Moz

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• Commented on Pushing it back
  Just because you only get Australia beern after it's been passed by experts doesn't mean it wasn't good before they passed it....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  29% land all locked together into a nightmarish extreme of here-n-now Australia SuperAustralia: Alice Springs but without the springs? Also makes me think the seasteaders really are in it for the long haul. Forget those stupid povo scum with their...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste this bacteria was doing much more than that – it appeared to be breaking down plastic fully and processing it into basic nutrients. From our vantage point, hyperaware of the scale of plastic pollution, the potential of this discovery...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Avoid breathing. Sorry the typo made it impossible to understand. Post-covid my spelling is not so good....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  The indigestible wood of the New Carboniferous Are you thinking of the "recycled" plastic fence posts and garden furniture that's being made now? I am. (it's downcycled - you take any old plastic waste, heat it up and compress it....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  argument about miscopying which changed '72 weight-units of fruit' into '72 virgin girls' Either way it's more dates than any of them had in real life... I'm also bemused that that's seen as a good thing. The Koran is explicit...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  structure with stone to its physical limits The Great Pyramid is ~140m tall, but Everest is almost 9000m and Mauna Kea is over 10,000m (most is under water) so 140m is more the limit on human willingness to pile rocks......
• Commented on Pushing it back
  causing its members to hide their traces as best they can. Not our social structure at all Australia suggests that just having an unrecognisable civilisation might be enough to "hide" it. Yez wandering along happily admiring the view and settle...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Trouble is that wooden building have the same exposure to capitalism that concrete ones do. I haven't seen anyone in that side of the industry talking about designing for the long term, and it'd be a bit foolish to anyway...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  I have a more techno-utopian view of that particular niche. I think we're going to see wholesale production of bioplastics from material that would otherwise be wasted feeding people, competing with the increasing number of things that discover they can...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  As with the carboniferous era the plasticene will end when enough things start eating the plastics which is likely to mean they mostly disappear. Our occasional landfills are not really equivalent to the huge swamps covering every bloody thing. Which...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  It might be worth looking at emu for excavations. Bush turkeys build large mounds, and emus already kind of dig. It might be possible to breed one or the other for size and use them to dig canals or other...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  It'll be a polyculture. I see what you did there....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  how far back into deep time do you have to go to posit a non-hominid civilization for which little or no evidence has survived to the present day? Selection effect is a real problem. We know that someone built pyramids...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  There's quite a lot of non-steel options, glass (fibre) reinforced concrete is popular here. Plus a lot of chopped fibre products rather than long-run fibre. Those are more homogeneous, and weaker but much faster to install. Even over quite long...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  we'd probably find proof of it unless it was done during an Ice Age glacial epoch in a now-flooded coastal area Given how shit we are at finding that evidence today even when it's less than 20m down, a primarily...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Doesn't some of that depend on the recovery/cycle time? If you can leave a planet/star fallow for a couple of million years then come back and do it again that means you only need a couple of thousand of them....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  [[ DELETED BECAUSE OFF-TOPIC -- mod ]]...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  how FTL might/might not work in an increasingly rapidly expanding universe That depends on the magic involved in the FTL, presumably. The simple answer is "it makes those volumes accessible" but that's no fun. Important to remember that we have...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  black women were told to step back and let the men have the stage The problem is that even if not true in a specific instance it's so common that it's plausible. Which led to that whole intersectionality thing that...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Yes. I regard nuclear weapons as abominations and skip past the bits where you get all excited about how cool they are....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I like the idea of Dragons United Against Gun-Weilding Pirates. There is power in a union and all that....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  you didn't read the Empire Games trilogy! I don't remember the bit where a spacecraft is world-walked across the same timeline and goes screaming out through the atmosphere due to conservaion of velocity. But I am not going to argue...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Yes, but it's more fun to think about it without necessarily buying into Niven's rules. Guidelines. Suggestions. Whatever you call them. I do agree that we have reasons to think teleportation isn't possible, except for the simulation fans. But they...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Running with OGH's version of teleportation where there's sort of limited conservation of energy modulo some handwaving, moving around the world between equienergetic locations should be possible, but jaunting to the moon not. Unless you build a cannon type thing...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  The problem is the gulf between mere humans and GHz computers. I think you're going to end up twiddling bits in an SSD where they're more or less static, and that means twiddling quite a few of them. Also, you're...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  https://theconversation.com/finding-a-live-brain-worm-is-rare-4-ways-to-protect-yourself-from-more-common-parasites-212437 BRAIN WORMS!!! In Australia, naturally. News reports this morning describe how shocked doctors removed a live worm from a woman’s brain in a Canberra hospital last year. The woman had previously been admitted to hospital with stomach symptoms, dry...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I'm sorry, articles like that annoy me. They were great and exciting in the 1970's, per the graphic theme of that thing, but today there are literally millions of people doing what that author is doing. Modern articles are often,...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  He's diabetic, fruit juice might kill him even faster than alcohol. OTOH, you can lead an author to a pub but you can't make them drink....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  And a way of treating the resulting alcohol poisoning. Or just a way to explain why he's drinking hundreds of shots of fruit juice or whatever it is we buy him when we have these outbreaks....