Retiring

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Without going into the differential equations, we can describe predator-prey systems I assume you wrote that just so that someone else could point out the Lotka-Volterra equations, a nice example of (simplistic) modeling....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  It's not the distance, or the altitude, or the change in potential energy. It's the speed. I can get up and walk across a room using plain old muscle power, which is to be sure a jaunt, but is it...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Right. The bit-hacking possibilities, as well as the dice-controlling possibilities, are limited by other innate human shortcomings. Shortcomings which could be mitigated by technology, possibly implanted at great expense into teleport or telekinesis-capable agents. Basically government assassins. Or one might...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  C'mon, guys. Teleportation has the same problem as telekinesis -- the energy budget is all wrong. Unless there's extensive surgical implantation of machinery which draws on mysterious super energy sources to power the trip....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I buy my weisswurst remotely from Usinger's in Milwaukee. They seem to also offer many beef sausages (and blood sausage)....
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Maybe so. It's a very narrow ruling, and there aren't many precedents. I foresee cases for the next couple of decades before this is settled. See also this ruling on "Zarya of the Dawn." This makes me think of the...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Not sure this actually means much. Thaler was trying to get his program, the "AI", listed as the sole creator of the artwork. The judge said, "that's ridiculous, a machine can't hold a copyright." If he'd applied for himself, and...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  https://film.britishcouncil.org/resources/film-archive/the-western-isles...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  not knowing the future so he could predict it correctly Sure. No slur on his predictive ability intended. I was entralled as a kid with Foundation and the robot stories, even though psionics and telepathy never made any sense, energy-wise....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Alec Nevala-Lee's joint biography Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction makes Asimov out to be someone whose attitudes towards women might not be entirely in accord with...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  I was referring to the last series of six French test shots in the Pacific in 1995-96 OK. Why then refer, in the immediately preceding sentence, to the US tests in 1950's? All the US tests were underground after...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  The French tests were all underground and quite limited in size The French exploded plenty of bombs in the atmosphere, both in Algeria and in French Polynesia, including at least one 2.6 megaton hydrogen bomb. Wikipedia has a list...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Yes, a great load of sentimental claptrap, with every character some kind of distorted caricature. So, of course, a huge success. And directed by John Ford (whose real surname was Feeney). It won him the "Best Director" Oscar the following...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  It would have helped if US citizens had not watched John Wayne films where the local IRA representative was a nice guy rather than an unprincipled yob with gun. Do you mean John Ford? He was an unabashed IRA fan....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Lead story in the NYT today....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  That seems like a simplistic assessment, but OK. I'm not familiar with the reasoning of those cretins. I'm just pointing out that what one individual wants in their government may not be what others want. (And I have to admit,...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The majority voted? Not usually. Usually it's a plurality, with plenty of non-voters. You don't get to chose whether or not to drive without a license.... Only because the government says so. The government selected by consent of the people....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I want to live in a nation governed with the consent of the people, rather than by the divine right of kings. Forgive me for straying back to the original topic, instead of the discussion of cooking techniques for...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  It was a joke, of course. Though impressive that you know what the requirements are. But the larger point is that everyone has something they don't like about the government they live under, and they (we) all gripe about it....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The points about the cost of emigration are reasonable. Though a couple of my ancestors were dirt-poor when they fled the UK. And somehow they managed to reach Illinois. But OGH doesn't have those financial barriers to emigration. Heck, he...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  It is a tradeoff, indeed. Anyone still living in the UK must feel that the advantages outweigh the burden of monarchy, or else they'd emigrate to... where? Switzerland? Lithuania? the USA?...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  From the U. S., I always figured the royals were sort of like Fox News or the NFL: entertainers who were allowed to plunder the customers. It's not about government (or journalism, or sportsmanship), it's about distraction from the mundane....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  In other words, your bog-standard car. Formerly bog-standard. Ford has announced they are discontinuing their sedans, except for the Mustang. SUVs rule the US....
• Commented on Place your bets
  completely bounced off her Phrasing, dude, phrasing....
• Commented on Place your bets
  The film that astonished me was an Apollo launch recorded by the engine observation camera at pad level, so the engineers could get a good close up look at the big engines just as they started firing. those actually on...
• Commented on Place your bets
  The blast-off scene in the 2019 "Apollo 11" (about 20 minutes in, for those with short attention spans) is worth looking at. Apparently NASA had all these high-speed 70mm cameras spotted around Canaveral, and they used this footage for a...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Have you seen "Memento"? "Godfather I" or "II"? "Licorice Pizza"? "No Time to Die"? Any James Bond movie, really. Or, for that matter, "Heat" or "Casino" or "Goodfellas" or "Everything Everywhere All At Once"? "Casablanca" is a shining example of...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Casablanca is a great story. But if you look at it critically it looks like a bunch of scenes stitched together. Not a continuous flow. I don't understand this take at all. But my favorite movie is the 1933 "King...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Gable and Bogart, I think was the original plan. But Bogart died while Huston was filming "Moby Dick"....
• Commented on Place your bets
  We keep seeing scary articles about minerals running out, then a few years later it turns out that we have even more of them available than we did before and the promised end of supply is nowhere to be seen....