Kardashev

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• Commented on Pushing it back
  Printing presses are useless without paper. Well, it would mean a different use model than we have (no 50,000 runs for the morning and evening newspapers), but printing onto parchment/velum rather than having scribes with quill pens doing the...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Somewhat related to Deep Time/Far Future matters: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03005-6 Up to 92% of Earth could be uninhabitable to mammals in 250 million years, researchers predict. The planet’s landmasses are expected to form a supercontinent, driving volcanism and increases to carbon dioxide...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  For example, a common greeting in North America is "How are you?". It isn't a question, the only acceptable answer in "Fine, and you?". Not just in NA English. Spanish "que tal?" and "como estas?" mean the same thing...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Perhaps of interest mostly to UKians, but also addresses one of my favorite obsessions, which is that higher education has been seen increasingly as advanced trade school since at least the middle of the last century. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/william-davies/stay-away-from-politics [EXCERPT] There​ are...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  But, for the record, I and almost all physicists regard GR as having been being proven for low gravitational stresses for half a century. Even so, there are some who dissent for VERY low ones or distances on the...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Good grief, it's mostly cabbage after all - one of the most boring veggies. Erm... nope, not per Korean prep! I've always been fond of cabbage, but recently discovered chile crisp (Lao Gan Ma in particular). Chop up some...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  The EMF fields around the smelters in eastern Washington state are strong. To say the least. This let to office working play games of how many paper clips can you stack end to end vertically. The fellow telling me...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  One of the justifications for switching to fusion is to make nuclear weapons harder to manufacture for nations that might reasonably want cheap nuclear electricity. Wow. Never heard that one. It's in the "I can't even" range of nuttiness....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Once you've accepted that time is a dimension and not totally separate from space, it's no more mysterious than the equivalent situation in space That's right, and is what makes a lot of argument about SR and its consequences...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  "Rosaviatsia has published the list of passengers of the business jet that crashed in the Tver region: Passengers seem to be all Wagner, unsurprisingly. A couple of Prigozhin's lieutenants and two bodyguards. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign/who-prigozhins-crashed-plane...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Beef sausage In the US beef, turkey, chicken and TVP sausages are readily available, especially if you allow hot dogs into the category of "sausage". Also blood sausage/morcilla (yum!) in Hispanic shops and, I'd expect, Eurodelis....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  the species has two male morphs Like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser?...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Vastly unrelated to anything else in the thread, but possibly interesting, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-023-00985-1.epdf Substantial improvements in computing energy efficiency, by up to ten orders of magnitude, will be required to solve major computing problems — such as planetary-scale weather modelling, real-time,...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pail_of_Air...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  "in a white color crime, so the penalty usually would be a fine." Well, he's kinda orange, but the point is valid. :-(...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/05/donald-trump-homeland-security-threat-00109928 This touches something I've been wondering about: does a significant number of people in the US national security community think that DJT 47 would be an actual danger to that national security?...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Emptywheel, which is pretty good at such things, has: Rudy Giuliani (CC1), John Eastman (CC2), Sidney Powell (CC3), Jeffrey Clark (CC4), Kenneth Chesebro (CC5), and either Boris Epshteyn or Mike Roman (CC6) AIUI, CC6 is now thought to be Boris...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  18 USC 241 About which the Department of Justice explains: https://www.justice.gov/crt/statutes-enforced-criminal-section Conspiracy Against Rights Section 241 makes it unlawful for two or more persons to agree to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in the United States in the...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Trump January 6 indictment Which includes 18 USC 241. As noted upthread, it sez: If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Perhaps of interest for worldbuilding. https://pkazajobs.datacenterfrontier.com/careers/65140-DataCenterFrontierJobs/jobs/16239995-Data-Center-Facility-Engineer--TSSCI/ Data Center Facility Engineer - TS/SCI San Antonio, TX Our client is an Engineering Design and Commissioning Company that has a national footprint and specializes in MEP critical facilities design. They provide design, commissioning,...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Chicken bones as an Anthropocene marker in the deep future. I've been thinking that it would be glass bottles in seabed sediment, but chickens might have a place. https://www.manilatimes.net/2023/07/11/world/chicken-is-proof-how-humans-reshaped-world-experts/1900067...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Engines that can go near c so that time dilation causes the crew to experience only a few weeks of relative time during a journey of a thousand years. That's challenging, because the relativistic parameter γ that characterizes time...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  "Can there be love if sex is impossible " Er, yes. The eros-agape-philia-etc spectum. Can you love your cat, children, siblings, dear friends of whatever gender sans sex? Or abstract entities like religions and ideologies?...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "My understanding is that relative sizing is more important than the visual angle," Yes, but you need to have a known relative (like Cousin Elvis) at a known or estimatable distance from the object in question to make that work....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "I guessed 50 miles" Fair enough, but I will use it as a hook to rant on a favorite subject. For distances of more than a few meters, humans can't determine linear dimensions or speeds of objects without additional information....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Is Chorleywood where the radar is? The pattern reminds me of things I occasionally see in NEXRAD images -- I think they're caused by peculiar propagation conditions in the atmosphere....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "They are not the US Marshal Service whose job it IS to deal with dragging people to federal court when needed." I think you're probably right about the Marshal Service; it will be interesting to spot what if any officers...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  A basic function of the Secret Service is to function a bodyguards for officials, not to function as general-purpose cops, even less to arrest their protectees. However, their defining legislation does contain a section that might be used for that...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "See my post @ # 480?" Yes?...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "I assume the horror story from the Indian railway disaster hasn't made much news in the US" No, it's being covered quite a bit, at least in the national media....