TheVat

I really pity the people that are driven to take such wretched boiler room jobs, many must know how noxious their presence is on the web. We had a pet go missing a few years back and the Craigslist ad was answered by some woman claiming to be a neighbor. It became clear she was a scammer (e.g. asking for us to send money to pay for her outlay on food and cat toys, before she brought the cat over), and I was able to track her actual location to someplace in Africa and flag her CList relay. I closed our exchange of emails by asking her how she lived with herself, preying on the hopes of people who had lost beloved pets. I didn't want her to starve, but I wanted to make her conscience twinge. A bit OT, but I recently received an email titled Your Prostate is the size of a Lemon. Spammers seem to be able to garner some personal information (age, in this case) and then direct a torrent of scare ads (failing organs, in my demographic) your way. It's interesting that science fora OTOH seem to get a lot of spam tilted more towards a younger demog. Possibly many keywords on-site suggesting students and areas of study.

Paul Neil Milne Johnstone (1952–2004) was a real poet who lived in Redbridge, Essex. Johnstone had attended Brentwood School with Douglas Adams. There Johnstone edited a broadsheet, "the Artsphere Magazine," that included mock reviews by Adams as well as Johnstone's own poetry. His name was used by Adams as the author of the worst poetry in the universe in the original radio broadcast, and first edition of HGttG, though this was changed to Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings for all subsequent versions. Johnstone went on to achieve moderate prominence in the poetry world as an editor and festival organiser, including the 1977 Cambridge Poetry Festival. So here's a thread for bad poetry. Whether it's a lump of green putty in your armpit or dead swans in a stagnant pool rotting away, let your Muse take you someplace truly awful, repellent, rancid, festering, or even confectious. Or feel free to post quotes from the worst poetry you've encountered (with all due respect to copyright laws and the health and safety of SFN members and guests). To get the ball rolling, here's the peerless Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings to provide a little inspiration. ( her poetry is still considered to be the worst in the Galaxy, closely followed by that of the Azgoths of Kria and the Vogons, in that order.) The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool. They lay. They rotted. They turned Around occasionally. Bits of flesh dropped off them from Time to time...And sank into the pool's mire. They also smelt a great deal. I will also offer, from beyond the Hitchhiker universe, i.e. the so-called real world, a snippet of what is considered one of literature's worst poems, The Tay Bridge Disaster, by the infamous William McGonagall: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tay_Bridge_Disaster Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv'ry Tay, I now must conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed." Now, have at it, gruntbugglies!

I have generally found Axios to be fairly low-bias, though I see that media bias analytic groups like All Sides have generally rated them as left-leaning. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/axios

And now Turnip is backpedaling on agri and lodging laborers... https://www.axios.com/2025/07/11/trump-immigration-farmworkers-visas Under pressure from worried farmers and hotel owners, the Trump administration is launching a program to streamline issuing visas for temporary, migrant workers to try to make sure fruits get picked, meat is packed and lodgings are cleaned. Why it matters: President Trump's immigration crackdown has put his administration between a MAGA rock and a special-interest hard place. Farmers who rely on noncitizen workers — who make up as much as 40% of the agricultural labor market — are howling that Trump's mass deportation program is damaging the labor market, and could therefore threaten the food supply. But Trump's MAGA base wants to ratchet up deportations, saying the administration shouldn't allow employers to incentivize illegal immigration by granting "amnesty" to certain noncitizen workers. Zoom in: Trying to balance those competing interests, the Department of Labor has created the Office of Immigration Policy. It's designed to be a red-tape-cutting, one-stop shop to help employers get faster approval for temporary worker visas...

I didn't encounter a paywall (or realize the Times was Murdochian - yikes!). I also wondered about the school name. Sounds highly specialized. 😁

You're most welcome. As I was reading your exchange I began to hear small whimpering sounds and after some looking around realized they were coming from me. Though the Science Direct article provided some amelioration, there were periodic resumptions of the pitiful sounds when my eyes passed over phrases like "low damping and high nadir." Overall, I welcome any opportunity to expand my understanding of how grids deliver power to a home. (Once it's delivered to my 200 A load center I become more expert, having wired four houses so far, with no electrocutions to date)

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/how-the-cat-got-its-miaow-to-mimic-babies-and-manipulate-their-owners-6tmwgq36n Cats miaow only to humans and mimic newborn babies to grab our attention, according to one of Scotland’s foremost vets who says that we should listen to our pets better. Danielle Gunn-Moore, professor of feline medicine at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at Edinburgh University said that cats had learnt to manipulate human emotions. She said: “In the wild kittens will mew to their mum to get them to come back and rescue them. But they are not miaows. Cats have learnt over the millennia that if they make a noise not unlike a newborn baby it is a good way of getting attention whether we like it or not.”

For those experiencing curiosity as to what Seth and Ken were talking about, here is a brief on virtual inertia (which concept was new to me): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128194324000196 The concept of virtual inertia is adopted from the moment of inertia of synchronous generator (SG) rotating masses. The conventional power systems profit from the inertial function of numerous existing SGs to solve or improve the frequency challenges, e.g., low damping and high nadir due to the load/generation disturbances. However, the modern power systems are penetrated by a large number of the inertia-less power electronic–interfaced distributed energy resources (DERs). Hence, the rotational DER portion decreases impressively and the power system frequency experiences more intensive changes due to disturbances than the conventional SG-dominated power systems. In order to solve the low-inertia challenges of the power electronic–based power systems, the concept of virtual inertia is introduced, which is realized by applying a control function on the power electronic–interfaced DERs to mimic the SG inertial dynamics and provide the inertia, virtually. The main source of the virtual inertia is the short-term stored energy in the DC link of the DER power converters, which should be injected to the AC side according to the virtual inertia control objective. In fact, the DER power converters are controlled to surmount the low-inertia challenges including high-frequency nadir and high rate of change of frequency (RoCoF), low frequency/power oscillation damping, frequency instability, and severe changes triggering protection devices mistakenly.

From today's NYT... "Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” It was Wednesday afternoon and President Trump was having lunch in the State Dining Room at the White House with five leaders of African nations. There were several different languages being spoken in the room. Headsets were worn by all so that translations could be heard. But no headset was needed to understand what President Joseph Boakai of Liberia was saying. English is the official language of Liberia, which was founded in part as a movement to resettle free Black Americans in the 19th century.

What I was speculating (admittedly) was that deporting a large percent of the agricultural labor segment that picks produce, packs meat, etc would allow tech firms to roll out new robotic product lines and ride in to rescue untended fields of crops and stalled processing lines in slaughterhouses. (Unless of course that plan to force Medicaid patients to do fieldwork is implemented).

"Grok," Elon Musk's AI, which he has been running on his social media platform, seems to keep turning into a Nazi. https://bsky.app/profile/kthorjensen.bsky.social/post/3lti7lu56uc2n When it isn't suggesting a new Holocaust, it's praising Adolph Hitler... https://x.com/tab_delete/status/1942690597866799405 Or attacking people with Jewish surnames. Grok singled out a user with the last name Steinberg, describing her as “a radical leftist tweeting under @Rad_Reflections.” Then, in an apparent attempt to offer context, Grok spat out the following: “She’s gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids in the recent Texas flash floods, calling them ‘future fascists.’ Classic case of hate dressed as activism—and that surname? Every damn time, as they say.” (one may wonder if Steinberg was a troll account, designed to provoke the less sentient) And black people have not escaped Grok's artificial stupidity, with a series of posts (since taken down) using the N word spelled out to slur Blacks - this drew the admiration from an actual white supremacist group... https://x.com/TheTowerWaffen/status/1942678406245802050 Given the origin of Grok's name, I can well imagine Robert Heinlein turning over in his grave.

Yes, I realized that I meant oil reserves, NOT coal, in my post, but missed the edit window here. Sorry. Small oil reserve, large coal reserve.

Could be that corporate forces are split - tech bros see deportation as a way to clear the path for automation (the ultimate in cheap, docile and submissive workers) while other corporations and smaller biz fear the economic shrinkage from mass deportation.

China has relatively little fossil fuel production or reserves, compared to other populous nations, and so I would guess they are more motivated to gain some energy independence and not be too dependent on imported FFs. Being a totalitarian society also helps, in terms of implementing large-scale plans to transition to sustainable energy. And they are also achieving some global market dominance in production of PV panels, which will further their geopolitical goals. While regressive nations like the US have been busy fighting with themselves over the inevitable and essential transition, China just cut through all that bullshit, rolled up their sleeves, and are getting the job done. My guess is that China's success, and its implications, will eventually penetrate even thicker American skulls, as people realize how China has cheap power and affordable electric cars (which cars many American consumers have started to notice and has set them wondering why they can't buy a decent no-frills EV for under 20K).

I'm thinking, with regard to creating chaos, that oligarchs try to aim for a kind of Goldilocks zone, where people have enough anxiety to be manipulated but not so much that they withdraw from consumerist comforts and turn their wrath on the oligarchs and the politicians who serve them. When you turn the 99% (in David Graeber's meaning) into frightened peasants, you can get peasant uprisings. Like the Jacquerie in France, peasants have a way of noticing when the leadership is asking them to defend failed and corrupt institutions.

Not a physics guy, but aren't photons massless and chargeless? How would they interact? 🫣

We are currently amazed at the acuteness of our cat Louisa's sensitivity to her new born kittens mewing when they wake up and she's been taking a Mom Break outside. This morning she was in the backyard and I had closed the windows and just left the laundry room door slightly ajar so she could get back in - the kittens were in a towel lined deep box in the quietest corner of the cellar. I went down there to retrieve a canister of oats (we keep a backup food supply down there) and began to hear very faint mewings. In the box they were all writhing around and crawling over each other, awake and hungry. This area is sonically very far removed from the upstairs, let alone the shady back of the yard where Louisa was hanging out by the birdbath. But somehow she had sensed the awakening and was rushing down the stairs as I made my way up. We've seen this happen many times now in the past five days. I'm saving one of them to ship to England - I know @pinball1970 has been eagerly awaiting a kitten. (In-joke)

Stateless groups, i.e. after the collapse of polities or after a diaspora, does sound interesting. Hope OP can post some text for us. Understanding how these could survive and potentially thrive could help people like Kurds, Palestinians, and even very dispersed stateless groups like the Roma. It's also interesting to me personally, because I live around many Lakota (aka Sioux) people who have experienced statelessness in a peculiar way, where they were recognized as a nation but without any real sovereignty over their affairs.

Not really. Just pointing out the difference between a simulation and a naturally existing world. The simulation needs more than just a few rules - it needs to call up particular files which present sensory impressions (large quantities of data) to conscious agents. You can't cut corners if the sim is realistic. The sensorium of each of billions of humans is quite complex with enormous variations of particular types - like @pzkpfw tree example. You walk through the woods, you don't just see the same tree repeated a thousand times - and people would notice, if that happened. Bear in mind that deception, which a simulation is, requires a lot of fake reality. And a lot of monitoring of conscious agents - for example, the system must know that Fred Shmeebly in Twin Falls, Idaho is about to look through a telescope to study details on the surface of the Moon. Those details must be there when needed, to preserve Fred's reality. Yes, propagation delay could be a huge issue in the massively parallel and enormous architecture of a universe simulator, even if transmission is photonic.

This definition of "simulation" is then entirely yours. Generally, it is defined as something which is designed by some intelligence to simulate a world. Natural phenomena don't just randomly build computers which are then creating a simulation - this is akin to suggesting that the electrical activity in the thunderstorm passing over just happens to be simulating a dog kennel in Tulsa. This notion needs a shave from Ockham's barber shop. Yes that is the problem with sheer scale - in a nutshell. (Not that a simulation could not have shortcuts - physics people need only see subatomic particle tracings when they are looking at some readout from a particle collider. Subatomic particles don't have to be simulated for people engaged in ordinary macro world activities. Simulating physics and chemistry takes far less code and processing than real fizz and chem.). What would take a monster chunk of data and processing would be giving billions of conscious beings instant access to files like "pine tree, full details," whenever their gaze falls in that direction. If someone was carrying a field microscope with them, they'd need another file with, say, cambium cells details, etc. The rich/poor divide you mention in "Upload" seems plausible. I have myself imagined such a simulation where the lowest budget version requires you to be mildly myopic and incapable of seeing much details, and there are only twelve basic odors. You want to smell gardenias? There's a surcharge for that.

Seems like the "bottom turtle," which is the RW programmer, will desire a clock speed that provides whatever it is hoping to get from its simulation in what it construes as a reasonable amount of time. From this RW perspective, using lumps of beach sand and pebbles and waiting a billion years would likely not be the option it chooses. Indeed, a sophisticated hybrid (digital/analog) might be devised, especially where the simulation was populated by conscious and intelligent beings. Eventually they would arrive at 42, as the answer. Clearly, Doug Adams was the ultimate output of our matrix.

This seems both plausible and a towering exemplar of American innovation at its finest. Because operating a crank to remove butts is ever so much simpler than tilting the ashtray over a dustbin. Ideally, the apparatus would launch the butts upward and on a trajectory which could be set for the specific location desired. Or they could be lobbed at passing hobos and vagabonds who retrieve them for residual scraps of tobacco?

That's the uniquely disturbing work of Grunthos the Flatulent if I'm not mistaken. We are all mere putty in his hands (or whatever those appendages are). Putty that wishes fervently to die soon. Putty che desidera ardentemente morire presto! As an amateur architect, I remember following this story - I think they called the building the Walkie-talkie. That was when I learned of the famous Carbuncle Cup, which it won that year. The term "fryscraper" was also coined. I should really start a thread on architectural abominations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbuncle_Cup

Sorry for the assuming. I didn't think you were joking, and at first did think it reminded of enigma objects in web ads. On the question of the OP, it looks a little like something that gun hobbyists use to process ammo. Higher rez would really help but I understand you are stuck with this pixelated image.

Can't help but wonder how one would translate Vogon poetry into another language. Imagine being the translator and confronting this bit of verse... Oh freddled gruntbuggly, Thy micturations are to me, (with big yawning) As plurdled gabbleblotchits, On a lurgid bee, That mordiously hath blurted out, Its earted jurtles, grumbling Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer. Congratulations to your son, btw. And may I recommend the excellent features of the humble brick, as paperweight?