Procrastes

> What is the addiction to want to find life outside of the planet?

Another perspective on this. We currently study life with a planetary sample size of 1. Just a single additional example, especially one with a completely different origin, would almost certainly change many of our most basic assumptions about what life is and how it works.

I'm one of those folks who appreciate a well-engineered landfill. We had a great one in Nevada County, CA. Now that I've moved back to Texas, I've learned the difference the hard way, although not as hard as the people who lost their homes.[1]

1. https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/officials-say-stinky-fir...

Some of the data centers in Texas are at least partly being built to turn surplus natural gas into cash.[1][2]

1. https://energynow.com/2026/03/us-natgas-prices-at-waha-hub-i...

2. https://www.rbccm.com/en/insights/2026/05/natural-gas-powers...

I'm not a geologist, but for comparison, the Siberian Traps[1] erupted for 2 million years, and there have been other large events on that scale. Any heat we release will be insignificant in comparison.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps

It really is beautiful. It also makes me think of Sir Terry Pratchett, which is a good thing. If this were Ankh-Morpork, it would be a stunningly realistic carving of a cabbage—carved from another, larger cabbage.

"A.I."[1] like "technology"[2] is a term colloquially reserved for things that don't work yet. Once something works, we have to call it something else.

1. "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being called AI; it becomes just computation." - Ray Kurzweil

2. "Technology n. - Something that doesn't work yet." - Douglas Adams

Sorry, I conflated Finnish lunches and Norwegian matpakke in my head. Nothing wrong with Finnish lunch.

I actually know a goat rancher who is working to require ag impact studies for data centers in Texas. Sounds like I should give him a call while I can.

(Also CVE-2026-LGTM would be an awesome name for a Culture ship)

This is great! Thank you for sharing it. Fun to use and already customizable.

I was thinking the same thing, or even just little minigames and Easter eggs for people to find.

Yes, definitely. Shades of Accelerando, Saturn's Children, and Neptune's Brood. Give me the tentacles any day.

> Democrats US who always love to say “Follow the Nordic Model”

past performance is not indicative of future results

I'm not about to run out and suggest Finnish lunches or buy a tin of Surströmming for breakfast, but it might be nice to have a balanced budget.

As I recall, the Dr. knows were programmed to feed that information to runaway mechas who, who were, in turn, programmed to seek out the blue fairy.

Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

The metaphor may not hold up well in practice, but as counterexamples, I've had a pair of motorcycle boots since the late 80s that have never needed any maintenance beyond some saddle soap, and my grandfather's fountain pen from the 1920s just turned 100 and still writes fine. I put a new nib in it about 15 years ago or so.

Yes, that's more what I'm saying. There's no aether, but there's a much more interesting and complex world of forces and fields. There are no humors, but anatomy and biological processes are spectacularly complex and full of surprises. Aether and humors just aren't useful abstractions.

Maybe it's the same. Rocks are different, sure, trees, dogs, cows. But why do we assume that the way they are different is somehow related, that there's some overarching concept that contains all the complexities of those differences? It doesn't even make sense when I think of it that way.

But not in any convincing way, which seems like the root of the problem.

I sometimes wonder if we'd make more progress in understanding ourselves if we gave up the whole concept. More and more, it feels as though "consciousness," like "aether" or "humors," is an insufficient abstraction built on overemphasizing some observations at the expense of others.

I gave up on Kindles long ago. They wake up and drain their batteries, so they're always dead when I pick them up to read something. Not a problem with Kobo. But I really want to pick up one of these little Xteink readers next. They just seem perfect for pulling out of a pocket and reading. Also, I'm a smaller person, and they look like they would fit my hand. Modern phones feel like tablets to me.

These were the last posts from Sir Terry's Twitter account, March 12th 2015:

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

The end.

As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess?

Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...

I want to buy you a CMOT Dibbler Sausage for the Vimes reference. Perfect metaphor for this situation. His point was that it was the cheap boots that keep people poor, so that makes me think artist and artisan patronage will be an even bigger thing in years to come.

This reminds me of the central ideas in Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization[1]. I feel the pressure of the complexity, too, but attempting to oversimplify complex things has consequences.

"Politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

I'm having a Mandela Effect moment. I could have sworn it was a typo for "antipode" instead, but that must be a false memory I picked up somewhere.

A more charitable reading might be that the comment you're replying to was specifically referring to how jaywalking was a made-up offense that was specifically created and promoted to cynically protect the auto industry from liability. So there are parallels. [1]

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797

Diapers are no problem, as other folks have mentioned. The hard part for me is the over-the-top hypervigilance. One little breathing change, and I was halfway across the house to her room before I realized I was even awake. I could feel every sharp corner and tripping hazard in the house as if they were gouging my own skin.

@aselimov3 Thank you for the reminder! This is something I used to do all the time when I was younger, and I have gotten away from it. Very helpful.

Mediator here. This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what mediation is for. Mediation is about helping the disputants find a solution they can live with, but mediators never decide what that is. Mediations have a large emotional, human component. Most mediations include a step of just giving parties a chance to be heard by another human being. Mediation outcomes don't look like court outcomes for a reason.

And mediators do sometimes offer a mediator's proposal, but that's the exception, not the rule, and mediators do not decide what is fair. That's not mediation.

Real examples:

1. $50,000 contract dispute, really just wanted an apology, and dropped the dispute once they got it.

2. Civil dispute over incomplete landscaping that had been paid for. Was actually about an explanation for a romantic break-up. Ended with paying to replace the flowers.

3. So many disputes over which extended family members can have what access to kids, pets, and boats.

Those are choices the disputants made for what was an acceptable outcome, not the mediator, which is the point of mediation.

This tool sounds like it might be closer to something for Arbitration? That's a very different environment.

I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.

A half-joking comment I once heard from someone who was part of the group that established the NUC. It stood for "Not US Currency," but tracks the dollar because that compromise was the only thing everyone could agree on. The first stablecoin.

There used to be a story going around, possibly apocryphal, that the process to reset them used to be entirely manual and generally unknown to the rest of the organization. There was a big problem the week the person who had that task retired. Someone around here was probably there if it really happened and can add some color.