Here’s an updated carousel of my books from the guy who signes himself here as Xanares:
Author: Neal Asher
Well Spotted
Jin Liqun, chairman of the board of supervisors of China Investment Corp., slammed the welfare systems of European countries and said the continent must address its own problems to attract outside investment.
“If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society,” Jin told Al-Jazeera television in an interview broadcast at the weekend.
“The labor laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hardworking.”
Spot on, but we’ll be a long time waiting for any such sanity from our ‘leaders’.
Incidentally, two elected leaders have been chucked out and replaced by Europhile shills (I will not call them ‘technocrats’ because the word implies a pragmatism that just doesn’t exist in the EU elite). How long do you reckon before they’ll start calling them ‘delegates’ … and how long before they start suggesting ID implants as a practical solution to border control?
Chuckling
Waterstones, Chelmsford
We popped into Chelmsford yesterday, mainly so Caroline could renew her driving licence (nearest post office with the facility to take her photo too) and, as is usual before these trips, I first printed up some of my bookmarks. I then went to Waterstones and offered to sign my books there. They were fine with that as usual and I went through about the 10 – 15 copies on the shelf. Meanwhile I was passing a greedy eye over a big fat Vernor Vinge tome, but on closer inspection discovered it to be a repackaging of Fire Upon the Deep & Deepness in the Sky, so gave it a miss. However, while browsing I did see some stuff I wanted to try. In the end I left Waterstones with the lot below:
Update:
Nope, I screwed up. The Vernor Vinge one isn’t a repackaging – I must have misread on the quick glance inside I had. I’ll be buying a copy shortly.
Get those Tobacco Seeds in.
The future of The Departure is closer than you think. Take for example this little wheeze (excuse the pun) suggested by Simon Chapman in that hotbed of totalitarianism, Australia. Now, maybe you don’t agree with smoking, but remember that where the anti-smokers lead the anti-alcohol, fat, sugar (name your poison) brigade follow:
Under the proposal, a license would give the smoker a right to a limited quota of tobacco supply, say 10 cigarettes a day or 20 cigarettes a day and so on. There is a fee payable to government to give the consumer the right to use tobacco. The more tobacco the license holder pre‑commits to smoke, the higher the license fee involved.
Under the licensing plan consumers would be asked to pass a test, ‘not dissimilar to a driving test’ Chapman stated, to qualify for a right to receive a license to legally purchase tobacco.
Based on the questionable notion that smokers lack an awareness of at least three decades of heavily publicised research about health problems that smoking causes, the government would see itself fit to decide for the smoker the amount of cigarettes he or she is allowed to smoke.
Read this guys additional comments below as well. Coming your way soon: a licence to fart.
Last Kazani
Linear no Threshold Hypothesis
With junk science, it is easy to scare people. There are many things that are bad for us that are present at low levels in the environment — for example, mercury, lead, radiation, or tobacco smoke. The junk science approach to trace toxins is to claim that if a high level of the bad thing would cause X people to get sick, then a level 10,000 times smaller must cause 1/10,000 as many people to get sick. Given 300 million people in the country, this math can give you thousands of people getting sick from low levels of mercury, lead, radiation, or secondhand tobacco smoke. This approach is known as the linear no threshold hypothesis.
So considering this approach, don’t you think this toxic substance should be banned or controlled?
Gotta love Fusion
This looks promising (check comments).
They are over halfway through this funded (about $8 million) project. This part is just one step towards commercial fusion and if successful could justify a $200 million follow up to develop a full commercial scale system.
As one commenter notes:
In earlier statements it was explained that WB-8 was only going to be produced if WB7/7.1 were successful — i.e. validated WB-6 results. I think we can assume that happened. WB-8 is to determine scaling. This means a lot of testing to provide a lot of conclusive data for peer review. The fact that the research is ongoing, means they’ve hit no serious snags – the contract would end if they did. This is a very very positive report, do not listen to the naysayers.
We Ain't Looking Hard Enough!
Here’s a little bit over at The Register related to the Fermi Paradox:
The problem, according to boffins Jacob Haqq-Misra and Ravi Kumar Kopparapu of Penn State uni, is that it’s entirely possible that our Solar System is littered with ancient alien space probes and we simply haven’t found them yet. Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu have investigated this mathematically.
Of course it might also be the case that we have no idea what they might look like. Maybe they wrap them up in a big black rock the size of an aircraft carrier…