zipwitch
-Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age
Here's a piece on the origin of the quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Exp... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine
It is a simulation of satellite warfare in low Earth orbit. The players are the USA and the APU (Asian-Polish Union). The object is of course to destroy your opponent's satellites and such..."
After reading, "Novichok agents: a historical, current, and toxicological perspective"[1] it looks like the only places to have produced such agents are Russian chemical weapon labs and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical Database.
Maybe someone who works in the field can provide some more evidence either way?
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039123/#R19
If something like this were to happen in cyberpunk RPG the players would assume that with a billion dollars on the line the hedge fund had either hired a hacker or suborned a Citibank employee in order to make certain they got paid. (As a hedge fund, lawyering up to hang onto the money once you have it is comparatively cheap.
If you want to see what someone who is credibly trying to predict events look at the work of Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb. When you obsess over one prediction by person most known for comedy and questionable personal statements, it's neither difficult nor inappropriate to put them in the clown category.
If Adams himself wants to build his reputation as a prognosticator, he can easily create a publicly-verifiable record of them and any questions of his ability will answer itself in short order. That he has not (to the best of my knowledge) done so makes him look like a huckster.
Before he pegged my personal BS meter and I just started ignoring anything from him that I happened across, I noticed that Adams seemd fond of a lot of "cold-reader" type tricks: vagueness that can be turned into specifics after the fact, ignoring their own failures while hyping their successes, that kind of thing.
If you want to see what actual serious prediction attempts look like, search for Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
When the Soviet-Afghan War started in 1979, the population of Afghanistan was 13.41 million. Current population is 38.93 million.[2] Afghans who were 14 or older when that war started make up less than 7% of the population.[1]
While I don't doubt that many Afghans would like a more stable country, I'm skeptical that a large portion of them have any real idea of what their country was once like. (Nor do I know how accurate and the Westernized portrayals I've seen really were.)
1 https://www.indexmundi.com/afghanistan/demographics_profile....
2 https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/afghanistan-popu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganographia
"Trithemius' most famous work, Steganographia (written c. 1499; published Frankfurt, 1606), was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609 and removed in 1900. This book is in three volumes, and appears to be about magic—specifically, about using spirits to communicate over long distances. However, since the publication of a decryption key to the first two volumes in 1606, they have been known to be actually concerned with cryptography and steganography. Until recently, the third volume was widely still believed to be solely about magic, but the "magical" formulae have now been shown to be covertexts for yet more cryptographic content."
From a paper describing "the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"[1],
"the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children"
1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full
And here's a summary: https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...
Twenty years later, a substantial part of American society is still insisting Moab really was nuked, drives around with "Remember Moab" bumper stickers, and considers the purported continued existence of Moab to be something like a Deep State plot.
Especially if the real motivation is not the BTC scam, but the access to who knows how many DMs for possibly blackmail/propaganda down the line. (And not necessarily just DMs from the known compromised accounts, either.)
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
Source:https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
Link to the other thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851622
Link to the recent HN discussion of said letter by Admiral Rickover here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730
They've got more than a few roots in fantasy gaming, which in turn does owe something to Tolkien, but they're unquestionably high fantasy, and they certainly struck me a very diffent from Tolkien.