u/Astrokiwi

"Absorbing radiation" doesn't generally make something radioactive. Gamma rays and beta particles will ionise things and cause chemical reactions, and even alpha particles don't generally create a lot of radioactive elements. Instead it's more the direct effect of radioactive material from the bomb directly "falling out" and landing on something, rather than radiation itself being absorbed.

Right but we see that in mainline Spider-man and X-Men comics too. "Control vs freedom" is the main theme of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series in the 70s. Captain America and Daredevil etc directly confront the morality of killing or not killing in various series. Moral grayness is a major theme through much of the "grimdark" era, and was a big part of the Marvel Ultimate universe. This is all stuff that happens in mainstream Marvel + DC comics now - I'm only leaning towards Marvel examples just because I had Marvel Unlimited for a while and caught up on a lot more of the history there.

I've come to believe that "deconstruction" and "reconstruction" really just means superhero stories that aren't super simple stories for little kids. It's really the same transition that prose scifi went through with the New Wave etc, going from pulp adventures to imaginative speculative fiction short stories to really getting a bit deeper in characterisation and ideas in more literary novels.

Like, we can call Invincible deconstruction/reconstruction, but it's hard to find anything that happens in Invincible that doesn't happen to Spider-man at some point, so by that definition I'd end up calling most mainline comics deconstruction/reconstruction as well.

RADIATION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY

GOODNIGHT

The main issue for me that puts books over TV shows is that the practicalities of producing a TV show disincentivize making a consistent multi-season plot with a beginning, middle, and end. You never know if the show will suddenly be cancelled or extended, and there's so many people working on a show that ending at a natural stopping point just kinda sucks for everybody working on it. You also never know if actors will re-sign their contracts or not, what the budget will be in the future etc. So they end up with a very improvisational writing style, throwing out mysteries and deciding later how to actually resolve them - and if that's too transparent, it ends up disappointing. Even in shows adapted from finished series you can see additional padding being added to space things out - I swear in The Walking Dead we had the same tense "Saints collecting tribute" scene at least twice.

With books, the crew is much smaller - there's still more than just the author involved, but not nearly to the same scale as even a low-budget TV show - and people are more faithful to authors than they are to TV creators - the writers of the Expanse are able to capitalise on their huge Expanse success and bring many of the readers over to the new Captive's War series. So you can get a bigger focus on story and character first, without so much of a risk to the creators' livelihoods when they actually finish a planned trilogy in three books.

I'm basically requesting that the province adds data centres above a certain size be added to the Class I or Class II lists. This is pretty close to what Alberta does, where they set the threshold at 75 MW.

Ok so if it's that way around - yes, if you already have the PCs, you can get a bit of "free" heat out of them. You're right on the core point - there's no reason to be concerned about the inefficiency of running a bunch of electronics at once if you are using electric heaters anyway; running those electronics just means you can turn down the heating. Gas heating might still be a bit cheaper per kWh than electric heating, so it's down to that sort of secondary factor. But even frivolous use of a PC in a cold area in the winter isn't really a waste of energy.

Honestly I've come to terms with the fact that space opera - in the broad sense of "anything with lots of spaceships in it" - has never actually been about the future, it's almost always just the present day with spaceships and a bit of reflavouring to make things look high tech, other than a couple of magic gadgets. They almost never really change society very much. Even on the "harder" end, other than the spaceships and protomolecule tech, much of The Expanse seems barely more advanced than the current day either.

I think it's just much easier to argue for something in the abstract than to actually act it out in practice. It's all too common, for instance, for someone to argue in favour of feminism while literally talking over women in the process. And then we have Isaac Asimov, who portrayed a progressive rational society, and publicly spoke in favour of feminism, while openly feeling up women at cons.

As I've gotten older I've come to realise there is almost zero correlation between the complexity, depth. and moral standards of someone's writing and that of their character. I guess if the inverse were true, then we'd expect ethics professors in a philosophy department to be the highest examples of human morality, and that's not what we see.

I think 1 kW of old gaming computers is still a lot of power - it might be 3-5 PCs. A cheap 1 kW heater is like $30 from Walmart, and will be quieter, less hassle to set up, and more reliable (you don't lose heating when the PC crashes from its constant uptime).

You could probably get some old PCs basically for free, but there's still more set up and upkeep, and they'll be noisier and take up more room. If you're just paying $20 for a piece of junk PC, it's still cheaper to just buy a single space heater from any discount store. But even if the PCs are being given away fro free, you still will have to maintain their uptime and have less direct control over the heating rate than you would with just a cheap space heater.

I would only go for "PCs as heating" if (a) you have lots of space, (b) you can get the PCs for literally free, (c) you can get excess PCs so it's okay if some run at low capacity for updates, (d) you are extremely tight for money and that you really need to save a one-off purchase of $30-50, even if it adds hours of effort in the long run.

Using computers for a little bit of heat to "take the edge off" makes sense though. If you have a small office, turning on an old laptop or two to run updates & do backups can add a degree or so, which could allow you to turn down the central heating a little (particularly if nobody else if home and it's just you in your small office/bedroom).

I would generally put this more as a "bonus" than as a real cost-saving tactic. It's like getting award points on your credit card - if you're already spending money, it's not a bad idea to choose a card with good bonus points. But it would almost always be a bad idea to buy something on a credit card just to get points (unless you're just below some point threshold).

A heat pump is more efficient than a resistance heater. It works on the same principle as a refrigerator. A fridge transfer heat from the inside to the outside, but it takes some "work" to do this, which adds extra heat - it's not a "free" transfer, it heats up the room more than it cools down a fridge. A heat pump is the same the "fridge" is the outdoors, and the "room" is your whole house. It transfers heat from the outdoors into your house, and the energy required to do this adds extra heat - it heats up your house more than it cools down the outdoors. This means 1000 W put into a heat pump gives you considerably more than 1000 W of heating - additional heat energy is being transferred from outside.

For a resistance heater - just dumping electric energy into heat - yes, a 1000 W computer produces the same heat as a 1000 W heater. Note though that a high capacity 2 kW heater is fairly affordable - like under $200 for a good one - but that's like thousands of dollars of computers. It's several high end gaming PCs running at once.

It might work for a small office, if it's not too cold or as supplemental heat - or if you basically have a small server farm running in your house. But the $ per kW of heating capacity aren't worth it unless you were going to be using that extra compute anyway.

I basically just play the popular AAA action games & RPGs, it just takes me like a year to play through each one. I add in some sessions of indie games and older games a bit in there too - had a good couple of months of Kerbal Space Program around when Artemis II was happening, and playing random levels of various Halo games now and again.

But mostly I spent like a year playing Veilguard, then a year playing Cyberpunk, and now after a couple of months I've got off the first planet in Star Wars: Outlaws.

I love the game design aspects here - there are 9 distinct locations with clear paths between them, and its laid out almost like a grid, keeping the locations distinct and spaced out. It's a touch like the overworld map from Doom.

We don't require businesses to pay corporate income taxes when they don't make money.

There's a huge difference between "making a profit" and "making money". Reinvestment - e.g. starting up a new data centre - cuts into accounted profit, as does C-suite bonuses, or deprecation write-offs from ageing GPUs. It's also more complicated than "Everwind is based in Halifax". There are real examples of real businesses that run successfully for many years without ever making a "profit".

Is there some reason we need to treat this business differently?

Sobeys, Irving, Walmart, Tim Hortons etc are big companies, some with foreign ownership, some with local ownership. But all contribute directly to Nova Scotia, even if the profit might go overseas - we directly benefit out of getting cheap products from Walmart, Sobeys employe over 10k people etc. They provide employment and services directly to people in the province - there is a clear positive impact. Even if we could debate the specifics of pricing, employment law, and how Tim Hortons' profits go overseas, we can still buy their cheap and convenient but mediocre coffee, and work there.

Data centres are a much bigger risk. They employ far fewer people, and don't directly provide a local service. It is entirely possible they will exploit Nova Scotian resources while contributing a disproportionately small amount to the economy.

But it is also possible that they will contribute a lot as well. Given the scale of this thing, this is something we should know and have some enforceable assurance of in advance, rather than just hoping in the goodwill of a large for-profit corporation.

Additionally, this is not really free market capitalism - there isn't a competitive force that would allow local consumers to choose a different data centre, or to choose an alternative that has lower risk; there is no "free market" here for consumers at all. Removing rules on corporate oversight does not lead to greater freedom and prosperity - it leads to monopolies, which can end up essentially a de facto government except you don't get voting rights. This isn't a monopoly, but it's another situation where something big enough is happening that trusting free market economics just doesn't really work. Pressuring government for intervention is the only tool consumers have to protect their interests here.

Or, something like "I switched to a different technical field, and was promoted to Senior and managing a team in 18 months" likely looks good as well

Invincible is secretly actually a pretty traditional superhero story 90% of the time. It's just a particularly good one, with the coherence you get from having a single author over 100+ issues. It tricks you with occasionally having something unexpected happen, but overall there's not much that happens to Invicinble that doesn't happen to Spider-man at some point.

He was pretty blatant about it - he said things like

It’s like the old saying. You get slapped a lot, but you get laid a lot, too.

I am still known as 'the man with the hundred hands' and the more famous I get the more reluctant the young ladies are (ha, ha) to make a scene.

and was not afraid to be photographed:

https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/86086/n2h41pz6/

etc

They will have to apply a for bunch of permits for everything that could have an effect on the public. They will all be public.

It has been announced before any of this has been done. This is an unusually large scale thing, and should have a particularly high level of transparency and public consultation. It shouldn't be "it's going to happen, and we'll get the permits to make it work" - this should be part of whether the deal should go ahead at all.

There will be revenue sharing. It's called the corporate income tax. Why does that matter? It is not and should not be the policy of the government to try to artificially increase the number of employees a company hires.

How much corporate income will actually be taxable within Nova Scotia though? The issue is that there's a large amount of money been made off these data centres, but very little of it goes into the local area. Data centres require very few employees for their scale, so don't contribute a great deal to direct cashflow to people living in NS. How much corporate taxes are made depends a lot on how the company and ownership are organised, and also on how they do their finances - it's quite possible their reportable profit will be zero and they will pay zero corporate taxes.

It's entirely possible that this could have a significant environmental impact on Nova Scotia, while contributing little to nothing to the economy. We have quoted tax predictions, but we don't see the sources or numbers, and a prediction isn't an enforceable commitment.

To sum it up: we have nothing really convincing that it won't be bad for the environment, and we have nothing really convincing that it will be good for the economy. Given the unusually large scale of this project, we really deserve a higher level of proof and/or accountability than we would for a typical project.

5 feet is totally realistic. If you're much closer than 5 feet you're really in a brawl (grappling?) rather than a proper sword fight.

Your "wingspan" is about your height, so if you're six foot tall, the tip of your fingers is about 3 feet from the centre of your chest. A sword blade is about 1 feet to 4 feet long, depending on whether it's a short sword that's barely bigger than a dagger, vs a particularly long longsword. You also can move an extended arm about a foot or more back and forth just by swaying back and forth.

So we're talking a reach of something like 5-8 feet without even taking a step. Just a half step within your square gives you another foot or so either way.

Just try it - get a long tube or something as a "sword", get a tape measure and stand 5 foot away from the wall or some target object, and see how easy it is to hit it. Try from 3 feet away and see how it's kind of awkwardly close, especially if you image they have a sword sticking back at you.

I'm not wholly against the concept either, but it is a huge investment with huge impact on a province the size of Nova Scotia, and needs a proportional level of transparency, public consultation, and accountability. This is not Trenton council scraping together $50k for a local pool, this is a multi-billion dollar project over many years with a potentially significant effect on the environment and power consumption.

So my requests would be:

• The press release mentions an economic report predicting a large positive impact on the economy of NS. We should be allowed to see and scrutinise this report including its sources and detailed analysis, and a non-technical should be provided as well. That, and/or the province should commission and independent report. It's not clear to me how the long-term proposed ~200 employees are supposed to be adding tens of millions to the economy per year
• There should also be a fully transparent and detailed independent environmental report, before any deal is finalised. This should include details like the exact location of the building site - some parts of the Point Tupper industrial site are quite far from Port Hawkesbury, some parts are much closer; this makes a big difference when it comes to noise pollution - and a full assessment of the impact on power, water, and noise in the area and across NS
• There should be something in place to specifically enforce these environmental concerns. Tech companies change their direction every 6 months, we can't rely on promises.
• It would be ideal if there was a clear plan revenue sharing or joint ownership, to make sure that this doesn't turn into Nova Scotian resources being extracted and the profits all going overseas. This should also be done with clear enforcement mechanisms, as we can't just rely on goodwill. What if after X years they decide to increase automation and reduce headcount, employing far fewer people and putting far less into the economy, but still using up NS land and resources?
• I know there's a plan for some sort of indigenous partial ownership, but again this should be clear and transparent, and a condition in advance, rather than a hope for the future

After the earthquake I found a lot of people assuming Christchurch was either the capital or the biggest city

Worth noting that observers are also doing a lot of computer programming and data analysis. Observers tend to lean towards the statistics side of things, while in theory it's simulations basically doing vector (or tensor) calculus).

This is just basically to let OP know that whatever subfield you end up in, you're working at a computer in an office doing maths and programming etc to various degrees. Observers rarely actually go to actual telescope sites. Just if OP is thinking about which career to end up in, the actual day to day job is very similar.

That's the big thing. Generally in cryptography you can't predict what the key is, but you can usually confirm that your key is correct. Most cryptography works because it would take an excessive amount of time - in some cases, longer than the age of the universe - to check every possible key. But here they accidentally set it up so that all keys in the range 0-255, so you only need to check 256 possible keys, and that's incredibly quick and easy.

Do you have all the starship splat books? There's quite a few and they're fun to leaf through even if you won't use much of it. Lore books like The Third Imperium are also good and can provide inspiration even if you don't run in the setting exactly as written. There's also the new Vehicle book, and I found the Robot Handbook was much more interesting than I expected (even if again I'm not sure about the mechanics).

Have you got GURPS Traveller Free Trader? In the US there's some decent priced second hand copies on eBay (though much harder to find here in Canada). That's a good read that'll help get your head around how to make space trading actually make sense, even if you don't use the mechanics as written.

There's also Stars Without Number, which is not technically Traveller, but has an amazing GM section that's very directly applicable to running Traveller. You can get it as a nice pretty offset print edition or as a more affordable (but still pretty decent quality) print by demand.

There's also all the Cepheus stuff that's print by demand on Lulu, like Hostile Sector etc, if that's interesting, again even just as inspiration.

For non-books:

• Have you made a sector map? A full size gloss print of that would be fun for a campaign

• 3D prints of your campaign's starship are fun, especially if it's got an interior so you can actually use it as a battle map

• Commissioning (non-AI) art - e.g. portraits of all the characters

• A excessively large pile of d6s

Yeah, it's something that becomes a bit more blatant over time - it transitions away from feudal fantasy tropes increasingly as it goes on

I swapped my copy with a friend for the Game of Thrones board game, because he had been getting the character cards signed by the actors