The Hugo awards come from the audience. The audience is a bunch of drooling retards. Also, I'm surprised XKCD got the graphic story thing.

Seriously, Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games are largely a joke. And they're bringing out Dragon Tattoo movies. You won't see Gateway or The Gap Cycle as a dramatic long-form series (it's too fucking massive to run as a set of movies); I would love to produce The Gap Cycle as a scifi-drama-epic narrative in an opera-style, as the prose won't translate to modern theatrical style. ("He looked over at the alarming medistat screen. It said he was awake. No shit. It also said...")

You really want the Nebula awards.

Further research says 500-1000 meters, so 1km. So I was off a bit.

Radioisotopes with longer half-lives are less dangerous, tbh. Imagine 1 pound of Plutonium, but the Plutonium has a radioactive half-life of 200,000 years. You could sit next to it and, over 200,000 years, you'd be exposed to the radioactive output of 1/2 pound of plutonium detonated as a nuclear bomb. Background radiation is several orders of magnitude larger.

By contrast, supercritical uranium has a halflife of a few microseconds.

A 2500sqft-ish house is staggeringly large to live in by yourself. On the other hand, it's distinctly not the Roivas mansion.

If I had a 2500 sqft house, I would make extreme use of it.

My bathroom squeezes a 5 foot bathtub against one wall, with the opposite housing a towel rack less than 3 feet away. In the back corner, there's a sink, and there's a toilet behind the bathtub. I'm going to convert to a corner vessel sink with a custom-cut counter top, which will give me a massive amount of counter space but open up the space rounding that corner--it will enlarge the openness and mobility through the bathroom. A Toto toilet with a $600 washlet (no toilet paper; heated toilet seat uses warm water and a forced warmed air blower to wash and dry your ass), double shower head, and 21-inch deep jet tub with inline heater (maintains temperature) will complete a $3000 upgrade. Another $1500 goes into tile floor/walls, double drywall (sound isolation), insulation, and lighting.

That tiny bathroom will be a decked-out luxury spa.

I'm repainting and insulating the house. I'll pop the cost up by about $500-$700 on a $1500 job adding sound isolation. That doesn't include the $1500 of windows--the total cost comes to about a 20% increase, as a DIY project with no labor costs. That's just one room, hardwood flooring and insulation, new drywall, new paint. 75% decrease in sound transfer into the room.

Kitchen got an upgrade. More open, easier to work in, more counter space, more appliance space, and provides a combination counter/table so as to free up the dining room entirely as living space.

You'd be surprised how much you can fit into small spaces. Turn things a bit, move this bit here, and suddenly it feels much more open and has more utility. A little sound isolation eliminates the cramped feeling.

No, this is separate from active volcanoes. If it were that simple, we would skip the digging part and dump everything around Hawaii.

I'm talking about the borders between earth's tectonic plates. The entire earth's crust floats on top, in a sense, and this gap between is subject to a lot more movement than anywhere else. You'll notice there isn't a huge river of constantly-bubbling magma and churning earth spewing out of the ground thousands of miles long between Europe and Asia; the churn moves largely downward, and so the overall movement is downward.

Funny, too, because it looks like it's a major pre-fab job building the printer on-site.

In pre-fab construction, housing modules (rooms, etc.) are built off-site, brought in, and assembled. This can range from full room- or floor-sized housing modules down to prefabricated walls and framing assembled into rooms. The most recent prefabricated construction element is the Insulated Concrete Form, a rigid foam form assembled as a concrete pour channel for a basement, producing an insulated foundation.

These 3D printing projects look to assemble prefabricated industrial machinery--the 3D printing platform itself--and then deliver materials to crudely construct a cementious form. It looks like they're using magnesium-based cements instead of Portland lime cement.

Given existing prefabricated concrete forms, I don't see the advantage. Using an ICF, you bring light-weight prefabricated concrete forms rather than heavy-weight prefabricated machinery. Using an ICF, you build up a permanent structural form rather than a temporary industrial complex that must be deconstructed and shipped post-job. Using an ICF, you pour the material directly into the form in one go, rather than layering it in a slow process. Using an ICF, the prefabricated form provides insulation, which a 3D printed form must have applied separately.

This is quite possibly the worst method in history for building simple, small-scale concrete forms. Large-scale forms (high-rises) are currently best built with insulated concrete forms, cranes, steel beams and pylons, and construction methods including driving pylon into the ground.

Looks like a fad to me. 3D printing is not a universal constructor.

My house is 1300sqft plus a 680sqft basement. 2400 is a normal-sized house; I have a dinky town house. The town house is inefficient, too: the first floor is kitchen and a giant sprawl room; it was kitchen, dining, sitting, but I altered the kitchen to improve space utilization and decrease cramping, resulting in no need for a dedicated dining table.

If it were just 16 inches wider, I could fit a chamber-REST and floatation-REST isolation chamber inside (both!), instead of just floatation-REST. On the other hand, the master bedroom is greatly oversized.

This is not good business.

This is institutionalized harassment. The training materials suggest squeezing the customer, selling them things they don't need, and convincing them they'll lose something of value--manufactured, if necessary--if they don't buy things. The employees have 1/5 of their job performance predicated on sales success. It's pressure on the employees to put pressure on the customer.

This is actually illegal. High-pressure sales tactics will get people taken out in handcuffs by the FTC OIG.

Oh it does not. There are fault lines in the earth's crust 50 meters down where geological activity causes anything buried so deep to sink to the earth's core. You could bury nuclear waste, and it would be permanently out of reach of the surface world within 10 years.

We shouldn't address lesser problems with resources more effectively targeted at worse problems. This is why I go rip-shit on people having pity-parties about whatever the cause-of-the-week is, showing up like "oh my grandfather has (MS|alz|als) it's so terrible" and everyone's like "we should fix this RIGHT NOW!" ... no, no we shouldn't. We should fix something more important. I don't care about your sob story; individuals are irrelevant.

By the same token, however, we shouldn't implement new, lesser problems unless they're both fixing a greater problem *and* impossible to reasonably mitigate. A solution which causes a new problem requires analysis; if the new problem can be controlled--reduced (mitigated) or eliminated (avoided)--you should modify your plan such that your solution imposes less bad consequences.

Cats killing birds is not an issue. Those little ground finches? The sparrows? They're prolific. They climb into other birds's nests and destroy eggs. They kill small birds. They're vicious, hateful little bastards, and they're extincting the native species of the United States.

95% of birds I see are sparrows now. They're ground-foraging. We need more cats.