TheVat

It is a reaction to the disparity between between posts and profile claims. He teaches school in the UK, but not really, and cannot spell pollution. Other hints in posts elsewhere suggest poseur to me, and I have been at online forae long enough to understand why people dislike that. This post is deletable, and I will say no more.

It has been "forever" since I read Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, so I am trying to recall if there are any descriptive passages about going into a BH. I know the BH is part of a transport system, but don't recall if there are details about entering. There remains a nagging memory of a shorter work where some group of scientists figures out how to avoid spaghettification and enter intact but I cannot find it atm. In the meantime, take care of your liver.

(chuckle) I myself am currently tutoring various members of the royal families of Europe in quantum field theory!

Emergence reminds me of Lee Smolin and his emergent space ideas. A blog of his, in SciAm... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/space-the-final-illusion/

Prometheus, it does seem like BH are used more as devices or sentient beings - Greg Benford's Eater was what first sprang to mind. Fredrick Pohl's Beyond the Blue Event Horizon another famous use of a BH -- as a hiding place for aliens. What you are after seems rarer and I have only the vaguest dimmest memory of a short story, read decades ago, which fits your description. I will look around, see if I can bring anything to light. Did Paul McAuley write something like that?

What strikes me about the dispute is the way that expressing grievances has changed in recent years. At one time, a drunk boss saying something stupid, would be fodder for commiserating elsewhere... wow, the boss is a mean drunk, and starts spouting bullshit. Maybe you meet a coworker in a break room and share some venomous comments about your stupid boss, no one is turning it into deep angst over being marginalized. We wouldn't be reading about it on BBC. I mean "transwomen are a danger to actual women in toilets," sounds like the kind of drunken idiocy that should give underlings something to mock at, not launch some sort of public official inquiry or attack campaign. And if said director claims to be open and egalitarian, then party attendees should just openly push back on her remarks, then and there, or later one-on-one. If her clueless views are ever amenable to modification by facts, that is more likely to happen if she is not publicly horsewhipped and has her worst moment paraded around the nation. The time for lawyers, sharp knives, and publicity, is if the director is called on her behavior by people at the party and she then punishes them at work or fires them. IOW, real discrimination. Real oppression. If that was happening in this case, the report is not clear about that.

If our furnace starts to fail, you will probably hear about it here first. I am listening to my furnace, going zhhreeeee-kachunk!-umgggghhhh.

My reference to The Byrds was a lame attempt to maintain topical relevance. Back to topic: Sorry to hear about Bronski. Too soon. As a Gershwin fan, I recall Bronski did a tune of theirs, It Ain't Necessarily So, back in the eighties. I wonder if Bronski influenced The Eurythmics. Had a similar synth sound.

https://www.wikihow.com/Replace-a-Washing-Machine-Belt In all the houses we owned, this seemed to be the most common washer problem. You can listen to Turn Turn Turn by The Byrds while fixing.

Fascinating. Clarity was achieved on the first page of this thread, but it took eleven more pages for it to sink in. Long live the cyan lizards!

As someone who went through a sculpture phase that involved plumbing parts and misc. metal stuff, I really dig this lamp. The room is pleasant, too, though I would have heart arrhythmia if our coffee table was ever that uncluttered. The spouse likes her teetering piles. Plus one.

There is always a tension inherent between democracy and government mandates. I think it was someone like Edmund Burke who pointed out that you have to, in order for government to impose a top-down rational scheme for a public good, assume that some people are somewhat "childish" and will not voluntarily act in their own best interest or that of the community. Philosophers like David Hume and Burke pushed back against that. Unfortunately, Burke et al did not anticipate the sort of turbocharged mind-control and propagandistic powers of the Net, and lived in a much simpler time where events happened at a much more local level. Pandemics are the classic large-scale event that our normal local perceptions and moral sentiments (to use a Burkean phrase) really are not equal to, and so history shows over and over that you have to go Draconian (a word that itself derives from a famous solution to an epidemic, IIRC) and somewhat violate the usual social and political norms if you really want to save lives. My guess is that societies that have a cultural foundation built more on conformity will have an advantage in fighting pandemics, because public health mandates will be received with far less distress and ideological debate. I find it ironic that the social movement in the US that most resists public health measures, and howls the loudest about their freedom, seems also to be the group that is most plagued with unthinking conformity.

Sorry, that was confusing on my part. I meant the conclusion drawn by the "latter day Bezos or Musk" in your quote seemed paradoxical. "...the only life possible outside Earth would be an artificial intelligence." If they mean that humans can only survive off-Earth by uploading into more durable AI form, that is certainly one speculation. But I was perhaps taking you too literally, and interpreting it as extraterrestrial life only being AI. Which would beg the obvious question.

That conclusion seems paradoxical.

Scratch the surface of any science buff and you will discover an inner twelve year old. Fact. Or "farct," perhaps. Some years ago, I read an article that said every breath I take will have some atoms that DaVinci breathed out. I looked around, couldn't find the exact one, but this gives you the idea: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15020308-500-the-last-word/ The article is too delicate to suggest we are also breathing Leonardo's farts, but it does seem inescapable. Given that the laws of atmospheric chemistry also force us to absorb the flatus of all the scoundrels as well as all the geniuses, I guess we should find other sources of..... inspiration.

Welcome, um, Kevin. Your profile says you teach astronomy at a school in the UK. Just curious what school that is. Thanks.

A quick (I hope) one: when I cut/paste from another site on the web, the rich-text format seems to then apply to whatever I type after (so that, say, a biggish font is perpetuated down through my own writing). How do I keep that paste in its distinct font and format, but be able to type in the standard font in the following paragraph? The only workaround i've found so far, which is hitting submit and then typing another post as quick as I can so my total post isn't broken up into separate parts by another member post, is a bit perilous. I guess I just put the pasted text in its own quote box? Seems redundant, when the format already makes clear it is a clip from elsewhere, but I can do that. WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is ready to warn Vladimir Putin during a video call Tuesday that Russia will face economy-jarring sanctions if it invades neighboring Ukraine as Biden seeks a diplomatic solution to deal with the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed near the Ukraine border. End of quote, and this is me doing the following paragraph. As you see, I am now stuck in the AP font, as I write my own text. I tried to cursor my way away from the quoted text, but it wouldn't let me do that. So I guess the quote box was my only solution here?

I remember there was a character on the sci-fi/fantasy series, "Lost," who was immortal, named Richard. While he never seems like a terribly happy person, he seems to ward off world-weariness by having a strong sense of purpose as a caretaker of an unusual island and its longterm inhabitants. Because its focus is elsewhere, the series skips over some opportunities to give us a sense of his inner life and how he handles the burden of centuries. I sometimes found myself wondering if Richard tired of his tasks and obligations, always being sort of a second-in-command and factotum to the mystical force of the island. Given the temple and the statuary on the island, and Richard's penchant for eyeliner (or maybe his eyes just look that way), I was led to think he had been around since ancient Egyptian civilization. I would think that kind of duration would produce a being who is not quite human as we understand it.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is ready to warn Vladimir Putin during a video call Tuesday that Russia will face economy-jarring sanctions if it invades neighboring Ukraine as Biden seeks a diplomatic solution to deal with the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed near the Ukraine border. Biden aims to make clear that his administration stands ready to take actions against the Kremlin that would exact “a very real cost” on the Russian economy, according to White House officials. Putin, for his part, is expected to demand guarantees from Biden that the NATO military alliance will never expand to include Ukraine, which has long sought membership. That’s a non-starter for the Americans and their NATO allies. Hard to see what anyone can concede on. We can do sanctions, which haven't really done all that much in the past. Russian has watched NATO swallow up a lot of their old Soviet satellites in E. Europe in the past 25 years or so, so I think Ukraine with all its gas, minerals, and grain, as well as strategic location, would be viewed as the last straw. While the US and NATO see Ukraine as a natural additon to all the recent added satellites. There is also the chance that Putin could fight for Ukraine and have it turn into another Afghan debacle, where the invasion turns into a giant budget-buster for Russia. That might give him pause. If any of this was really up to Russian citizens (i.e. on Earth 2), then I think they would be saying, hell no, not another insane land war.

Yep. Too many labor-saving devices to the point that we suffer physical ailments as a result of underusing our bodies. And too many "hidden costs" that lurk behind all our amazing comforts. We don't pay directly the ecological costs or cleanup costs when we buy a product, usually. There was some famous activist in The Netherlands back in the sixties who wanted to give everyone a free bicycle. I liked that idea, but I knew he was going to have little success in selling it, as a daily use device, to most people.

Erm, I was referring to fire codes and stove regs to prevent houses burning down, not preventing some using of wood as fuel. I meant safe installation and design of woodburning stoves and fireplaces, so that the carbon fixed in house structures (as Studiot referenced) would stay there. In terms of a home's main heat source, however, then yes wood is not so great given that its combustion is far less efficient than NG and can lead to overharvesting of woodlots and profiteering.

Yep. I lean towards China as having a natural geopolitical interest in Taiwan. And if the US can think that what was an independent Polynesian kingdom until 1898, Hawaii, 2000 miles offshore, stolen by western businessmen, is somehow under US sovereignty, then it's hard to see how we can deny another nation's claim to an island 80 miles off their shore that was long part of them (going back to the 1600s) ,and is 95% Han ethnically. It would be like China telling us we can't claim Nantucket.

Plus one to the whole post, and in particular that you mentioned timber construction as a carbon fixer. Unfortunately this is more true in the UK and EU where homes are preserved much longer than in the USA. The tendency to demolish old houses and buildings with good timber, and then fail to reuse it, is painful to behold. I have participated locally in recycling demolition wood and using some myself in renovation projects. This carbon fixing is also a reason to support strong fire codes and regulation of woodstoves and hearths. Also, subsidize renovation by governments, encouraging that option over just bulldozing.

I clearly need to use the winky emoji. The lychee nuts was a bit of dry humor. I am not sure that China, which needs healthy trade with us, would use annexation to put a crimp in our chip supply. If they want to do that, they are already positioned to do so.

Our commitment to Taiwan, a smallish island that exports lychee nuts and which is snugged up next to China (Mike Phelps could probably swim out there), seems shaky at best. The loss would be more symbolic than strategic is my guess. Ukraine, with its central location, and having major NG and mineral resources, and being one of the planet's major grain exporters, and having received some serious commitments from the US and European allies, and being headed towards NATO membership, might be a more significant bone of contention, and maybe even rise above our domestic catnip issues. It will be ugly when it heats up. But I'm not scanning the real estate ads in Auckland yet. Maybe I should.