The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion
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Daily Chit Chat
Ed wrote: "I'm not too worried. I don't really care if people know I pick food up off the floor and eat it. ..."EWWWWWWW
Sabri wrote: "On the topic of surveillance, I work with the waste industry and analyse lots of GPS trails from the refuse collection trucks, as well as planning/optimising waste collection routes. From what I he..."Interesting post, thnx. As always, when the Real World meets hopeful ideas, adjustments must be made!
Ed wrote: "Speaking of creepy surveillance.... Today I got an e-mail warning me that they've been recording my disgusting habits from my web-cam and are going to release it to the world.I'm not too worried...."
Ed: real email, or just leg-pulling?
ObSF: Sheckey's WATCHBIRD. Wonder if it's online?
Yup, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579... --from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1953.
He got a lot of things right, almost 70 years ago. Especially armed drones! Pretty scary stuff.
"Watchbird" was our Jan 2019 short story. The discussion is here:https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Jim wrote: ""Watchbird" was our Jan 2019 short story. The discussion is here:https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/..."
Thanks, Jim. Missed that one. And I doubt I've read "Watchbird" in 20 years or more! That I remember it so well tells you something....
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(It is apparently the same contents as The Callahan Chronicals.)
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Probably attempted blackmail. But I ignored it. My webcam lens is covered when not in use.
Just like I ignored today's e-mail message from the deputy director of the FBI trying to deliver me $410,000.
Ed wrote: "This edition of Callahan's Crazy Crosstime Bar is currently available on Amazon for $2164.69. Is it worth it?..."I've only found the first book (this is a compilation of the first 3, I believe) to be worth reading. The second isn't too bad, but the 3d is Robinson trying to be Heinlein in his post 1970 stage & I've never managed to finish it.
I adored the first book. Robinson captured the time & heart perfectly with his short stories. I especially liked the time travel story with the missionary. I grew up in the area. As best I can tell, Callahan's should be in or near Fort Salonga. There was a bar there in the 60s & 70s, the Ft Salonga Inn, I think. It was a nice quiet place, but visible from 25a & the couple that owned the place were not Callahans.
Here's a picture of the first 3 drying in & on the microwave. 
If you look on the right side, you'll see a bowl screwed to the wall that's a natural edge that didn't work out. It warped too much while I was turning it. Now I use it as kind of a catch all shelf.
Below is the Paulownia natural edge bowl with the side/bottom busted out due to a rotted branch which I found as I turned it. I was on one of the very last interior cuts when the rotted area suddenly flew off.
I'll probably try to fill the gap in with clear epoxy, although that's tough to do with an area this big across that much & many curves. It takes a lot of carving & sanding, not to mention a day for each pour. I'm not sure it's worth the time & trouble. Probably not.
Love the wood grain. Does wood dry well in the microwave?
It dries a lot faster in the microwave. I just nuke a bowl the size of these for a minute & let them sit for an hour or so before doing it again. About a dozen heats over the course of a couple of days & they're dry. I can tell because that postage scale on the left is set to measure their weight in grams. When I think they're close, I'll weight them about 10 - 15 minutes after heating & again at least an hour later. If their weight increases, they're dry.
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I was joking about the weird price on Amazon. I don't care if it's good or bad, I'm not paying over $2000 for a paperback book.
Jim wrote: "It dries a lot faster in the microwave. I just nuke a bowl the size of these for a minute & let them sit for an hour or so before doing it again. About a dozen heats over the course of a couple of ..."A quick question, do you think it would work on a slice of log? My nephew want to turn an old cross section of log into a plaque.
Papaphilly wrote: "A quick question, do you think it would work on a slice of log? My nephew want to turn an old cross section of log into a plaque."Quick question, long answer: Usually log slices get pie-shaped cracks unless the wood cells are filled with something so they don't collapse. The center or heart wood is denser than the later wood toward the edges, so it doesn't shrink as much which means something has to give. There are a few exceptions, but nothing to count on. A lot depends on the type, age, & cut of the wood. Cottonwood is so soft that sometimes the interior collapses if the outer area is intact & tight. Old hard maple (Sugar or Black) can fill up with so many minerals that it's practically petrified & won't split, but usually it does. I have turned bowls of both. More wound up in the brush pile, though.
They make some chemicals to soak the wood in that's supposed to alleviate this cracking. I've tried several different commercial kinds, mostly versions of "PEG" (Polyethylene glycol), over the years & have never been satisfied with the results. Of course, the chemists keep coming up with new products, so maybe one works now. Popular Woodworking has an article from 2009 about it here:
https://www.popularwoodworking.com/qu...
I'm not sure what chemical it is. Your nephew should probably look around & read all the comments about it he can before attempting it.
I've had the best, if spotty, results by using the old ship hatch method of soaking the wood in salt water. One was a slab of Silver (soft) maple that I soaked using table salt. I tried it again with a bunch of bigger Sugar (hard) maple slabs & they wound up rotting. I guess the salt concentration wasn't high enough. I tried it with an elm bowl & the salt bubbled out under the polyurethane a season after it was finished. I guess the salt concentration was too high & the change in humidity drew it out.
I soaked a couple of 2'x3' - 6" thick Chinese chestnut slices for 6 months, but I'm not sure what the salt concentration was. I lined the kids' old sandbox with plastic & dumped in a 100 lbs of water softener salt & let them soak for 6 months or so. I let them dry about 6 years before cleaning them up. I had to make a table with a router guide to clean up the faces. The salt ruined the bit & router & it was like working with rock. I coated them with clear epoxy & one never cracked. The other, which is my end table, got a 1/2" crack in it even after all that. I filled it with clear epoxy & it's been fine since. The crack doesn't really look bad, either.
The upshot is, good luck & don't be in a rush. It might work out & the results are great if it does.
Ed wrote: "I was joking about the weird price on Amazon. I don't care if it's good or bad, I'm not paying over $2000 for a paperback book."I knew that. I wouldn't either. Sorry you couldn't see me chuckling when I read your post.
There are some crazy prices on Amazon. My go-to book for that is the self-published Birth Control Is Sinful in the Christian Marriages and Also Robbing God of Priesthood Children!!. Besides being written all in caps, it is selling today for the low price of $150 with used copies available for a mere $265. The prices have varied over the years, but they've always been ridiculous. It tempts me to publish something similar just to see what happens.
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Found the site "TechNovelGy" today. Odd that their list of SF Surveillance technology doesn't have "Watchbird".
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science...
It smelled the outpouring of certain glands, tasted a deviant brain wave.
Does anyone have a favorite phone app for identifying plants & such? I've tried several over the years & they've gotten a lot better as optical recognition has advanced & databases have grown. There are a lot out there, but a lot of them are really spammy & not very good. I don't use them all that often, either. The best seem to use an online database which makes them slow, but more accurate than those that fill my phone with their database.PictureThis was recommended by my mother & seemed to work really well for plants, but they recently changed from free to $3/month or something. It's a bit confusing, but they keep wanting money & only work on the phone, no online place to tweak things.
Seek works with iNaturalist
https://www.inaturalist.org/
an online community where I can see what I've identified or get help when there are issues. It works with plants, animals, & fungi, but I've mostly dealt with plants & a few insects. It can take a long time to make an identification requiring a lot of different angles before it finally takes a photo & then it only seems to send one up to iNaturalist. If I want to add others, I have to do it manually. Perhaps this last is ignorance on my part, but the time it takes can make live animals very frustrating. Just as it is getting close, they'll usually move.
The online community seems pretty good & one of my sightings has been added to a research group. I guess they're studying the distribution of Solanum carolinense the Carolina Horsenettle which is kind of interesting.
After a few identifications, it often locks up. I think that's because my phone is still trying to upload previous IDs to the iNaturalist site, so it gets confused. It's probably due to the poor signal I get at times. Still, it's been the best I've found so far.
I've tried other apps such as Merlin, the birding app from Cornell University,
https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
but I suck at zooming in well enough with my phone camera. I find it easier to look them up with binoculars & a book. It will also identify bird songs, but it's usually too noisy.
I'd be interested in other apps that might work better. I'm in the Eastern US, so that limits things a bit more.
I'm going slightly crazy since I got a new PC on Monday & a new phone today. I was ready for the PC & have been dealing with them for decades, so I had it pretty much set up in a couple of days, but the phone has been maddening.I'm not much of a phone guy, so I got my daughter to do the initial setup. Unfortunately, a lot of stuff we thought would be transferred wasn't. Not a big deal with files, but trying to deal with the apps & the slightly different interface is a pain. There's some weirdness, too. For instance, the Samsung keyboard doesn't seem to have / character. Where it should be, there's only a / character. I had to plug in a keyboard to setup my email because of that. PITA!!!
Jim wrote: "I'm going slightly crazy since I got a new PC on Monday & a new phone today. I was ready for the PC & have been dealing with them for decades, so I had it pretty much set up in a couple of days, bu..."I'm not a phone guy either, in fact I barely use mine. But my immediate family is 100% iphone, and my wife's son is our iphone/Apple tech support.
Lest you bring up price: my current phone is a middle-aged SE (entry level), which I like because it's the last of the true pocket-size ones. Mine was around $100 used a couple years ago. Unfortunately it's developed an annoying bug: it cycles on & off, resetting itself at random. I've followed the online support guides for dealing with this, and stalled at "bring it in for repair." Which would almost certainly be more than it's worth!
My phone was certainly not that cheap. AT&T gave us 2 free phones & that's OK for my wife, but I do a bit more with mine. I need a good camera for my Seek program which identifies plants & then sends them up to iNaturalist. A few identifications in row would lock up my old phone.My old one was a hand-me down from my son-in-law & the USB port only worked for charging. That was fine when I had an even older one in the shop to use with my borescope & microscope, but the battery blew up on it. That's really the only reason I needed a new one. It feels like I just get comfortable with one & I have to get another. Time just goes too fast now.
A new phone always has a lot of little annoyances until I turn on the developer options & break some of the proprietary crap. This one has something called Samsung Dex which wants to open a desktop on my PC when plug it in. That breaks the Windows RAS service which kills my VPN connection to work until I reboot the PC - a complete PITA. All I really want to do is get to the root directory to transfer files.
I also won't have the damn thing listening to & tracking me constantly. The first is a total invasion of privacy. I've seen too many examples of targeted ads as it picks up conversations even when it is 'off'. The location tracking sucks quite a bit of battery power, but I have to toggle it on for some applications, so I'll have to figure out how to get that ability onto the home screen.
Does Anyone know of a decent weather app for the home screen of an Android phone? I just want something that takes up the top 1/4 or so of the screen with big numbers showing the current time & temp; something I can glance at without putting on my glasses. I don't mind paying a one time fee, but I don't want to be pestered by ads since that would probably mean putting on glasses & probably getting off the tractor to deal with little X's.
Jim wrote: "Time just goes too fast now."I've noticed that!
Also: "Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart"
In my case, I seem to have passed "peak smart" some time ago....
Still doing better than our current President! Whose "Peak Smart" was, hrm, never high. Imnsho.
No politics, religion, or other matters of faith, please.
Jim wrote: "No politics, religion, or other matters of faith, please."Noted.
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Thanks. And that includes sports, too!
Jim wrote: "Does Anyone know of a decent weather app for the home screen of an Android phone? I just want something that takes up the top 1/4 or so of the screen with big numbers showing the current time & tem..."I use two weather apps on my iPhone: Weather by The Weather Channel. Free IIRC. Shows current weather with Temp in large numbers at the top of the screen. hourly and/or daily forecasts on the bottom. It'll show weather where you are or any where you want; and Dark Sky. It also shows temp in large numbers at the top and forecast below, it can send you notifications if it will start raining soon, such as heavy rain starting in 14 minutes, or light rain stopping in 20 minutes. It also has radar and extrapolated radar. It wasn't free, but I don't remember how much. I presume they will work on non-iPhones.
Neither of these show time in large numbers, but the iPhone does that on the lock screen when you wake it up.
Thanks, Buck. I finally managed to find one that works & I also changed the lock screen to display the time in big numbers. It's tough figuring all this stuff out.
A squirrel screwed up a few hours of the day today. It committed suicide by taking out the electric at work, so I got a call from one of the owners & a VP. The servers & such were all still running, but the local electric company said the call was a low priority, so they figured it would be a while before it was fixed. Power had been out over an hour, so we decided to shut everything down.I live an hour away, so I walked them through it. Interesting. I can do it on auto pilot, but trying to describe where power buttons were, which UPS controlled what, & the specific order was challenging. We got it done, they hung up, & I started to make lunch.
I hadn't got the bread toasted when they called back to tell me the power was restored. Getting things turned on was quite a bit more challenging. The servers & various appliances don't like it when everything has gone down since they can't find services they depend on. It takes quite a while for them all to start chatting properly again & it was quite frustrating for my assistants. On the plus side, they had no idea how many different systems & devices we have on our small network & they got to find out the hard way.
I looked up a book today & was 'treated' to the new beta version of the book page. I'm not a fan. It's cleaner looking, but that's because so much information is hidden behind "more" tags & they left out the ability to see my own review URL unless I edit it first. I often go to old reviews & get the URL to paste into discussions both here & in emails.It really bugs me that they're fiddling around with this instead of fixing long time issues.
Jim wrote: "It's tough figuring all this stuff out."You got that right. Phones are hard, even when they are working. I wasted 15 minutes yesterday trying to deposit some checks online. The problem is, logging in with my long 'secure' password on the tiny fake keyboard on the phone!
I was about to give up and change the password (yet again) but gave it one last try. A la fin!
Still handier than going to the nearest physical bank to use the night depository. Plus they are Really slow depositing physical checks from there.
Progress! 2 steps forward , 1.5 steps back.
"If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a
damn fool about it."
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I don't like it either. But resistance is futile.
Ed wrote: "Jim wrote: "I looked up a book today & was 'treated' to the new beta version of the book page. I'm not a fan. ..."I don't like it either. But resistance is futile."
Well. At least It's been awhile since they lost an almost-complete review....
Unlike Flickr, for a horrible counter-example, which routinely erases even 1 or 2 paragraph comments. Very annoying & frustrating. But: no real competitors, either!
"Resistance is futile."
Ed wrote: "I don't like it either. But resistance is futile."If you click on the 'beta' at the bottom right, you can tell them what you like & dislike about the new page.
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Good luck with that!
I don't like the new page either. Moreover, I have some scripts and new pages mean re-rewriting them
I think we should all try. If enough point out issues, maybe they'll fix them. Of course, there's a lot of other things that are broken on this site that they've never addressed even though we've been asking for years.
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I had to prove I wasn't a robot to add a review today. Sigh. I guess they've had a rash of automated reviews, but it still sucks.Our A/C wasn't working this morning & our repair guy can't get here until Monday. Of course, this weekend has to be in the mid 80s while all the surrounding days are in the 70s.
Well, the heat will be good for the hay. Russell cut it Thursday night. It's incredibly thick & we've had really heavy dews each night. It's been 10 or 11 am before even the mowed areas of the lawn dry up. He hasn't tedded it, which is weird. Oh well, his lookout since he's buying it all this time. We filled the barn with the first cutting.
Jim wrote: "I had to prove I wasn't a robot to add a review today. Sigh. I guess they've had a rash of automated reviews, but it still sucks."
Intermittent for me. Sometimes I get a run of 4 or 5 "click on the dumb pictures" routine, other times just an occasional check-box to tick. Annoying. You would think the algorithm would recognize me (and you) as Trusted Users! Decades-old tech,
Peter wrote: "You would think the algorithm would recognize me (and you) as Trusted Users! Decades-old tech,."Fully agree - I have to post 4 threads in my group, which I created and mod at the start of the month for monthly reads, but each time their algorithm stops me at three, assuming spam
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Ed wrote: "I read an article recently about how spam could be greatly reduced here if they'd take the one simple step of requiring validation of e-mail address. "I doubt it'll stop them - making tons of google accs or an equivalent is too easy. And there are already quite a lot of bogus accounts here - not long ago I checked info on members from Ukraine (to find some locals) and in top-20 all-time top readers there are quite a few suspicious names and profiles
Ed wrote: "I read an article recently about how spam could be greatly reduced here if they'd take the one simple step of requiring validation of e-mail address. Right now spammers can create new accounts with..."It might help a little, but I have some 'fake' accounts of my own that I use for honey pots on several major free email systems. At work, I set temporary email accounts on several different domains for a specific job listing & delete the account once the position has been filled. All it takes is setting up an email server which anyone can do for practically for free & domains are cheap, too.
Jim wrote: "I looked up a book today & was 'treated' to the new beta version of the book page. I'm not a fan. It's cleaner looking, but that's because so much information is hidden behind "more" tags & they le..."Yes. I am not a fan. I tried to leave feedback about it. but they made it so complicated to do that I gave up and did not bother.
Jim wrote: "Ed wrote: "I don't like it either. But resistance is futile."If you click on the 'beta' at the bottom right, you can tell them what you like & dislike about the new page."
Not unless you install outlook you can't, I loath outlook. No way am I ever installing that on any device I own.
In other and better news; QLD Australia is vaccinating like anything, I just got my second Pfizer and hope to be allowed to travel again some time this decade....
Deborah wrote: "In other and better news; QLD Australia is vaccinating like anything, I just got my second Pfizer and hope to be allowed to travel again some time this decade...."Good on you!
My wife got her Pfizer booster TOD (immunocompromised), and I should be eligible for a booster next month. I think they have settled on 6 mos after your most recent shot.
Maybe we can meet at the Monterey Aquarium next year? I could show you the harbor seals next door! They are such sweethearts 🦭 ❤️ 😇
Just going ANYWHERE overnight would be a treat!
The Evolution of Science Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 4 Vols (other topics)Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (other topics)
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (other topics)
Bleak House (other topics)
A Night in the Lonesome October (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Winston Churchill (other topics)Roger Zelazny (other topics)
Felix Salten (other topics)
Sam Kean (other topics)
Chuck Tingle (other topics)
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I'm not too worried. I don't really care if people know I pick food up off the floor and eat it.