Lawnmower Boy

Well, once ultimate AI is possible, it's inevitable that one will arise that will decide that you suck. From your internet comments, because, in the end, don't we all? (Shut up about my self-loathing!) And since it's ultimately intelligent, it can do anything. Like time travel and stuff. (I saw it in a Family Matters once.) So it'll go back in time and punish you in advance for your comments with infinite torment! Only then you won't make the comments, so it'll make this android clone of you that will make the comments. Because cauality. ....Of everybody, because we're all, you know... ...So it pretty much has to make androids of everybody, for all time. Hmm... Maybe a Matrix-type situation is more logistically plausible? OMG, I don't exist. Because I'm being tortured somewhere, and I'm an android. An android of a brain-in-a-tank! So. Seem's pretty airtight logic to me, right there. Can I have as much money as Elon Musk, now?

It turns out that's a myth, which is a good thing, because the nurse didn't even realise that I was... I mean, look over there! It's a zeppelin!

Here's a simple dictum that everyone needs to remember about social interactions: they can escalate, or de-escalate. It is in the hands of all participants which takes place. Police/civilain interactions begin with the raw material of escalation at hand. Everyone feels guilty about something; everyone feels defensive about something. People will react to police on the basis of that instinctive guilt, police will interact with civilians with a defensive intention of justifying their intervention to themselves. Every officer is an oppressor, every civilian is a perp. Given that, it is amazing that most of these interactions get de-escalated. (And a real social problem for the out-group of the day that they tend to get de-escalated less for them.) It's easy to see what factors lead to de-escalation, and which are missing in the recent cases. Vondy notes training. I would point to lack of training and see systemic factors behind it that also helped lead to the unfortunate outcomes in other ways. (i) Training. Chokehold? Really? (ii) Numbers. Darren Wilson was patrolling without a ridealong, and didn't have backup when he dismounted his vehicle. (iii) Operational efficiency. A number of things come together here, above all the lack of training already noted, but also fatigue from long patrols, or too many patrols back-to-back, as seems to have been the case for Officer Wilson. Above all, I am thinking about the Federal report on the Cleveland police department that came down today, and the BBC's discovery that the officer in the Tamir Wilson shooting had already been dismissed from another force as not suitable for police work. What these come around to is a lack of investment in the police work force. This may be a funding issue in the sense that force strengths are being cut to the budgetary cloth, or in the sense that funding is insufficient to meet the demographic headwinds. (You need so many officers, and cannot get them at the wages you can pay, and so are forced to hire unsuitable material.) I may be projecting from my own experience as a middle manager, but I am very familiar with the problems of chronic workforce unsuitability and experience, and lack of labour hours. together, these lead to poor job execution, poor management, and, as a consequence, bad customer service in the form of unnecessary confrontations with customers. (Especially 'profiled,' which is to say, scruffy, customers.) The solution is to throw money at the problem until it goes away (which it probably will, but as a second-order effect, as people like Michael Brown get the jobs vacated by the people hired to be MOAR POLICE), and I do not have to spell out why this is deemed to be impossible in our current climate. Well, congratulations to everyone who is minding the public purse, because heckuva job!

I opened the Christina H. article and got ads for something involving teenaged Chinese girls in Vancouver something something. Now I'm feeling all skeevy again. I understand that this is off-topic and irrelevant, but I just want everyone to know before I'm caught in public dressed in a diaper, crushing rodents with a giant, pink, stiletto heel shoe, because there's really nowhere to go but down from here.

Yes, but Las Vegas is a nightmare landscape of nerve-shattering, blinding casino lights and giant handlebar mustaches, whereas Vancouver is the most beautiful place that has ever deigned to let human feet tread its soil. It's different.

Took me a while to catch up with "Plastique," but I wanted to point out that at the end, Flash carries the giant bomb out of False Creek, out towards open water, then turns back past Stanley Park, under the Lions Gate Bridge, and into the harbour for the giant explosion. This TV show is dead to me! Other than that, we finally had some lived-in moments from Caitlin and Cisco, and it looks like we're getting Grod!

When you do introduce discretionary grading by committee, a narrow range like that gives every member of the committee a veto. Which is how you spell "nepotism." Not that there's anything like that in medicine. Gee, wonder how my nephew did on the MCAT. (Son, nephew, grandson and great-great grandson of doctors; we don't talk about his missionary great-grandfather, who let the side down by wasting his time with the liberal arts at Cambridge. What a maroon.)

Very pretty and talented, but that's what 10/10 on the narcissism scale looks like.

While I'm massively disappointed by the loss of the planned Omega the Unknown movies, the rest of this news is downright exciting.

Elder care is fun!

It's not like it needed to be accurate. If it didn't take out Hawaii, Seattle was right there as a backstop!

Scientists at the Springfield Nanoquantum Engineering Laboratory announced today that they were in the last stage of developing a giant cybernetic hype machine, capable of generating more hyped-up news articles about future scientific breakthroughs in a second than a roomful of publicity hounds with shaky scientific credentials and dubious pasts could produce in a 11 parsecs. GCHM Mark !, would, they confidently predicted, be available for installation on the International Space Station by 2016.

Ana was supposed to wipe Hawaii out, not ruin my day!

Here's the Seife article. It's an old Slate article --in a series funded by Statoil, no less!-- on the Princeton Plasma Laboratory's 2012 announcement that it had Korean "angel investors." It cycled back up onto the front page because of the Lockheed announcement, and the action is in the comments: Curvefitter says: "A lot of the Lockheed Martin press release read like the MIT Tokomak guys's spiel to incoming physics grad students back in the day: They were working on adaptive magnetic confinement so the fields got stronger in response to plasma instabilities. They had a small reactor so could iterate quicker to solve the few remaining engineering problems. Any day now. Maybe a couple of years, tops! That was in the late 1980's. The generous reading here is that they started working on this in earnest about five years ago. They made a lot of progress real fast (these are smart guys, they built the SR71 after all). The few remaining problems look small enough to be winnable. But those last few problems always turn out to contain show stoppers. " etc. It looks like I'm going to get pretty ugly formatting if I go on excerpting from the Slate comment thread. I'm not sure that random Slate commenters are worth that. And since I'm diving into horrible comment threads anyway, from the Yahoo story, Vern says: These two fusion energy announcements were primarily hype to attract investment funding. The following is an abstract of the University of Washington design. It appears that this is a rehash of their patent application. It appears to revolve around a reactor concept, not a breakthrough in achieving evidence of a fusion reaction, let alone a reaction that generates more power than it consumes. The dynomak: An advanced spheromak reactor concept with imposed-dynamo current drive and next-generation nuclear power technologies http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379614002518 The following article provides some technical details regarding Lockheed Martin’s announcement. After reading through it it appears to be mostly a new plasma confinement concept and associated engineering of the construction materials. The article shows no evidence that any breakthrough was achieved showing evidence of a fusion reaction, let alone a reaction that generates more power than it consumes. Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details Lockheed Martin aims to develop compact reactor prototype in five years, production unit in 10 http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details Scientists Are Bashing Lockheed Martin's Nuclear Fusion 'Breakthrough' http://finance.yahoo.com/news/scientists-bashing-lockheed-martins-nuclear-232518813.html?bcmt=1413438197265-6bfd75f2-c126-4eb7-a488-6a11e353de3d&bcmt_s=u#mediacommentsugc_container Ten years to see how this breaks.

People often talk about radar as some awesome idea that somebody had one time, and the British got hold of it, and developed it all secret-like, and BAM, Battle of Britain! In reality, no-one had to be told that radio waves might let you see in the dark, as it were. In fact, steam foghorns had been used that way for almost half a century when the earliest experiments with radar began. In 1924, an American engineer at Bell Labs announced a "radio altimeter" that would let airplanes see the ground in the dark. The need was well-established. IN 1937, a sufficiently-powerful emitter, the klystron, was developed and matched to the concept. In 1938, Bell Lab placed a few "radio altimeters" in Western Airlines aircraft, but the results were underwhelming due to difficulties in what we would now call the "user interface." A radio altimeter was finally installed in military aircraft in 1941. Seventeen years. That's a fusion timescale! What's the hold up here? "Submarines? The Germans have submarines now? When did that happen? More importantly, where are the convoy escorts going to come from?". "Five years ago, Bill. We told you at the time. We said we needed to build more " -"Sure you did. You also told me that they had diesel-powered flying boats that catapulted from merchant raiders. You said we needed more battleships, more cruisers, more aircraft carriers. You said we needed more effing floating docks! Anyway, past is past. How about we build some modified whaling ships. Did that in the last war. Subs are kind of like whales." -"And those "corvettes" were useless in the last war for convoy escort, George. Little boats rolling around at night so the only thing the crews could see was water. You remember, George." -"What's that new thing you've got, radar? Stick one of 'em on." -"Little ship, small mast, George. Why, the radar would need to be a 10cm wavelength to spot a sub. And--" -"10cm radar. Got it. Put out a call for tender." -"George, do you have any idea how hard that is--" "No, and I don't care, either. Just put together a circular and send it out to the usual suspects. Radio companies, electrical instrument companies. Hey, remember how Barr and Stroud got started? Pair of physics profs stuck at some community college? Ask 'em to name their price and see how much they want to get out of Wolverhampton." Less than a year from announcing a need as quotidian as a surface search radar for the new "whale catcher" corvettes, a university lab in Birmingham announced a breakthrough in high frequency radio wave production, the magnetron. The difference? i) Money, ii) Usage. First, you have to be prepared to pay for the scale of research required. Second, usage. The klystron has a wide range of applications, while the magnetron did not. Now, this is an argument from analogy. I do not know what secrets Lockheed-Martin might be sitting on. Maybe there has been one of those miracle breakthroughs. But most people are skeptical, and skeptical for a reason. What I do know is that the history of technology is littered with private developers promising breathtaking breakthroughs on a "real soon now" timeframe that peter out on closer inspection. There's a reason for that. They're looking for funding. I'm saying that of you want to solve this problem, solve the funding problem first. The recent history of fusion research is one of projects petering out at the $20-billion-and-five-years-overdue mark because the funders (usually governments for fairly obvious reason) look at the prospect of dropping another $20 billion to fund another five years of work on what was originally supposed to be a five year project because $20 billion is just too much money given all of the other Very Important Priorities, and, after all, the thing that the fusion scientists are by now promising is a sad shadow of their original vision. So I'll reiterate that fusion may come to us as a result of a miracle breakthrough at a private lab on a shoestring budget. But to me that looks a lot like people who are twenty pounds overweight and decide that instead of not having donuts for breakfast and working out every day, they're going to click on the link for that one strange fruit that melts fat.

The Lockheed-Martin fusion initiative was the subject of a pretty skeptical article by Charles Seife at Slate this week. I don't want to be Mr. Party Pooper, but given the amount of money already spent on fusion, I have a hard time seeing how its going to be a private sector play. Fusion pretty clearly needs a spend-like-a-drunken-sailor budget and a smile-graciously-at-Aunt-Mabel's-ugly-sweater attitude to the (interim) product it produces. That's the kind of approach we haven't seen since the space race. It would be nice to see it back.

Well, in all fairness, the snakeheads keep bringing in the poor Chinese. We need someone to oppress them!

Jesus forgives you for thinking that. That's why you're being turned over to the secular arm for summary execution.

The Little Engine Whose Boiler Exploded Goldilocks and the Three Bears Who Exhibited Predatory Behaviour Charlie and the Heavy Machinery Factory Good Night Moon Millennial Edition Horton Hears Voices Telling Him to do Kill Teddy the Tank Engine and the Massive Derailment Rescue Rangers Beyond the Line Context.

Per Bernal's recent research, this is not as far-fetched as Markdoc supposes.

I bought my COM up to 8! Then stupid Steve Long...

The success of comic book movies strongly underlines Chris Taylor's point. The superhero is emerging as the central figure of the American mythos, and pretty darn important in the rest of the world, too. Elements like the secret identity, the iconic costume (even if toned down for different media), the Manichaean struggle, the origin story. This stuff is pretty key to the way we live now. (Suck it, Joseph Campbell. Suck it.) Now, that said, it can be pretty hard to monetise something like this. People are raiding dungeons to level up their magic users all round the country right now, but not a penny gets back to Hasbro because the old Dungeons & Dragons crew couldn't find a way to take hold of the craze they created. The classic way of monetising superheroes is with four-colour comics, and the decline of that medium is an established fact at this point. Now, I think demography plays a larger role, and cultural shifts a smaller one, than is often argued. But that doesn't mean that we can change demography. (Well, we can and we should, but we aren't going to start with comics.) At the moment, looking at gaming, the obvious winner is Heroclix, and the explanation is pretty clear. Superheroes fight, and it is pretty darn hard to fight superheroes without some way of simulating them. Champions is a much better simulation of superheroes than Heroclix, and more inclusive of diverse agonistic elements, too. Correct me if I'm wrong, Clixers, but you can't drop points on Batman's deductive skills in Heroclix, or use them if you could. I do not, by the way, buy for a second the argument that Champions is too complicated. If you want to play it, there's a billion templates, design aids, and outright character grabs you can use, instead of mastering character design right off. And as difficult as certain rules are, no-one says that you have to understand them to play them. [insert Hilarious joke about unarmed combat and attack of opportunity rules in D&D here.] You won't play Champions right or well if you just jump in knowing what you know and doing it as you please, but you'll get there in the end. The problem rather is that the commitment in time and effort required to enjoy any tabletop RPG is huge, and, by and large, superhero RPGs take more effort to overcome embarrassment. Plus the whole "attention seeking personality disorder" thing comes into play in tabletop RPGing (and cosplaying, and internet commenting, and busking outside the liquor store for spare change, and any number of other activities that eventually lead us to swear off on the whole "being around humans" thing) . The essence, the trick of capitalising on superheroes, either for money or for all those higher aims of moral education that hack writers like to cherish is very simple: be entertaining. That's it. Allen Thomas, for example, used to be very good at that. So is Ken HIte; so all your favourite RPG writer/designers. Do what they do. Which is to say, tell affecting stories. As for finding the perfect medium to entertain with superhero stories that doesn't involve having a couple billion in the bank to gradually grow a cinematic universe, your guess is as good as mine. It looks like the MMORPG ain't it, which is too bad given the high hopes we had for CO. On the other hand, the MMORPG genre hasn't taken off like we expected, anyway, so it's hard to blame the studio, even though I totally do.

Need link. Want to post some comments.