Keithmasterson

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• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Riders through Central Asian steppes needed ingenious survival strategies, and the Mongols pretty much figured it out. Meat was kept fresh by storing it between the saddle and the horse's back, since the combination of horse sweat, heat and constant...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  Marketing analysis for new products designates consumers as early adopters, on trend, or late adopters. The fact I only started reading or even being aware of Discworld, Girl Genius, Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Rivers of London in the last few...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The national debt being 32 trillion means the government borrowed that much through sale of debt instruments, mostly bonds. If the owners of those bonds seriously think there'll be a default due to Republican interference with the debt ceiling, they'd...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  "The Fifth Elephant" plot involved a maguffin called the Scone of Stone, now at last I understand the reference. Buh-haw!...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Could be a rare coincidence, or just the end of learned obliviousness on my part. Either way it seems unusual: the same disastrous weather system that brought tornados to the southern U.S. a couple weeks ago briefly caused intense fog...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Pigeon@1366 suggests "you get a partial polymerisation that very slowly turns the whole mass of fuel to jelly" Sounds like a threat risk assessment on the order of Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" in which a Marines commander sick of slogging troops...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  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...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  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...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  "Reports of flocks covering the sky for days sounds unnatural, like a Biblical plague of pigeons." I dunno, sounds bloody great to me. Indirectly it was sort of like each Native American killed by smallpox turned into ten thousand pigeons...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  So.....Thunder the Wondercar?...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  If slice-'o-life depictions of Asian farmers entertains you, don't overlook Nobel literature prizewinner Mo Yan's "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out", a farcical fable of a 1950s era Chinese landlord who is multiply reincarnated as various farm animals. I...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  H @ 867 writes: "That's what disappeared in the 16th Century, and researchers will continue to argue about it until the research money runs out." I think I read that estimated carbon fixation from the disappearance of regular burning, due...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Moz@682 wrote"These days the options for "light, but not too much" are so varied that it's easy to get overloaded. But also means my preference and your preference might not overlap at all, and someone else can sit there wondering...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I was so convinced that was a real 80s movie I checked Cronenberg's filmography wiki, and got nothing. So I googled the title and learned it's all just a leisure time internet amusement posted by Keith Schofield, an L.A. director...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Pratchett's "Witches Abroad" had a fairly hilarious take on an anthropomorphized tomcat, Greebo, a dim bulb reprobate who drove women crazy, in the right way. His thumbs worked okay, but a door handle was too much fuss and bother for...
• Commented on WTF
  Now you point it out, that does sound kind of 'ends justifies the means.' I was thinkng more along the lines of world empire itself bringing along its own horrible bag of tricks before the benefits kicked in. I blame...
• Commented on WTF
  Best info to flush through the Wayback Machine would be a map of the world showing coastlines, rivers and deserts, along with strategic passages to get through mountains, and sea lanes to traverse oceans. Knowledge of all the continents and...
• Commented on WTF
  (What's your most shocking find on the internet? No limits!) Ten months old, but still qualifies from my somewhat retro viewpoint, a collection of apparently living, breathing portraits generated by a.i. to show historical figures in modern attire, based on...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  If giving away free vodka was really an effective way to influence Russians, then a tiny fraction of their natural gas resources could be cheaply converted to megatons of ethanol methanol mix over nickel oxide catalyst at 150 degrees, and...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  @1130 speculates "stupidly named vehicle if there ever was such a thing." Chevy Nova led GM marketers to enquire why the product wouldn't sell to Latinos, till they realized it means Won't Go in Spanish. "Hey senor, my chevy no...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  "I can't believe I didn't see the locomotive" How many times did the gorilla cross the court… :-) Like in Pratchett's "Mort", where Death takes a night off and lets his apprentice make the rounds, then an assassin is accidentally...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  If all Musk wants to do is shut Twitter down and reboot the whole company top to bottom front to back and side to side from a cd-rom, then fire everybody and run it off a skeleton crew of cheap...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Good point, gunning down a camp full of armed cultists wasn’t probable, even though he had combat experience and they didn’t. Plot devices did occasionally push the envelope of credibility, but the dialogues and his extended internal monologues never seemed...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Paws a 563 writes: Seconded; in fact I'd suggest Richard Condon books to fill in some of the gaps between yours. ("gaps" based on how most people read faster than most authors write) The motion carries. His "Whisper of the...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Too bad there’s copyright blockage on Benny Hill’s performance of that number, odd since YouTube has most of his other stuff. Powers that be must think it’s too subversive, but then being offended at sheer buffoonery, a politician would have...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Timely, timeless advice from a departed sage: Musixmatchhttps://www.musixmatch.com › lyricsBenny Hill - Ting-A-Ling-A-Loo Lyrics...
• Commented on I can't even
  “what happens when Lovecraftian horror meets Regency romance.” 2009’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies proved the undead mashup concept works as a pedagogical device to make even Americans voluntarily read Jane Austen, since the comic was largely a straightforward graphic...
• Commented on Necroqueen!
  EC@173 wrote: “I agree that, if it had meant no industrial revolution, that would have been significant. But I think that it would have occurred eventually, because so many of the prerequisites also happened elsewhere in Europe.” Eventually may have...
• Commented on Necroqueen!
  Retiring@88 writes "I'm still wondering how tea parlors displaced the coffee shops of Samuel Johnson's time?" Another wiki article, Tea in the United Kingdom, says the 1720 ban on cheap cotton textile imports from India, passed by Parliament to protect...
• Commented on London Bridge
  Hippotolemy@693writes: "This is where I highly, highly recommend the ecological argument laid out by Robert Marks." Per earlier recommendation on this blog I got his "Origins of the Modern World" and just today found a paragraph I think makes an...