I’m pretty sure he was wearing the sash from his first scene in Encounter at Farpoint.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating the obvious… At first Ford formed a theory to account for this human behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep on excercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

One of my favorite passages from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The fusion reaction with the lowest requirements is the deuterium + tritium reaction. Both are heavy hydrogen isotopes. A common hydrogen nucleus consists of a single proton, a deuterium nucleus consists of a proton and neutron, and a tritium nucleus consists of a proton and two neutrons. The first two are stable while the last is radioactive.

Deuterium is rare but naturally present on Earth. It’s no challenge to harvest it from water. You can come across some fun facts when you talk to fusion folks. The top inch of San Diego Bay has enough deuterium to power the city for a year, when fused with tritium in a “burning plasma”.

Tritium is not naturally present in harvestable quantities on Earth. This has to be bred through other reactions. The reaction of interest is lithium reacting with a neutron (a neutron is a product of the fusion reaction) which produces tritium and other products.

Effectively, the easiest fusion reaction involves “burning” deuterium and lithium.

Now, there are other fusion reactions that don’t involve tritium, but they are more challenging physically, and some have their own challenges for sourcing the required fuel. Almost all fusion reactor proposals today are based on the deuterium + tritium fusion reaction.

For some reason being a nerd about heraldry scratches an itch for me. Traditionally the “stain” Sanguine represents blood.

Red is the most common color in national flags. I wouldn’t want to cede the color to Nazis.

There’s something kind of clever about heraldic implications of the original (intentional or not) that this misses.

Supposedly, the first rule of heraldry is " the rule of tincture: metal should not be placed upon metal, nor color upon color". White represents sliver and yellow represents gold, so they should not touch (metal upon metal). There are many exceptions in heraldry, but the rule still kicks around. Vatican City’s flag explicitly breaks this rule to demonstrate that “Vatican follows God’s rules and not man’s.”

I find it clever that a flag of capitalism would have a field of gold and a giant roundel of silver (called a plate when silver, silver plates are also associated with wealth), and they touch to demonstrate that capitalism doesn’t care about the rules.

In heraldry red often stands for courage, and that’s not a virtue I associate with capitalism. Also a red roundel is called a tart, and tarts are delicious.

According to some myths, King Solomon did something like this. With his wisdom he learned the true name of a powerful genie, and with the true name a of a genie he could bind them and force them to obey him. So he commands the bound genie to give him all the true names he knew, and bring these genies to him. Once he had these genies, repeat the process until all the genies were bound under his seal.

There’s lots of talk about the kids who didn’t wait 5 minutes, but I also find it interesting to read about the kids who did delay gratification. It’s not that they were superior specimens, or junior ascetics, or reborn Buddhist monks. They were as tempted as the rest.

They mostly avoided temptation by coming up with games to distract themselves. It’s something creative and it can both be learned and improved like a skill. It reminds me of the people who compete in memory games. It’s not a super normal talent, it’s games people can practice.

It does raise a question why kids who could do this were more academically successful later, and if kids who are taught this will have similar success later. Important questions that should be considered carefully.

Musk is trying to check all the boxes:

• Iteration X: Tesla, Solar City, Boring Co.
• New World Order: xAI, OpenAI, Zip2
• Progenitors: Neuralink
• Syndicate: PayPal, X (Twitter)
• Void Engineers: Space X

It’s like a Syndicate stooge staged a hostile take of the other conventions of the Technocratic Union, and it’s going about as well as expected. Cybernetics is a bit of a cheat as it’s in the overlap between Progenitors and Iteration X. If anything he’s trying to sideline Progenitors out as he boosts anti-vax statements.

He said force, not kinetic energy. They’re probably treating the acceleration term in F=ma as proportional velocity, which strikes me as naive, but it makes the math easier and it’s correct if the error bars are big enough… Functionally you’re comparing momentum at that point, but I imagine you can find some American truck built to evade CAFE standards that has a 4-1/3:1 weight ratio with some version of the Civic.

Yeah, just like he “…needs just a little more time to process his loss,” in 2020.

They have no more fig leaves left to cover their shame.

I’ve been working my way through NADDPOD, and there was a great session where

It was such a great session. It really emblemizes how I try to approach being a GM. Have a prepared roadmap, but have space around the road for the characters to take a roadrally off-road.

I mean, obviously I don’t know how the internals of how the party works from first hand experience. That said I seriously don’t think we should build them up into a bete noir. Every party is in the business of winning. The party went to the center because Nixon walloped McGovern, and Reagan crushed both his elections. Also, the DLC found a way to fund the party after labor support waned for a variety of reasons.

Did the party impede Sanders’ primary campaign against Hillary? It’s been acknowledged that they did. Of course he’s been a career independent, and not a party member for one thing. Probably more importantly, party leadership still doesn’t think going to the left will win nationally. Of course we choose our candidates through a primary process, but like it or not, the party’s job is to win elections, and it’s not outside the party’s mandate to support candidates who they think will win.

But party leadership isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t a conspiracy. It is a group of people trying to make sense of things and find a way to succeed. Of course the old guard is resisting change because they still think they’ve got the recipe for success. Time will tell how it plays out. It’s going to be hard work, and as party voters our ability to influence change in the party has been diluted by a bunch of consultants that are telling the old guard what they want to hear, and only face a reckoning every two years. I imagine, in the face of fascistic tendencies in the rightwing party, moderation and compromise will be even less attractive, even to a center left party. We’ve got to make our voice heard, and when we get a crack, we’ve got to deliver wins.

Indeed. It feels like a lot of historical context is missing in Lemmy political discussions. The Democratic party was the party of FDR, JFK, and LBJ. The Democratic Leadership Council took over the party after the left candidates failed to deliver election successes, but even then, the DLC had to do the work to take the party leadership positions, build a funding network, and win elections. Before that FDR had to wrestle party control from the the Dixiecrats.

Hopefully Hogg and allies will be successful in reforming the party once again.

If she’s anything like Phyllis Schlafly, why yes, the moment her husband tells her to get back in the kitchen she absolutely will! Right away! She’ll drop everything, her privilege, her power, her perks. Her entire staff will be S.O.L. after just a word from her husband. If he just says the word, why, she wouldn’t utter a word of protest. Honest!

I’m often reminded that while Jesus counselled his followers to turn the other cheek, he reviled the hypocrites.

Have you seen Dmge ? It’s web based, but it has fog of war and a few other nice tricks, if you’ve got the maps.

Just a few weeks ago there were left voices mad that the party wasn’t preventing Andrew Cuomo’s campaign to be mayor of NYC. I didn’t see any one on the left crying foul over suggesting the party shouldn’t play fair.

The number of warheads each nation maintains is agreed on in the START treaties, and those levels are determined by stockpile effectiveness. The US is recognized to have superior targeting and guidance systems, so they need fewer warheads to maintain parity with Russia’s stockpile.

The best possible outcome is for SDI and it’s descendants to be a complete waste of taxpayer money. If some clever chap comes up with a practical missile defense system, Russia would immediately generate enough warheads to overwhelm such a system and maintain parity.

Each missile represents a potential fault path to WWIII. We’ve been lucky with at least a couple near misses in our history. I don’t look forward to a future with more.

A lot of the usual suspects, but when my group of grognards plays we reach back a bit. Tomorrow we’re playing Traveler. Last few times we played it was Champions.

I’d like to run an OpenD6 game of I can pull a group together. The last few times I ran it was D6 Star Wars, but I like the system for other genres as well.

Let’s not forget the endless conversations about which park is Werewolf territory and which is Gangrel Vampire territory. Then the slow realization that you don’t live in a place cool enough to attract any supernatural presence.

To make things even more awkward, prior to making promises to the Jewish community, the UK had already made promises to the Arab community to provide independence to Arab Palestine in exchange for fighting the Turks.