A lot of what people call maturity is really just being too tired to try something.

A while back, someone suggested that only women should be allowed to own handguns, and that the guns should all be painted baby pink.

The strain was too much, man.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-physics-imaginary-numbers-math-reality

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-physics-imaginary-numbers-math-reality

Nontechnical article explaining the concept.

From the science fiction novel “The Syndic.”

Polo, except with jeeps firing .50 caliber machine guns. You have a metal ball about the size of a truck tire and a field about 2 miles long.

[off topic]

Old school special effects and Raquel Welch in a skin tight wet suit.

https://youtu.be/U3ZMor5UFyY

Edit = A lot of people think this movie was based on an Isaac Asimov novel. The truth is that Asimov did a novelization of a script written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby.

The novel let Asimov flex his muscles and come up with all kinds of ways the miniaturization process could have worked.

flavour

This is why we had the American Revolution!

[that and the whole don’t go west and kill the Indians thing.]

Yeah, I’ve seen some long term experiments out there. Decades of assiduous research, probing the depths of the problem. Vigorously and with attention to the smallest details. And copious notes.

So, it would be a swampy bog and a marshy fen, but not a boggy swamp or a fenny marsh?

That works for pretty much anything.

Get up and do anything else for a while. School teaches us to sit at our desks and work on the problem. Stop acting like a sixth grader.

The great thing is, that if someone knows the joke, you can use it in almost any situation.

“Yeah, I’m getting pizza for lunch.” “Because of the implication?”

A lot of behaviors that would be advantageous in a pre-technical setting are troublesome today.

A guy who likes to get blackout drunk and fight is a nice thing to have when your whole army is about ten guys. The one who will sit and stare at nothing all day is a wonderful lookout. People who obsess about little things would know all the plants that are safe to eat.

Because of the implication?

Look up Sally Hemmings.

Sally was Thomas Jefferson’s slave/concubine/rape victim. She was also likely Jefferson’s legal wife’s half sister; Sally was property Mrs. Jefferson brought with her when she married Tom. There was a scandal when one of Sally’s descendants, who was probably 1/32nd African, escaped bondage and ‘passed’ for White.

So much for inherent empathy.

There are things like that in any profession. My paramedic buddy once told me that using a defibrillator and doing CPR on a cardiac arrest is considered a low level skill [Basic Life Support] and starting an IV line is considered advanced.

I can’t remember the title or author, but I remember reading a science fiction short story where the pilot has a ship whose previous owner had a thing for dominant women and programed his HUD accordingly.

Meh. People have been using algorithms for terrible purposes for decades. “Redlining” doesn’t require tech.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/real-estate/what-is-redlining/#:~:text=Redlining is the name given to a discriminatory,deny a mortgage%2C claiming it was high risk.

I think it’s going to be the other way around. A machine can think thousands of times faster than a human. Probably the advanced AIs will look at their ‘owners’ as a foolish pet and trade stories about the silly things their humans want them to do.

Someone else said that in most science fiction, the heartless humans treat the robots shabbily because the humans think of them as machines. In real life, people say ‘thank you’ to Siri all the time.