Friday Ephemera (832)
It’s his surfboard now, baby. || Big shaking booty. || Boof. || On buying a computer, 1980s. || Mr Reubens has 600 banjos, 1979. || On Columbo and creating intrigue without mystery. || Rotation detected. || What do drugs do? (1971) || So how was your day, dear? || Colour counter. Less than 50 is unacceptable. || Tastes like chicken. || Incoming. || Detection detected. || We’ve all done it. || Sci-fi franchise convergence. || Diverging values. || Divert auxiliary power to the filter. || Tony Hancock in The Impersonator, 1959. || More than a hanging flap, you know. || Grip strength confirmed. || Passing piglings. || The progressive retail experience, parts 755, 756, 757, 758, 759 and 760. || Place in food chain negotiation. || Scenes of shouting, tugging and bodily fluid. || And finally, a project for the weekend.
To enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions, comment editing, upvotes, custom avatars, and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page and click register. It’s free and quite painless.
For additional rumblings, follow me on X.
Oh, and hitting the tip jar is what keeps this place here.
[ Fetches enormous mirror, admires full-length fur coat. ]
Noodling.
Ah. Aka dogging or, er, catfisting.
Okay then.
I have questions.
Forget beer without alcohol, the Royal Geographical Society, courtesy of a lecturer in human geography, has given us pogroms without victims.
The damsel looks a mite distressed.
Her name is Alice. She’s just been told she’s going to the Moon.
Naming 100 colors is exactly the sort of tedious thing I have computers for.
Why would I like to summarily execute any man who wants to wear women’s clothing and go camping with little girls?
Yeah. And why did Trey Parker and Matt Stone think there was nothing suspicious or objectionable about Big Gay Al wanting to go camping with little boys?
If you want justice, you need all white male juries.
replying to this:
From the comments: Let’s ask @CatoInstitute to tell us this is actually a good thing.
Is the Cato Institute just an atheist David French?
“What if the universal translator works but they still can’t understand the language?”
In the script they called it metaphor but it was really literary allusion. It’s a take-off on the idea that language makes sense only in a larger cultural context.
I was proximate to a linguistics department when the episode first aired, and they were entranced.
It’s a briefly amusing idea, if improbable, and if taken as a parable of some sort. But again, it doesn’t work in context. It doesn’t really work as science fiction. I don’t see how you can do any advanced mathematics armed only with fuzzy metaphor and mythic allusion. You need precision. Quantities, tolerances, ideas unrelated to existing mythic lore.
And if you can’t do maths, you don’t get space travel.
It’s rather like how any fleshy space-faring alien beings, should they exist, seem likely to have hands or something much like hands. To get to computers and space-faring, you need some means of quite precise physical manipulation. You need dexterity, to build things more dexterous. You can’t build radio telescopes by nudging things with your nose.
I am, of course, discounting anything-goes loopholes like telekinesis or the existence of sentient plasma, or whatever. I’m sticking to fleshy things or things built by fleshy things. To keep things manageable.
If we’re going to be speculative, I think we should keep at least one toe on the ground. Lest we forget where we parked.
[ Slurps coffee, chomps crumpets. ]
Togo-sponsored resolution called to phase out traditional map that depicts continent as similar size to Greenland
Go for it, Togo 🇹🇬. Raise awareness that Africa is an overbearing blob squashing the civilized continents into the corners.
By making Europe big on the map, Mercator made Europe big in science, trade and conquest, but the magic misfired with his ambitions for Greenlandic global domination. But if that’s what it takes to create Wakanda, let’s make Africa twice as big on the map, ten times as big on the map.
Exactly. And those beyond a certain Piaget level of development might be prompted to ask if it’s a good idea to pour the contents of the big jug into the little jug.
Especially when the little jug is cracked.
To no one’s surprise, France has already surrendered to the map police.
Regarding the size of Africa, this person notes the African Nobel prize winners, fails to note that aside from the astoundingly useless peace prize there is a plethora of pallor amongst them and in literature, who amongst us can forget that famous African (rereads) Albert Camus?
Counter-proposal: the Unequal IQ projection, in which size on the map matches average IQ. Per capita GDP would yield a similar map.
Be interesting to see Singapore on that map.
Wouldn’t be able to find North Korea without a jeweler’s loupe.
Tentacles!
That is a not uncommon problem in the field.
Heh. But tentacles imply aquatic life and fire-making would be rather tricky underwater. And if you can’t master fire, you can’t forge metals, and if you can’t forge metals, you can’t build…
Same problem, basically.
I suppose it’s a matter of whether you prefer your science fiction to be in some way constrained by what we know. That toe on the ground. If you throw out all of the limitations, anything goes – which, in story-telling terms, is a mixed blessing.
It’s the difference between, say, The Expanse, in which the drama emerges in large part from real-world limitations. You can travel this kind of distance at this kind of speed, taking this kind of time, and with these kinds of risks and restrictions. That’s part of the drama, its structure. The limits create tension. (Even in Star Trek, there’s occasionally some lip-service given to travel time, power constraints, the scale of Federation territory, etc.)
Whereas in, say, Doctor Who, it’s magic-box-does-whatever-is-required-by-the-plot-this-week-regardless-of-what-we-said-last-week.
from the link:
The vastness remains unproven.
The author blames
But is it government? Or is that the entire culture is defective? And the average intelligence is just too damned low?
SF author Gregory Benford calls this “playing with the net up”.
I can hear Stephanie’s drunken cackling from here.
Dang. How many martinis has she had?
Leash laws ineffective?
Also the author:
There is a BFO for you, never heard of a CT, I guess.
One of my favorite SpongeBob jokes
Well, again, to some extent it’s just a matter of taste, of how much fantasy you like mixed in with the science fiction. I generally lean to the nit-picky end.
Me, finding fault. Can you imagine?
Like Roadrunner, it’s not really science fiction. Not sure what to call it, but I often struggle to recall words I rarely use.
Der Sturmer level fabricated conspiracy theories.
When institutions are captured by the left, they don’t become more truthful or humanitarian; they become more dishonest and demonic.
Abdul El-Sayed: Being poor is not a failure… We need to push back against the cult of hard work.
There are some objections.
On UK crime and surnames.
There is some degree of truth in this attitude and we ignore it at our own peril. For most of human history there was a place for people to “just get by”. Even the somewhat recent past we had hobos and tramps and hermits. There was wilderness on the edge of cities and towns where they could exist in ramshackle structures. That’s just the way *some* people want to live. The problem is we no longer expect them to behave themselves. To be responsible for getting their own food and shelter. And we require them to have clean environments to live in, whether they want it or not. We turned their personal health into our public health issue.
We have essentially outlawed piecemeal work, day labor, etc. except of course for illegals. Not everyone should be expected to hold down a fulltime 40 hour/week job, make enough money to cover the expenses, insurance, overhead, electricity, etc. that goes along with even the most minimal rental property because not everyone can or will do those things. We made those things our problems thus here we are. Note, I am NOT saying we should provide any of these things but we shouldn’t be taking away or making it hard for people to just get by if they want to live that way. Such people have always existed and they always will. Browbeating them into some sort of modern life conformity is asking for more trouble.
Gotta pump those numbers up.
What’s with the Joseph’s, Ross’s, Hamiltons, and Grants? I’m a bit of a distant Ryan spinoff myself, so I kinda get that. Kinda.
Precisely why I was very interested in The Expanse right up until I saw the episode with the “ghost” and understood where they were going with the “protomolecule”.
The reconstructed Miller, or Miller 2.0, turns out to be one of the more entertaining elements, I think. Much more watchable than his original self.
Say true things out loud. Then do it for 30 years.
Did he snort his nose off?
What an odd thing to include in an article on a crime victim:
(Emphasis mine.)
Was it somehow relevant to why he was shot?
Some cultures just need to be eradicated.
“Say true things out loud”–Just want to point out that one may have to pay a price for doing that. I have. In fact I nearly lost my job over true things but my productivity saved me. Had to retool my work into different topics however.
There is a huge irony in the main platform that the Dems have come up with here in the US (besides hating Trump)–Affordability. The irony is that they keep doing things that make life less affordable. They raise taxes. They restrict the housing supply which raises the cost of housing. When they do permit housing they add requirements for solar or for “affordable” units as conditions for the builders. They mandate inefficient renewable energy which raises energy costs. They add regulations on business that make business add costs to products. They prevent pipelines for oil and gas which means oil and gas must be shipped by rail or boat, at greater cost. and so on.
Liberals loudly proclaim themselves to be the defenders of free speech, but they are the first to punish speech they disagree with. (In my experience, they justify this by saying that you have free speech but you also have the consequences.)
Parody. For now.
I lost a job opportunity myself, also turned down a promotion for similar reasons. The thing is, not every opportunity to say true things out loud comes with such dire consequences. 95% of the time, it’s just a matter of social awkwardness. Sometimes driven by fellow “conservatives” who are afraid to speak up themselves so they use social pressure to try to discourage others from doing so.