May 182019
 

As many now, the “Streisand Effect” is when you try to prevent some piece of information from going public and in the process you simply make the public more interested in it and spread that info much further than it would have gone if you’d just shut the frak up. The latest example of this is “Soph,” a soon-to-be-deplatformed 14-year-old girl who makes (soon, “made”) some surprisingly foul-mouthed YouTube videos touching on numerous political issues. There are doubtless a million like her in that regard, but since she takes the politically incorrect positions, the attack-leftists could not allow her to continue. And thus, Buzzfeed squeezed this article out a few days ago:

YouTube’s Newest Far-Right, Foul-Mouthed, Red-Pilling Star Is A 14-Year-Old Girl

Prior to this I’d never heard of her. Chances are good you hadn’t either. Now you have. The video that seemed to most irritate the author of the Buzzfeed attack piece was dutifully removed by YouTube, and so “Soph” has set up a BitChute account, and re-uploaded the video there. To my recollection I’ve never tried to embed a BitChute video… but now, thanks to Buzzfeed and their desire to silence this kid, I now have. So, behold (and beware: NSFW):

Oh, and if you might find the author of the Buzzfeed article familiar, it might be because he was momentarily newsworthy last year when he advocated for genocide, or at least mass murder. I fully expect to see calls for physical violence against her now because that’s the world we live in: silence anyone who disagrees with you, by whatever means necessary.

 

 Posted by at 10:56 pm
May 182019
 

Teaching AI how to feel FEAR could make autonomous cars better drivers, study suggests

It’s the Daily Fail, so Accuracy May Vary. The actual researchers don’t seem to be trying to instill fear into machines, but instead are simply teaching the machines to examine human reactions to situations including those involving fear as a way to teach self-driving cars to avoid dangerous situations. One one level… yeah, sure, I can see that. On the other hand, if the AIs do actually become self aware at some point, it probably won’t have been such a good idea to have made sure that the first emotion humans taught them was fear. You really don’t want our future overlords to look at us as Terribly Bad Critters.

 Posted by at 10:05 pm
May 182019
 

Over the last month or so I’ve been modestly amused by the chaos this little song by rapper “Lil Nas X” has sown: it sure sounds like a country song, but people have argued that it isn’t. Billboard magazine said it reached #19 in the “Country” charts, then disqualified it since they decided that it’s not actually a country song. In early April, Billy Ray Cyrus participated in the first official remix of the song; this of course makes it harder to argue that it’s not a country song.

Finally a true narrative video has been produced featuring both Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus. I find it unaccountably entertaining.

 Posted by at 5:53 am
May 182019
 

Here’s a little story I wrote late last year. Not meant for any attempt at publication, just a little something Because I Wanted To. It’s a “Zaneverse” story with the crew of the commercial starship Corpus Georgi, which you may have read about before. Feel free to read and discuss/compliment/critique in the comments. Assume spoilers in the comments.

“The Creature” PDF File

Going on two years ago I wrote a novel starring these folks. For right at one year I tried to get it published by way of a literary agent, but… pfffft. Since then I have written *another* novel with these folks, which I have no desire to try to get published; rather, it’s for background to make sure it’s all straight in my head. I’ve grown somewhat attached to this cast of characters, and have a number of other stories that I’ve written and have vague doomed hopes for, as well as several more stories and novels in process or planned. Not, perhaps, the most practical of hobbies. But if you like them, perhaps you could point me in the direction of a literary agent, editor or publisher who would like to see published the next Twilight Potter literary juggernaut, sure to be turned into a series of major motion pictures that will wipe the floor with Star Wars. Or just hit the tip jar…


Fiction TipJar


———–

 Posted by at 12:26 am
May 162019
 

Due to laws being passed in Alabama and Georgia and the like that greatly curtail the legality of abortion, discussion of the general topic seems much more common in recent days. Listening to NPR today, there was a piece on the debate on when human life begins, largely focusing on various religious views on the subject. My own views are pretty straightforward and are not religion based: human life begins at conception. Why? Because:

1) It’s obviously alive. Sperm is alive, egg is alive… fertilized egg is alive. At no point in the process is it non-alive, unless it has died.

2) Obviously it’s human. What, is it a Komodo dragon?

That said, the point at which a living human fertilized egg becomes something to give a damn about is a much trickier question. For those who believe that give-a-damn begins at conception… well, that’s a simple and straightforward answer. Others believe that *birth* is when human rights are magically bestowed upon what had previously been a simple expendable mass of tissue. This is much less sensible, because a fetus can be removed from the womb prior to birth and can survive.

My own view: I dunno. You terminate (for no medically necessary reason) a baby that’s seconds from birth… that to me is murder. But you take a Day After pill and the undifferentiated blastocyst gets flushed from the system… meh. But somewhere in between, things get fuzzy.

The pro life people almost invariably come at this from a religious angle, and that is a good way to irritate me. But their hardline view on “at conception” is consistent and a position worthy of respect. The pro abortion people, however, come at this from a non-religious position, which yo would *hope* means a scientific one. But it almost never is. Instead, it’s usually internally inconsistent and sometimes downright terrifying.

On the one hand, they tell us that this is all about “womens health” or “womens rights,” because the fetus is little more than a parasite which is threatening or even merely inconveniencing the mother. Yeah, ok, but… she remains inconvenienced *after* birth. The “parasite” remains every bit as dependent upon human assistance for the basic of life after birth as before. Even so, you can’t just toss a baby in the trash. Nor can someone wander through a neonatal unit and stab all the preemies and not get charged with something rather substantial. Not just the legal system, but actual humans look down on infanticide. Even if the infants not only weren’t actually born, but were not even due to be born for several months yet.

For a legal system to be a *good* legal system, it has to treat people consistently. What’s “murder” for one person is “murder” for another, if the circumstances are the same. But with the unborn, it’s different. If someone attacks a pregnant woman and intentionally assaults her unborn child with the intention of killing it, that’s murder or attempted murder. But if the mother gets an abortion… it’s not murder. And this disturbs the bejesus out of me: someone can decide that what is recognized as a human *isn’t* a human, and the legal system accepts that. I’m cool with the legal system accepting Person A intentionally killing Person B if it’s a matter of self defense or defense of another, but at no point does the legal system decide that it was ok for A to kill B because B wasn’t a human and did not deserve human rights.

The new laws that have been passed basically make abortion illegal except in the case of the mothers life being in medical risk due to the pregnancy. The people I’ve heard argue against these laws have often used a very similar argument… that these new laws will ban the “great majority” of abortions, thus openly accepting that abortions are not about the life of the mother, but because she simply wants it done. For those people who truly believe that even the smallest blastocyst is a human life worthy of protecting, the knowledge that some people can rather nonchalantly chose to murder their babies in the interest of convenience must be maddening.

The NPR piece ends with this:

“… they don’t see it as just property, and they don’t see it as fully human, but somewhere in between.”

Cuz, yeah, declaring someone to be somewhere between human and property… gosh, when has *that* ever been a bad thing?

I’ve posted much this sort of rambling incoherent post before, largely because the subject keeps coming up and keeps not being resolved. Seems to me that science can provide some solutions:

1) A modernized Norplant that not only can be easily implanted, it’s *mandatory.* It could be mandatory for all women who:

A) Are on government assistance, in jail, on parole, in the country illegally, etc.

B) Are over the age of 13 (or whatever) and have not yet passed Motherhood 101 and received their Parenting License. Sure, the idea of the government licensing people to be able to have babies is a fairly terrifying thought, but they want to license other Constitutional rights, so why not?

2) Perfect the artificial womb, and come up with a way to extract a fetus from a womb and implant it within the robo-womb. The procedure would have to be on par with an abortion in terms of safety and time consumed, but that doesn’t seem too unreasonable. I’m sure Bubbles Cortez would be perfectly happy to let the Green New Deal wait on hold while the resources for it are devoted to this project. Once the baby is extracted and implanted in the artificial uterus, adoption can begin. Fetuses that are sufficiently early on that they can be safely frozen can be put into long term storage for the day we need easily transported workers for the Off World Colonies, or for after some horrifying plague rubs out a large fraction of the population.

 Posted by at 11:33 pm
May 152019
 

Let’s say Mars gets terraformed with all the bells and whistles. Oceans worth of added water and an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere with more or less 1 standard atmosphere pressure at “sea level.” Since the gravity of Mars is substantially lower than Earth, to get that same pressure, the atmosphere will have to be substantially heavier in order to provide the same pressure, and thus be properly breathable. And that heavier atmosphere will be necessarily thicker… not denser, but extended much further out into space: “scale height.” With about 3/8 the gravity, it seems you’d need 8/3 the mass of air per unit area to get the same pressure.

I’ve little doubt that numerous people have run the math on what all would be needed and what all would be the result. Anybody know of examples of such results? What would be the temp and pressure at various altitudes for such an atmosphere? What the lowest stable satellite orbit would be? How tall and how high clouds could get? How freakin’ high the birds would fly?

 Posted by at 9:24 pm
May 132019
 

Protect the solar system from a mining ‘gold rush’ by creating a ‘space wilderness’ that preserves 88% of planets, moons and other heavenly bodies, scientists urge

 

Sure, because a pristine dead rock is more important than the living world it could be used to produce.

‘Once you’ve exploited the solar system, there’s nowhere left to go,’ he added.

Really. REALLY. Because a civilization that utterly uses up an entire solar system, converting every last gram of matter into a freakin’ Dyson swarm, is incapable of wandering off to, say, Alpha Centauri, I suppose?

‘And what about the rings of Saturn? They are beautiful, almost pure water ice.

‘Is it OK to mine those so that in 100 years they are gone?’

Umm… YES. The rings mass ~ 1.5X10^19 kilograms, and if that was all water, it’d be fifteen million cubic kilometers. That would be a square ocean one kilometer deep by 3872 kilometers on a side. Why, that would be just DANDY on the surface of Mars. I’d gladly trade Saturns rings, which I cannot see with the naked eye, for turning Mars from red to blue-green. Not only is that a win in the aesthetics category, it’s a win in the practicality category: the rings are doing nothing. Move that water to Mars, you bring the planet to *life.*

 Posted by at 9:40 pm