malloyd

Welcome to the global village, a place where falling out of your raised bed and landing on tatami mats passes as an unremarkable thing that could happen.

I doubt this software was specially optimized for reading the weather, it's presumably repurposed from some commercial book reading package or something. Optimizing would probably cost more than hiring interns to read it into a tape recorder for several years, which makes it hard to justify in the annual budget. Sure 5 years down the road you'll have savings to show for it, but Congress isn't authorizing the budget for 5 years at a time.

Probably not. The reason this comes up in philosophy classes though isn't so much for whether it means anything about you, but because it's a close cousin to one of the great debates in the history of philosophy - the one about proving the existence of God. It's a way of coming at "existence is not a predicate" that doesn't require getting tangled up in arguments about religion.

Who has looked at Diane's records so far? I suppose being adopted but still knowing the exact time of her birth does imply *she* has seen her birth certificate, and it was filled out at the time, not something generated after the fact for a Jane Doe foundling, but another information source isn't impossible for that. Maybe she actually knows somebody from her birth family who told her. Being adopted doesn't necessarily mean she has no contacts, or even no genetic kinship - one of my cousins was formally adopted by his mother's sister. Though if she was born in another universe that would imply a lot of traffic between them.

Depends on your definition of hard. It requires more skills and equipment than the more usual method of getting women pregnant, but in vitro fertilization clinics do it as an outpatient procedure all the time. If both of them were IVF babies I suppose that would be possible given a sufficiently corrupt clinic, but if you are going to that much trouble to have a baby, putting her up for adoption afterward would be, well, *strange*.

Have you tried? An amazing amount of information is now available online in already organized format for the US and much of Europe at places like familysearch. I think largely through the obsession of the Latter Day Saints.

Actually not so good, small holes don't leak that fast and aren't too hard to plug enough to leak even more slowly. Punching a few small holes in a boat (or an airplane or spaceship for that matter) isn't all that effective. If you do kill a vehicle that way, it's because you hit something important on the other side of the hole, and triremes don't have many critical parts. It's also *really hard* to shoot a hole below the waterline - water is 700 times denser than air and slows bullets proportionally. A few meters of water is plenty to stop a bullet, or even most shells. Especially if you are shooting from the surface, and hence coming it at a shallow angle, which means shooting through a lot more water than the depth you are going to hit.

Most people's race relations through history really. The ethnic enslavement kind only shows up when you have a labor shortage among your own group, which isn't nearly as common as having a surplus population you'd like to steal your neighbors' cropland to support. Still, it does happen. I wonder if we'll start to see it reappear in first world places with negative population growth like Western Europe or Japan in the near future. I think it's already a factor in the Gulf States.

As a purely practical matter, how could you enforce wage equality? Minimum wages are hard enough to enforce, actual *equality* at levels higher than that... Both parties in the transaction have a real incentive to cheat - employers obviously want to pay less, but the applicant who otherwise wouldn't get a job but would prefer not to starve to death has a strong motive to make a lower counteroffer too. And then there's the problem that you need to standardize jobs so you can compare them. Rare or unique jobs, like say anything that involves doing something new and innovative, must be made illegal. It sounds good, but actual implementation would be an administrative nightmare at best. I do think wage transparency - making what you pay everybody a matter of public record - might go a long way toward the goal, but Americans will scream privacy rights, not for employers sake but because they'd have to reveal what they earn themselves. Admittedly much of the problem is at the minimum wage level (though some of the grumbling is about tech jobs). But that just highlights the difficulty - it's already illegal to pay immigrants less than minimum wage.

I think this misunderstands the politics. People like that are all for illegal immigration, and like the welfare state (People who aren't even using the slaves will pay some of the cost to feed them? Sign me up!). They voted for Clinton. Trump supporters who hate the Other mostly do because they are the competition for jobs. The last thing they want is slavery to make replacing them even more attractive to employers. I think Americans get them confused because they think slavery is related to racism. It's not. People who favor slavery as a source of cheap labor, and for that matter most of them for it for sadistic or sexual reasons, were and are perfectly happy to enslave people of their own ethnic group. It's a historical accident that one particular kind of racism was used try to quell moral objections to slavery in the Americas. And in any case it was a different flavor of racism that is rather rare now, one that classed other races as resources to be used for our advantage. Modern racism is mostly about other races as competition for resources. It's evil extreme is not enslavement, but genocide.

You just need to know what the particular forum really cares about. I've seen a thread on the evil Nazis turn into a discussion of the details of Nestorian theology (via how many people the Mongols killed in central Asia).

It's surprisingly difficult to sink wooden boats with cannon fire, and this isn't a big enough caliber for a really effective bursting shell. Also PT boats may well be light enough the greek warships ramming tactic can sink them. Can you kill enough people on the warships to immobilize them before any of them can close? At 1000:1 odds it doesn't look good for a stand up fight, but you're faster, so in a running engagement maybe. Generally if the other side can hurt you at all, even if it takes a really lucky hit, engaging disciplined opponents at worse than a few handfuls to 1 odds is not something you should try by choice no matter how much of an edge you think your superior skills or weapons give you. Run away and try to figure out a way to fight them in detail.

Nah, nobody cares about the 13th. That just ended slavery, and even the most crazed elements of the alt-right mostly don't think slavery is a good idea anymore. The 14th is the one that defines anybody born in the US as a citizen though. If you reversed it, arguably the Dred Scott decision still stands and non-whites are not and cannot be citizens of the United States. There certainly are people in favor of that, especially in a more limited form that would let you redefine citizenship for smaller groups. There are a lot of people who might like to deny it to children of illegal immigrants for example.

No. It's barely conceivable Trump could lose this way - if he announced tomorrow his intention to swear his oath of office to uphold the Constitution except for the illegitimate XIVth amendment and his plan to execute any member of Congress who doesn't agree to vote him godhood it's possible his electors would vote for Pence or something, but even if they found a reason to ditch Trump they aren't going to give the election to Clinton.

That's normal. Probably half of what politics is like will make sense to toddlers. The more sophisticated stuff may require middle schoolers, or at least adult chimpanzees - there's some stuff that puberty influences. Yeah OK, some of the *issues* can get pretty complicated, but once you peel away the technobabble (I guess for politics you call this rhetoric) the actual core mostly doesn't.

All presidents push up against their Constitutional limits about as hard as they can, but it slanders most of them to say they didn't stay within its limits. You may disagree where those limits *should* be, but that's not the same thing at all. They do have habit of changing their own opinions on where those are from their time in Congress. Aside: have we had a President other than Taft who sat on the Supreme Court? It'd be interesting to see if they switched back. Obama is still fairly young and a former Constitutional Law professor.... And contributions affect policy? Say it isn't so. Seriously with the bloody obvious influence exerted by donors to political campaigns, we're supposed to get worked up over contributions to a charity? If donors to the Clinton campaign, or people paying them actual speaking fees, aren't getting more for their money than donors to the charity, the Clintons must be paragons of virtue as politicians go. But nobody wants to call much attention to that sort of thing, might encourage campaign finance reform or something.

It's clearly one of those subtle diseases magicians can come down with, you know like Witches Nose, Compulsive Monologuing, Fairy Twinkle, or Post Traumatic Spontaneous Pulverization.

Collecting really detailed information about large areas (and we don't actually know *how* large) does require a lot of energy. But really, we don't know how it works. It looks like imagination, but then it would look like imagination if it actually works by creating an entire duplicate universe, transferring Sarah's consciousness to it, and giving her the powers of a god. Does it persist even if something happens to her real body? Could she stay in it forever and actually become a god? Probably not, but we don't really know.

I assumed it was the gremlin. Abraham summons it "Very Early Tuesday Morning", but it doesn't interact with Elliot until lunch, where it gets unsummoned, so to provide information on Ellen's "curse" it has to have checked her first (though I suppose deduced it from Elliot's ability is an option).

Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, the Planck length (and the other Planck units) aren't some independent parameter of the universe. It's a combination of the actual fundamental constants that happens to come out in units of length - specifically square root (hbar G/c^3). So to make it 1/7 smaller, your options are shrink hbar by a factor of 49, which does nasty stuff to relative energy levels - I think it means the vibrational energy content of every molecule in the thing now vastly exceeds that necessary to instantly dissociate it, possibly into plasma - shrink G similarly (the rotation of the Earth throws the shrunk object off into space) or increase c by 7^2/3, which might be the most survivable, but still does bad things to relative energy levels, electromagnetic forces, and may well raise the strength of nuclear binding energies enough for something to start spontaneously fusing.

I'm not sure it matters. If electricity won't flow out of the wall socket, it won't flow out of the battery either. But any debate about how the simulation works that assumes physics is pretty obviously nonsensical. If stuff worked the way physics would require time stopped stuff to, Sarah wouldn't be able to see (no time for photons to cross her eyes), or move (even air is infinitely rigid). It clearly works like basically all fictional time stops do, i.e. in ways that are complete nonsense physically but advance the story. Pandora (or Dan) may have said something about accurate simulation, and may even believe it, but they're wrong.

A moment of thought should convince you that's nonsense in this case. We never know the exact composition and atom locations of anything, and yet we are able to predict the outcome of mixing chemicals together confidently enough to build billion dollar industries around it. Yes, some systems are dynamically unstable even at the macro level - weather really looks like one over a timescale of more than a few days - but most things aren't. Much popular babble about "chaos theory" notwithstanding,the interesting stuff in the mathematics of chaotic systems is not "nothing is predictable" but "here's a way to predict if something will be unpredictable" and "some things that are chaotic are kind of predictable anyway" (check out strange attractors for that one). The quantum mechanical argument has much the same issue. You can't predict the outcome for a specific particle, but can predict the average for a lot of them very accurately. Where the uncertainty goes has always been one of the confusing problems of quantum theory, swept under the rug with "the wave function collapses" and we won't think about how.

It's hard to guess what this spell might do. It feels like there must be more to it than we've yet heard. If not Dan described it horribly - starting from the central concept of it having anything at all to do with "time". I mean "takes a mental photo of your surroundings, lets you look at details, moving yourself and them around if you like, and gives you photo editing tools if you want, which are pretty useless but make it a really cool toy" covers everything it's definitely said to do. The only time effect is "subjectively feels like you have longer to look at/play with it than actually passes while you do".

Actually chemists are a bit vague on "has carbon" - there are things that have carbon but aren't organic (carbonates for example) and a few things that lack it that are sometimes allowed in the club (siloxanes, sulfur chains and the like). Of course the *original* meaning of the term in chemistry actually has nothing to do with carbon at all, it's "stuff made by (or found in) organisms" - dating back to the time when it was legitimate science to think life could be made of something different than the rest of creation. Given the way magic is usually portrayed, if the term matters at all to it, it is likely to use that definition - magic cares about life a lot more than about atomic nuclei

It is a fine name. I'd actually be very surprised if you couldn't turn up at least a couple world languages in which it's a perfectly ordinary name. We're mostly biased by having seen it in print as an English word, which of course the characters haven't. Just hearing it as a name, you'd most likely expect it to be spelled Bachs or Baux, which look quite plausible as family names even in some major European languages don't they?