Jules Morrison

Recent Actions

• Commented on Place your bets
  Call them "Blarney engines" - they've got the gift of the gab, but the best they can generate is truthiness. Useless for most things, but they may have a great future ahead in the preparation of political speeches....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  I think an important counterpoint to that is: nearly all of that utterly vast GWP is hand-to-mouth. It achieves a lot, but that "a lot" looks like a steady state of "people get fed, trade moves around and infrastructure exists"....
• Commented on The Laundry Files: an updated chronology
  Deep Ones in one supplement attacking humans on a boat ... using knives, rather than magic and/or super technology: BLUE HADES aren't crude tribal/ethnic stereotypes straight out of Lovecraft. Perhaps they wanted to make like humans did it? Ugh,...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  Going by what's happening out there at the moment, China has got a handle on non-imported infections, and that rules out too aggressive a whack-a-mole problem with latency. Otherwise it would be reigniting in "clear" areas....
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  In regard of testing positive after infection... it feels more likely to me that this is latency and resurgence, like the British nurse Pauline Cafferkey who got Ebola, got better, and got sick again. She wasn't re-exposed, because the source...
• Commented on COVID-19
  Yeah, for "hide myself in a hole", read "actively conceal my case from authorities who are trying to control infection". Instead, infect the entire office, the fast food joint I serve in and all its customers, everyone riding in my...
• Commented on COVID-19
  I've heard they're billing the ones in quarantine too. Because what you really want from a population experiencing a pandemic is for them to think "if they catch me and send me to hospital, I'll be billed vast sums I...
• Commented on COVID-19
  Shincheonji also has a fun policy of "recruiting" by false front businesses and exploiting the vulnerable by fake friendship. I will not cry in the least if the South Korean government decides to nuke them with extreme prejudice. I feel...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  My pitch is to make this, but as a Black Mirror episode....
• Commented on Creative writing challenge!
  When they accidentally ended the world in 2012, looking for the Higgs Boson, nobody realized it. With an entire planet dropped into the afterlife all at once, the sheer inertia and weight of expectations made the seemingly mundane carry over...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  The interesting and open question is who picks up the pieces if the Conservatives have been tainted beyond salvation and Labour are shattered by their own divisions? The UKIP has been making some worrying Bannon-ward advances lately. The Lib Dems...
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  And now they're going to use the BFR for suborbital earth-to-earth executive trips, earth-to-orbit, earth-to-moon and earth-to-mars. And mothball the whole 9 series. Interesting times....
• Commented on Help Wanted at the Climate Policy Sausage Factory
  This article has part of the answer: https://shift.newco.co/amp/p/38b843bd4fe0 Decarbonization is not going to be an individual thing (which makes it super expensive) it's going to be a societal thing, driven by money mostly, renewables and electric vehicles will simply be...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  Patreon is the most creative thing up-and-coming in this space. it's subscriptions, but your subscription goes towards making a thing freely available even to non-subscribers. That was always the one reason everybody comes back to advertising despite its glaring awfulness:...
• Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
  I've had the idea before for asteroid mining direct to ultrapure elements by the construction of a huge, in-vacuum mass spectrometer. Vapourize asteroid mass using a free electron laser, charge and accelerate it through a magnet with a solar powered...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  There's another downside to this. A tech which can cross interstellar distances in single digit lifetimes, can also deliver a rather energetic kinetic kill vehicle. Deliberately or by accident. "Oh drat, I think we punched a hole clean through their...
• Commented on The unspeakable truth
  I propose we designate this scenario CASE NIGHTMARE TWEED....
• Commented on Updating a classic
  Periodic pointless automated, automatically assigned training in aspects of the business and regulatory environment which don't actually affect you, made slow and tedious by animations, unskippable "activities" and with a multiple choice test at the end that sends you back...
• Commented on Markov Chain Dirty To Me
  Voice synthesis is hard because tone, pacing and emphasis are semantic. Computers are capable of simulating the full expressive range of the human voice, see for example the various songs composed in Vocaloid. But they aren't yet smart enough to...
• Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  "Aliens have a much longer history of spaceflight than humans, but unaccountably failed to stumble upon and domesticate us during the 11th century" Actually this one is justifiable. Throw a dart at a timeline between now and the first habitable...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Ships going up and down gravity wells like it was about as hard as the commute to work. If you don't have implausible tech, it absolutely will be a big deal to get up to orbital speed. And the two...
• Commented on 21st Century: a complaint
  Re the inflation thing, they retconned it with a bit of too-clever sleight of hand. It turns out that if you run everyone's money presses at once, the foreign exchange doesn't show any apparent inflation. And if that free floating...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  One idea I had for dealing with this: launch devices containing huge quantities of liquid self-expanding hardening foam, so it can become a gigantic semi-solid blob in orbit, and soak up flying scrap. Small stuff that hit it would become...