We started deploying malaria vaccines!

Mallory Chipman is wonderful.

We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

I just fell off the couch.

Maybe just because we don’t understand it, but the ancient Sumerian bar joke:

A dog entered into a tavern and said, ‘I cannot see anything. I shall open this one.’

This would indeed result in no more war, at all. I fail to see the problem. (Besides that it wouldn’t work, of course – but it’s a nice fantasy.)

Does it actually annoy people? Wow, that makes it even funnier.

Habits can be adaptive, but addictions are more about external drugs hacking the brain. And highly refined and addictive drugs didn’t really exist in the ancestral environment. (Alcohol was first refined ~9000 years ago, which isn’t enough time to evolve an anti-addiction mechanism.)

Rimworld is awesome. But I guess I was thinking in terms of “all crops” being one type of food source. In Rimworld, you can’t get multi-year droughts that make growing anything almost impossible. In real life, you can.

Interesting! I didn’t know that, but it makes sense.

I would suspect a correlation more with climate. If it’s temperate, you don’t shower as much as when you’re hot and sweaty all the time.

Also, geothermal power exists.

The Romans were really, really good at making concrete. Like most “ancient secrets”, it’s been overblown by sensationalist pop-historians, but they were still really good at it. IIRC they figured out that if you mix volcanic ash in with your concrete, it becomes stronger when exposed to water, not weaker.

edit: exposed, not exposed

Deathists I guess?

I don’t know where it’s going. We’re in the middle of a hype cycle. It could be anywhere from “mildly useful tool that reduces busywork and revolutionizes the clickbait industry” to “paradigm shift comparable to the printing press, radio, or Internet”. Either way, I predict that the hype will wear off, and some time later the effects will be felt – but I could be wrong.

The CNN article says that he was selling horns to people in Manhattan. Jurisdiction for international crimes is complicated and I don’t know anything about it really, but my guess is that even if he never personally visited the States, he’s still considered to have committed crimes there – if a drug smuggler used a catapult to launch packages of drugs across the border, it would make sense for them to be charged in the US even if they didn’t ever step foot on American soil.

Yeah, I like the idea of using humans for computing. Or that they don’t want us dead. I just thought that the idea that all of Matrix-physics is a lie to be such a mind screw that I had to include it.

Although…

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who’s made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: …in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn’t run on math.

I don’t see it as obvious. If anything it makes it harder for vested interests to have an outsized influence, since there are no traditional politicians to bribe. What flaws do you see that I’m missing?

When that one aired I assumed they were going to genre-shift into dark comedy or slapstick, but they… really, really didn’t.

Because I didn’t want people arguing about current events and the end of the Cold War seemed as good a cutoff as any.