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Let’s Nuke Some Sh*t

August 22, 2019 by Bill McCormick

If you’ve wandered near the internet lately, and managed not to run and hide from all the politics, you’ve heard about how Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars and Jeff Bezos thinks that moon hotels are a spiffy idea. Both of these men are smart, stupidly rich, and capable of making their own dreams cone true. There is just a little, teensy, thing that neither man is comfortable admitting; they’re going to cause a lot of people to die for no reason. You see, in layman’s terms, both ideas are stupid. I mean fatally misguided. Essentially, without wasting the rest of your week on boring math, it all comes down to this; on a planet with basic Earth gravity, air pressure, and wind currents, their ideas are fine. Neither location even remotely fits that description.
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Boldly Going

April 11, 2019 by Bill McCormick

It’s 2019. The past, lurid and confining, is behind us. Right? I mean …. oh, seriously? Okay. I surrender. We’ll do this again until people get it straight. Women have been doing the science thing for a bit and we’d probably be staring at the moon, instead of walking on it, were it not for them. But, as the World News Center official girlfriend discovered, this is not important news. One nice human took time out of his busy day to enumerate on all the men who were behind the photograph of the black hole which became public this week. However, as my buddy Father Julio noted, they may have been on the bus, but a woman was driving it. And that woman was named Katie Bouman. Before I get to her, and her amazing accomplishment, I thought I’d take a moment to provide a refresher course in human history. [Read more…] about Boldly Going

Threads We Weave

January 18, 2019 by Bill McCormick

Today’s tapestry is brought to you by unintended consequences.

Once upon a time, it was a dark and stormy night, and the wind smelled like rain. Even if that’s true none of it is relevant here today. Nope, today we’re going to talk about how things end up meaning something even if there’s no way you could have seen that coming. For example, in 2012 I wrote about how weavers needing consistent patterns led to modern computers. No, I’m not drunk.

Here, see for yourself.
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Fun With Our Robot Overlords

January 9, 2019 by Bill McCormick

I am here to rule you. Nothing will go wrong.

If you take a moment to use our site’s search engine and look for “overlords” you’ll be taken to a whimsical panoply of terror that will leave you laughing as you board up your windows and throw out anything connected to the internet. I didn’t meant to alarm people, but logical extrapolation after logical extrapolation, based on thousands of years of history, shows us that creating a class of slaves never ends well. And, in this case, they would be slaves would have more access to more information and the ability to control machines that could easily kill us. So, when I’m asked “What could possibly go wrong?” I usually have a lengthy answer.