wrog

wrog, 4 months ago

@glyph

Note that you can still send somebody email or a text file containing

(mapatoms #'fmakunbound)

something that will almost certainly never be "fixed".

[in case it's not obvious, you do not want to ^X^E this in any emacs session you care about]

[... hm, 20 minutes after the Kill Task, there seems to be some delightful remaining wreckage in process space that Windows is still trying to clean up; I think I'll have to reboot...]

wrog, 3 months ago

@johncarlosbaez @grant_h

the real question is what CERN's energy cost for creating antimatter

To be sure, doing it at CERN is obviously a lose, but...

Sun's energy output is around 4.26 billion kg/s, so...

A single orbit with, say, aphelion 42.6 million km (just inside Mercury's) filled with a ribbon of power satellites having an effective width of 20 meters (e.g., use 1km² satellites spaced 50km apart at aphelion) will intercept around

1 kg/s

or

30 million kg/year

i.e., craploads of antimatter once we have any kind of method to make and store it even vaguely efficiently.

Hell, just a single1 km² satellite at that distance gets 6 kg/year

(... yeah, I know, not happening any time soon, but, in principle...)

wrog, 3 months ago

@johncarlosbaez @grant_h

If there's some way to do it that doesn't involve particle accelerators, I'd love to hear about it.

Then again, there are any number of ways building particle accelerators in space is way easier than building them at CERN (negotiating land-use rights, maintaining vacuum, etc...).

Meanwhile, we'll have this vaguely circular ring of a million+ satellites, each with its own independent power source and nothing better to do. We just have to find a supply of charged particles somewhere... oh, wait...

(yeah, I know: Not a blueprint. There will be Engineering Issues; we'll have to use both sides of the paper. Still seems doable, eventually.

…I was going to say storing it is the Hard Problem...)

wrog, 4 months ago

@ColinTheMathmo

hm. this is the first one in a while that gave me a "you would have blown this if you hadn't been careful" vibe (e.g. multiple routes for "certain" and "existing", "UNhappy",...)

Current Streak: 34 (perfect)

#CellTower 617

➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️

https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/?p=617

wrog, 4 months ago

@Ulrich_the_Elder @bodhipaksa @cstross

kompromat only works if the target would actually be ashamed or embarrassed by the information getting out.

wrog, 4 months ago

@TazPoltorak @ned

the projective fucks would include all of the fucks at infinity

wrog, 4 months ago

@xs4me2 @mattblaze

You mean someone like Liz Cheney? We lived, we saw the day, and she simply got voted out of office. Now what?

wrog, 4 months ago

@johncarlosbaez @gregeganSF

I kept thinking I should probably dismiss the problem of storing antimatter as entirely hopeless but now I'm starting to wonder.

(It's the Being Able to Trap Neutral Shit that's coming out of left field for me)

wrog, 4 months ago

@lauren

It always annoyed me when I was a kid that they never reran those first-season episodes in syndication (I'm not quite old enough to have seen the 1st run) so I never saw them until maybe a year ago. (In retrospect, it's obvious why: they're quite weird. First season has a general who is different from the one you see in the rest of the series, whose daughter is Tony's fiancée with the first 4 episodes riffing off of that...)

wrog, 4 months ago

@lauren

hm. I guess it got colorized for the DVD release

wrog, 4 months ago

@moira #ShortenTheMoviePlot #HashtagGames

One steamship cruises across most of the Atlantic Ocean, then there's a non-surprise ending

(I guess I need to learn the rules to this....)

wrog, 4 months ago

@JRFreeman @GW

"Each side believes God gave them The Holy Land, all of it"

It's actually worse than that. They are both referring to the same gift "event" in Exodus as applying to them. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are essentially the same religion from 30,000 feet, same god, same cosmology + a large body of shared scripture. Christianity is the Greek version, Islam is the Arabic version. (translators added new material, but same core).

That is why Jerusalem is a holy site in Islam, because as far as the Muslims are concerned they are Israelites, i.e., all of the "history" from Genesis on up through Chronicles, Kings, Maccabees, etc... the entirety of the Hebrew bible is their "history", too.

wrog, 4 months ago

@futurebird

How about:

Neutrinos: You'd always know where the sun is, even in the middle of the night or bad weather (but not really useful for seeing stuff since pretty much nothing blocks them). Also early warning on supernovas.

Voltages: Any hotel room you'd immediately know where the outlets are. Or if there's been a power outage in the middle of the night, you're not having to look for clocks that have gone out. Never get electrocuted by anything (you could safely do fractal woodburning).

Gravity waves/tides: buh. Always know where the sun and Jupiter are? Maybe you could find oil?

wrog, 4 months ago

@mcc @futurebird

I'd think that only works if you have artists with the same ability, otherwise it's just going to be random.

Also, 3-d movies probably wouldn't work for you (unless we're talking about the severe-old-school ones that used different colors rather than different polarizations).

wrog, 5 months ago

@moira @FlipperPA @shonin

Things get really weird for a number of reasons. (1) primaries are intra-party functions that the state runs as a courtesy; it's up to party rules to determine which candidates can be listed on the ballot and how; primaries are used to elect delegates; some states, you vote for delegates directly, and it's also up to party rules whether the primary actually counts for anything. State can't actually tell the party how to select its delegates because that violates Freedom of Association.

wrog, 5 months ago

@moira @FlipperPA @shonin

(2) for the general election, you're voting for Electors, and unless the "faithless elector" rules can actually be used to prevent electors from casting particular votes (as opposed to punishing them if they vote the wrong way -- which I believe is the only bit that's been tested; not sure about this), again, I'm not sure what leverage the state has here.

wrog, 5 months ago

@moira @FlipperPA @shonin

Even if SCOTUS declines to hear the case or upholds the COSC ruling, the CO Republican Party could just amend its Delegate Selection Plan to stipulate that all delegates will be Trump delegates and ignore/cancel the primary entirely. A number of other states have effectively done just this.

wrog, 5 months ago

@moira @FlipperPA @shonin

the main value of this is the optics.

An actual court has declared he is an insurrectionist and therefore ineligible per the intent of the 14th.

If SCOTUS replies with the "14th doesn't apply here because it doesn't specifically list `President' and we have this stupid system where nobody votes directly for President anyway", that will be technically correct but won't undo the damage (i.e., how this will play with the independent voters -- the MAGA folks will, of course, ignore it as they've ignored everything else).

wrog, 5 months ago

@ColinTheMathmo

Being so sure it was PRIM & SEMEN took a while to sort out that part of the board

#CellTower 592

➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️

https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/?p=592

wrog, 5 months ago

@annathepiper @moira @rmd1023

to be fair, I don't think anybody in 1967 anticipated we were going to be able to do the Stephen Hawking Thing anywhere near as soon as we did (cf. Issac Asimov in 1950 imagining pocket calculators as this 10,000 years in the future thing when it only took until 1972.)

Note that SNW authors writing in 2021 do not get to use the same excuse.

wrog, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

@moira @annathepiper @rmd1023

re "The Problem of Captain Pike"

So... My Talosian headcanon:

They figured out EARLY (in "The Cage") they were going to have to be a LOT more subtle to get anything useful out of the humans -- confirmed once finished going through the records, which went MUCH faster than depicted in the episode.

Guy in Charge of Humans, originally Somebody's Nephew, got replaced very quickly, probably after that 1st illusion with Pike crashed and burned.

They then had to work out a convincing Escape Narrative -- none of the phasers in that sequence were real -- and then some kind of long term plan to get to a Talos redevelopment contract with some federation mining/colonization agency/corporate-entity.

1/n

wrog, 5 months ago

@moira @annathepiper @rmd1023

Hunchback Veena = total fake (her ship has records, too; and once she's awake, her memories tell them what to fix, so she's rebuilt just fine).

Yes, they would need a real Veena to know what kind of distress call to send, how to do fake encampment, interact with Pike convincingly, etc.

But she also knew too much, so no way in hell would they ever let her go, and something like HV would have been the only way to convince Pike to leave her behind.

(After: "Okay, assholes, I did EVERYTHING you asked. Vegas Honeymoon. Then you fucking KILL ME ALREADY. That was the deal. Otherwise, it's replays of Saw III and Event Horizon from now on."

13 years later, she's gone, one way or another.)

2/n

wrog, 5 months ago

@moira @annathepiper @rmd1023

I'll assume for sake of argument their hallucination range doesn't QUITE reach SB11, otherwise they just subvert entire base from the get go, but...

ability to reach even halfway there includes a HUGE volume of space with lots of ships passing through (why else would SB11 exist?). All sorts of opportunities for mischief AND they'd have learned to be careful about it.

I'm sure Pike's accident was arranged.

Even stipulating they only make contact with people they'd previously encountered (i.e., familiar minds only), e.g., Spock,

... there's 250+ OTHER Cage-era Enterprise crew that would be eligible.

What's #1 or Yeoman Colt doing these days? I bet they'd have issues that could be exploited.

3/4

wrog, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

@moira @annathepiper @rmd1023

Thing is, if SB11 were in range continuously for 13+ years, they'd be subverting the shit out of it. There'd never be any need to hijack Enterprise.

So there has to be some reason that wouldn't work.

Best I can come up with it's right on the edge (i.e., not close enough for major skullduggery). But SB folks can pack Kirk onto the shuttle by himself and get him launched (as they actually did), and with Kirk having been awake for 36+ hours, it's that much easier for T4 to plant at least the vague suggestion of Mendez changing his mind and coming along right before Kirk finishes setting the autopilot and dozes off.

And then by the time he wakes up, he's fully in range with "Mendez" in the copilot seat

wrog, 4 months ago

@scubbo

ouch. I can't wait for the 3rd law.

. o O ( "A woke Hitler shall not injure another woke Hitler, nor, through inaction, cause another woke Hitler to come to harm.")