The White House has a system in pl,ace to let people set up and sign petitions and, if the petition garners 100,000 signers, the White House is supposed to address the issue. One recent one that is if nothing else a little amusing is:

The next major U.S. Navy Ship should be named “USS The Deplorables”

To honor those citizens who rose up to defend America and The Constitution from the globalists.

The petition was created December 4, runs to January 3. So far it has a whopping 6,140 signers out of the required 100,000. Kinda behind schedule…

Los Alamos has used supercomputers to simulate an ocean impact. According to their results, tsunamis won’t be the major threat they’ve long been assumed to be…. but there will be an exorbitant amount of water vapor injected into the atmosphere.

Visualizing ocean asteroid impact

Interesting video at the link.

Really vintage.

T.he world’s oldest water is even more ancient than we realised

In a three-kilometer deep mine under Canada, researchers have found a supply of water that’s about 2 billion years old (based on measurements of noble gases dissolved in the water). Article includes discussion of ongoing chemistry that could provide an energy source adequate to the task of maintaining a microbial ecosystem, trapped in place and separated from the rest of the world for *billions* of years. If such an ecosystem was trapped in place in a reservoir like this billions of years ago, I’d bet that the genetic connection between the life *there* and the life *here* would be pretty minimal.

In the same vein as the “Earth: Where to Colonize” thought experiment from a few months ago, I present this discussion topic: baby licenses.

Lots of places, you need to have a license for a pet dog. You need to have a license for a sidearm, or to have a lemonade stand or to do roof repair, dentistry makeup, hairstyling. And yet, we let just anybody have babies.

It’s a common enough trope in futuristic sci-fi to have “baby licenses.” But what would actually make a *good* regulatory system here? The problem is that it’s really easy to see how such a system could quickly turn into a dystopian nightmare… licenses doled out not based on a rational set of metrics, but due to political favors, bribery, nepotism, etc. And what happens when someone has more babies than allowed? That has been the subject of many a dark short story or short subject film.

But it may come about that some form of reproduction-regulation becomes necessary. China tried with their one-baby policy, which they’ve recently abandoned. In some future Lunar colony, or on a generation-starship, or a free-flying habitat… or just in an overcrowded US or UK or Sweden it may be necessary to say “ok, enough, we need to clamp down on the baby-making for a while.” This idea might *also* be applied for “Ark Selection” purposes… who gets to ride the rocket to Bronson Beta when the time comes.

So… let’s say the decision came down that only half of the couples in the land were going to be allowed to have a baby. What would make a good set of regulations?

My own thoughts: computerize the selection process to the maximum degree possible. And any humans involved are under *intense* scrutiny, with massive penalties for screwing with the system. Additionally, include a sizable truly random lottery. Lots of people are going to be shut out of the process, and they’ll know it; and when many people find out they’re not going to be allowed to reproduce they can get twitchy. A *trusted* lottery where people who want can toss their ID’s into the hat can serve as a relief valve for those who know they won’t be selected otherwise.

Some ideas…

Things that would be used to exclude:

1: A criminal record

2: Transferable genetic diseases

3: Crazy

4: Stupid

5: Poor. Sure, that one would *really* set off some folks… but let’s face it, if you’re poor, maybe you shouldn’t have more mouths to feed.

6: Being a general screwup

Things that would be used to get you a license:

1: Achievement (good and vague right there). If you have proven useful to society, not only do we want to reward you (assuming, of course, you *want* a baby), we want more like you.

2: Being rich. Rather than bribery, though, make it possible to outright purchase baby licenses for yourself. Something impressive like a million bucks a pop, or perhaps even a sliding scale (say, a million bucks until your net worth rises to $10 million… and from that point on it’s $1M plus 5% of your net worth). Beyond the funds-raising potential, you *want* the rich to have as many children as practical… because then the fortunes will presumably get split up among the many heirs, rather than passed down in a straight line. Make having many kids be a new status symbol.

3: Being physically and mentally fit.

I’d argue against making a baby license transferable, since if it was it could by criminals.

So: for a reasonable, rational, *just* system… what would the baby licensing system look like? Discuss.

UPDATE: problem has been resolved satisfactorily.

I need this DWG file, a ~450 kb 3D CAD model of a truss, converted into an older version of DWG. I’m running Rhino 4, which can’t open it; I was told to download “DWG Truview,” and 670 megabytes later I had a program that wouldn’t install *at* *all* on my work computer and nearly killed my netbook. Someone kindly converted it into a Rhino file for me, which was awesome… but a Rhino *5* file, which Rhino 4 can’t open.

~~GAAAAAHHHHHH~~

~~Thanks in advance.~~

So some lucky schmoes have already seen “Rogue One.” From what I’ve seen, the reviews are pretty positive… mostly. And then there’s this:

“Rogue One” Reviewed: Is It Time to Abandon the “Star Wars” Franchise?

From the title it seems like the reviewer is not going to like “Rogue One.” But then… he starts yapping. And it’s exactly the sort of impenetrable liberal arts word salad that makes you wonder if you are reading parody.

The director of “Rogue One,” Gareth Edwards, has stepped into a mythopoetic stew so half-baked and overcooked, a morass of pre-instantly overanalyzed implications of such shuddering impact to the series’ fundamentalists, that he lumbers through, seemingly stunned or constrained or cautious to the vanishing point of passivity, and lets neither the characters nor the formidable cast of actors nor even the special effects, of which he has previously proved himself to be a master, come anywhere close to life.

And.

So.

On.

Read through it and you get that the reviewer was not a big fan of the flick. Fine. Maybe it stinks. Maybe it’s great, but he’s an outlier. Maybe he’s just not the right audience. Whatever. But when you use gibberish like “corporate Kremlinology” and “There’s none of the Shakespearean space politics, enticingly florid dialogue, or experiential thrills of the best of George Lucas’s “Star Wars” entries (“Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith”),” man, it’s really hard to take you at all seriously. In fact, it’s real easy to see this piece as mocking the reader. And after a political season where politicians thought they would win by insulting large swathes of the voting public, people are getting kinda fed up with that.