Michael Cain

Michael Cain

  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    I've always liked to think about magical programming languages as imperative, not declarative. What the spell is supposed to achieve rather than how to achieve it. Granted, it wouldn't work well if it's a specification given to a demon, as...
  • Commented on Shrinking the world
    From 1834, on the near order of 700,000 Americans migrated west using the Oregon Trail and trails that branched off. Just over 2,000 miles (3,200 km). A large majority of them walked it in about nine months....
  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    I suspect that the biggest difficulty if the US were to abruptly announce a peaceful partition into two countries is the rest of the world screaming, "But wait! What about all these bonds denominated in 'US dollars', which just happens...
  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    The usual motorcyclists' mantra is that you assume everyone else on the road is actively trying to kill you, and ride accordingly. It may be technically a bit of an exaggeration but in practical terms it's realistic advice. Many years...
  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    (That there are examples doesn't change this, any more than the Icelandic reliance on geothermal is a general solution.) Yes, highly situational. I am fortunate to live in a place (US Western Interconnect, Colorado, a small power authority) where pumped...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    I tried one of the Travis McGee novels and ended up finishing the whole 21 book series, no disappointments at all... Meyer has always been one of my favorite takes on the Companion to the Hero character....
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    Note that the Tories have gone bonkers-crazy to the right, despite Labor/SNP/Wales. Not to US standards, but what will the next few years bring? Will they run on "20% of the population should lose subsidized health care"? We have national...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    ...and that has left us with only 2-3 companies (TSMC, IBM and Intel, I think) producing the bleeding edge chips... TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. IBM sold off their chip-making arm to Global Foundries, which subsequently decided that sub-10nm was too...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    (I forget how long freight trains run, but there are no double-stacked containers -- not with our tunnels and overhead wires -- and I think they max out at around 30 cars long.) I live on the western edge of...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    But Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York - so is a perfectly acceptable candidate. :p Boris renounced his US citizenship rather than take on the US Internal Revenue Service over a significant amount of unpaid taxes....
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    As for Priti Patel becoming President? Dubious. More than dubious. The "natural born citizen" requirement has always been interpreted to mean "citizen from birth". None of the people already born at the moment Britain (or some subset) became a territory...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    If the PRC did invade (and conquer) Taiwan, what would that do to U.S. security (particularly military defense) that is overwhelmingly dependent on Taiwanese semiconductors? My understanding is that ICs for use in US weapons systems must be produced on...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    On the topic of EUV in semiconductor manufacturing. The lasers that produce the light depend on ultra-pure neon. Most of the world's supply of such came from Ukraine, and production there has stopped. The backup supplier is... China. ASML, the...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    The thing I don't understand is that the both the U.S. and the EU have programs in place designed to undermine the Taiwanese semiconductor industry (like the CHIPS Act). No. The US at least is saying, we will not be...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    How might those voter percentages turn out as seats? I'd pay money to watch the PM's Questions with the SNP leading the loyal opposition....
  • Commented on I can't even
    Anecdata related to a couple of the agriculture themes... Eastern Nebraska in the 1970s was full of places where WWII industrial hemp had gotten established on land where power equipment couldn't go. I worked three summers at an agricultural field...
  • Commented on London Bridge
    I can't overemphasize how much brighter everything is, from being just a thousand miles further south on a globe 24,000 nautical miles in circumference. I strongly urge that you get polarized sunglasses, even if that means some sort of clip-on...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    And this piece in the guardian is all about the increase in pests as soil temperatures rise... Bear with me... I know this has been a horrible year for wildfires in the EU. Is this strictly a current drought problem?...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    Florida had a referendum. No, Florida had an initiative. It was on the ballot because hundreds of thousands of Floridians signed petitions to put it there. Referendums are ballot issues referred to the voters by the legislature....
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    Re 1020... In my first real professional job in 1978, I was assigned to do maintenance on a program written in PL/I in exactly that style. When the guy who coded it hit the end of a statement, it was...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    Australia has or had three pumped hydro systems, all owned by coal power companies, and they worked just like the UK one: fill them overnight when the coal systems were underloaded, empty them during the evening peak. My modest local...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    You replied to my post, yet the header says "Michael Cain replied to this comment from shrldu". Any idea how his happened? Almost certainly some sort of fumble-fingering on my part. Software is like fictional magic: do every step in...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    Graduate students are a pool of free or almost free labor, as teaching assistants... Which explains in part why all large universities have pretty big graduate programs in mathematics. All those people from "outside" that have to get through at...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    I do admit that since OGH first put this post up, I check UK news first thing each morning to see if the blackouts or food riots have hit yet....
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    My own opinion about why the Industrial Revolution occurred where/when it did is the emergence of a scientist/engineering guild, at least informally. The masters exchanged information, they taught apprentices and journeymen, they tried to one-up each other. So far as...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    The others are being too snippy. Simple question: Did your dinner partners have an answer to the question, "Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain, its American colonies, and the rest of Western Europe, rather than China?"...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    Ha! I knew that one. I don't remember any of the things I could prove about them from back in the long-ago days when I was doing large-scale network flow optimization, but at least the name popped up....
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    I went to grad school in the middle of it, and it was absolutely bonkers, with the textbooks being regularly thrown out as more information came in. This may sound normal to in computers, but biology runs more on the...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    Can you provide a pointer? Screws are important. If my notes survived the downsizing associated with a recent move, I haven't seen them. Sorry. The reference that was most useful was some a book on the history of machine tools...
  • Commented on The gathering crisis
    I once got interested in how we got from crude wooden screws to Ramsden's accurate 125 threads per inch screws in the 1790s. Interestingly, it's basically a matter of toggling back and forth between two devices. Given a screw of...
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