Scott Sanford

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• Commented on Place your bets
  Off topic but amusing: By Klono's Silk Unmentionables! It is starkly unimaginable that a more thrilling discovery from the golden age of science fiction will be made today....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  BTW, Season of Skulls just showed up on James Nicoll's Books Received list....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Spiderman(tm) but inside there's really a zillion wee flesh eating spiders... Spiders-Man is a canonical character in the Marvel multiverse and is, horribly, exactly what you imagined....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Has Gerrold said anything about finishing the Chtorr books? What Charlie said. A novel draft exists, but I haven't heard anything about a release date lately. He has occasionally mentioned tending to work on projects he's not at liberty to...
• Commented on Place your bets
  ...De Santis, who is no better on policy but marginally more competent. For those lucky enough to be an ocean away from Florida Man, take note that "more competent than Trump" is a really low bar. Governor DeSantis is a...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I'd heard reliable information about this regarding Star Wars, but not Star Trek. I casually follow David Gerrold over on Facepalm but he's spoiling his grandkids more than he's worrying over the working conditions in the Trek mines. And good...
• Commented on Place your bets
  ROFL... wait for it as woman in baseball cap gets arrested for the wrong reason As an American, I'm used to seeing far-right people saying dumb things on TV wearing red baseball caps. The depicted event is literally a Yakov...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Apparently NASA had all these high-speed 70mm cameras spotted around Canaveral... Yes, and why wouldn't they? They're going to the fucking moon, which is not only amazingly historic but also amazingly expensive. The extra cost of adding the best...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Even a comedy like the US Murphy Brown from the late 80s / early 90s doesn't work very well as so much of the humor was based on the Bush 41 presidency. Comedy is hard. (I remember watching Murphy Brown...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Comparisons between petro-states, narco-states, and old school alco-states (cf US politics in the Gilded Age) may be interesting to some. Do you know any essays on the differences between these categories? I suspect they exist but can only conjecture how...
• Commented on Place your bets
  There was a corker of an example of that in China... someone hired a hitman to bump someone off, the hitman subcontracted it to another hitman, and so on. After five iterations they closed the graph. At least when it...
• Commented on Place your bets
  KSR's novel uses pebbles, fired from 100 or 1000 different directions at precise velocities, all to arrive exact same point and time. In effect coalescing into a large unexpected rock just in front of the jet intakes, just as the...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Ken Thompson [was] really crucial to the development of programming languages and operating systems... I'm reminded of a breathtaking "you are in a hole" moment that I was privileged to witness. If you're pontificating online about the GNU open software...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Scott Adams has withdrawn the Dilbert Web page, and you are given the option of signing up to one of his blogs. Er, no, just no .... I just noticed this yesterday. (Has the Dilbert web page just gone down...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I see no way in which this could go horribly wrong! Alberta brewery's first AI-designed beer...
• Commented on Place your bets
  The SD's aren't creative, and certainly don't understand subject material all they can do is create a probabilistic image out of random image substrate, which is why they create so much nightmare fuel, for real this is what 10,000 fingers...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Howard NYC is in any case wrong because he's American, speaks with an American accent, and presumably learned Hebrew with an American accent. I'm reminded of a story told by that other American Jew from New York City, Issac Asimov....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Any bets on how many MAGAt RepubliQans would be affected as opposed to Democrats? That would cover Donald Trump. You may remember that he and his father were caught being naughty landlords back in the 1970s, illegally refusing to rent...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Really? { Links or info, please? } I assume it's more lying bullshit? Oh, it's 100% bullshit. But the proposal was really made by Florida senator (state government, not federal) Blaise Ingoglia, a humanoid who's attacked the practice of letting...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Never mind blocking trains and cars and trucks, North Koreans will sneak across on foot. Reciprocally, if crossing on foot is forbidden they'll disguise themselves as a bus. Anyone want to guess what an AI might make of that? All...
• Commented on Place your bets
  One favourite of the YECs is the idea that the Grand Canyon was carved by the retreating waters of The Flood. But there is a relationship between the speed of flow of the water and the sinuosity of the resulting...
• Commented on Place your bets
  YEC's basically want to see a lab experiment run where an ameba turns into a dog. And until you show them such, hand waiving. I've discovered that they get very defensive if I start asking about "amoeba into a dog"...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Since I know of no commandment in the Bible to believe it is literally true... As a small child I got taught in Sunday School that a lot of the Bible's stories were parables, lessons wrapped up in stories to...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I have a question for everyone: What sciences currently have a method of proving that Earth is more than 6000 years old? Short answer, pretty much all of them. Check out https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_against_a_recent_creation for a long, and somewhat snarky, list of...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  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...
• Commented on Place your bets
  The concept of "dictionary" something so simple that it was obvious after you explain it to someone. But. But first someone to come up with it and then go through a couple dozen drafts for how entries ought be laid...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  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...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  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,...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  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...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  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...