AVR

AVR

  • Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
    How does it achieve that? Soulbound is an obscure enough system that there's not much out on the internet about it....
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    The first thing I wonder is whether there are an unlimited supply of microimps or just a practically unlimited supply, like TCP/IP v4 address ranges. Though not necessarily to that exact number it might be something defined in this universes'...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
    It looks like removing verification is a manual process - how many would they have expected to want to remove? - and removing all the legacy blue ticks will require Twitter to write a new process. Which they're short on...
  • Commented on Make Up a Guy
    I sort of think that by the time you can upload a human mind and then have it interact with the world usefully, you can also do things with semi-intelligent AIs which would severely limit the usefulness of having human-AIs...
  • Commented on I can't even
    The easiest way to raise the CO2 level in a greenhouse is to use fossil fuels to warm it. There's NZ farmers who do exactly this. Which has obvious problems from an environmental perspective....
  • Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
    Hunting and gathering reaches a sustainable point but not immediately. Large animals tend to go extinct when humans arrive and massively wasteful hunting seems to be at least one cause of that (it was the reason that moas and the...
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    On jaunting to other worlds with airships - this sounds exciting, in a bad way. Airships are especially vulnerable to crosswinds and you're talking about a very sudden shift in wind direction and speed, the exact nature of which you...
  • Commented on A death in the Firm
    She got a couple of new dogs earlier this year, one corgi cross and another whose details I forget. She had planned to not replace her dogs but that's a hard plan to stick to as I found out myself....
  • Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
    Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine apparently can be stored at reasonable temperatures, they're making an application to have the required storage conditions loosened up and may make another application later to loosen them further. Off-topic I know but I thought some here...
  • Commented on Covid on Mars
    What if senior medical staff are easily replaceable in 2070? With expert systems for diagnosis and computer assistance for surgery it's possible that the loss of Prof. Watzername, Oncology, ExtraLetters, is a hiccup rather than a showstopper. Her no. 2...
  • Commented on What happens now?
    Trump is not a brave man as far as anyone can tell. This little insurrection wasn't organised at any real level because he was careful to maintain enough distance that he couldn't be charged, I think. The phone call putting...
  • Commented on Submarine coming through!
    @Dave P: going for the swing voters is the traditional strategy, but with the low participation rates the other is to rouse your parties' base and discourage the other sides' base. It worked in 2016 enough to become well-known though...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    It looks like the Pfizer vaccine is being kept that cold because that's how they stored it in the testing labs. There's nothing inherent to mRNA that requires -70/-80 C to store it, and further tests should find out what...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    In Wellington, NZ, there's a Lancaster St. It is of course pronounced as God intended - Lan-cass-ter. This gave my English aunt conniptions....
  • Commented on The Laundry Files: an updated chronology
    If I had to guess where the Christian devil's pitchfork comes from and was looking at pagan deities it'd be Hades' bident not Poseidons' trident. Hades/Pluto ticks a lot more of the boxes like being a god of the dead...
  • Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
    First, move your capital offshore before the big day. Some of it will grow faster once banks, manufacturing etc. move out of the UK and into the places you've moved capital into but the important thing is to keep it...
  • Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
    Bindweed is a pest in some parts of the country, but no I really meant morning glory, called convolvulus here. If you want to clear an area of it you need to keep digging it up for multiple years. White...
  • Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
    Herb fennel, though it's less spindly than that pic. And yes it does form dense thickets, though it's one of the more minor invasive plants here. I'm in Wellington, NZ. Convolvulus (morning glory in Britain I think?), Darwin's barberry, wandering...
  • Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
    I was on dexamethasone for a while as part of chemotherapy. 4 mg/day rather than the 6 mg/day used to treat covid-19, sometimes actually per day and sometimes 1 big dose per 5 or 10 days. It doesn't have a...
  • Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
    The one that English gardeners brought over as a herb. It forms thickets too dense to push through. The flower heads look a lot like that hogweed which brought it to mind, though the foliage looks more like finely-branching stems....
  • Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
    So what controls giant hogweed in its native range? There must be something. I mean, gorse is harmless enough in Britain that they used it for hedges around pastures. I don't think fennel in England grows to 2+ m either...
  • Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
    I'm meaning no offence, but you lost me at 'torture scenes'. That's not a desired or even acceptable part of my reading escapism....
  • Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
    It's slightly more complicated than that article suggests - burning sulfur mostly gets sulfur dioxide, you want sulfur trioxide to make sulfuric acid. Heating it further, ideally with a catalyst will oxidise the dioxide to tri-. Messing around with this...
  • Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
    BJ appears to be making a beeline for no-deal Brexit. It's not something that could get approved under its own name in Parliament, but put up a bill to 'protect the UK from being carved up' which effectively does that...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    It's too juicy not to spread. Say what you will about Trump, he makes great stories - intentionally and otherwise. I guess his followers will still mostly dismiss it as fake news (with a few deciding instead that they never...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    I'd first read it in a very secondary source. Closer to a primary source here, which suggests that some benefit does accrue to the Kurds, though the contracts have been given to an American company set up for the purpose...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    If Trump was going to start a new war on short notice, wouldn't Venezuela make a lot more sense than Iran? Much closer, no major potential allies with a land border, just as much oil (Trump has carried through with...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    The colonised aren't likely to be be happy about the colonisers getting a vote to stay part of France in any case, but when France was subsidising people to move to New Caledonia it was particularly disliked by the Kanaks....
  • Commented on Dead plots
    So you haven't seen the movie? It was a very funny, low budget NZ production back in 2014. I have hopes of this sequel....
  • Commented on Dead plots
    "Why is Amber jumping on the top of the cowshed with her hand in the air?" "Someone might have suggested there was a bar of cellphone coverage around there..." "Was that you???" There are still places with terrible cellphone coverage....
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