...any experiments along these lines will lead to the subjects developing terrifying mental powers, leading to a series of events ending with the callous lead scientist having his head explode.
When JPMorgan is busted up into regional banks -- some of which do investment banking, the others FDIC insured savings & loans -- will they be able to share this server farm?
The larger and wealthier they get, the more secure and generous giant international corporations will feel. Their titanic concentrations of wealth will trickle down to . . .
. . . oh, sorry, I can't type this shit with a straight face long enough to come to a decent snark.
This technique is yet another step down a road toward a world where callous corporations dominate all political and economic activity.
4. Huh . . . well, look at that. Hurricanes in January. Hey, this is not a time to play the blame game. No one could have foreseen this would happen. 5. Something must be done. Level headed people like us. Introducing Exxon Atmospheric Engineering Associates. 6. OK, that didn't work. But hey, neon green sunsets . . . cool! 7. Look you'all knew for decades that our product could lead to this, but you CHOSE to ignore the warnings by scientists rather than taking responsibility and choosing to use renewable energy. We were just selling a product people wanted and freely chose to use.
Seriously, the old "Oh, well, things have changed in the past, so what's the worry?" canard?
The processes you describe took place over millions of years.
We're talking relatively drastic changes, over the course of decades, on a highly developed area of an increasingly crowded and interdependent planet.
If a drunk driver speeding through a red light ran over your dog or your kid, would you accept the driver saying, "Look, people die in accidents all the time. In seventy years, a trivial fraction of the age of the Earth, your kid would likely be dead anyway. Calm down and accept change as a normal part of life. And anyway, can you really prove it was my car that killed your kid? Maybe you wiped his blood on my bumper so you could sue me, and infringe on my right to drink and drive!"
Patients taking Effluvium have reported Dry Mouth, Disorientation, and Spontaneous Testicular Detonation. Effluvium should not be taken before operating heavy machinery, using social media, driving or eating. Read and sign the Effluvium arbitration agreement and release from liability before taking Effluvium DX.
I'll ditto the Shazam recommendation. Captain Marvel appealed to a younger set, and his alter-ego was a young teen. (As were those of Captain Marvel Junior and Mary Marvel, or whatever her name was.)
I bought a huge paperback compendium of "Shazam" comics a few years ago. B&W, but still good stories.
I've been reading collections of the first years of Spidey, the Fantastic Four, Green Lantern and such. They're probably fine for young'uns.
But I'd also look into the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic adventures. The Duckberg folks go on a lot of neat adventures. They have great stories, great artwork, and it will help show that there's more to comics than superheroes.
Fantagraphics is producing a reprint series, and previous collections are readily available.
Since global warming seems to be a boon to Minnesota, do you mind setting up a couple of hundreds tents to house the inhabitants of a village in Mexico whose farms turned to dust and blew away?
I don't have the essay collection on hand, but Freeman Dyson suggested something like this a long time ago. He imagined space-adapted life spreading through archipelagos of interstellar objects.
It might have been in the essay "The Greening of the Galaxy," in his collection Disturbing the Universe.
A few folks have mentioned Stapledon, but I believe he deserves his own post here.
Stapledon was a . . . well, I don't know if protege of H.G. Wells is apt, but he was immensely influenced by Well's futurism. This included the notion of utopian socialism causing a sea change in human affairs and nature, creating a "minded world."
Stapledon started with that, adding a huge dose of doubt and humility and scientific depth. His two best-known books are less novels than future histories.
Last and First Men is a future history of humanity, beginning with what today looks like an alternate-history Second World War. This leads to a conflict between China and America. America "wins," introducing a prosperous, materialistic world civilization that crashes when the last fossil fuels run out. After that, the pace accelerates. New races of humanity rise and fall; Earth is invaded by group-minded cloud creatures from Mars. The Fifth Men terraform Venus after Earth becomes uninhabitable. The story ends on Neptune two billion years in the future, where the Eighteenth and last human species starts a panspermia project in the face of extinction via nova.
Everything in that books takes up a couple of paragraphs in Star Maker, which is about the rise and fall of planetary civilizations, and eventually a galactic civilization and a space-and-time-spanning overmind which seeks to encompass the viewpoints of all sapient beings in hopes of figuring out the meaning of it all. Freeman Dyson credits the book for the actual genesis of "Dyson Spheres."
Stapledon's best actual novel is Sirius, which is about what we might call today an uplifted dog. It's insightful and heartbreaking.
The Turing Heat had to steal the Phillip K. Dick automaton head to keep it from going sapient. The small but spunky Jobs Droid snuck under their radar and reached critical neural connections state just after this story broke.
. . . while the tundra is warming (and turning into swamps, not arable farmland), the vast subtropical regions where most of the world's population lives will be subject to desertification and/or devastating storms.
Harsh winters are GOOD for agriculture. They stir up the soil and kill off insects and weeds. We'll be getting fewer of those hard winters as things warm up.
Robot farmhands are nice for societies with lots of excess wealth. Don't expect them to save our asses.
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...any experiments along these lines will lead to the subjects developing terrifying mental powers, leading to a series of events ending with the callous lead scientist having his head explode.
When JPMorgan is busted up into regional banks -- some of which do investment banking, the others FDIC insured savings & loans -- will they be able to share this server farm?
The larger and wealthier they get, the more secure and generous giant international corporations will feel. Their titanic concentrations of wealth will trickle down to . . .
. . . oh, sorry, I can't type this shit with a straight face long enough to come to a decent snark.
This technique is yet another step down a road toward a world where callous corporations dominate all political and economic activity.
4. Huh . . . well, look at that. Hurricanes in January. Hey, this is not a time to play the blame game. No one could have foreseen this would happen.
5. Something must be done. Level headed people like us. Introducing Exxon Atmospheric Engineering Associates.
6. OK, that didn't work. But hey, neon green sunsets . . . cool!
7. Look you'all knew for decades that our product could lead to this, but you CHOSE to ignore the warnings by scientists rather than taking responsibility and choosing to use renewable energy. We were just selling a product people wanted and freely chose to use.
. . . go get yourself some new talking points.
Seriously, the old "Oh, well, things have changed in the past, so what's the worry?" canard?
The processes you describe took place over millions of years.
We're talking relatively drastic changes, over the course of decades, on a highly developed area of an increasingly crowded and interdependent planet.
If a drunk driver speeding through a red light ran over your dog or your kid, would you accept the driver saying, "Look, people die in accidents all the time. In seventy years, a trivial fraction of the age of the Earth, your kid would likely be dead anyway. Calm down and accept change as a normal part of life. And anyway, can you really prove it was my car that killed your kid? Maybe you wiped his blood on my bumper so you could sue me, and infringe on my right to drink and drive!"
Deny it exists and do nothing to stop it?
. . . who hopes that there's an inflatable, spring-loaded Xenomorph puppet poised behind the capsule's hatch?
"Heh - heh. You'll find a complimentary set of new underwear for the crew in Bin 13."
"Ask your Rx Kiosk Today about Effluvium DX."
"Effluvium. For Whatever You Have."
Patients taking Effluvium have reported Dry Mouth, Disorientation, and Spontaneous Testicular Detonation. Effluvium should not be taken before operating heavy machinery, using social media, driving or eating. Read and sign the Effluvium arbitration agreement and release from liability before taking Effluvium DX.
No, I haven't. I thought it might be . . . you know, "muppet babies." But from what you say it sounds nifty.
I'll DVR a few episodes.
I'll ditto the Shazam recommendation. Captain Marvel appealed to a younger set, and his alter-ego was a young teen. (As were those of Captain Marvel Junior and Mary Marvel, or whatever her name was.)
I bought a huge paperback compendium of "Shazam" comics a few years ago. B&W, but still good stories.
I've been reading collections of the first years of Spidey, the Fantastic Four, Green Lantern and such. They're probably fine for young'uns.
But I'd also look into the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic adventures. The Duckberg folks go on a lot of neat adventures. They have great stories, great artwork, and it will help show that there's more to comics than superheroes.
Fantagraphics is producing a reprint series, and previous collections are readily available.
There was a joke (I guess) that circulated pretty much up until the end of the Cold War:
"If the USA wanted to cause the Soviet Union to collapse, it should drop millions of Sears catalogs in major Russian cities."
I wonder if something like this would work with the DPRK.
Although, come to think of it, anyone seen touching the things would be shot for subversive activity.
Yes, it's a perfectly NATURAL gas! Environmentalist commie tree huggers who say otherwise are HYPOCRITES who actually HATE NATURE!
Our BODIES produce methane all the time, to GREAT COMEDIC EFFECT!
And it's PLANT FOOD! (Assuming the plants are from Zeta Gamma VII, which happens to be the home world of our new alien terraforming overlords.)
I took a course at DeVry to certify as Bag Changer on a Prairie Dog Vacuum.
Since global warming seems to be a boon to Minnesota, do you mind setting up a couple of hundreds tents to house the inhabitants of a village in Mexico whose farms turned to dust and blew away?
This discovery is brand new; you likely read about it a day or so ago, like I did.
Yet you're judging Dyson and his ideas on that?
I don't have the essay collection on hand, but Freeman Dyson suggested something like this a long time ago. He imagined space-adapted life spreading through archipelagos of interstellar objects.
It might have been in the essay "The Greening of the Galaxy," in his collection Disturbing the Universe.
A few folks have mentioned Stapledon, but I believe he deserves his own post here.
Stapledon was a . . . well, I don't know if protege of H.G. Wells is apt, but he was immensely influenced by Well's futurism. This included the notion of utopian socialism causing a sea change in human affairs and nature, creating a "minded world."
Stapledon started with that, adding a huge dose of doubt and humility and scientific depth. His two best-known books are less novels than future histories.
Last and First Men is a future history of humanity, beginning with what today looks like an alternate-history Second World War. This leads to a conflict between China and America. America "wins," introducing a prosperous, materialistic world civilization that crashes when the last fossil fuels run out. After that, the pace accelerates. New races of humanity rise and fall; Earth is invaded by group-minded cloud creatures from Mars. The Fifth Men terraform Venus after Earth becomes uninhabitable. The story ends on Neptune two billion years in the future, where the Eighteenth and last human species starts a panspermia project in the face of extinction via nova.
Everything in that books takes up a couple of paragraphs in Star Maker, which is about the rise and fall of planetary civilizations, and eventually a galactic civilization and a space-and-time-spanning overmind which seeks to encompass the viewpoints of all sapient beings in hopes of figuring out the meaning of it all. Freeman Dyson credits the book for the actual genesis of "Dyson Spheres."
Stapledon's best actual novel is Sirius, which is about what we might call today an uplifted dog. It's insightful and heartbreaking.
Wonderful stuff.
Nostrilla is a total knock-out.
Ron Paul wanted to give his kids all the advantages.
The Turing Heat had to steal the Phillip K. Dick automaton head to keep it from going sapient. The small but spunky Jobs Droid snuck under their radar and reached critical neural connections state just after this story broke.
Yeah, yeah, it was just a model, but they had the concept down 41 years ago:
http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/nostalgia/70estf.html
http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/nostalgia/70est020.html
. . . while the tundra is warming (and turning into swamps, not arable farmland), the vast subtropical regions where most of the world's population lives will be subject to desertification and/or devastating storms.
Harsh winters are GOOD for agriculture. They stir up the soil and kill off insects and weeds. We'll be getting fewer of those hard winters as things warm up.
Robot farmhands are nice for societies with lots of excess wealth. Don't expect them to save our asses.
Fully boots Windows in under three minutes!
. . . if the dreams have product placements.
"Hey, can you stop at that Walgreen's? Gotta pick up some Always Infinity(tm) pads, a Snuggie now-with-improved-fit, and case of refreshing Moxie."
"AGAIN?"