the all fired up for the last flight of the day.

    My ex naval pilot / airline pilot friend commented: "I wonder if we start walking across the runways how far we'd get?". To visit the CAF planes we were part of a decent crowd of folks inside the security fence.

    1340:
    It's so much harder to keep secrets about military activies

    I mean it's easier now to see the "ground truth" for ourselves. How much that really tells us is another matter.

    1334:

    The US Navy is finding that it doesn't work. At least not at this time.

    This is what I meant by my reference to the RISKS forum and USS Yorktown. Even with a full crew, tech can let us down in a big way. Obviously a reduced crew will make matters much worse, even when the vessel is much smaller.

    Heteromeles made some interesting points in 1336. (I mentioned the idea of a ChatGPT interface for a reason.) A seasick/disabled crew might be a good use-case, but how well would that work in practice? I'm thinking "I tell you three times: bug out." I don't believe you need or want ChatGPT for anything like that!

    So what are those MS folks doing? I recall they had some military dev stuff going on a few years ago. Or was that Google? Or both? I hope I'm just adding 2+2 and getting 11, but I won't be suprised to learn they're thinking about this too.

    1341:

    =+=+=+=

    Martin Rodgers:

    uhm... "make me a sandwich" tops my list of things a well-written prevent-fatal-error handler should trap for prior to obeying vaguely worded and unintended "assisted suicide" utterances

    =+=+=+=

    tee hee.... it is finally happening! FoxNews (aka: FauxNewz, Life Styles of the Sick 'n Fascist, Overly Paranoid Preppers Shopping Channel, Incel Rage Machine, etc) has been shown to be lying sacks of shit who knowingly repeated utter falsehoods for sake of leveraging rage for rating... the Dominion v. FoxNews lawsuit has a potential judgement as high as USD $1.6B (which is lots 'n lots in both euros and pounds)

    not enough to destroy FoxNews, but as an unexpected “cost of doing business” surely sharp enough of a hit to anger-worry-rouse those larger scale investors to demand executives be spanked, possibly one of them forced into early exit ("ritualistically sacrificed”)

    my favorite quote, Laurence Tribe: "I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues. Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model."

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/feb/20/fox-news-dominion-voting-systems-defamation-case-analysis

    =+=+=+=

    twenty minutes into the future of air support and air combat looks a bit like RPVs (semi-AI to do fiddly bits but humans very much in decision loop) providing one or more unique roles:

    1) retrieval of wounded

    2) resupply of consumables

    3) reusable with long term loitering for sustained recon

    4) statically positioned swarm for more-or-less permanent station keeping (PV skin to power electric motors)

    5) platform for deployment of expendable munitions including: conventional missiles (proven design and established Pentagon vendor); longer range 'cruise' missiles; one-time use RPVs/drones;

    6) carrier vessel for reusable smaller RPVs which are slower-cheaper-expendable but ought be retrieved for sake of cost containment if feasible

    7) carrier vessel for next gen 'slaughterbots' as surprise party (for those looking for nightmare fuel or inspiration for your novel about how WW3 will kick off with an unforgettable opening act or end-of-democracy as WSCNs cleanse the world of 'wrong people')

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

    =+=+=+=

    1342:

    Is it? Independent reporters are now almost unknown in conflict zones, and there is considerable evidence that at least the USA, Israel and Russia actively target them.

    Censorship and misinformation are ancient, probably no worse than in some previous eras, but the latter has definitely got worse in the UK over the past 50 years, not least because of one viewpoint's strangehold on almost all of our media.

    1343:

    Legal? I doubt it, but 19 bedrooms at $185/room is a nice little earner. Something for every slum landlord to aspire to.

    What makes you think it is not legal? And if it is not, how do you expect this to play out?

    1344:

    Forbes is generating quite the backlash today! Especially as the SNP rank and file (who get to vote on the leader) discover she's an anti-abortion nutter as well as a homophobe and TERF.

    How exactly did this nutcase become an SNP front-runner?

    1345:

    And what has induced her to decide to suddenly nuke her own career?

    1346:

    You didn't read the wikipedia page for the Spearhead class, did you?

    It's an abominably bad design for a warship. Mainly because it isn't one! It was originally designed to be an inter-island fast car ferry for Hawaii. Then local politics happened and the firm that built it went bankrupt. The Navy bought one and liked it enough to order a couple more to see if they could find a use for it -- it's dirt cheap by military procurement standards.

    Along the way they discovered that it's a wee bit wobbly above 10 knots and can't do much of anything above sea state 4, that is, in 1.5-2.5 metre waves: in sea state 5 it can only make 5 knots, and in worse conditions all it can do is station-keep. Also, its range is 1200 nautical miles (but I betcha it won't do that at full speed -- 43 knots).

    What it's good for is carrying 20-30 amphibious APCs to within a couple of miles of a coastline, from which they can swim to shore: or carrying 200-300 infantry, or maybe half a dozen Abrams tanks, and getting them ashore at a relatively austere port. So yes, it's basically a jolly big and fast landing craft. But the USMC already has LHDs an order of magnitude bigger, and LCAC hovercraft that are faster and able to come up a beach to deposit their armoured vehicles. (Yes, it has a longer range than an LCAC, but the combination of LCAC and big-ass Marine helicarrier is obviously better ... just, a lot more expensive so there are fewer of them.)

    It looks like the Littoral Combat Ship all over again.

    It's a solution in search of a problem and they've already got an array of better solutions.

    1347:

    How exactly did this nutcase become an SNP front-runner?

    She's not a front-runner.

    SNP leadership candidates throw their hat in the ring, then campaign, and the members get to vote on them.

    Forbes was first to put herself forward, and the Unionist (anti-SNP) press is pushing for her hard because they know damn well she'd split the SNP right down the middle if elected, and they agree that this is a desirable goal.

    For purposes of "Unionist press" the Guardian is as much a component as the Daily Mail -- they're all opposed to Scottish independence, and while the Graun is broadly pro-Labour, Labour are just as bitterly opposed to the SNP as the Tories.

    So you're seeing lots of coverage of Forbes, and lots of enthusiasm for her among people who maliciously desire a bad outcome for the SNP (and don't care if it's also ultimately bad for the people of Scotland), because they're mostly London based Tory or Labour propagandists.

    But the headlines don't translate into actual enthusiasm among the SNP rank and file, or the Scottish population at large. In fact, she's pretty much the SNP equivalent of Liz Truss, if Liz Truss was widely despised by maybe 80% of her own party right from the start of her leadership campaign.

    To answer Pigeon's question I think she's doubling down on her position (as Candidate for Gillead-on-the-Firth) because she'd already gone too far in pushing the Free Church line and saw no point in backing off at this point: she made an early mistake, then decided to try and push through in case there are more tartan tories left in the party than appears to be the case (after Alba flounced and Sturgeon spent a decade consolidating the left-liberal wing's gains). She's got nothing to lose and lots of coverage for her own faction, so from her point of view, why not?

    1348:

    Charlie Stross:

    as you pointed out, the concept of a VTOL commuter aircraft is not the problem, it's the possible "failure modes"...

    here in New York there's a lust-n-loathe relationship with helicopters... lots 'n lots of folk want to have the use of them to get to the airports faster (ditto second homes on shorefront and semi-isolated gated communities) so there are a number of rooftop helipads...

    problem -- repeated problem -- being whooooopsies as helicopters turn into industrial scaled corpse shredders...

    so there's been chatter about building platforms of seawater tolerant concrete down south of New York Battery Park (just north of Governor's Island, west of the bridges) for landing strips capable of accepting short takeoff and landing aircraft... either a modified "executive flying brothel" (what the sales force calls their latest 'n greatest Gulfstream 5 when there nobody too close to overhear) or an enhanced-for-upmarket passengers military jet... really appeals to a certain crowd, having a private airport only accessible via boat and annual corporate membership dues of USD$5,000,000...

    understandably this sort of elite mode of private transportation -- noise, grease, fumes, etc -- would look bad if politicians signed off... but there are those still dreaming of building it...

    1349:

    We're probably going to end up with Humza Yousaf as First Minister unless John Swinney says "fuck it" and throws his hat in the ring, but Swinney is going to turn 59 before the vote is held, which makes him a bit old for a new leader: also he's had a long run as deputy leader.

    Yousaf, despite wikipedia headlining with him being muslim, and his voting record is generally progressive and socially liberal: he's made a few missteps, but then, he's only 37 (which by leadership standards is young).

    What interests me is whether at some point in the next couple of years Mhairi Black stands down from Westminster and pops up on the SNP party list before the next election. If the election runs to schedule (mid-2015) she'd be 31 and a natural pick for a junior ministerial appointment if they want to fast-track her for the leadership by 2030. In which case, expect fireworks: the current SNP front bench don't hold any obvious stand-outs like Sturgeon, but Black has potential. (She's the record holder as the youngest MP to gain election to Westminster since the Great Reform of 1832.)

    1350:

    Then local politics happened and the firm that built it went bankrupt.

    Thanks for that background.

    A few weeks ago I was talking to someone about Hawaiian environmental politics, and holy...

    Oh wait a minute, this is a UK blog. Got to watch what I write.

    ...anyway, things can get messy in a hurry, even compared with what I'm used to in California. Since they are the currently the extinction and invasive species capitals of the US, so I don't blame them for caring. But that's where the, erm, complexities start, rather than stopping.

    Anyway, an unarmored car ferry turned into USMC assault vehicle. Sigh. They'd do better to rig it as a Q-ship, not that those work particularly well anymore.

    1351:

    Mhari, huh? And does she have some, ah, special relationship with a Certain Undead Ruler?

    1352:

    The origin of the problem is as EC says. The RFC about URL validity goes on and on and on, is badly written, vague and hard to understand, and I'm not even sure it's either complete or unambiguous (its other characteristics having put me off going too deeply into it). Nobody has written a regex or a library function for testing whether or not a string is a valid URL (not that's remotely complete enough to count, at least) - if it's even possible - and far too many writers of code that handles URLs have done the usual thing of trying to "be helpful" and achieving the opposite, by each allowing their own personal set of abortions which definitely do violate the standard to be considered valid by their own code "so people don't keep getting errors" without consideration of what anyone else's code will make of it. And on and on along the same lines.

    Because of all this, the situation very rapidly became a horrible mess, in which the sensible thing for any generator of URLs to do is to be as cautious as possible and avoid using any character that does not match [A-Za-z0-9._-] in any part of the URLs generated.

    This was definitely true by the time wikipedia started up, and they should have bloody well known it. Instead, they made themselves from the beginning a prolific source of fragile URLs, by refusing for some dumb-arsed ideological reason to exclude basically anything apart from ampersands and question marks. Wikipedia URLs breaking at the brackets or other weird characters they contain is not by any means a problem limited to Markdown. They are even quite happy to generate URLs containing characters that aren't ASCII at all, which is definitely wrong, such as those stupid fucking mdash and ndash things which are especially annoying because in a monospace font as used by debuggers and the like you can't even see what's unusual about it.

    It's true that in this particular instance the problem shows up through the creators of Markdown not correctly specifying how to handle links. They didn't noticeably specify correctly how to handle anything - the whole thing is a conglomeration of invalid assumptions and failures to handle all sorts of not-uncommon cases which didn't happen to occur to them when they knocked it together. But it's only one of many bits of software which break because wikipedia made a wrong decision back before they were written. Wikipedia set up the conditions for failure in the first place by assuming universal robustness against invalid URLs in anything that might have to handle them, despite that not being remotely the case at the time and there being absolutely no reason to expect it might ever become the case.

    1353:

    I was refering to "open source intelligence" but forgot to make that clear. Thanks, now sorted.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

    1354:

    Those specifications don't strike me as "good" for a fast ferry, never mind a warship.

    The then Condor Express was explicitly designed as a fast ferry between the English South Coast, Guernsey and Jersey, and France.

    1355:

    Wikipedia set up the conditions for failure

    Just a reminder that the original wikipedia link was broken because it started with en.wikipedia.org instead of commons.wikimedia.org, the gibberish afterwards was the same for both.

    So the complaint is more "why can't I read OGH's blog at www.bbc.com" than "the bad mans mangled my URL".

    1356:

    The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) has advised that Pfizer's bivalent BA.4/5 booster can be used in all people aged 12 years and over.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2023-02-22/new-pfizer-bivalent-covid-vaccine-available-march/101999092

    Now all we need are supplies of the thing... I'm kind of hanging out.

    1357:

    David L @ 1333:

    Some of the joys of being an 8yo living near an RAF airbase in the 70s.

    Growing up under a 2 hour drive from Ft. Campbell (101st Airborne) we occasionally got flyovers of the planes carrying troops on paratrooper practice. I suspect under 1000 ft as we could see the window panes in the front and other details on the planes.

    With a SAC bomber base a few hours drive west we'd occasionally get formations flying over way up. Saw a few Hustlers at times.

    Then there was the time my cousin flew his naval trainer (big prop job) over our neighborhood at well under 500 ft. I'm sure he broke a few regulations. My grandfather and his 3 sons all lives within a 1/2 mile of each other.

    All in the first half of the 60s.

    Mid-50s to mid-60s here (age 5 to 15) ...

    The Air Force used to do fly-overs all over the state on Memorial Day (back when Memorial day was May 30 instead of the last Monday in May).

    It varied from year to year, but there were always ...
    • Formations of fighters - piston engine (some Air Force Reserve & Air National Guard units still flew piston engine fighters well into the 60s) & jets
    • Cargo aircraft (C-119 Flying Boxcars & C-97 Stratofreighter)
    • & Bombers (B-47s & B-52s from Seymour Johnson AFB in Goldsboro - an hour or so east of Raleigh on Highway 70).

    The newspaper would publish a timetable of when to expect the fly-over in YOUR community, but you really didn't need it. Even SMALL formations of large aircraft generated a significant "round engine music" to let you know when it was time to go out and look to the skies.

    Going to the beach was always a treat because the runway threshold is only about a mile west of the intersection between US 70 and NC 111 and if you were stopped at the light there was a good chance of catching a B-52 on final (and/or heading out at takeoff power if the wind was blowing the other way) and VERY LOW so you got a good look at it as it came over. I mean a rattle the windows & doors "good look".

    The B-58 Hustler wasn't stationed at Seymour Johnson, so I don't ever remember seeing one there.

    In 1958 I became a Cub Scout, which included annual Scout Jamborees hosted by the Army at Ft. Bragg - over night on a summer weekend with static displays and aerial demonstrations.

    And then when I was in the National Guard, we always had equipment (usually including a helicopter or two) on static display for the North Carolina State Fair.

    1358:

    paws4thot @ 1355:

    Those specifications don't strike me as "good" for a fast ferry, never mind a warship.

    Maybe that's why the company building it as a fast ferry went bankrupt?

    1359:

    "Swinney is going to turn 59 before the vote is held, which makes him a bit old for a new leader"

    Hmm. Here in NZ we just had 42-year-old PM Jacinda Ardern retire from being PM, replaced by 44-year old Chris Hipkins. Seems reasonable to me - people in their 40s and 50s.

    Meanwhile Biden will likely run for president again next year at age 82, likely vs Trump who'll be 77. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is 81, Bernie Sanders is 81... US news is when a senator like Feinstein finally announces her retirement at 89.

    1360:

    My understanding was that the Rotodyne was only excessively noisy at takeoff and landing because the rotors were unpowered during forward flight. My only helicopter flight from Penzance to the Isles of Scilly was deafening. The crew wore ear protection but none was available to passengers. Verbal communication between passengers was impossible. Fairey/Westland claimed to have reduced the takeoff and landing noise dramatically. Fairey was always badly treated by governments. The Farey Delta 2 was bypassed as an RAF fighter. Fairey got more support from the French for the World speed record in the FD2. The airspeed record was carried out over France because the UK government insisted on insurance and British insurance companies quoted ridiculously high rates. Marcel Dassault said the without the FD2 there would have been no Mirage fighter.

    1361:

    Howard NYC
    So .. you are saying New York (city) needs an LCY ??

    1362:

    They closed down Miegs Field in downtown Chicago years ago.

    1363:

    OMG -- an undead Bun-Bun??? Doesn't bear thinking about really!

    1364:

    Looking into it a bit further, it was a retirement/nursing home in the '80s (imagine warehousing you elder in that: storing granny in a backyard shed!), then used for student accommodation. It was probably legal originally and stayed OK under grandfather rules but the previous owner is now deceased and her heirs have changed its classification from commercial to residential, and I don't think that kind of multiple occupancy would meet residential requirements (too few kitchens and bathrooms) or fire regulations. It is in a beach suburb, on a large block with a wide frontage, probably it would be demolished and several new and expensive houses built instead.

    1365:

    The B-58 Hustler wasn't stationed at Seymour Johnson, so I don't ever remember seeing one there.

    The ones I saw were always high up but what other plane was a full delta with 4 engines leaving a contrail.

    The contrails were how we spotted various planes. You'd see a straight line(s) in the sky and look at the tip.

    1366:

    Something that came up in another forum Swatting raised some questions I thought y'all could maybe answer.

    In 2021 a Tennessee man was a victim of a swatting prank, had a massive heart attack and DIED.

    One of the swatters involved, Shane Sonderman, was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison. Authorities said Sonderman was a minor at the time of Herring's death but turned 18 after his arrest. He was charged as an adult with wire fraud/conspiracy, interstate communication of threats, false information and hoaxes, and conspiracy.
    In March, he agreed to plead guilty to the conspiracy charge in exchange for the other charges being dropped.
    His co-conspirator is a minor from the United Kingdom, according to court documents, which do not name the person. The co-conspirator was not extradited to the U.S. for charges.

    So questions ...

    Would the U.K. prosecute the co-conspirator for his role in causing this man's death?

    Sonderman targeted at least five people across the country, demanding they give up their social media handles, according to an indictment. Herring was the only victim who died.
    If the person surrendered the handle, Sonderman would then put it up for sale on internet forums, the indictment stated. If they refused, Sonderman and his co-conspirator would "bombard the owner with repeated phone calls and text messages" and harass them in an attempt to get them to change their mind, according to the indictment.
    Prosecutors said Sonderman and his co-conspirator would find addresses for their target and the target's family members and post the information online. The two would send food deliveries to the homes and would make "swatting" calls to police departments in their target's hometown.

    Can the victim's family sue the co-conspirator (or his parents if he's under the legal age of responsibility) in the U.K. for the Wrongful Death

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-man-targeted-his-twitter-handle-dies-after-swatting-call-n1274747?

    1367:

    No, not at all. I don't know why you think it was to do with the domain. The problem was that the correct en.wikipedia URL includes a substring within brackets, which the Markdown parser removes. Reinserting that missing substring converts the broken en.wikipedia URL to a working one, without touching the domain part at all.

    1368:

    Greg Tingey:

    I'm not sure what you intended me to look at on that link... but if you are suggesting NYC needs a synthetic island in New York Harbor as an airport much the Japanese have done... so long as it is not an elite only facility there's be enough interest by many New Yorkers in ignoring the environmental impact...

    personally my preference has always been there ought be tracks laid directly between city center and all three major airports with trains accommodating luggage trams so family groups (2 adults, 3 children, etc) could simply unload a taxi at various points in neighborhoods, load a rented tram, get on an elevator, shove the tram onto a train, ride twenty minutes, reach their terminal, and get to their flight with lessened hassles... and upon returning to NYC do it in reverse... okay... okay... stop laughing at me for being too optimistic...

    though such well designed elevators-trains-stations have as added benefit makes anyone in a wheelchair significantly more mobile...

    1369:

    For over a year I lived a bit 100 metres from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital helicopter landing pad. I was never heard a landing or takeoff when I was inside the house. It just had standard UK double glazing and insulation (built circa 2000).

    1370:

    "can't do much of anything above sea state 4, that is, in 1.5-2.5 metre waves: in sea state 5 it can only make 5 knots,"

    The local car ferry from where I am to the South Island typically runs in sea state 4 or 5 - it's 5 today - with tidal currents of 5 knots. So "abominably bad design for a warship" is putting it mildly...

    (The tides on the East and West coasts of NZ are almost exactly out of phase - so take our tidal currents seriously)

    1371:

    > It [N96MG] landed at Tampere-Pirkkala Airport...

    And was videoed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtiOKBA6ZP0

    Most interesting is the short segment starting at 2:33 that shows stuff being loaded or unloaded.

    1372:

    The Chinese spy balloon rides again! Or at least, now we've got a literal snapshot from a U2 that buzzed it. Note the four propellers:

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/our-best-look-yet-at-the-chinese-spy-balloons-massive-payload

    1373:

    https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/11/how-your-leds-are-killing-you/

    “Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness” is a study looking very specifically at “reading on an ereader” vs “reading a book” in the evening.

    Kind of disturbing, someone did a study directly comparing eink reader with books as discovered that the backlit ebook is bad.

    Study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1418490112

    1374:

    Confirmed by experiment that Pigeon is correct. Inserting the _(CVA-59) into the URL with the en.wikipedia.org domain works.

    JHomes.

    1375:

    I've never quite understood these studies. Both the eReader and the printed book are emitting photons, even if one case they're generated internally, and in the other case reflected. But this one seems poorly designed; the eReaders were at maximum brightness, while the paper book sessions used "reflective exposure to very dim light". Completely different light levels. And reading in very dim light is fatiguing in and of itself.

    1376:

    personally my preference has always been there ought be tracks laid directly between city center and all three major airports with trains accommodating luggage trams so family groups (2 adults, 3 children, etc) could simply unload a taxi at various points in neighborhoods, load a rented tram, get on an elevator, shove the tram onto a train, ride twenty minutes, reach their terminal, and get to their flight with lessened hassles... and upon returning to NYC do it in reverse... okay... okay... stop laughing at me for being too optimistic...

    Ding ding ding ding!!!!! We have a winner.

    To get from anywhere there's a subway stop in NYC to the major regional airport, LaGuardia, requires (or did last I had this fun) a subway ride, a bus ride, then a long block or few of walking or a Taxi/Uber/Lift. Now with Uber/Lift you can skip the bus ride bit but still. And when you exit the subway system it is find the right bus stop on the street. All with some luggage.

    Now at one point in the 80s you could get from the Times Square (I think) subway station to JFK on a direct ride for $5. I suspect the price has gone up, if the service still exists. And if you've never been in it the Times Square subway station is really a huge underground maze where 3 independent subway lines from 100 years ago were interconnected. Lots of up down turn here and there to get to a specific platform. Natives are used to it. Us visitors can be easily confused.

    1377:

    I missed that, 30 lux from the ebook vs 0.9 from the paper book is a huge difference. Who would guess that staring into a light would keep you more awake?

    From the study above: For the LE-eBook reading condition, the distance between the participant and the LE-eBook in the stand was adjusted (e.g., moved closer or farther) if the light reading measured outside of the range of 30–50 photopic lux in the angle of gaze so that the light measurement was maintained within range.

    1378:

    (ooops: the 30 vs 0.9 numbers come from "table 1" in the paper which is a few pages after the reference to it and those numbers only appear in the table as far as I could see)

    1379:

    Now at one point in the 80s you could get from the Times Square (I think) subway station to JFK on a direct ride for $5. I suspect the price has gone up, if the service still exists.

    Thanks to Tube enthusiast Geoff Marshall (and my inability to stop wasting time on Youtube) I now know the trick of moving between Heathrow and London without paying the special exploit-the-tourists fare. I have no use for this, being in the wrong hemisphere and disinclined to fly into Heathrow anyway.

    1380:

    Howard NYC
    Um - there wasn't a link (!)
    But "LCY" is London City Airport - which may or may not help you?
    It's on our "DLR" inner-city metro line & connects easily to what I call "CrossLiz" the new mainline-but-suburban cross-London Railway, which itself interchanges, in the middle with "Thameslink".
    So that Heathrow is on CrossLiz, Gatwick is on Thameslink & Stansted is train-change at "Liverpool St" from CrossLiz.
    More by luck than judgement, all our main airports are on regular rail services - even Luton (shudder) & Southend are on rail connections, too.

    1381:

    1361 - Points:- 1) Ear defence is essential in a helicopter; what the flight crew are wearing are headsets rather than mere ear defenders though.
    2) The FD-2 was a pure research type (cite given) so how do you justify your assertion that the type was " bypassed as an RAF fighter"?

    1366 - Contrails are an artifact of atmospheric conditions at the aircraft altitude. They can (not will) be generated by wing and/or tailplane tips as well as by engines. A B-58 could have 2, 4 or 6 trails, and a B-707 up to 8 (4 engines and 4 lifting surface tips). If existing in period, a DC-10 or a Lockheed-1011 could generate up to 7 (seven). I'm not aware of a BUFF ever having been observed with 12 (8 powerplants + 4 lifting surfaces) though.

    1371 - I'm a software engineer who's only interest in ferries is in reliability and travelling on them, and I could still spot issues with the cited "not very fast ferry".

    1374 - Question. Does an e-ink device actually contain LEDs in the reading display (rather than as status lights in the frame)?

    1382:

    "all our main airports are on regular rail services" - Perhaps you'd like to name some "main airports" rather than "Sarf-East regional airports" then. The only one I know if Prestwick International, where there are travelator links (~400 feet) between the airport concourse, the bus stops on the A77 and the Scotrail station "Prestwick International", and it took about 50 years plus replacing a Liebour government with an SNP one to even get that done.

    1383:

    ""all our main airports are on regular rail services" - Perhaps you'd like to name some "main airports" rather than "Sarf-East regional airports" then."

    Birmingham, Edinburgh, Prestwick

    1384:

    Is Prestwick still a "main" airport ? Its a lot less busy than top-10 airports Glasgow, Belfast, and Bristol ( none of which have a direct rail link ).

    1385:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_Requirement_F.155

    The proposed FD 3 and the proposed Saunders-Roe hybrid jet/rocket interceptor based on the SR53 were both contenders with export potential. The Lockheed scandal resulting in the sale of the Starfighter to most European air forces. Some F104G were actually made by Avions Fairey in Belgium. And you would expect a world record attempt by a British experimental aircraft to be supported by a British government.

    1386:

    paws
    And then the idiots abandoned Preswick for "Glasgow" - which becomes noticeable in winter .....
    Nick K I would strike Brummagem & substitute - Manchester - a proper city with a proper airport & it's own rail-&-tram station.

    1387:

    1384 - Despite the name, there is no railway station at Ratho Station, and no direct travel link from the township to Turnhouse.

    1386 - And? I already showed that the FD-2 was a prototype (some features used in Concorde) and you didn't mention it...

    1388:

    Round here we get a pair of RAF fighters practising their contour flying about once a month. They get to fly over sea, high ground, loch, BRIDGE, loch, high ground, low ground, high ground, all within a 30..35 mile stretch. If you look up as soon as you hear them, the second one will just be passing by.

    1389:

    Seems reasonable to me - people in their 40s and 50s.

    Acceptable age for political leaders varies between countries.

    Here in the UK Menzies Campbell assumed leadership of the Liberal Democrats at age 65 (in 2006) and was hounded out by a press campaign shouting that he was too old. To be fair, if he'd hung on until the 2010 election he'd have been 69 at the start of a new parliament, but even so the oldest prime minister I can remember was James Callaghan, who was 64 when he took office in 1976: every PM since then has been younger.

    (Compare to the USA where presidents are all septuagenarians. Weird.)

    1390:

    The US has had at least one centenarian Senator. There are currently some elected reps who are over 80 years old and a third of the Senate and a fifth of the House is over 70. Surprisingly the new class of 2023 has actually shifted the median age down a little from the previous Congress.

    1391:

    Edinburgh airport isn't.

    1392:

    Well sort of; you walk out of Haymarket station onto a tram, which runs on rails...

    1393:

    1387 - There is no such place as "Preswick". That aside, I did specifically say that "Prestwick International Airport" has co-linked bus and rail services.
    No-one (at least in Scotland) ever claimed that Willie Ross was anything other than an idiot.

    1392 and 93 - Arbee, are you saying that 7 miles, 20 minutes is "a direct connection"? By that argument the Glasgow Airport bus service is one too.

    New question and I don't know the answer. How did DRoss become leader of the Scottish Con Party?

    1394:

    Would the U.K. prosecute the co-conspirator for his role in causing this man's death?

    The Communications Act (2003), per the government's own advice, says: "Under s. 127(2)(c) CA 2003, a person may be guilty of an offence by persistently making use of a public communications network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another person."

    I'd say "caused so much anxiety the other person had a heart attack and died" is pretty clearly covered by s.127, which is regularly used to prosecute and jail trolls on social media.

    (UK legal systems don't use the misdemeanor/felony distinction employed in the US. They're all offences, although some are more serious than others.)

    The problems I can see would be the minor's age (although the age of criminal responsibility in England is quite low) and their degree of involvement. If they just let the swatter use their laptop as a VPN endpoint it could be really difficult to prove an s.127 offence, although other laws might apply.

    Also bear in mind the difficulty of liaising with foreign law enforcement and prosecutorial personnel in a radically different judicial system over what is essentially "he helped someone else make a malicious phone call, and the recipient then died of a heart attack".

    1395:

    now know the trick of moving between Heathrow and London without paying the special exploit-the-tourists fare.

    Lemme guess, catch the Piccadilly Line instead of the Heathrow Express?

    It works. It takes about 1h15m to get into Zone 1, though, whereas the express is about 15-20 minutes. Also they serve different main line stations, so where you go from there is, well ...

    NB: I last visited London in, uh, probably 2018? 2017? And I last went inside Zone 4 even longer ago. So my specific London lore is ancient.

    1396:

    There's a tram-rail interchange (Edinburgh Gateway) out on the ring-road that reduces the time to get from Edinburgh airport to a rail station. Saying that it only has train services covering the east of Scotland (Fife, Aberdeen etc.) as far as I can tell. Travellers wanting to go to Glasgow or places in England by train need to go into the city centre, to Haymarket or Waverley (which is not actually on the tram line).

    1397:

    Yes, reading in dim light is tiring, but reading in bed with a very dim light is much better for going to sleep. And few light-emitting E-readers go that low - but for that matter, nor do any commercially-available reading lights. I have moaned about that before ....

    1398:

    Haymarket is on the tram line, however (rather: there's a tram stop right outside it), and there's about a 100 metre walk from the St Andrew's Square tram stop to the Waverly Steps (big-ass escalator that you can ride down into the main line station, which is the terminus for a lot of trains to/from Englandshire).

    1399:

    I live in central London, near Mornington Crescent tube.

    Google Is suggesting using the Piccadilly Line or the Elizabeth Line, depending on which terminal you are going to or coming from. And the times you mention still check out.

    As I recall you can use the Heathrow Express to move between the terminal free of charge. It only charges you for the ride into London Paddington itself.

    1400:

    Mine is, too, but the claimed speed advantage for the Thiefrow Express isn't more than a fraction of what it is supposed to be, in practice. Not merely are there fewer trains, you end up at Paddington, which isn't just a rarely-wanted destination but also not a great place to start a tube journey to elsewhere from. Still, it's better than the one that landed you in Victoria!

    When I used to use that route (ugh), the overall time gain from Cambridge was 5-10 minutes.

    1401:

    (Compare to the USA where presidents are all septuagenarians. Weird.)

    Let's see: Obama was 48 when he took office. Bush II was 54. Clinton was 47...

    1402:

    For truly random giggles. Right now it's about 5oC here. I know, I know, pobrecito as they say. The interesting part is that there's actually a blizzard warning in the LOS ANGELES mountains and surrounding ranges until Saturday ( https://www.wunderground.com/weather/us/ca/mount-baldy ). First one I ever recall, although they do get snow.

    Just another reminder that the problem with climate change isn't that the average temperatures go up, it's that the extremes get more extreme. Instead of average rainfall every year, we now swing from drought to blizzards and floods and back.

    1403:

    And, in science (fiction) news, they're getting better estimates for the variables in the Drake Equation, and the estimates are high:

    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-many-alien-civilizations-are-out-there-new-galactic-survey-holds-clue

    1404:

    Every West Coast Main Line and some East Coast Main Line trains I've caught out of Edinburgh also stop at Haymarket. If you live on the west side of Edinburgh and need to travel to Englandshire, there's rarely a reason to have to go to Waverley (personally I much prefer Haymarket to the usual chaos and tourists at Waverley)

    1405:

    To which I say: Reagan, Bush I, Trump, Biden. And of course the various house leaders these days. 54 when taking office -- Bush II -- is about the age UK prime ministers seem to be leaving office these days.

    1406:

    Every West Coast Main Line and some East Coast Main Line trains I've caught out of Edinburgh also stop at Haymarket.

    Not if they're heading south, they don't!

    ECML trains to Aberdeen via Edinburgh will of course go via Waverley then Haymarket. And trains to Glasgow all go via Haymarket. But some of the ECML and cross-country services terminate at Waverley -- as their northernmost station.

    (Waverley has more amenities and waiting nooks if you happen to know it well and are aware of the shopping mall on top, or the rear exit and steps to the Halfway House on the way up to Cockburn Street: a marvelous wee little boozer in the old town, a five minute walk from the platforms.)

    1407:

    In Toronto for a long time to get to the main airport (Pearson) from downtown required either a taxi or a subway ride followed by a bus ride (and neither the subway nor buses are designed with luggage in mind). Eventually they built a direct line between Union Station (downtown) and Pearson, which is expensive but cheaper than a taxi (for singles). Getting to the airport from other than downtown via public transit is tedious.

    When I lived there Ottawa public transit connection to the airport was horrible. Local rumour said that the taxi industry did a lot of lobbying to keep it that way.

    In Vancouver they have the Canada Line, which has a branch going to the airport. Trains are designed with room for luggage. Fare is $8 leaving the airport, regular TransLink rates arriving. The only downside is that the Canada Line serves a lot of other destinations, so actually getting on a train heading to the airport can be problematical during rush hour (which lasts longer than an hour). I have actually taken a train heading the other way to the end of the line, just so I could be certain of a spot to get to the airport. (Did this after being unable to get on three trains in a row.)

    1408:

    Does an e-ink device actually contain LEDs in the reading display

    That's what's illuminating the display, if it has a light.

    My old Kobo had a light for reading at night, which was LEDs. I didn't use it much, partly because it really drained the battery (compared to just turning the page) and partly because I found it hard on my eyes — it was more restful to just use an external reading light. I had a small LED reading light that clipped to a book that fit the Kobo, so I used that.

    1409:

    Yes, reading in dim light is tiring, but reading in bed with a very dim light is much better for going to sleep.

    Indeed. I couldn't stay awake for four hours under those conditions. Well, maybe with the right book. Flashman At The Charge, perhaps.

    1410:

    We've just had six-plus inches of snow/ice pellets, with a forecast of freezing drizzle overnight while the temperature drops to -10, so lots of ice and too cold for it to melt.

    I''m off to shovel, at bit at least. See how much my knee lets me do before I have to call it quits. Looks like I'll be marooned inside for a couple of days. (Torn ligament and ice are not a good mix.)

    1411:

    Not if they're heading south, they don't!

    Oddly enough... For Novacon last year, my train down to Manchester Piccadilly from Edinburgh departed from Waverley station, as I expected. What I didn't expect was for it to stop at Haymarket. I had made great efforts to get up early and make my way into the city centre to Waverley station to catch the train which I could have caught from Haymarket station, just across the road from where I live.

    1412:

    To which I say: Reagan, Bush I, Trump, Biden. And of course the various house leaders these days. 54 when taking office -- Bush II -- is about the age UK prime ministers seem to be leaving office these days.

    You're right, but I suspect age is irrelevant until it isn't. I'm not fond of Biden's age, but even as old as he is, if he didn't so assiduously cultivate that Sleepy Joe persona, he'd be really scary. I mean, this is a guy who has the guts to walk around in Kyiv in broad daylight, within range of Russian forces, just to make a point. When you look at what he's getting done and who's willing to work with him and for him (most of his campaign opponents, for example), it really doesn't square with him being too old or too incompetent for the job.

    I'll believe age matters when I see someone like PM Sunak walking around in range of Russia.

    1413:

    Except for Obama (born 1961) and Bush II and Clinton, (born 1946, and taking office in 1992 and 2001 respectively.)

    I think to be accurate you'd have to say that the range of admissible ages in the U.S. is larger.

    1414:

    I''m off to shovel, at bit at least. See how much my knee lets me do before I have to call it quits. Looks like I'll be marooned inside for a couple of days. (Torn ligament and ice are not a good mix.)

    Yeah, don't be a hero out there. Hopefully you won't need a pickax to get the ice fractured.

    1415:

    I confess I use the WCML more than the ECML so fair enough...

    I stopped using the back entrance to Waverley after running into a "gentleman being pleasured" by a "lady of negotiable affection" on the Scotsmen Steps on a Sunday afternoon!

    1416:

    Um, er, flew out of/into JFK in '14 for Worldcon in the UK. Nice, easy - subway to stay at someone's, then go to hotel, and take the shuttle. Coming home, easy rail line to... was it Penn Station?

    1417:

    We just got dumped on by the same storm I think. A similar 6” or so . Bugger. I avoid digging it as much as possible by putting the car at the bottom of the (20+ degree, 700ft) driveway when it looks likely. Sliding sideways down that in a car is no fun at all. Fortunately almost everyone else around here has some ATV thing with a snow blade, so I can get cleared if needed!

    1418:

    Elizabeth Line is 35 minutes to Paddington vs 20 minutes for the Heathrow Express, frequency is every 30 minutes for the Lizzie vs every 15 for HRX (every 10 minutes for the Piccadilly).

    Lizzie line scores if your timing is right, you want decent Central London stops or you want onward travel east (Liverpool St, then either Stratford and on towards Essex or Whitechapel, Canary Wharf, LCY...)

    Picadilly wins on price expecially if you want excellent Central London coverage or connections at Kings-X/Euston for trains north, but slower.

    HRX is fastest to the western edge of zone 1 but it's the expensive ticket and needs onward connections for anywhere other than the immediate environs of Paddington (handy for the Frontline Club tho').

    1419:

    I'd have to say that the recent crop of UK Prime Ministers isn't much of an argument for the versatility of youth.

    1420:

    As Charlie has pointed out there is something to be said for a few years of seasoning to make sure your life experiences are varied enough. Charlie for writing fiction. PM's need to know the world more broadly than 3 years out of college.

    Of course staying in the bubble/echo chamber is hindering such experience these days.

    1421:

    when I see someone like PM Sunak walking around in range of Russia

    This do you?

    1422:

    silburn
    Err ... NO Eight trains an hour from Heathrow, via CrossLiz through central London

    1423:

    Does Putin still do topless photoshoots in the wilds of Siberia? Or has he realised how fucking silly he looked?

    1424:

    Right now it's about 5oC here

    I think we got each other's weather. Here in central NC it is around 26C. Which is 10 to 20 above normal.

    Want to swap?

    1425:

    I think East/West is a more useful binary pair for describing Waverley/Haymarket than North/South is. After all that's how the alignment actually runs. Everything heading west out of Waverley necessarily has to go through Haymarket, and AFAIK they all stop there because it would be a bit silly not to. Conversely, everything heading east out of Waverley can't go through Haymarket. So Haymarket is always a convenient option for Glasgow, Carlisle, Manchester and other places on the western side of the island, but probably calls for a change at Waverley if you are heading for Newcastle, Leeds etc. (I think quite a few services by that route did start from/end at Haymarket in times gone by, but few or none now.)

    1426:

    For getting from Paddington into central London it's worth remembering that it's less of a walk to Lancaster Gate station on the Central line than it is between main line and Underground platforms at some of the places where they are supposedly part of the same station.

    1427:

    Sorry, 5C to 10C above normal.

    1428:

    when I see someone like PM Sunak walking around in range of ...This do you?

    Yes it does, thank you!

    1429:

    David L :

    NYC does not have the oldest subsurface train system on the planet but what it does have is the distinction of being in the tightest geographic footprint of any major city, urban core being an island of 26 SQ miles... all we want is boredom on our daily commutes... whereas all anyone going to airports is certainty of getting there in time to crawl through security checkpoint to be wedged into seats too small onto an airplane likely to squat on the runway for two hours... there are not enough elevators nor are all of them large enough to move a tram heaped with luggage and one small child from the street level to platform and then onto train... doors too narrow, cars poorly laid out, and while there is now an extension of the rail to one airport there's still complaints about moving luggage from platform to surface due to too few elevators, too small, too slow... etc...

    I am so glad there no critical reason for me to endure SouthWest Sardine Cans (what they insist is an airline everyone considers as anything but) or any other monopoly-in-all-but-name airline

    1430:

    I just had the idea that most places in the south of England like Manchester were accessed from Edinburgh via the east coast line through Berwick hence they'd set off travelling east and not stop in Haymarket. My mistake.

    1431:

    Does an e-ink device actually contain LEDs in the reading display (rather than as status lights in the frame)?

    Yes, and some also have colour options, at least in the warm or cool "white" area. I couldn't find a red one. They all have an intensity control, but the ones I've had have all been linear (Kobo) so 1->2 is a big step but 99>100 is imperceptible. As with EC I find the lowest level to be annoyingly bright when I'm in a dark place. Also, my bedroom is very dark, especially by city standards. The LEDs on the wifi AP and solar system have tape over them to dim the light because otherwise they cast noticeable bright spots.

    The good news is that a cheap red LED "high stop light" that I bought has resistors to control the current and runs happily off as little as 5V, so it was easy to play with it when I bought it and add (IIRC) a 10Ω resistor to the circuit to make it a useful reading light. It also has a strip of masking tape over the LEDs as a diffuser. If I was using a wall wart I'd run it off 9V instead of the extra resistor but it runs off the 12V solar setup...

    1432:

    I suspect Heteromeles would rather have had the 300mm of rain that our South Coast got the other day. Or Auckland got. Preferably not overnight the way they got it, but beggars can't be choosers. Think of it as a chance to test your wind turbines :)

    1433:

    You're right of course, Greg.

    My mistake was to only be looking at the Terminal 5 services while drafting my comment. There are other services that go from the Terminal 2/3/4 station.

    1435:

    "If you need to ask why there is a fence in the kitchen, you're not ready for the answer".

    1436:

    It was once a sort a religious point that Kindles had no LEDs in the screen. This has relaxed a bit in recent years, as far as I know all the current models have backlights, although they can be switched off altogether. I did have one of those earlier Kindles with the case that contained a little slide-out reading light... in practice I found that was far too bright in a dark place.

    For dark reading I still find OLED screens (not backlit LCDs) beat e-ink-plus-backlight. It was a major factor when I got the original Samsung Note, although it took quite a bit of hacking to get its light generation low enough (resorted to apps that applied an overlay "colour" to reduce what the phone thought it was trying to hit.. clunky as it sounds). Any recent iPhone with OLEDs does this a shedload better (between the phone settings and the Kindle app it goes down to "too dim to read" quite easily), so that's my go-to. It's not everyone's thing, I just find I'm okay with the frequent page turns you get when you make the text big enough not to strain. One less device, but I keep the hardware Kindle around anyway and use it when it's convenient.

    Neither works well for textbooks, those still seem to need a fully-fledged tablet or a computer.

    1437:

    I dunno 'bout that - when I've flown in the last 10 years, SW has more legroom than, say, American.

    1438:

    for anyone looking to add as subplot to a novel set in UK circa 1945, here's an interesting but overlooked part of the 'yankee invasion'

    “People of Birmingham, England, treated us as heroes”

    "...In Europe, the Black women [of the 6888th] were liberated from the Jim Crow laws that limited which establishments they could visit in parts of the US. They went out freely to restaurants and nightclubs..."

    or make it the central focus... given the hunger for content it's a good bet Netflix will at least give you two minutes at their next cold pitch cattle call if you can figure out how to tell this story in eight episodes for less than USD$5M

    https://www.nps.gov/mamc/the-6888th-central-postal-directory-battalion.htm

    https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/23/us/6888th-battalion-world-war-2-cec

    1439:

    NYC does not have the oldest subsurface train system on the planet but what it does have is the distinction of being in the tightest geographic footprint of any major city, urban core being an island of 26 SQ miles...

    When I was single and traveling on business in the 80s I'd spend an extra night or two in NYC if in New England and take in a show or just a nice meal near Washington park or similar. (Home was the suburbs of Pittsburgh.) The company didn't mind as way back then it meant my plane ticket was half price so they picked up the hotel. I almost immediately started riding the subway. My friends were aghast at me bravery / foolishness. Oh, well. The only time I was a bit worried was when my novice rider brother stepped out of the car to make sure we were on the right train and away I went. This before cell phones. I got off at the next stop and he had to sense to figure out that was the most logical thing for me to do. He waited for a train that would stop at the same station.

    Labor Day weekend 2019 Google Maps said my wife and I did 100 miles on the subway. We should have bought a passes instead of paying by the ride.

    1440:

    My little buddy spent the day at the Vet; no problems, just normal preventative care.

    But I had to take him in and leave him early this morning, and then come home to take my meds, test my blood sugar before I could make my own breakfast ....

    I had forgotten what it was like to eat a quiet meal without someone's nose poking me in the knee to tell me he had finished HIS food and now wanted to eat all of mine.

    1441:

    David L @ 1425:

    Right now it's about 5oC here

    I think we got each other's weather. Here in central NC it is around 26C. Which is 10 to 20 above normal.

    Want to swap?

    Here in Raleigh, we usually get the harshest winter weather during the last half of February & first half of March.

    This February has been unseasonably mild, but we have had mild winters before (and this is the first year I actually had a pipe freeze - back in January). The fat lady hasn't sung yet, so this year may still hold true to form.

    1442:

    I suspect Heteromeles would rather have had the 300mm of rain that our South Coast got the other day. Or Auckland got. Preferably not overnight the way they got it, but beggars can't be choosers. Think of it as a chance to test your wind turbines :)

    No place to put 300 mm/day, but thanks anyway.

    1443:

    dpb @ 1435:

    Oh dear.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/23/crypto-firm-with-links-to-parliamentary-groups-appears-to-have-vanished

    Heh! Another [EXPLETIVE!! DELETED!!] "Crypto" investment turns out to be a swindle. Who'd have thought that could happen?

    What are the odds the Philippines doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.K. for financial crimes?

    1444:

    It was even called "phoenix" ... talk about tells.

    1445:

    ...when I've flown in the last 10 years, SW has more legroom than, say, American.

    American and Delta have a 2 class coach section, with a bit more leg room for a few rows in the front. Their rear section is certainly more cramped than Southwest, where all seats are the same.

    But the main advantage Southwest has is that their boarding process is actually sane.

    1446:

    Meanwhile ...
    HOW NICE
    A religious f-wit in charge ...
    Equivalent to having Jacob Grease-Smaug in charge of the tories ..
    Oh, wait a minute ....

    1447:

    I believe that the best practice is to invest in a diversified portfolio of Ponzi schemes.

    1448:

    I now know the trick of moving between Heathrow and London without paying the special exploit-the-tourists fare.

    Lemme guess, catch the Piccadilly Line instead of the Heathrow Express?

    It works. It takes about 1h15m to get into Zone 1, though, whereas the express is about 15-20 minutes. Also they serve different main line stations, so where you go from there is, well ...

    Yes, and...

    There's apparently an airport bothering fee for going to Heathrow, so going from London towards Heathrow one gets out at Hatton Cross, which is the last stop before Heathrow and therefore one has not gone to Heathrow. If arriving from the air, it's possible to move between Heathrow terminals without charge in a loop that includes Terminals 2 & 3 (but not 1 any more), Terminal 4, Terminal 5, and Hatton Cross. You see the trick: by changing trains at Hatton Cross one transitions between being on the Tube to being inside Heathrow without ever actually going to or leaving Heathrow.

    Mind you, I suspect that for the kind of person who has multiple Youtube channels subdividing his videos about different rail infrastructure, spending extra time on the Tube is a feature not a bug.

    1449:

    Yep. The best e-reader, in my experience (and I do a lot of ebook reading) is an iPad. Ideally the iPad Pro 13" with micro-LED screen, but that's bulky and heavy (and expensive): the best current compromise for reading fiction is the iPad Mini, which is about the size and weight of a mass market paperback (well, it's the thickness of a slim 1960s novel and the weight of a fat 1980s novel).

    Unlike the paperback you can adjust the typeface and font size, mess with the contrast, search within books, and carry basically a small lending library in your jacket pocket.

    Battery life is a non-issue in actual use: it's good for over 8 hours on a charge (in practice I never run it down below 60%, so it's probably closer to the official 10-11 hours), it charges over USB-C, and an 18 watt wall wart (Apple branded or third party, it doesn't care) will top it up from 50% to full in about an hour. If going off-grid you can just throw a USB-C booster battery in the bag instead of the wall wart. And if you need to deal with email or office work there are reasonable keyboard folios available for it: a bit (a lot) cramped, but not impossible to touch-type on.

    Some folks still seem to prefer e-ink or complain about LED/LCD screen flicker. For them, I'd prescribe a pricier tablet with a ProMotion display (refresh rate up to 120Hz). The high end e-ink readers have lost their battery life advantage due to tablets being "good enough" (use intensively for a day, charge for a couple of hours a night) and the e-ink readers mostly running a variant of Android these days and having their own backlights to drain the battery.

    1450:

    Google Is suggesting using the Piccadilly Line or the Elizabeth Line...

    BTW, I checked that and was amused to notice that Google re-colors the route indicated to be appropriate for the Tube line used. That's a nice touch. I played with that a while.

    1451:

    The cost of a tube ticket from Kings Cross to Heathrow is exactly the same as one to Hatton Cross. That fee does not apply to the underground.

    1452:

    E-ink readers still have advantages for some people (like me, at least in the past), provided the backlight can be turned off; being able to use them for a week without charging is very important. Battery banks are HEAVY.

    1453:

    American and Delta have a 2 class coach section, with a bit more leg room for a few rows in the front.

    Yeah, then compare with what Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways, et al sell as premium economy on long-haul flights -- it's basically a slightly cut-down business class experience, an old school recliner with leg lift rather than the full lie-flat bed you get in bizclass these days. It's actually equivalent to a US domestic first class seat, minus the fancy meal and priority boarding.

    The American carriers rely on most of their customers not flying outside their homeland and therefore not realizing how they're being ripped off.

    1454:

    Not gonna happen, Greg. You're taking a headline about the SNP in a unionist newspaper at face value. Reading between the lines: 70% of SNP members don't want Forbes as leader, it's just that the other candidates are individually less popular. In reality, they must know that Forbes would split the party and crater their vote at the next election -- she's way more conservative than the centre of public opinion in Scotland.

    1455:

    For sure; I mean I would not vote for a Wee Free to name 1.

    1456:

    The American carriers rely on most of their customers not flying outside their homeland and therefore not realizing how they're being ripped off.

    90% of US flyers, maybe 99%, care ONLY ABOUT PRICE. They may bitch and moan about leg room, baggage fees, $10 sandwiches, whatever, but when they buy their tickets for their next family trip a year later they will make a decision based on saving $40 on $2000 in tickets.

    My wife worked the phones at a reservations center in all kinds of duties for 18 years. Most flyers in the US fly once or twice a year and price is the decision driver ahead of everything else for them.

    Given that, steerage class is a given.

    Also, what is this Ryan Air thing that's all over Europe?

    1457:

    Also, what is this Ryan Air thing that's all over Europe?

    Something to be avoided when booking flights?

    I just had to fly the first time in over three years, and, uh, even though the flights were short and 'usual' (I had only regular economy seats, but it was okay with the short flights, for me) it was still an annoying experience. I didn't fly Ryanair, as I have some consideration on how comfortable the whole experience is.

    1458:

    Re: Obviously a reduced crew will make matters much worse, even when the vessel is much smaller.

    This isn't clear either way. Smaller, cheaper craft can be replaced and updated more often. I think reliability could go either way. The GPs claim of "at this time" is really about "as of last year". It may well still be correct, but you can't really guarantee it.

    OTOH, there's a good argument that for this process to work most effectively, the craft need to be much smaller. Research scientists have kept various craft working autonomously in places like under the antarctic ice sheets for 6 months or more. But those are LOTS smaller. Still, that's a good argument that in principle reliable operation is possible with current state of the art. But possibly only at low power levels and small sizes. That could work for a drone mothership or a spy mission. Perhaps, however, working at the scale of a LSI is a bit too far, but also perhaps not. Or perhaps it just needs a few iterations of the design.

    1459:

    "Some folks still seem to prefer e-ink or complain about LED/LCD screen flicker. For them, I'd prescribe a pricier tablet with a ProMotion display (refresh rate up to 120Hz). The high end e-ink readers have lost their battery life advantage due to tablets being "good enough" (use intensively for a day, charge for a couple of hours a night) and the e-ink readers mostly running a variant of Android these days and having their own backlights to drain the battery."

    I have a reasonably recent e-ink Kindle. It's back-lit. It's battery life is measured in days. And I too do a lot of e-reading.

    1460:

    Also, what is this Ryan Air thing that's all over Europe?

    Yeah, I don't fly Ryanair, period. Made that mistake once, not going there again.

    1461:

    It appears that it may not be possible to copyright AI output in the USA.

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/24/copyright_ai_art_us/

    1462:

    EC
    NO
    You GET OFF at Hatton Cross, tap out, then tap in again, as "HC" is in both zones. It's a wondeful fiddle, in both senses of the word.

    Charlie @ 1454
    Oh good, I thought that might get a response (!) - Seriously, as I have zero idea, who is likely to be the winner, as my knowledge of the other two is also zero. And, in very short form, what are their track records?
    I wouldn't use the word "conservative" for a Wee Free, either: "Primitive" / "Out-of-touch" / Religious head-job" would be nearer the mark.
    Repeat: Your opinions, please, pretty please?

    1463:

    Spirit and Frontier and one other are the bottom feeders in the US. JetBlue is a mid range with a great fan base. They are buying/merging with Spirit. I can't imagine the synergy unless it's just a way to acquire jets and slots without directly spending money.

    When you approach a Spirit gate there are all kinds of signs/prices on various add ons. It almost looks like a fast food restaurant.

    Then there was the fellow who grew up in Australia but his family roots were from India. He said he flew an Indian airline flight from Oz to India where there were 8 passengers with "stand up" tickets. This was in the 80s. At one level I find it hard to believe. But I know a flight attendant who talked about breaking up a group getting ready to have a cock fight on an Eastern L1011 just before they went out of business.

    1464:

    Okay, your run-down is:

    Humza Yousaf, currently Scottish Health Secretary. Age 38, first non-white and muslim Scottish Cabinet Minister. In 2011 became the youngest MSP ever elected to the Scottish Parliament. Has been in ministerial roles since 2012, which was arguably too young: he's widely perceived as gaffe-prone, probably because he's been in the public spotlight since he was 27. (Despite which, I have to say he's my least-disfavourite: plenty of experience and socially liberal.)

    Next we have Ash Regan, in third place with something like 7% support within the SNP. Has ministerial experience, but stepped down in 2022 in protest against the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. (Which had roughly 80% support in Holyrood, across all parties.) TLDR is, she an outspoken TERF -- willing to hold an unpopular view to the extent of it costing her a ministerial portfolio even though she's clearly out of step with her party.

    Finally we have Kate Forbes, who -- even leaving aside her religious beliefs (she's a member of an evangelical calvinist church) is only 32. About four years' ministerial experience (the SNP starts 'em young) but currently on maternity leave. She represents a Highlands and Islands constituency, hence the Wee Free connection. (And of course she's a TERF.)

    Of the three, leaving aside their personal beliefs, Forbes strikes me as dangerously inexperienced to lead a party in government. Which is why I think the Labour and Tory leaning media are wildly supportive of her -- they're setting her up to fail.

    Regan would maybe be acceptable if she did a U-turn on her transphobia, but as transphobia is usually an early indicator of more general homophobia, I'm not optimistic about that. (Questions have also been raised over pay-offs to ex-staff in her constituency office, with allegations they signed NDAs.)

    Yousaf seems to me to be the least-bad option. He's socially progressive, not a TERF, and would represent continuity of Sturgeon's social policies (and economic ones, i.e. centre-left).

    1465:
    This isn't clear either way. Smaller, cheaper craft can be replaced and updated more often. I think reliability could go either way. The GPs claim of "at this time" is really about "as of last year". It may well still be correct, but you can't really guarantee it.

    I was thinking that a reduced crew size decreases the chance of any crew member possessing the required skills or tools to fix a technical problem. I do not assume that the tech will just work or that it will be easy to fix in the field, particularly when the "field" in this case may be extremely remote.

    Clearly I've been reading RISKS digests for too long. (I've read all of them, from vol 1, issue 1.) So I'm inclined to a little cynical - in the Ambrose Beirce sense of having a memory.

    Apart from that, I think you make some good points. Thanks.

    1466:

    Grew up in Philly, which, please note, also has a subway/el system. Taken the subway in NYC, and commuted on it in Chicago. The one and only time I've ever been nervous on a subway was visiting friends in the mid-seventies, and a group of 8 or so of us were going to a party in, I think, Queens, and though it was not a costume party, we decided to go in full SCA garb.

    One woman had a guitar. We were sitting, riding, when a bunch of yes, skinheads walked into the car (from car to car was still doable then), took one look, and sat opposite from us. One of the jerks started on "play us a song...."

    I was at one end of the group, and I and the guy at the other end of our group had exactly the same idea at the same time, and turned to the friend next to us, and began discussing what we were carrying on our hips. And showed the hilt.

    From across the aisle, "HE'S GOT A SWORD, MAN!!!"

    The skinheads got off on the next stop, and we were left in peace.

    1467:

    shrug Happy with my Nook touch - rarely use the backlight, though I did on occasion when reading on the bus, or waiting for it.

    My Samsung 7 is acceptable, though it's not quite, in form factor, the correct size to replace a mass market paperback.

    And a lot cheaper than Apple anything.

    1468:

    Well, some of us ain't rich, and the airfairs are high enough, why give them more? It only encourages them to split out more to charge for.

    And I only do carryon. If I can, I'll bring food on.

    1469:

    This should tell you all you need to know about Ryanair.

    https://youtu.be/HPyl2tOaKxM

    Youtube

    1470:

    Mike Collins
    That "Ryanair advert" { Or maybe not? } is a classic .....

    1471:

    In the U.S. at least there are plenty of Lesbian terfs. A couple of them belong to the family of choice.

    1472:

    That "Ryanair advert" { Or maybe not? } is a classic

    Dead on. People want to know the "fare" when on the phone. They ask about the details later.

    Every damn time.

    After watching this YouTube then brought up Bob Fosse's "Hey Big Spender" from Sweet Charity. Interesting choice.

    1473:

    OK. Just showed this to my wife.

    Tears in her eyes from her laughter.

    1474:

    Silver lining of NZ weather hits. The week after the intense Auckland event Cyclone Gabrielle came through, smashing the northern and southeastern parts of the North Island, a dozen dead, a few still missing, infrastructure destroyed etc. The airshow planned for this weekend just south of the impacted areas has been postponed (emergency services having other priorities). Today's forecast is rain, so I would have had a wet day in a small town without the postponement.

    1475:

    I notice that the video after the Ryan Air video is "So Sorry Scotland." Nice.

    1476:

    I'm one of the people who place price at the top of my considerations when flying. There are limits, but the tradeoff of cost/discomfort is significant, especially when flying a family of 4.

    All well and good to insist on comfortable seats, but when it adds $1-4k to a total cost I'll sit awkwardly for a few hours. Using Thoreau logic, I'll be uncomfortable for a few hours rather than work an extra two months to pay for the trip.

    There are limits - in 2006 we flew standby from Athens, Greece to Vancouver, BC with a 6 month old infant. 4 stops, 3 layovers of >4 hours, and 32 hours total in company with a cranky infant, cranky spouse and cranky mother-in law. Never again.

    1477:

    Btw, EC, if you haven't seen this.. it's an intelligent discussion of why Putin suddenly jumped.... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/24/vladimir-putin-invade-ukraine-2022-russia

    1478:

    There are limits - in 2006 we flew standby from Athens, Greece to Vancouver, BC with a 6 month old infant. 4 stops, 3 layovers of >4 hours, and 32 hours total in company with a cranky infant, cranky spouse and cranky mother-in law.

    Good grief.

    That calls for an intermediate decompression stop and overnight in an airport hotel halfway along the route, if at all possible! Either Greece to UK or Ireland and overnight, then the real long-haul flight, or Greece to the first available airport in North America (NYC would be good, if you're okay with clearing US immigration en route to a Canadian destination). Assuming you're not flying east instead ...

    Seriously, the hotel might set you back $250-400 for a suite, but breaking the journey in half is priceless. I've ended up on 32 hour routes before (don't ask) and even with business class tickets, I was half-dead for a week afterwards.

    1479:

    Good grief.

    Dallas to Frankfort back in 2017 or 2018. Overnight flight. 8 or 9 hours. I and my wife got seats on each side of the 4 seat middle up near the front of coach. Not sure if those were the extra room ones or no. We figured if a couple got the middle seats we would offer to swap with one of them so we could sleep/drool on each other's shoulders.

    Middle seats were two pre-teens. Mom and another pre-teen and a lap baby were several rows up at the bulkhead in 2 seats. In first hour mom must have run back and forth a dozen times. We offered to take the bulkhead seats and give the the row. Mom took it.

    We shuffled around a bit got settled. New seat mate lady then turned to us and literally said: "Thank God".

    1480:

    That's a fairly intelligent article. Still no sympathy for Putin.

    1481:

    No. It's Russians that I feel so sorry for - once again, they're getting screwed by the West and by their ruler.

    1482:

    Well, by the time we realized what a nightmare we were stuck in we had target fixation. Also there was a real risk of bloodshed if the me-spouse-MIL vortex had continued to build.

    Athens-Frankfurt arriving at 6am. Wait around for 5-8 hours, Frankfurt-Montreal. 6 hour wait. Montreal to Calgary. 4 hours. At this point we are at death's door but one more short flight...

    Standby is brutal. MIL was an Air Canada Employee so we had very cheap tickets, but paid the price in other ways.

    I'd still do it again, but not with an infant.

    1483:

    Standby is brutal. MIL was an Air Canada Employee so we had very cheap tickets, but paid the price in other ways.

    Last 30 years most of my flying is standby (non-rev). It takes a temperment and planning. [eyeroll]

    6 years ago or more we were invited to go to Ireland with a couple where he was there on a seminar and his wife was flying in to meet up with him. The plan for for an extra week. She was on "our" airline so we did it. Had to fly to Charlotte (3 hour drive away) to catch the flight to Dublin. And even as of the morning the flight had business seats available for us to slide up into. So we flew early to Charlotte. When we got there the flight was showing a change of planes and a much lower count of business seats which would force us into the back of a 20-30 year old plane. So I did some checking and discovered there were 2 787s with plenty of seats from Chicago to Dublin so we jumped on a flight to Chicago. (A coach seat in the back of a 787 is a much better experience than the back of a 757.) At Chicago we managed to get the nicer coach seats to Dublin. And got there before our friend. When we messaged her to tell her we were abandoning the orginal flight her repsonse was: "What? You don't want to sit with the rift raff in steerage?"

    Non-rev can work well. Or can be a total fail. 3 times I've spend 12 hours at an airport and given up and gone home. 3 times I've driven to a bigger city to catch a flight with empty seats. Once to fly from Charlotte to Houston then back to Dallas. 3 of us trying to get to Dallas split the car rental ($20 each) and we all got there, abet on 3 different planes from Houston to Dallas.

    1484:

    To each their own.

    I find a backlit e-ink kindle much better for reading than my IPad mini. Notably lighter, much better very dim light use for reading at 3am (especially in ‘dark’ mode) and enough battery that I can take it on a 4-day hike. My wife uses hers to read in the bath because it’s waterproof.

    I’ve issues with Amazon’s T&Cs around ebooks, but the hardware is good.

    1485:

    whitroth @ 1482
    BUT - mostly - by their own "ruler"
    Remeber that Zelensky was criticised, earlier, for being an almost-appeaser .....
    He was prepared to talk to Putin about "terms" ... but Putin was not interested.

    1486:

    Stupid computers!!!

    I couldn't get onto the internet today. I spent a number of hours troubleshooting before I finally traced the problem to the Ethernet cable connecting my computer to the firewall/router. Replaced the cable with a spare & I'm back in business.

    ... BUT, while I was trouble-shooting the problem I had no problem connecting to my home server or other devices (printer, NAS, ...) that are also connected through the router ... using that same cable. I was afraid my firewall/router was dead and I was going to have to replace it.

    I found the Ethernet cable for the computer had somehow become pinched between the file cabinet the computer sits on and the printer table that's right next to it.

    Doesn't seem logical to me the cable would be defective for the internet, but not for other devices on the network? But how else can I explain it when replacing that cable appears to have fixed the problem?

    Plus, it's a thoroughgoing PITA because Firefox & Microsoft Edge don't want to allow me to log into the firewall/router because the Security Certificate has expired (it's an old one) and they won't allow me to add an exception.

    1488:

    David L @ 1464:

    Spirit and Frontier and one other are the bottom feeders in the US. JetBlue is a mid range with a great fan base. They are buying/merging with Spirit. I can't imagine the synergy unless it's just a way to acquire jets and slots without directly spending money.

    When you approach a Spirit gate there are all kinds of signs/prices on various add ons. It almost looks like a fast food restaurant.

    Then there was the fellow who grew up in Australia but his family roots were from India. He said he flew an Indian airline flight from Oz to India where there were 8 passengers with "stand up" tickets. This was in the 80s. At one level I find it hard to believe. But I know a flight attendant who talked about breaking up a group getting ready to have a cock fight on an Eastern L1011 just before they went out of business.

    New kid on the block at RDU appears to be "avelo". They have A MAP showing the destinations they serve from RDU. A couple of the other airlines also have maps.

    1489:

    Last 30 years most of my flying is standby (non-rev). It takes a temperment and planning.

    Yup. One I don't have. Discovered that the Omicron Christmas when a relative decided I was going to tear up all my holiday plans and fly across the country at their command — and I had an anxiety attacks so bad I couldn't type whenever I visited an airline website for months afterwards…

    (It wasn't just the last-minute travel and pandemic — there was a lot of intra-familial crap in there too — but apparently schedules are a known and accepted way of coping with anxiety, especially if you're on the spectrum. Telling someone with anxiety to rearrange their life and 'just deal with it' is not recommended by therapists.)

    1490:

    David L @ 1473:

    That "Ryanair advert" { Or maybe not? } is a classic

    Dead on. People want to know the "fare" when on the phone. They ask about the details later.

    Every damn time.

    After watching this YouTube then brought up Bob Fosse's "Hey Big Spender" from Sweet Charity. Interesting choice.

    Which one? There's a whole bunch of "Ryanair adverts" on YouTube?

    1491:

    ttps://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/24/study-its-comically-easy-to-identify-anonymized-users-in-the-metaverse-with-a-tiny-bit-of-motion-data/

    Researchers found that the data they leave behind in virtual reality is more useful than a fingerprint to identify individuals. It also provides significantly more data to monetize, including a user’s height, handedness, gender, potential disability, strength, personal tics, etc.

    Seems likely to be a problem with any motion capture system, not just meta. By using it at all you're handing over a whole lot more info than you normally do.

    Kind of like ebook readers... once you commit to an always-online device you're providing a valuable data stream, but getting a tablet to live offline is much harder than an e-ink device. Last time I enabled wifi on mine it whined that it had been more than two years and it really wanted the latest firmware.

    1492:

    Stupid computers!!!

    Speaking of which, messages from my niece have started showing up on my computer (OSX 10.12) and iPad (iOS13) as being from her iCloud email rather than her phone number (iPhone 10, don't know iOS version), and if I reply to the old conversation (sent to her phone number based on my Contacts) I get 'message not delivered' errors. But on my iPhone 6 (iOS 12) they show up in the same iMessage thread.

    Her friends with Android phones can message her fine, but say that they are seeing her iCloud email instead of her phone number (which is in their address books) when she replies.

    She says she hasn't changed anything on her phone (no settings, no software updates). Any ideas what might have happened, and how to fix it? She's worried that she might have been hacked, I'm guessing that Apple might have changed something but I really don't know — I was last involved in messaging protocols in the days of ISDN…

    1493:

    It never rains in California
    But Girl don't they warn ya'
    It SNOWS ... man it SNOWS!!!
    🙃

    1494:

    today's eye catching phrases from news sites and book reviews:

    a ghost-powered doomsday machine

    snow flurries in Los Angeles

    Ohio toxic train wreck

    Dominion uncovered ‘smoking gun’ evidence against Fox News

    rationing vegetables in UK supermarkets

    escaped owl feasts on Central Park vermin

    apparently Ohio not having suffered enough Trump visits toxic train wreck

    air fryers recalled because of fire hazard

    Canadian uber-pigs threaten American homes

    people who enjoy flying coach class are not masochists

    treachery and intrigue and failure are everywhere but there's a happy ending

    1495:

    Looks like the Rideau Canal won't open for skating this year.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64766191

    When I lived in Ottawa, Christmas holiday skating on the Canal was a thing.

    1496:

    A tugboat capsized off Greenock, in weather calm and warm enough that I was outside in a short sleeve shirt and no jacket!

    1497:

    'Which one? There's a whole bunch of "Ryanair adverts" on YouTube?'

    If it's what I think it is, it's not an advert, but a satirical song, about some very cheap fares indeed, but everything is an extra that gets charged for, including the steps to get off the plane at the destination.

    Sorry, no link handy, but hilarious.

    JHomes

    1498:

    Which one? There's a whole bunch of "Ryanair adverts" on YouTube?

    The parody in comment 1470.

    1499:

    Seems likely to be a problem with any motion capture system, not just meta. By using it at all you're handing over a whole lot more info than you normally do.

    Which is why I was pissed after putting up 4 ring.com motion lights with cameras plus a doorbell. THEN ring.com was bought by Amazon. And now I can't share my video feed with family members without integrating my ring.com account with my Amazon buying account. I refuse.

    1500:

    Speaking of which, messages from my niece have started showing up on my computer (OSX 10.12) and iPad (iOS13) as being from her iCloud email rather than her phone number

    This started recently. I think Apple made a change to their back end. I don't have the issues you're having with using phone numbers. But most everyone I trade messages with are in my contacts and I use names for them instead of numbers.

    1501:

    My camera setup is pure HikVision, hacked about by someone in China because it's China-internal product (much cheaper) modded to work outside China. So it can't officially connect to China or get firmware updates. But it's not connected to the internet anyway. It has a bunch of slightly fancy cameras (with selected focal lengths etc) so I'm getting 2.5k @ 12fps from each one and have ANPR on the one that looks up the street.

    My next system is likely to be similar but much more expensive because I'll buy a locally supported setup and ideally one that I can download update for rather than just giving it access to the internet and hoping for the best.

    My coworker has a setup where his firewall blocks the camera system from everything except a script that takes a screenshot every second and moves that to an internet-accessible location so he can check up on things. I'll likely go for something similar, especially now that fast SSDs make bandwidth less of a concern (viz, you can write 10+ FHD video streams to one SSD without worrying about overloading it... just wearing it out)

    1502:

    paws @ 1497
    Tugbout capsises - this report.
    Bizarre & very dodgy - they will be lucky to find thos two as living survivors, if it happened as fast as reported.

    1503:

    Short but accurate history of the MV Hebridean Princess, which I have sailed on under the former name of RMS Columba.

    1504:

    There was this one time self plus spouse flew from Edinburgh to Sydney, using Air France (because alliance/air miles). So, sectors were: Edinburgh to Paris CDG, two hours to transfer to a 747 bound for Hong Kong, then three hours to transfer to a 777 to Sydney. Business class all the way, carefully synchronized so that the HK-SYD flight would be a 9 hour overnight with a lie-flat bed, arriving in the morning -- I'd done Australia previously and really wanted to avoid the jet lag this time.

    (The antipodal point from Edinburgh is about 200 miles south of South Island, NZ, so about 2500 miles from Sydney. It's 90% of the way around the surface of the sphere. I needed afternoon naps for a week after that first trip, even with a lie-flat bed on the 747 over.)

    Anyway, things went smoothly until the 737 from Edinburgh pushed back from the terminal ... and waited. Then waited some more.

    We reached Paris 30 minutes after our onward flight had taken off, so had to wait 3.5h for the next flight to Hong Kong, got to Hong Kong exhausted (middle of the night, our time!) and had to wait another five hours for our onward connection. Slept like the dead on the long third sector ... then woke up and arrived in Sydney around 7pm and totally not on local time because the 24 hour journey had taken about 32-36 hours!

    The next week was ghastly ... and I'm nearly 15 years older now. (If I ever visit Australia again I'm either breaking the journey for a minimum of 48 hours halfway there, or paying for business class beds aboard one of the new non-stop flights that go direct from Heathrow to Aus, and never mind that I hate Heathrow with a livid, fiery passion.)

    1505:

    This started recently. I think Apple made a change to their back end. I don't have the issues you're having with using phone numbers. But most everyone I trade messages with are in my contacts and I use names for them instead of numbers.

    I have my niece's phone number in my Contacts, so I see her name not number. But I don't have her iCloud email, because she uses a different one for email. So now when she messages me on 2/3 of my devices it shows up as from nieces.handle@iCloud.com rather than from Nieces Name.

    When I message her I can no longer do it from my contacts, because that defaults to her number which no longer works. I can reply to the thread that uses her iCloud email, which is what I'm doing.

    Annoying. I'm used to Apple stuff 'just working'.

    1506:

    Root Mean Square Pigeon?

    Nice to see that Squeaky Robertson gets a mention in the linked article about the Lochmor.

    1507:

    Royal Mail Ship - Any vessel that is formally contracted to carry the British Royal Mail.

    1508:

    I regret to report that 2 bodies have been found. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-64769605

    I suggest Charlie locks this thread to prevent further speculation, and as a mark of respect.

    1509:

    JHomes @ 1498:

    'Which one? There's a whole bunch of "Ryanair adverts" on YouTube?'

    If it's what I think it is, it's not an advert, but a satirical song, about some very cheap fares indeed, but everything is an extra that gets charged for, including the steps to get off the plane at the destination.

    Sorry, no link handy, but hilarious.

    David L @ 1499:

    Which one? There's a whole bunch of "Ryanair adverts" on YouTube?

    The parody in comment 1470.

    Ok. I misunderstood and was looking for an old Ryanair commercial on YouTube trying to figure out which one was in the style of Bob Fosse.

    1511:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/23/florida-lawyer-jailed-pregnant-woman-fetal-personhood-reproductive-rights

    Meanwhile in the USA...

    Attorney William M Norris filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the “unborn child” of Natalia Harrell in Florida’s third district court of appeal on 16 February, the Miami Herald first reported.

    “Fetal personhood” laws are a key aim of the anti-abortion movement in the US following the US supreme court striking down Roe v Wade last summer.

    It all makes perfect sense, in the weird and twisted way so beloved of christofascists. But it does give hope for the electronic incarnations of souls as well..

    1512:

    There was a woman in Texas who argued that, as her unborn child was legally a person in Texas, then she was legally using the HOV lane because her vehicle legally had two passengers in it.

    And apparently, the judge agreed with her because he tossed her traffic violation. Which didn't stop a deputy giving her another.

    https://www.npr.org/2022/09/02/1120628973/pregnant-woman-dallas-fetus-hov-lane-passenger-ticket

    1513:

    Here I think it's three, but if god is her copilot or she's having twins...

    1514:

    I mean, this is a guy who has the guts to walk around in Kyiv in broad daylight, within range of Russian forces, just to make a point.

    i doubt the russians wanted to blow him up, bad optics

    somebody probably called them, said look, our boy's gonna be there, can u not for a while, and they probably said no problem

    1515:

    Well yeah, until you hear that the head of the Wagner Group is accusing the generals of treason, and hear speculations about Russian military discipline, drunkenness, and issues therewith...

    That's the problem. It's not Putin starting WW3, it's the ijit who either didn't get the orders or was too drunk to care and ordered a missile strike anyway.

    So yeah, I think it took guts.

    1516:

    H
    Yes
    See also MH-317 - the um "carelessness", indiscipline & arrrogance displayed there are plainly still present.

    1517:

    Bugger: MH-17

    1518:

    somebody probably called them, said look, our boy's gonna be there, can u not for a while, and they probably said no problem

    If you scan up thread the Biden admin DID call and basically said "Don't even think about ..."

    1519:

    warning someone not to do something they would have happily not done anyway certainly sounds more macho

    i'm glad the sleepy joe thing is just an act tho

    1520:

    There are a lot of non official / semi official fighters in this conflict. Such as the Wagner Group and lots of smaller militias. I suspect the point was for the Kremlin to pass the word.

    1521:

    Exactly. As Heteromeles and Greg noted above, it wasn't "don't shoot," it was "don't make any dumb mistakes."

    1522:

    Re: Dilbert's Creator

    Dear Mister Adams,

    I've spent a good deal of time and money on your products over the years; bought a couple of your books (I particularly enjoyed your discussion of gravity,) read your comic daily for something like three decades, etc. Unfortunately, with your latest statement on Black people we've come to a parting of ways.

    Since I'm not a dick, and we're "breaking up" our creator-consumer relationship, I'll try to keep this polite, and I'll try to be as kind as possible while not softening my position: at some point in the last decade your worldview got pretty screwed up, possibly by watching Fox News/something similar, or by reading the thoughts of "business leaders" so you could satirize them, or maybe you fell down the rightwing rabbit hole because you dislike communism (a sensible decision) but don't understand how badly the word is misused in modern propaganda, then connected with other parts of the hard-right, anti-pinko worldview. Whatever.

    Frankly, I don't care how it happened.

    Whatever did happen is turning you into the kind of human being who can, without much thought, class all the 48 million Black people in our country as a "hate group," because almost half of them reacted poorly to the slogan "It's OK to be white." Maybe some of them know the history of the slogan, which has been used by hate groups since 2001, and disagree with the slogan for exactly that reason! Here's a cite.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white

    I'd strongly suggest reading the whole article, so you can understand just how badly you've been trolled, and you might then admit the possibility that Black people, who are very frequently sensitive to racism, recognized a racist campaign when they saw one. In short, disliking the slogan "It's OK to be white" is a sensible decision if you're Black. If you want to salvage your situation, you might call a press conference, apologize, and acknowledge that you didn't understand this was a racist slogan.

    You might also look into Black history if you really want to understand what powers this dislike for slogans like "It's OK to be White." Why wouldn't the descendants of people who've been afflicted with slavery, Jim Crow, convict leasing (which preserved many of the essentials of slavery until a Supreme Court decision in 1942,) White-led race riots like Tulsa, redlining, and an outrageous number of police shootings be a little cynical?

    There's something else you need to understand, which - and you probably do understand in one sense, which I'll discuss below - is that modern conservatism runs on fear. All those discussions about the horrors of Islam/Immigration/Blackness/Communism are aimed straight at your amygdala. The clear idea behind whatever you're watching/reading is to make you afraid, for example, to have you imagine that a Hispanic person whose family has been in the U.S. for four generations is a ravening robber/rapist who crossed the border an hour ago and is looking for victims, or that a Black person who rejects a racist slogan hates all white people.

    Here's a good article about the right's fear tactics, and how they've been aimed at you.

    https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

    "Conservative grift" is a good search term if you want to read more about this.

    The really sad thing - and I think you understood this once - is that this longstanding conservative grift runs along the same lines as all the poor business decisions you write about. One of the reasons why I’m not spending any more on your products or reading your comic online, is that I can't understand how you were ever anything but cynical about these ideas and tactics. In short - and I'm not sure how kind I can be while preserving the sense of what I want to say - Our creator-consumer relationship is ending because you've become the very pointy-haired boss you satirize.

    Anyway, I hope you fix your life. I hope you can conquer the raging fear your consumption of crappy media has saddled you with. I hope you can discover that you don't have to be super-confident; that you can be humble and brave. But you'll have to do it elsewhere, because we're through.

    T.

    1523:

    To keep non-reich-wing Americans current with what is currently ging around, PenceNews is pushing the story that three recent fires in Mexican oil refineries are Biden's fault:

    "Coincidence? Three fires happen at 3 separate Mexican oil refineries on the same day The climate change and energy ideologues within the Biden administration are doing everything within their power to raise energy prices, specifically oil and gasoline. This is part of the strategy to make the green new deal energy programs hold financial viability as an alternative."

    1524:

    Rbt Prior
    Enlighten us non-US people please? What specific reich-wing paper/website is "PenceNews" ??

    1525:

    https://pencenews.live

    Although I get emails several times a day, filled with "news stories" and ads for CBD products. So I basically never go to the web site.

    PenceNews is even less of a news source that Tucker is, which is saying a lot. And honestly it doesn't really pretend to be anything other than a partisan outrage machine that just happens to include the word "news" as part of its name.

    1526:

    That far out of touch with reality!?

    1527:

    "I can see reality from my house" sort of territory?

    1528:

    I'm not sure I should have asked ...
    Real "Bleach your brain after reading" stuff

    1529:

    Troutwaxer @ 1523:

    Re: Dilbert's Creator

    Dear Mister Adams,

    [...]

    I remember Dilbert being amusing some 20 years or so ago. But I don't think I've seen any of it recently.

    This most recent outburst is NOT Scott Adams first foray into QAnon/MAGAt/right-wingnut white supremacy. Not sure when he went Nuckin' Futz, but its been at least a decade.

    Anyway, how do you boycott something you'd already given up years ago.

    1530:

    Some Apple=oriented design pseudohistory.
    Apple people will probably find this funnier than I do, though there's at least one joke which made me laugh out loud.

    https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/the-cursed-universes-of-dana-sibera/

    1531:

    i doubt he'll get to read it unless he takes on extra staff, his inbox is probably unmanageable

    points for condescension tho

    1532:

    You probably write to the people who carry it in your daily newspaper (if you take one of those, either online or otherwise) and tell them you'll be cancelling your subscription if the continue to carry the comic. He's also got a blog and a podcast which might be carried by someone you buy from.

    1533:

    Apropos of HUNH?

    If you believe this Politico article, it looks like the EU will be normalizing cryptourrencies as part of their financial system, just as the US is purging them. What could possibly go wrong?

    Quote: “We will have the best framework in the world in which companies can develop,” said Stefan Berger, the conservative German lawmaker who shepherded the EU crypto rulebook that will come into force in the second half of 2024. “We will have everything that you need for a workable market.”

    https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/26/europe-crypto-u-s-00084322

    1534:

    Some Apple=oriented design pseudohistory.

    I have an old 15" snowball iMac. I want to find a 17".

    My plan is to put the guts of my M1 MacMini into it.

    1535:

    Back in the day, I knew someone who had a valve amp in his hi-fi system (it was old even then). He repaired it, but lost the screws to put the case back together. End result, he strung it around the living room and got a free lightshow.
    I don't know how long it ran for, but I do remember him saying "no kids and no pets!".

    1536:

    And the point is, HAD THE WEST, and the US, helped Russia in the nineties, he probably would not have gotten into power.

    1537:

    I bought a tablet to replace my circa '09 netbook. I use it, infrequently, when I buy a book from Amazon (which I'd rather not do, mostly epub, and put it on my Nook), and for that, email, newsreading, and some writing when we go to a con. Before leaving for con, I plug it in, recharge it... and update it AT HOME, on a trustworthy network, not at a hotel (that happened once - never again).

    1538:

    Yes, and a lot of us were ROTFL hysterically. The Oligarchic party really doesn't do English or logic.

    1539:

    Ellen told me this morning his syndicate has dropped him. Good - he started chanelling the PHB a dozen or so years ago.

    1540:

    That's good to hear. How long until Dilbert becomes a webcomic?

    1541:

    I mean... just a webcomic?

    1542:

    There might not be any need now:

    Dilbert comic distributor cuts ties with creator https://boingboing.net/2023/02/27/dilbert-comic-distributor-cuts-ties-with-creator.html

    No distributor, more comic? I don't know. Maybe if the dilbert.com hosting provider drops him too?

    1543:

    Yeah. I saw that. He'll probably get a job as a commentator for Faux news.

    1544:

    Maybe not even that if his hosting provider drops him too. Just look at the people this has also happened to. It's almost like there's a pattern.

    BTW, has anyone heard from Kanye West recently? Google search results tells me he still has 18m Instagram followers, for what that's worth. Also, 0 posts.

    Loads of recent stories about his stock being dumped, old business partners moving on etc. Just nothing about the man himself. It's like he's disappeared.

    Given Ye's signs of poor mental health, I'm a little worried.

    I'm not so worried about Scott Adams.

    1545:

    BTW, has anyone heard from Kanye West recently? Google search results tells me he still has 18m Instagram followers, for what that's worth. Also, 0 posts.

    Just maybe, unlike Trump, when his lawyers told him to STFU, he took their advice.

    1546:

    He'll probably get a job as a commentator for Faux news.

    Not this week. FN is likely running a bit scared. Or at least very cautious. They have been caught spilling obvious false news that they knew was false. Which even in the US is a no-no. The law suit with Dominion is a really big deal over here. And will likely go to the Supremes. And none of the level headed legal experts expect the end result will be a sure things either way. But under current case law Fox is screwed. And if they lose, there may be a line of lawsuits forming.

    1547:

    Apropos of nothing...

    In the Pipeline takes on a perennial SF world-building question: why do we have the 19 amino acids we do? https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/why-these-amino-acids-anyway

    Interesting stuff, with possibly more to come. The tl;dr is that the 19 we have tend to produce proteins that fold in complicated ways.

    1548:

    That dual screen MacBook would have been perfect for Exreme Programming aficionados back in its heyday.

    I’m pretty sure somebody somewhere has made a NeXTstation min or PS/2 mini (a PS/6 ?) to put a Pi in. I mean, I know I would. It would be a nice addition to my Replica AstroPi sales.

    1549:

    e-ink screens keep getting better, with the latest round having quite plausible windowed updates for normal typing speeds. Reading on them has long been easy, we're getting closer to the point where using one as a terminal is a good idea. Sadly for reading the internet colour is still very slow (there are 7 colour displays but two second+ refreshes are the norm for those and they look awful while that's happening).

    I'm still quite keen for a dual-screen laptop with e-ink+lcd/OLED because e-ink is still much more efficient than active emitters, and works better in daylight as well. But e-ink displays and laptops with e-ink are still in the vapourware to weird one-off range. If I was going that way I'd likely DIY a Pi-based laptop myself rather than paying a significant premium to get a MS or Apple half-arse attempt. Lenovo are apparently going to sell a flip-screen laptop but it's currently just a press release.

    1550:

    Reply to David L @ 1547
    Well ... referring back to the "dominion" law-suit ...
    Murdoch hanging his own employees, who were following his instructions - out to dry how nice.

    1551:

    That was just what was released on discovery. (Lying in discovery can result in jail time. Admitting the company fibbed is just fines. Big ones but still M can handle it.)

    It was more than just M. There have been released all kinds of texting messages where virtually all of the top personalities discussed how fraudulent the stolen elections claims were. And they then would go on the air within hours giving credence to or even flat out promoting it.

    M didn't hang anyone out. They all dropped their pants, turned to the audience, and waggled hard. It is just that his deposition got released first in the latest court filings.

    They ALL privately talked about how they did it to keep the ratings up.

    These recent revelations are a bit odd in general for such a lawsuit but Dominion asking for summary judgement allowed them to make such things public. They most likely will not get the summary judgement but it seems they may have done it just get some of the only partial crazies to just STFU.

    1552:

    David L
    Thanks for that ... explains some of the niceties of US "law" that we (fortunately) do not have over here.
    Still, one can hope that some of the principals, not the small fry do go to jail
    Rupe in jail would be marvellous

    1553:

    I was wrong about one bit. Jail time in a civil suit is just not going to happen.

    But if you are caught lying under oath it is almost a certain lose in the case. As the judge and jury will get to assume you've lied about any and everything to your advantage. Discovery depositions tend to be sealed until a trial. And if a settlement before a trial, then they may remain sealed. Apparently Dominion got around some of this in their request for summary judgement.

    This is also sort of why Bill Cosby is not in prison. He was assured that nothing he said in a deposition could be used against him. Then the next prosecutor up said "nope, I'm going to use it in a separate court case". The conviction was tossed after a bit of prison time as the higher courts said deals are with the government, not the prosecutor.

    Lying in a CRIMINAL case is a different issue altogether. The Fox/Dominion case is civil.

    1554:

    What I've read here about ChatGPt suggests productive uses for it in theological schools, generating scholarly works based on training such machines with centuries worth of PhD thesis arguments from divinity colleges like Harvard, which was founded as a diploma mill for clergy in the 1600s. Computer intelligence so employed may never attain the Singularity foreseen by Kurzweil, but they might be eligible for the Rapture.

    1555:

    Sadly regurgitating older works isn't really scholarly—even in theology.

    Although ChatGPT would certainly excel in an unfortunate, but long standing scholarly habit: making things up on the fly and passing them on as old tradition.

    1556:

    Most universities were theological diploma mills aimed at churning out clergymen even if they never actively worked in ecclesiastical affairs afterwards. A typical example would be Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll who, after graduating from Oxford with high honours in Mathematics was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England (saying that his family were High Anglicans and it was basically him going into the family business).

    1557:

    Real "Bleach your brain after reading" stuff

    Here's the latest, for your amusement:

    DISTURBING: Why Are "After School Satan Clubs" Growing At Public Schools?

    More “After School Satan Clubs” backed by the far-left group The Satanic Temple (TST) are popping up in public school districts across the country, and chaos seems to follow the clubs wherever they go. Is one coming for your town?

    1558:

    I'm starting to like the Satanic Temple. They're really throwing down the gauntlet for the Xtian hate groups. "We can worship Satan and be better human beings than the Xtians."

    1559:

    "the far-left group The Satanic Temple"

    I love how "far left" has come to mean "cares about people" as a way to distinguish it from the rest of US politics.

    Many links found, not sure where the original quote above came from: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/after-school-satan-clubs/

    1560:

    Moz
    In current US-speak "far left" = Kier Starmer - yes, really!

    1561:

    If anyone cares, In the Pipeline published another post on amino acids, this time talking about analyses of the Ryugu carbonaceous chondrite. The Hayabusa2 probe collected samples from it and returned them to Earth.

    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/asteroid-organic-chemistry

    The tl;dr, an especially important one for wannabe asteroid miners, is the last paragraph: "If your image of outer space is of something stark, clean, and black-and-white, revise those thoughts. We find ourselves, as I once put it, in a galaxy full of gunk."

    Carbonaceous chondrites an waste dumps at unregulated chemical companies have a lot in common. Living on such an asteroid would be stimulating for all the wrong reasons.

    1562:

    I thought terms like "dirty snowball" and "moon dust" tried to suggest that space was filthy? Certainly conveyed it to me...

    I like the recent suggestion that liquid nitrogen was good for washing moon dust off. Gives a decent idea of just how much fun the stuff is. And how capable a moon suit needs to be.

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230228085113.htm

    1563:

    H & Moz
    Well, straight off ... there is your "Abiogenesis" problem solved. With all those amino acids & other organic compounds "floating" around, it's only a matter of time before they knock together, in the "right" manner, & start the basic processes we call "life".
    Yes?

    1564:

    it's only a matter of time before they knock together, in the "right" manner, & start the basic processes we call "life". Yes?

    Well those things are very complicated. So the universe being billions of years old tend to maybe allow for that.

    1565:

    Re-run the Miller-Urey experiment, with different starting blocks?
    Namely a suite of all those pre-existing amino acids, plus conditions similar to early Earth & simply let it run & ... see what happens?

    1566:

    There's some kind of folk saying about throwing muck at the wall and seeing what sticks that is probably relevant here.

    "Take a few million comets, some balls of rock, mix vigorously then leave to settle. A froth will form on one of the balls of rock".

    1567:

    Namely a suite of all those pre-existing amino acids, plus conditions similar to early Earth & simply let it run & ... see what happens?

    Experimental biologists haven't been standing still in the last 70 years. (Here in the US the creationists are very angry about this and are flailing around with increasingly incoherent protests.) Last month I saw an article on improved cell wall synthesis under early-Earth conditions but the only thing I can find now is behind a pay wall. Recently there's been some interesting proto-life chemistry found, showing both self replication and metabolism. This one doesn't seem to be a precursor to our kind of life but it's an interesting proof of concept that demonstrates raw chemicals can do the kinds of things they'd have to do before coming together as life.

    1568:

    Re-run the Miller-Urey experiment, with different starting blocks? Namely a suite of all those pre-existing amino acids, plus conditions similar to early Earth & simply let it run & ... see what happens?

    As Scott noted, it's been done. Miller-Urey experiments would be lab exercises now, except that they take so long to run.

    The more fundamental point, which is why I'm writing this, is that biochemists, despite their truthful protestations that cells are more complicated than any human really understands, know huge amounts about the chemistry of life. They can make defensible hypotheses about why some set of amino acids works better than others, and they can demonstrate their ideas in the lab. Basically, the set we have produces proteins that tend to spontaneously fold into complex structures, while many other sets produce blobular strands that are indistinguishable from denatured soup. Such snot blobs can be biologically active, but the point is that different suites of amino acids differ wildly in what one can do with them.

    1569:

    I find the language of your last two sentences particularly appropriate, since one of my prescriptions is for a modified amino acid to make me produce runnier snot.

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