Damian

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• Commented on Pushing it back
  It might surprise you Or it might not, although pushing things here risks treading in some sort of religious mess and best avoided. I think table 2.10 here is the interesting piece. It shows pretty clearly why our UK friends...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  compassion for everyone and everything who's stuck living right now That sure seems to be the priority. Of course climate is not the only driver for that, nor the only source of relentlessly negative findings. Compassion fatigue is a thing,...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  So only at best tangential to the active threads, I've been making myself upset, somewhat, reading around "climate doom", being a topic of some interest where the people who write their strong opinions just don't have anything vaguely satisfactory (to...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Cockatoos do seem to employ noisy miners as bodyguards, sort of, when out alone (as opposed to when they are out in groups, which tend to dominate the other birds in the area). At least, I occasionally see a lone...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  The range of possibilities available in timescales where tectonic subduction is an active part of the scenario makes this really, really broad I suppose. But what about looking at it the other way around: what would "we" discover first? Some...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Just to round the circle (or square the square, or something), it isn't that Pete's widow won't get a pension if Pete kills himself, it's that Pete might have his own ethical objections to suicide in the first place, at...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Any other options? (Exorcism not being feasible.) Pete's the only PHANG who is likely to conceptualise his symbionts primarily via theology and philosophy of mind. I don't want to hand you another rabbit hole, but the Faust legends have a...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Well definitely one thread to close is Vicar Pate's arc. There are at least 3 things in that, all of which had some airing in previous books. The least is how Pete (and Sandy) functioned as Bob and Mo's anchors...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  So like social media, but with introspection? Heads exploding with unaccustomed self-awareness? All over the carpet......
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  strategic reserve of steam engines That's The Rhesus Chart (which I'm just re-reading now, just because......
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Gah: lich-Rupert (second time around, autocorrect tried to change it to "loch")....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  and also gives us a bit more insight into PHANGs through a neat tie-in with The Rhesus Chart. I still need to go back and re-read TRC in light of SoS. ISTR that in TRC George has an epithet...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  it would be libellous for me to record my thoughts about him. Gah. Well O'Chee is 4 years older than me. He was the youngest Senator ever at the time when he was appointed to fill a casual Senate vacancy...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Likewise the collateral for both is similar, or at least has similar conceptual underpinnings - similar enough to be suspicious....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  https://youtu.be/ylpnkaevDUs?si=TjtW8MpB8haa6r52...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I wonder whether you've made a go of the straight storytelling thing, not necessarily with no genre (after all the argument goes that literary fiction is just another genre), but without the trappings of a genre. So recognisably contemporary humans...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Sabine Hossenfelder did a deep dive vlog on this: How bad is Diesel? Spends a considerable proportion of the time confirming that particulates are bad, really very bad and a lot worse than you probably expect, that diesel as opposed...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Anyway, given all the strikes, I now have this unholy urge to open a ChatGPT account, and tell it to write a pastiche of Uncle Tom's Cabin set in the Star Wars universe during the Old Republic, with droids taking...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I [...] made a data corruption problem go away by adding a 4-byte NOP in a part of the code that was neither executed nor read. Well obviously if it was never read, it totally needed that, how else is...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  If the weather disasters continue, I'm guessing we'll see fatalities even higher than for COVID Excess deaths due to climate change is pretty actively studied. Worth starting at WHO....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Well I suppose using nets is sort of equivalent to trapping, which is something else I left out. But again trapping rabbits for food is less viable where rabbits are routinely baited with 1080 (along with everything else, which is...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  @ Moz: I would have thought that Australians might eat lots of rabbit, but I guess if something is thought of as a pest, people won't want to eat it however tasty it is. Well that's mostly a scaling issue....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  As historian Will Durant noted, we consider the Inquisition to be an atrocity and an abomination. The Spanish people considered each auto de fe to be a glorious victory for Christ. It was not imposed from above. It was demanded...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I already enlarge the size of text on my iPad so that I can read for longer Been doing it for years, even reading on a phone. Not seeing page-turns as an overhead. I still see what EC means, though....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  So I'm wondering just the percentage of those who will be taking care of our health compared to other things. Like smelting steel, mopping floors, programming the latest wiz bang OS feature, or whatever else. The way we usually express...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Sure, but it integrates longitudinally too. Clive James and Germaine Greer were in the Footlights at the same time as the Pythons and the Goodies....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  (British actor) Hugh Lawrie, a comedian-turned-actor, once partnered (professionally) with Stephen Fry. Something all the non-Americans and probably some of the Americans know quite well. I never watched House, but it was certainly on air for several years here (in...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  It's a minor mercy, but they probably died so fast their nervous systems couldn't propagate the pain signals into their brain ahead of the shockwave. I wonder a little about this sort of thing because our ability to conceptualise the...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  There's a better Talmudic formulation Well there's also the Kant's first formulation, Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law, though I guess Kant has multiple formulations...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I have Boccaccio's Decameron in my head too. Several of the narrators are women, and some of the stories have female protagonists. It might be a technical pass (the female story narrators are telling the story to the group of...