They consciously trained their algorithms to do what babies do: pan, and zoom/frame-in-software until facelike features emerge. But what is more interesting, the research relies on YOU to take the last, great leap.
They present the results --- the one from merged faces and the one from objects --- as a 'face'. But is it really a face? Ask yourself, if you were walking outside under perfect lighting conditions and someone with the precise blurred faces shown as their result approaches you. What would your reaction be? Calm and casual recognition or astonished horror? The Uncanny Valley represents the confusion we experience when our facelike scanning apparatus returns a high score but we do not perceive other cues necessary for casual recognition such as limb movement or fluidity of expression.
We now grow up in a sea of photographs and paintings. Try to imagine a time in history when naturally vivid artwork of human figures and faces was first presented to other humans, who until then had only seen actual people resembling people The synchronous echo of "Is a person!" and "Is not a person!" in their minds, depending on their temperament and personal experience, could result in anything from euphoric wonder to a panic of paranoid discomfort.
At times naturally occurring phenomenae we encounter 'seem' intelligently designed -- faces on Mars, crystalline growth, beacon-like pulsars. But that is because they are being intelligently observed. In the early days of ether -- hearing odd radio emissions was thought by some to be 'ample evidence' that there must be a message, was someone talking, we just weren't clever enough to parse the language.
As a kid I first learned that a portion of the static that embodies the white noise between FM stations, and the 'snow' on empty analog TV channels is actually an energy remnant of the Big Bang -- I was hooked. I found an empty channel and watched a lot of snow, just in the wild wild wonder of it all. And after awhile I did begin to see things! Shapes! Hear voices! Coherent slime, oozing out from my TV set. Yet, even as it happened -- one of the intelligent avatars in my seething mind was working in tandem, pursuing its own dream... suggesting to me perhaps, perhaps. The whisper of an alternative theory for these 'visitations'. A flat-fact, I have decided -- I was shaping the static into the familiar by the very mechanisms of my own thought and perception. Aliens and dragins within. That so fit, I wrapped static into a concept, turned off the set and embarked on a fascinating trek of learning about sensory deprivation, the human mind's insatiable lust to find patterns, anywhere! Everywhere!, the mystery of how children 'bootstrap' language, acquiring it by some algorithmic neural osmosis.
Then 'modern' TVs were designed that blank that wild and beautiful analog static, which we once called snow. Then they were all changed again over to digital, so now we are shown our coherent signals, or ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You could say that at one time there was a bit of the Big Bang in every living room but now it has been banished to the laboratory... appearing most often as a little squiggles on a graph. I feel a sense of loss in this.
I have kept an analog television just so I can turn it on from time to time and see that the static is still there. And there will come a day when the static is still there but I will be gone, along with all analog televisions. It will be a whole world of everything or nothing, all noise squelched or designed out or shouted over. No sublime cosmic mystery in your own living room left to gaze into. A dark age of total enlightenment.
Some times yes, some scepticism is in order. In the case of the downed Russian plane, I'd even agree. But in this case, no. If you can't tell the difference too bad for you. It's obvious the IS claim is genuine, at very least it's a similar islamic group. Who do you want to blame? The Russians?
I understand your "at the very least" gist but it covers a lot of ground these days. You should check out Adam Curtis' 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares. It describes the rise of the American neo-conservative movement in the United States and the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East, and dares to compare them, finding some striking similarities. Curtis' documentary describes how Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by what he experienced in America and what was happening in Egyptian society at the time, and was instrumental in re-planting the ancient seeds of ultra-orthodox Islam 'Wahhabism' in modern times.
What we call "radical Islam" these days would be more appropriately described as "radical action to promote ultra-conservative Islam". In the 1950s, many places in the Middle East were becoming 'Westernized' as they were becoming 'modernized' --- two terms one cannot always use interchangeably --- in places very similar to the urbanization occurring in the US. Nothing communicates this more clearly than these photographs taken in Kabul. Ironically it was the US and USSR way by proxy starting in 1979 that set the country back, handing control to the victorious CIA-ISI-supported mujahideen.
Those who engage in such acts are murderous fucks, and if they claim they are Muslim they should be fed to hogs.
To identify them directly with any religion, even if they are completely enthralled by it, is no favor to you. It elevates them and the religion more than either deserve. Yes some Muslims are assholes. Certainly not the family running the grocery store next door who gave me food and electricity when I had none. State sponsors of these terror groups, including our own CIA (through the Pakistani ISI) should also be held accountable for their actions --- not just by people who remember certain periods in history --- but everyone with the courage to stand up and demand answers to questions today. Like where exactly are the modern weapons and training support coming from? If our allies are involved, what is the true extent of the involvement? And how is Russia's involvement in Syria today similar to what happened in Afghanistan in 1980?
There are no easy answers. If you reach back far enough in time there aren't even any good guys.
Why do I fail to equate the tenets of any sect of Islam with any Middle Eastern country, including the newest one --- Europe? Because I am an American and I believe in the separation of Church and State.
Why do I believe States should be held more accountable than Religions in sponsoring terrorism? Because I am an American and I do not believe in the establishment of an official religion for anything at all.
Once upon a time, people were generally less stupid.
If any 'claim of responsibility' emerged hours or days after a terrorist attack it would be treated with the utmost suspicion. Even if transmitted directly to them, news networks would notify the authorities of course, but they might not even report it publicly. Unless a phone call or fax was received at the moment of breaking news, some times even minutes before, the information was deemed to be zero-credible or less than zero, more likely than not the work of a crank. And news sources were generally averse to being cranked.
News sources did not even want to be cranked by governments. They'd never forget to add the words "allegedly" or "believed to be" when repeating a government source who was pretty sure who was behind something. Some acts of terrorism in those days would end up being reported as if they were... simply crimes. The 'who' would not be examined at length until or unless individuals were actually brought forth and charged. Then, their connections to organizations would be explored.
Then the 21st century dawned and people have become generally more stupid.
Now ascribing an organization to an attack is as simple as starting a rumor or sending a tweet. Everyone is on the verge of believing anything, they just need a little push either way. There is no burden of proof, only a preponderance of NOISE. Axe-grinding news sources and governments are already blaming them anyway to take advantage of this lower IQ, so they're already on the ball. Just like Michael Ledeen at AEI was blaming Saddam Hussein for 9/11 on the afternoon of 9/11. (Hint: that was Donald Rumsfeld's favorite website. Can you see a decade of bad road ahead?)
Now a claim by a single so-called 'unnamed source within the government' is cause enough for a press association like AP to drop the 'allegedly' and report the deed as having been done by those people, ready to put in the history books.
If all information should be free, we're sure getting what we paid for.
Yes there is. It is called death and is a part of nature.
Well people --- you're just in a pickle because you've let 'em abandon THE SWITCH. How was grandpa sure he could get some shut-eye without the vacuum cleaner going round in circles? How'd we know that when we flicked on that AM radio, the batteries in it would be just as good as we left it? When we put down the phone how'd we know the gub'mint wasn't listening? We had honest to God switches, little bits of metal with springs that snapped 'em so far apart those electrons would just stay put.
Now all you have are little copper titty-buttons on the sides of things, and you've got chipsets to manage the buttons, see? And everything is really connected all the time to these chips, and it's all programmable. It's all flashable. It's all exploitable. There was a time when people liked switches on things because they liked control. You could actually beat your competition if your thing had more switches than your competition's thing, even if some of them were silly. But something changed, and now consumer focus groups and product design engineers try to eliminate as many controls as they can. When we started seeing switches disappear from things we thought engineers were stupid. Turns out engineers were doing it because they thought people were stupid.
If you think you have a Power button that's an actual Power button --- well you don't really. There's probably a timer in there somewhere I could exploit to tell your thing to turn on again. And why would I bother? I could just take control of your thing and make it sing and beep like it's shutting off and once you see that dark screen you'd be none the wiser.
Sometimes I used to send a WAKE-on-LAN packet to my buddy's computer the moment he sat down at his desk in the morning, just as he was reaching for the power button. He'd hear the computer beep and withdraw his finger, puzzled. Took him a while to figure out what was happening.
We now worship the Golden Calf of the Software Sandbox... and we expect our devices to be on their Super Duper Boy Scout Best Behavior. Hope that works out for everyone, but I don't want to hear any whining when shit happens. Google offering a 'Decline Forever' button,
Shoo Google, don't bother me, Shoo Yahoo, don't bother me, Shoo Amazon, don't bother me, Nothin' ever turns off and I ain't gonna pay gimmie everything for free.
I'm going to thwack off the MONSTER FRANKENSTEIN KNIFE SWITCH that I have all my modern tech wired to, and get some serious shut-eye. NO CARRIER
"No amount of _____ pixie dust or _____ hype can hide the technological and societal irrelevance.
Well done! I'm going to clip this word-puppy and spice a bunch with some ugly Pando type illustrations, where crudely drawn cartoon figures are fondling little blobs of 'techy' things with ludicrous expressions of awe, disgust or blank stares. Then spray the Ad networks with variations of it... selling everything from Cadillacs to Cialis to Catpoop scoops.
Socio-irrelevance-slackers will click on it expecting to land on some obtusely erudite scathing commentary on how things, especially these things, really really suck, and what's the use anyway. They seek articles that trigger a little endorphin release they get when smarty-people tear a popular or noble idea apart and trash it in front of them --- and due to a bit of faulty brain wiring --- the mere act of reading triggers in them the same wave of satisfaction as a difficult obstacle overcome or job well done. Just as if they had thought of and written it themselves.
But it is a conditioned response and the mere anticipation of reward begins the endorphin release. So by the time they actually load the sell-page and are staring at the Product the joy juices are already flowing. They'll rationalize away the appearance of simple advertising, thinking that the Author is fronting some edifice by 'reproducing' the object of scorn first on the page. By the time they navigate the spiel and reach the buy/commit links at the bottom, they'll think they're participating in an elaborate multi-page dismemberment of said Product that is so well done, and Author so courageous and hip that the commentary if on... the next page! Or even omitted entirely, since the Point is so Obvious and you are so Clever. In the presence of such greatness, one can only proceed to the end so one can boast about the experience.
Actually, they'll just keep clicking and agreeing until the endorphins stop. Proud owners of a Catpoop scoop to place on their coffee table as a symbol of capatalist-anarchy-agression. And I'll be affiliate-rich!
I love the headline (really do, no/sarc) because it really shocks the monkey. It brings to mind some hypothetical Ouija Board conversation with say, a channeled framer of the Constitution or Machiavelli or Stalin --- using the USB interface Ouija Board I built for faster throughput. I will market it as IRC for the Dead. Once the modern definition of 'wiretap' is cleared up it really gets rolling.
FRANKLIN: I take it you mean the interception of private letters? We affix waxen seals to guard against casual inspection should carriers desire to do this, though there are some with great skill in revealing their contents. Steam from a kettle is often employed. But it is surely an unreasonable search for a government to do so. We also at times employ clever codes. MACHIAVELLI: It is hard to imagine why such inspection would be desired for the massive daily packets that traverse cities, nations and oceans. Would not the burden of reading become tiresome? STALIN: I instruct my post office to tear everything open whether there is time to read them or not. They rifle and crumple the contents. Some times they even stain the letters with wine to give correspondents the impression that there was a great feast and their precious documents were passed hand to hand and read aloud. In order to preserve equanimity the State must keep all persons on uneven footing.
ME: In these times hardly anyone speaks in code and there are no seals. We speak into our devices plainly, and the paper packet has become a flowing river of letters passed over wires. Any communication can span the globe.
FRANKLIN: No seals and plain speech everywhere. What an enlightened time! MACHIAVELLI: So those who talk greatly outnumber those who might listen? In the cacophony of such a mob secrets may be shouted yet unheard. STALIN: This is madness. Every telephone conversation across the border had a listener. If one was not available the operator would ring you back, at times days later. Shut it all down before it is too late. FRANKLIN: Surely our government takes steps to protect its citizens from having their conversations heard by hostile governments?
ME: You guys are so behind the times. These are not just voices, everyone is identified and it so happens that the United States Government does most of the listening throughout the entire world, even and especially to its own citizens. People all over the world consider us scoundrels for doing this. They can even store voices and play them back years later. If a tyrant should arise, the Militia will discover that their own names and entire personal histories are laid bare, so the tyrant can clean house more efficiently than any in history.
FRANKLIN: How... can.... this.... be?? No,no no!-------- LOST CARRIER MACHIAVELLI: How crude and uninteresting. So this is a simple story of gross stupidity and madness then. Ah, and I had hoped that as time progressed the plots of men would become more intricate. I think I will leave now to find a more suitable parallel existence. MACHIAVELLI <has left the channel> STALIN: Now it gets interesting. Tell me more about your government's so-called 'wiretaps'.
ME: Well, which one? I mean there are so many. You have Local policemen tracking people with their phones, able to follow their position. The voices are inside their boxes and with a flip of the switch they could hear them. They're only supposed to flip that switch if they have permission. It is the law under the CALEA Act that our telephone companies be able to simultaneously intercept as much as 1 in 100 conversations in cities... Under FISA people can be followed everywhere in the country and listened to with no involvement by local police and judge. The DEA, Treasury and IRS can do pretty much anything they want, they rely on judges that rubber stamp requests. The NSA is a spy organization like your KGB that was bound by charter
Note that NERC's Compliance and Enforcement process is voluntary. This means no one's going to jail for failure to implement these measures... and there are many in the industry who prefer it that way. We have witnessed the growth of the Department of Homeland Security way past its original mandate. Indeed there is a slow motion power grab in progress.
If you distrust large corporations and the consortiums they form then you're already suspicious. But few can argue that the grid is not resilient or well designed. In most cases frequency and voltage give operators all the feedback they need. But it has not ever been shut off completely, and the electrical equivalent of post-9/11 'ground stop' is neither practical nor possible to test black start capability... NERC does do regular computer simulations of country-wide restarts.
So if you are fortunate to live near one of the ~7,304 operational power plants in the United States (for example) and know some people who work there, you might pose these questions:
Has your plant participated in EOP-005 drills? Has there ever been a country or region-wide drill where procedures are acted out in real time? Do you feel the time presently devoted to this scenario is adequate, and plans are in place? Do you have confidence that the grid could be restarted successfully? Are there any 'old school' approaches to this problem you feel are not addressed or trained adequately? To what extent are these black start procedures reliant on computers and functional computer networks? What kinds of grid-wide inter-plant communications are in place for coordination when the grid is down? Would any coordination efforts rely on carrier networks (telephone, cell, Internet) being up?
The very first BBC episode of Connections The Trigger Effect explores how we have become reliant on modern technology without needing to understand its intricacies, and uses the Northeast Blackout on November 9, 1965 and peoples' reactions to illustrate this.
If Black Start should fail or become delayed indefinitely, National Geographic: American Blackout is a documentary that dramatically explores effects of an extended grid outage. It is a tame outage -- no Winter freeze or volcanic ash --- with cyberattack as its rather specious scenario. At present the operational controls of power plants are diverse and there is a great deal of manual control, and a coordinated attack could only target the grid monitoring systems and communications between plants.
Following from Google's strategy, but spreading it out quite a bit so it would be more convenient and less devastating to tracking applications, YET would completely remove the leap hiccup from the IT world which seems to be the main concern...
Why not agree to install a few 'shims' at all the world's stratum-zero sources that start a linear drift of 1 second over the course of six months to a year before the 'scheduled' leap second deadline? Then once the drift crosses the 1 second mark the shim is automatically disengaged? The drift would be precisely accounted for and measurable in GPS sources but would be hidden well below the noise level of NTP sync.
If the drift would create a problem, it may only require specialized software to 'un-drift' the signal for those few high precision applications that already contain nanosecond-capable hardware and (presumably) a firmware update cycle.
Just a few shims and some international coordination in place of umpteen million software changes or a clock drifting further out of sync... and the world's consumer GPS and Inter-networks would be infinitesimally off the mark for awhile?
You are sick, you might want to seek a therapist for your empathy issues.
You are Anonymous, you might want to seek advice from a philosopher as to why some feel comfortable ascribing their identity to positive opinions, but seek anonymity when expressing negative ones.
Empathy is the basic human currency of civilization and its value has been debased by a 'fiat' system of pop-psychology political correctness, a hive phenomenon. Many ugly hivey things arise from it, like an institutionalized idea of 'mental health' that is little removed from religious judgement and (when it does not work) fervor, and the coddling of people with therapy/drugs/feedback who know damned well what is wrong with them because they are intelligent, and lack only the (mental, figurative) kick in the arse that they can only supply themselves. But now it will all be supervised by an Expert and it will begin, tomorrow. Or when the drugs kick in. Or when my girlfriend stops harassing me. Or when I'm good and ready.
Perhaps my MOD:FLAMEBAIT stern advice on syncing to the 24 hour clock and forcing yourself into regular habits --- before trying anything else --- would seem very different if it was served up by a Siri-sexy voice on a Google Wearable Device. How creepy is that. All watched over by machines of loving grace.
(DISCLAIMER: I don't give a shit if you trample my lawn) Just 'grow up'. And find the right folks to hang around with who you trust to supply honest and direct feedback on your progress. In growing up I mean.
Growing up means fixing yourself on a 24 hour cycle of basic habit, eating, pooping and sleeping at the same times every day, including 'weekends' because your biology recommends it. The week is an artificial construct and what everyone calls the Monday and Tuesday blahs is usually jet lag from the weekend lack-of-schedule. Be awake the same times of day, every day and if your work schedule is harsh, compensate by taking a brief nap when you get home from work before you do other stuff, and longer afternoon naps on the weekend. No sleeping in late, always rise at the same time every day and give it a go, at least for awhile.
Growing up means you decide when it is time to sleep and do it, literally stare at the ceiling in a dark room until you either fall asleep or it's time to get up again. No screen watching or phone twiddling when it's time to sleep and then you whine to your friends and doctor, "I just couldn't sleep! Pity me! Medicate me!"
Never mind the broken childhood or unfulfilled dreams or loony parents or voices in the head. Even collecting weapons is cool, the world is full of armed persons who don't kill people. You're probably not really paralyzed or hung hung up so much by that stuff as you are ready to use it as a stupid excuse for doing stupid things anyway. So just don't do stupid things. Unless you're able and willing to try my simple 24 hour schedule before you seek help you're probably on a narcissistic road of advice dismissal anyway and have a fun time on the way down, hope you can afford the meds and side-effects. If you drink alcohol, well happy day what the fuck --- you drink alcohol. It's your liver. But drink it at the same tie every day and when you lay down set your alarm for three hours and drink a big load of water to flush your body and prevent your waking self from becoming a desiccated science experiment.
If you are not diagnosed with anything that makes the doctor machines that go 'ping!' start pinging, then fuck you if you're unwilling to try my simple advice. You're a burden to everyone else and the sooner you realize that and grow up the better. You can even pretend it was all your own idea and I'll be just as happy. Because I love you all and we're all Bright Giant Love Balls bouncing around so free!
I'm like a bright giant love ball, bouncing around so free Out of the night that covers me, a bright giant love ball, happy to be me Black as the pit from pole to pole, I'm like a bright giant love ball, shining for all to see I thank whatever gods may be I AM SPECIAL! I AM SPECIAL! I AM ME! For my unconquerable soul. So let us dance, oh let us dance, In the fell clutch of circumstance be happy, be happy let us dance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Oh let us dance, oh let us dance, Under the bludgeonings of chance let us dance and laugh and sing and shout for joy! My head is bloody, but unbowed. I'm like a seed that I planted, so young and so small Beyond this place of wrath and tears needing to be watered, so I'll grow strong and tall Looms but the Horror of the shade, friendship is my water, my sun the warmth of love, And yet the menace of the years I will grow and grow and grow and grow and grow! Finds and shall find me unafraid. So let us dance, oh let us dance, It matters not how strait the gate, be happy, be happy let us dance, How charged with punishments the scroll, Oh let us dance, oh let us dance, I am the master of my fate, let us dance and laugh and sing and shout for joy! I am the captain of my soul. ~The Rev Carey Landry and William Ernest Henley mashup
Wouldn't the thriving presence of this phantasmagorical phylum in the ISS environment --- as it exists in every nook and cranny everywhere on Earth --- be a sign that the ISS environment was AOK, as conducive to human life as any other? A most healthy singing canary?
Potentially Lethal Levels Of Dust Discovered In Vacuum Cleaner Bag! News at 11.
Those 2-3 richter scale earthquakes could cause devastation. The security guards' "best Dad" coffee cups might fall onto the floor and break.
What about the little ceramic coffee cream dispensers that say "Lubbock TX" shaped like a cow that pours out of the mouth? Because they tried making one that poured from the udders like it should but the milk leaked onto the table. Then they tried raising the udders up right under the tail but it looked really weird and disgusting. Clearly we have some serious problems to solve in this country besides small earthquakes, like cow dispensers that barf milk. Who has the courage to stand up and decide that cream dispensers do not have to be shaped like cows after all, because the engineering hurdles are too great to overcome? And terrorism porn addicts who go around looking for things terrorists can do and shout in the media, "Look! See what terrorists can do! I thought it up all by my self!" and pant as they receive a pat on the head as their tongues loll to the side, their eyes glazed in thought as they think up some other evil thing terrorists could do.
She pretty much exemplifies today's online reviewer culture.
RESTAURANT: communicate negative experience, get free meal. AMAZON: give positive reviews on line, get free stuff.
Sometimes they fight back. This guy was essentially a walking Internet ad agency posing as an independent reviewer when it suited him. The online world is full of people who tap into existing social traditions (eg, independent restaurant reviews) and try to give them a 'new modern edge' with no clue that there are established rules of conduct, such as paying for your meal (or) acknowledging in the review that it was comp'd... and they're all butt-hurt when someone exposes their inconsistent behavior. It's perceived as an attack by people who think we should all just get along, that harsh words are baaad, and do not recognize that trust-based systems and traditions are fragile, deserving of protection.
How anyone in the 21st century can say the word 'blogger' without grimacing is beyond me. What a horrid word. Sounds and looks like 'booger' or 'bugger'
what promising technologies --- in generating, storing, and saving energy, and in storing greenhouse gases or removing them from the atmosphere --- show most potential to help the world come to terms with global warming?
I'd wait for more proof that Temperature follows CO2 before I'd rearrange civilization. I'd let CO2 get even higher, because plants love it and I love plants. Do you love plants?
But with enough carbon-neutral electricity and heat anything is possible, even CO2 sequestration on a grand scale. But only bring CO2 down to pre-industrial levels if you really hate plants.
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."
CONTENT: [00:00] LFTR in 5 minutes; [06:05] dialogue on Energy sources & conservation; [08:29] Elizabeth May (Green Party of Canada) on why nuclear 'fails', response; [13:40] Kirk Sorensen's time at NASA, discovering molten salt research; [17:30] on Glenn Seaborg's discovery of Thorium's fissile properties in 1942; [20:05] What nuclear fission is, decay chains, half life; [26:45] neutron absorption, cross section, Xenon poisoning at Hanford; [30:06] isotopic enrichment, Thorium/u233 rejected for weapons; [32:45] Atoms for Peace, absorption propensity and performance of nuclear fuels, thermal & fast spectrum, Thorium/Plutonium debate; [36:28] Alvin Weinberg focuses on Thorium and liquid fuels, Oak Ridge Labs, Aircraft Reactor Experiment, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, Fluoride Salts; [44:40] two-fluid molten salt reactor; [48:18] light water reactors, Watts Bar, reactor safety and containment systems, issues with water, Fukushima Daiichi hydrogen explosions; [01:01:38] solid fuel & rod assemblies, Eugene Wigner & liquid fuels; [01:04:38] PWR efficiency, Weinberg's quest for near-100% utilization, AEC's choice to pursue Plutonium fast breeders; [01:06:46] Weinberg's concerns about LWR safety, Congressman Chet Hollifeld's inquiry, Weinberg leaves Oak Ridge, WASH-1222, Integral Fast Reactor, Traveling Wave; [01:11:26] Fusion is hard; [01:14:12] Thorium in a CANDU; [01:18:12] Colonel Paul Roege on military reactors, Robert Hargraves: prosperity is related to energy, Robert F. Kennedy on mercury from coal; [01:21:42] transuranics, LFTR active processing, electricity & isotope production from LFTR, Pu-238 and RTGs, Molybdenum-99 & Bismuth-213 in medicine; [01:27:48] cost to build LFTR; [01:30:26] proliferation concerns; [01:31:50] hysterical news coverage of radiation, LNT; [01:40:02] coal & natural gas radioactive emissions, Thorium & Uranium decay in the Earth, magnetosphere, Hargraves on CO2 emissions & ocean acidification & energy density, one-sided press coverage for 'renewables'; [01:50:07] various approaches to nuclear power, the 'reason why not' (LFTR), LWR business model; [01:54:40] China and LFTR, Sorensen's visit to Oak Ridge to obtain access to LFTR documents, the Chinese visit Oak Ridge; [01:58:01] Thorium and rare earths, China's domination of rare earths market, China's LFTR program; [02:06:39] transitioning energy sources, without plentiful energy we will revert to slavery, energy cheaper than from coal; [02:10:44] process heat applications, desalinization, synfuels, Brayton Cycle, managing transuranics, gas & oil working against nuclear, closing remarks and recap.
Why do you think that TEPCO worked so hard to remove the fuel rods from the structure that is failing. What do you think would happen to plutonium fuel rods in a spent fuel pool without water surrounding them to moderate neutron activity had the structure collapsed?
Nothing spectacular --- MOX or no MOX.
Circumstances of Unit #4 fuel pool was the biggest money-making lecture bonanza for Arnie Gundersen and Harvey Wasserman, two disingenuous prophets of nuclear doom whose popularity peaked in 2013. I am sorry to see that your scenario is directly taken from their playbook. Wasserman it was who doubled down on TEPCO's offloading of fuel for his bread and butter, saying âoeWe are now within two months of what may be humankindâ(TM)s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.â Even then the experts could see that aside from a few places where debris had fallen into the pool there was nothing even remotely resembling the dangers espoused by these two men. To make matters worse the Japanese press picked up their remarks verbatim without even attempting to verify the physics, then the wussy American press echoed the stories as if their Japanese colleagues were 'reliable sources' and also failed to interview experts. Web sites like enenews serve up this crap again every day as if it's still fresh or has an ounce of merit. That's their bread and butter.
The doomsday scenarios rely on some miraculous condition where all convection was blocked and all bundles are somehow pushed together and reach the 900C-2500C sustained temperatures required for ignition and meltdown. It is like announcing that a wildfire is likely to melt a steel building and having the newspapers pick up the story.
Leslie Corrice documented the unfounded hysteria centered on #4 In almost any other branch of science there would have been an immediate and severe blowback of ridicule, but in matters pertaining to nuclear energy the press seems to feel there is no such things as journalist 'thin ice'. Doom porn sells.
it would be, IN FACT, an extinction level event
So ease your worries. Give TEPCO a pat on the back for a successful and uneventful fuel offload. If you were so worried about this why cannot we hear the jubilation in your voice?
TA is one of those gee-whiz ain't the world chaingin' golly gee wow. I think this article is also a great authoritarian training exercise to help condition people to the thought of centrally imposed austerity measures. Take two things most people use, each of which they carry a range of opinion from indispensable to frivolous --- depending on their own unique circumstances --- but of course!
Combine these people together in a bowl, and add a dash of confiscation trauma, and stir. Confiscation trauma is when someone wants to explore how people feel about specific things, but they feel that a good way to get people to 'open up' about their true feelings is to introduce the idea that one of them might be involuntarily (or forcibly) taken away.
It can be as subtle as a choice of headline, where One third of people would opt for smartphone over car becomes Would Give Up Their Car Before Their Smartphone.
To 'opt for' implies you may have one (or neither) and you are not in any position of adversity, simply evaluating them. To 'give up' changes the flavor completely. Now people are imagining unwelcome external forces influencing them. Things are being taken away. Some may imagine financial difficulties, others become outright paranoid. Both camps, have merit these days as take-home pay has stagnated and as special interest groups push their agendas through Congress. But an integral part of the game is that you imagine some adversary that is forcing you to make a choice.
Now the rants and counter-rants begin, and the issue clouds because some of the people who seems to be favoring smartphones are actually just saying that their own lifestyle does not include driving. Today. At this moment. Some who argue in favor of cars are actually feeling threatened because --- well, let me cut to the quick here --- cars use evil fossil fuel and folks who consider automobile ownership and the personal freedom they provide to be a modern rite of passage, feel they are feeling 'encroached' by metropolitan and suburban attitudes, and it is not difficult to imagine some future where even rural people who need their own transportation are impacted by these attitudes.
So because the headline has tapped into this Confiscation Anxiety, this discussion becomes inflamed by people stating the obvious in a way that is assertive enough to come off as threatening (if their views were politically persuasive). And there are rebuttals just as inflamed TA does not help resolve this or even seed the aruments, really. It's just about suburbia and In the end it's just a puff-piece exploring attitudes about driverless cars and how people feel about them.
The way I see it, sooner or later we will all be slapped against the wall by the economy. If by some miracle it could be resolved by making this silly either-or choice... what will be experienced by must-have-cars-fuck-the-smartphones people like me would be an unwelcome choice:
Someone is broke, and they're going to need a ride for the tenth time. 1. Do I give you a ride? 2. Do I give you $20 so you can use your fancy smartphone to call Uber? 3. Do I suggest that you should find a new friend.
Not if you have a "sun stone". The Vikings used them a few years before I was born. Yeah, I'm that old.
Leif Erikson I presume? When I read your message something in my mind whispered, "calcite" and whaddaya know, it was correct! Check out the science behind it. P.S. when you landed on Erika (mis-named America) did you see any golden arches? I've always thought they were some natural feature, and people later decided to build restaurants under them.
[part of conversation in Pizza Hut commercial] "OK Google, what is trojan injection page nine six stroke alpha? I feel lucky!"
I'm holding out for GLaDOS. I would never want a digital assistant that was not my equal, and having one is always looking for ways to kill me would spice things up.
You're going to have to stay low tech with this, and become 'disruptive'... but only slightly. The environment is probably far more sterile (less nav clues) than the places he has lived most of his life.
Find some stickers that are well shaped arrows in bright colors, not too large but big enough to be seen at a glance. Place the stickers at eye level on the wall in the hallway across from his door so the arrows are the first thing he sees when he leaves the room. At every left/right junction, another arrow at eye level.
Make two or three arrow paths with different colors going to the places, and by the door inside his room have a simple diagram that associates color with place. Don't worry about the return path unless it becomes a problem.
This is a special needs case and if the staff are supportive as you say then here is a way to test it. Just do it, don't ask permission, if they have half a brain they will figure it out and if the arrows are removed, just place more until they leave them up OR come to you and claim it's a problem. If they do your best tactic is to refrain from anger and take on a position of incredulousness, saying "Why would you remove the arrows and confuse him like that?" as if doing so was just fixing a problem. The lack of clear navigation cues is their shortcoming, not his.
Maybe you'll help them to wise up and repaint the corridors creatively so every hallway and junction has unique color and shape cues that people can commit to memory more easily, and people can hold on to their dignity and not get lost like rats in a maze.
If this keeps the termite-mound nanny states the ability to detect 'inappropriately enriched uranium' and keep their mitts out of everyone's business, then it looks like modern particle physics will finally begin to pay its dues to mankind.
But that's a big IF. More likely this is yet another layer of useless technology that doesn't build or create anything, useless in the end because its global coverage would not become complete without bankrupting us all, and practical countermeasures may exist. The kind that a high school student might envision in a science fair. Predictably those vested in this political-military pork barrel will first try to Classify the science fiar exhibit and give the student a lucrative job, then discredit its science publicly, and the prohibition beat goes on.
We are at this moment facing an existential threat, a threat that has arisen from the suppression of nuclear power research and deployment. These last 40 years have been a technological 'dark age' for nuclear power. A continuation of wars for oil (while ostensibly for other things), a steady increase in the cost of basic energy units required to run a modern household, a steady reduction of options in the energy mix as we are now poised to hang our entire energy future on one single thread, natural gas.
All this as the value of the dollar and practical influence begins to fade. Also we are at the twilight of the petro-dollar as world currency.
Through this Modern Dark Age there have been echoes of the previous ones. The Church of Environmentalism has arisen to gather power and stifle the various indigenous cultures of research and scientific development that were in the process of refining and perfecting nuclear energy. Just as the Vatican had astronomers in Galileo's time, this church supported its own esoteric nuclear magii --- the chosen ones in particle physics who pursue Specifically Fusion Not Fission. Like the Holy Grail it is always around the corner, just beyond the bend. Never mind that fusion is hard and fission is easy in its fundamentals... and compared to fission its practical application is many years away... with a little faith one can ignore the dangerous threat that humanity might begin to bog down in its petroleum present and might not even survive in its modern form until the Grail is found. A practical physicist might run the numbers and decide "Hey! This is ridiculous. We have more people, we need to unlock more energy now. Let's get fission on-line first." But the Church of Environmentalism has forgiven them this concern for the immediate future.
In the early 1970s at around the same time we last set foot upon the moon, something irredeemably ugly took hold of the United States. A group of people rose to power --- from all walks of life --- with two forms of blindness.
The first blindness had nothing to do with so-called Environmentalism (ask Steward Brand or others who have awoken). It was a simple irrational fear of radiation.
The next blindness, by far the worst, has nothing to do with so-called Environmentalism either. It is a casual disregard for simple math. It is now someone else's job to 'do the math', or take steps to ensure our survival in the short term. Those people in whom you have placed your trust have deceived you, even as they have deceived themselves. Math on population growth, declining EROEI of petroleum sources, and more recently a mass-delusion that unreliable energy sources plus storage technology (presently as illusory as stable fusion containment) are ready for prime-time... we are headed for a sorry-ass short term future.
If we had not abandoned fission research 40 years ago, better and safer nuclear plants would be on-line by now and you'd have your electric cars.
After a few more Winters, ask the people of Vermont if it was a good idea to shut down Vermont Yankee. Right this minute many of them are piping in natural gas to generate electricity which they are usin
But notice how warm and rich the 'pops' are! Can't do that with a CD, now can ya?;)
As a kid I'd sometimes let an LP sit in the inner circle-groove and turn the amp way up, just below the point where the rumble fed back into the cartridge. The repetitive sound was as unique as a fingerprint and I'd listen to that for awhile. I'd imagine I was inside some giant machine.
The worst gash-skips I'd 'fix' with a hot needle or razor blade. This stopped the skip but left a horrible noise. Then I discovered that you could often shave gently down from the top of the gash until the part protruding into the groove came out, leaving some of the musical material intact.
I'd always check the serial number traced into the vinyl casting on the smooth surface just outside the label looking for a secret message. Sometimes there was one.
One day I resolved that my cultural education was not complete until I actually listened to Wagner's complete Ring Cycle, which was recorded on many discs. After the first half-hour I switched over to 78rpm so I could appreciate the music and be amused by the chipmunk singing. The Ring Cycle was completed ahead of schedule.
I placed Christmas albums on the ends of the shelves so when my cat tried to climb then she wouldn't ruin the good stuff.
Used to have 40 feet of vinyl collected over a lifetime. Lost it all in the financial Self-Storage Unit Disaster of 2007. I now advise people if you fall upon hard times, gather your most prized possessions and bury them in the woods. There is a much better chance you will see them again, OR at least they will find a good home --- because unlike storage auctions where strangers acquire everything and discard what they don't want --- anyone who finds your cache will only take what they consider valuable.
I have the utmost respect for the people who are diligently placing out of print vinyl onto the Internet in high quality. But so very many of them fail to apply a light spray of isopropyl alcohol to the surface before playing. It boggles the mind.
One of my favorite riddle-stumpers used to be, How many grooves are there on the average 12" long playing record? I'll consider any guess with the right number of digits to be a correct answer. Answer:.edis hcae no eno,owt ylnO
This used to be a real 'I should have known this' forehead-slapper. Now people have so little experience with LPs you just get a smile and a nod, as if I was just volunteering some useless obsolete fact. Which it is, I guess.
Thanks. And here is the Ace + Emu story in more detail (turns out Ace did ask but was its 'pulp' was rebuked by Tolkien). The grassroots anti-Ace campaign is worth a read here, it was something the publishing world had never experienced. Also a good photos of the Purple Emu Fellowship I owned which showed more of the drawing. It was a nice illustration. The artist pegged the landscape pretty well but could not have known that Tolkien was fastidious in his portrayal of Middle Earth and kept its flora and fauna strictly Earthlike in appearance, save a few notable exceptions. No emus or lion-things.
To counter the "What the hell does all this have to do with 'news for nerds'?" while discussing Tolkien, How It's Made: Books
Slashdot Mirror
They consciously trained their algorithms to do what babies do: pan, and zoom/frame-in-software until facelike features emerge. But what is more interesting, the research relies on YOU to take the last, great leap.
They present the results --- the one from merged faces and the one from objects --- as a 'face'. But is it really a face? Ask yourself, if you were walking outside under perfect lighting conditions and someone with the precise blurred faces shown as their result approaches you. What would your reaction be? Calm and casual recognition or astonished horror? The Uncanny Valley represents the confusion we experience when our facelike scanning apparatus returns a high score but we do not perceive other cues necessary for casual recognition such as limb movement or fluidity of expression.
We now grow up in a sea of photographs and paintings. Try to imagine a time in history when naturally vivid artwork of human figures and faces was first presented to other humans, who until then had only seen actual people resembling people The synchronous echo of "Is a person!" and "Is not a person!" in their minds, depending on their temperament and personal experience, could result in anything from euphoric wonder to a panic of paranoid discomfort.
At times naturally occurring phenomenae we encounter 'seem' intelligently designed -- faces on Mars, crystalline growth, beacon-like pulsars. But that is because they are being intelligently observed. In the early days of ether -- hearing odd radio emissions was thought by some to be 'ample evidence' that there must be a message, was someone talking, we just weren't clever enough to parse the language.
As a kid I first learned that a portion of the static that embodies the white noise between FM stations, and the 'snow' on empty analog TV channels is actually an energy remnant of the Big Bang -- I was hooked. I found an empty channel and watched a lot of snow, just in the wild wild wonder of it all. And after awhile I did begin to see things! Shapes! Hear voices! Coherent slime, oozing out from my TV set. Yet, even as it happened -- one of the intelligent avatars in my seething mind was working in tandem, pursuing its own dream... suggesting to me perhaps, perhaps. The whisper of an alternative theory for these 'visitations'. A flat-fact, I have decided -- I was shaping the static into the familiar by the very mechanisms of my own thought and perception. Aliens and dragins within. That so fit, I wrapped static into a concept, turned off the set and embarked on a fascinating trek of learning about sensory deprivation, the human mind's insatiable lust to find patterns, anywhere! Everywhere!, the mystery of how children 'bootstrap' language, acquiring it by some algorithmic neural osmosis.
Then 'modern' TVs were designed that blank that wild and beautiful analog static, which we once called snow. Then they were all changed again over to digital, so now we are shown our coherent signals, or ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You could say that at one time there was a bit of the Big Bang in every living room but now it has been banished to the laboratory... appearing most often as a little squiggles on a graph. I feel a sense of loss in this.
I have kept an analog television just so I can turn it on from time to time and see that the static is still there.
And there will come a day when the static is still there but I will be gone, along with all analog televisions.
It will be a whole world of everything or nothing, all noise squelched or designed out or shouted over.
No sublime cosmic mystery in your own living room left to gaze into.
A dark age of total enlightenment.
Some times yes, some scepticism is in order. In the case of the downed Russian plane, I'd even agree. But in this case, no. If you can't tell the difference too bad for you. It's obvious the IS claim is genuine, at very least it's a similar islamic group. Who do you want to blame? The Russians?
I understand your "at the very least" gist but it covers a lot of ground these days. You should check out Adam Curtis' 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares . It describes the rise of the American neo-conservative movement in the United States and the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East, and dares to compare them, finding some striking similarities. Curtis' documentary describes how Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by what he experienced in America and what was happening in Egyptian society at the time, and was instrumental in re-planting the ancient seeds of ultra-orthodox Islam 'Wahhabism' in modern times.
What we call "radical Islam" these days would be more appropriately described as "radical action to promote ultra-conservative Islam". In the 1950s, many places in the Middle East were becoming 'Westernized' as they were becoming 'modernized' --- two terms one cannot always use interchangeably --- in places very similar to the urbanization occurring in the US. Nothing communicates this more clearly than these photographs taken in Kabul. Ironically it was the US and USSR way by proxy starting in 1979 that set the country back, handing control to the victorious CIA-ISI-supported mujahideen.
Those who engage in such acts are murderous fucks, and if they claim they are Muslim they should be fed to hogs.
To identify them directly with any religion, even if they are completely enthralled by it, is no favor to you. It elevates them and the religion more than either deserve. Yes some Muslims are assholes. Certainly not the family running the grocery store next door who gave me food and electricity when I had none. State sponsors of these terror groups, including our own CIA (through the Pakistani ISI) should also be held accountable for their actions --- not just by people who remember certain periods in history --- but everyone with the courage to stand up and demand answers to questions today. Like where exactly are the modern weapons and training support coming from? If our allies are involved, what is the true extent of the involvement? And how is Russia's involvement in Syria today similar to what happened in Afghanistan in 1980?
There are no easy answers. If you reach back far enough in time there aren't even any good guys.
Why do I fail to equate the tenets of any sect of Islam with any Middle Eastern country, including the newest one --- Europe?
Because I am an American and I believe in the separation of Church and State.
Why do I believe States should be held more accountable than Religions in sponsoring terrorism?
Because I am an American and I do not believe in the establishment of an official religion for anything at all.
Once upon a time, people were generally less stupid.
If any 'claim of responsibility' emerged hours or days after a terrorist attack it would be treated with the utmost suspicion. Even if transmitted directly to them, news networks would notify the authorities of course, but they might not even report it publicly. Unless a phone call or fax was received at the moment of breaking news, some times even minutes before, the information was deemed to be zero-credible or less than zero, more likely than not the work of a crank. And news sources were generally averse to being cranked.
News sources did not even want to be cranked by governments. They'd never forget to add the words "allegedly" or "believed to be" when repeating a government source who was pretty sure who was behind something. Some acts of terrorism in those days would end up being reported as if they were... simply crimes. The 'who' would not be examined at length until or unless individuals were actually brought forth and charged. Then, their connections to organizations would be explored.
Then the 21st century dawned and people have become generally more stupid.
Now ascribing an organization to an attack is as simple as starting a rumor or sending a tweet. Everyone is on the verge of believing anything, they just need a little push either way. There is no burden of proof, only a preponderance of NOISE. Axe-grinding news sources and governments are already blaming them anyway to take advantage of this lower IQ, so they're already on the ball. Just like Michael Ledeen at AEI was blaming Saddam Hussein for 9/11 on the afternoon of 9/11. (Hint: that was Donald Rumsfeld's favorite website. Can you see a decade of bad road ahead?)
Now a claim by a single so-called 'unnamed source within the government' is cause enough for a press association like AP to drop the 'allegedly' and report the deed as having been done by those people, ready to put in the history books.
If all information should be free, we're sure getting what we paid for.
Nam-shub.
Don't look at it!
Science fiction of yesterday is the science fact of today.
there's no "Decline forever" option.
Yes there is. It is called death and is a part of nature.
Well people --- you're just in a pickle because you've let 'em abandon THE SWITCH. How was grandpa sure he could get some shut-eye without the vacuum cleaner going round in circles? How'd we know that when we flicked on that AM radio, the batteries in it would be just as good as we left it? When we put down the phone how'd we know the gub'mint wasn't listening? We had honest to God switches, little bits of metal with springs that snapped 'em so far apart those electrons would just stay put.
Now all you have are little copper titty-buttons on the sides of things, and you've got chipsets to manage the buttons, see? And everything is really connected all the time to these chips, and it's all programmable. It's all flashable. It's all exploitable. There was a time when people liked switches on things because they liked control. You could actually beat your competition if your thing had more switches than your competition's thing, even if some of them were silly. But something changed, and now consumer focus groups and product design engineers try to eliminate as many controls as they can. When we started seeing switches disappear from things we thought engineers were stupid. Turns out engineers were doing it because they thought people were stupid.
If you think you have a Power button that's an actual Power button --- well you don't really. There's probably a timer in there somewhere I could exploit to tell your thing to turn on again. And why would I bother? I could just take control of your thing and make it sing and beep like it's shutting off and once you see that dark screen you'd be none the wiser.
Sometimes I used to send a WAKE-on-LAN packet to my buddy's computer the moment he sat down at his desk in the morning, just as he was reaching for the power button. He'd hear the computer beep and withdraw his finger, puzzled. Took him a while to figure out what was happening.
We now worship the Golden Calf of the Software Sandbox... and we expect our devices to be on their Super Duper Boy Scout Best Behavior. Hope that works out for everyone, but I don't want to hear any whining when shit happens. Google offering a 'Decline Forever' button,
Shoo Google, don't bother me,
Shoo Yahoo, don't bother me,
Shoo Amazon, don't bother me,
Nothin' ever turns off
and I ain't gonna pay
gimmie everything for free.
I'm going to thwack off the MONSTER FRANKENSTEIN KNIFE SWITCH that I have all my modern tech wired to, and get some serious shut-eye.
NO CARRIER
"No amount of _____ pixie dust or _____ hype can hide the technological and societal irrelevance.
Well done! I'm going to clip this word-puppy and spice a bunch with some ugly Pando type illustrations, where crudely drawn cartoon figures are fondling little blobs of 'techy' things with ludicrous expressions of awe, disgust or blank stares. Then spray the Ad networks with variations of it... selling everything from Cadillacs to Cialis to Catpoop scoops.
Socio-irrelevance-slackers will click on it expecting to land on some obtusely erudite scathing commentary on how things, especially these things, really really suck, and what's the use anyway. They seek articles that trigger a little endorphin release they get when smarty-people tear a popular or noble idea apart and trash it in front of them --- and due to a bit of faulty brain wiring --- the mere act of reading triggers in them the same wave of satisfaction as a difficult obstacle overcome or job well done. Just as if they had thought of and written it themselves.
But it is a conditioned response and the mere anticipation of reward begins the endorphin release. So by the time they actually load the sell-page and are staring at the Product the joy juices are already flowing. They'll rationalize away the appearance of simple advertising, thinking that the Author is fronting some edifice by 'reproducing' the object of scorn first on the page. By the time they navigate the spiel and reach the buy/commit links at the bottom, they'll think they're participating in an elaborate multi-page dismemberment of said Product that is so well done, and Author so courageous and hip that the commentary if on... the next page! Or even omitted entirely, since the Point is so Obvious and you are so Clever. In the presence of such greatness, one can only proceed to the end so one can boast about the experience.
Actually, they'll just keep clicking and agreeing until the endorphins stop.
Proud owners of a Catpoop scoop to place on their coffee table as a symbol of capatalist-anarchy-agression.
And I'll be affiliate-rich!
I love the headline (really do, no /sarc) because it really shocks the monkey. It brings to mind some hypothetical Ouija Board conversation with say, a channeled framer of the Constitution or Machiavelli or Stalin --- using the USB interface Ouija Board I built for faster throughput. I will market it as IRC for the Dead. Once the modern definition of 'wiretap' is cleared up it really gets rolling.
FRANKLIN: I take it you mean the interception of private letters? We affix waxen seals to guard against casual inspection should carriers desire to do this, though there are some with great skill in revealing their contents. Steam from a kettle is often employed. But it is surely an unreasonable search for a government to do so. We also at times employ clever codes.
MACHIAVELLI: It is hard to imagine why such inspection would be desired for the massive daily packets that traverse cities, nations and oceans. Would not the burden of reading become tiresome?
STALIN: I instruct my post office to tear everything open whether there is time to read them or not. They rifle and crumple the contents. Some times they even stain the letters with wine to give correspondents the impression that there was a great feast and their precious documents were passed hand to hand and read aloud. In order to preserve equanimity the State must keep all persons on uneven footing.
ME: In these times hardly anyone speaks in code and there are no seals. We speak into our devices plainly, and the paper packet has become a flowing river of letters passed over wires. Any communication can span the globe.
FRANKLIN: No seals and plain speech everywhere. What an enlightened time!
MACHIAVELLI: So those who talk greatly outnumber those who might listen? In the cacophony of such a mob secrets may be shouted yet unheard.
STALIN: This is madness. Every telephone conversation across the border had a listener. If one was not available the operator would ring you back, at times days later. Shut it all down before it is too late.
FRANKLIN: Surely our government takes steps to protect its citizens from having their conversations heard by hostile governments?
ME: You guys are so behind the times. These are not just voices, everyone is identified and it so happens that the United States Government does most of the listening throughout the entire world, even and especially to its own citizens. People all over the world consider us scoundrels for doing this. They can even store voices and play them back years later. If a tyrant should arise, the Militia will discover that their own names and entire personal histories are laid bare, so the tyrant can clean house more efficiently than any in history.
FRANKLIN: How... can.... this.... be?? No,no no!-------- LOST CARRIER
MACHIAVELLI: How crude and uninteresting. So this is a simple story of gross stupidity and madness then. Ah, and I had hoped that as time progressed the plots of men would become more intricate. I think I will leave now to find a more suitable parallel existence.
MACHIAVELLI <has left the channel>
STALIN: Now it gets interesting. Tell me more about your government's so-called 'wiretaps'.
ME: Well, which one? I mean there are so many. You have
Local policemen tracking people with their phones, able to follow their position. The voices are inside their boxes and with a flip of the switch they could hear them. They're only supposed to flip that switch if they have permission.
It is the law under the CALEA Act that our telephone companies be able to simultaneously intercept as much as 1 in 100 conversations in cities...
Under FISA people can be followed everywhere in the country and listened to with no involvement by local police and judge.
The DEA, Treasury and IRS can do pretty much anything they want, they rely on judges that rubber stamp requests.
The NSA is a spy organization like your KGB that was bound by charter
Take a moment to review NERC EOP-005-2: System Restoration from Blackstart Resources. If you live in North America, plans described in this document are your only real line of defense from the chaos and harm that may arise from grid-down disaster. Here is a peek at some software tools used by the industry and Black Start specific enhancements in progress [2013].
Note that NERC's Compliance and Enforcement process is voluntary. This means no one's going to jail for failure to implement these measures... and there are many in the industry who prefer it that way. We have witnessed the growth of the Department of Homeland Security way past its original mandate. Indeed there is a slow motion power grab in progress.
If you distrust large corporations and the consortiums they form then you're already suspicious. But few can argue that the grid is not resilient or well designed. In most cases frequency and voltage give operators all the feedback they need. But it has not ever been shut off completely, and the electrical equivalent of post-9/11 'ground stop' is neither practical nor possible to test black start capability... NERC does do regular computer simulations of country-wide restarts.
So if you are fortunate to live near one of the ~7,304 operational power plants in the United States (for example) and know some people who work there, you might pose these questions:
Has your plant participated in EOP-005 drills?
Has there ever been a country or region-wide drill where procedures are acted out in real time?
Do you feel the time presently devoted to this scenario is adequate, and plans are in place?
Do you have confidence that the grid could be restarted successfully?
Are there any 'old school' approaches to this problem you feel are not addressed or trained adequately?
To what extent are these black start procedures reliant on computers and functional computer networks?
What kinds of grid-wide inter-plant communications are in place for coordination when the grid is down?
Would any coordination efforts rely on carrier networks (telephone, cell, Internet) being up?
The very first BBC episode of Connections The Trigger Effect explores how we have become reliant on modern technology without needing to understand its intricacies, and uses the Northeast Blackout on November 9, 1965 and peoples' reactions to illustrate this.
If Black Start should fail or become delayed indefinitely, National Geographic: American Blackout is a documentary that dramatically explores effects of an extended grid outage. It is a tame outage -- no Winter freeze or volcanic ash --- with cyberattack as its rather specious scenario. At present the operational controls of power plants are diverse and there is a great deal of manual control, and a coordinated attack could only target the grid monitoring systems and communications between plants.
Following from Google's strategy, but spreading it out quite a bit so it would be more convenient and less devastating to tracking applications, YET would completely remove the leap hiccup from the IT world which seems to be the main concern...
Why not agree to install a few 'shims' at all the world's stratum-zero sources that start a linear drift of 1 second over the course of six months to a year before the 'scheduled' leap second deadline? Then once the drift crosses the 1 second mark the shim is automatically disengaged? The drift would be precisely accounted for and measurable in GPS sources but would be hidden well below the noise level of NTP sync.
If the drift would create a problem, it may only require specialized software to 'un-drift' the signal for those few high precision applications that already contain nanosecond-capable hardware and (presumably) a firmware update cycle.
Just a few shims and some international coordination in place of umpteen million software changes or a clock drifting further out of sync... and the world's consumer GPS and Inter-networks would be infinitesimally off the mark for awhile?
If you'd like to read what might be the world's only science fiction short story about loss of NTP sync, see my tiny yarn here on Slashdot, The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future --- and Gained the Past.
You are sick, you might want to seek a therapist for your empathy issues.
You are Anonymous, you might want to seek advice from a philosopher as to why some feel comfortable ascribing their identity to positive opinions, but seek anonymity when expressing negative ones.
Empathy is the basic human currency of civilization and its value has been debased by a 'fiat' system of pop-psychology political correctness, a hive phenomenon. Many ugly hivey things arise from it, like an institutionalized idea of 'mental health' that is little removed from religious judgement and (when it does not work) fervor, and the coddling of people with therapy/drugs/feedback who know damned well what is wrong with them because they are intelligent, and lack only the (mental, figurative) kick in the arse that they can only supply themselves. But now it will all be supervised by an Expert and it will begin, tomorrow. Or when the drugs kick in. Or when my girlfriend stops harassing me. Or when I'm good and ready.
Perhaps my MOD:FLAMEBAIT stern advice on syncing to the 24 hour clock and forcing yourself into regular habits --- before trying anything else --- would seem very different if it was served up by a Siri-sexy voice on a Google Wearable Device. How creepy is that. All watched over by machines of loving grace.
(DISCLAIMER: I don't give a shit if you trample my lawn) Just 'grow up'. And find the right folks to hang around with who you trust to supply honest and direct feedback on your progress. In growing up I mean.
Growing up means fixing yourself on a 24 hour cycle of basic habit, eating, pooping and sleeping at the same times every day, including 'weekends' because your biology recommends it. The week is an artificial construct and what everyone calls the Monday and Tuesday blahs is usually jet lag from the weekend lack-of-schedule. Be awake the same times of day, every day and if your work schedule is harsh, compensate by taking a brief nap when you get home from work before you do other stuff, and longer afternoon naps on the weekend. No sleeping in late, always rise at the same time every day and give it a go, at least for awhile.
Growing up means you decide when it is time to sleep and do it, literally stare at the ceiling in a dark room until you either fall asleep or it's time to get up again. No screen watching or phone twiddling when it's time to sleep and then you whine to your friends and doctor, "I just couldn't sleep! Pity me! Medicate me!"
Never mind the broken childhood or unfulfilled dreams or loony parents or voices in the head. Even collecting weapons is cool, the world is full of armed persons who don't kill people. You're probably not really paralyzed or hung hung up so much by that stuff as you are ready to use it as a stupid excuse for doing stupid things anyway. So just don't do stupid things. Unless you're able and willing to try my simple 24 hour schedule before you seek help you're probably on a narcissistic road of advice dismissal anyway and have a fun time on the way down, hope you can afford the meds and side-effects. If you drink alcohol, well happy day what the fuck --- you drink alcohol. It's your liver. But drink it at the same tie every day and when you lay down set your alarm for three hours and drink a big load of water to flush your body and prevent your waking self from becoming a desiccated science experiment.
If you are not diagnosed with anything that makes the doctor machines that go 'ping!' start pinging, then fuck you if you're unwilling to try my simple advice. You're a burden to everyone else and the sooner you realize that and grow up the better. You can even pretend it was all your own idea and I'll be just as happy. Because I love you all and we're all Bright Giant Love Balls bouncing around so free!
I'm like a bright giant love ball, bouncing around so free
Out of the night that covers me,
a bright giant love ball, happy to be me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I'm like a bright giant love ball, shining for all to see
I thank whatever gods may be
I AM SPECIAL! I AM SPECIAL! I AM ME!
For my unconquerable soul.
So let us dance, oh let us dance,
In the fell clutch of circumstance
be happy, be happy let us dance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Oh let us dance, oh let us dance,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
let us dance and laugh and sing and shout for joy!
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
I'm like a seed that I planted, so young and so small
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
needing to be watered, so I'll grow strong and tall
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
friendship is my water, my sun the warmth of love,
And yet the menace of the years
I will grow and grow and grow and grow and grow!
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
So let us dance, oh let us dance,
It matters not how strait the gate,
be happy, be happy let us dance,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
Oh let us dance, oh let us dance,
I am the master of my fate,
let us dance and laugh and sing and shout for joy!
I am the captain of my soul.
~The Rev Carey Landry and William Ernest Henley mashup
My refrigerator is home to potentially dangerous bacteria and fungi.
I think what's in the vegetable crisper drawer may even be of alien origin.
Beat me to it!
Here is the obligatory Weird Al reference
Wouldn't the thriving presence of this phantasmagorical phylum in the ISS environment --- as it exists in every nook and cranny everywhere on Earth --- be a sign that the ISS environment was AOK, as conducive to human life as any other? A most healthy singing canary?
Potentially Lethal Levels Of Dust Discovered In Vacuum Cleaner Bag! News at 11.
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red on a green Slashdot sea
setting my soul free
exotic matter
how I long to fly with you
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primitive tribesmen
gaze at the little red square
dream of things to come
Those 2-3 richter scale earthquakes could cause devastation. The security guards' "best Dad" coffee cups might fall onto the floor and break.
What about the little ceramic coffee cream dispensers that say "Lubbock TX" shaped like a cow that pours out of the mouth? Because they tried making one that poured from the udders like it should but the milk leaked onto the table. Then they tried raising the udders up right under the tail but it looked really weird and disgusting. Clearly we have some serious problems to solve in this country besides small earthquakes, like cow dispensers that barf milk. Who has the courage to stand up and decide that cream dispensers do not have to be shaped like cows after all, because the engineering hurdles are too great to overcome? And terrorism porn addicts who go around looking for things terrorists can do and shout in the media, "Look! See what terrorists can do! I thought it up all by my self!" and pant as they receive a pat on the head as their tongues loll to the side, their eyes glazed in thought as they think up some other evil thing terrorists could do.
She pretty much exemplifies today's online reviewer culture.
RESTAURANT: communicate negative experience, get free meal.
AMAZON: give positive reviews on line, get free stuff.
Sometimes they fight back. This guy was essentially a walking Internet ad agency posing as an independent reviewer when it suited him. The online world is full of people who tap into existing social traditions (eg, independent restaurant reviews) and try to give them a 'new modern edge' with no clue that there are established rules of conduct, such as paying for your meal (or) acknowledging in the review that it was comp'd... and they're all butt-hurt when someone exposes their inconsistent behavior. It's perceived as an attack by people who think we should all just get along, that harsh words are baaad, and do not recognize that trust-based systems and traditions are fragile, deserving of protection.
How anyone in the 21st century can say the word 'blogger' without grimacing is beyond me. What a horrid word. Sounds and looks like 'booger' or 'bugger'
what promising technologies --- in generating, storing, and saving energy, and in storing greenhouse gases or removing them from the atmosphere --- show most potential to help the world come to terms with global warming?
I'd wait for more proof that Temperature follows CO2 before I'd rearrange civilization.
I'd let CO2 get even higher, because plants love it and I love plants. Do you love plants?
But with enough carbon-neutral electricity and heat anything is possible, even CO2 sequestration on a grand scale.
But only bring CO2 down to pre-industrial levels if you really hate plants.
Thorium Remix 2011 [02:23:49]
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."
CONTENT:
[00:00] LFTR in 5 minutes; [06:05] dialogue on Energy sources & conservation; [08:29] Elizabeth May (Green Party of Canada) on why nuclear 'fails', response; [13:40] Kirk Sorensen's time at NASA, discovering molten salt research; [17:30] on Glenn Seaborg's discovery of Thorium's fissile properties in 1942; [20:05] What nuclear fission is, decay chains, half life; [26:45] neutron absorption, cross section, Xenon poisoning at Hanford; [30:06] isotopic enrichment, Thorium/u233 rejected for weapons; [32:45] Atoms for Peace, absorption propensity and performance of nuclear fuels, thermal & fast spectrum, Thorium/Plutonium debate; [36:28] Alvin Weinberg focuses on Thorium and liquid fuels, Oak Ridge Labs, Aircraft Reactor Experiment, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, Fluoride Salts; [44:40] two-fluid molten salt reactor; [48:18] light water reactors, Watts Bar, reactor safety and containment systems, issues with water, Fukushima Daiichi hydrogen explosions; [01:01:38] solid fuel & rod assemblies, Eugene Wigner & liquid fuels; [01:04:38] PWR efficiency, Weinberg's quest for near-100% utilization, AEC's choice to pursue Plutonium fast breeders; [01:06:46] Weinberg's concerns about LWR safety, Congressman Chet Hollifeld's inquiry, Weinberg leaves Oak Ridge, WASH-1222, Integral Fast Reactor, Traveling Wave; [01:11:26] Fusion is hard; [01:14:12] Thorium in a CANDU; [01:18:12] Colonel Paul Roege on military reactors, Robert Hargraves: prosperity is related to energy, Robert F. Kennedy on mercury from coal; [01:21:42] transuranics, LFTR active processing, electricity & isotope production from LFTR, Pu-238 and RTGs, Molybdenum-99 & Bismuth-213 in medicine; [01:27:48] cost to build LFTR; [01:30:26] proliferation concerns; [01:31:50] hysterical news coverage of radiation, LNT; [01:40:02] coal & natural gas radioactive emissions, Thorium & Uranium decay in the Earth, magnetosphere, Hargraves on CO2 emissions & ocean acidification & energy density, one-sided press coverage for 'renewables'; [01:50:07] various approaches to nuclear power, the 'reason why not' (LFTR), LWR business model; [01:54:40] China and LFTR, Sorensen's visit to Oak Ridge to obtain access to LFTR documents, the Chinese visit Oak Ridge; [01:58:01] Thorium and rare earths, China's domination of rare earths market, China's LFTR program; [02:06:39] transitioning energy sources, without plentiful energy we will revert to slavery, energy cheaper than from coal; [02:10:44] process heat applications, desalinization, synfuels, Brayton Cycle, managing transuranics, gas & oil working against nuclear, closing remarks and recap.
Why do you think that TEPCO worked so hard to remove the fuel rods from the structure that is failing. What do you think would happen to plutonium fuel rods in a spent fuel pool without water surrounding them to moderate neutron activity had the structure collapsed?
Nothing spectacular --- MOX or no MOX.
Circumstances of Unit #4 fuel pool was the biggest money-making lecture bonanza for Arnie Gundersen and Harvey Wasserman, two disingenuous prophets of nuclear doom whose popularity peaked in 2013. I am sorry to see that your scenario is directly taken from their playbook. Wasserman it was who doubled down on TEPCO's offloading of fuel for his bread and butter, saying âoeWe are now within two months of what may be humankindâ(TM)s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.â Even then the experts could see that aside from a few places where debris had fallen into the pool there was nothing even remotely resembling the dangers espoused by these two men. To make matters worse the Japanese press picked up their remarks verbatim without even attempting to verify the physics, then the wussy American press echoed the stories as if their Japanese colleagues were 'reliable sources' and also failed to interview experts. Web sites like enenews serve up this crap again every day as if it's still fresh or has an ounce of merit. That's their bread and butter.
The doomsday scenarios rely on some miraculous condition where all convection was blocked and all bundles are somehow pushed together and reach the 900C-2500C sustained temperatures required for ignition and meltdown. It is like announcing that a wildfire is likely to melt a steel building and having the newspapers pick up the story.
Leslie Corrice documented the unfounded hysteria centered on #4 In almost any other branch of science there would have been an immediate and severe blowback of ridicule, but in matters pertaining to nuclear energy the press seems to feel there is no such things as journalist 'thin ice'. Doom porn sells.
it would be, IN FACT, an extinction level event
So ease your worries. Give TEPCO a pat on the back for a successful and uneventful fuel offload. If you were so worried about this why cannot we hear the jubilation in your voice?
TA is one of those gee-whiz ain't the world chaingin' golly gee wow. I think this article is also a great authoritarian training exercise to help condition people to the thought of centrally imposed austerity measures. Take two things most people use, each of which they carry a range of opinion from indispensable to frivolous --- depending on their own unique circumstances --- but of course!
Combine these people together in a bowl, and add a dash of confiscation trauma, and stir. Confiscation trauma is when someone wants to explore how people feel about specific things, but they feel that a good way to get people to 'open up' about their true feelings is to introduce the idea that one of them might be involuntarily (or forcibly) taken away.
It can be as subtle as a choice of headline, where One third of people would opt for smartphone over car becomes Would Give Up Their Car Before Their Smartphone.
To 'opt for' implies you may have one (or neither) and you are not in any position of adversity, simply evaluating them. To 'give up' changes the flavor completely. Now people are imagining unwelcome external forces influencing them. Things are being taken away. Some may imagine financial difficulties, others become outright paranoid. Both camps, have merit these days as take-home pay has stagnated and as special interest groups push their agendas through Congress. But an integral part of the game is that you imagine some adversary that is forcing you to make a choice.
Now the rants and counter-rants begin, and the issue clouds because some of the people who seems to be favoring smartphones are actually just saying that their own lifestyle does not include driving. Today. At this moment. Some who argue in favor of cars are actually feeling threatened because --- well, let me cut to the quick here --- cars use evil fossil fuel and folks who consider automobile ownership and the personal freedom they provide to be a modern rite of passage, feel they are feeling 'encroached' by metropolitan and suburban attitudes, and it is not difficult to imagine some future where even rural people who need their own transportation are impacted by these attitudes.
So because the headline has tapped into this Confiscation Anxiety, this discussion becomes inflamed by people stating the obvious in a way that is assertive enough to come off as threatening (if their views were politically persuasive). And there are rebuttals just as inflamed TA does not help resolve this or even seed the aruments, really. It's just about suburbia and In the end it's just a puff-piece exploring attitudes about driverless cars and how people feel about them.
The way I see it, sooner or later we will all be slapped against the wall by the economy. If by some miracle it could be resolved by making this silly either-or choice... what will be experienced by must-have-cars-fuck-the-smartphones people like me would be an unwelcome choice:
Someone is broke, and they're going to need a ride for the tenth time.
1. Do I give you a ride?
2. Do I give you $20 so you can use your fancy smartphone to call Uber?
3. Do I suggest that you should find a new friend.
See! I can play this austerity flame game too! ;-)
Not if you have a "sun stone". The Vikings used them a few years before I was born. Yeah, I'm that old.
Leif Erikson I presume? When I read your message something in my mind whispered, "calcite" and whaddaya know, it was correct! Check out the science behind it. P.S. when you landed on Erika (mis-named America) did you see any golden arches? I've always thought they were some natural feature, and people later decided to build restaurants under them.
[part of conversation in Pizza Hut commercial] "OK Google, what is trojan injection page nine six stroke alpha? I feel lucky!"
I'm holding out for GLaDOS. I would never want a digital assistant that was not my equal, and having one is always looking for ways to kill me would spice things up.
Buy some new experts.
You're going to have to stay low tech with this, and become 'disruptive'... but only slightly. The environment is probably far more sterile (less nav clues) than the places he has lived most of his life.
Find some stickers that are well shaped arrows in bright colors, not too large but big enough to be seen at a glance. Place the stickers at eye level on the wall in the hallway across from his door so the arrows are the first thing he sees when he leaves the room. At every left/right junction, another arrow at eye level.
Make two or three arrow paths with different colors going to the places, and by the door inside his room have a simple diagram that associates color with place. Don't worry about the return path unless it becomes a problem.
This is a special needs case and if the staff are supportive as you say then here is a way to test it. Just do it, don't ask permission, if they have half a brain they will figure it out and if the arrows are removed, just place more until they leave them up OR come to you and claim it's a problem. If they do your best tactic is to refrain from anger and take on a position of incredulousness, saying "Why would you remove the arrows and confuse him like that?" as if doing so was just fixing a problem. The lack of clear navigation cues is their shortcoming, not his.
Maybe you'll help them to wise up and repaint the corridors creatively so every hallway and junction has unique color and shape cues that people can commit to memory more easily, and people can hold on to their dignity and not get lost like rats in a maze.
If this keeps the termite-mound nanny states the ability to detect 'inappropriately enriched uranium' and keep their mitts out of everyone's business, then it looks like modern particle physics will finally begin to pay its dues to mankind.
But that's a big IF. More likely this is yet another layer of useless technology that doesn't build or create anything, useless in the end because its global coverage would not become complete without bankrupting us all, and practical countermeasures may exist. The kind that a high school student might envision in a science fair. Predictably those vested in this political-military pork barrel will first try to Classify the science fiar exhibit and give the student a lucrative job, then discredit its science publicly, and the prohibition beat goes on.
We are at this moment facing an existential threat, a threat that has arisen from the suppression of nuclear power research and deployment. These last 40 years have been a technological 'dark age' for nuclear power. A continuation of wars for oil (while ostensibly for other things), a steady increase in the cost of basic energy units required to run a modern household, a steady reduction of options in the energy mix as we are now poised to hang our entire energy future on one single thread, natural gas.
All this as the value of the dollar and practical influence begins to fade. Also we are at the twilight of the petro-dollar as world currency.
Through this Modern Dark Age there have been echoes of the previous ones. The Church of Environmentalism has arisen to gather power and stifle the various indigenous cultures of research and scientific development that were in the process of refining and perfecting nuclear energy. Just as the Vatican had astronomers in Galileo's time, this church supported its own esoteric nuclear magii --- the chosen ones in particle physics who pursue Specifically Fusion Not Fission. Like the Holy Grail it is always around the corner, just beyond the bend. Never mind that fusion is hard and fission is easy in its fundamentals... and compared to fission its practical application is many years away... with a little faith one can ignore the dangerous threat that humanity might begin to bog down in its petroleum present and might not even survive in its modern form until the Grail is found. A practical physicist might run the numbers and decide "Hey! This is ridiculous. We have more people, we need to unlock more energy now. Let's get fission on-line first." But the Church of Environmentalism has forgiven them this concern for the immediate future.
In the early 1970s at around the same time we last set foot upon the moon, something irredeemably ugly took hold of the United States. A group of people rose to power --- from all walks of life --- with two forms of blindness.
The first blindness had nothing to do with so-called Environmentalism (ask Steward Brand or others who have awoken). It was a simple irrational fear of radiation.
The next blindness, by far the worst, has nothing to do with so-called Environmentalism either. It is a casual disregard for simple math. It is now someone else's job to 'do the math', or take steps to ensure our survival in the short term. Those people in whom you have placed your trust have deceived you, even as they have deceived themselves. Math on population growth, declining EROEI of petroleum sources, and more recently a mass-delusion that unreliable energy sources plus storage technology (presently as illusory as stable fusion containment) are ready for prime-time... we are headed for a sorry-ass short term future.
If we had not abandoned fission research 40 years ago, better and safer nuclear plants would be on-line by now and you'd have your electric cars.
After a few more Winters, ask the people of Vermont if it was a good idea to shut down Vermont Yankee. Right this minute many of them are piping in natural gas to generate electricity which they are usin
But notice how warm and rich the 'pops' are! Can't do that with a CD, now can ya? ;)
As a kid I'd sometimes let an LP sit in the inner circle-groove and turn the amp way up, just below the point where the rumble fed back into the cartridge. The repetitive sound was as unique as a fingerprint and I'd listen to that for awhile. I'd imagine I was inside some giant machine.
The worst gash-skips I'd 'fix' with a hot needle or razor blade. This stopped the skip but left a horrible noise. Then I discovered that you could often shave gently down from the top of the gash until the part protruding into the groove came out, leaving some of the musical material intact.
I'd always check the serial number traced into the vinyl casting on the smooth surface just outside the label looking for a secret message. Sometimes there was one.
I owned one of the first SAE Impulse Noise Reduction systems made. It was even better than sliced bread.
One day I resolved that my cultural education was not complete until I actually listened to Wagner's complete Ring Cycle, which was recorded on many discs. After the first half-hour I switched over to 78rpm so I could appreciate the music and be amused by the chipmunk singing. The Ring Cycle was completed ahead of schedule.
I placed Christmas albums on the ends of the shelves so when my cat tried to climb then she wouldn't ruin the good stuff.
Used to have 40 feet of vinyl collected over a lifetime. Lost it all in the financial Self-Storage Unit Disaster of 2007. I now advise people if you fall upon hard times, gather your most prized possessions and bury them in the woods. There is a much better chance you will see them again, OR at least they will find a good home --- because unlike storage auctions where strangers acquire everything and discard what they don't want --- anyone who finds your cache will only take what they consider valuable.
I have the utmost respect for the people who are diligently placing out of print vinyl onto the Internet in high quality. But so very many of them fail to apply a light spray of isopropyl alcohol to the surface before playing. It boggles the mind.
One of my favorite riddle-stumpers used to be, .edis hcae no eno ,owt ylnO
How many grooves are there on the average 12" long playing record? I'll consider any guess with the right number of digits to be a correct answer.
Answer:
This used to be a real 'I should have known this' forehead-slapper. Now people have so little experience with LPs you just get a smile and a nod, as if I was just volunteering some useless obsolete fact. Which it is, I guess.
Thanks. And here is the Ace + Emu story in more detail (turns out Ace did ask but was its 'pulp' was rebuked by Tolkien). The grassroots anti-Ace campaign is worth a read here, it was something the publishing world had never experienced. Also a good photos of the Purple Emu Fellowship I owned which showed more of the drawing. It was a nice illustration. The artist pegged the landscape pretty well but could not have known that Tolkien was fastidious in his portrayal of Middle Earth and kept its flora and fauna strictly Earthlike in appearance, save a few notable exceptions. No emus or lion-things.
To counter the "What the hell does all this have to do with 'news for nerds'?" while discussing Tolkien,
How It's Made: Books