I wish Pournelle’s Birth of Fire Mars colonization novel would have been made instead. James Cameron optioned it, but I wonder if that was just to spike it.
Andy wrote ‘The Martian’, the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars–it’s a book we can’t recommend enough. Adam and Andy talk about the research that went into writing the book, the portrayal of astronauts in fiction, and the upcoming film adaptation.
bruce: David Drake’s ‘Lacey and his Friends’ assumes the output will go to oligarchs.
Felix: The Transparent Society by David Brin, if I recall, assumes there will always be Flockish cameras and the like. So, make their output public. Side note: Amazon’s “Customers also bought or read” for this book is quite the interesting reading list.
McChuck: Being seen in public is fine. But what Flock camera coverage does is effectively stalking.
Isegoria: I haven’t read In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir. Does the father come back to die under the son’s care?
Michael Lynch: Actually Junod did have that father and wrote a book about it.
Phileas Frogg: He combined gentle and meek kindness with implacable strength. A consummate Christian gentleman, and a better man than I.
Szopen: I was too young to ever read them, and in fact I only learned about them after the fall of Communism. I was only 13 when the first semi-free elections were held. I mostly remember hearing old jokes with my parents laughing and explaining why it was funny — and then slowly they stopped laughing.
Bruce: Szopen, is that what happened to Krokodil and Szpilki? Or were they too establishment?
Szopen: In Poland, a similar phenomenon appeared with respect to comedy: the quality of comedy shows fell in the first few years, because previously a lot of comedy was based on innuendos and clever allusions, hinting on something which people supposed not to know or were not supposed to think or say. Once those things could be said in the open, comedians kept depending on old tricks and it was just not fun anymore.
Gaikokumaniakku: When East Asians ask me whence come my antiquated notions of the USA, I read selections from the first Little House book to them. The dear, sweet, sympathetic little girl hopes that her father will bring back a dead bear, because she loves to eat bear meat.
Isegoria: No, xanthan gum isn’t anti-microbial. Natamycin is an anti-fungal commonly used in products such as cream cheeses, cottage cheese, sour cream, yogurt, shredded cheeses, cheese slices, and packaged salad mixes. Nisin is a polycyclic antibacterial peptide produced by the bacterium Lactococcus lactis that is used in processed cheese, meats, beverages, etc. during production to extend shelf life by suppressing Gram-positive spoilage and pathogenic bacteria.
Jim: Isn’t xanthan gum used as an antibiotic agent, especially in dairy products, or am I thinking of something else?
Jim: What actually mattered was not the profession of the user, but their expertise. The more domain experience someone had, the more successful they were in using Claude Code in that domain. And, even more interestingly, the more useful output they got from Claude from each prompt. This is because each session begins at the center of the manifold, and human expertise is required to push it further and further into distant regions. The more expertise you have, the more you can push the session in a...
Jim: Biotech is arguably AI’s most promising application.
Jim: James James: Granted, the Great Halfrican Uprising Media Spectacle presumably was astroturfed with real money—to the extent that the banks’ circulating credits can be described either as “real” or as “money”—which must then have found its way into the pockets of real people.
Jim: *A media spectacle involving Halfricans somehow, or a different media spectacle involving a rabble of white people wandering the premises of the so-called “People’s House”, one would not.
James James: Black Lives Matter may have been fleeting, but for the people who stole millions of dollars and bought multiple houses, the consequences were not fleeting. These short-term movements could also be conceptualized as temporary astroturf fronts for permanent political machines.
Jim: Politics ordinarily affects the distribution or redistribution of wealth, directly or indirectly, as its ends or as a byproduct. “Follow the money,” as they say. Thus, the enormous shorting of airline stocks just before 9/11 was politics, just as South Carolina’s tax cut on Boomers’ boats is politics, and Florida’s tax cut on Boomers’ houses is politics. By this metric, one would expect “hyperpoliticsR 21; to be something like the seizure of innocent...
Jim: There is hardly anything more unsettling than a parasite.
Jim: Bruce: honored. Isegoria: Thiel’s optimistic thought experiment, as excerpted, fails to suggest any awareness that material production has intrinsic value independent of its successful financialization. As a card-carrying member of the “investor” class, a group of “people” who “allocate capital” (i.e., redirect the allocation of the labor of engineers) in order to “seek returns” (i.e., extract free money), that he would be blind to unpriced,...
I wish Pournelle’s Birth of Fire Mars colonization novel would have been made instead. James Cameron optioned it, but I wonder if that was just to spike it.
It’s an apt description. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought of myself as exactly that kind of person, but apparently I am. Really enjoyed the book.
Adam Savage interviews author Andy Weir