Zorro

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• Commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
  For example, our tribes (well, nation-states) typically don't report war deaths or judicial killings as homicides, although anthropologists might, on the theory that inter-tribal combat isn't war or legal justice. Comparisons (especially with Washington DC, where those who order the...
• Commented on Neptune's Brood: an excerpt
  I love this excerpt so much. I loved Bit Rot too. I can't bring to mind anyone else trying to write space opera without rewriting physics for the story's convenience. SF writers working on an interstellar scale rarely commit to...
• Commented on "Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying" — Iain Banks, 1954-2013
  If you believe that you can just mix and match technologies with whatever social order you like, then yes, the difference between Star Trek and the Culture is just a matter of taste. But I believe that is incorrect: you...
• Commented on "Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying" — Iain Banks, 1954-2013
  My Banks introduction was Consider Phlebas, and I could not have considered it more perfect. Almost everything about it -- other than the wild disregard for known physics -- was a breath of bracing fresh air compared to other space...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
  Doesn't that make the parallel to automatic machine enforcement of traffic laws more compelling, not less compelling? The traffic camera doesn't know if it is taking a picture of a wealthy local from a connected family or a poor immigrant....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
  I have to disagree. For example, what's the punishment for killing an endangered butterfly? Technically it's a felony, but if someone accidentally steps on one that's off the reservation, do they deserve to go to jail for a year (at...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The key problem with laser weapons is thermodynamics; you can't build a 100% efficient laser. Indeed, efficiency usually tops out at or below 25%. Which means, for every kilowatt of beam energy, you need to dump at least 3 kW...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  I think that current wind and solar PV technology is basically "good enough" on a technical basis though financial viability varies widely with region. The conversion efficiency is high enough, the EROEI is adequate-to-good, and there aren't any critical mineral...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  My point is that there is a physical reason why that won't work, or is at least very questionable. That reason is the second law of thermodynamics and its corollary Carnot's theorem, which states that the maximum efficiency of a...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  As you can probably guess, I'm a supporter of the adage "anything that isn't impossible will eventually happen, and even the seemingly impossible has a way of happening sometimes". Eventually can be a very long time. It seems like the...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  Ideally, of course, I'd like to live with a mature nanotechnology that works in water, at room temperature, using locally available atoms and energy derived mostly from the sun. Oh yeah, that's right, we do--it's called the biosphere. It's also...
• Commented on Me, talking
  Want an 20th-century-style change-the-world type of invention? A better battery. Something the size of a brick that holds enough energy to drive a mid-sized auto 500 miles on a full charge. And cheap of, course. With that kind of battery...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  According to the wiki article on Fukuoka, his system can give high productivity without modern machines or chemicals, but it is also more labor intensive and can take years for a farmer to learn well enough to consistently surpass conventional...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  Simplicity is context-dependent. Education is not dramatically faster/cheaper today than 70 years ago, despite an explosion of technological marvels. At some point it gets easier to distill skills into machines than to train millions of people. This is why (e.g.)...
• Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
  As for making sparks, I've got to note that the sparks coming off two rocks may not be hot enough to ignite a tinder bundle, and there's still some force involved. You can't place a flint on top of a...
• Commented on Unbreakable (part2)
  Does American culture promote "characteristics such as dominance, power, and control as means of establishing or maintaining manhood."? Must male power equate to causing fear in others? Corporate power. Religious power. Political power. Pricing power. Cultural power. Negotiating power. Naval...
• Commented on Women in SF and Fantasy
  It's not just harder for an author to really inhabit the past and its different social rules without going anachronistic or didactic. It's harder for the reader to appreciate too. I can't really enjoy Gone With the Wind because it's...
• Commented on Tapeworm Logic
  It still would not work. Free will is supposed to be more than just flipping a coin to make a decision. Oh, I agree that it doesn't make any difference. I think free will is either trivially demonstrated or incoherent,...
• Commented on Tapeworm Logic
  Of course human consciousness requires quantum effects. So does brewing alcohol. Organic chemistry: that's quantum effects, right there, and all of biology is riding on top of it. I gather that most of the proponents of quantum consciousness mean something...
• Commented on Tapeworm Logic
  Though, it has me wondering if there's an AI parallel to the Fermi Paradox*, along the lines of "Would we recognize it, if we saw it?" Or are our assumptions about what intelligence is (Human, Artificial, or Alien) too ingrained...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Hawaii has a feed in tariff for solar, so there's an incentive to size installations larger than if all production had to be used where it's made. Electricity pricing may well get more complicated to reflect the costs of different...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  It's simple to deploy PV so that it doesn't put additional burdens on the grid. Size the installation so that 90% (or 95%, 99%...) of the time, production is less than local consumption, and don't even try to do net...
• Commented on 2512
  I'd be surprised to see chlorates and CO in the same environment, but if that's what they measure, that's what they measure. It's a bit surprising, since perchlorates are extremely oxidizing. Perchlorates and chlorates are good oxidizers at high temperatures...
• Commented on 2512
  More to the point, we've already got a hell of a lot of computing power, and what exactly the benefit of having 5-6 orders of magnitude more is not terribly clear. We've long since reached the point where the human...
• Commented on 2512
  We can't really know if humans will still be around, or if so what our societies will be like, but we can bound things. Nuclear fission offers specific energies within 3 orders of magnitude of matter-antimatter annihilation. Existing photovoltaic systems...
• Commented on 2512
  "China is poised to take over from arch rival Japan as the biggest robotics market in the world in the next few years, as manufacturers struggle with rising labour costs and demand greater efficiencies." I don't see how that indicates...
• Commented on 2512
  The Anglosphere is not the whole world. The last 10 years have seen socialists take electoral victories in regions with unemployment and poverty rates much lower than 80%. At 80% the big question would be where they wouldn't make big...
• Commented on 2512
  When machines do all the useful work, ordinary people don't need wages any more than capitalists need workers. If the only thing preventing 80% of the population from switching to prosperity from poverty is a few antediluvian rentiers, elections will...
• Commented on 2512
  Q: In a world where machines perform all useful economic activity, how do you tell the capitalists from anyone else? A: Everyone's an idler, but the capitalists are the ones that look unhappy....
• Commented on 2512
  If machines do all work and manufacture everything, including copies of themselves, it only takes a small number of altruists or pirates to neutralize the capital-owners' initial advantage....