bensen.daniel

Comment Threads

• Greg. Tingey commented on Existential threats
  paws4thot @ 362 "Western Isles" & crop-growing. Erm, isn't it Tiree, the island beneath the waves, that has more sunshine than almost naywhere else in the UK, and was recorded as growing TWO crops of barley in one season, in ... 1764. @ 364 At least one variety of cat, the Norwegian Forest, have their front "thumb" claws significantly separated from the rest. Which is why they can climb things significantly better than other varieties of cat. Couple that with the intelligence of a Birman or Aby (our Birman tom understands, and can open, objects with lids - oh dear)...
• Greg. Tingey commented on Obsolete existential threats #1: The Bomb
  d. brown @ 257 Yes? And? There are "9/11 "truthers", and GW-deniers, and believers in YEC, as well. So? Deranged loonies, the lot of them. PICK THE SIMPLEST EXPANATION THAT FITS THE KNOWN FACTS - huh?...
• Charlie Stross commented on Obsolete existential threats #1: The Bomb
  Hang on, let me think ... Yes, you're right: it's not going to go past 50%. My bad. One could speculate about using different mechanisms to go past 50% -- say, using a membrane pump that binds to four chelated Uranium atoms, and only sequestrates if they're in a 3:1 mass ratio -- but at that point you're looking for a pump that can discriminate down to 1 Dalton of mass in over 1000. At which point the presence of other random isotopes in the chelation molecule is probably going to bugger up its reliability. Phew. (An isotopic quicksort mechanism...
• untranslatableconcept commented on Existential threats
  this may have already been suggested, having skimmed too quickly the above entries. the same people who are really into custom order genetic sequence printing in their basement kludge together a crude brain - machine interface, not very advanced, but enough to make you raise your hand in front of a senate committee, which promptly outlaws everything to do with it. this sparks, of course, serious black investment projects into exactly the kind of stuff we're not ready for yet. and when it is done crudely, leaked and blueprints/geneprints/schematics torrented, you get the best street high anyone has ever experienced....
• aratuk commented on Existential threats
  Going further, there may come a day when we forget we once built this stuff. Maybe theres a potential fictional work in this, a far far future fantasy story where the "magic" starts to break down[...] I highly, highly recommend you read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It takes place in an "Urth" of the far-future where the vast majority of people essentially have the means, knowledge, and culture of Europe in the middle ages, while they live among the detritus of what had clearly been a much more advanced civilization (in the form of a...