Student of Trinity

<approbation> It's always nice to mark these milestones. <meaningless> Rah rah rah! You go, internet person! </meaningless> Here's to the next two-thousand! </approbation>

Ach, nein!

The service charges may simply be passing on charges from banks, that this insurance company has to pay. How much does it cost to open an envelope and deposit a check? I don't know, but it might actually be much less than $2, since at minimum wage you can handle a lot of envelopes in an hour. Why the banks charge for their services, I don't know, but it is a considerable convenience, so I suppose it should be worth something. And it must cost something for the banks to maintain the necessary infrastructure. Much less than $2 per transaction, however, I would say. In Europe automatic bank transfers are all free.

"Bizarro world" is a total misnomer, of course. The term suggests that there is exactly one bizarre world. In fact, there are many. So many, that the set of non-bizarro worlds is of zero measure. Every time you step through a portal, it's essentially inevitable that you will enter a world more bizarro than the one you left. This is a well-known corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can never step through the same portal twice. The world is never going to get less weird.

If you google 'net10 phone zte' you can discover that this phone's operating system is Android 2.3. So then googling 'sync itunes android 2.3' seems to reveal that there is no official way to sync from within iTunes (since Apple hates Android), but there are third-party apps available that claim to be able to do it. Once you know you're dealing with an Android 2 phone, there are probably a lot of people who can help you.

Yeah, it's good, too. He's got a thing for Russian rulers. But he makes you think that a couple of them were some of the best arguments autocracy ever had. He got into it, at least in part, because his son was hemophiliac. So he got interested in the role that Alexei's hemophilia had played in the collapse of the Romanov monarchy. Massie's son survived, however, though he has had some severe health troubles related to his disease. He has had an interesting career of his own. Among other things he turned out to be naturally resistant to HIV. He was an associate priest at the church I attended when we lived in Boston, so I knew him a bit. He really needed a liver transplant for a long time, but he went too quickly from not-quite-sick-enough to too-sick. Somehow he hung in there, and medical technology advanced, and he finally got a transplant a couple of years ago. His health is now much better, and with the new liver, he doesn't even have hemophilia any more.

I keep catching myself thinking that if I can only be articulate enough, I can actually influence the collective unconscious, and get the Zeitgeist to sieh things my way. Slowly I'm beginning to suspect that it doesn't really work that way. Poop.

I'm skeptical as well. It's something you can do, so the temptation probably exists to do it even if it's killing a lot more civilians than real bad guys. All you have to do is squint at the photos right, tell yourself that none of the bodies look innocent, and you're a hero striking back at the terrorists, instead of just another terrorist yourself. I see a lot of potential for the program to develop its own momentum, until the trigger is getting pulled just because it can be. But in principle there is something to be said for making terrorist leadership a hazardous occupation, instead of letting the old guys sit snug and send dumb kids out to die for the cause. The drone program itself is also probably pretty cheap, on the scale it takes to fight poverty and illness and barbarism.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much good advice. I expect that creations are likely to be more trouble than they're worth at this point, though it depends just how much you'd have to sacrifice of other things to get up to a Wingbolt. I forget just how hard that would be for a G4 servile, so I don't really know if a Wingbolt would be worth what it cost, but it would at least be worth the trouble of keeping it around once you got it. Nothing else really is, though. My memory of runed onyx slowing is that it was very disappointing. It hardly ever seemed to take effect. The Guardian's Claymore is a weapon that you might well keep for the rest of the game, so it may be worth holding out for a golden crystal.

This is a poll, but it has only one answer. Actually, I kind of like that. Most polls tell me what to think subliminally, by determining the questions for me, and the range of possible answers. This one is honest.

The one by Robert K. Massie, by any chance?

Design of dorkness.

Huh: they do indeed do stainless steel. I doubt it would be anywhere near as strong as properly forged steel, but it's got to be less flimsy than plastic.

It's great, but it's still just plastic, and I think it must be a pretty limited kind of plastic at that. You can make things, but not really strong things. It may already be enough to change the world in some ways, though. For instance, if the US bans large rifle magazines, enthusiasts can already download a plan and print working ones for themselves, without having to buy them from anyone. And I've read recently about new developments in metallurgy, making amorphous metal, with no crystal structure. It surprised me when I first learned it, but solid metals are normally crystals, just like those edgy clear quartz things, only not clear, and not single giant crystals, either, but jumbles of little crystal chunks stuck together. Much of the art of making things out of metal is really about dealing with that crystal structure, arranging not to have big fault lines where tiny chunks of crystal easily cleave apart, leaving you with the embarrassment of having to whinge and wheedle to some hoity-toity elven smith to get your broken sword reforged. Amorphous metal should be stronger than crystalline metal, but capable of being cast as easily as wax or plastic, with no worries about the metal's internal structure. Maybe amorphous metal would work with 3D printing, too, someday.

The spambot horde was coming over the hill in unthinkable, unstoppable numbers. We were all doomed. But then the old forum turned to the younger one and said, with a voice so steady it makes me tear up even now, "You're young, IPB boards. Get out of here, and live!" Then that grand old forum just charged right up there, sucked all the spambots right in with guest accounts, and blew itself up in one enormous final UBB crash. There was nothing left but, well, the Account Suspended page. But I think maybe I heard the old boards murmur something about how if they were cut down, they would only become more powerful than the spambots could possibly imagine. I'd like to think they're all still somewhere around here, watching over us, or something.

So hobbits were intelligently designed? Man, now we just have to work in Star Wars and Star Trek, and we can have the absolute ultimate flame war. Buwahahahaha!

With apologies to Haldane, one of the main properties of Deity which natural science has revealed is an inordinate tolerance for bugs.

Neonewbs are a thing, now. Like being a thing is now a thing. This, too, will pass, of course, but we can milk it for all it's worth until it does.

Probably. But it's got some very memorable parts. At least the sun doesn't rise twice on the same day, as it does in Crime and Punishment. (That was Dirac's only comment on that book, and the comment is a famous outlier of literary criticism. I never noticed, myself.)

Slainte!

Evidently hobbits have 30 teeth. That's weird, though, because it's not evenly divisible by 4. So either they have one tooth in the middle, above and below, or different numbers of teeth on top and bottom.

Can't ... talk ... faster ... need ... more ... coffee ...

To my partially color-blind eyes, this chart says, "There's some colors and a lot of spikes." Can there be a text summary?

Nobody knows. We may find out before too long, though, because we're beginning to make experiments and devices on scales approaching the atomic. Or we might not. Things happen in quantum mechanics, all right. They just don't look like the things we're used to. Let me pretend that trees fall in the way unstable atomic nuclei decay, just so I can stick with the language of trees and sounds. Suppose you start with a definitely unfallen tree. Then, after a little while, something will have happened: the state of the universe will have tipped over a bit into one with some weight for the tree to have fallen, and some weight for it not to have fallen. That tipping of weights is something happening, all right, but the thing that happens is not exactly that the tree falls. The tree falling is part of it, but only part. What are these 'weights'? Good question. They're complex numbers. What do they mean? Hard to say, in general. We do know that, if you got a whole lot of absolutely identical trees, but completely separate from each other, and waited the same length of time for all of them, then listened to hear if you heard any falling sounds, then in each case you'd simply hear either that the tree had fallen, or else hear nothing. Collecting this data for the whole lot of identically prepared starting trees, you'd find that the number of cases where you hear that the tree has fallen, versus the number of cases where you hear nothing, would be accurately predicted by a certain way of squaring the complex 'weight' numbers. That's how it will seem if you listen for trees to fall. What's really happening, though? Maybe all that happens when you listen is that the state of the universe goes to one with two weighted cases: either the tree is standing and you heard nothing, or it has fallen and you heard it fall. So you become part of the story, just like the tree. I don't think that can be the whole explanation, though, because I'm left asking why it always feels to me that I'm either one or the other, not a weighted sum of both. There seems to me to still be an axiom needed, to get from weighted sums to either/ors. This issue may be a problem for experiments, though. If we run an experiment where a bug listens for a tree to fall, it'll be hard to rule out the possibility that the bug just becomes part of the quantum story along with the tree. So we might not really learn anything, whatever happened.

This game has a whole bunch of factions, and there are late-game faction quests for one or the other of them scattered all over the continent. There are also a lot of optional tough fights, for which there's an easy way (though maybe only later) and a hard way, and the most natural thing to do plot-wise is sneak carefully past some bad stuff. It you really want to toast everything, there's a ton of loot to be had, but yes, there are a lot of very tough areas even rather early. You can't just steamroll from beginning to end. The other thing is that battle creations are finally good in G5, especially the tralls. This comes as a surprise, since battle creations have never been any good in any previous Geneforge game, with the partial exception of rots. Kyhsakks are disappointing, Wingbolts are okay but nerfed in comparison with G4. The disposable Shock Tralls are quite worthwhile, since they get two attacks per turn. A pseudo-singleton shaper-type who creates seven fresh Shock Tralls at the beginning of every zone can trash anything pretty easily except for the final challenge zone, and you can get to that well before the end of the game, if I remember rightly.