At Uni we had a stable of Vaxen.
7,349 karma · joined February 28, 2014
My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales of discarded clothes sent to them from Europe. Her suppliers have in effect sorted through the mountain of discards to find the ones that have sufficient value to sell back to us. She specifically buys clothes that have 'vintage' appeal (think tailored jackets rather than hoodies) and sells them primarily to students in a northern English city. Her business has done well enough to move from market stalls to a dedicated high street store and she is just branching out into 'vintage' kids clothes.
Challenges (apart from the time taken) are coming up with a good enough gene representation that captures the essence of the problem, building an efficient fitness function, and avoiding local maxima - i.e. a solution that is almost but not quite good enough, but from where you can't breed a better solution.,
The air may be the same everywhere, but roads and safety laws aren't.
(which I am now keen to use in an actual conversation)
I'm continuing with this initiative by proposing a new variant on Haggis: "Shepheard's Haggis". It's basically a Shepheard's pie - which is essentially lamb mince+stuff topped with mashed potato - made using haggis instead of mince. If I have any leftover gravy in the freezer that gets mixed into the haggis to moisten it a bit. I've making this for years.
For added heresy I replace the neeps with baked beans, themselves livened up with some sumac or similar.
As you say, with retrospect we can see the Aeolipile as a tech demo, but at the time it was an interesting novelty with zero practical application.
The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.
The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.
Something like this applies in the UK Midsomer Murders. Specifically, in the episodes where one of the suspects has a prior criminal record, they always get grief from Inspector Barnaby's current sidekick but are then proven innocent of the current crime. However, if an old police colleague from Barnaby's past offers to help, they are always guilty of something.
Personally, I don't find the phrase 'fully illuminated “dark side”' to be a convincing alternative to the physically more accurate term 'far side'. Of course NASA has only just emerged from the Earth's dark side as I write this (UK here, mid-morning), so I'm not expecting an immediate response from them.
And yes, I do know that 'side' is itself not entirely accurate because of libration [0] but that's a different hill to die on.
In fact, when Gandalf catches up with Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli in 'The White Rider' chapter, he explicitly tells them that Sauron has committed a major strategic blunder: attacking too early, as soon as he thought the Ring was in play. If he'd kept some forces back to guard Mt Doom, he'd have been alright. Especially because, as later becomes clear, Mt Doom isn't a normal volcano where you could just lob the Ring in from your low-flying eagle. The Cracks of Doom are in a chamber deep inside the mountain.
If the allies were counterfactually sensible enough to fly the ring to Mordor, Sauron could have been counterfactually sensible enough to station an Orc/Troll Battlegroup at the Sammath Naur, with a Nazgul combat air patrol.
Just to expand on this, substantial portions of LOTR were written well before the atomic bomb became public knowledge, e.g. Tolkien had written first drafts of Book 4 (Frodo's journey to Mordor with Sam and Gollum) by 1944. In other words, it was already a fundamental plot point that the ring should not be used even as an ultimate weapon.
The depiction of war in LOTR is perhaps more closely associated with Tolkien's personal experiences in the war of 1914-18. The dead marshes in particular have similarities to the trenches of WW1