bandibus

Hi everyone. I wrote this thing before SNL did its now-famous George Washington sketch about how ludicrous the U.S. system of weights & measures is - so since that sketch just got a sequel, and since in writing that newsletter I found a few reasons to defend Imperial (only a few ) I thought some of you might find it interesting, or at least a chance to teach me something by explaining to me how wrong I am. Cheers!

I'm the author of this piece. Since a few of my geology stories were very kindly received on here a while back, I thought I'd give this a go, with the hope I'm not being spammy in foisting my own stuff upon you all. Cheers for taking a look - and it's a pretty remarkable natural feature which I previously knew nothing about (if it was laid across Europe, it'd run from London to Belgrade).

Hi everyone. Since you were kind enough to upvote a couple of my pieces a good while back on the Zanclean Megaflood and Atlantropa, I thought I'd give this a whirl here, on the last & maybe the most ludicrous acquisition of the British Empire - a 20-metre high island in the Atlantic, surrounded by some of the roughest seas in the world, that's become the focus of a lot of paranoia and high farce over the last century. Cheers!

Haha. Thank you. Nothing but semi-clueless enthusiasm, I promise.

Hi everyone. Since a bit over a year ago many of you were kind enough to upvote and leave comments on my newsletter about the Zanclean megaflood (which seems to have filled up the Mediterranean basin in a matter of months), I figured you might be as interested as I was to learn that the English coast had its own version. (And if this is me being tediously self-promotional, huge apologies.)

More detailed writeup of this by Kotaku just went up here: https://kotaku.com/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-trigun-...

Thank you! I could definitely have picked a better writeup of this story than the PopMech piece, and this link is much better. Cheers for that.

Couldnt agree more. (I grew up in Cyprus.) From what I could tell, it didn't occur to Sörgel what effect the dams and evaporation would have on sea-life, and on the coastal economies depending on it. Probably catastrophic. But one thing that was encouraging about the Orkney turbine mentioned elsewhere in these comments: they ran a trial first, to see how wildlife would be affected. Result: negligible impact. So a modern-tech version that respects all that beauty does seem to be possible - if mining the raw materials required to build it is factored in, because that is a massive ongoing issue.

Hah. Not at all! If it sounds like that, I've misrepresented myself - I agree with you here, and the Strait is the perfect place to do it, using something like this: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid

Agreed. There's a tidal turbine off Orkney, the most powerful in the world, that just went live: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid It's powering 2,000 homes and an electrolyzer creating green hydrogen. A few of those - or a few arrays of them- in the Strait might do wonders.

The final part of a trilogy of stories I ran in my newsletter - and since the first two were well-received on here a few months back, and got me some generous & good advice on tightening them up, I thought I'd push my luck a final time. Plus, this topic's both wtf-barmy and perhaps timely, considering Europe's energy supply issues right now.

Thanks for that. Yep - I think the widely (wildly) varying numbers are due to there being various models currently being explored. The paper I referred to was recent but not "2020" recent. I'd also trust Gaffney's team's findings as the Lost Frontiers team are at the cutting edge of all this.

I got the 25 metre figure from a paper on the Storegga collapse - and I'll return and cite this when I'm back at where my notes are. It's the upper limit of the cited proposed model of what happened. It looks like Britannica is referencing the same model here (although I'm not claiming Britannica is a rock-solid source for the facts):

"Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metres (65–80 feet) in height along the coast of the Shetland Islands, 10–12 metres (33–39 feet) along the Norwegian coast, and 5 metres (16 feet) along the coast of eastern Scotland."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Storegga-slides

(I also wrote about all this in another newsletter, here: https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/imperial-vs-metri... This isn't me claiming Britain isn't idiotic on this matter, though...)

Yes, US and UK miles are the same. And yep, I'm English - and I have that blindspot that a lot of us have, where we don't noticed how we use both imperial and metric in a confusing mash-up of systems - so yep, apologies, and guilty as charged!

(In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it's centimetres and kg all the way.)

Oops! Thank you. :)

Thank you! :)

That's a fair comment, thank you. I originally wrote it that way because it was for longterm readers, with a bunch of callbacks to previous stuff, as you mention there. But for first-time visitors, it could be seen as clutter. I've cut some of that out, and I think you're right. Cheers!

Fabulous. Not just for the light-pollution & energy side of things, but because softer lighting is the thing sleep experts have been telling us to introduce into our lives in the evenings, all the blue light filters for our phones etc, to help us tell our bodies it's time to sleep...

But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc.

This is sort of a sequel to a piece about the ancient Mediterranean megaflood that did really well on here last month - so, with my fingers crossed it's not too obnoxiously self-promotional of me to do it, I thought I'd give this one a punt as well.

Also, thank you to those who left comments saying you didn't like that former piece's introduction. I agree with you! It was rambling and a bit self-indulgent and I should have just got on with the story. This one does that (I think). Cheers.

I remember there was lots of buzz about a resurgence of the genre when Double Fine's Broken Age did the crowdfunding thing and raised $millions. A lot of excited people. And then that seemed to go away again when the critical reception to Part 2 of it was pretty contentious? I wonder what it would have sparked if it had been as much a critical and publicity success as the first part...

This is fantastic news. If Ron Gilbert hadn't been on board - but yeah, he is. (I guess Orson Scott Card won't be providing any of the duelling banter this time round, considering his...somewhat-altered credibility these days.)

Considering the huge surge in popularity for retro-style gaming recently, the grainy Quake-type FPS shooters and pixel-art games, I've been surprised there hasn't been a similar upwelling of traditional adventure games - not just the Monkey Island type (there have been a few of those, but no megahits?) but also the old text adventure games. Is anyone trying to do an Infocom-like out there, or an evolution of it, in a somewhat mainstreamy way?

Thank you!

Ah, apologies. Got it. Thank you!

Yes, I agree with you there about some science journalism, and in particular the tabloid variety. When you read quality writing like you'd find at Nature, Aeon/Psyche etc, which values the ideas for themselves rather than for what outrageously speculative headline can be squeezed out of them for "the man on the street", you can see a huge difference in the way it's being communicated. And you're right - it's not as successful, because the good stuff isn't negative-emotionally triggering (unless the worst kinds of tabloids get their hands on it).

Negativity bias deranks science stories that are all about careful, quiet optimism and cautious hopefulness. That's a huge, huge problem - especially as our curiosity seems to grow out of positive rather than negative emotional responses to information. (Anhedonia, strongly correlated with depression, is the inability to feel pleasure, and it includes the inability to take pleasure in learning something new - ie. it kills your curiosity).

Anyway, I'm rambling. Thank you for this thoughtful clarification!

Not true in this case! I'm the author, and I believe the exact opposite about science - that there's astonishing value in learning about the work being done right now, that it's easy to miss so much of it simply because of the amount of information we all consume, and that the scientific process has a lot to teach the world about putting aside ideas of "right" and "wrong" in favour of keeping an open mind and holding our opinions lightly. But also: I'm happy if I can just point anyone towards those doing the actual scientific work, because I'm just a middleman here. If someone thinks I'm an idiot but clicks through to the research itself - that's a win too.

Sorry to hear - but thanks for reading it anyway!

Yes! Still one of the best things on the internet, just incredible.

It also inspired the Saga of the Exiles book series by Julian May. (It's presented as an act of terrorism by time travellers, to repel alien invaders.)

It did. I know this, because I'm the author of that Twitter thread. :) And yes, I'm not a science writer (ex-archaeologist turned travel writer). But the enthusiasm, which is real, is what seemed to make it go viral on Twitter. I hope I stayed on the side of being engaging rather than shamelessly clickbaiting, but - yeah, slippery slope. Nevertheless, the whole research project is incredible, and I was lucky enough to have the lead scientist weigh in, in the comments. (The comments were spectacular and I'm very grateful for that.)

Agreed - but I think some of that is just people being people. I know very settled & traditionally rooted folk who have absolutely retreated from the world. I don't think being in one place automatically makes you more sociable and communally minded. (Also, the longer you're somewhere, the more you tune stuff out & stop seeing what's really going on around you...)

So yep, totally agree that a siloed existence is a miserable one - and unhealthy too. I just think it can happen everywhere, including in small communities. It sounds super-trite, but there's nothing that kicks me out of a self-absorbed funk more than genuinely helping a friend with something and feeling like I did a good thing. That's not really a location phenomenon, that's more an attitude-based one? And it's infectious too. We're all herd animals really...

I've found cities fascinating all my life - and I've also found them incredibly stressful to spend a long amount of time in. I've also never lived in one fulltime, which may be a factor, and I grew up in a rural, economically depressed corner of England, so...that too.

But the "putting down roots" thing. When the pandemic hit I was renting a cabin in a corner of Scotland after selling my family home, prior to a few years of nomadism in Europe. And I realised I had so many roots online - meaningful ones, some with friends I've probably spent hundreds of hours talking to, but rarely get to meet in person. And maybe that's a new version of "putting down roots" that has never been easier? So maybe there's a traditional prejudice with that term, one that doesn't fit the newer, more fluid reality for so many folk. (Not just younger generations, either! I was 50 last year.)

All this reminds me a bit of Venkat Rao talking about permanent nomads, and how their constant movement is how they feel stable and rested: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/07/31/on-being-an-illegible-... Maybe many folk look "unrooted" but they're actually rooted in ways many people just can't get their heads around properly? Maybe (maybe) it's sometimes not about the place at all?