heteromeles

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• Commented on The language of alienation
  Good to know. I always thought that fracking (for hydraulic fracturing) was a particularly good term, given what it does to groundwater....
• Commented on The language of alienation
  True, the Battlestar Galactica use of fracking didn't start until 2004....
• Commented on The language of alienation
  "First Quarter revenues for the Tentacle Porn declined 10%, the franchise announced Wednesday. A spokesperson blamed the new generation of at-home food printers, which now equal the ones the chain pioneered in 2017 at a cost consumers can afford. Sales...
• Commented on The language of alienation
  Probably a little dated now, but here's a 2013 sentence: "Free Beer $8.00 a six pack, while supplies last."...
• Commented on The language of alienation
  Sorry I didn't attach this to the previous message, but it could be better summarized for this post as: "Higher education is facing similar problems to the publishing industry with regards to disruptive innovation."...
• Commented on The language of alienation
  To unpack this one, there's a lot of media in the US about how: a) In the US, the cost of college (aka higher education, aka university) has gone sky-high, with student loans now outweighing credit cards as the major...
• Commented on The language of alienation
  Also for 2023: "Demi Moore's Law continues to hold true in the solar industry." "Rose's Law continues to hold true for quantum processors. Ghost-thread spoofing has taken the place of encryption as the standard for data protection, with a mean...
• Commented on The language of alienation
  As for 2023, how about something like: "He made his first fortune with a chain of mobile printshops for Clintonvilles in the Carolinas and the northeast, helping storm refugees furnish their shipping containers with cheap, stylish kitchenware and other necessities."...
• Commented on The language of alienation
  Sorry, missed the tech and pop culture ephemera. Here's another one: "Graduating seniors should consider whether it's still worth going to college or not."...
• Commented on The language of alienation
  Something that probably was seen as a "won't happen" headline that could, but to my knowledge hasn't, appear: "The bishop of Stockholm and her wife attended the premier of...". However, we can say that Gene Robinson, bishop of New Hampshire,...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Actually, the conspiracy is probably much simpler than that: Oswald had showed up on CIA radar well before the assassination, and probably was on the FBI radar as well. After all, the dude had gone to the Soviets and (AFAIK)...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  One other interesting possibility is that, for the first billion years or so after the late heavy bombardment, Venus, Earth, and Mars would also be roughly equally , erm, habitable. If time travelers ventured back that far, there could easily...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Um, there may be bigger reasons why a Klemperer rosette was not set up. They don't seem to be terribly stable even when properly set up with planets of equal weight. I'm not quite sure how you set up one...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Okay, fine, we'll let you have your Final Library. I know, big of me. Still, it better make sense this time!...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Actually, I already had that design, although I named it after Jack Vance's Chronoplex, rather than Piper. My conceit was that the only major history branches happened at mass extinctions, because a) the geology of the events never seems to...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Well, the only way you get a causal universe with time travel is either if there are large numbers of alternate histories, or history gets rewritten by each choice. Otherwise, time travel stories take place in a non-causal universe, where...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  That's effectively a dimensional problem. There's no reason you can't have a fifth dimension (a second time dimension) for "time outside of time" actions." One can also posit additional spatial dimensions within which alternative histories are located. The problem then...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Cough *fossils* cough! Every dead, cooling planet is different, because different histories leave radically different imprints on the planet itself. Saying that all such futures are the same is analogous to saying that all books are the same, because they...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Um, I think the Universe as a whole allows more than one wormhole, don't you think? If "going through a wormhole" causes an alternate history, this could be a problem if there are many such wormholes throughout the universe. As...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Well, two things bugged me about Palimpsest. One was that this seemed to be an infinite universes sort of thing, where a bunch of shaved apes, on an insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy, were making versions of the entire...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Actually, it's quite simple to make civilians commit suicide en masse. All you have to do is tell them that the Americans are going to kill them all anyway, possibly after raping the women. It helps to use American propaganda,...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  First off, I'm sorry I derailed this thread, Charlie! That said, it's worth reading about the conditions under which microbes existed for the first 3.3 billion years or so. They're rather more extreme than a nuclear bombardment could generate, so...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Ah, thank you. I should have guessed there would be a list somewhere. I counted at least five versions of the idea....
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  At the risk of being boring, I should point out that, after Downfall, the general consequences would likely have been: --The USSR either annexed Hokkaido outright or set up a puppet state of the People's Democratic Republic of Japan. --the...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Hmm, missed that one. Actually, dumping the A-bomb in the ocean was the failure protocol. The alternative was flying back to Tinian with a live atomic bomb in the belly of the plane. If the plane crashed and/or the bomb...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  To cross over from the previous thread, here's another story idea: During the closing days of WWII, the Allies decide to drop atomic bombs on Japan. The Hiroshima bomb fails to detonate. The clouds over Nagasaki prevent them from dropping...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  First off, cahth3ik, please read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_downfall and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan. These are good summaries. I know it's fun arguing from ignorance, but you need to learn this history. Logic won't help you when you argue from ignorance and false assumptions. Here's what...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Actually, I don't know that. IIRC, our president is black, and a majority of people (50.6%) voted for him over a very white man with a stable marriage. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/election-map-2012/president/ That's except in the South and some other places. While I...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  In turn, I'd suggest that Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran have learned the wrong lessons from the Japanese and Germans of WWII. Statecraft is a true craft, and not everyone is a master. In any case, there's a real concern, going...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  One good question is, what "should" the Japanese have done? Not invading Manchuria would have been a good start. No, wait ... The fact that it took just a decade or two for the Japanese army to go from adherence...