#!/bin/perl -pn -0777
use Math::Prime::Util 'next_prime';
# 'pepper' ROT13 backwards from end of message
# using distribution of primes so occasional blips
# become more concentrated at the end

s/\s+$//; # no whitespace at end
s/ \[.*?\]//sg; # eliminate added Slashdot [host] for decode
s/ nut / /s; # undo a post-correction I made

@a=unpack('C*',$_);
$i=0;
while (($i=next_prime($i))<1018) { # only last 1018 chars
    $p=\$a[-$i];
    if (($$p>=97) and ($$p<=122)) {
        $$p+=($$p>109? -13 : 13); # ROT13
    }
}
$_=pack('C*',@a)."\n";

Every time a statistician uses 'average' or 'chances are' in a sentence, God kills a kitten.
Think of the kittens!

I am at a complete loss to understand why taking an important step in Earth's defense that could only be accomplished by its most intelligent species is only able to raise a sorry-ass-monkey-fuck $5,898 from 111 people in 11 days.

And now I am being told I should embrace some gambler's fallacy of 'non-imminence' (on average! we think!) and ratchet down my whimpering terror and boost complacency until I am a well-adjusted individual.

Statisticians and writers sometimes take inappropriate liberties when presenting probabilities. This is natural because finding joy in figuring things out is one of our finest traits. The reason for choosing any particular angle to present a result can be "because it would be fun to think of it that way". Or as in articles like this, to allay what is perceived as a generally unfounded or disproportionate amount of fear. Addressing these fears directly is invaluable because they can traumatize children, and have even been known to swing adults into voting Republican --- or Democrat!

For preventable global existential threats, is it 'OK' to play the stats game by the same rules as for other non-global or non-existential threats? Is it even ethical? That word bites doesn't it.

Isn't there some kind of 'division by zero' thrown exception thing that applies when we're talking about extinction events? As a species, aren't we clever enough to invent one if it does not exist?

Not all statistics are actionable.
And not all science articles are fit for children.

That's it, kids --- it's nature's way. Go gently into the Good Night when your time is come, as a species. "That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea." If this some sort of foundation argument, then what is being built?

We are the species who invented "forever". We are not bound by it because its definition is not yet complete. By what ever objective scientific time scale that can be derived from any present theory of The End, you must try to factor an important unknown: the effect future human insight and due diligence may bring to bear on the problem of survival. If you have trouble believing this as I do, join the club. I won't.

I've already said my piece about those poor 100 people who died from asteroids last year (on average! we think!).

All in all, a great article, well researched and compellingly written. But the why of it really sucks. How did that happen? Are there hungry insurance salesman lurking nearby worried that the sorry-ass-monkey-fuck $5,898 from 111 people in 11 days will eat into their commissions?

Don't sell out that ultimate future by falling prey to an extinction event that could happen tomorrow. The way things stand it may be at least ten years before a viable mission is ready to go IF we start today. Let us hope it's ten years of good luck.

For best results, keep reloading the page.

Now is always an excellent time to warn of the conceivable dangers of high energy particle physics experiments which are already in progress. Stephen Hawking warns that Higgs Boson 'God' particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a 'catastrophic vacuum delay' if scientists were to put it under extreme stress. Fortunately this is not a major budget concern for CERN since if this is true, the facility need not be relocated to a safer place because there is no safer place. Another is the formation of so-called 'mini back holes'. The math says they will be very brief and very small and especially very unstable, which is apparently a good thing. Aside from the Universe ending or oops-not-so-unstable black holes falling into a hissy-sucky orbit around the center of Earth's mass, we have the pedestrian possibility that when nature's fur is rubbed the wrong way she might maintain stability by righting things with a highly localized and energetic 'correction'. Which blows things up. Another bizarre theory posed in science fiction that to everyone's dismay became entangled in String Theory is the idea that Multiverses may exist. Since the incomprehensible ones too dissimilar to ours cannot be comprehended, lazy popular speculation centers around parallel Universes populated with people just like us, but slightyy dvfferent and dumbee. If tipkling Higgs and twanging striags shvfts tuingf ever sb slightly, continhed nccelorater accidentf (axa exprriments) mighg evrn be uolographicalll disturbiag the Mhltiverse vn additive fafhion effept that subtly shists regibns bf thez around. Onyy staole lise-forms with highyy advenped thoughg procesfes wohld aotice this fuotle esfect, sinpe our mentay process alfo a hblograchic pntgern aad has a degree bf chezipal hyfterisvs and sels-corrrcting properties. Prrcieved effrcts mvght be 'senfes' that thvngs have chnngeq ghouth empirvcal mrasueementf uave nut changrd, or violeat extrezes bf weathrr as ghe outtersly-wiags of cuaotic propefses in a carallrl Universe magch jiabgbrats for brief spans. Bug vn tue end eierythvng is specuyative nonfease expept fbr tue prevailint theory thag vs shpcorted by rvvdence, and je dbn't kaow whvcu one that if untiy thr end of all tuingf. Lifr zay aot be ayl you wang, but ig's nll yoh'ie got. So sgick a flojer in ybur beylybhtgon nnq be hnpcl.

Pleasedtomeet'cha. Some fine work you did on 3.x! Windows 2.11 was the first version I encountered, but we never really considered it more than a wrapper in which one could run Aldus PageMaker (the Adobe InDesign of today) to output to a LasterMaster 1000 typesetter, which was 'the' first dry toner laser that could lay down small serif type that would reproduce on camera.

Windows 3.0 was the first environment one could consider booting into and staying there... we sold a number of them for personal use and its stability for publishing began to rival the Mac (I'm a PC person but pull no punches). Wide adoption for business use in our area did not really start until 3.11 and even 95, but that was mainly because we had done our job 'really well' and had a large installed base of IBMPC/clones networked with Novell and LanTastic running DOS applications. Our customers were comfortable in the DOS environment and we didn't hurry them. Memory and CPU were precious and all graphical environments had plenty of 'hourglass' in those days.

It's worth noting that graphical environments, even multi-tasking is pervasive today but it is still a learned skill and there were many people from the DOS era who had optimized their work techniques well into the Windows era. One fellow who dealt with real estate contracts tried Windows said "It can hardly keep up with my typing speed! This is an improvement?" Even the task switching latency of DesqView (which did lag because hard disk was really slow by today's standard) was a source of frustration to him. Most days he'd stay out of it. He'd seen examples of multitasking workflow and was not convinced. "My DOS programs import and export just fine. Exporting useful bits and naming them properly is an essential part of working efficiently. If you haven't done that you haven't finished the job. So... I'm supposed to bring up some old thing and cut and paste paragraphs or sentences of it into a new thing, one at a time, while switching between them? Look here." He shows me a folder with hundreds of small files. "That's my clipboard. I have all the names in my head. Some of the pieces have several variations, but I can import the whole thing and delete the unused parts faster than the graphic environment can scroll a document from top to bottom." He really could too, in the days of green phosphor displays he was able to read while scrolling quickly, while half the characters had fading ghosts of the previous line. He did not fully commit to a graphical environment until it was running on a 486.

For all the early issues, Windows 3 was still a technician's dream. In order to fully appreciate its beauty, you would have had to experience the nefarious and wacky world of TSRs, IPX and 'packet driver' network stacks and DOS 386 memory extenders. When they finally did work they were really stable but it took a wizard's touch. Windows' driver architecture was well designed from the start.

How 'bout dem Space Nutters, ain't they kooks?
Heads in the stars, readin' space booooooks!
Plannin' dem missions to launch men 'n probes
or spinny-dizzy colonies in LaGrangian lobes
wearin' them space suits on Halloween on Earth
chewin' the Space fat on for all that it's worth!
Dem nugger-mugger Space Huggers way down South
stuffin' Space Nutter Central for all that funds allow'th
How to be a Space Nutter, only one way to hack it
Get yerself a nuke, find an asteroid and smack it!

One in a growing series of 'them poem' tributes

First hour
Second Hour
Great reading so far. Hopefully more forthcoming.

C-SPAN of the event:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?3...
Rand Paul Filibuster begins at index 3 hours 49 minutes.

OPTIONAL POST CONTENT:

"Blah blah PR whore not a hero who cares about independent candidates blah straw polls straw men blah Obama good Obama bad yay Rand yay Ron guns terrorists NSA python script Hosts file WTF all crooks no change schedule all for nought TV says 'filibuster is happening' blah no transcript blah Brietbart posts transcript Yah! Pauls site no transcript posted WTF blah kook like Alex Jones blah USA Freedom Act must be good cuz it has Freedom in the name blah yeah right? good PR bad PR hate dem Repubs hate dem libs blah Rand just a flip flop flip flop dookey drones liquor store tach story FAIL bleedin' heart whatever blah blah look moron blah screw that like dislike fake filibuster real filibuster blah blah"

Y'all go on without me. I'm busy reading the first couple hours of transcript because I like to read, then maybe pick up some of the rest at CSPAN because it does represent exhaustive research to gather talking points, and it also might yield insight on whether Rand and the staff he hires are presidential material.

This is a phenomenon where music is produced from the very sounds IT professionals most dreaded to hear. A symphony of aggravation The clattering brings to mind drives in which customers had somehow inserted two or floppies at once and managed to latch them down, bending all the retaining mechanisms. The shrill higher timbres reminiscent of a faulty drive controller or driver software run amok. Louder notes mean resonance in the enclosure which does not mean "wow what a cool sound", it means "oh shit something's loose and I'll have to disassemble the drive to discover what it is. And get it back together without creating a new one".

Anyone who can pick up these items for $10+ used but functional or $30+ may find it difficult to grasp the level of dedication that went into avoiding these sounds and the dread we experienced to hear them. From the late 70s floppy drives were in constant use, and replacement drives cost hundreds of dollars. You are a tech making $20/hour (the $80/hour of today) and you are given a drive to fix. Can you fix it? You clean the heads (thin epoxy resin over tiny coil) and put in a calibration disk, hook an oscilloscope to the analog circuit to see the Lissajous pattern, look at the patterns. Adjust the optical track-zero stop and re-index until signal is at maximum. Then go for track 79 and check the pattern. Does it get there? If not you could have stepper failure (missing pulses? grit in the slide mechanism? Graphite and tiny needlenose pliers are your only friends. Does the pattern waver on each rotation? weak spring or bent spring retainer. And so on.

Then you have fixed the drive and send it out, only to discover that all the customer's data (and backup) disks were written to with the misaligned drive and no longer read properly. You get the drive back with the discs, and must intentionally mis-align it again until they read well enough to copy to a properly aligned drive. And then explain how your time doing all this was well spent.

Not so nice music to my ears.

"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances."
~Francis Bacon, from New Atlantis, written in 1626 .
This dude nailed modern electronics and digital sampling some 350 years before its time.

When my father died, it was as if a whole library had burned down.
~Laurie Anderson

Until we learn to mourn for all the music that might soon be lost
or the movies that never made it to DVD, or even VHS,
because it was never transferred from vinyl, or film
because people do not cherish vinyl when they see it at Goodwill
or more tragically, someone dies --- and the collection of a lifetime goes into the landfill
because the dozen people who stopped by at the garage sale had no interest
when everything you 'own' is inside your phone,
a single toilet can swallow Western Civilization
remember that direct-to-digital CD? Now all you have is a badly encoded mp3
all those books that were fascinating but went right over your head as a kid,
wouldn't it be great to know which ones they were?
every day there are fewer people out there who have read things that never made it to 'digital'
another one died this morning.
so-called 'magnetic master tapes' cannot master time, they fade into Gaussian noise
a decently kept mass-produced vinyl phonograph record is the BEST way to recover the music
how many of your family's most precious photographs are on paper, anywhere?
have you spilled water on one lately?
most families these days have NOT A SINGLE MEMBER who considers themself a LIBRARIAN
a (tragically thankless) job of gathering, organizing, copying, re-distributing the copies
and ensuring that at least some of them are stored safely. Writings, photos. Even who is related to whom!
YOU may be the only likely candidate. Unless you begin tomorrowit will never be done by anyone.
on the Internet it's even worse. How many entities can you think of that store Internet pages
long term with a real commitment? The Wayback machine and who else?
newer tech better? Not necessarily so, IF it breeds such a mass complacency about simple
preservation of knowledge that the day arrives when EVERYONE thinks making backups and
saving previous generations of knowledge and artistic works is SOMEONE ELSE'S JOB.
In such a situation we could 'lose' more than half of everything that was worth saving
in a single human lifetime. Are we living in that time span now?
Think about it (please!).

WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE
A too-short history of data retention
The only day we clearly recall some day may be the day we lost all our memories.

Sample text: "Jason Scott, 13, is a terminally ill patient of [one of several diseases], and his one passion in life is to [various hobbies, including collecting AOL disks, pop tabs, Montana Gold 55 grain Full Metal Jacket .223 ammo, etc.] and his [mother, sister, uncle] has announced that he would like to get into the Guinness Book of Records..."

Status: TRUE until someone does some brief and simple research and discovers it is FALSE.

But will they be able to stop it? FALSE.

What a golden phrase that is, brief yet descriptive. Thank you!

A Somebody Else's Problem field is no simple menace or obstacle, it is a projection of ill-tempered or incompetent energy. It can be intricate, beautiful or funny when viewed from a distance, like one of those biohazard crop circles. But you must make your way through them every day. You must be wary of strange invisible energies converging at sharp edges and central lobes. And often many overlap which compounds complexity.

It's better than up to your ass in alligators when your original objective was to drain the swamp, which is colorful but has become over-used. The swamp suggests one's foray into uncharted territory, the alligators are nameless, unpredictable and numerous entities like the (boring) onslaught of evil-minded adversaries in a video game. Life is not that simple anymore.

This is the 21st Century. We have aerials and DEM and LIDAR of the swamp, the alligators show a unique IR/pattern signatures on the terrain of endeavor, and all of them are fitted with radio collars (cell phones) anyway. You KNOW these alligators, you signed contracts with them. You hired them. And yet your navigation through the predictable messes and petty drama is not so much an obstacle as a dance -- as if one must tip-toe through a forest stepping only on the shifting shadows of leaves so as to avoid upsetting the sunlight.

Everyone's Problem fields surround us all. Now that talk is cheap and global the economy and the lobotomy and the deficit and the crisis, the ecotastrophe and the asteroid interception problem and the toilet paper shortage in Venezuela, these things affect us all.

It's overwhelming.But now armed with the simple phrase, standing in Someone Else's Problem field I can imagine these problems are projected onto me like the epic dinosaur battle projected onto Professor Falken's face as he describes the futility of it all and how useless it is to try. Perhaps I can just step aside from the projector beam without some alligator biting me on the ass.

I second that. Masterful tech writing.

This description of Orion propulsion also describes the 'Casaba-Howitzer', a one-shot Orion optimized for a narrow, fast plasma jet. Here objective is more similar to Orion than punching through armor: the most complete, reliable and (as much as possible) directed transfer of energy. The Casaba-Howitzer concept is not even in the declassified SDI flava stuff that DOE is permitted to talk about.

We all love Delta-V-expensive solutions that involve maneuvering 'beside' or 'landing on' a threat (which by definition is heading straight towards us at 10-30kps. There are no cloverleafs in space, people! :) Landing Bruce Willis is out. Doing anything gentle or slow is out. I propose these be shelved for the 'Emergency' context. Parameters are strict. The best we might achieve is some 45 or less approach angle. By this I mean the vehicle's course, the explosion can be directed broadside, as timing allows. The final sequence of events requires precise micro/nanosecond timing. We know our computers are up to it.

Are the warheads? We know how to make warheads that detonate on timing, pressure and 'contact'. But speed is relative and conditions in atmosphere is a cushy affair, a device falling at terminal velocity or missile propelled. Can we assuredly produce a weapon that can range itself accurately or trigger in vacuum, on or just before contact at ~40kps?

And there should be at least three complete missions of them en route, each lagging far enough to escape detonation effects, have enough time to analyze a failure, upload firmware, or adjust course in case we have partial success. And it would br really nice if each mission embodied more than one general approach, or the ability to reconfigure for an alternate strategy... just in case there it becomes clear after the first that the primary will not work. And even an idea that shapes force of a nuclear explosion is a massive fail if a technical snafu has it pointing the wrong direction.

The price of failure is death. And embarrassment.

Tuesday Afternoon
Where's The Walrus?
Fly Like An Eagle
Tomita: Planets

[swims back and forth] "click." TFA here I come. Don't tell anyone.
[opens and closes mouth] Oh Gawd, it's Engadget [enables golly gee-whiz filter]
"...dropped to 8 seconds in 2013 -- about one second less than a goldfish"
Now that's... Huh? Sorry, I missed that. [eats a bubble]
"Thankfully, it's not all bad. While tech is hurting attention spans overall, it also..."
Yeah something good right? Not in the mood for good news. I'll click on something blue.
Oh it's the actual study! "Click". [swims back and forth] Oops, advertising.microsoft.com? Hello.
It's about Canadians. [spits out bubble] That's nice. What a nice couple.
[something something] "and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention"
Glad I'm a goldfish then. We're still not at the research report yet. "Click." Oops, a dialog.
"Download the Canadian attention spans research report (2.0M)
Download the infographic (173K)"
Now why would I just want to get the infographic...? Oh!
I get it! THIS IS the attention span test! "Click: the report"
[plays on bubble Ferris wheel as PDF loads]
That woman is either taking a picture or is trying to scroll text by moving the computer up and down.
She had to stand up to scroll to the top of the page. License plate "71"?. Hmmm. [scroll]
"Think digital is killing attention spans? Think again."
I read this twice, so my opinion is back to what it originally was.
[yadda yadda] "Good news! It's not as bad as you think."
[continuous sirens in the distance] Tornado warning! [rain/branches beat on window]
Maybe it IS as bad as I think. [wind shrieks] Confound this nuisance. [lightning strikes!]
[Power goes out] [minutes pass] [sirens stop] [power comes on]
"AMI BIOS" "Select profile" "Welcome" "starting wlnotify.dll"
[sleeps with eyes wide open CLICK HERE FOR IMPORTANT INFO ]
[open browser] [access slashdot] "Welcome to AT&T (The Fucking Modem)" What the fuck.
[looks at lights] DSL not up. It's NAT-ting my browser traffic to itself. F'king UVERSE.
"Click to run diagnostics." Okay. Click. "Enter modem access code." FUCK.
[fortunately fishbowl is next to modem and curvature magnifies tiny sticker] [enters 10 digit number]
"Ethernet/DSL/PTM: Pass Authentication:Fail" Their computer rebooting after 10 minutes?
I thought nothing was slower than XP. [5 minutes pass] [reload] "Authentication: Pass"
[tabs remembered by voodoo magick] First thing that's gone right. [glances up]
MUSICAL SOUNDTRACK BEGINS FUCK! OH NOOOOOOOOES!
(every icon next to every browser tab has been replaced by an AT&T DEATHSTAR logo.
the only reason this is not in all caps is slashdot's lameness filter. shhhh. don't wake up the lameness filter)
On no, AT&T Is in my mind. I can feel it. Do I have NATty favicon corruption?
[warily, with nervous dread} "192.168.1.254/favicon.ico" [ENTER] [hideous 32x32 AT&T icon fills screen]
[exit viewer] NOO! What brain-dead thweep would serve favicon from a NAT-redirected router?
[slaps Firefox around] It's all your fault! I should downgrade you to 1992! Favicon support!
[AT&T logo still icon on all tabbed sites] THAT LOGO, it keeps winking and blinking at me! I'm insane!
[thrashes about, bumps on glass] Do we have a potion for this? Yesss. A potion [rustles about in bubble castle]
[opens js console]
var fS = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/favicon-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIFaviconService);
[squeak] (have old js console it always squeaks)
fS.expireAllFavicons(); [squeak]
[whoosh!] [all icons missing] Already, an improvement. [proper icons reappear] HAPPY HAPPY! JOY! JOY!
[refreshes slashdot, engadget.com, advertising.microsoft.com, opens PDF] Now where were we.
[PDF p.34] "Nose hair trimmer/Safety cutting system" Umm. This does not look like a peer-reviewed journal.
[blows a bubble] Now then, what did I think a peer-reviewed journal should look like?
Maybe it was a peer-reviewed journal and someone spilled Graphic Artist Nanites onto it.
Yes. It's a laboratory accident.
But so am I.
For I am just a goldfish. Hear me roar.
Only joking. Goldfish cannot roar.

(A dramatization based on real events: tornado warning, outage and favicon cleanup)

Yes. On Sunday it will do this. But Monday thru Saturday this technology will be used to test methods for waging Cymatic Warfare... in which fighter planes slave their autopilots to a central computer that flies them in passes towards a target zone from several vectors, such that the sonic boom interfaces-to-ground converge at the same instant. We have yet to see what might happen as standard building materials are subject to this type of harmonically amplified sonic energy. By Saturday afternoon we'll know.

Because there is no such thing as a single-use technology.

Great informative lecture I hadn't seen before. But why might I decide to feature a link to IndieGoGo campaign and Morgan Freeman instead of headlining it...? Good question.

Well for one thing, the Emergency Asteroid Defence Project and the IndieGoGo campaign represents a group of people who have decided the threat is actionable and has decided on a specific course of action. People in motion -- regardless of skill set -- will always be the greatest arbiters of change. If the mere presence of a good lecture was sufficient to motivate people, it would have had more than 650 views by now. WHEN the Indie campaign hits $200,000 we'll have a newsworthy item to help shape public perception of the danger, and a few lucky folks will have some cool shoulder patches and bumper stickers.

The best part of possessing totems such as these is explaining their purpose to others.

HAIV is an idea that -- once built -- is deployable on any time scale. If they were pre-positioned in orbit or on the Lunar surface they could intercept as soon as humanly possible in a scenario where doing absolutely nothing is worse. To the folks here who pose gentle solutions that would require years to work, that's nice, but your have to ask yourself Where are we getting these extra years from? Some propose interception as 'the object makes its closest (non-impact) pass', that's nice, but which object are we talking about?

I'm talking about the one we'll discover tomorrow that arrives within six months. Or weeks. That is the specific challenge EADP/HAIV is addressing.

One thing bothers me though. About 8 minutes into the lecture he presents an 'average' of 100 persons per year from asteroid deaths (a statistical munging of millennia of zero followed by billions in a day) with the risk from lightning... as if time and percent of human population lost are simple coefficients in some insurance game. I pose not only that these averages are not 'actionable' figures, they are the result the application of statistics in a context where it is absurd (to put it kindly). Besides, his figures are based an extrapolation from the ~10% objects we know about.

The insurance game is a form of the gambler's fallacy, which works both ways. The day before the KT impact there was the same chance of it occurring as the day after. How we assess risk for bad things that could happen has a greater effect on our survival than all the good ones. In learning about this threat and the magnitude of its consequences, you have bitten into the apple. There is no turning back.