What's interesting about this thing is that it's hard to see how it could have been the only device of its kind -- engineering a long gear-train so it doesn't jam requires tricks which someone has to learn from experience. And yet there's not much trace of any others. It's not just that the devices are missing -- precious metal tends to get reused -- but also that there are very few references to them. Technical knowledge might have been closely held as the equivalent of guild secrets which died with the equivalent of the guilds, but at the very least, this suggests that there was other technology in ancient Greece and Rome of which no record whatever survives. And if some crowd of fanatics was trying to erase traces of it deliberately, well... that would explain why the only surviving example was at the bottom of the Mediterranean, where they couldn't get at it.
]]>The city government has tried to react to this with a shutdown of nonessential businesses. They then got sued by the state Attorney General's office, which is allowing the businesses (including restaurants) to reopen.
Last I checked, there were limits to how many links you could put in one of these posts before it gets held for moderation, but the obvious searches on Google News will pull in pretty ample documentation of all the above. So instead, for one link, I'll toss in an account from a nurse in a different state, South Dakota, of dying patients spending their last gasping breaths insisting that they will get better and they can't be dying of COVID because it's a "hoax":
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/11/16/south-dakota-nurse-intv-newday-vpx.cnn
]]>In an extended discussion of these brief remarks on quora, here:
https://www.quora.com/Is-Elon-Musk-right-about-space-solar-power
someone makes the additional point that the only orbit that keeps powersats in a stable position relative to ground-based rectennas is geosynch. Put them there, and the atmospheric losses to ground-based rectennas off the equator go up.
The larger point is that we already have purely ground-based solar power infrastructure (solar farms), and it's cheap. Expanding it down here (which Elon's totally down with) is likely more cost-effective than anything involving space-based infrastructure.
]]>Mr. ZK, the proprietor of a web site which he has convicned a substantial fraction of all humans to use to moderate their communications with close friends and family. This web site nevertheless uses complex and opaque algorithms to determine what information they will actually get to see (of the various things their friends and family have posted, and paid advertisements). The only announced goal of these algorithms is to improve "engagement" -- that is, to maximize the amount of time that people spend on the site, ideally making its use a regular and compulsive feature of their daily lives. They have on one occasion acknowledged selectively altering the emotional tone of peoples' feeds as part of an experiment. After the blowback in bad publicity, disclosure of such experiments has ceased -- but the experiments themselves almost certainly haven't. Indeed, Mr. ZK's company has staffed up a department of world-class AI experts, the equal of any university department anywhere, to improve text classification and image understanding in service of these undisclosed algorithms, to allow them to make more finely tuned decisions about what people actually see in the many hours per week addicted web-site users spend looking at it.
(Indeed, this web site seems to be quite happy to propagate emotionally laden, factually dubious political articles. And why not, in terms of their one stated goal? If it keeps people reading, that's "improved engagement"!)
While encouraging his web site's users to disclose as much as possible (the better to characterize them and filter their data feeds), and surreptitiously using technical tricks to figure out what other web sites they use, and how, Mr. ZK himself is notoriously private -- buying up the houses next to his own main residence so he won't have neighbors, building a massive wall around his Hawaii vacation property, and hiring cops with discipline problems to serve as his private security.
Oh, one more thing: while not announcing any ambitions much beyond CEO of his company and associated charity work, Mr. ZK has gone on a "get to know the country" tour of the American hinterlands, which is known to have been stage-managed in part by top shelf political consultants.
An interesting fellow, the way we are all living in interesting times.
]]>He's also well known as a proponent of "seasteading" -- that is, of allowing rich people to escape all government control by forming ship-borne polities in international waters -- and as a funder of such "alt-right" luminaries and theoreticians as neo-feudalist and race theorist Mencius Moldbug. (Mr. PT is an inventor of the business-model-free startup that pays Moldbug under his wallet name, Curtis Yarvin.)
BTW, what I said about Mr. T is that he's been shuffled into his present position by Mr. X, not that he takes orders from Mr. X (though even so, his desperation to please Mr. X oozes out of him). And as regards Mr. T's present job, what's in Mr. X's interests is less that he do it any particular way, than simply that he do it very, very badly. If that is all Mr. X gets for his efforts on behalf of Mr. T, they will have been well worthwhile. Anything else is a bonus.
(Besides, the other candidate for Mr. T's present position was certain to act against Mr. X's interests. Mr. T, much less so. That's also worth quite a lot, even if Mr. T does not take orders regarding any matter in particular.)
]]>(Besides, "Mr. T" is the stage name for an American actor who ... probably doesn't deserve to be tarred with the association.)
]]>(The system is a bit confusing -- US Senators serve staggered six-year terms, with an election every two years for one third of the seats, The 2016 batch had good prospects for pick-ups among Democrats because several Republican incumbents were in shaky situations; 2018 is rather the reverse. Wikipedia has a page on the 2018 Senate elections for those wanting a detailed run-down, but I think I've given the gist of it.)
]]>BTW, back in the (apparently) real world, Boris has been spraying insults around much more widely than just on Erdogan. Just in the course of Brexit, he compared the EU project to Hitler's thousand-year Reich, and then "explained" Obama's advocacy for Remain by saying that his Kenyan ancestry biased him against Britain. He's also lobbed personal insults at both candidates in the current US Presidential election -- though he has recently found kind things to say about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. See
for details...
]]>https://twitter.com/StevePeers/status/753315030884548608
This is getting off to a wonderful start. Truly!
]]>I can see no flaws in this plan.
]]>I posted a citation of them a few hundred posts that, but ever since (like, perhaps, others) I've been heeding the warning of https://xkcd.com/386/
]]>