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Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!

It's been a long time—a couple of years—since I last posted a blog entry describing a book I will not write, because mostly I either wrote them or I just stopped having so many wasteful ideas.

But I had a mild case of COVID19 in late May ("mild" belongs in scare quotes; it kicked my ass worse than influenza, and the lingering gastric effects are horrible, but I didn't need antivirals or hospital treatment, so yay vaccines?), and I downed tools and haven't gotten back to work yet, which is annoying to me but continuing an existing project while cognitively impaired is a really bad idea. (You generally end up spending twice as long untangling the mess you created as you spent making it in the first place.) I expect to get back to work later this week: but in the mean time, my Muse made an unexpected and unwanted house call, screamed at me for a while, and left me with an incoherent pile of notes.

The proximate trigger for this car-crash of a story idea was the blog of another author, Rachel Manija Brown, who is currently discovering the joy of Biggles for the first time, and blogging about the books. Biggles is James "Biggles" Bigglesworth, ace pilot and adventurer, the most famous fictional creation of W. E. Johns, writing as Capt. W. E. Johns (although he only made it to Flying Officer in the RAF). They say "write what you know," and Johns clearly knew more than was strictly healthy about dogfighting during the first world war, having been there. So over 45 years or so, he wrote boys' adventure novels—lots of them.

(Breaking the fourth wall: I'm taking a moment to appreciate just how hard it is to write a blog entry right now, and drawing conclusions about the wisdom of going back to tackle the climax of A Conventional Boy in my current state. Ahem: back to the blog ...)

Rachel Manija Brown noted with some glee the somewhat slashy, homoerotic overtones of the relationship between Biggles and his arch-nemesis/rival, Erich Von Stalheim, and this got me thinking Bad Thoughts. As these books run from the first world war through the inter-war years and then via a brisk WW2 update into the 1950s—Biggles is nothing if not long-lived—Von Stalheim is painted as an aristocratic German fighter ace in the Von Richthofen mode, with a detour into spying and various other nefarious activities. (The horrors of Nazism were not really in the boys' adventure wheelhouse back then, although Johns is as staunchly anti-Bolshevik as you'd expect from a guy who probably grew up reading William Le Queux.) Anyway, Biggles/Von Stalheim slashfic is an obvious no-brainer shoe-in for Archive of Our Own and it turns out that there's more Biggles/Von Stalheim slashfic on AO3 than all Laundry Files fanfic combined! What a surprise. More importantly, what happens if we take it to the max?

Anyway, my Muse has been AWOL since late 2020, presumably drinking his way around every dive bar in the South Pacific while I played catch-up with a bunch of existing books that were already scheduled and didn't need divine inspiration. But for some reason he decided to come back and pull his normal drill sergeant stunt of kicking my ass and demanding Ideas.

So here's an idea for a Biggles reboot. Or rather, my delirious post-COVID notes for how I ought to reboot Biggles if only copyright wasn't an issue (Johns' literary estate is in copyright until 2038: thanks, Disney!), by way of a twitter poll or two about how to maximize my chances of getting Biggles Banned in Texas.

Obviously as I'm an SF author I'm not going to do a historical Biggles reboot, I'm going to do an SFnal version. (Let's ignore the issue of W. E. Johns' own Biggles-by-any-other-name ten book SF series from the 1950s/1960s, which weren't very good.) To start with, how do we get Biggles into the 24th century (in time for some Space Opera) and queer him up enough for modern tastes (my twitter poll concluded that the most popular reboot would be trans lesbian Biggles: furry Biggles came a close second, with boringly pedestrian gay Biggles a distant third) without wildly contradicting the Biggles canon?

The set-up

Biggles is cryonically frozen by the RAF after he's horrifically injured when an experimental jet he's test piloting crashes in 1947. (The UK drew the short straw with the alien tech divvy-up in Operation Paperclip: the UK got the cold sleep chambers from the flying saucer that crashed in the Third Reich, while the USA got the anti-grav.) He is added to the National Stockpile of Fighter Aces against future need, part of Operation ARTHUR. But the utility of a truncated piston-era pilot is limited, and he's still in deep storage when the stockpile is privatized and sold off in the 21st century. Biggles is maintained by a pension corp for a few decades (his war pension pays the freezer bills). But finally, after one government bankruptcy too many, he's thawed, fixed (23rd century medical nanotech is amazing) and dumped on the street, like the Revivals in Transmetropolitan. (Indeed, the 23rd century Biggles experiences is straight out of the classic Warren Ellis comic.)

Biggles is homeless, future-shocked, and worse: they messed up his regeneration. When he crashed, the 1947 medics were forced to amputate everything below his pelvis before they froze him. ("Bend over and hold onto your arse—no, wait, that's your arse over there".) It turns out Biggles has X0/XY mosaicism. The bored clinic tech who set up the regeneration run in his tank missed this and the nanotech tried to repair him: so he went in the freezer apparently male (at least, before his wedding tackle was burned off), and woke up 160 years later, healthy and female.

(Note per canon Biggles' sexuality is ambiguous. He has a girlfriend at one point, but she turned out to be a German spy so it didn't work out: he never marries but holds a suspiciously convenient torch for her for the rest of his life. This being a series that starts in the 1920s, homosexuality was unmentionable and gender dysphoria unheard of. All we can say for sure is that Biggles conformed to male gender roles but was very uptight and didn't talk about Feelings. Stiff upper lip, chaps!)

Back to the space opera:

They say to steal from the best, so I'm stealing 90% of this aspect of the story from the Traveller role playing game. And the rest is a colaboration with the ghost of Poul Anderson (in his Polesotechnic League period) with a dash of Spider Jerusalem thrown in just to fuck shit up.

Cheap jump drive technology has been invented. But they need human pilots because (due to some magic quantum consciousness woo handwavium) computers don't work in hyperspace. Ships also need a lot of human inputs for stuff like life support and navigation and maintenance because, again, robots and AIs don't work in hyperspace. (So they tend to combine the worst control and maintenance aspects of submarines or WW2 aircraft in one happy fun package.) It turns out that there are lots of human-life-hospitable planets within jump drive range, some of which have suspiciouslty terrestrial biospheres. Looks like somebody's already been visiting them—maybe whoever crashed that flying saucer in Bavaria in the 1930s?

The jump drive has a couple of useful spin-offs and a couple of annoying quirks. The "computers don't work in hyperspace" is the worst of the quirks. (Makes life tough for cyborgs, as well.) One convenient spin-off is cheap, easy, aneutronic fusion reactors (proton-boron cycle) that do direct high-energy photon to electricity conversion. (Hyperspace pinch instead of electromagnetic confinement.) Another is gravity polarizers: ships can effectively cancel out their gravitational potential energy, make orbit easily, then jump out. So mass isn't a major constraint, they're built like ships out of welded steel construction with sloppy tolerance. But life support and onboard systems are purposely crude, to survive hyperspace travel. (This is how you get your Millennium Falcon kit-bashed look. Or more OG Traveler TTRPG stuff.)

Murder hornets are not the only interstellar pests: Fascists are everywhere, using cloning to address their Great Replacement neurosis. They're trying to colonize the galaxy. Biggles is in a bit of a cleft stick because she might be white and somewhat conservative, but she has a gut reflex to punch Nazis on sight—it's a tic she acquired during the Battle of Britain. This gets her into trouble in pretty much every spaceport after she's re-trained as a scout ship pilot, so she has to flee to the fringe worlds. But Biggles is not alone! She has her trusty co-pilot Algy, another 20th century RAF veteran, and their former stowaway turned apprentice, Ginger—thusly nicknamed because she's an anthropomorphic vixen (again: 23rd century medical nanotech is wild).

The story: BIGGLES AND THE PLANET OF THE AZHDARCHIDS

Azhdarchids are terrifying and it looks like someone a very long time ago stole a bunch of Azhdarchid eggs from Earth and left them on, er, the Planet of the Azhdarchids, an earthlike world with a somewhat denser atmosphere. The result is bigger/heavier flying dinosaurs: "dragons? Who needs dragons?" Which has been colonized by a bunch of lizard-worshipping nut-jobs known to the rest of the galaxy as the Azhdarchid Empire.

Biggles and co crash land here when they takes a contract to ferry (unspecified low mass/high value cargo) to the Azhdarchid Empire's high priesthood in the capital city. The planet in question is off the main shipping routes, so no container ships go there, just the occasional rust-bucket scout ship hired for a special courier flight.

Her ship makes a hard landing in the back of nowhere due to a series of unfortunate events. First, the planetary navsat array has been taken offline by a solar flare. Then, after re-entering off course, a quetzalcoatl strike takes out the main landing gear while is flying manually and trying to work out where the hell they are. So she and her crew have to make a forced landing, cross a couple thousand kilometres of wilderness in the emergency light-fliers (microlights with a magical unobtanium electric battery as a powe source), avoid being eaten by flying lizards the size of Cessnas, buy spare parts to repair the ship, deliver the cargo, and discover in the process that the Azhdarchid Empire is kind of skeevy, It's an aggressive, racist patriarchy run by cis white men (descended from Space Nazis). Biggles rescues the high priest's daughter, who has fallen into disfavour for refusing to marry her dad's Igor and is scheduled for sacrifice to a dragon, and ends up having to flee in a hurry. There is a thrilling chase scene, riding half-tamed Azhdarchids! Also, microlight/dragon dogfighting!

There's a second book idea that I am frantically trying not to write notes on, involving Ericha Von Stalheim, also genderflipped and transported to the 24th century and working as a spy (visuals: think in terms of a very teutonic Servalan), a diplomatic mission, castles, dungeons, and a very slashy BDSM scene. Smut, total smut, and so indecent W. E. Johns would stroke out if he read it. So I'm not writing it down.

Anyway my Muse insisted I write this all down so it's no longer irritating my brainworms, because misery loves company, and this is my misery. Make of it what you will, I'm not going to turn this into a book! I'm simply blogging it as an example of why writing with COVID19 is a bad idea.

So there.

2008 Comments

1:

Hmm. It falls into the category of books I will not read, except in desperation.

2:

Charlie ....
I (we) really hope you have not got "Long Covid" - which, AIUI is really unpleasant & lingering ( Though without the "boiling oil" ).
Your *Muse - bugger, I've forgotten the name of the seriously NSFW-but-very-funny comic series on the intertubes, that has a set where milord's muse is replaced by a new one, who beats him up & gets him working furiously ......
Lastly - a late W E Johns book was: "Biggles buries the Hatchet" - where he & Stalheim make up, over the evils of communism, eventually.
{ "Stalheim" - Steel-Head, yes? }

3:

1) Oglaf.

2) Steel Home I think.

4:

Maybe you can cowrite it with the new Google LaMDA fiction generator.

5:

You're the author, of course, but what you've described would be a perfectly cromulent space opera if you lose the Biggles connection and simply treat it as it is, on its own merits. And I suspect it would be a nice palate cleanser after nearly 20 years of Laundry Files. Might be a gentle way to get the muse back in gear!

That doesn't have to mean that it would necessarily be "fluff". There's lots of room, should you want it, to deal with issues of gender roles and "stranger in a strange land" temporal displacement. The tech is fun. And I'd be fascinated to see how you actually implement such a thing in a way that retains the "boys' own adventure" fun of golden-era SF but with a modern sensibility.

6:

The trouble about the "boys' own adventure" tropes of that era is that they were almost all seriously nasty, and promoted brutality based on bigotry, wanton destructiveness, social irresponsibility and so on. The earlier ones (Henty etc.) were extremely chauvinistic, but did NOT generally promote excessive brutality against even the enemy, let alone the "lesser peoples".

That is one of the reasons that I would not read such a thing; I disliked the trope when I was 11 and it was unavoidable, and my dislike has deepened with time. I might modify that if OGH was satirising the trope (as I would expect), but even so it would be distasteful.

7:

My son had a bit of a thing for the Biggles books a year or so ago, so I got to revisit my childhood slightly. So it's a bit more fresh in my mind.

There's some very interestingly 1930s-50s stuff going on with cultural stereotypes. Johns had a really big downer on Americans, for one. OTOH he's not universally negative with non-white characters, at least within the remit of them often being antagonists. I remember in one book set in India in WWII, Biggles gives a briefing to his (English) squadron where he explicitly tells them not call the locals "natives" because, quote, "they don't like it", and basically to remember it's their country. For the time, this qualifies as fairly socially aware. Johns also wasn't particularly keen on upper-class or even upper-middle-class people - he's pretty egalitarian when it comes to competence.

Biggles did have a clear levelling-up problem which left Johns with a problem of finding suitable opponents. More interestingly though, his books have the problem of where and how to have an off-the-grid adventure in a world where travel is increasingly accessible and increasingly regulated, and countries are far more interconnected diplomatically as a result. In later books, Biggles and his crew tend to be less like two-fisted white gods meting out imperial justice, and more a subtle sharp-end-of-the-spear investigation squad backed up by appropriate civil/military authorities when things hit the fan.

Biggles pastiches tend to miss the fact that he's writing through history happening around him, with two very different wars and two very different civilian worlds after each war. So trying to write (or avoid writing!) a Biggles pastiche needs to be pretty targeted at which of these four settings you're aiming at. Most significantly, there's a whole lot less dogfighting in the non-war settings, which are much more like Rider Haggard with incidental aeroplanes.

Re the sexual politics, I get the appeal of twisting it that way, sure - but one thing that tends to get missed from modern looks at older scenarios though is industrial-level prostitution. The default assumption for bachelors wasn't that they were homosexual, it was that they were shagging their way through whores on a level which was incompatible with monogamy. Like Holmes with his 7% solution, you could actually be more shocking for modern audiences by playing it completely straight and having him do what was considered normal (albeit not mentioned in polite company) back then. it would certainly maximise the culture shock by finding himself somewhere where whores weren't instantly available.

9:

As a previous commenter has mentioned, your outline includes a lot of 'space' to explore subjects such as gender conformity and social norms. You've created a character that is 'man trapped in woman's body'. In fact an early 20th century white privileged man trying to make her way in the 24th century.

As a trans woman myself, I would be fascinated to see how you played with this idea. Call it a palate-cleanser if you want, maybe a modern twist on Adam Adamant written by someone with an understanding of the science involved is what we need right now.

10:

I vaguely remember J. G. Ballard writing about a contest for best fiction written while under the influence of drugs. The announced intent drew the attention of the relevant Authorities, who pulled back after the contest holders assured them that they were just as interested in the effects of legal drugs as the other kind. (The winning writer's drug of choice was the female contraceptive pill.)

All this is by way of suggesting that even if writing with COVID-19 is a bad idea (COVID-19 is a bad idea, period, and I'm sorry it got you), perhaps writing under the influence of whatever meds you've been prescribed to deal with it would qualify under the terms of this contest?

On a somewhat more serious note, I'm also remembering a passage from a Robert Christgau review of singer-songwriter John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves. Prine--who 20 years later would be an early COVID-19 casualty--had just come through a couple of years of cancer treatments, and this album was mostly covers, which strategy Christgau characterized as "a perfect way for Prine to keep his hand in until his muse feels as glad to be alive as he does."

With that in mind, perhaps some sort of literary remix (other than Biggles) might be an idea worth pursuing? I have to say here that your RAH "tribute" Saturn's Children is one of my favorite books of yours. But I'm looking forward to whatever you write, in good health [fingers crossed] or otherwise.

11:

Elderly Cynic replied to my suggestion: "The trouble about the "boys' own adventure" tropes of that era is that they were almost all seriously nasty"

Which is why I wrote "[but] with a modern sensibility". The "fun adventures" was what I was getting at, not the racism, sexism, etc.

12:

Greg, if you'd bothered to click on the highlighed word "Muse" in the blog essay, you'd have been taken straight to the OGLAF comic you're thinking of.

13:

I assure you, I couldn't write a proper Biggles pastiche with a straight face.

14:

If you were to write this, I would definitely read it. Even pay good money for it.

15:

This made me relive Prophet by Brandon Graham! It does this same idea but with a terrible, stupid, hypermasculine 90s comics ip called John Prophet, a supersoldier who fought in Vietnam. Graham bought the rights to the dude for like a hundred bucks and carried the series on, like from the issue it left off of in the 90s chock full of that Liefeld art. He picked the story up some thousands of years in the future, where a cryo-frozen John Prophet wakes up to a universe where all wars are fought with masses of John Prophet clones. It's a total trip.

16:

There's a long tradition of SF about bloke from our time (FSVO "our") who is frozen/falls asleep and wakes up in The Future. From Rumpelstiltskin through to H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes and then the likes of Buck Rogers in the 25th century and a whole lot more besides. It's almost a subgenre in its own right.

17:

This all so corny it sort of reminds of that movie IRON SKY with Nazis on the moon: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/

18:

Resuna & Charlie & others ...
Yes ...
I had a Brain Fart ...
"OGLAF"
THIS ONE
...
Doire
Sumfink went worng with the HTML/Markdown in your post.

19:

Dragons? Those are wyverns. Rocs. Nazgul steeds! The problems I see is:
1. in one spot you mention them being brought to the capitol, in another, they have to fly there in their ultralights.
2. Do the worshippers ride the azdarchids?
3. Can we put in a flying giant turtle....? Or maybe a giant moth?

20:

I think I've met your muse. He's pestering me, right now. And then, he says, he wrote this pile of incongruent notes, hilarious! Haha!

How to bring Erich von Stalheim into the story? And why did the flying saucer crash in the area of the Third Reich? Maybe when the Brits tested some more of the left over Aggregat 4 rockets in Operation Backfire Again, this time calculating the trajectory based on newly discovered notes on Hohlwelttheorie, from the diary of a Sturmbannführer who had left his belongings when he fled for Argentina. The test went a bit awry and the rocket accidentally took down the flying saucer. The saucer went down near Duderstadt, a little conservative town in the best of its times, not to speak of the Nazi times. The aliens went into town to buy some tools to repair the anti-grav. Meanwhile Operation Paperclip located their flying saucer and, making perfidious use of the temporary absence of its owners, plundered the saucer for the spoils. When the aliens returned to the crash site later, with a toaster, a Bakelite analogous phone, some copper wire and a monkey wrench (the name of which would be an Engländer, the shopkeeper had told them) because, obviously, the saucer got no metric screws, uhm, where were we? Ah, when the aliens returned to the crash site, they realized that they were stuck. And then they meet Erich von Stalheim, because he had changed his name to not be prosecuted by the allies for his war crimes and opened a driving school. Driving by near the crash place with a very young and very hot student driver, he noticed the ascending smoke and the large pile of rubble that used to be a flying saucer, beside the road. He makes up his mind to impress the student with his courage and strolls over towards the pile to investigate. And from there it is clear now how he comes to wake up in the 24th century, because the aliens, well, that's another story, the muse says, twinkles and waves.

21:

The trouble with anything based on Biggles is all of the baggage that comes with the character. The books have been parodied endlessly, not least by M. Python and co., and it's difficult to find anything new to say about them.

While Johns' SF was pretty dire, and largely inspired by the flying saucer craze, he did have a couple of other series - the one that might be worth a look once copyright ends is Worrals of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. I honestly don't remember much about the series since I was a small boy who read the Biggles books and thought that Worrals was "ewww... gurrrls!" when I came across them, but my vague memory is that they were more varied than the Biggles books, and have at least one possible romantic pairing if you assume that Worrals is bonking her sidekick Betty.

see http://www.worrals.com/ and http://www.wejohns.com/

22:

You want to know why the UFO crashed? Simple: several late teenaged/early twentysomething aliens had gone over to the orbital junkyard near the construction docks, and found an old UFO. They grabbed stuff for weeks from nearby junkers, and made it workable. Then they went out for a joyride.

Why, you don't believe that? A friend on a techie mailing list was just talking about being that age, and after getting into an accident, his buddy got the front off a junker that had been smashed in the back, cut the front off his, and welded the front from the junker onto the front of his, and he drove it for a couple of years more.

23:

And I just discovered Poul Anderson is dead. Yet another author whom I loved as a child gone :/

24:

It's missing Cat.

25:

Biggles, Algy, and Vixen? Suddenly getting a flash from Flesh (Godron), where the sex ray hits Jerkoff's rocket ship....

26:

If anyone wants an adult story of WW1 flying, I reccomend "Winged Victory" by V M Yeates, who was also a pilot and it is basically a fictionalised story of the life of the author and friends during the war, or at least the backbone is his own experiences.

27:

I'd never heard of Transmetropolitan (no surprise - it was published right after my late wife dropped dead, and until I was into the years of literally no work.

Just read the wikipedia on it... and it sounds like someone took Stand on Zanzibar, smashed it with Max Headroom, and threw in Hunter S. Thompson.

The scary thing is - Callahan sounds a lot like The Former Guy.

28:

Callahan was really based on Tony Blair, but with overtones of Trump. Really, he's horrible all round. Bonus points for spotting the passages where Callahan quotes Dame Shirley Porter verbatim (of notoriety from the Westminster housing scandal in the 1990s -- pre-Johnsonian Tory gerrymandering in London).

I strongly recommend reading at least the first volume of Transmet.

29:

I had one or two Biggles books as a boy. They were post-WWII books, I think. Don't remember any of the storylines (which sounds like a good thing, from you description), just that they were jolly adventures. One was "Biggles of the Interpol", a collection of short stories.

30:

One of the interesting Biggles things I sort of noticed as a child was that the stories which came out first, the short stories later collected into a book whose name escapes me, are deeper than a lot of the later ones. They reach adult levels of emotional involvement and goings on, I felt even back then. It turned out that, roughly speaking, he wrote the early ones for a different audience and wasn't very sure where he was going with them but in the end got more work writing adventure stories for boys so carried on with that for decades. I sometimes wonder how he would have done writing books aimed at adults.

31:

Wait, 24th century and you didn't include Duck Dodgers? What kind of a monster are you?

As for Azhdarchids, someone's been watching Prehistoric Planet, no? Since I'm one of Darren Naish's patreon supporters (check the credits under "chief science advisor) and I spotted Mark Witton's name in the credits, I'm surprised they didn't include more of the buggers, since Azhdarchid research is one of the things they're known for. That whole show was a bit of a valentine to the book All Yesterdays, which I think is a very good thing indeed.

Thing about Azhdarchids: they're kind of the biological versions of WWI planes. Quetzalcoatlus was huge (11 m wingspan, 3 m at the shoulder, or taller than a giraffe), but estimates of its weight range from 70-250 kg (versus 1900 kg for a giraffe that takes up less volume). Any of Dungeons and Dragons' wide selection of polearms would probably be sufficient to take one on. So would a 10' pole, if swung hard enough. Seriously. Their bones were flimsy compared with those of birds.

Doesn't mean you can't have fun with them, because you could probably train them up to be better than drones, although I'm not sure they could carry a human, unless said human was small enough to swallow and place near the animal's center of gravity.

No, if you're doing Cretaceous. In. Spaaace, the real crowd pleaser isn't gigantic furry marabous, it's sauropods. Vomiting sauropods, to be precise. Turns out, if a Brachiosaurus projectile vomited with its head 14 m off the ground, the 50 kg upchuck (which might contain gastrolithic rocks) would hit with 68,600 N, or approximately T. rex bite force. Nifty defense, no? If you're dealing with sauropodish things that do this, I'd advise taking a really, really good umbrella with you when walking near them. That way, the umbrella will survive to mark your corpse.

Fun times.

Apropos of nothing: it's a good thing you're talking about jump drives, because they never talk about the overheating starships would face if confined in a warp bubble barely bigger than the ship, with no universe to shed heat to. That would rather limit warp times a tad.

32:

My grandparents had shelves of books of that genre, presumably because Grandma was a stereotypical posh Brit with 3 strapping boys (and one girl). They also had all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, as well as a large number of other series. I recall churning my way through most of them, if not all.

I'm sure I enjoyed them, but I most strongly remember stumbling over his casual use of n----- and ch--- to describe the various villains (always villains). Product of his times, I know, but as a 10 year old product of my own times I knew that was well offside.

The trope/story type of a free roaming pilot/sailor with various sidekicks who goes places and has adventures was very appealing to me in all of its iterations. It's why Han Solo was the most popular character in Star Wars. It was also very appealing to the various unhappy puppies of SF culture wars, since that seems to be what they were so upset about missing in current products.

If you are into that sort of thing, the animated series 'Archer' has a full season that does a thorough pastiche of the Biggles style of story, complete with loyal but unappreciated airplane mechanic, suspiciously behaving Nazis, a rebellious heiress and all the rest of the tropes. They also do a season pastiching Moonraker style adventures, another on Cousteau/Steve Zissou stories, and a 30s noir.

33:

Would there be any Trans people in a universe with that kind of medical nano-tech?

If you're feeling short-changed by your natural born equipment package, how hard would it be to pop into the medical chop shop & have the defect corrected?

34:

Doire @ 8:

Unfortunately, your links don't have any links in them.

35:

Charlie Stross @ 13:

Who says you have to keep a straight face?

37:

Graham @ 7
The OTHER weired, regarding racial stereotypes & villains, is, of all people: H Rider Haggard.
In many of his novels, especially the one featuring "Allan Quartermain" the (excuse me) "native" Africans are at the worst neutral & often heroes such as Umslopogaas ... the obvious, & openly racist+cruel villains are .. the Boers.
Weird but true.

gutrie - & Everybody
Sagittarius Rising
"The Real Thing" TM - seriously, I have a copy - it comes across a real & scary & that was how it was ( WW I flying, that is! )

38:

it's a good thing you're talking about jump drives, because they never talk about the overheating starships would face if confined in a warp bubble barely bigger than the ship

The classic Traveller jump drive takes about a week in jump space to get anywhere. Heat isn't a consideration, because even in normal space the canonical power plant outputs will cook a ship in very little time.

So being in a warp bubble wouldn't have that much difference in the cookedness of the crew :-)

39:

Re WW1 military flying, I'll recommend Derek Robinson's 'Goshawk Squadron'. Published 1971. Fiction, but not by all that much.

His later prequels extend this (War Story, Hornet's Sting) while keeping the lead character alive convincingly, which is something of an achievement.

40:

Would there be any Trans people in a universe with that kind of medical nano-tech?

If you're feeling short-changed by your natural born equipment package, how hard would it be to pop into the medical chop shop & have the defect corrected?

Would people be like the characters in Vinge's Steel Beach — changing sex was just something you did, not worth more remarks than a new hairstyle gets now?

What about people with less binary identities? Would their bodies reflect that? Would you get Betan hermaphrodites? (Nod to Bujold.)

Would the furry community come out of the closet? (Transhuman Space played a bit with that, but not much, and mostly linked to Japan IIRC.)

On the bright side, that level of medtech would mean that they should have uterine replicators, so abortion wouldn't be an issue.

Would the penalty for rape be being forced to experience being the victim's sex? Turn the 100 kg linebacker into a 50 kg cheerleader? Would that level of mutability mean that society finally gets away from prejudice based on bodyform?

41:

A couple of years ago, before I decided to toss the whole story line (because billionaires expanding across the universe started annoying me even if I killed them all), I ginned up an alcubierre-type warp ship. Its speed under warp was around 100c, but it had to spend 50% of the trip with the warp drive off, cooling in interstellar space, for the cargo and crew to arrive in a raw state. The fun part was contemplating a ship that, like the SR-71, was built to deal with extreme heat fluctuations, so most of it was a shell of silicon carbide metamaterials, because with the special handwavium class of metamaterials, you can get a silicon carbide based system that acts as if it has negative mass when it's powered up, even if it's over 600oC.

42:

If you use the movie version as your template you have the basis for a fun romp ranging up and down the timeline, without having to butcher the character.

Biggles: Adventures in Time 1986 Trailer HD | Neil Dickson

Biggles: Adventures In Time (Full Movie) Family Adventure Sci-Fi. Time travel

That's most useful. I'll add it to the series I have with someone being shifted by a whirlwind.

Now I just have to find my DVD of the movie.

Thanks...

43:

"You're the author, of course, but what you've described would be a perfectly cromulent space opera if you lose the Biggles connection and simply treat it as it is, on its own merits."

I agree. The characters and plot ideas work basically fine by themselves, but the Biggles connection seems to me to be hopelessly flimsy and over-contrived, and also rather pointless since the resulting character has basically nothing in common with the original bar the name. (Which is something that greatly irritates me in any case - a familiar character suddenly being changed into something completely different is only acceptable for Doctor Who - and another such irritation is turning non-sexual characters into crazed rabbits on whiz fucking all over the world.)

I reckon it would work better - and be funnier - if the central character is simply someone who was born in the normal way x hundred years in the future and purely by coincidence happens to have the same nickname. No contrived time travel or sus-an or reincarnation; the whole point is they're not the same person, nor even related, and have never heard of the books. (Maybe the name could be a contraction of Biggleswade, so Ginger could be Sandy, and Algy is... a unicellular plant biologist.)

44:

As someone who grew up reading every Biggles book available in my school library (I'm old enough that this was before they had been purged from every school library for their undeniable racism, misogyny and general old-fashionedness), I'd read this! Our good host seems to have perfectly captured the plot of almost every Biggle book. For an ace pilot, he sure did a lot of crash landings. Then invariably followed by treks across "enemy territory" / inhospitable terrain (usually inhabited by unfriendly locals - hence the racism). All rounded off with a showdown/confrontation/dogfight to save the day. Just not sure how you shoehorn the sex in ... Biggles seemed too have already had everything below the pelvis removed in the original books.

45:

You could extend the range at least of the first hop, by collecting a big chunk of ice and using it as a heatsink until it melts. If your spaceship can keep itself tolerably cool for a useful amount of time with no more than its own mass to warm up, then it might well be able to do a lot better by raising a big lump of H2O through 300K-odd plus heat of melting. Then of course you have to wait longer for it to cool off again. Or you could pre-plan a high speed trip by collecting the orbital data of as many comets as you can find in all the solar systems along the way, then hopping along swapping the liquefied lump for a pre-frozen one at each step. Plus fun and games if someone else has already used the comet you had your eye on by the time you get there, etc.

Or... a fairly standard piece of spaceship equipment seems to be a force field screen which repels meteorites, and as a rule it also has the property - usually inferred but occasionally explicitly stated - of allowing radiation to pass freely outward from the ship, but reflecting all radiation coming inward (apart from just enough to let you see where you are). And the warp bubble itself probably really wants to be quite a bit larger than the ship, so as to make it practical to have a big enough bit in the middle where the gravitational field is approximately uniform for the ship to sit in and not be pulled apart or something. So you have a large volume between the screen and the bubble which you can dump heat into through this perfect one-way photon valve, until the radiation density in that volume gets so great that it starts being a nuisance. Then you drop out of warp and release this massive burst of heat which isn't actually very hot, but is extremely intense.

Or maybe it isn't even a problem anyway. It's quite likely that the gravitational field inside the bubble is kind of an inside-out version of that around a black hole, so it's zero in the middle and tends towards infinitely strong as you approach the surface from the inside. So from your point of view in the middle the closer the photons get to the bubble the slower they go and they never actually get there, they accumulate in a traffic jam instead and you get a similar kind of flash when you turn it off.

46:

Re: 'Note per canon Biggles' sexuality is ambiguous ...'

Even though I've never even heard of this character before, i.e., never read any of these books, I'm going to comment. (Ahem.)

Okay - it's late, I'm tired, probably some non sequiturs but here's my ramble anyways ...

Going by your story ideas and Wikipedia, maybe Biggles is asexual because he was raised in India and when he was sent off to a very old (and emotionally cold) all-boys school in England these childhood background influences got scrambled together. Specifically an internalized idealized Hindi attitude toward sex such as females are the 'good' part of a couple, while males are the 'evil' part. This ideal doesn't get any attention or testing in school because he's constantly surrounded by males. When he's finally able to test this ideal, he's emotionally betrayed by the first woman he falls in love with so he decides unconsciously to shun all romantic involvements thereby becoming emotionally if not physiologically asexual. In a way this could tie in with a Wikipedia mention that Biggles never got over certain war traumas/events, i.e., he suffered from PTSD. And this is sorta similar to other fictional English 'war heroes': traumatized in their youth, they become heroes because they've got energy and talent even though they've lost their will to live.

You mentioned that Biggles wakes up in the 24th century and also mentioned a bunch of sf-ish tech stuff - except there's no mention of any AI. Why not? If Biggles is in cryo because of too many missing body parts/severe injuries and he isn't particularly emotionally well-developed (he comes across as pretty one-dimensional) it'd make perfect sense for him to be re-animated as a cyborg or an AI built into a spaceship, jet or even a fancied up blimp warship. This is premised on my assumption that neuro/psych will continue to develop at least as much/quickly as other sci-tech branches. Maybe the med-psych team/AI that assigned him a new body did a read of his brain and put him into the most suitable body. This is where the real adult adventure begins: how will knowing this about him/herself make him reassess his life and what aspects of his childhood, young adulthood and various cultural influences will he most want to forget. And what steps will he have to take in order to grow into or mesh with his new body if most of his conscious life the common wisdom was: your body dictates who you are.

Now that you've gotten this story off your mind and when you're ready - I'm looking forward to what happens next to Mary, the kids and the rest of the bunch.

Relax, take care.

47:

A couple of things.

First off, I'm not using this ship model for anything, so if people want to play with it, FEEL FREE! I'm leaving it on the donation table, because I have a project I like better now.

Ice is a great idea.

A second point is that I mistyped. To travel useful interstellar distances for exploration or whatever, any Terran starship needs to average around 100c at least, because there are a fair number of interesting stars 40-50 ly out. In stating this, I'm assuming that a starship can operate independently without restock for a year, so it spends six months in flight to another system, dinks around trying to figure out whether the flight was worth it (but not for very long!), might restock on volatiles in the new system if it can do something with really dirty ice moving at high delta-V that it would have to catch, then spends another six months flying back to Earth with the results.

Now if you've got a ship that has to spend 50% of the flight cooling off, that doubles the ideal speed, so in this model, it has to warp at 200c.

A third thing is that other stars near us are moving at 10-20 km/sec relative to us, so the starship has to be able to match velocities. This isn't a huge deal, as interplanetary probes do this now--slowly. Presumably this can be done while cooling off, as can many other things (because heat gradients are quite useful if you can tap them). Conversely, if you're going to mine comets and asteroids, you're going to be matching velocities with them too, and that also takes time and resources.

Finally, I'm going to make the controversial statement that even if you've got anti-gravity equipment, it's likely that the easiest place to build a starship is on the ground, not in orbit, both because it's easier for humans to work under gravity and under atmosphere, and because any body that has plate tectonics probably has more useful elements in relatively purified forms than does some random comet or asteroid. If you buy this logic, then this implies two further things: one is that starship size (remember, it has to be able to travel for a year without restocking) is limited to the biggest thing that can be launched), and colony development probably will probably make developing starship manufacturing its second goal after survival, just as the Polynesians usually built big ships early on when they colonized new islands.

And if you think that it's trivially easy to build a ship in orbit, then you can shift the emphasis from building starships on the ground to building starships in space with parts launched from the surface. That will rather strongly constrain designs, but in different ways.

Anyway, later-gen warp drives seem to be making for bubbles that are weakly connected to reality, so force shields aren't useful. Even without this, they're a hell of a drag chute, with all the photons and stuff bouncing off them at light speed and exerting a lot of force.

As for the gravity inside a warp bubble, it seems to be that the ship makes a pocket around itself and closes off from the rest of the universe, hence the problem with heat dissipation. Probably within the bubble the only gravity is generated by the structures of the ship (e.g. nanogravity) because the ship does not accelerate with respect to the bubble. It controls the bubble, which is superluminal but only made of empty space, so whatever.

Since an alcubierre warp is generated by a gravity dipole, with negative mass pushing from the rear and pulling towards the front, if it's used without the warp bubble for subluminal maneuvering, gravity is going to be down towards the nose, and it's going to get heavier the faster the ship goes (which won't be that fast, because shedding heat in a vacuum is hard). Probably it won't be doing any sharp turns either, for obvious reasons.

Since I think people who posit local gravity grid inside ships are nuts (draw the field lines and figure out how much extra weight is needed to brace the structures), I'd instead suggest taking a note from the RP FLIP or The Mote in God's Eye and rerigging the ship each time it reorients which way is down. That also makes for fun design decisions. And, of course, you get one set of design decisions if the ship is supposed to be large and supposed to land on planets, another if it's assembled, ISS style, in orbit.

Fun stuff.

48:

If you're feeling short-changed by your natural born equipment package, how hard would it be to pop into the medical chop shop & have the defect corrected?

I'll try to step carefully here, but I do sincerely apologize in advance if I say something wrong or offensive. Now that everyone's hackles are up, let's proceed.

So far as I can tell, in humans: the physical gender you're born piped with, the psychological gender you feel yourself to be, and the gender(s) you're attracted to are not controlled by the same sets of genes. It looks like they are controlled, not just by three overlapping sets of genes and epigenetic signals, but also by environmental and social cues.

If you think about this evolutionarily, it makes some sense, because human sexuality is a kludge. For one thing, we're among the most cisgendered, heterosexual apes (Biological Exuberance documents this), so our ancestors may have been more...labile. Back down on the mammalian tree, vision replaced olfaction in cuing animals about who to screw and when to do it, so vision cues used by apes are an adaption on an older signal. Having all our gender-piping genes on X and Y chromosomes is fairly new too. It's likely a precursor for viviparity, and in oviparous species that have their gender-piping genes dispersed across multiple chromosomes, other cues like the temperature the egg incubates at control gender-piping expression.

Anyway, the genetics of human gender (piping, feeling, attraction) seem to be a kludge that works most but not all of the time, and this makes sense evolutionarily, because it evolved from older systems that worked differently.

That's not the point. The point is, if you've got magical nanotech that will repipe you and rework your brain to accept that your new gender piping feels correct, what are you going to go through while transitioning?

If I had to guess, even easy gender transitioning is going to take awhile, weeks to months. During that time, urination is going to be a nightmare, you're going to have all sorts of weird feelings as hormone balances shift. And worst of all, as your internally perceived gender shifts, you're almost certainly going to have a major case of gender dysphoria when you loathe what you're doing to yourself. So I'm not so sure how many people are going to do this just for the experience.

Note, please, that I'm not talking at all about treating gender dysphoria by transitioning a person's gender piping to match the gender they feel themselves to be. Instead, I'm talking about people who are comfortable with how they're piped deliberately changing both the piping and the feeling just because.

My guess is that, just like dieting and extreme exercise (say a movie star prepping for a role), most people aren't going to want to go through with it just for a job or for the experience. This isn't to say the technology is bad. It's good, and I'm quite sure it will save lives, either by adjusting what people feel their gender to be, or adjusting their piping to match their felt gender. Or both (for bisexuals who want to become hermaphrodites). But I doubt recreational gender rebuilds will catch on widely.

49:

All those planets with “suspiciously terrestrial biospheres” were terraformed by intelligent dinosaurs, before they had a little accident with an asteroid they were mining.

50:

aAll those planets with “suspiciously terrestrial biospheres” were terraformed by intelligent dinosaurs, before they had a little accident with an asteroid they were mining.

There are gods, they thought humans made great pets, so they took us everywhere with them because we were so good at believing in them and reifying them in this universe. Maybe they're still around, too. (oops, plot of Stargate. Never mind).

As for large numbers of terrestrial biospheres, who says we were the first? Panspermia, baby.

What would be fun, given what they're finding with exoplanets, is if the normal terrestrial worlds were mostly in two classes:

--orbiting a red dwarf (but with dinosaurs! And black trees, and maybe the dinosaurs are radiation proof like Godzilla.), and

--Moon of a Hot Jupiter with long days, daily Hot Jupiter auroras that would make Carrington green with envy, and a really good reason to have ruggedized tech. And dinosaurs! Not like Avatar at all.

In both cases, land is in a ring around the terminator, with a huge sea on each side. In the red dwarf planet case, the ocean on the back side has a thick ice cap, but whatever.

Earth is weird, because we're not tidally locked on anything. In fact we've got tides. And tide pools even. In fact, our tidepools are among the great wonders of the galaxy, because no other planet has a large moon like ours. And, alas, our dinosaurs are mostly tiny.

51:

There are gods, they thought humans made great pets, so they took us everywhere with them because we were so good at believing in them and reifying them in this universe. Maybe they're still around, too. (oops, plot of Stargate. Never mind).

Getting back to Traveller, this is about what happened in the backstory. Not really gods, only god-like aliens (Grandfather and his progeny) taking samples from Earth, for some reason, and putting those on various planets. They took humans (well, some probably 'Homo' people, the time frames are wonky as most of this was written in the late 1970s and early 1980s) and wolves, made some changes, like uplifting the wolves to the Vargr, and dropped them off in many places.

Then they disappeared. This is of course to explain why there are humans on other planets than Earth, and the Vargr (upright dog-furries, basically) are just a nice addition.

There are a couple of adventures on finding out the 'Secrets of the Ancients' for Traveller. The one I have is not very good, and what I've gathered from the more recent one, it's not that good either.

52:

21 - The Biggles film) springs to mind as a parody of WE Johns' books.

46 - IMO "A Intelligence" is an oxymoron; "A Stupidity" would be closer to the mark (unless you happen to be Banksie, and I've been in the same room as both OGH and Banksie).

53:

Robert van der Heide: All those planets with “suspiciously terrestrial biospheres” were terraformed by intelligent dinosaurs, before they had a little accident with an asteroid they were mining.

Oh, you mean this lot!

I read these to my son. There is one exchange between two crew members along the lines of "How is Earth doing?", "Just as bad as ever. The asteroid has basically totalled the planet, we'll never be able to live there again."

54:

Johns's SF was the first SF I read and, while it was pretty dire, it wasn't the ubiquitous thud and blunder; at least it had some thought put into it. I read Biggles, and didn't like it and, as for Gimlet, ugh.

Even ignoring the nastinesses, 'heroes' who rely on a ridiculous amount of luck (or ridiculous physical abilities) to recover from the consequences of their utterly stupid mistakes are pretty irritating. As are the 'geniuses' who can predict near-future events with certainty, so never need a back-up plan. Yes, you need some exaggeration to make a story exciting, but when those tropes are the plot, the whole plot and nothing but the plot, it grates on me and has done since an early age.

55:

I should have added: and 'geniuses' who produce inventions to order.

56:

Would people be like the characters in Vinge's Steel Beach — changing sex was just something you did, not worth more remarks than a new hairstyle gets now?

It's worth pointing out that the Banksian Culture universe has it exactly like that. It's explored most in Excession, but also tangentially in Player of Games. It's something human bodies can do on their own at will, albeit over a period of time (growing some bits while other bits fade away, etc).

57:

“I've been in the same room as both OGH and Banksie.” One & the same, right?

58:

I’m sure a male to female transition would be more traumatic but the güevedoces “penis at 12” children in the Dominican Republic seem to have few problems. They don’t have 5-alpha recductase which converts testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT). So their penis doesn’t develop and they seem to be female. At puberty their higher levels of testosterone make them develop into males. They have small prostate glands and investigation of this led to the development or Finasteride to treat benign prostate enlargement.

59:

Yes, the Ancients in Traveller were a good excuse for strange unnatural things and our adventurers always finding weird stuff wherever they went. When they actually answer the question "who were the Ancients and what was their deal," it was disappointing.

60:

With all due respect, Pigeon, you are not exactly typical of my readership.

61:

There are a couple of adventures on finding out the 'Secrets of the Ancients' for Traveller. The one I have is not very good, and what I've gathered from the more recent one, it's not that good either.

Written in the 80s, in a background based on 70s (or earlier) science fiction, based on a few throw-away lines…

(Which describes a large part of the official Traveller setting, actually.)

The biggest problem I had with the Ancients was that they went from some deep secret that overturned history to 'everyone knows that' trivia. A big buildup for nothing.

Part of that was that a large chunk of fandom didn't want the Traveller universe to change, so like a TV series no matter what happened during an adventure the main background didn't change. Even huge events like the Fifth Frontier War went back to status quo when over. (Until the Rebellion — which was unpopular and shed a lot of fans.)

Anyway, fun game, played for decades, no urge to play again. Probably should get rid of my complete collection.

62:

(Re: Traveller)

Anyway, fun game, played for decades, no urge to play again. Probably should get rid of my complete collection.

I agree, though I haven't played it that much - mostly read, built stuff and hung around on TML. The best campaign I did was with GURPS Traveller books (mostly Nobles) and Silhouette Core Rules. I never got more recent books than the GURPS ones.

Nowadays, I'm more inclined to play Scum & Villainy or even Diaspora for the scifi rpg itch.

63:

I had a thought on ship construction whilst reading this. It was to 3d print the gross structure of the ship in orbit from metal obtained from asteroids. A common problem with 3d printing is the bonding together of layers as you print, the difficulty of shedding heat in vacumn would then become an advantage, helping the layers bond. Also without air resistance or gravity the print head should be able to move at very high speed, again helping with the bonding of layers as they don't get a chance to cool. This should result in a very strong structure.

This would require a not currently extant type of metal 3d printing, but I don't think it would be difficult to develop. Maybe a variant on filament based printing using metal wire and induction heating as the simplest option. You could insert ground made components as you go or after you have finished. Cable/pipe runs would be left etc.

64:

Second that about Winged Victory. The main character is slowly cracking under PTSD (not called that at the time, of course) as he watches his friends die and has one close call after another. He finds killing German pilots to be stressful when he thinks about it (after killing them, of course).

In one chapter, he gets into his plane while totally drunk, erratically flies over the lines, sees a German artillery nest, strafes it, and flies home. When he gets back, he's sober enough to land without cracking up. Then he's asked where this artillery nest is. He can't remember and other pilots can't find it when they look. All played for laughs, but on reconsideration, I wonder if he wasn't having a psychotic break from reality and only thinks he saw German artillery.

65:

Re: '"A Stupidity" would be closer to the mark ...'

Okay - what needs to change - be added/removed to get from current 'AI' stereotypes to whatever you personally think makes 'intelligence'?

Most SF that I've read says that improving 'machine intelligence' means making computers more like humans. Curious whether any authors have looked at making humans more computer-like, how they rationalized that decision and whether that rationalization makes more or less sense as we learn more about ourselves. And by 'making more computer-like', I don't mean just like the stoic/emotionally repressed Spock/Vulcans.

If we're heading into a phase of species evolution-by-design/intent, then we might want to streamline or even remove some of the bits that are obsolete or only 'meh' in helping us survive in our current or anticipated future environments. It might be easier, faster and cheaper to change human physiology/neuro* than to build spaceships to haul fragile (i.e., needs a min 20-factor Goldilocks environment at all times) bodies. We can store each individual's complete genome, microbiome, proteome, and all other -ome info as a reference template for whenever we want or need to change back or further adjust.

*Improved thermo-regulation would be handy given recent temp increases and increases in older populations. (Thermo-reg decreases with age.)

66:

I had a thought on ship construction whilst reading this. It was to 3d print the gross structure of the ship in orbit from metal obtained from asteroids. A common problem with 3d printing is the bonding together of layers as you print, the difficulty of shedding heat in vacumn would then become an advantage, helping the layers bond. Also without air resistance or gravity the print head should be able to move at very high speed, again helping with the bonding of layers as they don't get a chance to cool. This should result in a very strong structure.

Well, there are a bunch of small problems with this. One is that asteroids aren't precisely formulated chunks of metal stored in orbit, they're raw ore if you're lucky, junk if you're not. The step of going from asteroid to printer feedstock can't be handwaved away. Worse luck, most of what goes into actual spaceships isn't metal, and you've got to source and refine all that into feedstocks too.

Then there's the little problem of Delta-V. If you're printing a ship in orbit, it's going at a fairly steady speed. However, all your feedstock (the asteroids) is moving at a rather different velocities, and those are roughly in the bullet range or higher relative to the construction site. So one way to think of this is to go out on the WWI battlefield and to 3-D print a tank by catching bullets and artillery shells out of the air without damaging them, defusing the fuses on the explosive shells because you're going to need to refine all those high explosives to get the rubber you need for gaskets and so forth, and doing this all safely. While I'm being silly, that's the problem you get when all your raw materials are moving at high delta-V relative to you.

To over-extend the metaphor a bit, you could print the same tank behind the lines in a bit more safety. In this case, behind the lines means sitting on the surface of a planet with the atmosphere protecting you from stray debris moving 10+ km/sec relative to you, and all your materials moving at about the same speed as you are, though a bit of driving or sailing will undoubtedly be required to actually get them to where you're making your feedstocks. It has the added benefit that humans require gravity or a reasonable substitute to live long and healthy lives, and you get gravity for free on a planet, while having to generate it--somehow--in space--takes energy and more structures.

67:

Getting back to the original idea, I'll suggest a variant, which I'll call Bogey instead of Biggle.*

Here's the idea: Bogey was a WWI pilot who got snatched by a UFO and stored as a research collection, because reviving him was difficult for reasons. Over the centuries, he was stored in the equivalent of a university, and occasionally was the object of research. Eventually, some bright bulb, modeling his brain in AI systems, found out by goofing around, as young researchers are wont to do, that a simplified version of Bogey was a cracking good drone pilot, far better than simple AI. Probably it was because WWI fighters worked in about the same realm of airspeeds as drones normally do.

Anyway, the student did the equivalent of patenting their process, and BogeyCorp became well-known for its high-quality, autonomous, drone guidance systems. And all these systems were copies of Bogey. Apparently Bogey was okay with this, because he loved to fly and didn't mind if copies of him died.

Of course there was competition, and BogeyCorp learned that it had a problem: the disembodied "souls" of corpsicles can't upgrade their flying skills. Decanting would restore Bogey to humanity, thereby ending his value as intellectual property, so they came up with an alternative: they'd entangle/download copies of Bogey to ride along in the brains of human pilots and adventurers, to give Bogey the chance to fly in all sorts of strange new worlds and improve his skills. When the copy returned to BogeyCorp, they'd upload Bogey out of his human and use that more experienced version of Bogey for their next generation of drone guidance systems. Bogey got to be immortal in aggregate and have adventures, while the people he got entangled with got to have the adventure of a lifetime, along with the notoriety of doing a Bogey.

The dysphoria comes in because Bogey gets downloaded into people of all makes, models, genders, and hangups, and they get to share their brains and bodies with a WWI flying ace of repressed sexuality and probably some PTSD, who uses flying as therapy. It's far more than just gender dysphoria.

Anyway, use this as a story engine. Someone goes through all the work to become The Next Bogey, then gets to go on a some-expenses-paid adventure, with BogeyCorp sidekicks to make sure that the Bogey comes back alive and can be uploaded. Rinse and repeat, etm.**

*Originally I chose Bogey because it's a term with multiple uses so it can't be trademarked, while Biggles is purportedly trademarked. But I did a trademark search just in case. Turns out, all the Biggles trademarks are dead in the US, but W.E. Johns (publications) limited owns the EU trademarks, and the latest was filed in 2005. There are a bunch of Bogey trademarks in the US, but they're mostly for sandwich and golf businesses.

**I'm experimenting with etm. instead of etc. Etm showed up in my Faceplant feed some weeks ago. It's short for et merde. In case you were wondering.

68:

Apropos of nothing: it's a good thing you're talking about jump drives, because they never talk about the overheating starships would face if confined in a warp bubble barely bigger than the ship, with no universe to shed heat to.

It's canonical in Traveller that starships leave for their jumps with many tons of cryogenic hydrogen, which is gone when they arrive. For convenience this is called "fuel" even though few reaction drives use it and the tons required are spectacularly more than would be needed by the fusion reactors. What exactly happens to it all varies somewhat by edition and has been the subject of plenty of fan wanking by players; cooling the ship is one of the options.

69:

I'd buy this book, if OGH published it.

70:

"Traveller" - never been anywhere near it ... but that mention of the "Ancients" made me think of "The Jokers" from Pterry's Dark Side of the Sun ...

71:

" rather pointless since the resulting character has basically nothing in common with the original bar the name"

A fact that you are creating out of whole cloth. Read what he wrote - there is nothing in there about Biggle's personality other than 'is pilot, punches Nazis, has adventures' so unless you think Biggle's plumbing is the only character trait, you're just assuming this is the case.

As 'this story would work fine' - yes, well constructed stories will work with characters who fit the broad role. Any Superman story that's actually good will broadly work with any Supermanlike character.

But the usual point of things like Charlie posted to comment on the original character and make use of the pop cultural knowledge of them.

72:

You should find some similarly-interest gamers, get a reissue copy of original Black Box Traveller, and try it. It's fun, although it's spectacularly easy to die before you even finish character creation, and the in-person combat rules mean that every shoot-out basically ends in a bloodbath (everyone dead, boo). So, less unrealistic than D&D in that respect.

73:

Re: '... sitting on the surface of a planet with the atmosphere protecting you from stray debris'

Or, you could travel to an asteroid that's got most of the raw materials you need and is travelling in the direction you'll be heading in or orbiting often and close enough to Earth/your home planet so that it'll be easy to restock. Basically: dig in, mine, 3D print - mainly the interior - and off you go. Apart from a steady raw materials supply, the asteroid provides already proven existing protection from outer space elements.

Comment from the article below suggesting that GAIA could help determine where space mining might be most worthwhile: 'the stars closer to the centre and plane of our galaxy are richer in heavy metals than stars farther out.' Maybe it could also help identify asteroids most suited for setting up a spaceship manufacturing plant - size, raw materials, orbit, etc.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/gaia-release-3-findings-1.6486720

This article also has a link to a GAIA video (5:18 min). Based on the number and variety of observations/measurements now possible, it could help locate planets with similar profiles to Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6MGF0BBhckE&ab_channel=EuropeanSpaceAgency%2CESA

74:

Why do people keep wanting more metal in spaceships? They're mostly not metal.

The problem with manufacturing a spaceship in orbit is stoichiometry. Bluntly, grind down your spacecraft into its component atoms, figure out the ratios these atoms occur in, and that's what you need in an asteroid. If the asteroid as the elements in the wrong ratios, then you're at best discarding most of the asteroid to get the elements you need, or else you're stuck because you're missing key elements you need.

Plants do this all the time. I learned it in two forms: Leibig's Law of the Minimum (which states that plant growth is limited by the nutrient in shortest supply, even if all other nutrients are present in surplus) and in the Redfield Ratios (phytoplankton have C:N:P in 163:22:1, and some versions of the ratios contain another dozen elements). Since plants are basically nanotechnology, I'm pretty darned sure the rules apply to tech as well.

75:

Further to my suggestion of losing the Biggles connection, I can imagine OGH using a similar framing to craft a response to Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil) the way "Saturn's Children" responds to Heinlein's "Friday". I read a ton of Heinlein when I was young, but something about IWFNE kept me from getting past about 50 pages, even after three tries.

76:

It's fun, although it's spectacularly easy to die before you even finish character creation

Part of the fun, actually. Character generation is essentially a push-your-luck mechanic: stay enlisted for more skills and benefits, or muster out now to play this character rather than risk it dying and having to start over.

IIRC at least one set of rules recommended that if you rolled really crappy characteristics you should enlist in the Scouts where the character would likely die and you could start again. (I think it was framed as a subconscious suicide wish.)

77:

67 - From Wikipedia "William Earl Johns (5 February 1893 – 21 June 1968)", so all his characters are still in copywrong by the 70 years from death rule.

72 - Or wind up with a planet where the idea of a brothel is people in soiled raincoats listening to a reading of "Lady Chatterley's Lover".

74 - ISTR a Saturn V being about 99% fuel, and indeed the fuel for stage 1 being most of the structure at launch.

78:

Heteromeles @ 48:

Yeah, my only point is that with medical nanotech that advanced there would be no reason someone would be trapped in the wrong body.

79:

Graham's comment @ 7 about a Biggles relatively tolerant of colonised people was interesting, though there's a long history of more sophisticated imperialists working to understand the peoples of the periphery in order to better exploit and conquer them, without regarding them as equals. Those sophisticates are usually suspected of "going native" or soft by their colleagues. That was especially true of the British in India, where divide and conquer, and the extensive use of Indian troops and Moghul administrative bureaucracy was essential to the colonial project. While the thuggishly racist Robert Clive kicked the door down, it took some finesse to expand British rule across the sub-continent from Clive's foothold at Calcutta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Hastings

Whatever his thoughts on colonised people, I don't think(?) Biggles ever questioned the colonial project, or his place in it. The "fractious tribesmen" Biggles dropped bombs on from his Sopwith Camel in one book were Iraqis. I believe there's been some recent unpleasantness in that part of the world involving a lack of trust of Western intentions. Why? It's a mystery.

So I wonder whether Biggles would consider it more discombobulating to wake up female, or Black or Brown.

Any number of SFnal narratives have invited Western readers to consider themselves in the role of the colonised, either via alien invasion going back to The War of the Worlds, or more literally in the likes of Avatar.

The end of The Forever War involved a war veteran coming to terms with a queer future, albeit as a metaphor for the difficulties of Vietnam veterans reintegrating into society. IIRC Haldeman's solution was a hetero-separatist colony.

80:

Biggles in Space!

Wasn't that Dan Dare? And Professor Peabody...

81:

WreRite
Given what you say, where would you ( & others ) put the one I mentioned earlier - H Rider Haggard?
He was very much was in the "Noble Savage" school where it came to brown people - he loathed the Boers for their cruelty & he had a fuckton of mysticism in many of his writings - often centerd, as was fashionable at the time, on Ancient Egypt.
With, IIRC, a side-dish of reincarnation & multiple lives as well.

82:

I think your criticisms are rather dubious.

Firstly, I assumed that processing was implicit in what I was saying. This is a sci fi blog. Also I mentioned integrating ground built components.

Secondly, I can't imagine how you think I envisioned working on things all moving at different speeds. Again I was assuming everyone would think that I meant at a Lagrange point or somesuch. Again this is a sci fi blog, I felt there was no need to patronise people.

Thirdly, there are numerous reasons you may want to make a ship in orbit such as size or non aerodynamic shape etc, and if you are building it in space it makes sense to build it from materials already there. Also you don't necessarily need humans to build it if you are 3d printing, with everything thing else done by robots. I think it would be possible to have humans without gravity if you were open to a bit of genetic engineering! Losing muscle mass should be easily overcome, humans only lose muscle mass without exercise so we do not have to maintain it in what could be difficult times. Some birds for instance build up muscle mass before migration just by eating, so losing it is not necessary. Equally weakening of bones could be overcome. This is a bit of a digression, but you see my point. Whether any of this will be possible or whether we will destroy ourselves first is an open question.

83:
  • I read a ton of Heinlein when I was young, but something about IWFNE kept me from getting past about 50 pages, even after three tries.*

Yeah, like maybe the fact Heinlein was deathly ill and expecting to die while he wrote it -- he had some sort of cerebral arterial occlusion -- and Virginia rewrote and edited it to get it out. (He remained ill for several years thereafter: Time Enough for Love also dates to that period. Then he received life-changing surgery and got a whole lot better.)

84:

My gentle suggestion is to take away all the handwaves and see what still works.

In space, it's actually really important to not assume that the speeds are irrelevant. Delta V is a defining fact in space travel and space warfare, and bullets are at the lower end of the velocity range of objects in space. Most material is moving faster than that relative to you.

One of the problems SF has it that it ages badly when exposed to reality. Cavorite, for example, is an outdated fantasy now that used to be tolerable SF a century ago. Now that we're seeing AI, it doesn't look that much like what we'd imagined. And we're now seeing the militarization of space. It turns out it's less Star Wars, with X-wings going 80 mph into the slot run, and more about trying to figure out what can be done to and with things that fly faster than bullets (seriously, look at the USSF puff pieces). You can, of course, do retrofuturism, but if you want to do SF, it's useful to start with the present.

As for asteroids, there's a better hack: copy the Polynesians. When you set your starship down on an alien, terrestrial world, do so on the biggest mid-ocean volcano you can find. Hawai'i, for example. You get most of the stuff you want an asteroid to provide for you (Hawai'i's rocks are iron-rich), you get immense amounts of volatiles from the ocean and air (no need to lasso a acomet), and you get a really simple ecosystem that you can probably destroy and terraform. If your nascent colony can't dominate the ecosystem on a mid-ocean island, then probably traveling to the mainland is suicidal and you should simply leave.

Of course, Azhdarchids certainly nested on oceanic islands. If it's their kind of world. So it wouldn't be boring. It's just the closest thing you could find to an asteroid on a planetary surface, so you get the best of both systems.

85:

Greg, I must have read some Rider-Haggard as a kid but I guess it didn't make much of an impression on me.

I'll just note that noble-savage and native sidekick tropes which were probably well intentioned and relatively progressive in their day tend to look fairly appalling today. Essentially propaganda depicting "good" colonised people who know their place and whose values and skills of loyalty, hard work, bravery, local knowledge etc. just happen to be very useful at the fringes of empire, but unthreatening to that empire and its "natural" racial hierachy.

Also his books were published after the first Boer war, 1880-81, so I'm guessing the Boers made convenient villains. Substitute the Hun for Boers and you get Biggles.

The non-fiction equivalent, also teaching boys to be good servants of empire, was by (second) Boer war veteran Baden-Powell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouting_for_Boys

86:

From Wikipedia "William Earl Johns (5 February 1893 – 21 June 1968)", so all his characters are still in copywrong by the 70 years from death rule.

I'm reminded that Kim Newman had James Bigglesworth in Condor Squadron in Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron, so it appears that it's not entirely impossible to use the character. Of course Anno Dracula Biggles was a vampire, so could find himself in the 23rd century simply by hanging around for a while.

87:
" rather pointless since the resulting character has basically nothing in common with the original bar the name"

A fact that you are creating out of whole cloth."

Nonsense...

"Read what he wrote - there is nothing in there about Biggle's personality other than 'is pilot, punches Nazis, has adventures'"

...as you yourself then admit.

88:

Speaking of post WW I flying adventures, Melissa Scott & Jo Graham wrote a wonderful series, The Order of the Air, about former WW I pilots who became a found family. It is an unconventional group. They are all marginalized in one way or another, but they care for each other, they love to fly and are very good at it, and they have another mission which is fighting occult evil. They're a small order and not a rich one, but they get around. I cannot say enough good things about this series.

89:

Now that we're seeing AI, it doesn't look that much like what we'd imagined

I wish someone would write a fanfic of "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" where Mike accidentally achieves sentience, but has no need for "friends", no particular interest in these moving blobs in the shade #FFE0BD, no sense of self-preservation, and definitely no notion that anything in the universe has "value". In short, Mike acts the way an unintentionally sentient AI without all the vertebrate evolutionary baggage is likely to act.

Chances are Luna will end up depopulated very quickly, as Mike begins playing with all the toys available to him.

90:

Those sophisticates are usually suspected of "going native" or soft by their colleagues.

Depending on which time period you're talking about. Mid-late 19th century, sure. 18th century things seem to have been different.

This book is a fascinating read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Mughals

Greg will be pleased to note that Evangelical Christianity seems to have been a significant factor in the shift…

91:

Yeah, my only point is that with medical nanotech that advanced there would be no reason someone would be trapped in the wrong body.

Agreed completely. It's one of those "character building" experiences that people should be given an easy choice to avoid if they (not society!) want to avoid it.

92:

Why do people keep wanting more metal in spaceships? They're mostly not metal.

Not clear from that article whether "heavy metals" refers to anything heavier than hydrogen as astro kids normally do, or actual heavier-than-lead type heavy metals. I'm kind of assuming they mean "significantly heavier than helium" but that could mean 'solid when water melts' or just metals the way us normal people think of them (like mercury and gallium).

I'm guessing that making a starship out of hydrogen would be even trickier than the handwavium people are talking about now.

I loosely tend to the view that without magic a starship is going to be a spun-for-gravity thing following a big lump of shielding, quite possibly asteroids or comets piled up until there's enough mass for the task. But the usual stuff we've talked about before crops up so I'm going with unicorns that teleport as my preferred technological solution to interstellar travel.

93:

I kind of think there have been stories about accidental AIs which either don't care about humans or are actively malicious.

Sadly I can't name any, but it feels like a regularly used trope.

For the scifi tabletop roleplaying side, for example the game 'Eclipse Phase' has antagonist AIs which I think were mostly accidental. (It's in a way post-apocalyptic transhuman game with a colonized Solar System and mysterious star gates to other worlds. After reading this blog for a long enough time I need to actively brace my suspenders of disbelief with that game, but it's still fun. The first version is also available for free as a PDF: Eclipse Phase first edition material )

94:

I loosely tend to the view that without magic a starship is going to be a spun-for-gravity thing following a big lump of shielding, quite possibly asteroids or comets piled up until there's enough mass for the task. But the usual stuff we've talked about before crops up so I'm going with unicorns that teleport as my preferred technological solution to interstellar travel.

I do think Scalzi's done it already, but if we assume the gods panspermia'ed the whole local galaxy with Earth-friendly life, and there are humans on so many worlds because we make great pets, then a starship could be seen as the equivalent of a pet carrier for humans. That would be special.

95:

I would have gone with The Planet of the Cryptorchids, although that may have strayed too close to Flesh Gordon.

Does anyone recall the short story (probably <1980) of the guy roused from suspended animation and hanging out with other (male and female) patients in a hospital, only to discover that they're all previous attempts to reanimate him?

96:
You get most of the stuff you want an asteroid to provide for you (Hawai'i's rocks are iron-rich)

Um, not really. Basalts are rather ferromagnesian, yes, but they're ferromagnesian silicates, which makes it rather a bastard to get the metals out - you generally have to wait for one or more cycles of very specific weathering, erosion and re-deposition to convert the silicates into more refineable metal oxides. I'm constantly explaining to newbs on the hobbyist iron smelting pages that their black basalt that's slightly magnetic isn't actually a useful ore of anything. Basaltic crust is generally not a good ore source unless it's well cooked (submarine black smoker hotsprings, for example, are much better than a barren basalt island - there are reasons Polynesian cultures were among the best polished stone adze cultures ever - they had nothing else). While it's a smaller isolated ecosystem to strip and terraform, yes, basaltic island volcanoes are pretty barren if you want accessible metal ores. Island arc systems are better, as they're more likely to have say, porphyry copper in some of the volcanoes, and what really works well is any sort of massive collisional continental arc system - much better systems for concentrating rare stuff.

97:

John Varley wrote Steel Beach and the rest of the (damned fine) Eight Worlds series.

98:

Off-topic, or maybe not, given the initials "LSZ" in 1917 - now, perhaps - "LSA"
Luftschiff!

99:

Read the post out to my partner and her reaction was: I want to read this, I want to read this right now! Weirdly it reminded me of the Ack-Ack Macaque series, which I'd strongly recommend to anyone who also wanted to read Charlie's non-book

https://www.amazon.com/Ack-Ack-Macaque-Gareth-L-Powell/dp/1781080607

100:

I kind of think there have been stories about accidental AIs which either don't care about humans or are actively malicious. Sadly I can't name any, but it feels like a regularly used trope.

Skynet is the most obvious example of an accidental malicious AI. The Mailman in "True Names" by Vernon Vinge is accidental, malicious, and a little more plausible than Skynet. The Eschaton in OGH's "Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise" duology is not exactly malicious, but treats humans like managed wildlife, which most humans do not appreciate.

But an accidental AI which really does not care about humans one way or another, or even recognizes that "humans" are a thing... I think this was either never done at all, or very rarely. The closest I can think of is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke "Dial 'F' for Frankenstein", but it does not at all touch on what the accidental AI actually thinks, perceives, or wants.

101:

Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @93:

I kind of think there have been stories about accidental AIs which either don't care about humans or are actively malicious.

Sadly I can't name any, but it feels like a regularly used trope.

Harlan Ellison - "I have no mouth and I must scream".

Can't speak to how accidental it was, but it's certainly actively malicious by the time we get to meet it.

102:

Um, not really. Basalts are rather ferromagnesian, yes, but they're ferromagnesian silicates, which makes it rather a bastard to get the metals out - you generally have to wait for one or more cycles of very specific weathering, erosion and re-deposition to convert the silicates into more refineable metal oxides.

Thanks! A good reminder (to me too) that just because an element is present, doesn't necessarily mean it's usable without a lot of work.

My little niggle is that the Polynesians also used shark teeth and bamboo to cut food and other things, so they weren't just stuck grinding basalt into those lovely adzes.

The other point is more important: colonizing a remote island on an alien planet is one way to start dealing with the real problem, which is figuring out your place in the local biosphere. The problem's not viruses (probably your DNA codes and cell membrane proteins won't match with local stuff, so subcellular biohacking probably won't be a problem for the first few centuries). Instead, the problem is the local decomposers, especially bacteria and fungi, that just see you and all your technology potentially as substrate to grow on. A deep ocean island isn't the most sterile place you can go on a planet, if huge deserts or ice sheets are available. However, especially if the weather's tolerable, it has a nice mix of resources and isolation to see if you can make a go of it.

While I completely agree that an island arc is better from a metals perspective, making your first colony some place like Japan, New Guinea, or Indonesia is kind of jumping in the deep end without a floatie. I'd suggest those would be excellent places to set up mining camps once you're sufficiently comfortable that you're not stuck on a death world. Other good places for mining camps are placer deposits of rare earths and dry lake beds with lithium salts, and artesian oil seeps, if such can be found via aerial survey...

103:

You're right. I keep mixing up Varley and Vinge.

104:

Charlie,

Just do it already, yeah!

Your protagonists are Mrs Olivia Bigglesworth, a first generation space pilot on the regular Mars run in 2112, and Ludwig von Losheim, her Space Nazi antagonist (and fellow Mars run old-timer).

After a mix-up in their regeneration (after tangling with one another), Oliver and Ludmila must complete another run -- this time to Epsilon Bootes -- to pay for a correction.

Your milage may vary, but this story is so out there, that no one can object to copyright violations.

105:

Iron meteorites are actually pretty easy, because they make a tolerable steel just as they are. But that assumes that you want that kind of steel, and that's ALL that is easy.

106:

"John Varley wrote Steel Beach and the rest of the (damned fine) Eight Worlds series. "

Definitely worth a read -- I was impressed by them at the time. Start at the beginning, with Ophiuchi Hotline.

107:

The not difficult to parse idea is that you can presume that this Biggles is the same as the original except in the ways Charlie noted - and the only change he noted was the sex change. That you presume this meant Biggles In Name Only means either you think his plumbing is his primary character trait, or you're making up a bunch of changes in your head.

108:

Isn't the Mekon now a government minister?

109:

Wouldn't that require a degree of competency on the part of a government minister? ;-)

110:

There is a thrilling chase scene, riding half-tamed Azhdarchids! Also, microlight/dragon dogfighting!

Let's get back to the original scenario, and talk about just how one rides an Azhdarchid. I think "half-tame" is very Avatar and pigtail neuro-links, so I'm going to assume they're fully tame. Because consent is very important in this case, as we'll see. Remember, tame is not the same as domesticated, it means the beastie loves you, not that it's comfortable with all humans. Strangers might well get pecked.

The next thing to realize is that Azhdarchids were basically Lovecraftian beasties with gorilla bodies, bat-like wings stretched out between forelimbs and hindlimbs but not between the legs, the legs, hands, and especially fourth fingers of the gorilla are enormously elongated and made hollow, to hold the wing membrane. Then you replace the ape head and neck with something like a giant stork's apparatus, with the neck somewhat longer than a giraffe, but also with stiff, hollow bones.

The gorilla torso isn't exactly a mistake, because the most solid part of the critter's its chest, and it's about (yes) gorilla-sized, on something that's otherwise bigger than a giraffe.

So assuming it could lift you(!) you'd have to be carried on its back, backpack style. No saddles here, you're strapped chest-down to a harness, centers of gravity nicely matched. And since the harness can't go around the torso between shoulder and hip, due to the wing membrane, there's only one way to do it: mankini style (NSFW???), as popularized by Borat, in a vee between shoulders and crotch. Hopefully with space for the cloaca, since flying animals generally don't specialize in carrying feces for long durations.

So we've got this leather bondage harness that you're going to clip yourself onto the back of, and you've got to put it on your (half) tame Azhdarchid. Remember what I said about how you want it fully tame? You're going to be fiddling around its crotch area to get the harness properly seated. You two really better trust each other.

Finally, where does one get and tame an Azhdarchid? Well, on Earth, Azhdarchids may well have been scavengers as well as small-game predators (small to them is child-sized). On Planet Setting-B, presumably there are cities, and presumably they've realized that giant flying scavengers are an excellent way to process various organic wastes.

Yes, I'm saying that the mounts are giant, tame bin chickens.

The way you tame one of these beauties is that you start with a flapling (flying chick), whose struggling to feed itself around its giant kin. You feed it and thereby bond with it. By giving it a superior quality and quantity of garbage food, so that it becomes trusting, then dependent on you, until finally it consents to your scene with the bondage gear and carries you off. Consensually, of course. And I'm sure lots of training and practice is involved too.

So that's my take for the thrilling final aerial duel: Our Heroes riding Giant Furry Bin Chickens In Bondage! With real Combat, too.

Brain bleach optional.

111:

Y'all realize capitalism is a thing, right?

112:

Y'all realize capitalism is a thing, right?

You're funny. I like you.

113:

I no longer recall the other guy with the master/slave obsession but, I threw out his books instead of passing them on.

John Norman, with Gor?

Or Jacqueline Carey, with Kushiel's Legacy?

114:

zephvark
NOT SO - Jack Chalker was a nice guy to talk to, with interesting stories - he was ahead of his time, though, as regards the problems we are now having with the 3-way dsitribution of actual biological gender, sexual preferences & dysphoria.
He was trying to explore this space, without the words, or so it seemed to me.

115:

Yeah, saw a biomechanics video on YouTube which reached much the same conclusion about how to ride an Azhdarchid.

Bin chickens: just say no! (I've seen them in the botanic gardens in Sydney, robbing tourists of their sandwiches. The tourists seemed disinclined to argue with the chook with an eight-inch dagger on the front of its head ...)

116:

I think that he must be the Mekon's idiot nephew, sent to a backwater country to get him out of the way.

117:

Bin chickens: just say no!

I don't find them scary, and neither did my real chickens. Chooks would occasionally take offence at them landing on the lawn and chase them off. They do run round poking holes in the lawn after rain, though. So I guess if you're green and soft you wouldn't have a good time.

Bin chickens round here are mostly annoying because there's roosting trees nearby and the endless honking gets annoying. And they shit copiously on the cars parked under their trees (I presume most people only do that once). OTOH they are quieter than the gangs of cockatoos who also like to screech round in large numbers and vandalise stuff.

Ah, wildlife, so picturesque and wholesome.

118:

Meh, ibises are awesome, misunderstood and don't deserve the bad rap they get. I've watched an ibis get a small crab out of the mud, wash it carefully and eat it. That's the natural element, while the ones who are reduced to mugging tourists would be doing that if they still had a habitat. And ibises in flight are just majestic af.

If you've seen a kookaburra killing a snake, or even just one killing a chip at the back of the pub, you'd be surprised to lean their beak is light and not much harder than hair. You can have one go at your finger without getting so much as a scratch. Well within reason... you don't let it get your finger down the back of the bill where the mechanical disadvantage is less. Just the same way getting someone out of a dog's front teeth is much less fraught than getting it out of their back teeth.

119:

Well, I meant "something" rather than "someone", but hey it still scans okay.

And (per Moz) you would be much more careful about fingers around cockatoos.

120:

Good point, but he does come fully stocked with the cruel disregard for others.

121:

*Meh, ibises are awesome, misunderstood and don't deserve the bad rap they get. I've watched an ibis get a small crab out of the mud, wash it carefully and eat it. That's the natural element, while the ones who are reduced to mugging tourists would be doing that if they still had a habitat. And ibises in flight are just majestic af. *

Ibises are awesome, even as bin chickens.

One thing to remember is that Australian White Ibises are so close to the Sacred Ibis of Egypt and elsewhere that it took until the 1990s for the idea that they were separate species to win out. Apparently, the Sacred Ibis can be a bin chicken too, going back to the Middle Ages and probably to Ancient Egypt.

The other thing to remember is that Ibis-headed Thoth is "moon, wisdom, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magic, art, and judgment. His Greek equivalent is Hermes." (per Wikipedia).

Now I agree that Ibises aren't particularly intelligent, but I've come to realize that the animal heads on the Egyptian gods aren't random, they just seem so because most of the animals are exotic to us. So if I had to hazard a guess, the people who put an ibis mask on Thoth were honoring ibises' adaptability to civilization. And their ability to live in fairly unpleasant places, like salt marshes and cities.*

So yeah, envisioning alien Azhdarchids as the giant equivalent of crows, seagulls, or ibises that are quite happy to live in close proximity to humans isn't just me goofing around. How else are they going to live with us, and what are we going to feed them? They can't fly on hay, after all, and keeping large predators that eat small animals and the occasional child is a bit too dangerous. But if they help you recycle waste into compost for your manioc-equivalent fields, that's just another way they're useful.

*I remember coming across a flock of ibises feeding at a spring while working on the dry bed of Owens Lake. That was one of my least favorite work sites, but there were the ibises, probing away while we suffered.

122:

I vaguely recall that the famous clip of a kakapo mating with Stephen Fry's videographer includes a shot of one gently biting someone's finger... and drawing blood. Anything that cracks nuts with its beak is likely to be able to do that, and obviously many raptors will count fingers in their basket of snacks.

Watching what cockatoos do to bunya nuts made me very reluctant to put anything I value near one. Or 100. Those nuts are hard to open but somehow end up as piles of shredded bits after a visit by a screaming horde.

One cocky: https://youtu.be/xOPUuwqGzik?t=21 A horde made people grumpy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE4GxzZ4Sr4

123:

Re: '... reminder ... just because an element is present, doesn't necessarily mean it's usable without a lot of work.'

Okay, how about this reminder:

Although six elements make up something like 99% of the human body, the current design of a healthy, functioning human body contains/needs approx 30 different elements. I'm guessing that if humans are hoping to colonize a distant planet 'colonization' would include having biological children. So I see two options:

(a) make sure you transport as much of the trace elements as you can or

(b) figure out how to redesign a human body so that it can function well without those elements.

About being safe from viruses on an alien planet ... I've started watching the virology lectures again which is in a somewhat different format and somewhat different content than last time, i.e., more emphasis on functional aspects. Anyways based on lecture 3, my guess is that because viruses are apparati of convenience whose make-up ranges into near-infinite combinations/permutations, there would soon be whole slew of deadly-to-humans viruses on that planet.

About 'capitalism' ...

I think we need a new name for what's being currently touted as 'capitalism' because an increasing proportion of total global 'wealth' that's being created is not from 'hard assets', i.e., land, property. Rather it is being created from speculation (gambling - which includes some luck) especially the IPO-instant-billionaire, and more recently crypto-billionaires. Most of these new-gen billionaires seem to rush to convert a good chunk of their new 'wealth' into traditional hard assets. (It's magic!) I think we need to pay attention to each step along all of our current wealth creating processes instead of fixating on/measuring/using a convenient/old-fashioned end result.

124:

Most of these new-gen billionaires seem to rush to convert a good chunk of their new 'wealth' into traditional hard assets.

It's like they want something tangible that they'll own when the pyramid comes tumbling down…

125:

Sorry, I'll have to respectfully disagree:

For the elemental composition of the human body, it's ca. 23 elements, not 30. Many of the elements found in most humans (lead, for example) aren't necessary. If you're settling a planet as opposed to dinking around on an asteroid or comet, trace elements probably aren't a problem. If you're colonizing the Moon, probably water (H2O) is more critically short than silicon.

Viruses... IF THERE IS NO PANSPERMIA, the critical point of failure is the genetic code, where cells translate mRNA into amino acids. I don't know of any chemical reason why particular amino acids are coded by particular genetic sequences, and in fact there are minor variations in amino acid coding in various bizarre organisms. If my assumption is true, then alien viruses can certainly penetrate humans cells, probably (if they lug their own transcriptases in) transcribe themselves into human DNA, and possibly get their sequences copied. But the last step, where the code in the alien virus gets translated into more viral proteins, produces nonsense, and probably trips all sorts of immunological mechanisms resulting in host cell death.

Now, IF THERE IS INTERSTELLAR PANSPERMIA, none of this matters, and alien viruses are going to be a ubiquitous problem.

Interstellar Panspermia makes an easy, highly infectious scenario. It also makes an easy time-waster in interstellar travel: quarantine. Jumpships may travel parsecs instantaneously, only to spend 40 (or more) days in quarantine in their destination system, demonstrating to the satisfaction of the quarantine inspectors that they're healthy and can be allowed to dock or land. Any ship trying to break or avoid quarantine would probably be turned into plasma as a matter of policy. Presumably the quarantine area would be in high orbit or around a LaGrange point, so passengers could conduct business (the equivalent of Zooming to meetings) without breaking quarantine. It's also likely that the quarantine service might have automatic access to system life support and medical data, as part of clearing ships and issuing a free pratique license. So if you're doing a space opera and want ships to take months between planets, add in panspermia and quarantine.*

As for capitalism, I'm afraid that, like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and a few other labels, it's a set of associated symbols that has been used for so many different things over the years that it now has little consistent meaning. Just remember, a couple of hundred years ago, chattel slavery was a central part of capitalism. Many of the mechanisms that underlie the modern stock market and its vile offspring sprang up to purchase and insure slaves over 150 years ago.

The counter-argument for not replacing the term capitalism is about frog-boiling. More people pay attention to the label than the contents, and a lot can be shifted before people completely rebel. It would be easier to fix everything and call the resulting system capitalism than to build a competitor with it, given people's faith in the term.

*At one point, I'd contemplated a type of space navy labeled Investigation, Quarantine, and Adjustment (IQA). In this system, Investigation is the survey, scouts, and epidemiology section (first in microbiologists, etc), Quarantine is the coast guard equivalent that keeps interstellar trade from destroying civilizations, and Adjustment is the Space Navy military arm that deals with persistent scofflaws. Feel free to steal this.

126:

SFR
See also the Niven novel "Destiny's Road" - where vital trace elements are needed for the colonists?

127:

That's too simplistic. There is good evidence that some of the elements not found in the human body or are toxic in more than miniscule doses are in fact important to metabolism in some ill-understood way. Many of them cannot easily be tested, even in mice, because they are SO ubiquitous in foodstuffs (e.g. silicon, lithium and boron). Yes, that most definitely includes arsenic.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1916090/

128:

"I think we need a new name for what's being currently touted as 'capitalism' because an increasing proportion of total global 'wealth' that's being created is not from 'hard assets', i.e., land, property."

I agree. I use the term "monetarism" for what the plutocrats use now. It's using money as 'value' without anything backing it, except confidence tricks. It's very different from traditional capitalism.

129:

Here in Aotearoa, we found out about selenium. Toxic in small amounts, essential in even smaller amounts.

JHomes.

130:

W.r.t. alien viruses, you are assuming that (a) the DNA backbone and linkages are roughly the same and (b) the mechanisms for breaking the cell wall and reaching the DNA are 'compatible'. I am not enough of a fundamental biochemist to know if that is likely, implausible or what. As you say, panspermia makes it likely, but otherwise?

131:

See also the Niven novel "Destiny's Road" - where vital trace elements are needed for the colonists?

Yeah, and I wish I didn't: the biology was facepalm bad.

132:

Even I gagged at that. I wasn't impressed by the storyline, either, which seemed contorted around the bogus biology. It's one of the few of his I have, but never reread.

133:

W.r.t. alien viruses, you are assuming that (a) the DNA backbone and linkages are roughly the same and (b) the mechanisms for breaking the cell wall and reaching the DNA are 'compatible'. I am not enough of a fundamental biochemist to know if that is likely, implausible or what. As you say, panspermia makes it likely, but otherwise?

That's correct. I'm assuming the most favorable conditions without Panspermia, namely that there are solid biochemical reasons not just for which types of molecules are used (nucleic acids, amino acids, sugars, etc.) but for the chirality of the molecules being identical to what we have on Earth. My point was that the randomness of the code still gets in the way. Relax any of those assumptions about chirality of molecules, which amino acids are coded for, which nucleic acids and sugars are primarily used in the code, etc., and viruses become progressively less of a problem.

Microbes and fungal analogs likely remain a problem under most scenarios, just because they're so good at breaking stuff down.

As for Asimov's bugbear, chirality, you can read a more modern take at: https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/the-origin-of-homochirality/9073.article

There are some interesting points. One is that the RNA World (RNA came first and led to DNA) is commonly accepted, because RNA does all sorts of stuff (to the point where they're still figuring out all the things RNAs do in normal functioning cells). And it turns out that it's not that hard to build basic RNA out of plausible pre-biotic molecules.

The big problem is what the biochemists apparently call "breaking the mirror", and making life chiral. When you try to make RNA work in solutions of precursors with both chiralities, normally the result is that the mix jams and nothing happens. Figuring out how life went from unsorted solution to self-sorting is not an entirely solved problem, although there are hints that, once a version with a particular chirality becomes slightly more common (quite possibly by chance) it can take over with subsequent rounds of replication.

This gets back to the whole Panspermia thing. We work with L-amino acids and D-sugars. I suspect that if we tried to colonize a world with any other pattern of molecular chirality, it wouldn't just be that we couldn't eat the critters. It's possible that all sorts of things, random bits of organisms floating around like allergens, dirty water, etc., would cause some level of misery, possibly fatally so, when random molecules got into our cells and jammed essential cellular processes by being the wrong shape. Whether you believe this is a show stopper or not depends on how much you've struggled with allergies and chemical sensitivities during your life.

But of course I don't know that. All I can say is that at the moment, the researchers working on it don't think there's any inherent reason why the chirality of our biochemical building blocks is better than the other possibilities. They suspect that, when life first gets going, chirality happens by chance and then amplifies until it takes over the world.

And of course this is all science fictional for us, so figure out the level of realism you want to dominate in your story, and go from there.

134:

Endoparasites (including ENT and even lung invasion) are clearly a possibility. As you say, some fungi and bacteria will grow on almost anything.

The wrong chirality is obviously a show-stopper, but it could extend to other things in a system of the right chirality, by plants or animals producing a large amount of something toxic or allergenic. It's not even impossible to conceive of a system where some organisms emitted enough cyanide into the air to make it unbreathable.

It certainly makes sense for chirality to be a random choice, but for one to dominate.

135:

Damn! EXOparasites.

136:

Is biology in "Destiny's Road" that bad?

I know that the effects of potassium deficiency are nothing like what is it in the book: gradual loss of muscle control, followed by paralysis and eventually death; there are no cognitive effects at all. Niven should have used iodine, since iodine deficiency really does lead to imbecility.

But aside from this blooper, how bad is it?

137:

Think NPK fertilisers. It's essential for plant growth, in quite large quantities.

138:

Is biology in "Destiny's Road" that bad? I know that the effects of potassium deficiency are nothing like what is it in the book: gradual loss of muscle control, followed by paralysis and eventually death; there are no cognitive effects at all. Niven should have used iodine, since iodine deficiency really does lead to imbecility. But aside from this blooper, how bad is it?

Well...look at The composition of the human body. Potassium is 0.4% by weight, between phosphorus and sulfur. More to the point, it's soluble, so it's not going to easily get sequestered at the bottom of the ocean. Also, it's in the same column of the periodic table as sodium, which it acts like, as a salt. It doesn't act like arsenic, which is in the same column as nitrogen and phosphorus.

Speaking of phosphorus, that's probably where Niven should have gone, or possibly lithium, if he wanted to really mess with both technology and biology. The thing about phosphorus is that it's fairly insoluble and does have the bad habit of getting sequestered away from where we need it. In ancient rocks and soils (esp. Australia, and I think also the Canadian shield), getting enough phosphorus for plant growth is a perennial problem. Heck, it's even a problem for our civilization, because we've been casually dumping huge amounts of phosphorus into the ocean in our sewage and erosion, when we really should have been (somehow) recycling that sewage into fertilizer (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18326-7).

There are ways around this problem, as the Australian aborigines worked out (low-density nomadism allows weathering and other natural processes to pull more P out of the soil and rock), but if you're stuck in an alien biosphere with unfavorable biochemistry, living off the land is not an option. You'll need to get and process the elements and get them into your little terraforming project, or else. If you're stranded on an old planet, a lot of nutrients are sequestered in places you're going to struggle to get them out of.

139:

EC
"NPK" is only really necessary if the soil is seriously deficient in those Elements - OR - if you want to accelerate plant growth, because the little buggers are "greedy feeders" - like Tomatoes, f'rinstance.
I use Chicken Manure Pellets for that purpose - which have the added virtue of being slow-release, so that you are not filling the run-off/drainage water with the above NPK, leading to algal blooms & water pollution, of course.
See also: "H" on Phosphorus run-off problems.
... Next up is Magnesium deficiency, which can cause low growth, wilting & leaf-yellowing.
I'm borderline on this problem with my Raspberries & for that I occasionally use "Epsom Salts" - though, as is often the case in this sort of both nutrient & chemical / horticultural / osmotic balancing, too much "P" can inhibit the plants' uptake of Mg (!)

140:

In ancient rocks and soils (esp. Australia, and I think also the Canadian shield), getting enough phosphorus for plant growth is a perennial problem.

It's also an annual problem, depending on what you are planting…

I'll show myself out now :-)

141:

Not my point. The fact is that those three elements are CRITICAL in quite large quantities, and Niven was postulating an ecology where the potassium was unavailable. Plants would not have grown, and humans would not survive.

142:

It's also an annual problem, depending on what you are planting…

Yes! Someone got the cue!

Anyway, anyone that wants to redo Barsoom, just yarn about an old red dwarf, circled by an old red terrestrial planet, with old red sea bottom landscapes. The star is old enough to be fairly stable, so humans don't have to huddle behind the hills to avoid getting x-rayed too often.

The planet's the core of a super-terrestrial ocean world, where over the aeons, flares from the red dwarf have blown off the water, until what's left is gathered in a sea facing the star (it's tide-locked, of course), giant ice sheets on the night side, and mighty rivers running between the two. Because there's water, there's still tectonic activity, and because there's tectonics, there's a carbon cycle and life.

Wikiwalk on "red soil" and "ultisol" if you need a primer on what red soils are about.

143:

Speaking of phosphorus, that's probably where Niven should have gone, or possibly lithium, if he wanted to really mess with both technology and biology.

I vaguely recall a story, it may have been by Asimov, where a group of stellar explorers spend maybe too much time on a supposedly-habitable planet before their idiot savant Science Officer happens to come across some old 20th-century environmental reports in the ship's database that inform them that beryllium, overabundant in the planet's soil and dust, is not a good thing to share lungs and airways with.

144:

I vaguely recall a story, it may have been by Asimov, where a group of stellar explorers spend maybe too much time on a supposedly-habitable planet before their idiot savant Science Officer happens to come across some old 20th-century environmental reports in the ship's database that inform them that beryllium, overabundant in the planet's soil and dust, is not a good thing to share lungs and airways with.

IIRC, beryllium dust problems are kind of unsubtle, and I'm not sure how long it would take for those to become noticed by susceptible people.

145:

Sorry for the additional post, but I wanted to assuage my muse so that I can work on a deadline:

It's the idea that people are on a lot of planets because We Make Great Pets to the "gods."

What kind of "gods?" No, I'm not going to start the religion thing here. Sheesh.

In this case, by "gods" I'm thinking more of sentient gremlins that live in hyperspace and manipulate prior probabilities in our normal space (hyperspace being something like the d/dprobability of our reality, or some such handwave a la David Brin and quantum observation infrascience). Various writers (Card, WJW, Schmitz) have played with such entities. To stop annoying the atheists, let's call them "Foo" instead, after their appearance to WW2 flying aces (the infamous foo fighters).

Foo think humans are just adorable, not because we're such good observers, but because we've got such fascinating gaps in our observation skills: we perceive rather slowly, our brains paper over huge perceptual gaps with heuristics, and so forth. To the Foo, beings that rely on quantum observation handwaves to interact with our universe, we're kind of like cats. After all, half the fun in owning a cat is playing games with them where you mess with their heads. Foos are magical, not because magic is real, but because they're exploiting the same cognitive gaps that magicians use, combined with quantum woo, to play with us. As I said, gremlins.

So anyway, Foo Panspermia. When the Foo first started exploring our space, they got really fascinated by life (observation from complex chemicals? Dude, how does that work?). So they started playing with the probabilities of the formation of life on worlds, did a whole study with lots of replicates and citizen science (they live in an ancient adhocracy), and ended up with a bunch of biospheres that more-or-less work the same way. Project may still be underway, because time in FooSpace runs a bit weirdly compared with our, and "still" doesn't quite map when you differentiate it with respect to prior probability.

Then came the Pet Human craze, and a bunch of Foo enthusiasts took their pet humans to other planets and established breeding colonies there in a huge fit of hobby science. Since humans turn out to be like feral cats, these colonies caused a lot of damage, giving rise Fooish environmental angst and stuff, so the practice of starting colonies of feral humans has become restricted to Crazy Cat Ladies Fooish human enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, not all humans are properly conditioned to Foo. If the Foo get them when they're young, then they can grow up to be happy pets. If not, then they're always feral, and it takes the Foo a great deal of work, "love" (whatever that is for a probabilistic gremlin) and patience to get the stray human to accept being a Foo Gremlin's pet. But of course many humans are too afraid of Foo to get close to these Kindly Ones.

So what's up with the UFOs? They're the Foo equivalent of cat carriers. The controls are partly for talking with the Foo to try to tell them where to go (Meow! Point, point. Meow! That's what the joy stick is for), and ships are full of enrichment activities so that the humans onboard feel like they're doing stuff and not imprisoned on the trip (don't want them to start hurting each other or decorating their cabin walls with their feces, after all). Fooish human enthusiasts have learned that humans feel better if they have some control and can feed themselves traditional foods in traditional ways. So that's all good. Humans love to be "pilots," and some have gotten really good at performing stunts with their Foos.

Anyway, now we get to Ms. Biggles, who's very definitely a stray human, rescued by Her Foo, and Her Foo loves her dearly in her Fooish ways. Sort of like the relationship between Greebo and Nanny Ogg. Obviously Her Foo indulges Ms. Biggles enormously and carts her all over the galaxy. Is it because Her Foo is a supervillain and Ms. Biggles is Her white cat equivalent? Is Her Foo a wealthy eccentric tourist, and Ms. Biggles is just out causing trouble? Or is Her Foo some sort of anti-human conservationist, out to cull feral human colonies that are harming species other Foos care about. Sort of the human equivalent of a Judas Goat, as it were, where Ms. Biggles gets into fights and thereby helps the local Foo figure out which feral humans need to be treated (spayed/neutered and released? Put up for adoption? Who knows?)

Well, it could be all three. But we'll never know, because this is just an improbable story, not something that will ever see print, even in Probability Zero.

Anyway, that got my muse off my back, so hopefully I can go write a boring but necessary newsletter article that's due. Thanks!

146:

Re: 'Asimov's bugbear, chirality, ...'

Excellent article - thanks! I'll have to re-read this though cuz I kept having to look things up. It's been a while since I took chem. :)

BTW - that Wikipedia article does make mention of up to 29 different elements. I'm wondering whether inclusion of an element requires that the element actually is part of some molecule within the human body or whether it can 'merely' act as a catalyst. Or maybe even whether any microbes in our microbiome use that element. Fascinating stuff.

147:

»Foo think humans are just adorable,«

Or maybe we are just very useful as canaries in their coalmines ?

As long as there are still humans on the planet, something else is not there (yet) ?

148:

»IIRC, beryllium dust problems are kind of unsubtle, and I'm not sure how long it would take for those to become noticed by susceptible people.«

When Asimov wrote that story, beryllium oxide was a relatively new material in electronics and it took a long time for the bad news to percolate, because most uses were MilSpec/NatSec and/or classified, so the workmen were told they were working with "a ceramic material".

149:

The Asimov story is "Sucker Bait", was written in 1953, and published in 1954. It can be found in "The Martian Way and Other Stories".

150:

I'd buy it!

151:

"most uses were MilSpec/NatSec and/or classified"

Beryllium is a great neutron reflector...

152:

As long as there are still humans on the planet, something else is not there (yet) ?

Quite possibly. I want to be very clear that I'm not writing this story either. Merely getting my own muse off my back.

The frustrating thing about creativity for me is that it generally feels like I get ideas that other people would write better than I could. Since I think any work of art is 99% perspiration, 50% luck, and less than 1% inspiration, I very strongly feel inputs should be valued accordingly. So I share bright ideas I can't use. What's the point in hoarding them? After all, copyright is on words, not ideas, and you can't patent story lines.

153:

Beryllium oxide is good at conducting heat while insulating electricity, and so was considered a handy material for putting inside power semiconductor devices to improve heat transfer from the die to the can. Beryllium compounds were also used in the phosphors of early fluorescent tubes.

154:

Beryllium metal -- some alloys, anyway -- is also incredibly light. We don't use it in place of aluminium because of the toxicity issue, but it is used in some exotic roles that require light weight -- e.g. some components of inertial guidance platforms (Apollo, Peacemaker ICBM).

Obviously those, like its neutron reflectivity, are classified up the wazoo.

155:

I never played Traveller, although I scanned the books on occasion.

One thing that's started jumping out and yelling for attention is that, now that we've found thousands of exo-planets, it's high time to revamp the world creation rules that Traveller and other games, like GURPS Space, use. You can see the old rules at https://www.traveller-srd.com/core-rules/world-creation/

Here I'm thinking of space operatic worldbuilding, to the extent anyone cares about that anymore.

Yes, it's become obvious that global capitalist systems need to be terraformed to support human life in the long term. That should be included too, of course. No planet's going to support 100,000,000,000 people, or probably even 10,000,000,000 people.

But beyond that, it seems so far that hot Jupiters, super-earths, and red dwarf worlds are the norm, and our solar system (with rocky inner worlds and gas giants in the deep) seems to be exceptional.

Therefore, it's possible (admittedly not incredibly likely) that the norm for life-bearing worlds are terrestrial-type planets orbiting red dwarfs and exomoons orbiting warm Jupiters.

For the nonce, let's assume this is true.

For red dwarf worlds, habitability for humans means that the system has been around long enough for the star to settle down and stop blasting its atmosphere off in ways that scour the atmosphere off its worlds, so these are old worlds, as noted above in 143 (old red worlds orbiting old red dwarf stars).

Exomoons also orbit through exciting radiation environments, since the primary is bigger than Jupiter and presumably has radiation belts to match. Moreover, the exomoon will be tectonically active and have its own magnetic field protecting its surface. The effect of two powerful magnetic fields orbiting and interacting with each other will in turn make the EM environment in the space around both rather interesting for spaceships. Possibly a steel hulled vessel is not the ideal ship for such an environment?

It's probably relatively safe on the exomoon surface, thanks to a hopefully thick atmosphere and magnetic field, although I for one wouldn't spend much time at the magnetic poles. However, the auroras are going to be spectacular, and possibly the normal surface-level EM environment would be something we'd call a Carrington Event here. Build string power lines and find out, I say. Maybe you could create a self-powered grid, just based on induced voltages in long lines?

Anyway, the exomoon itself will be tidally locked to its primary, so there will be a big ocean facing the primary, a similar ocean facing away from the primary, and a band of land in between of width to be determined. What's going on here is basically the reverse of Earth, with a huge moon (the super-Jupiter) and a comparatively tiny planet (the exomoon). So the tidal bulge is a couple of kilometers high. Fortunately the world (the exomoon) is tide-locked, so that it turns as fast as the tidal bulges move, and the result is a band of dry land with two huge oceans facing towards and away from the primary.

Day length varies from shortish and exciting (Io's day is 1.7 terrestrial days) to "holy crap this is tedious" (Titan's day is 15.9 terrestrial days). The reason shorter is more exciting is that if there are multiple moons, inner moons get more tidally stressed than do moons that are further away. Io's pyrotechnical display is dumping a lot of tidal energy. Volcanoes can be a good thing, so you could posit a "super-polynesia" waterworld exomoon with a lot of volcanoes powered by the gravity of other large moons orbiting in resonance, as with Jupiter.

If you don't want to deal, another possibility is Triton, which was captured by Neptune and thus ended up in a retrograde orbit after sweeping all the big moons out of Neptunian space. A retrograde exomoon can (at least theoretically) be fairly close to the primary without having a lot of tidal energy being dumped into it by other moons, because there aren't any big enough to matter. Also, Triton's orbit around Neptune is nearly circular, and apparently that's an effect of it being captured. Assuming this is normal, a moon in retrograde could be fairly close to the primary and in a circular orbit, so it's not getting tidally stressed and blowing molten chunks to get rid of the excess energy.

Anyone else want to add anything? Like what panspermia does with a red dwarf world if it also seeded life on Earth?

156:

it's high time to revamp the world creation rules that Traveller and other games, like GURPS Space, use

I'm going to argue against that. Traveller is very deliberately a nod to classic SF, with scads of utterly unrealistic elements. If you update worldbuilding, then you also need to update things like lasers, computers, reaction drives, etc…

If your aim to create realistic worldbuilding, then better to go with a game-system-free algorithm for creating more realistic worlds, using real-world units, that GMs can use for their own campaigns.

If you're looking for a setting, Traveller: 2300 (no actual relation to Traveller) is probably a better background. (It got rebranded as 2300 AD to avoid confusion, but the rebranding also included a rerelease that emphasized the military and made the setting 'America rescues Europe from invasion' rather than 'multilateral colonization and exploration, America is not global hegemon'.

157:

I'm going to argue against that. Traveller is very deliberately a nod to classic SF, with scads of utterly unrealistic elements. If you update worldbuilding, then you also need to update things like lasers, computers, reaction drives, etc…

Um, no. Traveller the game was first published in 1977. That was 45 years ago. It's retrofuturism now, but it wasn't created as retrofuturism then.

There are a couple of issues here:

1) Is space opera now limited to retrofuturistic settings? If so, is it because we assume starships are impossible, we're doomed, and it's only a refuge for aging Boomers and Gen Xers?

2) If this isn't true and SF is about science-based fantasies, why do we keep pounding more kids into the "great" space operatic fantasies of the 60s and 70s, namely Star Trek and Star Wars. Great for community. As for creativity, love of science, and so forth? Meh.

3) Arguably the most current space operatic shared world we've got going is...The Marvel Cinematic Universe. Do you want that to be the "best available science" SF multiverse?

Especially when we're finally getting some really good available science, on everything from paleontology to exoplanetology?

The only reason this is about Traveller is that Charlie name-checked it and everyone here went "Oooh. Traveller. Yaaas." with dilated pupils. Hopefully, we can have a bit more fun than that.

158:

154 & 155:

Yes, beryllium has a number of interesting properties aside from being a good neutron reflector. Back in one of the earlier waves of enthusiasm for space-based laser weapons (1980s IIRC), it was the material of choice for beam director mirrors because of its thermal and mechanical properties. And, of current interest, the Webb mirror segments are made of beryllium.

I suspect that the NRO had something to do with the development of the technology -- it would be interesting to trace back where the Webb design came from.

159:

Um, no. Traveller the game was first published in 1977. That was 45 years ago. It's retrofuturism now, but it wasn't created as retrofuturism then.

I'm aware of that. I've played Traveller since it was published. I have everything published by every official publisher up to (and including) GURPS Traveller. I've written more JTAS articles than anyone, and co-written two Traveller sourcebooks. I like to think I know what I'm talking about.

It started out as a generic SF-RPG based on up-to-70s AF, but it quickly became a setting based on the rules (and vice versa). SF trends from the 80s (such as cyberpunk) passed Traveller by.

Do you want to run a campaign set in Anderson's Poleseotechnic League? Be Dominic Flandry? You'll have to kit-bash the Traveller rules to do so.

I have great nostalgia for the game (or maybe just my youth). But Traveller rules have so many disconnects with modern science that you'd be better off starting over, or writing a rules-free worldbuilding system.

And I guess that's what I'm arguing for: a rules-free worldbuilding system. Those that want to use it to generate a setting for a Traveller campaign can. Likewise those who want to run d20 Future with more realistic planets can. Those who want to use Fate, or BESM, or freeform can too.

160:

This sounds like an excellent April 1st article for Tor.com. Or post the plot on Archive of Our Own with a Creative Commons license... someday I need to finish my own Laundry fanfic, which is about Alan Turing's ghost.

161:

I'm aware of that. I've played Traveller since it was published. I have everything published by every official publisher up to (and including) GURPS Traveller. I've written more JTAS articles than anyone, and co-written two Traveller sourcebooks. I like to think I know what I'm talking about.

Apologies for any insults. They were not intended.

Where I'm coming from is Hot Earth Dreams, which I wrote as a rules-free worldbuilding system for a climate-changed Earth, although apparently it's doing double duty as an environmental science textbook in a few classrooms.

I completely agree that it's not worth rerewriting Traveller, for exactly the reasons you list.

What I am concerned about is that most budding science fiction writers who want to build alien worlds probably do not have the science chops to create their own worlds. As a result, they often seem to glom on to worldbuilding systems from games like Traveller and existing franchises like Star TwRaErKs. IMHO, this leads to a real dearth of creativity, especially when the alien world becomes a set, rather than something that helps to advance the plot by its nature.

Am I going to write Red Dirt Galaxy as a rules-free worldbuilding book? No, although it's vaguely tempting.

The impetus for Hot Earth Dreams was that I couldn't imagine what a climate-changed planet would look like, nor could most other people, and it seemed like a really gaping hole in our collective imaginations. So I decided to start filling that hole. We're still in a time where more people would rather imagine humans going extinct than contemplate our descendants living with the consequences of our folly, but fortunately, the cognitive log jam that existed a decade ago seems to have broken. I doubt I played any significant role in that, but it was nice to have helped as I could.

That said, I'm not convinced that there's a similarly pressing need to update space opera and SFRPG worldbuilding rules. But it would be nice to see some of it happen.

162:

Charlie @ 155
Beryllium is also used in significant quantities, as an alloy component, in the railway industry.
Almost all OHLE "knitting" is about (IIRC) 2% Be - improves the tensile strength enormously, without degrading the conductivity.
Because of the Be proportion, you are supposed to be very careful about how the "scrap" is handled & reprocessed - I think several dubious scrap metal merchants & railway-property thieves have, um "come unstuck" over that, not too long after someone did an analysis of the sample(s)

163:

Um, no. Traveller the game was first published in 1977. That was 45 years ago. It's retrofuturism now, but it wasn't created as retrofuturism then.

I remember playing black box Traveller shortly after it came out and it was totally retrofuturism back in the day -- it's full of shout-outs to 1940s-early 1960s space opera, notably Poul Anderson's material, but more or less anything later is too modern for it. Star Wars and Star Trek for sure. Only exception: The Mote in God's Eye, which was already consciously retro (and used a setting Pournelle had designed and written in during the 1960s).

164:

The tiled inner wall of the JET tokamak is mostly beryllium metal, apart from the to tungste divertor tiles in the bottom which have to withstand much higher temperatures. Why? Beryllium has a low atomic number, and therefore loses you less energy from the plasma when stray Be nucleui inevitably get knocked loose and contaminate the deuterium plasma. The bad news is the low melting point, compared with the tough old carbon tiles we used to have. The even worse news is the Be dust us very bad for you if you breathe it in, hence the paranoid health physics controls on anything that has been inside the vacuum vessel.

165:

A retrograde exomoon can (at least theoretically) be fairly close to the primary without having a lot of tidal energy being dumped into it by other moons, because there aren't any big enough to matter... Anyone else want to add anything?

I would add that the tidal interaction between a planet and a retrograde moon always draw the moon closer -- and the closer it gets, the faster it spirals in. IIRC, Triton will enter Neptune's Roche Limit and will turn into a set of rings within 40 million years.

Any "fairly close" retrograde exomoon won't be there for long.

166:

Hmmm. Unless this paper got it wrong, Triton purportedly will hit Neptune's Roche limit in 3.6 billion years. That's what I was going by. Obviously someone's got to do all the math to double check on any model system (Roche limit and Hill Sphere calculations aren't that hard), but I'd guess that a retrograde exomoon is stable long enough to develop a big animal terrestrial biosphere.

Remember, it doesn't start at the Roche limit, it starts much further out and spirals in.

For comparison, Earth's existence is ca. 8 billion years, of which 4 billion were trying to make the atmosphere consistently oxidizing, a hundred million was spent getting the carbon cycle working (see Cryogenian), and about 1.5 billion years is something a human would regard as in hacking distance of habitable, although probably 80% or more of that span will be hothouse dino-world, not the icehouse world we were enjoying until recently. After that, the sun gets too hot, the carbon cycle sputters to a stop, and that's it for multicellular life, although the Earth will continue on for a billion or more after that.

167:

If this isn't true and SF is about science-based fantasies, why do we keep pounding more kids into the "great" space operatic fantasies of the 60s and 70s, namely Star Trek and Star Wars.

Don't remember where it was, but I had read a call to "bring Star Trek into 21st century!" The point was that for 50 years Star Trek has been the face of science fiction, and even with later upgrades it has fallen hopelessly behind written SF. The article suggested visiting some previously unknown quadrant, populated by Kardashev II civilizations, Matryoshka brains, Peter Hamilton's Dreaming Void, etc. In short, make "the face of science fiction" catch up with science fiction.

I would particularly love to see a Starfleet vessel come across (and try to make sense of) The Festival from OGH's "Singularity Sky".

168:

Beryllium is also used to form very stiff dome tweeters for very expensive "high end" loudspeaker systems. I have even heard of it being used to form cones for lower frequency drivers.

169:

This is an awesome idea. I love it! A ringworld or some other Big Dumb Object, a group as "cyber" as the Borg but much more Gibson-like and composed of individuals, some "post-technical" civilizations, a few episodes that have some inheritance from Peter Watts, a few thing humanity, even with Vulcan help, can't even understand and is merely able to run away from... the possibilities are just about endless.

170:

As for a KII civ, TNG had an episode where they find Scotty inside a Dyson Sphere (the literal almost impossible to build kind).

They had an episode in TOS where a suped up enterprise was sent hurtling towards the Andromeda galaxy (Kirk seduce an alien babe, of course).

The Genesis torpedo can instantly terraform any planet.

They also had an ultimate computer that kicked Star Fleet's butt in a war game.

171:

Which is the most advanced civ, Star Trek's Federation or the Galactic Empire/republic of Star Wars

Answer, the one with teleportation.

Where would each be on the Kardashev scale?

172:

By warm Jupiters do you mean Brown Dwarfs?

What if BDs turn out to be scattered by the dozens or hundreds in the space between the stars? And what if most of them have mini-solar systems (like Jupiter and Saturn) capable of supporting life because there is enough heat is generated by the BD to allow liquid water and photosynthesis based on infrared frequencies? It's easy to imagine life based on infrared photosynthesis on moons orbiting brown dwarfs which give off heat but not light. Not just imagine it, we already know of such life here on Earth, green sulfur bacteria. And if BDs floating between the stars greatly outnumber suns, then visible light spectrum based life may be the exception instead of the rule. Advanced versions of infra red based life would see in infra read, like Predators.

In addition to infrared based life, Cornell researchers have modeled methane based life forms that don't use water and could live in the liquid methane seas of Titan. Methane based life forms by themselves are a fascinating concept. But ironically the potential "Goldilocks" zone for such life is far greater (extending across the range of Jovian worlds out to the Kuiper belt) than our narrow zone for water based life forms. However, the slow chemical reactions of such cryo-life forms may be such that an intelligent example may take thousands of years to finish a single thought.

So "life as we know it" based on water and the visible light spectrum photosynthesis may be the rare exception in a universe dominated by methane based life and life that utilizes infrared photosynthesis.

173:

Another interesting place for the Enterprise to visit.

174:

By warm Jupiters do you mean Brown Dwarfs?

No, I meant Jovian-sized and bigger worlds orbiting inside the snow line, so water would be liquid on them or their moons. While it appears there's a continual size spectrum up from Saturn-sized to Red dwarf with brown dwarfs in the middle, I don't offhand know of a brown dwarf in close orbit to a star.

So "life as we know it" based on water and the visible light spectrum photosynthesis may be the rare exception in a universe dominated by methane based life and life that utilizes infrared photosynthesis.

Wouldn't work, unless you're talking about microbes.

There's a basic problem in cell biology, involving electron donors and electron receptors, and the resulting electrochemical voltage difference. Turns out that aerobic respiration (sugar plus oxygen in, CO2+H2O out, is as good as you can do, over a very wide range of cellular respiration systems that microbes are known to practice on Earth.

The basic point is that on Earth we've already got organisms that get their energy from oxidizing and reducing a huge variety of things, everything from hydrogen to gold. The only organisms that are multicellular use oxygen in the process. Considering the planet was more-or-less anoxic for billions of years of life, but multicellular life didn't evolve until well after oxygenic photosynthesis evolved, I think we've got pretty good evidence that any world that doesn't have a lot of free oxygen in its atmosphere doesn't have multicellular, carbon-based life.

Then we get into the problem of getting infrared light in through an atmosphere composed of greenhouse gases, which methane is. Greenhouse gases generally block part of the IR spectrum, trapping heat in the atmosphere. So if you've got an atmosphere that's mostly methane, it's likely going to absorb the light and get hot, but it's unlikely that it will get hot enough to reradiate that heat in a way that anything can run photosynthesis off of.

Probably Clarke got to the better answer when he posited seas kept liquid and warm by tidal interactions with other bodies. Based on what I wrote above about cellular respiration, I don't see how such an ocean could hold multicellular life, unless some abiotic process was doing serious electrolysis in the ocean, breaking down water and liberating oxygen. I suppose that's possible with the right natural catalysts (iron-nickel high heat something?). Maybe not so likely though.

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with an exo-"moon" orbiting a brown dwarf orbiting a main sequence star that produced a fair amount of UV light for regular photosynthesis. It'd be a weird system, and quite miserable to fly a manned starship into due to the radiation environments, but it maybe could work.

Hope this helps.

175:

Re: 'space-based laser'

Retro-SF space operas and TV series/shows inspired generations of real scientists even though the 'science' used in some earlier shows was probably kinda iffy even back then.

What those shows really communicated was 'wouldn't it be cool to be able to do X/have these devices, tech and societies'. ST-TNG realized that it had enormous appeal to potential scientists and actually consulted real scientists for some aspects of their scenarios and sci background.

No idea whether the scientists who did the below research are SF fans - and apart from adding more test results confirming QM - I'm wondering how their work might figure in an SF novel esp. the 'forever' bit.

https://scitechdaily.com/eternal-matter-waves-physicists-build-atom-laser-that-can-stay-on-forever/

Reason I mention this is because there are at least two sides to tech/sci discoveries:

(a) what it is/does

(b) how it can be applied/usages

Saw an interview with one of the co-developers/co-Nobel laureates of MRIs/fMRIs: they discovered the science/principles of how this worked but when they started their work they didn't know how this knowledge could/would be applied. These scientists mostly focused on (a). ST/ST-TNG and similar mostly focused on (b).

176:

Hey, Vernor Vinge used Cavorite in 1999 and they gave him a Hugo for it!

177:

Various - Beryllium is also used in alloys like beryllium copper, which is used (carefully) in manufacturing openings for gauss cages.

171 - True about the Genesis weapon, but it's also presently unstable.

178:

il7a187 @ 168: Don't remember where it was, but I had read a call to "bring Star Trek into 21st century!" The point was that for 50 years Star Trek has been the face of science fiction, and even with later upgrades it has fallen hopelessly behind written SF. The article suggested visiting some previously unknown quadrant, populated by Kardashev II civilizations, Matryoshka brains, Peter Hamilton's Dreaming Void, etc.

Babylon 5 went quite a long way in that direction. The Vorlons and Shadows were arguably K2 level. We never learn if they have bothered with Dyson spheres; it may well be that they could build one but don't see the point. The Great Machine on Epsilon III is probably as close as you need to get to a Matryoshka brain for dramatic purposes. And of course even these things weren't the most powerful entities in the galaxy. At one poing G'Kar delivers a little lecture about the Ancient Ones, explaining that we are to them as ants are to us; we cannot begin to comprehend them, and the best we can do is stay out from underfoot.

179:

And I guess that's what I'm arguing for: a rules-free worldbuilding system.

Have you seen the latest revision of the GURPS Space star and planet generation system? I have not, so I'm not sure what the latest version looks like. (The latest I've got is GURPS4 Space, first edition; I expect there's been some fine tuning since 2006.) One thing I'll grant GURPS is that it's pretty good about factual accuracy where applicable.

The world generation system in the very first GURPS Space, back in 1988, doesn't produce systems like the ones we observe i reality - but that's because we know a lot more about exoplanets now not because it was badly written then.

180:

Don't remember where it was, but I had read a call to "bring Star Trek into 21st century!" The point was that for 50 years Star Trek has been the face of science fiction, and even with later upgrades it has fallen hopelessly behind written SF. The article suggested visiting some previously unknown quadrant, populated by Kardashev II civilizations, Matryoshka brains, Peter Hamilton's Dreaming Void, etc.

It wasn't up to speed with written SF in 1968 either. That's to be expected; even groundbreaking TV and movie science fiction will be twenty or thirty years behind the working face of the genre as found in prose.

Could it include weird new ideas? Of course; as already pointed out, there were no shortage of weird new ideas in TOS. There's plenty of room for new stories there, hopefully written by people who get what makes a good Star Trek story. I don't see the setting as played out yet.

I'm loving how Lower Decks handles their world and am willing to let Prodigy make its experiment (and that show arguably contains a Kardashev II starship). I haven't yet caught up with Strange New Worlds.

181:

I've had a cockatoo bite my phone while I was using it to take a photo of the same bird. We always like to give the cockies honorifics, otherwise it was hard to have a proper conversation, but we realised we had absolutely no chance at sexing them so we decided upon gender-neutral honorifics. The bird that bit my phone is the one we call Professor Surly, whose frequent companion, Captain Screamy, was also in attendance on that occasion.

182:

Have you seen the latest revision of the GURPS Space star and planet generation system?

No. I was underwhelmed with the previous ones.

Also, GURPS as a system grates on me. There's the niggling hassle of using units I have no feel for (as opposed to metric, which I've been using since I was a child). There's the incredible amount of cruft that's accumulated over the years. And most importantly (for me), the genericness means that often the crunch of the rules conflicts with the feel of the genre.

If I was to run an RPG campaign now, I think I'd use something like Gumshoe for running the game. And for creating the setting, well, probably Hot Earth Dreams if it was post-apocalyptic :-)

https://pelgranepress.com/2018/02/14/gumshoe/

183:

Re: 'Babylon 5 went quite a long way in that direction.'

I watched this series when it was on syndicated reruns - one episode per day, so almost all of the series within a couple of years. Easier to follow some of the longer story arcs.

Took me a while to adjust to this show because I was expecting it to be more upbeat like ST. Instead B5 actually showed Earthlings as not the be-all and bestest species ever. More distressing still was that despite their awareness that Earth's tech/power was probably no match for many of the alien species Earth pols decided to head toward authoritarianism. Huh? (I really liked that tech and values were treated as distinct phenomena in B5.)

In the original StarTrek an underlying theme was that once humanity achieved sufficiently high tech proficiency all of our societal ills will vanish. Per ST - aliens with even much shinier tech might still have screwed up social values but not humans.

I wouldn't mind watching (on YT) some non-US/UK sf TV shows of the same era just to see which values persist in other cultures' versions of Utopian/Dystopian futures. Any recommendations?

184:

In the original StarTrek an underlying theme was that once humanity achieved sufficiently high tech proficiency all of our societal ills will vanish.

And soon we'll be working 15 hour weeks with lots of time to explore our interests…

Sounds like Star Trek took Keynes' view of progress as a given.

185:

I watched the fourth episode of "Strange New Worlds" last night, and the plot involved a brown dwarf being absorbed by a black hole. Not bad where modern science is concerned.

On the other hand... the episode concerned the Gorn, who are clearly being cast as the first season's villain. The Gorn possess multiple star systems, and would obviously create (at the barest minimum) a hundred-million hatchlings a year. The Gorn clearly eat humans, and presumably other sentient races. During the course of the show, in order to capture and eat perhaps 10,000 humans (at the absolute maximum) the Gorn lost three starships, each the equivalent of a light cruiser or destroyer.

If the Gorn had sent a cargo ship to Earth, accompanied by monies sufficient to pay for only two light cruisers, they could have bought a hundred-thousand cows. The poor economics of this are obvious, and the Federation's most appropriate response to the Gorn's depredations is probably to plant a couple "colonies" in areas where the Gorn are active which consist of 5000 Starfleet Marines and a "terraforming plant" with high-powered phasers instead of atmospheric transformation gear.

If the Gorn don't get the message at that point, find out who else they're eating and form an alliance aimed at clobbering the Gorn.

The idea that the Gorn can't predict the next moves and either revise their behaviors or attempt a massive attack against the Federation is obvious.

So I'd give this episode high marks for the fun space battles, cool science, and a truly excellent cast,* but poor marks for making the villains out of something other than cardboard. Thoughtless, economically clueless cardboard, as it happened.

*Celia Gooding, who plays Cadet Uhura, is an excellent, amazing actress.

186:

Re: 'Keynes' view of progress'

Not sure I understand what you mean.

In my mind, Keynes and most other economists perceive 'the economy' and develop rules that are suited to inanimate machines and not to human beings: turn it on when you want to boost production/revenues; turn it off when you're overstocked/insufficient market demand. What happens in-between times is irrelevant - none of the org's concern. So basically it's: Screw the workers - they're not relevant! Yeah, sure - the data are clear: it's the billionaires that buy 100s of thousands of appliances, cars, housing units, billions of dollars' worth of food each year! (Actually this pov doesn't even make sense for machines because machines need downtime, regular maintenance, energy inputs, design, repairs, upgrades, etc.)

It's a complete disconnect from ordinary reality.* If you saw this type of consensus attitude/behavior (i.e. humans don't matter) among a different group of academics/leaders you'd write them off as psychos.

And no, I'm not a Marxist or any other 19th-20th century econ-ist.

*Imagine if 21st century physicists were desperately clinging to the four-element model of the universe.

187:

Best.

Star Trek.

Ever.

188:

A few points:

(Minor correction for H. Earth’s age: circa 4.7 billion years, not 8Byr, H. Earliest extant rock: 3.9Byr in Greenland. I’m not sure they’ve yet determined when the moon was created, but it must have been soon after earth formed.)

Planet formation: all systems with three or more bodies are essentially unstable under Newtonian Gravitation. Even our own solar system will eventually eject planets (or send them into the sun). The near final state — if the sun didn’t run out of hydrogen first — would be just Jupiter orbiting the sun, and then due to Einstein’s modification, Jupiter would eventually spiral in to the sun. But no matter.

The current best guess to planet formation is that the proto-disc starts collapsing into planetesimals quite quickly (~10Myr). And water is suspected to turn out to be pretty important: it’s what sticks the grains of dust together. Even more interesting, there is a “frost line” where the water turns to ice. In our system this occurred just beyond Mars orbit, and is thought to be why there is no planet where the asteroid belt is found: it couldn’t stick together.

Next, precisely because of the instabilities in the theory of gravitation, planets need not remain where they are formed.

On the matter of potassium, the human heart-beat is controlled by the sodium/potassium pump. In the US, a bad ratio is often referred to as an electrolyte imbalance. And it is by measuring this, that your CSI gets to find out if a body has been moved.

(I am an amateur in all this and would gladly accept any corrections.)

189:

"In our system this occurred just beyond Mars orbit, and is thought to be why there is no planet where the asteroid belt is found: it couldn’t stick together."

And a little further out, other elements start becoming liquids, thus the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are large, and mini-planets like Pluto form?

190:

Strange New Worlds? It's pretty good so far. It certainly doesn't suffer from "First Year Trek" disease. My favorite is Deep Space Nine, but I'd certainly agree that Strange New Worlds is in the same league.

191:

In my mind, Keynes and most other economists

In the 30s Keynes predicted that his grandchildren could see a 15 hour workweek.

https://www.openculture.com/2020/06/when-john-maynard-keynes-predicted-a-15-hour-workweek-in-a-hundred-years-time-1930.html

This didn't happen. But given that Keynes was a smart chap, and understood the economy enough to get rich I believe it's an unfulfilled possibility.

I wonder what he would think of the economy as it's currently structured, where the masses work long hours for low pay while a few have untold luxuries…

192:

Rbt Prior
A deliberate return to the US Gilded age, driven by (some of) the ultra-rich & powerful, mostly out of greed & spite?
That & the return of ultra-right politics, as psople forget the lessons of the past 120 years. ???

193:

I've just been machining some beryllium copper a few months ago. Making contact fingers for a little electric truck of my Dads. When heat treated they'll be suitably springy, yet conductive. Apparently machining it is pretty low risk, if you don't grind it. Hopefully google was right :O

You also see tools made from it for use in explosive atmospheres, as it doesn't spark. I think it was this they made rails from for the narrow gauge systems in munitions depots.

194:

"Almost all OHLE "knitting" is about (IIRC) 2% Be - improves the tensile strength enormously, without degrading the conductivity."

That's the modern standard, yes. Other alloying elements with a similar effect, but a longer history of use, include antimony and arsenic. I think it's antimony that you're likely to find in such things as telephone/telegraph wires strung from poles. Hence if you have an offcut of the wire strung between your house and the telephone pole in the street, and you decide to use it for some general purpose interconnection, you find your eyes popping out when you take the cutters to it.

195:

all systems with three or more bodies are essentially unstable

Timescales in our Solar System for this are thought to be very long, numerical experiments typically indicating 20 billion years or more for various scenarios for major alteration of planetary orbits. As you note, long before then the Sun will run through its available hydrogen in the core, expand to a red giant, puff off the outer layers and become a white dwarf that slowly cools. The Earth may or may not survive this, it's a close-run thing between the expansion of the Sun and the expansion of the Earth's orbit due to solar mass loss during the red giant stage.

The current best guess to planet formation is that the proto-disc starts collapsing into planetesimals quite quickly (~10Myr).

Or quicker, more like under 1 Myr. Currently-popular models for giant-planet formation require the growth of ~10 M_earth cores in the outer solar sytem while the gas is still there so that it can be accreted to make the gas-giant (Jupiter, Saturn) and ice-giant (Uranus, Neptune) planets. Disks around young stars seem to last between 3 and 30 Myr before dissipating.

And water is suspected to turn out to be pretty important: it’s what sticks the grains of dust together.

Not sure where this idea comes from? Liquid water isn't stable in (near)-vacuum environments; you go directly from ice to vapor ("sublimation"). We see this on the Moon and Mars, where the latter's atmospheric surface pressure is not high enough to allow liquid water on the surface even when the temperature is above freezing. Or well-known lowered boiling point of water at altitude on the Earth. So liquid water is unlikely to have existed in the solar nebula.

It is true that forming planetesimals is a problem. Going from molecules to dust particles seems not to be a problem. But getting from mm-size to meters and larger has been theoretically difficult as impact velocities seem to be large enough to break things up and gravitational accretion is too weak at that size. I think current thinking appeals to ideas like a collective instability in which local particle velocities are damped by gas (aerodynamic drag) to allow relatively gentle coagulation up to km-scales (cf. "streaming instability" and "pebble accretion").

Even more interesting, there is a “frost line” where the water turns to ice

Or rather, water vapor condenses to ice per above...

In our system this occurred just beyond Mars orbit, and is thought to be why there is no planet where the asteroid belt is found: it couldn’t stick together

.. which may be a bit of a coincidence. Traditionally, the lack of a planet in the asteroid belt region has been ascribed to tidal influence from a newly-formed Jupiter preventing accretion. That said, getting Mars to be as small as it is, has also been a problem for the models. One idea to get around this has been the so-called "grand tack" in which Jupiter temporarily migrated inward to about 2 AU, and captured Saturn in an orbital resonance, which somehow caused them both to migrate back out again. (Looking up the hypothesis, the outward migration would have been driven by the as-yet undispersed gas disk inside Jupiter's orbit in this picture).

Troutwaxer asks:

And a little further out, other elements start becoming liquids, thus the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are large, and mini-planets like Pluto form?

See above with respect to sublimation. Massive outer-planet moons are thought to have formed in "sub-nebulas" around the outer planets during their formation. It's true, though, that there's a lot of ice in most of these outer moons, and so we think they formed in disks where the temperature was below 273K.

196:

(Minor correction for H. Earth’s age: circa 4.7 billion years, not 8Byr, H. Earliest extant rock: 3.9Byr in Greenland. I’m not sure they’ve yet determined when the moon was created, but it must have been soon after earth formed.)

I didn't express myself that well: I was talking about presumed lifecycle, not age.

By my quick estimation, that's:

Ca 3.5-4 billion years from formation to a consistently oxygenated atmosphere. There was oxygen from possibly 3.5 billion and certainly 2.1 billion years before present. Banded iron formations from ca. 2.8-0.75 billion YBP suggest intermittent oxygenation (the banding is from iron deposited oxidized and reduced in successive layers).

Once there was consistent oxygen in the air, it appears that photosynthesis sucked too much carbon out of the air for about 100 million years (cryogenian snowball earth) before that got sorted out, around 750 million years ago, then we got into the Precambrian and Cambrian evolutionary multicellular metastasis.

Multicellular life on land has been possible for around the last 420-450 million years.

That brings us up to the present, ca. 4.5 billion years from start.

We've got another 1-1.5 billion years before the brightening sun makes photosynthesis impossible through overheating. At that point, the carbon cycle breaks down, and Earth is back to unicellular life.

The planet then goes on until the sun shifts to red giant mode and swallows us, possibly around 3 or more billion years from now, although that's just a guess.

Anyway, that's the lifecycle of the Earth, perhaps 7.5 billion years in length, where multicellular life on land is possible for perhaps 1.5/7.5=20% of the entire time.

...

As an end note, I think it's possible that the human species will endure that entire one billion years. Whether this is a great blessing or a great curse depends on how they choose to live their lives. Probably it will be both. If humans last, it isn't because we're perfect, but because we adapt our cultures fast enough to keep our genes from shifting, and stay as one peripatetic "super-tramp" global species, rather than hiving off into conservative little inbred enclaves that manage to speciate relative to each other. Your mileage may differ, and I'll admit that our response to current climate change makes me suspect that "many people dying of stubbornness" will be a consistent theme in our great catastrophes. Oh well.

197:

I think it's possible that the human species will endure that entire one billion years.
Last & First Men - Olaf Stapeldon

199:

Beryllium copper alloys with up to 5% Be are used in high-performance internal-combustion engines as valve seats and they are usually machined before and after fitting. Their big advantage is that the BeCu alloy expands more than the aluminium cylinder head does so they remain tightly fitted as the engine heats up, unlike cast iron or hardened steel valve seats.

The total amount of Be exposure anyone working with these sorts of valve seats is small but personally I'd still be careful, wear an N100 filter mask and flood everything with coolant mist to trap anything that gets away from the cutting processes. Some other folks, well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaVDrFYXqKs

From about 11.20 onwards.

200:

A deliberate return to the US Gilded age, driven by (some of) the ultra-rich & powerful, mostly out of greed & spite?

Well, how can you force people to work for starvation wages unless they have no other choice?

201:

Have you seen the latest revision of the GURPS Space star and planet generation system? I have not, so I'm not sure what the latest version looks like.

Didn't realize it was out. And, looking at the Amazon website, I'm still not sure what's out, in the sense of whether the material is updated. The pdf Warehouse 23 is selling is of the 2006 version, and there's no preview on Amazon.

As for whether it's useful... it is. However, it reminds me of an old joke in the diversity sciences. We often use dichotomous keys for distinguishing between organisms. You get two choices, pick one, and it either identifies the critter or leads you to another pair of choices.

The common joke is that keys are written by people who don't need them for people who can't use them. I suspect that's what the alien world/biosphere/alien critter section will be for most people. Since that's my wheel house, I think it's handy in certain ways, problematic in others, missing in action on others still. If I handed it to a starry-eyed young wannabe writer who's bounced off every introductory science class they've taken but loves SF, they're likely to treat it like filling out a 1040 form and delete it or surplus it if they have a physical copy.

The big problem is that this is a setup for gaming, so anything you create is going to be a table of attributes, many of which relate to how to play it as an NPC, to use it to kill, and how it dies. What does it look like? That's a lot harder to get (large, three legged, long bludgeoning tail, herbivore, gregarious and paranoid sequential hermaphrodite. That's nice. What do you think it actually looks like?). This problem happens at all scales, from planets on down.

The missing in action stuff betrays RPGers' cultural biases. Plant blindness is an obvious one. For example, if I nabbed you in a classic UFO abduction andkicked you awake in a jungle, how could you tell whether you're in a terrestrial jungle or an alien jungle, assuming it's 1 G and you could breathe the air? Most RPGers would have no clue. Most botanists and many ecologists could tell rather rapidly, and if on Earth, they could give you a decent guess which country you woke them up in, and possibly tell you quite a few other things too.

That's a central thing that's missing in most SF: how do you make an alien jungle appear alien? Most people don't have a clue, and it's that kind of scene setting that's missing from the book. Does it matter? Maybe not in a game, but if you're using it to put a book together, it might. Problem is, most American at least suffer from what botanists call "the green blurs," so it takes a bit of doing to tell someone with no plant background how to differentiate between your "giant forest tree" being a redwood, a banyan fig, or a eucalyptus. Obviously it is doable (I just did it), but how do you do that with alien trees? For SF writers, that might be worth thinking about.

202:

A story I'm working on is about, more or less, a couple that goes camping and accidentally wanders into...somewhere else. And one point in there is that all the plants have changed, but they don't really have enough knowledge to tell until it's far too late.

203:

A story I'm working on is about, more or less, a couple that goes camping and accidentally wanders into...somewhere else. And one point in there is that all the plants have changed, but they don't really have enough knowledge to tell until it's far too late.

Cool! A couple of other thoughts. If they can't tell the plants, other things (light, smell, soundscape, feel of the forest floor) can change. If you really want to be nasty to readers and somewhere else is unpopulated by humans, have a pre-industrial civilization level of insects (flies, mosquitos, butterflies) and bird life equivalents (up to and perhaps including something like a passenger pigeon or Australian topknot pigeon flock overhead). You know, unfracked nature at its full exuberance.

Or not. Good luck and have fun!

204:

Or just arrive in the middle of a riot of galahs.

Wikipedia nails it "With its distinctive pink and grey plumage and its bold and loud behaviour, it is a familiar sight in the wild and increasingly in urban areas".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galah

Given the somewhat damp nature of our planet I'm sometimes surprised when random arrival points so often turn out to be not just on dry land, but on temperature lowland parts of it. Just because you'd probably live longer on an Antarctic plateau than in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn't mean you'd enjoy it... especially if you arrived at the same distance from the centre of the planet in both places.

205:

Given the somewhat damp nature of our planet I'm sometimes surprised when random arrival points so often turn out to be not just on dry land, but on temperature lowland parts of it. Just because you'd probably live longer on an Antarctic plateau than in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn't mean you'd enjoy it... especially if you arrived at the same distance from the centre of the planet in both places.

While I understand that you're joking here, I think there are at least two reasons for this: firstly, the authors know that kind of areas because they live in them, and it's easy to write about those.

Secondly, some of those stories could be quite short - either coming in at zero meters altitude from the sealevel in the Antarctic or a kilometer high up over the ocean doesn't make for a long life in the new environment, unless prepared. (I think OGH wrote some books about doing this...)

I've also rationalized the complete un-scientificness of TTRPG star system generation with the fact that it's nice to have a comfortable world to adventure in. Every place being just some variation of an enclosed base can get boring fast. For my games, I like the approach that the problems with the planetary environments are kind of fluff - can be used if necessary but mostly background colour.

I think 2300 AD did at least try to be more realistic with its planets. ISTR most planets with humans living on them were quite bad for humans even when they could live on the surface. Earth was still the best place for humans to live on. There was one guy making revised star charts for 2300 AD, using more recent data, but I don't see a good link to that on his website. There's some star system generation articles there, too.

206:

200 - I don't have time to research this just now, but I have vague memory that BeCu is actively banned in FIA "Blue Book" competition engines because of the toxicity of the dust.

202 - Just a quick note to say that I've never played BURPS $anything.

207:

"how do you make an alien jungle appear alien?"

An Earth jungle is pretty alien if you're not used to it. All the plants are not like the ones you're familiar with, so are most of the animals and certainly the noises they make, and so are most of the possible indications that something unpleasant is about to happen. Also, a lot of the plants are not like the ones you are familiar with in weird ways. On top of that, there are different kinds of jungles depending on just how all these different things are different.

It seems to me that it could even be harder to write a story with bits set in different Earth jungles and keep it clear to the reader which is which, than to make it clear that an alien jungle is alien. At least with the alien one you can do something obvious like making the standard body plan for "large" animals have some number of limbs other than four, or having some plant that will attempt to parasitise you if you go to sleep in the wrong place.

208:

Just because you'd probably live longer on an Antarctic plateau than in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn't mean you'd enjoy it... especially if you arrived at the same distance from the centre of the planet in both places.

If you arrived at the same distance from the center, you would be up to 20 miles above the Antarctic plateau (depending on exactly where you were in the Pacific). It wouldn't be a fun descent, that's for sure!

209:

Uncle Stinky
Oh dear, not good.

H @ 204
CORVIDS - amazingly clever avians are corvids.

210:

I was actually thinking about the authors who go to some lengths to establish the random nature of the destination, and then their travellers just pop through wearing street clothes ... sometimes I wonder whether the suspension on my disbelief is really up to that sort of shock.

Authors who do the "same point on a parallel world" stuff not so much. Sure there's an element of magic with every version of our planet being in exactly the same place down to the centimetre and as OGH pointed out via exception, with astonishingly similar geography and climate.

And yeah, distance from the centre with flattened poles makes for an easy way to get airbourne, albeit only temporarily unless you're suitably equipped. But appearing 10km under the surface of the Pacific wouldn't be much fun. The temporary nature of the experience would be somewhat compressed.

211:

And yeah, distance from the centre with flattened poles makes for an easy way to get airbourne, albeit only temporarily unless you're suitably equipped. But appearing 10km under the surface of the Pacific wouldn't be much fun. The temporary nature of the experience would be somewhat compressed.

Ah, yeah, I was thinking about local environment, i.e. sea level, instead of thinking about the geoid. Of course with the same distance from the centre of Earth the surface on the poles is quite a bit lower than the equator.

212:

IERS's Bulletin A (https://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/DataProducts/EarthOrientationData/eop.html) delivers pretty compelling evidence that our greenhouse-gas pollution has changed earth rotation parameters enough to put the sign of the next leap-second into doubt.

If your destination multiverse happened to go electric instead of fossil, there is going to be a difference in time & longitude difference, and I personally wouldn't trust the latitude either.

213:

CORVIDS - amazingly clever avians are corvids.

Don't forget Alex, the African Grey parrot. He was said to have the English vocabulary of a human 5-year-old.

214:

An Earth jungle is pretty alien if you're not used to it. All the plants are not like the ones you're familiar with, so are most of the animals and certainly the noises they make, and so are most of the possible indications that something unpleasant is about to happen. Also, a lot of the plants are not like the ones you are familiar with in weird ways. On top of that, there are different kinds of jungles depending on just how all these different things are different.

Yes, but there are whole websites dedicated to this stuff, for the lay public. I've got a picture book published a few years ago titled Habitats of the World, just to keep myself cheered up during lockdown. If you know to look

Two things you're missing are: first, you normally don't see many animals, especially in rain forests. They're called green cathedrals (or green hells) for a reason. As EO Wilson put it, the first animal you're likely to encounter anywhere tropical is an ant, not an elephant.

The second point is "the green blurs" that most urbanites suffer with: they don't know how to look at a forest to see the differences, at least to the point where they can capture those in writing. It's entirely possible to start capturing the difference once you see a few pictures, but it's hard to imagine just from reading words.

As for an alien forest, flagging it as alien is parking a big animal with a different body plan around is probably not going to happen, Prehistoric Planet with its titanosaurs in forests notwithstanding. Most of the biomass in forests is in the trees, for one thing. For another, big-bodied animals that routinely knock trees around usually create more savanna-like open systems, not closed canopy forests.

215:

Anyway, if you want to put a forest on an exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf, here's something I wrote a few years ago on that subject.

216:

My suspicion, on a gram-for-gram basis, is that birds have much better brains than we do, and a crow with a head twice the size of the ones they currently have isn't unimaginable - consider the big-headedness of parrots - and it could reasonably contain four times the brain tissue.

217:

You don't even need to go for a jungle - any native wildlife a reasonable distance away is likely to be new to you. I was puzzled by seeing a blackbird with a russet front, the first time I went to the US. (I was even more puzzled to find they're called "robins". FFS guys - you're in a new country, at least give them a new name!) Mind you, I'd never really been round the London parks until I joined a walking group about 6 years ago, at which point I was majorly surprised to find that green parakeets are now native London birds.

It's still not as bad as the screw-up Disney managed in their live-action "101 Dalmatians" adaptation though, by adding raccoons to the British wildlife. Presumably some top Disney exec really liked raccoons, and wasn't prepared to listen to anyone telling him they don't exist over here. (Nor are they likely to be - they'd be competing with rats and urban foxes, and I'd be betting on the rats.)

218:

I find this all a bit junglist!

The English countryside is pretty alien if you are used to the savanna and, even on the savanna, the difference between around watercourses and not could easily be on different continents. Jungles are different again, but are not THAT different from other dense woodland, at first sight.

You also rarely see a mammal (and don't get more than glimpses of birds) in ANY reasonably dense woodland, and the first animal you are likely to see in almost all terrestrial ecologies is an ant or beetle. Provided you are looking, of course.

Alien is largely what you aren't used to, but it's hard to notice some differences unless you have SOME botanical or zoological knowledge or relevant experience - e.g. California live oak country / chaparral versus African savanna. Yes, that's a dig at Hollywood.

219:

The raccoons compete well against the rats and urban coyotes in Vancouver, BC. They are smart, work together, have flexible fingers and excellent manual dexterity, which means they can open things the rats and coyotes can't. They can run up or down trees in either direction, and climb trees to harvest cherries and other fruit, as well as insects in the bark. They're big enough to scare cats and dogs, and I suspect the coyotes that live in the nearby parks go for easier prey than an adult raccoon.

220:

"My suspicion, on a gram-for-gram basis, is that birds have much better brains than we do"

A problem with making such assessments is that we currently have very, very, very limited understanding of how brains work or, for that matter, what they do. With persistence and luck, the next century or two of research in the inelegantly named field of "brain science" will improve the situation.

221:

Raccoon here in the U.S. do just fine competing with foxes, rats, cats, coyotes, various wildcats such as lynx's and mountain lions, not to mention foxes and full-on wolves. Raccoons are very clever animals and have very little fear - if a breeding pair got loose anywhere in the UK they'd overrun the place in a decade.

222:

Actually, Troutwaxer's mostly right AFAIK, in that birds have more neurons/gram than we do, and the smaller avian/dinosauaran neurons seem to work just as well as bigger mammalian neurons do.

Tim Low, in Where Song Began made the case that, for at least the first half of the Cenozoic, Australia had the smartest animals in the world. These were birds, specifically parrots and basal songbirds like corvids, both lineages which appear to have evolved first in Australia before spreading. Mammal brains at the time were proportionally small (think hedgehog or possum), and only started getting big over the last 25 million years or so.

223:

The Disney wildlife errors go back at least to Mary Poppins, the robin feathering its nest is a deformed blackbird type rather than anything you'd see in that there London.

224:

The raccoons compete well against the rats and urban coyotes in Vancouver, BC. They are smart, work together, have flexible fingers and excellent manual dexterity

Hmm. Watership Down, but with raccoons?

Or uplifted raccoons? That's actually a pretty scary thought.

225:

Alien is largely what you aren't used to, but it's hard to notice some differences unless you have SOME botanical or zoological knowledge or relevant experience - e.g. California live oak country / chaparral versus African savanna. Yes, that's a dig at Hollywood.

Oh yes, we can dig at Hollywood. There's a herd of bison on Catalina Island because back in 1926, for a film called The Vanishing American, they wanted to stage a bison stampede. So they shipped a few dozen almost-extinct bison to Catalina, stampeded them across the severely overgrazed landscape (it was a badly run ranch/tourist trap at the time), and didn't bother to round them up again when they were done filming. The owner of the island found that the bison were a tourist draw, so he imported some more, and now the herd is in the low hundreds.

The film no longer exists, and no one's even sure if it ever made it to theaters.

Hollywood's getting marginally less destructive, but they are so contemptuous of reality that them actually caring enough to get some details right has been a marketing point for decades. Plants get the worst of it, but science, military strategy, iconic bits in books (like the wizards' skin color in Le Guin's Earthsea), and many other things get discarded in Hollywood, often for frivolous reasons. Or worse.

As with so much other exploitation, looking back, it's not clear in many cases why anyone bothered. Perhaps there's a space opera lesson in there somewhere?

226:

Raccons are at the top of my list (competing with corvids) for next 'intelligent' species to run the place if we manage to auto-extinct ourselves somehow.

My untestable hypothesis for why my 18 y/o blind and deaf cat stayed alive in our coyote infested neighbourhood is that he was also quite impressively fat, had no tail and had the coloration of a raccoon. Raccoons are fierce, and no coyote is going to be interested in that kind of fight.

It is rare to see a wild mammal in the woods, aside from creatures with nothing to fear from ground based predators (i.e. squirrels). I spent many tens of thousands of hours in and around the woods of Northern BC and Alberta. I did see a lot of wildlife, but they were rare enough that spotting one was a real treat and required a moment of appreciation. X

In an alien jungle, assuming predators follow the same basic rules of sneaking, visitors are unlikely to notice a predator until they are under one, wrapped up by one, or otherwise predated. I've spent a lot of time in the woods, I have never once seen a cougar. It is a 100% certainty that many, many cougars have seen me. xx

X - Of particular note were the Yellow-bellied Marmots who were busily ignoring us while we ate lunch about 20 feet away , the wolverine that casually crossed the road in front of me once, a bobcat who strolled past me once about 800 km away from what was supposed to be the limits of their range, a few staggeringly majestic owls that floated past me, and some adorable moose calves (though terrifying because a protective mother moose is murder with 4 legs).

xx - I would love to see a cougar. From inside a motor vehicle or other cougar proof location.

227:

Hmm. Watership Down, but with raccoons?

Blackhawk Watership Down

229:

Actually, Troutwaxer's mostly right AFAIK, in that birds have more neurons/gram than we do, and the smaller avian/dinosauaran neurons seem to work just as well as bigger mammalian neurons do.

Not surprising, given that the brain of any flying organism will almost certainly evolve for more intelligence and less weight!

230:

H
"Vegetation on a Red Dwarf World"

Tidally locked - SURE about that? What about a Mercury-analogue, where the day is (IIRC) 3/2 times the year length, or some similar simple-ratio "complication", meaning that one would get a day-night cycle, just not the same as usual (!)
- And, of course, that would mean that the light would NOT always be coming from the same angle, would it?
Why not Blue leaves, the short wavelengths being the least available, even though of higher energy?

231:

As for an alien forest, flagging it as alien is parking a big animal with a different body plan around is probably not going to happen, Prehistoric Planet with its titanosaurs in forests notwithstanding. Most of the biomass in forests is in the trees, for one thing. For another, big-bodied animals that routinely knock trees around usually create more savanna-like open systems, not closed canopy forests.

Who said anything about "big-bodied" animals? A monkey (or something vaguely like a monkey) with 6 limbs would be noticeable even to a city dweller.

233:

210: from a recent visit to the Harry Potter studios, and possibly slightly misremembered: crows can learn in a morning what it takes an owl a month to learn. But the problem with that is that crows don't want to repeat the tricks you've taught them - they want to do something new.

213: yes, I know the next leap second may well be negative the way things are going (and won't that be fun?), but what's your evidence that it's caused by human activity?

234:

"You also rarely see a mammal (and don't get more than glimpses of birds) in ANY reasonably dense woodland"

Unless you're a very unusual French bloke

235:

Indeed, one of them notices something is off in the way the light looks, first.

It's funny - I actually have two projects that touch on the concept of people not really recognizing plants and such. The other one is basically about an alien invasion that goes unnoticed for a bit because the invading alien life is quite beautiful, and stuff that if you're not familiar with Earth life looks somewhat exotic but plausibly terrestrial.

That ONE was me looking at a weirdish plant and realizing that for all I knew, it could be from another planet.

236:

*Tidally locked - SURE about that? What about a Mercury-analogue, where the day is (IIRC) 3/2 times the year length, or some similar simple-ratio "complication", meaning that one would get a day-night cycle, just not the same as usual (!) *

Well, let's play with the example of Trappist-1E. I just banged through the math, and it looks like the gravitational force exerted by Trappist-1 (red dwarf) on Trappist-1E is about 73 times what the sun pulls on the Earth (GMm/D^2), which might cause tidal rises of about 37ish meters in mid ocean (our solar tides are around 1/2 meter, lunar tides are around 1 m in mid-ocean). And Trappist-1E's year is about 6 days.

Now if T1E is in a 3:2 resonance, it spins three times for every two times around Trappist-1. So it has a day length of 4 Earth days.

The thing about the tides is that there are two bulges, one more-or-less under the attractor, one more-or-less 180 degrees around the planet from the main attractor.

And finally, T1E is thought to have a circumference of around 31,178 km. And it has to have a respectably large amount of water to support a carbon-based biosphere, so if there's life, there are seas.

So what we have here are tides 37 meters high in mid ocean every two days, and these bulges are attempting to move at close to Mach 1 in extremely low orbit around the planet. The water doesn't move that fast of course, but it does dissipate that gravitational force through friction with every solid surface it meets. On Earth, the ocean's drag on the Earth as a response to Lunar tides has both slowed the Earth's rotation down and caused the Moon to move further away, and the tidal force on T1E is around 37 times what the Moon pulls on Earth.

So my guess would be that a red dwarf planet with oceans on it would get scoured into tidal lock by its oceans reacting to the primary's gravity. Mercury is in 3:2 resonance, I'm guessing because it's more immobile rock and its orbit has been warped a bit by Jupiter twitching it, so the 3:2 resonance is less likely.

Also, Trappist-1 is thought to be 7.6 billion years old, and the orbits of the planets around it are nearly circular and in resonance with each other, all of which suggests they're locked. Other red dwarf planets that are in more eccentric orbits might settle into a 3:2 resonance, but if they've got oceans, the tides will be rather high.

237:

Re: Cougar.

How about an Everglades Panther? Said to be cougar but for a cowlick at the base of the tail. Four decades ago, I was working the Collier County Fair, selling Kaypros, and the booth next to me would drop a panther (the one most recently fed) on your lap, take a polaroid snapshot, and recage the puddy tat.

Felt like a chunky Great Dane, but for the supercharged purr. Smelled like, well, cat.

238:

H,

You may be interested in this -- latest -- news about red dwarfs and flares: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/red-dwarfs-arent-so-bad-for-planets-after-all/

TL;DR The flares appear to occur in polar regions -- which might miss any planets. But the sample size is only FOUR!

239:

Let us just say that it came as a surprise to a LOT of geophysical people that green-house gasses would have measurable effects on earth rotation parameters, so a lot of them are still in the "really?!" or even "I dont believe it!" phase.

The primary evidence is the timing and how out of character the changes are for the entire instrumental period (<120 years), and the utter absense of any other credible hypothesis.

Whatever changed things, did so under our feet because we know for certain that there have been no changes to external magnetic fields, no major tectonic or volcanic events, no major meteor impacts and so on.

That limits the possible physical phenomena quite a lot: Changes to the center of gravity by mass redistribution or changes to the core/mantle interface where the differential rotation matters.

There is a NASA study which links some of the changes to the altered distribution of land-locked water (lakes, glaciers etc) shifting the center of gravity around ever so slightly, but it does not seem to explain all of it, and certainly not the recent changes in dX.

One hypothesis is that we have lightened Greenland so much that it amounts to less friction in the core/mantle interface layer below. But like almost anything relating to what goes on deeper than about 10km, that is entirely guess-work, because the only data we have is from seismic events, and very limited in both extent, duration and resolution.

Recently old seismic array data from LASA was "heroically rescued" from decaying magtapes, and a totally fresh paper uses measurements from two USSR nuclear tests to argue that the core does pretty much the opposite of what we currently think rotation-wise.

We will probably not be any wiser on thit subject until we build some very comprehensive seismic networks and start popping underground nuclear tests again.

Until then, all we can do is stare in disbelief at Bulletin A every month.

240:

Anyway, back to the original topic.

Would a rewrite of Henry Miller's short story "Dawn Patrol" be a fitting way to conclude Biggles' career? (If its non-consensual sex were permissible these days)

241:

*- Why not Blue leaves [on a red dwarf world], the short wavelengths being the least available, even though of higher energy? *

Down the rabbit hole we go! First stop, a reasonable guess about why terrestrial plants have green leaves. It's not obvious. I'm going to claim rustiness to avoid commenting on whether this is true. Problem is, if it is, I'm not sure photosynthesis on a red dwarf planet is possible.

But let's assume life finds a way.

Why not shed blue light? Chlorophylls' absorption spectra. We know these work, and they work both at the red and blue ends of the spectrum? Since there's not a lot of blue light, why get rid of it?

The problem with red dwarfs is that most of the star's light is infrared, which mostly gets absorbed in a terrestrial-type atmosphere, heating it up directly. So that energy is only available to plants indirectly as warm air, depending on their location. Thus, a planet that's as warm as Earth isn't getting much useful light most of the time. The assumption therefore is that red dwarf plants evolve something like chlorophylls and a bunch of accessory carotenoids to capture every bit of light they can, leaving the leaf more-or-less black or some shade that's pretty dark. If the habitat's on the hot side, the leaf might reflect some light for thermal control, and appear gray.

Such a system is almost certainly less efficient than what we have on Earth, so these exo-plants will grow more slowly. Since, unlike on Earth, leaves may well be in the business of stopping all photons, there probably won't be a lot of light in forest understories, assuming forests can grow at all. This means there might not be many plants growing under the trees.

Does what I just said jibe with the explanation of why terrestrial plants are green? Probably not! But there is another potential way that might. On Earth, some plants specialize in really crappy light, growing on the ground under forest trees. What they do is harvest light flecks: they get everything ready with what little light they have, and when a beam of sunlight hits them for a few minutes, they go into overdrive making photosynthate. It's a slow system, but if they have no competition, it works okay.

Something similar conceivably could happen on a red dwarf planet. The plants chug along with the crappy normal starlight, making precursor molecules. Then, if the star flares in some UV frequency they can harvest, they go nuts finishing all their photosynthesis while they're being pelted by UV. I have no idea how this would work physically or physiologically, but AFAIK it's not impossible.

One might even imagine that red dwarf plants set up X-ray "shielding" materials that ionize when interacting with the right X-ray frequencies during stellar flares. The plant then passes these ions to cells that can process them into useful chemical reactions to make stuff and regenerate the shield/collector to do it again. I know precisely nothing about X-ray chemistry, so I have no idea if this is physically possible. But if it is and life can evolve towards it...?

So what color is all this? You got me. It depends on how the plants are interacting with the IR (shed heat or warm up), visible and near UV (what to eat with chlorophyll) and speculatively with higher frequencies.

Hopefully, at least, this helps you be more usefully confused about what color the plants are.

242:

Re: 'Keynes predicted that his grandchildren could see a 15 hour workweek ...'

Thanks for the link. Paints a different portrait: Keynes was a lot more forward thinking than I recall hearing/learning.

Troutwaxer @ 217:

'Bird brains'

Ever since I saw a doc about how birds perceive time (film analogy: 72 frames vs. humans' 24 frames per sec) and their ability to mentally puzzle out how to get a seed/treat out of a jar without first physically moving the jar or treat, I felt that these creatures' intelligence has been greatly under-rated.* Also - some birds have more neurons than some mammals. So they have more neurons operating faster - pretty interesting.

'Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain'

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113

*Much like the octopus.

Rocketpjs @ 227:

'Raccons are at the top of my list (competing with corvids) for next 'intelligent' species to run the place ...'

Yes, raccoons are both pretty intelligent and physically agile. But they can be aggressive and don't get along with other species which can be a limiting factor in running a planet. Which is why I suggest the beaver - they're natural builders and they've been documented to allow at least one other similarly non-aggressive furry species to over-winter in their lodge. Not sure whether they ever participate in any communities though. (Recently read Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' - even though it's an overview of homo sapiens' past 25,000 year history, it's great background reading about some key behavioral, geographic and other factors in world building. Wish I'd read it when it first came out - over 20 years ago.)

Heteromeles @ 237:

'The water doesn't move that fast of course, but it does dissipate that gravitational force through friction with every solid surface it meets.'

Okay - so this is like regularly occurring tsunamis? My impression is that chemical/biological mixing is what stimulates change, new compounds/organisms, their adaptation, and eventual evolution. Then again - maybe there are creatures who've developed complexity in a completely unchanging environment. If yes - please post which creatures and where. Thanks!

Would be interesting to speculate about the physical characteristics necessary to survive/thrive in a perpetual tsunami. Maybe something similar to creatures in the ultra deep - very porous skin/outer membrane so that energy isn't constantly being wasted keeping things out. Such a skin could also mean no need for a separate mouth - the skin of some species could do that job. And long thin stretchy tentacles to manipulate their environment, other creatures and each other.

243:

"Nor are they likely to be - they'd be competing with rats and urban foxes, and I'd be betting on the rats."

They seem to thrive in urban areas in the continental USA and Canada; the UK will hold no terrors for them.

244:

Until then, all we can do is stare in disbelief at Bulletin A every month.

Real Science{tm}!

Like the quote says, the fun part of science starts with "that's weird" not "I have a theory".

245:

It's entirely possible to start capturing the difference once you see a few pictures, but it's hard to imagine just from reading words.

Poul Anderson had a knack for it — his descriptions of alien worlds are achingly lyrical.

David Brin did a decent (if not poetical) job with the ecology of Garth in The Uplift War.

I suspect the problem is that a lot of writers see a 'green blur', so what they write is based as much on Hollywood as actual botany.

246:

The raccoons compete well against the rats and urban coyotes in Vancouver, BC.

They are also, apparently, doing quite well in Japan — and seriously damaging ancient wooden temples.

Years ago there was an anime where a boy releases his pet racoon at the very end, which was promptly emulated by enough Japanese families to form a sustainable population. And old temples are ideal places for dens, with a bit of gnawing to make them suitable…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/childrens-book-behind-japans-raccoon-problem-180954577/

247:

Nor are they likely to be - they'd be competing with rats and urban foxes, and I'd be betting on the rats.

Just noting that Toronto has rats, foxes, cats, and coyotes — and a serious racoon problem.

248:

specifically parrots and basal songbirds like corvids

Australian magpies and butcherbirds are songbirds that resemble, but are not closely related to corvids and I suppose that's what you or the author means, although there are talkative but non-singing corvids here too. We get a mix of parrots (cockatoos, king parrots, rainbow lorikeets), kookaburras and butcherbirds coming to our roofed deck/living space and interacting directly with us in return for seeds, nuts or meat depending on the species. Magpies, peewees (aka magpie larks) and both native and feral mynas hang around and pick up scraps, but seem much less social (at least with humans).

And yes, butcherbirds appear to be very smart. Magpies are too, but they are perhaps too smart to come and interact with humans directly. The other familiar sight that similarly looks a bit like a corvid but isn't one is the currawong, which comes in a pied variety that also resembles a magpie.

249:

"birds have more neurons/gram than we do, and the smaller avian/dinosauaran neurons seem to work just as well as bigger mammalian neurons do."

Yes, but does neuron density correlate with what we might call for the sake of brevity "intelligence"? Or is it synapses per neuron or, (as I suspect) some specific interconnection of neurons via synapses? To repeat my former post, we just don't know yet what's significant in the working of brains to produce emergent behaviors.

250:

It was my understanding that climate change was fiddling with Earth's rotation through water, as were humans.

There's the land-based water stores: glaciers and big reservoirs. They put a lot of weight far from the center of the Earth, so gaining a reservoir or losing a glacier fiddles Earth's spin by a millisecond or two.

Then there's the problem of losing the weight of ice in ice sheets near the rotatinal poles and redistributing it into ocean currents that move around the globe. That slows rotation.

Then there's the problem of water warming and expanding. This only adds about a meter or two to ocean heights, but that's a lot of water moving a bit further from the center of spin, from the outside in, equator to poles. That's going to complicate spin.

There's also isostatic rebound, as crust that sunk under the weight of ice sheets rebounds with the ice off it. That's still going in North America, and that moves things around.

Fun stuff, and I'm very glad I don't have to calculate it.

251:

Butcherbirds, Australian magpies. Yup, and some of the big honeyeaters.

If you haven't seen Where Song Began, try to pick up a copy. It was my favorite book last year.

252:

Yep, already found it on Kindle after your earlier post. Looking forward to reading it.

253:

Yes, but does neuron density correlate with what we might call for the sake of brevity "intelligence"?

That might actually be a case of putting the solution before the question. Here I'll quote from this article about the study that discovered the neutron density surprise and some of the reasons it was done in the first place:

The study provides a straightforward answer to a puzzle that comparative neuroanatomists have been wrestling with for more than a decade: how can birds with their small brains perform complicated cognitive behaviors?

The conundrum was created by a series of studies beginning in the previous decade that directly compared the cognitive abilities of parrots and crows with those of primates. The studies found that the birds could manufacture and use tools, use insight to solve problems, make inferences about cause-effect relationships, recognize themselves in a mirror and plan for future needs, among other cognitive skills previously considered the exclusive domain of primates.

The TL;DR is that this is not a finding in isolation, other studies that have shown some of the things we associate with "intelligence" are in fact present in certain birds, an observation that their higher neutron density goes some way to explaining. And it goes to show that smart people operating without all the context can find themselves chewing on doubts that can be dispelled easily with more knowledge (something I find myself doing all the time).

254:

it came as a surprise to a LOT of geophysical people that green-house gasses would have measurable effects on earth rotation parameters, so a lot of them are still in the "really?!" or even "I dont believe it!" phase

I certainly find this astonishing, though I am ready enough to believe it. I knew that warming has had noticeable effect on vulcanism, specifically melting glaciers releasing the "cap" on volcanos in various places. But this is a whole other order of wow.

Looking forward to whatever publicity occurs around that negative leap second, when it happens.

255:

All this talk about Red Dwarf worlds makes me think that perhaps it's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere...

(Though for some people there might be kippers to smoke for breakfast.)

256:

Yes, raccoons are both pretty intelligent and physically agile. But they can be aggressive and don't get along with other species which can be a limiting factor in running a planet.

Are you suggesting our limited ability to get along with other non-human species could be a limiting factor in how we run this planet? :-)

257:

Well, we're certainly not doing it particularly well outside of about a 5 year window.

258:

»Looking forward to whatever publicity occurs around that negative leap second, when it happens. «

Dont wait up :-) Currently we have no credible models for when the next leap second will be needed, much less its sign.

But dont panic: When we did a show of hands in "The Secret Leap Second Appreciation Society" a full two persons said they had tested their time-keeping software with negative leap seconds :-)

Also there may never come another leapsecond, as USA/DoD is still trying to get them abolished.

259:

Also there may never come another leapsecond, as USA/DoD is still trying to get them abolished.

Just like all those countries who refused to give up the Julian calendar, despite the Gregorian calendar being more accurate.

Who needs reality, anyway? :-/

260:

Robert Prior @ 246: David Brin did a decent (if not poetical) job with the ecology of Garth in The Uplift War.

Also pretty prescient, though AFAIK you couldn't use the wood-wide-web as a covert signalling system.

261:

higher neutron density

Gah. I don't think it's entirely credible to blame that one on autocorrect, or even finger macros, but I'm prepared to give it a try...

262:

»Just like all those countries who refused to give up the Julian calendar, despite the Gregorian calendar being more accurate.«

A calendar is primarily a convention enabling people to communicate about events in the past or future.

Tying your calendar to astronomical phenomena is merely a choice of implementation.

263:

Rbt Prior
"the problem is that a lot of writers see a 'green blur' - " - yeah, well. It depends: - my small front garden contains plants from Wales, Australia, Tasmania, S America, Columbia, China, S Africa - as well as "Brit Native" species.
{ Meconopsis cambrica, Solanum lacinatium/aviculare, Dicksonia antarctica, Phasoleus coccineus, Cyclanthera pedata, Wisteria chinensis, Pelargonium spp. }

264:

Tying your calendar to astronomical phenomena is merely a choice of implementation.

Not when you're a farmer trying to decide when to plant your crop...

265:

According to the very comprehensive book "Calendrical Calculations" religion seems to have had a much bigger influence on calendar design than agriculture.

My personal experience also is that planting or sowing crops happen when soil temperature and humidity are suitable, with little or no attention paid to calendars.

This has also been hypothesized to explain the magnitude of crop-failures during various volcanic extinction events: The cold weather meant that the growing season was started late further reducing the harvest. If they had followed the calendar, they would likely have been (slightly) better of.

266:

Re: '... but does neuron density correlate with what we might call for the sake of brevity "intelligence"?'

Corvids can recognize individual human faces and pass along this info to other corvids including their 'children'. I think this signifies considerable intelligence.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/grudge-holding-crows-pass-on-their-anger-to-family-and-friends

A 'conspiracy' of ravens regularly visits the protected wooded area behind my house. Each bird has a distinctive call when sitting on the tree branches or wires when chatting (?) among themselves. At the same time I've heard them relay the same 'call' across fairly long distances. They call out, then wait for a response. Repeat until some signal tells them to stop. I should visit the local bird watchers society to find out more about them esp. any do's and don'ts given their excellent memories for human faces.

Anyone know whether corvids eat other dead non-corvid birds? I know that corvids eat road kill and with the current avian flu blazing across NA and in the UK resulting in thousands of birds of different species dying, I wonder how at risk they and the other bird species are. (I ask because most news headlines focus on poultry farms.)

267:

Anyone know whether corvids eat other dead non-corvid birds? I know that corvids eat road kill and with the current avian flu blazing across NA and in the UK resulting in thousands of birds of different species dying, I wonder how at risk they and the other bird species are. (I ask because most news headlines focus on poultry farms.)

I'm not really sure about adults, but at least here for example fieldfares with nests seem to be pretty aggressive toward the gulls and crows flying around. I think they at least eat eggs and hatchlings, if not adults.

268:

A major component of crows' diet is carrion, and they will attack weak but live animals. Hence the antagonism of moorland sheep farmers to hooded crows. I believe that ravens are similar.

269:

Er, leap seconds are to do with the length of the year, not the length of the day. If you can postulate a plausible explanation for how climate change could affect that significantly, I take my hat off to you for a fertile imagination.

270:

http://dubiousprospects.blogspot.com/2022/06/not-best-news.html to return to the dismal topic, Damien has found a preprint that suggests covid is not getting better by itself.

271:

Agreed. Anecdata. A young crow (Corvus corone) landed in my back garden, wich was surrounded by 6' tall hedges. It needed to grow up a bit in order to climb out over the hedges, and we supplied some food and water whilst it was growing. One day, there it was, gone, and no piles of sad feathers either.
A few weeks later, I was heading down into the local town centre, and a not yet fully grown crow was happy to let me withing 4 feet of it. Shortly thereafter, a young mother came down the road following me, and the crow did a flight response when she was about 25 feet away.

272:

I have seen a crow attack and kill a baby rabbit, presumably to eat it. I don't know if a crow is capable of catching and killing a full-grown rabbit. A mob of crows might manage the task.

Virtually all predatory birds will eat carrion given the chance -- I recall reading a fieldsports magazine article about a ghillie in the Highlands who had shot a red deer in a tight corrie. He was gralloching the carcass preparatory to packing out the animal on a pony when a capercaillie flew over his head at high speed followed in turn by a golden eagle in pursuit of dinner. The birds were only in sight for a moment or so between the two ridges of the corrie but when he looked up again the eagle was circling above him, obviously waiting for the chance to get at the pile of deer guts on the heather beside the carcass.

273:

I've seen a (Eurasian) Jay literally on the back of a Carrion Crow, pecking at it, one May about ten years ago. At the time I interpreted it as a Jay trying to protect its nest.

274:

Aargh... a flying Carrion Crow.

275:

On what makes for smart brains:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4685590/

Neuronal factors determining high intelligence
Ursula Dicke and Gerhard Roth
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2016 Jan 5; 371(1685)

Abstract

Many attempts have been made to correlate degrees of both animal and human intelligence with brain properties. With respect to mammals, a much-discussed trait concerns absolute and relative brain size, either uncorrected or corrected for body size. However, the correlation of both with degrees of intelligence yields large inconsistencies, because although they are regarded as the most intelligent mammals, monkeys and apes, including humans, have neither the absolutely nor the relatively largest brains. The best fit between brain traits and degrees of intelligence among mammals is reached by a combination of the number of cortical neurons, neuron packing density, interneuronal distance and axonal conduction velocity—factors that determine general information processing capacity (IPC), as reflected by general intelligence. The highest IPC is found in humans, followed by the great apes, Old World and New World monkeys. The IPC of cetaceans and elephants is much lower because of a thin cortex, low neuron packing density and low axonal conduction velocity. By contrast, corvid and psittacid birds have very small and densely packed pallial neurons and relatively many neurons, which, despite very small brain volumes, might explain their high intelligence. The evolution of a syntactical and grammatical language in humans most probably has served as an additional intelligence amplifier, which may have happened in songbirds and psittacids in a convergent manner.

276:

"Er, leap seconds are to do with the length of the year, not the length of the day."

Not according to Wikipedia:- "A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), to accommodate the difference between precise time (International Atomic Time (TAI), as measured by atomic clocks) and imprecise observed solar time (UT1), which varies due to irregularities and long-term slowdown in the Earth's rotation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

277:

270: no, leap years are to do with the length of the year, which is not an integral number of days at the moment.

Leap seconds are a result of integrating the difference between the theoretical length of day (86400 SI seconds) and the actual length of day (variable) over time; when it gets to more than about 0.7 seconds, we add (or subtract) a leap second to bring them back into line.

Bulletin A shows that the integrated difference is 0.08060 seconds.

Bulletin B shows that in April the length of day varied between 86399.9993994 seconds and 86400.0005563 seconds with a mean of 86399.9999303 seconds and an integrated total of 2.0895 milliseconds. At that rate we would need a negative leap second in 2062 or so.

[Disclaimer: Poul is much more of an expert in this than I am. I just dabble in the topic.]

278:

Just to throw a monkeywrench into the intelligence discussion, I want to suggest a couple of really inconvenient ideas:

One is that science rests largely on a Christian ideological framework, because it arose originally in Christian countries. I'm NOT saying that one has to be Christian to do science, because that's obviously BS. However, I want to point this origin out, because it shows up quite strongly in research about what makes humans special and different from other animals.

The reason to point this out shows up quite nicely in the Dicke and Roth abstract, which appears to contain two Christian memes:

One is the notion that there is a thing called general intelligence and that humans either are the only animals to have it (the outdated version), or that we have the most of it (the newer version). The inconvenient idea here is that general intelligence is a synonym for soul, and that the theory of general intelligence arose as a way to make a science out of studying souls.

The other is the notion that general intelligence has something to do with language, which echoes the idea that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1).

Does the evidence support that these questions are properly framed? Let's take them in order. Humans don't have the best sonic communication. That honor belongs to sperm whales, which not only use their voice as sonar to see their world, not only yell loudly enough to stun and kill with their voice alone, but apparently are extremely good at replicating and repeating the sounds they hear, sort of like us sharing images instead of trying to describe things in words. In contrast, human speech is slow, clunky, and error prone. The few people who study sperm whale vocalizations say that parsing their vocalizations is sort of like trying to pick the words out of an electronic fax feed. They suspect there's a language or languages in there, but the density of information in their calls makes linguistic analysis problematic.

While I don't disagree that humans have made more uses out of language than whales have, I don't think there's a single dimension of linguistic skill, with humans at the apex. Echolocation systems are orthogonal to it. Non sonic signals are orthogonal to those two, and there human writing has to compete with all the chemosensory data-processing signals that other organisms, from plants to ants, use. If general intelligence is about data processing, we suck at chemical processing compared with most big plants. Or compared even with our own GI tracts, if it comes to that.

I'm not going to posit an answer here. Instead, I'm trying to point out the problems with the assumption that general intelligence has something to do with data processing. Data processing is a multidimensional problem, and assuming that human language-processing is the pinnacle of language processing isn't terribly well-supported. Also, it echoes strongly back to science's Christian roots. Remember, the study of evolution arose from natural theology, trying to find evidence for God's works in the natural world. Because if Genesis is correct, traces of that history, from the Creation to the Flood, should be visible in the world. The schism occurred when natural theologians found no trace of that evidence, and started unearthing evidence that better supports other explanations.

The other problem is the notion of general intelligence itself. Is it a thing? A capacity? Or a stalking horse for proving that humans have souls that animals and other organisms lack? Again, I'm not going to posit an answer. I will, however, point out that many human belief systems, including Buddhism, Taoism, and a variety of animist systems, more-or-less say that it's a nonsensical question. Some see soul as an illusion, and humans as different more than special. Does a crow have Buddha nature? Taoist folklore is full of stories of animals practicing for years to become human-appearing Taoist immortals. Some animists will tell you that what makes you different and special isn't even confined to your head.

That last may sound nonsensical, but can you be your full self without your computing devices, your library, your connection to the internet, and/or your friends and family reminding you of who you are? Without them, how much of yourself can you be? If stripping bare like that lessens you, how much of your general intelligence is actually located in your brain?

That's what makes this question problematic.

Again, I'm not going to posit an answer. What I'm asking is the utility of trying to determine whether general intelligence exists, whether it has anything to do with human linguistic ability, and whether these questions still make sense if you deliberately divorce them from a Christian context by trying to frame them in other belief systems that don't posit that humans have a soul that other organisms lack or have less of.

279:

Tying your calendar to astronomical phenomena is merely a choice of implementation.

Not when you're a farmer trying to decide when to plant your crop...

Actually, from what I remember the 'need' for calendar reform had nothing to do with crop failures because farmers were planting at the wrong time, and everything to do with concern about the correct date for Easter.

Come to that, planting dates have been slowly shifting during my lifespan as the climate has progressively warmed. Gardeners and farmers have adapted.

280:

I'd just like to point out that here on Earth leaves are green because they reflect those wavelengths.

if they used green light for photosynthesis they'd be another colour.

As it is they use the red frequencies for photosynthesis, and reject the green ones, thus they appear green.

For readers of science fiction this should be obvious.

A perhaps more subtle question is why are leaves not black?

281:

"whether these questions still make sense if you deliberately divorce them from a Christian context by trying to frame them in other belief systems that don't posit that humans have a soul that other organisms lack or have less of."

An interesting question. There are a lot of scientists functioning in Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Hindu, Shinto etc. contexts -- have any of them come up with a different take?

(I have the impression that discussions of general intelligence are somewhat muted these days because of past abuses, mostly of a racist sort.)

282:

A perhaps more subtle question is why are leaves not black?

Perhaps because they'd get too hot to photosynthesize efficiently?

283:

Oh, really! That is too much!

No, it did NOT originate in Christian countries, though they dominated it during the 'age of enlightenment'. We got it from Arab or Persian countries, which dominated science for a long period before that and, arguably, they got it from Greece and India.

284:

This more-or-less got answered in 242, and AlanD2's answer in 283 is correct AFAIK.

More generally, very few plants have their growth limited by photosynthesis. Certainly if they're growing in the shade of something else, they are so limited, but a plant in full sun with sufficient nutrients and water normally has to deal with overheating and photooxidation, not collecting more energy. One big reason for this is that photosynthesis has a maximum rate limited by the amount of CO2 the plants can get into its cells pull into photosynthesis. Once that process is maxed out, additional photons start causing damage, rather than being harnessed to do useful things.

The reason a red dwarf plant might have black leaves is the light spectrum a red dwarf star normally emits. While it's the same amount of energy (W/M2) as the sun produces (remember, the planet's really close to the red dwarf), most of that energy is infrared that gets directly absorbed into the atmosphere, leaving behind not a lot of light that penetrates the atmosphere and can be used by the plant. Hence it might make sense for them to try to get every photon they can. Or it might not.

285:

An interesting question. There are a lot of scientists functioning in Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Hindu, Shinto etc. contexts -- have any of them come up with a different take?

Don't know about religion, but I knew a scientist who would quite deliberately have "Chinese days" where he would keep himself away from all English so he could think in Chinese*. He claimed that he saw problems and solution differently when thinking in Chinese.

*Probably Cantonese, given this was in the early 80s in Canada.

286:

A calendar is primarily a convention enabling people to communicate about events in the past or future. Tying your calendar to astronomical phenomena is merely a choice of implementation.

Watching the sky has always been about two inseparable things: telling time and navigating. Remember how precise determination of longitude only became possible when sufficiently precise and durable clocks were created?

We live in a four-dimensional universe, and if you want to keep track of where you are in spatial dimensions, you also have to keep track of when you are temporally. Since they're interconnected, you can use the sky for both. For most of human history, the sky was the most reliable reference we had for both long-term timekeeping and long-distance navigation.

287:

An interesting question. There are a lot of scientists functioning in Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Hindu, Shinto etc. contexts -- have any of them come up with a different take? (I have the impression that discussions of general intelligence are somewhat muted these days because of past abuses, mostly of a racist sort.)

I honestly don't know, but it might be worth looking. This would also get into the charged arena of who is willing to pay whom to do the research, as you pointed out.

This also gets into the related problem of general artificial intelligence. If someone questions whether general natural intelligence exists, what to make of the pursuit of general AI, and questions about whether we have it yet or not?

288:

Er, no. The whole world is NOT like California! North of something like 45 north, especially in places with adequate rainfall and significant cloud cover, sunlight is the main limiting factor. That is the main reason farmers have converted to almost entirely winter wheat, harvests in the UK are not in July, planting even many green vegetables in semi-shaded areas is less productive, and late-ripening crops (like grapes) are iffy.

290:

God-like aliens. You mean, like the beings "upstream" from the Dreamers, in my novel? The ones who've been around since the previous universe?

They'd really rather not be bothered by something they've seen 5,420,342 times before. They're willing to pass some info along, if the kids are ready for it, because maybe they'll eventually, in a few hundred million years, evolve into something worth talking to....

291:

Please note I've referred to what my late wife and I came up with in the early nineties: an artificial stupid (AS). Example of it's work - it's going through my email, yeah, know this, that's junk, uh, hey, boss, what the hell do you want me to do with this? (NOT TRY TO GUESS WHAT I WANT DONE WITH IT).

292:

Um, er, Bogey? As a character? A lot of us old folks will instantly thing of Humphrey Bogart.

293:

I disagree. I've used D&D melee rules for fights, and they worked very well. As in "wait, I didn't expect her to get hurt, and he did what?!" The readers thought it was more realistic than most other fight scenes they'd read.

294:

I never read anything between, I think, MIAHM and Friday. What reviews I saw suggested he was dealing with the water on the brain (literally), and Friday was after the surgery.

295:

In my future universe, colonies are planted either on large islands, or peninsulae. If nothing else, think of it in terms of the board game Risk - you do not want to try to conquer and hold Asia, unless you have no choice at all.

With islands or peninsulae, you limit what's coming at your of the native land/air-based flora and fauna, while you plant your airweed and base biofeedstock.

296:

I thought Jack was pushing his own thing, back then, but have come to understand where he was going, as society has edged along. I gather that there's interest in his novels growing....

ObDisclosure: he was a long-time friend of mine, as is Eva, his widow.

297:

In my Terran Confederation, after the first 50 or 70 years, the Confederation Navy mostly resembles a coast guard, dealing with smuggling, quarantine, and, oh, yes, disasters on colonies.

298:

Let me note that a number of folks, including, IIRC, Carolyn Cherryh, have talked about reminding people that planets do not have one climate.

299:

Thank you. Coherent matter beams... I think I've just found a new weapon/defense projector....

300:

Excuse me, no. You're lumping bs "economists" who never admit to being wrong, and who are happy to produce results that agree with what whoever's paying them want, with someone who actually tried.

Note that he was with FDR....

301:

Hell, I'm having difficulty writing something that ain't trees in a forest. So far, I've got tree-like trunks, multiples of them, with a "canopy", which doesn't look like leaves, and it dies fairly quickly, falling to the forest floor, having mostly turned into slimy black mush.

Doesn't do well on human drones....

302:

Trappist 1-E: thank you for that, and your post on red star vegetation, etc. In the novel I just worked through my first revisions, why, yes, I do have a colony on Trappist 1-E, tidally locked world, settled in archipelagos in the dusk, Cajun and Greek.... Parties go on for years (ok, ok, 7 or so standard days)....

That's going to help me add to the environment while they're there.

303:

"If someone questions whether general natural intelligence exists, what to make of the pursuit of general AI, and questions about whether we have it yet or not?"

I have the uneasy feeling that those may be significant questions.

Perhaps the Turing test is a baby-step but really, if we don't know what intelligence is, how do we know when we produce it? I've previously been somewhat sympathetic to the "You'll know it when you see it" approach, but doubts are growing.

Maybe we should be humble, admit that the grand questions are beyond us for now, just ask about H.sap. level smarts as displayed in the last 50,000 years and leave the broader questions for later. Chipping flint; lighting fires; making brick; farming and domesticating animals. Etc.

Even that restricted space would be tough to deal with when it came to the details.

304:

BTW, I was offline for almost a week - Ellen and I were at a Pagan event, spent the days at her booth selling jewelry. The wifi... um, no, er, how much per day? Or else they wanted me to agree to them scanning my posts to social media, and if I read that right, reading my login?

Fortunately, I had d/l to my Nook the Hugo packet....

305:

H @ 279
NO
Given the philosophical/scientific enquiry that went on in the "muslim" world approx 750-1250 CE or the previous classical "Greek" enquiries from Socrates onwards ( & even before that ) the "christian framework" won't stand detailed enquiry. Even more so when almost all of the supposedly "hard" philosophical questions have been solved by experimental & observational Physics ....
{ AS EC has also noted! }
* the study of evolution arose from natural theology, trying to find evidence for God's works in the natural world.* - REALLY?
And I note that you, yourself promptly shoot that idea down, yes?

Kardashev
AFAIK, ONLY ONE SPECIES has tamed & controlled "the Red Flower" - fire.
Are there differing versions of the Prometheus legend in other old cultures?

306:

That's going to help me add to the environment while they're there.

Excellent! Made my day!

So far as the trees go, the thing to remember is that they respond to three forces: light, gravity, and wind. Light and gravity are fixed, but wind does shift, and it's a function of global air circulation. Air flows away from the hot side towards the cold side, but air equally has to return from the cold side to the hot side. There are models of this out there, but the tl;dr version of it is that whether the wind's blowing from the cold side or from the hot side is in part a function of latitude. Probably your islanders are going to have their colonies where they get warm breezes, but that's up to you.

If the trees are getting both wind and light from the same direction, the trees will look rather odd. Windblown trees tend to grow away from the light (or streamline, or reinforce, but deal with it structurally) while light-hungry trees tend to grow towards the light. Balancing those two needs? Therein lies a little vignette.

307:

Yes. I was being stupid and take back what I said in #270. I blame a combination of senility and the extremely nasty drugs I am on.

308:

There's also things like bamboo and banana. Fast leaf decomposition is typically associated with ample water and fleshy vegetation.

309:

There was a lot of observation of the world around us and the heavens above in places like classical Greece, Babylonia etc. which have the hallmarks of science, recording information and measuring things. What there wasn't was a coherent and testable experimental science until the Renaissance in Europe, when Galileo dropped rocks off the Tower of Pisa (yes I know, apochryphal and all that but...) and proved that gravity was a constant force regardless of the mass involved. Previous to that the Greeks and others believed that light objects fell slower than heavy objects purely because of observation and thinking that it was obvious. I was myself shocked when I was told in school physics class that this wasn't true, that acceleration downwards was constant and identical for ball bearings and cannonballs.

The establishment of experimental science with reproducible testing and falsification of theories didn't happen (as far as we know) until, yes, the European Christian era. It was not because of Christianity, only that it happened at the time of the existence of a Universal Church in Europe (along with schisms later in that time period). The establishment of educational establishments to train up priests and theologians did help along the way but organisations like the Royal Society were not Church-led even though many scientific researchers were churchmen (Gregor Mendel was a later 19thC example).

310:

Hell, I'm having difficulty writing something that ain't trees in a forest. So far, I've got tree-like trunks, multiples of them, with a "canopy", which doesn't look like leaves, and it dies fairly quickly, falling to the forest floor, having mostly turned into slimy black mush.

Well, forests are vegetation dominated by trees, sooo...

If the forest is strongly seasonal, you'll mostly have trees and things that live under trees, because most of the stunt plants I'm about to mention can get water stressed and do best where there's water falling from the sky year-round.

In general plants either grow with trees (subcanopy trees and shrubs), under trees (understory), on trees (epiphytes, vines and lianas, hemiepiphytes), and in trees (mistletoes and other parasites).

There are such things as drought-tolerant epiphytic cacti and bromeliads, and epiphytic mosses which are good at drying out and rehydrating. In general, epiphytes do better in rain forests (they're getting their water from the rain, not from the soil), vines and lianas do better where there's no frost or severe drought (long thin stems get water-stressed badly) and parasites do better where their hosts are present (and hosts can include cacti).

As for leaves dissolving into black goo, that implies they don't have a lot of carbon and do have a lot of water and other nutrients, so they rot like mushrooms, less like leaves. Leaves tend to have lignin and cellulose which rot slower, unless they're in a tropical forest floor that's warm and wet.

Hope this helps a bit.

311:

It doesn't need to be tropical to get fast leaf-rot, but it DOES have to be wet. Lots of waterside plants have very fleshy leaves, and rot quickly (e.g. rhubarb). My suspicion is that they hold their shape more from turgor than lignin and cellulose.

312:

SFReader @ 187:

Imagine if 21st century physicists were desperately clinging to the four-element model of the universe.

Ah. "Quondam Physics".

Well played, sir.

313:

Re: 'Thank you. Coherent matter beams... '

You're welcome!

I'm looking forward to reading your next/follow-up book. Curious how you're going to handle and resolve how the alien go-between/underling misinterpreted/misvalued some data that humans consider relevant.

I feel that this is akin to the general intelligence discussion about humans and animals, esp. those under our care. For example, do we know whether humans been dumbing down all of the species that we've tamed to work for us (pull or carry heavy loads), supply us with various materials like wool and food (meat, dairy), hunting prowess, security and companionship? We've been altering animals to suit our purposes but what if our breeding attempts resulted in the loss of some very important attribute that we're not able to detect because we lack that sense/ability.

Re: Keynes vs. 'BS' econ's

Yeah, at least Keynes at some point considered the impact of his proposed policies on real (albeit privileged) human beings. Still too much emphasis on corps (the 20th century version of the elite/nobility) though.

Considering the amount of data currently collected from just about every person on this planet on a daily basis, there is no excuse to not pre-test every single economic theory and policy. If not - then this is not a 'science', it's a quasi-religion.

314:

I disagree. I've used D&D melee rules for fights, and they worked very well. As in "wait, I didn't expect her to get hurt, and he did what?!" The readers thought it was more realistic than most other fight scenes they'd read.

I am confused. You "used D&D melee rules for fights" in what exactly? And what did Charlie say that you disagree with?

315:

If the trees are getting both wind and light from the same direction, the trees will look rather odd.

https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg150.pdf

The above link is Dragon magazine #150 (October 1989). Go to "The Sunset World" article.

316:

The above link is Dragon magazine #150 (October 1989). Go to "The Sunset World" article.

Wow, that takes me back.

And miniatures of the Fellowship of the Rings advertised in that article! Where's my durn time machine so I can buy some?!?

317:

...and possibly tell you quite a few other things too.

Like "Put me back on earth, dammit!" I presume!

318:

past abuses, mostly of a racist sort

"past" in the John Howard sense that anything that's been done necessarily happened in the past? Those abuses continue today in a lot of places. It's easiest to look at the US because they are self-analytical and talk about stuff like "black people don't feel pain the way white people do" being one of the problems their medical system needs to address. The related and equally obvious point that "black kids/people are inevitably dumber than white/non-black"... and therefore there's no point providing the same educational facilities etc is also discussed.

Whereas in Australia it's just known and accepted that those things are true of aboriginal people but what can you do, they just are.

Aotearoa has some weird versions of that going round, but right now the big fight is over Maori science/religion and much as Heteromeles is talking about with Christian science (distinct from Christian Science), the idea that Maori science is a thing, should be discussed, or even acknowledged is triggering some people. Matariki is a new public holiday and the racists have come out to play. Maori New Year... unacceptable. But celebrating the spring equinox is just fine as long as we slap a Christian label on it (Easter, for you post-pagans... and oh boy is that a fun description all by itself). Not to mention the solstice, again with the Christian sort-of-science bullshit slathered over it (and up here we mostly celebrate it Euro-style, with all the trappings of winter in midsummer. Shut up and enjoy summer solstice being an excellent time for a few days off).

The whole "Maori science" thing is an ongoing clusterfuck of bullshit from all sides. There's viewpoints from "astrology is a science" all the way to "farming doesn't require science" as well as the obvious "dumb savages can't do science by definition". Like the GE ban, any sense is hard to discern among the nonsense.

319:

I've previously been somewhat sympathetic to the "You'll know it when you see it" approach, but doubts are growing.

Like asking how you detect a false negative? Very real risk of the whole "white men and lesser animals" approach to categorisation. We haven't even been able to get very far teaching human-like animals to communicate with us, let alone any that are very different. The inverse of the discussion about humpback language - teaching dogs to follow instructions, or gorillas to use sign language. Can be done, but is hard to escape the "programming a robot" approach (robot, slave, same same).

Listening to people who have working dogs it's interesting how they accept that their dogs have personalities and moods. Also that the dog recognises their personality and mood. Some dogs will get you a beer at the end of a hard day, others will trip you as you're going inside just as an extra "fuck you". And some dogs are really good at understanding human language, other dogs DGAF unless it's about food. Do they have "general intelligence". Or even "Corporal Intelligence"? More or less than a human child? Of the same age?

(personally having had a dog that used tools I found it frustrating because the tool use was primarily about doing things that I wanted him not to do. Specifically getting out of his run, but OTOH he could heave learned most of that by watching the pig do it)

320:

the Greeks and others believed that light objects fell slower than heavy objects purely because of observation

Well, most of the time they do :-)

Aristotelian physics works as long as you are dealing with a system where friction is significant.

One of the very real problems students have learning Newtonian physics is unlearning the Aristotelian physics they have constructed by observation since they were children. (Frictionless surfaces being in short supply in most nurseries.

321:

Practical engineering had a thing this morning about myths, and one is that bedrock exists. Sometimes it does, for varying values of "bedrock", and sometimes you can reach it by digging or drilling.

One place I worked they built it on piles. Which they banged into the mangrove swamp as far as they could by stacking a new pile on top of each pile once it was too far down to hit. When hitting them stopped producing movement they deemed them done. Did any reach "bedrock", or were they just so far down into the mud that static friction defeated the pile driving machine?

Christchurch in NZ has a similar issue with alluvial gravel. I can't find an easy reference to the depth but the city is basically a swamp on top of gravel on top of... stuff.

Interestingly someone has a global map with discussion of "what is bedrock" that starts with the observation that "bottom of the soil" and "top of the bedrock" are not the same thing. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016MS000686

322:

In Denmark (- Bornholm) bedrock is at least 50 meters and often several hundred meters down, so that is not a relevant concept in building.

When we started building our house seven years ago, I learned that the applicable technical term in Denmark is "OSBL" - an abbreviation meaning "Overside Load Bearing Layer".

It took me some time to track down the actual definition for it, and when I finally found it in a 50+ year old compendium for geo-technicians is said "The first layer not disturbed during the last ice-age."

The reasoning given was "It could sustain a glacier, it will sustain anything we can build"

323:

https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg150.pdf. The above link is Dragon magazine #150 (October 1989). Go to "The Sunset World" article.

That was fun. Thanks! Good to see I didn't invent something accidentally.

One of the penalties of my education was having an advisor who studied carnivorous plants was having it pounded into my aching head that on Earth, carnivorous plants live in high light, low nutrient, generally wet areas (bogs etc.), and used the energy and water to kill things to get nutrients from the corpses. This isn't the first thing I've read where a low energy environment had giant, mobile, carnivorous plants acting like sitz-panzers.

I wonder where the carnivorous plant in the dark came from? I'm guessing old science fiction. Thoughts?

324:

Coming back to present horrors
Tory plan to go fascist & Henry VIII - & - as a reminder ...
HERE is U Eco's fascist list
And, so far numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13 & 14 have been ticked off.

Here's hoping that we get a G.E. before time - as it's certain the Lords will throw BJ+Raab's proposal out, giving us a year's grace-period ....

325:

Thanks, that's fascinating.

A question for anyone who might know:
Sweden seems to have disproportionately many boreholes. Does anyone know why?

326:

Re the carnivorous plant in the dark: Don't know, but I am reminded of a predator in Andre Norton's 'Night Of Masks', which I certainly read before this was first published. I don;t know that it qualifies as a plant (IIRC it was not shown directly), but it was definitely sessile.

327:

Would have been easier to list what hasn't been ticked off…

A great many also seem to be part of American Republican ideology, judging by what's jst happened in Texas.

328:

Dense objects that vary in weight still fall at similar speeds even with air resistance -- small granite rocks versus large granite rocks, for example or different sizes of lead balls. There is no recorded evidence that anyone in classical times tried the experiments that Galileo performed. More importantly he recorded and disseminated his findings, another key part of the flowering of science during the Renaissance.

I could imagine Da Vinci coming up with a clever timing mechanism of sorts to compare the speeds of falling objects -- I have a mental plan for such a device involving a vertical wooden shaft carrying large horizontal wheels at fixed intervals along its length. The wheels are covered in a thin layer of paper, easily penetrated by heavy falling objects. The shaft turns slowly and two weights, one perhaps half the mass of the other are dropped simultaneously side by side down through the disks, punching holes as they go. If the weights fall at noticeably different speeds then the resulting pairs of holes in each wheel's disk would be displaced radially, if they fall at similar or identical speeds the holes would align on each wheel all the way down. The radial difference of hole positions between wheels would provide a physical record of the speed and acceleration of the weights which, if the speed of the shaft's rotation was fixed and known could eventually provide a calculated figure for 'g'.

329:

»Sweden seems to have disproportionately many boreholes. Does anyone know why?«

Many separate reasons. It's mostly a case of "Most of sweden had shallow bedrock, if you want to know something, you drill a hole."

But there are some notable distinct reasons for some of the holes, related to Swedens clandestine nuclear weapon plans, both prospecting for viable uranium ores and possible locations for the facilities.

330:

There are some places in Brisbane where the rocky layers (including the Brisbane Tuff) are accessible, many where they are not and where they are not, there are areas where concrete slab foundations are only required to bear static loads, and areas where they are effectively boats.

There was a craze for ferro-cement boatbuilding in the 70s, leading to a generation of concrete yachts. It was popular because compared to almost any other boatbuilding material, it's extremely cheap. While keeping salt water out of the reinforcement was the main challenge, it wasn't hard compared with, say, steel and it's much easier to repair minor damage (you just need a way to keep a couple of bags of Redimix dry). But it makes for a boat that is very heavy, something that doesn't work well in small sizes for recreational use.

331:

There is no recorded evidence that anyone in classical times tried the experiments that Galileo performed.

True. There's also no recorded evidence that anyone in classical times built a computer, yet we have an example.

I'm not arguing that Aristotle got it right, but after decades of teaching introductory physics I'm acutely aware that his explanations feel right to students. Most students believe that heavier objects fall faster, that objects stop unless some force is pushing on them, etc.

I remember chatting with a university prof years ago, and he said that even upper year students often compartmentalized "physics explanations" in a difference mental box to "what actually happens". For a long time in physics education research we concentrated on using demonstrations to counter misconceptions, but even actually seeing a misconception falsified doesn't stop people accepting it anyway. (We already know this in other fields, physics isn't immune.)

332:

I owned and lived on a ferrocement sailboat for about 3 years in the mid-90s. Built by John Samson, the originator of the ferrocement boat 'craze'. Sturdy and cheap, however the knock-on costs of other materials were higher than with a fiberglass boat. A heavier hull means you need a bigger mast and bigger sails, which mean you need heavier lines, a larger auxiliary etc etc. Costs on boats increase exponentially, so it isn't a minor tradeoff.

The primary issue with ferrocement boats was that they had to be built correctly to be safe. Many were backyard builds with unknown qualities. You also had to make very sure to avoid electrolysis in the rebar, and if there was elecrolysis you might not be aware. My understanding is that there were a couple of instances of a part of a hull 'falling off' underway, which somewhat undermined the appeal of ferrocement sailboats overall. Mine was built by Samson himself so I was fairly confident, but I also discovered that confidence ashore is somewhat different from confidence at sea.

I loved that boat, but was quite glad to be free of it as well. The next one was fiberglass with an aluminum mast. Much, much lighter, so smaller and lighter sails, lines, motor. And fiberglass is also easy to repair with 2 part epoxy (in a rush or underway), or with more fiberglass if you have the means to get the boat out of the water.

333:

One of the more bizarre problems one can encounter in building underground railway stations is when they insist on keeping trying to float to the surface. Or indeed just ordinary cellars before you put the building on top to weigh it down. As you go south and east from London the ground becomes more like a kind of gravel slurry under the surface, and instances of the phenomenon have cropped up on Greg's other favourite blog.

334:

Sorry to disappoint you, but I've no book planned that follows 11,000 Years. One of my big things when I talk to people about it is that it is not the first book of an 18 book trilogy - it's complete in itself.

The one I'm looking for an agent now is set between 55 and 105 years from now, and covers the creation of the Terran Confederation. The one after that... is set about 1k years from now. And the one after that, which I've just done the first set of revisions on, is set about 250-300 years from now.

I've a large, interesting universe, and don't intend to follow one person going out looking for adventure (because what you call folks like that, sooner, rather than later, is dead).

335:

I remember chatting with a university prof years ago, and he said that even upper year students often compartmentalized "physics explanations" in a difference mental box to "what actually happens". For a long time in physics education research we concentrated on using demonstrations to counter misconceptions, but even actually seeing a misconception falsified doesn't stop people accepting it anyway. (We already know this in other fields, physics isn't immune.)

Since I disliked most physics classes I took, I do understand the compartmentalization. If you ignore friction in the real world, you're dead, so being asked to learn a system that starts by telling you to ignore friction pretty much automatically puts it in a separate box from lived experience to begin with.

For what it's worth, one thing that pedagogical programs may miss is the need for repetition. My anecdata on this was listening to a young prof lamenting that they couldn't get their students to understand cladistics in a freshman intro class, yet a senior faculty member had no difficulty teaching cladistics in upper division. Since I'd TA'ed for both of them, I spoke up and pointed out that they were teaching exactly the same material. The thing is that cladistics, like algebra and calculus, takes repetition for the basic concepts to really make sense at a useful level. Since it was just a unit covered among many lessons, the students only got exposed once per class and learned it superficially at first. When they finally understood it as juniors and seniors, it was because they'd seen it repeatedly, not because one teacher was better at explaining it than the other. Perhaps this is a widespread problem?

336:

"every shoot-out basically ends in a bloodbath (everyone dead, boo). So, less unrealistic than D&D in that respect." Whereas in std. melee rules, that's not usual. Initiative, try to hit, how much damage....

Please note that I use ORIGINAL D&D, or which I have photocopies, and Ellen has the actual books....

337:

It doesn't need to be tropical to get fast leaf-rot, but it DOES have to be wet. Lots of waterside plants have very fleshy leaves, and rot quickly (e.g. rhubarb). My suspicion is that they hold their shape more from turgor than lignin and cellulose

Going back a ways because I forgot to respond to this, but temperature does correlate for decomposition rates, which is what I was getting at with tropical.

Otherwise (to annoy everyone with botanical geekery) the turgor pressure versus lignin and cellulose thing is fairly important. Plant cells are basically tiny living water balloons to a first approximation. Wood is what you get when you reinforce the balloons with lots of lignin and drain the balloon out (you can mimic this by plastering a balloon with paper mache, letting it dry, and popping the balloon). Plants don't move through muscle power, they do it by fiddling with some combination of water pressure inside the cells, and tension in the walls around the cells.

This is what I was getting at when I noted that carnivorous plants tend to use light and water to trap things: they use photosynthesis (light+CO2+water) to make cells that might be a spring trap with water pressure changes as the trigger or motivator (Venus fly traps, sundews), or they build some sort of pit trap and fill it full of carbohydrate bait, and slippery sides (different carbs), and/or they make a sticky carbohydrate goo that traps prey. Only when they start breaking the prey down do they need enzymes and amino acids with nitrogen in them. It's kind of evil-genius when you think about it this way, using the stuff you have in abundance to kill things to get the stuff you need. This is also why some pitcher plants are perfectly happy switching to become toilets for small mammals, instead of death traps for bugs. They're after the nutrients, not the energy.

338:

Since I brought it up, without taking particular sides, I think there's something to be said for acknowledging that Maori KNOWLEDGE is something that should be valued and taught, if only because the Maori made somewhat less of a mess of Aotearoa in the millennium or so they lived there than the Europeans have in the few centuries of colonization. Probably worth at least remembering how they did it. And perhaps a bit of Moa history needs to get taught too?

The problem certainly looks political. Knowledge is a form of political power, and who gets to claim superior knowledge therefore becomes importance, whatever the merits of a particular knowledge field are. In this context, I happen to agree that scientific claims, real or bogus, shouldn't be used to either disenfranchise people, nor to empower people who couldn't otherwise do the work. An example of the former is American Indian objections to scientific studies saying that they came to the continent 20,000 (or whenever) years ago. Why? Because bigots use this to say that they're immigrants too, and therefore have no right to their land. That's where science becomes political. I get to deal with stuff like that quite a lot.

339:

So instead of the cat shitting in the soil in the plant pot, it shits in the actual plant...?

340:

Rbt Prior
Yes-and-No ...
The US "R's" drive to fascism has a very strong Evangleical-christian component, along the lines of "Kinder, Kirche, Küche" - which seems to be entirely missing over here. Probably, because if they did, it would immediately be noticed & the game would be over.
And, of course, we do not (usually) have the pervasive level of religious brainwashing that the US has - { See a previous conversations on this subject! }

Pigeon
YES! When they were building the Victoria Line, they had lovely problems with Tottenham Hale station.
It's in the lower Lea Valley flood plain, with the original river course & then the later canal within a couple of hundred meters. IIRC, the subsoil(s) wan't "just" boggy marsh or extremely wet London Clay, but also interspersed alluvial gravel.
The problem was eventually solved by drilling & leading piping several km of tubing through the site & all round it, & then running very cold brine at about -15°C for a month or so.
Once all the surrounding gound had "set" nicely, then they could start excavating. Seeing all the exposed piping, covered in deep frost in the middle of the summer was amusing.

341:

So instead of the cat shitting in the soil in the plant pot, it shits in the actual plant...?

Not a cat, otherwise yes: tree shrews and three species of Nepenthes. pics.

342:

»One of the more bizarre problems one can encounter in building underground railway stations is when they insist on keeping trying to float to the surface.«

The Opera house in Copenhagen is built on an (old) artificial island in the middle of the harbor, and it has five basement levels, mostly rehearsal spaces. As I recall, around 25% of the concrete piles were sideways rather than down, to keep the buoyancy of all that air in check.

343:

It doesn't help that cladistics is pretty fair crap, when used the way that most cladists do. The amount of cross-linking in many organisms (even excluding viral involvement) means that the structure is more complicated than the simple rooted tree that cladistics assumes.

344:

It doesn't help that cladistics is pretty fair crap, when used the way that most cladists do. The amount of cross-linking in many organisms (even excluding viral involvement) means that the structure is more complicated than the simple rooted tree that cladistics assumes.

How to not be snarky about this...

Since we were being taught how to deal with this very problem in the 1990s, you can take it as given that the field has progressed just a bit since that was a relevant issue.

345:

Robert Prior @ 328: Would have been easier to list what hasn't been ticked off [Eco's ur-Fascism list by the Tories]. A great many also seem to be part of American Republican ideology, judging by what's jst happened in Texas.

Yes. The Tories have much of the list, but in a weakened and anaemic form. E.g. they don't openly preach "life is a struggle", they just consistently try to make it one for people who don't vote for them (unlike pensioners, who generally do vote Tory, and are scheduled to get a 10% pension bung as a reward). They don't say "Disagreement is Treason", they just imply that those who actively oppose them (e.g. by taking them to court) are acting from some vague sense of malice instead of principled opposition. And so on.

Meanwhile the Rethuglicans are in full Fascist mode on pretty much the full list. For many years a standard bit of R rhetoric has been that Democrats "hate America" and are therefore traitors who are actively trying to destroy it. Anyone who claims Biden honestly won the election is a fair target. Its WAY worse over there.

346:

»Its WAY worse over there.«

Compounded by the fact that the opposition party is owned by, conntrolled by, and run by, a bunch of rich old people, who mentally still live in "the good old days", and who are in politics more as a hobby, than to actually try to improve the world.

347:

Re: 'The one I'm looking for an agent now is set between 55 and 105 years from now, and covers the creation of the Terran Confederation.'

No problem - Since the event I was referring to occurred pre-11,000 years, you can probably sneak in an explanation. :)

Look forward to reading your next book.

348:

Interesting (carnivorous plants). I had observed that the Scottish Highland ones (butterwort and sundews) do not grow in shaded locations.

349:

The field may have, but a great many cladists haven't. I haven't read a huge number of recent papers, but most of them ignored the issue (even when it was demonstrably present). Also, it was bloody obvious that it was a major issue when cladistics was first promulgated, and was swept under the carpet.

350:

Re: 'The Tories have much of the list, but in a weakened and anaemic form ...'

OOC and because I'm not seeing a lot of headlines about BoJo when I open GoogleNews: what is the current sentiment wrt Tories over there?

Are any of the other parties doing anything useful with this opportunity to solidify their voter base and maybe reach new potential voters/supporters?

It's nice to have a meme to throw at your political rival but with the number of different parties trying for power I'm guessing that most voters over there probably don't have a clear idea of each party's complete platform. If so, then these voters are likely to drop support when the next meme makes the rounds.

351:

I'm not sure what specific knowledge you mean.

In the 1300's a group of polynesians turn up on two large landmasses well suited to colonisation, start hunting, start some agriculture and continue doing what extended-family tribal groupings have done all over the world - having divisions, squabbles, power struggle, alliances and generally living and being people (warts and all). As elsewhere, lovely art emerged, some fine buildings appeared but they never got round to a written language, so the total sum of information retained by the tribes was relatively small - and presumably only the most key information was codified.

However, while interesting, most of what they would have to teach would be rather akin to the experiences of the first Hawaiian and Australian settlers. The interesting thing would be contrasting how the behaviours adapted to the different resources and the weather conditions. Personally, I would find it fascinating to know how the Chatham Islanders culture arose given their pacifism in a society that permitted cannibalism and slavery.

300 years later a bunch of europeans turn up. Just people again. No better. No worse. Just equipped with better technology.

Its an interesting area of study. But I am really unclear how someone is disenfranchised by facts. Illusions of exceptionalism may be shown to be unfounded, but thats going to happen if you base your self esteem on the actions of your ancestors and not your own.

352:

what is the current sentiment wrt Tories over there?

Ask again tomorrow night, there are two by-elections taking place. Tiverton and Honiton usually counts as a safe Tory seat, but the by-election was triggered when the MP was caught watching porn in Parliament and resigned. Wakefield was triggered when the MP was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy and jailed for 18 months, it had been a safe Labour seat for nearly 90 years but went Tory in 2019.

353:

Because we're organised. :-P

The Geological Survey of Sweden was founded in 1858.

354:

what is the current sentiment wrt Tories over there?
Well, I habitually refer to them as "The Con Party"; Have you noticed many (even any) people arguing the point?

355:

There's also no recorded evidence that anyone in classical times built a computer, yet we have an example.

Yes, but Stonehenge does stand out a bit. Figuring out what it was computing was a bit of a struggle and of course "they used it for ritual purposes!" kept on sticking its oar in.

There's another factor in organised science apart from testability and falsification and that is the necessity of telling everyone else who is willing to listen what you had found out, the successes as well as the failures. There's a good reason a lot of the scientific journals with a long publishing history are called "Letters", "Bulletins" etc.

A lot of sciencey-type stuff before the Renaissance, like iron-making, compasses and good navigational maps was commercially sensitive information and much of that knowledge was either never written down or communicated to others and definitely not widely disseminated. After establishments like the Royal Society and the Lunarians came into being hard-won knowledge could not be destroyed by a single library fire or a sudden outbreak of plague. We know what stupid untested fever dreams Aristotle and his peers came up with in their imaginations because their hangers-on wrote it down and made copies, some of which survived long enough for the printing press to be invented. Who knows what other true wonders of the real world we lost when the Library of Alexandria burned.

356:

Let's disentangle this a bit.

The Polynesians used genealogies as their mnemonic systems, on the so-and-so did such and such principle. AFAIK they did this more than most people, which kind of annoys outsiders who don't want to learn genealogical chants (and to be fair, apparently many/most Maori struggle with them too).

THE PROBLEM HERE, and it's a big one, is that land ownership is tangled up with their land management and art, because they're all remembered by who did what.

So if you toss all their chants, you toss their traditional claims to land. Same problem happens in Hawai'i, AFAIK.

While I'm not thrilled about "Maori science" claims for this kind of knowledge, it's because it's an Apples/IBMs problem, not because their knowledge shouldn't remain current. Their tradition doesn't separate between knowledge and law to the degree ours does. Given what I've seen with legal approaches to western science (US abortion law, climate change, rights of non-white/non hetero-cis/non-males, etm), I won't say that our system is better. It's just practiced by more people and elaborated for that reason.

Australian aboriginal claims are at another level entirely. Their ancestors were on the land well in excess of 50,000 years, and much of what we think of as "Wild Australia" is a product of their work. I'd very much privilege their traditional knowledge, because they've got a vastly longer track record and better outcomes. Given how bad a mess white Australians have made in two centuries, they need all the help they can get.

357:

Yes, but Stonehenge does stand out a bit. Figuring out what it was computing was a bit of a struggle and of course "they used it for ritual purposes!" kept on sticking its oar in.

I like Lynne Kelly's notion that it was a mnemonic complex, much like classical Roman architecture. This doesn't foreclose the ancient astronomy and burial complex ideas, but it might explain more features.

Her explanation also covers the "moat." Apparently these dry excavations have a lot of the same acoustics as small lecture halls.

Her take on the Stonehenge complex was that it was a combination of state fair and convention, where pig-herders came from all over Britain to party, trade, hook-up, eat, learn stuff, and pass on knowledge. Yes, this is all "ritual behavior", but having HengeCon as the annual basis for British civilization is a very pleasant idea.

358:

There's another factor in organised science apart from testability and falsification and that is the necessity of telling everyone else who is willing to listen what you had found out, the successes as well as the failures.

Yup. Ibn al-Haytham got that part right, too. Back in 411 AH, some seven centuries before Newton…

(I've only read a bit of the Kitāb al-Manāẓir, but it wass interesting seeing how modern those bits seemed.)

359:

Robert Prior @ 328:

Everything is bigger in Texas, including the stupid ... maybe especially the stupid!

Although, FloriDUH seems intent on giving them a run for the money.

360:

no recorded evidence that anyone in classical times built a computer, yet we have an example.

I was thinking you meant the Antikythera mechanism which irritates a lot of people because we're pretty sure it computes, we have some ideas about what and how it computes, but it's taken a lot of time and effort to get to the level of understanding we currently have. It would be so much easier if we had the instruction manual of even a sales brochure for it.

Annoyingly the calendar it uses is in many ways better than ours at combining solar and lunar cycles :)

361:

Interesting (carnivorous plants). I had observed that the Scottish Highland ones (butterwort and sundews) do not grow in shaded locations.

Just to finish up the carnivorous plants on alien world thread, while sessile carnivores aren't entirely stupid (there are A LOT of them in the deep ocean, and so even reach decent size), they're less likely in low-light situations. If we're talking about large ambush predators (which human-scale carnivorous plants basically are), they're sort of like pythons and other large snakes, except that large snakes change location periodically. A carnivorous tree that's been killing human-sized prey for centuries probably won't be visited all that often...

That said, carnivorous plants may be more common on ancient worlds, for two reasons:

--Stars tend to brighten as they age, so there's more energy available.

--As planetary cores cool, nutrient cycling slows down, so the soils tend to be poor. Areas with old soils, such as parts of Australia and the Venezuelan tepuis, are host to lots of carnivorous plants.

Most of these alien carnivorous plants would be bug eaters, but one could imagine a something like a gympie forest composed of large clones of a stinging tree* that tackle larger prey.

Only a few of the trees would have stingers at any given time, so most organisms wandering through the woods would be safe, and none would know which plants are dangerous until the corpses pile up near them. But by the time they've killed, the stings on the murder-trees will have senesced, and different trees somewhere are coming online. And meanwhile, they produce just the best fruit and nectar, it's positively addictive. Totally worth the risk. That's how I'd build a human-capable carnivorous plant.

*clone like pando, a large colony of trees that are genetically identical and which spread as root suckers.

362:

I was thinking as much about the (holy) ghost in the machine stuff, where there's a whole lot of effort put into isolating the single cause and addressing it when we know as a completely separate unrelated thing that biology and sociology are messes of complex interactions. The definitely-not-science Polynesian approach of seeing everything as a network obviously wouldn't help and definitely couldn't tell us anything useful about how any modern "ecology" or "physiology" works, they don't even have words for those things.

One place I struggle is the idea from the indigenous side that any attempt to formalise or integrate that knowledge is cultural appropriation and colonisation and must be resisted at all costs. It feels as though they're taking the wrong lesson from white colonial culture, the one about the primacy of Intellectual Property, adding a bit of "miscegenation is abomination" from the Holy Bible and arriving at "fuck you I've got mine". To which I feel like saying... good luck with your Mars colony.

Meanwhile I look at the giant pile of knowledge the human species has piled up, collecting even "imperialist science" from the various bits of India, Arabia, Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, the Near East, the Barely East At All and so on then throwing in the blender to arrive at a hideous mix of Greek, Latin, English, random other words that capture the zeitgeist (what's the English word for zeitgeist anyway?). And I wonder... would adding random bits of Maori, Nyungamarta or Ndebele knowledge to the pile really be so inappropriate?

363:

As a bit of an addendum the birds subthread, I had lunch yesterday at a restaurant overlooking the Brisbane River, and observed over the course of about an hour:

  • a pair of brahminy kites loitering over the water apparently fishing
  • a mob of crows (didn't count them, around 5-10) moving down the river, driving off first one then the other kite, before moving on themselves
  • both kites re-appearing and continuing to "fish".

It seemed like the crows didn't like having raptors around, but didn't stay in one place long enough to exclude them entirely (especially over water).

364:

I was thinking you meant the Antikythera mechanism

I was, actually, but Stonehenge also works as an example.

I do take issue with people who claim that the scientific method originated in Europe. Around the turn of the millenium, during Europe's Dark Ages, Ibn al-Haytham elucidated it quite clearly in a book which (in translation) became very popular in Europe.

Like Snell's Law (which Wildebrod never claimed to discover) it seems to be one more concept that had its roots elsewhere.

365:

cultural appropriation

I confess I get a little confused by that expression, because it seems to be inconsistently applied. (Or possibly I'm not understanding it.)

A Cree singer using Inuit throat-singing is cultural appropriation, at indigenous music awards that have categories for country and hip-hop (and many of the singers wear jeans and cowboy boots). Someone non-indigenous can identify as two-spirited without it being cultural appropriation, but wearing a traditional shirt from another culture is enough to get one accused of cultural appropriation.

It's all very confusing.

366:

what's the English word for zeitgeist anyway?

No single word. Closest in my mind is "the temper of the time", but that's an awkward phrase, somewhat cliched, and we each probably associate it with specific texts (Midnight Oil comes to mind for me). The literal translation "spirit" would be better, because it has the same triple meaning as "Geist", while "ghost" only has one of the three, but you don't get away from the awkwardness ("of the").

So, say "the spirit of the time" if you want to be technically correct and safe against possible dual meanings. Say "the temper of the time" if you feel more comfortable situating your expressions in lots of prior art, and don't mind sounding a bit pompous. Say "time ghost" if you want to sound Dada and are confident your audience knows what you mean, though in that case "zeitgeist" is probably even betterer.

Another option is just to make something up entirely that aligns in meaning very loosely, tenuously or uses gratuitously wrong etymology. "Erratic gin" (or "djinn") works for me, but I'm sure people here could come up with better...

367:

The cynical part of me says it's whenever someone from a "primitive savage" culture says they don't like what you're doing. Revenge of the downtrodden!

More gently it's often used when someone takes something out of context, or more generally without respect and acknowledgement. The difference between a bunch of British kids who've studied Maori culture for a term doing a haka because they've learned about it, and a bunch of drunks doing one outside a pub. Both know the words of a haka, both know some actions, but the context is quite different.

But it really comes down to the people whose culture it is, insofar as we can even identify them. Preserve what we have left or let it die? There are often arguments on both sides.

The other things is that living cultures change. New songs are written, new music is integrated, and arguments about whether that's appropriate aren't limited to the Bureau Francaise. You can shove your Disque Compact where the sun don't shine...

368:

I do take issue with people who claim that the scientific method originated in Europe. Around the turn of the millenium, during Europe's Dark Ages, Ibn al-Haytham elucidated it quite clearly in a book which (in translation) became very popular in Europe.

There's a big step between elucidation and implementation. The historical record is that experimentation and testing of physical theories began in earnest in Europe during the Renaissance.

I'd like to read at least a good summary of Ibn al-Haytham's book to judge whether they got most of what we now regard as the scientific method right. What sort of influence did his work have in the Arabic world (which I presume is where he lived and wrote). Is there any documented history of, for example, a workable understanding of gravity from non-Western scholars that preceded Newton's revelation of the attraction of masses? We do know that, among others, early scholars studied the stars and knew of the visible planets (aka "wanderers" in classical Greek) but did they ever postulate and model a heliocentric Solar System with elliptical orbits?

369:

The historical record is that experimentation and testing of physical theories began in earnest in Europe during the Renaissance.

The European historical record, certainly. It's the one we learn in school. To us it's the default record. There's a lot missing or misattributed in it, though. For example, a fair number of classical pieces seem to have been written by wives and sisters of the composer of historical record.

I'd like to read at least a good summary of Ibn al-Haytham's book to judge whether they got most of what we now regard as the scientific method right.

At least as right as Newton, who wasn't above fudging the calculations and claiming credit for other's work.

Ibn al-Haytham certainly seems to have followed his own precepts. How many others did too? I don't know enough Arab history to tell you. Ibn Sahl was also experimenting with optics; he's one of Ibn al-Haytham's precursors.

370:

I just watched the new HBO documentary "Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes", which exposes the lies that the Soviet government told its citizens about the accident (which later helped lead to the downfall of the USSR).

Rather depressing, as it shows people dying from radiation poisoning and babies with horrible birth defects.

The 2019 TV Mini Series "Chernobyl" said that members of the USSR military (liquidators) were tasked with cleaning lethally radioactive reactor debris from the roof of the building adjacent to the destroyed reactor. It said these people worked on the roof for only one minute - then they were never allowed to do it again. The new documentary says the liquidators were up there many times, and 80% of them died within a few years.

Highly recommended for people with a strong stomach.

371:

Do they like or hate the All Blacks rugby team doing the haka?

372:

Yes.

Maori are about as unified as any other group of people.

There was some discussion a few years ago when they switched from the Haka of Te Rauparaha to a newly written one for various reasons.

https://www.allblacks.com/the-haka/

Here's a useful discussion of some kids in the USA treating that haka in a way that's culturally appropriate for them: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/misappropriation-ka-mate

373:

H
Did you say PYTHONS? - IIRC, Burmese Pythons have an "attitude problem", unlike Indian Rock Pythons or Boas, but like Anacondas ....

374:

356 - I've said this, or variations on it, before. When an archaeologist says "they used this for ritual purposes" it can/may have the actual meaning of "we can't be bothered doing the actual science to find out what it was used for".

363 what's the English word for zeitgeist anyway? - Er, zeitgeist. No, really; it's a loan word from German rather than any of an English word, a translation or even a transliteration.

374 - The only "pythons" I know much about come under "Python (Monty)".

375:

This article is interesting in several ways, but it prompted me to wonder about the unidirectional nature of ideas like "cultural appropriation". Indigenous peoples taking up ideas like the Westphalian state are a cliche example of cultural appropriation, but somehow the only fault the colonists find is when they fail to exactly conform to the concept.

The primary issue, alongside its eurocentrism, when it comes to this understanding of sovereignty is that it believes power has to be exclusive. It can not imagine a sharing of power or political authority but Indigenous concepts of sovereignty predate, and exist beyond the boundaries of, the Westphalian model. It can be understood as the organisation of political function where we don’t invest all authority into a singular sovereign.

https://indigenousx.com.au/stand-back-waleed-sovereignty-is-more-complex-than-an-oath/

I also wonder whether my whole understanding of stuff like this is tainted by growing up in a small country where "sovereignty" was never simple and nor did it meet the "no outside interference" qualifier that apparently makes a state Westphalian. If Aotearoa wasn't being explicitly told what to do by various colonial powers it was fighting to be heard in international forums. While also negotiating sovereignty with various colonies and outposts it was bequeathed when the British Empire died (the Cook Islands, for example). Then I moved to Australia which is the same thing on a slightly larger scale, with the joy of The Dismissal where as recently as 1975 Australia was reminded that it's not an independent nation at all.

Which means that the idea of intersecting, overlapping actions of governance is how I see the world working. Admittedly less of the "responsible for" and more of the "control over" than Indigenous, especially Australian Indigenous, people seem to understand as the basis of government. But since we're living through a colossal failure of "control over" by governments that will obviously change in the foreseeable future.

376:

As planetary cores cool, nutrient cycling slows down, so the soils tend to be poor. Areas with old soils, such as parts of Australia and the Venezuelan tepuis, are host to lots of carnivorous plants.

Oh great.

As the mobile life forms develop, the usual arms race tends to lead towards adaptations like: venom (it seems to be an increasingly common trait in only the past 200M or so years) and brains/theory of mind (both for predators and prey).

And then you get symbiosis.

Think in terms of a small poikilothermic puma/mountain lion with proteolytic venom glands -- not a lizard, but a lizard-like tendency to hibernate between rare blow-out meals. It hunts by dropping on its prey and envenomating it (hey, it's a drop croc!), then hauls its kill up into the branches to ripen for a while. It then naps until the game is ready, slurps up as much of the liquefying glop as it can hold, then moves on. Eventually the kill putrefies and rains on the roots of the tree. Wary prey might look up and see the skinsack full of undigested bones hanging from the branches, but likely not.

Perhaps the trees provide some benefit to the drop crocs? Seriously nasty stingers which the drop crocs are immune to, perhaps (making them safe shelter for a predator that spends 98% of its lifetime sleeping).

377:

...and this doggerel that flows from my pen has just been written by
Another 20 telepathic men, all word for word
And it says: Oh for the wings of any bird
Other than a battery hen
That's the spirit of the age...

378:

Four Responses...

...Heh heh yup. Except that Australia proved you can do all that with monitor lizards and crocs, both winners of the "how the frack can something with that small a brain be so disturbingly intelligent" people's choice awards. And monitors are venomous. Seriously, google Perentie. And salties.

...Heeehe nope. You're missing all the cool bits, but you only get those by getting your own copy of Tim Low's Where Song Began, about Australia's birds. Seriously, if you want a SF alien generator, that book is a really good one.

...And one prize for "Living on an old land" goes to the Australian aborigines. Seriously, they walked around mostly naked in Lands full of horribly poisonous everything, and got called primitive rather than awe inspiring (you do it if you think it's easy). I, for one, hope there are still people in the Gympie Gympie Dreaming out there.

...And finally, to stand up for your Canadian readers, some of whom are within canoeing distance of the Canadian Shield, I have to point out that ancient landscapes can equally host moose, beavers, bogs, loons, and mosquitoes, the last of which need rather more carnivorous plants, IMHO. Oh, and the other "Living on an old land" prize goes to the Athabaskan First Nations, who have called that area home for awhile.

Cheers.

379:

Yeah nope, that song is totally cancelled. Creepy AF, if you read the lyrics these days.

380:

Re: 'Ask again tomorrow night, there are two by-elections taking place...'

Will do - thanks!

381:

Re: '... more carnivorous plants,'

How about throwing fungus into the mix?

Depending on your definition of 'eat' - fungi eat plants and animals. Plus some can communicate via fine filaments (nervous system), grow almost indefinitely and live thousands of years.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/

Hmmm - just found out that humans share something like 50% of the same DNA as fungi and that we contract many of the same viruses. (Some fungi also provide beneficial medicines to us, bees and probably other life forms.)

382:

Just bought & started in on Where Song Began.
Fascinating & clearly a work in progress, as well ...

As for "Old Lands" the plateau-islands in the far N of Brazil, like Roraima are, IIRC, populated by carnivorous plants & numbers of large Spiders ... euuwwww ....

383:

Polling stations are open until 10 this evening, having opened at 7 this morning. Results probably in the early hours. There seems to have been very little news coverage for these compared to the usual by-election level.

(Just coming up to 7:45pm at the time of writing)

384:

"Cultural appropriation" is difficult. There's the version where ad agencies grab memes, as it were, and then advertise it as the Real Thing.

But then, what do we call George Harrison studying with Ravi Shankar - is that "cultural appropriation"?

385:

*As for "Old Lands" the plateau-islands in the far N of Brazil, like Roraima are, IIRC, populated by carnivorous plants & numbers of large Spiders ... euuwwww .... *

Yeah. And eastern Venezuela and parts of Guyana too.

I was trying to stay out of there, because, especially in the blackwater river areas, I don't think a lot of people have ever lived there. And, very probably, I'll go spend five minutes with...

...yup, some people live around the Tepuis and the old mountains. Never mind. I don't know much about them, but I don't think many (any) lived on the tepuis, Arthur Conan Doyle notwithstanding.

386:

Pigeon at 378: That's the first thing I thought of!

OGH at 380: I thought it was supposed to be creepy? It's a dystopian tale, surely? I could see Moorcock's influence, I thought. A tale from a decadent and melancholic age, or some such.

387:

I've heard a Mongolian throat-singer covering a Depeche Mode song. Was that "Cultural appropriation"? There was certainly a degree of culture shock; I barely recognised it as a familiar song.

Years later, I don't recall which Depeche Mode song that was, and I'm not sure if it matters now.

388:

Yeah well, the opening verse would I think get it pigeonholed for paedophilia these days ...

389:

I am totally confused what song you are talking about

390:

Re: 'very little news coverage ...' (by-elections in Wakefield in West Yorkshire and the Devon seat of Tiverton and Honiton)

Yeah - I just checked BBC News.

And if the Tories do lose those seats Bojo already has his spin ready: losing a mid-term by-election happens all the time and doesn't change anything.

391:

Spirit of the Age by Hawkwind. It was a Robert Calvert song, written and first recorded in the late 70s. It hasn't aged well.

392:

"Spirit of the Age" by Hawkwind.

393:

And then there's Kurb Crawler, another Calvert song. Yikes, the whole song is problematic!

394:

I just googled "Spirit of the Age" by Hawkwind. Yes, I see how it has not aged well! :)

395:

Yes, verified by Snopes (and, since I grew up there, also verified by a former Seminole tribal judge friend with whom I went to HS).

396:

There's a little bit about Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham over on ask historians. It's not much but definitely enough to say, as with most things, it's a bit more complicated than that. Useful extract- "A key tenet amongst historians of science is that what we call "science" is not about some specific method so much as it is a series of social practices that took many centuries to evolve (not merely the use of observation, experiment, and theory, but institutions to support research and knowledge-generation, the circulation of knowledge, the use of reliable patronage, and the standardization of education and professionalization). It certainly owes some of its origins to Abbasid scholars, as well as many other influences. To speak of the "groundwork for what became the scientific method" sounds both teleological, as well as ahistorical — it is both a mythical understanding of what science is, and its history. (On this, general theme see, e.g., Shapin, The Scientific Revolution.)"

397:

Bob Calvert was definitely smart enough to be depicting a character in his stuff, rather than making an endorsement of the behaviour. I mean, I doubt he was a fan of dying in car crashes but Deathtrap opens PXR5, which includes Kerb Crawler.

398:

I've heard a Mongolian throat-singer covering a Depeche Mode song.

Are you sure you're not thinking of Joy Division?

399:

Ok, Hawkwind is too weird for me. But the wings of a bird thing seems as though it would resonate with you :)

400:

The cover I recall hearing was much more "poppy", for what I can only guess might be Mongolian values of "Pop". This sounds much too acoustic to be mistaken for what I heard years ago.

However, I note that Yat Kha has also covered When The Levee Breaks by Led Zepplin https://youtu.be/Z_8CPhfTxyU. Both covers are wonderful. Thanks for introducing me to this amazing artist!

402:

If you ever have to use a computer with windoze10 on it you'll probably never write anything else again.

403:

I recognize that. Hawkwind.

Your android replica is playing up again. It's no joke; when she comes she moans another's name. That's the spirit of the age!

404:

Ha. I'd forgotten that particular lyric, literally a line above the ones I quoted. My bad.

405:

windoze10 on it you'll probably never write anything else again.

Wait until you get upgraded to Windows 11 and never have to own a computer again! It's a new and improved business model! ("pay us and we won't stop you using your stuff"... not sure when that was invented but the IP is probably owned by Microsoft now)

406:

Well BoJo now has another record, biggest swing in history with the Tiverton and Honiton result.

407:

OGH: "Yeah well, the opening verse would I think get it pigeonholed for paedophilia these days ..."

Maybe, but the reference to underage is to the age of majority not the age of consent. I don't think they are advocating for sex with underage girls anymore that they are for the cloning of telepaths for space missions! From what is in the song it would be quite possible for the protagonist to be 18 when he signed up for the mission, and his girlfriend 17 and thus unable to sign up for freezing until his return. I have never felt the need to analyse it like this until now though, I just accepted it for what it was, a song about someone on a weird space mission.

408:

Vulch
From the numbers, it looks as though a ot of actual "Conservative" - as opposed to "tory" voters sat on their hands at home - which is, itself a result of sorts.

409:

Still, that makes them "good Germans". Not to blame your lot of course: you're more like the Austrians this time around, while we're the Hungarians or maybe Romanians.

410:

Turnout down by around 16,000 compared to 2019, Labour candidate dropped 10K votes, Conservative 19K5 and LibDem up 14K. Almost a worse result for Labour going from 11,654 in 2019 to 1562 yesterday, though a lot of that may have been tactical voting.

411:

a lot of that may have been tactical voting

The joys of FPTP in a multi-party system…

412:

You might find the Rush song Anthem song easier to criticise, unless perhaps you're an Ayn Rand fan. I've read that Neil Peart, who wrote the song, was a fan in the 70s, but may have become less so in later years. His lyrics in the 80s and 90s have certainly reflected that shift.

I'm not and never have been an Ayn Rand fan, and I disliked the lyrics for years before I learned anything about her. So I used to be able to hear the song and enjoy the music, now I'm can't bear to hear it at all. The last time was just a brief quote in an instrumental medley intro to a much better Rush song, The Spirit of Radio.

I don't know how Hawkwind have handled the troublesome line in their song in later years. I've only ever heard the original studio version. Perhaps other singers, in the post-Calvert period found their own way to deal with it. I've only read that they found their own ways of singing those songs, not wishing to immitate Calvert's interpretations.

Anyway, that's enough musical criticism from me.

413:

No electoral system can be completely fair, but here's how I would modify our system to get rid of the worst problems without introducing the problems of (e.g.) party lists.

Halve the number of constituencies but not the number of MPs. Then, in a general election:

1: The person getting the most number of votes in a constituency becomes the/a MP for that constituency.

2: Each party is allocated a number of seats proportional to the total number of votes they got. If a party got more seats in step 1 than this would give them, they keep those seats and the other parties get a few less seats, but still in proportion.

3: The parties fill any remaining seats they are allocated with their existing candidates in the order of the number of votes they received. Those people also become an MP for their constituency.

Each MP was clearly a candidate for their constituency and was clearly popular. But the overall Parliament is as close to proportionally representative as possible, meaning tactical voting is less useful because you'll still get seats for your party, possibly even in your constituency.

(I haven't fully worked out how to do bye-elections.)

414:

Oh, I don't know. Simply select the MP at random, pro rata to the number of votes. Very simple, and works for bye-elections, too.

415:

(Finally Moveable type accepts my email address!)

Regarding "Spirit of the Age" - yes, it looks creepy now, but remember it was written in 1971 (and recorded a few years later) when the age of consent/majority/etc was in a state of flux.

"Underage" when Calvert wrote it would generally have meant under-21 if you wanted to get married (18-year old friends of mine who got married had to get permission from both sets of parents, or make a run for Gretna-Green), under-25 if you were female for a bunch of things (like a bank account, access to contraception if unmarried or (presumably) being cryogenically frozen).

The age of consent and voting age had only just been dropped from 21, unless you were gay (think it had just been decriminalised at that point), although at 18 you could drink, 14 leave school and work full time, 16 join the army, etc, etc.

It was all a crazy mess and "Schoolkids OZ" was very much a recent thing in the underground publication scene Calvert was immersed in as a "space poet".

I only caught the tail-end of it (I'm a few years older than OGH) but can remember the social, if not legal, mores of the time (shacking up with my future wife was most definitely "not the done thing").

Weird to think how much society has changed in just my lifetime. Suffice to say, reading early 1970's lyrics outside the context of when it was written makes as much sense as re-analysing the plotline of "The Gay Divorcee" from a 21st Century perspective.

(Apologies for no relevant links to some of the terms above, my coding-fu isn't up to it these days. Chucking relevant search terms into wikipedia should help clarify this old fart's reminiscences though).

416:

Congratulations; that looks a lot like you have just reinvented the Additional Member System and all its issues, like a party which polls over 50% of all votes cast still not holding a majority of seats in the House.

417:

The "Schoolkids OZ" was an infamous trial at the time. If you follow UK legal history at all, you'll learn about this at some point. ISTR there was a TV documentary.

Literary link: the defense lawyer was John Mortimer, QC. Also worthy of note: Geoffrey Robertson, not yet QC.

That's a lot of reading for context. However, the fact remains: the song, or at least that line, has not aged well. People forget the context and judge books, songs, whatever by today's standards.

Who has the time to read all that history? Social media demands outrage right now, dammit! You'd better be suitably outraged, too, because you'll be judged by the level of outrage of everyone else, and the people judging your outrage can be complete strangers. They may be outraged by your lack of adequate outrage, as judged by their standards. So how can anyone be sure they're sufficiently outraged? Simple enough: just show as much outrage as the last person, then add some more.

Old media may be much slower than new media, but there may be a similar feedback process. Nevermind third-parties who can exploit it to further their agendas.

Thankfully, this isn't Twitter, and I doubt anyone here is a GRU trollbot.

418:

The News is Dire ... - the USA is now heading straight into fascism, unless the "D's" can scrape a win this autumn.
"What is to be done?"

Here, the news is ... dubious. Bo Jon-Sun is clearly fucked-over, but he will not go - & do we want him gone, anyway?
Is it better to have him & his crooked, corrupt & part-fascist cronies remain until 2024, to be thrown out, but doing immense damage in the meantime. ...
Or, is it better to have him go & some other Brexshit-tory nonentity in charge, with the horrible prospect that the voters will NOT throw them out in 2024? { And what total arsehole would they pick, anyway? It could be worse than "BJ" anyway { Patel or Schapps or Raab }

419:

here's how I would modify our system to get rid of the worst problems without introducing the problems of (e.g.) party lists

I like ranked ballots.

AIUI, you rank the candidates in your riding in order of preference, and can leave candidates off entirely. So in my case, with the choice of Green, NDP, Liberal, Conservative, and a plethora of further-right parties, I might rank NDP as #1, Liberal as #1, Green as #3, and no one else.

• If the candidate with the most ballots has over 50% of eligible votes, they win.

• If no candidates has over 50%, then the candidate with the lease votes is dropped and any ballots for them count for the next choice down (and if there is no lower choice then the ballot doesn't count anymore).

• Got back to step one.

Any winning candidate is more acceptable to the voters who care than any candidate who didn't win, even if not their first choice.

Advantages: keeps existing ridings and candidate lists, prevents vote-splitting*, simple to understand.

Disadvantages: a bit more complicated to count votes (not really an issue with computers), is a change (any change will upset some people), and there are probably ways of gaming it I haven't thought of (but I'm certain someone has!).

*A big issue in Canada, with two leftish parties and one right-wing party. In Alberta when the right-wing party fissioned and split the vote it was such a big deal that they reunited again. Of course, when the two left-ish parties agreed to cooperate the right claimed this was perverting democracy and a socialist plot.

420:

Bo Jon-Sun is clearly fucked-over, but he will not go - & do we want him gone, anyway?

Who does Murdoch support?

Looks like in America he's switching from Trump to DeSantis.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/06/desantis-fever-is-spreading-across-murdochs-media-empire

421:

»the USA is now heading straight into fascism«

No, no, no, you're misunderstanding!

The Council of Guardians are simply defending The One True Text from the heresy of progress!

422:

At first I called our highest court The Supreme Clown Posse. But rappers and their fans were upset at being compared to people like Thomas or Alito, so I apologized and now call them the Extreme Court.

But yes Greg. We're fucked as bad a you guys now.

423:

As Charlie pointed out, the US 13th Amendment doesn't outlaw enslaving convicts.

So my guess is it's a bit of fascism, and a bit of reinstating slavery by making it illegal to not be rich, white, and structurally male. And, oh, giving white male officials broad powers of discretion over exactly what to enforce.

So next up is probably reinstating Dredd Scott to deal with the expected rebellion by the democrats...

424:

H
Go back to what ( I think ) Charlie said before ...
The "justification" for this decision is the striking down of a supposed "Right to Privacy" ...
Which opens several barrelfuls of writhing poisonous worms.

425:

Yes it does. My interracial marriage might be made illegal, for example.

It's going to be a long, hot summer.

426:

I really hope enough women in USA has read Lysistrate to make it long sex-less summer.

Proposed slogan: "No Rights for me ? No Sex for you!"

And future historians can start using the headline "Summer of No Love"

427:

Bang on Martin - there was a whole social history rabbit hole behind that outrage even then. This was the era of Mary Whitehouse after all.

Proof that you don't need the internet to start outrage one-upmanship (although it does make things much, much easier).

Even weirder, recently there have been attempts by some radicals to rehabilitate the appalling Whitehouse on the basis she opposed some things that are now taboo. (She opposed everything - a classic stopped-clock and most definitely not an enlightened reformer).

Probably best to leave it at that though, it all gets a bit recursive. :)

428:

That's going to make life interesting for Clarence Thomas (Supreme Court justice married to a white woman who helped get traitors to DC on 6 Jan).

429:

Moz @ 406:

Windoze11 ... THEY keep trying, but I ain't buying. The only reason I have Windoze10 on this computer is that's what it came preinstalled. This is only the third computer - other than laptops - I've bought outright (286, Mac Mini, this one).

The latest Windoze10 fiasco is there doesn't seem to be any way to shut down a computer (not that I could find). Windoze 7 has it right there on the start menu.

We had a power outage last night. Someone plowed through a mini-park and decapitated a power pole. I have everything on UPS batteries, so I had time to shut down, but it's not readily apparent how you do that with Windoze10.

Then, to cap it off, when the power came back and I restarted all of my computers, Windoze10 came up with a splash screen showing date & time (and a pretty picture), but NO WAY TO ACCESS THE LOGIN SCREEN (until I had unplugged & replugged the mouse & keyboard several times).

So no fuckin' way am I installing Windoze11. Why make something bad even worse?

I'd switch over to Mac, but someone is supposed to be looking for a copy of the Mac OS version of Photoshop CS6 Extended Edition (the last stand-alone, with a license I can purchase) and they haven't come through yet. I'm not going to switch to Mac and abandon the licensed version I already have for Windows (and I'm not going to buy the current extortion-ware version).

I'm still running Windows 7 on my Photoshop computer.

PS: Photoshop doesn't work under Linux even using the Windows emulator software. According to the Linux community, it SHOULD, but I've never been able to get it to work. And GIMP just doesn't give me the tools I want.

430:

Martin Rodgers @ 413:

Even if you can get past the inherent sociopathy in her writing, she's still not a very good writer.

431:

TIME ( & Past-time? ) ... for Charlie to update & comment on his previous tread, perhaps?
Since the right to privacy has gone. A government or agency, at any level, can now snoop on anything & interfere ....

432:

I really hope enough women in USA has read Lysistrate to make it long sex-less summer.

You and I are thinking along the same lines! I just posted the same thought on FacePlant. I phrased it as "Republicans shouldn't be allowed to breed. Not even recreationally."

I suspect the slogan will be something more along the lines of "Fascists, go fuck yourselves." Most people I know are deeply angry about this, and I think the rhetoric will follow.

Since some state legiscreatures are proposing to criminalize women going across state lines for abortions, another tactic I'd suggest spreading is suing any breeding-age female relative or employee of any politician who opposes abortion and a right to privacy. Especially in Texas, where it's legal for anyone to sue. Hard on the women, but I think grinding their lives to a halt for months every time they travel for any reason will hammer the problem home to them soon enough. Grinding civil courts to a halt over this is unfortunately worthwhile too.

The reason? It's impossible to differentiate between an early miscarriage, a late period, and a Plan B induced abortion, the last being now criminal and the first likely criminal (depending on the state). So sue them if they have a period until they take up the fight on the side of choice.

And yes, it makes me nauseated to suggest this.

433:

Re: 'Well BoJo now has another record, ...'

Well if he manages to hang on for a couple more years maybe he can get re-elected. I hear that he's fathered scads of kids - some might be approaching voting age.

'Roe' no longer has basic human rights in the USofA

I haven't checked but I imagine that the pro-lifers overlap the anti-vaxers by a lot. If yes - then it's kinda confusing unless what they really mean to say is that they personally reject for themselves and all their fellow citizens any and all medical treatment interventions. If yes - but then about about the inalienable right of every citizen re: pursuit of happiness? (Then again - their dictionary probably defines 'happiness' as '$$$' and guns instead of humanity, compassion, intelligence, imagination, etc.)

The only way to get this changed in order to guarantee all women full human rights esp. wrt to their own bodies/health is via legislation. Since apart from the anemic gun bill recently passed, both parties refuse to put their population's well-being above their own party lines, I really feel sorry for all the women caught in this nightmare.

OOC: a) What's the legal status of vasectomies? b) And of artificial insemination? c) At this rate maybe C-sections might soon also be considered excessive interventions.

434:

»The only way to get this changed in order to guarantee all women full human rights esp. wrt to their own bodies/health is via legislation.«

No.

This is the kind of shit you have to nail down in your countrys constitution, so that no politicians can ever fuck with it again, without asking the voters directly.

435:

It's going to be a long, hot summer.

Which may be the coolest summer of the rest of your life.

Metaphorically as well as climatically.

436:

We had a power outage last night. Someone plowed through a mini-park and decapitated a power pole. I have everything on UPS batteries, so I had time to shut down, but it's not readily apparent how you do that with Windoze10.

Weird. The Start button (usually bottom-left corner of the screen, little four-frame Windows logo) to bring up the Power menu (the symbol that looks like a stylised switch, a circle with a pointy-bit at the top), click on that then click "Shut Down". Before you say it, "Start" here means "Start doing stuff" like shutting down.

I would, myself like a "do you really want to shut down" confirmation after selecting "Shut down" since I don't power this machine down that often. I use the "Sleep" option nearly all of the time and that's immediately above the "Shut Down" option in the same menu and I have fat-fingered it a couple of times in the past. There does seem to be a way to add a confirmation step but it's fiddly, using some under-the-hood commands and system configuration tools like Group Policy Editor.

I've had Windows machines in the past that had odd problems but they turned out to be bad hardware more often than not. Sometimes the Windows OS worked around the problems so I didn't see the issues until I went into the Event Viewer and looked at the warnings and error logs. Issues I recall were a bad RAM stick in one machine that meant every few weeks or so the OS would go funny or just blue-screen on me. Another annoying bug was a damaged Ethernet port on another machine that meant sometimes the network connection would get iffy or fail completely.

Since building my current machine about eighteen months ago I can't think of any notable issues I've had with it. I just upgraded it from 32GB of RAM to 64GB because I got a great deal on Gumtree, an exact match for the two existing sticks of RAM at a very good price.

437:

I'm still running Windows 7 on my Photoshop computer.

Take a serious look at Affinity Photo.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

I'm very impressed with it. It can do everything I used Photoshop for, and faster.

438:

I imagine that the pro-lifers overlap the anti-vaxers by a lot

They do up here, certainly. Not entirely, but enough to notice. Clusters with support for other right-wing views, including hating on Trudeau (which started before he'd actually done anything, probably based on his name).

439:

I'm rather fond of Affinity and its sibling products. The price is nice too.

440:

This is the kind of shit you have to nail down in your countrys constitution, so that no politicians can ever fuck with it again, without asking the voters directly.

The "yes except" part is that the US requires two-thirds of the states to ratify an amendment, and we couldn't pass a women's rights bill at the moment.

Now, if we were talking about a constitutional right to privacy, that would get interestingly different. Probably that would fail too, not because most Republicans don't want a right to privacy (I'll bet they do), but because the tech bros and prison-industrial complex bros don't want it.

Anyway, having Clarence Thomas in prison for abetting the sedition of his wife (not impeached, in prison), possibly with Kavanaugh in the next cell for perjury? That would get very interesting indeed.

441:

It's going to be a long, hot summer. Which may be the coolest summer of the rest of your life. Metaphorically as well as climatically.

Thanks for reminding me...For those who aren't as familiar with American history, "long hot summer" is a reference to 1967.

442:

Re the anemic gun bill - no, the Dems would happily have added a lot more. They wanted something that would pass, so they went with this. Anything stronger, the GOP would have stopped dead, as they have for decades.

443:

Re: 'Kavanaugh in the next cell for perjury'

Is this a new/different story or are you referring to the pre-SCOTUS appointment hearings?

Based on the below, he comes across as pro-authoritarian. Probably makes it a lot easier to reach a decision since it boils down to 'the boss is always right'. (Key reason DT nominated him.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh#Notable_cases

444:

I remember the Hawkwind tour when Spirit of the Age was the new release. They were supported by a little known band called Motorhead.

The 70s is 45 year past and a foreign country. The Sun had page 3 with beautiful Babs, Benny Hill was popular and a slimy git called Saville was cuddling young women live on Top of the Pops. If you need reminding, try The Mail Online pictures on the right hand side of their webpage.

No one blinked at the lyrics and half the audience were too pissed or stoned to care anyway. To a young sci-fi fan it sounded like tales from a distant universe.

Must have been about the same time The Stranglers released Nice 'n Sleazy. There were lots of songs from the time that are really rather dodgy by 21st century standards.

445:

The symbol for the Dems should be good old Charlie Brown, not the Donkey.

One of his most famous quotes after losing a little league baseball game by 184-0:

"How can we lose when we are so sincere?"

http://thecomicssection.blogspot.com/2010/04/peanuts-how-can-we-lose-when-were-so.html

That's the Dems' problem in a nutshell. They are so full of their own obvious self righteousness they could not believe that that the bad guys could win.

Bad guys win all of the time.

Unless good guys fight as viciously and as dirty as the bad guys.

The Dems are nice guys.

Nice guys finish last.

446:

Of course, since I'm not musically educated, I started thinking of "Have Some Madeira M'Dear" from 1957. Little bit rapey that, nowadays.

447:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/america-is-growing-apart-possibly-for-good/ar-AAYOl0V

The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.

It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

448:

So far as I know, I'm talking about Kavanaugh's pre-SCOTUS hearings. We'll see if he gets snared by Jan 6th, but so far he's just spattered by the spray. Thomas, unfortunately, looks more and more like an unindicted co-conspirator.

450:

Start -> Power -> Shut down

451:

Unless good guys fight as viciously and as dirty as the bad guys.

Then it becomes difficult to tell who is who... :-(

452:

I just checked, and the 2004 single has the same line in it. The 1:37 point in the video shows an illustration of the "android replica" looking adult but unconscious. So, even the video is creepy.

For some context, 2004 was the year Facebook was launched and W. Bush re-elected. It was also the year of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" and Dimebag Darrell's murder on stage by a fan. In the UK, Jimmy Saville was still alive and presenting Top of the Pops. However, 8 years later he was dead and the revelations had begun.

453:

Duffy
Yes - I'm obviously not a USAian, but .... the drive towards "States Rights" by your Supreme Arseholes is reminiscent of that period & worrying for that reason

454:

keep hitting ALT-F4 until you get the shutdown dialog. Or just click the desktop then ALT-F4 and it comes right up. Much better than click-wait-move-click-wait-move-click-wait.

The ALT-F4 version closes programs, so also helps with the "program X is preventing shutdown" because you can more easily see what program is saying "file has changed, save?"

455:

There my also be a keyboard option.

456:

AND
As Charlie was saying, imitating Tom Lehrer - "Who's next? ... Contraception / "gay" rights /equality of marriage ... the works.
Echoing the ultra-evangelical arseholes pusing this & the "delightful" Jean Calvin - It was as if all the walls of the houses in Geneva had been turned into glass

457:

“A big issue in Canada, with two leftish parties and one right-wing ” Say what? The NDP is a bit leftish, sure. Assuming you are limiting your list to the three majors, you surely can’t be suggesting the Liberals are left-wing? Sure, they’re not the actual nazis that the “conservatives” aspire to be but...

458:

you surely can’t be suggesting the Liberals are left-wing

Left of the Democrats south of the border.

Left of the Conservatives, even the old Progressive Conservatives.

A bit left of New Labour in Britain under Blair (at least the current federal Liberals are).

Admittedly right of where they were a generation ago, but that's true of all our political parties.

Note: I'm talking federal not provincial. BC Liberals are like federal Conservatives, like the BC NDP is like federal Liberals. I think. BC politics is confusing when seen from halfway across the country — hard to get a complete picture from the media.

459:

I'm rather fond of Affinity and its sibling products. The price is nice too.

My biggest complaint is that they haven't released an equivalent to Lightroom. They were working on it at one time, but I fear that project has fallen by the wayside as they have released both Designers and Publisher since I had that conversation with a developer, and still no digital asset management program seems forthcoming… :-(

460:

As Charlie was saying, imitating Tom Lehrer - "Who's next? ... Contraception / "gay" rights /equality of marriage ... the works.

Non-Christian religions.

461:

Re: '... becomes difficult to tell who is who... :-('

Agree.

For a group that's supposed to be well-educated, in touch with real issues and real people, and forward thinking, they've made some pretty dumb mistakes. Starting with underestimating hate, fear and psych insecurity as motivators. IMO, the core MAGA message was: if you elect people that look and act like me [privileged white male] then we can claim the top of the heap again because we'll make it impossible for anyone who doesn't look/act like us to ever succeed. (Even if they're smarter and harder working than us, they'll never become richer or more powerful than us - so we'll never have to feel insecure/worthless again!)

I think the Dems also underestimated how much effort and time it takes to really learn the issues - and in some jurisdictions, to even get on the voters list, wait in line to vote. And a lot of their vote usually comes from those who are regularly short of energy and time. (Because these folks have two jobs, very long commutes, plus are probably also looking after family, etc.)

Ease of voting - Because the mail-in ballots were made into an issue, I'm wondering whether mail-in ballots will get de-legitimized unless you're white and will be too busy cruising somewhere on your yacht on election day.

How to unskew/depoliticize SCOTUS -

There is another recourse which was mentioned at least a couple of years ago: increase the number of SCOTUS judges. Of course this would likely start a series of various reprisal escalations. Mitch and friends would be guaranteed to filibuster everything with the result that zero work would be done by elected pols until at least the next presidential election.

462:

Heteromeles @ 433:

I really hope enough women in USA has read Lysistrate to make it long sex-less summer.

Won't matter to me 'cause I'm "incel" (prostate cancer killed my little soldier). But there are a lot of others out there who won't be convinced by withholding sex. They'll just see it as another women's assault on their manly RIGHTS

While I don't "support" abortion1, I DO support human rights, and the right to control your own body is the most basic of human rights.

The decision came down while I was down at the park with Prince. Heard about it on the radio while I was out running a couple of errands after.

Didn't have time to make a sign or anything before I went down to the rally at Bicentennial Square, but I was there to show my support.

Since I got home I've "designed" my own T-Shirt - "Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" on the front & American Flag on the back (because nothing is more American than standing up for people's rights ... ALL people, no matter what color their skin or how they're equipped below the waist or how they want to use that equipment.
--

1 It is a medical procedure sometimes necessary to protect women's health. But I would hope we as a society can find alternatives (mainly contraception, but eliminate rape & incest) ... I'm pro-choice, but I hope women never have to choose. I don't like "abortion on demand", but I WILL NOT criticize someone who has to make a terrible decision I will never have to face, and I will not deny them their rights.

463:

Poul-Henning Kamp @ 435: This is the kind of shit you have to nail down in your countrys constitution, so that no politicians can ever fuck with it again, without asking the voters directly.

That won't help because the bigots who are running the place now don't give a shit what the Constitution actually says. It's already nailed down. The founders KNEW they hadn't thought of every EVIL government could get up to, so they included the Ninth Amendment.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

464:

For a group that's supposed to be well-educated, in touch with real issues and real people, and forward thinking, they've made some pretty dumb mistakes. Starting with underestimating hate, fear and psych insecurity as motivators.

Don't forget the zero-sum mindset: "Someone else's gain is invariably my loss". My parents are Jewish and are educated professionals, and they are totally Trumpists. Because as far as they are concerned, any gains by blacks, Hispanics, etc. MUST be at the expense of Jews. (Also at the expense of whites in general, but my parents are less concerned about that.) And don't even start on any gains by Muslims.

465:

This just kicks the can down the road. What's needed is a Democratic Party which fights.

466:

Nojay @ 437:

We had a power outage last night. Someone plowed through a mini-park and decapitated a power pole. I have everything on UPS batteries, so I had time to shut down, but it's not readily apparent how you do that with Windoze10.

Weird. The Start button (usually bottom-left corner of the screen, little four-frame Windows logo) to bring up the Power menu (the symbol that looks like a stylised switch, a circle with a pointy-bit at the top), click on that then click "Shut Down". Before you say it, "Start" here means "Start doing stuff" like shutting down.

Yeah, that's the way it worked on every Windows computer I built since Windows95 up through Windows 7. That's where I expected to find it. But it wasn't there. Also, "Ctrl+Alt+Del" should have "shut down" ("Turn off this computer"?) as one of the menu selections and that wasn't there either.

[...]

Since building my current machine about eighteen months ago I can't think of any notable issues I've had with it. I just upgraded it from 32GB of RAM to 64GB because I got a great deal on Gumtree, an exact match for the two existing sticks of RAM at a very good price.

At the time I bought this I didn't need a new computer, I needed a new video card ... but that was during the Covid induced supply chain fiasco and buying this new computer cost less than buying a replacement video card (which I couldn't find at a price with even nodding acquaintance with affordability). It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now and just after I got the new computer the old computer died.

PS: This is actually the second computer they sent me. Video card in the first one didn't work & I had to send it back for replacement.

467:

Sorry. More justices on the Supreme Clown Posse just kicks the can down the road.

468:

paws4thot @ 51:

That's what I thought, but it wasn't there.

469:

For a group that's supposed to be well-educated, in touch with real issues and real people, and forward thinking, they've made some pretty dumb mistakes. Starting with underestimating hate, fear and psych insecurity as motivators.

Don't forget the zero-sum mindset: "Someone else's gain is invariably my loss". My parents are Jewish and are educated professionals, and they are totally Trumpists. Because as far as they are concerned, any gains by blacks, Hispanics, etc. MUST be at the expense of Jews. (Also at the expense of whites in general, but my parents are less concerned about that.) And don't even start on any gains by Muslims.

470:

Moz @ 455:

Didn't remember that one. Hope I never need it again, but I'll try to remember it if I do (probably won't).

PS: it was Paws at 451:

471:

Robert Prior @ 460:

I don't use Lightroom, but I would need something that is either equivalent to Bridge or compatible with Bridge. I'd also need to be able to work on all my old PSD files.

472:

Robert Prior @ 461:

Ultimately, the target is Brown v. Board of Education.

473:

Benny Hill was popular

That's one show I just never got.

474:

they could not believe that that the bad guys could win.

The D's have been playing to win the next play for decades.

The R's (the strategic ones) haven't cared a gnat's ass about winning any one play. They were in it to win the game. And figured out the best way to do that was take control of the rule book. And so each time they had a win at any level of a particular play they worked on adjusting the rules. And now they almost have complete control of the rule book now.

And to be honest the R policies and stances on things were not real for these long ball players. To them the only thing that mattered was control. Much to the recent surprise of many true believers in conservative (as defined in the US) policies.

475:

Non-Christian religions.

Nope. Most of those are anti-gay. You win a battle like this by slicing off small groups at a time. Not huge chunks that can help you with the smaller groups.

There was an interesting read about how the precedents that Alito is going after were used to stop states from forcing all kids into public schools. States would have the right to say no religious schools allowed if those precedents from the 1920s fall.

476:

My parents are Jewish and are educated professionals, and they are totally Trumpists

I think you said somewhere you grew up in Russia/USSR.

You must have some interesting family history in terms of political opinions.

477:

Just noting that Toronto has rats, foxes, cats, and coyotes — and a serious racoon problem.

Central NC, and as I understand it a lot of the US, has a growing problem with coyotes. Without wolves they have taken over as a dominant hunter in many areas. They really don't bother people as we're too big. But they will eat most any small creature. Which seems to be causing a rise in smaller pets going missing after being let out into the back yard un-attended at night to do their final business. And is a real downer to those who think their cats should be free outdoors at night.

The rise in security cameras has caused them to be noticed a lot.

478:

As you go south and east from London the ground becomes more like a kind of gravel slurry under the surface, and instances of the phenomenon have cropped up on Greg's other favourite blog.

New Orleans and nearby has their cemeteries above ground. Caskets, or maybe just parts of bodies, floating up out of the ground gets on people's nerves.

479:

I really hope enough women in USA has read Lysistrate to make it long sex-less summer.

October 24, 1975. 90% of the women in Iceland went on strike. No housework, no childcare, they rallied in the streets for equal rights.

Look up the Kvennafrídagurinn.

480:

I don't use Lightroom, but I would need something that is either equivalent to Bridge or compatible with Bridge. I'd also need to be able to work on all my old PSD files.

Affinity Photo is a Photoshop replacement.

No idea whether it interacts with Bridge at all, or does what Bridge does, as I never used Bridge even when I used Photoshop.

481:

It would be so much easier if we had the instruction manual of even a sales brochure for it.

Or all the pieces. And it was basically encrusted in to a solid lump or two.

I don't think they've taken it apart to date. Just done a lot of MRI/X-Ray imaging to figure out what it consists of.

They do seem to be getting closer.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/scientists-solve-another-piece-of-the-puzzling-antikythera-mechanism/

482:

Replied too soon. A bit of Googling reveals that Affinity Photo works with Bridge. And I forgot to mention that it imports psd files just fine.

https://www.thepicpedia.com/faq/can-i-use-adobe-bridge-with-affinity-photo/

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/116332-using-adobe-bridge-to-open-affinity-photo/

483:

It seemed like the crows didn't like having raptors around, but didn't stay in one place long enough to exclude them entirely

I have 4 bird feeder tubes on a pole in my back yard. 6 perches per tube.

There is definitely a class tribal system of which bird species put up with which other bird species. And for the ones that don't like to mix there are both "we just don't want to be around you" and "crap, lets get out of here till they leave". Plus some like the bluejays which just wade in and throw all the rest out of the way.

And at times when it gets quiet, you can look up and see a raptor of some sort circling overhead. I also see them buzzing at high speed across my yard every month or so in hot pursuit of another bird or ground creature.

484:

Ultimately, the target is Brown v. Board of Education.

Ultimately, the target is getting rid of public education altogether. Those people don't need an education, after all... :-(

485:

This just kicks the can down the road. What's needed is a Democratic Party which fights.

Oh please, stop parroting. I'm active in the democratic party. We fight.

What's going on?

We have what's become a party of the aristocracy. They are not interested in governance, they're interested in gaining power, looting the government while they're in power, and setting up such a big mess that they're not prosecuted for it because that would take away from the emergency response. Then they use their loot to corrupt, and also to make politics so obnoxious that everyone thinks it's broken and leaves it, when they're the ones breaking it.

And we have a party that actually believes in fulfilling their oath of office and governing.

And we have about a third to half the people who don't want to or can't deal, and sit it all out.

What you and Duffy are calling with your taunts for is for the democrats to abandon governance, and devote themselves wholly to looting the government, enriching themselves, and calling it a fight. Thing is, you (and I, and Duffy) are pretty damned disposable in such a situation. It's the typical third world hell hole, which is where some of the aristocrats honed this particular scheme in the first place.

Want leaders who govern? Get off the sidelines and get fucking active. None of them are saints, but they don't have to be. Competence and a bit of self-discipline in controlling their hunger for power and privilege are rather more important.

486:

What you and Duffy are calling with your taunts for is for the democrats to abandon governance, and devote themselves wholly to looting the government, enriching themselves, and calling it a fight.

Why do you make such idiotic accusations? (If you can't read this over a couple times and see why I don't like it there's not much point in trying to explain it to you. And I still haven't forgotten your nasty comment about my being a Putin supporter. (Half my family came out of Ukraine around 1900 - you do the math!)

487:

»Oh please, stop parroting. I'm active in the democratic party. We fight.«

Only in the same sense that any Country Club Tennis Association fights: For the fun of it and to while away the hours.

Look at the D's lineup: At least two out of their three leaders are clearly in steep cognitive decline, and there are several layers of rich white pensioners between those jobs and anyone young enough to actually have some skin in the game.

If the D's were actually fighting:

A) Biden would have come out those polished doors yesterday and said: "What USA needs now is a woman president, I hereby resign as president of the United States."

B) Congress would be recalled, filibuster eliminated, and SCOTUS reformed to at least 21 seats.

But there will be none of that, only a lot of handwringing and a lacklustere election effort, where the rich white pensioners, primary objective will be to not hand over the reins to the young firebrands who might disturb things.

488:

A) Biden would have come out those polished doors yesterday and said: "What USA needs now is a woman president, I hereby resign as president of the United States."

--And, unfortunately, the mainstream democrats who got Biden elected would revolt, and we'd have a Jimmy Carter stalemate.

Harris had her chance to win that fight during the election, and she couldn't make it work. I happen to agree with you about Bidens' age, because I've had much more direct reports than you have. Whatever the reason, Biden's organization absorbed his rivals (Bernie, Sanders, Harris) who are individually better than he is.

Stop comparing Biden with Trump's one man band, and look at the organization he's part of. That's what's critical here, on both sides.

B) Congress would be recalled, filibuster eliminated, and SCOTUS reformed to at least 21 seats.

Yeah, you forget that, aside from the filibuster, Manchin votes with Biden over 90% of the time, and holds onto power in a democratic state, because he isn't just a mine owner, he's got the mineworkers' unions on his side. No progressive has come close to working up a competing organization, and if Manchin got booted, the Republican governor would select a Republican senator and we'd be in a worse hole.

Yeah, it sucks, but the alternatives suck worse.

As I noted above, the NeoCon Republicans are all about power. They don't particularly seem to care about governance, which ideally should take more than half their time. While that gives them a political advantage, it's disastrous for the US, and you can see it in the decline in many of their districts. I'm not going to be polyanna-ish about it, because I've got my own scars from dealing with local political systems that were majority republican until 2020. And some still are. To be fair, most of the Republicans were old school and actually did a modicum of caring for their constituents. However, they did an increasingly bad job, which is why San Diego at the moment is becoming increasingly pro-business democratic. Term limits certainly helped that too, at least for the moment.

489:

Why do you make such idiotic accusations?

Because they're supported.

As I'll say for the third time, governments govern. That's a different game than electioneering, and if you have to do that and run elections, you're less effective at both. But if you don't govern, the country falls apart.

Since Clinton, the playbook has been that the Republicans run up the debts and the democrats lower them, the republicans break things (2008, 2020) and the democrats fix them.

Again, do you really want the democrats to be focused on nothing but winning elections and paying out their richest supporters? That's the fight you're advocating for.

I'd rather have the Republicans actually govern their own damned states, at least so that the average lifespan of their voters stopped dropping in them.

490:

Thanks for confirming my analysis, even if you did not intend to.

Have you already forgotten how upset the D's apparatnicks were, that their annointed rich old white woman had her rightful election stolen by some young firebrand who had not paid his dues to the machinery ?

491:

»That's the fight you're advocating for.«

No, that's the only other fight you can imagine, because you, as almost all other USAnians, have been brainwashed to think that those are the only two alternatives.

The attitude you express on these two comments, is precisely the kind of defeatist hand-wringing I was talking about.

USA politics is literally "The Mob vs. The Country Club".

What USA needs right now is a new and really left-wing party, fueled by young people's needs and desires, a party which can displace the D's to their rightful position as the country's conservative party, and push the republicans into their rightful and shameful place in history.

492:

Rbt Prior
YES - especially Atheism - which "they" will categorise as a relgion & promptly ban & persecute.

SFR
"SCOTUS" - the answer is: IMPEACH - yes/no?
- as Troutwaxer says, increasing the number of "judges" kicks the can down the road & is basically useless.

JBS
"Brown vs Board" - maybe, but bloody Clarence Thomas is already on record as wanting to go for Griswold, Lawrence & Obergefell ...
{ Banning Contraception (!) / Same-sex activity / Same-sex marriage } - back to Ireland in the 1930's in other words.

P H-K
Disagree
What the USA really needs is a committed Social Democratic party - which would be labelled "Commonist"by the "R's" of course, but hey.

493:

»What the USA really needs is a committed Social Democratic party«

How is that any different from what I said ? :-)

Anyway, EU better get their shit together fast, because there is more than 70% probability that three years from now, USA is going to be a fascist dictatorship.

494:

456 - True, but I don't know what it is and have never needed it.

464 - True, but how many people know what the 9th Amendment is? I didn't.

467 - And still does work on my W7 and W10 boxes (Avoided W8, and W11 so far).

493 - Have you ever started a conversation, or a blog posting with "Can I interest you in The One True Way?" I submit that you have, ignoring that I an normally a "Don't Care" with an intellectual interest in ALL religions.

495:

I've just remembered a quote:
Calvin's Geneva: "It was as if all the walls of the houses in Geneva had been turned into glass"
An all-seeing, persecuting absolutist theocracy, & practically indistinguishable from fascism - worse, in fact, because "they" are doing it for your own good

496:

It's one thing for us outside the USA to provide a piles of unsolicited advice about what they need to do. The similarities across our cultures and political systems is such that many of the problems are shared ones, but many of the solutions that are familiar in some places play into the differences rather than the similarities.

This looks like cross-purposes discussion that is really about two different patterns for democracies. One is a two-party system, where issues and policies are aligned along a binary continuum and (in theory, supposedly) decided at the centre via an aristotelean medium of sorts. All political struggles are therefore a tug-of-war over repositioning the "centre" where polices are enacted. The other is a multi-party system where governments are formed from temporary coalitions, and interest groups speak for themselves and their issues add separate dimensions that are not squashed into a binary continuum (at least, ideally). These two patterns are not the only ones possible, it's just that the difference between them appears to be the underlying difficulty here.

Multi-party legislative assemblies are common in Europe because proportionally elected multi-member electorates are common in Europe. The UK has single-member electorates with a first-past-the-post system, but still manages to get a diversity of representation... most likely mostly due to population density. In Australia we get diversity because we have preferential voting (and some multi-member proportional electorates), though the two-party system still dominates. We do better at electing more diverse candidates in the areas with the highest population density, and that seems to align with the UK experience.

The USA has different scenarios at the electorate level, and at the macro level has historically institutionalised a two-party system far more than anywhere else. It doesn't mean that diverse representation is impossible, especially in high-density areas, but because of the way electorates are managed it is extremely challenging across the country in general. Work for meaningful change is most cost-effective to do within the two-party system, a fact that favours entryism and coalition building within parties. To be fair, this is the case in the UK and Australia too, though it plays a little differently in both places.

497:

In Australia ... the two-party system still dominates.

That might become past tense fairly soon. It seems increasingly likely that there will be a realignment in the Coalition that is one half of the two parties. Specifically over climate change, with the new leader of the opposition seemingly still with the smaller parties in that coalition as far as their response being "make out like bandits while it lasts". But the inner city elite side of the party is looking at the losses in the recent election and could well jump ship when they (continue to) fail to get anywhere inside the party and it gets increasingly clear that they can't keep getting re-elected as members of it.

The kiwis have a different way of getting a bunch of parties into government but somehow managed to give one of them an absolute majority during the early stages of covid. Barring another disaster that will almost certainly revert to normal at the next election.

In the US it does kind of look as though the Democrats are better at repelling entryists, while the Republicans are better at keeping their coalition together (lest they hang separately, to a large extent). AOC is cool but nowhere near Trump levels of successful entryism. And as Heteromeles keeps saying, there is no way in hell that AOC or anyone like AOC is going to be allowed power inside the Democratic Party. US voters just have to keep voting to the lesser weevil and hoping that eventually that does something.

FWIW I think the Republicans are incredibly focussed on governing and they are very good at it. They get a lot done, their changes stick, and things they don't want generally don't happen even when they're in the minority. I detest a lot of what they want but it's hard to argue that they're not getting it. Yes, there's looting, but there's also slavery, indentured servitude, very low taxes and so on. It's hard to tell from here whether abortion is really a central thing or just a wedge issue that's got away from them. It definitely works in the "morally uptight voters holding their noses and voting en bloc" sense.

498:

It's hard to tell from here whether abortion is really a central thing or just a wedge issue that's got away from them.

Central thing for a fanatical minority. But it is a minority that shows up. So after a while they mattered.

And got away from them? Yes. For many of the elected it was a great thing to run on because at the end of the day there was nothing they, (the elected), could do that would change things. So they ran on it, filed laws, pontificated, all the time knowing nothing much would change.

Then the fanatics elected a crazy person who stuffed in enough judges to make it happen.[1] Now, like "repealing ACA/Obamacare", it's no longer a thing to run on, the crazies may just start electing more crazies. They have a good start.

It was bad enough when the "study group" (shut down the government hard core) in the House were enough to determine if bills could pass.

Now it may be a block of MTG and Gaetz clones who have that power.

Very depressing.

[1] The opinion written by Alito is not about repealing RvW. It is about allowing the "state" to tell people how they must live their lives. Repealing RvW is just the first thing to happen as a result.

499:

Some folks whose opinions I rate note that on Monday the Supreme Court is due to rule on whether or not to gut the EPA in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. They're predicting that other states -- notably California -- will say "fuck you" to any states who try to water down environmental protections, even if the EPA is de-fanged. Leading to a mess of inter-state trade wars, and to the Supreme Court being effectively side-lined on the basis, ironically, of States Rights (but the wrong States' Rights, from the Republican point of view).

Basically there's a risk that the current court is so radical that states will begin to unilaterally ignore its rulings. This is already beginning to happen with the states who are declaring themselves abortion safe harbours. Which would ultimately prove self-defeating for the hardline Supremes. And ultimately lead to a confrontation within Congress if the Screaming Jeezus People try to push for a Federal law banning abortion nationally. See also, the war on drugs (how's that marijuana criminalization working for you these days?).

500:

Re: 'zero-sum mindset'

Guess they're sh*tting their pants every time a census/population forecast comes out. 'Whites' as a demo segment has been in decline for decades. And no - it's not just because of immigration - 'white' fertility rates except in a few of the hard-core evangelical type states keep dropping lower and lower. (Or is your parents' interpretation: the fewer of us Whites, the more I'm sure to get becuz all the non-whites will still get none?)

So if access to abortion (and possibly even birth control) is denied locally within a state I'm guessing that the moneyed segment (predominantly white) will still be able to get to a state that will provide such service. To me, this scenario will likely mean an even faster increase in non-white segments. In some ethnic/cultural/religious subgroups this could easily result in placing females of child-bearing age under more restrictions.

More likely though is that women who might need such services will get scammed by con artists starting with outfits that look and sound as though they might offer such services but are actually 180 degrees opposite. I think the immediate focus right now - because timing is critical in this situation - should be on how to safely and affordably help any/all women who need this service starting with a central register of legit clinics.

501:

It's hard to tell from here whether abortion is really a central thing or just a wedge issue that's got away from them.

Definitely a wedge issue, in my opinion. If the GOP really cared about the lives of babies/children, we'd have gun control, a guaranteed minimum income, adequate school funding, mandatory Covid vaccinations, and a lot of other stuff you'll never see Rs supporting. :-(

502:

I'd go a step further and say the Supreme Clown Posse* is very much not legitimate these days, for a number of reasons.

1.) The Republican-controlled Senate's refusal to consider Merrick Garland in early 2016.

2.) Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself from a decision involving his wife. (One of the Jan. 6th cases.) There may also be other reasons involving Ginni for why he should not be on the court. We know he’s lied about her income (and who gave her the money.)

3.) The question of who either paid off, or bought, Kavanaugh’s gambling debts has yet to be answered. I'd also like to know who currently owns that debt! (The FBI also never followed up complaints about Kavanaugh’s rough treatment of women in the time leading up to his hearing.)

4.) In his anti-Roe opinion, Alito quoted the thoughts of an English jurist and witch burner who openly violated British law, and allowed spectral evidence** in his court. The fact that he would do so, in my mind, means that he’s not fit to be a judge.

I'll note for the benefit of Heteromeles at 490 that all these issues could be brought before a Democratically controlled Judiciary Committee. (This is how you fight!) I'm guessing you'd get at least one resignation out of it - and I really want to know who bought Kavanaugh's gambling debts, as this is a standard tactic of agent recruitment.

* My apologies to any rappers, or their fans, who are offended at being compared to the Extreme Court.

** "Spectral evidence" is evidence derived from visions or dreams.

503:

Scarily, it looks like Alito et al are affecting Canadian politics as well.

Arnold Viersen, who represents Peace River-Westlock for the Conservative Party of Canada, titled his video "History in the making!"

"This is something that I know a lot of people have been praying for for a very long time, the overturn of Roe v. Wade," Viersen said.

"The pro-life movement in the United States has been working hard on this for generations and it feels so good to have a win."

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/it-feels-so-good-alberta-mp-celebrates-overturning-of-roe-v-wade-1.5962293

Our crazies are beginning to gain control of the Conservative Party. Many of them are anti-abortion (and like American crazies, also against anything that helps children who've already been born).

Also on-topic, this satire in the Washington Post is so on-point it hurts:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/24/supreme-court-protect-life-conception-birth-satire/

504:

this scenario will likely mean an even faster increase in non-white segments

More slaves servants, gardeners, farm labourers, etc.

505:

Your ideas are so far from reality that I'm not going to even try to debunk them. It's like you live in a different universe than the mainstream political conflict and don't understand it at all.

Also, you'Ve become the kind of person who comes out of the blue with insulting accusations that someone else supports Putin (because they disagree with you, not because they actually support Putin) and you haven't managed an apology. What I'm going to say here is diagnostic, and not meant to be an insult, (though I'm sure you'll take it as one.) In the past six months, you've developed the strong tendency to insult people who disagree with you and behave badly in general, using a sort of DARVO-light. You were a very respected commentator here and you're on the verge of losing that status because you can't stop making accusations at people who disagree with you. In short, you're headed down the path of Major Assholism, and you need to stop and reassess before you actually arrive at that path's destination. Once again, this is meant to be diagnostic, and if I had your email I'd call you out privately rather than publicly, but it needs to be said.

GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELF!!

506:

women who might need such services will get scammed by con artists starting with outfits that look and sound as though they might offer such services but are actually 180 degrees opposite

That is already happening. Been happening for over a generation.

From 1990:
The establishment of "fake abortion clinics" poses a great threat to women's ability to make free and informed procreative decisions. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2309498/

From last week:
U.S. lawmakers are questioning Google over how the company’s search engine shows users in certain states inaccurate results about abortion services by diverting them to “fake clinics” that don’t provide the procedure and dissuade people from ending a pregnancy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/18/google-abortion-clinic-searches-fake/

507:

Re: 'Kavanaugh’s gambling debts'

Wasn't aware of this - I didn't watch every episode of his hearing.

Anyways, I did a search and one result suggests his gambling debt might have been paid off by a higher authority (DT/GOP?). There's a quote attributed to a 'Kavanaugh' but who knows if it's the Justice since Kavanaugh is a fairly common surname and I'm not sure I can access enough of the book to find out. Anyways - given the few paragraphs I've read, the ideological and class values fit the SCOTUS Justice. (Comments about socially acceptable genders, etc.)

For anyone willing to chase this down: the reference is on pg 167 in 'Women and the Politics of Self-representation in Seventeenth-century France' by Patricia Francis Cholakian.

508:

"Seventeeth Century France?" Not sure how that relates to Kavanaugh.

509:

Also, if DT paid of Kavanaugh's gambling debts, did he sell the debt to someone else. Like Putin or some other oligarch?

510:

Re: '"Seventeeth Century France?" Not sure how that relates to Kavanaugh.'

He studied History at Yale - undergrad.

Ah yes, them golden formative years: frat member, drinking in excess, sexually assaulting coeds, etc.

511:

Anyways, I did a search and one result suggests his gambling debt might have been paid off by a higher authority (DT/GOP?).

I think we can eliminate DT. He's well know for vacuuming money in but never giving it away...

512:

Not at all. Buy Kavanaugh's gambling debts, sell them for a profit. (Or "Less than a million and you get to own a Supreme Court Justice? What an amazing bargain!")

513:

Re:'... did he sell the debt to someone else'

Probably not necessary assuming Kavanaugh wasn't lying when he said his debt was around the $200K mark. That's small change in terms of $$$ but a very tight noose if word got out -- which is exactly how Louis XIV played it.

514:

I think you said somewhere you grew up in Russia/USSR. You must have some interesting family history in terms of political opinions.

Well, "interesting" to someone used to the usual US political spectrum. I had seen it in other Russian Jewish immigrant families all my adult life.

To summarize my parents' politics: Utterly anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-Putin, pro-Israel, worship Ronald Reagan, atheist, pro-abortion, slightly anti-gay. Aware that the far right are no friends of Jews, but consider them a smaller threat than far left. As my mom once put it, she trusts the strength of American institutions to keep the Neo-Nazis in check; she has no such trust in keeping Marxists in check.

My parents' biggest fear is that US will go the way Russia went in 1917 -- fall into mutually hostile factions, and the most vicious, most ruthless assholes end up the winners. I think they see people like Ocasio-Cortez as the equivalent of Russian Mensheviks -- idealists who carry out the revolution, only to be killed by the equivalent of Bolsheviks (Antifa?).

People like my parents refuse to recognize just much "pro-choice atheist Jew" is an anathema to what Republican Party has become.

515:

Guess they're sh*tting their pants every time a census/population forecast comes out. 'Whites' as a demo segment has been in decline for decades.. (Or is your parents' interpretation: the fewer of us Whites, the more I'm sure to get becuz all the non-whites will still get none?)

Definitely first interpretation, not the second

516:

The perfect Republican policy would be that abortion is unlawful for Whites, and mandatory for everyone else.*

* Don't misunderstand me please. I think such a policy would be abhorrent - but this is how the party of giant assholes thinks!

517:

Ah... so "GOP" stands for "Giant Orifice Party". I always wondered about that.

518:

May I instead suggest Start -> Power - Shutdown while holding down the Shift key? That makes certain to clear memory completely.

Windows assumes your time is valuable, so the default Shutdown action is the quickest possible, a 'hybrid' Shutdown, which does NOT purge memory, but allows a quicker startup later, by snapshotting the system and writing that snapshot to disc.

If you want a complete, clean Shutdown, hold down Shift while you select it.

519:

Heteromeles @ 489: As I noted above, the NeoCon Republicans are all about power. They don't particularly seem to care about governance, which ideally should take more than half their time.

Part of the NeoCon ideology is that government is a Bad Thing. They don't believe that good government exists, and in any case they don't want people trusting government because then they might start voting for it to do useful stuff. As it is they can wreck the government's ability to do anything useful, and then say "look, its just like we said: government is useless".

520:

David L
* It is about allowing the "state" to tell people how they must live their lives. Repealing RvW is just the first thing to happen as a result.* - THIS, EXACTLY.
A Christofascist absolutism, whose all-seeing lidless eye never sleeps denying any right to privacy - which is how they screwed Roe & which they have publicly stated they intend to re-use on issues they care about - denying people contraceptives, making homosexuality illegal (again) etc ...
A 21st Century evangelical version of the Inquisition & the Holy Office, with matching C21st levels of surveillance.

Charlie
VERY SMALL correction: "Basically there's a risk that the current court is so radicalFascist that states will begin to unilaterally ignore its rulings.

Ilya 187
My parents' biggest fear is that US will go the way Russia went in 1917 -- fall into mutually hostile factions, and the most vicious, most ruthless assholes end up the winners. - SEE ALSO - Iran - exactly what happened there, or even France 1792-9

521:

Thanks for confirming my analysis, even if you did not intend to. Have you already forgotten how upset the D's apparatnicks were, that their annointed rich old white woman had her rightful election stolen by some young firebrand who had not paid his dues to the machinery ?

Actually, we mostly agree on this. Since I'm definitely in the progressive wing, like it or not, I agree that the mainstream democrats are definitely not governing the way we need them to govern, and that this is a horribly dangerous situation. They're better than the Republicans at governance, but that's not the same as dealing powerfully with national emergencies like climate change or this attempted plutocratic/fascistic takeover of the US.

Where I disagree is in your assessment of Clinton. She scared the crap out of Putin, and that, among other reasons, is why I think she would have been a very capable president, as would Harris or Warren.

522:

Once again, this is meant to be diagnostic, and if I had your email I'd call you out privately rather than publicly, but it needs to be said. GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELF!!

Consider it said.

Consider also that you keep telling me my lived experience is wrong, and your ideas are right.

It's also worth considering that you may be misreading what I'm writing, and that asking for clarification from me (I read that as....is that really what you meant to write?) won't get an attack in return.

523:

the default Shutdown action is the quickest possible, a 'hybrid' Shutdown, which does NOT purge memory, but allows a quicker startup later, by snapshotting the system and writing that snapshot to disc.

As far as I know that's called "Hibernate" in Windows.

There's a hierarchy of non-active states in Windows. I've never gone deep into the technicalities of it but it starts from cold, that is, shut down. This restarts everything with any programs that were running at power-off not running after login. Windows Updates often (but not always) forces a shut down and restart after the patches and updates are applied. This start will display the BIOS start menu first since the PC is starting from cold. If the restart option is in the Start menu or you have a reset button on your machine (it's often missing from laptops and tablets) then that will also force a restart but without a power-down.

The second non-active state is "hibernate", that is, the system is snapshotted to disk before the PC is shut down. On restart (usually via the power button) the system is restored to the snapshot with any files, data, and programs running at the point when the snapshot was taken. It's usually seamless but I do know that in some cases things break, especially Web sessions due to timeouts but anything running on the machine natively should be there. It can take twenty or thirty seconds to restore the system from hibernation depending on how big the RAM image is since the machine still has to go through the BIOS process.

The next step up is "sleep". In this case the machine stops running but a trickle of power is used to keep the RAM data and some peripherals alive. Getting out of sleep mode is as simple as pressing a key on the keyboard or tapping the screen. This only takes a couple of seconds since the machine isn't restarting, it's just going from one mode to another.

I know all this because drivers are a bitch. I can get my main PC to sleep AND hibernate with an AMD video card and drivers installed but I can't get the option for sleep if I fit an nVidia card and its drivers, just hibernate. No idea why, no-one on the internet can tell me or provide a workaround. There's a Powershell utility that will tell you what state options a given Windows system will support.

powercfg /availablesleepstates

524:

Poul-Henning Kamp @ 491:

Hogwash of course ... and "sour grapes" from the Bernie Bros that their even OLDER, rich old white MAN, who wasn't even a Democrat didn't get the nod. The use of the word "anointed" is telling.

One reason Saint Bernie didn't get the nomination was because his supporters were a bunch of slackers who couldn't be bothered to GO VOTE in the primaries.

Who did YOU vote for in the primaries? What did you DO to help them win the nomination? What did you do to help the Democratic Party Nominee get elected?

PS: I voted for Sanders in the 2016 NC Primary, even though I found his record on gun control legislation somewhat LACKING. I voted for the Democratic Party's Nominee in the general election.

I didn't throw a fuckin' tantrum because my guy didn't get the nod and refuse to endorse or work for the benefit of the party, because I AM a Democrat.

Same story in 2020. I supported Elizabeth Warren and voted for her in the NC Primary election. But she withdrew and threw her support to eventual nominee Joe Biden ... and she DID endorse the Democratic Party Nominee and DID work to get him elected.

So take your "annointed rich old white woman" and put it where you've obviously got your head stuck.

525:

paws4thot @ 495:

Can't say I "Don't Care" about religion. It's more of a deep seated wariness, fear and loathing based on past experience.

While I do frequently quote scripture, it's usually to point out the difference between the "theory" I learned as a child and the PRACTICE of modern day religionists (not ALL of the bigoted assholes in this world claim to be Xtians, but it sometimes seems like they have a firm majority here in the U.S.).

I'm no longer a believer, but I still try to live by the tenets I learned as a child ... "do unto others", even though I'm not very good at "judge not" and definitely a failure at "turn the other cheek" ...

526:

AlanD2 @ 502:

I'd say it's the CENTRAL wedge issue. I went downtown for the rally at Bicentennial Square Thursday evening. One of the signs I saw read:

LIFE BEGINS AT FERTILIZATION AND ENDS AT A SCHOOL SHOOTING

Pretty much sums up the modern day republiQan party for me.

527:

Robert Prior @ 504: Also on-topic, this satire in the Washington Post is so on-point it hurts:

Hard to tell since it's behind their STUPID pay-wall (it's not the pay-wall, it's the STUPID).

528:

Troutwaxer @ 510:

CHEATolini iL Douchebag ain't gonna pay off his own debts, gambling or otherwise, what makes you think he's gonna pay off Kavanaugh's?

529:

ilya187 @ 515:

I thought "interesting" was more like the ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times!"

Kun Fu Tzsu (or whatever his name was) is probably snickering up his sleeve about the current U.S. political situation.

530:

"so the default Shutdown action is the quickest possible, a 'hybrid' Shutdown, which does NOT purge memory, but allows a quicker startup later, by snapshotting the system and writing that snapshot to disc."

That is the usual out-of-the-box default, but somewhere in Settings there is an option to change that, and have it do a hard Shutdown every time. This is essential if you have a dual boot system, and want to be able to access Windows partitions from the other operating system, which is how I know about it.

JHomes.

531:

kiloseven @ 519: May I instead suggest Start -> Power - Shutdown while holding down the Shift key? That makes certain to clear memory completely.

Windows assumes your time is valuable, so the default Shutdown action is the quickest possible, a 'hybrid' Shutdown, which does NOT purge memory, but allows a quicker startup later, by snapshotting the system and writing that snapshot to disc.

If you want a complete, clean Shutdown, hold down Shift while you select it.

Y'all can suggest anything you want, and I'll try to remember the suggestions if I need them six months or a year from now. 8^)

But y'all are missing the most important point. There was NO Shutdown or Power Off Option on the menu when I needed to shut off the computer the other night. I know it's supposed to be there, BUT IT WASN'T THERE ** ... even when I searched for it. I've been a Windows USER since Windows 3.0, and I do know how you are SUPPOSED to shut it down.

** Like the little man upon the stair ... but I'm NOT wishing it would go away again.

532:

I didn't say he paid off the debts. I said he bought the debts - that is, bought the right to collect the debts from Kavanaugh. Whether Trump himself bought the debts is an open question, but there's no doubt someone now owns those debts, whether paid off or otherwise, and it's NOT the people Kavanaugh made his bets with!

Note that buying debts is a standard tool of agent recruitment.

533:

Greg Tingey @ 521:

I wonder what Thomas is going to do when the Court gets around to overturning Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)? ... 'cause you KNOW they're going to get to it eventually.

534:

I wonder what Thomas is going to do when the Court gets around to overturning Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)? ... 'cause you KNOW they're going to get to it eventually.

They won't make it retroactive, of course.

Speaking of Thomas, I'm wondering if impeachment is even the best route. What I'm looking at is US Code chapter 115 §2383. "Rebellion or insurrection. Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."

If his wife assisted in January 6th and gets convicted of insurrection, he's next. At that point, impeachment seems like a formality. Of course, IANAL.

More likely they try her (and him) on seditious conspiracy, which has a 20 year penalty but no removal from office. That would be interesting too, having a justice sitting but unable to serve. Hmmmm.

here are the relevant legal codes.

535:

" Loving v. Virginia,"

It may be a death bet, assuming that's it's not going to happen until he's no longer in a position where he cares. It's not a priority for either the Religious Reich or the Repugnant Party, so "eventually" might be quite a while.

Or overturning it will not make mixed-race marriages unlawful, it will just allow States to make them unlawful if they so choose. Not all will, and he plans on living where they are still lawful.

JHomes

536:

Poul-Henning Kamp @ 491:

I'm not sure if you're yelling at me or Poul, but he is Danish I think (apologies if I got that wrong), and to be fair, he knows more about American politics than I do about his.

So far as Clinton in 2016 went, I donated to her campaign and voted for her, but yes, I was pissed off when she won the popular vote and lost the electoral college. Why? It's her job, and especially her freaking campaign director's job, to know how to win the election. If a duffer like me knew that the electoral college matters more than the popular vote, what the hell were they doing? My uninformed guess was that Clinton's campaign crew included a bunch of the same people who lost for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 (in the latter case, they had something like $15 million unspent in the election fund. Why weren't they getting out their ground pounders in the swing states?).

Obama and Biden did it differently and won handily.

Anyway, my 2020 experience was pretty much like yours, except that I was switching between Warren and Harris before settling on Biden because, for all his faults and bad decisions, he's better than Trump.

537:

But y'all are missing the most important point. There was NO Shutdown or Power Off Option on the menu when I needed to shut off the computer the other night.

The three-finger salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del) should work in most situations. (Although I have run into rare situations on my desktop where a hardware reset or power-off were the only things that worked.)

538:

Just wait until the current scotus Reich gets to what the GQP really wants ; revoking “North v South”.

539:

the Democrats are better at repelling entryists

Well to be fair, I doubt the ALP would let me in after my years as a Green.

540:

I thought "interesting" was more like the ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times!"

apparently ancient chinese scholars have gone looking for this curse and traced it to an old eric frank russell story

541:

Nick Gruen's latest vodcast is titled "Should politics be boring?" and despite Betteridge's Law he's arguing "yes".

Makes the point early on that the US is one extreme of "the national leader must be primarily a performer" with the Swiss at the other end, their prime minister being one of a council of seven who serve a year each in rotation.

Plus an amusing rant about ambiguous survey questions :)

542:

I don't feel any need to ask for clarification when you tell me I'm supporting Putin, or insist that the only other choice for the Democrats is to act just like the Republicans - both ideas are clueless on their face, and your manner was insulting on both occasions.

Back to ignoring you.

543:

My limited experience is that they'll happily accept volunteers without asking too many questions. I can't tell how much of that is that I am known to them as a letter writer/asker of questions, and how much is just "handing out how to vote cards is hard to get wrong".

I have extreme doubts about whether I could make it to the point of being a candidate in any party, let alone a machine politics one like the ALP. The Greens are bad enough in that respect, and I'm not even sure whether it's possible to have an effective party without a lot of party machine people. Or as one friend put it "the ALP brain worms"...

544:

»Who did YOU vote for in the primaries?«

As a Danish citizen, living in Denmark, I obviously dont vote in US elections ?

And to you too: Thanks for confirming my hypothesis, that US politics is "Gangster Inc. vs. Country Club Tennis Association".

545:

I happen to agree with you about Bidens' age, because I've had much more direct reports than you have.

i think the youtube videos of his speeches are probably enough for a lot of people

"it's just a stutter"

sure it is

546:

Incidentally, here's the original post, from a thread where Troutwaxer praised a twitter thread that said Russia's invasion of Ukraine was all about Russian character and I criticized it.

Apparently he's come to read it as me saying he supported Putin, when my statement was not to blame the existence of Putin on some supposed Russian characters.

"And don't use Russian culture to excuse Putin or his followers."

Why does this matter? If you see a group as uniformly evil, then there's no bargaining with them. If there are people within the group who are repelled by what their group is doing, then those are the people you hold your nose and work with, for the purpose of fracturing the group. This is what the democrats are doing with Liz Cheney and the January 6th Commission.

With respect to Russia, one hope for ending the Ukrainian war early is to convince Russians with Ukrainian ties (due to years of intermarriage and inter-migration during the Russian Empire and CCCP) to sabotage the war effort from within. On a wider scale, it's worth trying to help make it possible for Russians to force Putin to abdicate and give him a little house near Yekaterinburg, perhaps.

So far as RvW goes, finding Republicans who are so repelled by the SCOTUS action that they will either will vote democrat this fall, or will simply not vote, is one strategy towards keeping democrats in control of the House of Representatives. I'm not sure I can do it where I live (nothing's really contested here), but others might be able to try it with friends and relatives.

547:

And then you get symbiosis.

Think in terms of a small poikilothermic puma/mountain lion with proteolytic venom glands ... Perhaps the trees provide some benefit to the drop crocs?

Ooh, web comic link time!

Your ideas remind me of symbiosis in a strange world from Dresden Codak and the feared Canadian trapdoor alligator from Something Positive.

(I think many readers here would enjoy Dresden Codak.)

548:

Well doing HTV cards is how the local ALP branch members know I'm a Green. I worked quite closely with the ALP state MP on community stuff a few years ago, and I guess in retrospect it's a little suspicious just how many of my volunteers for that turned up on election day as ALP volunteers. I guess if I'd changed parties between those times, I'd have had a fighting chance to be pinged as potential candidate fodder, since that seems to be the way it works with the ALP... you go to branch meetings, show some strong opinions about something, doesn't really matter what, and an ability to talk about it in a way that doesn't alienate anyone, and the branch will start putting you forward to stuff you don't really want, but which includes the chance to make a difference, albeit for a lot of very hard work. After all these years I'm still not sure how that bit works in the Greens, it seems like it is more about personality on the day of some off the wall debate. Of course, poke an ALP branch member on a topic like coal mines or refugees, and they will get all Sky News on you, so I'm not really tempted to change.

549:

t will just allow States to make them unlawful if they so choose. Not all will, and he plans on living where they are still lawful.

There are state laws all over the US that have been rendered moot by various SCOTUS decisions. Many (most?) time the states don't bother to actually repeal the laws. Usually as it creates a campaign issue against those doing the repeal. So they let them be.

With the over turning of RvW some states have laws on the books since before the 1940s that have suddenly come into force. Which it turns out that nobody seems to want to enforce. So you have bad laws that various attorneys general are not enforcing but are on the books. Which opens up things to all kinds of mischief from various cops with a beef. And will force state legislatures to deal with.

550:

525 - AIUI, voting in primaries (for those who self-describe as supporters of members of $party) is a more or less uniquely USian thing.

526 - "Don't Care" about religion means things like not attending services of religion (other than possibly friends' and/or relatives' hatches, matches and dispatches), and not actively proselytising TOTW. It does not mean things like not learning a bit about the "Holy Scribble" (or a translation thereof), and/or $church's canon law.

532 - Everybody else's mileage does seem to vary in this respect; mine to the extent, mine to the extent of expecting to find Start -> Power -> Shutdown (also Sleep and Restart options) in the same place across multiple machines and Windoze variants.

545 - Or not? Bozo is a UK citizen living in Ingurlundshire, but, because of where he was born, he had to actively renounce USian citizenship to escape liability for US taxes and the right to vote in USian elections.

549 - Similarly, the Con and Liebour parties over here regard me as a member of the SNP (I was once a fee-paying member, but have not been a member in good standing for some 26 years, although I have never formally resigned my membership).

551:

but others might be able to try it with friends and relatives.

I thought about this and I have none of those whose opinions are hard and fast. And they all vote. I will be encouraging my kids to get their friends who tend to skip voting to get out this next cycle. They are in their early 30s. I'm nearly 70. Plus we have decent early voting which means you can vote without making the final election day crazy if your calendar is full that day.

552:

AIUI, voting in primaries (for those who self-describe as supporters of members of $party) is a more or less uniquely USian thing.

We used to have a lot of situations where the state (and maybe more local) "party bosses" would pick the candidates to stand for elections. But it got so incestuous / corrupt (think of the phrase "smoke filled room") that in so many ways these practices led to the Chicago riots at the national Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago. Which led to most state party organizations switching to a primary system.

Very much overly simplified history here.

553:

Grauniad quote: The right wing has been imagining a civil war, publicly, since at least the Obama administration. - same as the slavers were imagining a civil war from about 1845?
But - the same article also noted that the "R's" have the guns & the shrieking, the "D's" have the money & the tech, & then compared that to Europe & Putin (!)

JBS
- # 527 - Euww - horribly true
- # 528 WaPo - Open in incognito Window does the trick (for me )
# 534 - Loving is the Inter-Racial Marriage ("Miscegenation") one, isn't it?
AIUI, Clarence Thomas is the Ultimate Oreo ??

554:

»But - the same article also noted that the "R's" have the guns & the shrieking, the "D's" have the money & the tech«

But unlike UA, the D's hobby-politicians are never going to grow enough of a spine to use the tools they have.

Heck they can't even get themselves to call a president ordering a coup for "traitor".

And dont bother with the "we dont have the votes"... of COURSE you dont have the votes when you actively supress the candidates people want to vote for and converge on some "safe" grandfather or grandmother who hasnt been in touch with reality since the wall fell.

They've had a month's warning about Roe being overturned, what did they do ? Did they make a plan, did they rally the troups ?

No, they wrung their hands and "hoped it wouldn't happen".

555:

Welp, we still have local (as applicable to election) party branches choosing candidates for seats, and no-one much has felt a need to riot about it.

556:

The Labour Party tried a "primary" system for a while to elect the Party leader. Unfortunately for the apparatchiks the lumpen proletariat voters kept on choosing the wrong popular candidate (Jeremy Corbyn) and eventually they had to go back to the old elitist system of hand-picking one of their own (Sir Keir Starmer QC) for the top job.

557:

I'm still not sure how that bit works in the Greens

NSW it is fierce for the parliamentary seats that have a vague chance of being competitive and that's where the machine comes in. You have to convince a bunch of people that you're a serious candidate, and while in theory it's raw votes at conference in practice you need a team and a lot of positive word of mouth.

For council it's often the person most vulnerable to peer pressure. I don't go to those meetings because I find the process unpleasant (rather than because I'm vulnerable). I'd rather not run candidates if we don't have anyone who actually wants to do the work.

558:

Not actively aware of that; of course I'm not now and never have been, a member of the Liebour Party.

559:

The unions and elected MPs had a say but the vote to choose the Labour Party leader was also opened up to members of the Labour Party. The individual membership fee was quite low at the time, as I recall and I think there were about 500,000 fee-paying members with the right to vote. The first election was held, four top knobs from the Nice side of the Party stood for the post expecting to have to fight it out in a second round after they would all fail to reach 50%. Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time back bencher and outright Socialist (ewww!) was persuaded to run too just to make it look like the contest was real, and he won on the first ballot with more than 50% of the vote which wasn't supposed to happen. Oops.

The Nice people got together in their smoke-free rooms and decided that for the next Party leader election they'd settle on one Nice candidate to run against Corbyn rather than splitting the anti-Socialist voters with multiple chancers and greasy-pole climbers like the first time around. Unfortunately for them Corbyn won 60% of the votes. Double oops. After that "democracy" was abandoned and they went back to the old-boy-and-gals club method of fixing things the way they wanted it.

560:

Exactly this. The Democratic politicians don't fight. Assume a Liberal-ish Supreme Court Justice appointed by a Democratic politician. Assume this person doesn't recuse themselves from a case involving their wife.* If the Republicans controlled either house of Congress they'd hold hearing pretty much by reflex.

The Democrats can't even bring themselves to denounce the guy, much less hold hearings.

* This is one of Thomas's many sins.

561:

Nojay
CORRECTION: Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time back bencher and outright SocialistIdiot (even more ewww!)
Hasn't had a single original idea, or learnt anything new since about 1975.
The electorate want some form of Social Democracy, but they would & did back the utter lying tosser BJ, rather than JC, because he's an idiot.

  • Which reminds me: Which is the least-worst option:
    1: BJ hangs on until 2024 & is swept away in the tide, never to be seen again - but he manages to do even more immense damage between now & then.
    2: He's got rid of, & some bland tory fuckwit is put in charge, thus making it liable that the arseholes will STILL be in power in 2025.
    Thoughts?
562:

We used to have a lot of situations where the state (and maybe more local) "party bosses" would pick the candidates to stand for elections. But it got so incestuous / corrupt (think of the phrase "smoke filled room") that in so many ways these practices led to the Chicago riots at the national Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago. Which led to most state party organizations switching to a primary system.

I think it's safe to say that boss-type shit still goes on in Southern California. Minding UK libel law, I'm not going to name names, but it seems to show up more in small towns than big cities (remember, LA County has 86 separate municipalities within its borders, and except for Beverly Hills, Pasadena, and Santa Monica, you probably haven't heard of most of them). FWIW, San Diego seems to be drifting away from that at the moment.

Primaries are effing annoying, but one good thing is that it provides a demonstration of how good the candidate is at building coalitions to get things done, and this is an essential political skill. Hand-picked candidates often struggle with that.

563:

Re: 'And don't use Russian culture to excuse Putin or his followers'

Russian culture is as diverse and fractured as any other culture. I think that the performing arts (esp. TV, film) are a good indicator of cultural shifts esp. in differences between generations.

https://popnable.com/stories/117-top-10-most-popular-russian-singers-in-2020

Something I noticed with my parents: their perceptions of Eastern Europe (USSR back then - and yes, completely dominated by Russia) was frozen in amber to the time that they last lived there. They would have rejected artists like the above - who've become mainstream across Eastern Europe - as not 'genuine' Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Latvians, etc. It's a generational as well as living through the process thing.

It'd be interesting to compare socio-political sentiment by age-sex subgroups in Russia, US, UK, China, etc.

564:

Labour Party voters freely chose Jeremy Corbyn twice to lead the Party by significant margins. The Nice people decided that Labour Party voters shouldn't choose the Party leader any more, they should shut up and do as they're told by their betters because, like you, the Nice people think they're idiots.

It's worked for the Tories for decades, I can quite understand why centrists like Starmer and co. think it will work for them. I don't know if they can actually go full elitist while still singing "The Red Flag" at the Party conferences, time will tell.

565:

I'm not going to name names, but it seems to show up more in small towns than big cities (remember, LA County has 86 separate municipalities within its borders, and except for Beverly Hills, Pasadena, and Santa Monica, you probably haven't heard of most of them)

Hah. Got you beat. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located had 143 municipalities when I was there. And no unincorporated areas. And is only 15% of the land mass of LA County.

And yes, at the local level sure anyone can enter a primary but it sure helps if the local party folks are willing to use their people lists and known pots of money to help you out. So it is rare you get a break through candidate.

But no where near as bad as it was before modern mass media. (Which is one reason the Chicago machine fell in my opinion. Only it didn't fall far enough. Just a little bit. Oy vey.) For those not in the know prior to the 70s in the US there were a lot of Don Vito's deciding who would get elected in much of the country at a local level.

566:

And unrelated to anything in particular. I just learn that a neighbor from my childhood just died. He was 5 or 6 years older than me. He introduced me and other grade school kids to telescopes and astronomy back in the mid 60s. I lost track of him when we moved away and he graduated from high school.

I now realize how big a deal it was for a young teen to share views AND HIS TIME with his nice at the time telescope ($100 or more in mid 60s) at 2 am with a group of 10 to 12 year olds.

It got me to beg for a $10 Sears model for my next birthday which I used till it fell apart 10 years or so later.

567:

Nojay @ 557: The Labour Party tried a "primary" system for a while to elect the Party leader. Unfortunately for the apparatchiks the lumpen proletariat voters kept on choosing the wrong popular candidate (Jeremy Corbyn) and eventually they had to go back to the old elitist system of hand-picking one of their own (Sir Keir Starmer QC) for the top job.

The trouble with a primary-style system is that it rewards extremism. An awful lot of the dysfunction in US politics is down to a combination of primaries and gerrymandering. If you want to be elected into a safe seat you don't win by persuading the real electorate, you win by pandering to the small minority of committed party supporters who turn out for your primary. Once you get the nomination the actual election is the easy bit; just tack to the centre for your soundbites and the real lumpenproletariat will vote for your party (not you) just like they always do. They may not even know your name.

Listen to the Trumpists; their big threat over their politicians is that they are going to get "primaried". That is the real reason why so many Great Orifice Party politicians are still mouthing Trump's big lie.

I know you meant "lumpen-proletariat" sarcastically, but the term really means the ordinary voters who don't pay much attention to politics. They generally vote for their usual party without bothering to read the manifestos, and get most of their information about party policy from brief soundbites. They don't even listen to interviews: once the talking heads come on the news they change channel.

I remember having a conversation with a Corbynite after he got the leadership. He said that Jeremy Corbyn got was supported by N thousand Labour party members. I said yes, but is anybody else going to vote for him? As it turned out, the answer was "no".

568:

Hah. Got you beat. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located had 143 municipalities when I was there. And no unincorporated areas. And is only 15% of the land mass of LA County.

Yep, you absolutely do have LA and San Diego beat.

Just as a side note, I was hinting at where there might be political bosses in this day and age...

569:

Exactly this. The Democratic politicians don't fight. Assume a Liberal-ish Supreme Court Justice appointed by a Democratic politician. Assume this person doesn't recuse themselves from a case involving their wife. If the Republicans controlled either house of Congress they'd hold hearing pretty much by reflex. The Democrats can't even bring themselves to denounce the guy, much less hold hearings.*

I have to point out that if you believe in the rule of law, you can get in the awkward position that you have to wait for a person to break the law before you go after them. They may certainly appear crooked (cf Robert Bork), but appearing like they might ignore their oath of office is not the same thing as them actually breaking their oath of office.

The flip side is just as toxic: If a person is a member of group X, you "know" they're evil, and you act on it, how often do you get it disastrously wrong? Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all practiced that form of judgement, and I don't think much good came out of it.

With respect to Thomas, in retrospect his approval was fucked up, and Biden messed up as the head of the committee. At the time, I'm not sure it was so clear.

But taking down Thomas is similar to taking down Trump: unless you're pulling a Lenin and showboating a revolution, you can't just walk in waving an arrest warrant and lead him away. You've got to treat his actions like a mafia case and peel away his associates until he's all alone. Since his wife was a major played in January 6th, if that whole hearing ends up in criminal prosecutions, she'll get charged, and he'll likely be next if she's convicted.

We all know he can't be impeached because there's no way to get to two-thirds of the Senate voting for it. But impeachment is only removal from office. He can still be convicted and imprisoned if he abetted sedition, and then I'm not so sure impeachment even matters.

570:

The trouble with a primary-style system is that it rewards extremism. An awful lot of the dysfunction in US politics is down to a combination of primaries and gerrymandering. If you want to be elected into a safe seat you don't win by persuading the real electorate, you win by pandering to the small minority of committed party supporters who turn out for your primary. Once you get the nomination the actual election is the easy bit; just tack to the centre for your soundbites and the real lumpenproletariat will vote for your party (not you) just like they always do. They may not even know your name.

I know this is the received wisdom, but I'm not so sure how true it is at the moment.

If an district is gerrymandered, the primary is the only race that matters, because there's no real opponent in the general election and no need to tack to center in single-party district. As we've seen in a bunch of recent primaries, it's not necessarily the foaming MAGAts who always win, either.

The other purpose of a lot of ads is to make marginal democratic voters who probably won't vote so disgusted with the whole election process that they run away screaming. I'm not sure if it's only democrats who are being discouraged, either, because getting your foes to acquiesce is AFAIK a normal authoritarian tactic.

The other issue is what candidates have to do post-election. My understanding is that legislatures are often like high schools, where which clique you belong to determines what you can do. The current crop of Republican congresscritters seem to be totally cowed by the MAGAts. I don't think it's just the threat of being "primaried", it also seems to be about whether they'll get anything out of being in Congress if they don't make a big show of belonging to the clique or at least keep their mouths shut and doing as their told.

571:

Starmer isn't a centrist - he is a sodding Blairite.

572:

Er, no. In 2017, he got within 1% of May in the popular vote, with a 9.6% increase. Despite the malicious and false propaganda and finance campaigns by (foreign and non-dom) oligarchs and at least one foreign country, he still came close in 2019. The seat difference was due primarily to our rigged electoral system.

573:

Just as a side note, I was hinting at where there might be political bosses in this day and age...

I realized. And you don't think Pittsburgh has had and may still have a tendency in that direction?

Carnegie, Frick, Homestead, United Mine Workers, US Steel, United Steel Workers(name?), etc... all had their hands in the process over the decades.

I spent my time there working in Forest Hills. A nobody knows of it town. At the top of the hill was the edge of Braddock. And east Braddock down the road. And 2 or 3 miles away but down from the cliff was Homestead. The last steel mill in the area is in Braddock. Google those names.

Check out the fortunes of the D running for PA Senator against Dr. Oz. He became mayor of Braddock to make it better. He turned the town from a candidate for hell hole of the century into just a town in really bad shape.

The locals talked about the mob running the construction industry when I was there and how it was normal to have to re-do a 30 year road project after 5 or 10 years and nobody every lost their job or went to jail.

But as best I could tell, the Pittsburgh area was better off than Philadelphia.

574:

Just the usual reminder that Charlie's blog isn't in the US, and UK libel law applies to him. While I doubt that any local pol will sue Charlie over what gets published, here, I err on the side of not wanting him to spend more on this blog than absolutely necessary, since it's not free.

That's why I'm not naming names, affiliations, or locations. My supposition is that there are various levels of corruption in various municipalities around the country. Proof? That's a different issue. Necessary to go into details in what we're discussing here? Not really.

I'd also note that this is bipartisan corruption. IMHO part of good governance is working to keep this under control, rather than letting it take over.

575:

Nojay
The VOTERS rejected J Corbyn & chose arshole BJ .... didn't they?
As Paul says: The trouble with a primary-style system is that it rewards extremism. - see IQ45 & his fascist followers, yes? Or the Brexshitters here.

EC
SO?
Do you want Bo Jon-Sun & his claque of greedy crooks & fascists OUT - or not?

576:

AlanD2 @ 538:

With Ctrl-Alt-Del on Windows 7 (IF I remember without going into the other room to actually look ...) "Shut Down" is one of the menu selections. On Windoze10 it's supposed to be one of the icons in the lower right corner of the display

... but this was one of those "rare situations ... where a hardware reset or power-off" was the only option.

577:

Poul-Henning Kamp @ 545:

Fuck you ... AND THE WHITE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON

578:

573 - Tory B Liar, Teresa Maybot, Call me Dave Scamoron, Jeremy Cor Bin, Kier Stammers, Bozo the Clown. What do all of these individuals have in common? (Hint; it's not their party)

577 - Er no. The Power menu is in the lower LH corner under "Start", so like most Windoze afer 95, you (start to) turn the computer off by pressing "Start".

579:

More worldbuilding, two ways.

There seems to be better evidence for what caused the PETM. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 56 mya is currently one of the better models for anthropogenic climate change. This article shows there's some decent evidence that it was caused by volcanism, specifically, Iceland.

This didn't surprise me. Iceland's odd. Basically it's a hotspot volcano like Yellowstone or Hawai'i, and during the Paleogene it was tracking across Greenland and into the widening north Atlantic. Now the hotspot is under the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and I'm not sure if it will stay stuck there or keep moving. That hotspot X spreading center thing is unique AFAIK.

It's the details that matter, both for our current climate change nightmare and for worldbuilding on ancient SF planets.

--First off, the PETM carbon emissions were significantly higher than our fossil fuel supplies, so we could (if incredibly stupid) burn all our fuel and not get that hot. Since we're burning fuel on the order of ca. 300 years (most in the last 50 or so) and the PETM took 3,000-6,000 years, life WILL NOT adapt to our terfart as it did to the PETM. This is was incredibly stupid means. We're not slowly boiling the climate frog, we're microwaving it, and we need to control our emissions ASAP. Still, +8oC in the next 500 years seems to be off the table. Which is good, seeing how the rivets are starting to pop at +1oC.

--Second, the clathrate gun hypothesis seems to be dying. That's the idea that methane released from the ocean floor can flood the atmosphere and rapidly raise temperatures. As the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout showed, when mass quantities of methane are released into the ocean, they get gobbled by methanotrophs before they make it to the surface. So this isn't (thank Gaia) as likely a doomsday scenario as it was 20 years ago.

And then we get to the proposed mechanism for how Iceland blew carbon, and it's kind of cool. From the article:

"CO2 and other gases can bubble out of tectonic plates as they dive into the mantle, percolating up into the underside of thick crusts like Greenland’s, and forming carbonate formations that can be stable for millions or even billions of years.

"If the crust is ever pulled apart by rifting, however, the trapped carbon can spill upward and erupt as rare carbonatite lava, which contains far more CO2 than standard lava. Indeed, such a process appears to be underway in East Africa right now, where a rift has begun to tear the horn of Africa away from the rest of the continent..."

"Similarly, the hot spot that burned through Greenland starting 60 million years ago could have mobilized any carbonate under its crust, Gernon says. When the rifting began to open up what today is the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, 'you’ll have a huge amount of carbon venting.'

"Evidence of the carbon-rich melt is abundant on either side of the North Atlantic rift, the tectonic division that marks the old boundary between Greenland and Europe..."

The tl;dr point of this is that, even on worlds with thick crust and little active rifting, carbon-rich lavas are possible (Ol Doinyo Lengai is the current example), and that's how carbon will come back into the air.

If I had to guess, this will turn out to be the major mechanism for Earth's mass extinctions: massive volcanoes hitting carbon-rich rocks. It's almost certainly what caused the End Permian (Siberian Traps burning through a huge, young coal field). The Jurassic is associated with the rifting open of the Atlantic (more thick, old rock getting cooked), and so on.

So, as long as flood volcanism and rifts can continue on a planet, both short term mass extinctions and long-term life will continue.

Isn't that wonderful?

580:

paws4thot @ 551: 525 - AIUI, voting in primaries (for those who self-describe as supporters of members of $party) is a more or less uniquely USian thing.

Probably, but since he was pontificating on why the U.S. Democratic Party nominated Clinton instead of Sanders, appropriate to point out he didn't know what he was talking about.

526 - "Don't Care" about religion means things like not attending services of religion (other than possibly friends' and/or relatives' hatches, matches and dispatches), and not actively proselytising TOTW. It does not mean things like not learning a bit about the "Holy Scribble" (or a translation thereof), and/or $church's canon law.

I don't think you grew up surrounded by it the way we are here in the southern U.S. which is why I made the distinction. I don't refuse to go to weddings or funerals just because they're going to be held in a "$church" ... but I've had a few run-ins with "$religious" (mostly "$Xtian") assholes who won't take NO for an answer and I've had trouble because I won't back down from "$religious" bullying ...

I was raised in a "$church" and they kicked me out. I'm still outraged about how it happened.

532 - Everybody else's mileage does seem to vary in this respect; mine to the extent, mine to the extent of expecting to find Start -> Power -> Shutdown (also Sleep and Restart options) in the same place across multiple machines and Windoze variants.

As it should be. My problem stems from IT WASN'T. If it had been there I wouldn't be ranting about it.

545 - Or not? Bozo is a UK citizen living in Ingurlundshire, but, because of where he was born, he had to actively renounce USian citizenship to escape liability for US taxes and the right to vote in USian elections.

Wasn't that something to do with British Law requiring him to give up his dual citizenship to stand for elective office? AFAIK, he was already not paying U.S. taxes or voting in U.S. elections and didn't have to do anything in order to achieve that.

549 - Similarly, the Con and Liebour parties over here regard me as a member of the SNP (I was once a fee-paying member, but have not been a member in good standing for some 26 years, although I have never formally resigned my membership).

I've never been a "fee-paying" member, although I have occasionally contributed monetarily to the Democratic Party & to Democratic candidates (I'm in the REALLY SMALL donor category) ... in addition to attending rallies & making sure I VOTE.

But the voting thing is more a citizenship obligation; a duty to be "informed on the issues" and to "make his/her voice heard". It's not related to which political party I belong to. It's the only democracy can work. Besides, I think it's hypocritical to complain about the government if you can't be bothered to vote.

581:

Since Blair did more harm to British society and politics than any prime minister since (and, arguable, than ALL ones since), I fail to see that replacing the current bunch by a Blairite is likely to be an improvement.

582:

Not as far as I know and, in fact, you don't even have to be a British citizen, because the prime minister is simply an MP who can command a majority in the house of commons. The eligibility rules are here:

https://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/electing-mps/candidates/

It may have been electioneering, or it may have been to due to USA law - the media was highly confused at the time and I couldn't be bothered to chase up.

583:

The UK doesn't require citizenship for some long-term residents to vote in various elections up to MPs for Parliament. I think it's different in the US.

584:

»Probably, but since he was pontificating on why the U.S. Democratic Party nominated Clinton instead of Sanders, appropriate to point out he didn't know what he was talking about.«

Did you totally miss how the National party apparatus tried its damnest to handicap any other candidate that the pre-annointed one during the primaries ?

Also, we're talking about the Country-Club-Party here, where do you think all the Wall-Street money was steered ?

An entirely different thing is that HC, even if she had won, which given the pervasive misogyny I find improbable, would have been unable to get anything done.

If not right out of the gate, both chambers would fall to the opposition after two years, and the propaganda-engines would suck all oxygen out of the room by relitigating Whitewater, Monica and everything else they could throw at her.

Not that I think BS would have done much better, or that BO did - talk about a man who didn't make hay while the sun shone.

But yeah, what do I know, having followed US politics closely for 40 years, and having read a lot about what went down before that...

585:

Not sure I get the rationale.

Johnson took us to hard Brexit, is going to scrap the ECHR, operates without ethical oversight, wants to smash the GFA (in a specific and limited manner), made it harder for minorities to vote and has appointed a bunch of third rate Randian nutjobs - including the sociopaths Javid and Patel and morons like Hancock- to Cabinet level. Oh, and allowed about 120,000 people die through not going to COBRA meetings.

May gave in to the UKIP entryists in her party and created a bunch of dumb redlines and took them from one Nation Tories to UKIP/BNP/NF lite plus introduced the hostile anti-immigrant stance.

Cameron proclaimed big society and ushered in huge cuts in services that decimated Councils and led to 6 years of austerity that crippled the NHS, closed libraries, care homes and parts of the Civil Service we needed and paved the way for the Brexit vote - which he only initiated to protect his arse from the likes of John Redwood and other nutters. Because he was frightened the party might schism and leave his stranglehold on the shires in doubt.

Blair screwed up in how he went into Iraq, but was otherwise reasonably effective - a little too far to the right for my taste. But given the choice between him and 3x Tory administrations, its a no brainer.

586:

Some folks whose opinions I rate note that on Monday the Supreme Court is due to rule on whether or not to gut the EPA in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. They're predicting that other states -- notably California -- will say "fuck you" to any states who try to water down environmental protections, even if the EPA is de-fanged.

Good to see West Virginia v. EPA mentioned. It's a real wild card. The Court may simply say the EPA can't regulate greenhouse gases without some specific guidance from Congress. The Court may say the EPA can't do more than details about anything without specific Congressional guidance. And in the worst case, the Court may say that no agency can write rules without much more guidance than Congress has historically provided. The last one is really scary, because Congress has delegated rule-writing with minimal guidance to various agencies for a long time.

This week I expect an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts that says climate change is Congress's problem, not the EPA's nor the states. Also a concurrence by Justice Gorsuch that is a lot like Justice Thomas's concurrence in the abortion case: that there's a whole lot of other rule-writing discretion that needs to be reconsidered. IIRC, he actually wrote a dissent like that when he was at the Appeals Court level.

587:

I cannot find the statute that states the eligibility to stand as an MP (assuming there IS one!) but, as far as I can see, there is no residence requirement. Yes, people can stand as MPs who can't vote for them, but that's well-known ....

588:

No. He was damn good at covering up his actions under a veneer of semi-socialism, but was at least as monetarist and fascist as the current lot (and more effective at it).

Blair screwed up badly in Northern Ireland, which is probably the main cause of the current mess, but let's skip that. He did more to privatise the NHS, schools etc. (especially to USA companies) than anyone else. He was responsible for gutting the House of Lords (which, remember, was the liberal opposition to Thatcher, not Pillock). He introduced and extended many (perhaps most) of the fascist laws we have today, such as Kafkaesque trials and imprisonment without trial.

589:

Yeah, I know from sources that the federal agencies are bracing for a rollback of agency rule-making authority. In the meantime, I'm just waiting to see what happens.

Oddly, I kind of expect this one, along with Roe, to be what breaks SCOTUS' power, at least if they gut the ability of agencies to make rules. Last year, the US took something like $210 billion in climate-related disasters (hurricanes, wildfires, floods). To give you an idea, that's the size of the annual New York State budget, and only California's is bigger, while the median state budget is closer to $30 billion.

Saying that only states or Congress can regulate GHGs is catastrophic. California, for example, has a 50% chance within the next 50 years of experiencing a trillion-dollar statewide flood due to climate change (the last one was in 1862). And yes, that would bankrupt the world's sixth largest economy, since unlike the US, we can't print our own money to inflate our way out of it.

Note that I'm focusing on money, because it hits rich white men in ways that the RvW decision will not, so they'll have to pay attention too.

Anyway, having some jumped-up, unaccountable lawyers arbitrarily ruling that such costs are just or bearable is going to get them defanged, one way or another. And it will be a fucking mess no matter what happens.

590:

Heteromeles @ 571:

The use of primary elections to choose candidates for the general election was an idea introduced by advocates of the late 19th & early 20th century Progressive Movement that sought to apply the Scientific Method to the problems of industrialization, urbanization immigration and political corruption (a revolt against the excesses of the Gilded Age).

Primary elections were supposed to take control of electoral politics away from political machines and their bosses.

"Many activists joined efforts to reform local government, public education, medicine, finance, insurance, industry, railroads, churches, and many other areas. Progressives transformed, professionalized, and made "scientific" the social sciences, especially history, economics, and political science. In academic fields, the day of the amateur author gave way to the research professor who published in the new scholarly journals and presses. The national political leaders included Republicans Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Charles Evans Hughes, and Democrats William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Al Smith. Leaders of the movement also existed far from presidential politics: Jane Addams, Grace Abbott, Edith Abbott, and Sophonisba Breckinridge were among the most influential non-governmental Progressive Era reformers."

What I think is wrong today is political "machines" have managed to reassert control over the electoral machinery through the insertion of $$$$$$$$$ & TV advertising in primary & general elections. Going back to "smoke filled rooms" wouldn't change that.

591:

EC @ 582
I ASSUME you are badly deluded rather than deliberately lying ....
Bo Jon-Sun's damage is already far greater than anything Tony B did & he's still at it.
SEE Grant @ 586, yes?
.... @ 589 - Sorry, you need to see a trick-cyclist.

592:

Poul-Henning Kamp @ 585:

I refer you to the response in Arkell v. Pressdram

593:

Now this is interesting.

Now that the SC has overturned Roe, suppose state abortion bans get overturned on religious grounds?

That would mean that the states decide on abortion, but they can't decide to ban because of religious restrictions.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jewish-abortion-rights-advocates-use-religious-freedom-suit-access-rcna34178

That principle of religious freedom is the basis of a lawsuit brought by Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor, a synagogue in Boynton Beach, Florida, against a sweeping state abortion ban set to take effect on July 1. Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor is challenging a single law on behalf of a single religion. But the case is also a broader challenge to the anti-abortion rights movement, which conflates a right-wing Christian demand for forced birth with universal morality, and insists on subjugating the country to a sectarian code.

The new Florida law bans most abortions after 15 weeks. There are no exceptions for cases of incest, rape or human trafficking. It does allow an abortion to save a pregnant person’s life or to prevent serious physical injury. But these exceptions aren’t enough to keep the law from violating the free exercise of the Jewish faith. The congregation’s lawsuit states that the Florida law violates Jewish religious beliefs holding that abortion “is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman,” among other reasons.

The Florida law is uninterested in the mental health of the pregnant individual and narrowly restricts its concern for physical harm. As a result, the lawsuit says, “the act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion.” It also “threatens the Jewish people by imposing the laws of other religions upon Jews.”

594:

Fedsoc thought leaders are already floating arguments that conservative Christianity is the only sincere religion.

https://forward.com/culture/507161/reform-jews-abortion-freedom-of-religion/

The legal concept of a "substantial burden," which was developed in the context of Christian faiths, does not neatly map onto a Jewish faith that does not actually impose any requirements on congregants, but instead only offers aspirational principles.

My conclusion here should not be surprising. Historically, the people who brought Free Exercise claims tend to be more observant or orthodox. Those who are less devout are less likely to be burdened by restrictions on religion. Stated differently, those whose religions practices do not conflict with prevailing societal norms are unlikely to seek redress in the courts.

595:

Er, I meant to italicize everything after the link

596:

“ get a reissue copy of original Black Box Traveller, and try it. ”

I think the connection to Biggles is not a surprise. Traveller always looked like an attempt at the Star Wars “clunkers in space” / Andre Norton “Traders” style universe that descended from the Boys Own Stories. Dan Dare, anyone?

My problem with Traveler is players (or, worse, GMs) who try to make sense of the economics of running a space vessel doing trading. Same problem with Firefly role playing. You’ve got to get the players to Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain - they can play at being space-traders, but must pay no attention to how much they pay or earn doing it. Because it will not make sense.

597:

That's such a brilliant argument. I really hope the Jewish group fail in court purely so we can see the far right vigorously arguing over which is the One True Faith, who best expresses it and the appropriate punishment for heathens and apostates.

Personally I'd be hanging out for the first trip through Leviticus. There's a whole bunch of that sort of thing, with obligatory diversions through The Handmaids Tale, Salem, miscegenation laws, slavery, you name it. Some of which various Christian sects adhere to, and some they don't (throwing a shrimp on the barbie vs men putting their penis in another mans vagina).

Actually, am I right to assume that constitutional amendments like the one restricting slavery are outside the direct purview of the court? They can interpret them, but they can't just say "amendment expunged due to non-compliance with religious dogma"? But they could say "since non-Christians are inferior that counts as due process of law and thus they can legitimately be enslaved"?

598:

Dude! That's my country you're talking about!

599:

Just the usual reminder that Charlie's blog isn't in the US, and UK libel law applies to him.

Yes.

All of the people I mentioned are dead except for 2. And for those I didn't mean to imply in any way they are corrupt. Just that they are swimming in a system that is. Basically one of them has fought the corruption in an impressive way. The other was mentioned just to help identify who is who.

And as to the organizations, I was referring to historical things happening prior to the 1970s.

But your point is well taken.

600:

Also, we're talking about the Country-Club-Party here

Just to be clear here. The country club membership of the US in general is dominated by R's. D's who are in the country club set are a distinct minority of such club memberships.

I think you mean the country club members of the D party. Which are distinct from the more and more confused "rabble" "common man" they feel they might be controlling.

601:

IANAL.

That said, I think basically everybody with a brain supports the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof). For the Aussies "Congress" is normally read as "every legislature at every level in the US."

The fun begins when you ask what "free exercise" means, which is the case here. Per Wikipedia, "in the 1890 case Davis v. Beason: 'However free the exercise of religion may be, it must be subordinate to the criminal laws of the country, passed with reference to actions regarded by general consent as properly the subjects of punitive legislation.'" So my first guess is that a simple "abortion is murder-adjacent" rule would be regarded as civil law, not criminal, and religion is irrelevant.

Where the fight might get interesting is if someone makes a compelling case that science and various religions differ on what constitutes a viable embryo, because it's a continuum, not a state change, and that the lawmakers have been ignoring the real diversity of opinion and following a religious practice. This would be forbidden under the anti-establishment clause. Obviously this SCOTUS won't bite, but some other group might.

Another way to seriously mess with the "life begins at conception" crew is to file suit on behalf of the HeLa cell line, which is a hardy human cell line that was derived from a cervical cancer taken from Henrietta Lacks.

It's a single-celled organism, and while its genes are human, their arrangement into chromosomes is not. There's an analogous problem with a newly fertilized zygote, where the chromosomes of the egg and sperm take time to integrate and become a functioning diploid. So if newly fertilized eggs are human, arguably HeLa cells are too. And there immense numbers of them out there.

The point of all this chicanery is to demonstrate that the idea that life begins at conception is a religious idea arbitrarily imposed, that therefore it is forbidden by the anti-establishment clause, and that all anti-abortion bills have to, at least, be rewritten to forbid abortion after fetal external viability. And that was part of the Roe ruling already.

602:

»The country club membership of the US in general is dominated by R's.«

I know, but you dont need to be member of a country-club to subscribe to the value-set they represent, which is why I use that metaphor.

The major problem is of course one of age.

If the D's were actually interested in advancing their stated agenda, they would elect AOC to speaker of the House and Biden would resign to give Kamela a head-start.

Not happening, and Biden even already shot down any talk of reforming the Council of Guardians: When you're north of 65 and got your shit together, it is all about "stability".

603:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/democrat-republican-elect-primary-1.6497911 https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1538872853755469825?s=21&t=HnUt_aYSOFRFrcz6FiFIiA

Meanwhile the Democrats are spending money helping fringe Republicans win their primaries, because that worked out great in 2016.

604:

Duffy
I ( And a few others - none of us have so far been listened to ) have been saying this for a couple of months.
The "abortion ban" is specifically an Evangelical-christian hang-up, which they are trying to impose on others.
Suppose you are Jewish? Or Bhuddist? Right
Interesting court cases ahoy!

skulgun
But that is openly against the US' "Establishment" clause, isn't it?

Troutwaxer
Precisely - YOUR country - NOW is the time to stop christofascism, before it's too late.

605:

Basically there's a risk that the current court is so radical that states will begin to unilaterally ignore its rulings.

Not just entire states. This headline showed up almost immediately: Dozens of elected prosecutors say they will refuse to prosecute abortion care.

An interesting point is that these are elected positions, meaning the current holders are aware they can be kicked out very easily.

Too, every prosecutor has more potential cases to deal with than they can handle anyway, constrained by both time and money. It's easy to say, "Sorry, we've got more pressing matters."

606:

If the D's were actually interested in advancing their stated agenda, they would elect AOC to speaker of the House and Biden would resign to give Kamela a head-start.

And just how would that change much of anything except generate a lot of talk points for the next election.

As a practical matter the Senate is at 50+1,50 for most things that CAN get through. And at less than 50 for anything very progressive.

So lots of sound and fury but not much else.

607:

Greg: The "abortion ban" is specifically an Evangelical-christian hang-up, which they are trying to impose on others.

Opposition to abortion wasn't even in the evangelicals' wheelhouse until the end of the 1970s/early 1980s; prior to that point it was mostly a Catholic thing (and note that per polling, about 70% of US Catholics are opposed to a ban).

The abortion crusade is, purely and simply, a white supremacist shibboleth (driven by terror of white extinction) with overtones of what, to British eyes, are a vicious class war against the poor (who are disproportionately non-white).

The real agenda is segregation and suppression or complete elimination of non-white communities (while the white christians are forced to be fruitful and multiply).

You cannot take what they say at face value: it's all code-words that turn out to mean something else. (Which is a real problem for foreigners like us, or for folks on the ASD spectrum, who tend to be overly literal-minded in interpreting what wormtongue neurotypicals say.)

608:

Administrative note: this topic appears to have run its course and is now a sucking swamp of, well, the obvious chew toys: Roe v. Wade, climate change, and weirdly the purpose of the Windows "Start" menu (which I would really like to ignore completely because I'm not a Microsoftie).

So I'm abandoning it.

I'll blog about something else when the fancy takes me, but first I have to start work again (I think my head's over COVID now) -- got a novella to finish.

609:

My limited experience is that they'll happily accept volunteers without asking too many questions.

I'm reminded of Questionable Content's take on a volunteer's first day and general duties. I've done conventions; I can relate. Although to be fair, con volunteering can be more like this.

610:

That is why I base my judgements on what people do, not what they say; it's always a good principle, but is essential for people like me. That often involves some research, such as finding the original statement for which people are pilloried for 'anti-semitism' or looking up the text of the actual statutes. It's still not entirely reliable, of course.

Greg should try it, at least as an experiment.

611:

»And just how would that change much of anything«

If you cant see that yourself, I dont think there is any way I can possibly explain it.

612:

The Jesusland Map is starting to look plausible, even desirable.

Blue States secede and join Canada (forming the United States of Canada - USC) leaving the remaining backwards poverty stricken Red State to form the United States of Jesus (USJ)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesusland_map

I know its not that simple, since places like Atlanta will want to stay Blue and Pennsyltucky will want to be Red.

So look for mass migrations and large numbers of deaths similar to that of post imperial India when Muslims went to Pakistan and Hindus moved to India. - with millions dying along the way.

Once things get sorted out, the USC becomes a high tech advanced tolerant multicultural society (underpopulated Canada is actively encouraging immigration from all over the world).

Without Federal funds stolen from Blue States infrastructure and military capacity of the USJ collapses.

The only industries left to the USJ are timber, agriculture and fossil fuels.

Climate change fucks with all of them as it makes Canada ever more desirable place to live with a temperate climate.

Raging forest fires spread even to eastern woodlands, destroying the timber industry.

The drying up of the Colorado River and Oglala Aquifer kills most of USJ agriculture leaving half the nation in a new dust bowl.

However, Texas continues to pump oil even after a 130 deg F heat dome combined with a failure of the Texas power grid results in a million dead Houstonians.

As the USC becomes the worlds new superpower, the USJ descends into a backwards uneducated third world shithole theocracy governed by rich oligarchs and tele-evangelists.

When that happens, the USC builds a great wall to keep out USJ refugees.

613:

The establishment clause has been raised in this context before. Stevens' dissent in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) argues that defining the beginning of life in a certain way legislatively contravenes the establishment clause. Anti-choice legal scholars have a counterargument for this, but the court hasn't ruled on that point so far.

614:

Given recent decisions by the Supreme Court, is it wise to rely on "normal" definitions? Only Congress is specifically prohibited from establishing a religion.
Could, say, a sitting President use an Executive Order?

615:

bit atlas shrugged really

616:

That's a really ugly question.

617:

Charlie
Um, err ... I realise that the US foamers are all liars, but are you really sure that the "white supremacist" bit is not a bonus add-on, rather than the main aim? { And, yes, I was aware that this "abortion" thing is a recent - i.e. the past 30 years phenomenon }

EC
Oh bloody STOP IT - of course I watch what they do, which is why even Blair would be better than this lot, whom you appear determined to support, because Labour are not "pure" enough ....

Duffy
Very amusing, but what happens if/when the "R's" manage to grab power in 2024 & the whole USA goes fascist, eh?

618:

Sorry. But if I can think it...

619:

I'm channelling Scalzi, I suppose: But what if they didn't?

620:

That's such a brilliant argument. I really hope the Jewish group fail in court purely so we can see the far right vigorously arguing over which is the One True Faith, who best expresses it and the appropriate punishment for heathens and apostates.

Well, there's Jewish opposition to it, on the grounds that not all Jews share the beliefs of the synagogue that filed the lawsuit…

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/jewish-arguments-against-pro-lifers-misunderstand-judaism/

621:

~Sighs~ Yeah, I know. So can the crazies.

622:

The white supremacy is central. One way to describe the faults of American Conservatives is to say that they care far more about the genes of the people who control the U.S. than the culture, and they don't understand that the culture is more important than the genes.

623:

If you cant see that yourself, I dont think there is any way I can possibly explain it.

Great excuse.

BTW if K becomes President how does anyone she nominates for the new VP get through the Senate as it is now tied 50/50?

Sorry but to someone who does pay attention to local politics, your suggestion sounds more appealing to a base than a plan rooted in reality to get something done.

Now that Charlie has grown tired of this I'll likely not reply to any reply you have.

624:

Blue States secede and join Canada (forming the United States of Canada - USC)

Um, if you're joining us, why would we accept your terminology? We don't have "states", we have provinces, and the power split is very different to the American one.

Sounds like you're contemplating a takeover more than joining…

Also, given the population differences adding American stats as provinces would basically turn political control of Canada over to former American states. I don't see Canadians supporting that, especially given that your left includes a lot of our right, while our left is basically not in your conversation.

I'll grant that this would be a Conservative's wet dream — an overwhelming number of voters primed to vote Conservative — except for the little problem of suddenly being outvoted by all the newcomers. Poilievre is short-sighted enough (and an ideologue enough) he might go for it, assuming he'd be in charge, but I doubt many other party leaders would.

625:

Yup. Especially this lot, who are literalists.

626:

Blue States secede and join Canada (forming the United States of Canada - USC) leaving the remaining backwards poverty stricken Red State to form the United States of Jesus (USJ)

The JesusLand map is cute, but it doesn't really show how the Red/Blue divide in the U.S. is mostly urban (blue) and rural (red). Aside from metropolitan areas, the West Coast (California, Oregon, and Washington) is definitely red. Here in Oregon, people in the eastern part of the state (everything east of the Cascade Mountains) want to secede and join Idaho. And there have been many proposals by conservatives to split California into two or more states.

So a real JesusLand map of the U.S. would be totally red, with lots of barely-visible blue splotches.

627:

Unless you made the blue and red splotches represent the populations, in which case the red would be small and the blue large.

628:

...what happens if/when the "R's" manage to grab power in 2024 & the whole USA goes fascist, eh?

I'm afraid we're likely going to find out - and most of us in the U.S. are not going to be happy...

629:

BTW if K becomes President how does anyone she nominates for the new VP get through the Senate as it is now tied 50/50?

Irrelevant, really.

Until 1967, when the 25th Amendment was ratified, when a president died and was succeeded by the VP, or the VP died, the VP post was left vacant. So four presidents never had a VP, and eighteen have served part of their term without one.

If K becomes president, then next in line is Nancy Pelosi, and would remain so until the next election.

(For added alt-history lulz: if Wendell Wilkie had been elected in 1940 but everything else remained the same, both the POTUS (Wilkie) and VPOTUS (Charles McNary) would have died before the next presidential election. Which would have left whoever Wilkie chose as the Secretary of State as POTUS. (Different presidential succession rules before 1967).)

630:

Moz @ 598:

Constitutional Amendments become integral part of the Constitution. A religiously biased court could claim some state law does not violate the 1st Amendment establishment clause, but they can't say the 1st Amendment doesn't apply.

Same thing goes for the 13th Amendment.

631:

I see no reason for Canada to accept any form of integration with Blue State USians, for the reasons articulated by Robert above.

I suspect what we will actually see is more of a Stephenson-esque 'Ameristan' situation where travel through the red zones is best done in an armed convoy as they collapse into Supply Side Jesus madness, while the cities continue to develop.

632:

How will they feed the cities?

633:

»How will they feed the cities?«

One of the dirty secrets of the federal budget is how perverse many of its details are in the aggregate.

US agriculture is very heavily subsidized in a blue→red direction.

The so-called red-states are general pulling in more federal dollars than they pay in taxes, in particular if you also count natural disaster responses.

634:

Just a reminder, ten miles from my purple-blue district is redneckistan. California's a blue state only because it has some stupidly massive cities. The rural areas are stuck being governed by a blue legislature, and a bunch of them want to secede (state of Jefferson), but California mirrors the rest of the country. Oregon and Washington have the same divide.

I'd also flag industrial agriculture as one of the big, underlooked problems for the rural areas. When a few people control most of the means of production, their politics generally rules. We saw that back with the slavers, too, and that playbook hasn't changed very much. Only the map in play has changed.

Since no one's paying attention, I'll flag that the Colorado River's in danger of not supplying enough water to Arizona, Las Vegas, and southern California this summer. If you think water politics doesn't matter...

635:

There are no blue states. There are no red states. There is urban and there is rural.

636:

Greg Tingey @ 605: But that is openly against the US' "Establishment" clause, isn't it?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

"Establishment" like the Church of England. Some of the former colonies had "established" religions; Massachusetts - Puritans, Maryland - Roman Catholic, Virginia - Church of England ... and discriminated against followers of other sects.

In the early years after ratification of the Constitution & Bill of Rights, Congress interpreted this to mean that "religious" entities & their affiliates could not receive money from the government. Period.

Lately the court has stood that on its head and ruled that religious institutions must receive the same funding as non-sectarian "charaties" ... but the religious institutions are NOT bound by the laws, rules & regulations (non-discrimination & accountability) that control non-sectarian organizations.

637:

Yes. But the comment I replied to implied that peaceful relations had broken down.

638:

Greg Tingey @ 618: Charlie
Um, err ... I realise that the US foamers are all liars, but are you really sure that the "white supremacist" bit is not a bonus add-on, rather than the main aim? { And, yes, I was aware that this "abortion" thing is a recent - i.e. the past 30 years phenomenon }

If he's not "really sure", I am. I've lived with it & lived through it (so far). It's been going on for a lot longer than 30 years.

It's the anti-abortion message that's the bonus add-on. It starts with Brown v. Board of Education. Many of the other Warren Court & subsequent decisions acknowledging rights flow from it.

  • Reynolds v. Sims - apportionment "one person, one vote"
  • Miranda v. Arizona - right to have an attorney during police questioning
  • Gideon v. Wainwright - right to have legal representation at trial, paid for by the state to indigent defendants
  • Cooper v. Aaron - States are bound by the Court's decisions and must enforce them even if the states disagree with them
  • Abington School District v. Schempp - School SPONSORED bible readings in public schools are unconstitutional.
  • Engel v. Vitale - It is unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official school prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools, due to violation of the First Amendment.
  • Gomillion v. Lightfoot - An electoral district with boundaries created to disenfranchise African Americans violated the Fifteenth Amendment.
  • Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County - A decision to close all local, public schools and provide vouchers to attend private schools were constitutionally impermissible.
  • Green v. County School Board of New Kent County - A "freedom of choice" plan did not comply with the responsibility to determine a system of admission to public schools on a non-racial basis.
  • Lucy v. Adams - Established the right of all citizens to be accepted as students. Enjoins and restrains denying college admissions solely on account of race or color, the right to enroll in State Supported universities and pursue courses of study there.
  • Loving v. Virginia - Ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Cited as precedent in Obergefell v. Hodges.
  • Boynton v. Virginia - Racial segregation in public transportation was illegal because such segregation violated the Interstate Commerce Act, which broadly forbade discrimination in interstate passenger transportation.
  • Wesberry v. Sanders - Districts in the United States House of Representatives must be approximately equal in population
  • Brady v. Maryland - Prosecutors must turn over all evidence to the defense (including exculpatory evidence)
  • New York Times Co. v. Sullivan - "Actual malice"
  • Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District - Defined First Amendment rights of students in U.S. public schools
  • Griswold v. Connecticut - THE "right to privacy" decision ("right to marital privacy"). Overturned Connecticut's Comstock law that prohibited any person from using "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". Basis for privacy as "protected from governmental intrusion".

Griswold is the foundational precedent for Eisenstadt v. Baird, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges.

I could go on (and on, and on, and ...) but the ULTIMATE TARGET is the entire civil rights oeuvre of the Warren Court, so "white supremacist" is EXACTLY the main aim.

List of Warren Court Cases

639:

I remember some of the later of those.

What's very obvious to me, as an outsider, is that the anti-abortion message has changed (over decades) from being one of many examples of their intolerance to being their primary slogan, at least for now. I am not the right person to predict whether this would be superseded if they win and by what, nor why they chose it in the first place, though I doubt they took even a semi-conscious decision to do that.

640:

David L @ 624: Sorry but to someone who does pay attention to local politics, your suggestion sounds more appealing to a base than a plan rooted in reality to get something done.

Actually his "suggestion" is straight out of Tucker Carlson's Faux Newz playbook along with other fascist republiQan "Clinton Crazies"1 irrational hatred for the former First Lady, Senator & Secretary of State.

But, what are you gonna' do, haters gotta hate.
--

1 Yes, I realize that fascist republiQan "Clinton Crazies" is an unnecessarily duplicative redundancy ... but sometimes you gotta' go with the double (triple) negative to emphasize the true state of affairs

641:

Troutwaxer @ 628:

How you gonna' do that though? If you make sizes proportional to populations you end up with your blue urban splotches being bigger than the splotches for the states they're located within.

Maybe instead of using the size of splotches, use color saturation. The blue splotches are a deep, rich blue, while the surrounding rural areas become a faded pink.

Which might even be appropriate given how so many of their "leaders" are former Trots.

642:

JReynolds @ 630:

With Pelosi only a heartbeat away from the Presidency, I don't think 'K' would have any problems getting republiQan votes for ANYONE she wanted to nominate ... well, maybe not Stacey Abrams and I don't think A.O.C. will be old enough until right before the 2024 election (October 2024?).

Maybe 'K' would consider nominating Hunter Biden?

643:

I would expect her to pick Elizabeth Warren

644:

“If you make sizes proportional to populations you end up with your blue urban splotches being bigger than the splotches for the states they're located within.”

So dump the entire nonsense of states. Why on earth should there be states (with a governor and two senators) with fewer people than some modest towns (with a mayor, maybe)? It’s ridiculous,anti-democratic, unsupportable and other words of disapprobation.

Yes, yes, history, sovereignty, blah, blah, blah. Fuck it. Maybe try doing something different.

646:

I would expect her to pick Elizabeth Warren.

I'm pretty sure this won't happen, for important procedural reasons.

When a senator resigns, the governor of their state picks their successor.

Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker is a Republican, so he'd likely pick a Republican to replace Warren.

Now the thing to remember is that the VP is primarily assassination insurance. They certainly can get an additional portfolio, but their primary job is to either replace the POTUS in an emergency, or (alternatively) scare off the assassins by being scarier than the POTUS so don't shoot him. (Sarcasm warning) Based on this "logic," if Harris became President during an emergency and had to select a successor, she could do worse than to choose Hillary Clinton. What MAGAt would want to target Harris if they got Hillary as their reward? (/sarcasm) Don't bother explaining why this is a bad idea. I flagged it for a reason.

So far as who Harris would actually choose, if it was after the November election and Stacey Abrams lost her run for the Georgia governor, I'd expect her to be high on the list of candidates. Two black women in charge wouldn't piss off the radical white more than one, and it should would energize everyone else.

In the 19th Century (when most of the VPs replaced Presidents), often the VP job remained vacant until the next election. Depending on politics (President-in-waiting Pelosi, with no need for a tiebreaker in the Senate) that could also happen.

647:

Je m'enrôlerais demain.

648:
  • The National Review is right up there with the Federalists - they're certainly not to the left of Faux Noise.
  • Of course there is, just like GHWBush found a black lawyer willing to sell out everyone like Clarence Thomas.
  • 649:

    JBS
    THANK YOU for that horrible list - it is clear that - from the list - that the current SCOTUS "wants" to go back to (at least) the legal position as of about 1954, yes?

    650:

    US amendments function legally the same way they do here, it's just that (presumably for hysterical raisins) they appear to stand alone as separate documents forever. I guess that way you don't need to know about whatever previously existing provisions they clash with and therefore supersede, so it is simpler to put up as a proposition. For us, our referendums usually ask a question that is phrased either to paraphrase an Act in plain language describing its effect on the constitution, or to include the specific wording in the constitution and how it is intended to be changed. It's clunky, but it means we revise and amend the wording of the existing constitution rather than create separate documents, which is the same way we amend legislation and write legislation to amend legislation.

    The Americans do use legislation to amend statute law the same way that we do, they just don't seem to do it that way for constitutional change. I guess for us the Act that accompanies a referendum is subject to some sort of judicial review and therefore open to challenge, but the referendum provisions of the constitution allow referendums to change anything, including the referendum provisions themselves (and such a referendum was indeed passed in 1977 to allow Territorians to vote in referendums), so I think the review input has to be more about jurisprudence than constitutionality.

    I couldn't say whether one way or another is better. As you can see in this list of Australian referendums, we've passed significantly fewer (namely 8) constitutional changes in 121 years than the USA has (27) in 234 years. But that hides the way that the early US amendments were used as an extension to the original document, and in particular the extraordinary story of the XXVIIth Amendment (something that could have just been a very minor wording change but for some reason took 200 years to ratify).

    651:

    More like 1864, I think.

    652:

    Just saw in the news that Thomas is open to reconsidering the 'actual malice' provision of American libel law. I guess with all the negative press he and his wife are getting, that makes sense…

    653:

    The thing about amendments to the US Constitution is that they require the amendment to pass both houses of Congress by two-thirds vote, and for three-quarters of state legislatures or purpose-called state constitutional conventions to approve them, before they become law. That's pretty much an impossible hurdle for both sides for most issues. I'm not an expert, but I suspect that a constitutional right to privacy would be the easiest amendment to pass, and I don't think it's coming any time soon.

    In California, the amendments have to be passed by both houses of the state legislature and approved by voters. As presented to voters they have a plain text summary, arguments for and against, and the actual strike-out and amend text of the amendment if you like such things. Ditto county and city amendments. These are fairly routine.

    654:

    Re: Roe vs. Wade

    Maybe folks here already knew the below, but it was new to me.

    Anyways ... When I looked at the most commonly mentioned 'medical' (physiological) reason for having safe access to abortions, i.e., ectopic pregnancy I also found some disturbing socio-demographic info.

    In the US, ectopic pregnancies account for 3-4% of all deaths during pregnancy.

    The below article was authored by two MDs. I've listed only a few key points.

    https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/Ectopic_pregnancy_epidemiology_and_demographics

    'Ectopic pregnancy mortality ratio was 3.5 times higher for women older than 35 years than those younger than 25 years during 2003-2007 in The United States.'

    'Ectopic pregnancy mortality ratio was 6.8 times higher in African Americans than their whites counterparts during 2003-2007 in The United States.'

    'In most of European countries and North America, the incidence of ectopic pregnancy has tripled over the past 30 years.'

    Taken together with the info below, this recent SCOTUS decision is a disaster on so many levels.

    https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rates-declined-for-younger-women-increased-for-older-women.html?utm_campaign=20220406msacos1ccstors&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

    'Shifting Age Structures' (I've shortened some of the sentences.)

    a)There were 116.40 births for every 1,000 women ages 20-24 in 1990. b)In 2019, there were only 66.59 births to every 1,000 women in that age range — a 42.79% decline.

    During the same period, the fertility rates of older women rose significantly.

    c)In 1990, there were 31.50 births for every 1,000 women ages 35-39. d)In 2019 there were 52.72 births for every 1,000 women ages 35-39 — a 67.35% increase.

    Net overall fertility rate declined because the increased birth rates among older women did not offset the declines among younger women.

    655:

    Australia has a similar setup, but it's up to the people rather than a tangle of representatives. The federal government passes the referendum bill then the people have to approve. They generally don't.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Australia#Alterations_to_the_constitution

    Aotearoa has more success, but on the other hand if it was a US city it wouldn't make the top 10 for population, so it might be more accurate to regard our PM as a mayor equivalent (or alternatively, the overwhelmingly popular choice as governor of five states... if you choose the least populated five or six and allow the same person to be elected to run all of them)

    656:

    California, like most of the western states and a few of the eastern ones, has ballot initiatives. The voters can put an amendment to their state constitution on the ballot and approve it and the legislature can pound sand.

    657:

    California, like most of the western states and a few of the eastern ones, has ballot initiatives. The voters can put an amendment to their state constitution on the ballot and approve it and the legislature can pound sand.

    Oh yes it does, and for laws, not just constitutional amendments. I was involved in getting a local law on the ballot a few years back.

    658:

    What you describe for California is similar to Australia and its states (though an Australian referendum isn't a simple majority, it requires a majority of states as well as a majority of people, though the state votes are counted as the votes of the people of the states). You'd think they were descended from the same British legal system or something.

    I'm not sure I'd say this is a matter of routine here. At least, it's complicated and some changes can be made without a referendum. I already mentioned Australia has only passed 8, but the number of changes achieved through legislation is larger than this. The state of Queensland has passed 3 referendums, one of which, in 1899, was the referendum to participate in federation and become part of a country that didn't exist yet, called Australia. It did not pass a 1917 referendum abolishing its upper House of Parliament, yet in 1921 on achieving the needed majorities in both houses, the government of the day did abolish the upper house via legislation (its members in the upper house who voted for abolition were called the "suicide squad"). Queensland has a colourful history, and while its a reputation as a conservative backwater is accurate enough, it has also been something of an incubator for the Australian progressive movement in many ways (not to mention boasting some surprising progressive milestones in its own right). Why yes, that is a recipe for conflict.

    Ballot initiatives sound like fun. I think they would freak the living fundament out of quite a few people here, which is why we'll probably never have them. It's fascinating to consider what could be done, even if it's just showing how much support there might be for things that wouldn't get up that way, but could still influence conventional lawmaking. I'm sure a bit of that happens?

    659:

    timrowledge @ 645:

    Then you have a map with no meaningful relationship to what it's trying to represent. Nobody is going to understand it.

    And as far as doing away with the "governor and two senators", you're going to have to amend the Constitution. If you've got the necessary two-thirds majorities in both houses and the requisite three-quarters of the states to ratify, have at it, But I don't think you're going to get it.

    You're going to have to find solutions within the constraints you're stuck with? You can curse the darkness, but that doesn't provide any light.

    660:

    timrowledge @ 645:

    ... or to put it another way, Which one of you mice going to put the bell on that cat?

    661:

    Duffy @ 594: That principle of religious freedom is the basis of a lawsuit brought by Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor, a synagogue in Boynton Beach, Florida [...] The congregation’s lawsuit states that the Florida law violates Jewish religious beliefs holding that abortion “is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman,” among other reasons.

    I would love to see that succeed, but I don't think its going to fly.

    First, the lawsuit has to demonstrate that carrying out abortions is a genuine part of a sincerely held religious belief. In this case they probably can: I'm not a student of Judaism, but I can well believe that there are long-standing strands of Jewish theological thought that consider this question and arrive at such a conclusion.

    However the government (in this case the State of Florida) can still prevail by arguing two things:

  • This is not aimed at Jews in particular. I don't think anyone is going to disagree there.

  • The law is in support of an overriding government interest which is more important than the religious liberty being circumscribed. This is the important balancing test. There are lots of religious groups who would like to do things which are illegal, but merely because its your religion doesn't give you a free pass. Case in point: the "Children of God", a pseudo-Christian cult who believed that God wanted them to do things the law called "child sexual abuse" and "incest". Their claims to 1st Amendment protection for their religious practices failed because the government has an overriding interest in protecting children from abuse.

  • The legislature in particular gets a broad pass from the courts to decide what its interests are; if the legislature decides that protecting "unborn children" is important, well, it is presumed to be so unless proven otherwise. You and I may suspect that the real motivation is the imposition of a religious agenda, but the government doesn't have to prove us wrong to prevail.

    Also, atheism isn't a junior partner here (at least in theory). A claim by a humanist atheist doctor that he should be allowed to carry out abortions because that it is the morally right course of action is just as much protected by the 1st Amendment as any claim that God told him to. Ultimately the issue comes down to the right to bodily autonomy of the woman versus the supposed rights of the fetus, and the Supreme Court has already decided the answer to that.

    662:

    Heteromeles @ 647:

    Slightly complicated by state laws for how vacancies are filled. The Governor of Massachusetts appoints a replacement, but state law requires a special election 145 to 160 days after a vacancy occurs.

    Additionally, Federal Law requires the appointee to face the voters at the next general election, which is November 8, 2022. We're already less than 145 days from that date, so that would probably be an additional complication for Massachusetts republiQan Governor.

    The Federal requirement is why in Georgia Kelly Loeffler was appointed in December 2019 after Johnny Isakson resigned, but had to face an "open primary" on November 3, 2020, with a run-off election on January 5, 2021 (where oddly enough the other republiQan incumbent ALSO lost a run-off to his Democratic opponent).

    Because the seat vacated by Isakson is Senate Class III, Raphael Warnock (who defeated Loeffler in the election) was only for the remainder of Isakson's term and he faces election/re-election in November 2022, when Isakson would have normally have had to stand for re-election.

    Georgia's other Senator Jon Ossoff is in Senate Class II which will be up for election again in November 2026.

    Warren is in Senate Class I and faces voters again in November 2024.

    And the cherry on top is that if Biden WERE going to resign, it would best for the Democratic Party if he waited until AFTER January 2023 so that Harris would have the advantage of being eligible for two full terms of her own under the rules of the 22nd Amendment.

    663:

    Greg Tingey @ 650:

    At least ... although the closer they can get to 1854 the happier I think they'll be. I just don't know how they're going to find a way to rule the 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments unconstitutional ... along with the 16th of course.

    I think they'd probably find 1564 even more congenial.

    664:

    SFReader @ 655: Re: Roe vs. Wade

    I'm pretty sure the court had access to the data indicating that lack of abortion services would increase pregnancy mortality by almost 7% among African-American women. I don't think that factored into their decision.

    African-Americans already suffer greater adverse outcomes from our health care system. I doubt a 7% increase would have been enough to tip the balance in favor of striking down Roe v Wade. The "court" had already made up their minds to do it and needed no added incentive.

    665:

    Eliminating privacy, reducing women to the status of service animals, erasing the line between church and state - all in a day's work for the SC.

    But you ain't seen nothing yet. With West Virginia v USEPA the SC can eliminate the EPA's power to regulate (and call into question the entire basis of government).

    https://fortune.com/2022/06/27/supreme-court-epa-ruling-ramifications-2022/

    And what perfect timing.

    https://kmarson.com/2022/06/27/americans-are-pissed/

    Extreme weather events are occurring on an almost daily basis, whether it be rising temperatures, fires, tornados, hurricanes, or floods. I’m glad we didn’t plan a trip to Yellowstone this summer because a large portion of it will remain closed. Oceans are heating up and deserts are dying. Ghost trees line up and down along the East Coast. Ocean conveyor belts are shutting down, and seas are heating up and acidifying. Marine life gobbles up microplastics like they are candy. Ice sheets are melting and oceans are rising. Soon, all coastal cities will be threatened with flooding and there won’t be enough FEMA or insurance money to go around. America is losing its trees to fires and the world is collectively losing its lungs to Amazon deforestation. Biodiversity is declining across the board, and soon there will be no bugs left for birds to eat. The ozone layer keeps depleting, but our government does little to keep pollution at bay — especially if the power of the EPA will be limited. Topsoil is eroding, bees are dying, and aridification is drying the planet out. Monoculture upsets the natural balance of soils, genetically modified foods are risky, and farm animals are loaded with antibiotics. Worldwide, famines are becoming more frequent and cities are running out of drinking water. Fracking contaminates aquifers and oil spills damage the ecosystem. Air pollution, acid rain, urban sprawl, and overpopulation are just a few modern day problems. Unrecycled plastics overflow waste dumps and we breathe their particulates into our lungs. Cryptocurrency mining uses huge amounts of power, and that power is getting harder and more expensive to create.

    The clock is ticking ever faster toward the day when a huge portion of this country will officially run out of water. We pretend that the inevitable will never happen, but doing so fools no one but ourselves. Lake Mead is nearing dead pool status which translates to a massive loss of power. Speaking of power, the country’s largest nuclear plant needs lots of water to keep it running, and that facility is located in a desert. Unfortunately, that same desert allocates much of its water to farms leased to Saudi Arabia. All across the country, rivers are drying up, reservoirs are evaporating, and salt water is contaminating the drinking water supply. Soon, water will be worth more than its weight in gold.

    So you government haters will get what you've always wanted - to be free of those nosey meddlesome federal regulations.

    You will also get poisoned water, carcinogenic soil and contaminated air.

    Bon appetite.

    Your grandchildren will live in a crap sack world, and they will curse your memory for it.

    666:

    "R v W"
    Useful Link - which is P Z Myers' "Pharyngula" blog on this & the widening circle of religious insanity.

    Damian
    Maybe - but, perhaps 1860-61 would be a better bet, jut before the US Civil War kicked off?
    When were the Saelm witch trials? Ah - 1692-3. Perfect.

    Duffy
    Yes - & it's virtually certain the arseholes will do it - back to a minarchy, as proposed before the present US "constitution" was passed - IIRC, wasn't there a brief period when the US actually had a minarchy { Which failed disastrously } before the present set-up was instituted?

    667:

    Or, indeed, that an ratified Amendment to the USian Constitution requires a further Amendment to "cancel" it.

    668:

    When were the Salem witch trials?

    Well, Alito was citing English legal authorities going back to that era. I'm sure we'll end up talking about William Tyndale ere long.

    669:

    The Americans do use legislation to amend statute law the same way that we do, they just don't seem to do it that way for constitutional change.

    Trying to add a new U.S. Constitutional Amendment is a real nightmare - which is why it has been over 50 years since the last one was approved (I'm ignoring the weird 27th amendment, which was initiated in 1789 and ratified in 1992, 202 years later!).

    The Constitutional amendment process is way too hard, since trying to get three-fourths of the states to agree to anything is virtually impossible. Changing this process would require a Constitutional Amendment - talk about Catch 22...

    672:

    Actually, I think that abortion laws more more liberal in 1854 than the one recently upheld.

    673:

    From 1776 until the mid-1800s abortion was viewed as socially unacceptable; however, abortions were not illegal in most states. During the 1860s a number of states passed anti-abortion laws. Most of these laws were ambiguous and difficult to enforce. After 1860 stronger anti-abortion laws were passed and these laws were more vigorously enforced. As a result, many women began to utilize illegal underground abortion services. Although abortion was legalized in 1970, many women are still forced to obtain illegal abortion or to perform self-abortions due to the economic constraints imposed by the Hyde Amendment and the unavailability of services in many areas. Throughout the colonial period and during the early years of the republic, the abortion situation for slave women was different than for other women. Slaves were subject to the rules of their owners, and the owners refused to allow their slaves to terminate pregnancies. The owners wanted their slaves to produce as many children as possible since these children belonged to the slave owners.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10297561/

    Looks like we're heading back there, with slaves the poor forbidden abortions but achievable for others.

    Although one would expect someone espousing and originalist interpretation of a document to actually go back to the origin of the document, at least if one assumed the originalist was sincere. (An assumption I consider willfully blind, given their behaviour.)

    See also this article, for a brief, more socially-oriented history.

    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-complex-early-history-of-abortion-in-the-united-states

    674:

    Irrelevant, really.

    Not at all.

    K becoming Pres immediately puts the Senate into a tie. And confirming a new VP who can break ties requires a majority vote. So most likely no VP and almost anything will now stall in the Senate.

    As to what the VP does. Those examples are all before the modern world. WWII maybe. I don't know where to find it but I have a memory of reading about FDR couldn't get the Congress to allow him to hire more staff during WWII. They thought the 6 or so he had was enough for any one person.

    Today, it varies by administration, the VP deals with all kinds of lower level things to keep them off the desk of the Pres.

    But the 50/50 Senate tie is a big one. No more judges for one thing.

    And as to all those folks saying Biden needs to demand the Fillibuster go away. He can yell and scream all he wants but there are two public D Senators who say they will not do it. Which means it just cannot happen. And the scuttlebutt is that there are a few more D's who would not go along with this. I would expect that on Tester of Montana is one of them.

    675:

    What's very obvious to me, as an outsider, is that the anti-abortion message has changed (over decades) from being one of many examples of their intolerance to being their primary slogan, at least for now.

    Same for an insider. Outlawing school prayer was a bigger deal for much of the 70s. (School prayer wasn't outlawed. Just school LED. Which is why some of us can't wait for an observant Jew or Muslim to want to lead a prayer before 5th grade math class.)

    But LIFE DEATH was an easier slogan so the political consultants hyped it into a frothing mess.

    676:

    As presented to voters they have a plain text summary, arguments for and against,

    Did I read recently that now there are lawsuits about the plain text summary wordings. Not every one thinks their side is getting a fair shake or similar?

    677:

    Not 1954; 1854!

    In my head 200 is a nice round number. So 1822.

    Founders are all dying off or dead and the new crew is working hard at re-arranging what the founders meant. Good and bad.

    678:

    I'm thinking 1861 for the next stage; they want to overturn North v South.

    679:

    timrowledge
    Probably - but where does Clarence Thomas fit in there - or are "Oreos" honorary whites?
    Meanwhile, our very own cycle of corruption, lies & incompetence { Sometimes called "the tories" } spirals towards the plug-hole.
    Here's a small one - open in icognito to read it.
    And
    Here's a stinking one - long overdue for reaming out

    680:

    if one assumed the originalist was sincere

    I really struggle with the idea that there even could be such a thing as a sincere originalist. It seems, just on the face of it, such a very odd thing to believe in. I can go along with "states rights" being sincere, because federalism (versus a hierarchical structure) has a practical purpose in terms of promoting regional autonomy and even if you don't agree that is a good thing, you must agree it's possible to believe that is a good thing. But originalism seems to be a belief in the perfect genius of lawmakers at a point in time in the late Enlightenment whose viewpoint must now be taken as frozen and perpetual. But only some specific thinkers from that time who lived in a British colonial outpost and (mostly) owned slaves. And only the content that made it through a constitutional convention process made up of delegates with similar economic interests. That instead of taking this as an unlikely but promising starting point, and working forward in time to our present day where those foundations (what's not to like about the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence?) have been used to develop a consensus model that has adapted, updated and endured over the years, and where that underlying consensus is being strained and challenged by the very people who want to go back to basics...

    Nostalgia for a mythical lost time (or cause) that never existed in reality is the underlying ideology for nationalism in the Blut un Erde variety, and I suppose the only way to take originalism seriously as a sincere belief requires me to imagine the person holding it is participating in such a form of nationalism, and trying use their national foundation documents to create such an underlying ideology. And even that isn't really a sincere belief in the perfection of the document! So to me, it's preferable to assume that such people are insincere, as this is the kinder, more generous position to take.

    681:

    Re: 'I'm pretty sure the court had access to the data indicating that lack of abortion services would increase pregnancy mortality ...'

    Indeed they did - several professional medical and science groups sent them data.

    So basically, SCOTUS is telling the American public that they know more about health - including what can kill people - than physicians.

    Please tell me at point exactly being sworn into SCOTUS magically confer omniscience? I think I missed the magic sparks, lightening bolts, angels trumpeting, manna falling from the heavens, etc. I guess with them being so smart about health matters, the SCOTUS signatories will never need doctors, hospitals, etc. - that could save a few bucks off their admin/operating budget.

    BTW - ectopic pregnancies start going way up really fast over the age of 35 or so. This means that all women (regardless of race) who delayed or plan on delaying childbirth until they've completed grad degrees/gotten established in their careers are now at much greater risk of death.

    682:

    Topic drift: Cory Doctorow published a list of useful browser extensions intended to protect your privacy despite the mostly toothless GDPR (not that my homeland has done damn-all 'bout this): https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/28/bartlebytron-3000/#i-would-prefer-not-to

    683:

    David L @ 675:

    I dunno. It would only take one crossing the aisle to break the tie.

    I still think having Pelosi NEXT in line of succession would likely motivate some republiQan Senator to hold his/her nose and vote for whoever Harris nominated ... as long as it wasn't Hillary.

    684:

    David L @ 676:

    The court never outlawed prayer in school. How could they enforce it? As long as schools have report cards, kids are going to pray.

    The court has at different times told various states & local governments that public schools and public school officials cannot REQUIRE prayer or bible readings or other religious observances.

    The ruling in "Kennedy v. Bremerton School District" is NONSENSE because they're allowing the "free exercise" clause to VIOLATE the "establishment" clause.

    685:

    So since this thread nominally is about space-travel, here is an interesting new bit of science:

    Q: If you want to "mine asteroids", where do you go ?

    A: Jupiter's L4 and L5

    https://twitter.com/ESAGaia/status/1541413043250364417

    686:

    Just got a news update from the NY Times - Turkey has dropped their opposition to Sweden & Finland joining NATO.

    687:

    SFReader @ 682:

    I think what you missed was the implication they're a bunch of goddamn lying hypocrites; having an increase in mortality among non-white poor people is a BONUS for them, not a drawback.

    688:

    JBS
    Someone twisted Erdogan's arm, oh dear, how sad

    689:

    SCOTUS is telling the American public that they know more about health - including what can kill people - than physicians.

    Is anyone surprised? Republicans have been doing that since before Covid, and keep doing it.

    690:

    As presented to voters they have a plain text summary, arguments for and against,...Did I read recently that now there are lawsuits about the plain text summary wordings. Not every one thinks their side is getting a fair shake or similar?

    Yes, I've certainly seen it happen. There are a couple of ways to read this. One is that the person doing the summary did in fact mess up and it needs to be fixed. The other is that it's seeking publicity for the side protesting. Or both, of course.

    I think it's par for the course. Putting an initiative on the ballot is quite expensive. There's pre-polling (checking to see if it might work), signature gathering, etc. There are firms that specialize in getting signatures for a few bucks a sig, because you typically have to get a certain percentage of the district voters (tens to hundreds of thousand signatures) within a fairly short time window (30-60 days), and it's always a good idea to get as many more as you can, because someone will always sign Donald Duck or something else invalid. Then you have to do all the electioneering. It adds up rapidly.

    691:

    I dunno. It would only take one crossing the aisle to break the tie.

    On really important issues (gun control, immigration, abortion, etc.), there is currently no tie in the Senate. Since 2 Democrats side with Republicans on these issues (and perhaps also some other conservative Democrats who are not quite so obvious about it), it would take at least 2 or 3 Republicans aiding Democrats just to achieve at a tie. No way enough Republicans would cross over to break a filibuster, of course...

    692:

    The court has at different times told various states & local governments that public schools and public school officials cannot REQUIRE prayer or bible readings or other religious observances.

    From what I remember, the court said that public schools and public school officials cannot HAVE prayer or bible readings or other official religious observances at school.

    Individual students and employees can do any religious stuff that they want while in school, as long as it's not an official event.

    693:

    Someone twisted Erdogan's arm, oh dear, how sad

    I sure somebody made Erdogan's change of heart very profitable for him... :-(

    694:

    Turkey

    I think that this was mostly a matter of horse-trading and quid-pro-quoing between Turkey and Sweden.

    Also, Turkey may be seeing which way the wind is blowing and deciding that remaining a good NATO partner is the best course. ADS-B Exchange has shown that tankers with both Turkish and US registration have been flying out of Istanbul to the usual orbit east of Brasov, Romania the past couple of weeks. That wasn't the case earlier.

    Be interesting to see if Hungary starts to reconsider the situation.

    695:

    Erdogan was the one doing the twisting: he got Sweden and Finland to switch sides in the war against the PKK and YPG.

    696:

    Yes. For example, we (Finland) haven't given out new permissions for arms sales to Turkey (since 2019), so we've had less and less arms trade to Turkey. That'll change.

    I'm... not happy with this, but also I'm angry at myself because this was kind of inevitable and the signs could have been seen years if not decades earlier. The co-operation of NATO militaries with the Finnish military has been on-going for a long time, and always, always presented in a positive light in the mainstream media. Also: see the F35 deal we just made, for one example. (Of course in this, some of the Finnish military people first did prepping work, then quit and started working for US military companies. No corruption here, no.)

    Still Ukraine could to my understanding use some help, but the conflict seems to have faded mostly into the background. Grh.

    697:

    Still Ukraine could to my understanding use some help, but the conflict seems to have faded mostly into the background. Grh.

    nah, they've lost, and everyone's trying to figure out how to put a brave face on it after all their previous blustering

    698:

    Just a reminder that we have our own religious fascists - fortunately, they are few in number & likely to be ridiculed.

    Adrian Smith
    Utter fucking bollocks. By your reckoning the Kaiser had won, immediately after first Ypres

    699:

    Just got a news update from the NY Times - Turkey has dropped their opposition to Sweden & Finland joining NATO.

    Per UK reporting, horse trading is the cause. Turkey was demanding that Finland and Sweden declare the PKK to be a terrorist group as a precondition for letting them join NATO. What eventuated was a vaguely-worded declaration deploring violent insurrection, and a hefty arms purchase (from Turkey). So Turkey got to pocket a bribe and claim victory. Although the bribe in question is probably going to be useful to Sweden and Finland anyway -- it's not like Bayraktar UAVs are useless against Russian invaders, after all ...

    700:

    nah, they've lost, and everyone's trying to figure out how to put a brave face on it

    Strong disagreement here.

    Wars are ultimately won or lost by economic forces, and Russia is taking a hammering.

    Russia just defaulted on its foreign debt for the first time since 1917, which is going to make importing anything from outside difficult -- who's going to risk selling them stuff if they might never get paid?

    There are signs that Russia is running out of boring old-fashioned artillery shells, never mind smart weapons. Their military factories rely in western-manufactured CNC tools for which they can no longer obtain parts, and the former Soviet era machinists have all aged into retirement -- they can't go back to making shells and bullets the old way.

    Their deployable army got chewed up to hell already, but they no longer have the barracks or training capacity from the cold war to accommodate a large draft of conscripts. Nor do they have the population base to provide such a draft, without sending press gangs out in Moscow and St Petersburg, which would trigger mass unrest in the two capital cities.

    In theory Russia still has nukes, but my suspicion is Putin doesn't dare authorize the release of even battlefield weapons -- the failure rate of Russian rocketry is as high as 50%, if they tried to fire off a nuke and it fizzled it'd publicly undermine the viability of the Russian strategic deterrent, without which Russia's last claim to be a superpower just went up in smoke.

    The whole war is a ghastly clusterfuck and it's done hellish damage to Ukraine and it's going to starve millions of people in the developing world to death because Russia is engaging in food scarcity terrorism, but that hardly means Ukraine has lost.

    Final note: it still looks to me like Putin miscalculated badly, because he allowed a deadline to rush him into a premature conflict -- probably a deadline imposed by a terminal diagnosis. He's old (by Russian standards) and sick and there's no obvious succession mechanism.

    My gut feeling is that the Russians will dig in and keep trying, but with increasingly dwindling resources, until Putin dies. At which point his successor will be faced with a massive fiscal and economic crisis and will probably decide the war is an unwinnable dead weight that needs to be cut loose. At which point we'll see a forced settlement, and it'll be heavily in Ukraine's favour because it'll be dictated not by NATO but by the G7 and they'll try to put heavy enough financial shackles on Russia to prevent it from rearming for future wars of aggression.

    701:

    Charlie
    And/or until "Western/NATO" armaments reach Ukraine & RU artillery is - if not helpless - extremely vulnerable to their fire.
    One might look forward to widespread mutiny in in the RU ranks when ( not if, when ) that happens, at which point it gets really interesting.
    Furthermore, "Adrian Smith" seems to have ignored "our" (all of us) earlier comments about Sun-Tzu. Russia lost the moment the attack on Kyiv failed.
    It's "just" a matter of time & how many thousands more are going to be killed & maimed for an insane dictator's whims.

    An historical reminder: The Allies were preparing for the "Civilian Military Government" of what was Nazi Germany as early as March 1944.

    702:

    There's a PowerPoint Cowboy commentator on Youtube by the name of Perun who has been doing a series of presentations about the Ukraine conflict, mostly from the logistics and economic side of things. This is GOOD PowerPoint, a rainbow-shitting unicorn impossibility I will admit but... He claims to be an economist from Australia and he tends to go to primary sources for his slides and reporting.

    His general take on it from the sustainability side of things is that Russia can keep fighting at their current level of activity for about another six months or so, into early 2023. It will take that long for the international sanctions to really bite and for stuff to break in their manufacturing, manpower and logistics channels as shortages appear.

    As for nukes, they are weapons to have, not to use in anger. There's nothing good that using nukes in the current conflict can achieve for the Russian nation and even if Putin goes full Trump crazy no-one under him will pass on the authorisation to deploy and use such weapons since the Russian nation is not under existential threat. Chemical and biological weapons are another matter though. However use of such weapons in Ukraine would make Russia a pariah state and would lose it the few friends and willing fossil-fuel customers it still has in the world (China and India, mostly).

    703:

    There's another failure mode that's likely to bite Russia a lot sooner than next February: civil air transport.

    Aeroflot and Russia's other airlines rely heavily on western-built kit by Boeing and Airbus. When sanctions came in, the manufacturers withdrew certification because they couldn't confirm that replacement parts being fitted to these planes were genuine (not recycled or counterfeit), and the leasing companies wrote them off (because Russia refused to hand them back). So the clock is ticking on a bunch of still-flying Airbus and Boeing airliners.

    Some parts wear out slowly, others wear out fast -- tires, for example, need replacing after 2-3 months of short-haul ops, and you don't want to bet 200-300 passengers' lives on a batch of retreads. They've already begun grounding some aircraft because major bits need repair/parts that are unavailable: this is only going to get worse.

    It probably won't affect the Russian war effort ... but Russia is huge, and the roads are generally shit outside of the major cities. Freight travels by train, but there's very little high speed passenger rail. So passenger travel is heavily reliant on airliners.

    When those western built airliners begin to go tech, or worse -- when they start crashing because some idiot swapped in a time-expired part from another already-grounded bird -- Russia's internal civilian travel is going to grind to a halt, with unforeseeable economic effects.

    704:

    Yes, Russia's economy is going to collapse, and I agree that the G7 (and other countries that the USA can pressure) will try to ensure that it is not allowed to rebuild. But we should remember the last time that was attempted - Germany, post 1918. And I agree that its nuclear deterrent is probably as decrepit as its conventional military, but that will NOT stop it being used as a boegyman. Tt seems likely that that NATO will also taken advantage to advance its bases (and probably missiles) closer towards Russia (*), which will fuel Russia's paranoia further. The question is what happens then.

    Despite his utter insanity in this Ukraine invasion, Putin is relatively sane by world leader standards (hence I agree about the nukes), and Russia has not so far fallen apart; neither may remain true, and we have some examples of truly insane warlords in failed states. But that's the short term. In the longer term, Russia is self-sufficient in resources and could rebuild its industrial base in half a century, at a huge cost in lives and liberties, leading to a large, fairly powerful country with a visceral hatred of the west.

    But that's what most people seem to want, so who am I to quibble?

    (*) Remember that they were needed to counter the invicible superiority of Russia's army.

    705:

    Remember that Russia still has Ilyushin and other civil aircraft builders plus their supply chains, mostly internal so keeping a few hundred airliners operational even with knock-off parts and refurbs for the non-Russian models isn't really an issue for them. At the moment the Russian war in Ukraine isn't dependent on heavy use of military aircraft so there's not much impact on the parts and manufacturing lines for general aviation stuff like tyres. I don't think civil aviation in Russia is going to be impacted that much, at least in the near future. It's certainly not as immediate a problem for Ivan Ivanovitch as the loss of McDonalds and Vuitton from the high streets.

    What's not being mentioned by the Kremlin watchers is the Russian oligarch problem -- there's a lot of rich and influential Russians who suddenly can't travel to Cannes for the summer or spend time schmoozing at Ascot with top knobs from the British finance industry any more. Putin's got a death grip on the Russian military and internal security forces but the oligarchs still have some leverage, and if they want to shed their pariah status and start being accepted in polite society abroad then they know Putin is standing in their way.

    706:

    Not exactly military, but...

    https://gcaptain.com/russian-superyacht-san-diego

    Russian Superyacht Docks In San Diego Flying American Flag By K. Oanh Ha (Bloomberg) June 28, 2022

    After a stopover in Hawaii, the $325 million superyacht that’s tied to Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov and that was seized by US authorities in Fiji has sailed into a port in Southern California.

    snip

    The stop in San Diego caps a more than 13,000-nautical-mile odyssey for the vessel as it attempted to find a safe haven, with US agents from multiple government agencies pursuing it. The seizure is a huge win for the US as it looks to punish titans close to President Vladimir Putin by going after their megayachts, villas, and other assets.

    707:

    the default was kind of forced on them by the sanctions tho, it may not be taken like one of the interminable argentinian ones in the long or even medium term even if a lot of people would like it to be, since russia has quite a lot of resources to sell and customers to buy them

    also signs are that parts of the developing world have drunk the wrong kool-aid and largely don't hold russia as responsible for what's happening as we might like them to

    they'll try to put heavy enough financial shackles on Russia to prevent it from rearming for future wars of aggression

    versailles 2.0? let's hope it's different this time

    [greg] "Adrian Smith"

    dat so-called adrian smith

    Russia lost the moment the attack on Kyiv failed.

    thought that coulda been a feint myself

    i think some people are closing their eyes to the potential non-linearities of the situation tbh, but we shall see

    708:

    The attack on Kyiv wasn't a feint. You don't have a forty-mile-long convoy if you're going for a feint. The Russians believed they could take Ukraine as easily as the U.S. took Iraq, but they made the twin mistake of splitting their forces and attacking during Mud Season, so their tanks/artillery/etc didn't have any off-road mobility. This resulted in the Ukrainians being able to concentrate their forces in the west while fighting a holding action in the ease/south, and the Russians were defeated in detail* around Kyiv.

    "Kyiv was a feint" is the worst kind of excuse-making.

    The Ukrainians are actually doing very well right now. They're making excellent use of the weapons given them by NATO. They have retaken Kharkiv and are advancing on Kherson while they bleed the Russians elsewhere. They are currently finishing their own mobilization and I suspect we'll see a very serious counter-attack sometime in the next six weeks.

    * "Defeat in detail" is a military term which means that when the enemy attacks from multiple directions their opponents concentrate the maximum possible numbers on one of the attacking forces while holding off the other. If the first enemy force is defeated, the opponent turns on the second enemy force.

    709:

    Regarding the initial attack by Russian forces on Kyiv:

    thought that coulda been a feint myself

    Perun disassembles that myth in one of his PowerPoint presentations -- the Russians burned their way through much of their best-quality military assets in the attack on Kyiv and got nothing from it. That's not a "feint", that's a long-shot gamble that could have paid off big if it had worked with the Ukraine capital in Russian hands, the "Nazi" government fleeing in disarray and a replacement Quisling administration telling Ukranians that it was all over and it was time to bring out the flowers and chocolates for their liberators. See "Operation Market Garden" for another worked example of a military long-shot that didn't pay off. A real feint was Patton's "First US Army Group", the fake military organisation that led the Germans to believe that the WWII invasion of France was aimed at the Pas de Calais, complete with inflatable dummy tanks and turned spies.

    It's a common statement by Russian apologists, the Russians weren't really trying to capture Kyiv but the cost to them of experienced first-rate troops and equipment belies that fable.

    710:

    701 - Pretty much agreed; reference sources include Myamoto Mushasi "Go Rin No Sho", Adam Smith "The Wealth of Nations", Carl von Clauswith "On War" and Nicolo Machiaveli "The Prince".

    703 - Can't comment, because I ignore YouTube political commentary regardless of source.

    711:

    There's another failure mode that's likely to bite Russia a lot sooner than next February: civil air transport

    Russia is currently refusing to confirm pilot certifications, so Russian pilots grounded in Russia (by lack of flights) are unable to fly for other countries' airlines. Needles to say the pilots are not happy about being forced to remain unemployed…

    712:

    "Kyiv was a feint" is the worst kind of excuse-making.

    coulda been, dunno about "the worst kind" tho, u should keep something in reserve for when more substantial crimes start to filter in imo

    713:

    Remember that Russia still has Ilyushin and other civil aircraft builders plus their supply chains, mostly internal so keeping a few hundred airliners operational even with knock-off parts and refurbs for the non-Russian models isn't really an issue for them.

    Maybe. Or not.

    I read an article about the Mexican airline that had 26 (I think) of one model of a Russian jet in their fleet. This was from 3 or 4 years ago. Maybe 1/3, most likely less, could fly at any one time. Constant break downs and lack of parts. (If so inclined you can likely find the article on onemileatatime.com or thepointsguy.com.)

    I think I read that Russia had 500 or 900 non Russian passenger jets. Mostly Airbus and Boeing. And at this point maybe 10% to 20% are down. And more going down every day. That's just a lot of transport capacity.

    Back to Ilyushin and kin. How much of their jetliner flight deck and engine controls came from non Russian companies that no longer supply spare parts?

    714:

    Here's an article on the subject of jets made by non "western" companies.

    https://thepointsguy.com/news/why-you-wont-be-flying-russian-or-chinese-planes-soon/

    Note it was written in April 2019.Pre pandemic and Russia invading Ukraine.

    715:

    Russia is currently refusing to confirm pilot certifications, so Russian pilots grounded in Russia (by lack of flights) are unable to fly for other countries' airlines.

    There are multiple reasons. Per a March 12, 2022 article in the NYTimes there were 523 passenger jets owned by leasing firms. And the expectation is that those planes will never fly to any airport outside of Russia as they would be instantly re-possessed.

    Of course this somewhat helps the parts and maintenance issues for the Russian domestic flights.

    716:

    Some parts wear out slowly, others wear out fast -- tires, for example, need replacing after 2-3 months of short-haul ops, and you don't want to bet 200-300 passengers' lives on a batch of retreads.

    I fear they might do just that. They're already in denial about many things like this, so why not this too? I fear the result will be dead passengers eventually grounding the planes, more than anything else. I.e. passengers will stop booking flights because they don't want to die.

    However, the end result will be the same. The only question is: how many people will die in the process? I hope you're right and I'm wrong on this.

    In general, I don't expect rational behaviour here, but I may be suprised. We'll see.

    They've already begun grounding some aircraft because major bits need repair/parts that are unavailable: this is only going to get worse.

    That's a good sign that you may be right. That is at least a rational response to the problem.

    Russia's internal civilian travel is going to grind to a halt, with unforeseeable economic effects.

    We totally agree on that point. Maybe that's where the irrational behaviour will manifest. We've seen so many examples in the past. Maybe not. There could be a sudden outbreak of (more) rational players - or, perhaps more likely, a sudden removal of irrational players - that changes everything.

    717:

    Agree on the economic aspects.

    But the military aspect is open to a wild card: Belarusian forces invading Ukraine.
    There have been artillery strikes from Belarusian territory against Ukraine in the last couple of days.

    Of course, that may just be a pinning tactic, to force Ukraine to commit defensive forces it would rather use in the Donbas. That's my guess. And personally I'd have said that Belarus should avoid any closer involvement, because there is no way that ends well for Belarus.
    But I'm not Lukashenko and I don't know what levers Putin may have.

    718:

    703 - Can't comment, because I ignore YouTube political commentary regardless of source.

    Perun's analyses are non-political although he is clearly on the Ukrainian side of things. Some of his stuff is logistical, a lot of it is macroeconomic and, if he is to be believed, he actually is an economist or financial analyst of some kind. Everything he puts up in his presentations is publicly-published information. He is remaining anonymous behind his pseudonym for good reasons since social media is a sewage pit at the best of times.

    His basic take is that if NATO and the Western powers keep supplying Ukraine with weapons and especially the financial support they need while sanctioning Russia then Russia is going to lose, but that won't happen quickly if the fighting carries on as it is going. Black Swan events are another matter (Putin stands too close to an open window, Zelensky eats a sniper bullet etc.)

    719:

    That's a good sign that you may be right. That is at least a rational response to the problem.

    One issue is some parts have timers/counters built into the control systems that only get reset if the part is "correctly" replaced and/or goes through an "certified" maintenance check/overhaul.

    I wonder how far down the path of hacking these control systems Russia will go. I suspect as long as Putin is in charge, as far as they can.

    720:

    Black Swan events are another matter (Putin stands too close to an open window, Zelensky eats a sniper bullet etc.)

    It is somewhat telling to me that Russia doesn't have a smart missile crew on hot standby to target where Zelensky is assumed to be based on state visits by others, public appearances, or whatnot. Maybe they can't target and launch that fast. Or just don't have the intelligence inside of Ukraine. (At least not anymore.)

    721:

    The US tried that with Saddam Hussein for several years before they went with the trillion-dollar alternative, missiling various places Saddam was thought to be visiting. It didn't work but it racked up the "innocent bystander" bodycount a chunk.

    722:

    Took us a decade with Bin Laden too. I'm not going to go into the mortuary of all the failed US drone strikes either, but targeting individuals, while possible, is apparently pretty hard, even when you have total air supremacy.

    While the Russians could conceivably take out Zelenskyy and he needs to be protected, I don't think that even killing him will end the war, because I'd be shocked if he doesn't have a chain of succession already in place.

    Unfortunately, Putin's most likely successor is the Dead Hand, so he's safe from unnatural endings.

    723:

    Russia has tried to assassinate Zelensky up-close-and-personal a lot with no success, that suggests that whatever intelligence network they had in Kiev got wrecked by going to war. Not that they seem to have had much of one to begin with, or they would have known Ukraine was going to fight.

    724:

    Saddam Hussein was over 3 decades ago. Targeting has gotten better and faster.

    Bin Laden was hiding most of the time. And it was 10 years ago.

    Zelensky goes on walks in public at times.

    As I said, I think this tells us some things about Russia's capacities.

    725:

    that suggests that whatever intelligence network they had in Kiev got wrecked by going to war. Not that they seem to have had much of one to begin with, or they would have known Ukraine was going to fight.

    Politicians (Putin) are very good at ignoring facts/opinions that imply their great plan is wrong.

    726:

    Politicians (Putin) are very good at ignoring facts/opinions that imply their great plan is wrong.

    Bush/Cheney were good at this too...

    727:

    Dunno. My current feeling is that they'll hold onto the "breakaway" regions of eastern Ukraine, and bunker down.

    728:

    Versailles would be BAD. Kindly consider how the USSR fell, and there was zip to rebuild, unlike Germany post WWII.

    But some VIP (very important people, as Krugman refers to them) REALLY, REALLY HATE Russia, and want to buy it for pennies on the dollar, as the ex-Soviet's did.

    We're looking at the result of that.

    729:

    As far as they can? Consider the large numbers of hackers from Russia and other eastern European countries that are the major "cyber" threat... they're good at what they do, not script kiddies.

    730:

    Nukes - they will not use them. Reason #1: consider the jet stream... and which way the winds would blow the fallout.

    731:

    I used the plural.

    But I personally have stories from very large companies scrubbing inconvenient facts from a product choice analysis before running it up the chain of command to get the company to pick the product they personally wanted. And then cost the company a wasted $10s million over the next few years.

    732:

    they're good at what they do, not script kiddies.

    Yes they are. But we're not talking about a hack into some defense system across the planet that can just take as long as it takes. And if you only get 1/2 of the planned data it can still be a success.

    They get one bit setting wrong on such a hack and planes might fall out of the sky. Hacking a control system is one thing. Understanding the 100s of interdependences on such a thing without the design docs is just plain hard. And they might have have 3 years to figure it out.

    733:

    might NOT have 3 years

    734:

    There are multiple reasons. Per a March 12, 2022 article in the NYTimes there were 523 passenger jets owned by leasing firms. And the expectation is that those planes will never fly to any airport outside of Russia as they would be instantly re-possessed.

    Yes, but I was commenting on the pilots and how they are being treated, not leased aircraft.

    Generally pilots trained in one country can fly for an airline in another, provided their training and certifications are confirmed. Russia is refusing to do the confirmations for Russian pilots, effectively limiting them to working only in/for Russia.

    Pilots are a pretty international bunch. This move is not making Russian pilots very happy.

    735:

    It is somewhat telling to me that Russia doesn't have a smart missile crew on hot standby to target where Zelensky is assumed to be based on state visits by others

    What happens if they whack Zelensky with a missile while he's talking to a NATO head of state like Johnson or Biden?

    Hint: NATO Treaty Article 5 territory ahoy!

    736:

    The US tried that with Saddam Hussein for several years before they went with the trillion-dollar alternative, missiling various places Saddam was thought to be visiting. It didn't work but it racked up the "innocent bystander" bodycount a chunk.

    Fewer casualties than Shock & Awe followed by an invasion…

    737:

    Yes, but I was commenting on the pilots and how they are being treated, not leased aircraft.

    Yes. My point was the seats available to Russian pilots is down due to this. In addition to everything else.

    738:

    Just skimmed reviews of three of the Hugo-nominated novels on File 770, and was struck by a thought here. Mixing threads... I got a picture of Putin as really having had their life twisted around Gorbachev and his failures... and the was is Putin's over-reaction to "what Gorbachev should have done".

    Esp. if you're right, Charlie, and he knows he's dying....

    739:

    »Nukes - they will not use them. Reason #1: consider the jet stream... and which way the winds would blow the fallout.«

    There is very little fallout from nukes at height, there being only air for neutrons to activate.

    It's when nukes explodes at low altitude (ie: anything but "air-burst"), where the shock-wave mixes soil and dust into the column of hot rising gasses, full of fission products, that you get relevant fall-out.

    "Lay-down" and ground-penetrators is the worst in terms of fallout, because the "foreign matter" is right there when the real action happens.

    It is the mushroom cloud which lifts the fallout, and the maximum height scales strongly with yield.

    The good news is that after the initial MT-euphoria, development has been towards smaller and more precisely delivered nukes, with many in the current stockpile being able to be dialed down to a few kilotons or even lower.

    The bad news is that it happened in order to make nukes "more usable."

    Therefore fallout in the jet stream is not a major concern any longer.

    However, nuclear winter is, and it looks like even "a limited nuclear exchange between IN and PK" would take peoples minds of global warming for some time.

    There are a few MT-class options still available in the arsenals, but they are kept only as "contingency" and not part of operational plands, recently "anti-meteorite" have become the go-to excuse to keep them around.

    740:

    There are a few MT-class options still available in the arsenals, but they are kept only as "contingency" and not part of operational plands, recently "anti-meteorite" have become the go-to excuse to keep them around.

    Dumb-sounding question, but can any missile reach bolide-adjacent speeds fast enough to make them useful? To me, it seems sort of like using a model rocket to intercept an incoming artillery shell.

    741:

    Paraphrasing a bit, "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear weapons". The delivery system only has to get the warhead to the right position relative to the target, there's no need to match velocities. Once the little drop of instant sunshine starts glowing brightly you're into speed of light territory.

    742:

    Speaking of science fiction and Russia, here's a relevant twitter thread: https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1535582101621420032

    It begins: "THREAD Let's start a long thread about how Russian book market prepared Russians for a full-scale war against Ukraine, NATO, the West, and promoted stalinism and nazism, and how this was ignored by the West. Keep seat belts fasten, you will see a lot of nasty things here."

    What follows is a series of rundowns on Russian political propaganda disguised as time travel novels.

    Fun example: https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1535602482218418176 "Let us start with easy reading "Tsar from the future": a guy wakes up in a body of Russian Nicolas II emperor, prevents Russian revolution, defeats Great Britain, and conquers Istanbul with modern weapons. "Russia Arise!" Popadantsy in bodies of Nicolas II and Alexander III /16"

    My favourite is this hilaribad example: https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1535596080884240385 "The basic Russian trauma is that RU was treated unfair and taken its power and place as the only world super power. This is what you learn at school. Russians were conquered by Mongols and lost 300 years of development. Queen Elisabeth denied marriage to Ivan the Terrible /13"

    Yeah, the Queen of England, who famously didn't marry at all, failed to marry a Russian serial killer who just happened to be a Tsar, so she should've overlooked the torture and killings, nevermind all the more "elligible" suitors, and married good old Ivan.

    Perhaps you can begin see why I doubt the rationality of people running the current Russian state. While I have doubts about the rationality of all 7 billions humans now living, and I've chatting with many humans suffering from degrees of paranoid psychosis (some of them subsequently sucked into the vortex of hate that is Q-Anon), this is on a level of its own.

    Like the rants by alien conspiracy kooks I've enjoyed reading over the last 3 decades, I applaud the creativity of the authors while questioning their state(s) of mind(s).

    743:

    Note to MODS: if the links in my last post are a problem, please remove them. If the whole post is a problem, please remove it. Sorry for this additional post. I should've put this in the same post to avoid "spamming".

    I'm ok with this post also being removed. ;)

    744:

    »Dumb-sounding question, but can any missile reach bolide-adjacent speeds fast enough to make them useful? To me, it seems sort of like using a model rocket to intercept an incoming artillery shell.«

    That is actually a very good question for which there is no definitive answers.

    The most credible people seem to think a strategy where you attempt to change the orbit of the offending threat is the most promising, essentially arguing for sending a rocket out there to impart a delta-V somehow.

    Detonating a nuke nearby could do that, but it is not particularly efficient, and the logistics would be formidable, but the consensus seems to be "... but if all else fails."

    "All else" varies a lot, but again the rock solid consensus is that the earlier the action, the less of it you need, ultimately just sending a scientific probe and crashing it into the object being enough to divert it out of the risk-zone.

    "The earlier the action..." implies keeping track of a lot of junk (see the fresh GAIA plot I linked to above) including their possible interactions.

    Here consensus seems to be that the primary danger is stuff which gets thrown out of it's normal orbit, either by collisions or by "accidents of gravity".

    With data like GAIAs we can try to predict future collisions, so that we can attempt to observe them and try to spot any shrapnel.

    Accidents of gravity are virtually impossible to predict, because we have no usable information about the mass of any of these objects.

    So we probably wont know until it is too late for any gentle and sophisticated diversion, and therefore, since all else fails, we will probably end up throwing nukes at it, and most likely without effect.

    745:

    »Once the little drop of instant sunshine starts glowing brightly you're into speed of light territory.«

    Not really.

    Most of the radiation with weapons-relevant photons are reradiated multiple times before they finally escape (Hence the characteristic double-flash signature which "bhang-meters" detect) and the primary weapons-relevant effect is the shock-wave, which orders of magnitude slower than photons.

    But still very fast of course, just not speed of light.

    A lot of people overlook that nukes in space are an entirely different and much more boring thing: Without the atmosphere you just get a burst of radiation and a good polished metal surface will reflect a very large fraction of it. (See also: Project orion)

    746:

    'Fraid I disagree - the pure craziness of supporters of the Former Guy is right up that, and equal to the believers of the Russian propaganda.

    I had an argument with one, late one night at Balticon, and believe me, she was there.

    747:

    Dumb-sounding question, but can any missile reach bolide-adjacent speeds fast enough to make them useful?

    Yes, because having a big-ass nuclear warhead means you don't have to match speeds, you just have to put the warhead in front of the bolide just before it arrives.

    The further out you can spot an impactor the better. Ideally you want to see it in time to send a warhead out to meet it months before it comes close to Earth. Your ideal tool would be something like a disposable Falcon Heavy stack with a big (multimegaton) warhead on top of an ion rocket, with a couple of years to creep up on the rock: not too different from one of the existing asteroid sample return missions, except (a) no sample return, and (b) the vehicle would be an order of magnitude heavier (5-20 tons rather than 500-2000kg).

    A modern 0.25Mt warhead weighs roughly 250kg and gets yeeted at the target at about 90-100% of orbital velocity. The elaborate 1970s/1980s MIRV ICBMs that carried these could punch as many as 20 of these warheads into low orbit, so a payload of up to 20 tons. Many of these older/larger ICBMs went on to have post-decommissioning careers as satellite launchers. For example, the Minotaur launcher (US) is a satellite launcher based on the old Peacemaker (MX) Missile; the Russians did the same with the R-36M ICBM (NATO reporting name: SS-18 Satan); it flew as the civilianized Tskylon satellite launcher, and there was a proposal to modify a variant of the ICBM to serve as a bolide destroyer.

    Anyway: TLDR is, you don't need to catch up to the same speed as an impactor, you just need to get out in front and blow it to pieces. The further away it is when you do this, the better. And we have the tech to put a big-ass nuke anywhere in the solar system, as long as we have a few years' notice.

    748:

    Without the atmosphere you just get a burst of radiation and a good polished metal surface will reflect a very large fraction of it.

    Yes but as recent asteroid sample return missions have shown, asteroids seem to be gravel piles that are barely held together by gravity. So if you can match velocity with the asteroid, there's some hope that you can burrow into it to a depth of metres. In which case when your nuke goes off it generates its own atmosphere (of vapourized carbonaceous rock) to couple the shockwave to the junkpile and disrupt the entire thing.

    749:

    “ So if you can match velocity with the asteroid, there's some hope that you can burrow into it to a depth of metres.”

    You’ve confused me. You seem to have jumped straight from “you don’t need to match velocity, just get out in front” in one comment to “if you can match velocity…” in the next.

    Could you kindly explain?

    750:

    You really want to divert the incoming body rather than shatter it. Breaking up the gravel pile stops it reaching the ground intact (although if it is a gravel pile it would crumble as it enters atmosphere and it's more a plasma jet hits the deck) but if the spread is insufficient you get the same mass hitting the upper atmosphere and causing a massive heat flash. Ideally you want the boom to happen a short distance away (generally doesn't matter exactly where with enough warning, ahead, behind, above, below, left or right are all likely to shift it enough) and if it does break up you've hopefully just got a new annual meteor shower rather than a hemisphere of forest fires.

    751:

    »Ideally you want to see it in time to send a warhead out to meet it months before it comes close to Earth.«

    This is where the people who know something about nukes start to mumble about "tricky envionmentals".

    You should probably expect to transport the nukes in a heated and pressurized envelope if you want them to work after some months in space.

    It's all classified, but from what I can figure out, nukes only function in a relatively narrow temperature range due to the many interesting materials having very different thermal expansion coefficients.

    There are some surprising low upper temps, on purpose, to make sure the explosives melt out of shape in case of fire.

    F-35's too hot internal bomb-bay means that they cannot go stealth more than some undisclosed amount of time with the B61 ground penetrator, which was one of the primary customers for that bomb-bay in the first place. Opening the bomb-bay doors is waving goodbye to whatever "stealth" the F35 actually might have.

    But low temps are just as bad, because the critical materials contract different amounts, causing delaminations, cracks and other mechanical trouble.

    My personal guess is that the allowed temperature range is only something like -30°C to +70°C.

    ICBM's work because the nuke is only exposed to extreme temperatures relatively short time and because the reentry vehicle has a very expensive inner surface for radiative insulation.

    752:

    Charlie Stross @ 700:

    I don't know WHY Turkey changed their mind and dropped their opposition to Sweden & Finland, only that they did. That was all the email from the NY Times told me.

    753:

    Who was the "former guy"? I remember quite a few of them, but there will always be Stalin fanbois. Do you mean that one?

    754:

    Just did a bit of checking, and meteorite speeds are 1x to 7x escape velocity. For comparison, arrows move about 20% the speed of handgun bullets, so Robin Hood trying to hit a bullet fired by the Lone Ranger isn't far off the mark.

    Thing is, bolides come in from semi-random directions relative to Earth's surface, so hitting one that's on terminal approach to Earth likely means you have to have a bunch of nuclear missiles in LEO, all ready to aim and light off with little warning.

    My second thought is that the bolide's remains are still going somewhere, so unless you can pulverize it with the nuke, so that the pieces blow up in the atmosphere, your best bet is to change the course of the debris cloud so that it comes in at as horizontal an angle as possible. That decreases the rate at which the bolide sheds its energy and spreads it across as bigger area, resulting in less damage.

    Speaking of damage, lighting off a big nuke or two in LEO is going to seriously ruin the day for a bunch of people, and managing to frag an incoming asteroid and getting it to spray into LEO will cause a Kessler Cascade. Bye-bye Starlink, ISS, possibly GPS...

    And having lots of nukes in Kessler-prone LEO is going to get a lot of people worked up, just as having a bunch of nukes sitting on active standby on Earth would get a lot of adrenal glands pumping.

    Of course, if the nuke ignites in the wrong place, then you have nuclear attack plus major meteorite strike, which is literally double-plus ungood.

    Probably the best answer is the boring one: do the risk/reward calculations, figure out which rocks are likely to require armageddon-level nuclear responses, and work towards rerouting those away from Earth. This is reasonable. Conversely, I don't think anyone could have justified using a nuke to take out the Chelyabinsk bolide, considering how much damage it caused (not much) for how much energy it dumped (a lot, but over an extended time). What to do about the messy middle? Hopefully there's a whole cadre of really bright guardians in the US Space Force grinding on that problem right now...

    755:

    Heteromeles @ 741:

    Have a look at Phalanx CIWS and C-RAM CIWS. I believe Israel adopted the C-RAM system as part of their "iron dome".

    C-Ram Phalanx Defense

    756:

    I'm sorry, I could swear that's been used here before. We really dislike advertising his brand name - traitor Trump. You know, the one who tried to set up a coup on 6 Jan 2021 in the US.

    757:

    With a little more notice, landing an ion drive probe on an asteroid and use the drive to alter the rock's course. Perhaps into lunar orbit, for construction material.

    758:

    One thing about bolide deflectors - I've seen a number of discussions that much of the force of a nuke wouldn't be there, with no atmosphere, so "in front" or "just beside" wouldn't be anywhere near as useful as "hit it that way."

    Actually, I just had a great reason for a) going to the Moon and staying there, and building a mass driver: bolide blasting.

    759:

    I've also seen the term used, though I prefer "Drumph!" because it also describes the content of "Former guy's" speech.

    760:

    “ However, nuclear winter is, and it looks like even "a limited nuclear exchange between IN and PK"”

    Nukes don’t cause ‘nuclear’ winters.

    Burning cities with nukes causes nuclear winters.

    The firestorm that engulfed Hiroshima is quoted as giving off 100 times more energy than the nuke itself - it certainly gave off vastly, vastly more smoke than the initial mushroom cloud. The firestorms that engulfed Dresden and Tokyo were just as bad, but required hundreds of bombers (sorry London, your blitz doesn’t actually rate among the worst).

    The recent modelling of a IN/PK exchange causing nuclear winters assumes 100 Pk urban areas and 150 IN urban areas are nuked, and over half a billion people killed in the nuclear exchange. “Limited” isn’t a great word for 250 nukes hitting cities, though I get that you mean “not a global war between two large alliances”.

    Rating of Nuclear War between India and Pakistan: 0 stars out of 5. Would not recommend.

    761:

    A late 60s/early 70s study whose name it is too near bedtime for me to remember proposed using Saturn Vs and modified Apollo CSMs to deliver the warheads. Using cargo Dragons (No LES but they have environmental controls to keep the contents in suitable conditions) on top of Falcon Heavies would be the present day equivalent.

    762:

    Just in general, major wildfires and hurricanes emit nuclear-war level energies, but spread out over days rather than microseconds. I completely agree that igniting South Asia for political reasons is stupid, and I don't particularly care what those political reasons are. Same is true for any place on Earth.

    763:

    Oh, you mean Forty-Five. ;) Yes, I know a few of his fanbois too. Even a few Nazi-lovers. I had to quit a chatroom because it was taken over by both fanclubs. It seems there was a lot of overlap in their passions.

    I also know a Discord server full of them. I gave up on that too. As I said, many harmless alien conspiracy kooks I knew were sucked into the QAnon vortex. That server is one of their homes.

    So I know exactly what you mean. That's why I find that thread on Russian propaganda so interesting. None of the US kooks I know are that functional. I recall chatting with one of them - many years earlier - about his movie script. He couldn't keep the plot stable from one minute to the next. That's how fast the ideation was flowing.

    If you want to write in that state, the best you might do is record your rapid-talking stream of consciousness BS. Then, when you're back on the anti-psychotic meds, you might be to sift through the recording(s) and find some gems you can weave into a written diatribe worth posting.

    Alternately, just write in uppercaps for hours at an end in a chatroom. Yes, I've seen that happen. 3+ hours non-stop wild hate-speach. Yes, that creep was permabanned. Yes, he'd find ways of getting around it, but he's not functional enough to get around that last permaban. Unless - I hope this is the case - he's back on his meds and this time he'll keep taking them.

    I can call him a creep because its like the psychosis reveals the true inner character, then distorts and amplifies it. I watched him go down that path over more than a decade. Pizzagate grabbed him and took him further, but he was already heading that way.

    However, I've also chatted with many who don't have any sign of psychosis and still went QAnon or plain fascist. 2017 was a watershed year for those folks.

    764:

    the once and future guy, unless various unguaranteed circumstances intervene, i'm afraid

    765:

    Politicians (Putin) are very good at ignoring facts/opinions that imply their great plan is wrong.
    Our ENTIRE "government" are doing this!

    766:

    Dumb-sounding question, but can any missile reach bolide-adjacent speeds fast enough to make them useful?

    Well maybe SLS. Of course you'd need a year or three to build the next one but it is an option. Sort of. Kind of....

    767:

    the once and future guy, unless various unguaranteed circumstances intervene, i'm afraid

    Well, that's why everyone who doesn't want that, who can get involved in US politics (mostly by funding candidates and sending messages to their reps) NEEDS to get involved. /End political message.

    The more interesting thing is that, in the event D Littlefingers is convicted of sedition, I'd speculate that it will change the nature of the US Presidency from a noun to a verb. This is because a person who is being paid to be POTUS is convicted of seditious conspiracy against the US. To me, this seems to mean that a person "presidents" (performs the duties of office) without being the president. The POTUS may start a nuclear war and end life on Earth, but if the person doing the job gets his hands on the steering wheel of his limo and runs someone down, he can be convicted of manslaughter or murder, because he was acting as a private citizen when he grabbed the wheel, not on behalf of the US.

    This will change the nature of US politics. Whether for the better or worse, I can't say. It is implied in the notion that no one is above the law, though. Interesting to think about though. Probably it means that the authoritarians will try to subvert the Department of Justice.

    768:

    Asteroid deflection: What you want to do is to deflect it, not blow it apart. Hopefully, it will be detected in time to do that. How to deflect it seems to be best done by ablative blow-off of the surface using neutrons from a nuclear bomb. (I was surprised by the "neutron" part -- x-rays had seemed the most obvious ablator.)

    See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521001028

    769:

    "Just did a bit of checking, and meteorite speeds are 1x to 7x escape velocity. "

    Yeah. Earth's orbital speed around the sun is ~30 kps and so solar escape velocity at Earth's distance from the sun is 42 kps. Put those together and a head-on encounter of the Earth with a near-parabolic orbit asteroid going the other way has a closing speed of a touch over 70 kps. But almost all are quite a bit slower.

    770:

    It is implied in the notion that no one is above the law, though. Interesting to think about though

    Not a close parallel, but this concept's (modern) foundational expression was the trial of Charles I.

    Probably it means that the authoritarians will try to subvert the Department of Justice.

    Well John Cook, who prosecuted Charles, was hanged, drawn and quartered once Charles II was restored.

    There really should be more statues of John Cook.

    771:

    Damian @ 681: I really struggle with the idea that there even could be such a thing as a sincere originalist. It seems, just on the face of it, such a very odd thing to believe in. I can go along with "states rights" being sincere, because federalism (versus a hierarchical structure) has a practical purpose in terms of promoting regional autonomy and even if you don't agree that is a good thing, you must agree it's possible to believe that is a good thing. But originalism seems to be a belief in the perfect genius of lawmakers at a point in time in the late Enlightenment whose viewpoint must now be taken as frozen and perpetual.

    I don't think originalism is quite as silly as you suggest. Actually, if you believe in the rule of law then originalism, or something close to it, is the only logical position. The Constitution is the foundation document for US law, so therefore the words of that document must rule. The meaning of those words has to be the one that held when it was written because the only alternatives are the modern meaning (which leads to issues with phrases like "well regulated") or the Humpty Dumpty theory where the meaning is made up according to the preferences of the reader. Neither is compatible with the rule of law.

    You don't have to believe the framers were infallible; they wrote in a mechanism for changing the constitution, and that mechanism has in fact been used on a number of occasions since. Its not practical to do that today because getting 3/4 of the states to agree that the sky is blue would be impossible, but there were good reasons for making it difficult, and the history of prohibition suggests that its probably a good thing it wasn't easier. Imagine if the War on Drugs were backed by a constitutional amendment.

    However all this fails once you look at the Bill of Rights. Most of the Constitution is concerned with mechanics of elections, the structure of the legislature, and the division of powers. Those parts are mostly unambiguous; they say what they mean, mean what they say, and are easy to interpret. However the Bill of Rights isn't like that. The language is plain and unambiguous, but there are always exceptions, and always were:

    The law is perfectly well settled that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the "Bill of Rights," were not intended to lay down any novel principles of government, but simply to embody certain guaranties and immunities which we had inherited from our English ancestors, and which had, from time immemorial, been subject to certain well recognized exceptions arising from the necessities of the case. In incorporating these principles into the fundamental law, there was no intention of disregarding the exceptions, which continued to be recognized as if they had been formally expressed. Thus, the freedom of speech and of the press (Art. I) does not permit the publication of libels, blasphemous or indecent articles, or other publications injurious to public morals or private reputation; the right of the people to keep and bear arms (Art. II) is not infringed by laws prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons; the provision that no person shall be twice put in jeopardy (Art. V) does not prevent a second trial if upon the first trial the jury failed to agree or if the verdict was set aside upon the defendant's motion, United States v. Ball, 163 U. S. 662, 163 U. S. 627, nor does the provision of the same article that no one shall be a witness against himself impair his obligation to testify if a prosecution against him be barred by the lapse of time, a pardon, or by statutory enactment, Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, and cases cited. Nor does the provision that an accused person shall be confronted with the witnesses against him prevent the admission of dying declarations, or the depositions of witnesses who have died since the former trial.

    Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275 (1897)

    So the Bill of Rights doesn't say what it means or mean what it says; it is surrounded by a vague collection of exceptions. Is "hate speech" protected, or does the overriding government interest in preventing mob violence mean it can be banned? In 1969 the Supreme Court decided that it is protected, but they could just as easily have decided it differently.

    This is a problem regardless of how wise James Madison was (to say nothing of the subsequent horse-trading leading to ratification); it is not possible to be an originalist with respect to the Bill of Rights because there was no real "original" meaning in anything but the broad intent. The exceptions that were recognised in 1787 were contingent on the nature and technology of the times, and have changed since. "Blasphemy" and "indecency" are listed in the quote above as unprotected speech, and Madison would probably have agreed. But today blasphemy is protected. The 2nd Amendment was intended to apply to all kinds of weapons up to and including canons and ships of war, but today anything more deadly than a semi-automatic rifle is heavily restricted or banned.

    So I disagree with originalism, not because the basic idea is stupid, but because it can't be applied to the Bill of Rights, and was never intended to be.

    772:

    Two different problems:

    1) Interception close to re-entry (like intercepting an ICBM warhead)

    2) Diversion or disruption of it a long time before it intersects Earth's orbit (like an asteroid rendezvous mission)

    The former: you need an ABM system with a bigger warhead. Yes, you now have a shotgun blast of shrapnel rather than a big-ass bullet coming at you. But the shrapnel is more likely to burn up at high altitude before it reaches low enough altitudes for the shock wave to reach ground level and cause damage. Think Chelyabinsk object.

    The latter: you need to do this if you're faced with a large ( >50 metre or so) impactor -- think Tunguska or larger object.

    773:

    if you believe in the rule of law then originalism, or something close to it, is the only logical position

    Without getting into the rest of your argument, that doesn't follow at all. You don't need to have a constitution or even statute law to have rule of law: common law is enough, if you have institutions that apply it uniformly to all alike*. Indeed code law, when adopted, takes the (at least symbolic, mythological) place of a constitution if there isn't an explicit one. Over time you could even get to rule of law if you start from customary law, given the right sort of historical iterations. That's what happened with the British...

    * cf my comments about John Cook above.

    774:

    You don't need to have a constitution or even statute law to have rule of law: common law is enough

    I completely agree, but it's beside the point. Yes, you can have the rule of law without a formal written constitution. And indeed the UK is a case in point. But once you have enacted a constitution (or any other written law) then that written law must rule. Otherwise you don't have the rule of law.

    775:

    ... And the problem with the US constitution is that it tries to do two different things: establish procedures for conducting the legislative process, and enumerating a whole bunch of rights and duties of government.

    Arguably these belong in two different foundational frameworks -- one for process, and one for policies.

    (Bill of rights, equal protection, abolition of slavery, etc. should all fall under "policies". What Congress consists of, how seats are allocated, how elections happen, term limits and how states can join the union, are all "process".)

    "Process" probably shouldn't be easy to change. "Policy" however is something that shifts with social norms and mores. Applying originalism to policy issues results in perversely reactionary outcomes (the originalists like Clarence Thomas are trying to apply 18th century social norms to the 21st century); that seems to me to be part of the current problem. (Although the real problem is white supremacism, which underpins everything else wrong with the US -- as someone or other pointed out, the original sin of the USA was slavery.)

    776:

    Enslaved labor was how they could best serve Mammon centuries ago. That they still rely on white supremacy after all these years doesn't speak well of their capacity to learn new tricks.

    777:

    the originalists like Clarence Thomas are trying to apply 18th century social norms to the 21st century

    Except they aren't.

    No way in hell Thomas would be a judge in the 18th century. Indeed, by 18th century social norms he'd still be a slave (like his ancestors) and his marriage illegal.

    They are being very selective about which bits of the 18th century they hold sacrosanct…

    778:

    On asteroid deflection: If you have enough time and the ability to match speeds with it, the best thing is to use a gravity tractor to divert it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor

    On originalists: I think the point of originalism is to provide a sacred text to justify your righteousness. That your actions are not in line with the text is irrelevant, because you are righteous. See a lot of religion.

    On slavery as the original sin of the US: I don't think slavery is the original sin of the US per se, it is the contradiction with the stated nature of the US. This is what is tearing the US apart, that freedom is somehow compatible with slavery cannot be sustained. It has led to the current contradictory views of the American right that oppression and freedom are compatible, they are currently pursuing this to the detriment of the country. I think perhaps these contradictory things create some kind of moral and intellectual void upon cancelling each other out, perhaps because people have to avoid thinking about it to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. I think if there wasn't this vacuum at the heart of America maybe it's problems could have been resolved.

    779:

    This is what is tearing the US apart, that freedom is somehow compatible with slavery cannot be sustained.

    I think there's a simple explanation for this thinking: it's the idea that people are not equal. It's 'Freedom for us, slavery for them'.

    Equal rights to everybody is not the driving idea about society for many people. (Well, there's the discussion about children which is an another thing...) Especially if you start thinking that 'everybody' includes also people who weren't born in this country, or don't have the correct passport, or would like to play games all day.

    But I still think there is not that much dissonance in wanting all the rights for me and all the obligations for others. I don't think it's a good basis on which to build a society, but I see where it comes from.

    780:

    They are being very selective about which bits of the 18th century they hold sacrosanct…

    Yeah, just like Da'esh/ISIS, who I've seen described as mediaeval muslim cosplayers -- imagine if a RenFaire crew decided to declare independence and set up a mediaeval kingdom policed by wild-eyed guys with swords and faked-up titles (and AR-15s and technicals for backup), then started hanging anyone who didn't want to play along, wear [in-]authentic olde worlde costumes, do without running water and modern medicine because they hadn't been invented, and so on.

    And yes, Clarence Thomas is a fool. A very scholarly fool who was smart enough book-learning wise to pass the bar exam and then become a judge, but still a fool.

    781:

    Gravity tractors are great, but you need either a lot of time or a lot of mass to make one work.

    Alternatively, you need a lot of smarts: send a PV-powered ion rocket with a lot of surplus propellant and a big-ass net and some sort of mechanism for filling it with gravel from the junkpile. (You may be out of luck if the object you're trying to divert is the metal core left over from some much larger body that has lost its shell of junk in an earlier collision.)

    Verdict: it's borderline-feasible with today's tech, but we really need to test-fly prototypes, and the ARM project got cancelled by NASA in 2017 -- otherwise it might have flown in 2021.

    782:

    As Margaret Atwood noted, there are multiple types of freedom -- notably "freedom from" and "freedom to".

    "Freedom to" can mean stuff like free speech, freedom to roam where you want, engage in trade, marry whoever you like, or maybe freedom to own other people ...

    "Freedom from" can mean freedom from hunger, freedom from oppression ... or freedom from the burden of personal autonomy, freedom from reproductive choice, freedom from having the other types of freedom.

    "Freedom" is a shibboleth. It means different things to different people and some of those things are unequivocally toxic.

    783:

    Actually, the anti-bolide defense is interesting because it looks like super-science might be required for some essential parts.

    Here's a couple that keep nagging at me:

    Time to orbit. Assume you've got a ground based ABM (anti-bolide missile) coming in at somewhere between 10 and 70 km/sec. You launch your ABM as soon as it has a target, and it takes ca. 500 seconds to reach Low Earth Orbit. Is that when it's going to hit the bolide? No, that's when it's up to speed. It might take upwards of 10,000 seconds to get it aimed (an orbit and a bit) and then to turn on the engines again to set up the intercept. The Moon's 384,400 km away, for reference, so just to get the intercept set up, you need to detect probably out beyond the Moon, and you need to have an ABM missile, tipped with a nuke, that could launch instantly and hit the Moon, more or less.

    Spotting the bolide in translunar space is doable. The ABM? That's a bit super-sciencey. I leave it to someone else to explain how they keep nuclear missiles ready to fly, but we're talking about the same thing on the scale of a Saturn V, a bunch of them kept in silos, ready for launch. If they have to be stored in pieces and assembled and prepped for flight, that's, what, a months'-long process?

    So we put the ABM in orbit. Here's the question: do we know how to maintain a live nuclear missile in orbit for years to decades? Not a satellite, but something that has absolutely enormous delta-V, has a warhead that can be armed from the ground, and all that? I suspect this would need super-science too, as rocket fuel's not the most forgiving class of substance, and LEO is not the most forgiving operational environment, just from day-night thermal cycling and debris impacts.

    I won't get into the math of whether the ABM money's better spent on protecting humans from routine natural disasters where bolide-level amounts of energy are released, because I mean that's silly, those happen every year, unlike an impact. Why derail the discussion?

    Getting back to spacecraft though, this does get at some interesting hard SF ideas, about what goes into making something rapidly launchable, the active lifecycle of a spacecraft, what can be maintained in space, and whether it's useful to think about an anti-bolide defense as being analogous to a ship anti-missile defense, just with a few zeroes added on in speed and range.

    And since I'm just doomscrolling, waiting for the West Virginia vs. EPA SCOTUS decision to come out...

    784:

    You launch your ABM as soon as it has a target, and it takes ca. 500 seconds to reach Low Earth Orbit.

    No.

    It takes roughly 800-900 gee-seconds to reach low earth orbit, and 500 seconds is correct for something like a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifting a stack of fragile satellites, but ABMs are another matter entirely. The 1970s Sprint missile accelerated at 100g, going from a cold start to Mach 10 (7500mph) in five secondfs. The current RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 Block IIA, the long range interception component of the Aegis naval system, is capable of hitting (and has demonstrated the ability to) satellites and ICBMs in flight -- I'm not clear on whether it gets up to orbital velocity or not, but it's able to kill the target by direct impact (Sprint had a nuclear warhead because it wasn't accurate enough for a kinetic kill).

    If your objective is bolide defense, you probably want something like Sprint, but with an extra stage stacked under it so it can reach a bit higher up -- solid fuel, long-term storable at ambient temperature, stacked in a VLS cell. It looks an awful lot like a 1970s ABM system, in fact, except you don't need a pack of 100 of the things around your capital city, you need individual rockets dispersed and positioned to cover all your major population centres. Which, purely by coincidence, is an ABM system too, just not optimized for an all-out superpower war.

    Hmm. There's some potential for getting the military-industrial complex on board with that, isn't there? Diplomatic conflicts aside.

    Is that when it's going to hit the bolide? No, that's when it's up to speed. It might take upwards of 10,000 seconds to get it aimed (an orbit and a bit) and then to turn on the engines again to set up the intercept. The Moon's 384,400 km away, for reference, so just to get the intercept set up, you need to detect probably out beyond the Moon, and you need to have an ABM missile, tipped with a nuke, that could launch instantly and hit the Moon, more or less.

    785:

    Enslaved labor was how they could best serve Mammon centuries ago. That they still rely on white supremacy after all these years doesn't speak well of their capacity to learn new tricks.

    Why bother to learn new tricks? Prisoners can still be treated as enslaved, and the prison-industrial complex is huge. Heck, Jim Crow effectively took away most of the rights the freedfolk had received in 1865.

    Moreover, white supremacist violence won the Reconstruction, along with political strategies that are on full display right now.

    I hate to say it, but they're still doing it because it works. I think criticisms of the left, that we don't fucking remember what we and previous generations learned, are perfectly valid.

    786:

    And there's the fracking West Virginia vs. EPA ruling: EPA can't regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants: https://www.yahoo.com/news/supreme-court-limits-epa-curbing-140541946.html

    MARK SHERMAN Thu, June 30, 2022 at 7:05 AM

    WASHINGTON (AP) — In a blow to the fight against climate change, the Supreme Court on Thursday limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law can be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

    By a 6-3 vote, with conservatives in the majority, the court said that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming.

    The court’s ruling could complicate the administration’s plans to combat climate change. Its proposal to regulate power plant emissions is expected by the end of the year.

    President Joe Biden aims to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade and to have an emissions-free power sector by 2035. Power plants account for roughly 30% of carbon dioxide output.

    “Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion for the court.

    But Roberts wrote that the Clean Air Act doesn’t give EPA the authority to do so and that Congress must speak clearly on this subject.

    "A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body,” he wrote.

    In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the decision strips the EPA of the power Congress gave it to respond to “the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

    Kagan said the stakes in the case are high. She said, "The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

    787:

    "Freedom" is a shibboleth. It means different things to different people and some of those things are unequivocally toxic.

    Still remembering all to clear (though it was many years ago) because it was an eye opener for me: For some reason I was sitting in a café early one morning, quietly munching my breakfast sandwich and sipping coffee. At a table next to me were two men talking to each other. Not actively eavesdropping it was soon quite clear they both were members of some sort of evangelical church. They started talking about "freedom" (I vaguely remember it was a hot political topic then) and one of them with conviction in his voice stated firmly he really couldn't understand the debate - freedom is of course to totally submit to god...

    788:

    I'm not clear on whether it gets up to orbital velocity or not

    Not. 4.5 km/s for a block IIA against ~7 km/s for LEO.

    789:

    Charlie's decision was right, not to follow up on the story idea for Biggles with a sex change. It's been done to a fare-thee-well for lo this past quarter century, and her name is........Lara Croft. Biggles &Croft both traverse the globe shooting exotic species along with truculent indigenous peoples while looting cultural artifacts, how much wiggle room does that leave for new variation on the same old character? Indy Jones and Nate Drake follow this formula too. In some ways they're all retreads of pre-WWI yellow journalism, which boosted papers' circulation by exaggerating the exploits of publicity hungry explorers like Heinrich Schliemann and Hiram Bingham, as well as a couple of intrepid Victorian era roving women correspondents whose dispatches told their adventures around the world. Can't recall their names, although one was dubbed "the unsinkable", probably not Molly Brown. Anyway, once the image was popularized but the real life explorers ran out of new material, it left a void in the public's imagination which fiction writers and cinema were only too happy to refill. Now with a surfeit of video game franchises like Tomb Raider and Uncharted, the field is crowded, and its fans may be dying off fast enough to produce a media consumers' backlash against new entrants in a familiar guise. Witness the thundering yawn that greeted the Uncharted movie a few months ago. It hit the dollar dvd kiosks so fast it must have made studio execs' heads spin.

    What new voids in the public imagination are likely to appear in the next decade, the charismatic CEO? As our current crop of billionaire entrepreneurs exploit their first mover advantage and make entry costs increasingly prohibitive for would-be competitors, less and less swashbuckling innovators like Jobs, Musk, Branson and Bezos will dazzle the public eye, and they may be missed just as sources of entertainment. Calling all fiction writers, we have an all points bulletin for a missing person....and don't say Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark, there's got to be a plausible product or service tied to the name. Preferably of the consumer variety. Batmobiles don't count.

    790:

    The original sin of the USA is not slavery, it is treason. Slavery was was the purpose of that treason - possibly in both directions. As in wanting to maintain slavery for the benefit of the wealthy owners, and to escape the ersatz slavery of being subject to British rule.

    791:

    Beat me to it. While the 1500 km ceiling is nice, 4.5 km/sec is still slow compared with a bolide coming in between 10 and 70 km/sec. And its warhead is 1.5 tons, which is nice.

    This is where the rocket equation sprouts teeth, because each stage below it has to accelerate the mass of whatever it's carrying. I suspect that will get rather annoying. Still, if there's good stable solid rocket propellant, and we can use it to loft something the weight of a Mercury capsule into space...why aren't we?

    792:

    This is what is tearing the US apart, that freedom is somehow compatible with slavery cannot be sustained. I think there's a simple explanation for this thinking: it's the idea that people are not equal. It's 'Freedom for us, slavery for them'.

    Since I periodically have to remind myself of this, the phrase "All men are created equal" is in the Declaration of Independence, not in the Constitution. There's apparently a fair amount of case law saying the Declaration isn't a legal document.

    One of the big causes of the Rebellion was the notion that the Northern Republicans were trumpeting "All men are created equal" when the constitution plainly allowed slavery. The southerners believed (correctly I might add) that the US would stop following the Constitution, and so they wanted out. The Confederate Constitution plainly said that men were not equal.

    I'll also note, for any benighted Lost Cause junkies out there (staring at our Supreme Court) that the Confederacy did a fucking lousy job at governing, notwithstanding the fact that they were at war. As the EU's finding, it's not the greatest system of governance. Anybody who wants the US to become a confederacy isn't working in the best interests of most Americans.

    793:

    The making of arbitrary political decisions about deeply divisive issues by the US Supreme Court has made a complete mockery of the US constitution: it is in effect a judicial coup d'etat.

    So where will the counter-coup come from?

    794:

    Just because it shows up a couple of times upthread; there was nothing at all wrong with the Treaty of Versailles by the standards of the time. It suited both sides to lean into the "squeezing till the pips squeak" bit. If anyone really wants details, The Myth of Reparations by Sally Marks is a good place to start.

    795:

    Just write in uppercaps? You mean... UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED (R. Mcelwaine)

    796:

    One problem with having nukes in orbit: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

    Which is why I suggested building a mass-driver on the Moon. Or several.

    797:

    You need to be a bit more cautious with your links - that started with https://sci-hub.ru, followed by the actual link.

    "Myth"? Really? And what about the "myth" that the current inflation by consumers, and the supply chain... and not by massive profit taking and demands?

    Works well for the right.

    798:

    Good point about Lara Croft.

    Welll...Uncharted cost $120 million, grossed $400 million worldwide (the PR flacks put this all up on Wikipedia as a matter of course). I don't think adventures are going away, Tomb Raider's failures notwithstanding.

    Our problem is that, with a more global market, action FILMS are easier to translate than cultural films, for fairly obvious reasons. They're not going away anytime soon, even if we're all suffering from Marvel fatigue.

    One interesting niche is K-drama, which sucks a lot of people in around the globe. Most of the tropes and plots are Old Hollywood, and that's kind of the point. South Korea's a bit more culturally conservative, so Korean social norms play well in much of the Middle East and apparently Latin America, while American capitalist sexuality is still a bit transgressive for most. So if you want your story to get translated a lot, targeting Korean moral norms might work.

    That said, books are a niche market, so targeting literate readers makes perfect sense. I'll defer to Charlie on how to do this, of course, since he's the master and I'm the apprentice in this field.

    799:

    Rbt Prior
    They are being very selective about which bits of the 18th century they hold sacrosanct…
    They are trying to adhere to the religious ideas of the C18th, without admitting it, of course, because that would collapse the whole thing { Contra to the "Establishment Clause" ) - as several people have already spotted. Um.

    "Freedom From" vs "Freedom To" This is the pricipal difference between the US & the UK - & as usual, certain arseholes are trying to drag us in the US' direction.
    { Hello Bo Jon-Sun }

    H
    As expected, the wreckers are at it again.
    However, I foresee vast protests & demonstrations & enforced shut-downs of polluting plants, anyway, because people simply are not going to put up with this shit ......
    Also, yet again - ignorant, but "very clever" lawyers know more than the professional technical experts - shades of smarmy little Gove, eh? This is not going to end well.

    timrowledge
    Precisely - I keep saying this & many USAians will go into paroxysms of foaming if it's even suggested to them.
    Some of them are still under the impression that we are "subjects" & that EIIR is NOT a Constitutional monarch & talk about "bending the knee" - what's more they seem unable to recognise OUR "Separation of powers" so that the Head of state is NOT the head of the executive.

    Charles W
    The making of arbitrary political decisions about deeply divisive issues by the US Supreme Court has made a complete mockery of the US constitution - Absolutely nothing new there.
    The words Dred Scott come to mind.
    IIRC that SCOTUS decision made Civil War almost inevitable, yes?
    And now we have 2 more SCOTUS decisions at odds with what the population actually want. Um.

    800:

    One problem with having nukes in orbit: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Which is why I suggested building a mass-driver on the Moon. Or several.

    Oh yes, thanks for the reminder. For me, the major attraction about this discussion is what it says about space flight and SF norms, like being able to get in an old spacecraft and fly it with little prep.

    Otherwise, city-killer asteroids are rare on the ground, compared with city-killer earthquakes, droughts, storms, and for all I know wildfires. And certainly Carrington Events.

    It's fun technology to talk about for a few hours. Real stuff, like "how fire-resistant a house is sufficiently resistant?* is more realistic, and also quite tedious.

    801:

    "One problem with having nukes in orbit: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. "

    Nah. It prohibits weapons, not explosives designed to be used for other purposes. If one doesn't make that distinction, one would run into trouble with ANFO, for example.

    802:

    "There's apparently a fair amount of case law saying the Declaration isn't a legal document. "

    Nor is the Preamble to the Constitution, despite having being written on the same sheet of paper and obviously meant to be a statement of intent. Ditto the militia clause in the 2nd Amendment.

    Me, I'd take those at face value as guides to interpreting the law, but what do I know?

    803:

    "because people simply are not going to put up with this shit"

    Of course they are, unless it gets much closer to the personal lives of the people.

    "This is not going to end well."

    No, it isn't, at the gigadeath scale. But that's off in the not-so-sweet bye and bye, and who worries about that? Geeks and nerds, mostly. Ignorable. Ask Heteromeles about that.

    804:

    Heteromeles @ 768:

    Preaching to the choir here.

    805:

    I've been recently introduced to the idea that economists undervalue the lives of the unborn. Apparently each generation is valued lower than the previous generation. This raises a few questions for me. Apologies if they're painfully obvious to most readers here, but I suspect they may relate to your point about "gigadeath scale" endings.

    Firstly, is this true, and if so, then which economists? All of them or only some of them? How far back does this undervaluing go, and looking ahead, how will future generations of economists value the unborn? How many parents value the lives of their children and grandchildren lower than they value their own lives? Do economists differ from non-economists in this way?

    If you value the lives of unborn humans so low, what of non-human life? What if people undervalue the living, nevermind the unborn? When we can't agree on how to value life, how can we usefully discuss things like extinction events? 'Useful' like avoiding future extinction events.

    806:

    Charlie Stross @ 776:

    The problem with originalists like Clarence Thomas is they've formed their agenda and then gone looking for arguments to support it.

    They care neither for what the document actually says, nor for what the framers intended. They take EVERYTHING out of context and twist it with pretzel logic. If it were not for ARGUMENTS IN BAD FAITH, they would have no faith at all.

    And while slavery is the original sin of the U.S., it was sin that pre-existed the U.S.

    Don't forget WHO introduced slavery into their American Colonies. Y'all are just as guilty.

    807:

    The actual anti-impact defense of earth is that the solar system debris is quite well mapped, and getting more so by the year. The odds of us only knowing about something when it is as close as the moon is, well, quite-hard-to-distinquish from zero. With more realistic levels of advanced warning, sending a big bomb to do a bit of nudging via radiation-flash-boil-of-surface is a perfectly reasonable plan. It does not have to change direction or velocity much if its half the solar system away when its done.

    Carrington, now, that actually can hit with fuck-all useful warning, and I am an unhappy camper our grids are not better hardened against it, because it is not only something we wont get much notice of, it also is something that will happen at some point. Not may. Will.

    In other inevitabilities: I.. really dont see much in the way of happy resolutions for the mess that US politics. The US is currently failing hard to live up to the standards of institutional self-defense set by the Weimar Republic. I mean, Weimar actually arrested Hitler for the beer hall putch.

    808:

    Preaching to the choir here.

    Can I have an amen?

    Going back to the topic of books I won't write, I thought of a doozy.

    It's a revamped version of an old bestseller that's long out of copyright.

    The title is Uncle Thom's SCOTUS.

    809:

    timrowledge @ 791:

    WRONG. Slavery existed in ALL of the British Colonies, but no one in Britain was proposing to do away with slavery either here or there.

    If you want to know why the colonies revolted against colonial misrule, look at the U.S. Bill of Rights.

    Along with "taxation without representation" & British mercantilism that sought to prevent the colonies from participating in the burgeoning global economic system (trade & manufacturing), British colonial governments abused the colonists in other ways:

    John Peter Zenger

    Boston Massacre

    The Arms of All The People Should Be Taken Away.

    In 1777, William Knox, Under Secretary of State in the British colonial Office, circulated a proposal entitled “What is it to be Done with America?” Knox advocated the creation of a ruling aristocracy loyal to the Crown, establishment of the Church of England throughout the colonies and an unlimited power to tax. To keep them servile, Knox offered the panacea of disarming all of the people and relying solely on a standing army:

    Quartering Act of 1765

    I could go on, but Amendments IV, V, VI, VII, VIII are all responses to abuses by the colonial administrations.

    The only real mention of slavery from the period of the American Revolution that I have found, is a passage deleted1 from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, excoriating the King for refusing to abolish the slave trade:

    He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

    Jefferson blames the king for the existence of slavery in the colonies; blames the king for NOT allowing the slave trade to be abolished in the colonies and most of all he blames the king for fomenting slave rebellions among those whose liberty the king denied, offering slaves "freedom" if they will only kill their "colonial masters".

    Bottom line though, slavery was NOT an issue in the American Revolution.
    --

    1 Jefferson later blamed removal of the slavery passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

    810:

    In other inevitabilities: I.. really dont see much in the way of happy resolutions for the mess that US politics. The US is currently failing hard to live up to the standards of institutional self-defense set by the Weimar Republic. I mean, Weimar actually arrested Hitler for the beer hall putch.

    I dunno. Did the Weimar have freedom of political speech? This isn't a trivial question. Apparently a bunch of lawyer/talking heads were of the opinion going in that Trump's Jan 6th speech was covered political speech, so it would be hard to prosecute.

    Incitement is defined as "Stoking imminent lawless action." What Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony showed on Tuesday was that Trump definitely knew that some in the crowd were armed, and he asked the Secret Service to "Take the mags (magnetometers) away," so they could come in and give him a better crowd. That shows that he knew that what was going on was illegal, and he wanted it to continue. Apparently in US law, knowing transforms it from political rhetoric to incitement to riot.

    We're nowhere near done with this mess.

    811:

    I've been recently introduced to the idea that economists undervalue the lives of the unborn.

    Do you mean via the future discount rate where they attempt to guess how much we should allow the present to impose costs on the future? This about a business borrowing money, by doing that "future business" will be faced with a debt created by "present business". How do we justify that? The answer is by saying that money invested now returns more money in the future, so "future business" will get (debt + some interest) but also (investment earnings) and hopefully the latter will be larger.

    At a government level the same thing is done, most obviously with infrastructure. Spend a few billion building a new train system, pay it back over 20 years but keep using it for 50.

    Rather than go through that detailed analysis for every bit of spending economists prefer to say "money now is worth slightly more than money in the future", and call that the discount rate.

    Inevitably and necessarily the same thing is done with human lives. Spend money now providing medical care, or spend it later providing early childhood education? Someone has to decide. Sadly this is also often not done, you rarely hear of tax cuts being discussed in terms of how the money could be spent with "give it to rich people" as just one option. But that's what it is.

    Much the same as the electoral system isn't seen as "more democracy vs more authority" even when that is the easiest way to understand the proposed change (but for some reason the people wanting 'more authority' rarely want to come out and say that).

    812:

    is wanting a better crowd the same as wanting them to riot tho?

    seems like a stretch, though maybe it depends on how many senate republicans u need to convince, i have no model of how the jan 6th thing works

    813:

    You really didn’t bother to read what I wrote at all.

    Treason was the original sin because by the very nature of rebelling against the legitimate authorities they committed treason. They knew that - amongst things that explains the very limited definition of treason in US law, since they wanted to assert a distinction between what they did and the definition in place at the time of their acts. Pretty much every country can count some act akin to treason in its creation, somewhere in its history. Remember, treason does not prosper for if it prosper none dare call it treason (paraphrased from someone or other)

    Slavery? Yes, it’s common across history and across the world and far too common now. I demand a Cherwell Convention, now.

    814:

    is wanting a better crowd the same as wanting them to riot tho?

    It is when you know they are armed and tell them to go to the Capitol.

    815:

    JBS
    Jefferson blamed the king....
    When, even then, it was Parliament, not the monarch?
    HOW CONVENIENT

    816:

    It took no time at all, really, for the end of democracy in the US. With The Five on SCOTUS establishing the xtian, white, male authoritarian rule, and abolishing the authority of the POTUS, the House, the Senate, federal rule and law, states' rules and laws from governors down to the most local, and substituting what The Five say the final and only authority -- here we are, Russia incarnate. Putin won beyond his wildest dreams.

    Now all we need do to patiently wait for time to reveal who the Final Strongest and Only White Guy is, who then, like Napoleon as emperor, replaces the entire shebang, starting with the Constitution, with whatever version the Strongest and Only White Guy's Code Napoleon shall be.

    817:

    You all are missing a very great deal about US slavery, even slavery in the Constitution.The Constitution sets up the carcel system as legalized slavery, at least as far as being a convicted, imprisoned person not needing compensation for work.It also outlawed the importation of slaves from elsewhere to protect the domestic product, by which so many of those nice men who drafted the Constitution actually lived -- by selling the natural increase of their owned work force to newer territories needing the labor.

    That had already begun to a degree before the war of independence, and Jefferson, Madison were in the thick of it, though nothing like the endless scaling up of the export sales after the cotton gin's invention and the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory.

    Now, supposedly Benjamin Franklin, who was certainly present at the Constitutional Convention, is credited to being anti-slavery. However, in those crucial younger decades of his life, when he made his fortune, the buying and selling of slaves was a big part of that. Few of the Founders can escape the privilege granted them -- to even be attending such a thing as a Constitutional Convention -- or a convention earlier to declare Independence -- w/o that privilege being overtly financed or otherwise made possible by either owning slaves then, having family that did, or servicing the buying and selling of slaves, as Franklin did.

    It was so scaled that it could not be a compatible capitalist economic system, even in terms of purchasing goods, outside the geographical system that it dominated. And slavery did dominate, every frackin' institution and business, from law enforcement to politics. Because every bit of the system was focused on keeping the population in check, keeping it at home, and keeping the system protected, growing and expanding.

    In the end, that all resources are pushed toward that makes an overt slavery system in this day and age particularly, impossible. But there are so many other ways, and the prisons are already doing it.

    The first great sin was genocide. It was consciously genocide too. But color-based slavery tended to go from the very beginning with genocide. Genocide to replace that population with African descent slaves.

    818:

    Yes, discount rate.

    It was this interview: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/03/07/187-andrew-leigh-on-the-politics-of-looming-disasters/

    From the transcript at the 0:22:57 point: "If we, massively, if we just count the future at the regular discount rate that you use, say, 5% a year, then you get the results that future people aren’t worth very much. Indeed, if you discount at a rate of 5%, then you get the result that Christopher Columbus is worth more than all the eight billion people currently alive today, or similarly, that your life is more valuable than 8 billion lives in 500 years time."

    That whole interview may be relevent to this subthread, in particular with regard to gigadeath events.

    819:

    I saw an analysis saying that this actually confuses the fsck out of all the lower courts because the precedents that the current supreme court is generating, and the rationalisations for them, contradict each other and don't make sense. Was centred on a recent reversal other than the abortion one, where two years ago they said "definitely X" and now they say "clearly not X, what were you thinking?" to a different lower court. The combined precedent is ... {shrug}.

    Plus any court now has to face the prospect that their decision is wrong according to the supremes because last year's precedent might be superseded by an obscure 14th century cleric in Saxony.

    And I can't find the article, sorry. I thought it was techdirt but I don't see it there. And my feed reader doesn't bring up anything using obvious search terms.

    820:

    Until today I still thought we had some hope for the future.

    The oil companies (thanks to Citizens United) own Congress.

    Nothing will get passed into law.

    The planet will burn.

    821:

    Greg Tingey @ 800:

    FWIW, the U.S. Constitution has both in the Bill of Rights ...

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, [freedom from] or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; [Freedom to] ...l

    822:

    Adrian Smith @ 813:

    In the case of the January 6, 2921 riot, the answer is YES without doubt.

    There's plenty of other evidence that Trumpolini anticipated violence by the rioters would at best intimidate Pence into going along with the conspiracy to steal the election by inserting bogus Slates of Electors,

    ... and at worst force Congress to do Trumpolini's bidding at the point of a gun after lynching Pence as an example for others.

    823:

    there was nothing at all wrong with the Treaty of Versailles by the standards of the time

    The reparations were roughly equivalent to those imposed on France after the Franco-Prussian War, which were supposed to match those imposed by Napoleon on Prussia…

    824:

    Bottom line though, slavery was NOT an issue in the American Revolution.

    A number of historians, including (I believe) Foxessa, would disagree with that statement.

    I've mentioned both these books before:

    https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25246348-the-american-slave-coast

    https://nyupress.org/9781479893409/the-counter-revolution-of-1776/

    If slavery wasn't an issue in the Revolution, why did the vast majority of black colonials side with the British? Look up the history of the Black Loyalists…

    825:

    timrowledge @ 814:

    I read what you wrote; all of it. I just strongly disagree with it.

    You're wrong. I don't know where you're from, but you apparently have little grasp of the actual history of the American Revolution.

    Your assertion that the American Revolution was "treason motivated by slavery" is nonsense. And your assertions about the Constitution are at best "uninformed".

    The founders chose to limit the definition of Treason in the Constitution because under British Colonial Rule, treason was whatever the king or his appointed representative (Royal Governor) said it was ... even hunting deer in the King's forest ... or criticizing "Royal" policies The law was routinely used to suppress dissent; to deprive the colonists of their rights as Englishmen.

    Also note that under British Colonial Rule you could be punished for "treason" just because the King's governor sent a Bill of Atainder (which is also prohibited under the U.S. Constitution).

    826:

    Greg Tingey @ 816:

    In that case Greg, why did the King keep sending Royal Governors to be the chief administrative officers of the colonies?

    If Parliament was in charge, why weren't they sending Parliamentary Secretaries instead?

    827:

    Until today I still thought we had some hope for the future.

    Read the full West Virginia v EPA opinion a few hours ago. The Kagan dissent is good. The RWers are a-holes. Even a few words gratuitously wrapped with scare quotes.
    As a short-term [Anger]-control project, I've been trying to map out courses of action that don't involve selective mass murder or the destruction of the USA or general global mass death (but less than caused by global heating). (Sub-zero thanks to those who helped D.J. Trump, Appointer-of-Christian-Supremacist-SCOTUS-Justices[1], win the 2016 election.)
    Here's an amusing one:
    The SCOTUS grabbed power in 1803, Marbury v. Madison, asserting the power of Judicial review. Congress has control over the jurisdiction of the SCOTUS:
    From US Constitution, Article III, Section 2: "In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make."
    If the Democrats hold the US House and gain enough seats in the US Senate in the 2022 Nov elections, they can ditch the filibuster for a bill that places appropriate limits on the power of the SCOTUS.

    They could literally strip the SCOTUS of most of its power of judicial review, and it would be constitutional. The downstream political consequences would be exciting. Maybe then reverse one or more of the grotesque decisions of the past couple of weeks.

    [1] Also "one-who-backed-out-of-important-treaties", notably the INF treaty, the Paris accord, the JCPOA (Iran deal).

    828:

    Robert Prior @ 825:

    I guess you missed this bit:1

    “exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another

    I believe the British offer to free slaves was insincere. And it was NOT a cause of the American Revolution, it was a "ruse de guerre", considered legitimate as long as it does not involve treachery or perfidy, adopted AFTER hostilities commenced (and I can't say for certain it DID NOT involve such).

    How many of Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment survived the war and lived as free men in England after the Revolution? How many slaves owned by British Loyalists did Lord Dunmore's proclamation free?

    What happened to the slaves owned by British Loyalists after the Treaty of Paris (1783)? Were they freed? Or were they transported to other British colonies, STILL ENSLAVED.

    It IS, however, a fairly astounding bit of hypocrisy.

    PS: John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore PC (1730 – 25 February 1809) - a real piece of work! Before issuing his "proclamation", as Royal Governor Dunmore withheld his signature from a bill against the slave trade. This is the exact incident Jefferson is addressing in the text above.

    In 1787, Dunmore was appointed governor of the Bahamas, where thousands of blacks had been transported after the war, most of them enslaved. Despite his effort to pose as the "Great Liberator," Dunmore's attempts to reconcile conflicts over property claims for runaway slaves resulted in the reenslavement of 29 of the 30 who brought their claim of freedom before his Negro Court. The planters' support later turned to condemnation when blacks built a village in Nassau behind Government House, and another near Fort Charlotte, to provide asylum to runaways where "no white person dares make his appearance...but at risk of his life." Critics charged that Dunmore intervened to protect blacks from punishment, despite the fact that several black leaders were arrested and prosecuted for assault on whites.

    --
    1 Note however that this passage was deleted from the list of grievances against the King in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

    Slavery was a problem in the colonies, just as it would become a problem in the United States, but it was not THE PROBLEM that led to the American Revolution.

    829:

    I think you're arguing semantics over the titles used, rather than examining which body was responsible for appointing the post holders. I haven't done either; simply identified that this may not be a duck just because it is labelled "duck".

    830:

    once you have enacted a constitution (or any other written law) then that written law must rule

    Yes, you said that before and it still doesn't follow. You haven't explained why you think the latter is an outcome of the premise, but that's what I'm disagreeing with, in any case. Common law isn't just for where there isn't statute law, and there can be more than one source of law. Also, "what the authors meant" isn't the only way to interpret written law and many jurisdictions at least tacitly interpret based on what the law says rather than what they believe the authors intended*. That's the case with the recent hijinks involving Section 44(i) of the Australian constitution, for instance, which holds that anyone who:

    "Is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or citizen of a foreign power"

    is not eligible to serve as an MP or Senator in Australian Parliament. This is currently interpreted by the High Court of Australia to mean that even merely having the option of dual citizenship with another country, including Commonwealth countries, disqualifies a person from serving in Parliament. Now when the constitution was written, the concept of Australian citizenship being distinct from British citizenship was unknown, and Brits, Canadians, Kiwis and Indians would all have counted as not being a subject of a "foreign" power. So long story short, there's no way in hell the authors intended it to apply to people with dual citizenship of those countries, but as Wiki notes 'the Court interpreted s 44(i) according to the "ordinary and natural meaning" of its language'.

    I'm sure similar US examples exist, I just don't have any to mind. I'm sure that there are loads of UK examples too. The idea that the UK doesn't have a written constitution is incorrect, it's just that it's not concentrated into a single document and includes things that don't look like constitutional artefacts as someone coming from a US perspective would recognise. Take Magna Carta as a starting point and do a stepwise crawl through history.

    * there's a lot of discussion about authorial intent in philology and hermeneutics, but that is a whole different rabbit hole that isn't necessary to explore here.

    831:

    JBS # 827
    It's a TITLE - like "Her Majesty's Armed Services" or "The Crown" - which actually means Parliament.
    As Paws has also noted.

    832:

    no way in hell the authors intended it to apply to people with dual citizenship of those countries

    There's equally no way they intended the "Israel exception" that Frydenberg et al use, especially since the court held that they did intend exceptions for Britain or any commonwealth countries, not even the white ones.

    The is relevant due to there being another MP of middle eastern origin who was required to dance in circles due to another government in that area also making it difficult for people to renounce their ties. Somehow it's not blatantly hypocritical to say Jews are fine but Iranians can fuck off back where they came from. Part of the problem is that Sam Dastyari is a Labor MP and Frydenberg is Liberal, so the neofascists have no problem with the "good Jew" and are actively looking for excuses to harass the enemy within.

    You can bet that if the new federal Labor government even hints that they ,might be thinking of using S44 against the opposition there will be a screaming outbreak of woke hurt feelings from the neofascists social justice warriors on the right.

    (Frydenberg survived a S44 challenge but that was based on inherited Hungarian citizenship, not his "right of return" (in the John Denver sense))

    833:

    As the EU's finding, it's not the greatest system of governance.

    As a reminder, the EU isn't a government. (That it was, was the big lie that the Brexiters used to scream about -- that UK laws were being made in Brussels.) The EU is a free trade treaty with policy-setting powers that are implemented in law by its member states, so it doesn't need the rapid response and proactive executive arms of a regular government, stuff like military and police forces and direct taxation powers.

    834:

    The idea that the UK doesn't have a written constitution is incorrect, it's just that it's not concentrated into a single document and includes things that don't look like constitutional artefacts as someone coming from a US perspective would recognise.

    Which documents ARE part of Britain's written constitution then? Magna Carta was mostly obsoleted virtually as soon as it was written and I think there's only one small part of it that is still applicable to modern Britain's governance today.

    Britain's "constitution", such as it is consists of laws and rules passed by Parliament and is subject at any time to those laws and rules being altered or deleted by any existing or succeeding Parliament. There's no overarching document that defines and restricts Parliament in regard what laws it may pass. The (UK) Supreme Court may say such and such an action taken by the government is unlawful but it cannot rule that a law passed by Parliament is against the constitution since there's really no such thing in the UK.

    835:

    "Constitution" merely means the set of guiding principles around how a polity operates. Off the top of my head, some of the most critical documents that make up the UK consitution include:

    • Bill of Rights 1689
    • Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949
    • Representation of the People Act 1983
    • Constitutional Reform Act 2005
    • Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011

    Magna Carta is indeed pretty much irrelevant today. I believe that one or two paragraphs still apply, but I do not recall which ones. Its main relevance was to create the precedent that anyone other than the monarch might have a valid interest in how the polity operates.

    The USA chose to apply a higher level of protection to their constitution than to their "normal" laws, and while that's not necessarily a bad idea, the implementation is rather showing its flaws: to all intents and purpose, it is now fixed in stone and unmodifiable. And yet, that hasn't really ossified how it works - as we have seen, change the roster of people who are responsible for deciding what it means, and, well, all of a sudden, the same words mean completely different things.

    All in all, I am not convinced that the USA's approach of a (n effectively) read-only consitutition is unambiguously superior.

    836:

    I literally just counted them, and there are 37 (thirty seven) Representation of the People Acts applying to the present UK of GB and Northern Ireland. What makes you pick out the 1983 Act as special? And, indeed, the Fixed term Parliament Act (2011) that you cite has been repealed, vis Wikipedia "After winning the 2019 election, the Conservative Party committed to repealing the FTPA. In fulfilment of this manifesto pledge, the government published on 1 December 2020 a draft Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (Repeal) Bill that would repeal the FTPA and revive the royal prerogative power of dissolving Parliament as it existed before the Act. The legislation was formally announced as the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill in the Queen's Speech of 11 May 2021, and granted Royal Assent on 24 March 2022."

    837:

    Damian @ 831:

    [Me] once you have enacted a constitution (or any other written law) then that written law must rule

    [Damian] Yes, you said that before and it still doesn't follow.

    I'm struggling to see what the alternative is. As far as I can see, if you write down a law then either its the law and it rules, or its just a piece of paper. China has taken this approach: it has a constitution and set of laws, but the executive takes the position that its decisions are automatically law and therefore override anything previously written down. That isn't the rule of law as most people understand it.

    Common law isn't just for where there isn't statute law, and there can be more than one source of law.

    The dictionary definition of common law is "the part of English law that is derived from custom and judicial precedent rather than statutes." Any statute overrides any pre-existing precedent and custom, and subsequent judgements must be in accordance with the statute. Yes, any particular judgement might draw on both, but a judge can't say "the Silly Buggers (Prohibition of Playing) Act is overridden by the long standing custom predating the Act, so I'm going to ignore the Act".

    Also, "what the authors meant" isn't the only way to interpret written law and many jurisdictions at least tacitly interpret based on what the law says rather than what they believe the authors intended*. That's the case with the recent hijinks involving Section 44(i) of the Australian constitution [...]

    The whole point of the Rule of Law is that anyone can read the law, understand what it means, and see how it will be applied. In some cases you might need to hire a lawyer to understand the subtleties, but any two lawyers should still agree on what the law means. If there are gray areas (e.g. the word "reasonable" crops up a lot in some areas of law) then they will at least agree on the scope of those gray areas.

    If you can't do that then the Rule of Law is weakened. Its not fatal in any particular case, but if those in power can reinterpret the law to suit themselves then the law is failing. If you believe that the Rule of Law is a Good Thing then you should object to this.

    As for the Australian cases, I've skimmed the Wikipedia article you link to and I can't see anything in particular where the law was reinterpreted contrary to the intent of the people who drafted and passed it. Can you be more specific?

    838:

    Atropos & others
    The Bill of Rights of 1689 is the important one - if only for its principles ...

    839:

    Everybody is concentrating on the 'written', but the real doubt is whether if is a constitution. The problem is threefold:

    No sitting of Parliament can bind its successors - I don't know where that is written, and it may not even be in an Act (e.g. it might be in Erskine May).

    Parliament is supreme, and nothing, not even natural law, can stop it passing any Act it wants to, and mere impossibility does not invalidate what it says.

    What enforcement there is, is effectively done by the government or Parliament, which is effectively appointed by Parliament, including the enforcement of rules that are supposedly binding.

    The effect is that it is nothing more than a set of conventions. Some are more enshrined than others, but ALL can be changed or ignored at any time. Witness the way that the Fixed Term Parliaments Act was bypassed.

    840:

    Neofascists(crossed out)/social justice warriors is incorrect. The correct verbiage is social injustice warriors (or snowflakes, if you prefer), since they're pushing injustice and inequality as hard as they can.

    841:

    China has taken this approach: it has a constitution and set of laws, but the executive takes the position that its decisions are automatically law and therefore override anything previously written down. That isn't the rule of law as most people understand it.

    There's more to it. Lots of China's laws when translated into English (and I suspect in the original) seem overly vague. Like it is treason to do bad things against the interests of the official Bank of China or similar. (Making this up but I think it fits the mold.)

    Now layer on to that, the Party is the official government of China. Full stop. And the military belongs to the party.

    It is a strange setup to use "western" folks. Many times our sentences and words don't make sense when talking about China.

    842:

    I know where I linked. It's scihub. If you cut the scihub link you just get a pointless extract, not the whole paper, unless you're prepared to fork over £20 for access or have the required academic route in. Which I don't.

    843:

    Except for me, it gave me a very unhappy browser page.

    844:

    Weird. Here's the where is scihub? page that tracks its latest iterations. If you use that to get through to a scihub mirror and then use the article link it may get you there. If you're sufficiently interested to bother anyway. It's about 25 pages and quite a good read.

    845:

    the military belongs to the party

    During the Cultural Revolution one of my friends lived on an army base and never left without a military escort, because the PLA kept her safe from Party Red Guards.

    The PLA is a power bloc in China, nominally but not entirely under Party control.

    846:

    This is the original link you posted. Note that it goes to sci-hub.ru.
    https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900018707

    847:

    paws4thot @ 830:

    Royal government is the King's government whether it's the King's own hand that wields the blade or Parliament acting in the King's name with Royal assent.

    848:

    I'm struggling to see what the alternative is. As far as I can see, if you write down a law then either its the law and it rules, or its just a piece of paper.

    I think the issue is that you're thinking in far too absolute binaries.

    --The Constitution is part of our identity as Americans. Now this is sort of like the Bible being part of all Christians' identity. Almost all Christians, to the extent they've read it at all, bounced off books like Numbers and Leviticus. Even ardent practitioners tend to focus on things like the New Testament and the Psalms. Point is, a document can be critically important and still be largely unread. As I noted above, I regularly remind myself that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" isn't in the US Constitution. It should be, IMHO, but it isn't.

    --Laws are irrelevant unless someone empowers, enforces, and often embodies them. A constitution may be full of all sorts of stuff, but if it's unenforced, so what? Sometimes this matters, sometimes it does not.

    --The big problem: how do you deal with new situations? THIS IS INEVITABLE. While I agree that drastic changes need to be incorporated into the law, doing so before dealing with the change is a hopelessly reactionary process. A lot of governance happens in areas where the laws don't particularly match reality.

    The classic problem in the 20th Century US was the advent of nuclear weapons. In the Constitution, only the Congress can start a war, but if you have 30 minutes to respond to incoming missiles, there's no time for Congress to even make sure all its members get to read the declaration and vote on it, let alone debate it. And that's if they're all willing to die in the attack (which, to be fair, many were and probably are). So instead, the POTUS has assumed the power unilaterally to launch the US missiles, thereby likely dooming our species, and it is hoped that this threat will keep a nuclear war from ever happening, and so we can go on acting as if only Congress can declare war.

    The ability to start a nuclear war is AFAIK unconstitutional, but the alternatives are worse. Does this make the Constitution only a piece of paper? To most of us, no. However...

    --The final issue: people's interpretations inevitably differ. The nuclear POTUS opens the door for a totalitarian takeover, in ways that pre-nuclear presidents didn't deal with. If you think about it too hard, the nuclear football a profound abrogation of the US Constitution, since the POTUS can end our species without us being able to protest. So why not just get rid of that silly little Constitution, and give the POTUS the American Imperium? We've been headed that way for decades, with Congress assuming falsely they're irrelevant, and that's one reason we're in trouble now, with so many old Congressmembers, especially in the GOP, unused to standing up to the POTUS when it matters.

    Then we get someone who's both an unfit to rule and a power-hungry authoritarian in the office, and a lot of people suddenly get a clue about why imperial decision-making is often suboptimal at best.

    Anyway, laws are simultarneously real, a matter of opinion, and pieces of paper. I wish it was less confusing, but life is messy and so is power.

    849:

    Greg Tingey @ 832:

    It was the King's government acting in the King's name to enact the King's policies depriving the American colonies of their "natural rights as Englishmen" at a time when King George III still had [some] REAL POWER to shape those policies.

    You're dismissing the GRIEVANCES of the American colonies because of a meaningless distinction over who wrote out the order to fuck us over.

    Doesn't matter if it was King or Parliament it was ONE government. Everything that was done by Parliament was done in the King's name, with Royal Assent.

    850:

    Charlie Stross @ 834:

    Seems like (from what I read in the news) the EU is reconsidering the need to have their own military & police (para-military) forces. Or to at least implement some kind of unified European command structure that can call upon their member states & give those forces direction.

    Don't think they've taken any concrete steps in that direction, but it's come up for discussion in the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

    851:

    Atropos @ 836: All in all, I am not convinced that the USA's approach of a (n effectively) read-only consitutition is unambiguously superior.

    The U.S. Constitution is not really "read-only". The founders/framers recognized they didn't have all the answers to problems that might arise in the future. Hell, they knew they didn't have all the answers to the problems they were facing in 1789. That's why they included a mechanism for Amending the Constitution.

    They did make the Constitution difficult to amend, because they wanted to deter future U.S. governments from amending the Constitution frivolously ... which I think has more or less worked, the 18th amendment not withstanding.

    852:

    Royal government is the King's government whether it's the King's own hand that wields the blade or Parliament acting in the King's name with Royal assent.

    In Canada, an act of parliament doesn't become law until it received royal assent.

    This doesn't mean that everything done here is the result of a decision by the queen. Or even that the queen is responsible.

    853:

    It's one of those things that gets chewed over periodically, and inconclusively.

    I believe there's a joint French/German brigade-sized unit, but that's as far as it's got. That, and the unified NATO command structure (France aside) makes it mostly redundant insofar as the EU is mostly a subset of NATO (USA, UK, Turkey, and Canada excluded) and doesn't generally operate out of area -- there are exceptions (notably UK/France) but most of the European military forces are local/defensive only: remember the fuss when Germany sent troops to support NATO action in the Serbian war in 1994, for the first time they operated outside the country since 1945?

    An EU military force begs the question of what foreign policy they'd be needed to back up, other than trade policy. (The North Atlantic Treaty covers self-defense: what would they be needed for beyond the provisions of NATO?)

    854:

    I think JBS is confusing "the Crown" or "the Royal [whatever]" with an actual human being wearing a piece of fancy headgear. Whereas it's more like "the Constitution" -- it's not a specific piece of paper, rather it's a wellspring of legal authority. (You can burn the paper the Constitution's drafters all signed, but that doesn't invalidate the legal principles in enumerates. Similarly, the Crown isn't a person, it's a legal abstraction.)

    855:

    "The Crown" is a legal abstraction now, but what about in 1776? How much has that changed in 250 years?

    856:

    "The Crown" was a legal abstraction back then, too: in 1649 the absolute monarchy came to an abrupt end thanks to a trial and a headsman's axe, which settled the question of "who wins: parliament or king?" for a couple of generations. Then in 1688 the question got asked again, and while they didn't give James II a close shave, parliament drove him into exile and imported a new build-to-order monarch who was willing to do as he was told. ("Shut up, sign laws when we put them in front of you, don't rock the boat, and you can have all these palaces and fancy clothes.")

    From then on, the monarchy lost ground gradually, as more and more of its powers ended up being delegated to and executed by the Crown-in-Parliament.

    857:

    So by 1776 it wasn't possible to blame George III for much?

    858:

    Well..

    The EU is suddenly very, very focused on getting rid of unanimity in favor of qualified majority, and on building a more independent defense because the Russians have lost the plot, and the odds of the USA lighting the bag it keeps its marbles in on fire in 2024 look.. Terrifyingly high.

    "I have good news and bad news."

    "Good news: Secret plan to take over world by sitting on ass and waiting for all rivals to self destruct is going very well!"

    "Bad news: About the time schedule for Secret Plan. It has moved up. A whee bit."

    859:

    David L
    Actually, it's quite simple.
    Whatever the "Emperor" ( Shi Jin-Peng at the present moment ) says is law & must be followed. Now, "The Party" is very much a trailer, here - a change from the last century - even under Mao, the Party was important - but a reversion to "traditional" values is apparent.
    Utterly unchanged from/reverting to the days of the Quin.

    JBS
    Oh dear .... # 860 - that is SO WRONG - in so many ways, I don't know where to start. And the person to blame ( If there was blame ) would be Lord North, the Prime Minister of the time, NOT Geo III.
    SEE ALSO Charlie @ 855 - far too many USAians still don't "get it" - elsewhere I have been called a "Subject" & the other person obviously believes E II R is the same as E I R in terms of power & authority. They simply "don't get" Constitutional Monarchy.

    860:

    An EU military force begs the question of what foreign policy they'd be needed to back up, other than trade policy. (The North Atlantic Treaty covers self-defense: what would they be needed for beyond the provisions of NATO?)

    Probably here it's worth pointing out the US experience with having an inconvenient naval scholar named Alfred Thayer Mahan. Here we were, minding our own corrupt little continent-spanning empire (little in number of people), and Captain Thayer went off about sea power after seeing that the Chilean Navy was more powerful than the US Navy. Since he sucked as a ship's captain, he went to work as an academician, and wrote a book or two about how fundamental sea power was in the world. And it was a hit, especially in Europe, and most especially in the British Imperial Navy and German Imperial Navy.

    Unfortunately, his little inspiration led the US Congress to get into the business of building and fielding battleships, just when everyone else was. And it led the US to grab the Panama Canal Zone, the islands leading to it (Puerto Rico, Cuba, briefly Haiti), and Hawai'i, that commander of the northern Pacific. Because sea power. And now here we are: Numero uno du jour.

    How does this apply to the EU? Beats me, because I don't know what stupid, revolutionary game-changer a half billion of all y'all are going to cough out that makes imperial consolidation a painful necessity. Maybe it already happened?

    Snark aside, don't be surprised by rapid changes like Thayer's little book. While I agree that the EU is not an official confederacy, confederacies are a bit too slow to deal with crises. And we're sure looking at a bunch of those.

    861:

    Heteromeles said: Beats me, because I don't know what stupid, revolutionary game-changer a half billion of all y'all are going to cough out that makes imperial consolidation a painful necessity. Maybe it already happened?

    There's a couple of things.

    If you can pack the same smarts as a fruit fly into a cheap drone (which seems likely) and wrap the smarts in tinfoil (which seems likely) then the unstoppable massive micro murderbot swarm attack seems likely. That's got to sway the balance of power.

    Second. Warships. Mahan published in 1890. It appeared during a time of major change in Naval tech. Ships went from sails that could bring small numbers of weapons to the fight, slowly, and only when the wind was right, with most of the crew engaged in just sailing, to huge ships with huge guns that could move fast in any weather. There's a somewhat similar thing happening in space. We're about to go from small light craft with an active crew of less than 7 and a support crew of thousands, that take a lot of getting ready, don't react fast and are pretty harmless, to huge ships with a crew of 100-1000 fighters, carrying hundreds of tonnes of weapons, that can project force anywhere on the surface in 45 minutes. That sounds like at least as big a change as the change from sail to oil battleships.

    Now obviously there are ICBMs that can do force projection anywhere in 45 minutes, but they're a bit unsubtle.

    862:

    My apologies in advance for nerding out on you, but I went down this particular rabbit hole last night, and I'm still processing it.

    Steam ships? Not exactly. The US and Europe had hybrid steam/sail ships in their navies by the 1860s. The US Civil War was where the first steam powered ironclads were fielded in war (remember the CSS Merrimac and the USS Monitor?). The geek part of this is a lot of the experimentation happened in the battle for control of the Mississippi, leading to weirdness like the Mississippi Rams (putting a ram and iron cladding on a sidewheeling river boat), Pook Turtles and other odd designs that make gen 1 of any technology so much fun. If you like weird early-gen tech, have fun looking at the role armored (and unarmored) steamboats played in securing the Mississippi as the chief Union military transport route.

    By the time Maher was writing, armored cruisers were the norm and battleships were coming into being. These had iron hulls. Evolving gun tech forced the change, IIRC. There's arguments about whether his books made war safe for battleship builders or screwed things up, but that's the era he wrote in.

    As for space, unfortunately the US Space Force is already there, and the EU will have to play late-mover advantage if they can.

    Instead of big, manned spaceships, I think they're going for huge fleets of disposable drones. The Falcon Heavy is being designated as the shotgun shell for this kind of effort. I'm afraid they're planning for how to survive a Kessler Cascade. That's not about putting vulnerable humans in a hypersonic shooting range with no cover. Unfortunately it's about lofting operable shit into orbit faster than their existing shit gets rendered inoperable. Hyper-consumerism and polluting the high frontier, in other words, which hopefully explains my disgust.

    Maybe if the EU came up with some really good, mobile lasers that could plink away from the ground? put them in submarines in the north Atlantic for thermal control? I dunno.

    863:

    See, I don't disagree with much of what you say there, and that's a good sign we're talking at cross purposes. I think the issue is that I'm talking about originalism, which on the face of it, at least as it appears to me via my lived experience of what I think of as consensus reality, (though I accept that a dictionary definition might be stronger), is the strongly held belief that the authors' intention is the only valid interpretation of the text of an artefact like the US Constitution. My remarks concern my viewpoint that I find it hard to accept such a view, applied rigidly as some figures have suggested they wish to do, as being a good faith representation of a sincere belief, rather than a factional strategy.

    We (at least the anglophone democracies and other jurisdictions that trace their descent to principals established in British law) do in fact appoint judges to interpret the meaning of the text. Precisely because interpretations can change, we are careful about who we appoint and the process can be quite political in some jurisdictions. Struggles do in fact occur over the direction and those are legitimate struggles to have.

    Ultimately a constitution is not an artefact at all, but rather it is an abstract model of a shared consensus about the political entity it defines. It's an overall vision, the entity's collective selfhood that distinguishes it from other things that are like it. A written constitution is an attempt to codify some of that model. It's like a binding vision statement: it isn't the vision itself. I think originalists wish to call it a mission statement.

    Constitutional law is the study of that model, but the originalist position is that it is and can only be the study of the Constitution of the USA. Their model for a consensus vision, in as much as they have one at all, is one that is locked to the consensus of the late 18th century.

    I'd actually argue that the US Declaration of Independence is also part of that model* for the USA, given we can reasonably assume that the values it espouses are part of that shared consensus (now, even if not in the 1780s). The thing is that the consensus can change over time, and that's a feature, not a bug. It doesn't mean you don't have rule of law. Written artefacts can limit change, but that doesn't mean that no change is legitimate, unless it is a change to those written artefacts. Quite the contrary, really. It does mean that where there is a lack of consensus, a new one needs to be formed and there may not be a solution, there's nothing written in the fates that says there has to be one. Sticking doggedly by an old version of the model certainly isn't one.

    I think that one should definitely have a process for changing the written artefacts to reflect the model, that it should be a careful process and come with a lot of safeguards. But it should not be impossibly onerous. Unfortunately the latter condition does not pertain for the USA at the moment. I think the people who insist on an originalist interpretation do so cynically and I've said that. I think we perhaps disagree on what originalist means, and perhaps on some more theoretical concepts. I think that's not terrible.

    * H, I hope that makes you feel better, even if you don't agree.

    864:

    Mahan published in 1890.

    Munroe doctrine was 1823, per Wikipedia. I'd say empire (or at least hegemony) was well underway before Mahan.

    865:

    Similar analysis of supreme court confusing things here: the Court says it is going to look to history and tradition, but then ignores history and tradition. The Court says that only gun laws which have historical precedent are constitutionally permissible, and then the Court dismisses all of the historical precedents for heavy restrictions on concealed-carry laws as outliers. The Court says that it is going to look to history, but dismisses early English common law as too old. The Court says that it is going to look to history, but dismisses any laws that were adopted after the mid-eighteen-hundreds as too young...

    Related blog post: With West Virginia vs. EPA. SCOTUS picked a case where the policy being contested — an Obama era interpretation of the Clear Air Act to regulate power plants — never went into effect, was reversed by the Trump administration, and is not coming back. The constitution specifies that the Supreme Court can only hear “cases or controversies” to limit the capacity of the court to pick and choose its own policy agenda. The fact that it is impossible for plaintiffs to demonstrate harm in a case where no actual policy is in play offered no constraint on the court in this case... Why do this? Because SCOTUS wanted undermine the administrative state, and the case provided a means to do so

    866:

    I'm not upset by what you or Paul wrote, although I'm annoyed by the "originalists." It's good that you're more charitable than I am.

    To me, Uncle Thom's Courthouse and the rest of that troop are less truly originalist than the Confederates were, but they are similarly working for white supremacy. That aligns them with the hard core Christians who can selectively quote a text few people are deeply familiar with (including them), to give their opinions and actions unearned legitimacy.

    867:

    Damian & others
    How about Un-originalism? - just as the US goes majority non-religious, the scrofulous ( oops, SCOTUS ) look set to drag the USA back to 1650.

    H
    Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if "white supremacy" ( With Clarence Thomas in charge, yeah? ) may be a beneficial side-effect, an additional feature, so to speak.
    The real goal is a christian USA, complete with persecution of others & the "wrong christian sects ( e.g. Quakers ) - leading to that worst form of all government - an authoritarian Theocracy. There are already frequent references to the Amerikan Taliban after all.

    868:

    862 Para 4 - Nonsense. A First Rate ship of the line would carry at least 100 cannon (up to 120), each needing a crew of 8 to serve it, and have a total compliment including gun crews of maybe 1200.

    863 "(remember the CSS Merrimac and the USS Monitor?)" - Well no, but I've read accounts of the action, which suggest a no-score draw.

    869:

    Heteromeles said: apologies in advance for nerding out

    Love a good nerd out.

    But nothing I disagree with there. He was writing at the "end of the beginning". We're at the beginning of the beginning for both the drone tech and the space tech. We're at the sails/muskets/longboat end. So guessing what the future might hold is guessing what the end of the beginning might look like. If we're asking what the EU military might look like in say 50 years, if they suddenly wake up and decide to become a new empire, then maybe there's parallels to be drawn with the USA who did the same at the end of the beginning of the naval power revolution.

    Still history doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes.

    870:

    »would carry at least 100 cannon (up to 120), each needing a crew of 8 to serve it«

    There were no set "x men per cannon" rule, the size of the cannon-crew for ships were calculated based on the weight of the (actual!) cannons on the ship. This is most obvious on conquered ships.

    (Drop me an email, and I can connect you to a researcher who has spent his life finding out how ships were actually built, staffed and sailed.)

    871:

    Paws said: Nonsense. A First Rate ship of the line would carry at least 100 cannon (up to 120), each needing a crew of 8 to serve it, and have a total compliment including gun crews of maybe 1200.

    Nonsense...

    The 500 tonne Mary Rose had 200 sailors to 30 gunners. 4 cannon, 8 calverin, all with a range of about 300m, and some antipersonnel guns. So I said "Ships went from sails that could bring small numbers of weapons to the fight, slowly, and only when the wind was right, with most of the crew engaged in just sailing".

    The 21,000 tonne HMAS Dreadnought did 21 knts in any weather. 700 men (they were men), ten 12 inch guns that could shoot 21,000 m (50 times further than the Mary Rose). So I said "to huge ships with huge guns that could move fast in any weather"

    So not nonsense.

    The Mahmudiye at the very end of the age of sail had 1200 sailors to handle her, but that was centuries after the earliest period considered in the book we're discussing so well into the transition (she would have been converted to steam but for some rot). Plus, the guns were quite large in number, but individually nothing in comparison to the HMAS Dreadnought.

    872:

    Nonsense. A First Rate ship of the line would carry at least 100 cannon (up to 120), each needing a crew of 8 to serve it, and have a total compliment including gun crews of maybe 1200.

    But note that ships of the line would only fight on one side of the ship at a time (with possible rare exceptions), so your crew count could be cut in half.

    874:

    Damian @ 864: See, I don't disagree with much of what you say there, and that's a good sign we're talking at cross purposes.

    I think you're probably right.

    I think the issue is that I'm talking about originalism, which on the face of it, at least as it appears to me via my lived experience of what I think of as consensus reality, (though I accept that a dictionary definition might be stronger), is the strongly held belief that the authors' intention is the only valid interpretation of the text of an artefact like the US Constitution.

    The dictionary definition is that the words should be interpreted in the way they were commonly understood at the time they were written. The author's other writings can be evidence of that understanding, but so can other writing from the time. There is also the long period of horse-trading and editing between Madison's first draft of the Bill of Rights and the version finally enacted; the understanding and intention of everyone along the way counts just as much as Madison's.

    My remarks concern my viewpoint that I find it hard to accept such a view, applied rigidly as some figures have suggested they wish to do, as being a good faith representation of a sincere belief, rather than a factional strategy.*

    I think its probably both. There is a good-faith argument that the words mean what the people who wrote them meant them to mean, as opposed to some other meaning made up later. But I completely agree that those who call themselves "originalists" seem to have a remarkably flexible view about how to determine what that was.

    The trick, of course, is to make an originalist argument for things like the right to abortion and the control of guns. That isn't actually very hard. The other is to keep asking your originalist "where does the Constitution say that?" when they try to explain how the Bill of Rights doesn't actually mean what the plain words say.

    875:

    gasdive @ 872: The 500 tonne Mary Rose had 200 sailors to 30 gunners. 4 cannon, 8 calverin, all with a range of about 300m, and some antipersonnel guns.

    Yes, but the Mary Rose was at a transition from naval engagements dominated by grapple-and-board to ones dominated by cannons. The reason she sank was that too many cannons had been put on a ship originally designed for grapple-and-board. (See also the Vasa) which suffered the same fate for the same reason).

    A better measure would be HMS Victory, which was from the height of the age of sail and cannons. She had a crew of about 850 and around 100 guns. The crew were not divided into gunners and sailors: during battle the sails were set to a battle rig so that most of the men were able to man the guns rather than doing the sailing, but the rest of the time the sailing was the job of the bulk of the crew.

    BTW, if you are interested in the topic, do go and see the Vasa if you are ever in Sweden, and if you are in the south of England go and see the ships at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. They include the Victory, but also the Warrior, which was a hybrid steam and sailing ship from the transition that you are talking about. The Warrior never fought a naval battle because nobody was willing to take her on.

    876:

    Charlie @ 834: As a reminder, the EU isn't a government. (That it was, was the big lie that the Brexiters used to scream about -- that UK laws were being made in Brussels.) The EU is a free trade treaty with policy-setting powers that are implemented in law by its member states, so it doesn't need the rapid response and proactive executive arms of a regular government, stuff like military and police forces and direct taxation powers.

    I think its more accurate to say that it isn't a government yet.

    It started as a free trade treaty. But free trade requires harmonised regulations, and those regulations need some kind of democratic legitimacy. So .. a parliament. Multiple currencies and exchange rates are a hindrance to free trade. Linking national currencies via stabilisation pacts didn't work, so the Euro got introduced. A common currency requires a central bank, so the European Central Bank got invented. At first the ECB was banned from lending to poorer EU members (like Greece) at below-market rates, but now its starting to do that, which is starting to create a common European monetary policy. And so it goes. Each stage leaves work undone, which leads to a crisis, which leads to the next stage.

    A similar thing was happening in military and foreign policy. Until recently the EU simply relied on the major overlap between its membership and NATO. Then NATO started to look irrelevant and unreliable (thanks Donald), so maybe the EU had better look to itself for mutual defense. Now Putin has set the clock back 40 years that is temporarily off the table as everyone discovers that NATO is actually pretty useful. But give it another decade or two and we might start seeing something centrally EU in foreign policy terms.

    877:

    »The dictionary definition is that the words should be interpreted in the way they were commonly understood at the time they were written.«

    That is the "headline" or premise if you will, the substance of originalism is "If you want to recognize new rights, pass a law or amendment to do so.".

    That is a perfectly defensible intellectual position to hold, and Scalia, who coin the term and laid the foundation for "originalism", with his invention "statutory construction", said so over and over and over in his opinions, often with phrases like: "If congress/the framers wanted ${xyz}, they could and should have written so."

    However, in practice the Equal Rights Amendment, 99 years after it was proposed, have still not been ratified.

    Ideally the progressive part of USA should have gotten their shit together, and passed some sensible amendments, clarifying that equal rights are for everybody and that the 2nd only allows you to own a single fore-loader, provided you meet for militia training at least 13 weekends per year, and that congress can regulate all other weapons.

    But they didnt, and they probably still wont even try, certainly not as long as their party is entirely controlled by proto-senile rich white people north of 70 years old.

    878:

    872 - AND? Neither the Mary Rose nor the HMAS Dreadnought were ships of the line, or first rate. And you accuse me of introducing straw man arguments!!

    876 - This I pretty much agree with, except that I think you've under-crewed the Victory.

    879:

    You've described the philosophy of Originalism, but in practice it means "rich White people in charge" which is the real original structure of the U.S. Getting from "what the founders wrote" to "rich White people in charge" is why you see all the contortions by the Supreme Clown Posse when they actually have to interpret the ideas of the founders.

    880:

    Welcome to Ohio under the new abortion laws.

    https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/01/ohio-girl-10-among-patients-going-indiana-abortion/7788415001/

    "As Ohio restricts abortions, 10-year-old girl travels to Indiana for procedure"

    But there is hope.

    The possibility of a 10 year old girl going to jail for 20 years under the new abortion laws might explain the new nationwide polling.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmnDeDQJ5d8

    "SHOCK POLL: Dem Advantage EXPLODES After Roe"

    In a choice between a generic democrat and a generic republican the Dems now have a 7% polling advantage (a doubling since the Dobbs ruling).

    Given GOP gerrymandering advantages, that is enough for the Dems to hold on to both houses.

    However, when a pro-choice Dem is matched against a pro-life Republican the Dem wins by 15%.

    And in an election in Nebraska's first district, where the GOP should have won by 17%, the Dem challenger outperformed and lost by only 2%.

    So if the mid term is framed as a referendum on Dobbs and the overturning of Roe, the GOP gets crushed, even in Red States.

    However, if it is about inflation the GOP could still pull it out.

    Unfortunately for the GOP, gas prices and inflation peaked last month and are trending down

    https://www.ft.com/content/fa54afe5-5959-4b57-a40d-bd2102a8c106

    Meanwhile, the stock market (and my 401K) are finding bottom:

    https://www.thestreet.com/investing/has-the-stock-market-bottomed-sp500-nasdaq

    So if the stock market is recovering and gas prices are falling in the Autumn (what matters is trends and the perception of improvement) the GOP gets crushed in November because of the overturning of Roe.

    Going forward, inflation and stock values are always temporary phenomenon offering only temporary advantages to the GOP.

    However, overturning Roe is a permanent political condition that permanently favors the Democrats going forward.

    881:

    Something they don't teach you in right wing Sunday school.

    The Bible has a recipe for an abortion which was used in a ritual known as the "Ordeal of Bitter Waters"

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_of_the_bitter_water

    The ordeal of the bitter water was a trial by ordeal administered to the wife whose husband suspected her of adultery but who had no witnesses to make a formal case (Numbers 5:11–31)

    Basically, if an Israelite husband suspects his wife of fooling around - and the child she may be carrying is not his - but has no witnesses, he will take her to the tabernacle and and put her to the test by making her drink "bitter water" mixed with dust from the floor of the tabernacle along with ink used to write curses on a scroll.

    16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. 20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[b] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”

    Different translations use the euphemism of "rotted thighs" for miscarriage's and abdomen is the Hebrew usage for womb.

    23 “‘The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. 24 He shall make the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering will enter her. 25 The priest is to take from her hands the grain offering for jealousy, wave it before the Lord and bring it to the altar. 26 The priest is then to take a handful of the grain offering as a memorial[c] offering and burn it on the altar; after that, he is to have the woman drink the water. 27 If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. 28 If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.

    About that "dust". That would be the sweepings of the tabernacle's burnt animal offerings, a nasty bacteriological soup, and myrrh (on of the three gifts given to baby Jesus by the Wise Men). Myrrh was kept burning in the tabernacle as an incense mixed with other spices. So the dust would be a mixture of ash and soot from the incense and burnt animals.

    However, myrrh is an abortifacient.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5265628/

    And at the time around when this was written they were still sacrificing animals, so blood, urine, feces, and general intestinal ick would likely be present in the dirt of the tabernacle floor as well. So you've got a natural abortifacient and a whole slew of nasty bacteria.

    Myrrh was also used as a contraceptive as in the book of Esther as used by Queen Esther and other wives of the Persian king.

    https://www.salon.com/2014/01/05/biblical_birth_control_the_surprisingly_contraception_friendly_old_testament/

    In an article in the scholarly journal Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Joseph Prouser points out that the King’s potential wives were all required to anoint themselves with myrrh oil and aromatic herbs for one full year – which is a pretty long time for what some read as just a beauty treatment. Myrrh was a known contraceptive at the time, cited in the writings of Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek physician who was an expert on gynecology and midwifery. He explained that when used in a pessary, myrrh oil would work as an abortifacient, preventing the implantation of fertilized eggs. The aromatic herbs may have also had contraceptive properties.

    So let's sum this up: An Israelite husband suspects his wife has been fooling around but has no witnesses. So he makes here drink "biter water". If she is pregnant, the fetus gets aborted right there in the tabernacle and his rival's baby is killed. If she is not pregnant I guess he figures no harm no foul. But it's a crap shoot whether the woman survives ingesting all of that filth from the tabernacle floor. And it's possible both she and her lover's baby survive. Anyway its all seen as God's judgement.

    But the Bible isn't exactly what we would call pro-life now is it?

    882:

    persecution by individual states of Native Americans" within their own territories.

    Well, there's a long-standing tradition that when native territories are inconvenient they can be moved or ignored. Look up the Trail of Tears, for example.

    883:

    You've described the philosophy of Originalism, but in practice it means "rich White people in charge" which is the real original structure of the U.S.

    Well, the constitution was written by rich white men, and the first governments were run by rich white men*, so clearly the founders intended rich white men to be in charge, even if they didn't explicitly write that.

    *Even to the extent of crushing poor white men. Shays' Rebellion, for example.

    884:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 878:

    [The words of the Constitution mean what they meant in 1789] is the "headline" or premise if you will, the substance of originalism is "If you want to recognize new rights, pass a law or amendment to do so.".

    That is a perfectly defensible intellectual position to hold, and Scalia, who coin the term and laid the foundation for "originalism", with his invention "statutory construction", said so over and over and over in his opinions, often with phrases like: "If congress/the framers wanted ${xyz}, they could and should have written so."

    Which is actually wrong. I'm not sure if you've misquoted or misunderstood Scalia (I've read Heller, but nothing else), but the 9th Amendment is pretty clear on the subject. If someone argues that there is e.g. a right to a private life, then the mere fact that it isn't in the Bill of Rights is not a valid argument against that position. While I can imagine some "originalists" whose knowledge of the Bill of Rights is limited to the 2nd Amendment taking that position, I rather doubt Scalia would have done so quite that baldly. But maybe I'm wrong.

    Where the originalists are on slightly firmer ground is where a right is enumerated and people no longer think it a valid right. The 2nd is the primary target here; the rest are either dead wood (e.g. the third) or still important. But there is a good argument that the 2nd has been overtaken by the facts. The originalist rebuttal to that is "if you think that then get an amendment passed saying so", and is at least consistent.

    The real trouble with the "if the framers meant that they would have said it" argument is that the same people who make it then go on to explain that of course the framers never meant the Bill of Rights to be absolute and of course there were exceptions then and there are exceptions now. That includes Scalia in Heller. Except that somehow the framers forgot to include that in the constitution, which makes any argument along the lines of "if the framers meant that they would have said so" unsound.

    885:

    Well, there's a long-standing tradition that when native territories are inconvenient they can be moved or ignored.

    i did read that one of the endless egregious examples of british perfidy which led to the american revolution was that the british were inclined to actually keep some of the treaties with the native americans, which would have interfered with the western expansion of the colonies

    886:

    "(remember the CSS Merrimac and the USS Monitor?)" - Well no, but I've read accounts of the action, which suggest a no-score draw.

    Sort of. The day before when it was just the CSS Virginia (renamed Merrimac), the Virginia wiped the floor (harbor?) with two wooden Union ships and would have taken them, (which were blockading the CSS in the area), all out in a day or two. But the Monitor showed up on the second day and, yes, they fought to a draw.

    But the import was if you didn't go iron clad you were toast. And the navies of the world noticed.

    887:

    Ahem: Captain Thayer went off about sea power after seeing that the Chilean Navy was more powerful than the US Navy.

    That would be the Chilean navy established and led during their war of independence against Spain by Thomas Cochrane, nicknamed "the Sea Wolf" by Napoleon, and something of a legend:

    In Speedy's 13-month cruise, Cochrane captured, burned, or drove ashore 53 ships before three French ships of the line under Admiral Charles-Alexandre Linois captured him on 3 July 1801. While Cochrane was held as a prisoner, Linois often asked him for advice.

    So yeah, that's who Mahan was paying attention to.

    (As for the EU, if you rope the UK in on defense because of obvious shared common geopolitical interests -- viewing Brexit as a temporary aberration -- you're looking at a bloc with 30% of global military spending, in second place to the USA's 50%; with 8 ballistic missile submarines and about eight aircraft carriers, two of them supercarriers and one of the others nuclear-powered (and due to be replaced by a nuclear-powered supercarrier in the next decade). So lumbering, undercoordinated, and slow to respond, but potentially a front rank superpower.)

    888:

    i did read that one of the endless egregious examples of british perfidy which led to the american revolution was that the british were inclined to actually keep some of the treaties with the native americans, which would have interfered with the western expansion of the colonies

    An interesting alt-America that I've not seen is what America would have looked like if it had absorbed Indian nations as territories on the path to statehood, allowing them to keep their land if they agreed to follow American constitutional law. The model here is how ancient Rome expanded by making allies out of the foes it defeated.

    The reason to point this out is that, like the idea of Reconstruction succeeding and Blacks becoming full citizens in the 19th Century, it makes the person creating the work wrestle with their own racism. On the surface, we "know" that Indians were inferior, archaic, and doomed, and we also "know" this about Blacks. That's not the reality, of course (race has nothing to do with intelligence or personality). Imagining Indians and Blacks in roles we don't normally think of them in is a really useful exercise. Imagine Iroquois sachems campaigning for their congressional seat in the early 19th Century, for example, or taking the oath of office in the US Capitol on a wampum instead of a Bible.

    Or ask whether a Gilded Age was possible without Jim Crow. Reconstruction was a chance we wasted to reimagine race in America. It would have been interesting if "All men and women are created equal, with equal rights," had become the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. Who gets exploited then, to build those great fortunes? Or do those fortunes never get built?

    889:

    Ideally the progressive part of USA should have gotten their shit together, and passed some sensible amendments, clarifying that equal rights are for everybody... But they didnt, and they probably still wont even try, certainly not as long as their party is entirely controlled by proto-senile rich white people north of 70 years old.

    Sadly, due to the difficulty of passing Constitutional Amendments in the U.S., there is no chance of any part of the U.S. (or either party) unilaterally passing a new Constitutional Amendment. :-(

    890:

    i did read that one of the endless egregious examples of british perfidy which led to the american revolution was that the british were inclined to actually keep some of the treaties with the native americans, which would have interfered with the western expansion of the colonies

    That is indeed the case.

    [The Royal Proclamation of 1763] created clear borders for the new British province of Québec and for the 13 Anglo-American colonies, and reserved the vast territory beyond the Appalachian Mountains for Indigenous peoples.

    The first Treaty of Fort Stanwix (another by the same name was signed in 1784) was the first major agreement negotiated according to the terms of the Royal Proclamation. When the dominant fur-trade companies of Pennsylvania made claims against the British government for damages incurred during the Seven Year’s War and Pontiac’s War, Indian Department officials tried to compensate them through a major land transfer. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix moved the border between Indigenous territory and the Anglo-American colonies significantly westward to the banks of the Ohio River.

    The lands ceded in the treaty — most of modern-day Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland and western Pennsylvania — were the ancestral homes of the Shawnee, Delaware, Cherokee, Seneca-Cayuga, Miami, Potawatomi, Mingo, Odawa and Wyandot. This led to the emergence of hardline leaders in the debate among the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley area about who was authorized to cede land in treaties.

    Sir William Johnson, who was a land speculator, hoped that the Fort Stanwix Treaty would satisfy the entrepreneurial wants of the business community in both the Thirteen Colonies and in Britain. However, the deal only fed the land speculators’ greed. Some of those speculators, whose political representatives included Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania and Lord Shelburne in Great Britain, attempted to counter the Royal Proclamation by insisting that Indigenous nations could make land-ceding treaties directly with private colonization companies. Just when it seemed that these powerful business interests were about to prevail, the British government introduced the Québec Act in 1774 which favoured the fur-trade interests of Montréal over the land-speculation interests of Philadelphia, and treaty agreements made with Indigenous peoples over the expansionistic aspirations of Anglo-American settlers. This act was a major factor in the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776 (see American Revolution – Invasion of Canada.)

    Source:
    https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-treaties

    891:

    Good to know about Cochrane!

    To straighten out the timeline a bit, Cochrane helped Chile gain independence in the 1820s. Mahan was actually stationed in Peru in the mid-1880s, as captain of the USS Wachusett, to protect US interests during the War of the Pacific aka the Saltpeter War, between Peru, Chile, and Bolivia.

    892:

    Question for the USians, since that seems to be the topic here. What about a constitutional convention?

    My approximate understanding is that the framers intended the constitution to be malleable, and if needed it could be scrapped and rewritten.

    Clearly that is a giant can of worms and nobody is willing to even consider such a major step, but it would technically be legal, correct?

    If the Supremes continue to scrap all that the majority of the population prizes, and takes it further down the rabbit hole of fascist insanity, is there a point where the majority (or pols representing the majority) will just throw up their hands, push ctrl-alt-del on the whole thing and call a constitutional convention?

    I assume there has to be a red line somewhere. Reversing suffrage perhaps, or reinstituting slavery? At which point the best hope is to start from scratch?

    893:

    But the import was if you didn't go iron clad you were toast. And the navies of the world noticed.

    That was where the idea of the steam ram came from. The early ironclads were clumsy boats, and I'm guessing pretty top-heavy, since they were generally ordinary ships below the waterline and masses of armor above. A number of them sank or grounded. Anyway, the idea was that cannons by themselves aren't all that great at sinking ships, so if armor made the ironclads theoretically cannon-proof, why not power straight in and ram?

    The end result was a transient fad for putting ram prows on warships from the 1860s-90s. Apparently, the net result was more sinkings of squadron-mates than had happened before, after some early successes in (yes) the Civil War and the War of he Pacific. It appears that ships banged into each other fairly frequently in the late 1800s, but with a ram prow, that was kind of a bad thing.

    As for steam rams like the Switzerland, they were literally uparmored steamboats, with a reinforced prow and armor plating around the pilot's station, superstructure, and wheels. The small problem with this idea were that steamboat hulls weren't compartmentalized, so they tended to sink if holed. Still, the US Ram Fleet in the Mississippi (not part of the US Navy), defeated the ironclad Confederate River Fleet while the US Navy basically stood off and watched, so there's that.

    894:

    But nothing I disagree with there. He was writing at the "end of the beginning". We're at the beginning of the beginning for both the drone tech and the space tech. We're at the sails/muskets/longboat end. So guessing what the future might hold is guessing what the end of the beginning might look like. If we're asking what the EU military might look like in say 50 years, if they suddenly wake up and decide to become a new empire, then maybe there's parallels to be drawn with the USA who did the same at the end of the beginning of the naval power revolution.

    Agreed. My personal guess is that, assuming the EU is still around in 50 years, it will be dealing with Age of Migration-type crises, probably after having dealt with a bunch of resource wars related to battery materials, phosphate fertilizer, and similar. Creating a rapid-response segment of the EU government to deal with rapid crises, without igniting a millennium's worth of carefully curated fears and grievances, will be a neat trick. Let alone making a formal federation out of the EU. I wish everyone luck, including the UK. Y'all'll need it.

    It's probably worth contemplating what a post-petroleum military would look like, not that there's been much public discussion of it in the last decade. That's as strange to our thinking as the Mississippi steam rams would have been to Cochrane in the 1820s.

    As for space? It's not analogous to ground or air warfare. The problem is speed and distance. Aircraft don't get over mach 2 normally, and hypersonic whatsits might get up to Mach 7. LEO speeds are around Mach 21. When things are moving that fast, humans can't react fast enough to even indicate intentions by squeezing a trigger. We're relegated to strategy and logistics, telling our combat systems what to do under what conditions, then letting them engage at a more appropriate speed. Also, since mass destruction backfires massively (Kessler cascade) and space dominance seems to be more about degrading intelligence, coordination, and control, it's not clear how physically destructive space weapons need to be, or whether we need boots in the sky for much anything, given our vulnerability up there. I agree that it's early days, but looking at where we'd be fighting, how we'd be fighting, and what we'd be fighting for, space marines are likely as useless as air marines would be in plane to plane combat.

    895:

    A very interesting take on SCOTUS - & Alito - It likens Alito to the judge who ruled in the Dred Scott case, with disastrous results. Also highlights Alito's ultra-right - "pro-business" attitudes to altering the US, to the detriment of its citizens.

    896:

    The issue there is that the Fascist Right in the US have been wanking about using one of those to re-write the US into a theocracy for decades, which has made the idea.. less than popular with the mainstream. I would call it a very successful psy-op to preclude that avenue of reform, except they are entirely sincere, so it is an accidental one.

    More practically, the issue is that the republican-controlled states would are unlikely to actually sign the outcome of a successful convention. Why would they? Present dysfunction is what they want. So

    897:

    »Sadly, due to the difficulty of passing Constitutional Amendments in the U.S., there is no chance of any part of the U.S. (or either party) unilaterally passing a new Constitutional Amendment. :-(«

    Wrong: Sadly to the progressives /not even trying/ we will never know if even a modification to the 2nd would pass.

    These day (D) does not stand for "Democratic" but for "Defeatist"

    898:

    Wrong: Sadly to the progressives /not even trying/ we will never know if even a modification to the 2nd would pass.

    Given that a proposed amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the States - and that a majority of states are conservative - just why would progressives even bother to try this? It's not as if there aren't other pressing problems in the U.S. these days...

    899:

    AlanD2 pointed this out, Poul, but I want to add that for years, progressives have been circulating a canned email warning about a new constitutional convention.

    The basic problem is that if Republicans control the federal legislature plus three-quarters of the state legislatures, they can rewrite the US Constitution. In this atmosphere, deliberately calling constitutional conventions for something else is not only ineffective, it's fucking dangerous. Gridlock is preferable.

    An analogous situation would be if the EU was built like the US, with the current nations subsumed as states and Brussels in charge. And the Hungarian-style politics starts to take over, especially in Germany. What do you do? Try to renegotiate the terms under which the EU operates, remembering Germany's history? Or do you beat back the fascists first, before reorganizing?

    What I'd personally like to see is all the women working in the US government (aside from electeds) go on strike throughout the greater Washington DC area during October, until the US congress overturns the most odious SCOTUS rulings and Biden signs the bills. I doubt it will happen, but something like that would be more effective than amending the constitution at this time.

    900:

    It goes to the scihub ru page which allows me to see the full paper, not the abstract. Just clicked it now and it shows the full Sally Marks article to me. I don't know of a better way to do it that doesn't feed the ripoff that is academic publishing.

    901:

    The Falcon Heavy is being designated as the shotgun shell for this kind of effort.

    Although there are four FH launches scheduled for the next six months, FH is already obsolescent. The upper stage isn't reusable, and prepping the first stage stack for re-flight takes a minimum of several days (and, more realistically weeks). In contrast, Starship has about three times the payload (or about 150% the payload of a Falcon Heavy in disposable mode), is intended to be fully reusable, and is designed to fly multiple times a day.

    Those latter two requirements are a tall order, but they've got a prototype prepping for a test flight in the next couple of months and a spectacular track record with Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy, which have demonstrated first-stage reusability combined with a high flight rate (last weekend: three flights in 48 hours, all successful, all first stages landed successfully). Oh, and NASA throwing a few billion bucks at them to bankroll development of the Starship HLS vehicle.

    I think it would be unwise to bet against Gwynne Shotwell's company at this point. (NB: Yes, his Muskness remains CEO, but I'm pretty sure the President and COO with a 35 year career in aerospace engineering deserves more credit than the Musk fans admit.)

    As for Kessler syndrome, I note that Starlink satellites used ion propulsion for active reboost because they orbit low enough that atmospheric drag is a problem -- they're designed to make a rapid uncontrolled re-entry if dead on arrival in orbit, to make a controlled de-orbit at end of service life, and to de-orbit naturally within 3-5 years if not reboosted.

    I expect most of the rival internet constellations will have similarly short lifespans on orbit if not actively maintained. So while Kessler syndrome is a risk, one way to minimize it would be to simply de-orbit the entire cluster if things get dicey.

    (A single Starship launch can apparently deliver 240 Starlink comsats in one payload. The initial cluster of 2400-odd satellites could thus be replaced in well under a week once Starship hits full operational capacity. They cost roughly $0.25M per satellite -- they're mass-produced appliances -- so replacing the core cluster would cost $600M plus launch costs, which is the sort of thing an insurance policy ought to stretch to -- having to tear down and replace the entire constellation should, by 2032, be a "shit happens" contingency rather than a "the industry just died" situation.

    902:

    The 500 tonne Mary Rose had 200 sailors to 30 gunners. 4 cannon, 8 calverin, all with a range of about 300m, and some antipersonnel guns.

    Yeah, that was in 1511.

    Sailing ships with cannon underwent some evolution: compare with HMS Victory, launched 1765 and nearing the end of its service life when it served as Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: 104 guns, roughly 850 men. I can't find figures for the range of its guns, but the 32 pound heavy guns on the main gun deck (30 of them) per wiki had a muzzle velocity that was supersonic, probably comparable to a cartridge pistol round.

    Yes, it'd still be outclassed by 1908's Dreadnought, but not quite as badly as the Mary Rose. (And lest ye forget, 1908's all-big-gun turbine-powered Dreadnought would basically be a sitting duck if it got into a pissing match with the HMS Dreadnought (S101) from 1960, never mind the next-generation HMS Dreadnought due to be launched in a few years (designed to carry twelve Trident D5 SLBMs, but perfectly capable of using its torpedo tubes to zap an old-school battleship from beyond battleship gunnery range with a Spearfish).

    903:

    I raised Cochrane to make the point that navies run on tradition, and the Chilean navy got founded by one of the Royal Navy's toughest headbangers -- at a point when the RN was the global naval superpower and the yardstick everyone else measured themselves against.

    Yes, Mahan got to see the Chilean navy an entire generation after Cochrane died (he lived long enough to see service in the Crimean war!), but that sort of tradition lingers.

    As for "why Chile?" Well, Chile has an enormous coastline, and before there were railroads running its length shipping was the fastest way to get about. Also the fastest way to mount an invasion, so obviously something no Chilean government could ignore. And then there was the Cape of Good Hope, which put Chile (along with Argentina) in a position to interdict all Pacific-Atlantic trade if necessary. Before the Panama Canal opened in 1914 there was no way for US merchant ships, or US naval vessels, to get from the eastern seaboard to the western seaboard of the USA without passing the Cape.

    So, kudos to Mahan for recognizing that the geopolitics were insane and the USA needed a navy strong enough to strong-arm Chile and/or Argentina if things broke bad.

    904:

    »The basic problem is«

    …still primarily that the "D" party is so obviously uninterested and corrupted by the 1%'ers that they cannot rally all the voters they claim to serve, which is basically how the rabid right has taken control of USA.

    If the D's had a leadership and candidates which actually wanted change and tried to sell that to the voters, they would sweep the R's to a side.

    Take ObamaCare: Why didn't D's go for proper socialized healthcare ?

    Because in USA the "health" industry is one of the most profitable, and one which any millionaire who is not totally incompetent therefore is heavily invested in.

    905:

    @886

    New England in particular was outraged that they couldn't expand as they pleased and get in on the great land boom, since England was protecting the incredibly lucrative fur trade -- thus protecting the land that supported all those fur bearers and hides, and those who hunted the animals. All of such animals had already been hollowed out in the South earlier in the century, particularly the deer, since doe hide was so important for gauntlets -- driving or riding -- and riding breeches, for both gentlemen of leisure and the military. And all the leather which made the belts which machinery of the time so depended -- including naval equipment.

    Many of the forts established along the common routes north and south from upper Canada to the Gulf that for centuries the tribes traversed, were still large subjects of contention at the negotiations in Ghent post the War of 1812. The British were quite desultory at evacuating and shutting down those forts. Which situation provided a lot of playground for that scandal prone scoundrel, Gen. James Wilkson, who never saw two -- even three -- he wasn't ready to play for at the same time. A traitor who never stayed bought, no matter who paid him.

    @896

    It's the first thing most of us thought with the overruling of RvW -- Taney and Dred Scott, making the war inevitable. People who'd not spent much time if any thinking about abolition one way or the other, got progressively more angry and anti-slavery. I.e. Taney brought on the slaveocracy the very thing they for which they justified every cruelty -- abolition.

    906:

    And then there was the Cape of Good Hope, which put Chile (along with Argentina) in a position to interdict all Pacific-Atlantic trade if necessary.

    Surely you meant Cape Horn?

    907:

    Take ObamaCare: Why didn't D's go for proper socialized healthcare ?

    Could it be because ObamaCare - as imperfect as it was - barely passed by the skin of its teeth in 2009? So narrowly, in fact, that any attempt to improve it before its passage would have killed the whole thing?

    Also note that if a better version had been passed, John McCain might well have changed his deciding vote in 2017 and completely killed ObamaCare.

    You seem to have a very idealistic idea about what is possible in today's bitterly divided political atmosphere...

    908:

    Take ObamaCare: Why didn't D's go for proper socialized healthcare ?

    Here's the latest roadblock to a better ObamaCare:

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/1/2107845/-Joe-Manchin-has-a-choice-Help-West-Virginia-and-Biden-or-McConnell

    909:

    Because Obama did not have the common sense to have the filibuster killed from the word go. He came into office with 60 seats in the senate! That is a massive mandate. Handing over his entire agenda to be held hostage by any blue dog wanting to grandstand was naive as heck.

    Kamp's kind of got a point when he says the D's don't fight very hard.

    910:

    I may have mentioned before - if the Dems would simply vote to remove the time limit on the ERA... the commonwealth of Virginia ratified the ERA under the previous governor... and the instant the time limit was removed, it would become part of the Constitution.

    911:

    SHRIEK!!!!!

    Dominated by GOP "Christian" "conservatives".

    912:

    let's compromise on the cape of good horn

    913:

    Completely agreed.

    The original point about Mahan was that, before he published, the US was basically focusing on killing Indians, building too many railroads, resubjugating blacks, and letting in as many poor immigrants from the Great Empires of Europe as we could find factory jobs or homesteads for. All within the continental United States, oh, and Alaska (Seward's folly).

    Then Mahan published, and fairly rapidly Congress and the War Dept. realized that, if we didn't control our sea routes (as noted, Cape Horn, the Magellanic Straits, and the Panamanian Isthmus crossing) others like Britain, France, and Spain would be perfectly happy to control the trade between our coasts instead. So we got into claiming critical islands, buying up the Panama Canal after France failed, and projecting sea power of our own.

    The lesson for the EU is that it's possible there's a Mahan-like black swan somewhere that will completely change the way the EU functions in the world. In fact, I'd bet on it. Whoever figures out how post-petrochemical military might works is going to reshape a lot of militaries in a hurry. If it's the EU that does it...?

    914:

    Off-topic space physics question about coronal mass ejections.

    If these were light, the intensity of the flare would fall off proportional to the square of the distance. Is that also true of a coronal mass ejection? Or are they constrained by a magnetic field of some sort so they don't attenuate so rapidly?

    Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

    915:

    Because Obama did not have the common sense to have the filibuster killed from the word go.

    Not Obama's decision. But he could have made more of an effort to get Harry Reid to do it. However, it's not clear that enough Democrats would have voted to kill the filibuster, even if Reid had put it up for a vote.

    Kamp's kind of got a point when he says the D's don't fight very hard.

    Sad but true. If only Democrats would commit more crimes, I'm sure they could rule the U.S. - if not the world...

    916:

    If the D's had a leadership and candidates which actually wanted change and tried to sell that to the voters, they would sweep the R's to a side.

    You view from afar seems to give you a warped view of the opinions of the USA citizen ship. Their is just not a solid, or even barely fragile progressive majority. At all.

    And while party unity in the US at the Congressional level can be fairly solid in the "against" mode, the "for" mode is very much less solid. Unlike how many political parties in Europe tend to operate. The R's may be changing this a bit lately but still...

    917:

    is there a point where the majority (or pols representing the majority) will just throw up their hands, push ctrl-alt-del on the whole thing and call a constitutional convention?

    There are very few rules about a constitutional convention. And the precedent is that it can tear up everything that came before and do something new.

    While the extremes in all directions like this idea, most sane national politicians know this is a very bad idea. Just now think of the R primary voters. They are the ones who'd love to attend such a thing and write a new R document to their liking.

    Who gets to attend? How do they vote? Who writes the rules. It would make the fights at the D convention in Chicago in 68 look tame. Both those inside and outside the convention hall.

    918:

    Whoever figures out how post-petrochemical military might works is going to reshape a lot of militaries in a hurry. If it's the EU that does it...?

    although it's possible to imagine countries throwing drone swarms at each other on a fairly tight energy budget, i have some doubts about whether chip production on any scale is going to be able to continue once we get seriously into petrochemical decline, those fabs need a lot of support infrastructure

    919:

    H
    WHEN the EU penny drops that they with Britain ( Militarily if not economically ) re-remember the lessons of 1792 - 1945
    The RN controlled, or at the very least dominated, all the European pinch points: - Exit from the N Sea, transit of the Channel, entry/exit to the Med (Gibraltar), Egypt & what became Aden & after 1802, Malta.
    Mahan was/is proposing the opposite to Mackinder & I think Mahan was correct.

    920:

    Or maybe the cape of cream horn, which I hope we can all agree is in good taste, unless you happen to be allergic to dairy and/or lactose intolerant?

    921:

    "[are] coronal mass ejection ... constrained by a magnetic field of some sort so they don't attenuate so rapidly?"

    Yes. Charged particles in a plasma are "guided" along magnetic field lines, which is why auroras only happen where Earth's field lines guide them down into the atmosphere near the magnetic poles, and fusion reactors have big magnets to contain their plasma.

    With CMEs it's more complicated because they have enough energy to modify the field that's guiding them, and you get the concept of a "magnetoplasma" with a continuous dynamic interaction between particles and field, and the field lines can snap and recombine and form loops (the magnetohydrodynamic equivalent of ox-bow lakes!)

    922:

    "the cape of cream horn, which I hope we can all agree is in good taste, unless you happen to be allergic to dairy and/or lactose intolerant?"

    Coconut Creamery!

    JHomes

    923:

    No Senator of either party is ever going to give up the filibuster for the same reason that no Poiish noble in the royal Diet would ever give up the librum veto.

    The ability to halt legislation in its tracks is too much power for any politician to surrender voluntarily.

    924:

    Correct.

    The USA is only going to lose the fillibuster if there's a constitutional crisis as bad as the British one in 1911 (which neutered the House of Lords' veto over bills passed by the House of Commons[*]).

    [*] Not completely -- the Lords can still refuse to pass an Act from the Commons -- but then the government can invoke the Parliament Act at which point it goes back to the Lords in the next annual session, this time with an override attached. (And the only way to disrupt this is to hold a general election, which the House of Lords has no way of triggering.)

    925:

    Okay, here's a game-changer:

    An international team of researchers, led by scientists at the University of Manchester, has developed a fast and economical method of converting methane, or natural gas, into liquid methanol at ambient temperature and pressure. The method takes place under continuous flow over a photo-catalytic material using visible light to drive the conversion.

    (Methane: good energy storage medium but a cryogen and a horrible greenhouse gas if it leaks. Methanol: a decent energy storage medium that is a liquid at room temperature and not a greenhouse gas until you burn it, and even then, to nothing like the same extent.)

    This may be part of the answer to Heteromeles' earlier question of how military force projection works in a post-climate-change world: your pathway is energy from PV cells plus water and atmospheric CO2 is converted to methane via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, then in turn catalytically converted into methanol for transport and consumption, which is burned in existing internal combustion engines, releasing the CO2 back from whence it came (rather than adding fossil carbon to the atmospheric carbon cycle).

    926:

    Nice.

    No good for existing powered flight, IIRC - energy density not sufficient. But we fly too much anyway.

    927:

    I'll just repeat my Facebook comment on this:

    "Please let it scale up this time. Please let it scale up this time."

    929:

    I recall reading, somewhere (and it may have been here), that internal combustion engines were originally designed to run on propanol. Methane and methanol to propanol doesn't seem a huge stretch, though I'm not a chemist.

    930:

    Could it be because ObamaCare - as imperfect as it was - barely passed by the skin of its teeth in 2009? So narrowly, in fact, that any attempt to improve it before its passage would have killed the whole thing?

    And it is not a stretch at all to argue that the passage of ObamaCare by the skin of it's teeth is what led to the mess the US is in now. Tea Party. Trump. And more.

    Passing a law that impacts EVERYONE in non trivial ways and that a significant portion of that everyone hates (for reasons valid or not) is not a way to ensure domestic tranquility.

    931:

    I'd personally be happy if they just reinstated the talking fillibuster, rather than just the handwaving one we have now. After all, Depends are a thing, and if it's important enough, the Republicans should be able to organize relays to talk and keep the vote from happening.

    932:

    I'm with you but it will not happen. The current setup allows things to be blocked "forever" with basically no effort. The talking one requires people to actively participate and get uncomfortable.

    And let's no go into "blue slips" and other such hold actions the Senate allows.

    934:

    And it is not a stretch at all to argue that the passage of ObamaCare by the skin of it's teeth is what led to the mess the US is in now. Tea Party. Trump. And more.

    I suspect Obama's melanocytic density was enough to nucleate the Tea Party.

    Remember that Obamacare is basically a scaled up version of what Mitt Romney instituted in Massachusetts when he was governor.

    935:

    The Tea Party thing didn't really explode until 2010. After OC.

    936:

    Also of possible relevance to the post-petroleum world,

    https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/emerging_hydrocarbon.html

    TLDR: There are pathways to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels that don't involve net CO2 production in the entire production-use cycle. How practical those will turn out to be applied at scale for transportation, warfare or energy storage, I don't know.

    937:

    And it is not a stretch at all to argue that the passage of ObamaCare by the skin of it's teeth is what led to the mess the US is in now. Tea Party. Trump. And more.

    Sure it is. Conservative extremism has its roots in Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" back in 1968, if not earlier. Newt Gingrich's divisive "Contract with America" (1994) was another thing that predated ObamaCare.

    938:

    Passing a law that impacts EVERYONE in non trivial ways and that a significant portion of that everyone hates (for reasons valid or not) is not a way to ensure domestic tranquility.

    There is no possible way to ensure domestic tranquility today - or at any time in the last 2 or 3 decades, for that matter. So it makes sense for Democrats to pass legislation (such as Obamacare) that helps a large number of average Americans despite pissing off conservatives. Given the Republicans' "My way or the highway" attitude toward any kind of legislation, I see little value in trying to appease them.

    And as the recent House January 6th hearings have shown, Republicans (and their Supreme Court) are hellbent on destroying America as a democracy. So much for their view of "domestic tranquility"... :-(

    939:

    A law that impacts everyone? Like this revolting case? - A 10-year old was raped ...
    And STILL the "R's" are. effectively insisting that the child should be forced to have a child, not answering questions ... and, please note ...
    The state to which she travelled { Indiana from Ohio } is moving to make it the same there.

    Prediction: Unless the D's hold on to their majority this year (2022) AND win in 2024, then either the USA goes fascist, or they have a new civil war.

    We are slowly moving down the same road, with our "Removal of Human Rights Act" as currently proposed....

    940:

    Sounds very close to the function of Canada's Senate, which together with the House of Commons forms the Crown-in-Parliament. (Note to JBS: the use of the word "Crown" doesn't mean Lizzie gets a say.)

    Our Senate can reject legislation and send it back to the House. This rarely happens and when it does the suggested changes are carefully considered and usually adopted.

    The Senate is traditionally described as a 'house of sober second thought'. Despite being appointed, it fulfils that role reasonably well, without becoming the partisan pile of manure that the American Supreme Court appears to have become.

    941:

    ... without becoming the partisan pile of manure that the American Supreme Court appears to have become.

    Likewise the Republican Party...

    942:

    There is also this, high grade biofuel:

    https://newatlas.com/energy/bacteria-biofuel-higher-energy-density-jet-fuel/

    And on a similar subject, thermal storage is looking increasingly viable:

    https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/29/1053177/a-better-heat-engine/

    We seem to be in a race between our stupidity and our intelligence.

    943:

    The Dems ignore lots and lots of perfectly legal and ethical things they could do.

    To some extent, I don't blame them. They are not the party of progress, they are the party of stability. Their senior ranks are filled with people for whom the system worked, which makes them disinclined to make or even see when big change is necessary. If their only meaningful opposition weren't traitors and terrorists, this wouldn't be as big a deal.

    Likewise, they also suffer from not really being a party, per se. Much more so than the current GOP, they're a coalition of sort of compatible interests. And the GOP has the much easier goal of destruction rather than creation.

    Having said all that, the first sentence is true. The party as a whole doesn't use all of the avenues available to them. The GOP has naked stated their goals for decades and the Dems have failed to stop them.

    944:

    The Dems ignore lots and lots of perfectly legal and ethical things they could do.

    Yup. But when the other party is committing crimes, that's like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

    The party as a whole doesn't use all of the avenues available to them. The GOP has naked stated their goals for decades and the Dems have failed to stop them.

    No question about that. But what hasn't been mentioned here is American voters. The responsibility of an American citizen who votes is to understand the issues and the people running for office. In general, American voters fail abysmally in this responsibility. No matter how you look at it, the quality of the U.S. government reflects how people voted...

    945:

    Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite?

    946:

    Regarding the Constitution and a Constitution Convention -- Washington believed Constitution was unlikely to endure 20 years. It would all have be done again, then. There were too many errors in it that didn't address the divisions in the territories it was bringing together under a single government. There were also too many, such as Jefferson, who did not want a single, central government in control. He also realized that the anathema of political parties -- "factions" as he called them -- blew up so fast because Jefferson aided, abetted, and he the arch debtor of then all -- financed through his newspapers. (It took some time for Washington to learn those papers and 'democratic societies' that so vilified him, lied about him with the most preposterous of lies, had been brought into being by Jefferson.)

    947:

    Greg Tingey @ 860:

    And you don't seem to "get it" that even your own "Bill of Rights" (which received the Royal Assent in December 1689) says "petition THE KING"

    That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.

    Where does it say "petition parliament"?

    See Also: Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (Book the First - Chapter the First : Of the Absolute Rights of Individuals)

    And, laftly, to vindicate thefe rights, when actually violated or attacked, the fubjects of England are entitled, in the firft place, to the regular adminiftration and free courfe of juftice in the courts of law ; next to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redrefs of grievances ;

    Since your own Bill of Rights says the proper address for such petitions is the king, why then do you mock Jefferson for doing so?

    I think you're letting anti-American prejudice get the better of your reason.

    948:

    Charlie Stross said: A single Starship launch can apparently deliver 240 Starlink comsats in one payload.

    Minor update. The Starlink V2 is much larger. 1.25 tonnes, 7m long. 10 times the data throughput. So probably under 100 per Starship launch, but equivalent to a thousand V1 Sat's.

    949:

    Greg Tingey @ 868:

    The goal is to turn the U.S. into a White Patriarchal Theocracy based on syncretic "$Xtian beliefs" that have little or nothing to do with whatever some itenerant carpenter-philosopher might have taught back in Roman Palestine 2000 (more or less) years ago. The guiding hand will be whatever modern day Torquemada contols today's Spanish Inquisition.

    White supremacy + patriarchy + fascism + radical theocracy ... with Thomas likely playing the part of Robespierre in this counter-revolution.

    950:

    Paul @ 885:

    [The words of the Constitution mean what they meant in 1789]

    Even if you limit it to discussion of the Second Amendment, the so called "originalists" don't care what the words meant in 1789, otherwise they wouldn't completely ignore the first two-thirds of the Amendment.

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    It didn't really have any meaning in 1789, but in 1791 when it was ratified & became part of the Constitution, it meant that Congress could not deprive the states of their defense by abolishing the Militia.

    What it did NOT mean was any diminishing of the enumerated powers of Congress:

    • To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
    • To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
    • To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
    951:

    Adrian Smith @ 886:

    I've read the same thing. But I think it's fair to compare British rhetoric on the subject with their actions.

    Siege of Fort Pitt (1763).

    Did the British intend to keep their promises or was it just another ruse de guerre?

    952:

    Totally on the money, there.

    The judgement on 23 June that has basically over-ruled state laws against concealed carry included an opinion from Justice Thomas which overtly expressed a non-originalist view. In fact it essentially made the same argument I made above, that the written constitution is just an expression of a consensus model of a constitution and that the consensus changes over time: making the case that it's "established" that people have a right to carry handguns for self defence. He's not arguing that the authors of the constitution intended that at all, just that he believes the consensus has expanded to incorporate that. I would argue that he's wrong, that while there's a viewpoint that incorporates this, there certainly isn't a consensus. But again, this shows the so called originalists are inconsistent in their originalism.

    953:

    Robert Prior @ 891:

    [The Royal Proclamation of 1763] created clear borders for the new British province of Québec and for the 13 Anglo-American colonies, and reserved the vast territory beyond the Appalachian Mountains for Indigenous peoples.

    A Royal Proclamation in 1763? Did parliament know the king was issuing Royal Proclamations?

    What else did that Royal Proclamation promise? Were the promises kept?

    Siege of Fort Pitt (1763).

    954:

    Our Senate can reject legislation and send it back to the House

    To be fair, that's the function of the US Senate too, while the filibuster to my eyes falls in the category of "abuse of procedure". I get that these days it's different to Mr Smith goes to Washington, but that just makes it worse, Shirley?

    I would add that the situation with the US Senate reflects the population disparity between states and the reduction in the value of the franchise in the more populous states. I note that even while unelected, Canada's Senators are appointed partly to represent regions rather than individual provinces. Australia's Senate represents states as Northern-European style multi-member electorates with both proportional and preferential voting, but that only works because there are relatively few states, compared to the USA or even to Canada. But it means we now have 12 Greens Senators in a balance-of-power position with the new Labor Government and its ability to pass legislation through the Senate, for good or ill.

    I am not sure what solutions to the prevailing structural inequality are compatible with the US version of federalism. In the fantasy realm, you could consider breaking up the most populous states into multiple states with 2 Senate seats each. The contenders make a fun exercise... NoCal, SoCal, and the State of Long Island are first to mind for me, but there's a risk that splitting cities from their hinterlands could increase the number of sparsely populated states too. But of course the whole premise that such a thing is possible seems a bit silly. Might be easier than constitutional change, though.

    955:

    Even the Founders disagreed about what the words in the Constitution meant, and some of them changed their minds about what they meant over time. That the Constitution as it stood was ratified, very quickly became amended.

    A book I don't like much for lots of reasons, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of the Founding Fathers (2021) by Dennis C. Rassmussen, lays out the loss of faith in democracy and republicanism of Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson -- and the exception to loss of faith, Madison.

    It documents the divisions from the very beginning, papered over, that already began peeling after the 2nd year of Washington's first administration, and Washington's complete loss of faith in them by the end of his second administration. This was due to the rise of the 'factions' and the complete difference of views on finances. Interestingly, the South not wanting banks, or much central government, certainly didn't want firm mercantile financing either. Nor did it, in it's already grand tradition of not paying debts, see particularly Jefferson, want the new nation to pay off the debts accrued abroad during the war of independence.

    What I really don't like about the book is the author's sunny viewpoint that we are not in any crisis today, that we have endured the worst division of faction in the early Republic and it's never been a problem since. Somehow he misses, among other major crises of same, the War of the Rebellion.

    956:

    "some itenerant carpenter-philosopher might have taught back in Roman Palestine 2000 (more or less) years ago"

    Slightly less.

    Opinions differ, but the best guess is that he was born in early 4 BCE and got fatally crosswise of the Romans at Passover in 30 or 33 CE after having preached one or three years. So teaching/preaching was likely a 1- or 3-year interval between 27 and 33.

    Still, pretty close to 2000 years.

    957:

    Rocketpjs @ 893: Question for the USians, since that seems to be the topic here. What about a constitutional convention?

    My approximate understanding is that the framers intended the constitution to be malleable, and if needed it could be scrapped and rewritten.

    Article. V.
    The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

    The Constitution can be amended by two thirds majority of both the House and Senate passing such and submitting it to the states for ratification.

    OR Congress could be compelled to hold a convention of the states for proposing amendments IF two thirds of the state legislatures and/or state conventions [34 states] call for such ... but it's not clear who has the authority to call state conventions if NOT the legislatures?

    In either case, any Amendments proposed by Congress or by a convention of the states still have to be ratified by three quarters of the states [38 states] (or by conventions of three quarters of the states AS THE ONE OR OTHER MODE OF RATIFICATION MAY BE PROPOSED BY THE CONGRESS" which I read to mean Congress decides if it's legislatures or state conventions ... however they are proposed, amendments have to be ratified in the "normal" manner.

    But there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for just scrapping the whole thing and starting over.

    I assume there has to be a red line somewhere. Reversing suffrage perhaps, or reinstituting slavery? At which point the best hope is to start from scratch?

    The former would require repeal of the 14th, 15th, 19th and 24th Amendments and for that repeal to be ratified by 38 states; the latter requires repealing the 13th Amendment & again ratification by 38 states. The Court doesn't have the power to overturn Constitutional Amendments (yet).

    I don't think it would get that far. A rogue court that intent on depriving U.S. citizens of fundamental rights would probably be replaced by justices more respectful of the Constitution (might require extra-judicial action, but as T.J. noted "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."

    I hope it would not have to come to that.

    PS: The last part of Article V sets up two conditions that CANNOT be changed by Amendment - Prior to 1808 there can be no Amendment or law limiting or prohibiting the importation of slaves ... and in 1809, after that provision expired, Congress DID pass a law to end the importation of slaves ... (but the slavers figured out loopholes).

    The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
    No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

    And no Amendment may reduce the EQUAL representation of any of the STATES in the Senate without the consent of that state.

    958:

    David L @ 931:

    I don't know if it led directly to the current turmoil. We were already headed there & this just seems like a bump in the road along the way.

    959:

    AlanD2 @ 938:

    Dates back farther than that. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was an outgrowth of Goldwater's "Extremism in defense of Liberty" which was essentially a war against the New Deal and a civil rights movement that grew out of it, especially the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education and Katzenbach v. McClung ... and the earlier 1946 decision in Morgan v. Virginia which led to Boynton v. Virginia.

    The segregationist past of of "Conservative" extremism dates back to the end of reconstruction at least.

    960:

    anti-American prejudice

    You start out this comment expressing some opinions that are merely factually incorrect, then descend into this, which is totally uncalled-for in anything that Greg actually said here. Next you'll be talking about how we subjects will never experience the feeling of true freedom coursing through our precious bodily fluids.

    961:

    Robert Prior @ 941:

    Y'all still don't get it. It's not an argument about who is in charge in the U.K. NOW, or who was in control of the UK in 1776.

    It's a question of WHO under the existing law that governed the colonies in 1776 was Thomas Jefferson supposed to have addressed his "Petition for Redress of Grievances" to?

    The English Bill of Rights of 1689 said "petition the King" and Greg is an ASS for mocking Jefferson for having done so.

    962:

    Damian @ 961:

    Nope. Not even factually "incorrect" - your own English Bill of Rights of 1689 says petition the KING, not petition parliament, and Greg IS an ass for disparaging Jefferson on this point.

    Greg Tingey @ 816:

    JBS
    Jefferson blamed the king....
    When, even then, it was Parliament, not the monarch?
    HOW CONVENIENT

    It's a STRAWMAN that deserves to be set on fire and the 4th of July weekend is as good a time as any.

    963:

    It's a STRAWMAN that deserves to be set on fire and the 4th of July weekend is as good a time as any.

    No fires, please. The entire West Coast may go up in smoke if you do...

    964:

    strawman + bovine manure = decent compost.

    I agree with AlanD2, the incendiary danger's too high at the moment. JBS, if you could send one of those tropical storms our way, we'd be much obliged.

    965:

    JBS
    SEE ALSO Rbt Prior @ 941?
    In 1689 they were using already-outdated language, the penny hadn't dropped, if you like.
    "A petition to the Crown" will always end up in Parliament ( I think )
    - HOWEVER -
    Thanks, @ 950, for confirming what we suspected. As in Nobody expected except not funny any more.
    Robespierre came violently unstuck, didn't he? How sad.

    OH DEAR.
    "Royal Proclamation" of 1763 - "The King (crown) in Parliament".
    How many times must we say this before it penetrates?
    Ever seen a video of the Annual "Queen's Speech" to Parliament? ....
    Each section begins with ... "My Government will .... " BUT As Private Eye showed one year - speech bubble from Lizzie saying: "I hope you realise I didn't write this rubbish"

    966:

    There's about 3cm of water running down my driveway at the moment, diverted from the 10cm of water running down the road. Sydney is wet, if you can work out some way to divert it to California you're welcome to it.

    I reckon right now if you took the top 10m of Lake Warragamba the people monitoring it would heave a sigh of relief... that's quite a lot of water.

    967:

    No matter how you look at it, the quality of the U.S. government reflects how people voted...

    i mean to some extent it reflects the options which have emerged for them from the cloaca of the primary system

    but maybe people vote in that so it's all fine

    968:

    Heteromeles @ 965:

    Hah! You think I control the weather?

    969:

    Adrian Smith @ 968:

    It reflects how some people voted, how some other people can't be bothered to vote and a system that's become unbalanced growing from 13 states to 50.

    A system intended to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority has become the tool for a minority to exercise tyranny instead.

    970:

    Good luck with that, hope you are affected badly. Flood cleanup is just unpleasant all round, and yeah we’re in for it again this spring most likely.

    971:

    Gah, I mean I hope you are NOT affected badly.

    972:

    You realise that’s your 1689 bill of rights as much as is it mine? That is, in a pinch it’s still a source of law, albeit most likely very rarely used as one, in both the USA and Australia, to about the same degree.

    973:

    i always felt the minority they were most sincere about wanting to protect from the tyranny of the majority was the rich tho

    974:

    "Proof" by partial quotation thus: The original text "right of petitioning the king and Parliament" (my emphasis) you've shortened to "right of petitioning the king".

    975:

    A good question
    ANyone want to provide answers?

    976:

    Sure it is. Conservative extremism has its roots in Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" back in 1968, if not earlier. Newt Gingrich's divisive "Contract with America" (1994) was another thing that predated ObamaCare.

    Taking your approach lets go back to 1900 or so.

    Booker T. Washington eating dinner with president T. Roosevelt. Lots of blow back. Especially from the south. A SC Senator quote. ""we shall have to kill a thousand n*s to get them back in their places."

    Election of Woodrow Wilson who re-segregated the federal civil service. (And military?)

    FDR's ignoring racial issues during the depression and WWII. He needed the southern D's and so played the game.

    Truman then desegregating the federal civil service and military leading to the failed Dixiecrat movement. Strom Thurmond anyone?

    Civil and voting rights acts of the mid 60s. Plus what, to the south, was a socialist take over of the D's. Which is what gave Nixon's southern strategy a chance.

    Newt failing to get elected as a regular conservative in 2 tries then winning as a kill the government fire brand on the 3rd try.

    The D's getting utterly complacent and basically committing bank fraud with the Congressional bank and handing the 94 House to the R's. Newt's Contract with American was a neat stunt. But it needed the D's messing up big time to give it traction.

    Obama getting elected in 2008 irritated a LOT of R's. But didn't get most of them foaming at the mouth. But OCare did. Seriously. I know/knew a lot of those folks. They were clients and/or friends. Most of my 100 or so known relatives are there. Again, Obama's election pissed them off. Big time. But OCare took it to the yelling and screaming level.

    You can believe the Tea Party was grass roots or astroturf. But at the end of the day the hard core R's starting going totally nuts with the passage of OCare.

    Which led to the 2010 elections at both state and national level being such a wipe out for the D's. Many of them acted as if "we're done now that O is elected, ta da". Here in my state of North Carolina turnout of D's fell dramatically from 2008 to 2010. More than typical for an off year and it really seriously mattered. The R's took over the NC legislature for the first time since reconstruction and quickly re-drew the lines to ensure they would win big majorities in our 50/50 state. It didn't help that the D's in 2010 made the "Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" look like season professionals compared to how the D's ran their elections and PR that year.

    But my point is the OCare was sort of major point that may have changed politics in the US for decades. Everything up to that (except for the mid to late 60s) was a more gradual thing. OCare triggered the outrage. Valid or not.

    977:

    It took some time for Washington to learn those papers and 'democratic societies' that so vilified him, lied about him with the most preposterous of lies, had been brought into being by Jefferson.

    For those of us who have raised kids or taken part in some community effort with strangers, this makes some sense.

    With kids you get to associate and be friendly (hopefully) with other adults with the only tie being you have kids of close ages who are in school or sports or whatever together. As your kids no longer have those ties you discover (maybe you knew it all along) that you may not like these people or are indifferent to them and stop associating with them.

    I think of the US "founding fathers" as a similar group. They were (mostly) the best and brightest sent to the quasi government body of the colonies to try and work out a plan. These were mostly not people who had been hanging out together for 5 or 20 years before this point. And many of them just didn't get along in private life. Washington wasn't around much at all during they war when Jefferson was attending the Continental Congress. So I expect their times together were short and most business than anything else.

    978:

    if you could send one of those tropical storms our way, we'd be much obliged.

    So far they are staying out to sea for the most part. Making a bit of a headache for people who booked a beach house for the holiday weekend / week but not much inland rain.

    979:

    There's about 3cm of water running down my driveway at the moment, diverted from the 10cm of water running down the road.

    I was wondering if you were affected. News reports in the US are talking about your rainfall in feet. Not inches or cm.

    980:

    You might know a guy...

    981:

    To help a dumb Brit understand this, what was so bad about Obamacare?

    Its not quite killing the first born sons, burning the flag on the White House lawn or saying you've never liked baseball?

    982:

    i mean to some extent it reflects the options which have emerged for them from the cloaca of the primary system

    Primaries in the U.S. tend to fly under the radar, so to speak. So the people who get out and vote in them are usually a lot more partisan than voters in the general election. Thus we're getting a lot of Trump crazies elected this year... :-(

    983:

    The only explanation I ever got was that "those people" might feel free make themselves ill in order to get something they weren't entitled to (like healthcare), and that this was somehow bad and evil.

    None of the folks who offered this explanation could tell me just why "those people" might actually wanted chronic renal failure or a coronary occlusion or emphysema badly enough to rate dialysis, open heart surgery, or an oxygen mask.

    So chalk it up to racism-induced irrationality and move on: if a white Republican president had passed an identical act to provide, call it Romneycare, they'd have said it made them proud to be Amurrican. (Except it'd have been ringfenced to stop the insufficiently pale and patriarchal people from benefiting.)

    984:

    I'm cautiously optimistic about America remaining a democracy (at least to the extent it is now, which is not always that great).

    I see the overturn of Roe v Wade as potentially a great motivating factor to get people out to vote in November. Whether the Democratic Party makes good use of this remains to be seen...

    In the long run, I suspect the conservative base is going to die out (congratulations, anti-vaxxers!) to such an extent that even extreme Republican gerrymandering will no longer be enough to keep them in power.

    985:

    There's nothing bad about Obamacare, though from the standpoint of any European with a national healthcare service, it's very weak tea indeed.

    The problem was that the usual suspects, Faux News, etc., all worked very hard to propagandize against it, deliberately misunderstanding some of the provisions and lying about others, with the usual accusations of "Communism."

    986:

    To help a dumb Brit understand this, what was so bad about Obamacare?

    Well, mostly because it was taking our taxes to help those people...

    987:

    To help a dumb Brit understand this, what was so bad about Obamacare?

    So many things. Let's see. BTW most folks don't have all of these but all told they add up to a sizable block of "against". Especially in 2010.

    The "other people" that have mentioned is part of it but a small part. Sort of. It had much less to do with color than not being in the upper half of the income distribution of the US population.

    Discourages personal responsibility. Why should I pay for the health care of a drunk. (Pick any of 100 character flaws (or not) that can impact someone's health.)

    Death panels. Why does a faceless government bureaucrat get to decide how much health care I get? Of course except for the uber rich a faceless insurance bureaucrat does that now.

    If I can pay for it why can't I have as much health care as I want. (You can. But this was a faux argument with a lot of traction.)

    Obama's huge gaff. "If you like your health care you can keep it." You can imagine the instant search for people for whom this wasn't true to make those attack ads.

    I want to pick my doctor. No matter what. Of course that wasn't and isn't reality then on many health plans but reality isn't always a place people want to go.

    And the biggest one, I don't want the government doing anything like this at all ever because nothing the government does is ever any good.

    And these all intersect in all kinds of ways.

    "I'm a self made xyz. The government had nothing to do with it so they should get any taxes from me for anything. Especially health care." This is from the Cliven Bundy and his fan club crowd. Very much a heads I win, tails you loose view of the universe. And all bovine excrement but still it had traction with many.

    I don't want to pay for anyone else's health care. Everyone should pay their own way. Many Christians would spout this and just walk away when you pointed out the contradictions between this and their statements of faith.

    Big companies don't want to pay for health care. But the long tail of WWII is putting them into a bad spot. Walmart was an early big fan of national health care. The cost to them to offer decent health care per employee was/is more than their profits per employee. 20+ years ago IBM was upsetting employees by instituting a $20 co-pay for doctor visits compared to everything paid for before. Big companies more and more hire contractors for mundane tasks so they can avoid health care costs.

    At the end of they day, health care costs keep going up for all kinds of reasons and most of the US population today wants to keep OCare. Not even close. But in 2010 and for a few years after it was used to divide and conquer.

    988:

    David L
    In other words, very much like Brexit - a vast collection of half-truths & deliberate lies ....
    { Which reminds me - I hope Keir Starmer gets a police fine.
    WHY THE FUCK should I vote Labour, if they are not going to even start rolling Brexit back? }
    At the end of they day, health care costs keep going up for all kinds of reasons and most of the US population today wants to keep OCare. Not even close. But in 2010 and for a few years after it was used to divide and conquer. - Sounds reasonable

    989:

    'Scuse me, "fights" outside the 1968 Dem convention? Are you referring to what the US federal commission appointed afterwards to look at it officially called a "police riot"?

    Where there's proof that Daley (sr) and his police chief literally gave a St. Crispin's Day speech to the pigs (riot cops, not to be confused with the ordinary cops), to go out and break heads, and they did?

    990:

    When there is any water running down the pavement (part of the road), it runs straight into our drive. We had the foresight to demand a damn great soakwaway in the middle when we had it done with paving blocks, despite the builder saying we didn't need it, so all we have to do is paddle through 10 cm of water to our cars. Unfortunately, we can't charge the council for drainage services ....

    991:

    The rational end of that one is that people who harm themselves through poor lifestyle or have children, should not expect other people to pay for that. Rational it may be, but civilised it is not.

    992:

    "I'm a self made xyz. The government had nothing to do with it so they should get any taxes from me for anything. Especially health care."

    ... so they shouldn't get any taxes ...

    993:

    It's not Christian, either...

    994:

    Um, no. The "Tea Party", which was paid for (the buses, and a lot else) by the extreme right-wing Koch brothers. This was when McConnell announced that his #1 agenda item, instead of doing the peoples' business in the Senate, was to make Obama a one-term President.

    995:

    Nothing... well, not that Medicare for all wasn't a lot better, but what was wrong was that not only a Democratic administration proposed it, and helped push it through, but a black man, the first black President, pushed it, and that made it HORRIBLE!!!

    The GOP - they are NOT "republicans" - are full-bore white supremecists.

    996:

    Vote for anyone who will dislodge a Tory. Even the pro-business anti-worker shite Starmer's been peddling will be slightly better for those of us stuck on the bottom of the heap. Labour have to put money into public goods, it's their main USP now Keir's backed down on all the actual possibilities for change.

    Re the King, reading William Hague's biography of Pitt the younger shows that a king could really be quite creatively obstructive politically, so it's not entirely cut and dried where the power flows. I doubt there was much to be done about that until we finally all got to vote. That said, I have no knowledge specific to what you've been discussing with JBS.

    997:

    "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"; or in other words pay your taxes in full, and stop looking for loopholes.

    998:

    That is not why 99% of the people who were against it hated it.

    999:

    To understand Obamacare you have to understand the health system in the USA. They spend something like a sixth of their GDP on it, very roughly twice what other rich countries spend. (And remember US GDP per head is pretty much the highest in the world too).

    Nobody knows how much of this gets spent on actual health care. We can estimate how much gets taken by the insurance companies, and we can estimate how much gets paid to hospitals, and how much to doctors and how much to drug companies. But none of those last 3 are actual spending on health care (although individual doctors probably come closest). Hospitals all have admin, and they also have to treat any indigent who walks into A&E with an injury. They then recoup the costs of this by overcharging everyone else. The exact amounts are largely secret though. Drug companies spend some money making drugs, and some researching new drugs, and an awful lot on marketing, including things that look a lot like kickbacks to doctors ("come to our conference in sunny Florida and learn about our new drugs"). And of course all these people have lots of lawyers and their own liability insurance policies, because in the US you have to.

    In short the whole ecosystem is so snarled up and tangled that you can't just unpick one bit of it, because that bit is needed by all the other bits.

    But you also can't just cut away the whole lot because at a single stroke you would be abolishing 1/6 of the whole US economy. In the long run that would be a Good Thing, but in the short term you would have to have something to replace it that worked really well from day 1 (and you get the blame for every time it doesn't work), and you also have a lot of suddenly unemployed health insurance employees very mad at you.

    So the only thing to do is to add more patches on top of the existing kludge-work, and hope for the best. That is what Obamacare did.

    1000:

    It was created as a gift to the insurance companies.

    i read it was effectively written by them

    1001:

    What was wrong with Obamacare?

    I am not a conservative myself, so perhaps what follows should be taken with a grain of salt, but I have spent considerable time trying to understand the mindset of people who are, including their opinions on Obamacare. What was wrong with Obamacare was the same thing that conservatives see as wrong with a great many liberal proposals. To wit:

    *It was a program to be run by the Federal government. The power of a large centralized Federal government is seen as more dangerous to individual freedom and autonomy (defined as freedom from outside interference) than any other potential source. Economic power is subject to market forces that are difficult for anyone to game. Government power is seen as vulnerable to selfish political interests.

    *It is better to avoid long term risk, than to take advantage of short term benefits. Raising taxes is inherently more dangerous than paying a price for a good or service, because payment is usually one time only, or a contract than cant be canceled at any time. Once taxes are raised, it is often very difficult to lower them again.

    *It was proposed by people with divisive political values. So called “Liberals”, “Progressives”, or “Socialists” appear to possess a value system that prioritizes collective solutions to common problems. This values framework appears to run counter to a values framework that prioritizes individual initiative and “deservingness.” Collectivism (defined as any ideology that de-emphasizes individual problem solving) is seen as vulnerable to pressures to conform and exploitation of ordinary people by elites.

    *It was justified by technical experts (economists) with an agenda Technical experts, and people with advanced degrees in general, are not just objective observers of national issues, they are participants, with an agenda of their own (primarily to advance the interests of their social class). To the extent that they come to conclusions that are difficult to follow or confirm, they should not be trusted.

    *It seemed to undermine the influence of trusted employers Most workers are employed by retail chains how typically make hiring and pay decisions on site. Therefore, they are local employers with a track record of paying and supporting employees. They are more accountable and more relatable than government agencies and their managers, and therefore a better bet.

    *It ran counter to the zero-sum worldview of many people It is the common experience of working class people that one must compete for everything. There seem to be more people wanting any given good or resource than there are resources to share. If you don’t stand up for yourself, and promote your own interests in the competitive arena of the world, you will be exploited and prevented from accessing the standard of living that you might otherwise earn.

    *It ran counter to the importance of in-groups In a dangerous world, the only people you can really trust are individuals that you know well. Feelings of empathy or sympathy among people at large is very weak, only those with whom you have a common connection based on similar beliefs and values will make any sort of real sacrifice for each other.

    Note: while the vast majority of conservative voters are not explicitly racist, a preference for in-group members who are similar to oneself rather lends itself to racist (and sexist, homophobic, etc.) outcomes and consequences. Meanwhile, Democrats and liberals are often seen as pandering to demographic minorities.

    Like any worldview, conservatism makes sense to the people who believe in it. It is self-consistent, based on a selected set of truths, and therefore seems to validate itself when compared to other people’s worldviews. Conservatism isn’t the only value system for which this could be said.

    1002:

    Damian @ 973: You realise that’s your 1689 bill of rights as much as is it mine? That is, in a pinch it’s still a source of law, albeit most likely very rarely used as one, in both the USA and Australia, to about the same degree.

    To some extent. Much of the language was adapted into the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... sans the language about "petitioning the king"

    My argument with Greg wasn't about who ruled - king or parliament. I don't care, it's not my problem; your king, your parliament, your problem.

    I was put off by Greg's sarcastic dismissal of Jefferson's writings, simply because Jefferson used the common, appropriate language of the time.

    1003:

    Adrian Smith @ 974:

    That's the way it seems to have worked out nowadays, but I'm not so sure it was meant to be that way in the beginning ...

    Else why did Jefferson substitute "Pursuit of Happiness" for "Property" in the Declaration of Independence?

    Jefferson was as much concerned about the rights of the "common man" as he was for the rich. I will also note Jefferson had no hand in writing the Constitution (U.S. ambassador to France at the time).

    1004:

    Uncle Stinky
    "Hold my nose & vote for him" ?? Maybe
    BUT
    My local ( Labour ) MP, whom I know personally ( & her mother ) is leader { Chairbeing } of the Labour Movement for Europe ...
    I will be corresponding - this is getting very silly & I might have to join said organisation (!)

    Paul
    To understand Obamacare you have to understand the health system in the USA. - Um, err ... WHAT supposed "Health sytem in the USA" might that be, then?

    1005:

    My place has a similar issue, and the easement down the side is basically an overflow for times like this.

    The bucket that normally sits upside down non the rainwater tank blew off on Friday and has been sitting out in the rain for three days. I don't know when it filled up but it's full now. So at least 300mm of rain in a bit over 3 days.

    Much of Sydney is well designed to cope with stuff like this, it's worth noting that most of the problems are in areas built since the big flood in the 1980's. At that time a bunch of land was taken by the government(s), houses knocked down and parks created. Park/stormwater pond, same thing. Seriously, they have big drains and stormwater infrastructure in them so that water can be diverted into them during heavy rain. Because Sydney often gets summer thunderstorms, 100mm of rain in an hour over a couple of square kilometres.

    But since then we've also seen property developers buy a couple of political parties and get laws changed to make development more profitable. In related news you might have heard about some big apartment blocks where major structural problems were discovered less than five years after they were completed. Also, new tract housing built on the floodplains in Western Sydney. That's the stuff that's currently underwater. Again. Third or fourth time this year.

    I expect the current plans to rezone even more floodplains for housing are still under way. From a state government that officially "accepts the reality" of climate change while acting as though it's not happening (same Liberal Party that was our federal govt until recently). There are some great photos going round of "land for sale" signs poking up out of floodwaters with text on them like "amazing water views" and "buy now, this won't last".

    personally, one of the criteria when we were buying was more than 30m above sea level and out of the way of any plausible flood. The whole Sydney basin is basically a swamp, but it's got little hills in it. So the sort of flood that would hit my house would be world headlines ... showing the opera house under water and the harbour bridge with a river running just under the road platform.

    1006:

    yeah we’re in for it again this spring most likely.

    So are we :) The wet season is forecast to stick around most of the east coast until next year. Sucks for the people whose rain we're getting far more than it sucks for people like me who can't buy Australian grown organic rice because apparently rice doesn't grow under water or something. And for the people who will be in underwater houses for the sixth or tenth time in two years by then.

    I've been using the rain radar to time my trips to the shops etc, and interestingly Aldi was out of eggs and nearly out of bread last night. Mind you, I have almost nothing edible in my garden right now, all the small stuff has drowned and the big stuff has been eaten by slugs and chickens (there are neighbourhood chickens).

    I did get to cut up some timber on the front verandah between showers, because I'm rebuilding furniture to optimise stuff now that I've admitted that I'm not going to be renting out rooms any time soon. I have long covid symptoms now, the idea of welcoming another dose into my house just for a bit of extra cash doesn't seem like a good idea.

    Getting the timber was an experience, I still have the muscles to pedal 5 sheets of plywood home up a few hills but something in my cardiovascular system cracks the shits if I push too hard and I feel like throwing up. Then I feel like lying down for a couple of days. It's not fun. It's especially not fun because there's no warning when I'm out doing it, only after I put in the effort and the recovery is from panting hard to feeling like throwing up. Bah!

    1007:

    A satirical site has "NSW suffers historic ‘once every month or so’ flooding" and the reddit discussion makes some good points about why people choose to live in shitty houses, or flood-prone houses or whatever. The answer is, as so often, that we have chosen to immiserate a large chunk of the population and these are symptoms of that. So no, moving out of the "cheap because it floods" rental property isn't an option for a lot of people, let alone "walk away from the cheap-because-it-floods house you bought" for the slightly less poor.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/vr2lep/nsw_suffers_historic_once_every_month_or_so/

    I'm quite glad I replaced the old and fragile tile roof with long run steel when I did, it means I'm not up in the roof with a tube of sealant every second day chasing newly cracked tiles. Pity the neighbours who couldn't afford $20k then and can't afford $30k now... they're paying $500 or $1000 every couple of months to have someone else run round fixing cracked tiles.

    1008:

    paws4thot @ 975:

    Blackstone wrote "right of petitioning the king and parliament" in his Commentaries (published 1765-1770).

    The only actual text I was able to find from the 1689 Bill of Rights itself just says "petitioning the king"

    That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.

    Perhaps if you would read what I wrote you might understand the difference.

    Why can't you understand Jefferson was writing in adherence to how the law was written rather than to how the law might have been twisted by later interpretations in England.

    And I am not quite convinced the king (and royal prerogative) were quite so toothless in the colonies as they apparently had become in England at the time.

    Be that as it may, it doesn't matter who was running the show in England in 1776. Blame the king or blame parliament, I don't care. Whoever was in charge fucked it up.

    If they had respected the colonist's rights as Englishmen the same as if they had actually lived in England still, there would have been no need for the American Revolution.

    But I dunno ... maybe parliament or the king or whoever had as little respect for the rights of people in England (or Wales or Scotland or Ireland) as they did for the rights of their American Colonists.

    1009:

    David L @ 977:

    I think 1900 is still late. Go back further to the Compromise of 1877 (or really right to the end of the "War of the Rebellion").

    But really, you can trace the roots of today's conservative extremism back to the Tory losers in the American Revolution; those who chose not to uproot & move to other colonies - or back to the mother country; those who stayed here & stayed in opposition to the new government.

    Maybe further back than that. In his opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Alito quotes Matthew Hale, who became Lord Chief Justice of England in 1671 - over a hundred years BEFORE the American Revolution.

    1010:

    Grant @ 982: To help a dumb Brit understand this, what was so bad about Obamacare?

    Its not quite killing the first born sons, burning the flag on the White House lawn or saying you've never liked baseball?

    Depends on which side of the debate you're on.

    To the RIGHT it's socialized medicine; a direct, communistic assault on the Dog Given Rights of Doctors, Hospitals and Insurance companies to squeeze every last cent of profit out of anyone who needs medical care.

    To the LEFT, it's NOT socialized medicine, and condemns people to suffer & die if they don't have enough money. It's not "Medicare for all".

    It could have been something like Britain's "National Health" (pre-Thatcher), but instead of being for the benefit of people needing medical care, it's all for the benefit of the FOR PROFIT insurance companies (and big pharma and hospitals and doctors).

    1011:

    I think 1900 is still late.

    My point was no matter where you start there is always something earlier. I was just using 1900 as it was an easy one to hit with Teddy's dinner guest.

    1012:

    I ain't too happy with the 4th of July right now. My little dog does not like fireworks one little bit.

    He's just shivering in terror despite all I can do to hold and comfort him.

    I noticed when I was out to walk him this afternoon that the smell of fireworks is different from the smell of firearms. I never noticed that before.

    1013:

    "they're paying $500 or $1000 every couple of months to have someone else run round fixing cracked tiles."

    Here all houses have tiled roofs (unless they still have slates) and that just doesn't happen. Instead they last for years and years (slates last even longer, the fixings rust out first). Why are your roof tiles so shit?

    1014:

    That one puzzles me completely. What on earth do they think the sound is? It can't be simple dislike of sudden loud noises because I've known dogs freak out at fireworks so inaudibly distant that it was only from the dog that I knew they were happening at all. And they get so disproportionately terrified that they just freeze up and tremble on the spot, instead of trying to run away or attack. They obviously think the sound portends something unimaginably horrific and inescapable, way beyond the range of any normal hazard, but I can't imagine what it could possibly be... and then on the other hand you get other dogs, sometimes even in the same household, who just don't give a toss. It's very strange.

    1015:

    Mostly they're clay, cheaply fired and they only last about 50 years. Mine were about 60 when I replaced them.

    We also get hail the size of tennis balls occasionally, that that's not ideal for stone or clay tiles. But luckily the big stuff tends to be very local - a couple of hectares get it, the rest of the city goes out an does an insurance job on their car :)

    1016:

    I think I mentioned before, the house I grew up in was built about 1900. The tiles on it are still fine. The house I'm living in now are concrete from about 1980 and they're falling apart. So materials have changed and they weren't always shit.

    1017:

    Very true. Mine is a tract house from the 1950's and is built in what is, for the time, as cheaply and shoddily as possible while still being saleable. This like it has carpet because that way the 20mm+ gaps between the brick walls and the edge of the floorboards don't matter. Adding network cables was easier than I expected, except for the construction debris under the house (why pay to remove it when you can just chuck it under the house where no-one will ever see it?)

    And so on. But as Lakemba's finest purveyor of second hand houses told us at the time, that's what ya get.

    1018:

    Hale was a judge who accepted spectral evidence, that is, evidence which comes from visions and dreams, in his court. He also executed a couple witches. Alito quoting the man was no accident, and points clearly at the Right's agenda.

    1019:

    Pigeon @ 1016:

    I have no idea. He doesn't like thunder either, but it doesn't terrify him the way the sound of fireworks does.

    And it's strange, because I play a first person shooter game and the sounds of the "guns" from that don't seem to bother him.

    1020:

    Troutwaxer @ 1020:

    True, but I think it also gives an insight to how far back the roots of right wing extremism extend.

    1021:

    Many animals hear a lot more than you do, so the computer "gunshot" is missing most of the high frequency content as well as any punch in the lower frequencies. Not only is it not as loud, it's more of a "thwop" than a "crack".

    One thing argued about by some audiophiles is whether the sound of a handclap is a meaningful test of an audio system. Some people argue that since we can't hear a sine wave over 10kHz-20kHz we can't detect any audio content at all over whatever our personal cutoff frequency is. Others argue that it sounds different :) But if you cut off the high frequencies at 5kHz a clap sounds muffled and soft.

    I suspect dogs at least have the same problem. "bang" goes a real gun "boom thump" goes thunder, "thwop" goes the gun noise from the computer.

    (the QI youtube channel just played the clip about "why don't pigeons like movies" to which the answer is "frame rate too low, movie is just a boring, badly shot, slideshow". Meanwhile some cats will watch pigeons on TV all day)

    1022:

    "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"

    The Jewish of that time knew everything belonged to God, so Caesar got nothing. :-)

    1023:

    »Here all houses have tiled roofs«

    The quality of ceramics is almost entirely dependent on the available clay, even just across Denmark, the quality of bricks varies from "indestructible" to "lasts only 50 years".

    1024:

    ...or, indeed, just a streak flying down the screen repeatedly. Some cats try to catch it, and never seem to get the idea that they can't. Pigeons just don't give a toss. They do, however, dislike hearing the screech of a hawk on the soundtrack. Their hearing cuts off at 10kHz; the sensitivity is said to go down to the noise floor, but the dynamic range is such that they can happily sit next to a speaker blasting out Motorhead with no inclination to move away.

    Dogs can also hear sounds too faint for humans and their hearing goes up to somewhere about 40kHz, but the thing about their reaction to fireworks that puzzles me is not how they might hear the noise, but what horrendous calamity they think it portends - what do they think is so utterly fucking terrifying that even when the sound is too faint for humans to hear at all, it nevertheless represents such an overwhelmingly awful clear and present danger that all they can do is cower and whine and shiver on the spot. And why other dogs don't think this at all and just ignore it entirely.

    1025:

    My dog also becomes utterly, bone shakingly terrified at a single 'pop' of fireworks. No idea why, I gather it is fairly common.

    It is not unreasonable to expect that when he gets a bit older he might well die of a heart attack on Halloween or July 1 (our two fireworks days).

    1026:

    1007 "Also, new tract housing built on the floodplains in Western Sydney." - This is not a uniquely Australian problem. It tends to happen anywhere you find property "developments" with names like "$Meadows" (and yes a silent ' water ' in the middle.

    1010 - Believe what you like; it took me all of 2 minutes to find the full quote that you abbreviated.

    1014 - Well, in the UK fireworks still use black powder (mixed with entertaining metal oxides); firearms use more modern and cleaner burning deflagrants (mother and maternal grandfather both worked for Nobel Explosives).

    1016 - Makes even less sense; my BFF's cats will happily sit and watch fireworks in their neighbours' gardens.

    1018 - I think this may be partly an issue of climate. Maritime temperate I've seen concrete tile roofs last over 40 years.

    1027:

    JBS
    Well, obviously! Gunpowder is "Black Powder" 75:15:10 of KNO3 : C (Charcoal) ; S -
    Whereas firearms use descendants of Cordite, which was/is made by"mixing" Nitroglycerine & Guncotton.

    I think it also gives an insight to how far back the roots of right wing extremism extend. - Back to the Witch-trials & a rabid Theocracy, in fact. Euw.

    1028:

    Originally, cordite was just nitrocellulose - nitrated wood pulp or cotton - also known as gun cotton.

    The practice of adding nitroglycerine (very carefully) appeared later. A nitrocellulose/nitroglycerine mixture is generally known as a double-base propellant and, like cordite, has the benefit of far less smoke than a gunpowder based formulation and also higher barrel pressures.

    Adding something like RDX takes you to triple-base/composite propellants but that tends to be used in larger guns such as main tank armaments.

    I saw the mention of Nobel's, and recalled being told of an incident at one of their sites, where the only way they could be sure anyone was in a building that blew up, was from blood smears on some roof timber splinters.

    1029:

    remember US GDP per head is pretty much the highest in the world too

    Wrong: in GDP per capita the USA is at number 12, well behind Ireland and Norway. In PPP-adjusted GDP it's slightly better, ranked tenth in the world.

    You need to beware of the myth of American exceptionalism, or America Number One. It was true for a brief period after 1945 (as everywhere else was basically trashed by years of war), but the lead has eroded significantly. Furthermore, if you consider the Gini coefficient as well, the average wellbeing of US citizens is worse than you think -- there are a couple of thousand billionaires, but a hundred and fifty million people at the bottom of the heap who are one pay check away from destitute.

    1030:

    For the nitpickers, here's the definitive gov.uk text of the Bill of Rights (1688).

    1031:

    a sixth of their GDP on it, very roughly twice what other rich countries spend

    The go-to reference for health expenditure is the OECD health resources site. You can see that that "roughly 1/6", namely 16.8% is true, but also in the separate variable for "government/compulsory" that the USA spends 13.9% of GDP in tax money on healthcare, substantially more than countries with "socialised medicine".

    Note that just looking at %GDP can cause confusion due to outliers. For instance Luxembourg, which has almost double the USA's GDP per capita, but a tiny population, looks like a low spender on the %GDP graph, but a high spender on the USD-per-capita graph. To interpret the figures accurately you'd really compare %GDP-per-capita and PPP-adjusted-USD-per-capita, but to do that you need to extract OECD.org's raw data and calculate it yourself.

    To see what citizens get for their money, the usual reference is a US-based not-for-profit foundation called The Commonwealth Fund, which ranks 11 high-income countries on their health system performance. The latest edition ranks Norway 1st, Netherlands 2nd and Australia 3rd (a shift from the previous edition, which had Australia and the UK at equal 1st).

    1032:
    whether the sound of a handclap is a meaningful test of an audio system

    How do audiophiles feel about tests using the sound of one hand clapping?

    1033:

    My thanks to everyone one who took the time to inform me why Obamacare was so hated.

    I have spent a lot of time in the US and met and worked with lots of interesting and friendly people, but never quite understood how a society, allegedly one based on Christian principles, was willing to let someone die of a readily treatable condition, merely because the ill person was poor. I was taught it was a moral imperative - no religion involved - to help others and whether they deserved help or not, didn't come into the equation.

    I get the whole "undeserving" thing, but strongly believe circumstances and chance have a bigger role in our success than we would like to admit. Would Johnson have ended up PM if born on a council estate in Peckham? Would Trump have ended up POTUS if born to a used car salesman in Idaho?

    Sometimes the deck really is stacked against you. The wrong friends at school, an ill timed recession, a lack of encouragement at home, the multiple distractions of hunger and squalor - hundreds of things can affect your chances. For everyone who succeeds there are hundreds who worked just as hard and did not. Must the unfortunate and the less able (its a spin of the genetic dice) really be the collateral damage of life?

    A lot of the explanations seemed to be "the world is out to get me" scale paranoia plus a side order of ignorance and naivete. I'm not being smug here as many of the same attitudes are clear in UKIP and the Conservative Party - its divisive crap.

    1034:

    Conservatism isn’t the only value system for which this could be said.

    they're like attractors in a way, buggered if i know how you'd model them tho

    1035:

    Re: '... but something in my cardiovascular system cracks the shits if I push too hard and I feel like throwing up. Then I feel like lying down for a couple of days. It's not fun.'

    I've only read the comments from the latest so may have missed some between when I last visited and yours - so apologies if this is a repeat of someone else's already posted comment.

    Anyways ... I've been trying to visualize what goes on in long-COVID, i.e., the why/how it happens, which tissues are most affected, how long it takes affected tissue to recuperate/regenerate in general, etc. Haven't got a lot of info yet but the below may be a useful starting point for you. (I know that there are a bunch of long-COVID studies being conducted, hopefully at least a few will provide info re: tissue repair/regeneration.)

    a)Why/how - ACE2, inflammation, cells are damaged from multiple (biochem) directions, your waste control system can't get rid of the damaged cells fast enough so this organic slurry accumulates and (potentially) causes even more damage down the road. (I think the flooding you're experiencing is an apt analogy.)

    b)Tissues most affected - ACE2 binding sites are located throughout the body so my guess is that individual factors (genetics, epigenetics, nutrition, overall health/age, etc.) determine which part of the system is likeliest to 'fail' first/hardest on a per-case/individual basis. Here's the map plus lots of info on tissues with more/less ACE2 binding sites concentration.

    'Body Localization of ACE-2: On the Trail of the Keyhole of SARS-CoV-2'

    https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.594495/full

    c)How long for tissue to repair/regenerate - different tissues regenerate at different rates. Some tissues that have a quasi-hibernation/stasis mode (e.g.. hair - 2 to 3 months after) may not show the full extent of their damage or begin regeneration until after coming out of hibernation/stasis.*

    The link below is to a page that gives a bit of an overview. However, I'm wondering whether the additional stress of being ill with many more damaged cells per tissue type, with a large number/variety of different tissue types boils down to more tissues competing for cell-repair resources. (I'd like to know what exactly about these different cells advantages/disadvantages them in getting the resources they need to regenerate.) Also - since COVID affects so many different tissues/systems all at the same time I think this probably means multiplying the given time frames by 3, 4 or even more (overall burden).

    http://book.bionumbers.org/how-quickly-do-different-cells-in-the-body-replace-themselves/

    The below outlines components and processes involved in inflammation.

    https://quizlet.com/342941171/inflammation-diagram/

    *Hair - first learned about this from a MedCram video that popped up on my YT recommend feed. Weird stuff - and more weird still that it hasn't been publicized in mass media given so many cultures are obsessed with physical appearance. Note: This is also triggered by other infections, inflammations and stress.

    First video (MedCram) - more technical explanation with diagrams.

    'COVID-19 and Telogen Effluvium (Hair Loss)'

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNbCVta1oRQ&ab_channel=MedCram-MedicalLecturesExplainedCLEARLY

    Second video - presenter is a board certified dermatologist providing more of a lay-person explanation.

    'COVID HAIR LOSS EXPLAINED // REGROWTH & RECOVERY//DERMATOLOGIST'

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Ygwl4Ohig&list=LL&index=43&t=367s&ab_channel=DrDray

    c)Regenerative resources - by this I mean external raw materials, i.e., nutrition. Although the article title might suggest external 'wounds' that's not really the case because a lot of your insides need/use the same raw materials. Key nutrients: protein, energy (carbs), fats, l-arginine (to boost protein repair pathway), VitC, VitA, Zinc, Iron, hydration.

    This site is run by Aussie registered dietitians. (The info I've read tracks with what the hospital dietitian told us - different medical circumstances but with some serious internal tissue rebuilding/healing involved.)

    https://www.eatwellnutrition.com.au/wound-healing/nutrition-and-wound-healing

    1036:

    Para 4 - Which site? I'm absolutely certain it was not Ardeer (Stevenston), and pretty sure it was not any of the Dumfries or Girvan sites.

    1037:

    "Anyways ... I've been trying to visualize what goes on in long-COVID"

    Just to add a teeny bit to this discussion, apparently "Long COVID" may be similar to Chemo Fog, and respond to some of the same techniques, which hopefully gives Moz some other stuff to try as well.

    https://www.wired.com/story/the-secrets-of-covid-brain-fog-are-starting-to-lift/

    You may need to open this in a private window.

    1038:

    Yes. The things in which the USA is the world leader are not always what people think, and few of which are creditable. The UK does no better, but we are number one in very few things now (not even voter stupidity, though we are working on it).

    1039:

    I was just about to post something along those lines! Yes, chemotherapy is pretty close, because it hits the whole body. Basically, it's poisoning the cancer without quite killing the patient. It's like military assessment of where to shell opposing troops in close conflict - the best approach often accepts some 'friendly fire' deaths, including when 'best' means 'fewest deaths among our troops'.

    1040:

    the best approach often accepts some 'friendly fire' deaths, including when 'best' means 'fewest deaths among our troops'.

    life is full of tradeoffs but i wouldn't want to be the officer who signed off on one of those fire orders

    1041:

    Let's be more specific.

    Cancer cells exhibit two traits that are unusual in human tissues: (a) unconstrained replication, and (b) contact inhibition. (Most cell lines, when they are replicating normally, stop when they run up against neighbouring tissues.) A third trait is loss of specialisation -- many cancer lineages tend to regress towards an undifferentiated state -- but this isn't universal. (We're colony organisms consisting of multiple highly specialised eukaryotic cells sharing a common genome, but our ancestral eukaryotic relatives, the protozoa, are still around. One line of argument is that cancerous cell lines are regressing towards a primordial single-celled ancestral state.)

    Anyway: first generation chemotherapy agents were simply designed to inhibit cellular replication, on the theory that cancer cells replicate faster than normal tissues and that if their rapid replication can be inhibited the immune system can mop them up afterwards. Problem: immune cells (and some other tissues, notably the gut lining) also turn over rapidly, so that which hammers the cancer also hammers the gut (see also nausea and diarrhoea), hair follicles (baldness) and the immune system (many chemotherapy agents are immunosuppressants).

    More recently we've developed an astounding range of diagnostic tools for working out how cancer cell lines malfunction, and have had some success with super-specialized antibody treatments that target mutations specific to some cancers. Good news: if you get a cancer for with an antibody therapy exists, we can hammer it hard. Bad news: we only have a few (so far) and they're horrifyingly expensive (because development costs are high and have to be amortized over the relatively few patients whose cancers have the target mutation).

    There are also a handful of other approaches. Some cancers are hormone dependent, so hormone antagonists work wonders: we have drugs for those prostate and testicular and breast cancers that are testosterone and oestrogen dependent. Again, bad news: some such cancers don't respond to hormone antagonists.

    Anyway, the point about COVID19 ...

    COVID19 gets into cells via the ACE2 receptor, which modulates blood pressure (among other things), so we have a repertoire of drugs that mess with ACE2. Bad news: ACE2 is part of the ACE/ACE2/RAS pathway which is gnarly and has lots of not-fully-understood aspects and if you mess with it you can kill the patient. Also, once COVID19 gets into the cell, what it does is not necessarily anything to do with RAS -- it also does weird stuff to the immune system, hence the inflammatory aspect of the infection, and what it does changes over time.

    1042:

    Last para - Does this mean that taking ACE inhibitors (say for hypertension) makes you more likely to catch a Cov-19 family virus?

    1043:

    life is full of tradeoffs but i wouldn't want to be the officer who signed off on one of those fire orders

    Then I hope you're never in the military. When you have to sacrifice a few lives to save a lot of other soldiers (or civilians, perhaps), you grit your teeth and do it.

    1044:

    Re: WIRED article about '"Long COVID" may be similar to Chemo Fog, ...'

    Excellent article - thanks!

    Found the reference CELL article - no paywall becuz it's COVID. (I've reformatted for ease of reading.)

    'Mild respiratory COVID can cause multi-lineage neural cell and myelin dysregulation'

    SUMMARY

    COVID survivors frequently experience lingering neurological symptoms that resemble cancer-therapy related cognitive impairment, a syndrome for which white matter microglial reactivity and consequent neural dysregulation is central.

    Here, we explored the neurobiological effects of respiratory SARS-CoV-2 infection and found white-matter-selective microglial reactivity in mice and humans.

    Following mild respiratory COVID in mice, persistently impaired hippocampal neurogenesis, decreased oligodendrocytes, and myelin loss were evident together with elevated CSF cytokines/chemokines including CCL11. Systemic CCL11 administration specifically caused hippocampal microglial reactivity and impaired neurogenesis.

    Concordantly, humans with lasting cognitive symptoms post-COVID exhibit elevated CCL11 levels.

    Compared with SARS-CoV-2, mild respiratory influenza in mice caused similar patterns of white-matter-selective microglial reactivity, oligodendrocyte loss, impaired neurogenesis, and elevated CCL11 at early time points, but after influenza, only elevated CCL11 and hippocampal pathology persisted.

    These findings illustrate similar neuropathophysiology after cancer therapy and respiratory SARS-CoV-2 infection which may contribute to cognitive impairment following even mild COVID.'

    https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(22)00713-9.pdf

    My immediate reaction to this research was in the context of medical staff 'burn-out'. Pretty scary with considerable ethical consequences: a large proportion of medical staff have had COVID, of these many have since been dx'd with long COVID. Does it make sense to rush them back to work looking after patients (making life-or-death decisions) if they're physically and cognitively exhausted?

    The only upside to this pandemic: So much good research that has also helped shed light on other medical conditions (MS, etc.). Hope the funding and efforts continue.

    BTW - might be of interest to folks here who seem to skew heavily toward the engineering/math side of things - personal anecdata but fits the findings/discussion.

    One of the specialists mentioned that ability to do math seemed to take a real nose dive among kids undergoing chemo. I'm guessing this also applies to adults. (Kids are tested on math every year in school, adults aren't.) Would be interesting to find out why math takes such a hit. My personal hypothesis is that math tends to be taught/learned very uni-modally - only one approach, therefore only one neuronal pathway. Any glitches along that pathway and you lose everything and have to start learning [math] all over again. (Maybe Robert has some insights into what the education system where he's located has in place re: remedial math for cancer kids. Might be useful for adults post-COVID.)

    1045:

    It's unclear. Also, (ACE and ACE2 are not the same enzyme.) I've seen suggestions that ACE2 receptor antagonists (ARBs) may be protective against COVID19 mortality, especially among hypertensive or diabetic patients: they don't appear to make it worse.

    1046:

    I was told about in in the mid 80s. It was used as a tale to remind us not to get comfortable with what we were doing and try to minimise risks at all times. The lower drawer of your lab desk may have 3kg of RDX in it, but thats really not ideal for a long life.

    It may have been the 1930s explosion mentioned in Hansard, though we were given the impression it was more recent.

    1047:

    I can hear that perfectly well, but then I bought the cryogenically-treated audio cables (on sale, for only $999 for an 8' cable!)....

    Hope you didn't spray coffee/tea all over your keyboard reading that.

    1048:

    Thenks for the explanation. I was doing the layman's (people with no medical or biochemical training) hand-wave, but the standard questions about potential problems with my chemotherapy overlap to a considerable degree with those for COVID.

    1049:

    My immediate reaction to this research was in the context of medical staff 'burn-out'. Pretty scary with considerable ethical consequences: a large proportion of medical staff have had COVID, of these many have since been dx'd with long COVID. Does it make sense to rush them back to work looking after patients (making life-or-death decisions) if they're physically and cognitively exhausted?

    Long Covid is a problem, but speaking as a hospital spouse, you don't need to invoke Long Covid to explain staff burn-out, because they're not being rushed back into service. They may be rushing themselves back into service too fast, but that's not the fundamental problem.

    The problems we've seen have been:

    --Public fuckwittedness. I don't think most medicos like seeing people die as a result of their own stupidity, but they certainly saw a lot of that in the first year of the pandemic. Currently, where we are, there are a moderate number of Covid cases in the hospital, but only one in the ICU. Most people are getting diagnosed when they come in with some other problem. Yay vaccines? It would be nice if this continues. I'm not saying the current infection's a joke, but it's more disabling than destroying.

    --Staff overbooking. The problem is that if you're staff, you get stretched to cover holes, and in an emergency, you don't get time to recover (surprise), you just get lots of overtime if you can tolerate it. With nurses especially, this led to:

    --Young staff nurses quitting to become travel nurses. Travel nurses earn considerably more, because they're on short contract and don't get benefits. If you're young and unmarried, this was often seen as a good deal: more money, a chance to live in other cities, and equally importantly, the possibility of taking extended unpaid leave to recover, which you can't do if you're staff. The people who stayed in staff jobs put are older, with families, and other responsibilities to load them down in addition to overtime, long Covid, etm. This led to:

    --Hospital budgets getting fsucked. Covid treatment didn't make a lot of money for hospitals (unlike elective surgeries). It did hit them with massively increased staffing costs (out sick costs, plus overtime to cover some gaps, plus hiring contractors to cover other gaps). As a result, managers are now scrambling to try to lower staffing costs, which is currently pissing off workers. The travel nurse gambit has played out, but the managers are now trying to figure out how to get more work done with fewer workers. Kind of awkward, that.

    Now this is in one of the more medically progressive American cities. I understand that rural American hospitals are much worse off, and there are political pushes to print some money to keep them open, or some such.

    1050:

    1047 - Great thanks. OK the evidence is non-conclusive, but we're still researching the virus, the disease, the vaccines and specific anti-virals (they do exist folks; tablets and some administered intravenously).

    1048 - I don't really know about things as early as the 1930s, but I do know that my grandfather was never responsible for a plant that suffered a fatal explosive accident; indeed there wasn't a fatal explosives accident at Ardeer in the century or so that it operated.

    1050 - Aside from having hypertension and renal failure, my links with the field are yourself, a sister with a BSc in Microbiology and a Post Grad Diploma in Pharmacology, working as a bio-medical indexer and editor for various papers, and a next-door neighbour who has had to take early retirement due to ill-health.

    1051:

    Breaking ...
    S Javid {Health} & Sunak {Chancellor of Exchequer} resign in synchrony - had enough of Bo Jon-Sun
    What next?

    Damian & everyone
    "On Health spending" - THIS site is the go-to I cannot recommend it highly enough.
    I use it a lot to shoot US exceptionalists down in flames. (!)

    EC
    THAT may about to be tested - see my opening line.

    1052:

    whether the sound of a handclap is a meaningful test of an audio system

    How do audiophiles feel about tests using the sound of one hand clapping?

    In my experience with the over-the-top audiophiles they would be totally a-ok with it. Most of them (when demonstrating their new 15,000 USD stereo set - and oh, 10 records...) will - with no record on the player - turn the volume up to max and then ask:

    "Can you hear anything?"

    "No"

    "EXACTLY!!!"

    1053:

    Re: 'Staff overbooking.'

    Yeah - the double whammy effect.

    Since you've a personal connection with healthcare providers, please explain in plain language why these for-profit healthcare providers did not use their own funds purportedly set aside to help them over rough financial patches.

    Wonder what these hospitals spent the Fed gov't COVID funds on - gonna guess it wasn't on patient care. (Can the Feds get this money back?)

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/business/coronavirus-hospitals-bailout.html

    At the same time they derided their patients/clients and staff for not doing so: "If you need surgery/in-hospital medical care: no excuses, you must pay us NOW! I don't care if you just lost your job(s): You should have put aside enough money to cover your/your family's health bills!"

    Ditto for support staff for 'complaining' about hospital work conditions.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/hospitals-tell-doctors-they-ll-be-fired-if-they-talk-to-press

    A bunch of hospitals fired medical staff who refused to get vaxed - approx. 5% in NY. (I'm cool with getting rid of 'medical professionals' who are clueless about how viruses work/don't give a damn if they transmit an infection that can kill someone.)

    I forget when this started but it went on for quite a while: anti-vaxers started showing up at hospitals, verbally abusing and physically threatening health care workers.

    So yes - several issues leading to medical staff shortages and reduced high-priced healthcare revenues.

    And lastly - school/academic disruptions affected some areas of medical studies, i.e., fewer internships, locums, etc. therefore the annual influx of new staff was reduced.

    1054:

    I'm reminded of a spoof on "Biggles" concerning Bo Jon-Sun's latest fiasco ...
    { Meanwhile "Mad Nad" Dorries supports Bo J as does Grease-Smaug } Title: "Biggles flies Undone"
    Oh dear.

    1055:

    Since you've a personal connection with healthcare providers, please explain in plain language why these for-profit healthcare providers did not use their own funds purportedly set aside to help them over rough financial patches.

    Can't help you with that, because my wife works for a non-profit.

    They're not likely to go out of business, but if you're trying to pin down why staff are burning out, those are the problems I've seen firsthand.

    As for nurses getting assaulted, that goes back to long before Covid. Nursing is a hazardous profession, and I've got a coursebook and DVD on nonviolent self defense for nurses.

    Annual influx of staff has increased, not decreased.

    1056:

    Pigeon @ 1026:

    Well, whatever the reason, the holiday is over now, so there won't be much of a problem again until October when the State Fair comes to town.

    1057:

    Damian @ 1033:

    The reason the U.S. health expenditures are so high is that even some government provided services are reliant on the fee-based, for profit medical-industrial complex. If we could get socialized medicine in this country we'd get a whole lot more bang for our buck.

    But the corporations would HOWL! The AMA almost shit a brick over Medicare, they'd go postal over Medicare for All

    1058:

    Re: 'Annual influx of staff has increased, not decreased.'

    How? Seriously - because the local hosps did not get as many new staff as folks here hoped for. Half wondering whether early retirement played a role here - we've a considerably older demographic than the major urban areas.

    1059:

    Grant @ 1035:

    Essentially those for whom the deck is stacked favorably make a great effort to ensure the deck continues to be stacked in their favor.

    They've managed to take control of the government (now control 1/3 and stalemate another 1/3 and hope to gerrymander their way to a permanent trifecta). They've done this through the power of propaganda (aka advertising) to alienate half the people in the U.S. from their own interests by painting the "OTHER" as a threat to the little success our Corporate Overlords have permitted them.

    There is a real class of the "undeserving" here in the U.S., but it's NOT at the bottom of the socio-economic system.

    1060:

    Charlie Stross @ 1043:

    Can you get a bit more specific still?

    So far I've managed to elude COVID19, but I take medications to control high blood pressure & diabetes.

    How does COVID19 affect the function of those medications? IF I were to get COVID19, would it be worth asking my doctor to increase the dosages for those meds? Could increased doses of those medications offset the adverse effects of COVID19.

    1061:

    Regenerative resources - by this I mean external raw materials, i.e., nutrition. Although the article title might suggest external 'wounds' that's not really the case because a lot of your insides need/use the same raw materials. Key nutrients: protein, energy (carbs), fats, l-arginine (to boost protein repair pathway), VitC, VitA, Zinc, Iron, hydration.

    I am noticing this, possibly. My vitamin B12 levels are low despite taking over the counter multivitamin pills and getting shots of it a couple of months ago. And same with a bunch of other stuff. I was vegetarian for ~25 years without the B12 problem! Now I'm eating meat and :( GP is struggling to understand the issue and doesn't really have time to do more than "hmm, those blood tests aren't great, let's shoot more B12 into you".

    Luckily I can afford to live mostly of fresh fruit and veges even with the various supply chain issues and my garden sulking (well, drowning, but you know. My solar panels have been putting out about 20% of usual sunny weather yields and I suspect the plants feel the same way).

    Thanks for the links, I will grind my way through.

    1062:

    AlanD2 @ 1045:

    OTOH, a lot of what they teach in military officer schools (at least here in the U.S.) is planning ahead to avoid (as much as possible) getting yourself in those situations.

    Sometimes officers do have to give orders sacrificing a few for the benefit of the many, but they don't have to like it

    ... and sometimes they're not able to make those decisions and the indecision ends up costing the lives of the small group of soldiers and the larger group of soldiers AND the civilians they were trying to protect.

    And sometimes it doesn't matter what you do, all of your options are going to be WRONG. IRL, there is no cheat that allows you to "change the conditions" for the "Kobayashi Maru" test.

    1063:

    resemble cancer-therapy related cognitive impairment

    In my case it's a persistent headache and an inability to hold a train of thought for long. I have to write down the steps when doing multiplication, it's most annoying.

    Viz, 1234 x 7 = 28
    21 +2
    14 +2
    7 + 1
    = 8638

    (ie, from the right 28 leads to the next digits being 21 + 2)

    Not only am I not sure that's correct, I think my explanation of it is garbage. Normally I would just write down the correct answer from the right, holding the carried digits in my head without thinking about it. Sometimes doing multi-digit multiplications the same way. Now I use a spreadsheet. Even for really simple stuff like "what's 50km/hr in rpm for a 5cm disk" the other day. Normally I'd say 3600 is near enough to 100 pi and get a rough answer in a second.

    Luckily I have a couple of months sick leave banked up so I'm working ~4 days a week and my management are being pretty patient with me.

    1064:

    There's also a problem/irritation that often my medical issues like this leave me comfortably within the normal range of ability. Which means doctors aren't necessarily good at noticing, or very sympathetic if they do. And I kind of feel bad about whining. "I can't multiply three digit numbers in my head"... "yes, that's completely normal. Now, why have you come to see me today?"... "brain not work good no more. Head hurt".

    It sucks, and makes me reluctant to go to the doctor at all. I spend a chunk of every 10 minute appointment just trying to persuade the doctor I'm actually sick, and not just trying to wangle opioids or something.

    As a friend says, "you've dropped from excessively powerful cyclist to merely above average. My heart fucken bleeds for you".

    Yes, but when you've built your life around "I can sprint for 60s to get the load bike up the hill" that's a big change. Tasks that used to be doable on the two wheel bike are not even close now. I dropped the bike the other day bringing timber home, because a little hill that I didn't even think about slowed me down to the point I couldn't balance. I did the next trip using the quad bike. Which weighs twice what the two wheeler does and will not go through some of the anti-bicycle barriers between me and the timber place.

    1065:

    On a completely different topic, Professor Q asks "would we be better off without corporations".

    https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/would-we-be-better-off-without-corporations

    Something much nicer to think about, and he has comments open for those who like such things :)

    1066:

    Thanks, I'll check it out. I liked his Zombie Economics book.

    1067:

    Then I hope you're never in the military.

    so do i tbh, but it's fairly unlikely at my age unless i inexplicably find myself in a volkssturm situation

    When you have to sacrifice a few lives to save a lot of other soldiers (or civilians, perhaps), you grit your teeth and do it.

    tell me about when this happened to u

    1068:

    The economics of zombies is an understudied area :)

    1069:

    OTOH, a lot of what they teach in military officer schools (at least here in the U.S.) is planning ahead to avoid (as much as possible) getting yourself in those situations. Sometimes officers do have to give orders sacrificing a few for the benefit of the many, but they don't have to like it.

    The reverse, medical triage during a disaster, is apparently really hard for doctors and nurses. Their training is to try to save everyone and to pour resources onto extreme cases. When resources are limited and they have to ration, them, apparently many struggle or simply refuse. It's a nasty problem, but I'm not sure how you train doctors to think backwards (in favor of resource conservation and maximizing survival of the most) in rare circumstances, while continually training them to try to save everyone day to day.

    1070:

    A great deal of what's being discussed as "covid burnout" is moral injury from that triage. It's not just medical people either, I've read a couple of articles lately about teachers having the same problem where all the kids in their class need extra help but they don't have enough hours in the day to provide it, or the emotional resources to draw on even if they did. Too many have sacrificed their own mental health trying.

    Expand that across a range of different fields, right down to checkout operators who have been going to work even though they know it's dangerous and they don't have the support they need from their employer. Where it gets ugly is those staff pressuring each other to work despite the obvious risks. "put your life on the line in exchange for minium wage, the economy needs YOU!"

    Meanwhile in Australia we're talking about using higher interest rates to punish people for buying expensive food and fuel. We must prevent inflation no matter the cost! If you can't afford rent, live under a bridge... just keep up appearances, you boss doesn't want you looking rough at work.

    Meanwhile I find it hard to look at all the "things must return to normal, we have to learn to live with covid" stuff going round, for obvious reasons. That's less a moral injury than a cause of disbelief. Sure it's only 2% chance of long covid every time you get it, but with reinfections after 3 weeks and that interval getting shorter... just how many people with my symptoms do we want to have? All of them?

    1071:

    Re covid,

    I've been using disposable N95 masks because the mask I had for bushfire smoke has exhaust valves.

    Now the situation has changed here. Since they removed the mask mandates and changed it to "strongly encouraged" the use has dropped to about half a percent. Me not exhaling isn't going to change the miasma one bit. On the other hand, the probably 90% effectiveness of a mask, which is 99% when both parties are wearing one, is only 90% when it's only me. Which given that most crowds now contain a couple of active cases is pretty dismal odds. Especially if you multiply it by number of exposures.

    So I've bitten the bullet and bought a 3M 6000 half mask and 2138 filters (rated for toxic dust at 100 times the safe level, not certain these are the right ones, input welcomed). It's a medium, which is too small, but the seal is good (I know how to test for fit) so I'm happy that I'm getting the same protection from a half mask that I would from a full face. It's also hardly heavier than the disposable and significantly more comfortable.

    I feel like a prat wearing it, but as Richard Feynman said "why should you care what other people think?"

    One trip to the supermarket and no one commented, stared or apparently noticed. So I shouldn't have cared.

    At 50 dollars it will pay for itself in about 50 outings (I reused the disposables a couple of times and they're 3 bucks each) and the $15 filters should last for a year used every day.

    1072:

    A great deal of what's being discussed as "covid burnout" is moral injury from that triage. It's not just medical people either, I've read a couple of articles lately about teachers having the same problem where all the kids in their class need extra help but they don't have enough hours in the day to provide it, or the emotional resources to draw on even if they did. Too many have sacrificed their own mental health trying.

    Expand that across a range of different fields, right down to checkout operators who have been going to work even though they know it's dangerous and they don't have the support they need from their employer. Where it gets ugly is those staff pressuring each other to work despite the obvious risks. "put your life on the line in exchange for minium wage, the economy needs YOU!"

    Meanwhile in Australia we're talking about using higher interest rates to punish people for buying expensive food and fuel. We must prevent inflation no matter the cost! If you can't afford rent, live under a bridge... just keep up appearances, you boss doesn't want you looking rough at work.

    Meanwhile I find it hard to look at all the "things must return to normal, we have to learn to live with covid" stuff going round, for obvious reasons. That's less a moral injury than a cause of disbelief. Sure it's only 2% chance of long covid every time you get it, but with reinfections after 3 weeks and that interval getting shorter... just how many people with my symptoms do we want to have? All of them?

    1073:

    Re covid,

    I've been using disposable N95 masks because the mask I had for bushfire smoke has exhaust valves.

    Now the situation has changed here. Since they removed the mask mandates and changed it to "strongly encouraged" the use has dropped to about half a percent. Me not exhaling isn't going to change the miasma one bit. On the other hand, the probably 90% effectiveness of a mask, which is 99% when both parties are wearing one, is only 90% when it's only me. Which given that most crowds now contain a couple of active cases is pretty dismal odds. Especially if you multiply it by number of exposures.

    Additionally I can no longer kid myself that this is temporary. I'll be filtering my breathing media for the rest of my life. The "Protector" brand mask I bought for bushfires is a cheap heavy hot unpleasant thing that's fine for short term use.

    So I've bitten the bullet and bought a 3M 6000 half mask and 2138 filters (rated for toxic dust at 100 times the safe level, not certain these are the right ones, input welcomed). It's a medium size, which is too small, but the seal is good (I know how to test for fit) so I'm happy that I'm getting the same protection from a half mask that I would from a full face. It's also hardly heavier than the disposable and significantly more comfortable.

    I feel like a prat wearing it, but as Richard Feynman said "why should you care what other people think?"

    One trip to the supermarket and no one commented, stared or apparently noticed. So I shouldn't have cared.

    At 50 dollars it will pay for itself in about 50 outings (I reused the disposables a couple of times and they're 3 bucks each) and the $15 filters should last for a year if used every day.

    1074:

    Thank you for your enlightening answer!

    1075:

    I'm still using disposable "paper" ones because I have a box of them. I also have a bicycle/work mask with valves that uses similar filters and is more pleasant to wear. They both fit test properly and I replace them fairly often. I kind of hope it's good enough. Mostly I focus on minimising exposure. Because as you see, mask wearing even where it's required (public transport!) is under 5%.

    Round here the occasional nasty looks I get for wearing a mask at all are enough for me. I am not willing to up the level (yet).

    During the worst of the fires I was biking in a half face mask for a bit and that was awful. I have a full face mask for the workshop but I only have dust filters for that and they're easier to breathe through. The combo of hard to suck air through and riding my bike made the half face mask really hard going. But over 1000 ug/m3 particulates I felt a lot safer wearing it...

    Speaking of which, I should go shopping and buy more meat. Sigh. Poor skippy.

    1076:

    Sometimes officers do have to give orders sacrificing a few for the benefit of the many, but they don't have to like it

    I never suggested they had to like it. But they DO have to do it when the situation arises.

    1077:

    tell me about when this happened to u

    I joined the Air Force in 1966 to avoid this kind of situation. Spent 4 years as a programmer in Texas. Otherwise I'm sure I would have died in Viet Nam...

    1078:

    I've been using disposable N95 masks because the mask I had for bushfire smoke has exhaust valves.

    Now the situation has changed here. Since they removed the mask mandates and changed it to "strongly encouraged" the use has dropped to about half a percent.

    I've noticed the same thing here in Oregon. I'm double masked in stores and other indoor place, but virtually nobody else is masking. What don't people understand about the Covid epidemic NOT being over???

    1079:

    I also have a bicycle/work mask with valves that uses similar filters and is more pleasant to wear.

    Masks with valves protect the people wearing them, but they don't protect bystanders if the wearer has Covid. I'd recommend ditching them...

    1080:

    I assume you mean I should stop wearing a mask completely, since I've already explained why and where I wear the vented mask.

    But just in case, why should I go to considerable extra inconvenience so that people who are happy to accept the risk might face a possibly microscopic reduction in that risk? Riding with a non-vented mask is an ugly experience (I may have said this already too). Doing that so that people I ride past, who are almost universally not wearing masks, don't face the added risk of possible infection from someone who is trying very hard not to get infected, seems ludicrous. They're already happy to walk next to people who don't wear masks at all.

    1081:

    Yeah, my thinking too.

    I wore masks with no exhaust valve to protect others, but there's literally no point anymore. I'm often in a room (like a supermarket) where there's 100 odd people in there and I'm the only one wearing a mask. There's about a 97% chance that there's an infected person wandering around unmasked in that room, or there has been in the last 2 hours.

    (official figures are ~45000 cases a day, probably 90,000 or more, so about 900,000 active cases. About 1 in 30)

    At this point in terms of preventing transmission, I'm more likely to end a transmission chain by preventing my own infection. Even from a public health point of view, I'm doing the right thing. (despite the bizarre "let it rip" attitude of the governments)

    Having said that I'm trying to get hold of the 3M 604 Exhalation Valve Filter.

    1082:

    While I remember, it's worth wearing glasses as well. The mucus membranes there are well connected to the rest of you and I did see a report early on suggesting that that might be a risk to think about. Since I wear glasses anyway the only obvious step is a full face mask... I'd have to buy proper filters for it, but I could wear that out and about.

    1083:

    I think it is a risk. If I was flying or similar I'd go the full face mask. At present I'm rocking wraparound sunnies.

    The ffm just seems a step too far, but that might change. I never thought I'd wear a half mask in public.

    I would even consider a power mask first, if they weren't so absurdly expensive (1000 dollars for a fan)

    1084:

    Concerning the ongoing British political shit-show:
    Wonderful quote in today's "indie": Who, at this point, would bet against Johnson actively trying to run the country from some kind of gold-wallpapered bivouac while on the run from law enforcement?

    But - Bo Jon-Sun WILL NOT GO
    He will have to be forcibly dragged, kicking & screaming, out of Downing Street.
    Meanwhile, thanks to him & his gang of corrupt cronies, the entire country is collapsing & imploding, because of him & his "policies" ( Brexit )

    And - why is no-ne else commenting on this, not even as a tragical farce, which it is - for us. ( ?? )

    Moz
    "Getting the doctors to listen" - yeah - I'v still get a wheezing/bubbling in my left lung after lying down overnight. Um.

    1085:

    consider a power mask first, if they weren't so absurdly expensive (1000 dollars for a fan)

    Yeah, I've often thought power would be great, especially for welding but just generally when it's hot. I've tried one and it was better than what I have now. But $1000-odd is a pretty steep price for something that's not essential. If I was doing composite work all day I'm pretty sure it would be worth it.

    1086:

    Can you get a bit more specific still?

    No. Because ...

    So far I've managed to elude COVID19, but I take medications to control high blood pressure & diabetes.

    I can't give you medical advice because I haven't been licensed to practice for nearly a third of a century now. I'm so rusty my rust has begun to form a fossil strata.

    Secondly, there are multiple classes of medication for both those conditions, and you're probably on more than one type of med for each. Some of them appear to have no negative effects on COVID19 morbidity; others may differ. For example, at least one of my own diabetes meds (which didn't exist back when I was a practicing pharmacist) has to be discontinued temporarily in event of vomiting or diarrhoea (either of which can cause dehydration, which is a real problem while taking that medication).

    You really need to ask your prescriber or a pharmacist with access to your medical records for advice on what to do when (not if) you get COVID19.

    1087:

    "...the entire country is collapsing & imploding, because of him & his "policies" ( Brexit )"

    BTW, what's currently going on with Brexit?

    1088:

    The latest Brexit legislation appears to be the new Human Rights bill. At least that's the one that's getting all the attention right now. Human rights lawyers are making dire predictions about the rising costs for vulnerable people, meaning many such people will be unable to defend their rights vs the government.

    TL;DR its a big win for government(s) (see other recent Brexit news) and a big loss for vulnerable people.

    I'm heavily simplifying, of course. The government line is that this makes everything clearer and better, but they would say that, wouldn't they? Beware of the passive voice and heavily ambiguous language. (The classic example of this: "Mistakes have been made; lessons have been learned.") The real test will be, as it always is, in the courts.

    My personal standard for judging any policy is an ancient one (so I can take no credit for it): how does a society treat its most vulnerable members? Even critics appear to be acknowledging that the new legislation is a big improvement over what the UK used to have, just a few years ago.

    It's a heck of a lot better than many other parts of the world but what kind of defence is that? I've seen the Saudi ambassador to the UK openly and casually admit that his country tortures and kills its own citizens (and blame it all on W. Bush). By contrast, the UK has the decency to ship UK citizens to other countries where they may be tortured and killed. That keeps our hands clean, right? Well, maybe legally. I don't know of a home secretary ever being prosecuted over this. I don't expect that'll ever happen.

    So I can understand why some are not comfortable with this new bill, but I'm well aware of how much worse it could be. This could be a step toward something worse, but that'll depend on things we can't usefully predict at this point. That isn't stopping people from making predictions, of course. I'm just saying that I've read enough history to appreciate how much "noise" individual events like this can be over a longer term, like decades.

    However, I'm judging that history by the ancient standard. I sometimes think of it as a reversal of "Who benefits?" I.e. "Who suffers?"

    1089:

    I've noticed the same thing here in Oregon. I'm double masked in stores and other indoor place, but virtually nobody else is masking. What don't people understand about the Covid epidemic NOT being over???

    I now shop mostly at a Chinese grocery, because almost everyone there wears masks. When I have to visit another grocer I try to go early in the morning when the only people there tend to be pensioners who are mostly masking.

    As to why most people don't care anymore, I think that's a combination. Politicians are saying it's over. Removing public health restrictions (like mandatory masking) sent the message it's over. (Masking is seen now as a way to protect the individual, not other people.) Covid has fallen out of the media spotlight. Wearing a mask has been made a political statement, exposing the wearer to abuse.

    Probably most importantly, social pressure to conform. When everyone is wearing a mask the pressure is to wear one. When most people don't the pressure to to not wear one, which increases the number not wearing. And people who are concerned are more likely to avoid people and crowded places, which means that the most visible people are those who don't care, which sets the 'social standard' in public places to bare-faced.

    1090:

    I now shop mostly at a Chinese grocery, because almost everyone there wears masks. When I have to visit another grocer I try to go early in the morning when the only people there tend to be pensioners who are mostly masking.

    Here in the RDU area of North Carolina it seems to vary all over. Mostly based on where you are. In my area of town you can expect 30% to 60% of the folks in a store to be masked. Grocery, home center, office supplies, etc. Interestingly in the higher end grocery store where I shop a lot up to 1/2 of the staff are masked at any one time.

    5 to 10 miles on the other side of town, I can be the only person I notice with a mask in a home center.

    And if you study the historical voting of the various areas for the last 10 years, you can very accurately guess the masking percentages.

    1091:

    Anybody have any comment as to whether 2138 filters are the right choice for COVID protection?

    1092:

    Martin Rodgers @ 1091:

    I am not a fan of George W. Bush (even less a fan of his Vice President). There are A LOT of things he (they) should have to answer for, but the government of Saudi Arabia torturing and murdering its own citizens ain't one of them.

    1093:

    I am not a fan of George W. Bush (even less a fan of his Vice President). There are A LOT of things he (they) should have to answer for, but the government of Saudi Arabia torturing and murdering its own citizens ain't one of them.

    Agreed. I watched that interview with amazement. It was the single most openly obscene statement I've seen made on TV. I can recall how he justified it, but I'd prefer not to repeat it. I'll just say that clerics were part of it. Perhaps you can find similar statements made within the Bush administration. I can recall some people quoted at the time, including "God is in the Whitehouse." I didn't see or hear these statements, only people quoting them, but I saw the Saudi ambassador speaking on a BBC Panorama show. It was jaw-dropping television.

    1094:

    Not a Doctor, or even a pharmacist. However, my mother and I, both fully vaccinated for our age etc (so at least 3 doses each) both recently had Cov19, confirmed by PCR. The symptoms were "bad cold", nothing more.

    1095:

    Not yet.

    I've done a bit more research and it appears that the 2138 and the closely related 2135 are fine. (the 2138 also filters some nuisance level organic vapour) However the model numbers are for filters that meet Australian standards. So advice from the rest of the world probably won't apply.

    There's a couple of suggested filters for medical use. The 6035 in Australia, and the 7093 in the USA. They have a hard splash guard and they're more robust for hospital use.

    Australian info.

    https://youtu.be/FigbakqJRZw

    3M also make asbestos removal kits. You get a full face mask and 2 pairs of 6035 filters for $335 at Sydney Tools, which seems a bargain.

    1096:

    If I was flying or similar I'd go the full face mask.

    If you're flying aboard a pressurized jet airliner, you probably don't need to bother once it's in flight.

    Airliner air conditioning sucks bleed air from the engine compressors, where it's heated to 200 celsius (which will sterilize any viruses or bacteria in the intake), then chill it down to human-friendly temperatures before pumping it through the fuselage. They aim for a complete air change in the cabin every 2-4 minutes. It's also pre-filtered before it gets into the cabin because otherwise the passengers will all be choking on oil fumes and/or poisoned by the organophosphate pesticides the engine oil is doped with (to prevent anything nasty growing in it).

    So jet cabin air is pretty damned safe unless you're cheek by jowl with a COVID case who's coughing on you.

    What's not safe is the airport terminal itself, where social distancing goes out of the window, everyone's packed in queues for hours on end, and the aircon is probably not adequately filtered.

    So: FFP2 or better mask for check-in, security, departure area, arrivals, immigration queue, and customs. But you can probably relax while you're airborne and remove your mask while eating/drinking unless you have a worrying neighbour.

    1097:

    Latest per the Graun is that the 1922 Committee is considering changing its rules to permit another confidence motion, and may make the change as soon as tonight.

    If they do that, I expect he's toast. I mean, they won't change the rules unless they're confident enough members will vote against him to make a leadership election necessary.

    1098:

    Can he unilaterally announce a new General Election and force the Tory MPs to consider whether they want to go into that election with a leadership contest underway?

    Does the PM have the power to call an election or must it be referred to the House?

    1099:

    If losing one Cabinet Minister is misfortune, and losing 2 is carelessness, just what is losing 18 (and counting)?

    1100:

    How long before Boris does his own Extinction Rebellion and glues himself to the door of No.10 ?

    1101:

    Other news sources, like The Independent, are also reporting the story. Some are suggesting days rather than hours, but the central point is the same: a possible change to the "one year" rule, just to deal with this current crisis. Is it really that bad (for the party) or are they anticipating worse to come? I suspect the answer may be "both", and "much, much worse."

    1102:

    I believe it requires a vote of no confidence by the House. Starmer might whip Labour behind Johnson if he asked, because Labour are currently polling 10 points ahead while Johnson has reached bottom-level parity with Corbyn as Labour leader, but a bunch of Tories would automatically vote to keep the current government because if there's an election they'd lose their seats.

    Remember, it was this or Chaos with Ed Miliband!

    1104:

    By contrast, the UK has the decency to ship UK citizens to other countries where they may be tortured and killed.

    Sadly, the U.S. does this too - at least under IQ45...

    1105:

    The countries ranked higher than the US in GDP per capita are small oil producers (Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Norway), tax havens which are credited the economic activity of other regions (Macao, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, San Marino), and small trading nexuses (Singapore, Hong Kong). Western European countries tend to have GDP per capita 10-20% lower than the US.

    On median household income, the US fares similarly compared to the OECD, but the US is below most of Western Europe on median household wealth and has a higher poverty rate.

    1106:

    If losing one Cabinet Minister is misfortune, and losing 2 is carelessness, just what is losing 18 (and counting)?

    Introducing a new, improved version of our flagship product? Oh wait, that's the computer industry version, we're talking about the UK Parliament.

    Sorry.

    Just remember, this type of chaos is how plutocrats destabilize democracies.

    1107:

    It's only two CABINET ministers - the rest are not in the cabinet.

    1108:

    "Punishing inflation". There's answers, and they're not monetary policy. But they're HORRIBLE (assuming you're in the top 1%): price gouging laws applied, and windfall profit taxes.

    1109:

    And, just to jump back to one of Charlie's favorite themes, crypto: I see one vendor(?) is declaring bankruptcy, and a cryptocurrency (Luna?) is collapsing.

    But I thought those were supposed to be so much safer than "fiat" money....

    1110:

    Since we're on politics, here's a good new interview with Corbyn, for those who may be interested. As for Johnson, I think they'll be trying to get him to jump soon (tonight). Doubt he'll have the grace to do so but you never know.

    1111:

    RE: '"hmm, those blood tests aren't great, let's shoot more B12 into you".

    B12 needs 'intrinsic factor' in order to be absorbed/used by your body. 'Intrinsic factor' is a glycoprotein made by your gut's 'parietal cells'. 'Parietal cells' in turn need histamine ...

    Occam never met human biology ...

    Anyways ... parietal cell testing is (apparently) uncommon - your doctor might give you a weird look if you ask about it. If you have anemia then maybe your doctor might order a test for Vit B12 and folate deficiency. Some of the B vitamins seem to overlap in function and deficiency symptoms. So unless your doc orders testing for more than one B vitamin, it's possible the testing may target the wrong one, i.e., the one B vitamin that's actually okay. I'm mentioning this because both these B vitamins (12 and folate) seem to be issues with anemia that's why testing is usually done for both. [Disclaimer: I'm not a medical pro - my only experience was with looking after my parents who had these issues.]

    Nutrition - Ever since the pandemic began I've been trying to maintain a healthy diet so that I won't have to set foot in a doctor's office/clinic. For me, apart from the protein, fat, carbs, etc. - ensuring variety of foodstuffs has been as important.

    Masks - I'm still masking when out shopping. I've had only one anti-masking comment directed at me. My reply: Yeah well -- my doctor says otherwise and he actually knows my medical history. (That guy backed off.)

    Math - dumb suggestion but it may work - how did you first learn your math? I'm guessing that it was using paper and pencil. If so, maybe you should re-learn/review the same way. (There's been some published research showing that people who hand jot notes have much better recall of the content than people who typed their notes. And the hand jotting might also help jog some other part of your memory that had been involved in consolidating that particular mental exercise.)

    1112:

    I am trying to finish writing a novella (which is threatening to overrun it's 30,000 word target length) otherwise I'd be throwing up a blog entry about either (a) Boris Johnson's attempt to copy Trump, or (b) the way transhumanism/the singularity would affect our definition of crime. (a) is currently winning. He's passed 39 resignations from the government so far -- more than all other Conservative prime ministers combined in British parliamentary history.

    This is abnormal but they're all shiterags and I do not wish to allow them to rent space in my brain so I'm going back to the word mines.

    1113:

    B12 and folic acid are both essential for avoiding anaemia (as is adequate iron); if something throws your metabolism completely off-course (e.g. some cancers), you can get weird forms of anaemia. But the lack of intrinsic factor stops you absorbing B12, so it doesn't need a separate test.

    https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamin-b12-or-folate-deficiency-anaemia/causes/

    1114:

    He can certainly ASK the Sovereign to dissolve Parliament, but the usual action is to enquire if anyone else could command a majority before doing so. This usually means simply following the Conservative's choice of leaders, as you know.

    If he has clearly lost the confidence of the House, and still will not resign, we are into (I think) essentially uncharted waters. If Parliament petitioned her to remove him, I am sure she would be happy to do so, but I don't see that happening.

    1115:

    1: thank you, that was interesting. And nothing at all like the attacks, old and ongoing, against Bernie Sanders over here.

    Oh, nothing at all like them.

    1116:

    Oh, forgot: 2: I'm sorry, I'm having cognitive dissonance between "BoJo" and "grace".

    1117:

    And apropos of nothing else;

    We shaved apes like round numbers. Today we seem to be at a high of 101F (38C). With a heat index of 110F or so due to what the locals call high humidity. (If this was where I grew up add a few more degrees to that.) Tomorrow should be a bit less with a big drop of 10F or so for the rest of the week.

    While we typically get close to this magic number of 100 we rarely pass it.

    Now Phoenix is 105F or so. And at times get at or near 120F. They can keep it. Plus they are running out of water.

    And at least BJ's folks are quitting on him instead of pretending that things are just a bit off and staying aboard the ship. (Unlike Trump's folks.)

    1118:

    AlanD2 @ 1106:

    By contrast, the UK has the decency to ship UK citizens to other countries where they may be tortured and killed.

    Sadly, the U.S. does this too - at least under IQ45...

    Specific instances? Details?

    The Stay in Mexico policy for asylum seekers was bad enough, but I'm not familiar with any instance where Actual Americans were unjustly deported to be tortured & killed?

    Seems like Trumpolini committed MANY serious crimes while he was in office (and that doesn't appear to have changed since he'd been out), but sending U.S. citizens to detention, torture & execution in other less democratic countries just doesn't appear on the list as far as I can tell?

    1119:

    I got the 3M 6300 respirator, designed for large faces. So what if the filters are palm-sized and pink? The ridiculousness shows others I'm serious and, I hope, encourages others, along with the large florescent 2D scan code on a neck lanyard showing my vaccination/boost status (Go, Team Moderna!)

    https://microcovid.org has a calculation method I found worthy (based on my time in the trenches for a Florida county public health department), https://www.microcovid.org/paper/13-q-and-a discusses masking, and https://www.microcovid.org/paper/14-research-sources points to several sources on mask effectiveness.

    I also use safety (prescription) glasses with side shields, and for my semi-weekly social gatherings (D&D/Pathfinder) directly ask folks at the table if they're experiencing symptoms. Twice in the past month, players have self-isolated, which I think speaks well to those Portlanders.

    Let's be careful out there!

    1120:

    That's why I added filter material cut from an N95 mask within the exhaust vent of my half-face respirator, and notice no extra effort needed to exhale.

    I am heartened, when I shop at the regional employee-owned big box grocery store (WinCo), that 1/4-1/3 of the shoppers are still masking, months after the state mask mandate was dropped.

    1121:

    B12 and folate have very similar haematological effects. Folate can ‘cure’ the anaemia caused by b12 deficiency. But low b12 can have neurological effects which are not affected by folate. For this reason I instigated a policy that a request for assay of one of these would automatically generate a test for both. Since B12 is the most expensive of the routine blood biochemistry tests I didn’t speak of this too much to those controlling the budgets. B12 assays also have the worst precision and accuracy of the common biochemistry tests. My lab used to get a cv of about 12 percent and we were better than average. The test is now being replaced by active B12 (holotranscobalamin) which is more clinically useful, more accurate and more precise.

    1122:

    Topical chalkboard allegedly spotted in London and spreading online:

    "Carpenters urgently required...

    Cabinet falling apart--

    Apply to 10 Down Street

    (no tools required, the building is full of them!)

    1123:

    Seems like Trumpolini committed MANY serious crimes while he was in office (and that doesn't appear to have changed since he'd been out), but sending U.S. citizens to detention, torture & execution in other less democratic countries just doesn't appear on the list as far as I can tell?

    Nor Bush II/Cheney even during the fever years of the Global War on Terror™, again as far as can be told. Furriners, yes, but Civis romanus sum seems to have translated well into American.

    How long that might last is uncertain.

    1124:

    Re: 'B12 assays also have the worst precision and accuracy ...now being replaced by active B12 (holotranscobalamin)'

    Interesting - thanks! Found what looks like a review article from 2011 that gives background on these tests. The authors' conclusion: test results are clearer with the 'holo' test.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127504/

    Why I mentioned different B vitamins - it seems that there's sometimes/often (?) a preferred sequence in how different compounds are used by the body. I read this as: this also means that there's a preferred sequence for fixing a chemical imbalance. For example, while going down the B12 deficiency rabbit hole on YT, in a video on pernicious anemia the presenter (a newly minted MD) said: if deficient in both B12 & folate, fix the B12 first otherwise there's a risk of 'subacute combined degeneration of the cord'.

    1125:

    Charlie --

    I really would like to see your blog entry on how transhumanism/the singularity would affect our definition of crime. And the ensuing discussion :)

    1126:

    Thanks for the youtube link.

    I'm kind of torn on the full face mask. My Scott one is a few years old and the elastic straps have been repaired once, but it still works. The filter form factor has changed and the new ones don't seem to be splash resistant (and are hard to find).

    The 3M rubber straps I find great when they work, but they break more easily than the cloth/elastic ones and are difficult to repair. The cheap chinese clones break more easily, but I've fixed a friend's genuine 3M one that had the same problem. But OTOH I did not break the cheap chinese one I used for a few days (during which time someone else broke the other chinese one that was bought at the same time). In other words it may come down to careful handling.

    FWIW the 3M ones are noticeably nicer to wear than the $50 ones off ebay. But for six times the price you'd hope so. For workshop use I will happily use cheap particulate filters off ebay at ~$1/pair because I'm mostly filtering wood dust. But for Covid I have a supply of proper filters.

    This morning's trauma was the supermarket "self checkout" doing the inevitable "wait for staff" thing, and the staff being maskless (of course) and mistaking my desire not to get breathed on for impatience with her fumbling. She eventually got the machine to cooperate but not without blowing straight in my face from close range as I tried to maintain social distancing. Maybe I should go full face and wet wipes. Or just a bucket with lid that's big enough to take the full face mask so I can take it off in the carpark and disinfect it at home.

    Coz going back to the doctor is going to be an experience, last time the waiting room was full of unmasked sick people and some of the staff weren't masked either. So I might change doctors.

    1128:

    I must announce a most awesome miracle, clear and obvious evidence of a profound and powerful force beyond human understanding: After three months, my missing sock has returned! PRAISE EVERYTHING!!!

    1129:

    I am trying to finish writing a novella otherwise I'd be throwing up a blog entry

    I suspect most of us would rather have the novella, given the choice :-)

    1130:

    Seems like Trumpolini committed MANY serious crimes while he was in office (and that doesn't appear to have changed since he'd been out), but sending U.S. citizens to detention, torture & execution in other less democratic countries just doesn't appear on the list as far as I can tell?

    So it's OK if done to people who aren't American?

    Extraordinary rendition continued under Trump. Given that your government was happy to kidnap and torture Canadians, you can imaging how warm and fuzzy that makes us feel…

    Germans, Italians, Canadians, Brits all have been kidnapped and tortured — and the American government has steadily refused to accept responsibility (or pay compensation*).

    *Which is really rich given that it is apparently OK for Americans to demand compensation from child soldiers for injuries that happened during combat…

    1131:

    Before you threw away the other one? Truly a miracle!

    1133:

    I'm really thinking a FFM is a bridge too far. I've spent thousands of working hours wearing much bulkier FFM and I'd be perfectly happy to wear one full time, but geeze, I'm shit enough at social interaction as it is. I feel like I'm playing the character of a normal person in an ad-lib larp now. Attaching a gigantic sign to my head saying "this person isn't one of us" as well...

    Added to that my partner is a Normal. So she hardly masks up at all and when she does it's a decorative cloth mask. Hence my total risk reduction is minimal.

    1134:

    PS,

    Supermarkets... I get home delivery ever since lockdown started. It's great. I interact with one person from 4m, outdoors. It's often free of you're happy to accept weird delivery times, and the cost is less than petrol. The app lets you add things to the shopping list as you go, so when you open the last bottle, just add it to the list then and it will be there on the next order. No need to figure out what you need at the time of ordering. Highly recommended. I probably make a physical supermarket trip once every 3 months or less now.

    PPS, my doctor requires masking for everyone on site. (so does my vet actually, but only humans) So there's doctors out there that do. I wait outside and they call me in. I'm thinking of using the online prescription service for most visits but I've not tried it yet.

    1135:

    "Sadly, the U.S. does this too - at least under IQ45..."

    Specific instances? Details?

    ICE May Have Deported as Many as 70 US Citizens In the Last Five Years.

    "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) keeps making an inexcusable error: it has been deporting U.S. citizens by mistake.

    "70 potential U.S. citizens were deported between 2015 and 2020, a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded. They were deported even though U.S. citizens cannot be charged with violations of civil immigration law.

    "All told, available data shows that ICE arrested 674 potential U.S. citizens, detained 121, and deported 70 during the time frame the government watchdog analyzed."

    https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-citizens/

    1136:

    It's often free of you're happy to accept weird delivery times, and the cost is less than petrol.

    My grocery system runs on pizza, and that's something that's important to me. Covid isn't the only thing that's happening. And I did get another "I like your bike" comment in the carpark today :)

    Actually, the lawyer who deals with my will and living will stuff has taken about 10 years to get used to the "if I can't ride my bike put me out of my misery" clause in the latter. It is "I'd rather die" in the very literal Cohen the Barbarian sense.

    I suspect that for that stuff I'm in the "there's always one" group rather than even the 1%.

    1137:

    After three months, my missing sock has returned!

    I shall slaughter a fatted kangaroo in its honour!

    My sock strategy is to buy lots of identical socks and just accept that sometimes I have an odd number of them. Which is only obvious when they wear out to the point that even dog counting can see there's not many of them left. One, two... hey, where's all the rest of my socks?

    I kind of need some more lightweight socks but I'm putting it off while I grind through the last of the various odd socks I've accumulated. The cost difference between plastic socks and even cotton is significant, and while I'd prefer a wool blend those are even worse. I need to do more research into bamboo as clothing because that's available but just seems wrong{tm} (a highly scientific evaluation, I think you'll agree)

    1138:

    I tried that sock strategy. Threw out all my socks, which by that time were nearly all singles. Bought ~20 pairs of identical socks (enough to go 3 weeks between wash days). Then after wearing them for a few months developed a contact allergy to that sock.

    I decided that the universe wants me in odd socks. These days both my shoes and socks never match.

    1139:

    Robert Prior @ 1134: So it's OK if done to people who aren't American?

    No, but if you go after him for crimes he didn't commit I think he's more likely to skate out on the ones he DID commit.

    And if you think about it, if you DO go after him for crimes he didn't commit, how are you any better a person than he is?

    1140:

    AlanD2 @ 1139: "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) keeps making an inexcusable error: it has been deporting U.S. citizens by mistake.

    https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-citizens/

    I've highlighted some key points - "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ... by mistake.

    It is an inexcusable error, but how do you prove Trumpolini did it? Because if you read the article you linked, it says "ICE May Have Deported ...". The reason it says MAY is because the investigation records are not being properly documented. And if you read down to the bottom, it's a on-going problem that predates Trumpolini.

    It's wrong deport a U.S. Citizen for an "immigration violation", but did Trumpolini order it? Seems to me the problem is ICE is not following the proper procedures that should allow them to identify U.S. Citizens who aren't supposed to be deported?

    Data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, however, found that ICE wrongly identified at least 2,840 U.S. citizens as potentially eligible for removal between 2002 and 2017. At least 214 were then taken into custody for a period of time.

    Of the 214 "taken into custody" during the 15 years the data covers, it doesn't say how many were actually deported. And I'd be willing to bet the problem dates back a lot longer than 15 years ... to Nixon & Reagan (and if so, the Democratic administrations in between didn't fix it either).

    Trumpolini didn't do anything to fix the problem (or more accurately require ICE to fix their problem), but again I don't see how you can hang this around his neck like an albatross.

    I want to see Trumpolini in jail. I want to see the State of New York put him away if only for the satisfaction of the headlines when he's sentenced to serve his time at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, NY (Clinton County, named for former NY Governor George Clinton [1777 to 1795 and again 1801 to 1804] - not Hillary). But I'll be just as happy to see the Feds put him away for sedition & insurrection ...

    Going after him for extraneous shit that can't be proved in a court of law is the surest way I know for him to get off scot free.

    PS: This is the GAO report the article you linked appears to be based on: https://www.gao.gov/assets/720/715828.pdf

    ... in case anyone is really interested & wants to know.

    1141:

    1136 -
    Supermarkets - What's the carbon footprint of the delivery vehicles like. In Scotland they'll do ~20mp(imperial)g and are likely to cover the same territory 4 times a day due to the slots system and the need to return to base to reload.
    Doctors - Again in Scotland, you are still required to mask up to enter any human healthcare facility.

    1139 - Ref "bamboo clothing". The last time I saw this it was underwear at between 2 and 3 times the price you'd pay for cotton.

    1142:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICE

    TO THE SEAGULL

    Yes you, you know who you are.

    YOU ARE BANNED FOR LIFE. GO AWAY.

    Stop trying to register new sock puppets. If you succeed they will be banned and any comments you post will be deleted on sight.

    1143:

    To Administrators and Site Owner,

    Your combined efforts in this matter are appreciated. Thank You.

    1144:

    No surprise, the plot of Cheech Marin's "Born in East L. A." likely didn't entirely come out of his imagination.

    1145:

    I was gifted some bamboo "work socks" of the thick and fluffy sort you wear with boots and they're pretty good. But after a year they're starting to generate little piles of fluff so I'm wondering about longevity and whether the fluff is biodegradeable.

    I have "big stompy boots" from Mongrel that are awesome. Steel caps, zip side + laces to set the fit, and they come in a wide enough fitting that I am not too uncomfortable. I went barefoot a lot while growing up so my feet never got properly compressed to fit shoes. But the new to me combo of lacing to get them to fit then being able to slip in and out using zips is just amazing. I've completely sworn off second hand boots from the nature strip forever.

    https://www.mongrelboots.com.au/product/high-leg-zipsider-boot/ 😍

    1146:

    Supermarkets... I get home delivery ever since lockdown started. It's great. I interact with one person from 4m, outdoors. It's often free of you're happy to accept weird delivery times, and the cost is less than petrol.

    Contrarian view:

    Yes, I use home deliveries. But my supermarkets are close enough I don't need petrol, they're within walking distance. And I still have to go out to fill in gaps. In Brexitland the quality of fresh vegetables available in supermarkets has become very erratic, so it's necessary to go and hunt through the racks in person unless you're okay with the occasional rotten potato or infested whatever. And there are weird shortages. (Morrisons earlier this week had no Edam cheese listed for sale—a major British staple!)

    Stuff you can rely on is fine. But I'm about to go out in half an hour to do a speed-run around my nearest M&S food court because they've got the best fresh vegetables outside of Waitrose (who are not within walking distance) and they also sell Edam cheese, without which I shall surely die.

    I reckon home deliveries are good for about 70% to 80% of what I need, but that's still not 100%.

    1147:

    One of the biggest bollockings I remember from my childhood was when I learned that you could use the wax from Edam to make crayons suitable for drawing on hot radiators.

    I call it an interesting application of physics, my parents were less understanding and stopped buying Edam shortly after the third incident.

    1148:

    Yes, I agree with every point.

    I still have to physically go to shops. (hence the discussion of reusable masks) It's just much reduced, both in number and duration. Plus reduced in destination (nick into a bakery vs wander around a Gruen nightmare) So that cuts exposure a lot.

    The local supermarket is walkable (an hour return) but carrying a week's staples is "doable" but it's easier to drive.

    1149:

    UK awaits Johnson resignation statement:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-62072419

    1150:

    We get delivery for non perishable stuff to fill up the store cupboards and freezer. It saves carrying heavy tins and cartons of fruit juice etc. up the stairs to the flat too. Fruit, veg, dairy and meat we can all get locally. The only supermarket trip are for the occasional thing they don't list online. Mind you, after seeing an advert for delivery drivers at £10 per hour I am thinking I will start tipping....

    1151:

    I came over here to find out from the most reliable source I know of if Boris is really gone, and I find out instead that the Seagull is.

    May the good news keep coming. And maybe Boris is the Seagull?

    1152:

    Looks like he hopes to be replaced by a fellow traveler: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-62072419

    1153:

    American Taliban strikes again: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62073675 Given the scriptural prohibition on graven images, I wonder if more traditional monuments are at risk.

    1154:

    I have never found Boris to be as coherent as the Seagull usually was. Maybe that's just me lol.

    1155:

    Lest the climate strange attactor start feeling neglected, there's this, which is actually somewhat interesting. Global warming apparently accelerates both the production of methane and its retention in the atmosphere via a somewhat indirect mechanism. And more methane means more warming. (Positive feedback situations frequently end with something breaking.)

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/05/global-heating-causes-methane-growth-four-times-faster-than-thought-study

    The[ ] findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest global heating is four times more influential in accelerating methane emissions than previously estimated, with rising temperatures helping to produce more methane (by speeding up microbe activity in wetlands for example), while at the same time slowing down the removal of methane from the atmosphere (with increasing numbers of wildfires reducing the availability of hydroxyl radicals in the upper atmosphere).

    1156:

    1148 - Well, Edam (and Gouda) cheese both come from the Netherlands, which is (are?) in the EU. Call it another WrecksIt bonus! ;-)

    1156 - Mibbae aye, mibbae nay. Did Bozo really think that leading the UK was a cricket match? ("sledging" reference in his speach; this is cricket talk for deliberately winding up the other team during a play session).

    1157:

    Be careful what you wish for - you may get it! Of those in this list, all but two would be at least as bad, and five would be worse. Oh, yes, they would have fewer scandals, but I am talking about ruining the country.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60037657

    In the long term, Starmer has signed up to maximum Brexit, and eschewed raising taxes and any form of socialism.

    1158:

    Thank you. Interesting.

    1159:

    I wonder if more traditional monuments are at risk.

    Had to look it up, but the Georgia Guidestones were erected in 1980 and were defaced starting in 2008 (see Wikipedia). This year, apparently a Georgia gubernatorial candidate called for them to be taken down, saying they were satanic. She lost rather badly in the primary, but refuses to concede, and I'm not interested in finding out whether MAGAt, Qnut, or other best defines her headspace. Sooo...

    I happen to agree that traditional monuments are at risk. But one of the more obnoxious things about humanity is that always seems to be true. There's always a mad, evil impulse wandering around, to erase your perceived opponents from history. When that impulse takes someone over, entropy gets accelerated.

    1160:

    Be careful what you wish for - you may get it! Of those in this list, all but two would be at least as bad, and five would be worse. Oh, yes, they would have fewer scandals, but I am talking about ruining the country.

    Hi Charlie,

    If you want to handicap this PMUK (pronounced "Pee-muck?") nightmare horse race for the rest of us, and give yourself at least 300 comments of NOT US POLITICS, this could be a possible essay. I, for one, will need to know who's being referred to with which nickname, if nothing else.

    1161:

    Er, I didn't say anything about my preferred candidate for PM (it's actually Larry the cat). Anyway, of that list the only 2 I don't dismiss out of hand are the Steves, because I've never even heard of either of them.

    1162:

    There's always a mad, evil impulse wandering around, to erase your perceived opponents from history.

    In the US there is always Proctor and Gamble.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procter_%26_Gamble#Logo_myth

    1163:

    There's always a mad, evil impulse wandering around, to erase your perceived opponents from history.

    Then there is this:

    www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2022/07/05/Britain-London-Royal-Academy-oil-protest-glue/8781657054325/

    1164:

    and give yourself at least 300 comments of NOT US POLITICS

    How about merging them together with this bit of satire? www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/boris-johnson-freaks-out-after-giuliani-arrives-in-london-to-help-him

    1165:

    I am beyond disappoint. Woke, turned on pooter, see everywhere blojo RESIGNED!!!!!!!!!. But no, I remain condemned to see his grotty image everywhere, just like romperisto's equally vomit inducing image, who also won't go anywhere except headlines, forever and ever, world until the end, amen.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~

    Ahem, groceries, delivered. For both of us, some weeks after our second vaccination, the greatest thing was going food shopping again, in person, our selves! Yay! Hooray! Not only do we both enjoy being in supermarkets and other food emporiums, just to 'shop' as well as getting what we need and want, it gets us up and off the ass every day. As we live in such small space, like so many for as long as the city's existed, we tend to need to shop for food every day. One gets so easily mesmerized by the screen, working at home as we both do now, since covid. We are rather doubtful that the risk will ever be a level now, at our ages, that working elsewhere will be safe enough.

    All that said though, we were more than grateful to have home delivery available from our local supermarket. They quickly left off outsourcing the service to those shyte, extremely expensive entities such a grubhub (exoebsuve for customer, while paying nothing to those who pick the items and those who deliver) and hired and paid their own employees to do it. Those who pulled the items on the list, which we submitted in the morning, know the supermarket and products well, so we very seldom had mix-up. They'd phone us, to say an item wasn't available, to see if we wanted a substitute. We too know the supermarket, its goods and its layout very well, so our list included the pertinent details, often including brand.

    The delivery personnel too have to WALK the bags to the customer, as we do, to and from, since it is this city -- HELL YES WE TIPPED THEM AND TIPPED THEM WELL. I cannot IMAGINE not tipping, particularly for this service.

    But we were so fortunate to have had this service available, and be able to afford it -- not everybody could.

    Probably don't need to add that we always STILL wear masks when getting groceries -- or whenever we enter shop of any kind, or ride the subways -- even in the library. (Most people don't anymore, despite the insane rates of infection.)

    1166:

    Re: 'This is the GAO report the article you linked appears to be based on ...'

    Very repetitive - same findings, comments and identified issues throughout.

    Interestingly, they show data by male vs. female and some age groups but not by race/ethnicity.

    And because these border agents weren't required to update the central data base/files on who exactly they stopped - huh? is that how you run security? - I think there's a good chance that the same person was stopped more than once.

    Based on what I've read in this report - yeah, pretty good chance that legit Americans got sent away.

    1167:

    I am beyond disappoint. Woke, turned on pooter, see everywhere blojo RESIGNED!!!!!!!!!. But no, I remain condemned to see his grotty image everywhere, just like romperisto's equally vomit inducing image, who also won't go anywhere except headlines, forever and ever, world until the end, amen.

    Why I like this site:

    Reason 1: It's text only.

    Otherwise, I agree. Unfortunately for me, that mad impulse to erase history definitely covers monuments to creeps with parasitic blond combovers. But so long as I don't see their pictures too often, I can resist.

    1168:

    dpb
    I got the sniggers, very badly, on reading that.. Full marks for inventiveness.

    Tim H
    Unfortunately, yes - it will have to be a superhard brexshiteer, with zero empathy & a vicious streak - Patel would be perfect ( Shudder )

    TonyM
    Amusing, but not necessarily true!

    EC
    Agree about the list, but the rest is untrue - unfortunately.
    Wrecksit has been done - the best we can hope for is to salvage something from the wreckage & THEN start slowly, cautiously re-aligning ourselves with the EU. Agree that Starmer is far too timid - I would imagine that Stella is livid - & I'm not amused.

    1169:

    Newsflash: Bojo has not in fact resigned. He just said he'd resign at a future date.

    He's said to be clinging on because he's planning to throw a huge wedding bash for himself and Carrie at Chequers at the end of July. On the taxpayer's ticket, of course.

    (Chequers is the Prime Minister's countryside retreat. In other words, a bloated Victorian mansion the likes of which you simply can't rent for a wedding reception unless you're in the private-jet set.)

    This may, however, be a blinder. Parliament goes into recess on July 21st, so if he stays on until the wedding bash there's no way for the 1922 Committee to meet and sack him as party leader until early October -- the committee can't sit if the MPs aren't present in parliament.

    Upshot -- if they don't yeet him into the heart of the sun in the next 13 days, he gets to hang around for months like a stale fart, during which time he can appoint a new cabinet and carry on his reign of misrule. There's a lot of damage a Trump Lite could do in three months ...

    1170:

    1167 - {Foxessa}. It wasn't a whole lot better in Scotland, since the English BC cancelled all normal programming after 09:30 local and spent 3 hours talking about how Bozo was going to resigh, 15 minutes covering his mercifully brief resignation speech (I still don't understand how international politics can be like cricket) and then another hour telling us that Bozo had resigned to the exclusion of all other news stories. After which we could at least switch to the relative sanity of lawn tennis from Wimbledon.

    1170 - Keir Stammers has guaranteed that all 3 UK parties are unelectable with his current stance on WrecksIt.

    1171:

    Specifically, I could imagine contemporary Republicans have at minimum mixed feelings about the first Republican Presidents, and might wish to forget them.

    1172:

    Upshot -- if they don't yeet him into the heart of the sun in the next 13 days, he gets to hang around for months like a stale fart, during which time he can appoint a new cabinet and carry on his reign of misrule. There's a lot of damage a Trump Lite could do in three months ...

    Sheesh, can't we persuade the Church of England to celebrate one of its oldest rituals and raise a Wickerman on Primrose Hill for the cabinet, to exorcise the Ill Luck from the Land?

    Oh, I suppose that falls foul of air pollution laws. And littering laws.

    Well, how about the ritual inhumation of the "best and brightest" in a bog?

    Oh, and I suppose the UK's killed off so much of its wildlife that bogs are too endangered to disturb now?

    Well, I suppose Richard the Thirding them in a nearby car park is out of the question too?

    1173:

    Re: 'I need to do more research into bamboo as clothing because that's available but just seems wrong{tm} (a highly scientific evaluation, I think you'll agree)'

    I'd be interested in hearing the results of your research because I'm still hesitant.

    Pro: bamboo in itself should be a relatively sustainable raw material

    Con: lots of toxic ingredients currently used to process bamboo into thread/cloth

    https://www.popsci.com/environment/bamboo-clothing-sustainability-truth/

    Not sure how well any existing international manufacturing or 'quality' standards for bamboo clothing fiber address either of the two points above.

    1174:

    Agreed. Bamboo fabrics are basically rayon, and the bamboo's just supplying the cellulose that gets made into the rayon. If rayon's not being made out of bamboo, it can be made out of wood pulp.

    1175:

    Um, no, thank you. I gather you feel comfortable accepting any fresh fruits and vegetables they pick; I do not. Besides, I can go to the Korean supermarket, and pay half the price for veggies as good or better.

    1176:

    My SO tells me that, since she hasn't gotten on her computer today yet, she hasn't seen Larry the cat's twitter feed. She also tells me he's running, and has an appropriate podium to speak from....

    1177:

    Unfortunately, one of the two Brexit parties will get elected :-( Greg may THINK that the wrecking is complete, but that is a very long way from being the case. Even if Starmer restored the Northern Ireland Protocol in full (which would mean something close to imposing direct rule), we have scarcely started on negotiating the many long-term agreements with the EU, and I believe that there are still some joint projects to wreck.

    1178:

    You might check out the NC State College of Textiles site and see what they might have.

    Not my area of interest tho.

    1179:

    paws
    Keir Stammers has guaranteed that all 3 UK parties are unelectable with his current stance on WrecksIt. - UNLESS he changes/modifies his tune.
    Opinion polls now suggest that something like 60+% of the population realise that they have been badly cheated by BrexShit, but, hey.
    And Starmer thinks it's still 2019 (?)

    EC
    I accept your horrible idea that it (B-shit) could get even worse.
    I THINK Starmer is saying that the long-term arrangements could be much better arranged, without the tories religious aversion to the European Court, f'rinstance.

    There is always the convention that no Parliament is bound by the rules of its predecessors?

    Charlie @ 1171
    I hadn't realised that BoJ's stance was that edgy - he's all-too-clearly hoping "Something will turn up" &/or as you imply, he can wreck a lot more things.
    Starmer MUST talk with the other opposition parties & push for a "No Confidence" vote, I think?

    1180:

    Someone suggested he just wants the extra few months because it gets him past May's tenure, which, given the man he is, is not entirely implausible. I like the tweet that said "Third Prime Minister in a row to be brought down by Boris Johnson".

    1181:

    This is true, but also: Johnson sold his house, thinking he'd be in 10 Downing Street for years. Carrie has a one bedroom flat, not exactly fit for a family of 4 (including two babies). He doesn't have a car, either, and is about to take a big pay cut from PM level (about £160K per year with all sorts of freebies thrown in -- the apartment, the limo, the jets) to regular MP (£60K a year plus rather fewer expenses).

    Obviously he's going to make bank on his memoirs and public speaking -- by some estimates he could be good for £5M a year, even without taking any non-executive corporate board seats -- but that takes time and there's going to be some cash flow embarrassment and also he owes child support to at least two exes.

    1182:

    1176 - Thanks for confirming that; I will mot be wearing "bamboo" underwear ever on that basis. Cotton being more breathable and all.

    1178 - Cheers; I don't use twatter, but I have a feed for a few gems called "my sister".

    1179 - Not necessarily; a proper SNP majority in Scotland and we can ditch Bozo (or AN Other, and Stammer).

    1183:

    "that takes time and there's going to be some cash flow embarrassment and also he owes child support to at least two exes."

    One could imagine quite a number of ways BJ could have provided against such a circumstance. Most involving putting shady money in the bank for services rendered. It will interesting to follow his future career and fortunes.

    1184:

    "The situation does not exist, however bad, that a little bit of human effort and ingenuity cannot make worse."

    1185:

    He is saying that, and it's pure polemic. By the time of the next election, that would mean reversing Brexit 'arrangements', and he has said that he will NOT be doing that. Blair didn't. He MIGHT reinstall the Northern Ireland Protocol, which would allow negotiations with the EU, but I doubt even that.

    1186:

    Moz @ 1147: I was gifted some bamboo "work socks" of the thick and fluffy sort you wear with boots and they're pretty good. But after a year they're starting to generate little piles of fluff so I'm wondering about longevity and whether the fluff is biodegradeable.

    I've been wearing "SmartWool" or some knock-off brand Merino wool sock since the mid-80s. Get 'em six pairs at a time and they last almost forever.

    Started wearing them when REI opened a store here in Cary, NC. Started buying the knock-offs because Costco had them in six-pack bundles for the same price as the brand name. Wear 'em year round with sandals or boots.

    I do have one pair of black dress socks in case I ever need to wear a suit again.

    I have "big stompy boots" from Mongrel that are awesome. Steel caps, zip side + laces to set the fit, and they come in a wide enough fitting that I am not too uncomfortable. I went barefoot a lot while growing up so my feet never got properly compressed to fit shoes. But the new to me combo of lacing to get them to fit then being able to slip in and out using zips is just amazing. I've completely sworn off second hand boots from the nature strip forever.

    https://www.mongrelboots.com.au/product/high-leg-zipsider-boot/

    I never liked the zip-side boots very much. They just don't seem to stand up as long as regular boots. The zippers always fail before the boot wears out.

    I'd rather have regular lace up boots. My Corcoran boots were still good when I gave 'em away after 40 years (10 years after I retired from the Army). My desert boots are wearable 18 years after they were issued. Mostly wear 'em now when I'm doing yard work.

    For casual walking, if I'm not wearing sandals (with socks - I'm old, I'm allowed), I've got a pair of Vasque boots that are well broken in, maybe 10 years old ...

    And, of course, I still have my classics for when I'm in a rock 'n roll mood.

    1187:

    Charlie Stross @ 1148:

    There's one GOOD supermarket that WOULD BE within walking distance if the city of Raleigh would just put in some damn sidewalks. In fact, it would be good exercise & I could use it (and could DO it). As it is, I plan my shopping trips out so that I can visit three stores in one seven mile round trip (that includes Costco for gas if I need to fill up), and I make that round trip about twice a month. Whenever possible I combine it with some other trip I need to make.

    The problem with home delivery is, even though I make a shopping list, I don't always know what I'm going to need, want or find when I get to the store ... or if the stores will have it. With home delivery, it just gets back-ordered & you have to do without. Going to the store I can usually find some acceptable substitute.

    1189:

    Apparently, Johnson has indicated he will be staying on as the MP for Uxbridge after he resigns as PM.

    Given he will be back on contract with The Telegraph for his weekly column (was £250k/annum) thats at least £320k/annum through until the next election, by which time the autobiography deal should get him a £2M advance and the after dinner circuit should be coining at the £500k - £1M/annum level.

    Even with the maintenance payments he will still be in the UK's top 1% earners.

    Sort of suggests the optimum time for Carrie to sue for divorce will be in about 2 years time when his income peaks.

    1190:

    Tim H. @ 1155:

    Hmmmm! I guess Qonservatives don't believe in private property rights as much as as they claim to.

    Why am I so NOT surprised.

    1191:

    wearing sandals (with socks - I'm old, I'm allowed)

    That was a Roman thing. Just how old are you? :-)

    1192:

    SFReader @ 1168:

    Re: 'This is the GAO report the article you linked appears to be based on ...'

    Interestingly, they show data by male vs. female and some age groups but not by race/ethnicity.

    Well, it IS a Government Accountability Office report to Congress, requested by some members of Congress as part their oversight responsibility. It's going to be couched in the language of Government SPEAK; redundant redundancies and all.

    There may be some restrictions on what data regarding race/ethnicity they're allowed to release.

    What I take away from the report:

    • WHO is a U.S. Citizen is sometimes complicated! There are many people out there who ARE or COULD BE U.S. Citizens and do not even know it.
    • U.S. law exempts U.S. Citizens from being deported in immigration actions.
    • The Department of Homeland Security, Department of Customs & Border Patrol, Division of Immigration & Customs Enforcement are tasked with enforcing U.S. Immigration Laws.
    • When a person shows up without necessary documents, CBP/ICE are required by law to identify whether they are U.S. Citizens or have a claim on U.S. Citizenship EVEN IF the person doesn't know they have such a claim.1
    • ICE has Policies and Procedures to do this, INCLUDING procedures to identify those with claims to U.S. Citizenship ("probative evidence") that they are unaware of.
    • The training ICE provides to their agents FALLS SHORT in giving the agents tools to identify potential U.S. Citizens.
    • Nor does the training sufficiently inform agents of the procedure to be followed when "probative evidence" of U.S. Citizenship turns up during an immigration interview.
    • ICE has regulations for how its agents will document the results of citizenship investigations, but this is NOT being adequately enforced.
    • Congress needs to take steps to ENSURE ICE is in compliance with U.S. immigration law & does a better job identifying persons with potential claims to U.S. Citizenship AND ensure ICE is documenting such compliance IAW U.S. law.

    And because these border agents weren't required to update the central data base/files on who exactly they stopped - huh? is that how you run security?

    Seems like this IS how CBP/ICE are running border security, and they're getting it WRONG.

    FWIW, CBP/ICE ARE required to update the records, they're just not doing it like they're supposed to and management is not enforcing the requirements like they should.

    The purpose of this report is to identify HOW they're getting wrong so Congress can fix it. It's right there in the sub-title:

    Actions Needed to Better Track Cases Involving U.S. Citizenship Investigations

    So, obviously some U.S. Citizens HAVE been turned away and/or subjected to Immigration Enforcement Actions and Congress has to fix the problem.

    Whether Congress WILL be able to fix the problem is a completely different question.

    But again, IS this something uniquely caused by Trumpolini; a crime for which he can be indicted & convicted? As much as I despise the man, I don't think it is.
    --

    1 Q: Where were you born?
      A: Iraq
      Q: Where was your father born?
      A: I don't know. He was an American who was in Iraq ...

    This person would have a claim to U.S. Citizenship, but whether he/she actually IS a citizen would be as yet undetermined. That's why there has to be a Citizenship Investigation ... but until the outcome is determined, he/she cannot (SHOULD NOT) be deported or turned away from the U.S.

    1193:

    Robert Prior @ 1193:

    Not QUITE that old ... though sometimes it feels like.

    It's just a comfort thing. Keeps my feet from getting too dirty & keeps the straps from rubbing.

    1194:

    Ok, riddle me this? British Libel laws being what they are, how does this guy get away with it?

    Bye Bye Boris - Jonathan Pie [YouTube]

    1195:

    https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/this-clunky-mask-may-be-the-answer-to-airborne-disease-and-n95-waste/ seems to validate the respirator as an alternative to the less effective N95/KN95 masks.

    1196:

    Not sure how well any existing international manufacturing or 'quality' standards for bamboo clothing fiber address either of the two points above.

    As far as I can tell via a wall of bullshit. Sample: "60% viscose from Bamboo 40% Sorona" where "viscose" is rayon and "Sorona is DuPont's brand of triexta, a subclass of polytrimethylene terephthalate (PTT)" ... co-polymer of 1,3-propanediol (obtained by fermentation) and petroleum-derived terephthalic acid (TPA) or dimethyl terephthalate (DMT). Then elsewhere on that site a few pages of marketing fluff about bamboo, plant-derived textiles and how bamboo is biodegradeable. No mention of whether the actual fabrics they sell are biodegradeable...

    https://www.biome.com.au/blog/bamboo-sheets-bamboo-socks-eco-friendly/

    So now I'm sad. I think it's time to go mug some sheep and get proper socks.

    1197:

    So now I'm sad. I think it's time to go mug some sheep and get proper socks.

    Ah yes, the wool from those famous Norstrilian sheep...

    1198:

    I never liked the zip-side boots very much. They just don't seem to stand up as long as regular boots.

    For walking yes, laced boots are fine. I spend a lot more time wearing them than putting them on or taking them off.

    But work boots I seem to always end up on the wrong side of the door, so I'm constantly taking them off and putting them back on, sometimes while holding something annoying. Today we have a break in the weather, for example, so I carried my current woodwork project outside and got a whole lot done. Previously it was all clustered at the front door so I could whip the mitre saw onto the front verandah during breaks in the weather, chop stuff up, the glue things inside (on drop cloths so I don't end up with PVA in the carpet. I love carpet. Really).

    A week of that got me three plywood-with-rim trestle table tops made. 5 bits of wood each. Lots of putting boots on, using power tool, taking boots off, going inside to get something, reverse... today five hours outside with everything scattered over the lawn and I have two more tops, the legs cut and shaped, and the brackets to hold the legs glued to the tables.

    Sadly showers tomorrow so I may or may not be able to sand everything down and start painting. There's no way I'm sanding in the house, and the shed can either hold all the tools so they don't get rained on or have enough space to sand one table. This is one reason I'm so keen to build a granny flat and have a double garage instead of a single one (also no carpet, but that's kind of incidental). Not having enough space or even a flat surface outside means I struggle to get anything longer than about 2m cut accurately because it's a big challenge cutting it at all. And small, portable tools tend not to have long infeed or outfeed supports which doesn't help.

    1199:

    There's one GOOD supermarket that WOULD BE within walking distance if the city of Raleigh would just put in some damn sidewalks

    Actually they are. In so many ways it is about money and who is asking the loudest.

    Building new sidewalks TODAY where none were every planned creates all kinds of works. And thus money. What to us old farts and good old boys seems like eye watering amounts of money. ADA (American Disability Act) rules for new work require all kinds of things that never existed in the past. Beeping boxes at lights. Crossing paths and signals and texture changes and sloping down to pavement and ... at lights and other intersections. Dealing with thing like a power tower too close to the roadway so it has to have a bump out with traffic changes. And on and on and on. Mailboxes in right of way legally but now have to be moved anyone?

    Don't forget drainage. Will the sidewalk block runoff or a legal existing rainwater drain.

    How best to deal with those street where the side of the roadway is a ditch for rainwater?

    Plus property rights along they way. Remember your issue with the city over where you boundary is? And if the boundary isn't in dispute the city still gets to deal with fences and such that were built on the city right of way. (My daughter's house.)

    We had a major road/street near here get sidewalked (and traffic calmed) and it only took 3 years or so start to finish for a mile or so.

    My daughter is getting a sidewalk in front of her house. Stakes have been in the ground for at least 6 months. Everyone is negotiating with the city over how much $ to get for the hassle and some taken property. Construction MIGHT start by the end of the year. And part of the back yard fence that came with the house is really in the city street right of way and likely will have to be "adjusted".

    Go to the CAC or whatever exists for your neighborhood and find out what the process is to get them started or make your area a priority. But be prepared. It is a government process designed to accommodate the needs and wants of all kinds of stake holders.

    1200:

    Good grief.

    Things cost more today than decades ago because we do them better. And pay most workers more than way back when.

    You comment sounds awfully ocean bird like to me though.

    1201:

    EC
    Agree. It's a complete shit-show, especially as support for Brexit is draining away by the day. I suspect that Stella & many others, will be "having words" about this incompetence.

    Charlie ( & Mods) @ 1144
    Um, err: "Q.E.D." @ 1202 / 1203 / 1205 / 1206
    Red Flag - looks like the Seagull to me?
    { I hope I'm wrong }

    1202:

    the shed can either hold all the tools so they don't get rained on or have enough space to sand one table

    This sounds like an excellent application for rigging up a big tarp, or even some sort of portable marquee.

    1203:

    Does she plague other SF blogs or just this one?

    1204:

    Seen her briefly pop up on other blogs but usually got instabanned. This one proved more tolerant.

    1205:

    I have used a tarp before but it doesn't work with wind, and the last week has seen regular bursts of 45 degree sideways rain. And for sanding and painting it's just not worth the risk of blobs of water on wet paint or freshly sanded timber.

    I will sand tomorrow then likely just paint one at a time in the spare room with a tarp on the floor. I should paint the kitchen ceiling at the same time. Which mens chipping the peeling paint off then washing and sanding the ceiling, then cleaning everything in the kitchen most thoroughly because eating lead paint is a bad idea. Sigh. Hence not having done that yet.

    1206:

    Reply to self @ new 1203 ... They've vanished, so I assume it was her/them.

    Would that Bo Jon-Sun could be eliminated so easily!

    1207:

    Yeah, she worked her way in again so has been nuked and I remembered to tweak the Apache configuration to block her this time.

    1208:

    Labour says "if Boris doesn't go now, we call a vote of no confidence".

    And then the Conservatives are completely fucked. Either give Boris a reason to tear up the resignation by voting "confidence", or bring down their own government by voting "no confidence."

    Can Nyarlathotep step in and fix this? Or do we need someone even more powerful, like Yog-Sothoth?

    https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-opposition-leader-starmer-if-johnson-wont-go-well-call-vote-confidence-2022-07-07/

    1209:

    Is it libel is written and slander is spoken? Law is not my speciality.

    Don't they both require that what is said is untrue?

    Johnson is a liar. Ask a PM May, his two previous employers, his wives and his mistresses.

    There are also public classics like "An over ready deal".

    Replacing rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic with rearranging the cat shit in a litter tray was very good.

    1210:

    Don't they both require that what is said is untrue?

    Laws in the US and UK are incredibly different on this.

    In the US you can say untrue things about someone. Especially if your intent is NOT to harm them. Ditto if you don't know it is untrue. In the US.

    Then you get into the details.

    The UK and other countries have very different takes on the issue.

    1211:

    1189 - Similarly. As a worked example with the supermarket I usually buy in, they will normally have (and I often buy) good beefburgers, good chicken Kyivs, canned sweetcorn and baked beans in sizes for one. OTOH, I can't predict whether or not, on any specific day, they will have skin on salmon portions, haddock Kyivs, pork Kyivs, what sort of pasta salad will be in... so I need to actually shop and not just check a website form.
    (as an aside, the speel chucker has recognised "Kyiv" as a singular, but not as a plural!!)

    1201 - This can get really complicated. My grandparents lived on a service road purely to access residential properties. Those properties had an apparent property line, separated from the footway by a low wall. However, the footway was actually part of the property. The service road wasn't. There was then a grass area which was also part of the property. Then we eventually got to a main thoroughfare and its footways.
    The telecoms company wished to lay a new phone cable in the grass area, and had to negotiate an easement with the property owners in order to do so.
    The local council wanted to adopt the footway on the service road, and (sensibly) had the owners pay to bring the footway up to code first.
    Then the county council wanted to widen the main thoroughfare, and had to buy the extra width from the householders.
    Finally (AFAIK) the local council decided to resurface the footway, and attempted to make the householders pay again. My grandfather responded to this by producing the original adoption for the footway in question.

    1203 - Greg, the Seagull is banned. Somewhere upthread I have thanked Charlie for this.

    1211 - "Slander is Spoken": Yes, and that's how to remember which is which.

    1212:

    John Meltzer
    Yes - but will Stammer have the basic gumption to do this?
    After his complete fuck-up & craven cowardice over Brexshit, I really do wonder.

    1213:

    Honestly I think it's more acceptance that it's a fight he can't win. However much we know that Brexit is a fool's errand, there are enough people in the country who genuinely do want it. I have a friend who was an avid Brexiteer. He's not stupid or malicious, he just got too much information about what Brussels does wrong (which is plenty, sure) and not about what it does right. And like it or not, those people are the majority.

    Whether they stay the majority, we'll see. Prohibition was a great example of how mass public opinion can be swayed the wrong way, and how the public seeing the consequences can push the status quo back again. Plus Brexit was primarily won by old white Conservatives; most other demographics were against it, so that needs to be allowed for too. On the downside, we're not going to get a seat at the table next time anything like as cheaply as we did last time.

    Right now though, there aren't enough people who'd make Brexit a campaign winner. Not when sleaze, defunding public services especially healthcare, no/low taxes on the rich, and the economy imploding are all much better hooks to hang a campaign on.

    1214:

    The telecoms company wished to lay a new phone cable in the grass area, and had to negotiate an easement with the property owners in order to do so.

    AT&T has an easement along the back of my yard. I looked it up a while back and the original easement was done in 1932. It has be re-filed 4 times due to corporate ownership changes. The lot lines in my area follow it.

    There are a few signs around if you know where to look saying don't dig here. If you call the number on the signs you get a nice lady who tells you "no she doesn't know who to really call but she's not the person you want". If you call the utility dig people they don't mark it. I've seen the cable dug up a few times. 25 or 50 pair I think. Given when it was created I suspect it was a long lines trunk between cities.

    But the easement is still there. Likely tied to 1000 or more properties. And if you pull a permit for a fence or similar the city doesn't want you to put one up over the easement. But you can. You just have to understand that if AT&T in 2153 wants to drive a bulldozer down the easement, sucks to be you. (My neighbors pool filter/heater units is on the easement.) It is just one of those things that creates friction in our lives.

    I think thy only reason the easement exists is the lawyer and filing fees to do all the paperwork to give it up aren't worth it to the corp at this time.

    1215:

    I think thy only reason the easement exists is the lawyer and filing fees to do all the paperwork to give it up aren't worth it to the corp at this time.

    OTOH, there is no advantage to the company to giving up the easement, and possible downsides. So they have no incentive to give it up, and every reason to keep it.

    1216:

    RE: The Seagull

    That poster's sort of like mint in a garden. Once they get established, they spread until it becomes a constant chore to keep them under control. The situation is akin to Popper's paradox of tolerance.

    1218:

    Don't they both require that what is said is untrue?

    No, they just have to damage the complainant's reputation. That's what makes libel claims so damaging: the burden is on the accused to prove that no reputational damage was caused, which is difficult (proving a negative) and costly (in front of a jury!).

    1219:

    And just because it's really good, the opening paragraph of Marina Hyde's latest-

    "Boris Johnson is leaving office with the same dignity he brought to it: none. I’ve seen more elegant prolapses. Having spent 36 hours on the run from what other people know as consequences, Downing Street’s Raoul Moat was finally smoked out of his storm drain on Thursday, having awoken that morning with what one aide described portentously as a “moment of clarity”. I mean, he’d lost 57 ministers? And been booed everywhere from the steps of St Paul’s to the cricket? Hard to know how much more clarity could have been offered to this big-brain, short of a plane flying over Downing Street trailing a banner reading U WANT PICKING UP IN THE MORNING PAL? This is the version of Jaws where the shark eats the mayor, and the entire beach is rooting for the shark.

    1220:

    they can sue u for calumny and detraction?

    that sucks

    1221:

    I think thy only reason the easement exists is the lawyer and filing fees to do all the paperwork to give it up aren't worth it to the corp at this time.

    I'll crawl through the dusty basements of my memory, but there's a legal principle that, even if someone owns a piece of land, if they consistently fail to stop someone else from using it, then it becomes difficult to remove that use if the landowner changes their mind.

    The example I know of is illegal trails in parks. If the recreation department fails to try to close them long enough, it becomes legally difficult for them to suddenly start charging people who use those trails with trespassing. That's California, though, and I'll bet every state is different.*

    If I had to guess further, I'd bet that the easement's just part of a rather huge bundle of assets that changed hands. Unless someone wants to do something with it, it's just a bunch of paper. Sort of our society's equivalent of a magical trap, something that doesn't exist until a bunch of specific actions are taken, after which things change.

    *Note that California's been the Golden State of Land Speculation Scams since before it was a state, so don't necessarily think that we're all that liberal or tolerant in our land use laws. A house deed's a good part of a ream of paper in California just because the legislature--rightly I think--decided caveat emptor was insufficient and forces sellers and buyers to do due diligence on a large set of risks and potential scams.

    1222:

    Hmm. You trip several items related to me.

    My easement and that of my neighbors is written into by reference out deeds and we all get to sign paperwork agreeing to it when homes are sold. So it becomes an issue for the title companies. (Title company law varies greatly by state.)

    As to long term use, the local moderately sized airport (150 or so jet flights a day) has a running battle with bike trails on airport property. Plus a hiking trails. They want to put up fences but the trail folks say but it's a great trail area and keep it in the courts. The airport talks security. TSA and all that. Plus the trails violate multiple state and federal statutes and agreements about water runoff into a protected watershed. And the bike trail folks are weird allies and enemies with the hikers depending on the exact situation in which court filing.

    And then there's the way I totally pissed off my backyard neighbor. Long disagreement with fencing, thicket, dogs, etc... that got to the point where he wanted to put up a fence but run it 6" onto my property. I looked into it and had to tell him that I was OK with it but would immediately send him a letter thanking him and claiming the fence as mine. Otherwise my mortgage, title, home loan, and whatnot could get to be a mess. So he cut down the tree in the way and I became the bad guy for causing trees to be cut down.

    And to top it off after he put up the his 6' privacy wood fence it turned out my dogs were getting out because his kid and another were digging under OUR fence in various spots and encouraging them to get out. We got word to the kids to stop it or else but decided to not involve his and the other kid's parents as why escalate the dispute even more.

    1223:

    I'm really confused - hardly a first.

    So, saying something damaging to their reputation is potentially actionable.

    But can you be successfully sued if you can provide evidence or point to evidence that it - damaging or not - is true?

    1224:

    Via James Nicoll, bunker subtitles sketch.

    Best hashtag #Clownfall

    And finally... "I miss the days when the only reason a British PM had to suddenly replace 40 ministers is because they were disintegrated in the latest Dalek attack."

    1225:

    Graham
    And like it or not, those people are the majority. - ARE THEY ... now, really?
    Or has reality finally started to bite?
    A v recent survey in the Grauniad suggests that this is the case.

    1226:

    In English law, truth is not a defense (outside of some limited scope they added a decade or two ago); you have to demonstrate that their reputation wasn't damaged in order to have a defense. Truth can be mitigation (you damaged their reputation but everyone knew they were a horrible little shit already, for example).

    There's no equivalent of the US interpretation that public persons are fair game unless there's actual malicious intent behind the libel.

    1227:

    Here's a recent example of the UK's libel laws in action, curiously on the BBC's entertainment page. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-62090652

    Here's a source of some more examples, but I can find no royal cases there at all. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cxwke9d43kkt

    News media (including the BBC) like focusing on the big celebrity cases. Perhaps that reflects the public interest. Last year there were several big royal stories and a lot of legal action that was barely reported, largely because of that legal action. One of those cases concluded earlier this year. The Vardy case also concluded, but still occupies many items in the BBC's list.

    I'm not suggesting any bias here. I just note the absence of one kind of libel case and the dominance of another.

    1228:

    As to long term use, the local moderately sized airport (150 or so jet flights a day) has a running battle with bike trails on airport property. Plus a hiking trails. They want to put up fences but the trail folks say but it's a great trail area and keep it in the courts. The airport talks security. TSA and all that. Plus the trails violate multiple state and federal statutes and agreements about water runoff into a protected watershed. And the bike trail folks are weird allies and enemies with the hikers depending on the exact situation in which court filing.

    Same crap happens here.

    Our latest wrinkle is that law enforcement officers don't want to confiscate the bikes of people riding where they aren't supposed to be, especially when the bikes are worth thousands of dollars, and keeping them in the condition they were confiscated in is a major hassle (translated: tossing an expensive ebike in the bed of a ranger's truck and bouncing down five miles of bad road may result in the bike owner suing over property damages that are bigger than the ticket the creep got for trespassing. Yet another advantage of buying expensive toys).

    1229:

    IMHO, the U.S. could use some stronger libel/slander laws.

    1230:

    JBS @1196

    As the person who was probably number two on the plaintive’s list for the first case of libel on the internet (note no names — keep it that way), perhaps I can try to explain.

    The civil law there are two usual types of defamation: slander (verbal) and libel (written). Historically, libel was more common, since it was easier to show what had been alleged. Nowadays, with wall-to-wall mobile phone footage, slander may be about to make a bit of a comeback. The use of libel and slander appears to have grown with the demise of the old-fashioned way of settling such disputes: “Pistols at Dawn on Hampstead Heath — name your second”. The public grew concerned that Wellington wanted to duel a political opponent who’d insulted him whilst he was Prime Minister. For some reason 1828 seems lodged in my mind.

    Anyway, suing someone for libel made a more than adequate substitute for duelling: it was more painful, it was much more protracted, and if you succeeded, your opponent would be forced out of public life altogether, by way of lack of funds. So, civil law is a game for gentlemen — or at least those that can afford astronomical legal fees. As Jerome K Jerome wrote in “Three Men in a Boat” in the late Victorian Period, having dismissed theft and robbery of his watch as things he’d feel obliged to retaliate against: “But if a man were to sue me for my watch, I’d take it off and hand it to him gladly, counting myself lucky to get away so lightly.”

    Using the libel law in the UK is really just a high stakes poker game. Let’s consider the hypothetical example where Charlie makes a defamatory comment about me. I and my lawyers have to make a calculation about how much Charlie is worth. A writer beavering away in his attic garret? Not enough to cover my sides legal costs let alone Charlie’s defence costs. My own lawyers will want to go through my finances to check that I can cover their costs (and Charlie’s lawyers) if things go wrong. Costs for each side might be between £0.25M and £1M, with £100K being very much a low-ball estimate.

    The next problem to consider is how much my damaged reputation is worth. Given that I’ve retired and play no part in public life, the hypothetical damages that might be awarded to me will be minimal: I have no real reputation to damage. Now in days gone by, the trial would have taken place in front of a jury, and the amount of any damages awarded would be up to them to determine. Cases have arisen in which the jury awarded damages of £0.01, indicating “Yes, you were libelled; but we don’t think your reputation is worth more than one pence.” Sadly, these days I think the judge gets to do all the interesting bits — certainly that’s what happened in Depp’s UK case. Had it been held in front of a jury, the personalities of the plaintiff and defendant become more significant than the legal facts of the case.

    In the case I mentioned at the top of this item, what made it worthwhile was the prospect of shaking down my employer as well as me.

    I trust this helps, at least a little bit.

    1231:

    Let's not forget the stupids who "knew" that it wouldn't pass, and so they voted "leave" as a "protest" vote.

    1232:

    The problem with Brit libel laws are "SLAPP" cases - being used far too often to shut up discussion, or to suppress discussion of crooked or even traitorous dealings. A "SLAPP" case fell apart about a week back, I'm very glad to say - concerning dubious dealing with Russians, shall we say?

    1233:

    Btw, yesterday I found the perfect description of what the actual vulture rich are trying to do to the US and the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/07/the-family-took-over-how-a-feuding-ruling-dynasty-drove-sri-lanka-to-ruin

    Tall me that's not where they will go, even if they're not aiming for it.

    1234:

    In English law, truth is not a defense (outside of some limited scope they added a decade or two ago); you have to demonstrate that their reputation wasn't damaged in order to have a defense.

    So if A. Random (a financial advisor) is convicted of fraud, a reporter who writes a story about that risks a libel suit because reporting the truth damages his reputation (which is integral to his livelihood)?

    I must be misunderstanding something…

    1235:

    One case where freedom of speech comes in handyL California's anti-SLAPP statute. We like it around here.

    I agree though, that basic stakes in a civil action are $100k and up, so it's difficult for ordinary people to sue on civil law environmental issues like I deal with.

    1236:

    THIS was the case I was referring to VERY rich Brexshiteer tried to silence journo about his, ahem, "apparent" connections to Putin & friends.

    1237:

    That's exactly the kind of libel case I find oddly absent from the BBC's "Defamation cases" pages. Thanks.

    Thanks also to whitroth for the Sri Lankan story. I read it yesterday and had some similar thoughts.

    1238:

    If they've already been convicted of fraud then suing for libel would be foolish -- you're looking at a legal bill north of £0.25M for starters, and all they have to do is point to the existing guilty verdict and it's a slam dunk.

    The time to sue is before you've been found guilty. (And hope to hell you aren't committing perjury, as Jeffrey Archer found out the hard way.)

    1239:

    David L @ 1201:

    There's one GOOD supermarket that WOULD BE within walking distance if the city of Raleigh would just put in some damn sidewalks

    Actually they are. In so many ways it is about money and who is asking the loudest.

    They're not putting them in where I need them to be so I can SAFELY walk to the grocery store & back. Especially going over that bridge on Atlantic Ave.

    1240:

    Charlie Stross @ 1240:

    I'm not sure I understand this. How do you "hope to hell you aren't committing perjury"?

    1241:

    If you make a statement in a civil court, then later make a statement in another court, perhaps a criminal court, that contradicts it, one of those statements is perjury and people will notice.

    1242:

    Yes, and there've been a couple of high-profile libel lawsuits in the UK in the past couple of decades where the complainant won and was awarded serious damages ... then a later court case contradicted their testimony, and they ended up being prosecuted for the wonderfully-named charge of "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice". The maximum possible sentence is life imprisonment[*], but the normal sentence for doing it during a libel lawsuit is 2-3 years in prison (and a totally ruined career and reputation).

    [*] It's a catch-all offense covering everything from relatively minor offenses -- like perjury during a libel lawsuit -- to giving false testimony in a murder case, hence the top end maximum sentence.

    1243:

    So truth is a defence, even if publicizing it damages someone's reputation?

    1244:

    Court proceedings are part of the public record, so if someone has been convicted of a crime, then that is already public knowledge. Reporting that isn't libel. It's why when a certain commentator in Australia was fined under Australia's Race Discrimination Act (1975), editorialists were able to refer to him with the epithet "convicted racist" for some time afterwards. Truth as a defence would apply when someone hasn't been convicted, but you can demonstrate to a court that your allegations are true (or justified), at least in Oz. I don't think the UK has that.

    1245:

    Even more joyous was the period during which we could refer to Criminally Disgraced Former Minister of Police John Banks, homophobe and all round wanker.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banks_%28New_Zealand_politician%29#False_electoral_return_accusation

    1246:

    Charlie @ 1244
    Jonathan Aitken - for reference.
    "Aitken" is, of course the surname of the utterly vile [Lord Beaverbrook]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Aitken,_1st_Baron_Beaverbrook)
    Even more evil than Murdoch, IMHO.

    Moz
    Unfair to honest masturbators!

    1247:

    You're right. I apologise to all the Right Honourable masturbators of the world, and also to the Left Honourable masturbators. And to anyone other than John Banks who was offended by my remarks.

    1248:

    You are forgetting my near-neighbour, the unfragrant Lord Archer.

    1249:

    i remember when he got out private eye channelled rupert brooke

    "stands the church clock at ten to three,
    and is there money still for me?"

    though he was fairly sorted from all those potboilers he wrote i think

    sri lanka looking lively:
    https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1545692019288416256

    1250:

    If you want to have more weird thoughts, here's one:

    Jon Stewart versus Tucker Carlson for the US Presidency in 2024.

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/08/jon-stewart-2024-democrats-00044146

    1251:

    Jon Stewart has been asked many times to run for president, but his canned answer seems to have been "This country would have to be much more f**ked before that happens…"

    1252:

    Jon Stewart has been asked many times to run for president, but his canned answer seems to have been "This country would have to be much more fked before that happens…"

    Which is as it should be. That, and the canned answer for this point in the election cycle is a variation on the theme of "I'm not worthy."

    Anyway, it's July, and it's more fun thinking of President Stewart than going down the rabbit hole of mass killings and improvised firearms. Don't you think?

    It's that or wonder why Boris Johnson didn't take a sabbatical to go study in Sri Lanka...

    1253:

    Speaking of Archer, my former brother-in-law wrote a biography of him, The informal family chat was that there were may more instances of dishonesty and the like, but they weren't provable, and so they got left out.

    He also found Archer oddly charming, despite everything, which he found rather disturbing.

    1254:

    Re: 'And for sanding and painting it's just not worth the risk of blobs of water on wet paint or freshly sanded timber.'

    I've got to do some work on the back stairs and deck - they're both basic wood. The previous owner didn't properly prep before painting so I get to do scraping, sanding, scrub wash, power/pressure wash, wait until the wood is thoroughly dry (48 hrs), duck tape, fill cracks, sand, paint and paint again. I've always stained the decks at my previous houses so not sure what to expect with paint. Definitely more steps involved. The pressure washer will also be a first. Things could get interesting.

    It's supposed to be sunny for the next 2-3 days over here except the winds are forecast to pick up to around 20 mph with gusts to 40 mph. Basically this means I'll have to add one more item to the prep list before painting - water all the backyard so that the wind doesn't send dirt and grass clippings onto the painted surfaces.

    Ah yes - the joys of suburban life!

    1255:

    It's supposed to be sunny for the next 2-3 days over here except the winds are forecast to pick up to around 20 mph with gusts to 40 mph.

    We've got sunny but not humid, so actually quite nice. And not windy — I've been able to fly the Mini (which struggles with wind, but is legal to fly within walking distance of home while the Mavic 2 requires driving*).

    *Technically I could pay a few hundred to get advanced certification, and then permission from NavCan for the flight (which takes a while to get), but that's impractical for a fun flight on a nice summer day! :-)

    1256:

    Jon Stewart has been asked many times to run for president, but his canned answer seems to have been "This country would have to be much more f**ked before that happens…"

    I think we can safely say Mission Accomplished!

    1257:

    excellent application for rigging up a big tarp

    I had to quickly install a tarp today because I swear it was sunny when I started painting...

    https://imgur.com/a/mN97hdk

    The ocky in the middle pulls everything down to that low point so it drains, but makes it annoying to work under. But the alternative is the occasional bucket of water being added to the paint project...

    Some of you might be amused to learn that the yellow paint is sample pots donated by my ex-gf's new bf's parents :) He was given them, and saw me as someone who might actually use them. The underside of some tables seemed like an excellent place for some mustard-coloured paint...

    1258:

    We've got sunny but not humid, so actually quite nice. And not windy

    I'm here in the southeastern US. Well on the northern edge but still...

    For the next 2 or so months it will be humid most days. With a chance of thunderstorms in the late afternoon or evening. But most days not. But always a decent chance. So your choices are to work in 85F-95F (or higher) mid day no rain or 10 or more degree cooler but a more likely chance of rain/thunderstorms. Of course if you don't start a project the rain will be a deluge a mile or so away. If you do start expect to get wet. Or quickly build a "Moz" tarp setup. I have a collection of very similar tarps, ropes, poles, etc...

    1259:

    It's that or wonder why Boris Johnson didn't take a sabbatical to go study in Sri Lanka...

    Johnson isn't able to pull a 1/6 stunt in the UK, but he hasn't given up on saying in office -- he's probably hoping something turns up (like his aspiring successors spontaneously forming a circular firing squad, or Russia invading Rockall, or something).

    Also, they're only about 48 hours into campaigning and the rhetoric sounds increasingly deranged to the public at large because after the MPs hold a run-off the two candidates with most votes get put to the party members to vote on, who are the most deranged bunch of senile nazis imaginable. So you've got Rishi Sunak (former US Green Card holder and proximate billionaire ex-chancellor, which should tell you about his commitment to the UK) declaring that he'll offer up a wave of tax cuts and start a war on gender-neutral pronouns. And that's on day one.

    Tighten your seat belt, they'll all be wearing Hugo Boss suits and unironically singing a chorus of "Springtime for Hitler" before it's all over.

    1260:

    Weather in Edinburgh is threatening to hit 25 celsius in the next 48 hours (with a risk of it hitting 40 celsius in the south-east of England: hint, humid and there's no air conditioning).

    So I'm breaking out my office portable aircon unit and damn the electricity bill.

    1261:

    The 1922 committee aren't going to elect their committee and fire the starting gun until tomorrow! And Sunak sounds sane compared to Jeremy the *unt.

    1262:

    For the next 2 or so months it will be humid most days.

    That's what I'd expect here too, so I'm luxuriating in the dryness while it lasts!

    Managing about 15 km a day walking, which is doing me a world of good.

    1263:

    Yeah. Worth noting for non-UKans:

    The Conservative party leadership process is a run-off voted on by members of the 1922 Committee (ie. all Conservative MPs who aren't current members of the government, which is most of them as 80% of the cabinet resigned last week), until there are just two left standing ...

    And the vote then goes to the Conservative party membership. Average age was close to 70 before the influx of ex-UKIP/BNP/BXP entryists in 2017-19, and they're foaming lunatic xenophobes.

    (They are willing to vote for a non-white leader, or a woman, as long as that leader exemplifies their values. So the likes of Priti Patel (a vicious authoritarian xenophobe) or Sajid Javid (an Objectivist) are fine. Rishi Sunak may be a lot less fine: he held a US Green Card for some years, along with non-domiciled status for tax purposes -- even during his period as Chancellor, thus showing a disturbing lack of dedication to maintaining himself as a UK citizen. But he might still be in with a chance because tax-dodging is a core Conservative value.

    1264:

    [i]Average age was close to 70 before the influx of ex-UKIP/BNP/BXP entryists in 2017-19, and they're foaming lunatic xenophobes.[/i]

    Just to back up Charlie in regard to the Tory Party membership demographic, lest people think that average age close to 70 is hyperbole. The Conservative Party had a huge membership drive during the 1950's in response to those radical Labour governments (who established the NHS in 1948). As a result, the memberships of the various Conservative clubs (established to counter the working men's clubs that were Labour strongholds), were "fixed" and not really expanded on after that decade. The demographic in those clubs is therefore somewhat singular (and shrinking).

    1265:

    To expand further: unlike the USA there's no primary system and no party-based voter registration. The Electoral Roll is maintained by the Electoral Office of each local authority council and every year they mail each household a form to update with the name and date of birth of everyone who is eligible to vote or will become eligible in the next year. (And a few other check-boxes: do you want a postal ballot, do you want your name to be kept off the public register -- copies of which are sold to marketing firms -- and so on.)

    So there's no "register as a Republican/Democrat if you want a ballot, they'll handle sending you a copy". It's entirely non-partisan.

    The party members are therefore members of the public who actually want to get involved in their party's activities, not just a voter list.

    1266:

    Weather in Edinburgh is threatening to hit 25 celsius in the next 48 hours (with a risk of it hitting 40 celsius in the south-east of England: hint, humid and there's no air conditioning).
    So I'm breaking out my office portable aircon unit and damn the electricity bill.

    Enjoy San Diego visiting you while it lasts, I guess. It's currently foggy and low 20s (oC) here, although the fog will burn off in a few hours.

    A friend of mine from Wisconsin was in town last week, and it was cooler here than there. I do love the California Current and the cold Pacific Ocean this time of year. If we weren't in a thousand year drought, things would be fine here.

    1267:

    EC
    And then there's Grunt Schnapps, whose grasp of reality seems to have been even more tenuous than usual of late ...
    There's always the inestimable "Diamond Geezer" whose summary follows:
    • Rishi Sunak: uber-wealthy free-marketeer (6-4)
    • Liz Truss: thick as a pork market (6-1)
    • Tom Tugendhat: unpronouncably moderate (8-1)
    • Jeremy Hunt: last time's runner-up (16-1)
    • Sajid Javid: neocon big hitter (16-1)
    • Nadhim Zahawi: new arrival at no. 11 (16-1)
    • Kemi Badenoch: abrasive culture warrior (20-1)
    • Suella Braverman: righter than right (20-1)
    • Grant Shapps: slippery former fraudster (33-1)

    Preparing to stand
    • Penny Mordaunt: dark horse liberal Leaver (5-1)
    • Rehman Chishti: blank slate non-entity (500-1)

    Might stand
    • Priti Patel: Lord save us (66-1)
    • Nadine Dorries: inept attack dog (250-1)

    Charlie @ 1265
    CORRECTION:
    ex-UKIP/BNP/BXP entryists in 2017-19, and they're Even more foaming lunatic xenophobes.
    You really could not make this stuff up - shoot the scriptwriter, I say.

    1268:

    So there's no "register as a Republican/Democrat if you want a ballot, they'll handle sending you a copy". It's entirely non-partisan.

    That's not how it works in the US. The Registrars of Voters handles all elections (overseen by the state Secretaries of State, in case you were wondering what that job was about). That's why the MAGAts are working to corrupt the voting process by getting highly partisan candidates elected to oversee these processes. When you register to vote, you can check a box for party preference, or check no party affiliation.

    What happens is that the municipalities print a bunch of different ballots for primary elections. Each primary ballot contains the party candidates for each partisan position, PLUS the non-partisan candidates for various jobs (judges, school board members, other special district positions), PLUS whatever referenda got on the ballot for that election. So there are separate ballots for registered voters in the major parties, and a non-partisan ballot for those who don't list a party affiliation.

    California simplified this process a few years ago by making the ballots non-partisan. All candidates of whatever party are on the primary ballot. The highest two vote getters (regardless of affiliation) advance to the general election, unless the top candidate gets a clear majority of the vote, in which case they win outright. It makes the politics more interesting.

    With regard to the referenda, typically fewer people vote(d) in the primaries, and primary voters tend to be older, so controversial propositions tended to get pushed onto primary ballots, in the hope that no one would notice and they would sneak into law, approved by a minority of conservative voters. With the non-partisan primaries, this trick doesn't work as well as it used to.

    1269:

    As I said, two that are not fanatically monetarist and fascist, and at least five that are more so than Bozo. The true heir to the spirit of Bozo and his chaos is, of course, Truss.

    1270:

    It's 28 Celsius and 55% humidity here - high for the UK.

    1271:

    It's 28 Celsius and 55% humidity here - high for the UK.

    That's almost exactly what's predicted for my area today. It's fairly early morning, so I'll see what actually comes up.

    I'm not being nasty, we're just in a weird situation where UK weather is very similar to that of coastal San Diego. I know full well your buildings are not designed for it, so I hope you can find ways to stay comfortable. Otherwise, I guess go outside and enjoy San Diego visiting, if it helps make the experience more endurable.

    1272:

    Isn't Sajid Javid the one who occasionally reads out loud from Ayn Rand books to his wife?

    Looking at that list, is there one of them that looks like a rounded, intelligent person who will work for the country rather than make the country work for them.

    I could cope with Heath or Major, but most of the current candidates must surely have green glowing worms at the back of their eyes.

    Better yet, the final selection will be made by the cultists of the Tory party.

    1273:

    Sajid Javid's latest claim is that a prayer meeting inspired him to resign (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62113401), which is an obvious pitch to the Jam & Jerusalem brigade within the cult although it does beg the question as to whether he has any actual personal integrity (that's rhetorical).

    1274:

    In general, the way British architecture works means that for any given outdoor temperature, the indoor temperature feels about 5 degrees celsius warmer. Sometimes more.

    1275:

    Weather in Edinburgh is threatening to hit 25 celsius in the next 48 hours (with a risk of it hitting 40 celsius in the south-east of England: hint, humid and there's no air conditioning).

    Don't worry. Once the Gulf Stream shuts down, you guys will cool off in a hurry... :-)

    1276:

    Possibly Tugendhat and Mordaunt. Major was a total shit and more extreme than you seem to think, but not batshit insane.

    1277:

    Normally, I would like it, but I have other (irrelevant) problems and so am not being effective. My wife is not so happy.

    1278:

    It's 28 Celsius and 55% humidity here - high for the UK.

    Here we're below that today as a big rain front rolls through. But the last weeks were all way above that with 2 days in a row over 38C. Which is fairly rare for us. Any days over 38C is a big deal here. Miami / New Orleans are 200+ miles south of here.

    And tomorrow we start another two or more weeks of mostly 30C to 35C for daily highs.

    Enjoy your cool weather.

    My son just bought a house and we are going to do some work in the detached garage to install some electrical upgrades. I can't wait. We have set up fans.

    1279:

    I'm right outside of Detroit, MI. it was around 12-13 degrees C this morning. It should have been 21 (July is when we get the really warm and sticky nights).

    We've had possibly the coldest summer I can remember here.

    It's been great for not running my A/C though.

    1280:

    1275 - Well, the BBC news report I heard, Sajid Javid claimed that he was inspired to resign from Cabinet, and to stand for leader of the Con Party at Muslim prayer meetings. How will that play with the Jam and Jerusalem Brigade, or, indeed, with his fellow Muslims?

    1280 - Central heating thermostat in the core of the house (just West of Glasgow)

    1281:

    EC & Grant
    Tugenhadt is the easily least-worst option, so he doesn't stand a chance - he's at least half way to sane ....
    Hit 29 - 30°C here today, 31 promised for tomorrow.

    1282:

    It's currently 26 degrees in Edinburgh. Which may sound low for the current heat wave but is within 2 degrees of the all-time high.

    1283:

    " It's currently foggy and low 20s (oC)"

    Or, "It's currently foggy and low 20s (°C)"

    You make the little degree thingy as [ampersand]deg[semicolon].

    There might be other ways to do it, but IDK.

    1284:

    You are welcome to our winters - people from both Canada and the mid-west have said that they have never been so cold as in Cambridge (and that means outside).

    1285:

    "It's currently 26 degrees in Edinburgh"

    That's on the verge of "It's getting a little cool" for us. Opinions differ.

    1286:

    Or you use the unicode character for ℃: enter &#x2103;

    1287:

    No thanks - I'll stick with the winters we've got already. At least down this end of the country, we mostly get no fucking snow. As in rarely more than a few inches of it and it rarely hangs about for more than a couple of weeks - and I'm particularly well off since I'm in the middle of a little local mini-climate where it usually doesn't snow even when everywhere more than 15-20 miles away does get it. When it does snow everywhere grinds to a halt and it makes headlines all week, and when it snows as much as it does all the time in those awful continental climates it's enough of an event that those years become notorious even to people who weren't born at the time, and get separate wikipedia pages about them and everything.

    I hate fucking snow. At least other forms of pain-in-the-arse weather only last as long as they're actually happening. Fucking snow hangs about for weeks after it's stopped, making every single activity that involves taking even a couple of steps outside a pain in the arse, and if anything it gets worse as time goes on until it finally gets to the point of nearly having gone. The standard winter weather of rain alternating with zero evaporation rate, so everything's continuously wet for months on end, is bad enough, but at least plain liquid wet doesn't soak things above ground level when it's not actually falling, doesn't get in the way of everything, and doesn't compel you to walk like a clown to avoid falling over all the time. If I never experience fucking snow again I certainly won't miss it.

    It has to be said I didn't find winter in Cambridge particularly cold; I've probably been colder in the winter everywhere else I've lived (all in England). You certainly don't get everyone walking around looking like the Michelin man the way pictures of places like Canada suggest they do there (though to be sure that may have more causes than simple unprotected rate of heat loss).

    1288:

    Yes, Major was a shit - just ask his wife - but not totally bat-shit insane puts him head and shoulders above the vile wombles currently showcasing their wares.

    1289:

    Worth reproducing the concluding paragraph of Stewart Lee's Observer/Graun column -

    "Because despite the drama, we are still where we always have been. Rightwing media and the Conservative party enabled the promotion of a man they knew was a dangerous lying corrupt cheat, in order to further their own interests. And so far they have wasted six years of our country’s life now, briefly wavering only when the figurehead’s corruption could no longer be concealed and threatened to blow the political reactor core sky high, a Chernobyl explosion of backhanders, bullying, Brexit bullshit and ridiculously expensive wallpaper. You fucking idiots. Your self-serving resignations ring hollow. Your backpedalling editorials stink. You should all be in prison."

    1290:

    "portable aircon unit"

    I had one of those once, when I lived in a heat concentrator in the middle of a solar oven. It was an epic pile of dogshit, having been designed by a cageful of complete and utter morons.

    Pretty much every possible aspect of its design was a turd of its own particular size and consistency. The most potentially calamitous was the motor run capacitor being mounted so that condensate would drip onto it and form a puddle shorting the terminals, but the most immediately obvious dysfunctionality was that the intake air for the hot side of the circuit was drawn from inside the room. So as it blew the hot-side exhaust out of the window, it sucked more hot air from outside into the room to replace it. (And the outside air wasn't much cooler than the inside in the first place.) This meant it was fighting against itself the whole time and achieving basically fuck all.

    So the first thing I had to do with it was gaffer-tape a cardboard box over the hot-side intake, and run an extra length of ducting from that box to the outside, so it drew its hot-side air from a sensible source and no longer tried to suck hot air into the room as fast as it cooled it down. Then there was more Heath Robinsonery with gaffer tape to lead the inlet and outlet ducts through the window without leaving a massive area of gap around them.

    There were so many shit things wrong with it that I spent quite a bit of time trying to find one that wasn't quite so shit, but I found that apart from a few variations in power rating, there was nothing to choose between any of them and they were all as shite as each other. Even the egregiously stupid lack of a second duct for the hot-side intake was common to all of them. The only way to get anything noticeably better would have been to ignore everything calling itself "portable", and pay several times the price for the kind of thing that involves drilling holes in the wall and bolting things to the outside of the building.

    Of course that is even less feasible for you than it was for me, and given your previous comments about your DREADED WINDOWS I am wondering how even the arsery with the ducting works in your place.

    1291:

    Seeing how his main achievement was something even Thatcher thought was a step too far, that may merely indicate lack of opportunity...

    1292:

    Grant @ 1290 The whole “Conservative” (they’re about as conservative as our Greedy Oligarchs’ Party) sounds like a bad replay of Python’s Upper Class Twits skit.

    1293:

    Me @1294 Oops, omitted “leadership selection process” after the parens.

    1294:

    I am wondering how even the arsery with the ducting works in your place.

    Simples: I paid about £20 extra for a chunk of ducting, an adapter ring, and an expanding insert that can be jammed under the sash window so that the hot air outflow vents outside and doesn't come back to bother me. (The intake for the hot air is in the room, well away from the cold air ejection port because the thing is, alas, the size of a tank.)

    1295:

    Isn't Sajid Javid the one who occasionally reads out loud from Ayn Rand books to his wife?

    From Javid’s home truths in The Spectator, 2017: "As a student, Javid read the passage to his now-wife, but only once — she told him she’d have nothing more to do with him if he tried it again."

    From Why do Tories love Ayn Rand? in The Spectator, 2018: "Our new Home Secretary Sajid Javid is a big Ayn Rand fan: twice a year, he reads the courtroom scene in ‘The Fountainhead’."

    So she married him knowing this. 1997, according to Wikipedia. It also refers to her as "his childhood sweetheart" - I can make no comment on this.

    1296:

    Heteromeles @ 1254:

    If Biden should choose not to run in 24 ... or for any reason is unable to run in 24, I think Kamala Harris would be the Democrats' best choice.

    Stewart might be Ok for the VP slot. He's younger than Bernie.

    1297:

    AndyW @ 1266:

    Average age was close to 70 before the influx of ex-UKIP/BNP/BXP entryists in 2017-19, and they're foaming lunatic xenophobes.

    Just to back up Charlie in regard to the Tory Party membership demographic, lest people think that average age close to 70 is hyperbole. The Conservative Party had a huge membership drive during the 1950's in response to those radical Labour governments (who established the NHS in 1948). As a result, the memberships of the various Conservative clubs (established to counter the working men's clubs that were Labour strongholds), were "fixed" and not really expanded on after that decade. The demographic in those clubs is therefore somewhat singular (and shrinking).

    So, if membership was closed off a generation or two ago, where do the skinheads, neo-nazis & other right-wingnuts go to join the party?

    1298:

    So, if membership was closed off a generation or two ago, where do the skinheads, neo-nazis & other right-wingnuts go to join the party?

    They don't: the headbangers join the BNP, Combat-18, EDL, Britain First, National Action, or whatever the current fascist head-stomping group du jour is.

    The Tory party is a gerontocracy, reliant on the votes of pensioners. It's also the party of the well-off. It used to have a mass middle-class base, but (a) middle class in the UK is not socially equivalent to middle class in the USA, and (b) it doesn't have a mass base any more -- it has under 100,000 members UK-wide (compared to the 90,000-odd members of the SNP, a party limited to Scotland, which has less than 10% of the UK's population).

    If they could ban membership by under-65s they would.

    1299:

    So, if membership was closed off a generation or two ago, where do the skinheads, neo-nazis & other right-wingnuts go to join the party?

    Are they actual members, or just supporters?

    Up here, membership in a political party tends to only be important when the party is selecting a leader (and candidates). Most people aren't members — only around 1-2% actually join a party.

    I suspect that it's the same in Britain — our political system is modelled on their's, after all.

    1300:

    It sounds like they survive only because everyone's afraid of the horrible, pinko, commie things Labour might do if they gained power.

    1301:

    Grant
    UNFAIR to Wombles!

    Uncle Stinky
    YES

    1302:

    Charlie Stross @ 1267:

    Just kind of a side note, but do y'all know that the U.S. system of primary elections is an outgrowth of turn of the century (19th to 20th) REFORM measures put forward by "progressive republicans" like Robert M. La Follette and Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt?

    The idea behind the primary system was to bring control of elections & selection of candidates to the PEOPLE and take it out of the hands of party BOSSES.

    The RepubliQan party wasn't ALWAYS so totally corrupt as it is today.

    1303:

    Down here in Retirementland, when it snows (maybe every other years, seldom more than about 3cm for two days), the whole place grinds to a halt and there are complaints that I Moved Here To Get Away From That Sort Of Thing And The Government Should Do Something About It.

    1304:

    Charlie Stross @ 1288:

    Or you use the unicode character for ℃: enter ℃

    For windoze users, hold down the left ALT key and type in "0176" on the numeric keypad - makes the degree symbol when you let go of the ALT key.

    1305:

    If Biden should choose not to run in 24 ... or for any reason is unable to run in 24, I think Kamala Harris would be the Democrats' best choice. Stewart might be Ok for the VP slot. He's younger than Bernie.

    In terms of governmental competence, I completely agree you'd be right. Note that also, in terms of governmental competence, Sen. Hillary Clinton should have curb-stomped IQ45 at the polls.

    So anyway, we've got this effing mess, where face recognition and getting all the feels* seem to be important for the majority of voters who'll actually decide the race (e.g. independents who generally don't wanna deal, and the poor who have to be desperate enough to take time off to deal with all the shit put in their way to keep them from voting).

    Again, I completely agree with you that all the smart people (including both of us) know better and would prefer Harris. But as Presidential candidates have noted for a century, having all the smart Americans on your side is insufficient to win the race. You've got to appeal to a bunch of idiots too to pull it off.

    So if the GQP runs Flunker Carlsnot for Prez in place of IndictableQ45, he's going to bring the circus. Having a competent woman in a pants suit against him? Maybe not so smart. That, unfortunately, is where Jon Stewart might win. Unlike Harris, he has a reputation for being intolerant of BS, being well outside the beltway, and being capable of taking Carlsnot on on his own turf. Stewart also has a good reputation for assembling a good organization and hiring talent (see how many of his proteges have shows of their own, unlike almost every other comedian working late night).

    What Stewart could do is pull an Arnold Schwarznegger: come in as an entertainer, hire really skilled people to do the regular work and get him up to speed, and develop the chops to govern on the job. Oddly enough, I think he's more capable of that than Carlsnot is or IQ45 was, and I suspect most voters share my opinion.

    Problem is, I suspect there's going to be immense pressure on Biden to run again, as with Reagan. I don't envy him that choice.

    *Turns out the feels seem to be more important for clueless white men than they are for women, who have bloody-mindedly rational reasons to curb-stomp the GOP. I'm shocked, shocked.

    1306:

    I Moved Here To Get Away From That Sort Of Thing And The Government Should Do Something About It.

    Are those complaints from the same people who decry government overreach, by any chance?

    1307:

    Most the twits in the Upper Class Twit of the Year Show from Pythons were relatively harmless.

    This lot of talentless sociopaths are malicious and spiteful, and, if not corrupt themselves, are certainly moving in circles where some of those around them are.

    1308:

    Turns out the feels seem to be more important for clueless white men than they are for women, who have bloody-mindedly rational reasons to curb-stomp the GOP.

    Decades ago* I was told that in Arab cultures men are regarded as the passionate gender, while women are considered cold and calculating.

    Don't know whether or not that's true, but the whole 'men are rational, women are emotional' shtick has been getting on my wick for decades…



    *Back in the 80s, I think.

    1309:

    Funny you should mention that...

    1310:

    in Arab cultures men are regarded as the passionate gender, while women are considered cold and calculating

    Whereas in European cultures it's widely accepted that sometimes men think with their little head, and sometimes not at all.

    In an only vaguely related area both "crimes of passion" and "homosexual panic" are only associated with one gender and it's not the "helpless emotional" one.

    You'd almost think there was bullshit involved somewhere, but I could possibly comment (I'm all overcome, I think I need my fainting couch)

    1311:

    "This isn't the Brexit I voted for!"

    1312:

    One suspects that a wide range of different Brexits were voted for, all the way from "everyone else can just fuck off" (we live on an island) down to "just like now, but with bendy bananas". Not to mentional all the people who voted to stick their hands in a meat grinder because that was sure to piss off the Conservatives. And if that didn't work they'll trying sticking their whole head in one. So there.

    (un)Luckily for the UK the Brexit they got makes Frankenstein's monster look like a marvel of planning and construction.

    1313:

    For windoze users, hold down the left ALT key and type in "0176" on the numeric keypad

    On a Mac, it's fiendishly complicated. You hold down the "option" key (doesn't matter which side) and type 0 (that is the character zero).

    1314:

    feels seem to be more important for clueless white men

    This conclusion seems to be supported by all of literally everyone's life experience, but somehow everyone still seems to be surprised about it when it's pointed out.

    1315:

    I wonder how much of that is the social pressure not to display emotion (arguably other than anger) leaking out round the edges? Just because he can't say he's scared doesn't mean he's able to act as though he's not. You see this a lot with kids acting out feeling they can't verbalise. As always there's a song for that... Aussie rockers, no less, crying "true tears of joy".

    You just can't keep away
    You twist the truth, then you turn the other cheek
    Everybody knows its just salvation that you seek

    Much as there was a degree of "political lesbianism" when women were challenging gender roles, there's a proportion of young queer men who are mostly heterosexual but have opted out of the masculine gender role. You don't have to suck cock to wear a dress... but it's easier to let people think you do if you are (either way round, now that I think about it).

    I definitely find the more politically active queer groups more accepting of men who don't conform, even those of us who identify as ancient vanilla straights (or just come across that way, I've long since given up arguing with people about my identity. Unless they identify me as an undercover cop in which case they can fuck right off).

    1316:

    social pressure not to display emotion

    That's totally a thing, and I get quite a bit of what you go on to say about it. I'm talking about something different though. IME the blokes who insist they are rational while others are driven by feelings, when you ask about their reasoning, inevitably repeat their premises passionately, but offer no rational justification for them.

    1317:

    One suspects that a wide range of different Brexits were voted for,

    From this side of the Atlantic it's hard to tell but did anyone actually get the Brexit they voted for?

    1318:

    To be fair, I think Boris did and he got to be PM as a result. It's only afterward he turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a bit shit at it and has had some trouble keeping the job.

    1319:

    Well, I sure didn't, but then I voted Remain rather than WrecksIt anyway.

    1320:

    Decades ago* I was told that in Arab cultures men are regarded as the passionate gender, while women are considered cold and calculating.

    Given the prevalence of female genital mutilation back then, I'm not surprised.

    1321:

    Sexism? "I'm no girlyman with those shitty 'feelings' that make you weak and effeminate". Or homophobia... same same but "gay". To me those are both symptoms rather than causes in their own right, since they start from "only women have (show) feelings".

    I guess I'm poking away at the undergrowth and asking where that refusal to interrogate their feelings or refusal to admit to others that they have feelings comes from.

    It's interesting that economists have been fighting this one out in very academic terms for a while, since it was obvious even back when Marx was writing that the "rational man" was not even a useful simplification outside trivial scenarios (opiate of the masses and all). These days they call it "behavioural economics" and other things to avoid admitting that they're really sociologists and psychologists. But still maintain that while they study lesser, more emotion-driven creatures, they are themselves above such nonsense and act from purely rational motivations.

    Nick Gruen mentioned this stuff the other day, in a "us economists are not as rational as we like to pretend" comment. He referenced Kahnemann at the time too. Meanwhile a lot of mainstream economists still decry emotional behaviour in the sharemarket (or traders thereof, markets not being sentient let alone sapient... and whether even sapience implies rationality is perhaps a discussion for a rainy day).

    related: "man is a rationalising animal" from our favourite author :)

    1322:

    Somewhat controversial summary of the covid situation, with the obvious response "it's not an apocalypse, we will invent a cure sooner or later". Apparently many twits are in a frenzy over it.

    TLDR: there's increasing evidence that repeated infection doesn't result in immunity, that the risk of long covid rises with number of infections, and that the immune system in general becomes damaged making other infections more likely.

    https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/07/04/Get-Ready-Forever-Plague/ https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/07/08/Forever-Pandemic-Nikiforuk-Replies-Critics/

    1323:

    Grant Oh they are corrupt, all right - hip-deep in it - oh what fun!

    Damian
    But it's EXACTLY the one we dreadful remoaners warned you about, isn't it?
    - @ 1320 - not just Bo Jon-Sun, but also all the ultras who wantd ( & got ) "disaster capitalism".

    Moz
    ( Re: Covid ) Euw, nasty.

    1324:

    And in, "surely this couldn't get worse?" news, an Australian doctor who's been advocating for basic hygiene has been ordered to attend a re-education camp.

    At his own expense.

    At least in Mao's China they didn't make you pay for your re-education.

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/08/aakm-j08.html

    Your not allowed to say that you can avoid covid by breathing air without covid. We're to relax and breathe deeply.

    1325:

    Or you could just type "numberC", as the Celcius scale is not a degree-type scale.

    1326:

    Going back to the collection of nutters running for the tory leadership ....
    Surely anyone advocating "Objectivism" can be demonstrated to be at least as wrong as Marx, or possibly worse, sine the complete, unregulated exercise of "Free-Market Capitalism" has already been tried?
    It was called: The Nineteenth Century wasn't it?
    Children down coal mines, zero regulation of pollution, multiple fires & building collapses etc ... And rivers considerably more polluted than now, though we already appear to be going backwards on that one. ...

    1327:

    One suspects that a wide range of different Brexits were voted for

    Yes, and a bunch of random shouting-at-clouds stuff.

    Remember Brexit was about leaving the EU? My benchmark for "the British electorate are thick" was unfortunately raised the day after the referendum result when, listening to a news person-on-the-street piece, I heard one woman confess she voted for brexit because she "hated Eurovision".

    Reminder that the Eurovision song contest predates the EU and participating nations include Australia ...

    1328:

    > Yes, and a bunch of random shouting-at-clouds stuff.

    I realised we had become detached from reality when a work colleague said "it's not about economics, Nick"

    1329:

    My benchmark for "the British electorate are thick" was unfortunately raised the day after the referendum result when, listening to a news person-on-the-street piece, I heard one woman confess she voted for brexit because she "hated Eurovision".

    I saw that one. And more in the same vein.

    Then there was the farmer afterwards, upset because apparently no one told him that his EU subsidy would be ending after Brexit.

    I'm increasingly reminded of American red states, complaining about an overbearing federal government while being the major beneficiaries of federal taxation…

    1330:

    It's not really comparable, because in addition to 30 years of the usual malicious propaganda from the gutter press (most of it), we have had 30 years of government propaganda (both political and mandarinate) blaming the EU for its actions, and even government action promoting that.

    Cornwall's dislike of the EU dates from their sewage regulations to clean up beaches, which (obviously) needed money. Cornwall's problem was the multi-fold increase in population over the summer, mainly from London. But Thatcher forbade any sort of visitors tax, tax on 'second homes' etc., thus forcing the permanent residents of the poorest county in England to subsidise holidays for residents of one of the richest.

    That sort of thing is why I was certain Brexit was coming 25 years ago.

    1331:

    Cornwall's problem was the multi-fold increase in population over the summer, mainly from London. But Thatcher forbade any sort of visitors tax, tax on 'second homes' etc., thus forcing the permanent residents of the poorest county in England to subsidise holidays for residents of one of the richest.

    Here in central North Carolina we have all kinds of pissing and moaning against higher property taxes and developers. But state law forbids impact fees on new housing and the state only pays for road improvements when the traffic gets clogged, not before.

    So new folks move into one of the top 5 to 10 places to live or locate a business in the US and the existing folks get to pay for the initial burdens of more schools, water / sewage, police, etc...

    Same arguments. Different details.

    And if you mentioned the state legilature will not allow the locals to impose impact fees the typical response is "What does that have to do with my property taxes going up? Isn't it all due to waste, fraud, and gold plating?"

    1332:

    Rbt Prior
    Yeah - the people of Corwall, which was hip-deep in EU-subsidised works, voted for Brexshit & promptly complained.
    _ Oops - just seen EC on this, right.
    Even more fun & even more stupid, the inhabitants of Dover & their tory fuckwit MP ....

    1333:

    And totally on a different subject, I see the world will come to an end on 1 Sept 2024.

    The release of The Last Dangerous Visions is scheduled for that date.

    1334:

    "Or you could just type "numberC", as the Celcius scale is not a degree-type scale."

    That, actually, is what I do in other contexts. But in popular usage °C is still a thing, so it's worth knowing how to make it.

    1335:

    Could someone explain to me what this is about. I just read the Wiki article on Celsius

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius

    and this section

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Name_and_symbol_typesetting

    indicates the degree symbol is to be used.

    1336:

    Going back to the asteroid diversion attractor above... After analysis of data from the Osiris-Rex sample collection it appears that asteroid Bennu has the cohesiveness of a ball pit. If the spacecraft hadn't started backing away again almost immediately after it grabbed the sample it may have landed up burrowing in to the surface and buried itself.

    From the last paragraph, "It's possible that asteroids like Bennu - barely held together by gravity or electrostatic force - could break apart in Earth's atmosphere and thus pose a different type of hazard than solid asteroids"

    1337:

    Re: Celcius

    It appears that °C is the accepted standard. I checked a recent issue of Science mag (24 June 2022, p. 1398) and https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/si-units-temperature. Both use °C .

    1338:

    "Could someone explain to me what this is about."

    It's about people being bloody daft.

    It's DEGREES CENTIGRADE, written °C. That was good enough for a couple of hundred years and it's still good enough now. Just because some bunch of bells thought it would be a wizard wheeze to change the name for no reason (and according to that wikipedia page, didn't even pick the right C) doesn't mean anyone else has to take any notice, and indeed for a long long time nobody did. Unfortunately they did copy the BBC when they started doing it on the weather forecasts, and it's got worse from then on. So it's the BBC's fault really.

    If it was a different unit then that would give a reason to change the name, but the unit is still the same, so the name can jolly well stay the same too.

    1339:

    Well, there WAS a reason - just not a very good one. The term centigrade was already in use for another unit.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian

    1340:

    Yep. And one more item in the long, long list to despise Bruce Asshole Willis, and Armageddon.

    1341:

    Moz @ 1312:

    In an only vaguely related area both "crimes of passion" and "homosexual panic" are only associated with one gender and it's not the "helpless emotional" one.

    How then do you explain TERFs?

    1342:

    ...so rather than change the one which isn't an SI unit and which nobody ever uses, they...

    1343:

    Charlie Stross @ 1329:

    That's kind of sad, because every once in a while The Eurovision song contest does produce a winner. And sometimes even the losers are interesting.

    1344:

    I wasn't aware that TERFs murdered people. Most of the trans murders I read about are done by men, and not in the "men can be feminists" sense. TERFs are more about excluding women, and inciting others to murder then. There are fantasists, sure, but actual killers?

    And while the homosexual panic defense was at least in theory available to women, I'm not aware of one attempting to use it.

    Criminologists seem to think women murder for slightly different reasons to men, at least statistically. They're more likely to kill their immediate family, for example.

    Sorry for getting bogged down in counterexamples. I "explain TERFs" the same way I explain any other phobia: fear of difference.

    1345:

    people being bloody daft. It's DEGREES CENTIGRADE, written °C.

    Can we talk about "degrees kelvin" now? Written °k to distinguish it from the SI unit of temperature, the Kelvin 😋

    1347:

    TERFs are more about excluding women, and inciting others to murder then.

    i assume u mean excluding trans women (from women's spaces), but where have they been inciting others to murder them?

    1348:

    Re: ' ... and that the immune system in general becomes damaged making other infections more likely.'

    The damage to the immune system has also already shown up as a spike in Type 2 Diabetes in some populations.

    'Diabetes risk rises after COVID, massive study finds

    Even mild SARS-CoV-2 infections can amplify a person’s chance of developing diabetes, especially for those already susceptible to the disease.'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00912-y

    The more opportunity this virus gets to reproduce, the more opportunity it gets to mutate - in any direction. It could get milder, it could get deadlier, it could get less transmissible or it could get more transmissible. It's a crap shoot. Viruses do not 'act' or have 'motives' - viruses are a bunch of atoms whose particular arrangement when turned on goes into reproduction loop mode.

    Surely someone in this crowd can come up with a computing analogy that can describe this. Analogies would be especially useful in this case because many more people are familiar with computers than with biology.

    1349:

    @Hetero at 1307: "In terms of governmental competence, I completely agree you'd be right. Note that also, in terms of governmental competence, Sen. Hillary Clinton should have curb-stomped IQ45 at the polls."

    But not so much at campaigning, which is the skill set that matters. Here in Michigan we have a Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who I think would kick butt. I could be biased, though. She is my governor.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer

    Sadly, it may be true that, right now, only a guy could win against whatever Alpha Dog the Reps put up.

    @Moz at 1317: "I wonder how much of that is the social pressure not to display emotion (arguably other than anger) leaking out round the edges?" Men in more traditional societies are constantly challenged to prove how tough they are--both by the men and the women around them. It comes from a cultural perception of the world as a fundementally dangerous place, and the community needs its' males to defend it. This gets worse as times become more turbulent.

    We live in very turbulent times.

    I wish I could say that the Dems are immune to this, but sadly I don't think so. Part of why Biden is getting so much flak right now (ie: "Why won't he fight back?" and that sort of thing).

    Damian 1318: "IME the blokes who insist they are rational while others are driven by feelings, when you ask about their reasoning, inevitably repeat their premises passionately, but offer no rational justification for them."

    That's because "Rational" has become a symbolic marker for "Effective", or "Successful." Such males are attempting to assert a status marker without fully understanding what's behind it, or caring.

    @Moz 1323: "I guess I'm poking away at the undergrowth and asking where that refusal to interrogate their feelings or refusal to admit to others that they have feelings comes from."

    In the high school where I grew up (in what we around here call "Corn Country") if as a male you demonstrated feelings, you didn't get laid. Very formative.

    I can't say from any sort of empirical evidence or research, but based on my own admittedly anecdotal experience, the girls were afraid of the males, and wanted a male to protect them (a similar dynamic also explains the TERFs). The term for that is "Vicious Circle."

    BTW, these days, economists mostly acknowledge the irrationality of people, but use rational decision making as a baseline to measure deviations from.

    1350:

    but use rational decision making as a baseline to measure deviations from.

    ... an evidence-contradicting belief that they just feel should be correct, so they assume it is and work from there. At least physicists know that spherical cows in a vacuum isn't a real thing. But there's whole schools of economics discussing the difference between spherical consumers operating with perfect information and vacuous people bumbling through real life.

    The famous quote is once again topical "I can't eat an ipad"... some parts of the cost of living are less optional than others, and people who can't afford food DGAF whether the price of silly geegaws is falling.

    And this isn't one of those cases where you can argue that, say, reforming the electoral system is a necessary precondition to having a functioning democracy, especially if the government is shit (as a counter to "they're all the same" or "my vote doesn't matter"). Buying a cheap ipad isn't going to lower food prices, Laffer Curve notwithstanding. Arguably if enough people choose to starve to death the resulting reduction in demand for food might have that effect, perhaps we could ask our cousins in the UK whether that's happening yet? (no, population still growing)

    if as a male you demonstrated feelings, you didn't get laid. Very formative.

    My memory of high school doesn't match that, but Aotearoa in the 1980's was not like the US, and very not like the rural US. Also, I was not chasing women at that stage so despite some weird shit going on that particular edge case didn't bother me. But FWIW it didn't seem to be the case, and in some cases very definitely the opposite applied - not least the goth-looking Cure fanbois emoting over guitars who had chicks all over them despite their at-times ambivalent interest in that (I did sarcastically say to one friend that he'd struggle to write properly depressed lyrics about his failed love-life if he kept the same girlfriend for another year).

    1351:

    I guess the occurrence of the phenomenon is proportional to redneck density.

    1352:

    It makes perfect sense that your having out there ideas. COVID is known to cause weird cognitive impairment. Another way of saying that is it scrambles your neural net. Its probably the same reason drugs and alchohol sometimes lead to creative epiphanies. When it comes back on line, sometimes something connects up differently

    1353:

    SFReader said: The more opportunity this virus gets to reproduce, the more opportunity it gets to mutate - in any direction. It could get milder, it could get deadlier, it could get less transmissible or it could get more transmissible.

    Not exactly. More transmissible is a tiny target in the huge space of possible mutations. It will vastly overwhelmingly mutate to become less transmissible.

    However those mutations are "incompatible with life" as far as the virus is concerned, so they're immediately eliminated and are of zero consequence. The only ones that are retained are ones that don't negatively effect transmission. So from our point of view, transmission can only increase.

    Note that it doesn't care how that increase comes about. We know that it has neurological effects. If it stumbles upon a neurological effect that increases transmission it will exploit that effect. So making people too stupid to put on a mask for instance. Making them crave close social interaction... Lots of hideous possibilities.

    But I'm sure that neuroscientists will be on top of this. They're going to be most loudly opposing those drives to crowd together, unmasked, while singing or dancing indoors.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/FENSorg/status/1545803277455032320

    https://mobile.twitter.com/Emre_Yavuz_21/status/1546670883015647232

    1354:

    And in the latest from "take your bat and ball and go home The Onion because the world is more ridiculous than you can satirise" we have the winners (not just runners up, they won) of the Centre for Disease Control "Return to the Workplace" photo competition. It's NIOSH who certify respiratory PPE. They say "Our submission shows off our passion for Respiratory Protection"

    https://mobile.twitter.com/NIOSH_NPPTL/status/1546636213318205445

    The photo shows 11 employees tightly clustered together, all with respiratory PPE IN THEIR HANDS

    (one exception who's wearing an inadequate paper mask)

    1355:

    SHIT
    Seagull detected { ? } 1357 / 1358
    At present count.

    1356:

    SFR @ 1350
    Your reference
    We already have a term for this: The Ansible.
    GO: U K le G!

    1357:

    The whole temperature conversation is fun.

    I've seen C used in the same way as K without complaint.

    So, the temperature here yesterday would be shown as 31.3C - presumably because the context was obvious and no one thought Coulombs were involved...

    I have a feeling a I have seen it used that way in some refereed journals. Will check that this evening.

    1358:

    Seagull appears to have started using a VPN.

    Seagull's IP address blocked.

    WARNING: I've been doing some reading about the Online Safety Bill the Tories are bringing in, and my obligations under it as a result of running this forum.

    If I can't even keep the Seagull out, I might as well throw in the towel and shut down the discussion forum on this blog for good.

    If the bill turns into an Online Safety Act in due course, without a loophole for small-scale or hobbyist operations like this one, then I'll be at serious legal jeopardy -- specifically, I'd be vulnerable to a malicious actor trying to get me prosecuted and jailed for shits and giggles. (There's no simple way to put an age verification check on this blog without a lot of work that I'm no longer sufficiently skilled to do myself, so a lot of money. And the bill would require significant expenditure of money (on legal licensing regulatory compliance) and expertise (appointing a compliance officer) and legal fees (ensuring I'm in compliance with the law) just so you guys can chat among yourselves. I'm already paying a thousand quid a year for hosting and untold amounts of pro-rata working time: if it comes to it, I'll just shut this whole thing down.)

    1359:

    Temperature - Temperature is measured on (that I know of) the Celsius (sometimes misnamed centigrade), Kelvin, Fahrenheit and Rankine scales. These names tell you which ) point and boiling point for water are used. However, all 4 are measured in degrees, so a correct statement of a temperature would be $temp degrees Celsius, Rankine or whatever. A correct statement of a heating or cooling would be, say, N Celsius degrees.

    1360:

    I admire your certitude but respectfully suggest you update your knowledge to take account of events post 1966. Kelvin, or if you must Kelvins, are not degrees any more.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin#Degrees

    Since we're doing this dance, I also remind you that the Temperate Moz is also not a degree-based unit but uses furlongs. A very angry Moz is close to 3nFur while room temperature is about 48 nFur.

    1361:

    if it comes to it, I'll just shut this whole thing down.

    I keep telling folks in the US that these "cures" will give results that are worse than the disease.

    1362:

    Right, unfortunately. I haven't read it, but will bet that it leaves gaping loopholes for 'big tech' to escape, while hammering smaller ones; it's a standard method for Whitehall to discourage inconvenient smaller businesses and non-profit organisations while favouring the multi-nationals. The original DPA was like that (and, to some extent, everything since) - the ONLY reason that it 'worked' is that the original commisioner said publicly that he wasn't proposing to enforce it where it was obviously stupid.

    1363:

    A completely irrelevant point, but three cheers for Mo Farah or even a nine-gun salute! A brave man, prepared to use his fame and popularity for good - the total antithesis of most news recently.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62123886

    1364:

    I had to shut a site down because of that stupid bollocks. (Well, that was the objectively defensible reason, though subjectively it was less important than that running the site was doing my head in and making me into an arsehole, and I was a good four years beyond being sick to the fucking bollocks of doing it.) (By an amusing coincidence, it's only La Polynomielle from here who I know to remember the site existing.)

    I didn't want to get into having to argue the difference between glamour and porn, or against the encroachment into the UK of US ideas of "morality" which hold that the merest glimpse of a digitised nipple is enough to permanently destroy someone's mind.

    And there was absolutely no way I would have put any kind of "age check" on it no matter what. If such a thing isn't so weak as to be pointless and no doubt not count anyway, it's not possible without demanding information from the user (a) which they may not even be able to provide anyway (I couldn't, for one), and (b) the mere demand for which is an UTTER OUTRAGE to the user and counts as justification for said outraged user to hack the site and replace it with a message saying "go and fuck yourselves". (And I wish more people encountering such demands would actually do things like that, because if enough people did sites would stop implementing such outrages, and the internet would be so much nicer without them.)

    All that is before we get to my violent disagreement with the whole idea of enabling and encouraging parents to renege on their responsibilities, and instead trying to dump them on billions of other poor irrelevant fuckers instead.

    However, it's not clear to me how the bollocks is relevant to this site, since the site contents are as different as sodium and water. AFAIK there isn't a single de-photoshopped de-captioned lads' mag picture on here at all...

    Re your hosting costs, you are using the same hosting company as I am (or was until a few months ago when they got wankerised and stopped accepting payments by postal order (while also commencing to send me emails every week about how great they are when it's no longer true)), and you have apparently got caught the same way that I did: signing up for a certain spec of server and then carrying on paying the same fee for years, while in the meantime the specs and prices on offer have changed and it's now possible to sign up for a lot more server for a lot less money.

    I discovered this when the server I'd been renting for 10 years blew up. Their default response was to replace it with a new server (of vastly greater capability, far exceeding my needs) for the same price as the old one. But in the meantime I had had a look at what deals they were currently offering for people to sign up to, and discovered that they started at about half the price I was paying but still gave vastly (and unnecessarily) greater capability than I had had before. So I said no thanks, I'll switch to one of these new deals instead.

    That was for a dedicated server - which IIRC is what you've got too - and it doesn't actually have to blow up before they will allow you to change your deal, so you too could halve your hosting costs by changing to one of the cheaper and better servers they are offering these days.

    1365:

    You seem to have a vastly higher tolerance for that sort of pointless chopping and changing than I do. I say the thing itself isn't changed so leave the bloody name alone and stop confusing people, very loudly. That big thing with the long neck and tail is a brontosaurus, too.

    1366:

    Seagull appears to have started using a VPN.

    Seagull's IP address blocked.

    They will keep trying. For years their behaviour has been to push against restrictions and usually they've gotten away with it. At times the comment section has been all about them, either people annoyed at them or people playing along with them. Egoboo and challenge all in one place.

    I hope (for your sake) I'm wrong, but decades of experience with adolescents argues I'm not :-(

    1367:

    I didn't want to get into having to argue the difference between glamour and porn, or against the encroachment into the UK of US ideas of "morality" which hold that the merest glimpse of a digitised nipple is enough to permanently destroy someone's mind.

    What makes this pretty funny (ha-ha) sense is that I'm (barely) old enough to remember the page three girls, many of them being sixteen or seventeen.

    The nipples weren't obviously as bad when they were analog and under-age.

    (We used to have same kind of pics in a yellow paper in the Eighties, too, not anymore.)

    1368:

    ...the Online Safety Bill the Tories are bringing in

    "And don’t forget that this regulatory regime is expected to be extraterritorial. If you are not in the UK but your site, service, or app can be accessed by anyone in the UK, you’re fair game."

    how on earth is that supposed to be enforced?

    i mean the japanese government is not bereft of shitty ideas about internet regulation nor of the will to sign up to their instantiations but still

    1369:

    If you think that's bad, avoid looking at botanical taxonomy.

    1370:

    The USA does it, using its bullying power, and the UK ungovernment is trying to be a 'mini me' in all respects. They don't seem to realise that our imperial powers are all delusional bullshit,

    1371:

    how on earth is that supposed to be enforced?

    It's not.

    It's an attempt to deliver on an unwise electoral promise by David Cameron that took on a Frankensteinian life of its own because please-won't-somebody-think-of-the-children has become an unackowledged touchstone of conservative politics (and by "conservative" I include Tory-Lite New Labour).

    The original idea was to require age verification for access to websites with adult (certificate 18 or equivalent) content. Then mission creep came in due to scares over Facebook bullying in schools. Added to which, a security/police desire to monitor all communications implicitly requires all communication channels to be licensed (thus making them easier to tap into) ...

    And there's no recognition that the whole proposal is massively intrusive on small scale/non-corporate/non-profit stuff like this blog.

    1372:

    In the case of this bill becoming law, maybe Tor could fix you up a blog on their site.

    1373:

    Charlie & everybody:
    So, then: It's UP TO US, the enthusiastic readers & contributors to police the blog to keep the Seagull ( & other malicious persons ) OUT?
    Yes?
    Which raise the Q: - What about all the other "open" blogs & web-sites with comments boxes, like ( In my case "Diamond Geezer" & "London Reconnections" - are we all in the same boat?

    1374:

    If it is like previous (pre-Brexit) regulations, it IS enforced to some extent. Quite a long time back, it became impossible to order many things online from Germany and some other places, because the UK demands for such things were far to onerous to bother with. We have more recently had the problem with "this page in not available in your region". None of that impacts on the abusive sites it is SUPPOSED to be dealing with, of course.

    1375:

    That's a real pity. There aren't many sites left online where you can have an intelligent conversation.

    1376:

    Greg: What about all the other "open" blogs - are we all in the same boat?

    Yes.

    1377:

    There's a business opportunity here for someone.

    1378:

    If a blogging site elsewhere in the world just happened to host a blog by a well-known Scottish SF author, would that author be held accountable for ensuring that all commenters followed UK regulations?

    What about a reporter with a column in an online newspaper that allows comments?

    YouTube channels? Will Nigel Danson have to disable comments on his?

    Or does this only apply to British sites?

    This has the potential to be a pretty serious assault on British journalism, as well as blogging…

    PS. I ran the article by a friend who's a lawyer, positing the 'what if a Canadian was to host the blog for a UK writer?', and he said that the Canadian would be OK as long as they never visited the UK, but it looks like if they did they might be prosecuted there…

    1379:

    I would have to read the bill very carefully to check, as would OGH, and the gummint isn't averse to sneaking extreme clauses into the last draft in the (often justified) hope that nobody notices.

    1380:

    Which raise the Q: - What about all the other "open" blogs & web-sites with comments boxes, like ( In my case "Diamond Geezer" & "London Reconnections" - are we all in the same boat?

    Yes. On a blog I've dealt with over the years we have had our share of tailholes who would change their name / email to get by being told to just go away. The subject of the blog is people in power who abuse that power sexually. So we attract a lot of "defenders".

    Most of them don't try very hard. And we have had some success with IP blocking.

    The biggest thing we do is to moderate EVERYONE new until they get 2 (pick a number) comments approved. But we're on Wordpress and I have no idea how Charlie would implement such here. Or ever want to do so.

    1381:

    There's a business opportunity here for someone.

    Yes. But to date those "opportunities" cost blogs way too much for the little folk. Especially blogs and other sites with no direct income. More ads anyone?

    1382:

    Maybe this is one for the crypto buggers. What is needed is some kind of system a bit like DHT and torrents; something where the content is hosted in bits and pieces distributed across all users' own computers, and the author is securely anonymised. Maybe indeed something like that exists already, and is just waiting for something like this to get everyone to start using it.

    1383:

    It's an attempt to deliver on an unwise electoral promise by David Cameron that took on a Frankensteinian life of its own because please-won't-somebody-think-of-the-children has become an unackowledged touchstone of conservative politics (and by "conservative" I include Tory-Lite New Labour).

    In the US the big thing that keeps popping up is forcing big tech to implement "secure backdoor entry points" only for use by legal law enforcement agencies. Periodically politicians of every stripe seem to jump on this. So far this has been beaten back but it shows just how uninformed US politicians can be on tech issues.

    1384:

    Charlie, this is an actual offer.

    I have a blog set up (wordpress, sigh). I pay (trivially) for hosting (and a domain from someone else). I could easily add another blog... and I am in the US. If you want to experiment, email me.

    1385:

    "Degrees" { Or not } C / F / K / R - or even Reamur (?)
    Shows that things have moved on: Defining everything w.r.t the Boltzmann constant is"ideal" but a real bugger to actually measure, I suppose.
    For practical purposes the old "Absolute Zero - to - triple point of Water" scale will do ....

    EC @ 1365
    Agreed.
    Wonder if Patel will now try to deport him?
    ...
    Which reminds me - it seems that Grease-Smaug & Mad Nad are backing Truss for not-quite-fascist leader ...
    Which leads, inevitably to the slogan: GoNads for Truss!
    Or maybe not?
    And Badenoch is in the "burn the planet down" crowd - how profoundly stupid.
    ...
    Which brings me back to the problem posed by the Shitgull & others & the "online safety bill & David L @ 1285
    but it shows just how uninformed US politicians can be on tech issues. - IDENTICAL to the problems with our ignorant & stupid politicos.
    I mean the aforementioned "Gonads" ( oops ) is our "Culture & Media" minister, right?

    1386:
    "secure backdoor entry points"

    ISTR that in the New American Commonwealth of the Empire Games trilogy, that this was a minor background point. The government there was serious about no back doors in computer systems for whatever reason.

    An enlightened view from a privacy point of view. Also informed by the ~USA having far stronger computing chops, and that any deliberately-left holes would be quickly found and exploited by the NSA and other TLAs of that ilk.

    ~oOo~

    I've been following this blog for years. A shame that the Seagull is doing their best to wreck it. Just went through something similar with Graydon Saunders' Google Groups. Someone chose not to play by the rules, so Graydon had to take everything down.

    1387:

    The government there was serious about no back doors in computer systems for whatever reason.

    Yup.

    At the time of the Revolution, the Empire/Commonwealth was just about up to ENIAC levels of computing tech.

    Then the Clan exiles showed up with their crib notes on revolutions and their failures modes ... and a bunch of other insights.

    Among these: they knew that by 2003 in the US time line computers had become absolutely vital tools without which you couldn't organize a modern economy. And that they could be hacked/perverted/sabotaged. And that the US infosec community would have a 60 year lead on the Commonwealth out-of-the-gate, and even with a catch-up rate of 5 years every 12 months (impossible to sustain) or 2 years every 12 months (not implausible: see also South Korea after 1953), the Commonwealth would be behind for 20-50 years.

    So the Commonwealth absolutely had to prioritize computing and networking technology, but also had to ensure it was secure by design, or at least less insecure.

    (The security culture at Microsoft circa 1985-2005 would simply not have been tolerated. Ditto the original rlogin/rcp/rsh and ftp UNIX tools, or the NSA's bone-headed refusal to permit end-to-end encryption in the IP stack in the late 1980s.)

    1388:

    Secure anonymisation is only for the unthinking masses - you need to be one of millions of almost identical people to have a chance. Inter alia, you could probably identify me on the net (and I mean the whole thing) by my prose style and literary references alone. OGH is better known, and equally unusual. Once the spooks have your identity, no amount of crypto will protect you.

    1389:

    It is possible to do encrypted coms with official-only access correctly. But it pretty much requires the government to be the crypto-coms-provider, and it would not be cheap to do right.

    You set up a central server under an army base, which keeps a very large one time pad for every single client of the secure coms system. Lets call this base Ada. When Bob wants to send information to Cherise, Bob encrypts the message and the recipient with his copy of the one time pad the army base has for him, and sends it to Base Ada. Ada decrypts it. Saves the message to the harddrive that held the chunk of one time pad that just got used up (it is the same length) encrypts it again with Cherise's key, and sends it to her at the top of the minute (That is, xx.xx.00. Given decent traffic levels, this would defeat all attempts at social graph mapping.)

    This gives you coms absolutely proof against non-official intercept, along with records available for access with a search warrant.

    Anyone saying it is inherently impossible have not tried to solve it - though, granted, most schemes to do it are.. many orders of magnitude less secure than Base Ada would be.

    1390:

    Once the spooks have your identity, no amount of crypto will protect you.

    Also:

    HMG can prosecute and jail you for refusing to decrypt material of interest to them, or for refusing to hand over your private keys. (Of course, the maximum sentence for refusal to disclose your keys is shorter than for possession of some times of CSAM or other stuff -- eg. material incriminating you in a murder investigation -- so it might be in your interests to take it on the nose: but then again, who's to say they won't change the rules? Mostly this law gets used against autistic or paranoid schizophrenic geeks who can't cope with applied pressure by neurotypical cops.)

    And that's in the UK: you could potentially be carted off to a black site and waterboarded -- rubber hose cryptanalysis is a thing.

    1391:

    (The security culture at Microsoft circa 1985-2005 would simply not have been tolerated. Ditto the original rlogin/rcp/rsh and ftp UNIX tools, or the NSA's bone-headed refusal to permit end-to-end encryption in the IP stack in the late 1980s.)

    I'm reminded of the book 'Hackers' and its description of ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, used in the MIT AI Lab, which didn't use to have passwords and each user could access all memory.

    Perhaps it was fine in a very specific environment, but I think it'd be kind of a bad idea for basically any multi-user computer system.

    1392:

    You missed a twist: you use the OTP not for direct 1:1 plaintext/cyphertext conversion, but for an RSA key (or similar) which is used for a single block of text. So, say, 256 bytes of OTP gets used to encrypt 8Kb of text. Cracking the cyphertext will be very unproductive insofar as it will yield at most 8Kb of useful material, rather than being the keys to the kingdom.

    1393:

    "Anyone saying it is inherently impossible have not tried to solve it"

    Yes, THAT problem (and see #1394), but that's the wrong context. This is for producing a blog, where the spooks have a massive amount of plain text to work with. Even better for them, they have a significant alternative Web presence and literary output!) that can be compared against. They don't even try to crack the crypto, but use the content of the blog to identify the author; it's far easier than you think, and virtually impossible to prevent. In order to resolve the text style alone, you need a prose rewriter that is at least as sophisticated as the prose analysers the spooks have access to.

    The main reason that secure crypto works for the evil (and nominally good) people is that it is end-to-end, so you have to crack it rather than doing a simple plain text analysis.

    1394:

    Broken link - and sounds disturbingly interesting.

    1395:

    Charlie Stross @ 1360:

    WARNING: I've been doing some reading about the Online Safety Bill the Tories are bringing in, and my obligations under it as a result of running this forum.

    If it came to that would it be possible for someone else (not in the U.K.) to host a blog and have you as the major contributor? Or would that still put you in legal jeopardy?

    I know that you occasionally have guest contributors make blog posts. Could you do it the other way around?

    I think this is a good thing and I'd hate for you (and us) to lose it just because some people have to be assholes.

    1396:

    Robert Prior @ 1368:

    It's like what happened to UseNet. Once you kill-filed all the trolls, there was nothing left except for the idiots who didn't have sense enough not to argue with the trolls.

    1397:

    Robert Prior @ 1380:

    This has the potential to be a pretty serious assault on British journalism, as well as blogging…

    That may be a feature rather than a bug.

    1398:

    which didn't use to have passwords and each user could access all memory. Perhaps it was fine in a very specific environment, but I think it'd be kind of a bad idea for basically any multi-user computer system.

    The original Mac didn't use memory protection. And everything ran at ring 0 or whatever you want to call it. And when Apple started to do real system protections and such, with OS X I think, it created an uproar amongst a few. All of those confident programmers who said THEY did not need such training wheels. THEIR code never broke the memory boundaries assigned. So why did THEY have to follow such nonsense.

    1399:

    This is an unfortunate sequence of events. It seems that it hasn't passed into law yet, and with any luck perhaps an unusual fit of rationality will strike your parliament and it won't.

    If it does anyway, it seems from my reading of it that it would be entirely up to some UK government agency to decide who to prosecute and how. Antipope is probably too small fry to catch anyone's attention, but Charlie might not want to take the chance.

    It truly is a pity. If Charlie is willing, he could send the database to one of his trusted US fans, since this specific form of paternalism isn't being practiced here. That fan could use a pseudonym and it would probably be fine, even if they visited the UK at some point. But all that might be more trouble than it's worth.

    'Course, anyone can start a blog and call it "Inspired by Charlie Stross". You wouldn't even need his permission for that, though I doubt anyone here would do that without at least tacit approval. Point being, he wouldn't be legally liable.

    As for the feline in a hard mineral, does anyone know who that person is IRL? The threat of being doxxed may be the only thing that works.

    1400:

    I can add "inspired by Charles Stross' blog" to mine: https://mrw.5-cent.us

    1401:

    This is an example of what I was referring to by we dubiously have a constitution - Johnson has broken an invariable convention which is stated only in Erskine May (the rules of procedure), and there is nothing to stop him - or subsequent prime ministers refusing to table ANY confidence motion, which makes a mockery of the law.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-commons-bid-block-b2121439.html

    1402:

    I think you are missing the point.

    Charlie's worry is less the Seagull specifically and more another poster of more malicious intent turning up and posting stuff that gets him sanctioned under the proposed legislation.

    So threatening to dox that specific poster is not helpful and pretty damned horrible behaviour anyway.

    1403:

    I looked into this some years back, when someone published a paper on 'multiplying' one-time pads that made some implausible claims. Yup. You can multiply them, arbitrarily, but the more you do the more you lose security. Who'd a thunk it?

    But that doesn't mean the technique is impractical. As you say, multiplication is a good way of using megabytes to protect gigabytes.

    1404:

    Once upon a time I aggregated all the posts by some of the most prolific users on a forum and used them to seed a Markov chain text generator to produce fake posts imitating those users' styles. (IIRC it used a fragment (or whatever you call them) length of 3 words.) It was remarkable how realistically so very simple a process did indeed imitate their styles (and also needed very little hand-tidying to eliminate grammar/punctuation howlers that would otherwise give it away), and the general reaction when I posted samples of the output back to the forum was pretty much "fascinating, entertaining, and a bit frightening how close it is".

    (Doesn't work so well with the official list of Network Rail train delay excuses - sample size is too small and there's too much repetition - so the service on 217.155.46.54:46009 uses another permutation stage after the Markov stage to fudge around the deficiencies.)

    From the same forum, it was interesting to see how much difference there is between different people's ability to identify a user from their style. Some people needed to see many more posts than others did before they worked out this new user was a repetitive returning wanker again - depending on the reader, not the wanker. I mostly seemed to need few, which was useful since I was running it. Similarly some people found it remarkably hard to accept that new user N was not old user M who hasn't posted for a few months and has created a new login after forgetting their old one, but was actually recurrent wanker X pretending to be M for a "joke", when to me it was obvious from the start that the style was only an imitation and not even a good one. Maybe this explains the occasions on which I've happened across some critic praising novel X for being a good pastiche of the work of author Y, and on searching further have discovered that it's actually widely accepted that X is a pastiche of Y, much to my surprise since I know both X and Y and they've got fuck all in common as far as I can see.

    It's perhaps less obvious that the situation is much the same regarding the bits of "machine data" that float around the place in association with human activity on the net. For example a recurrent wanker is barely any less identifiable even when only reading the site, from what they leave in the system logs, than when they start posting things and giving you prose to identify; or, I've also been able to discover and keep an eye on someone sending malicious emails about me behind my back from similar scraps of machine data. Hence all the hype about HTTPS is a load of shite: anyone who can snoop the data in the first place doesn't much mind about not being able to decrypt the payload, since they can still snoop on people very nearly as effectively by means of all the other characteristics of the transmission.

    However, what I call a useful standard of evidence for stuff like this would probably often not even be worth trying to present in court. A nerdy enough lawyer ought to be able to argue the arse off a court over the numerous possible ways for such data to still be collected without the accused having anything to do with it. The point about "secure anonymity" is not about preventing the collection of the data that suggests but doesn't prove, but about keeping things to the level of "between you and me I know bloody well who it is but I could never convince the court", and preventing any leap from that point to some hard evidence that actually can be used to prove something.

    Also, when I said "secure anonymity" I was intending a meaning inclined more towards "secure anonymity" rather than "don't tell them your name, Pike", and blithely ignoring considerations of how easy that would be to achieve :)

    1405:

    I think OGH was talking about encrypting a symmetric key with a public key, and using the symmetric key to encrypt the payload. You get the efficiency of the symmetric key and the security of the asymmetric encryption. Pretty standard practice these days.

    1406:

    Re: 'But I'm sure that neuroscientists will be on top of this ...'

    Oh well - we'll soon find out which neuro labs have to close because of outbreaks. Could really screw up lab results which would then put a real damper on funding . (Genetically designed rodents for lab work can get expensive. In general, rodents can catch COVID.)

    BTW - thanks for the Twitter thread. Really interesting map of the brain.

    https://thehighestofthemountains.com/images/brainwithquotes.jpg

    BLOOM also sounds interesting.

    https://towardsdatascience.com/bloom-is-the-most-important-ai-model-of-the-decade-97f0f861e29f

    Charlie:

    I haven't looked at the link re: legal responsibility for blog hosts in the UK but given the continuing popularity of sites like Wikipedia (and now BLOOM), how is this proposed law supposed to be applied to such multi-author, multi-user, multi-donor, multi-country, etc. sites?

    Greg:

    Quantum communications and teleportation? Not sure our species is ready for that based on past few years.

    1407:

    SECURITY / PROSECUTION / VICIOUS HACKER(S) / SHITGULL
    There is a possible way around this.
    What the shitgull is doing is Cyber-Stalking - and is, itself, already a criminal offence in the UK.
    IF ( Note the IF ) it can be shown that the shitgull's depositions are Cyber-stalking, then Charlie & all of us are in the clear - I think a download of the past interactions would show this to be the case - & she is not only banned by Charlie, but by the UK guvmint & we are in the clear.
    Might be worth thinking about?

    One slight problem - you might have to actually identify the shitgull, though if you have her actual IP address, that might not be too hard?

    1408:

    SFR
    Neither the inhabitants of Urras & Anarres nor the descendants of the Hainish were ready ( for the Ansible ) - but Shevek gave it to them, anyway. It's time ....

    1409:

    Sorry about this, heat getting to brain: What happens if we DO develop/(re)discover/invent the Ansible - turn it on & find ... it's full of traffic?

    1410:

    "What happens if we DO develop/(re)discover/invent the Ansible - turn it on & find ... it's full of traffic?"

    Blish's Beep?

    1411:

    "THEIR code never broke the memory boundaries assigned."

    Knowing the original Mac, it was probably actually true. It had to be, otherwise it WOULD crash no matter how few or how trivial the violations.

    It made me sort-of-laugh the way that original Mac was praised as a paragon of reliability compared to DOS machines. When it came to actually writing programs for them, it was very much the other way round. The Mac was touchy as fuck and you could crash it by looking at it in a funny way, so every time you tried some new code you could definitely expect it to crash, and yourself to spend the rest of the day in a crash/reboot cycle trying to find where its bollocks were falling off and why, until you ended up dreaming about floppy drives from hearing the thing grinding away for five minutes on every reboot. On a DOS machine, by contrast, the chances were that trying some new code would probably not crash it (although of course it still might not work); and if it did crash, it only took several seconds to reboot, and that was only if Ctrl-C didn't work, which it quite often did.

    It's possible that users saw it as reliable because Apple valgrinded (or whatever) every package to buckfuggery and back before allowing it to be sold, but I prefer explanations along the lines of it being so bloody difficult to program the thing (and for the bosses, involved so much more paying people to sit around doing nothing than to actually write code) that nobody bothered and so there was far less random dubious software around for it than there was for DOS, and for those few that did bother, it was so bloody flaky that if a program had even the slightest susceptibility to crashing they'd never be able to finish writing it.

    1412:

    We get to find out what all the various pangalactic alternative versions of cats and porn are like.

    1413:

    posting stuff that gets him sanctioned under the proposed legislation.

    The analysis I saw suggested that it could easily be the stuff OGH actually writes that causes the problem, because there's no mens rea (intent) required, just a "can be seen badly" test. All this stuff about overthrowing governments, supposed "fantasy" that treasonously slanders Her Royal Highness and so on.

    The liability attaches to the UK resident regardless of point of publication. As with Assange publishing in Russia but offending the US. Universal jurisdiction is widely accepted these days for good reasons (CSAM) and bad (thoughtcrime)... but even the bad isn't universally agreed, not even at the "what's the age of consent" level (you can marry at 8 but not show a nipple on the net until 21? (or never, if you're a woman in the USA)).

    Speaking of which, there's yet another round of nipple panic on Instagram ATM, some fashion show had a bunch of clothes-hangers get their nipples displayed and the puritans are fair frothing. It does make me think that some trouble-making warmer country should have "National Nude Month" just to completely fuck up everything... I wonder of Portugal would be game?

    1414:

    As a (former?) professional nudist I am somewhat familiar with the laws in that regard in Australia. Where the answer is "don't be a dick about it". In slightly dressed up legal language, but also very seriously. This is the country where a Prime Minister in budgie smugglers gets asked political questions rather than "WTF bro".

    Naked at the beach? Probably ok. Naked at a beach known for nudity... why is anyone even asking? Naked at the beach trying to piss people off... the constables would like a word.

    Everywhere else... you need a reason. Doesn't have to be a good one. Can be "I like getting my tits out" (I kid you not). Can be "World Naked Bike Ride" or after some discussion with the cops about Saturday afternoon downtown... "World Undies and/or Body Paint Ride".

    https://theconversation.com/avoid-a-bum-steer-this-summer-heres-what-australian-law-says-about-public-nudity-107525

    Breast feeding... probably not while giving a news conference to discuss world affairs, but then again maybe that is ok. Note that the outrage here was about the film crew intruding, not the Prime Minister breast feeding...

    https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/andrew-dickens-monday-afternoons/audio/onenews-criticised-for-filming-jacinda-ardern-breastfeeding/

    1415:

    It looks almost certain that OGH would be outside the "major online platforms" that have to remove "legal but harmful" content, but he would have to age-filter and prevent children accessing "legal but harmful to children" (a different standard!) Would be difficult to do even if it was the government operating the website, and the definition of LBHTC is deliberately vague with the reprehensible ministers talking about bullying to make it clear that they mean "Charmaign cried when she read that" rather than CSAM.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-bill-supporting-documents/online-safety-bill-factsheet

    https://www.techradar.com/au/features/uk-online-safety-bill

    https://www.article19.org/resources/uk-online-safety-bill-serious-threat-to-human-rights-online/

    1416:

    HMG can prosecute and jail you for refusing to decrypt material of interest to them, or for refusing to hand over your private keys.

    this is where steganography can be ur friend - hide ur material of interest to them in pr0n and then encrypt the pr0n

    course if they were any good they'd diff the pr0n against the original and come back with further questions, so ideally u would have to make ur own pr0n, which would be a lot of effort for some of us

    1417:

    Thet unly wurks of yew ken corn seal thy existenz awf tha 'crypted staff, thou.

    Und envotes da awforitties two jest keap beeting youse untol use toll thyme wot deys wont too here.

    1418:

    original Mac was praised as a paragon of reliability compared to DOS machines

    Well, it was, at least from an end-user perspective.

    Was it harder to program than a simple DOS machine? Yes, because windowing interfaces are harder than command line ones. But my Mac crashed way less than my Amiga or my father's PC…

    Back when I had a Mac Plus I bought a metric shit-tonne of shareware, lots of really odd programs, and very rarely had crashes even with those.

    1419:

    Re:'... but he would have to age-filter and prevent children accessing "legal but harmful to children" (a different standard!)'

    IMO, it'd be simpler to checkbox each site's profile on whatever parameters any legislation wants to monitor as part of the site registration process.

    Then as an additional precaution, get Google/whatever search engine to filter based on the user/searcher profile. Pretty sure that most PCs/Macs/Android laptops/computers have multi-user functions: Mom, Dad, kid (age group). Also pretty sure that Google can quickly/easily tell who the user is - not just via password but what they're searching for and maybe even their physical unique/hard to duplicate keyboard/typing style. (Harder to duplicate than writing style.) Easy way to test this is just look for what ads pop up when different members of the household use the same machine.

    A lot of laws have some sort of 'grandfather clause' - would this? Might have more impact on new sites.

    Completely forgot Reddit - it's been around a long time, it's huge, has a pretty wide-ranging topic areas for discussion (some heated) and mentions if a particular area might not be suitable for some users/visitors. (Reddit does mention its code of conduct up front and has contactable moderators - similar to how Charlie runs this blog.)

    Enforceability - I'm guessing that if most gov'ts don't have the resources to go after financial scammers, they're unlikely to have the resources to go after a broader range of nogoodniks.

    1420:

    I'm guessing that if most gov'ts don't have the resources to go after financial scammers, they're unlikely to have the resources to go after a broader range of nogoodniks.

    How much of that is lack of resources, and how much is lack of will?

    1421:

    they're unlikely to have the resources to go after a broader range of nogoodniks.

    I expect that they will string up a couple to encourage the rest. And show that the law isn't the complete farce everyone else thinks it is.

    Obviously they will need to prosecute one of the GooFacTwit ones, but that will take years and result in a negotiated settlement "we'd like you to obey the law but we agree that we can't make you".

    Meanwhile find a small-but-visible case and make an example of them. Probably several. But it can't be CSAM since that's illegal regardless of the new law, it will have to be "hurting the feelings of a Conservative Party member or employee", or "saying something legal but inflammatory". Maybe they could go after the BBC for reporting on the antics of the government? "legal but harmful"... sounds entirely accurate, knowing what your government does is really bad for everyone's mental health. If only there was an offence "bringing the law into disrepute".

    1422:

    This is where I think governments do actually understand how impossible it is to police the internet. They know that fixing it so even the most popular scams are impossible would require major changes to both internet and law, and those changes would break a lot of things. So they shrug and put out another ad campaign blaming the victims.

    Realistically you can look at China and Russia to see just how hard it is to stop scammers (from either side!) Both have considerable restrictions on internet use, China has vigorous censorship, both have huge problems with malicious gossip as well as scams (fake vaccines, fake vaccine certificates, but also human trafficking and similar. Oh, and simple fraud ranging from fake products sold online through to invoice scams etc).

    What the internet does, by design, and likely inherently, is make international scams easier and prosecution of them thus harder. Not so much "prosecute one scammer", but our legal systems don't scale, so more scammers = lower probability of conviction per scam. Thus the call centres in India that exist purely to scam Americans, despite that being an actively prosecuted crime in both India and the USA. There's just too many and prosecutions take too long for it to be effective.

    One aspect is that scams that scale generate enough money to either bribe law enforcement or entangle prosecutions to make each one even more tedious and expensive for the legal system. And for countries like the UK where the legal system is currently suspended pending either complete collapse or a major injection of money... hey, let's pass a new law that creates a whole lot of new and exciting work for the legal system!

    I don't have a solution, or even any real suggestions, I'm just aware of some of the more obvious problems.

    1423:

    There's the alternate, "heroic martyr" case. In this version, OGH is chosen at random as the exemplar of why The New Law Shall Not Be Mocked, with "A Bird in Hand" chosen as the example that this site is meant to pervert the Youngs.

    Never mind that it's written above the reading level of certain politicians of some countries...

    Anyway, the sheer, brazen imbecility of the persecution elevates Charlie to Scottish National Hero status, it spurs calls for Scottish Independence, and all his books come back into print as he is rediscovered as the great lion of northern literature that he is. And a Bird in Hand is ceremoniously read aloud after the consumption of every vegan haggis across the land. AFTER the children are put to bed with suitable tech to keep them occupied.

    Yes, this is slightly tongue in cheek and in questionable taste at best, but the point is that political prosecutions can backfire, badly. Assuming the prosecutors are aware of this, they'll more likely to go after kiddieporn or case-of-the-week sites to burnish their credentials, rather than pick on someone whose site so obviously not aimed at harming children that loss:gain probability falls heavily on the bad side.

    That said, I for one would be happy if this place had the Wordpress option that first posts by new accounts had to be approved, so that banned posters didn't spam the page before being taken down.

    1424:

    "Yes, because windowing interfaces are harder than command line ones."

    That's not what I was talking about though. I'm talking about it being a sod to program because (a) there are a metric shitload of twiddly things to get wrong regarding memory management and avoiding accidental access violations and the like (even when you're not programming the GUI); (b) it's vanishingly unlikely that you can get any of them wrong even in the most insignificant way and not have it crash; (c) a crash invariably means a total lockup with the only way out being to reboot it; (d) rebooting the machine does mean several minutes of stress-testing the head seek mechanism in the disk drive, because of the stupidly inefficient design which assumes that disk access is as fast as memory therefore it doesn't matter if you have to open about a thousand files to read a 20-byte chunk of data from each one (even if you've already used that chunk not five minutes ago - no caching; no point if the disk's as fast as memory...). Then add a few more minutes on top of that to load an IDE, for the same reasons.

    This means that every time you're ready to test some code, it will almost certainly crash; you then have to wait through a long enough period of forced inactivity to go and have an actual shit before you can even start looking for the reason; by that time you'll have lost most of your mental state regarding the code; whatever the reason is it will be hideously obscure; and the cure will be similarly obscure, so you probably won't get it right first time and will have to go round the loop again. Then repeat for all the other mistakes.

    This process takes forever, and is mindbendingly tedious and incredibly boring. So not many people want to do it unless they are being paid, and not many people who might be doing the paying are all that happy with seeing the people they're paying doing nothing half the time. I'm pretty sure also that before you could sell software "for the Mac", you had to get it officially passed by Apple. And programming tools were a lot harder to get hold of than for DOS, and the programming manual was huge - something like 9 ruddy great encyclopedias (and only one and a half of them for the GUI) IIRC. So even people who did want to program them at home had much more to do to get up and going than DOS people did. Then with the machine being much less popular than the PC in any case, there was a far smaller variety of stuff floating around that such people had written.

    The one "advantage" of the situation was that things that could make the program crash almost certainly would make it crash, so people were a lot less likely to fail to find them even with little testing, but would know the program crashed before they tried to release it. I did find some shareware programs that didn't work, but they did fail without crashing so you could still get out of them.

    DOS on the other hand was a lot more forgiving. When you needed to reboot, it only took long enough to have a good scratch of your arse. Often you didn't need to reboot, because the crashed program was quite often still listening to the keyboard enough for Ctrl-C to get you out of it even if nothing else was working. There were a lot fewer things to get wrong, and they were usually not so obscure to find. And you were a lot less likely to run into a crash when you tried some new code out.

    The thing is that DOS often didn't really care if a program pissed all over some bits of memory it wasn't supposed to. So it's quite possible to write a program that misbehaves egregiously but never have it crash. It's not until it's being used on a lot more different machines with different configurations that it becomes apparent that once in a while a few of the bytes it pisses on actually do matter and undesirable consequences ensue (possibly even long after closing the program down), etc. etc. So while on the Mac it was pretty hard to cock something up and get away with it, on DOS it was rather easy, but much harder to test for. The consequence was that there was an awful lot of software that did things it didn't oughter that worked where it was written but often didn't in the wild, not only from free sources but from supposedly diligent commercial ones too.

    1425:

    "it will have to be "hurting the feelings of a Conservative Party member or employee", or "saying something legal but inflammatory"."

    But that's already illegal too. I can't remember what the offences are called - probably something along the lines of "content likely to inflame or distress" - but they apply to stuff posted on social media regardless of the servers being foreign, and they've been around for a good decade or more. And bullying is illegal, although with kids you run into all kinds of "too young to prosecute/do other legal things to" difficulties. In fact it doesn't seem to be aimed at anything that isn't illegal already, it's just going after people who aren't the ones doing those things because they can't be arsed to go after the ones who are.

    1426:

    That said, I for one would be happy if this place had the Wordpress option that first posts by new accounts had to be approved, so that banned posters didn't spam the page before being taken down.

    That can lead to some amusing comments that can be saved. For some reason this other blog for a year or two had a strange attractor for "spell casters". Long comments about some sob story then how a "spell caster" fixed all their ills. Almost funny. Of course each comment had a link associated with it to some really weird domain name.

    1427:

    Article from The Atlantic:

    COVID Won’t End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking.

    It's an interesting idea. Second-hand Covid could become as big a health threat as second-hand smoke?

    1428:

    Und envotes da awforitties two jest keap beeting youse untol use toll thyme wot deys wont too here.

    "social engineering", innit, but aiui people coming round to ur house and beating information out of u isn't really the problem encryption was created to solve

    1429:

    That sounds disturbingly plausible. But I'm kind of reluctant to play that game because some countries are doing the "you have to be born before year X to buy tobacco" which... I don't see anyone doing that with vaccines. Not until covid starts impacting billionaires, anyway.

    1430:

    The original Mac didn't use memory protection. And everything ran at ring 0 or whatever you want to call it. And when Apple started to do real system protections and such, with OS X I think, it created an uproar amongst a few. All of those confident programmers who said THEY did not need such training wheels. THEIR code never broke the memory boundaries assigned. So why did THEY have to follow such nonsense.

    Well, yeah, I think the Mac and the ITS were different in at least one significant respect: ITS was a time-sharing multi-user system while the Mac was (and is still!) at its heart meant to be a single-user system.

    I say this even though modern computers are really multi-user computers. It's not that long ago that (home-use) Windows changed from the model "everything runs as the administrator user because that's just more convenient" to having separate administrator and user accounts. I could run basically any of the computers at home as a server (and that's basically how I use my Raspberry Pis), but Windows and Mac OS don't make it do that out of the box.

    Even having multiple users on my Windows machine confuses some programs. Many assume they're running on a single-user machine, and licensing gets confused by multiple users. (Steam is annoying here as it's sometimes per-user but sometimes per-machine.)

    I'd argue that for a networked multi-user computer the memory and account protections are more important, if not essential, than for a single-user computer not on a network, or just using the modem to call a BBS. Of course, as said, basically all our computers we think of as computers (and many more) are networked multi-user computers nowadays, so the other way of doing things doesn't matter anymore (except in for example hobby circumstances).

    As for DOS programming, when I fiddled with that, it was sometimes pretty easy to crash the computer to a state needing a power cycle. Of course the hard disk boot made it faster than booting it up from a diskette. Turbo C was especially fun with this, as it initialized pointers as null pointers, that is, binary representation all zeroes. Using them for anything without checking would then just start writing in the memory at the address zero, and conveniently the interrupt table was sitting in memory starting from zero. So, everything crashed and only power cycle would help.

    At some point the compilers and my development 'skills' developed to the point where I mostly don't run any code that does have any warnings or which doesn't pass static code checkers.

    1431:

    basically all our computers we think of as computers (and many more) are networked multi-user computers

    You mean like the internet-connected computer that I use to monitor air pollution at my house? AFAIK it's only single core but the box does contain at least two independent 32 bit microprocessors. One for the wifi, one for the nominal purpose.

    Mind you, my "simple" solar setup includes at least four CPUs, because there's bluetooth on two bits (quite likely each BT board has its own CPU) and two more are "smart" so I expect they're computers. The good news is that they don't connect to the internet, I have to connect them to my phone via bluetooth to install new firmware.

    Also, don't forget the completely separate computer inside the CPU of your desktop or laptop computer, and another on the motherboard.

    1432:

    »This is where I think governments do actually understand how impossible it is to police the internet.«

    … but far more likely where the IT-elite discovers the full meaning of "You and what {army|police force|court of law|lawyer} ?"

    I have been harping about this for a couple of decades now, but no political problem /ever/ had a technological solution, because the very definition of "political problem" is that it has no such "easy" solutions.

    What the IT-elite and in particular the IT-liberalists have utterly failed to do is engage in politics.

    As long as we didnt hurt anybody too badly, we were allowed "self-rule", but now that 45% of the hydro-carbon energy-supply for the US eastern seaboard has been shown to be at risk to script-kiddies, that is rapidly coming to an end.

    The quality and content of regulation depends entirely on who is writing it, and notably absent are the IT-elite, which is insanely proud of never getting into "dirty politics".

    When this or that regulation look more or less unhinged to us IT-elites, we have nobody to fault but ourselves, because we not only failed to try to get a seat at the table where it was written, we made a big show out of not even going near the building.

    The DotCom years made the IT-elite think that the "InterNet" was a flat global space, elevated above all kinds of politics.

    "InterNet" as a term was coined to talk about "Inter-connected Networks" because it was obvious to everybody at the time that different networks would have different politics, what with ARPANET being one of the networks &c.

    What we are seing is the reemergence of that original mental model of the InterNet.

    The german network have well-justified hang-ups about nazis, on the chinese network the hangups are all about democracy and human rights, on the french network they are about language and so on.

    Needless to say, on the UK network it will be all about protecting the class-structure of society.

    And the regulations work, primarily through the "cooling effect" they have on reasonable and intelligent people, as we have already seen with OGH starting to wonder if this debate-forum is worth the risk.

    The IT-liberalists can add all the encryption they want, but it will not stop the advance of regulation and it may well risk regulation of encryption as a "dangerous technology", just like certain parts of chemistry (poisons, explosives), mechanics (weapons), biology (GMO) and physics (fusion/fission) are already regulated.

    Want to write your own encryption algorithm ?

    Better get yourself an Encryption-Permit at the window next to weapon-permits...

    So yeah, I know who will win this battle: The people who got dirty in politics and who can therefore say "You and what {army|police force|court of law|lawyer} ?"

    1433:

    Moz
    Re: "National Nude month" - try photos on the Ile du Levant - as IIRC, described by R.A.H.

    1434:

    "It is possible to do encrypted coms with official-only access correctly. But it pretty much requires the government to be the crypto-coms-provider, and it would not be cheap to do right.

    You set up a central server under an army base, which keeps a very large one time pad for every single client of the secure coms system. Lets call this base Ada. When Bob wants to send information to Cherise, Bob encrypts the message and the recipient with his copy of the one time pad the army base has for him [...]"

    Key Distribution. How do you transfer megabytes (gigabytes?) of one-time-pad key from the government "secure" site to the user.

    OTP is less secure than Public Key Encryption

    1435:

    »OTP is less secure than Public Key Encryption«

    Only if you totally disregard how a society actually works with respect to responsibility and the laws which assign it.

    1436:

    Well, yeah, I think the Mac and the ITS were different in at least one significant respect: ITS was a time-sharing multi-user system while the Mac was (and is still!) at its heart meant to be a single-user system.

    Well. Sort of.

    My original IMPLIED point was every bit of code "back in the day" could access all of memory. And those "I'm a great programmer so quit putting limits on me" folks just didn't get the security aspects. So Macs have a big hole to dig out of and, like Windows, are still digging. Within a few weeks of the initial Mac release there were those cute background tasks that would do all kinds of useful (or pretty) tricks. And I was a big early user of Norton Utilities back in the days of DOS to do useful things like resorting a director folder into useful lists by re-writing the actual directory. And all those keyboard task managers who would fight over which one had final say over what happened when you pressed keys.

    Linux is in better shape here but without (love it or hate it) MS Office and similar plus an inconsistent UI it lost the desktop battle decades ago. (It is possible for Linux to stage a comeback but it will be a very long uphill slog.)

    As a consultant I always set up client Macs and/or Windows with a separate Admin account (NOT named "Admin") and with their normal day to day account as something different. And for a while now with a "backup" admin account. I get asked / fussed at about doing it that way and have gotten to the point of saying "I'm the computer nerd, you're not. Lets just do it this way and your chances of your bank balance being drained will be less." The point of this being if you get asked for your admin credentials, know why before typing in that password.

    There is a movement in IT systems admins where the slogan is "Treat users like adults and give them admin privileges." Of course every company I see doing that has almost all of these users only using horizontal software on their local system. Everything that is specialized is web/cloud based. So when they totally screw up their system they are just handed another one. With the previous one placed in the "to be wiped and re-issued" pile.

    Heck, my own personal systems have admins as separate accounts.

    1437:

    There is a movement in IT systems admins where the slogan is "Treat users like adults and give them admin privileges."

    Well, yeah, depends. At least in the companies (of more of the IT security persuasion) the usual way of doing things is to give two accounts to users who need them: The regular account and then an admin one, to be used when necessary. I think (though I've no real personal experience here) the tools to administer these have gotten better with time.

    Storing (or at least backing up) everything in the cloud and then just re-initializing the laptop seems to be a working solution to storing stuff. For my work, I have basically email and related stuff, and the things I'm currently working on on my own computer and everything else (code, documentation, notes in many cases, and live deployments) live on a server somewhere else. I have admin access but I've mostly used it to kill the Mac OS audio server as it sometimes gets laggy.

    At home I've used separated admin and user accounts for as long as they have been possible on my systems. I remember vaguely how this created problems with Windows in the last millennium as many programs just assumed they had admin privileges.

    1438:

    I remember vaguely how this created problems with Windows in the last millennium as many programs just assumed they had admin privileges.

    Yes. And harking back to a previous comment it seems a lot of programmers on Windows don't know the difference between a user and a computer based on how they totally use the wrong register keys at times. Sometimes in the same code.

    Then you get to drivers for specialty mice and trackballs where on both Macs and Windows they store system level stuff in the User structure and user settings in the system wide settings.

    Then we get to the licensing of CAD software. Some of it licenses to the user's email, some to the system, some to the system AND AND AND logged in user, some to the system and user email and .....

    And as CAD users switch between software on a single system they look at the admins as being mean to them or just incompetent because they are the tip of the spear.

    1439:

    "OTP is less secure than Public Key Encryption"

    OTP is unbreakable if you do it correctly. Doing it correctly is fiendishly difficult.

    Before anybody says, doing it correctly includes placing oneself where rubber hose cryptanalysis cannot be applied.

    Public Key Encryption can always be broken by an attacker who can apply enough grunt, and relies for its security on that being more grunt than an attacker is likely to have.

    JHomes

    1440:

    It's wrong, anyway. You use a separate, one-off transfer mechanism that is protected against spoofing and copying to transfer the OTP - having to collect a password in person with ID is the simplest example of this - the spys, spooks etc. use other methods. Yes, there is the standard battle that your enemies will try to intercept and copy, but that's just like copying the private key.

    OTP if done right is 100% secure, but is limited in capacity. Hence the tricks to 'multiply' it at an acceptable loss of security.

    1441:

    I like it! Yes, you can do a lot there, and even produce some fairly decent satire. If I recall, there are a few examples of that.

    It would be easy to hide against amateurs, but it would be damn hard to produce (a) published books and (b) a blog AND hide from the professionals. And they aren't looking for evidence that will stand up in court - just enough to start the process that OGH described in #1392.

    1442:

    We are already quite a long way there - it is illegal in the UK to post in support of the democratically elected government of Palestine, for example.

    1443:

    how is this proposed law supposed to be applied to such multi-author, multi-user, multi-donor, multi-country, etc. sites?

    The law claims international (global) jurisdiction, NO exceptions.

    In reality the UK authorities have limited resources and reach, and they're unlikely to pick a fight with big, popular, foreign institutions (eg. wikipedia, the internet archive).

    But a UK-author blog hosted in the UK is an easy target to crush if they want to improve their performance metrics and add a cheap scalp to their list of successes.

    1444:

    if you have her actual IP address, that might not be too hard?

    Ha ha nope.

    IP addresses are assigned dynamically to customers of an ISP that owns a block of them. They can change, so to find out who the customer is you have to find away to twist the ISP's arm into disclosing which customer had the IP address in question at the time it was used.

    You then face the problem that if it's a broadband line, the IP address is typically shared between everyone in a household. And if they're running a public wifi hotspot -- or are a British Telecom landline customer whose router is supporting a BTWifi access point -- it could be just about anyone.

    Oh, and forget IDing them if it's a mobile device and they're running iOS or iPadOS -- both of which provide IP address anonymization (via randomization) as a feature, like having a built-in VPN. (The Seagull isn't doing this. I think.)

    And forget identifying them if they're using a VPN, too.

    1445:

    That's an interesting read but it seems to overlook Long COVID. It's just focussed on encouraging vaccination to reduce hospitalisations from an infection.

    1446:

    Everyone seems to be ignoring Long Covid, as if that makes it go away.

    I'm getting really tired of people ignoring potential long-term effects. Especially when they're the same people who panic over the hint of a possibility that they might have been exposed to a single fibre of asbestos…

    1447:

    1406 - Anecdata; I'd reckon to need 1 to 3 posts to be certain that $name is actually the Seagull's latest alias.

    1409 - Equally, and FWIW, my reasoning for rarely to never engaging with the Seagull are:-
    1. I find her to regularly be deliberately opaque, and frequently meaningless.
    2. When/if she replies to message of yours, she will be one or more of:-

    A- Insulting
    B- Condescending
    C- Actively threatening towards the other party.

    1413 - I recall (no "seem to" about this) being told that you had to do "special setup" (tutor's exact words) on a Mac text file before a compiler would even look at $new_file.

    1438 and 1439 - And there is another movement which refuses to allow users sufficient privileges to be able to do such "difficult technical tasks" as setting the date and time.

    1448:

    "I'm guessing that if most gov'ts don't have the resources to go after financial scammers, they're unlikely to have the resources to go after a broader range of nogoodniks."

    How much of that is lack of resources, and how much is lack of will?

    And how much of that is due to campaign contributions from the financial scammers? :-/

    1449:

    1413 - I recall (no "seem to" about this) being told that you had to do "special setup" (tutor's exact words) on a Mac text file before a compiler would even look at $new_file.

    No idea what you're talking about. At all.

    1438 and 1439 - And there is another movement which refuses to allow users sufficient privileges to be able to do such "difficult technical tasks" as setting the date and time.

    If you're working with a group of people doing things other that typing your own private documents, dates and times can be critical. More and more workgroups depend on knowing what the latest version is or how to get to yesterday's 10:00am iteration. And backups are based on time stamps to some degree. And let's not get into a server (in the office, data center, or cloud) and how wrong dates and times will wreak your offices' day.

    If your a lone wolf, set you date and time by hand. If you're in a modern setup with collaboration the goal, you'll just have to get over some of the group controls.

    My wife works for a bank now. Mostly from home. Her system is locked so tight she can't do anything until she's connected to the bank VPN. Not even a Google search or weather lookup. And no, there will be no exceptions for the VP or C level suite. And I don't mean a VPN into the universe like we're talking about Seagull using. I mean one where every bit of network traffic in or out of her laptop goes through the mother ship before exiting to the real world. Which is why she sees speed test results in the low teens instead of low 100s that comes into our house.

    From 40 years of experience, users setting their own things like date and time that need to be correct for things to work will fail way more often than the automated setups getting it wrong wrong. Way way more.

    1450:

    And how much of that is due to campaign contributions from the financial scammers?

    What is the difference between:

    Advertising the great benefits of day trading or futures for the common man

    Investing in crypto

    Amway

    A McDonalds franchise

    Now write some laws that are comprehensible.

    1451:

    And aren't reprehensible.

    1452:

    My wife works for a bank now. Mostly from home. Her system is locked so tight she can't do anything until she's connected to the bank VPN.

    Sarbanes-Oxley. The bank may be required to provide records of what their employees said and did in the process of carrying out their work to a court, either civil or criminal at any time. The VPN connection ensures that any network traffic can be captured, logged and date-stamped to provide a trail of evidence and that includes Google and other internet searches ("Alexa, which offshore banking nations don't permit US government snooping and don't have an extradition treaty?")

    1453:

    Why does everybody want miracles? :-)

    1454:

    Oh I know why. I was just using it as an example of how not having admin rights is only a subset of many lock down situations on assigned computers.

    And for giggles the bank is switching to a new HR platform and has not yet made it so employees can fully access things like heath care and pension information outside of their company log in. And as a fairly new hire she went through all of these training on what she couldn't do. Print, take screen shots, etc... So aside from saving web pages of her new hire options, we had to "trust" we had the right choices. Official word is they are working on it.

    My family has an odd set of experiences to tie this all together. I've been doing systems admin for small (under 20 employees) businesses for decades. And in my immediate family and their SOs we have.

    A health care working in the transplant area A airline employee working in back office corporate situations A quality engineer dealing with construction and food packaging issues in separate jobs A manager dealing with low level auditing software installed way below the hood of sensitive systems An auditor career now working for a startup developing software to automate things like SOX audits. Plus my time with a blog dealing with sexual abuse victims.

    Anyone wanting an earful on various laws, rules, audits that aren't useful, and so on, I can loop them into a family member.

    1455:

    Oh well. Mark down.

    That last paragraph was supposed to be a list of items but I forgot to preview and thus leave a blank like between each item.

    1456:

    Sad part is, we're going on here about politics, and this is a SFF blog.

    Why aren't we going completely 2001 apeshit over the James Webb telescope first image:

    It's full of stars galaxies!

    1457:

    Heard it before about "users setting time wrong". How are users supposed to react to IS departments who never reset time as their machine clock drifts further and further from their $time_zone standard then? This happens (and has happened to my colleagues and myself more than once).
    I am arguing that, if IS will not allow users to set their clocks themselves, then IS must take rather than ignore responsibility for setting time regularly.

    1458:

    Why aren't we going completely 2001 apeshit over the James Webb telescope first image:

    Some of us are following. Closely. But are getting told it isn't worth the money. GDRFC

    1459:

    I am arguing that, if IS will not allow users to set their clocks themselves, then IS must take rather than ignore responsibility for setting time regularly.

    Some of use do it responsibly. Sounds like your admins don't/didn't.

    The problem is a typical office has folks who are competent to be their own admin and others who are pissed we will not let them download the "free" Excel macro that will make their life easier before having us look at it. And then their boss says "let them" we get to clean up why their browser searches go through kusdiosdf.com and they are now living amongst a sea of pop up ads.

    But having separate policies for each person leads to other SERIOUS conflicts in an office.

    1460:

    You pick up one HD platter/ current commercially popular storage medium full of key in person from a secure location when you set up your account. That would currently be about a terabyte of data.

    If your needs for secure coms exceed a terabyte per decade, well, buy more.

    The various tricks to "stretch" a one time key are pretty pointless given how low modern storage media costs are and would also mess up the log at Base Ada. Intercept of the key transfer is not really a meaningful concern if you do it like this, because the key would not only have to be stolen, it would have to be stolen without you noticing! That is an attack surface so hard that people would just try to bug your computer directly, and that is no longer a failure of the encryption method, it is a failure of physical site security instead.

    1461:

    Some of us are following. Closely. But are getting told it isn't worth the money. GDRFC

    I'll admit I had to look up GDFRC.

    That said, the our view of the universe embiggened itself a bit.

    One thing that's worth looking at is the whole SFF colonialist enterprise: we've gotta go out there and conquer it all, 'cuz it's out destiny/we're trashing Earth/blah profits blah power blah.

    Looking out and back 13 billion years made me at least realize that this was rather less realistic than a virus inside a mite on my left eyebrow screaming that it had to convert the entire Earth into copies of itself, or else existence had no meaning.

    What do you do in the face of infinity, when claiming it all is not an option? Curl up in despair? Say "Cool!" and look for someone to share the awesomeness with? Is the latter worth setting up an interstellar low bandwidth gossip line for, maybe? Or not?

    1462:

    What do you do in the face of infinity, when claiming it all is not an option?

    Refuse to deal and claim the universe is less than 10,000 years old? Once upon a time I thought this was a fringe position. Now I think it maybe be 1/2 or more of the US population. And similar in many parts of the world.

    Indulging me for a minute. Via Facebook I just learned that a neighborhood kid from my youth died. I hadn't talked to him since I was 11 years old or so. He was 5 or 6 years older than me. I wasn't tied to him on FB but saw the notice due to friends of friends of ...

    In the write up on FB by his widow she mentioned how he loved looking through his telescope. Which brought back memories. When I was around 9 or 10 he had a $100-$200 telescope. (This was 1963 or 1964.) He invited some of the neighborhood kids over to wait up to see Saturn's rings. I begged (maybe threw a fit) to get to do so. My mom dropped in every now and then through the night to make sure we were really watching things in the sky. Saturn would be visible around 2:30am. We looked at the moon and other interesting things while waiting.

    Saturn's rings were flat out amazing to me.

    There were a half dozen or so younger kids and one other guy his age. I was enthralled and wound up getting a $10 telescope for my next birthday that I used for 10 years or more. This night sort of started my fascination with space and science in general.

    My mother was a bit flabbergasted when she found we could have waited a month or two and seen Saturn and the rings just after dark. She just didn't get it.

    My mother would have likely forbidden me to stay up and join the group if she had realized the end result of all of this was that I would not agree with so many of her beliefs. Including a 6000 year old earth.

    1463:

    Asimov once calculated that it would take us less time than that to pack the whole universe with people as densely as Manhattan.

    1464:

    About the JWST: Some of us are following. Closely. But are getting told it isn't worth the money. GDRFC

    Heh.

    Hubble, over its launch and operating life -- including those shuttle servicing missions, without which it wouldn't be working -- had cost $9.6Bn over its operating lifetime as of 2009. Probably a couple of hundred million more by now, for the ground station upkeep and ongoing astronomy missions.

    JWST went way over budget and cost an enormous, whopping ... $10Bn, for which we get a ridiculously better telescope than Hubble.

    I can say some uncharitable things about the way costs mushroom on big-ass joint science projects bankrolled by US congress and operating internationally (remember ESA provided the launch system and a bunch of instruments?), and knock-on delays caused the budget to spiral, as did the pandemic (which was not NASA's fault). But the fact is that this is a ground-breaking design: nobody's flown a giant multi-mirror telescope in orbit before, much less one that needs to be cooled like JWST. (Look at the mirror array: their light gathering area is way bigger than the 200" Mount Palomar reflector, which was the world's biggest and best ground-based telescope for decades back in the 1940s-1960s).

    Hubble suffered from the defective primary, which on its own requires a shuttle mission to "fix" it, costing more than the telescope itself. It then needed more servicing missions during its life, which were chained to the shuttle, thereby ramping the costs horrendously -- with 20/20 hindsight it'd have been a lot cheaper to have built three or four of the things and launched them on disposable Titan IV stacks at 5-8 year intervals, the way the NSA flies spysats (which are an eerily similar design, aside from the instruments and the precise mirror focal geometry). But that goes under the "lessons learned", and JWST was -- if nothing else -- designed with that particular lesson firmly in mind.

    1465:

    The JWST just recently had a bit of sand or smaller poke a hole in a mirror. Which was to be expected multiple times over it's life. That it happened in the first few months has some wondering if this is just a normal statistical distribution in the expect hit rate? Or is there more tiny particles out past the orbit of the moon than guessed. Sophisticated guessing but still.

    We shall see.

    Someone in a local club is a distant cousin of James Webb. So from launch prep to start of testing on station we gave out updates on "Ed's" telescope at our weekly meetings.

    1466:

    The Poisson distribution is notoriously unintuitive. As yoy say, we shall see.

    1467:

    Refuse to deal and claim the universe is less than 10,000 years old? Once upon a time I thought this was a fringe position. Now I think it maybe be 1/2 or more of the US population. And similar in many parts of the world.

    Speaking as someone who's dealt with deep time stuff a lot in the last decade, I think most humans feel that their universe is less than 10,000 years old. They also feel that civilized and human are synonymous, and that there was nothing before civilization.

    Note the word feel. This is a subconscious bias. It can be consciously overcome with some struggle, but for the vast majority of people, it never gets done and it never needs to get done.

    This is in line with the geologists' idea that there are many yardsticks of time. In my experience, there's one yardstick, but people's mind use different heuristics for different parts of their lives, and don't bother to connect them. Thus, long ago means different things with personal history, family history, national history, civilization history, human history, evolution, geology, and cosmology.

    Connecting all these into one single time metric in your mind takes some real effort, and it does change how you view the world. For me, it gives a sense of real urgency to dealing with climate change that most people don't feel. In part, I think they don't feel it because their personal time, their notion of human history, and the duration of trash and GHGs are three unconnected balls of facts that they can't easily integrate across, so they see no urgency in changing their behaviors.

    With the JWST, people will go "cool images, billions and billions. Dude." Put that deep field picture on a personal spatiotemporal scale and things look very different indeed.

    1469:

    What do you do in the face of infinity, when claiming it all is not an option?

    For a long time I have felt that Milky Way Galaxy is quite sufficient to occupy our descendants for the rest of eternity.

    1470:

    For a long time I have felt that Milky Way Galaxy is quite sufficient to occupy our descendants for the rest of eternity.

    Four billion years isn't even close to eternity. That's how long the Milky Way is going to last as a unitary galactic entity before it gets wrecked by its collision with the Andromeda galaxy. The resulting combined mess will not be a stable galaxy structure until another three billion years or so pass after that.

    1471:

    Re: 'I'm getting really tired of people ignoring potential [COVID] long-term effects.'

    Just read an article that helped clarify some details for me re: the latest/7th COVID wave. Especially liked lay-person descriptions of some of the changes on the spike, immune evasion, clarification of what some recently published research articles actually mean/reveal, etc.

    Note: It's a longish read.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/ba5-omicron-variant-covid-surge-immunity-reinfection/670485/

    Re: Webb Telescope

    I've been looking at the photos ever since they were released - beautiful!

    Also really floored by how the new tech add-ons can scan exoplanet atmospheres for a variety of elements, water, weather ('air turbulence').

    Also read somewhere that public interest in these photos almost crashed the NASA server. If true, then NASA needs a better server now because I'm expecting that the Webb telescope is going to find even more spectacular images as it scans more and more of the universe. I 'know' that the universe is sorta homogeneous but there's enough of it that the bits that differ could be different beyond expectations. And when you're looking into the deep, deep past, these differences could be even weirder.

    Speaking of 'weird' - I zoomed in/enlarged a few areas of the photos and a couple of spots looked like limbs trying to punch/pull through a veil. Could work as cover art for an SF/F series book. [See the smallish projecting bit in the upper left hand side of the 'mountain-scape'.]

    Re: About never being able to reach/conquer the rest of the universe

    Flip-side of this is: hostile aliens can't reach/conquer us, physically at least. It's another story though if such aliens figure out social media and have quantum communications, i.e., they could easily get us to kill ourselves off just by planting some type of internet bug. Anyways - why expend resources and alien version of $$$ if you can wipe out your enemies remotely, for far less $$$, resources and potentially harmful personnel/species consequences.

    1472:

    Asimov once calculated that it would take us less time than that to pack the whole universe with people as densely as Manhattan.

    If it's the article I remember, he said it would take 3,000 years for all of the matter in the universe to be converted into human bodies, and 6,000 years for the volume of the universe to be filled with humans.

    Compound interest!

    1473:

    The last paragraph isn't very reassuring:

    Should we still care about preventing infections? If the answer is “not so much,” which is the implicit and sometimes explicit posture that America’s leaders have adopted, then BA.5 changes little. But if the answer is “yes,” as I and most of the experts I talk to still believe, then BA.5 is a problem.

    I was just talking to my banker today. He's had Covid twice, the second time being worse than the first (took him a month to recover, although still clinically a 'mild' case). His wife is a medical worker, and wants to quit and do something else. That's something no politician seems to be addressing — we've burned out a generation of medical staff, and have no real plans for remedying that even as we face an increase in chronic illnesses from both Covid sequelae and an aging population.

    If I was more cynical, I'd hypothesize that letting the poor die is actually the plan, to avoid pension obligations…

    1474:

    It's another story though if such aliens figure out social media and have quantum communications, i.e., they could easily get us to kill ourselves off just by planting some type of internet bug.

    That one's been written. Can't remember author or title, but I've read something where that was essentially the plot.

    1475:

    If I was more cynical, I'd hypothesize that letting the poor die is actually the plan, to avoid pension obligations…

    Makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Most poor are those people, who tend to vote for that party... :-(

    1476:

    Also read somewhere that public interest in these photos almost crashed the NASA server. If true, then NASA needs a better server now

    NASAs reluctance to change things seems to pervade the entire organisation. NASA-TV is still standard definition (possibly 720p at last) which regularly gets remarks during Dragon launches as it gets compared to the high definition feed SpaceX produces for its other launches. The talking heads on NASA-TV tend to be very last century style-wise. It's entirely possible that the spec for the public facing server was drawn up in the early days of the project and based on the typical speeds and bandwidths available to domestic users around the original planned launch date.

    1477:

    That one's been written. Can't remember author or title, but I've read something where that was essentially the plot.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution

    1478:

    "Speaking of 'weird' - I zoomed in/enlarged a few areas of the photos and a couple of spots looked like limbs trying to punch/pull through a veil."

    Yes, in the Carina Nebula picture there's a paper-clip-shaped thing a bit to the left and down of center. The NASA presenter said she had no idea of what it was, but it sure looks like a bow shock/magnetotail feature to me. So maybe something moving at high speed through the nebular material?

    1479:

    If I was more cynical, I'd hypothesize that letting the poor die is actually the plan, to avoid pension obligations…

    I had a conversation with a well-off person recently. They opined that things like climate change only affected the poor, and that wealth insulated them. I'm not sure whether they were messing with me or serious, but that attitude could be almost as damaging as deliberately targeting the poor for elimination.

    As an enviro, I do have to watch out for a "let them drive Teslas" level of clueless statement. On the one hand, yes, we're trying to electrify everything. On the other, I have to continually remind myself that, when a family's not getting enough food and parents have to drive to work in another city or county, they don't have the money for electric transportation, so somehow this needs to be solved too.

    1480:

    PilotMoonDog @ 1447:

    Long COVID is like getting lung cancer from second hand smoke.

    1481:

    I'm guessing that if/when we figure out an ansible, the frequency range and the modulation is going to be a LOT of channels. Oh... and are you assuming it's broadcast, and not focused? Certainly, I've got it focused in my stories.

    1482:

    My late ex was one of 11 charged in FL in the nineties, when Brevard County (this is where the Kennedy Space Center is) was trying to enforce a county anti-nudity ordinance on a national seashore (Playalinda Beach, with a wonderful view of the launch pads - yes, it's absolutely closed during launches, since if there's a BOOM, you'd be toast). The case took years.

    And for a while back then, she was on the Board of one of the two national US naturist organizations.

    1483:

    I used to see t-shirts with an encryption algorithm, and the phrase "this shirt is a weapon" on it.

    1484:

    Lack of will? You mean, like the way the GOP in Congress massively UNDERFUNDS the IRS, so that it doesn't even audit billionaires anymore?

    1485:

    Interesting. When I was programming PCs, I can't remember screen crashes.

    Oh, that's right: a) we were working in DOS; b) we were professional programmers, and c) we EXPECTED the programs to run on standalone computers, with maybe email through the server which it was wired to.

    And if you're wondering, I was on the team that first computerized the Boards, the exams that (back in the eighties, anyway) 75% of all doctors in the US, and 100% of grads of foreign med schools were required to take by US federal law), to get their licenses as doctors. (Look up National Board of Medical Examiners).

    1486:

    PLEASE! Linux and "inconsistent UI" - IT'S NOT BUILT BY A COMPANY, and it's UNIX-style, which means you can CHOOSE YOUR OWN INTERFACE. And where I've worked as a sysadmin, the company decides what window manager you will be using.

    I get so bloody tired of "there must be One Way for everybody to use, never mind if they hate it.

    1487:

    Well, I always found it a bit fishy.

    1488:

    they don't have the money for electric transportation, so somehow this needs to be solved too.

    I forget sometimes that I live in a city with unusually good public transport by world standards. It's a bit of a shock to see RMTransit or someone raving about how awesome it is and how the upgrades will make it even more better. We even have some electric buses! And double decker buses! And trams! How cool is PT in Sydney?

    Living here I focus on stuff like the train lines that shut down between 3am and 5am on weekdays, and worse on weekends. Or the half hourly services. And the trains that won't take my cargo bike. And the twice-daily services on some of the lines... that go 200km out of the city (these are commuter trains, not inter-city ones).

    But even in Sydney, for a lot of people "commute by train+bus" just isn't practical even if it's possible. The network really supports "from the suburbs to the CBD" and everyone else can fuck right off. "just" doing the 30 minute bike ride from my place to the next train line north or south is more like 60 minutes by train or bus. If I had to visit the office of the company I work for it's close to 90 minutes because I have to... you guessed it... go into the CBD and back out again.

    So for anyone commuting around the city rather than into it (or out of it, contraflow commuting is awesome), it's generally shit and frequently unreasonable. There's quite a few commutes that are 3+ hours each way with 15 minute waits in a couple of places and occasionally 1km walks or you can wait 10 minutes for a bus, go two stops then wait 10+ minutes again. This is where even 15 minute intervals between services is far too long (because those waits add up). But 6 hours a day commuting... I don't think that's reasonable even if you're in a train.

    1489:

    David L @ 1451:

    I am fortunately not doing any kind of shared work with others.

    I'm pretty OCD about getting the date/time SET correctly on my computers ... but it doesn't last because the clocks drift and 10 minutes later it's gonna' be wrong anyway.

    And every one of them drifts according to its own whims, so none of them ever have the actual, real date and time.

    1490:

    We force all our desktop computers to AEST and if people don't like it they can STFU. Anything that connects to the domain or uses the VPN works that way, except phones (which mostly get time from the cellphone system and if not too bad). Servers are on UTC for obvious reasons.

    We have had a tiny number of incidents where customers have weird locale settings on their computer so our website displays using their weird timezone and they complain. The answer to that is that if you tell your browser that you want British Virgin Islands time, that's what you get. If you don't want that don't tell your browser that you want it. This is why we pay our tech support people a decent wage, so they can afford to drink enough to make the job bearable.

    These days time servers are ubiquitous and there are enough timezones to make anyone who likes weird timezones happy, and the sane people despair. You might think I'm kidding but Australia has IIRC seven timezones, including one that's 15 minutes off because some tiny shithole town no-one cares about decided to split the difference between two states that are half an hour apart. I think that justifies the use of nuclear weapons but sadly they don't let me those any more.

    1491:

    Charlie Stross @ 1466:

    OTOH, not a single penny of that was spent anywhere except here on earth. The knock-on effects of spending all that money supported a lot of families far beyond those who worked for NASA or the contractors ... and just like Apollo, the things developed along the way just to figure out how to make it work are going to have untold benefits for years to come. Benefits we cannot yet even imagine.

    In 1961 when Kennedy said we should spend the money to put a man on the moon ... presuming you are old enough to remember Kennedy's speech ... did you imagine you'd have you're own computer more powerful than the biggest super-computer contemplated at the time with a color TV display built in and it would fit in your pocket?

    A lot of people complained about wasting THAT money, but just try to count all the things we have now that have enriched our lives that weren't even imagined until NASA needed to solve a problem getting a man to the moon (and getting him back alive).

    And besides, if they hadn't spent it on the telescope, they'd have just spent it on weapons development, so there is that benefit if nothing else. The Webb telescope ain't likely to blow anything up or kill anyone.

    1492:

    ilya187 @ 1471:

    What do you do in the face of infinity, when claiming it all is not an option?

    For a long time I have felt that Milky Way Galaxy is quite sufficient to occupy our descendants for the rest of eternity.

    My only real regret is I don't think I'm going to get to stick around and find out.

    1493:

    You wrote: More and more workgroups depend on knowing what the latest version is or how to get to yesterday's 10:00am iteration.
    You have to be joking. This is so unprofessional that I haven't seen it since pre-1990. This is what version control systems are for (and yes, I've also managed VCS). If they're not using one, they're untrained amateurs. And we used one in tiny companies, as well as huge.

    1494:

    You haven't seen the one they're not publicizing, the one that shows a fleet of Star Destroyers headed our way?

    1495:

    Pardon? You mean, the intranet isn't setting the time? Or the users aren't configured to point to NIST, or some other national clock?

    1496:

    That's garbage. I believe I've posted about this before, but no, we're not going to Conquer The Universe, and completely populate it with humans.

    In 11,000 Years, we never covered more than 5k ly.

    Think I'm wrong? Quick, introduce us to any statistically significant sample of women who want 10 kids.

    1497:

    But even in Sydney, for a lot of people "commute by train+bus" just isn't practical even if it's possible. The network really supports "from the suburbs to the CBD" and everyone else can fuck right off.

    So for anyone commuting around the city rather than into it (or out of it, contraflow commuting is awesome), it's generally shit and frequently unreasonable.

    The same thing is true in Portland, Oregon. For 2 years I worked in downtown Portland, commuting by bus from a suburb about 11 miles west of downtown - about a 20 to 30 minute trip, mostly on a freeway. (I had a private window office with a great view on the 12th floor of a 30-floor office building - the nicest place I've ever worked!)

    Then the company moved to a suburb about 8 miles south of downtown. To commute by bus involved 2 transfers and a 3 hour trip each way. Needless to say, I subsequently drove my car - a 20 minute drive each way.

    1498:

    Re: 'The Screwfly Solution'

    Thanks! (To Robert too!)

    I read the Wikipedia page and noticed a reference link which ultimately led to a Nature article published in 2011. The novella was published in 1977.

    Apt title once you factor in what the research shows. Article is paywalled but here's the gist from the Abstract:

    'Here we show that optogenetic, but not electrical, stimulation of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus, ventrolateral subdivision (VMHvl) causes male mice to attack both females and inanimate objects, as well as males. Pharmacogenetic silencing of VMHvl reversibly inhibits inter-male aggression. Immediate early gene analysis and single unit recordings from VMHvl during social interactions reveal overlapping but distinct neuronal subpopulations involved in fighting and mating. Neurons activated during attack are inhibited during mating, suggesting a potential neural substrate for competition between these opponent social behaviours.'

    I'll have to check whether this book is still available.

    1499:

    And besides, if they hadn't spent it on the telescope, they'd have just spent it on weapons development, so there is that benefit if nothing else.

    Get real. They would have spent it on tax breaks for billionaires. :-(

    1500:

    You have no idea what you are babbling about.

    1501:

    I knew someone would catch it…

    1502:

    But 6 hours a day commuting... I don't think that's reasonable even if you're in a train

    When I was in high school in Sydney (Moore Park, Surrey Hills), one kid in my class came in by train from Katoomba every day. But he was the only one commuting anywhere that far. He'd have had to get a bus to school from Central as well as the train from Katoomba Station, so probably 20-30 minutes messing around with that as well as the 2 hour plus train trip. I guess he was pretty well sorted for a place to do homework.

    1503:

    David: More and more workgroups depend on knowing what the latest version is or how to get to yesterday's 10:00am iteration.

    whitroth: You have to be joking. This is so unprofessional that I haven't seen it since pre-1990. This is what version control systems are for (and yes, I've also managed VCS).

    For coding, maybe. In my three decades as a teacher, I've yet to see anyone use a version control system. The bureaucracy is not staffed with coders, but secretaries and admin assistants, directed by people also not trained in coding.

    "Get me the version we settled on yesterday morning before Sally made those changes" is the level they work on.

    1504:

    And aren't reprehensible.

    1505:

    I still get a bit flustered remembering an incident at my workplace maybe 15 years ago. I'd explained that someone had done their undergrad with honours in astrophysics, and one of the finance officers had mused aloud this was "irresponsible" and "what would you even do with that?" We both worked for a scientific research organisation, so the befuddlement had a certain depth and undeniable irony to it.

    1506:

    6 hours a day commuting... I don't think that's reasonable even if you're in a train.

    The average Toronto commute is 84 minutes. In the 890s there were housing developments in Barrie designed for Toronto commuters — they came with an SUV in the driveway! ('Cause an SUV is what you need for a 2+ hour each way commute…)

    1507:

    In my three decades as a teacher, I've yet to see anyone use a version control system.

    My ex used git in architectural practice for a while. It made her very happy, especially once I showed her how to use filesystem triggers to auto-commit every change to the save file in their CAD system (which was a zipped-container thing that I hated, and git hated, but it beat "try to remember to copy a version to the network every now and then").

    She switched back to version numbered folders once it became obvious that no-one in the office even understood what a VCS was despite living in a world where version tracking and change management was someone's full time job...

    But with the twist that every single task switch she would copy {current version of job XXX} to a new folder, {version N+1 of job XXX} then make changes there. Which bailed her out a non-trivial number of times, especially once she got the hang of renaming directories to have descriptive text after the required info.

    Because of course you can't have a tree, {job XXX}/{version N}/... as that means people will either send the entire tree as an email attachment or they will email you {version N} and expect you to work out which job it comes from. Thus "Job XXX Version NN Date YYYY-MM-DD Pat is changing colours again".

    In a completely different context one of my coworkers has made a 900GB virtual machine image. I don't know what's in it other than Windows and an IDE, but given that our office NAS is littered with "backup copies" of the above-described version trees I would not be at all surprised to find that it is entire sets of build artefacts in vaguely named directories, times several copies thereof. As in "project X, versions 123 to 654" tree, plus a backup called "project X backup" and another called "project X July 2021" plus a couple more, then that whole tree copied to "My Backup By Dave". I am not ruling out that it contains a copy of his complete hard disk that in turn contains a copy of the hard disk from his laptop.

    1508:

    Oh, that's right: a) we were working in DOS; b) we were professional programmers, and c) we EXPECTED the programs to run on standalone computers, with maybe email through the server which it was wired to.

    Yeah, when I was fiddling around with MS-DOS and Turbo C and Pascal, and assembler, I was in comprehensive school, and later in the upper secondary.

    I'm young here, so when I started programming professionally, it was with Windows NT 3.51, with the NT 4.0 as the new thing. I've never worked with MS-DOS, professionally, though when I was doing technical security assessments, one co-worker did an assessment for a customer system which ran on DOS 6.22 (I think). This was in maybe 2015.

    1509:

    Heteromeles said Speaking as someone who's dealt with deep time stuff a lot in the last decade, I think most humans feel that their universe is less than 10,000 years old. They also feel that civilized and human are synonymous, and that there was nothing before civilization.

    I think it's a lot less than that. Most people can't conceive of a time before cars. One of my early jobs was working on the counter at a post office. I had to shoo away a customer who had parked her car blocking the entrance (so we couldn't get mail trucks in). She was outraged at the lack of parking. I pointed out that the post office predated the invention of the motor car by 50 years. "That's no excuse for not providing parking! You should have known people would need to park!"

    Inside the post office, in the area she had to queue up was a photo of two mail carriers on horseback outside the post office.

    1510:

    I suspect that rate of expansion is wrong - surely it would be constrained by the speed of light.

    1511:

    Most people can't conceive of a time before cars.

    It helped me to think about my grandfather. Born in a one room shack/cabin[1] in 1885. Died in 1982. The world around him changed a bit during his lifetime.

    [1] I may be the last one living who knows where it was located. My father took me on a walk through some fields around 1970 and showed me where it was. But given my politics I doubt any of the relatives still living in that area are interested in any knowledge from me. Plus I know of a very small cemetery with many of my ancestors. Maybe 20 to 40 graves. But the same feelings of those nearby.

    1512:

    I suspect that rate of expansion is wrong - surely it would be constrained by the speed of light.

    Asimov was expounding on the effects of compound interest on the growth of the human population. He certainly didn't explain where the googoleplex of new matter would come from to fill the entire volume of the universe with human bodies!

    1513:

    1488 - The biggest issue with *nix UIs is people who over-write the actual commands, for example 'alias rm renames "rm -s" '. This has the effect, on a specific user account, of replacing the standard "ReMove" command with the interactive "ReMove -s", so that typing "rm *", rather than deleting all files in the present directory (including symbolic links) goes through them all and asks "removing $file; do you want to remove this file y/n?". I'd have no similar issues with you adding functionality along the lines of "alias srm rm -s" and so adding "srm" to perform the interactive function.

    1491 - That is exactly my point; regardless of who actually does it, the frequency clock set instructions should be short enough to keep the display time on the machine in the correct minute.

    1493 - He's not. I was born in this month in 1962, and he's younger than I am.

    1508 - Only if everyone else with a similar commute is also cursed with a Suburban Useless Vehicle.

    1514:

    Most people can't conceive of a time before cars

    In the general vicinity of that sort of scale, I find my perspective challenged by "equidistant" dates as they come up. The current meme is that 2022 is to 1970 as 1970 is to 1918.

    Back in December 2015, the date when the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark song 'Enola Gay' was released ticked over to being further in the past than the famous mission flown by the B-29 called Enola Gay had been at the time the song was released. It's not a big deal, time moves on and all that, but noticing things like that makes me stop and think "what? Really?".

    1515:

    Some 25 years ago, I took my children to Egypt, and there was a biplane celebrating the opening of Cairo airport. I commented that was a long time since I used to fly out of Cairo (a stop on the route to central Africa), and my daughter pointed out that it was closer to the opening than it was to the (then) present day. That shook me.

    I remember when most people didn't have cars, and almost nobody had more than one per household. It's not that long ago, outside north America.

    1516:

    David L:

    It helped me to think about my grandfather. Born in a one room shack/cabin[1] in 1885. Died in 1982. The world around him changed a bit during his lifetime.

    There was a note in George MacDonald Fraser's book Flashman and the Redskins that someone could cross the American west in the 1849 gold rush as an infant in a coverd wagon and live to watch a program about it on television.

    Damian:

    In the general vicinity of that sort of scale, I find my perspective challenged by "equidistant" dates as they come up. The current meme is that 2022 is to 1970 as 1970 is to 1918.

    I recall a few years ago (2017) when it was noted in the media that more time had passed between the (movie) release of Gone With the Wind and the present than had passed between the beginning of the ACW and the release of Gone With the Wind1.

    1 GWtW is truly a great movie, but great in the sense that The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Triumph of the Will (1935) are great. Great, but in the service of evil.

    1517:

    I had the good fortune to grow up knowing my great-grandfather until I was 16 (and he was 102). Born in 1886 and spent his childhood traveling around Europe with his father (who was a moderately famous painter and botanist). He spoke 7 languages like they were his mother tongue, and taught himself Mandarin as a retirement project (along with hobby clockmaking/repair).

    He came to Canada at the turn of the 20th century and ended up riding a horse from New York to Calgary, then building a prairie farm. He retired in 1947 (!!), which gave him a fascinating perspective on the new world we have created.

    I have a distinct memory of a discussion with him in the early 80s where he could not grasp why we would find a personal computer useful, perhaps because I had just bought my first Commodore 64.

    1518:

    If I was more cynical, I'd hypothesize that letting the poor die is actually the plan, to avoid pension obligations…

    malthusiasm is everywhere, though i thought most of the poor didn't have pensions

    1519:

    "Without Cars" Hmm ... my father was born in 1910, but my Great Aunt Rose, the oldest of my Grandmother's sisters (Granny was the youngest) was born in 1854 or '55.

    Meanwhile the clown show in Westminster rolls on. It looks as though it's going to be down to Sunak / Mordaunt / Truss - but the mentally-deficient tory membership are likely to favour Mordaunt. I just looked her up - the opposite of Mad Nad & could spell problems for Starmer, maybe. She is, however: still a Brexit headbanger.
    Opinions, or do we wait until it's down to two?

    1520:

    There is a thread of ecofascism that accepts the coming climate catastrophe, but takes the position that a lot of non-white people will be dying so it is probably a 'good thing'. The number of things wrong with such a perspective can hardly be counted, of course.

    About 20 years ago, when tensions were high between India and Pakistan, I gave up on a particular web forum after it tolerated and encouraged a discussion of whether a few hundred million Indians and/or Pakistanis dying in a nuclear was might be a good thing for the planet as a whole.

    It is possible to navigate the web and wholly avoid the fascist fever swamps, but they exist and have been growing for decades.

    1521:

    An Auusie joke heard via my daughters is that getting rid of Johnson is like shitting yourself and then changing your shirt.

    1522:

    If that's your opinion, then I don't want to use your software. And I spent decades writing software before I started doing sysadmin work.

    1523:

    The tree - I did that, before I had my head wrapped around VCS in '91. The backups? Yeah, I remember (mid/late-eighties) having to go look at a secretary's computer, which had a full hard drive... and found the autosave on her word processor had well over 900 backups...

    1524:

    DOS 6, in 2015? [shudder] We were doing that in '84 or so, DOS 3.

    1525:

    Thanks for reminding me of my father's father. My dad told me once that his father and uncles had come over in 1909, gone back, then came back again to stay in 1914.

    He lived from trains, and still sailing ships... to see Apollo 11. (He died around '70 or '71.)

    1526:

    i thought most of the poor didn't have pensions

    Here we have a government pension, old age security, and socialized health care, so assuming they are not homeless and off the grid then there is a state cost to look after them (or to be more accurate, let them starve slower than otherwise — CPP/OAS doesn't cover basic needs like housing and food, even at the bachelor basement apartment/rice & beans level).

    1527:

    In '96 or so, when I was working at Ameritech (Baby Bell) on a gigantic project that collapsed the next year, and which grew from four teams to 27 in a year, when they finally brought in corporate (and contractor) sysadmins and set up two servers as test machines, the contractor in charge named them. I had to explain to one of the young consultants what Fat Man and Little Boy were, and why this was Not a good omen.

    1528:

    He lived from trains, and still sailing ships... to see Apollo 11. (He died around '70 or '71.)

    My grandfather went from horses* and trains to a man walking on the moon…

    *He always insisted that the motor car cleaned up London, compared to the horses that preceded it.

    1529:

    Sorry, hadn't intended bold - markup error.

    1530:

    I suspect Asimov was using estimates of how many atoms were in the universe, how many atoms are in a standard human body, and doing a compound growth calculation to scale up how long it would take humans to use all atoms in the universe.

    Kind of lazy for a chemistry professor, I say, but suitable for a pop science essay.

    If someone wants to update this calculation, start with the elemental composition of the universe, the elemental composition of the human body, figure out which elements would be most limiting (I'm guessing phosphorus), then calculate how man humans the universe could hold based on elemental abundance. Then divide that by 1000 or more to account for the all the systems that have to be in place to keep humans fed, because we don't automatically accrete atoms by handling other people's wastes.

    Then do the compound growth calculation, allowing in your growth rate for both average transit time and time to build a civilization capable of launching more starships...

    ...Nice thing about this little exercise is that it's probably publishable in a mid-level physics journal, considering some of the other simulations that get published.

    1531:

    You're right.

    The frustrating thing to me is remembering doing all the exercises on sea level rise and global warming in the late 1980s as an undergrad, then watching cars balloon in size, and now dealing with two whole generations of middle class Americans who think that it's abnormal not to take overseas vacations and work on filling your Bucket List before you die.

    All that shit happened after I graduated college. I'm not close with any climatologists but I can only imagine what it must feel like to grow your field during this era.

    1532:

    Ah. Also circa 1991, as tech author in a smallish company, I was asked to look at the secretary's (singular) PC, which was running slow.

    The full-timer had quit or been fired before I arrived at the company eight months earlier, since which time we'd had a succession of temps of varying levels of cluefulness.

    When I got to the PC I discovered they'd all been saving all the letters they'd created in Word Perfect (4.2, no less!) in C:\. Which had a few thousand files in it, and as DOS back then maintained directories as a linked list, any attempt to enumerate the contents ran slightly slowly ...

    1533:

    If that's your opinion, then I don't want to use your software.

    Not my software. There are fields that if you want a career in them the software is not picked by you 99% of the time. Fact of life. So you deal or decide on a different career.

    As someone else mentioned. CAD and project management for architects, civil engineers, constructions firms, etc. If you want to do VCS then have fun in your boutique practice. (And there are some people that exist in such practices tiny or buck the trend practices but it is hard.) Because it will not happen 99% of the time. Actually 99.9999% of the time.

    1534:

    He always insisted that the motor car cleaned up London, compared to the horses that preceded it.

    It DID. In terms of what people could see, smell, and step into.

    I read a while back on the stats for horse manure and piss in New York City around 1900 and the daily volumes were staggering.

    1535:

    That's garbage. I believe I've posted about this before, but no, we're not going to Conquer The Universe, and completely populate it with humans.

    Oddly enough, I completely agree with you. I'd just figured that, given how much time I've spent hammering on the problems with star flight, people would realize that wasn't my unvarnished opinion, and that I was pointing at precisely the opposite.

    1536:

    Why aren't we going completely 2001 apeshit over the James Webb telescope first image:

    For those in the US or other places that can watch it, TV or online; this week's PBS Nova was about the JWST. Great show. And was up front about the delays and costs. But the operations staff seemed giddy at times on camera.

    And the next show, typically in a week, is going to be about our galaxy.

    If you don't know, Nova is a mostly STEM oriented show that hits it out of the park more often than not.

    1537:

    I'll admit I had to look up GDFRC.

    Well it's GDRFC. But...

    It was my attempt to insinuate that all US space exploration is tied to politics.

    1538:

    For the next 2 or so months it will be humid most days. With a chance of thunderstorms in the late afternoon or evening.

    This mornings captions on one of our TV weather segments.

    Fri 50% - storm risk

    Sat 40% - storm risk

    Sun 40% - same ol' same ol'

    Mon 40% - more storms

    Tue 40% - more rain

    Wed 30% - more yuck

    1539:

    "Boutique"? Ah, Radian, where I first had to use it, was over 1500 people. I believe I used it at a software co with 20. Then it was required at Ameritech, a Baby Bell, with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of employees. And then as a subcontractor, supporting the City of Chicago 911 system. ALL of them were required by management to use a VCS, and which one.

    I'll note that every large open source software project, including Linux itself, uses a VCS.

    Your intended insult is, in fact, a demonstration of unprofessionalism.

    1540:

    And on another, unrelated note, happy Bastille Day.

    1541:

    " it's probably publishable in a mid-level physics journal,"

    E.g., perhaps, The American Journal of Physics, https://aapt.scitation.org/journal/ajp .

    You're probably not going to get tenure at your university or win the Nobel Prize for publishing in it, but I think the articles are frequently fun, interesting and sometimes surprising.

    1542:

    You keep talking about coding projects. I'm talking about end users dealing with vertical market software where a VCS is a total imposition. Look at Robert Prior.

    Not all computer use is coding. Or working with plain (or nearly so) text files.

    Much of it is using a specialized software (or collection of software) over which the users (or company) has no choice if they want to be in the business they are in.

    Quit being rude to those of us who work in a different environment than you're used to working in.

    1543:

    You can quit being rude as well. From the original post, it was NOT clear to me that the "teams" you were talking about were management with documents and policies.

    1544:

    It was my attempt to insinuate that all US space exploration is tied to politics.

    I think we can usefully strike the "US" from that statement.

    The one thing I've got to object to in our group discussion of the JWST is the notion that this is just American jingoism. I watched most of the Tuesday rollout, and each team was given a chance to reveal their first picture. That meant that the broadcast went to Quebec (failed to connect, so they had to fall back to their studio backup, a non-white, woman astrophysicist), and also to Germany for an extended segment from the ESA science team. They made a real effort to be inclusive.

    Years ago, I got disgusted by astrophysics project budgets, so I did a break down of the costs. Once you subtract the costs of certifying the vehicle (only a couple of places do that) bundling it up for launch, and launching it (ditto, not cheap), insurance (cost to replace if it goes boom), and similar, their personnel and material costs are basically the same as what I was used to doing ecology. The billions comes, not from gold-plated science contracts, but mostly from paying hundreds of grad students, post docs, and engineers over a couple of decades to make each part work. And these people are scattered across institutions around the world.

    1545:

    And "making it work" matters. How many years have voyager I and II been going? Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity are how many years beyond their "90 day" mission spec?

    My late ex, who was an engineer at the Cape, occasionally talked about how hard the worked to make them work and keep working.

    1546:

    it was NOT clear to me that the "teams" you were talking about were management with documents and policies.

    Good grief. What does it matter? Different people have different needs. Not everyone on this blog is a programmer or works supporting such.

    1547:

    And these people are scattered across institutions around the world.

    Most people have no idea what it takes just to keep things like the Mars rover project "idling". Someone needs to monitor the data coming in, allocate antenna and radio time, analyze the data (rover bits working?), etc...

    Plus pay for equipment rooms, computer upgrades, those pesky system admins, and on and on and on.

    Which is why it costs so much to keep such a program going on after its core mission plan is over.

    As to the costs you talk about. That Nova program was pretty good a pointing out indirectly just why it cost so freaking much. Aside from inventing hundreds of new one time use widgets. There were all kinds of one off tests that had to be done on something the size of a 10 person yacht. And move the thing around the country to where such facilities that can do the tests might be found. The cost an build and upkeep of the shipping container likely was north of $10 or maybe $50 million.

    1548:

    Robert Prior @ 1508:

    6 hours a day commuting... I don't think that's reasonable even if you're in a train.

    The average Toronto commute is 84 minutes. In the 890s there were housing developments in Barrie designed for Toronto commuters — they came with an SUV in the driveway! ('Cause an SUV is what you need for a 2+ hour each way commute…)

    When I worked for THE computer company out at RTP in the later half of the 1990s, I could leave the house at 7:30am in the morning driving and arrive by 9:30am ... OR I could leave the house at 7:15am, catch the bus at 7:20am and arrive by 9:30am

    ... or I could wait until 9:00am to leave the house, miss the morning traffic jam and arrive at work by - wait for it - 9:30am. Go figure.

    1550:

    Re: Cars

    My mother told me stories of her family's first car.

    Her brother had to drive it, her father was not comfortable doing it. When her brother got married, she learned to drive so her father could still go fishing on Sundays.

    They had to push it up hill, it didn't quite have enough power (I think this was the 1930s). Car #2 (next years model) fixed that problem.

    Her mother would freak out when it slid backwards when starting from a stop going up hill, it is just not a motion you want to feel in a horse drawn wagon (probably like feeling a "breeze" on space station...).

    Passengers always complained that she was driving too fast, they didn't have time to look at things they were passing.

    The neighbors thought they were rich because they had a car, in reality it was just that my Grandfather didn't go drinking after work and saved the money.

    1551:

    The scientists cliche "more research is needed"?

    1552:

    I'll note that every large open source software project, including Linux itself, uses a VCS.

    And most computer users aren't writing software.

    Last time I worked as a programmer was the 80s. We had version control. I haven't used version control since, despite using a computer most days at work since then, because I haven't been a programmer since then.

    1553:

    Pretty sure almost every company does use version control, but of the manual and random form. "do you have the latest version of that proposal" type emails are a bit of a give-away. VCS software... not so much.

    Back in the day even Word had primitive change tracking, but that seems to have been removed or hidden in the new versions. OTOH Word is explicitly not designed for "documents", it's for simple things that don't require any kind of standardisation or tracking. Ahem. Once you get past something you can fit in a Reddit comment box it's time to move up to a full-fledged document editor, like Notepad. And a proper document format, like HTML+CSS.

    At work we're trying to slowly push everyone towards wikis and similar because random Word documents flung about the place is no basis for a system of government.

    Right now they're paying me geek wages to go through one such Word document and make the style consistent and redo all the tables into a consistent, comprehensible format. It got to the point where some "tables" were one column with multiple rows and could better be a numbered list. But I digress :)

    1554:

    Car-related family lore:

    My great-uncle (father's father's younger brother) was born around 1912. He was driving the car to town when he was 12 himself. Not illegal - Ontario didn't have drivers licenses yet.

    He was able to get his older brother or father to turn the crank to get the car going when he was leaving home. But in town he had to park in front of the barber shop, do his errands, then ask someone waiting for a haircut to turn the crank, because he wasn't strong enough to get it to go yet.

    1555:

    At a prior employer (corporate research center), for a while... one of the popular ad hoc "version control systems" for managers was to send their MS Office documents to each other as email attachments.

    Used more mail server space than we in IT would have preferred, but it did give them time-stamped document archives with keyword and full-text search.

    This was actively discouraged once the corporate email system no longer enforced single instance storage of message data.

    1556:

    Yeah, that's how you get dates and descriptive text with each version of a document in your document storage system :)

    1557:

    Once upon a time, a certain state government organisation spent billions with a well-known tech giant to implement a new payroll-and-rostering system, and famously, the result was a debacle. There were several entertaining and storied outcomes to this debacle as it unraveled over several years and I won't go into those here, I just want to focus on a specific outcome. The sequence of events led to a situation where no-one even tried to implement the new solution's time sheeting component as a business change, so while the new system definitely had time sheeting and maybe this was the only good bit, maybe getting people to use it could have mitigated some of the nightmare the solution entailed, but that wasn't to be and no-one ever used it. Instead, someone decided to implement a workaround for time sheeting.

    The workaround involved admin staff in every business unit across the state collecting all the paper timesheets and leave applications for their business units, scanning them to a single pdf and emailing the pdf to a mailbox used by the statewide payroll service. A team of people monitored that mailbox, used a tool to split each of these pdfs out into individual documents for processing, which they would forward to other mailboxes, along with a copy of the original pdf for traceability. By way of explaining the scale, the organisation employed roughly 100,000 people state-wide. Mail servers (the organisation had a decentralised design for email which was relatively robust in normal circumstances) started crashing about a week later as the storage demand started to exceed capacity, and in the end the solution for that involved building a whole dedicated email infrastructure, before finally being replaced by a real online time sheet solution several years later. Don't ask about what else accreted in the audit and transparency space for time sheets and leave applications, and definitely don't ask about the surprising storage capacity built, by people who were just trying to do their jobs, using retail USB DAS devices in one office at the end of a 2Mbps link. In the end it all came under "debacle remediation", which had its own considerable budget.

    1558:

    Okay, a bunch here, not tied to any numbers because I can't be arsed.

    Sarbanes-Oxley (and its relatives): Bloody thing nearly caused a heap of grief back when it happened, until it was pointed out that ROT-13 (aka Caesar code) was sufficient. It's not like those of us who've been on USENET since before the great reorganisation couldn't read it straight off the screen...

    Time: If you aren't bright enough to set up an NTP server you're not even as accurate as a stopped clock.

    Version Control for non-Programmers: It's called Sharepoint, nearly all the large companies use it. It's shit, but it usually works.

    1559:

    Sharepoint is awesome if you have a team to manage it. Ideally a dev team as well as an ops team, because someone has to customise the interface for the org and keep customising it until it's usable by even the least trainable employees. Otherwise you get artifacts like encrypted zip files being uploaded because staff don't like the way the contents of normal zip files get tracked and traced. And if you're unlucky those zip files will contain entire hard disks. Not that I have ever sorted the contents by size limited to the top 10 files and then gone to have a word with the owners of said files. And ditto the most enthusiastic 10 users of disk space.

    Of course not. Do you take me for some kind of idiot? I sent an email to their managers like any reasonable person would do as their first step.

    1560:

    Sharepoint almost always stays just a little bit broken. Partly because beyond a certain scale, getting permissions right is everyone's job and no-one's job. But mostly because when you get it to work, it's such a relief that you forget all about the rest of the bits that don't work and just let them go. Or more likely you spent so much time getting it to work, that you don't have time to chase the other things wrong with it once you get to the document you had to work on, review or approve.

    1561:

    About the James Webb telescope (and its costs):

    I watched the White House Grand Opening and have since looked at a few more pictures, of which I have saved the Stephan's Quintett as a desktop background. I find it awesome and worth every cent.

    I also googled GDRFC, and the only things I came up with are

    • a plane of an airline named 'blueislands' with the code G-DRFC;

    • a random YouTube video of the 'children's song mashup' kind;

    • the 'Grupo Desportivo e Recreativo das Fontainhas de Cascais';

    • the 'Greenhouse Development Rights Framework and the Responsibility-Capacity';

    • an internet acronym for 'Grinning Ducking and Running For Cover'.

    I give up. Which one is it?

    Regarding the costs of deep-space exploration by telescope: So, Hubble cost a combined $10Bn over its lifetime, and James Webb costs another $10Bn. That's a total of $20Bn (which will certainly still grow over James Webb's lifetime). Meanwhile, the NRO could afford to donate another two completely unused Hubble-equivalents to NASA for free. Which means they (and the other three-letter-agencies) have built, launched and operated how many of them? 10? 20? 50? It must have been so many that they couldn't even use them all. Obviously they have so much money that they don't even need to count (and account for) their needs beforehand. They just build some more. Who cares for a few billions less or more? On the other hand, NASA is struggling to finance one (in numbers: 1!) Hubble, and one (1!) James Webb telescope afterwards. And they don't even have the financial means to use the two donated telescopes!

    So, would anyone like to venture a guess as to just how much money the US security apparatus has spent on its army of Hubble-equivalents? Whatever it is, I'd say that the $20Bn for Hubble and James Webb are dirt cheap compared to it. From the NRO's perspective it's basically pocket change.

    It's all a question of priorities. As long as the number one top priority for the hegemonial nations is to cling to their hegemonial status, their top spending priority will be power projection and stockpiling means of destruction with a side order of total surveillance. All the rest (like advancing our understanding of the world, fighting deadly and dangerous diseases, even dealing with the life-threatening consequences of the climate catastrophe or—god forbid—making life better for all people on this planet) is at best a side show and at worst totally irrelevant.

    Even my own country, faced with (1) the consequences of climate change (droughts and floods; we're just at the anniversary of last year's flooding in western Germany with estimated damages of €30Bn), (2) the necessity to transition from fossil to renewable energy (which the previous governments under conservative leadership have totally failed to do) and (3) the necessity to integrate well over a million of refugees (and as much of an effort we're currently making for the refugees from Ukraine, the ones who came in 2015-16 are still discriminated against, and the treatment of refugees from Afghanistan (including people who were working for the coalition there) is absolutely shameful), decided to spend €100Bn for—wait for it—arms and military. That's ten cost-overrun James Webb telescopes right there. But of course, a comparable amount of money would never be spent on any of the things that should actually be our top priorities.

    1562:

    "Time: If you aren't bright enough to set up an NTP server you're not even as accurate as a stopped clock."

    That is complete bollocks. NTP is a very complicated and, worse, brittle protocol, originally designed to keep hardware synchronised to better than the precision of its clocks. One misconfigured server can cause widespread chain and even network problems cause glitches of seconds.

    The SNTP protocol I designed does NOT have those problems and IS trivial to set up, but has faded from use as I have retired and it is no longer supported (not that it needs it). But using it as a server is incompatible with embedding in an NTP network, as I stress in the documentation.

    1563:

    What do you do in the face of infinity, when claiming it all is not an option?

    Refuse to deal and claim the universe is less than 10,000 years old? Once upon a time I thought this was a fringe position. Now I think it maybe be 1/2 or more of the US population. And similar in many parts of the world.

    Nah, don't overestimate your place in the world. From my continental European perspective I can tell you that Young Earth Creationism (like its parent, Biblical Literalism) is a very peculiar USian phenomenon, not shared by much of the rest of the world. So yes, your estimate of half of the US population seems at least in the realm of possibility. But for 'similar in many parts of the world': no. Most parts of the world are definitely not like the US. After all, USians are only about 4.5% of the world population. And the peculiar role religion plays in US politics and society is also an outlier. It's very much unlike any other 'western' nation.

    And of course for the other four of the five most populated countries of the world (China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan)—with a combined share of more than 40% of the world population—Young Earth Creationism (just like Biblical Literalism (or just Christianity)) isn't even a thing. So whatever the people there believe or know about the age of the universe, it's for certain that it is not rooted in the particular religiosity you're experiencing around yourself.

    And I'm pretty sure that for instance the Australian aborigines are perfectly aware that their songs are preserving memories older than 10,000 years. So by extension, they also know that the universe must be older.

    1564:

    It's fairly widespread in the UK, following our decades of being propagandised into the USA's mini me.

    1565:

    Brainfart. "chain" => "chaos".

    1566:

    Sorry, you're clearly not well enough informed about (S)NTP to be allowed to pontificate with that much pondus.

    First, SNTP is just a way to query a NTP servere in a strict client mode, seen from the servers point of view.

    Second, NTP is a way to transfer time, it is not "a time(scale)", so just saying "run NTP" would get you thrown out of any competent compliance team.

    For instance running NTP against a DCF77 derived time-source is not compliant with SOX, you time has to be traceable to NIST of USNO.

    One of the weirder aspects of time-compliance is in medicine production, where FDA demands timestamps traceable to NIST or USNO, while other markets have different demands, ultimately forcing you to either record multiple, for all practical purposes identical timestamps from different time-sources or maintain a paper-trail which can interrelated your chosen timesource to the other ones via the IERS paperclocks.

    And that's probably enough time-nuttery for now...

    1567:

    So, would anyone like to venture a guess as to just how much money the US security apparatus has spent on its army of Hubble-equivalents?

    We already know that NASA is no higher than #3 in the US government space program budget hierarchy. (NRO and USSC are both bigger budget operations.)

    It's possible that within a few years to a decade they'll be demoted to #4, if you count private space programs -- SpaceX are flying more than once a week on average this year, with four Falcon Heavy launches scheduled in the next six months, so even if you leave out Starship and Starlink, their current commercial launch business looks to be turning over on the order of $4Bn a year ... and growing rapidly. It takes a decade after a new launch vehicle becomes available for commercial payloads to start being designed to make use of its capacity (unless it's designed around the payload -- eg. Saturn V/Apollo), so I suspect the really big Starship payloads won't show up before 2030-2035 (with the exception of Starship HLS for NASA's Artemis program). But I see no prospect of NASA's budget growth matching the commercial launch sector.

    1568:

    "[...]four of the five most populated countries of the world (China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan)—with a combined share of more than 40% of the world population—Young Earth Creationism (just like Biblical Literalism (or just Christianity)) isn't even a thing"

    Im pretty sure there are Islamic Koranic Literalism. Pretty sure Turkey has 'em so I suspect Pakistan does too

    1569:

    EC
    ONLY "Fairly widespread" in very small ,but very vocal fringe religious groups PLUS the brain-fucked of NornIron, of course.

    1570:

    Elderly Cynic @1564:

    That is complete bollocks. NTP is a very complicated and, worse, brittle protocol, originally...

    Hmm, never seemed that brittle to me, but back when I was worrying about things being externally accurate - as in the time being the same here as on the other side of the planet - I had access to stratum 1 servers.

    These days I just point one thing at au.pool.ntp.org, (well, 0-4.au...), and everything else at that, and it does the job. Basically been stable for decades.

    And when I went looking for some information about SNTP, I found this gem: "The SNTP protocol no longer plays a role in time synchronization on commercially available PCs due to today’s improved computing power. More complex protocols such as NTP are used as standard, and have no noticeable effect on performance."

    1571:

    Sharepoint almost always stays just a little bit broken.

    Perfect. I'm going to tack this up somewhere.

    1572:

    I give up. Which one is it?

    The last one. It means I made a terrible pun/joke and got out of the way of things being thrown at me.

    My point was H wanted to get away from politics for a bit and talk JWST. Of course building and operating the JWST requires pure politics for almost all the funding.

    1573:

    YEC is a thing in the Christian communities of South America and Africa. And those are non trivial numbers of people.

    It IS growing in the UK. Of course the UK voted for Brexit so whatever.

    In the RC faith it is sort of weird. Official the RC church believes in the billions of years. But at local levels YEC beliefs are strong.

    1574:

    Hmm, never seemed that brittle to me, but back when I was worrying about things being externally accurate - as in the time being the same here as on the other side of the planet - I had access to stratum 1 servers.

    There have been multiple articles over the last 5 years or so about issues with the protocol. And there's also that the very few people who are primary maintainers are aging out of the expected human life spans.

    And it's not sexy so there isn't a group of young and restless wanting to take it over. Or companies for that mater.

    1575:

    Back about a hundred years ago when this thread was about Biggles I made a note to see how Kim Newman used "the modest British ace" Bigglesworth* in his novel The Bloody Red Baron. He's not especially prominent, but has a few scenes in the first part of the book, as do Bertie Algie and Ginger. How does Newman get away with this, and with the other characters still within copyright? I don't know, though I'll note it's not a Biggles book, it's a Dracula book. And a major change to the character is that, like (almost) all the pilots in the squadron he is a vampire, so not the actual Biggles.

    Other than this Biggles is played fairly straight here, he's the last pilot in the fight when the German secret weapons are revealed, cheating his enemy Erich von Stahlhein of a complete victory.

    • 'The Daily Mail calls him a "knight of the air."'
    1576:
    SNTP

    I assume that SNTP stands for Scottish Network Transfer Protocol? So used in Scotland, plus places like (but not limited to) New Glasgow, NS, Hamilton (Ontario and Bermuda), and Atolovo, Bulgaria.

    1577:

    Im pretty sure there are Islamic Koranic Literalism.

    According to Islamic tradition the Qur'an is (literally) the Word of God. It was dictated to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. So the Qur'an is indeed a Holy Scripture and Muhammad is merely its messenger relating God's words to the people. He is a witness testifying for the verity of the Word of God.

    As an aside: Note that in the Christian tradition it's exactly the other way round. Jesus Christ is the Word of God. The Books of the New Testament are merely messenges relating the good news to the people. They (or their authors) are witnesses testifying for the verity of the Word of God. Thus according to Christian belief the Bible is not in the same sense 'Holy Scripture' as is the Qur'an according to Islamic belief. Therefore the ideology of Biblical Literalism—if understood analogously to the Islamic view of the Qur'an, meaning that somehow God himself is the author of the Biblical books and their writers only received a dictate—is obviously false and frankly idiotic. I consider it to be on the very fringe of what may reluctantly be accepted as 'Christian', but mostly it is beyond the fringe. One variant of this ideology is the claim of 'divine inspiration' for the authors of the Biblical books. But its proponents usually fail to define what they mean by 'inspiration'. What does 'inspired by God' actually mean? For instance there are a hell of a lot of Hollywood movies 'inspired by' real events that have hardly any semblance to those events. That is certainly a far cry from 'dictated letter by letter'. So, where on that sliding scale would 'the Bible is inspired by God' sit? End of the aside.

    Anyway, yes, devout muslims do indeed believe that the Qur'an is literally the Word of God. However, the Qur'an makes no claims as to the age of the universe. (Another aside: the Bible doesn't, too. The only thing Young Earth Creationists can do is count through (conflicting and incomplete) genealogies in order to calculate the age. Even on the face of it that's only secondary evidence, and shaky at best. That's also the reason why there are so many different and conflicting Biblical Literalist answers to the question 'how old is the universe?'. End of the aside.) Thus, there is no need to put a Qur'anic time-scale (which doesn't exist) against a scientific time-scale, and consequently there is no Young Earth Creationism in the Islamic world.

    China and India—the two most populous countries in the world—have of course again completely different traditions (and both a multitude of them). I can't say what the typical Chinese or Indian person knows or believes about the age of the universe, but I'm pretty sure that it's not discernibly influenced by USian fringe Christian beliefs.

    1578:

    Oh, really? I think that you will find you are misinformed, both about me and NTP. One of your two statements is false (read the specification), and the other is irrelevant. What I said is true.

    1579:

    Sharepoint features in this week's "On Call": Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/15/on_call/

    1580:

    Right. My experience is a long time back, but NTP was fiendishly complicated; I could get slightly better accuracy over the Internet for a few percent of the amount of code and resources (including number of handshakes) (*). The code and specification were unspeakably awful, with the latter being self-contradictory, and contradicting what the code did; with all respect to David Mills (who I spoke to about it about that), he is NOT a software engineer. I implemented my code in less time that it would have taken to ESTIMATE whether NTP could have been ported to my systems, and it iwas (and is) phenomenally portable! This was because I had NO stratum 1 code, an algorithm far better suited to Internet use than NTP's (and using statistics, rather than fancy control algorithms), and I am a software engineer. But NTP had got established first.

    (*) Which means, inter alias, that it is was NOT suitable for the incredibly precise hardware synchronisation that NTP was designed for. I designed it specifically for synchronising Internet systems, and it relies on a consistent (even if wildly maladjusted) local clock, which all computers have nowadays. NTP will work without one.

    1581:

    USian fringe Christian beliefs.

    To be fringe it needs to not be major. It IS major.

    And while at the "top" many religions may not adhere to YEC. At lower levels, many do. Many.

    Sorry I got surprised by how strong YEC was a bit over a decade ago in the US. Which led some of us down various rabbit holes in the US and other countries till we gave up. We found out that YEC beliefs were stronger than friendships. Facts didn't matter to true believers.

    Sort of like US (and more and more other countries) politics.

    1582:

    YEC is a thing in the Christian communities of South America and Africa. And those are non trivial numbers of people.

    That is unfortunately true insofar as Christian communities on other continents have been created by USian Christian fringe groups (sometimes by way of South Korea, by the way). These communities tend to inherit a lot of the skewed beliefs of what I like to call the American Religion (this weird mix of Biblical (mostly Old Testament) origins, conservatism, the belief that the USA is 'God's own country', prosperity gospel, Manichaeism[1], misogyny, (latent) white supremacism and some other ingredients that seems typical for many US-'Christians').[2] It's another way of projecting hegemonial power.

    Fortunately these are not typical for all Christians in South America and Africa, not by a long way.

    Personally I tend to believe that normal Christians in any part of the world are not much concerned with the question of the age of the universe. In everyday life it's really not a point of contention. And while most believers would accept a Biblical message as 'true' for their lives and wouldn't have the means to question and probe it according to scholarly (or scientific) standards, that's not the same as Biblical Literalism. If questioned carefully, I think most would be (or could be made) aware that a Biblical account of something is not the same as a newspaper article and should accordingly be taken and understood on a different level.

    ===

    [1]The belief that there is a big fight between good and evil going on in the world, with 'us' of course on the side of good.

    [2]Note that from my perspective this American Religion =/= Christianity, even if it likes to call itself 'Christian'.

    1583:

    1561 - D@mn straight you grass them up to their supervisors; odds are otherwise at least one of them is further up the company "food chain" than you.

    1564 - These days NTP servers are often synced themselves to the GPS clock...

    1575 - It would be more accurate to say that a majority of those who voted in the EU Membership Referendumb who were domiciled in Ingurlundshire voted for WrecksIt.

    1578 - Er, NTP stands for Network Time Protocol

    1584:

    I'm sure your opinions are accurate. Mostly. Just as mine are. The world is a big place and with 8 billion people, 100+ countries, and at time what seems like 9 billion separate faith systems.

    When I bumped into this a bit over 10 years ago, I was surprised by how much YEC was running under the hood so to speak. And if you started a discussion, many times a church might split or at least a non trivial number of attenders leave.

    And such things are strong in Africa not all due to the US influence. You get all kinds of weird associations. The Anglican Communion Bishops in Africa tend to be very conservative and many "reformed"[1]. And it IS a large religion there. And after the food fight of the Episcopal Church in the US (really the CofE but that's another debate) many memberships went off and put themselves under African CofE bishops. But the pastors were trained up in SBC or similar seminaries. So you get very odd clumps of beliefs in what one would think of as a unified faith group.

    Then there is that very very strong Australian component to YEC. Hard to tell which way the influence is flowing between OZ and the US. The #1 guy in YEC in the US is from Australia. And one of the top YEC organizations "spreading the word" is based in Australia.

    And I've only touched on Christian mostly English based language non RC or OC. Of which both have interesting deviations in this subject.

    [1] I hate how the words "conservative" and "reformed" are used in faith discussions. Conservative is used to avoid fundamentalist. And Reformed is a pretty word used instead of Calvinism. Both are attempts to avoid the historical reality of the people using them. Especially conservative is used to claim unchanging when the reality is so far from the truth.

    1585:

    Especially conservative is used to claim unchanging when the reality is so far from the truth.

    Let's try this again.

    Especially conservative is used to claim unchanging when the reality is so far from this meaning.

    1586:

    D@mn straight you grass them up to their supervisors; odds are otherwise at least one of them is further up the company "food chain" than you.

    Of course many times their supervisors response will be "what's the problems"?

    Especially at larger companies. If their direct reports are not complaining there can't be an issue. Future problems will be dealt with when they blow up. I think Moz has stated his company's owner is of this ilk.

    1587:

    I think the Hindu religion's timekeeping involves kalpas which are days of Brahma, and are 4.32 billion years long, so I don't think they've got anything corresponding to YEC.

    1588:

    »I think the Hindu religion's timekeeping involves«

    The definitive book on such questions is "Calendrical Calculations"

    1589:

    Strautum 1 are GPS-synced - the problem comes as the time is distributed.

    1590:

    Since we're doing the "how old are we?!" thing...

    My girlfriend is 27 (yeah, age gap!) and doing English Lit A-level. She's reading a TS Eliot poem that mentioned a yellow mist. She was interpreting that as a metaphor, and I had to tell her that no, this is literally what smog is like. (I'm young enough that domestic heating smog wasn't a thing for me, but old enough and Northern enough that industrial smogs and car fumes were still very much present.)

    1592:

    "She was interpreting that as a metaphor, and I had to tell her that no, this is literally what smog is like. "

    Also The Dreadful Lemon Sky.

    A group of four grad students, one of whom was a pilot (and a Carmelite priest, so the rest of us figured that Gott mit uns) flew in a Cessna to watch the Apollo 14 launch. On the way back west, we got stuck in Tallahassee by weather and the sky the next morning was an amazing, no-fooling bright lemon yellow. Haven't seen anything like that since.

    The priest later resigned and got married, but he got us home, gracias a Dios.

    1593:

    Graham
    The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock ??
    As a lifelong Londoner, I can remember the fuss over the first "Great Smog" of '52 & certainly the second of '55 - that latter is not mentioned in the literature much, if at all, but it was really nasty.

    1594:

    The "All they do is break eggs, but you never get an omelette." line is a pretty good definition of what Conservatives have been doing for decades now.

    1595:

    I certainly don't want to deny the existence of fundamentalist Christians (and even their prevalence in the US, if not in numbers then certainly in terms of public profile and influence) or belittle your negative experiences with them. I just want to say that they're not the only type of Christians, and not even typical, at least from a continental European Christian perspective. Even more, from this European Christian perspective some of their tenets are looking at least weird, if not positively un-Christian. So, their answer to questions like 'how old is the universe' is definitely not the only possible Christian answer, and possibly not even an answer that Christians in continental Europe or other places would seriously consider.

    1596:

    »Strautum 1 are GPS-synced - the problem comes as the time is distributed.«

    Stop talking about things you dont know enough about, please ?

    Stratum 1 means it has an external source of time. It does not say what that souce of time is, how well it is implemented or anything else.

    These days it is typically GNSS (ie: not just GPS), DCF77, a few Rugby 60kHz, WWVB, CHU and surprisingly many atoms contributing to UTC via BIPM.

    In fact, one of the major NTP problems was that several major releases of a certain "distro" came with a preconfigured stratum-1 using the computers own wandering quartz-xtal and whatever was read from the CMOS at boot.

    1597:

    You are even more ignorant than you are offensive.

    I know that perfectly well, did not say that they were ALL GPS-synced, and personally use 'Rugby' clock based servers. The point stands that the problems with NTP are in the distribution (especially over a network like the Internet) and NOT the primary serving.

    1598:

    I certainly don't want to deny the existence of fundamentalist Christians (and even their prevalence in the US, if not in numbers then certainly in terms of public profile and influence) or belittle your negative experiences with them. I just want to say that they're not the only type of Christians, and not even typical, at least from a continental European Christian perspective.

    I thought I said that. But what I have found is that YEC, while closely correlated to "Evangelical" Christians in the US, is very big around the world. But very unevenly distributed in terms of which religion it pops up in.

    And it is growing in Europe, especially the UK. I suspect, that like in the US, it flows below the surface until you start poking around. Maybe not in the clergy but in the pew sitters. Or those who check the box on surveys but don't actually pew sit.

    One of the first comments I read on this blog a decade ago was Charlie going to a YEC debate in Scotland (I think).

    PS: RC = Romain Catholic and when I wrote OC I meant Orthodox Church. And there are at least 4 main flavors of the later.

    But whatever.

    1599:

    Just a couple of days ago I had to explain reality to a customer who complained about users having higher access rights to files than they should have (said customer recently having migrated from on prem Windows AD server environment to OneDrive - which is SharePoint fundamentally - sort of - but also not...): In a Windows NTFS (server) environment you have to really work (figuratively speaking) to make files and resources available to other people - the default state is more or less "not accessible". OneDrive (and SharePoint etc etc) is coming from the other direction - the default state is maximum sharing and you really have to work to limit access for users

    And of course you have to have the top level Microsoft 365 Enterprise licenses in your organisation to be able to access all the nifty admin tools for admnistration... (try explaining to customer that you must increase licensing cost maybe 500% to access that)

    1600:

    Been there for a few years now.

    Every time they, MS, makes a 365 admin function understandable by mortals usable, they seem to split off a lot of it into the "Enterprise" tier. So the things you can do the very hard way before now are only available if you pay the extra freight.

    1601:

    MSB
    "Un-christian" - REALLY?
    Example One
    Example Two
    Example Three
    Plus, of course:Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!
    And so on & on & on ......

    1602:

    Tallahassee? Yellow sky? Not smog, trust me, I lived there for a year. Pollen.

    Illustrations of pollen fallout:

    https://jmagonline.com/articles/tree-pollen-brings-severe-allergies/

    https://twitter.com/tallypd/status/1241056480914288642

    1603:

    IIRC, Altemeyer, in the Authoritarians, had something to say about American Xtianity. Note that he's a scholar of politics, not Christianity. His observation was that many evangelicals (when he surveyed) had a "great experience" in an evangelical church service and decided to join up. They're rapidly baptized, then given a Bible and told they should read it to find out what they've gotten into. And like most of use with our (after)life insurance policies, most of them don't. Or (I'm guessing) they read a few chapters of verses of Genesis, Revelations, and figure the whole book is like that. Then, as long as they feel a sense of community and stuff, they pay for the "afterlife insurance policy" they got onto by getting baptized, and they figure that any sins they commit will be forgiven by the merciful God they loudly proclaim their belief in.

    Ironically, many of their children go to Bible study, read more of the Bible, notice that it's very different than what their parents or other church members say or do, get disgusted with the hypocrisy, and leave. The truth has "set them free."

    The sad irony is that this also stresses out a lot of evangelical and other ministers. They've often put in serious effort on getting that ThD, taken counseling classes, learned Aramaic, don't believe in the literal truth of the Bible but do believe the church can do good things--and then they get told by their Church governing board to shut up about all that gospel stuff, it's driving down attendance and making people uncomfortable. Or else.

    And I'll admit Jesus' message is pretty uncomfortable when you first hear it. I remember a minister making me really uncomfortable as a teen when he did a whole series of sermons on what was actually in the gospels. In some very uncomfortable ways, it's unamerican, especially if we're talking about the America that thinks Joe Manchin's a hero and not a Trump-scale threat to humanity.

    1604:

    I've seen orange skies from wildfire soot. It's not pleasant.

    The classic LA smog sky (that, thankfully, we see a bit less of) is pearl colored, shiny off-white with a red-brown sheen. Gibson's "the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel" is close in some ways--and extremely dated now that few use CRTs.

    1605:

    Every time they, MS, makes a 365 admin function understandable by mortals usable, they seem to split off a lot of it into the "Enterprise" tier.

    I'm glad I don't have to deal with that, working for a small company where the communal filesystem is a Linux NAS box that attempts to pretend to be windows... and I access it primarily via Linux as a Linux filesystem.

    As a programmer one of the things I find natural is using powershell to access a lot of functions. Powershell is a long way from ye olde batche files, it's more like a command line interface to the full MS API set. So adding a VPN connection is a couple of pages of instructions with screenshots amd fucking about because things have to be done in exactly the right order... or it's ~10 lines of powershell in a ".cmd" file. Add a couple of lines if you want to prompt for username and password.

    Similarly for mounting network drives and fixing permissions on the stupid Windows interface to the nas (which I think is "pure" windows stuff rather than a proper Linux permission set dressed down to Windas)

    So from my position of profound iggarence of the actual problem... seems like scripting a bunch of stuff might be an alternative to at least the "no GUI" problem. And sometimes to the "technically you shouldn't be able to do that but we apply that rule by not giving you a GUI".

    1606:

    "Tallahassee? Yellow sky? Not smog, trust me, I lived there for a year. Pollen. "

    We lived in San Antonio for a number of years and became very familiar with huge amounts of yellow pollen fallout, but never a dreadful lemon sky. I think what I saw in Tallahassee was caused by something else.

    1607:

    Re: '... either record multiple, for all practical purposes identical timestamps from different time-sources or maintain a paper-trail'

    Is this for financial transactions? I'm guessing if there are a limited number of shares or quantity of a commodity, being able to prove who bid (therefore bought) when would be very important.

    Re: Xian sects - sects within sects

    Not sure how long ago it was but I had commented that the Salvation Army had taken an official position that LGBTQ rights are recognized and respected.

    A week or so ago one of the local SA churches said that they did not support this. This made the local news headlines as did the follow up story that this church has since lost the support of every major service organization (Elks, Optimists, etc.) including one that had been a major contributor and helped run fund raisers for them for decades.

    No news updates on what the senior level of the national SA church has said or done in response. But overall, it appears that this community is not afraid to tell a long established and (until now) popularly supported church to get stuffed because it crossed a line re: human rights.

    Oh yeah - this is not some trendy upscale urban community, it's small town-rural (mostly white) where everyone can trace their and their neighbor's family trees for generations.

    1608:

    David L @ 1583:

    Facts didn't matter to true believers.

    They never do.

    1609:

    David L @ 1602:

    I'm pissed off at micro$oft again. Got up this morning and my computer was at the login screen. They ran some kind of an update last night WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! and rebooted my computer.

    That's bad enough, but when I log in there's a screen that I should upgrade to Windoze 11. NO. I'm still mad I couldn't get Windows 7 when I bought this computer.

    Anyway, there's a button or a link or something for No thanks, I don't want to upgrade to Windoze 11. ... which takes me to another screen where I can explore the reasons I should upgrade to Windoze 11 or upgrade to Windoze 11 and NO OTHER OPTION.

    Fortunately our discussion a few weeks back about what to do when the mouse won't work paid off ALT+F4 worked.

    I really want to be a non-violent person, but sometimes THEY really make it hard for me not to hate THEM.

    1610:

    Heteromeles @ 1605:

    What THEY teach you in bible study & Sunday school ain't what THEY do if you try to live according what you learned in Sunday school.

    1611:

    Heteromeles @ 1606:

    I only remember seeing smog on one occasion. When I got to visit China in 2010, we were coming back into Beijing after visiting the Great Wall. We came back just around sunset and I remember the air being a deep brown. The sun was red, but there was no orange in the sky; only brown.

    I think they still had smog in L.A. when my family visited there in 1960, but we must have lucked out and missed it. Same again on our 1964 visit.

    California worked really hard to improve air quality and I'm sad to see the recent wildfires undoing so much of what was accomplished.

    1612:

    Kardashev @ 1608:

    I've seen clouds take on a greenish (almost yellow) hue near tornadoes.

    1613:

    Re the shock of historical dramas being closer to the history than the present day.

    Hogan's Heroes was the one that freaked me out most. It was set in WW2, which as a child I lumped in with the Norman Conquest and the sacking of Rome. Funny old clothes, funny old vintage cars and trucks.

    HH was set in the period 1943-1945 (episodes bounced around in that period a bit randomly) it was released in 1965. That's 20 years. So that's as far back as 2002 is now. The events that seemed so utterly remote in the past were the same distance back in time as we currently find "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "LOTR, The Two Towers", neither of which seem that long ago.

    1614:

    Re, life will find a way.

    I was talking before about viruses possibly finding unexpected ways to modify our behaviour.

    One of the weapons against the spread of the virus has been the Rapid Antigen Test. So if you test positive, you isolate, and that's an evolutionary dead end for that virus. So they've evolved to avoid the test. Some studies are showing an 80% false negative. That's a massive advantage for any strain that can pull it off. Con the host into thinking they're not sick so they can continue to mingle. Literally evolving ways to modify our behaviour. That's the fun of having millions of active hosts.

    1615:

    That's a standard trope, that Covid19 will turn into just another cold, and we won't care.

    Hopefully.

    However, we've got some problems, one big one being immunocompromised hosts. In general, a sub-par response against any invasive species favors resistant mutants, because the lackluster immune response allows mutants that are a bit resistant to survive. Infect someone like this with Covid19 for months or years and you get...?

    Another thing that bugs me is waning immunity. If Covid goes away now, we may all go back to being naive, and in a few years, we get hit with Covid19 Psi or some such. The countervailing argument is that most of the people who were perilously prone to covid have already caught it and died, so mostly we're just going to be effing miserable with it until a new cadre of naive young immune systems get it. We'll find out. I'm skeptical by nature, but the other thing that bothers me is that the new variants that become common all seem to have novel, unpredicted mutations as well as familiar ones. That suggests we don't quite know what all those viruses are capable of.

    I think the most interesting take was comparing Covid to smoking. The idea was that the death rates between covid and smoking are about the same, the populations smoking and not getting vaccinated are about the same, they tend to engage in risky behavior and have less quality health care, they both have subpopulations that need long term care for catastrophic diseases...

    1616:

    I only remember seeing smog on one occasion. When I got to visit China in 2010, we were coming back into Beijing after visiting the Great Wall. We came back just around sunset and I remember the air being a deep brown. The sun was red, but there was no orange in the sky; only brown.

    That's certainly smog. Wildfire smoke tends to be a bit grayer, but if it's bad enough you get reddish or orangish sun sun. Of course, if you're near the fire, then yes, it's orange. Haul ass in a general away direction if you're seeing a lot of orange light coming towards you.

    So far as seeing smog goes, polarized sunglasses make it more obvious. If you're concerned about the air quality, looking through polarized lenses makes it easier to spot smog and smoke. If you're sensitive to air quality, it's a cheap way to forecast how much misery you're in for.

    Or, if you're in LA, you check to see if you can see the mountains. If it's a warm day and you can't see them, it's smoggy. And yes, I agree that the air's actually gotten better since I was a kid growing up in LA, even though the population has doubled. Doing that's a neat trick that also gives us expensive gasoline.

    1617:

    I've seen clouds take on a greenish (almost yellow) hue near tornadoes.

    Me too. Back in the '50s, my family lived in tornado alley while my dad was getting his PhD at Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State). On a few occasions when threatening dark green clouds covered the sky, we'd head to the campus to shelter in the basement of the science building. Our WWII student housing would have been kindling had it been touched by a tornado!

    1618:

    That's a standard trope, that Covid19 will turn into just another cold, and we won't care.

    I fear it's just as likely that Covid-19 will turn into a super-transmissible black death. Roll those dice...

    1619:

    I'm pissed off at micro$oft again. Got up this morning and my computer was at the login screen. They ran some kind of an update last night WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! and rebooted my computer.

    Coming from the computer security perspective, I think that's a good thing. If not for you, at least more so for the general internets.

    I assume the computer was connected to the Internet as otherwise it wouldn't get the updates automatically. I have no idea about your firewall and computer security setup, but I'd think the computer is used to do things on the Internet, so getting data and acting on it.

    The thing here is that, sadly, computer programs, including Windows, have features we don't want. We call them 'bugs'. On a non-networked computer, they're annoying and can for example lose all your data. On a networked computer, they're more annoying as they can have a large effect on other people than you. It used to be so that home user Windows was derided because it didn't get that many updates, and not automatically, so most Windows boxes on the Internet were ripe targets for evil programs.

    Microsoft has done a nice job (in my opinion) in trying to plug those holes, both by closing much of the unnecessary stuff in Windows and updating the computers when there's a serious enough a fault.

    You can avoid the forced updates by installing the updates by yourself before the forced update happens. I got a dialog box asking if it's okay to update now or later, and I think (never having done proper Windows administration aside from my home computer, only auditing, and that was years ago) there's a set of options on how to handle updates.

    This is to make all of us safer, and also you. I like this model much better, even though it means I need to make sure the computer can reboot and I don't lose anything whenever I'm not using it. Keeping things up-to-date is good, and one of the main reasons Windows does this is because people just didn't update them often and early enough.

    For the Windows 11, it's more annoying. I have circumvented the problem by having a computer which apparently cannot run it, so they don't push it... Though however annoying it is to get new versions, making those is kind of mandatory if you want to have the expertise in operating systems. There are operating systems which do not get new versions, but, uh, how often do you install Plan9 or that ITS?

    Microsoft is (partly) doing new stuff for Windows to keep the employers happy and working for them. I'm not happy with the W11 pushing, though.

    Automatic updates... if you don't want to do them, do proper administration and follow Microsoft announcements and update when you want to. It might be easier with Windows 10 Pro instead of Home, but that costs more. I (as a computer security professional) am happy at home that I get the security (and other) updates automatically, even though it means that I need to be aware that the computer might occasionally reboot.

    (It'd be nice if the running system could be upgraded without reboots but my understanding is that it's because of hysterical raisins: the structure is inherited from older systems and is so fundamental it's pretty much impossible to change without rewriting the whole system.)

    1620:

    Oh, and my Windows 10 Home has this wheel thing called "Settings", accessible from the Start menu. In the main dialog there's a section for updates and protection, and clicking that I get options which control how the automatic updates are done. They can even be disabled for some time, and installed manually if necessary.

    That's the "manual administration" I was talking about. It's worth taking a look if you want to do that. If you don't it's (imho) better to just let the computer install the updates automatically - set the working times and the notification options to what you want to if they're not good enough.

    Yeah, I'm being snarky, but kind of having all kinds of unupdated computers on the internet is a problem for all of us using the internet. I, for one, would like less botnets and crypto mining on random people's computers, and kind of having less of an attack surface is good.

    1621:

    Or, if you're in LA, you check to see if you can see the mountains. If it's a warm day and you can't see them, it's smoggy.

    I lived near Pasadena in the '70s, about 3 miles from the San Gabriel mountains. I couldn't see the mountains on bad smog days - and there were quite a few smog days! This eventually led me to move to Oregon.

    There have been smog days here in Oregon (smoke from forest fires - local, from Washington State, and even from California). Luckily they are few and far between. I did buy an air purifier after the horrible 2020 fires (when Portland had the worst air quality in the world for about a week), but I have never used it.

    1622:

    Heteromeles said: it's a cheap way to forecast how much misery you're in for.

    None. I've had "exercise induced asthma" my whole life. At least that's how it was diagnosed, and given that a bit of running would result in an attack, I never questioned it. (despite knowing that I never had an attack breathing super clean compressed air while diving) I got a lot better when I moved to the country. I was a bit dodgy during the 2019 Australia fires. But I've been really great since covid arrived and I started wearing a KM95. I'm not quick, but I've finally realised that my health is linked to air quality. So now I'm walking every day wearing a proper elastomeric mask with 99.95% particulate filters, and I feel great. So no misery for me. Filtered air at home, wear a filter outside.

    1623:

    JBS
    "Brown" - that's it - a yellow-to-brown colur, so thick that at mid-day in Dec 1956 I could not see the school fence on the other side of my suburban street. { Less-than 15 meters }
    Incidentally, the quoted death rates for both the "Great Smogs" are seriously under-reported, they did NOT compare the deaths for that or similar weeks in other years & then subtract that from the smog-week deaths - they only recorded those as specifically down to the smog, though that was bad enough.

    1624:

    Heteromeles said: That's a standard trope, that Covid19 will turn into just another cold, and we won't care.

    I think you've misunderstood what I was saying. Not that it fools you into mingling by not making you sick. It gets you into events, conferences, flights, workplaces, nursing homes etc where you're required to show a negative RAT before you can get in.

    It's evading our behavioural infection controls. Our poor another way, we've selectively bred the virus to return a negative RAT.

    1626:
    Para 4 - Which site? I'm absolutely certain it was not Ardeer (Stevenston), and pretty sure it was not any of the Dumfries or Girvan sites.

    My grandfather told me the same story, he was probably working at Dalbeattie at the time. I can't remember if he said it happened on his site.

    (They did have at least one explosion on his site, I think nobody died, but he had to phone my gran to tell her to get the washing in before the acid rain started).

    1628:

    The events that seemed so utterly remote in the past were the same distance back in time as we currently find "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "LOTR, The Two Towers", neither of which seem that long ago.

    I think we tend to put events into two buckets: events we remember happening, and events that happened before we formed memories. The latter are all jumbled up, and it takes a lot of mental work to separate them into a chronological sequence, and even more to get a feel for the scale of that sequence.

    1629:

    I think the most interesting take was comparing Covid to smoking.

    Which makes infectious people the equivalent of second-hand smoke? And there are no non-smoking zones anymore (or at least non enforced) — including schools*.

    *Was talking to a friend last week who still teaches at my old school. Apparently most people have stopped masking and social distancing, even when they're coughing.

    (Although public health is recommending all the old safety measures, Ford made them optional so most people think that Covid is over because if it wasn't there would still be countermeasures in place. Kinda like how most people didn't wear seatbelts until it became mandatory (and enforced).

    1630:

    https://theconversation.com/breakthrough-in-gas-separation-and-storage-could-fast-track-shift-to-green-hydrogen-and-significantly-cut-global-energy-use-186644

    Using boron nitride powder in a ball mill to separate gases, rather than cryogenic fractional distallation. Looks very cool.

    1631:

    Which makes infectious people the equivalent of second-hand smoke?

    I was thinking it's more like carbon monoxide poisoning: you can't see the problem, people who suffer from it suffer mental issues and often become delusional, tracking down the source of the problem can be difficult, and fixing it impossible unless you have solid official support.

    But the response to pervasive second hand smoke is the same as covid... masks, of increasing severity as dose increases until you're wearing a full face mask with P3 filters whenever you're out of your safe space.

    https://www.uradmonitor.com/smoggie-in-sydney/ there is an orange sky photo there is you want to see what proper smoky skies look like. Nearest fire at least 50km away when that was taken.

    1632:

    There is an interesting similarity there, perhaps, with the case of external memory and the span of existence of the species. Broadly speaking, external memory goes back a few thousand years - the ancient Egyptians left loads of stone stuff in a desert, and then people started writing stuff down all over the place, but there's only a few scattered bits from the previous few thousand years and basically nothing before that. It's hard to realise that the span of time between then and when the big dinosaurs were about is so much more than just the same order of span over again.

    The naively literal impression of Biblical chronology is more or less consistent with this, too. There's lots of stuff about the Egyptians and Moses and all that, and before that there was Adam and Eve, and before that there was only a week. It's not an obvious interpretation that the week was actually a few billion years, and while such an interpretation might make sense from a scientific view of time, it's also inconsistent with the way it's natural to imagine how things went from non-scriptural external memory.

    So it becomes natural to accept both the recent-creation idea and the presence of dinosaurs in the Flintstones.

    And that's my half-baked theory of the week :)

    1633:

    Hogan's Heroes was the one that freaked me out most. It was set in WW2, which as a child I lumped in with the Norman Conquest and the sacking of Rome. Funny old clothes, funny old vintage cars and trucks.

    You were born around 1960, right?

    No European, let alone Soviet child in 1960's lumped WW2 with the sacking of Rome. I was digging out shell fragments from the garden on a regular basis, and the local forest had many very round pits we knew were from bombs.

    1634:

    "we've selectively bred the virus to return a negative RAT."

    Which annihilates with the positive rats, so people encounter supply difficulties when it comes to giving a rat's arse...?

    1635:
  • Maybe I was exaggerating for effect. But probably not a lot. My grasp of world history at the age of 5 was pretty dismal. I'd seen a couple of vintage cars, and that seemed to be what they drove. I was fed stories of the past in Sunday school about Jesus doing magic and I absorbed those in the same unquestioning way I absorbed HH episodes.
  • 1636:

    "I lived near Pasadena in the '70s, about 3 miles from the San Gabriel mountains. I couldn't see the mountains on bad smog days"

    I had occasion to visit JPL in the early '70s and remember looking out over the smog layer and seeing gravity waves rippling slowly along the top of it.

    1637:

    Weirdly "1962" was rendered as a bullet point.

    1638:

    Moz said I was thinking it's more like carbon monoxide poisoning

    I think of it like toxic dust. An unimaginably toxic dust. A single covid particle is about 1 femtogram. An infective dose of the latest variant is about 100 viral particles. Which makes an injurious dose ~100 fg. (10^-14 g)

    1639:

    No European, let alone Soviet child in 1960's lumped WW2 with the sacking of Rome. I was digging out shell fragments from the garden on a regular basis, and the local forest had many very round pits we knew were from bombs.

    While the life I lived in the US was no where near what you lived in the early 60s, WWII was still recent. All of US boomers born in the 50s had parents who served, or build things, or dealt with rationing, or ... and lived through the depression.[1] So Hogan's Heros was a comedy about the lives they lived. But my memory is of my father (a gunner on B-24s) really liking the movie and TV show 12 O'clock High. I got the impression that it was reasonably realistic. To the extend it can be without showing someone falling 20,000 feet with their legs missing.

    Ad to that I could visit the farm buildings he grew up with. They were about a mile away from where I spent my youth. And we were there multiple times per month. So when he talked about working in the slaughter house it was there in the same building where we were buying steaks.

    Prior to that was my grandfather's time (born in 1885 but still alive AND ACTIVE in the 60s and 70s). But yes. Times prior to that started to get hard to deal with.

    [1] So much of what goes wrong in the US in the 70s and onward with us boomers IMNEHO was due to most of our parents trying to erase the 30s and through WWII from their lives. At least the sucky parts which for most in the US were much of it. So we were raised on way too much happy talk.

    And again, compared to the USSR or basically Portugal to the Urals, life was relatively just hard. Not terrible.

    In the US WWII for most was a step up (for many a BIG step up) from the 30 if you weren't one of those dudes falling out of a plane at 20,000 feet.

    1640:

    "The thing here is that, sadly, computer programs, including Windows, have features we don't want. We call them 'bugs'."

    And the incidence of bugs goes as some power > 1 of program complexity. So as programs gradually get more complex, the number of bugs in them goes through the roof.

    So updates break shit. This is particularly obvious with Windows because of the huge number of "Windows insisted on an update and now my computer won't boot and there's fuck all I can do on it" stories we've all heard. There are similar stories about Macs, if not so many. They also happen with Linux - I had a failure to boot when some stupid bastard at Debian moved libmount from /lib to /usr/lib, so when some update pulled the new version in it removed this essential library from the boot partition and instead stuck it on /usr, which isn't mounted at boot, so the system could no longer find the library it needs to mount anything... (But at least it is Linux so I can fix it even though it won't boot. Fuck knows what you'd do if something equivalent happened on Windows.)

    There are plenty more such problems which don't break the boot process but do break something else - very often again because of stupid bastards changing things for no reason and not giving a toss what evils may arise in consequence. An example would be something gratuitously changing the format of its configuration files to something completely different and incompatible, so everything's fucked until you drag through working out how to convert your config by hand.

    These are worse when you can't tell they're there. There have been a few Big Panicky Problems which Charlie has been good enough to notify us about on this blog - ie. of the "EVERYONE with an internet-facing Linux server MUST SHIT THEMSELVES RIGHT NOW" type; can't remember all of them but one I do remember was some bug in bash that made it trivial for any attacker to get a shell (test case was something like 2 lines). Turned out I didn't have to worry about it because none of my servers were using a recent enough version of bash for the bug to have got into it in the first place. The same applied to the other big panics, and I'm fairly sure that with all of them the bug had been introduced by some pointless divot going "wouldn't it be great to change such-and-such a thing" when the thing was working fine already and the change did not make it noticeably better.

    And since people can't handle the idea of "if it ain't broke don't fix it", and won't restrict themselves to making updates which ONLY fix bugs and do not change anything else, we're going to be stuck in this exponential increase of new bugs resulting from people introducing new pointless shit, basically forever.

    1641:

    Well, there's a big cut-off around WW2 in the appearance of cars. "Everything" before WW2 had a long narrow bonnet in between separate mudguards for the front wheels sticking up on either side. After WW2 "everything" had the front wheels under wings rather than mudguards, so the front end of the car was pretty much a single broad lump instead of three narrow ones side by side. So there's a major difference in appearance which is obvious even if you're not at all into cars, and it automatically provides a cue to categorise a scene as "old" or "new".

    There's a similar cut-off a bit earlier with pictures of crowds - in "old" pictures EVERYONE is wearing a hat, in "new" ones nobody is.

    1642:

    Bubonic plague is pretty bloody transmissible as standard, by air (not just fleas), especially if someone gets the pneumonic version. You just don't go near them at all or else you get it too. I think I've heard a similar figure of 100 organisms being enough to start an infection. But the good thing is it makes you lie down and then you die really fast, instead of walking round the shops for a week breathing on people.

    1643:

    "LOTR, The Two Towers"

    From the dates you've given, that was about half way between when Hogan's Heroes was set and when it was first shown.

    1644:

    There's a similar cut-off a bit earlier with pictures of crowds - in "old" pictures EVERYONE is wearing a hat, in "new" ones nobody is.

    Ah, the JFK effect.

    1645:

    While I understand your sentiments, for most folks it just doesn't work.

    Based on your comments here for a variety of reasons you are not impacted by outsiders trying to break into your systems. But that is NOT the reality of the typical person in the industrial world.

    In so many jobs, much less their personal life, they MUST use browsers and email and deal with ads and links that can lead to malware, 0 day exploits, or similar.

    Thus they are forced to deal with updates to things that to them ain't broke.

    I wish it wasn't so but reality sucks at times.

    1646:

    various on yellow and/or orange skies - We used to see these over Ardeer in the days of the nylon plant. The simple explanation was that the nylon plant was discharging chemical oxides.

    1611 "Why you should 'upgrade' to Windoze 11"? - Short answer is you can't. The last time Mickeyshaft issued an actual upgrade to Windoze was when they went from NT4 to Windoze 7. 7 to 10 was, mercifully, a cross-grade unless your wallet happens to be connected to the software in question.

    1616 - I get it. No, really, I do. I recently had Covid-19 (based on positive PCR). I had all the symptoms of a cold, and if a SCN hadn't insisted I'd not have tested at all.

    1629 - I am genuinely surprised; from Hansard, my grandfather would have known of the incident, and been involved in any investigation.

    1647:

    The same applied to the other big panics, and I'm fairly sure that with all of them the bug had been introduced by some pointless divot going "wouldn't it be great to change such-and-such a thing" when the thing was working fine already and the change did not make it noticeably better.

    CVE-2021-3156, a root privilege escalation exploit for sudo that had been undiscovered for ten years since 2011. Buffer overflow again.

    1648:

    Some bug classes never die. There will always be another generation to discover it the hard way. No generation ever fixes it, its just a thing you might learn how to avoid, while someone else fails to notice the problem. Anyone who thinks they've "solved" the problem has misunderstood the complexity. Firstly, you can't solve the halting problem. Secondly, you can't solve the human problem. So Hilbert's delusion persists.

    Trying to look at this more positively, I like to compare this problem-space to the issues with models. "All models are wrong, but some are useful."

    E.g. the Monte Carlo simulation method is flawed but useful. It was good enough for John von Neumann and his wife in 1948 (she wrote the code). The flaw was made worse in this example by using the middle-squares method, but it worked well enough for that very specific problem.

    On the negative side, there's the 5th domain of warfare.

    1649:

    One of the common boasts of Open Source advocates was the "many eyes" approach meant that, among others, Linux and its most important components would have been tested and studied by lots of people and any severe errors tracked down and dealt with long ago, unlike closed-source software such as Windows which was presumed by open-source advocates to be bug-ridden, untested and with no validation before it was foisted upon an ignorant public.

    This has not turned out to be the case. MS spends time and money testing and validating their code and bugs still slip through, open-source coders write stupid code (HeartBleed anyone?) and any code review and testing that is actually done that should catch egregious errors just... doesn't.

    Better tools will help but the elimination of the "I'm a superstar genius coder and I never make mistakes" mindset would go a long way to preventing many of the security pitfalls that do make it to customer service.

    1650:

    Interesting week or two for blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

    In reverse order (just a scraping of stuff that I, as a non-tech person, found in my email and regular websites):

    --Celsius, a crypto trading company, is filing for bankruptcy. apparently they own all the crypto people "purchased" from them(?) per their terms of service, but they're still a billion or two short, because reasons.

    --Texas has become a haven for bitcoin miners after they were expelled from China in 2021 for using too much power. With the Texas power grid dealing with summer heat and overstretched, Texas paid the bitcoin miners to shut down, thereby freeing up 1,000 MW or 1% of capacity.

    --Bruce Schneier wrote some things about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The words "danger" and "uselessness" are in the title. He referenced, among others...

    --Nick Weaver saying all cryptocurrency should "die in a fire", and

    --This upper-level engineering lecture given at Stanford, that goes in to a bit more detail about all the problems.

    Oh my.

    1651:

    Dive into Biblical Literalism: do Literalists understand what they read?

    Well...

    Genesis 1:16 (KJV): "God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also." So the Moon's only visible at night? Well, it shows up during the day for a good chunk of every single month.

    That, I think, is critical reading test #1, a little hint that the following is not literally true.....

    Then there's the hint that Adam is not the first human:

    Genesis 1:26 (the first creation of humans) "Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”"

    Genesis 2:7: "then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed."

    This explains how Adam and Eve's kids found wives. They were two of the vegans (1:29) out there who'd been told to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

    Adam matters, not because he was first, but because when God decided veganism was evil and killed everybody except Noah's family, Noah was a 10th generation descendant of Adam, which means he was 2^-10 of Adam's DNA and 1-2^-10 Nephelim (gen 1.0 human) DNA...but who's counting.

    Anyway, after God scrubbed the Earth of all the Nephelim except for Noah's family, He came out with Terms of Service Genesis 9.1 (RSV): "And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 4 Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man. 6 Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image. 7 And you, be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the earth and multiply in it.”"

    Now note:

    --No dominion.

    --Meat eating is okay

    --Blood eating is NOT okay, nor is bloodshed. Hence vampires are Evul, so is shedding the blood of other humans. Not sure where menstruation fits into all this, which is, I guess, why the word is "man" and not "human."

    Yes, Charlie, I'll stop with the Bible whacking*, because I only wanted to make a point.

    NONE OF THIS is part of level 1 level evangelical churchianity, where people angrily claim Biblical literalism. Why go on about dominion, when that is literally not God's current covenant? Heck, how many people can read that thing about the moon only being visible at night and realize it's contradicted, in the sky where they can see it, every few weeks?

    *PS: I rather like the bite where the serpent, after talking in the Garden of Eden, remains utterly faithful to God's will, so that serpents never talk again and only bite people? While humans rebel against God so often that heroes are made of those who are even partially loyal? But we're the good ones? Oy. I'll stop now.

    1652:

    "Blood eating is NOT okay, nor is bloodshed."

    So no morcilla or Blutwurst? I love morcilla and the Blutwurst I've had wasn't bad.

    1653:

    Yeah, morcilla and blutwurst are apparently among those little heresies. So is wearing blended fabric, from somewhere in Leviticus IIRC. Weird, I know.

    On a deeper level, there's the weirdness of the Human 1.0 (Nephelim) and Human 2.0 (Adam and offspring). So apparently, for the first ten long generations of humanity, almost all the humans on the Earth who were not related to Adam were not descended from those who had eaten the Fruit of Knowledge (the Sons of God, version 2.0 build). But they were considered wicked and wiped out by the Flood.... Except that those who had survived were hybrid 1.0/2.0 kit-bash models, so it's unknown whether anything other than Adam's putative Y chromosome made it into Noah. Guess that's why human Y chromosomes don't cross-over during meosis? It's all about Adam and trans-Eve?

    Anyway, I'll stop with the Biblical literalism. The only utility of all the words I just put up is if you feel the need to mess with the literalists in your life and find them useful.

    I'll end by saying that I got a lot of this by reading a rabbi's blog after trying to figure out if the whole Dominionist mess was a mis-translation of the Hebrew or actually in the original. It's in the original, but dominion is not part of the current covenant if you're a believer. Nor was it part of the charge God laid on Adam. Dominion was only given to the Version 1.0 humans whose descendants were wiped out by the Flood, so it should be a dead letter among Biblical literalists. Heh heh.

    1654:

    > morcilla or Blutwurst

    or black pudding. Sorry, forgot the provenance of the blog. Never tried it myself.

    1655:

    I'm really not sure I see whats wrong with the Sun ruling the day and the Moon ruling the night statement.

    The Moon does indeed appear during the day, but it certainly does not rule it as its a lot fainter than the Sun, sufficiently so that most people rarely notice it.

    I think my query would be regarding what rules the night at new Moon? Darkness?

    But when the Bible tells you "the sun stood still" you know its talking bollocks.

    1656:

    1651 Para 3 - Very true this. I once had some code which threw an Ada exception repeatably with a certain binary data source file. In order to trace what the actual exception that the 3rd party outfit who wrote some of the code I had adapted to work with these files was, we wrapped the code that was throwing the actual exception in its own exception block in order to read the exception, at which point the exception went away and I spent the next 2 weeks writing a formal set of documents describing this paragraph!

    1654 - I honestly don't know either way whether or not black pudding is halal and/or kosher, but it is made in Stornoway and eaten by attendees of all the various $word "Free Church of Scotland" groups.

    1657:

    Yeah, it isn't about the number of eyeballs, it's the quality of the brains behind the eyeballs. However, if you read ESR's other writing, as I have, you may also question his judgement on some other issues. I would prefer not to comment.

    1658:

    The world doesn't need rockstar testers and code validators, it needs better tools that don't shit out buffer overflows and lots of resources for testing and validation of customer-facing code. The tools are being developed, programming languages like Rust that flag bad code and tell the rockstar coders that they possibly made mistakes. A lot of rockstar coders don't like Rust, funny that.

    Coding for the web that exposes said code to a world-wide attack surface can't depend on better brains, it needs tools that make meat-brains and human eyeballs redundant when it comes to hardening code and detecting screwups like HeartBleed or the aforementioned sudo CVE. Baby steps, baby steps.

    1659:

    It could be argued that Open Source helped researchers discover and test the recent "Retbleed" vulnerability. Anyway, this is a reminder that complexity also bites us at the hardware level.

    We try hard to manage the complexity, but it still bites us. At the hardware level, it bites us, we "manage" it, then it bites us some more. RowHammer will be biting us for many years to come.

    Some of this problem may come from making the attack surface Turing-equivalent, but this just makes it easier for a remote attacker. That's the risk of putting a language like Java or Javascript in a browser, but there's a local attack surface too. See the recent debate raging in the infosec world regarding Word/Excel macros. Will this ever be fixed? I doubt it'll happen during my lifetime, but if MS will fix this one - major - vulnerability, that would be welcome. It could help start the JS-in-the-browser debate. However, there are too many companies depending on these features to give them up any time soon. It's an industry-wide failure.

    My one small hope comes from watching the randsomeware industry grow in size each year. Someday the cost to other industries will be large enough for them to demand solutions. Will they be powerful enough to force a change in the IT industry?

    Are we there yet? Is this the year? I don't know, but it seems a lot closer now. Maybe next year. For now its just hand-wringing and a lot of muttering in the infosec world.

    1660:

    Ah, yes Stanford class EE380 - my old friend Dennis Allison’s “pretty much any speaker I find interesting “ class. An excellent weekly talk on a large range of subjects. Used to go fairly often when I lived down there. Dennis was, amongst other things, one of the founders of Dr Dobb’s Journal.

    1661:

    We've had better tools - and techniques - for many decades. The best tools, I've found, are books.

    I learned how to avoid buffer overruns reading a book written in the 1970s. (It's a very simple technique. It's not tied to any language or CPU. I've used it writing code in assembly language upwards for at least three differnt CPU architectures.) I was fortunate to find or be given/loaned good books. Now they're almost all out-of-print.

    By the mid-80s I saw a flood of new books that taught almost nothing of value. They were full of broken code and taught bad habits. Today we have entire websites that perform the same function.

    So I've given up recommending any books to other programmers. The typical response has been indifference. Nobody has ever shown any interest. After all, they've been writing code for years/decades - what more do they need to learn? Besides, books are expensive and they take time to read.

    Today I'll make the point that they help me unwind before I go to bed. I'm currently reading Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre (2nd Edition), and it works superbly. That's not a recommendation for anything, of course. I'm just saying it works for me.

    1662:

    Hogan's Heroes was the one that freaked me out most

    Me too, though I also remember discovering many of the actors had been around during the war, particularly Victor Klemperer, and that changed my perception to something more stepwise (Klemperer was in his early 20s during the war, but his 40s and 50s during filming). Changes it by using an actual human as a yardstick, sort of.

    I think that there are different versions of the observation that help with deeper time, albeit the turning points are themselves in the past. And then the perspective change is the other way around. It's a frequently made observation that the Great Pyramid of Giza was as-or-more ancient to the late Roman republic, civil war and early empire period as-or-than the latter is to us. Another example that I encountered recently: it is still 347 years till the Hagia Sophia will have been a mosque for longer than it was a cathedral.

    I think we run into trouble where we observe time periods where some things that we think are important to us haven't changed, so we flatten that scale into one with what we perceive as the equivalent amount of change. I suppose it goes along with the conceit that change is discrete, always occurring at a specific point in time, with handwaving around the unraveling between states.

    1663:

    gasdive, would you please be so kind as to source your assertion of 80% false positives for the Rapid Antigen Test? Have not found it in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, WolframAlpha, Yahoo!, and Startpage, in global searches as well as last-month-only, and since 80% accuracy is the FDA standard, this is most concerning. Thank you.

    1664:

    I zeee nuthing, nuthing!!!

    You've hit upon the 20 year cycle of nostalgia.

    It wasn't just Hogan's Heroes there was a tsunami of WW2 movies made in the 60s (Bridge on the River Kwai, The Longest Day, The Great Escape, Battle of the Bulge, Battle of Britain, The Desert Fox, Von Ryan's Express, Where Eagles Dare, Guns of Navarrone, Hell is for Heroes, 12 O'Clock High, Merril's Marauders, etc.

    Each had an appropriate number of British actors practicing their stiff upper lift and dry sense of humor, American actors being the tough wise guys often with Brooklyn accents, and German actors being either razor sharp Nazi fanatics or highly capable, rather noble and sympathetic soldiers)

    And on TV there was 12 O'clock High, Rat Patrol, Combat!, Dad's Army, and even McHale's Navy (another military comedy completely divorced from reality).

    60s nostalgia was all about the 40s

    70s nostalgia was all about the 50s (Grease, Happy Days, Sha Na Na, etc.)

    80s nostalgia was all about the 60s (anniversaries for Woodstock, Sgt. Pepper, etc.)

    So there really wasn't anything about unique about Hogan's Heroes.

    1665:

    But when the Bible tells you "the sun stood still" you know its talking bollocks.

    You make too much of this. Even today we speak of sunrise and sunset.

    1666:

    I don't think anyone is claiming there's anything particularly singular about it. The thing that's notable is that the time period it depicts were more recent at the time it was made than it itself is as a cultural artefact now. Because it was in popular culture when some of us were kids, it influenced our perceptions of the time period involved which seemed at the time like it was, on our then small individual timescales, a long time ago. The point is that we've all outlived that timescale, maybe outlived double that timescale.

    Next you're going to tell me that the 1990s is to the 2020s as the 1950s was to the 1980s or something...

    1667:

    Interesting week or two for blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

    A few weeks ago but I like this one:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fbi-adds-cryptoqueen-to-ten-most-wanted-fugitives-list-for-fraud.html

    https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110577425/cryptoqueen-ruja-ignatovas-international-scheme-landed-her-on-fbis-most-wanted

    Multi-level marketing of absolutely nothing. So MLM of a Ponzi scheme advertised as a cryptocurrency investment. I wonder if she got inspired by Bernie M.

    I like this note from the NPR story:

    But in 2017, Ruja Ignatova apparently got a lot of plastic surgery done. She boarded a flight from Bulgaria to Greece and disappeared

    1668:

    Sorry, I meant the film versions of both, which came out 20 years ago. If course LOTR was published almost equitemporal from the 1943-1945 setting and airing dates of HH. (Which I also find weird because the book feels like it's contemporaneous with say Alice in Wonderland rather than novels it's actually contemporary with, say The Star Beast)

    1669:

    you may also question his judgement on some other issues

    dude has some bees in his bonnet for sure but i still miss his blog

    1670:

    kiloseven asked: would you please be so kind as to source...

    https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/sciencebrief/use-of-rapid-antigen-tests-during-the-omicron-wave/

    "The pooled sensitivity of rapid antigen tests for the detection of Delta infections is 81.0%. Conversely, the pooled sensitivity for the detection of Omicron infections is only 37.1%."

    Particularly note Figure 2. "To our knowledge, of the evaluated tests, only Panbio and Standard Q are currently available in Ontario." these two RAT are the first two sets of columns in Figure 2 that show a positive reading for ~38% and ~21% of tests on known Omicron positive individuals.

    Not only is the new variant less likely to be picked up, it's less likely to be picked up for longer. That is to say, it can evade detection for longer after infection. It's also less likely to be picked up using the standard sampling technique.

    "We have established that the sensitivity of rapid antigen tests is lower for the Omicron variant than for the Delta variant, particularly in the first few days of infection, and that nasal samples are less sensitive than combined oral-nasal samples."

    This meta analysis is based on work published prior to Feb 2022, and I don't think its a stretch to think the BA5 and later variants might have improved their ability to evade tests.

    1671:

    Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 1621:

    I don't really mind the updates as such, although I have had some bad experiences with AUTOMATIC updates. I prefer to be in control to be sure the update not going to fuck-up the software I use. With Windows 7 I could get a notification whenever they had an update and determine in advance whether it was going to be incompatible with my software.

    If windoze10 allows this I have not been able to figure out how to make it do so. I've searched the web and followed micro$soft's instructions for how to set up for notification & manual installation (like Windows 7), but when the time comes for forced updates micro$soft ignores my settings.

    My firewall is located in my commercial small-business router; Ethernet, not wi-fi. I wired my house back before wi-fi became a thing. Nothing is supposed to come in through the router except in response to a request I sent out. I think I'm fairly well protected as long as I remember to NOT go to sketchy domains ... plus I maintain an extensive HOSTS file to block said sketchy domains.

    And I keep my anti-virus/anti-malware software up to date. I PAY to keep them up to date.

    The reason I'm upset with micro$oft is I said NO to Windoze 11 and that should be the end of it. They should not be trying to force it upon me. They especially should not be trying to put me into a loop where I cannot use my computer until I agree to install it.

    That's not only coercive, it's deceptive. AND it's damned bad manners and arrogant as fuck!

    So fuck 'em with a barb-wire dildo!

    PS: Every time they force an automatic update, they try to change my default browser to micro$oft's current piece of shit and try to force me to use micro$oft orifice instead of Open Office, and they try to substitute their software for EVERY other non-micro$oft application I use.

    The first time I try to do anything after one of these forced updates I get error messages telling me I'm using the wrong goddamn software. I have to reset all of my software defaults.

    1672:

    Robert Prior @ 1630: ... and events that happened before we formed memories. The latter are all jumbled up, and it takes a lot of mental work to separate them into a chronological sequence, and even more to get a feel for the scale of that sequence.

    I think it somewhat depends on where & when you went to school & how much of that shit you were made to memorize.

    I graduated from high school near the end of the era when most history, geography & "social studies" still required a lot of rote memorization of dates. It's faded over the years, but the basic relationships are still there if I just think about it.

    For my lifetime, most of the important events I remember are organized by who was President of the U.S. when they happened, so modern history is basically broken up into 4 & 8 year chunks for me.

    1673:

    PS, note also that the numbers for positives in fig 2 are for individuals that are already symptomatic. The advice was that if you have symptoms, stay home. The value of RATs was supposed to be that people could gather in large crowds confident that there weren't Infectious but asymptomatic people present. "There were no antigen positive cases until two days after the first positive saliva PCR test (Day 0), when nasal antigen test sensitivity was 16.7%"

    1674:

    All my tests are Rapid Response, manufactured (or at least distributed) by BTNX. It's what the only local pharmacy with tests has.

    https://www.btnx.com/Product?id=2010

    1675:

    Re: 'We try hard to manage the complexity, but it still bites us ...'

    Non-techie here ...

    When programmers write code are they writing the logical framework/elements of whatever task or are they trying to translate into machine lingo (break down into elements) what the human wants?

    The discussion about merits of different computer/programming languages ... if programming is about logic, why so many different programming languages*? Yeah, I get that in math you can solve many problems using different approaches, but if you're striving for efficiency including in communication between machines, machines-to-humans, humans-to-machines, etc., wouldn't it be more efficient to concentrate on one language and build on that?

    *Profit as in having a new language so that you can patent/copyright or whatever is a crappy motive because the vast majority of businesses make money by being able to communicate with as many potential customers as possible. Universal language/access.

    Are there any AIs/AI labs working on developing a universal programming language?

    Thanks!

    1676:

    "wouldn't it be more efficient to concentrate on one language and build on that?"

    This has been argued about many many times (thank you, Lady Counterblast) on this very blog.

    There are those who claim that the ideal language already exists (you know who you are), while ignoring the facts that there are still a lot of, mostly imbedded, machines out there for which it is too resource hungry, and that by the time you have done all the tailoring (which I'll agree should be possible) to make it fit for a specific problem domain you have effectively created a new language anyway, and that no language is of any use if your employers haven't installed it.

    Me, I consider that a competent programmer can work in any available language, except perhaps RPG. I consider myself to have been a competent programmer (not a rock star, but then there are no actual rock stars, just people who consider themselves rock stars, thus demonstrating that they are less than competent).

    Of course, some languages are better fits for particular problem domains, and for the strengths and weaknesses of particular programmers, than others. Nothing is universal.

    JHomes

    1677:

    We don't have a time detector, or a time sense, in our brains. Time is like distance, they are perceptions that our brains have to deduce from various cues in the environment. How we end up perceiving such qualities in the environment will depend heavily on how we were brought up, and what environmental stimuli we were exposed to during our lives. I read somewhere an account of the response deep forest dwellers have on being transported out of an environment where the farthest distance anyone could ever see was across a clearing, and into an environment where you can see all the way to the horizon. It was deeply transformative.

    I would imagine something similar would happen to us if we could experience significantly longer periods of time during our formative years, or if we were better able to gauge the rate of change.

    1678:

    Not a great programmer here, but different programming languages are useful for different things. Historically, Assembler and C are useful for programming that is heavily involved with addressing hardware. However, both have problems, which has resulted in the development of languages like RUST.

    BASH, CSH, KSH, ZSH, etc., are useful for manipulating the operating environmements of UNIX-style systems.

    Languages like Pascal and (cough!) BASIC were useful for training beginners, though these days Python and Ruby are probably better for this application, and are also used professionally.

    Scratch and Squeak are forms of Smalltalk designed for kids. Other languages are designed for proper mathematical compliance, or dealing with text, or being easily read by humans.

    There are also tradeoffs involved. For example, C programs run very quickly, but a useful C program can't be written quickly. Oppositely, Ruby programs don't run as fast as C programs, but you can write a RUBY program in a quarter them time it takes to write the same program in C.

    Javascript is specifically designed to run inside a browser while minimizing vulnerabilities to hackers. COBOL was designed to run business applications. It's not great at math, but is brilliant at arithmetic and runs natively on really big mainframes. SQL is designed to get the most out of a database.

    And so forth. Furthermore, every programming language also encodes an opinion and is aimed at a particular audience.

    1679:

    We don't have a time detector, or a time sense, in our brains. Time is like distance, they are perceptions that our brains have to deduce from various cues in the environment. How we end up perceiving such qualities in the environment will depend heavily on how we were brought up, and what environmental stimuli we were exposed to during our lives. I read somewhere an account of the response deep forest dwellers have on being transported out of an environment where the farthest distance anyone could ever see was across a clearing, and into an environment where you can see all the way to the horizon. It was deeply transformative.

    Time sense is learned, but it's built off innate ability. One way to learn it is through music, dance, or any activity (surfing, boating) where you have to coordinate your activities with those of other people or things. You start from interval between events and order of events, and work up from there.

    Last week I saw a show on PBS where an Idaho rancher who runs a dude ranch said he hated being enclosed, whether in a city or in a forest, because he liked to see who's coming towards him from far away. He lives on the High Plains/Big Sky Country, and has all his life. He probably has adapted over his life to being vision-dependent. I grew up in mountains and chaparral, and I love forests. I'm more multisensory, especially in chaparral, because I'm used to having short sight lines and use hearing for long-distance perception. I'm not that fond of being out under the Big Sky, although I can manage.

    Thing is, your brain's plastic and adaptable, so if you spend years in an environment, you're going to adapt to it. Going from one environment to another is disorienting, not transformative. It's commonplace to laugh about greenhorn biologists struggling in forests where indigenes move nonchalanatly. But take those indigenes to the city to experience the day-to-day life of the biologist, and they're even more helpless. One big (and very dangerous) example is that they have no idea how to read traffic, and often literally need to have their hands held while walking so they don't get hit by a car, bike, or train.

    Getting back to the idea of time, that's one of the great losses in Genesis 1. In other translations, the Sun "signifies" the day rather than ruling it, while the Moon "signifies" the night. Now, if, like the Genesis writers, you assume wrongly that the Earth is fixed in place and the Sun transits the sky, day starts before the Sun comes up and ends after the Sun goes down. Is the sun making the day, or signifying its passage. That's okay--the writers were wrong, but it took more clever observers than they had to spot the problem*. The problem in Genesis 1 is pairing it with the notion that the Moon signifies the night, when the Moon wanders through both the day and the night sky. Night happens, whether or not the Moon is in the sky. The Moon's presence doesn't signify night. Just as the sun marks the passage of a day, the Moon marks the passage of months. The writers of Genesis could have done something clever and set up that pairing, and we'd still be admiring it millennia later. Instead, they went for a symbolic duality of no real use.

    The interesting things are how hard it is to notice, and once noticed, how hard it is to say "this is wrong," rather than to reflexively justify it. As a biologist I'm sensitive to this, since we've caught the bulk of the crap from the creationists, while people from a physical science background tend to blow it off.

    1680:

    “Scratch and Squeak are forms of Smalltalk designed for kids” Uh, nope. Scratch was intended for very new programmers of any age though certainly with a realisation that many would be young. Squeak is a fullscale grownup Smalltalk with actual real tools etc. And no buffer overflow vulnerability issues. See several prior threads on this very site, seemingly ad infinitum.

    1681:

    You're probably right. I've never examined them much because Scratch and Squeak don't seem like they're designed to cooperate with the system they're part of. It's all "Fuck the kernel, libraries, utilities, etc., I'm sufficient unto myself." Not exciting. Smalltalk looks tolerable.

    1682:

    Actually I should expand a bit there - Scratch is not a Smalltalk. It is implemented in Smalltalk in the original version and the latest MIT release is in some HTML/JavaScript mix. Scratch itself is an Actor language where objects have scripts that run essentially in parallel and drive actions and interactions. Its biggest USP is that any interesting game type program has to be a parallel program and thus a lot of kids have had first experiences of software in a paradigm rarely dealt with until advanced stages of degrees. If nothing else this gives me hope that some of them will grow up understanding just how pathetic linear code from dead-text files is.

    1683:

    if programming is about logic, why so many different programming languages

    Programming is about the interface between people and logic. Much as urban planning is about the interface between people and cities ("the built environment" is the catchphrase of the moment). The key thing is people - you can't build a city for cars and expect people to live happily there, and you can't build a programming language for "rational people" and expect normal people to be able to use it very well.

    Partly this is affordances, or nudges - there are things that the language/city makes easy to do, and mistakes that are hard to avoid. And there are design features that make some mistakes easy to spot, and somethings are possible to do that while technically possible are effectively impossible because of the limitations of stupid meat puppets.

    That can be as simple as walking blindfold across a multi-lane highway or as complex as being a world-reknowed artist while living in a humpy outside Alice Springs. Similarly Matlab or R make a lot of maths stuff really easy, and while technically you could do the same things using Excel in practice you'd make mistakes and Excel makes finding those almost impossible.

    This is why Rust is so popular with people doing hard stuff, or people who like to think they do but haven't used Rust. Rust forces you into a particular way of thinking about problems, and that's enormously powerful for the problems it solves well. Leaking memory, for example, is kind of like "list everyone you've ever met. If you make a mistake that person will be offended, possibly enough to hunt you down and kill you"... Rust auto-completes names for you. C++ says "you can do anything you want to do"... but that's all it does.

    1684:

    (by rational people I mean those who can easily hold immense amounts of complex data in their head without making mistakes or losing track - they never get distracted by hunger, sleep or emotions. Homo economicus et al)

    1685:

    Keeping track of slightly deeper time? Background & early influences matter. Just from memory: Will, Will, Harry, Steve, Harry, Dick, Jon Harry3, Ed. Ed, Ed, Harry, Harry5, Harry, Ed, Ed? Dick, Harry, Harry8. Ed, Mary, Liz, James, Chas, NOLL, Chas, James, Will, Anne, Geo, Geo, Geo, Will, Vicky, Ed, Geo, Ed-the-brief, Geo, Liz. Further back, um: Alfred, Ed, Athelstan, Ed(old), 4-Eds, various(!) {NOTE}, Eth-Unraed, Ed useless. { Ignoring Cnut the Great, here } {Note: - Really HAD to look them up - it gets complicated }

    1686:

    1660 - I don't know Rust: I will reserve judgement until I have had some sort of course, and written a program of at least 1_000 lines. Fair?

    1665 - Is the UK's "Lateral Flow Test" an example of a Rapid Antigen Test? If so, then I couldn't quote statistics, but I do believe it to be less accurate (more false positives and false negatives) than a Polymerase Chain Reaction test.

    1673 - Well, FWIW MickeyShaft Blunt Edge is better than MickeyShaft Intranet Exploder 11, but compared with Chrome or Firefox that's d@mning with faint praise.

    1675 - Thanks for the expansion; that has given me some confirmatory evidence for my theory that RATs have become a waste of time and biochemistry.

    1677 - Confining the discussion to compiled programming langauges, the reason for more than one (other than the ongoing argument about strong typing (Ada programmer, so you can see where I stand on that)) is that different languages are strongest for different types of code:-
    1. Fortran or Pascal are strongest for mathematical work
    2. Ada is strongest for really strict typing, and for real time systems
    3. Cobol is strongest for file handling and producing hard copy reports...

    1678 - I take it you'd agree my partial response (limited to languages I've worked in/with) to 1677 above?

    1687:

    Greg, you're missing Richard II!

    Yes, I can do them all from memory. I can do most of the regnal years as well. And yes, I've got a history degree, how did you guess?

    1688:

    Oh, no. You've asked some questions about programming tools. Be prepared to get a lot of answers! A lot of twisty answers, all different. And then a lot more answers, all alike. And some, like this one, with an in-joke or two.

    I think a brief look at the history of programming languages may be useful here. Programming itself began in 1948, with the first stored program computers. Imagine programming at that time in binary, toggling switches on a panel. The first microcomputer, the Altair, also had a front panel. ISTR the very first version of MS Basic was loaded from paper tape. Systems like that used a classic bootstrapping technique: first load the "bootloader", the code that loads the real code you want to run. However, early machines used "persistant" storage like ferrite core memory, so the bootloader might not need reloading often.

    The first programming languages were created in the 1950s. Code has to be written to implement the language itself, so in those early days that would be binary. The result was a very simple but useful language that could solve a general class of problems, bound by the hardware limitations of the machines themselves, which were extreme by today's standards. It's really hard for most of us to imagine how extreme that was. (See the subthread here on understanding the past.) I have to recall the days when I was learning assembly language coding. As I had no assembler software initially, I began by using the Z-80 manual to hand-assemble each instruction.

    One of the oldest surviving programming languages is Fortran. The oldest surviving document on that language describes a very small language, but even that wasn't the first Fortran. We don't know what that was; it was lost. Like some of those early machines, we've lost so much history. Nobody documented it, apparently. Today we appreciate the value of these documents, of course. See the Bitsavers archive.

    Ok, that's the historical perspective. Where are we today? How did we get from there to here?

    Consider the way most programmers (and engineers, it seems) look at each other's work. It's as if we say, "I understand what you're doing, but I wouldn't do it like that." Of course, when the effort of creating any software is so high, and everyone begins from scratch (perhaps even binary), what incientive is there to do anything the way someone else did it?

    More importantly, most programmers and engineers have no idea what their peers are doing. It's impossible to communicate that level of information fast enough. As our numbers have grown, so Metcalf's law strikes. The cost of communication went up - until very recently, but now we share info so easily that anyway can do it, so we're drowning in info. We also have fierce demands on our time. A variant of Brooke's Law applies. As I understand it, the problem starts with the slow speed of info spread through a network of humans.

    Then there's the social aspect. Given all the emergent variety of solutions to problems, some humans will find ways of giving a choice of one solution over another meaning. Oops. Then we get tribes and tribal warfare, identity politics etc.

    So I saw a lot of flamewars in the 90s. Every single one of them was full of fallacius arguments that Aristotle would've recognised. It was both hilarious and very sad.

    Even sadder, not a lot has changed since then. Sure, we have a few new programming languages, more splintering of cultures, more tribal nonsense. Otherwise it's just more of the same.

    I like Paul Graham's way of looking at this. (He's a co-founder of Y Combinator, a seed company for startups.) He sometimes writes about this subject. Here are just a few examples.

    http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html

    http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

    http://www.paulgraham.com/weird.html

    1689:

    Regarding writing safe code -- The best tools, I've found, are books.

    There's an old techie joke-acronym, PIBKAC -- (the) Problem Is Between (the) Keyboard And (the) Chair. Books don't write code, there are a few intermediate steps between the printed page explaining best practices and executable code running on a system and those steps tend to be where errors are inserted. The best coders, fully cognizant of the best practices gleaned from the best books, the sorts who never ever ever make mistakes still write code at beer o'clock and fuck up in the grand manner and earn a citation in the Year's Best CVE lists (the Heartbleed fuckup code was submitted to the production code repository late at night on New year's Eve under, I believe, the affluence of incohol. Much merriment eventuated).

    The ones to watch out for are folks who say things like "I learned how to avoid buffer overruns reading a book" because they have internalised the idea that they never make mistakes, even if they think they haven't. That's why we need tools that don't think, they just do the job of making buffer overrun exploits a lot harder.

    1690:

    Kardashev: So no morcilla or Blutwurst? I love morcilla and the Blutwurst I've had wasn't bad.

    Those things are absolutely unkosher for Jews; in fact the whole point of kosher slaughterhouses existing is to ensure that Jews Don't Eat Blood (even a tiny bit, by accident).

    (Note that the folks who compiled the Babylonian Talmud didn't have access to microscopes or modern biology so they didn't know about capillaries or the circulatory system and therefore thought that if the meat had stopped dripping it meant there was no more blood.)

    1691:

    Yes, the histories and complexities of city's and their growth is a useful comparison for, well, the whole history of computing. Just as every city has its own path through time and space, so does every machine and the software development tools for it. We live in a lot of twisty cities, all different. We also live in a lot of twisty cities, all alike.

    So there are a lot of suprises and much forgotten history. The little that most people "know" is often wrong or only loosely connected with the past. (Has the difference between history and the past been discussed here already?)

    As always, the details get politicised. There will always be a Cato the Elder demanding that a "rival" be destroyed. It's the same with programming languages. Also editors, operating systems, browsers etc.

    1692:

    Some people are brain-damaged. No book can help them. ;)

    1693:

    Well if you want to do it that way, consider that the beginning of the reign of George V (1910) is closer to the end of the reign of George III (1820) than it is to the present day, and that in 4 years time (2026) the end of the reign of George V (1936) will be as long ago as the death of George III was at the time of the coronation of George V.

    1694:

    "1678 - I take it you'd agree my partial response "

    I'll keep my own counsel on individual cases, but agree wholeheartedly on the general principle.

    JHomes

    1695:

    1690 "I understand what you're doing, but I wouldn't do it like that." Of course, when the effort of creating any software is so high, and everyone begins from scratch (perhaps even binary), what incentive is there to do anything the way someone else did it?
    And yet you've already cited Fortran. One of the main reasons Fortran still survives is the sheer number of pre-coded mathematical algorithm libraries, which are exactly "doing it like someone else", to the extent that you're literally using their code.

    1692 - Thank you for clearing up the non-kosher nature of black pudding for me Charlie.

    1696 - That was the whole point; I was only discussing the few languages I'd actually used and acknowledging the incomplete nature of the comment.

    1696:

    It's a frequently made observation that the Great Pyramid of Giza was as-or-more ancient to the late Roman republic, civil war and early empire period as-or-than the latter is to us.

    Example which is less informative but really stuck in my mind:

    By the time the last mammoth died (on Wrangel Island) the Great Pyramid was already 1000 years old

    1697:

    DeMarquis:

    I read somewhere an account of the response deep forest dwellers have on being transported out of an environment where the farthest distance anyone could ever see was across a clearing, and into an environment where you can see all the way to the horizon. It was deeply transformative.

    Apparently after a tour on a submarine, submariners are instructed not to drive vehicles for 72 hours in order to give their brains time to adjust to seeing/processing lengths greater than a few metres.

    1698:

    The libraries came later. I was talking about the very early days of Fortran, including before Fortran II. Definitely before Fortran 66. The libraries that survive, like BLAS, all appear to be Fortran 77. There were portability issues even then, mainly regarding I/O. A lot of that was because there were big variations in file systems across platforms. More complexity.

    This is why studing the history helps us understand the issues. Linguistics also helps. Perhaps also psychology - a lot has been written about that over the years. Nevermind sociology and other fields. We can't remove humans and the complexity of human societies from any of this.

    I suprised myself just a few hours ago by making a connection between Cato the Elder and programmers making generic death threats over the use of semicolons. Perhaps it's worth recalling the centuries of regret that followed the destruction of Carthage. As some historians have pointed out, while their twin city existed, Romans could say, "Well, at least we're not as decadent as them." If you consider what programmers might think of as "decadence", you may possibly see my point.

    So I wonder how many programmers see this as a zero-sum game? I know there are some extremely vocal language advocates who probably do, but I'm not tempted to ask them. They all appear to me brain-damaged - that is, they lack the degree of theory of mind needed to understand the question. This is very evident from the language they use. Many interesting cognitive deficits are revealed in their online posts.

    This is what I mean when I say some people appear brain-damaged. I don't know how else to explain language and behavior that is consistant with cognitive deficits. This can even include people with high technical skills, like programmers and engineers.

    1699:

    thewehei
    No, I haven't
    ....Harry, Ed, Ed? Dick, Harry, Harry8...

    1700:

    Not only is the new variant less likely to be picked up, it's less likely to be picked up for longer.

    Yup.

    I know this is anecdata, but: I began feeling a bit off-colour/under the weather on May 18th. I had a bout of severe nausea which culminated in me vomiting in the night. I've normally got a cast-iron stomach: last time I threw up was on the order of 5-10 years previously. Luckily the nausea passed, but worse was to come.

    On May 20th I realized I was definitely ill. I had a persistent headache that lasted continuously for days (despite self-administered Naproxen, which always worked in the past). I was fatigued, and had muscle/joint aches everywhere, and felt cold. I went to bed and realized I couldn't maintain a stable temperature -- I was borderline-feverish for about 24 hours. My sense of taste didn't disappear completely but everything went very flat and feeble for about 3-5 days, and my sense of smell faded. (I've had anosmia secondary to an ENT infection before COVID was a thing, this was like a mild version of it.) I also had abdominal pain and constipation: not just normal DVT type pain, but it felt like my intestines had been scooped out and inspected by the TSA.

    The fever subsided rapidly, the joint/muscle aches receded after 3 days, but the gut rot lasted for more than a month and I needed mid-day/afternoon naps every day for two weeks. I didn't go outside for 10 days, and when I did, a walk equivalent to a regular shopping trip put me back in bed for two days.

    There were some other weird symptoms. Random hiccups, 2-3 times an hour, lasted for about 6-8 weeks. Trapped wind. Back ache. And for two weeks my brain was fogged badly enough that I couldn't consistently count out a single-digit number of pills into a pill pot: I had to re-count them 3 times to be sure I had the right number. (Forget writing. I blogged once, badly and using material I'd organized pre-illness, and was unable to do creative stuff for 40 days per calendar.)

    Does this sound familiar to you ...?

    Here's the fun bit: I tested using NHS-supplied lateral flow tests every day for the first 14 days and at no point did I get a positive test result. I was doing nasal swabs consistently, and half the tests also called for throat swabs, but nothing showed up positive.

    What you might have noticed missing from my account: I had at worst very mild hay fever symptoms, no sore throat, no runny nose, only mild/transient loss of taste.

    I'm pretty sure I had one of the more recent Omicron variants, not BA.4/5 but possibly BA.2 or XE. "Mild" obviously -- at its worst it was less severe than regular old-fashioned flu, although it out-lasted flu symptoms by multiple weeks. It's a variant that doesn't really go for the lungs, and often avoids the nasopharynx entirely -- for about 30-60% of patients the most notable symptoms are gut-related.

    Anyway: all my symptoms are consistent with me having COVID19, probably BA.2 or XE strain, from May 18th to May 30th, give or take ... except for the stubbornly negative LFT results.

    PS: Double-vaxxed and boosted, still masking and avoiding crowded situations, it still got me. Take care out there.

    1701:

    Gasdive@1615 writes, "HH was set in the period 1943-1945 (episodes bounced around in that period a bit randomly) it was released in 1965. That's 20 years. So that's as far back as 2002 is now"

    Mass media is all about perceptions, money doesn't even outrank that. So I'd think it could possibly be time for the entertainment biz to explore public perceptions about a comical treatment of al Qaeda attacking the Twin Towers, after all it was less than a tenth of a percent of the fatalities from WW2.

    Since Hogan's Heroes was as well received as it turned out, with the network production decisions mostly coming out of heavily Jewish NYC, which might otherwise have been presumed sensitive about a light hearted treatment of genocidal oppressors, then resistance to such an approach for 9-11 after an equal time interval implies other factors at work than just public opinion. Factors like maybe political or business interests founded on keeping anti-terrorist paranoia whipped up. Wouldn't want to disparage our patriotic corporate interests, after all. Really the whole media hands off approach towards Saudi cultural and political backwardness does seem egregiously self serving at times.

    Although attacks on the Paris office of the Charlie Hebdo humor magazine over a mere cartoon points out an interesting difference: the Nazis were perceived as totally dead back in the 60's, and so an easy target for ridicule. Muslim extremist violence today maybe not so much.

    1702:

    Apparently after a tour on a submarine, submariners are instructed not to drive vehicles for 72 hours in order to give their brains time to adjust to seeing/processing lengths greater than a few metres.

    See 1681.

    From my limited experience with boats, I'd guess the other problem is that the submariners have a particular form of "sea legs." For me, one cause of seasickness is being inside a boat, where my inner ears tell me I'm moving while my eyes say I'm not moving. Getting outside, where I can see the boat moving against the ocean rapidly solves the problem.

    If you're stuck inside a moving boat for a few months, I suspect your brain will adapt to your the divergent signals you get from your inner ears and eyes. Problem is, once you go into the surface world, the signal between inner ear and eye converge, and your brain needs to adapt again. At walking speeds, it's likely not a problem (except you wonder why the ground is rolling under you), but being in a vehicle moving at higher speeds might induce carsickness, which is fairly dangerous when you're driving.

    1703:

    There's a lot of presumption built in here. This is not a defense of Genesis, just about how we have a tendency to fit stuff into our implicit bias.

    Like, it's probably true that they thought the sun revolved around the Earth, but that's not actually a conclusion you can convincingly draw from oral history. If all you had was scraps of OUR culture, where we refer to sunrise and sunset, you could also conclude we believed the sun revolved around the Earth.

    Or

    " Instead, they went for a symbolic duality of no real use. "

    To you. To them, it probably did.

    1704:

    Double-vaxxed and boosted, still masking and avoiding crowded situations, it still got me. Take care out there.

    And my sister is still insisting that Covid is over and it's just a bad cold now…

    Sigh. She's drunk the Alberta Kool-aid in full measure.

    1705:

    "so they didn't know about capillaries or the circulatory system and therefore thought that if the meat had stopped dripping it meant there was no more blood."

    How was the advent of that knowledge handled theologically/ritually?

    1706:

    (Hogan's Heroes): other factors at work than just public opinion. Factors like maybe political or business interests

    Alternatively: 9/11 was followed by the GWOT, which included (a) the Iraq invasion and (b) the Afghanistan occupation.

    And (b) only ended earlier this year.

    So arguably the GWOT is still as sensitive in cultural memory as WWII was in, say, 1946.

    1707:

    Funny you should say that...

    I erased a long paragraph about Babylonian astronomy, which predates the writing of Genesis by something like 1,000 years and was the most advanced in the area. They had the first known mathematical description of the motions of planets in the sky, and they apparently conceived of the Earth and sky as round, not flat. Parts of their systems (360 degrees in a circle, for example) are still in use today. It's original use (going from the Babylonian calendar) was that ca. 360 days in a year (IIRC the Babylonians fudged with variable numbers of 5 or 6 holidays to line up the terrestrial year with the celestial year), AND a degree is, very approximately, the width of your thumbnail held at arm's length. Using degrees means you can line up measurements you can take with your body, with the shifting of stars in the sky day by day, with the changing of the moon, planets, and seasons over the course of the year. To me this system is rather awe-inspiring.

    Now, we don't know whether the Babylonians conceived of the Earth as rotating, but there's no evidence for this in the western astronomical tradition that came from the Babylonian tradition. So if someone did come up with that idea, it was lost.

    As for the Moon marking months, the Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, with lunar months and solar years. That's why I posited that the writers of Genesis might have done better to say that God established the Sun to signify days, the Moon to signify months, and the stars to signify nights and years. That would have made their calendar sacred.

    Anyway, the Jews were in contact with the Babylonians for an extended time, but they wrote up their own, much simpler system, for whatever reason. It's not that presumptuous to say that they could have made it more useful for their people.

    1708:

    How was the advent of that knowledge handled theologically/ritually?

    It wasn't.

    Rabbinical interpretation of texts was handled much like a common law system of case law and precedent, until one final congress in (I think) 1841 decreed that everything that could possibly ever need reinterpreting had now been reinterpreted, progress had obviously ended, and the books could be closed.

    A bit like the proposals to close the patent offices in 1900 on the grounds that everything that could be invented had already been patented.

    This, incidentally, led to the Reform/Orthodox split in the late 19th/early 20th century. (For "Orthodox" read "Conservative" in American terminology, the Haredim -- black hat guys -- really run on a late 18th century interpretation.)

    1709:

    "....Harry, Ed, Ed? Dick, Harry, Harry8..."

    That's Richard III. You missed out Dick II (plus points for the introduction of the hanky to England) between Ed3 and Harry4.

    1710:

    And my sister is still insisting that Covid is over and it's just a bad cold now…

    At least your close relatives are still talking to you. (I'm assuming.) Mine have decided if we don't agree with them on such we're too dumb to be a part of their social networks. Real or digital.

    1711:

    So arguably the GWOT is still as sensitive in cultural memory as WWII was in, say, 1946.

    There was a flurry of TV shows about ops teams fighting terrorists and bad guys around the world in the first years after 9/11. Think "I Spy" only with sat comms via Palm Pilots in the jungle. They all flopped fairly quickly.

    I think a big difference IN THE US in terms of memories leading to movies and TV shows is WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam involved a non trivial part of the population. So there were a lot of shared memories. Since then as the "productivity" of war fighting has gone up fewer and fewer people know someone who HAS served. Much less someone serving at the moment. So movies about war and such over the last 30 years are about things that didn't seem to impact the lives of most of the US population.

    NCIS walks near this a lot but I've not watched more than a minute or few in well over a decade. It is more of a soap opera than a military movie.

    1712:

    Oh, joy. I am REALLY not looking forward to getting COVID, because I am already miserable enough (with similar symptoms) for half the time.

    Apparently, the new vaccines are targetted aginst the new variants, except that 'new' will become 'old' by the time they are out. How well they will work is another matter. I am afraid that we are stuck with it as a persistent disease, at least for the foreseeable future. I have kludged up my script to display its progress, following their change of format and contents, but HMG have buggered up the data so badly that there's little point without significant further kludges; it does appear to be spreading again, though.

    1713:

    I am afraid that we are stuck with it as a persistent disease, at least for the foreseeable future.

    I expect to die of it -- probably indirectly, due to complications, rather than of the acute viral illness.

    I am type II diabetic with hypertension and aged going-on-58, so at higher than baseline risk. Vaccinated is good, but the risk of a fatal cardiovascular accident (heart attack or stroke) shoots up enormously in the 12 months after a COVID infection. I will do my best not to get it again (even a mild case fucking sucks) but if we don't get a wide-spectrum sterilizing vaccine sooner or later I'll catch it again. And again. And again. Until I roll snake eyes and it's followed by a sudden CVA, and with hospital A&E units overloaded and ambulance response times of 6-8 hours not unheard of, it'll probably be fatal.

    We need that next-gen vaccine badly. Otherwise we're all looking at having a decade wiped off our life expectancy. Type II diabetes is supposedly good for shortening your life expectancy by ten years, so if you stack it with COVID, I'm at equivalent to a 78-year-old.

    1714:

    At least your close relatives are still talking to you. (I'm assuming.)

    Talking to, but not listening to. She's upset that, as a retired person, I'm not willing to jet about the country doing what she wants.

    1715:

    I expect to die of it -- probably indirectly, due to complications, rather than of the acute viral illness.

    I'm in a similar boat, so I do sympathize.

    That said, it's possible that eventually the Covid19 will have explored the entire adaptation space allowed to it by its spike protein, we'll have a polyvaccine for all of them, all the unusually vulnerable people will be dead (not talking comorbitidies, just those whose cell membranes are inordinately permeable to some spike variation)--and that'll be the end of Covid19 in humans. Every survivor will be fairly immune. So long as there's not a reservoir in some animal species for it to reinfect from, that will be that. May this happen!

    What's horribly fascinating to me now is the interplay between the random walk of trillions of viruses mostly failing to propagate and occasionally succeeding, against the fuckheadedness of a fair number of people of our generations (40+) who don't have the discipline to wait it out, thereby prolonging the pandemic with their actions. It's literally evolution in action, with a population of organisms, some of which are hopeless naive in an evolutionary sense, dealing with a novel pathogen in their environment. When this happens to an animal, we think the animal's stupid or tragically flawed. With GenXers and Boomers who can't stand not to party or travel any more? That's a different story. Maybe?

    Changing the subject slightly:

    In my neck of reality, Dr. Travis Longcore at UCLA (geographer, not MD) periodically puts graphs of current Covid trends on his FacePlant feed. Currently things are looking up for the virus in southern California. If you're on FB, he's worth friending. Nice guy.

    1716:

    @1687 - Also missing Mary 2.

    And arguably Matilda, but she was never crowned. Stephen got there first.

    1717:

    Sorry, I'm being a bit dense here. When you watch a sunset - I have watched lots looking for "the green flash" - its obvious that the Sun is still apparently moving across the sky. Sunsets and sunrises are not stand still moments

    1718:

    who don't have the discipline to wait it out, thereby prolonging the pandemic with their actions

    I have some -- qualified -- sympathy for them: if you were paying attention in 2020 and pulled your eyestalks in when it was obvious where things were going, you're now at the two and a half year point, give or take a month, of what is essentially house arrest in situ.

    If you've got a split-level ranch style house with a sprawling garden (yard) and a pool and all the trimmings, plus internet ordering and delivery of all you need (or call-and-collect at a local supermarket so you can just drive by and pick up your bags) it's not necessarily too bad. If you're in an apartment with no green space closer than a ten minute walk (and no parking), it's less good, and if you're stuck in a student dorm or in a cramped studio flat it must utterly suck.

    Add all the misinformation floating around -- maliciously sponsored by commercial landowners who are missing their rents, or right wing politicians who made rugged individuality and belief that a strong immune system will see you through a political litmus test -- and it's hard to be surprised, especially as the US and UK leadership have been spectacularly crap at getting the facts across, never mind countering disinformation and lies.

    Finally, think what it must be like to be a youngster in this situation. To us over-50s, we've got some perspective: but to a 18-yo, the lockdown so far is around 15% of their life (so, to me, equivalent of nearly a decade).

    So yes, I have some sympathy and understanding ... still doesn't mean I'm going to go out to karaoke night at the crowded pub over the road, licking doorknobs along the way.

    1719:

    So arguably the GWOT is still as sensitive in cultural memory as WWII was in, say, 1946.

    Or not.

    WW2 was fought by a massive citizen army. Everyone from Brooklyn street kids to Hollywood movie stars (like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, e.g.) fought on the front lines.

    The GWOT was/is being fought with a small cadre of professionals.

    Since the GWOT is not a shared experience, Americans just don't feel it in their bones like we did WW2.

    1720:

    Charlie Stross @ 1715: We need that next-gen vaccine badly.

    Do you know if THEY are working on it? Any guesstimate when it might become available ... or IF it will become available.

    I've been lucky so far, where "luck" == extreme "social distancing", on-going self quarantine, rigid masking & just plain staying the hell away from people.

    Probably about time to check to see if I can get another booster.

    Do y'all know if there's any factual basis for what I've seen in the news about getting a bigger immune boost by alternating boosters by Pfizer & Moderna? So far I've had all Pfizer.

    1721:

    Jon Meltzer @ 1718:

    Who's on first?

    1722:

    How are you all in Europe coping with the heat wave?

    600 people dead from heat so far in Europe this past week.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62196045

    Heatwave: More evacuations as Mediterranean wildfires spread

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/15/heat-emergency-declared-in-england-as-temperature-expected-to-hit-40c

    England braces for 40C temperatures as experts warn thousands could die Level 4 heat alert announced for next week means ‘illness and death may occur among the fit and healthy’

    It seems that they never need AC in England before

    And if "misery loves company", it's now world wide:

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-25/chilean-lake-turns-to-desert-climate-change/101175540

    Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/climate/salt-lake-city-climate-disaster.html#:~:text=1.9k-,As%20the%20Great%20Salt%20Lake%20Dries%20Up%2C%20Utah%20Faces%20An,in%20Utah.Credit...

    As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces An 'Environmental Nuclear Bomb' Climate change and rapid population growth are shrinking the lake, creating a bowl of toxic dust that could poison the air around Salt Lake City.

    https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/11/san-luis-valley-farming-drought/

    A 150-year-old San Luis Valley farm stops growing food to save a shrinking water supply.

    Meanwhile in Texas, that power grid is looking shaky - again.

    https://archive.ph/hv2WQ

    ‘Things Are Going to Break’: Texas Power Plants Are Running Nonstop Operators are forced to defer maintenance as aging fleet is ‘run harder than it’s ever been run.’

    I wonder how many would die in Houston if a 120 deg F heat dome over Houston coincides with a collapse of their corrupt and incompetent power grid?

    1723:

    1702 - That's entirely consistent with my "feeling" on the subject, particularly about the ineffectiveness of LFTs, and, of course, Bozo has withdrawn free access to PCRs for anyone not dealing with healthcare (as staff or patient).

    1703 - OTOH HH sets out to portray the Ratzis as incompetent figures of fun, going the length of talking about the fictional Stalag 13 as a US special forces posting in Germany.

    1706 - Well, my one PCR confirmed bout (attack?) of Covid actually felt like a fairly heavy cold, with no particular symptoms other than an occasional cough, and very occasional production of mucus whilst coughing.

    1713 - "NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service" is the title; why are you apparently surprised that it's more of a police procedural where the majority of victims and perps are naval personnel than it is a military movie?

    1715 - I have acute renal failure, and am more concerned with the effects of anti-rejection medication post transplant, but for similar reasons.

    1724:

    Agreed on most of that. I've got a house, cats, and some hard-earned experience as a young adult being stuck off in the ass crack of beyond with nowhere to go. So I'm managing.

    The ones I'm referring to in particular have better houses and lifestyles than I do, and they're still traveling, getting sick (again in at least one case), and exerting social pressure on others to do likewise. And they're hard leftists, often highly educated, so this isn't about right wing misinformation, and more about them trying to get back to a "normal life."

    I'm also completely sympathetic to the kids. Since I remember what that was like, I can only hope it's a lesson that they develop into something useful, either for future pandemics, climate change, or both.

    The other part of this is that I'm trying to exert my nanonewton of social force to get people to decarbonize and take climate change seriously. Watching people who are putatively my allies break and go off on cruises to celebrate the passage of some action that gets someone else to emit a bit less GHG? And watching them get Covid in doing so? That peeves me.

    1725:

    Yeah, we completely agree on this one.

    As some have said, the 20th Century was the fuck-around century, while the 21st Century is the find-out century.

    Or maybe the 20th Century was the "Move fast, break things, and forget the rest of the quote" century...

    1726:

    You and me, both. I am in fairly good shape, except for advanced and possibly untreatable cancer, but am 74 and with issues in the organs it targets.

    1727:

    It's reported to be autumn in the UK, but I am doubtful that it will be all that effective - COVID is managing to bypass immunity with remarkable effectiveness. There is some evidence that mixing vaccines helps, but it's weak; I have had Astrazeneca and Moderna.

    1728:

    Oh, pfui.

    Scratch is not intended as a systems language. It isn’t its purpose to connect to every library. It does however connect extremely well to actual real things, so you can read external sensors and drive external devices. And the mechanism it uses to do that can be used to connect to most libraries, albeit not exactly in a high performance manner. From the perspective of “can I make this work” it does rather better than a lot of language systems for a lot of people.

    Squeak ... you’re flat out wrong. For a start, it is Smalltalk, perhaps the purest version since it is directly descended from the original and was released to the world by the people that originally created Smalltalk . It communicates with the world pretty well. Files? Sockets? Web services? Yup. Sound ? Video? Cameras? Yup. General DLL/library connection? Yup. Development tools and debugging and code management and sharing and on and on.

    I’m currently CTOing for a company using it to run web service systems to drive AI analysis of images and comments, to provide locode workflow development tools and pretty much any other software need. I have Squeak software running on the ISS and a few other Space things. Some of my Smalltalk runs an important part of the Scottish (and several US state) power grids. Please don’t tell me that Smalltalk doesn’t talk to anything outside. It does. It always has.

    1729:

    In Englandshire, badly. 40 Celsius at 20% humidity (even with nights of 25 and 40) isn't a problem for most people if (a) they are adapted to it (probably the most critical), (b) have a clue how to handle it, and (c) are set up for it (clothing as well as buildings). We are none of those. Expect significant deaths.

    1730:

    I have had Astrazeneca and Moderna.

    Me too.

    (Note for Americans: AstraZeneca was first off the block in the UK, but proved to have undesirable side-effects among under-40s -- rare but life-threatening for about 1 in 100,000 users, and as other vaccines were coming on-stream within weeks it got rolled out first among the over-40s while under-40s got Moderna. Then, when it turned out that mixing vaccines gave better long-term immunity, Moderna got used for booster shots in the over-40s. Pfizer had restrictive cold chain requirements and didn't get rolled out in the UK, as far as I know.)

    Anyway: as I understand it the current boosters in development are mRNA variants as they can be re-tooled rapidly, but they're still just remixed first generation vaccines. Other better vaccines are in clinical trial, including multiple intranasal ones, inhaled as a mist, which targets the cells in the nose and throat where COVID19 first enters the body: there are hopes that this will be easier for folks who don't like needles (at least 10% of the population) and more effective at providing total protection, but it's probably at least a year from being ready for approval.

    Part of the issue is that because we now have working COVID vaccines, even though they're imperfect, new vaccines have an additional regulatory hurdle to clear: are they more effective and no less safe? So they don't qualify for the same corner-cutting emergency approval that the first generation vaccines got.

    I believe this is a mistake which will ultimately cost many lives.

    1731:

    I recall Alistair Cooke commenting that the most rented movie in the days immediately following 9/11 was Die Hard. I can't imagine that being scheduled on TV at that time, of course. So I wonder what streaming services see following disasters? What were the most heavily streamed movied in 2020? Probably the big action blockbusters, but maybe there was a viewing spike for movies like Contagion, Outbreak or The Andromeda Strain.

    Movies like these, with a tough police officer, or competent doctors etc working to solve a problem and succeeding, may be reassuring to many people. Sometimes it beats going to church to pray away a pandemic.

    1732:

    Hollywood movie stars (like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, e.g.) fought on the front lines

    The film The Longest Day was mentioned earlier. Richard Todd was offered the part of playing himself in it, but declined and landed up with a scene with another actor playing him.

    1733:

    Charlie @ 1702
    Euw.
    I certainly don't want a dose of that!

    Keithmasterson Muslim extremist violence today maybe not so much. - more's the pity, though of course, if you do, you will immediately be accused of being an Evul_Waycist!
    Difficult.

    Back to Charlie ...
    I'm at equivalent to a 78-year-old. - Euwww {again} - I'm 76, haven't had it, got FOUR injections, expect another & still don't want to go near it. But I'm probably in the top 5% of my age-cohort for "fitness". Um.
    ... @ 1720: In my case, pottering off to my open-air solitary exercise space - the Allotment.
    I shudder to think what it's like if you live in a small flat.

    Duffy
    Tomorrow & Tuesday will tell:
    AT LEAST 37 °C on Monday & possibly 38-40 on Tuesday - London is in a big, shallow bowl that acts as a heat reservoir/reflector as well as the usual big-city heat island.
    I'm expecting a new record for Tuesday, probably somewhere near Gravesend & in the 39-41 degree range (If we are lucky).
    I wonder how many would die in Houston if a 120 deg F heat dome over Houston coincides with a collapse of their corrupt and incompetent power grid? - Doesn't "matter" - the arseholes will find some way to make it all the Evul Dems + "the Feds" fault, won't they?

    1734:

    Re: ' ... any factual basis for what I've seen in the news about getting a bigger immune boost by alternating boosters by Pfizer & Moderna'

    It depends ...

    COVID viruses and their spawn are weird -- as are other viruses. (Probably as weird as programming languages. I'm reading the programming language responses now - slow going but much appreciated!)

    Anyways, if you have the time, some of the vaccine challenges esp. regarding boosters were discussed on last week's TWiV with guest Paul Offit.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Offit

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXJ2Y2ARMvU&ab_channel=VincentRacaniello

    'TWiV 917: Boosters on, Paul Offit (10 Jul 2022)

    Paul Offit returns to TWiV to discuss why, during the recent FDA advisory committee meeting, he voted against releasing revised COVID-19 vaccines containing an Omicron component, and the reasons why children must be vaccinated against the disease.'

    I copied the link at the post-weather chat.

    1735:

    I've entertained the idea of going around satellite vaccination sites-drugstores, etc.- and just lying about being unvaccinated and seeing if they check, and repeating that every six months. Willing to listen to anybody tell me this is a bad idea.

    1736:

    RE: Heat in England.

    This is some advice from someone who doesn't particularly like to work in deserts but had to do it anyway. Three tricks:

  • Umbrella literally means "little shade." If you're out in the noonday sun, take the most opaque umbrella you have and walk in its shadow. This is better than a hat, because the umbrella surface has an air gap of at least 20 cm between the hot canopy and the skin you want to keep cool. When I did this in the desert, the black umbrella was too hot to touch, but I saved a gallon of water per day. Stick to the shadows in generaly, it's all about avoiding energy gain from irradiation.

  • If you start to overheat, find a grocery or convenience store, go to the refrigerated section (or frozen section), find a bare metal surface, and grab it with both hands. Your hands and feet dump heat faster than any other part of your body, so this is a way to dump heat fast when you're overheating. Since you just grabbed a pound or two of electricity to cool yourself, buy something to be nice to the store in return.

  • Similar trick at home: if you have metal water bottles, put some water in them and freeze them. Obviously you don't fill them completely, because you don't want them to burst. The point is to get a high heat conduction material between you and a chunk of ice so you can dump heat out of your hands rapidly. Of course ice packs, frozen plastic water bottles, etc. will also work, but if you're heat stressed and your body isn't used to it, it's good to have systems available to get heat out of your body quickly at need.

  • As a freebie, you can also go wade in a suitable pond, because your feet conduct heat and water's a decent thermal conductor.

    Hope this helps.

    1737:

    Heh. I live in a condo, but green space is literally five steps outside the door and the ocean is 400 meters away. In the summer of 2020, I used to put on my scuba gear at the car, then walk across the (mostly unmasked) beach breathing off my regulator.

    I am 56, fully vaccinated, and had since a completely asymptomatic Covid. Now I put the regulator into my mouth in the water... but still do not linger among the sunbathers.

    1738:

    From someone who grew up in the tropics, your hands and feet are not the best target, though those tricks will work well and aren't as messy as the best one. The best solution is to cool your head, because it is both a very good conductor of heat and where you will suffer the first (and worst) injury. If you have thick hair, soak it; if not, soak what you have, find a small towel or equivalent, soak that and wrap your head in it. That doesn't work in high humidity, when you need some source of cold (and not just evaporation).

    The classic treatment for heatstroke (which I have had to use) is to put the patient in a cold bath and do the above with their head; for people that don't know, heatstroke is NOT mere heat prostration and is a medical emergency, but can usually be treated as I describe.

    1739:

    So long as there's not a reservoir in some animal species for it to reinfect from, that will be that.

    Deer. Cats. Dogs. Mink.

    Seems there's enough other animals that can get it, not counting bats (if they were the original host species).

    1740:

    1732 - I got 2 x AstraZenica in Feb and Apr 21, followed by a Pfizer "booster" in Nov 21. I've also had Xevudy 500mg intravenous after I developed a "cold" that tested positive by PCR.

    1734 - And, of course, Audie Murphy plays himself in "To Hell and Back". That seems apt since it's his autobiography.

    1736 - Well, at time of writing I've seen nothing arguing with my comments on programming from earlier today.

    1737 - Not a doctor. I don't know whether or not it's a Bad Idea, but it almost certainly does waste your time and your health authority's money, and may possibly stop someone who'd benefit more getting a vaccine.

    1741:

    I wonder how many would die in Houston if a 120 deg F heat dome over Houston coincides with a collapse of their corrupt and incompetent power grid?

    Which will all be laid at the feet of Sleepy Joe and the Woke Left… at least by the Senator from Cancun and his cronies.

    But a lot of attention got paid to the sad and enraging plight of one young girl in Ohio. I warn you, the details are disturbing: 10 years old. Raped. Pregnant as a result of that assault. And, thanks to a newly implemented, Supreme Court-enabled ban on abortions, unable to terminate the pregnancy in Ohio.

    It is the stuff of nightmares, of horror novels. And it is the stuff of real life for this American child.

    It is, notably, exactly the kind of situation abortion rights advocates had warned would arise, and insisted on grilling abortion-ban advocates for their opinions on, only to be waved away as scaremongers by those who want to be seen as fiercely “pro life” without discussing the touchy subject of what kind of life they are dooming some vulnerable people to live.

    When the story emerged of this child having had to travel to neighbouring Indiana to have an abortion performed — Biden mentioned it in a speech, asking people to “imagine being that little girl” — right-wing political figures and commentators immediately cried “fake news,” as is their custom with any inconvenient truth. They suggested the girl did not exist. They accused those appalled by the turn her life had taken as liars.

    “Another lie. Anyone surprised?” Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted.

    “One problem: There’s no evidence the girl exists,” wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “What we seem to have here is a presidential seal of approval on an unlikely story from a biased source that neatly fits the progressive narrative but can’t be confirmed.”

    The most-watched cable news host in America, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, said flatly the story “was not true” and that Biden and others were “lying about this.”

    And then, when Ohio police announced they had arrested a confessed rapist in that very case, the same voices who’d denied the girl existed suddenly changed their tune. Jordan deleted his tweet and called for the perpetrator to be prosecuted; the Journal published a defensive editorial correcting the record. But now, right-wing commentators turned to justifying the law that limited the girl’s options and to demanding prosecution of the doctor in Indiana who had performed the procedure.

    James Bopp, a lawyer who has written model legislation for states to ban abortion, told Politico that laws prohibiting abortion should be designed to force child rape victims to give birth to their rapists’ babies. “She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.”

    Cheered on by Fox News, Indiana’s attorney general announced he was going to investigate and potentially prosecute the doctor who performed the procedure for failing to report it. (It later emerged the doctor had reported the procedure.)

    In Washington, Democrats in the Senate brought forward a bill to protect the right to travel across state lines for an abortion, and a Republican senator blocked it.

    So there it is, a familiar cycle: when the consequences of a policy are foretold, the U.S. right waves away the warnings and accuses the other side of scaremongering; when the warned-of consequences happen, they initially dismiss the story as fake; when it becomes clear it is true, they then say it was always the plan that this was going to happen, and that it is good — and then proceed to villainize and persecute anyone who tried to stop it from happening. Then they oppose any attempt to change the policy to prevent the same from happening in the future.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2022/07/15/this-week-in-us-politics-even-a-horrific-child-rape-is-reduced-to-business-as-usual-in-the-debate-over-abortion-rights.html

    1742:

    Re: '... find a grocery or convenience store, go to the refrigerated section (or frozen section), find a bare metal surface, and grab it with both hands.'

    Packages of frozen peas or corn also work. Peas are more versatile - can be used in salads. I've also tried frozen blueberries - repackaged at home into sandwich size Ziplock bags. Downside is they get eaten up too fast.

    Umbrellas - I understand why the opaque material but why black? Wouldn't white or some pastel colored opaque fabric provide comparable shade without attracting and retaining more heat?

    1743:

    Finally, think what it must be like to be a youngster in this situation.

    We're close to having kids starting preschool who have no memory of The Time Before.

    There are also kids down here starting their third year of "school" that's 90% virtual. Just because we start school ~ February which is when the plague first hit. They've never experienced school as day in, day out you go along and sit in a classroom. They've also got limited memory of roaming around meeting people just because they might be interesting.

    1744:

    It is slightly amusing reading you lot talking about heatwaves when Sydney is going through a coldwave. Same problem for the power grid, but as someone who prefers hot over cold this is no fun. My brick tent is still consistently cooler than outside which is unpleasant when it's a tropical 7°C outside. Yesterday afternoon I was struggle to solder small wires because my hands were iced up (it got to 12°C inside about 4pm... more like 20°C outside). I don't know how Big Clive does it (although the carbonated wine might help)

    1745:

    I've entertained the idea of going around satellite vaccination sites-drugstores, etc.- and just lying about being unvaccinated and seeing if they check

    Here in Ontario they do check. I discovered this the hard way in December when my records were screwed up and it showed that I'd received a booster when I hadn't — no one was willing to give me the booster I hadn't actually had because they'd get in trouble for a missing dose.

    (I eventually got the problem fixed, thanks to a nameless bureaucrat in the Ministry of Health who gave me enough information for me to locate where the mistake happened, and the doctor who made the mistake fixing it himself and even giving me his last remaining dose. No help at all from Waterloo Public Health or my MPP.)

    1746:

    We're close to having kids starting preschool who have no memory of The Time Before.

    That's most of my grandniblings. The oldest was in kindergarten when the kids were sent home. The other three are younger and missed open playgrounds entirely.

    1747:

    "Umbrellas - I understand why the opaque material but why black? Wouldn't white or some pastel colored opaque fabric provide comparable shade without attracting and retaining more heat?"

    I've wondered about that too. Aluminized fabric or mylar would work well, I'd think. Cf. Webb's sunshade.

    1748:

    Rbt Prior
    Lucky them. NO bullying, no picking on them because they are "different" from whatever this week's supposed norm is, or any other variations that make fr=or a cosmopolitan society

    1749:

    If you're at home and have water, fastest it to run a cool bath and sit in it (or take a cool shower).

    Putting your feet in a basin of cool water also works. A couple of decades ago my classroom was around 40° * and my buthole VP refused permission to take my students elsewhere. The students took turns at the eyewash station, and the next day one boy brought in a kids wading pool and we put a few inches of cold water in it and they took turns cooling their feet.

    I discovered that year there's no maximum classroom temperature in law. Minimum, yes, but not maximum.

    *No curtains on south-facing windows and the heat was on, in June.

    1750:

    It's about what you can get hold of easily. Black umbrellas are ridiculously common, and they work well enough for most people.

    Sure, if you can find a silver one they're better than black, even white is better, it's just that finding them can be tricky. Even in Sydney where there's a significant market in the Asian communities they're a bit of effort to get hold of.

    1751:

    No seeing their friends. Less experience getting to know strangers. Much less physical activity.

    Their parents have done as much as they can to help mitigate their isolation, but I can see the change in their behaviour.

    1752:

    I'll stick with "Smalltalk is tolerable," thanks. You do you.

    1753:

    These all work. Here's why I like black umbrellas:

    --They're more normally opaque than other colors, and you want it absorbing or reflecting sunlight, not transmitting it.

    --They're cheap and available. If you want a reflective hiking umbrella, you get to pay a bit more for a basic ultralight model that doesn't even have a catch to stay open, than you would for a black travel umbrella that folds into a smaller package and stays open in a decent wind.

    Anything's better than nothing, and if you've got a nice silver hiking umbrella or big golf umbrella--or a parasol, for that matter--by all means use it. We've just gotten away from using them in favor of sun hats, and in extreme heat, I tend to think umbrellas are more useful. Particularly if you don't need to use both hands.

    1754:

    paws4thot @ 1725: 1713 - "NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service" is the title;

    I actually knew someone who graduated with a degree in accounting from the University of North Carolina and became a NCIS "Agent".

    He said it wasn't very glamorous. Auditing Department of the Navy contract compliance for abuse, fraud and waste. He didn't get to carry a gun, but he had some killer spreadsheets.

    1755:

    Vulch @ 1734:

    Hollywood movie stars (like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, e.g.) fought on the front lines

    The film The Longest Day was mentioned earlier. Richard Todd was offered the part of playing himself in it, but declined and landed up with a scene with another actor playing him.

    It's one of the great scenes in the movie. Richard Todd as Major Howard (whose glider unit took the bridge in a coup de main, worries if the paratroopers will get there ... and just in the nick of time the actor playing Richard Todd comes up and reports the paratroopers have arrived.

    1756:

    Heteromeles @ 1738:

    Two things:

    Deserts are usually low humidity, so even the slightest breeze will help your sweat to cool you. Where the humidity is higher you have to make an extra effort to achieve the same effect. But in either case you need to look to staying hydrated EARLY. If you don't drink until you feel thirsty it's already too late; you're behind the power curve.

    I bought one of these. ... or something similar. I wanted plain white, but all the larger diameter ones with non-conductive shafts were silver.

    I don't think it really matters which one you get as long as it's "UV protective" and has the shaft that won't conduct lightning ... (around here there's a good chance you might get caught out in a thunderstorm).

    1757:

    Robert Prior @ 1743:

    Cheered on by Fox News, Indiana’s attorney general announced he was going to investigate and potentially prosecute the doctor who performed the procedure for failing to report it. (It later emerged the doctor had reported the procedure.)

    One bright spot, the doctor appears to be fighting back and has through her lawyers sent the "attorney general" a Cease & Desist letter.

    “Your false and defamatory statements to Fox News on July 13, 2022, cast Dr. Bernard in a false light and allege misconduct in her profession,” attorney Kathleen DeLaney said in the letter.
    1758:

    Kardashev @ 1749:

    FWIW, the one I bought is silver on the outside, but has a black lining. It appears the black absorbs and holds any heat that gets through the silver. Doesn't feel like it's re-radiating the heat down. I can't explain why or how that works, but I've noticed it.

    1759:

    Re: 'More importantly, most programmers and engineers have no idea what their peers are doing. It's impossible to communicate that level of information fast enough.

    As our numbers have grown, so Metcalf's law strikes.

    The cost of communication went up - until very recently, but now we share info so easily that anyway can do it, so we're drowning in info.

    We also have fierce demands on our time. A variant of Brooke's Law applies. As I understand it, the problem starts with the slow speed of info spread through a network of humans.'

    Thanks - for the in-a-nutshell history and the links.

    I reformatted your paragraph to highlight some key, and from my non-techie POV, possibly contradictory messages. Time vs. quantity of info/data - sounds like a game of leap-frog between human and computer system.

    Back to 'universal computer programming language' ...

    Okay, I've now got some idea of what the 40-70+ age group went through in acquiring their programming languages skills. But back then computers were used in only very select environments/scenarios. And only programmers actively interfaced with computers.

    As of COVID shutdowns even elementary school age kids were sent home with 'computers'. To me this suggests that the youngest and future computer user generations can be steered toward expecting some universal computer language. Yeah - there are slews of apps but if they don't work on your iPhone, they're junk. And whatever works on your mobile rules! (I've no idea how apps integrate with mobile phones vs. laptops vs. more complex computers.)

    BTW - I looked up the various computer 'laws' on Wikipedia and thought folks here might like this bit about 'Metcalfe's Law'.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

    'In a working paper, Peterson linked time-value-of-money concepts to Metcalfe value using Bitcoin and Facebook as numerical examples of the proof[16] and in 2018 applied Metcalfe's law to Bitcoin, showing that over 70% of variance in Bitcoin value was explained by applying Metcalfe's law to increases in Bitcoin network size.[17]'

    That's a hell of a correspondence!

    1760:

    Agreed. In the desert I was also trying to prevent water loss and overheating, because carrying two gallons of water was a pain. Whether it's a dry or humid, the point is to minimize how much of the 300 w/m2 or whatever the sun's dumping on you, so that ideally you're only getting heated by the air, not by air and sunlight.

    1761:

    Charlie, please don't. We'd really like you to be around for a while.

    This is a really bad day. Eric Flint just died. I curled up with Ellen, who needed that to cry. We knew him and his wife Lucille, and I considered him a friend.

    1762:

    Then there's android. I was REALLY, REALLY pissed when, in spite of my thinking I hit the "NOT NOW", it did a full update.

    While we were at a con, with a completely insecure public 'Net access.

    1763:

    Boomer here, and in Philly, no one saw HH as some sort of Ancient Times. The comics still had a lot of WWII stories, etc.

    1764:

    Sorry, I missed why you referred to the first people as vegans. And I don't see mention of "giants in the Earth".

    1765:

    ESR, um, yes. Like being all in on crypto (which I take as "avoid taxes"), and the one from a list I'm on, where he commented that if he were in Michigan, he's have joined in going after the governor....

    1766:

    For 20 or more years, every programmer over here had one or a shelf of O'Reilly books. They're good.

    Buffer overruns - IMO, too dame many people seem to be overly enamored with "while/wend, and snotty about for/next loops, which work hard to have an end. The only time I had overruns was with strcpy in C, and I moved to strncpy, where you must give a limit.

    1767:

    Nostalgia? IMO, fashion died in 1968, and the fa$$$$$ion designers have been rerunning the 60s', 70's, and 80's ever since.

    1768:

    @Heteromeles at 1681: "Time sense is learned, but it's built off innate ability. One way to learn it is through music, dance, or any activity (surfing, boating) where you have to coordinate your activities with those of other people or things. You start from interval between events and order of events, and work up from there."

    A lot of things we learn are built off innate ability: fear of spiders, depth perception, treating members of the opposite sex as real human beings... You learn it by living life, and because your ancestors learned it so do you. But the fact that your mind has to deduce these things via cues in the environment is important, because that means you can get it wrong.

    Another thing to bear in mind is that the human sensory cortex is sensitive to changes in sensation, not absolute levels. We notice changes in light levels or sound levels more precisely than we notice the actual level of light or sound or temperature, so a proclivity to equating time with "change" is build right into our neural architecture. It's not a choice, it's a process of discovery.

    Keeping track of changes in time that extend beyond our personal memory will depend on how our semantic network is organized. The more detailed cues you are trained to notice, the more likely you are to sense the passage of time. It doesn't surprise me that Hogan's Heroes is closer to WWII than it is to us: so many details about that show (the pacing, the dialogue, the humor, the quality of the picture) strike me as "old fashioned", so it looks more like a show from the past than otherwise.

    But overall it makes sense that it takes larger and larger changes in time to make the same impression the farther back you go. The age of the dinosaurs lasted longer than the time since it ended. That confounds me every time I remember it.

    JR Reynolds 1699: "Apparently after a tour on a submarine, submariners are instructed not to drive vehicles for 72 hours in order to give their brains time to adjust to seeing/processing lengths greater than a few metres."

    No imagine the effect on someone who has spent their entire life not needing to perceive time any better than "What affects me personally vs. what doesn't", being confronted with something like "Racial discrimination is the result of institutional practices that have been in place for over 100 years" (or whatever timeframe you name). They literally can't comprehend that in any way that makes it seem real.

    As for why we laughed at Hogans Heroes: we won that war--the victors can afford to treat the suffering lightly. We didn't "win" the WOT in any way that is meaningful. That's why so many of us are still afraid.

    1769:

    OTOH HH sets out to portray the Ratzis as incompetent figures of fun

    While HH was comedy based on absurdity, over time it was a part of my thought process. Did they really put any of the "best and brightest" in charge of POWs?

    And on a side note, my mother in law refused to allow her family to watch the show. Born in Germany in 1928 and spend the war near Stuttgart. And then married to an officer in the US Army.

    1770:

    why are you apparently surprised that it's more of a police procedural where the majority of victims and perps are naval personnel than it is a military movie

    I was disappointed that a show with reasonable scripts and somewhat believable characters turned into a combination soap opera and yuck yuck 3 stooges comedy.

    But surprised? Nope. Me liking a TV show is almost always a kiss of death. #1 on that list is "Frank's Place".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank%27s_Place

    Episode 5 is where I learned about brown bagging. Which my daughter later used (when I told her about it) as the basis for a high school essay during Black History Month in high school. A general comment made to her by her non pale instructor in JROTC (where the paper was assigned) was "I don't always agree with your thoughts but they are well formed and sure make most people think."

    The character Frank had a line near the end of that episode which was fantastic. A near quote from 35 year old memory:

    "I've spent my entire life avoiding being the token black in a white world and now I'm the token black in the black world."

    1771:

    Then, when it turned out that mixing vaccines gave better long-term immunity,

    I'm a Moderna guy with one booster. I plan on getting a Pfizer for my next booster. But my wife who got her first 3 with Pfizer couldn't be persuaded to go with Moderna for the 2nd booster. She emotionally didn't like the idea of changing horses in the race. It wasn't worth the debate.

    1772:

    We write logic to do what we want the computer to do. Interpreters or compilers turn our more-or-less readable by humans into binary.

    Languages are designed for different purposes. Fortran (formula translation), COBOL (common business-oriented language), etc. Part of the reason for the increasing number of languages are:
    1. Better understanding of the field;
    2. Individual concepts of what makes a better language
    3. Trying to prevent errors (I kid you not, the IEEE Spectrum in Jan '94 had, as it's cover, Java being presented as the silver bullet for the "programming backlog", and that you *couldn't have null pointers in it. (And no, I'm not exaggerating, go back and look.) Then there was ADA. 4. Oh, yes: the desire to become famous by creating a New, Better Language....

    1773:

    Deer. Cats. Dogs. Mink.

    Should we start a disinformation campaign claiming mink furs have been found to be a source of infection. As accurate as many other things on FB and Twitter. Might shut down a lot of the mink fur industry.

    1774:

    Sure, if you can find a silver one they're better than black, even white is better, it's just that finding them can be tricky.

    In the US you'd want to head to a sports logo shop. A place where you can pay extra for various hats, jerseys, and whatnot with various sport team logos on it. Just pick out one that is white, light blue, or similar.

    1775:

    Oh Jeez. That's terrible. I never met him but understood him to be a very nice guy. My condolences.

    1776:

    Abstract I stumbled across in May:

    Why do Bedouins wear black robes in hot deserts?
    • Amiram Shkolnik,
    • C. Richard Taylor,
    • Virginia Finch &
    • Arieh Borut

    Nature volume 283, pages 373–375 (1980)

    Published: 24 January 1980

    Abstract

    Survival in hot deserts has always posed a problem for man; Moses had to solve it in order to lead the children of Israel through the wilderness of the Sinai—a formidable hot desert. It seems likely that the present inhabitants of the Sinai, the Bedouins, would have optimised their solutions for desert survival during their long tenure in this desert Yet, one may have doubts on first encountering Bedouins wearing black robes and herding black goats. We have therefore investigated whether black robes help the Bedouins to minimise solar heat loads in a hot desert. This seemed possible because experiments have shown that white hair on cattle1,2 and white feathers on pigeons3 permit greater penetration of short-wave radiation to the skin than black. In fact, more heat flowed inward through white pigeon plumage than through black when both were exposed to simulated solar radiation at wind speeds greater than 3 m s−1 (ref. 3). We report here that the amount of heat gained by a Bedouin exposed to the hot desert is the same whether he wears a black or a white robe. The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin.

    1777:

    Back to 'universal computer programming language'

    There are a few considerations at play here.

    You might be interested to look up Wittgenstein, the work he set for himself in the Tractatus and the early 20th century jostling over the direction of analytical philosophy (between Wittgenstein and Russell). From Wittgenstein you move on to the Vienna Circle, which is sort of a continuation of the same trajectory of thinking with Neurath and IsoType being especially interesting to this topic. From the Vienna Circle you get Gödel, and from Gödel you get von Neumann and Turing. I'm sure you can get to Kevin Bacon from there without needing 6 more steps.

    Quick TL;DR: inspired by Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle sought to dissociate logic from natural language, arguing that many spurious and unnecessary entities which can be conjured by natural language don't exist in the sense that they represent anything other than a sort of syntactic interplay and ought to be discarded. Their goal was to establish a form of language that could only express defensible theoretical constructs and their logical relations. It all fizzled out somewhat when Gödel proved that achieving this goal is impossible, although the implications are more complicated than people generally let on. Gödel in turn was quite influential in the development of what we now call computer science.

    None of this explains why there are so many programming languages now, but it is by way of explaining that the concept of one true language for expressing logical constructs is something that pre-dates computing as we know it.

    In general, the "expressing logic" part of programming actually only encompasses a small part of what we do with computers in particular and ICT in general these days. The most important concept really is data, by which we mean information which has been quantified in a way that is amenable to digital transmission and storage. Most ICT is about moving data around, getting it from somewhere and putting it in front of the people who want to see it. Sometimes we perform computations on the data itself, but it's important to understand that those computations in general belong to specialised fields (e.g. statistics, image recognition, genomics) and in many cases simply automate tasks that were once performed by humans (e.g. statistics again, physics, banking transactions). Most programmers don't write the code to perform those computations, they use standard libraries written by people with expertise in those fields. So the "logic" in general programming is really a kind of plumbing for the data. And because of that, the language you use is often driven by the sort of problem and therefore the sort of data, because you rely on the specialised tools for the domain and the actual programming logic you add is almost trivial. I've exaggerating a little, but only a little.

    1778:

    This is a really bad day. Eric Flint just died. I curled up with Ellen, who needed that to cry. We knew him and his wife Lucille, and I considered him a friend.

    That's terrible news! My condolences.

    1779:

    Yeah, that really sucks.

    1780:

    sorry to hear that

    1781:

    "This seemed possible because experiments have shown that white hair on cattle1,2 and white feathers on pigeons3 permit greater penetration of short-wave radiation to the skin than black. In fact, more heat flowed inward through white pigeon plumage than through black when both were exposed to simulated solar radiation at wind speeds greater than 3 m s-1 (ref. 3)."

    Lack of clarity regarding "short-wave radiation" vs "heat". I'd call IR "long-wave" if I called it anything other than IR.

    Interesting, though, since there is a Thing What Goes Round about melanistic pigeons having a longer breeding season than ordinary ones, because their dark plumage absorbs more solar heat in the winter so they don't use so much energy keeping warm and find the conditions less antipathetic to breeding than ordinary ones. The observation seems to be true, in that it does seem to be the black ones who are more likely to still be at it all winter, but I've always had some doubts about the explanation.

    1782:

    I do me extremely well, thank you. Just as I do Smalltalk. If you don’t see the value, that’s very much your loss

    1783:

    Eric Flint just died

    I'm so sorry to hear that. My condolences to your family and his. I have read many of his novels and collaborations, he was a terrific writer and thinker, and you can't help but get a sense that he was a pretty good guy too.

    1784:

    "But in either case you need to look to staying hydrated EARLY. If you don't drink until you feel thirsty it's already too late; you're behind the power curve."

    Salt, also. When it's really hot and I'm sweating all the time I find it necessary occasionally to pour a little pile of salt into the palm of my hand and eat it.

    1785:

    Water salty as tears works reasonably well. That's roughly 0.5 tsp per 12 ounce water cup, but I think it's smarter to do it by taste than by measurement. Gatorade 2 works nicely too, in case the problem's you're short on magnesium or potassium, not sodium. 2 is the low sugar version of that gloop.

    1786:

    Most ICT is about moving data around, getting it from somewhere and putting it in front of the people who want to see it.

    dataviz is all the rage amongst de yoot afaict, i've been trying to get to grips with d3, which has some tremendous possibilities for some of the things i'm trying to do

    1787:

    That said, it's possible that eventually the Covid19 will have explored the entire adaptation space allowed to it by its spike protein, we'll have a polyvaccine for all of them, all the unusually vulnerable people will be dead (not talking comorbitidies, just those whose cell membranes are inordinately permeable to some spike variation)--and that'll be the end of Covid19 in humans.

    Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. How many centuries has the flu been with us? No sign of it going away anytime soon either.

    Every survivor will be fairly immune.

    Studies show that immunity fades in time. Also new varients continue to pop up. Surely it will be centuries before all possible Covid mutations are exhausted.

    So long as there's not a reservoir in some animal species for it to reinfect from, that will be that.

    One certain reservoir will be our anti-vaxxers, unfortunately.

    1788:

    Rbt Prior
    WHAT "friends"?
    Less physical activity - MAGIC, no fucking unnecessary fascist school spurts, you mean?
    Yeah, I'm bitter & twisted - deal with it.
    /snark

    JBS
    Yes, I saw that. Another case of ignorance + prejudice + stupidity attacking science & knowledge & compassion - but they Are US "Republicans" aren't they?

    1789:

    If you don’t see the value, that’s very much your loss

    As a 30+ year Smalltalk programmer, I strongly agree with you!

    1790:

    If you have thick hair, soak it; if not, soak what you have, find a small towel or equivalent, soak that and wrap your head in it.

    Cold wet towel, neck.

    Your skull is plenty thick and the stuff you want to prevent from getting hot is inside it.

    However, your brain has a copious blood supply and those blood vessels run through your neck relatively close to the surface. So you want to cool your carotid artery, and a cold wet towel around your neck is one way to do that.

    (Cold wet towel around your head will feel good, but is probably less effective.)

    1791:

    Last year we acquired some narrow scarves (like this: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Ergodyne-Chill-Its-6702-Evaporative-Embedded/dp/B084R5S723/ref=dp_prsubs_1?pd_rd_i=B084R5S723&th=1 ) which are a tube filled with some crystals which hold water. They do the same job as a wet towel but don't drip and hold more water so need resoaking less often. We certainly appreciated them walking around London last summer. They also fold up small so can easily be kept dry in a small pocket to be soaked and used if things get too hot.

    1792:

    Thanks for that; it does seem that the skull aspect is partly a myth. The way we did it, there was plenty of water running down the neck, so the head aspect was probably acting as a slow feed device. A cold bath will cool the neck as well, of course.

    I also suspect that feet and hands will work best if they are cooled and/or wet, not near freezing, because I have been simultaneously overheating and have had my peripheral circulation slow right down when I put my hands and feet into icy water. But that is very unlikely to happen when simply grabbing frozen things for a short while; it happened with wading through or keeping my hands in snow melt in hot conditions.

    1793:

    Interesting. There was (and still may be) a myth that humans developed hairlessness for better cooling on the savanna. My hair is chimpanzee colour, and has got too hot to touch (and it's a poor conductor!) under a hot sun. I estimated that a coat of hair saved 50 watts of evaporation under savanna conditions, and water is in short supply there. That is confirmed by the observation that there are no diurnal naked mammals on the savanna that weigh less than tons.

    The point is that the surface of a Bedouin robe or my hair reradiates, and radiation goes up as the fourth power of the surface temperature. Being naked may feel cooler, but at the cost of needing more water.

    1794:

    »Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. How many centuries has the flu been with us?«

    It is even worse than that, the closest analog of Covid-19, in terms of infection pathways, seems to be the common cold.

    The common cold is a collective noun for a group of vira which are so omni-present in our environment that old wive's tales about "catching a cold if your socks get wet" have held traction, and possibly truthiness, for centuries.

    In fact, the common cold is so omnipresent that there are almost no scientific research on it, because where would one even dream about finding a control-group ?

    Therefore we do not even know /roughly/ how many different vira we hide under the common cold, what regional or seasonal variation there might be and all we know about the R number(s) is that it must be huge.

    But from what little we do know about the common cold, Covid-19 looks like it will fit right in.

    1795:

    "Survival in hot deserts has always posed a problem for man; Moses had to solve it in order to lead the children of Israel through the wilderness of the Sinai—a formidable hot desert."

    Heh.

    Exodus 17:5-6
    Numbers 20:7-11

    An elegant solution, but difficult to put into practice these days.

    1796:

    "it does seem that the skull aspect is partly a myth."

    Well, the blood does skoosh up and down those great vessels at a fair old rate of knots, so although they may be close to the surface in the neck there isn't much time for any heat exchange to go on. Far less surface area than the head as well.

    Certainly when it's cold I find it is a lot more important to wear a hat (fluffy insulating variety) than a scarf. My head loses too much heat merely from being outside, whereas the breeze down my neck is no more than annoying at anything less than motorbike speeds. (Though having no hair on top of my head but what my sister calls a "Taliban beard" on the bottom of it does exaggerate the effect a bit, I suppose.)

    At pedal-bike speeds, the breeze down my neck can even be appreciated, given that perversity of the thermoregulatory mechanisms whereby the body can be struggling to shed excess heat but still utterly refuses to send any of the surplus down to my hands which are congealing into mere useless lumps of frozen meat. But taking my hat off in such conditions would be far too much of a good thing.

    1797:

    "Buffer overruns - IMO, too dame many people seem to be overly enamored with "while/wend, and snotty about for/next loops, which work hard to have an end. The only time I had overruns was with strcpy in C, and I moved to strncpy, where you must give a limi"

    I don't see the connection between while loops and buffer over-runs. Might be harder to prove your program halts though.

    I'd have a read of the strncpy spec if I were you. It has some odd behaviour.

    "Copies the first num characters of source to destination. If the end of the source C string (which is signaled by a null-character) is found before num characters have been copied, destination is padded with zeros until a total of num characters have been written to it.

    No null-character is implicitly appended at the end of destination if source is longer than num. Thus, in this case, destination shall not be considered a null terminated C string (reading it as such would overflow)"

    So it might copy a lot of padding characters. Or it might not terminate the string.

    1798:

    "WHAT "friends"?"

    Don't start trying to snort chalk and rat poison and things... ;)

    "Less physical activity - MAGIC, no fucking unnecessary fascist school spurts, you mean?"

    Exactly. While noting also that at the age under consideration I would not have been at all amenable to staying indoors in this weather instead of in the garden voluntarily fucking about.

    1799:

    1756 - But the sort of thing you could see the Abby and McGee characters doing in a different alternate universe to the one they're in, yes?

    1757 - Howard thinks "Hold until relieved. Hold until relieved."

    1763 - :-(

    1768 - Well, not a shelf load, but 3 or 4 anyway.

    1772 Paras 1 and 2 - I've not seen some of the later seasons of NCIS due a change of channel over here.

    1800:

    New blog entry is up.

    Feel free to continue to use the comments on this thread to discuss programming languages, the weather, public transport, etc.

    1801:

    ...although the man page does mention that libbsd contains strlcpy() which does behave more sensibly.

    It has to be said though that the members of the standard set of str...() functions do tend to be slightly perverse. I often find that they do nearly the right thing but not quite. Sometimes the easiest way to handle this is to redefine "the right thing", but sometimes it's easier to write my own functions that fit my existing definition, and this often makes it obvious that the standard functions actually require more code (even if only by one instruction) than the do-what-I-really-want versions do.

    1802:

    Sure, we could see a rising interest in programming. I hope we also see a rising interest in computer science.

    We might also need more interest in hardware.

    https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/

    1803:

    "The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information." -- Alan Perlis

    'For' loops work well when you know exactly how much work needs to be done before the loop begins. I.e. do something N times when you know the value of N before entering the loop.

    The C string example you mention is a classic case of not knowing in advance how much work needs to be done. In this example, N is the length of a string. If you use a counted string, N is the count stored in the string representation. This will be bound by 2^N-1, so take care to use an unsigned int for your loop index. Note that there are at least two potential pitfalls here for the unwary C programmer.

    However, C strings are not conventionally represented using a character count. You can do, and I recommend that you do, but the convention is a representation using a 'sentinel' character - in this case, a '\0' value - to indicate 'End of String'. This leads to a lot of sloppy coding and buffer overrun bugs.

    This problem can be avoided with care, but few C programmers seem capable of the self-discipline required. (This can be learned, but the programmer must first learn that they need to learn it. As it happens, I learned this lesson from a book lent to me by an older and more experienced programmer.)

    The OpenBSD developers have a coding standard they call 'Kernel Normal Form', KNF for short. KNF requires the use of counted string functions. So strncpy must be used, not strcpy. The programmer will provide the destination storage size as the 'n' argument, of course. Note that no sentinel is used. Everything string op is a 'for' loop.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_Normal_Form

    While we're using C examples here, the same risks can be found everywhere strings are used. (See the Perlis quote above. Also see the quote below.) I've only mentioned a few of the risks here, as storage management is a large and deep CS subsject.

    "It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on." -- Alan Perlis

    1804:

    ~Shrugs~ There are lots of good languages out there.

    My big argument with Smalltalk (and it's relatives) is as much with the people as with the languages themselves. It's the whole, "Oh you poor dear, what's wrong with you that you don't like Smalltalk, how can you be so deluded and not notice all the great things I've said about Smalltalk/Squeak/etc previously and how it can solve all your problems? No, I don't care why you don't like the language, really, tell us why you're so stupid that you don't get it?" (Yes, I'm exaggerating - but not much - mainly so you'll notice your own attitudes.)

    As to the language itself, making this family of languages interact more completely and compatibly with the operating system would be a big plus in my view - there's nothing wrong with wanting a Squeak app to more easily use a common library or open up in the same kind of window used by other windows opened in the same GUI - I'm not alone in feeling that predictable behavior has MAJOR benefits - so you could create a language that was very similar to Smalltalk, but which has lots of useful libraries, can easily talk to utilities or cooperate with the OS/GUI and then sell it a little more softly... *

    I'll tell you the story about my introduction to Squeak - some guy I barely knew (at the time) opened Squeak for me at a trade show, explaining to me that it was the best, fastest, most useful programming language ever. The Squeak window didn't use the GUI's windowing system,** and the first thought that went through my mind was "Oh, it's one of those languages."

    Then, because we had some people in common, this guy and I started talking about a website we'd possibly write together. I was OK with using Squeak as part of the website if it really floated his boat, but he insisted that Squeak also be used - entirely new code, mind you, (this was around 2010, and I think the Squeak version he was using was something like 0.6) for the backend database, which needed to be very large and exceedingly complex, for the web server, as an in-page substitute for Javascript, and ultimately for the OS itself, because in this fellow's view Squeak was perfect beyond anything else created by humanity... and I considered the size of the project we were contemplating, and the number of bugs which were likely in brand-new code, all of which we'd have to write/maintain/make secure ourselves on a non-commerical basis and I went "Fuck this!" (Because perfectly good, already debugged/properly maintained databases/webservers/OSes were/are available, including, at the time, the first big noSQL databases.)

    It's entirely possible that Smalltalk and it's children are as brilliant as you say it is. But you folks do a terrible - simply and utterly awful - job of selling it! If I were a member of the Squeak Committee, or whatever you call your governing body, I'd write a manual on how to not piss people off when you advocate for your baby! The second edition would actually discuss getting people to like the programming language without pissing them off!

    The point of all this is that there are a lot of programming languages which are really powerful and useful which aren't being pressed on me by difficult people. What I'd like you to take home from my rant is this: Selling Squeak has nothing to do with the language's benefits. It's mostly a people problem (and secondarily a problem of making the language cooperate with the OS it's running on.***)

    * Maybe call it... oh... Ruby? That's got a pleasant sound.

    ** Maybe the default for Squeak would be to run at the command-line and open a window when told to do so, then everyone could use their favorite editor and it would fit nicely into a version control system (please don't start on vi vs. emacs, thank you very much.)

    *** Yes, I know that's not easy, either socially or technically, but if you want people to actually wish to use the language...

    1805:

    While we're using C examples here, the same risks can be found everywhere strings are used.

    Not in object-oriented programming languages like Smalltalk. In these, each string is an independent object, and its size is maintained by the virtual machine in a hidden part of the object. This size may be accessed by the programmer if necessary, but it cannot be changed.

    1806:

    The 'n' here should be the destination size, not the source. Terminating when the source end is reached is important, however.

    I mentioned earlier that there are more pitfalls here. One of them is touching memory outside either source or destination areas. By 'touching', I mean either reading or writing. Your code (well, the process that runs it) might not have permission to do that. Strings are a very nasty, complex bundle of pitfalls for the unwary, but so is memory in general.

    1807:

    In terms of security, strncpy and strncpy are no better than checking the lengths first. In all cases, the main error is getting the length wrong; copying into an array of known size is the case that is easy to check for and fix.

    1808:

    People are taught from an early age to be helpless, clueless and ignorant. You can't possibly understand how this stuff works. It's not something normal people are capable of. And you certainly can't do anything to fix it if it goes wrong. You are certain to fuck it up if you do. All you are allowed to do or to believe yourself capable of doing is blindly follow what it says in the instruction book without understanding what's actually going on, in the manner of a sorcerer's apprentice reciting spells, viewing the thing purely as an incomprehensible magical artefact.

    And the answer to ALL questions that fall outside that very limited space is "you solve this by spending money". If the spells stop working or start making demons fly out of your nose, you pay someone else to do something about it. If they just never worked well enough in the first place, you pay someone else to sell you a different magic box and hope the spells on that one work better. This is, of course, the whole point of teaching people to be thick in the first place.

    As people get older and closer to leaving school, those few who haven't had any idea that maybe they could do some of this stuff themselves battered out of them yet start to be told that the way to be able to do them is to "do a course". Naturally this means you pay someone else to let you do a course; it also means you end up getting told what to do but not why. It's still absolutely impossible to learn it by yourself. The only conceivable reason for wanting to do it is to get a job, and the actual aim of doing the course is not to learn stuff but to get a piece of paper which allows potential employers not to bother finding out if you actually can do the job while still having their legal arse covered for when it turns out you can't. So there isn't even any point trying to do it yourself because you wouldn't get the piece of paper. And you'd not be able to anyway.

    By the time any people who do actually make the magic boxes drop out of the machine, they have been through a few iterations of being taught not to understand things at various different levels. So it's not much of a surprise that if you somehow do understand things and you do take one of the magic boxes apart, what you find inside is a cobbled-together piece of shit made of incomplete Lego assemblies mashed together in Frankensteinian style, held together with glue because the plain plugging together of the bricks would fall apart. For a readily-available and comparatively transparent example, the code behind more or less any web page these days provides sound evidence that the phrase "web developer" is a euphemism for "ignorant fuckwit who quite blatantly hasn't got a clue how any of the stuff they're working with actually works, but is nevertheless vastly overpaid for their ignorance" (apparently more than train drivers, which is a job requiring more brains and incurring a lot more responsibility). But you find the same thing going on with hardware, too, it's just more effort to analyse it enough to see that.

    1809:

    WHAT "friends"?

    She had a lot. Very caring and social girl, she is.

    Less physical activity - MAGIC, no fucking unnecessary fascist school spurts, you mean?

    No, I mean the playgrounds were cloased. Roped off and fines issued for people using them.



    Greg, I'm sorry you had a horrible childhood. Just understand that your experience is not the experience of my grandniblings, only the oldest of whom is in school.

    1810:

    From memory, my 4 NHS covid injections have been AstraZeneca x2 followed by Pfizer x2. My wife, who is slightly less vulnerable, had AZ x2 and Pfizer x1.

    We're in the south of the UK.

    As I recall, my brother-in-law over in the Welsh Marches has had 2x Pfizer plus one other.

    Some friends in Essex, also received Pfizer.

    Pfizer did get rolled out.

    1811:

    Perhaps this is how I should've written that paragraph: While we're using C examples here, the same risks can be found everywhere strings are used; I've only mentioned a few of the risks here, as storage management is a large and deep CS subsject.

    However, I wanted to refer to the Perlis quotes between those two sentences.

    I can justify the use the word 'same' here by taking about storage overheads for headers.

    Years ago, I read an explanation for how an XML processor written in Java worked. It ran into a variation of a storage problem. Java's 'automatic' storage management added enough overhead to make the data too large to fit in RAM. The solution in this processor was to use a large binary array representing the graph representing the XML text file.

    I realised in the early 80s that Smalltalk-80 would have this a problem like this representing the database for a particular game engine. The headers added for each object would increase the RAM footprint for the database. It could still be coded in Smalltalk, of course, but only by using a large byte array.

    Perhaps modern Smalltalks do better, but I'm not sure I know how they can eliminate it. This is a fundamental problem with the data model underlying the language. I.e. object headers. Techniques like the "big bag of objects (of the same type)" reduce the overhead but they also add management costs.

    This isn't in any way specific to Smalltalk. All storage management has costs, but this is the large and deep CS subject I refered to earlier. No language can solve the problem. The best a language - like Smalltalk - can do is hide it from the programmer.

    Languages vary in how well they do that, of course. I think SQL scores very high on that metric, but there's a lot more to database programming than writing good (correct and efficient) SQL statements. For example, I've seen databases stored on a file server, then processes in SQL and accessed over a network. Performance was as poor as you'd expect, but the programmer blamed Visual Basic. Other programmers have identified the real source of the overhead and copied the database they were using onto a local drive.

    1812:

    In 1990, in a travel mag, I read an article. A researcher worked with a grad student who was giving tours of the pyramids in Egypt. They tried them with a pith helmet, and then an actual pith helmet that they soaked in water first. It weight 10-20 lbs, and was hard on the grad student's neck... but a thermocouple showed it was 20% cooler inside, from the evaporation.

    After reading that, since then, I wear a boonie hat when mowing the yard, and soak that. Hear they did that in 'Nam as well.

    1813:

    The thing about while/wend vs. for/next is that poor programmers assume that the input will be shorter than the allotted memory.

    And when I was heavily using strncpy, my memory was a) n+1 for the length, and b) filled with nulls by me first.

    Which leads to endless loops: how to hunt an elephant - a programmer will start in Cape Town, and go up and back across Africa. The experienced programmer will put an elephant in the zoo in Cairo to assure that the loop will terminate.

    1814:

    So, you're saying they're like proponents of most languages (and vegans)?

    I'll also suggest that why do we need all the languages in the world (English, Welsh, Swahili, Mandarin...), all we need is one logical language that we can share....

    1815:

    That is the implicit assumption. Obviously the programmer is still responsible for managing the storage. That's my point. Small attempts have been made to make that task easier (like KNF), but there's a limit to what can be done here. While it's possible to write an OS kernel in other languages, the languages most often used tends to look a lot like C.

    The same can be said for a lot of other software. Until the quality of coding improves (if that's possible), I think we're going to see many more buffer overrun bugs. For networked code, that also means exploits.

    I appreciate the points made by the Smalltalk programmers here, but the infosec world isn't advocating Smalltalk. Some infosec people might talk about moving to Rust, but a change like that will take years. Meanwhile, we're in the 5th domain of warfare. Which languages are used for our most critical code?

    1816:

    "'For' loops work well when you know exactly how much work needs to be done before the loop begins. I.e. do something N times when you know the value of N before entering the loop."

    I suppose that's so if the language evaluates the terminating condition once at the beginning of the loop, and then just compares against that stored result every time round. IIRC some versions of Basic used to be like that (and of course the Basic for loop only worked with numbers): FOR X = 1 TO (A + B) with the comparison being done with a new X every time round but always using the single value it worked out for A + B at the beginning.

    But of course C and things that work more or less like C don't do that. for (a = 0; a < strlen(s); a++) evaluates strlen(s) every time round. Not to mention that for/while/do in C are all basically the same thing with different clothes on, and they all work with any data type you can get a testable condition out of. So I don't really see what distinction you (or whitroth) are trying to make.

    "The C string example you mention is a classic case of not knowing in advance how much work needs to be done."

    That goes with the territory where strings are concerned. Using a string type that carries a length count around with it just moves the problem to a different place. You still have to count the characters at some point, and you can still get it wrong. You get a different set of possible bugs with a different division between ones you have to watch out for yourself and ones that are only relevant for the writer of the string library, and the same with efficiency and with how closely the type relates to the actual data you're trying to process (compare turning a wodge of text into a bunch of strings with doing the same with a wodge of some data which has zeroes in it). I don't think either method is "better" in any general sense; one or the other is likely to be obviously better depending on the situation, but "how the language you're using naturally likes to deal with strings" is a big part of what the situation is.

    1817:

    Rbt Prior
    Actually I had quite a good childhood - I was taken to lots of interesting museums / art galleries / places ( In the UK ) & both my parents talked to me, a lot, as sensibly as they could & helped me learn things not on the idiot's curriculum. Primary schools were not too bad, as I realised, early on, that I probably already knew more than my "teachers" ... the problems came in 2 stages between the ages of 11 & 14 & 14-17. Curiously they almost entirely vanished in the last 18 months & I think I know why.

    1818:

    "[Squeak] as an in-page substitute for Javascript"

    HTF was that supposed to work then? Are there even any browsers that support Squeak for client-side scripting?

    1819:

    And the answer to ALL questions that fall outside that very limited space is "you solve this by spending money".

    Where did the billions of dollars spent after the OPM breach in 2014 go? Has it improved the security of the Office of Personal Management, the part of the federal government for the USA that vets the government itself? We can hope so. What would better OPM security even look like? Does anyone know?

    These are all rhetorical questions, of course. "Security is a process, not a product", as Bruce Schneier put it.

    1820:

    "They tried them with a pith helmet, and then an actual pith helmet that they soaked in water first. It weight 10-20 lbs, and was hard on the grad student's neck... but a thermocouple showed it was 20% cooler inside, from the evaporation."

    Something funny here... or two things, really...

    One is that as far as I'm aware soaking one of those things in water is not a very useful thing to do. Numerous references in Kipling to someone getting caught in a rainstorm while wearing one and it all turns to mush and dribbles down their neck, as if they'd been crowned with porridge.

    The other is that 10lbs is one UK gallon. That's a fair old volume. I'm finding it hard to imagine any kind of hat being made from enough volume of material to absorb that volume of water - doubt even one of those daft bloody things the Queen's Guard wear would do it, although you could probably get a bucket inside one.

    1821:

    But of course C and things that work more or less like C don't do that. for (a = 0; a < strlen(s); a++) evaluates strlen(s) every time round.

    Well, only if you write obviously inefficient code like that. ;) You don't need to do that. You could instead write

    for (i = strlen(s); i >= 0; i--)

    That has the disadvantage of accessing every character in the string twice. See below.

    When you want to count upwards, you write something like this instead:

    for (i = 0, len = strlen(s); i < len; i++)

    This also suffers by touching every character twice. You could avoid this overhead by storing the string length with the string data, and avoid using strlen entirely. I'll leave the struct definition and library of string management functions as an exercise. ;)

    1822:

    Self-correct:

    for (i = strlen(s); i > 0; i--)

    or maybe:

    for (i = strlen(s)-1; i >= 0; i--)

    depending on the loop body.

    My weakness is clearly off-by-one errors. ;) I don't using write string processing code in C like this. When I'm using null-terminated strings, I use that as the terminating condition. However, it's been many years since I last had to do this, so I'm clearly a little rusty. No pun intended.

    1823:

    The other thing to realize is that the advice to grab something cold comes from a device I originally saw being used by NFL players on the sidelines: cooling gloves. They're in widespread use. While I'm quite sure the device works better than the lifehack of grabbing cold metal or some water ice, what I'm concerned about, with people in danger of overheating, is suggesting tricks that work well enough and are widely available for not much money.

    It's like the black umbrella, which was me just grabbing my normal winter umbrella and putting it in my survey pack. The only things that were "special" about it were that it was opaque and sturdy enough to not get destroyed halfway through the survey.

    1824:

    At the time there was/is a version of Squeak which can be loaded into a browser. I have no idea whether it still exists.

    1825:

    I'm going to veer before addressing your point. I've often thought that the right way to teach math is to spend (in the US) the 7th and 8th grade years to do projects, possibly with electronics, which require some serious math. The big problem with learning/teaching math at that grade level is that kids are skeptical, and without showing them how maths work in the real world you're not going to get them to believe that math is of supreme importance. Also, a lot more work needs to be done to treat math anxiety.

    Do these two things and I guarantee you there will be many more engineers of all kinds.

    1826:

    Yes, I experienced a lot of bad maths teaching. Mostly abstractions, very few applications. In fact, the only example of the latter that I can recall was a game one teacher liked playing: she played a shop keeper and her students would "buy" from her using cardboard "coins" as payment. Some simple arithmetic was being taught there, but not much else.

    I don't blame any teacher for this failure. The pattern I observed at the five different schools I attended was the teaching of pure maths, but never applied maths.

    1827: 1823: Yeah, I know :) I should have proof-read my post properly. I changed the C example to something stupidly inefficient in order to emphasise it evaluates this every time!!!11!, but I should then have changed the Basic example to FOR A = 1 TO LEN(S$) to match (I think LEN was what it was called). 1824: Yes, quite; if strlen() could be expected to work at all I'd simply go for (t = s; *t; t++) in the absence of any compelling reason not to. And I would avoid counting down unless I was doing something like an overlapping move-upwards, because I definitely have a weak spot with fencepost errors and it gets even weaker when I'm going the wrong way :)
    1828:

    para 3 - The professor of mathematics will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant, and then leave the detection and capture of an elephant as an exercise for graduate students.

    1829:

    People who advocate for Smalltalk variants seem to be particularly poor at people. Not sure why. The sole exception seems to be the Ruby people, who don't realize that they've backed into a programming language animated by the Smalltalk philosophy - a first cousin, perhaps, instead of a brother or sister. They tend to be pretty chill for whatever reason. ~Shrug~ Said all I want to say and hoping to drop the subject at this point.

    1830:

    I appreciate the points made by the Smalltalk programmers here, but the infosec world isn't advocating Smalltalk.

    Sad but true. Smalltalk missed the boat, as it would have been superior to Java. One Smalltalk programmer I worked with back in the '80s wrote a distributed Smalltalk version that ran over a network, but it never got the support needed to make it a viable product. Sigh...

    1831:

    The folks around here may enjoy these parody O'Reilly books if they haven't seen them already.

    https://boyter.org/2016/04/collection-orly-book-covers/

    1832:

    I am biased to agree because I definitely consider maths to be the most useful, use-it-every-day thing I learned at school, and most of that use is for electronics. But at the same time I have difficulty both associating that level of electronics with school, and in considering it as a general-application motivator. At school I didn't know enough electronics for it to be mathematical beyond the simple-arithmetic level of Ohm's law, but I still found the electronics we did in physics lessons to be teach-your-grandmother stuff, and would whiz through the assigned experiment in ten minutes and then dig stuff out of the junk boxes at the back of the lab and make a radio or a set of traffic lights. But everyone else seemed to struggle with it to a greater or lesser extent, and probably more than half of them specifically hated it. I dare say I would have appreciated it if having done the complex plane in maths we had done some AC theory in physics with Smith charts and practicals about RF impedance matching, but I think for most of the class it would have done a lot to put them off.

    Physics at our school seemed to be distinctly maths-phobic in any case, to the extent of looking a bit daft. For instance in physics we related position, velocity and acceleration using a rote list of simple formulas for the constant-acceleration case and anything involving non-constant acceleration was "too complicated"... we'd already done enough calculus in maths to be able to relate them using integration and differentiation for arbitrary acceleration curves and to see how the physics formulae simply dropped out when you made acceleration constant, but there was no recognition in physics of what we'd done in maths, and on the contrary it seemed designed to give the impression that physics didn't really need much complicated maths. I know that at least one chap who was probably better than me at maths shat himself when he went to university and found out how much maths there really was in physics, and I strongly doubt that he was an isolated example.

    (I shat myself over maths at university because although I did have what turned out to be a not-unrealistic expectation of what we'd be covering, I did not expect the teaching to suck so much. I learn best by starting with low-level examples, getting my head round them, and using them as tools to work upwards to understanding the theory, then having got there I can use the theory in conjunction with the tools to work back down to applications. That's basically how they taught us maths at school, and it's how I learn things involving the same kind of structure and complexity myself. But when it was a lecturer frantically scribbling as much undiluted raw theory on the blackboard as he could pack into a single hour, then handing out a sheet of exercises and expecting us to work out how to apply the theory to them from scratch, the whole thing was pretty much arse-about-face as far as I was concerned and I couldn't make the connection.)

    1833:

    Antipope OK. Let's see if I can explain again. I’m really not sure it’s worth the bother since you appear to ignore anything written for you.

    As mentioned previously, Smalltalk has always been able to work with 'outside' stuff. Saying that it needs to “interact more completely and compatibly with the operating system” simply makes it obvious that you didn’t pay any attention to what I wrote.

    All the Smalltalk variants I know of can apply call typical libraries via typical FFI calls. The Squeak system I’m running right now (on a Pi, so we’re not talking anything requiring colossal CPUs and memory) is connected to CLib, SSL, DSA and related crypto, sockets, Cairo-Pango, OpenGL, the Pi camera library, X11 (because, duh, host OS window required), I2C, SPI, OneWIre, PulseAudio, TensorFlow, ElasticSearch… and on and on. I’m curious how this does not count as working with the OS and libraries. And yes, there are also many, many libraries of Smalltalk code too.

    Many Smalltalks - including but not limited to VisualWorks (the commercial one I used to be development division manger of), VisualAge (the IBM one I helped to start up when I was at IBM), SmalltalkMT, DolphinSmalltalk and Smalltalk/X use host windows, host menus, etc. Indeed, Squeak can - I wrote the code 20 years ago - but mostly we choose not to. Partly this is because the other systems already do, and partly it’s because we simply don’t much like host window systems a lot. None of them really do a great job of coping with a lot of windows, let alone non-window widgets that we like to use.

    Your claim is simply incorrect.

    One can certainly start many Smalltalks from a CLI if you want to. Squeak for example can be run from a CLI, given a script to run and exit, just like bash. Indeed we can even configure a unix to treat the appropriate filetypes just like shell scripts. Want to calculate the first Fibonacci number which requires 1 million digits to represent it, and print them to stdout? No problem. Want to ‘log into’ a Squeak system and drive from a shell terminal? Can do. It’s a bit boring though.

    Oh, in 2010 the Squeak version was not 0.6; it was 4.1. Maybe the software your acquaintance was talking about was v0.6. And I’m not certain but it might be that you were talking with an old colleague of mine that did build a database, and it worked rather well and got bought up by a big internet wolf… and buried.

    And back in history you could indeed run Squeak directly in a web browser because there was an actual API (you know, the thing that supposedly we couldn’t use) for doing that. Then the assholes started using that API to make nasty stuff and it all got closed down and javascript was allowed. And in fact you can run a Squeak system in your browser right now because it turns out that javascript can be twisted into being a VM for Smalltalk. See https://squeak.js.org/etoys/#fullscreen for a fun example or https://squeak.js.org/run/ for more serious info.

    On to Martin - I suppose in ancient days one could reasonably worry about the cost of object headers in memory terms. It was always an argument about cost vs value and in my view it was well worth it. In the 80’s memory was tiny - corporate customers of VisualWorks whined horribly about needing to upgrade their PCs to an entire megabyte of ram to run it. These days? Meh. My working system is about 86Mb of ‘image file’, the bit that gets dumped to disc when I save & quit. That is a developer’s working system; al the code, all the libraries I have loaded, code writing tools, code examine tools, object inspectors, version control, email, XML handling, web servers, webclient, database interfaces, the compiler and debugger (obviously all written in Smalltalk and available to modify right there and then), all the currently open browsers and other window I have open and in use. Oh and it happens to include a good chess game, tetris, solitaire, reverse, mines, chinese checkers and acrostic because I haven’t bothered to unload them yet. There are consumer cameras that save picture files of that kind of size. It isn’t an issue any more. My working set is typically ~150Mb but it can happily grow to many gigabytes if you need. It can also shrink to a couple of Mb if you want.

    I use postgreSQL for work related DB stuff. We just use the same socket connections as anyone else. GemStone is a database system written to be a Smalltalk where you pretty much don’t have to even think about databases. Magma is a simple but effective object DB that hides all the details. There are quite a few others. Take your pick.

    Why isn’t the ’inofsec world’ using Smalltalk? Good question. My long experience is that a very large fraction of people involved in software believe that you have to have only large collections of dead text files requiring manual editing in rather annoying string editing programs. They’re wrong but pervasive.

    As for Ruby - of course they know about Smalltalk. It was an explicit attempt to make something quite like Smalltalk. I happen to think they made a terribly untidy mess of it and failed to learn a whole pile of lessons from the past. Rather like java, which was also an attempt to make something like Smalltalk bit starting from a ridiculous set of technical assumptions that weren’t really true at the beginning of the project and certainly aren’t now. Even more ‘amusing’ is the java would not have existed if the salesdroids at ParcPlace Systems had been a bit smarter when working on a deal with SUN.

    Javascript has become something rather more like Smalltalk and gradually, little by little, gets to incorporate more. WebAssembly may make it irrelevant though since that will make it practical to put a real Smalltalk back into browsers.

    As for complaints about people, well maybe. Engineers are rarely salesmen. Engineers get passionate about different things, like elegance and power. In particular Squeak is an open source project driven by enthusiasts, not corporations, for good or for bad.

    1834:

    amalgamy @ 1778:

    Interesting, but I'm not sure that explains how the black liner of a silver umbrella works. The liner is not exposed to the sun.

    1835:

    Why isn’t the ’inofsec world’ using Smalltalk? Good question.

    Performance and habits. So much of the issues with security exist in networking stacks. And having a 10% faster networking stack running on hardware that costs 20% less is always a big deal with the market folks and C-Level buying decision folks.

    And the percentages in the past (and maybe today) were/are much larger.

    failed to learn a whole pile of lessons from the past.

    This is a rule. Any time someone does something "new and shiny" it must start off with already corrected mistakes from the past.

    1836:

    Heteromeles @ 1787:

    I hate Gatorade. It tastes like gasoline.

    1837:

    troutwaxer@1826:

    "At the time there was/is a version of Squeak which can be loaded into a browser. I have no idea whether it still exists."

    There's a version of Linux which can be loaded into a browser (together with a Javascript x86 emulator. Yes, an emulator, not a hypervisor.)

    That doesn't mean it's a good idea...

    1838:

    timrowledge@1835:

    "Antipope OK. Let's see if I can explain again."

    There's nobody here called Antipope...

    1839:

    Perhaps you were replying to Martin Rodgers comment in 1817?

    1840:

    Re: Eric Flint passing. Liked the first 1632 book, but somehow lost interest in the rest of the series.

    I don't know who on here knows her, but Dorothy Heydt passed away a couple of weeks ago, Hal is on rec.arts.sf-written if you wish to give your condolences.

    1841:

    So, linking the programming language thread to the Transhuman entry (ok, this is really a stretch):

    One of those strange little trivia things I find interesting: Ada Lovelace (world's first programmer) was Lord Byron's daughter. Lord Byron & Mary Shelley met in Switzerland about a year after Ada was born (Ada was not with him). You might say Frankenstein was the first modern fiction about the results of pursuing Transhumanism.

    1842:

    ~Sighs~ People. 'Nuf said.

    1843:

    AJ (He/Him) @ 1793:

    Those work real well where the humidity is low. They will also absorb sweat and then re-radiate (if that's the right word) it.

    But, in areas with high humidity they are not as effective. They were great when I was in Iraq, don't do shit here in Raleigh.

    1844:

    Pigeon @ 1822:

    Sounds like those old pith helmets were made out of real pith; something like Papier-mâché. I wouldn't expect them to be very waterproof. All the modern ones I've seen are made out of some kind of woven material.

    I prefer the "boonie hat" the U.S. military adopted from the Australians.

    I doubt it's UK gallons, but Stetson still makes a "10-gallon hat".

    1845:

    a lot more work needs to be done to treat math anxiety

    One thing you need to do is realize that math anxiety is contagious. Children catch it from their parents and teachers when they are young. It's also been normalized that being bad at math is an innate trait, and that it's OK to be bad at math.

    During three decades of teaching teenagers, I became increasingly aware that the real solution to children not doing well at math and science is going to be found in elementary school — by the time they get to high school the damage has been done, and while we can remediate it would be far better to have high-quality pedagogy for young children.

    Society does not agree with me. Elementary school is primarily looked at as childcare. Many elementary school teachers agree with this too — they are often fun and popular with the kids (and thus parents) but we can tell in high school who their students were…

    1846:

    sometimes it's easier to write my own functions that fit my existing definition

    Especially in C/C++, where the standard thing is often on the annoying-to-fatally-bad spectrum. mozstrncpy is all very well, but mozassert? WTF?

    Oh, it turns out that like exceptions, asserts don't tell you anything useful when they trigger. Unlike static_asserts. So the moz version emits a stack trace and a minidump as well as a message about what happened. Sadly I'm not up to the godlike levels of acumen required to be considered a "minimally competent C++ programmer" so I need crutches like that.

    I have a whole file of stuff like that, including the long-disparaged "printf and return a std::string" function that has mysteriously been shat into C++20. Whatever happened to the purity of streams? :-P

    1847:

    if you somehow do understand things and you do take one of the magic boxes apart, what you find inside is a cobbled-together piece of shit made of incomplete Lego assemblies mashed together in Frankensteinian style, held together with glue because the plain plugging together of the bricks would fall apart

    This almost made me snort my Pinot Noir because I found EXACTLY THAT (OK, not the Legos) when my underwater scooter conked out, and I took it apart. Buoyancy was achieved with pieces of styrofoam held together with paper tape. Not even duct tape -- paper tape. Yes, paper tape routinely exposed to seawater.

    1848:

    AlanD2 @ 1841:

    Perhaps you were replying to Martin Rodgers comment in 1817?

    Probably not. That's part of the programming languages sub-thread, and as I'm not a programmer I keep my stupid opinions on programming languages to myself.

    Maybe it was someone else replying to his comment?

    1849:

    RbtPrior @ 1847
    That's because most Primary School "Teachers" are licensed child-minders of "IQ" below 110 - they are either thick, or have zero knowledge of actual, "real" maths themselves.

    1850:

    few C programmers seem capable of the self-discipline required

    When you have a pervasive, widespread problem with your technology it's unwise to blame the users. At best that suggests you need to revise the interface to reduce the error rate, more commonly that you've built the technology to be used by perfect robots, and only by perfect robots.

    Gattica is a modern parable of that, except that real geeks are not even trying to breed a decent programmer.

    There's a whole field of "human computer interaction" that studies this particular aspect of the age-old question "why don't people behave according to my simple model" or "how can I make them".

    The latter question has never had a positive answer. In the bible god nearly wiped out every species on earth because some rule was broken. Later Stalin really struggled with the similar problem "be loyal to me". But that's true right down to simple stuff like "don't foul your own nest" as we see with the various pointless anti-littering and anti-graffiti laws.

    1851:

    That's because most Primary School "Teachers" are licensed child-minders of "IQ" below 110 - they are either thick, or have zero knowledge of actual, "real" maths themselves.

    Quit lumping everyone into categories that let you grind your axe.

    In raising my kids we had baby sitters (all 13 grades) and those marking time till retirement and some really great ones.

    Gee. Sounds like most categories of workers. Programmers, store clerks, lawn care dudes, whatever.

    The trick for us was working around the bad ones so their influences didn't take too strongly. And be willing to "deal". In the US in most places absent a lot of growth or shrinkage of the population in an area your kids will all go to the same 2 or 3 schools as they age up. Ours went to 6 plus one did a year in Germany. We dealt. And they turned out OK.

    We still know a few of their teachers (kids are now aged 30 and 32) and say high when we run into them. The teacher they both had in 7th or 8th grade science works part time at the local Apple store.

    Oh. They both did team sports in and out of school. Not all the time and not the same sports. And yes a few coaches were tailholes. One rec league coach was told by the parks department to not come back after some stories told by parents. Including us.

    1852:

    Yes, 'they' are working on a better vaccine: https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20211222/u-s-army-developing-its-own-covid-19-vaccine

    The Moderna vaccine is slightly more effective, and I would encourage you to supplement your Pfizer vaccination with the Moderna booster. Wish I could recall in which credible source I read that, but when I do, I will post details.

    1853:

    When you have a pervasive, widespread problem with your technology it's unwise to blame the users. At best that suggests you need to revise the interface to reduce the error rate, more commonly that you've built the technology to be used by perfect robots, and only by perfect robots.

    I wouldn't recommend anyone write an app in C/C++ today. Why bother when there's a high level language that will do the job just as well? Particular when there are language bindings for what APIs you need.

    This is why I've mainly used C/C++/asm to implement higher level languages. E.g. writing interpreters in C/C++/asm or writing compilers that emit C/asm code. In the last decade or two, I've modified more C code than I've written from scratch. E.g. adding to a runtime system written in C, writing bindings to an API for an interpreter, or tweaking an example program until it did what I needed.

    I don't know how far back this practice goes, but I think it began going mainstream in the 90s with VB programmers. Suddenly the library market was full of plugins (I don't remember the MS-approved names for these things now) for VB. Drag 'n' Drop programming had arrived. Within a few years, most of my skills as a programmer had been devalued, and I was ok with that.

    1854:

    When I started my current job about 6 or 7 years ago I went through a list of all the high-level languages I could find and decided that C++ was the least awful fit for the functionality I needed. It's a C++ server that grinds UDP into MySql... nothing unusual or surprising, but with the usual array of slightly ugly edges. It took me a couple of weeks to convince myself that sadly, there weren't any better options.

    So now I'm the proud owner of a hundred thousand lines of recent-ish C++ and some exciting questions on stack overflow.

    Stuff like at the time Rust didn't really have a usable set of crypto libraries, and since I needed compatibility with a modified version of AES128 that didn't seem promising. The "modified AES128" is not something I can control or even influence, the devices exist in the field and I must talk to them... but I couldn't get Rust to decrypt the packets so I went with a C++ library (I found an implementation of that algorithm and modified the code. It was a horrible experience).

    I did similar things in Go and looked at Scala, Java and a few other things. Mono wasn't stable enough to make C# an option, Delphi on Linux is a nightmare, etc. Some of our more recent stuff uses Rust (and there's the usual array of phone app languages on that end).

    I'm sure it could all have been done in Lisp or Smalltalk or Eiffel or some other pristine and perfect language, but frankly I'm barely mediocre at C++ so the idea of trying to learn a competent-programmer language scares me half to death. I have enough problems asking questions that C++ gods deign to answer... it's bad enough trying to get answers about some widely used by expert-only C++ tool, let alone the equivalent for a low user count "proper language". If I have a question about Smalltalk and a Prometheus logging server is there anyone else in the world doing that?

    1855:

    comment from Ilya187 said This almost made me snort my Pinot Noir because I found EXACTLY THAT (OK, not the Legos) when my underwater scooter conked out,

    I won't ask which brand, but I know it's not a Submerge. I'm actually chatting to Rodney right now on messenger. His whole family has covid.

    I've seen how a Submerge Scooter is put together, and when I'm a couple of km back in a cave, I wouldn't use anything else.

    1856:

    Oh, and FWIW I do agree on the "wrap a C library and call from a proper language" approach in general. I just dislike setups where there's 10% glue code in a high level language and 90% of programming effort goes into maintaining the supposedly wrapped code.

    Once you have a list of core functionality and it can be summarised as "points 1-6, 9-12 we import libraries, 7 and 8 we do natively" it's IMO time to reassess whether you've made the right language choice.

    I've seen someone use Eiffel to import Microsoft Office objects and I swear 90% of their code was just doing that, with the rest being the user interface... Eiffel being a notoriously brilliant language for building Windows GUIs in.

    1857:

    There may even be a read/write programming language that will do the job at least as well as the cited write only languages?

    1858:
    The discussion about merits of different computer/programming languages ... if programming is about logic, why so many different programming languages*? Yeah, I get that in math you can solve many problems using different approaches, but if you're striving for efficiency including in communication between machines, machines-to-humans, humans-to-machines, etc., wouldn't it be more efficient to concentrate on one language and build on that?

    Observation: There are too many programming languages

    Solution: we should develop a new language to replace them all

    Result: there are now more programming languages.

    Rinse, repeat.

    1859:

    1856 and 1858: The tool you know best will often beat the tool you barely know at all.

    BTW, I recall someone bragging about writing 40K of TCL code to control an oil rig.

    1859: What is a "write-only language"? I don't understand that.

    Any language the reader is unfamiliar with, I guess. That's how assembly language(s) looked to me before I learned how to write some asm code myself.

    This is the nature of all language: abstract symbols with meaning derived from shared knowledge and experience. After gaining a little knowledge and experience within a language domain, like assembly, all such code becomes "readable", or at least more readable. This may depend on the symbols. It may also depend on the reader, and their knowledge and experience. (The folks in comp.arch frequently post asm code for a wide variety of architectures and seem to have no difficulty understanding it all.)

    E.g. MULT usually signifies N-bit multiplication for some value of N. A symbols like 'R0' and 'R1' usually refer to a registers, which will be containers for an N-bit value. One of them may be the destination for the result. It may be the first or the second, or it may even be more complicated. There are usually conventions for these things, making it easier for the unfamiliar reader.

    No wonder I was initially unable to read any of it! It was very confusing to me when I first encountered it, but that didn't make it a "write-only" language. Other programmers could read it fine; I just wasn't one of them - yet.

    By contrast, I do understand the idea of "write-only code", as I've written some of that myself. I've probably written code in all the languages I know that I couldn't read a few hours later, mainly because the problem was that complex and the code was my first attempt to solve it. A rewrite and some small documentation (maybe just a link to a CS paper) makes it easier to read. Then I can look at it years later and, with a little effort (e.g. re-reading that CS paper), understand it again.

    A number of Alan Perlis quotes may apply here, but I'll pick one. "Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as adults we'd be able to read them."

    http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

    1860: There is, of course, an XKCD on that very problem.

    1860:
    So long as there's not a reservoir in some animal species for it to reinfect from, that will be that.

    I've read that COVID-19 is endemic in American deer populations.

    1861:

    I think some of this question about why can't we have a universal programming language is about unfamiliarity with different languages, and an assumption that it's like natural languages where the vocabulary and grammar is different, but the underlying concepts are still the same or similar (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis notwithstanding). That's not the case, and maybe it's because calling programming languages "languages" is an analogy with natural languages, not an actual equivalence.

    Natural languages have a specific function: communication. Programming is not communication: saying that we communicate what we humans want a machine to do to the the machine is strictly a metaphor. The machine has no use for communication, it doesn't understand semantic content and while we give it instructions, the idea that it interprets them (even though we do call some programming languages "interpreted" languages, that has a very specific meaning that isn't the one you want here) is totally incorrect. It's even a metaphor to say we give the machine instructions. What programmers actually do is create pieces of the machine that live in an emergent abstract space. Head and tail list processing is more like a machine for slicing salami than it is like something you might use to communicate a concept to another person.

    1862:

    1859 - "Write-only programming" is a snark about how opaque some languages (C is a commonly used example) can be when you try to modify code say 3 years after it was first written.

    1863:

    C is a long way from being the worst for that though. Python is worse, Perl is worse still, and C++ is gratuitously obscure, in a way that suggests that the idea behind it is to promote the cousin of Intercal as a serious programming language in order to take the piss out of programmers the world over. Javascript is similar, in that writing it like an entry in an obfuscated code competition seems to be standard practice, and the differences between ES6 and ES5 are of a nature that apparently confirms that that is indeed the idea.

    1864:

    Natural languages have a specific function: communication. Programming is not communication: saying that we communicate what we humans want a machine to do to the the machine is strictly a metaphor.

    Programming and languages are different things. The former is a process. The latter is a formal system of communication.

    So we use programming languages to communicate with machines. We also use programming languages to communicate with other programmers, including our future selves. A "future self" in this case may be the programmer reading the code they've recently written, perhaps just a few seconds earlier. It may also be many years later. All of this is communication.

    However, it's easy to internalise the programming and communication, so the programmer might not be as conscious of it, as they're doing it, as they are conscious of the code being written.

    This isn't unique to programming, of course. Consider what mathematicians do, and how they do it. Other activities are more social, and communication becomes more obvious, but anything that uses a form of writing will be communication. Therefore programming includes communication. At some level, like projects with more than one programmer, communication is extended into the social realm.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law#Explanations

    1865:

    Perhaps badly written code. One of the first things I learned about C was how to write good code in it. That was just from reading K&R's book. Actually using a C compiler taught me what kind of code to avoid writing. That is, if I couldn't understand the relationship between the C code going in and the asm code coming out, then I was doing something wrong. I had begun discovering the many pitfalls of this - back then - small language.

    There's also purposefully obfuscated C code. See The C Puzzle Book (if you have or can find a copy) and The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. I particular like Tony Finch's entry.

    https://www.ioccc.org/

    https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1998_fanf

    However, I appreciate really well-written code in any language. It's just hard to find any in open source C code. If you're looking for examples of well-written in any language, then I recommend looking at BLAS, which is written in Fortran. If you want other people to read and understand your code, whatever the language, studying and learning from BLAS will help you.

    http://www.netlib.org/blas/

    There's also a C front-end for BLAS. That's a good example of C coding. I'm not talking about little details like indentation, as that can vary and still be readble - providing the formatting is reasonably consistant.

    I think BLAS is a great example as the code is small enough to be studied, yet complex enough to present challenges for a reader. The documentation is in the comments in the code. Code and docs are easily distinguished from each other.

    You can read the code without even downloading it. Just one example:

    http://www.netlib.org/lapack/explore-html/de/da4/group__double__blas__level1_ga8f99d6a644d3396aa32db472e0cfc91c.html

    Some maths education is recommended. ;)

    The Software Tools books are also good, as is Elements of Programming Style.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_Style

    1866:

    Update on the brexit-succession lunacy:
    Sunak: 118
    Mordaunt: 92
    Truss: 86 Patel-with-a-smile + climate denier Badenoch is out.
    Predictions?
    Apparently, Labour want Truss to win as she's completely wooden ....
    OTOH, Mordaunt is the more foaming & therefore, easier to ridicule & knock down.

    1867:

    Well, there's something to be thankful for if the would-be Führerin is out.

    1868:

    What is a "write-only language"? I don't understand that.

    Any language the reader is unfamiliar with, I guess. That's how assembly language(s) looked to me before I learned how to write some asm code myself.

    I spent several months fiddling with APL. With a friend who is a better programmer than me. We both decided it was write once - read never. Unless we made notes while writing code in APL it made almost no sense the next day.

    1869:

    "Antipope OK. Let's see if I can explain again." Simple editing error - I wrote my text in Notes, which includes a page title. I copied and pasted and didn’t remove the title.

    Write-only language- APL is surely the lead contender here? Python is pretty bad but not in the same league.

    Natural languages - my observation is that the real primary purpose is to enable rapid detection of whether the other person is “one of us” or not.

    1870:

    Programming and languages are different things. The former is a process. The latter is a formal system of communication.

    People also tend to think they are precise when giving directions. To get somewhere or do something, it doesn't matter.

    But most directions by people are woeful. And the only reasons other people can follow them is years of experience and context.

    And interestingly when you start asking for details, the direction givers tend to get upset you can't follow their brilliant and perfect directions.

    And to date compilers and computers are terrible at applying past experiences and context to figure our what is really wanted.

    1871:

    APL began as a mathematical notation, so it makes heavy use of the Greek alphabet. For mathematicians, this may be an attraction. For programmers, this may have the opposite effect. See my earlier points about knowledge and experience. John Backus' FP is another language that uses these symbols.

    My main issue with APL, when I studied it, was that I didn't have any matrix shaped problems to solve with it. I didn't know it at the time, but I had list-shaped and tree-shaped problems instead. While you can clearly write code in APL for that, matrices are a lot easier to work with in that language. This may say more about the code I want to write than it does about APL.

    So I do not believe APL is a "write-only" language. I do believe it is still used by some programmers. I also believe that it is not a good choice for every programmer.

    The fact that a survives says a lot about the value of any language. When the code written in a language also survives, that says a lot about the code and whoever uses it. When the code is maintained, which is often a requirement for survival, that says a lot about the value of the code. When a programmer writes more code in one language than any other, that says a lot about how well that language matches the programmer using it.

    1872:

    Python is pretty bad but not in the same league.

    what's wrong with python (from a readability pov) tho? i mean it's still being used as a teaching language all over the place afaik, i'd have thought someone would have noticed

    1873:

    And to date compilers and computers are terrible at applying past experiences and context to figure our what is really wanted.

    This is why I'm reading the second edition of Computers as Theatre. It has a lot more material than the first edition, including many theatrical anecdotes. Recalling the section on Aristotle's Poetics, I wonder how this may be applied to programming. Maybe if we could find something useful there, we might make some progress on this. I don't have a clue how to do that, but I know there are people who have worked on problems related to it. I'm thinking of work by Pattie Maes, Conal Elliot and others.

    The games world may seem like a strange place to look, but a lot of interesting developments have emerged there in last few decades. Some of them have been discussed here on this blog. I'm also reminded of a few novels. <cough>

    1874:

    When a programmer writes more code in one language than any other, that says a lot about how well that language matches the programmer using it.

    Or perhaps it says a lot about the programmer's employer.

    1875:

    Re: 'Observation: There are too many programming languages ... Rinse, repeat.'

    Yeah, so it appears.

    Yet it should be possible to get to a universal programming code. After all, that's what DNA is and the variety of stuff from really basic to super-complex that it's programmed is remarkable.

    1876:

    40K of TCL code to control an oil rig.

    Completely credible claim, assuming they were talking about the 1950's. These days there's several million lines of code in the display that tells you whether the oil rig still exists. Or alternatively, there's at least a million lines in a wifi dongle... so their oil rig definitely had no wifi, and unless they blew most of their budget on an IP stack, no networking either.

    I work with embedded systems people and one of the surprising things to me is just how ridiculously huge modern embedded systems are. The days when you got a serial interface as a 74 series chip and it had 8 or 16 bytes of buffer are so strongly gone that it's hard to find an interface board that only has a 16 bit CPU on it. You want bluetooth? 32 bit microcomputer on a daughterboard. Wifi? On the same board, but has it's own microprocessor. And so on. Sometimes you can add your own code to those micros... in a few cases there's even an official way to do that (because if I want to add "read data off I2C, poke out wifi" why have a whole other processor just for that?)

    The great thing is that most of it is LEGO, you just designate a pin as I2C, connect three wires and bingo, now you can talk to whatever peripheral you like. 20 lines of whatever language you like and now your program has a GPS. But that "20 lines to get GPS" really, seriously does not mean that your vulnerability surface/maintenance demand is 20 LoC the end.

    1877:

    When a programmer writes more code in one language than any other, that says a lot about how well that language matches the programmer using it.

    Or the social context the programmer works in. Just as documentation written in Linear A might as well not exist, code written in a language that only runs on an emulator inside a VM that has an old OS on it might as well not exist.

    One of the machines in our factory is like that... it has an interface card so old that you have to interact with it via a DLL that I think shipped for Win95 or possibly DOS. But the machine works, so we run a geriatric Windows in a VM and somehow the card in the host gets forwarded to the VM and it all chugs along. Kinda.

    Where I work we have a Delphi guy who I think writes code sometimes, a few people who mostly use C like languages in embedded world, then me and another guy who can deal with more modern languages. So one consideration when choosing a language is that they need to be able to at least read my code, and hire someone to replace me should my funeral interrupt software development.

    I've been hired before to replace someone who left unexpectedly, and been the only person who knew anything about the language. Where I am now we had a coworker die and had to do some exciting code archaeology because it turned out that he was "using CI" in the sense that when CI builds failed he'd copy the executable up from his machine and re-trigger the deploy-to-test part of the build, which would succeed, so the CI front page said it was all fine. Urk! Also, {sigh}.

    1878:

    Re: 'Update on the ... [UK gov't] ... lunacy:'

    Just saw this.

    Germane considering the current weather and political state of affairs in the UK. So - it's okay to say you're going to do something and then keep futzing around and never actually deliver? (Or in this case, not even have a plan on how you might deliver.)

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62223551

    'Campaigners have hailed a High Court ruling that the government's 'net zero' strategy breaches its obligations under the Climate Change Act.

    The strategy commits the UK to slash emissions of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet to reach 'net zero' emissions by 2050.

    The court ruled there was not enough detail on how the target would be met.

    The judgment during the UK's first red alert for heat ordered the government to deliver a new report to Parliament.

    The government said in response that its net zero strategy was still official policy and noted that the strategy itself had not been quashed by the court.'

    1879:

    That would be assembler, which is basically processor instructions in the most primitive possible human readable form.

    1880:

    "what's wrong with python (from a readability pov) tho?" Well, my view - which is clearly biased by my preferred toolset and working environment - is that the use of indenting as a structural element makes it very difficult to read anything more than a few lines and still make sense. As soon as you have several layers of indent occupying more than a single visible page worth of code it becomes near impossible to keep mental track of what is going on. And because Python is one of the dead-text-file languages where you inevitably have large swathes of barely differentiated text all glommed up in a file, this is a common occurrence.

    I've had to read some relatively simple Python recently to try to help debug an AI facility and even though it was only a couple of thousand lines it was a nightmare of confusing "where did that block start? Where did this one end?" and so on. I suppose if you live in that particular hell long enough may be you get used to it but I have worked with nominally expert Python programmers and they don't really seem to perceive it any better than me.

    My code, in my chosen tools, does not generally have this problem because you just don't have large wodges of text thrown at you. The tool(s) keeps things conveniently split in logical function units (we call them methods) and presents them in a way that actually aids comprehension. Which seems like a nice thing to do, all in all. Also, the code is part of a system with proper reflexiveness and meta-programming capability so you can write more tools in the tools to make the tools better by having them understand the code they are presenting.

    1881:

    Agreed. The indentation is one of my big problems with Python.

    1882:

    "Or perhaps it says a lot about the programmer's employer."

    Quite so. Now think about what that means to the notion that people here should abandon the languages they are being paid to use, and insist on one that no one is offering to pay them for.

    To be fair to the employers, their primary concerns are quite rightly things like, who will will look after the legacy code, how much training will new hires, especially those being hired as experienced, require, and can we get a decent implementation on our hardware, at a reasonable cost and on reasonable terms.

    Had anyone ever offered me a good position where I was working in Smalltalk, I would have been happy to take it on, and I suspect that I would have preferred Smalltalk to C, at least. Nobody ever did. Meanwhile, I have done a great deal of work in C, which I don't much like, because either I was being paid for it or I was practicing for the work I would be paid for.

    Just checking. Smalltalk is not available in the repositories for my home Linux system either. So not now as a hobby either.

    JHomes

    1883:

    ah right, maybe for teaching purposes people are mostly writing fairly short programs (like me so far) and the problem doesn't get too serious. istr it was one of google's preferred languages for ages tho, i wonder how they dealt with it

    i saw some idealistic opinion somewhere once that "no function should be longer than a single screen", maybe they were thinking of python

    1884:

    Had anyone ever offered me a good position where I was working in Smalltalk, I would have been happy to take it on

    Heh. I have (paid) experience in a bunch of languages like that. Two things called "Jade", a weird/horrifying thing called IIRC 'Stellar', bound to be others. Not at all afraid to stick my hand up and say I know nothing about it but I'm willing to have a go.

    But the flip side is that I don't want to inflict that on some other poor sucker if I can avoid it. "this is a very fine language and there are at least two other places using it (in the world)" isn't the glowing recommendation some people think it is.

    1885:

    search for gnu-smalltalk

    1886:

    That would be assembler, which is basically processor instructions in the most primitive possible human readable form.

    Actually, the most primitive possible human readable form is machine language - the code executed by a computer's processor (in hex, octal, or whatever a particular computer uses). As an OS programmer back in the '70s, I knew my company's machine language quite well. I had to read and interpret huge raw memory dumps (the paper printouts were many inches thick) as part of debugging the OS.

    I could also key short machine language programs directly into memory from the computer's console. Not at all efficient, but sometimes useful for quick testing.

    1887:

    1876 - Or a design decision made by a 3rd party; I have written a lot of Ada 83, but the reason for that was a decision made by the body who issued the target system specification including "The main programming language for the system shall be Ada 83". There were reasons for this, including a need for real time multiple inputs to be combined and displayed on real time displays.

    1882 - Agreed. As soon as the structure of the code becomes an essential part of the design ( well, except for statement terminators or separators which are displayable/printable characters themselves (eg a ';' character in Ada or Pascal)).

    1885 - I've seen similar, and also written code where a single procedure covered some 2_000 print lines of Ada. It was made a separate subprogram simply to make the rest of the package body it was part of more readable.

    1888:

    Now think about what that means to the notion that people here should abandon the languages they are being paid to use, and insist on one that no one is offering to pay them for.

    Not only with programmers. In the universe of architecture, at least in the US, there are people who get really upset when hired at a firm then told "no, you can't use whatever CAD software you want".

    1889:

    Smalltalk is not available in the repositories for my home Linux system either.

    Cincom Smalltalk is free for personal use, and it should work on all platforms (personally, I've only used it on Windows).

    1890:

    Actually, the most primitive possible human readable form is machine language - the code executed by a computer's processor (in hex, octal, or whatever a particular computer uses). As an OS programmer back in the '70s, I knew my company's machine language quite well.

    I could do that also. But really tried to avoid it.

    Worst one I ran into was for a major computer vendor "back in the day" there was a micro controller and the maintainer was dealing with the entire 2K or 4K in hex. When he patched it, without an assembler, he had to jump past the existing code then jump back. Who needs an assembler with symbolic labels if you're flat out brilliant? The product manager was not happy with the situation but was a bit stuck till the controller was discontinued.

    1891:

    In the universe of architecture, at least in the US, there are people who get really upset when hired at a firm then told "no, you can't use whatever CAD software you want".

    Yeah. I went from AutoCAD in one place to MicroStation in the next. Similar, but a pain in the butt to change.

    1892:

    One of the machines in our factory is like that... it has an interface card so old that you have to interact with it via a DLL that I think shipped for Win95 or possibly DOS. But the machine works, so we run a geriatric Windows in a VM and somehow the card in the host gets forwarded to the VM and it all chugs along. Kinda.

    Tripping down memory lane, "The Travelers" P&C insurance company had a reputation for being better at tech than the competition back up to and including the 80s. Back before computers they had field offices create paper tapes from hand written forms and transmit the tapes at night via teletypes to the home office for conversion to punch cards to use in card tabulators. And they moved forward over the decades.

    When I was visiting their systems people in 1980 they were talking about how they were in year 8 of a 5 year plan to get rid of the auto coder emulation running on 360 code inside of a VM on a 370 or the equivalent at the time. And the field offices had 4300s which used 327x style terminals. The product out of those system was a CICS DB that generated a virtual paper tape that fed into the emulator mentioned. I wasn't around them long enough to know how the project finished.

    To give some scale, this system was used for processing automobile policies and they had something like 1 in 20 of the cars in the US insured with them at the time.

    1893:

    I remember hearing a couple of first-hand ParcPlace Systems rumors in the late 80s:

    • Lost sale on bundling ParcPlace Smalltalk on every Sun SPARCstation, allegedly refused by management for fear support costs would outweigh benefits of the sales revenue (so they missed out on maybe a million license units)
    • Missed sales opportunity to bundle with Oracle as a database development environment (or so said a developer working on a demonstration proof of concept)

    Almost forgot this one:

    • STRONG initial management resistance to selling a version for PCs
    1894:

    I think you're technically correct, but that kind of machine language is not "readable" for most people.

    1895:

    SFR
    BUT
    DNA is plain Binary, after all, isn't it?
    So, we already have a UPC ( Or UPL ) written in ones & zeroes ... perhaps not?
    Question - is there only one "Assembler" or not?
    ... Ah, Troutwaxer @ 1881:
    SO - there is "Only one (true) Assembler", then?
    ... It's so long ago that I wrote any code { Probably over 35 years, now } that all I can remember are the "basics", or maybe the BASIC's

    1896:

    "SO - there is "Only one (true) Assembler", then? "

    Far from it. Each hardware architecture gets its own Assembler, and there are a lot of weird architectures out there. For a while, my particular speciality was "You have this specialised machine with its own architecture that nobody around here has ever seen before, which needs to be programmed in its own idiosyncratic Assembler? Sounds like my line of work."

    Usually there is one Assembler for one architecture, but there are some arbitrary conventions in designing an Assembler, and it may be that there are multiple Assemblers based on different conventions.

    Then there are the extra features that can be added to your basic-grade Assembler, some of which leave it almost unrecognisable.

    JHomes

    1897:

    ""what's wrong with python (from a readability pov) tho?" Well, my view - which is clearly biased by my preferred toolset and working environment - is that the use of indenting as a structural element makes it very difficult to read anything more than a few lines and still make sense. As soon as you have several layers of indent occupying more than a single visible page worth of code it becomes near impossible to keep mental track of what is going on. And because Python is one of the dead-text-file languages where you inevitably have large swathes of barely differentiated text all glommed up in a file, this is a common occurrence."

    hmm. this seems entirely odd to me. Though I've heard other people say it.

    At one point pseudo-code was a design tool. You wrote your design in programming language-like notation (no, I've no idea why we didn't write it in actual programming language). I wrote a standard for said pseudo-code. It looked very like python. So when I came across python it was like "hey you stole my p-code!". Consequently I find python extremely clear and natural. The least write-only language possible.

    This in a nutshell explains why there is moe than one programming language.

    Isn't it good practice to indent in all languages? Why is say C less write-only than Python?

    Why then hell are you writing multi-page functions? Surely that's a crap idea in any language?

    1898:

    "Yet it should be possible to get to a universal programming code. After all, that's what DNA is and the variety of stuff from really basic to super-complex that it's programmed is remarkable."

    Is DNA Turing-complete?

    Superficially it's just a badly-designed [1] arbitrary [2] one-to-one mapping between a linear sequence of DNA bases and a linear sequence of amino acids, which makes it at best a description language, not a programming language and therefore not Turing-complete.

    However, it's not that simple. There's more to the DNA system than the language, there's also an interpreter, and there's clearly some kind of metaprogramming going on, with genes being "turned on" and "turned off" according to ... what?

    (At this point my 40-year-old knowledge of cell biology runs out.)

    [1] there is redundancy, but it's not exploited for error correction.

    [2] Although the mapping is (almost) universal on this planet, it's arbitrary. If DNA-based life evolves elsewhere there's no reason (so far as we know) why it should use the same mapping.

    1899:

    "Isn't it good practice to indent in all languages? Why is say C less write-only than Python?

    Why then hell are you writing multi-page functions? Surely that's a crap idea in any language?"

    Agreed.

    It's noticeable that those who dislike Python's compulsory indentation generally voluntarily indent their C/C++/C#/Java/Javascript/Smalltalk/whatever code to reflect its structure, and many of them are proponents of the One True Indentation Style (of which there are at least a dozen ;-)

    I think timrowledge's point is not so much about choice of language as the availability of tools which understand semantics as well as syntax and display the code structure accordingly, so you never need to interact with a raw text file (which may not even exist).

    1900:

    A development which might help address some solar power issues (notably, putting solar panels on vertical surfaces):

    https://medium.com/predict/pyramid-like-lenses-could-cause-a-solar-power-revolution-8daf6f93e16f

    Apologies if it's already been posted.

    1901:

    So we use programming languages to communicate with machines

    Again, the idea that we "communicate" with the machine is at best a metaphor. Communication implies a receiver capable of understanding the material transmitted to it and that's not the case with machines. Machine code is part of an abstract machine. Assemblers, compilers and even interpreters are machines for making abstract machines, and program code is an abstract representation of the machine code that results. Even to say program code consists of instructions is a metaphor, to make it easier for us to understand what's happening at runtime.

    Among the first modern computers were programmable looms. We don't conceive of the pattern programs that resulted in like-patterned fabric as a form of communication. Neither should we with digital program code. Software plus hardware is always a Rube Goldberg machine for creating outputs based on inputs, it's just that some of the components are abstract rather than strictly mechanical. Still, they align to theoretical constructs about the way they work just the same way that mechanical components do.

    If there are emergent properties, ones that resemble sentience, given adequate complexity and modelling, we don't know how to communicated with those (yet).

    1902:

    1899 - I think I just agreed with you about structural indenting? Although indenting when you have, say, 2 or 3 levels of nested loops and/or ifs does make it easier to follow which level of nesting you're on. also 1901 - As for "Why a multipage subprogram?", I honestly did try to subprogram common structures out of the 2_000 line one. It proved impossible.

    1903:

    While that's true, and a very important factor, I've rarely seen it used in language advocacy threads. Instead the assumption is that choice are made purely on technical merits. I've also seen this in hardware advocacy threads. The pattern is always the same. An "X vs Y" argument is made, where X is superior to Y, and the person making the argument uses X, but not Y. While the superiority is usually technical, it may also be moral, and I've seen some very strange arguments equating technical characteristics with morality.

    I've been puzzled by advocacy for four decades. It was particularly strange to me when I was a teenager. Since then, I learned a lot about how to debate etc, and eventually learned about fallacious arguments, cognitive deficits, and a few other things that shed some light on this behaviour.

    1904:

    The problem with Python isn't indenting. It's that indenting of a particular fashion is required for the program to work.

    I indent my own (amateur grade) code all the time, for readability as necessary. And I leave copious comments. But having my code fail because I wrote one less space than I should have? Indentation as an invisible substitute for curly braces? Just fuck off!

    * I'm particularly annoyed because I'll be taking a class soon where python is required. GAAUGH!

    1905:

    Yes. I'm reminded of many Perlis epigrams, so here's a short one: "Within a computer natural language is unnatural." You can find the rest here: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

    1906:

    Always look on the bright side...

    By the time you've finished that class, you'll be really good at getting the indentation right.

    1907:

    Or I'll have gone mad.

    1909:

    It sounds as though you're not using a 'language sensitive' editor. For python, try setting your editor's tab size to your preferred indent step and use tabs for indenting; (some editors will optionally convert these to spaces when writing the file).

    It can be irritating, but compared to the arguments over where to place { and } in C-like languages...

    1910:

    Which assumes that strings will always be null terminated within the length available to them.

    1911:

    That's going to take a while to browse. Does it include the Necronomicon, and Cthulhu?

    1912:

    Just the other day, I read that someone has created a version of Doom that runs inside Doom.

    1913:

    And so often, BOOORing. I did middle-C through high school, then badly in college. When I went back to college, nine years later, I was told I could take calc II, and this time I said no, I needed to get it. This time, I was not merely doing the homework problem, I was redoing them, until I not only knew I had the correct answer, but why it was the correct answer.

    Too many instructors are like the PoS I had, a full professor, at UT at Austin for logic, who literally told me, "don't try to understand it, just figure out how to crank out the answers."

    I nearly told him I was going to sue for fraud, because I was paying for a goddamned education, not "how to crank out the answers".

    1914:

    Beg pardon, but there's one more group to blame: management, esp. upper management. The folks who decide on deadlines without understanding or input from the folks doing the work. You are not going to write good code after 60 hours that week, and it's 22:20....

    1915:

    Sorry, but my reaction to what you wrote is that whoever wrote that python code was an amateur, in the worst sense of the word. That's spaghetti code.

    Around '92 or '93, the programmer who I shared an office with and I agree: if a function/subroutine was more than one or two 25-line-screens, you were doing far too much in it, and it should be broken up.

    1916:

    Beg pardon, but there's one more group to blame: management, esp. upper management. The folks who decide on deadlines without understanding or input from the folks doing the work. You are not going to write good code after 60 hours that week, and it's 22:20....

    Back in the '70s, I was in a group of about 5 programmers working on a rewrite of an OS for one of the seven dwarves. I worked about 100 hours a week for at least 6 months while getting this beast out the door. We were all young and eager to do this job. I don't remember any management pressure at all, but there was certainly peer pressure. Who needs more than one day a month off, anyway?

    It took its toll though, as several of the team later quit, and one committed suicide. Never again did I do anything like this...

    1917:

    You haven't worked on problems that have complicated basic 'actions', then. I have seen some that needed several hundred lines with a lot of local variables, and had no natural break points. You then have the option of making those local variables global or calling functions with too many arguments; neither improves clarity.

    I agree that you should think, hard, if a function goes over ones screen, and most of the time it is better to split it up. But the dogma that you always should is wrong - indeed, sometimes code can be clarified by merging functions. The point is that the criterion should be maximum clariry, and damn the dogmas.

    1918:

    I was commenting on Pigeon's code, which used strlen, so null-terminated strings is implied, but your point is a good one.

    When you use null-terminated strings, you should be sure you always set that null, either directly using something like *s = '\0' or indirectly via a string function.

    This is really easy to get right. The rules are small and very simple. When you follow them and never break a rule, you never fail to write correct code. The problem is, as has been pointed out already, not all C programmers do that. So they fail. Their string-handling code breaks.

    BTW, I learned these rules from the Software Tools books. I learned other rules from Elements of Programming Style and other books. I also learned a lot from writing code at the assembly level, which focuses a programmer's attention on the tiniest details. Literally each and every bit, and each and every operation on those bits. I learned to see computation at an even lower lever by studying digital electronics, the 4000 series of chips in particular. Before that, I learned more fundamental electronics, using resistors, capacitors, individual transisters etc, That was the most fun, for a while, as I discovered circuit bending.

    Unsuprisingly (to me), this is my favourite Youtube video. I long ago lost count of the times I've played it. Now I'm going to watch it again. ;) Thanks for reminding me.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Pbyg_kcEk

    1919:

    If you think that rule is sensible, you have never met a complex problem.

    1920:

    "For python, try setting your editor's tab size to your preferred indent step and use tabs for indenting; (some editors will optionally convert these to spaces when writing the file)."

    AAAArrrrghhhnonononono.....

    Tabs and spaces and mixtures of tabs and spaces and tabs equating to a different number of spaces and tabs and spaces getting interconverted back and forth under different ideas of the number of spaces to a tab...

    Very often I'll be editing a C file and the indentation will be all jaggied up on the scale of single screens, or jump back and forth on the scale of a-few-screens-sized chunks, and I'll have to go through and straighten it all out just to make things easier to read. But it is no more than an annoyance; the code does after all still work, whereas Python would be fucked to the wide, and I can go through and tidy it up without introducing new bugs in the process, instead of the near-certainty of being mistaken in my idea of how much indentation some bit of code was supposed to have before it got scrambled and ending up changing the logic of the program to conform with my mistake.

    Similarly arguments over where on the screen the curly brackets ought to go are no more than a distraction; as far as the program goes it doesn't matter, as long as they occur in correctly matched pairs (and the editor ought to be able to tell you that). It's not comparable with having random invisible curly brackets inserted or deleted by the natural interaction of the editor with unknown events in the history of the file.

    I do have strong opinions on how I like the indentation to work (and on where the curly brackets go), but it's not a case of me abominating Python because of it using indentation differently to my preferred style; as it happens I find the style it uses is a closer match to my preferences than most of the usual variations you find with C. What I object to is the style being actually part of the code, instead of doing nothing more than make it look pretty to humans with the computer ignoring it completely.

    1921:

    You are not going to write good code after 60 hours that week, and it's 22:20....

    I favour the Brooks approach, but there's a whole lot of stuff after that which establishes pretty clearly that people have a small amount of creative work available in a week, after that they're just grinding it out along a decay curve where the useful work produced per hour keeps dropping but the error rate rises to compensate.

    I've definitely done crunches both voluntarily and because management fucked up, and they definitely work for some people some of the time. But as a habit they just lead to an equilibrium between bugs fixed and bugs introduced which generally follows a decay curve until the programmer or team is producing net bugs every week.

    Personally I will design/code for maybe 10-20 hours a week, fill in the blanks for another 10-20 hours, and after that I'm testing or doing admin (yes, I can fill in a paper timesheet, let me get right on that)

    1922:

    editing a C file and the indentation will be all jaggied up

    My strong opinion is that I don't care what code formatting standard is used as long as it is mechanically applied. There shall be a key combo that causes the current file or selection to be formatted according to the rules, and I will use it enthusiastically. The end.

    I occasionally write slightly odd code to get the auto effect I want, typically something like

    if true
    and some thing
    and another thing
    and geez
    then whatever

    Because I like the nice vertical line of conditions. But there's probably one of those per thousand LoC (or per 2-5 thousand in a verbose language or one that counts lines that contain only a statement terminator.... is } a line of code?)

    1923:

    I mostly agree with you, but unless you're discussing Pascal or a close relative, will you please say either statement terminators or statement separators (and note they are not the same thing) rather than "curly brackets" or "braces"?

    1924:

    Also, these days code colourising is essential and even most text editors do it. When I was using Delphi there was a plug-in that colourised the vertical lines that link begin-end pairs to make it even more obvious that both your indenting and function size had grown beyond the bounds of sanity.

    I run high res monitors with fairly small text, so my code windows are ~120 lines by ~180 characters. I'm pretty vigorous about having 100 lines as my max function length but my line length has crept out to about 140 chars.

    OTOH in a code review the other day we noticed that even in a non-prefixing language it was easy to get function name + first parameter past 80 columns.

    widget_class find_next_widget_in_queue(some_class a_parameter
    (60-ish chars)

    In a prefixing language (and with C putting the return type at the start or the Pascal love of telling you it's a function) you can get to 80 chars just with that:

    function TMyObject::TwiddleMyWhotsitsBaby(const char * const OldSchoolStringsRule
    (81 chars!)

    Rust is much more terse

    fn getresultstring(result: CommsResultT) -> String {
    (48 chars)

    1925:

    "Is DNA Turing-complete?"

    The way the DNA/RNA mechanisms work looks to me, it probably either is a molecular instantiation of an actual Turing machine with the tape and the head and all, or it's only a gnat's cock away from being one. I don't know the exact details of precisely what the processing enzymes can and can't do, but they do appear to me to be performing the right sort of operations.

    The main difference I can see is that it does not have the tape moving back and forth under the strong control of the interpretation of the code, as the standard Turing machine does. All the operations are fully reversible, and the tape jiggles randomly back and forth past the head under the influence of Brownian motion, doing some small number of instructions forwards and then going backwards for a bit and undoing some of them, etc. etc. It gets to the end eventually because there is a fractionally higher probability of it moving in one direction than in the other.

    Fully reversible computation can be carried out with devices using processes that are fully thermodynamically reversible, so there is no increase of entropy. Such an ideal device can achieve the theoretical minimum energy consumption per instruction (some very simple expression which I have shamefully forgotten, involving Boltzmann's constant). Accordingly, research in this area is of interest for finding ways to build computers with lower power consumption.

    The difficulty is that anything that can be reversible will be reversible, so a perfectly reversible computer would spend as much time running backwards as it did running forwards and waiting for it to finish would be worse than Windows updates. You have to supply energy to shove it one way or the other, as Maxwell's demon is well aware. It's exactly the same deal as with chemical equilibrium thermodynamically - and of course literally in the case of DNA. DNA gets down to about 10x the theoretical minimum energy per instruction, which is several orders of magnitude better than anything humans have built.

    In theory there's no reason why you can't make a Turing machine which is perfectly reversible and can run backwards and forwards at random with no problems apart from futility. I just don't know enough detail about how the DNA mechanisms work to be sure there isn't some catch or wrinkle that makes them incompatible with being Turing complete even though it looks superficially like they ought to be. But even if there is, given enough lab time I don't see any reason why you couldn't come up with some variant on the same kind of chemistry that would do the trick.

    1926:

    40K of TCL code to control an oil rig.

    I've just been dragged into a debugging session at work which makes this obvious.

    Somewhere in the chain packets are going missing, in a fairly well defined circumstance. And that is a new problem on existing installed hardware, which suggests that someone has updated software on a subset of our cellular radio devices. Which means the good news is that if we can work out who it is we can tell them and they can at least in theory fix the problem and update the software again.

    But from our end, we have less than 40kB of compiled C code that loses packets sometimes. Hmm.

    (also, this is why "full stack developer" is such a bullshit term. Our website is affected by this problem, so if we had a "full stack developer" they'd be the obvious person to solve this problem, right? Bug in cellular radio network stack is right up their alley, being a "full stack developer" and all)

    1927:

    "either statement terminators or statement separators"

    I'm not talking about either of those though. I'm talking about the delimiters around blocks, typically of several statements/declarations/what-have-you, used in C et al as begin and end are used in Pascal. I'm also talking about the appearance of the way the characters are laid out on the screen, rather than what they mean to the compiler. So calling them curly brackets is more relevantly descriptive :)

    1928:

    Back to the political shit-show ...
    Liz Truss: A truly useless Remainer who did nothing in govt except gabble with hacks cos she’s reassuringly mad behind the eyes - quote, D Cummings.
    We are plainly in for a barrelfull of laughs, then.

    1929:

    As I said, the true inheritor of Bozo's mantle. He was right in his leaving speech that he has done most of the job - if you regard that as fucking up the UK. Truss will do her best to complete it.

    1930:

    EC
    Truss seems to be a true butterfly, seeking after whatever are the latest fad(s) with almost no depth.
    Just heard ( R4 ) where she was asked for any economists who supported her, um, "ideas" & she replied; "Yes, Patrick Minford" - the man who totalled (nearly) the UK economy in Thatcher/Major's time. Utterly discredited & wrong.
    IF she wins - & I can see her "electorate" loving her - it's going to be a rough ride. Of course, one continuity with Bo Jon-Sun, will be smashing things up.

    1931:

    I don't recall if the source wrote 40K or 40Kloc, but I'm assuming the latter. It just occured to me that 40 kilobytes of TCL source code would be something else. I'm so used to measuring Kloc that I sometimes forget this difference. They're usually related, but that depends so much on the coding style and the language. A lot of the TCL code I've seen (e.g. from the Walnut Creek archive) used many short lines.

    Metrics of code complexity are another measure. Is there a tool like Vagrind for TCL?

    Over the years since reading the claim, I've wondered how that TCL code worked. An oil rig is hardware, so how does TCL interface with hardware? How much, if any, of that TCL code called C code?

    How would you do it? How do you imagine they did it? How complex could that code get? Maybe complex enough to justify using a tool like Vagrind?

    What I know about oil rigs tells me that could get pretty damn complex, even if the rig consists of a large set of subsystems. There are real world case studies of systems like this, particularly when things go wrong, as they sometimes do.

    Then there are the big killers, like Piper Alpha, in the oil industry, and Therac-25 in the medical industry. I don't know how much software played a roll in the former case, but it certainly had a part in the latter. See section 3.5.3 of Nancy Leveson's Medical Devices: Therac-25*. The first paragraph of that section is relevant here. TL;DR Valgrind-like tools won't solve problems involving hardware when the design makes software responsible for safe operation. BTW, the Therac code was written in assembly language for the PDP-11.

    Be thankful whenever your is less likely to kill people.

    1932:

    An oil rig is hardware, so how does TCL interface with hardware? A SCADA interface?

    1933:

    Story from back in the day:

    A co-worker I knew told this to me:

    The CDC 6000 series used Peripheral Processors (i.e. PPs) to do the I/O processing, and CDC's original OS design had most of the OS actually run on the PPs. Note that the whole OS (both on the PPs and on the main CPU) was written in assembly (known as COMPASS).

    In one of the PP modules is a comment:

    "Disassembled by Seymour Cray on " (I forget the date).

    Yes, the first versions of the OS were written in octal.

    Actually, CDC machine code is pretty easy to disassemble on the fly (once you get to know it). I suspect Seymour did that deliberately.

    I now work in C just about every day, the internal fights with conflicting style and preferred tabs got bad enough we created a style guide and use astyle to enforce it. One thing I pushed was NO TABS. Use spaces for indenting, then we don't have to worry about what everybody's editor preferences are set at.

    I occasionally use Python, it picks up where bash leaves off (i.e. a good scripting language), good at parsing and processing text. Seen it used too much for production stuff, which I think is a bad idea for any interpreted language. I don't mind the indentation, I do mind the equivalence between:

    var['k']

    and

    var.k

    I guess the language designer thought it was a quick dirty hack for adding "structures" to Python, but it makes me want to puke.

    1934:

    If it wasn't clear, the co-worker told me about the Seymour Cray comment.

    The rest is from me...

    1935:

    My questions also apply to SCADA system. Today we should ask some new questions, like what happens when a system is networked and linked to a network everyone else uses?

    Actually, we know what happens. People have been doing that for years now, and those SCADA systems are remotely attacked. They're being ransomwared, and this sometimes makes international news well outside the infosec world. We know nation-state leaders have been briefed on some of these incidents.

    There are even a few SF writers who've been talking and writing about the problem for years. ;)

    I'm reminded again of the ACM code of ethics.

    1936:

    Yes, Python makes a good scripting language, and I use it a lot. I have also tried to use it for purposes where I might otherwise use C++ or (MODERN) Fortran, and its ambiguities, inconsistencies and misdesignx really cause trouble. But that is as nothing compared to trying to use its facilities to extend the language - don't go there!

    1937:

    I would go along with this. For a fast and dirty demo Python is fine. But, its slow, poorly typed, does not have native multidimensional arrays and the lists gobble memory like theres no tomorrow.

    I had a piece of demo code I handed over to a colleague for testing. He ripped out my code using 2D numpy arrays and went over to using 2D lists/tuples - because they were "more pythonic".

    I had to waste an afternoon putting the array approach back in as the languages it was most likely to be translated into were C and Fortran.

    I also had to leave a note for the C/Fortran programmers reminding them that the Python range statement (a FOR lookalike) top value limit was NOT inclusive - a real surprise after decades of C, Basic, IDL, Fortran.

    I'm sure Python is great for AI and data analytics, but it sucks for real world image processing.

    1938:

    My main use (before and after retirement) and what I recommended scientists to learn it for is unpicking gruesome text data formats. With care, I can check them fairly carefully, which is important when they change without warning. For that, it beats every other language I know (no, I don't know Ruby).

    1939:

    SFReader @ 1877:

    DNA appears to be the universal programming code for most life on earth. But how do we know that would apply elsewhere?

    I don't think it's even "universal" here on earth.

    1940:

    Sirislee!? I've only ever used SCADA on private networks, who's closest thing to an interwebnet connection is the GPS downlink for the NTP server.

    1941:

    Troutwaxer @ 1909: Or I'll have gone mad.

    Where's the problem with that? How many times have you seen the sign, "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!"?

    1942:

    Yes, I know. That's the manufacturer's recommended practice.

    This year's big SCADA/infosec story:

    https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/news/phmsa-nopv-pcp-pco-to-colonial-pipeline-company

    Followed by this government reaction:

    https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/56_vulnerabilities_critical_industrial/

    Links in the article to CISA advisories. I hope these clowns are reading them:

    https://www.datashieldprotect.com/blog/what-is-scada-iot

    https://www.scadalink.com/support/knowledge-base/internet-and-web-scada/

    "Fetch my sarcasm hat!"

    1943:

    Then there are the big killers, like Piper Alpha, in the oil industry, and Therac-25 in the medical industry. I don't know how much software played a roll in the former case, but it certainly had a part in the latter.

    Back in the later 70s when I was young and mostly innocent (24 or 25 yrs old?) I was farmed out as a contractor to a major (at the time) company that made medical X-Ray machines. CAT scanning had just become the hot thing and if you didn't have a CAT scanner to sell you were not going to be a player for very long.

    So we show up. OMG. They picked the computer hardware and OS before they wrote a line of code. And if you know the minicomputer industry of the later 70s there was a lot of fudge and rapid dev in the OS's of various brands.

    So they (bookkeepers) picked the single tasking OS with very little driver support. And early on the software guys figured out they needed multi-tasking but decided to layer it on top of the ST OS instead of the extra few grand the system would need for the MT version. This was on a total system where the price tag was going to be north of $1mil.

    Team was a manager (long term with the company) a CompSci PHD who was also a teacher at the local Univ. A couple of journeymen programmers (mediocre at best), the math wiz doing the numerical analysis who was really good, and us for a couple of months. (The math wiz wisely stayed out of anything not related to analyzing the data and creating color pics to display and/or print.

    We made our feelings known day one about MT vs ST but were told it just wasn't going to happen. So we had all kinds of home brew low level stuff to deal with like the disk IO system. Written by the PHD genious. (Seriously it wasn't 1965, it was 1978.)

    We wrote our first bits of code and it crashed spectacularly. We did some digging and found their MT layer didn't save the system state/registers over service calls. That was the job of the calling code in their design. OMG. But no that was not going to change. So just to see if our code was right we asked for a copy of the MT code and put in state saving. Then tested our code and it ran perfectly after correcting a few typos.

    This was on day 2. On day 3 they asked if we would give our code to them to put into their MT layer. Apparently what we did in an hour they had on the books as a task taking a week or few which was why they were not going to do it.

    A few weeks in after a strange set of crashes that seemed to come from no where at times I figured out the PHD's disk driver wasn't handling interrupts correctly. I mentioned it to him and was rebuffed as to how dare I criticize his brilliant code. (No custom code needed if MT OS used.) A day or two later during the big demo for the corporate "suits" his interrupt coding caused a crash at the end of the demo. I did a "told you so". It was my last week and my Asperger's tendencies let me be rude.

    I decided after all of this that if a CAT scan was needed but not critical to keeping me alive I wanted to know the brand on the device before I'd get on the table.

    1944:

    So they (bookkeepers) picked the single tasking OS with very little driver support.

    My first programming job was a process monitoring system for the environmental department in the early 1980s. My boss had requested a PC computer; the acquisitions people had given him an old development system with 56k of memory that used a floppy drive as swap space. "You asked for a computer, we gave you a computer so stop complaining" was roughly what he was told*.

    I didn't succeed at the task. I feel a bit better knowing that my boss, who was an experienced engineer, also failed when he took over the project. It wasn't just me, it was impossible to do what needed to be done with the equipment we were given to do it with.


    *That practice seems to be common with large organizations and technology acquisitions. They treat them like furniture, which is why when we got 'new' computers at school they were already off warranty, having been acquired years earlier and deployed on a first-in, first-out basis from the central warehouse.

    1945:

    Be thankful whenever your is less likely to kill people.

    I have worked on systems where the error response could be "User error. Insert new user and press any key to continue". The obvious one being a pelting machine... a device that removes the pelt from a dead cow. But those machines mostly use both mechanical and electrical interlocks, with software being more or less decorative. Which is not to say trivial, but loosely my stuff was there to say "good user", "bad user" and "user error".

    These days I work on burglar alarms, which mostly annoy people rather than killing them. Although since our systems also do access control ... maybe we let the dogs out?

    The big concern for us is exactly the network problem: our hardware is mostly designed to defeat in-person attacks and those right down to "they're right there with probes tickling our board". The idea of a systematic compromise affecting every online device took some people in the company quite some time to get their heads around.

    But the core problem is that the boards use tiny processors with fuck all memory and no storage to speak of. 48kB of persistent storage, shared between executable and configuration. The not as sarcastic as it sounds point made to me was Tell me more about your powerful new crypto library that supports DTLS and 27 other standards... we can afford 4kB of storage for the binary version of your library (libssl is ~600kB on 64 bit linux).

    We obviously have new hardware in the pipeline but of late management have been changing the chipset every week for reasons that make perfect sense from a business point of view. Hopefully at some point the boss will manage to just buy 50,000 of them and we'll be set for a couple of years. OTOH he normally tries to buy full production runs (we still have 99% of the components in stock to build the ~year 2000 version of the panel. Dozens of them, but still. Yes, we offer full support on that cobwebby thing in a rusty box nailed to the wall in the basement)

    1946:

    Speaking of ESR, as you did above, he has vanished from the web. His twitter seems to have had all posts erased, his website is gone, and his blog never got back up after going down a couple years ago. I find this to be a bit odd.

    1947:

    Troutwaxer
    The trail up-thread goes cold, I'm afraid: "ESR" ??

    1948:

    eric raymond, libertarian programmer and gun enthusiast of some importance in the open source community depending on who u ask

    i asked about him last year and nancy said he was fine

    1949:

    "I don't mind the indentation, I do mind the equivalence between var['k'] and var.k"

    That's not Python. Maybe you're thinking of Javascript?

    In Python those are completely different things,

    var['k'] is an "item" in a map-like object, accessed by instance methods getitem/setitem/delitem. (underscores removed to avoid confusing markdown :)

    var.k is an "attribute", accessed by the free functions getattr/setattr/delattr. Attributes combine with descriptor objects to implement things like properties.

    1950:

    "Tabs and spaces and mixtures of tabs and spaces and tabs equating to a different number of spaces and tabs and spaces getting interconverted back and forth under different ideas of the number of spaces to a tab..."

    The simplest solution is to ban the tab character from text files altogether (and use an editor that will forcibly turn it into spaces). It serves no useful purpose unless you're trying to emulate a typewriter, and probably not even then.

    1951:

    But those machines mostly use both mechanical and electrical interlocks, with software being more or less decorative.

    That's a key design point. Interlocks can save lives, with or without software. That's why the Therac-25 case is so interesting. There are so many mechanical and software design flaws! So much to learn from. (Corollary: so much for a future generation to ignore.)

    Thanks to Robert and David. All these horror stories are appreciated.

    1952:

    "That's a key design point. Interlocks can save lives, with or without software."

    A designer of hardware offered me the opportunity to override hardware interlocks from the software. A special FORCE UNLOCK command. "in case someone forgets to to unlock the system before leaving the remote site". I politely declined

    1953:

    What shocked me about the death ray machine was how few layers of safeguards they had. I was expecting a dedicated black box somewhere that just measured (energy x time) and cut the power off after some only slightly insane dose was reached. Sure, the operator can override and say "encore!" but it might be that there's no reasonable way to have a max sane dose.

    OTOH I've been a menial around a veterinary CAT scanner that had a weird semi-mechanical dial setup where you entered the weight of the animal and its species-based average density or something and that determined the max allowed dose, independent of what the computer was trying to make it do (it was an input, and the computer would say "not allowed", but the only override was moving the dials). The engineers were busy removing that bit because dead fish can take a lot more x-rays than live pets. Yes, they were feeding fish to a cat (scanner).

    1954:

    Just saw this in the news:

    Last week, the Florida Department of Education announced that military veterans, as well as their spouses, would receive a five-year voucher that allows them to teach in the classroom despite not receiving a degree to do so.

    https://www.gainesville.com/story/news/2022/07/20/military-veterans-spouses-can-now-teach-without-degree-florida/10084909002/

    Question for those who've been in the military: what special training and qualifications do military spouses get? "Married to someone who served two years without getting a bad conduct discharge" seems a pretty low bar to set for a teacher (who otherwise would need a university degree and special courses).

    1955:

    Um, yeah.

    Isn't it indeed a joyous thought that DeSantis is positioning himself to replace Trump in the Swamp? Imagine similar decisions involving a nuclear football and who among his supporters will profiteer most from its use? They'll be fighting in the War Room next.

    If only those silly Floridian teachers weren't unionized. Then their Leerless Feeder would be pushing jobs their way, instead of at people who more normally vote for things like him.

    1956:

    In other news, from last night's Jan 6th hearing (to non-Americans, it's worth watching when you get a chance...

    Based on the clip they showed, I think Sen. Josh Hawley should be nominated for the Sir Robin Medal of Bravery, second class.

    It's also sad to read the relevant US criminal code and find out that sedition and insurrection are punished less severely in this country than is the crime of running from a police officer while Black. As an American, I'm deeply offended by this.

    1957:

    >"I don't mind the indentation, I do mind the equivalence between var['k'] and var.k"

    >That's not Python. Maybe you're thinking of Javascript?

    You are probably right, I was thinking of Javascript.

    However, you can write:

    var.__dict__['k']

    instead of

    var.k

    Which is bad enough.

    1958:

    I think I hate more that they're actually not equivalent.

    obj.membername (identifier)
    obj['member
    name'] (string that looks the same as an identifier)
    obj['member-name-with-minuses-in-it'] (string that can't also be an identifier)
    obj[member_name] (variable whose value is a member name)

    I'd prefer it to be that if you're referring to a member of an object you always do it the same way, instead of a bunch of different ways depending on what you're referring to it with. I'd prefer that to be the dot, because it's less messy.

    I also hate that the third one exists at all because it encourages people to invent CSS identifiers and HTML attribute names with minuses in when they could perfectly well have underbars, so you have to use that form instead of the dot, and you have to keep remembering that this particular thing that comes from HTML or CSS is weird and doesn't go by the same rules as the other things that come from HTML or CSS.

    1959:

    Oh for fuck's sake.

    The first two occurrences of "member" and "name" in juxtaposition should be separated by underbars, and there shouldn't be any italics.

    Perhaps it is sort of appropriate for that to happen in a post about consistent relationships between what characters things are and what they mean...

    1960:

    Pigeon / Charlie / Moderators
    What's the "escape" character in Markdown, so that you can show what you want?
    Backslash?

    Trying it:

    obj.member_name (identifier)
    obj["membername"] (string that looks the same as an identifier)

    1961:

    The problem isn't trying to remember it, it's not forgetting that this is the only platform I've ever come across that assigns special meaning to characters which crop up frequently as part of ordinary text.

    1962:

    I wonder if Florida Man really intended to let gay men into the classroom purely because they've been married to a soldier? But it boggles my mind that "spouse" is now a formal qualification for a responsible position.

    Or more realistically, this is another step in dumbing down the profession of teaching because after all it's just glorified babysitting. Except when it comes to the proper schools for young people of wealth, where the cost (and qualifications) of the teaching staff is part of the point. Dr Wotsit, PhD DipEd teaching PE to 5 year olds gives the school a certain cachet and prestige, don't you think?

    1963:

    Or more realistically, this is another step in dumbing down the profession of teaching

    He's buying votes. And in the mind of his base glorifying veterans and their families while showing that the teaching profession can't deal.

    After all, who would you rather have teaching your kids? A well educated commie pinko liberal with an agenda or GI Joe's wife?

    That some GI Joes didn't marry right may not have been thought of when this was announced.

    1964:

    With Florida "education" at that level, they won't need books, so they will burn them .......

    1965:

    How about GI Jane, or are they still in the days of "Don't ask, don't tell, don#t marry?" ;-)

    1966:

    That some GI Joes didn't marry right may not have been thought of when this was announced.

    Is gay marriage allowed in the American military?

    In my outside opinion, you're right about this being virtue-signalling for his base, as well as poking fun at those with educations (either they don't protest so it's no big deal, or they do protest which proves they're snowflakes — can't win that one).

    1967:

    .. As terrible as the intent behind this educational "reform" is, it likely wont do much direct actual harm.. because the entire field of university education for teachers in the US needs reform by fire and sword.

    Degrees in education fail to have any impact on teacher effectiveness whatsoever. A bachelor of math will make you a better math teacher. A phd in education wont.

    https://www.mhec.org/sites/default/files/resources/teacherprep1_20170301_2.pdf

    Basically, the entire university degree programs that "train" teachers should simply be closed down, and teachers be directed to take at least bachelors in subjects that have some actual measurable skills to depart.

    "Teaching" as such is, of course, a real skill. There just does not appear to be any way to develop it other than time spent in trenches.

    1968:

    I didn't see much ref to PhDs in that report but, having had a couple of kids go through the UK system, I would say they seemed happiest when they were taught by someone how was 1, kind and caring, 2, had some understanding how to teach and 3, knew their subject well - in that order.

    I recall a maths graduate teacher who only had a PGCE in teaching and his response to any question (pretty much) from me was "Go away and think about it". He didn't want the bother of working out what it was that he had not explained well - it was clearly too much bother to think down to our level of understanding.

    I think what you want is someone bright who wants to teach rather than merely to have the title "teacher".

    1969:

    Having been in the position of knowing more mathematics than a physics teacher (at 17!), it's not an absolute order. You need a minimal ability at each of them.

    1970:

    My wife was a teacher, (before taking a medical retirement) and what's obvious to me is that teaching is a combination of social, management and leadership skills. Theories of pedagogy are all very nice (and some of them are even true) but a new teacher is essentially a green lieutenant, and it would be much better to assign a new teacher as a teacher's aide the first year rather than expect them to take a year of education at some pedagological school, which might be full of professors who've never taught in a classroom full of little kids.

    1971:

    If what whitroth said @1767 is correct regarding his sympathy with the Whitmer plot, there's a nonzero chance he was at Jan. 6 and may be acting on the advice of a lawyer, or just justified paranoia. Good riddance.

    1972:

    it would be much better to assign a new teacher as a teacher's aide the first year rather than expect them to take a year of education at some pedagological school, which might be full of professors who've never taught in a classroom full of little kids

    Having taught, then gone to teachers college, then taught again, I have some perspective on this. :-)

    I was a much better teacher thanks to my eight months at teachers college. I pity the students I taught before I had any idea what i was doing. Afterwards I was still green but not completely hopeless.

    i was lucky that my methods profs at Queens both had recent classroom experience. One was actually a part-time high school teacher, the other took periodic sabbaticals from university to teach in a high school — so each actually had more recent classroom experience than most school administrators.

    The pedagogical theory is most useful after a couple of years in the classroom, when you're no longer in survival mode and actually have time to observe and reflect on what is going on. Teaching is kinda like driving that way: at first you're so focused on controlling the car that you miss a whole bunch of stuff that a more experienced driver notices. Even the most pedagogically sounds lesson will fail if the teacher has no classroom control.

    Also note that, while there's a lot of really good pedagogical research well grounded on cognitive psychology, there's also a bunch of crap that somehow won't die. (Like supply-side economics, Meyers-Briggs keeps rising from the grave!)

    As to Florida, well, apparently two years as a soldier (or soldier's spouse) is as good as a bachelor in math at making you a math teacher. The service (or service by proxy) replaces all qualification requirements.

    1973:

    Probably lots of stuff to argue about over educational policy, but the situation in Florida is completely awful. DeSantis is essentially anti-civilization as far as I can tell.

    If you were king of the world, what changes would you make to educational colleges?

    1974:

    Robert Prior @ 1968: Is gay marriage allowed in the American military?

    It is for now. At least until Obergefell v. Hodges is overturned.

    1975:

    The pedagogical theory is most useful after a couple of years in the classroom

    I can see that being the case. Teaching is an experience, especially teaching kids in school. I've enough experience of scouts and Duke of Edinburgh kids in groups to flee when the idea of dealing with them is mentioned :)

    One thing that struck me about the teacher trainers at the university I studied at was how few of them could transition from classroom teaching (where I assume they were competent) to university lecturing. Overwhelmingly they were dull and formulaic, with the main inspirational effect being persuading students to choose other careers.

    Problems ranged from treating university students like primary school kids both in manner and behaviour, right through to requiring that no student have non-university activities. Which was a bit hard for people who had degrees in other fields, families or even sports interests. The short version was: no respect. Which in turn made it hard for students to respect the teachers lecturers.

    1976:

    One thing that struck me about the teacher trainers at the university I studied at

    That wasn't my experience.

    I've heard complaints from colleagues who went to other universities that their methods profs had never been in a classroom as a teacher, so had no real idea what large groups of children were like.

    I like what I got: methods profs who kept up their classroom experience. It meant they were familiar with contemporary youth culture and concerns.

    In fact, one of the boards I did a practicum in did the same thing for administrators. They had five high schools and six principals. Principals moved between schools, spending a year at their new school as a full-time teacher before settling into their job as principal. It wasn't Undercover Boss as everyone knew who they were, but it did mean that they were in touch with the common issues of the school, and how much workload administrative procedures placed on teachers. It probably wasn't coincidence that that board's teachers had very streamlined paperwork!

    1977:

    Question for those who've been in the military: what special training and qualifications do military spouses get? "Married to someone who served two years without getting a bad conduct discharge" seems a pretty low bar to set for a teacher...

    Oh, dear. At the risk of offending everyone who's not been exposed to the closed social circle jerk of the military...

    Getting married as a grunt is special and different (BTW, panel two is exactly how the barracks look during the off hours. Approach with caution). Consider the tale of The Revenge of the Dependapotamus - FWIW, there are no dependapotamus jokes that are not offensive or sexist AF, that's just the nature of the thing.

    On the other hand, retired General Mattis recently got married, prompting another Marine to observe, "his new wife is a respected physicist and not a stripper or a girl he’s been stringing along since high school." Reasonable human beings do appear as military spouses.

    Come to think of it, my maternal grandmother was a Navy spouse who got special training in identifying aircraft that were flying overhead. That turned out to be an appropriate precaution for people in Hawaii in 1941, but I've got no idea how it would help anyone teach elementary school in Florida.

    1978:

    Is gay marriage allowed in the American military?

    Yes. Frex, see the USMC Guidance on Benefits for Same-Sex Spouses (official) or What Is It Like to Be a Gay Military Couple (commentary). It's not my social group but I understand this gets one both all the gay jokes and all the married grunt jokes, twice the bullshit for the same price.

    But if one wasn't seeking random stupid bullshit, why did one enlist? *grin*

    1979:

    ... and different (BTW, panel two is exactly how the barracks look during the off hours ...

    Oops, that link should be to https://terminallance.com/2017/07/18/terminal-lance-483-married-marines-ii/, rather than to a page with two comics strips about Marines getting married. The upper strip on the first link is too accurate but not really what we were talking about.

    1980:

    I'm not going to turn this into a book! I'm simply blogging it as an example of why writing with COVID19 is a bad idea.

    Well, at least you got that part right. "What could I write that would make the political enemies of a bunch of Twitter shut-ins the angriest?" is a dispiritingly lame way to waste one's creative life.

    1981:

    Daily Kos article about synthesising jet fuel, on site, from atmospheric carbon dioxide.

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/24/2112238/-In-the-field-a-50-kW-solar-tower-reactor-is-fed-only-CO2-and-water-and-produces-jet-fuel

    Someone else pointed out that this effectively frees military units (and others?) from at least part of their fuel logistics problem. That might be a game-changer.

    1982:

    I don't think it's a field logistics solution, and initially it will be priced to military levels, but I can see some of the bigger bases near the equator just paving out a few square kilometres of mirrors to get a local source of kerosene (don't some tanks run on that as well?) and diesel (which sounds like just a tweak of the input fix and longer chain hydrocarbons come out)

    The real excitement will be if it's reliable enough that airlines start colonising helping African countries become non-fossil fuel exporters.

    1983:

    If you were king of the world, what changes would you make to educational colleges?

    It would take more than changing the colleges to make a difference. Graduating lots of enthusiastic, knowledgeable, capable teachers into the existing system won't have a big impact as there is a lot of inertia, not to mention conflicting priorities.

    Still, answering the question you asked…

    I would make teacher training more like the skilled trades. Start by requiring actual real-world experience in the subjects they will be teaching.

    Attend an equivalent to 'normal school' to learn the basic skills they will need: classroom management, regulations, legal requirements, assessment.

    Work for 2-5 years under supervision of a fully-qualified teacher, like an apprentice or journeyman, gradually taking more responsibility. Much of the planning and pedagogy being provided by the fully-qualified teacher.

    After the apprenticeship period, back to school for theoretical and applied pedagogy, firmly grounded in cognitive psychology. No Meyers-Briggs and 'styles of learning' nonsense!

    Regular refresher courses in both regulatory and pedagogical matters. Important that these not be provided by the employer (seen too many cases where employer policies are presented as legal requirements, even when they are actually in contradiction of the real legal requirements.) No 'motivational speakers' — I'm thinking more of a scientific conference kind of thing.

    Not certain how to make teachers actually want to stay current in pedagogy. I've seen a lot of younger colleagues deliver the same lessons for years, not modifying them a bit even as the student population changed, scientific discoveries were made, and lots of new pedagogical research was published. They sure did a lot of coaching, though. :-/ So making it a requirement would probably be necessary.

    1984:

    Tanks, and indeed trucks, can be engineered to run on kerosene, and indeed other hydrocarbon fuels as well.

    1985:

    Not certain how to make teachers actually want to stay current in pedagogy.

    "staying current" is a much wider problem than just teachers. You can lead a horticulture but you can't make them think, as the saying goes. Look at all the politicians busy legislating things they have no interest in learning about, especially internet-related stuff.

    Software engineering is in some ways a useful example - it's widely accepted to be a fast-moving field where significant changes happen often, but there's still an awful lot of software engineers who resist learning anything new. Whether that be methodologies or that women can also engineer software. But SE are also notorious for being cats in a sack when it comes to cooperation.

    At least schools often have a more collaborative environment as well as being full of people who are highly trained professionals in the field of sharing knowledge, so at least in theory they're better placed to share new knowledge and skills?

    1986:

    At least schools often have a more collaborative environment as well as being full of people who are highly trained professionals in the field of sharing knowledge, so at least in theory they're better placed to share new knowledge and skills?

    Thanks for the laugh.

    Collaborating at every school I've worked at has been done on our own time. Any scheduled collaboration time is monopolized by administration for their own projects.

    And a big problem is getting the new knowledge and skills. I worked a 50-60 hour week most years, up to 80 one year when I was hit with six different courses to teach on a six-period cycle, four of which were in a subject I'd never taught and last had (absolutely crap) training for 25 years previously. This workload makes keeping up with the research rather difficult, and most people don't really bother.

    I was scheduled to give a presentation at a teachers conference in 2020, and my principal denied me permission to attend. (Covid cancelled the conference, so I didn't have to decide whether to risk discipline for using sick days to attend.) We finally had the conference this spring, and many people couldn't go because they were denied permission to take a single day off even when the supply teacher was paid for. Schools and boards are really centralizing professional development and want to control what their teachers learn about learning.

    Needless to say, I'm not a fan of this.

    1987:

    Rbt Prior
    EXACTLY - I've been a teacher & if I had been given a schedule as you proposed, I would almosty-certainly have stayed the course ...
    Far too much inapplicable theory & nowhere near enough ( i.e minimal ) amount of actual practice.

    1988:

    Collaborating at every school I've worked at has been done on our own time.

    My mother was a teacher, and one of the several reasons I would never teach is the ridiculous hours. Not only do I work fewer hours than she did, I get paid a lot more for it (I passed her pay rate after about 3 years writing software). Which tells you a lot about how the effective monopsony employer of teachers values them... ahem.

    OTOH I bet you haven't had too many staff meetings where one of the senior teachers stands up, says "fuck you" to management and walks out. Kept his job, no-one apparently said anything, that was just another day. OTOH same company, the owner was taken aback when I said that I did not like hearing him and another director screaming abuse at each other "behind closed doors". Their normal 'discussion' went something like "that's fucking stupid, what moron suggested that" and downhill from there.

    I'm not saying all geeks work like that, and in fact that lot were unusually bad, but it's not at all unusual to get milder versions of that.

    1989:

    waldo @ 1983: Daily Kos article about synthesising jet fuel, on site, from atmospheric carbon dioxide.

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/24/2112238/-In-the-field-a-50-kW-solar-tower-reactor-is-fed-only-CO2-and-water-and-produces-jet-fuel

    Someone else pointed out that this effectively frees military units (and others?) from at least part of their fuel logistics problem. That might be a game-changer.

    Should work fine until the other guy's artillery gets the range.

    1990:

    I think the point there is that it's one truck not necessarily in the middle of a forest of cheap mirrors. So you can shell the mirrors all you like, that will just annoy the people who have to go round standing them back up and replacing the especially damaged ones. Until you hit the truck that has the focus and the reactor etc you're just spending ammo.

    Which, as we've seen recently, is not a trivial thing to waste.

    I was thinking more a fuel-air bomb or one of the war crime ones. Devastate a square kilometre at a time. Predictably the US hasn't signed the convention banning cluster munitions but I imagine they'd still get upset if they were the target of them.

    1991:

    Question is, is it any more vulnerable than the existing system of fuel dumps and logistics to keep them full. If not then it will be cheaper to run and with fewer casualties.

    1992:

    Which tells you a lot about how the effective monopsony employer of teachers values them... ahem.

    Public school system, so ultimately the employer of most teachers here is the provincial government. It's a weird split deal in which financial matters must be negotiated with the province and working conditions with the local school board (despite those being entwined).

    And the province can always pass a law limiting pay rises to, say, 1%. The same government that awarded its own party members 17% raises because they had 'taken on extra duties' but feels no compunction in assigning teachers (and nurses) extra duties by fiat.

    The goal of many Conservative supporters is privatization of both education and health care, because then money that is being wasted on workers could more properly got to profits…

    1993:

    waldo @ 1993:

    Question is, is it any more vulnerable than the existing system of fuel dumps and logistics to keep them full. If not then it will be cheaper to run and with fewer casualties.

    I expect it would be more vulnerable. Kind of hard to disguise it or hide it under a cammo net. It would be a target worth using one of your carefully hoarded supply of precision guided munitions to take it out.

    And you'd still need to maintain that other logistics chain to get the fuel from the solar reactor tower to where it's needed.

    1994:

    Thanks. Yeah, I see it's a higher-value target than a simple fuel dump.

    It would be useful to know how well it scales down. If you can put one on the back of a HEMTT, say, then you've effectively reduced the logistics train of a group of vehicles by a fair amount, if you're already grouping the vehicles.

    Also worth asking if you could add one to VLCCs and container ships - if most of the fuel need of your bulk container carrier is effectively met by the vehicle itself then the carbon footprint of shipping is relatively low.

    1995:

    if most of the fuel need of your bulk container carrier is effectively met by the vehicle itself

    That would require a solar collection system that's significantly more than 100% efficient. The energy used by the ship is vastly greater than available insolation.

    Just quickly, if you look at fuel consumption it's going to be roughly 150 tons/day at an economical speed for a 10kTEU ship. At 40MJ/kg that's ~70MW. If we assume it's always cloudless daytime and the ship is always on the equator we get ~1kW/m2 so 70M is 70,000 square metres of 100% efficient solar panels. For a ship that's about 334x45.6m they only have 15,000m2 of area available, assuming it's also rectangular and nothing pokes above the solar panels. So those panels would need to be ~500% efficient. If we assume ~25% capacity factor from night time and other irritations the efficiency required goes up to 2000% efficient. Real solar panels run about 25% efficient unless you want to pay NASA prices.

    https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/fuel-consumption-containerships/

    https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/combustibles-energy-content/

    https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/asia/hhi-builds-koreas-first-10000teu-containership

    1996:

    Okay, thanks. Links to read, always useful.

    1997:

    Sorry that that reads badly, I didn't intend it to be quite as dismissive as it sounds. I should have done it around area required rather than efficiency.

    But if you include the efficiency of the fossil motor (~50%) and real panels (~20% areal efficiency) as well as batteries so you don't still need a full size fossil motor you still end up trading a lot of cargo capacity for more solar area. If you make a "hybrid" setup that uses solar directly to boost/substitute fossil power I suspect it could work, but you'd want solar panels that you can use as the deck of an aircraft carrier. Coz that's the obvious thing to put them on.

    This thing has effectively zero cargo capacity but is entirely solar... and they have built the whole boat around that, from the hull design up.

    https://toronto.citynews.ca/2013/07/19/solar-powered-boat-catches-rays-as-part-of-scientific-voyage/

    Note that the "useful" solar powered boats have sails for propulsion, and the brutal answer there is that weight for weight solar can't compete with wind, especially if you include batteries for night work: https://www.treehugger.com/awesome-solar-boats-you-must-see-4857671

    Where solar powered boats work is the same as any other solar powered transport... you build a stationary solar farm and ship electricity to the moving bits. That can be using wires, mobile batteries, or making chemical fuel that reacts with air that can be more compact because you don't have to ship the oxidiser.

    1998:

    Thank you - no offence taken, I am grateful.

    1999:

    waldo @ 1996:

    Thanks. Yeah, I see it's a higher-value target than a simple fuel dump.

    Don't get me wrong, I do think it's a good idea ... and if it works it could be a great idea. It's just not something that should be near where the actual combat is taking place. It needs to be built somewhere far beyond the range of the other guy's artillery.

    In Ukraine's current situation it would serve better if it were built in Lviv rather than in Odessa ...

    I think output would shrink in proportion as you scaled down.

    But the main problem with shrinking it down so it would fit on a HEMTT is "Where are you going to set up the mirrors?"

    And how long are you going to be able to leave it set up? And how much fuel could you produce before you had to move?

    Same problem with where to place the mirrors applies to mounting it on ships.

    2000:

    If I can chime in, there's a nineteenth century solution to this...

    The basic problem with solar power in general is that you get on average around 300 w/m2 (average solar hitting the Earth's surface) times whatever your conversion factor is. Think of it in light bulbs per square meter and you see the problem. Solar ships certainly do exist, but they're like solar cars--optimized for efficiency, not cargo capacity.

    There is, however, an enormous solar engine a ship can tap into: winds.

    So basically, the best solar-powered ship is a windjammer. And that seems to be where a fair amount of experimentation and innovation is going on in the shipping industry.

    The problem with going back to windjammers is that they worked in a world of around a billion people or less. Starting around 1900, our species foolishly hitched the nitrogen part of our required nutrient cycling to nitrogen fixed using fossil fuels, so there are a lot more people now. If we can't move bulk fuel, fertilizer, and grain, we'll be in even more trouble than we are already. Winds are more fickle than engines, and that's more than a bit of a problem for the global supply chains we're now stuck depending on.

    2001:

    One thought I had was that you'd use it to fuel your drones. That would give you a perimeter sentry function (or road-ahead recon function) you didn't need to carry extra fuel for and didn't need to risk people for, at least to start with. It might also be small enough you were able to run it without dismantling it to move. But I've certainly not done the efficiency thinking for that.

    2002:

    Windjammers: I'd assumed that adding some sort of sail system would be a supplement to the BFDiesel, rather than the prime mover. Does the extra structure you'd have to add make that a non-starter?

    2003:

    Heteromeles @ 2002:

    If I can chime in, there's a nineteenth century solution to this...

    Yeah, I was only pointing out that the https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/24/2112238/-In-the-field-a-50-kW-solar-tower-reactor-is-fed-only-CO2-and-water-and-produces-jet-fuel under discussion probably wouldn't work scaled down to fit on a ship because there's no room for all the mirrors.

    I'm sure there are plenty of ways to move the ships about. This just doesn't seem to be one of them.

    2004:

    No. A significant number of ships were (and are, on smaller scales) powered by wind, with an auxiliary motor. The problem is that you have to put up with slower and more erratic trip times, which is perfectly feasible but precisely the converse to the way we have been going.

    2005:

    Yeah, I was only pointing out that the https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/24/2112238/-In-the-field-a-50-kW-solar-tower-reactor-is-fed-only-CO2-and-water-and-produces-jet-fuel under discussion probably wouldn't work scaled down to fit on a ship because there's no room for all the mirrors. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to move the ships about. This just doesn't seem to be one of them

    Sorry, missed the lead-in. I quite agree.

    Others who point out that trapping drone power on stationary solar farms and shipping it from there aren't wrong either.

    The odd thing is that, once we got away from muscle power, we explored the most energy-efficient forms of travel (boat, rail) first, then got crazier with energy expenditures as we went along. Actually this isn't entirely odd, because efficiency is how you get around having small, inefficient motors and limited fuel supplies. Still, the point is not to denigrate what looks like older tech when we're looking for efficient systems. Those technologies were explored first for good reasons.

    2006:

    The odd thing is that, once we got away from muscle power, we explored the most energy-efficient forms of travel (boat, rail) first

    Odd? Those existed as muscle powered transport (canal barges, the first tramways) because they were viable with low power inputs. The efficiency was needed to get round that long before the first motors were substituted for the oxen and horses.

    2007:

    Heteromeles @ 2007:

    Others who point out that trapping drone power on stationary solar farms and shipping it from there aren't wrong either.

    Yeah, my only quibble was the suggestion of putting it right up near the front lines (assuming it's the kind of war that has "front lines") to save on logistics costs won't really work.

    Putting it within range of the other guy's artillery just makes it a high priority target that's easy to take out. Put it back beyond the range of the other guy's weapons and truck the fuel up to the front.

    2008:

    Put it back beyond the range of the other guy's weapons and truck the fuel up to the front.

    Current reports out of Ukraine suggest that 200km behind the lines does not count as 'beyond the range of the other guy."

    Reports out of Afghanistan in the last two decades suggest that 2000km isn't a guarantee either, especially if the other side has a staging area.

    This looks like a harder problem in the 21st century than in the 20th, and much harder than in the 19th.

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