Frank Landis

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• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Speaking of 9/11, it's weird: I don't have the horrified reactions that everyone else does. I guess it's from growing up with mudslides, fires, and such (and having CERT training as a teen), but my reaction was to get very...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  With HPL, we're talking about the anarchists and communists who shot McKinley, won the Russian Revolution and threatened to take it worldwide. Yes, that's no more a unified group than "terrorists" are today, but they occupied a comparable place in...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Agreed. I still enjoy reading Lovecraft, and one of these days I'll reread REH (mostly because I have to liberate the old copies from my parents' house first). That said, the "Cthulhu Counterfactual" game I was trying to start up...
• Commented on Not dead but dreaming
  Yeah sure, the land is black, because of all that nice fertile silt that's washed down out of the mountains. The soil is dark, hence the Black Land, Khem. Problem is, water that's carrying lots of sediment isn't black, it's...
• Commented on Not dead but dreaming
  Oh, you've got multiple problems with Aswan, starting decades ago with schistosomiasis getting introduced to Egypt in the reservoir waters, continuing with the salting of the half of the Mediterranean's bread basket that was watered by the Indian Monsoon and...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  That's true now, although I suspect that, were the Mi-Go actually fronting for the Culture, they'd change tactics by year. The point of that one, as others noted, was to juxtapose the Culture and the Mythos in the 1920s. It...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Nice. To answer your question, he did. His archaeologists were truly amazing at deducing that the Elder Things were socialist slavemakers, simply from their hurried dicpherment of multi-million year-old alien friezes alone. Truly amazing--I want to get my PhD with...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  It's not two of everything, it's hedging your bets. The problem is that there are two mental math models for productivity. There's productivity maximization, which is where you use your high school calculus to find the local maximum and try...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  The "Best Practices" Party is a great theory. In practice, I'm afraid that most of its adherents will adopt its rhetoric and not its practices. Then again, I'm a little bit jaded by the previous talk of "ecosystem health" (start...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Yeah, but the problem is that the ideal farming technique, from most perspectives, is small-farming. It's more efficient and often more productive, because you have people who know a smaller farm intimately trying to get the best out of it,...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  The trouble with this question is that being scared is a short-term feeling. People might be scared of food shortages induced by war or climate change, but they're not going to be scared while they're dealing with it for the...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Yeah, maybe. I think climate modelers are heading towards the hourly climate forecast, and they're currently on monthly. That would be good for things like estimating chill hours, which are necessary for many temperate fruit trees. The problem is that...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  My generic comment on that is twofold: One is that it's too simple to last, since the problem with climate change isn't increasing heat, it's increasing unpredictability. This is the ultimate in managerial simplification, and it would work if the...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  I suppose it depends on how much they value the hostages... More seriously, the answer is it depends. That's the basic demon summoning/spy recruiting story, isn't it? It's the idea that it's possible to design a system (ritual, spell, procedure,...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  You're right, I shouldn't have crossed out the part where I said I was late to the party on that, which says nothing good about my racial awareness until recently. On the other hand, there's 80-odd years of stories that...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  With regards to A, I was thinking more about dealing with Yithians now, rather than in the 1920s (the hint about social media was the tipoff), but whichever. This is a game of what-if, after all. As for HPL, REH,...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Do we really need to go through this again? I'd suggest returning to something resembling the original topic, as we're only 35 comments in....
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Oh yeah, cycles of civilization, per Moties and Robert E Howard. The Moties are an extrapolation of the Erlich's population bomb idea, where they reproduce or die, and go from neolithic to nuclear war in a few centuries, only to...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Disturbing? Yes, I keep hoping we'll do better. As I've noted many times before, I don't think our species will go extinct due to this. The underlying problem here is that we're all working from different paradigms. You seem to...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  xxxx. There was a blob that said "Dang", I worshipped the holy Big Bang. Until, and damnation, Continuous Creation Was really the cause of the bang. Thank you! I was hoping someone would rise (or descend) to the challenge!...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  I think you forgot the part about things falling apart and being lost or forgotten. For us as modern humans, the oldest known skull is around 300,000 years old, dating not exact. That means we know little or nothing of...
• Posted Cthulhu Counterfactual to Charlie's Diary
  Nope, Charlie's not done, it's just me again. Yes, I wish Cthulhu Counterfactual was the title of the book I was publishing, but alas. Charlie's tied up in a D=3.76931323 fractal dimensional knot that he needs to solve in order...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Just when the thread was about dead, here's an interesting newspaper article about the problem of "resource shuffling." https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/government/in-rush-to-buy-clean-energy-coal-and-gas-have-hidden-role/ What apparently happened was that a rural county sold off some of its hydropower electricity at a fairly high rate to...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I'm noticing, and right now I've got the thankless task of telling spec builders how they're screwing up by building track homes oriented every old which way, with the difference paid for in air conditioning. By the way, what do...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  As a random aside, here's what being under a green sky really means (tl;dr: head for shelter). Also, here's a different take on to create sky colors on alien worlds (my favorite Orion's Arm essay)....
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Simplistically, removing water from air that is hot and humid will make it more comfortable, so this is a useful approach in the wet tropics. Since it's possible for air to get hot and humid enough to be lethal for...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I'd point out that you can make all sorts of weird comparisons by selectively choosing comparison dates. In Pinker's example, 1965 is when oil production is really ramping up, as was the production of subdivisions, while right now we're in...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I agree with Vimes' boots. That's why I bought a couple of kukri knives from Himalayan Imports. They're made from recycled metal, rated to last 50 years, and have a warranty as long as the company's still in business and...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  To Frank Landis (#520): yes, precisely. Horses? Look at the problems Victorian London had :-) I stand by my opinion that our priorities (in the 'West') should be to reduce our resource demands, minimise the environmental cost of the WHOLE...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Water's a problem for any power plant, whether it's cooling a heated system (basically, providing a cool place for all that heat to go to so that you can get some useful work out of it), or washing the gunk...