Scott Sanford

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• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  I like to have a little cash in my pocket for walking around money... And I pulled out $100 "just in case" money for my two trips out west in the last year. This is wise. Last night I spent...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  Every city was a microclimate. Or in the case of San Francisco, multiple semi-compatible microclimates that only occasionally talk to each other. Much writing has been done about this. The city is famously seven miles by seven miles (or in...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  Star Trek: First Contact is instead ends up titled Star Trek: Revenge of Clippy ( * silently points you Badgey from Lower Decks... * )...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  ... there was a terrifyingly satisfying mock-game in the late 1990s wherein you chased down and sledgerhammered hundreds 'n hundreds of clippys... I knew an engineer who made a half-meter tall physical model of Clippy, went out to the range,...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  Lisp seems to attract brilliant people who are unpleasant to work with. Since the filk song asserts that God Wrote in Lisp, the sample size of One-or-Three-depending-on-your-perspective supports the characterization of brilliant but difficult to work with. When was the...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  I definitely remember using wordperfect's "Presentation Perfect" long before I was even aware powerpoint existed so I'm all for the wordperfect future... though that's apparently ungoogleable? I'm not imagining that software package am I? I suspect not. I used and...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  Of course there is a social media network: Usenet is booming... As someone who was on Usenet in 1995, yeah, I could live with that. Also, PostScript instead of PDF? Meh, six of one, half dozen of the other. The...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Probably should add that “Long, hot summer” is an American political dog whistle to 1968... 1968 was a year with way too much history happening all at once, all over the place. (Honorable mention to the Prague Spring, which showed...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  As heartwarming as it is to read about the legal problems of the Orange Jesus, there's also some bad news. John Trimble has left us. Over fifty years ago he and Bjo saved Star Trek; it was not their first...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Re the computer logout, I always think this cartoon is apposite The web comic Grrl Power at one point mentions the character Harem had to apologize a lot to some college friends who were unaware she was a teleporter before...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  ... how long will jury selection take, do we think? As long as Trump's lawyers can drag it out, I'd expect - but it looks to be a matter of days rather than weeks. New York Times article about jury...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Around 10 years ago I put up Ring.com cameras around my house plus a door bell. We were at a point where the house might be empty for a week or two at a time. A few months back I...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  I often find new music on YouTube... I record the audio using Audacity and save it as a MP3 file. Yes, this. In my case I've got a browser add-on for downloading Youtube videos and can convert mp4 to mp3,...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Diaspora is "what if string theory was just the start" and gets a bit weird in places. Elliptical quarks and toroidal wormholes are not the worst of it... As a side note, I did appreciate the subplot that boiled down...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  but after crunching the numbers? so many card-carrying batshit crazy tinfoil extremists died that it has assuredly thinned the herd enough to reduce support for Trump You're right, the numbers have been crunched. You may have seen this a few...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  I'm fairly sure that Shakespeare failing on his own works is an old Asimov short story. He could have used it in fiction, though I couldn't name the short story. I do remember Asimov telling the story on himself, as...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  I managed to see the eclipse yesterday. Clouds started to clear an hour before, reappeared right at totality :-( I didn't get totality, by hundreds of miles; in my part of the Pacific Northwest it was solid cloud cover for...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  ...an entirely deniable military project... Honestly, I'm not convinced. That the Soviet Union would intentionally build a dual-use machine with an eye toward being useful in wartime, yes, absolutely. But, wow, the PZL M-25 was not a good plane. I...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Burma Shave? The right era, but no. It's to the tune of the novelty song Shaving Cream by Benny Bell, from 1946. It was re-discovered by Doctor Demento a few decades later, so people who don't remember WWII knowing it...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Since we're wildly off topic anyway, let me share this lovely verse that some algorithm found for me. It's both topical and a throwback to the memes of our grandparents' times, and it surprised me how many of my friends...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  The Avro Arrow wasn't cancelled by Diefenbaker, that was just a cover story... Fair enough. The European analogue of the Avro Arrow in the "really cool but technologically obsolete war plane" category is obviously the Saab Draken. I don't know...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  ...there's no mechanism by which His Dread Majesty could hijack the US government from the top down in a matter of a month or two unless he turns up in mid-2024, Renfields Trump and gets himself the VPOTUS slot on...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Laundry ==> clothing store with on premises tailoring... upmarket shoppe played for laughs Are You Being Served? with someone trying to fit a suit to/around/over a Blue Hades....
• Commented on Announcement time!
  And I don't think Karen Gillan is too old for Mo. The dark necromancy of the Youtube algorithm happened to offer up this talk show appearance (7m, Karen Gillan and Steven Colbert, April 3rd) and I agree; she could play...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  The question is this: given a moonless Earth-sized planet that has a Uranus-scale axial tilt, if you could maneuver a large asteroid into polar orbit around it, would the pull of the asteroid perpendicular to the planet's axial tilt decrease...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  In my head for the last decade I've had Arthur Darvill as Bob and Karen Gillan as Mo. For those who don't know them, they played companions to Matt Smith's eleventh Doctor... Oh, yes, they'd do wonderfully! Unfortunately the audience...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  My favorite soundtrack is still Buckaroo Banzai. I still have the Buckaroo Banzai theme on my computer (in MP3 format and copies on multiple devices; it's not going to disappear when The Cloud burps). I listened to it yesterday, in...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Also, the Best Doctor Who was Peter Cushing (in the 60s movies)! We really needed him on TV in "Genesis of the Daleks" facing off against Vincent Price as Davros (in Dr Phibes grade ghastly make-up). I was amused to...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Lots of bridges have posted limits for vehicles traveling on/under a bridge, why not have limits for ships - not just height but weight/m mass? They do - but if your life doesn't involve ships and boats, you rarely hear...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  And as for giant blades, it’s obvious that they should make twin-rotor helicopters out of them and just fly them out to the locations. With some thought the structure of the fuselage could be (part of) the tower. Any Spark...