Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle
The generally negative-sum struggle for fascist state power is diametrically opposed to the positive-sum logic of cooperation that is the very heart of capitalism, and the justification of democracy.
I am tall enough to wish I were two inches shorter. Do any very bright minds wish they were dimmer?
A few weeks ago I read – I’ve forgotten where – an article reporting with a bit of worry that Americans stopped getting taller about fifty years ago. You might say aha, Eisenhower’s America stops caring, ordinary folks’ health and nutrition suffer, unlike the progressive Dutch who keep on zooming up — but no: the trend has gone flat for rich and poor, hip and square. It’s a puzzler.
But it’s not bad news in itself. I know most of you would rather be taller, for social reasons, but would anyone be better off if everyone were two inches taller? Sooner or later (I suspect sooner) you run into the cube-square law.
May 30: Found it again. (Cited by yet another weird sf fan.)
June 08: Another version of the story, in the New Yorker. (Cited by Angelweave)
2011: after TCS reorganization
I spent the Seventies in Champaign, Illinois, which is on the boundary between two cicada broods: X (1970) and XIX (1972). Yet I seem to remember that the bugs were out every summer, though not in Biblical numbers. Does my memory divide the two swarm years by the twelve years I spent there?
I just had the most clever idea, thanks to watching part of Firefly for the nth time.
Now and then you may need to talk to someone on subspace video relay. Each of you is looking at the monitor, not the camera, so the illusion of eye contact – and thus some gestural nuance – is lost. (Or so I assume; I have not tried it.)
Solution: bracket the monitor (horizontally) with two cameras, and transmit the image in fine vertical stripes, corresponding to an array of prisms on the monitor. Each user gets a binocular view of the other, centered in the right place.
(Later: Dad tells me he almost got to see a Sharp notebook computer with such a display. He’s jazzed about the possibility of adapting Visual Python‘s stereo feature for it.)
Drawback: the cameras are farther apart than your eyes (unless the monitor is tiny), and so the image may seem to bulge grotesquely.
Alternative: process the two views into a single interpolated view; I believe the algorithm already exists, but have no idea how much processing power it needs.
I’ve had quite enough bogus PayPal verification notices, thank you, you can stop now.
Some people take offense at the term Human Resources, on the grounds that it turns persons into something less. But I say: I’d rather not let the Firm have the entire Me, even if they wanted it, so I don’t mind if my marketable subset has a different label.