TheVat

I have wondered if K3 just missing some key inflection point where civs realize they need their biosphere and move towards technology that is more efficient (like molecular computers instead of entire-star-sucking stacks of silicon) and producing less waste heat. And/or their energy goals and demographics shift massively away from the large-scale. @sethoflagos makes the point about 2nd law limits - I only toss "funneling waste heat" in there hoping sharper engineering brains will clarify where that's "rubber science." For all we know there's some arc that bends from K 0.8 to K2 to gentle eco-yogis sitting on rotting logs swapping droll anecdotes about their past brute technology phase. Unless of course Skynet goes live and takes over. I need to dig out Charles Stross's mindbending novel "Accelerando," where almost every bit of mass in the solar system is converted to computronium. IIRC he is one of the very few speculative fiction writers who at least tries to address the waste heat issue. (But given his civilization is just our solar system, I guess he can just punt)

Some of the speculative stuff I've seen takes the view that civilizations at that Kardashev level three are doing types of thermodynamic capture we can but dimly (NPI) imagine. Dyson clusters and galaxy wide AI networks and so on, then routing waste heat to power specialized megastructures, such as stellar engines or accretion disks around supermassive black holes at the galactic core. There's even hypothetical cosmological engineering - manipulate dark energy distributions, alter vacuum energy, or even estivate over cosmological timescales to outlast the universe's natural heat death. Like I said, we can only dimly imagine a K3 society and struggle to postulate what their technosignatures might be. They could shield themselves in ways we can't penetrate, so it's not like we'll find some anomalous IR signature as a telltale. Can they make a decent sourdough? We only find out if they like us.

That's some mighty fine grub, pardner.

If you can forgive my sci-fi pedantry I can forgive you pulling up the wrong fish. (Sturgeon btw was the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's "Kilgore Trout" character) I will stoically master my yearnings to read the Maxwell files. ;)

The reaction mass issue with any impulse engine seems hopeless for anything practical and fast. Ground-push from lasers makes a bit more sense, if you can work out tacking for the deceleration. Otherwise you have the bootstrapping problem with the deceleration phase of a journey, e.g. how to put laser decelerators on your destination planet or system. And also any trip beyond a close neighbor like Proxima C requires extraordinary feats of alignment, targeting and collimation to deal with beam divergence. So even approaches that seem grounded in real physics can run up against mindboggling engineering hurdles. And using natural solar output for a lightsail as @npts2020 mentions will have the inverse square law to reckon with when traveling interstellar distances. (Might be okay for small UM probes, though, if you're not in a hurry.) I have some pictures of a hair-sprouting mole. From someone. How would you rank its evidentiary value compared to your documents?

Sturgeon, not Heinlein. It's even called Sturgeon's Law. OT - I had a weird pattern in my life of moving into neighborhoods where lived famous sci-fi authors and encountering them in mundane situations. Lived near Asimov in suburban Boston, then Connie Willis in Greeley, Colorado, and Sturgeon in Springfield, Oregon. Mundanity ranged from seeing Ursula Leguin examining produce in a Portland grocery to stepping on Asimov's foot during a game of tag in a Unitarian church, apologizing, and Asimov replying it was okay he stepped on his own feet all the time.

Random and cryptic headlines in Emily's feed, as she eats her Lady dal... Gold Iranians secede Cessna in arid log. A Dave note: tart's no Medieval slave, I demonstrate to Nevada.

I've had similar molasses-in-Greenland slowness on Edge, Firefox, and Chrome, and on both desktops and handheld, FWTW. You are our last hope, Obiw-, Iodine, both for this matter and the rising incidence of goiters.

Haha, yep. Like watching plate tectonics this morning. CAN A MOD PLEASE NOTIFY THE OWNER AND/OR ADMIN?

ETA: And here's another symptom: when I posted, the site did it's now usual "grinding the corn" and I went off to fix coffee. Came back and it had successfully posted but had also logged me off. Now I'll see if it does that again. Clicking submit button now... .....okay this time I wasn't logged off. So that is just some intermittent glitchiness. Hope not, and I'm wondering if this is some planning error with our web hosting service not adding enough ports or processing for the end of the school year in the States. Maybe the owner could pass our feedback along. If any conscious brains still are there in customer service.

Still quite slow here. As with yesterday I had some tasks where I could click and then go do something for a couple minutes while the site glacially responded. SFN has a problem, Houston.

@swansont Haven't been able to log on for two days. This morning it took about fifteen minutes to log on and make this one post (I did this with tablet while fixing breakfast etc. as each step took several minutes). A couple others at a sister website mentioned same difficulties accessing SFN.

Seems an extraordinary claim, if you mean the sort of cognitive surrender we're talking about in this thread. What evidence is out there for core damage before age seven and what kind of damage is that? (And are there early learning programs that could mitigate such damage?)

M. Reeves emits raw rats, red nudes, opposed under Star Wars times, Eve? Erm....

A Peru decor precluded ulcer procedure, Pa.

He was using a metaphor, dude.

Had an intro calc course and a dim memory of Taylor polynomials as an approximation tool, but that stuff is a use it or lose it thing. If you never use, you swiftly lose. Especially anything beyond basic algebra and trig. So me hearing "Maclaurin expansion in one's head" is a bit like my predatory cat hearing a lecture on Lotka-Volterra equations.

Hehe, yes, or the mum. The kids are Karen, Bob, and Pareidolia. Pareidolia was the best at Hide n Seek - you would spot her face almost anywhere but it usually wasn't actually she.

https://medium.com/@reuvengorsht/what-we-lose-when-we-stop-doing-hard-things-01830f7a2c41 When Texas Instruments released the first handheld scientific calculator in 1972, math teachers everywhere sounded an alarm. They worried that students would lose the ability to perform mental arithmetic, that the cognitive muscles required for mathematical thinking would atrophy. They were right, but also wrong in ways they couldn’t have predicted. Research from the late 1980s confirmed what teachers had suspected: students who relied heavily on calculators showed diminished mental math abilities. A study published in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education found that calculator-dependent students struggled more with estimation and number sense. (Goes on to more nuances, with those losses paired with some students gaining more problem-solving abilities and mastering more complex math problems)

Yup, and even when a pattern is somehow (often retroactively) claimed as showing itself, sometimes an observed pattern or connection is nothing more than apophenia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Farewell Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert joined by Sir Paul McCartney for The Late...The host joined Sir Paul and the band to close out the show with a performance of the Beatles' Hello, Goodbye. But even as he [Colbert] began to introduce his final guest as hailing from "the Vatican", a staffer interrupted to say Pope Leo was refusing to come out of his dressing room. "We didn't read his whole rider, and we didn't get him his snacks," his staffer said. The only glimpse the audience had of "the Pope" was an arm reaching out from behind a dressing room door labelled "Pope Leo XIV" and throwing away a hot dog. "The Pope, who was definitely my guest tonight, has cancelled. We already sent the other stars away. This is terrible," Colbert said. "Who's going to be my last guest now?" (...)

Why does the CP have to assume that burden? Maybe could you clarify a bit what is meant by the "internal structure of the theory"?

Reasonable precaution. Yes I was just adding information and expanding on things a bit. BTW, it would be interesting to see if there seasonal correlations which were reversed six months, calendar-wise, in NZ. Chaldeans are troublemakers. When you get a 9, they just act coy and pretend that's not real.... BIVSChaldean Numerology Explained: Meaning, Chart & Name...Discover what is Chaldean numerology, how the Chaldean numerology chart works, and how to calculate your name number. Learn its secrets for success and destiny. Somewhere back there, an early Chaldean numerologist got one of his fingers chopped off.

Also, most Libras are Virgos, due to equinox precession. And Virgo being a large constellation, over fifty degrees of arc along the plane of the ecliptic. Sorry, puny Libras. Jesus = 11 Yeshua = 25 One of them must be wrong. "The other one's out on hunger strike, he's dying by degrees. How come Jesus gets industrial disease?"

Canadian study of pro hockey players. Showing a fairly straightforward causal relationship between birth season and early encouragement from sports teachers and coaches. There could be other seasonal effects, as well, both in terms of homeroom age differences and also early infant development as it relates to day lengths, ambient temps, airborne pollens, etc. These effects are amenable to statistical analysis, unlike mystical conjectures like those of numerology or astrology.