More like an ant crawling up one of the strings of the world’s biggest bass while the bassist jams away. IIRC, if you’re riding a space elevator, you’re riding up or down for at least a week (50,000 miles is a long distance to travel). If the thing is vibrating, that could be a very long week, and you wouldn’t be…

The one I’d like to see discussed is horizontal vibrations. If something is thousands of kilometers long, even a one-in-a-thousand vibration means that there’s at least a kilometer of horizontal swing. That will make for a wild ride.

Actually, I spoke too soon. There are some slime molds in there too. It looks a lot like a mycology teaching lab.

Not slime molds, just ordinary molds, I’m sad to say.

I went road-tripping through California and the west a few weeks ago, visiting national parks, and there’s hurting little towns like this all over the place. It is the water and the drought, but it’s not just that. Even in places with water and no Walmarts, there are main streets half boarded up and people just trying…

One thing to realize is that the Deccan Traps were (very probably) belching a lot of greenhouse gas into the air. And the Chicxulub Impact was (very probably) worse than we could do to ourselves with an all-out nuclear war.

However, if you want a crude simulation of what the effects would be of an all-out nuclear…

So let’s see, Rey and Kylo Ren are Leia’s twin children, separated at birth. Perhaps Ren was being taught by his uncle Luke, but he went over to the dark side and wants to finish what he thinks his grandfather started, not realizing that Vader went back to the light in the end. Rey gets stuffed into another desert…

Well, I was going to say that I didn’t think Ged’s skin was dark enough, per the descriptions in the book, but if Ms. Le Guin is satisfied, I wouldn’t think of contradicting her.

Maybe Knowhere is the easter egg, and GOTG 2 or something after that is going to be involve Celestials?

So, orcas also reportedly undergo menopause. Are they also romantic? Orangutans and chimpanzees go through menopause, at least in zoos. Are they also romantic pair bonders?

The bigger problem with this is that we assume that western society is historically normal. Until 100 years ago, when things like public health…

Although I’m not a soldier, I’m very fond of David Kilcullen’s Out of the Mountains for worldbuilding. What I like is his theory of competitive control, as a way of understanding how different groups can vie for power over a productive population.

Wow, more mythology. Please, please look at the research Jon Keeley and crew at the US Geological Survey are doing about fire risks and how to reduce them. The tl;dr version is that all the fuel reduction in the world doesn’t help, because fuel reduction does very little in extreme fire events when embers can fly for…

As I recall, there is a bunch of research on Beechey ground squirrels vs. rattlesnakes. They are at least somewhat immune to rattlesnake venom, and they heat up their tails through vasodilation when confronting a rattlesnake, apparently to make them look bigger and meaner than they are.

I’ve borrowed their trick of…

Amusing irrelevancy. I had a Swiss friend stay with me here in the states for a couple of weeks. He was vastly amused that the cheese we call swiss cheese has those holes in it. Apparently the cheeses they make in Switzerland do not. Not sure what that says about Clarissa’s story, but perhaps it says something about…

Well that sucks. Maybe someone will have to graft some blueberries for you.

Well, yes, but I’m trying to find something positive about this. I don’t think it works with bananas, and if you’re allergic to Rosacaeae, that does cut the options quite substantially.

Wonder if we can graft a bunch of vacciniums (blueberry, cranberry, huckleberry) together to give you a consolation bush.

Here we go again. I don’t have the energy to dig through the references, but there are two big problems:

That looks more like an industrial autoclave than a pipe. Wonder what it’s supposed to be?

75% of subsidies reportedly go to the top 10% of farms. That’s $178.5 billion over 18 years. It’s over $30,000 per year to the top 10%, $600 per year to the bottom 80 percent. It’s not a matter of who gets subsidized, but how much. Indeed, it appears more profitable to own a big farm, but the question is how much…