Open Thread

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m under attack by alien virus from heck. I know, I know. I WAS going to write a post, but breakfast exhausted me.
So consider this an open thread. Have fun.

58 thoughts on “Open Thread”

  3. But but… This is a post!!!!! [Crazy Grin]

    As for that Alien Virus, we need to find out where it came from so we can destroy that place.

    IE “Nuke It From Orbit!”

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  6. Naomi Wolf remains, for the most part, a California liberal (not quite leftist), but she had the, “knock you over and stomp on yous,” and suggested hibiscus tea, plus extra vitamin C, fwiw.

    We’ve avoided the crud so far, but I’m having what’s probably industrial-strength reflux and I don’t want to go on acid blockers for the rest of my life.

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    2. Whatever. They can have Star Trek at this point. They’ve already ruined.

      We’re better off keeping them from ruining something else, which they’ll do while we distracted fighting over the pile of manure they plopped out.

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  8. For those who haven’t heard…

    A conservative managed to get himself(?) onto the Signal chat groups that are being used to coordinate the anti-ICE activities in Minnesota. And when I say coordinate, I mean *everything*. Got a suspected government vehicle, and want a sympathetic government employee to run the tags? Post it in the Signal groups. Need logistical support? Post it in Signal. Need reporters you can trust? Signal. And on, and on. Everything is being coordinated through Signal.

    And the person at the top of at least some of the Signal groups is the state’s Lt. Governor. A state representative has also been IDed as another person helping to run things. Many other people in the government or in the press have also been identified as being part of the Signal groups.

    In short, if there was any doubt before that this was all being coordinated, the cold hard digital proof has been revealed

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    3. If that account by the LT governor is not an elaborate false flag.

      Yeah, I know, I am being stupid.

      But, the medium to longer term consequences are probably going to involve trying to prove allegations in court.

      And, I have not had all the key actors locked up for thirty days for psychiatric observation, so even if I were competent to judge mental health, I kinda can’t tell who is simply insane.

      I’m amazed and appalled at how stupid this seems to be. I should not be, because last year I was warned early that Tim Walz had serious defects. But, still, I want to believe that people were not just surprised and trying to manage what they were told to do in very very stupid ways.

      But, it looks like Walz should have been confined for his own safety last year, and that we are not looking at an extremely sudden cognitive decline.

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    4. See this on X (via link chain from Insty to PJM) by a retired Green Beret Chief Warrant Officer, and thus an expert in insurgency and counter insurgency, explaining how this is not any sort of grassroots protest, but a funded and organized insurgency in it’s early stages:

      https://x.com/schwalm5132/status/2015470661490057540

      As I understand it one of the most powerful strategic weapons in countering the Iraq insurgency was extensive data analysis to follow and interdict the money flows, and I believe there are a lot of folks with that experience who outlasted the Autopen in Federal service who know how to do that exact thing.

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      1. That’s what datarepublican has been doing. Of course, the best evidence in the world does you no good if your court system has been coopted so the crooks are released.

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        1. If we get to arresting the insurgents, even if it’s known to be in a catch-and-release jurisdiction, we need to make sure those retina-scan gizmos they used to build the big ID database in Iraq get issued widely to the arrest units. They have to be sitting in military warehouses somewhere, next to the Ark of the Covenant crate, even given the military’s well deserved aversion to all things counterinsurgency at this point.

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    1. Possibly related.

      https://twitchy.com/samj/2026/01/26/eric-schwam-mn-n2424358

      I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.

      Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.

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      1. Further down:

        The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience.

        Can we just pull the bandage now and have at it? One side has decided it will destroy the country to win. It would be nice if the other side didn’t just let them.

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        1. As noted in the CW4’s X post, they know how to address and dismantle this stuff. They just need recognition that it’s not actually wine moms and college kids at highest levels so they can dive into these structures, within existing law, and snap the money and organizational connections that are making it happen.

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    2. I hope so but a lifetime of failure theater by the GOP doesn’t have me optimistic. I figure he’ll administer the requisite stern talking to and nothing will change.

      I worry Trump is finally becoming a Republican instead of what he was.

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        1. I deny all accusations, on behalf of all Dans, Daniels, Dannys, and suchlike forenames in perpetuity! We are all innocent of any such malice or carrying of diseases, virii, bacterium, or other malefactions. Any scurrilous slander is henceforth to be dismissed without prejudice, but with something chocolate, because tasty that’s why.

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            1. Lies and slander, all of them! To be Dan is to be virtuous and without doubt unvirified by nasty virii. We Dans have been maligned, but we stand tall! Even if we’re small, which I was about forty-fifty years ago now.

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  11. I’m hoping that sending Homan there will help politicos save face (not that I really care a whit), and “Do the right thing”(TM — NOT). It will also allow some stealth elint on the clowns mentioned above. There’s a perfectly nasty short story called April Fool by JL Curtis that is apt. It comes close to describing what’s been going on up there. We need consequences!

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  13. I read an interesting article a few days back about making advanced computer chips. I bet no few of you had no idea that the electrical properties of elements with more than one isotope add a random element to electrical conduction and magnetic properties. As the conducting paths of computer chips get narrower it creates problems with noise and widens signals. It’s even worse with trying to create quantum devices. The solution? Pure materials of one isotope. As you may guess they are fantastically expensive. That’s enough of a teaser to make you look up more about it if you are interested.

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    1. Also see — from yesteryear, back when the latest Tom Clancy novels were ‘hot’ — the idea and actuality of making synthetic diamonds out of purified carbon-12. The natural stuff has about 1% carbon-13, which is enough to impair their (amazingly high, though direction-dependent) thermal conductivity, as compared to the pure stuff.

      This was(/is?) relevant mostly as super heat sinks for assorted components like high-power electronics (which can also be made from semiconducting diamond) and (IIRC?) laser stuff or something… see one of Clancy’s books on that, one I never read.

      The smaller electronics get, the more fiddly and fidgety they get. Even metallic wires fall prey to something callled ‘electromigration’ where the current actually moves the atoms around. ‘Small is beautiful’ may still be mostly true, but small can also be big, big trouble, and bigger the smaller.

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      1. Yeah, for me this stuff verges in between ‘oh, it is more funky, how cool’ and ‘I hate this stuff, and myself for trying to understand’.

        This idea of using particle accelerator tech to pipe x-rays around a semiconductor fab is really cool.

        Validating those designs, and improving the process yield, could well be immensely painful.

        If the AI money does not evaporate, there is gonna be production yield improvement work across a lot of chips with the older EUV technology.

        I can’t tell if I would hate doing that work, or not. And EUV work on GaN/??? HEMT should be relatively straight-forward, and able to be based on some relatively mature research.

        I know that I nope out when it comes to some of the quantum stuff. Sure, it is merely a bunch of bets on physical models, and the information exists to do those shrewdly. I haven’t spent years on that stuff already, and it is just outside of my comfort zone, I think.

        For chips at high frequencies, the wires carrying signals through the packaging wind up being a fairly skilled engineering task.

        There are a thousand and one little pieces of microelectronics that are now potential technologies in research and development. It is very cool to just hear about them.

        But, sometimes the work of doing that development sounds painful and confusing.

        But, I am definitely the sort of idiot who tries to understand the whole at the same time that I study a little piece.

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      2. The Reader remembers when diamond heat sinks and substrates for III-V semiconductor power amps such as Gallium Nitride (GaN) were all the rage at DARPA. He had pointy haired VPs at his Great Big Defense Contractor moaning that the world was ending because our competitor was ‘ahead’. The Reader shook his head and smiled. Turned out that DARPA ‘discovered’ what some of us already knew. The buffer layer needed to lattice match GaN to diamond had so much thermal resistance that the diamond didn’t provide any benefit. The one useful thing that came out of the DARPA program was a set of much better techniques for precisely measuring the thermal resistance of materials.

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      3. Quantum tunneling was a thing already at the geometries the company I worked at around 2010 was designing in, and that was an FPGA place so emphatically not bleeding edge. Electrons magically migrating from this circuit here over through solid theoretically nonconducting matter to that circuit over there is of course just plain crazy talk, so it fits perfectly in quantum mechanics.

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    2. Hmm.

      I actually can’t tell whether or not I had no idea about that.

      I’ve spent some time reading up on electromagnetic properties of materials, and still am pretty sure I have no idea what is going on.

      So the basic first order/linear exponential solutions to maxwell’s equations seem to directly lead to a complex permittivity, a complex permeability, and conductivity that I can’t tell if it is ever complex, or what that would mean. There are obviously the usual additions for anisotropic properties in different directions, etc.

      I have hit the point where I am not actually sure that permittivity exists. Okay, the scholarship says it does, but the scholarship says a lot of things.

      Anyway, I explicitly do not understand the electrical or magnetic properties of semiconductors, especially not the fancier and more elaborate models. I knew that they got funkier than I really followed.

      I am very unsurprised to hear that isotope might matter in some cases. But, I have no idea if my previous exposure included any hint of that. Certainly, none that I was aware of.

      Anyway, very cool. Thank you.

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  15. Heck is not the name I have heard before for the chinese province with that one laboratory.

    (I know, figure of speech, and maybe it is not a bioweapon.)

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  16. Nothing to do with anything, but here’s a picture from yesterday’s immoderate weather. Northern Virginia didn’t get creamed nearly as badly as locations further north, but we did get some snow and ice. Anyway, I kind of liked how the perspective played out on this one:

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  17. Four inches of snow are melting into the ground. The might hunter, Jase T. Cat, stalks birds through the window. Alas, the birds do not acknowledge his ferocity and prowess, instead gorging themselves on free birdseed.

    The past is not so far away as it seems.

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  19. Anyway, in 2019 I was reading an American written take on Xianxia.

    I have spent the past few years reading Murim novels in webtoon format.

    Murim is a somewhat wider Korean version of the Chinese xianxia and wuxia genres.

    Basically, Wuxia inventions and actual Chinese history, folklore and martial arts magical thinking seems to have been mined to form a standard low power martial arts cultivation setting for such stories set on ‘our’ Earth.

    The Buddism of the Shaolin temple at Mount Song, and the Taoism of the Wudang mountains are associated with various Chinese martial traditions.

    Mount Hua is a real place that exists, but the mount hua sect seems to have been an invention of wuxia novels, from what I can tell. It feels like there are quite a few murim novels involving some dude who is ‘a genius’ at the mount hua sect, due to fairly genre standard cheats. I would say easily two dozen that I am aware of that use the standard list of sects, are not mount hua oriented, and which do mention mount hua.

    I have revisited the web novel I was reading in 2019 (I can see my comments), and one of today’s chapters mentioned mount hua. I did not know about mount hua then, and do now.

    My instinct always tells me that I should write stuff that I read a bunch of. Lately, I’ve been concerned that I might be unstable enough that a really focused fiction writing mindset might be pretty bad for me. I dunno.

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  20. Unsolicited log feline shenanigans, part 3aIV.c:

    The snowpocalypse has come to the wee little town of Speck, Appalachia. The fu zi residents of the Lane plantation and repair shop met this event with varying enthusiasms.

    “Make it stahp, nao! Window cold, wants made of warm! Hooman make warmness!” His orangeness the fuzzmonster disapproves of all things snow, cold, and wetness with all the furry fury of a thousand suns. He sits on the computer, in his pine box, soaking up the warmness when I’m not sitting down.

    Nastycat is still crazycat. Went out into the snow to fight the snowflakes. Did a full 360 flip trying to catch one, landed in a drift and sprang right back out demanding to come in. How dare the cold get wet on him! This situation was intolerable. Also, cold sticks don’t fight fair. No fair! Referees must make this match a tie, not a loss!

    Othercat on the other paw, lurves teh snowpocalypse. Chonker monstercat, his hugeness the floofy, goes out to dive bomb every drift and shake every tree. He climbs up the Christmas tree pine in the front lot, looking for evidence of squirrels, springs off onto the porch roof (a feat of agility for such a massive kitteh as he), finds out the metal roof is slick, and slides right back off into the deep drift by the porch where all the snow slides off. Then goes and does it again, because “wheee!”

    Neighborcat is watchful. Even with the blanket of white, the property must be protected. Rent must be paid in the blood of verminous villains, squirrely agents provocateurs (those what stir up the mice and rats and voles to infiltrate, to attempt to divide the attentions of the protectors of this land), birbs that dive bomb and threaten from above, and all other unsanctioned souls that dare. Few are they that chance the unbroken white during the grip of this bitter cold, but for those desperate souls what do there can be no forgiveness. An interloper and invader shall not live to tell the tale.

    Inside the domicile, where chicken dinners are nommed with all the grace and dignity of drunken Vikings, the fireplace burns steadily through the woodpile. Despite central heat and air, there’s always been something nice about a good fire going, and the fu zi foursome appreciate it.

    Nightly zoomies commence at eight pm sharp, with the tag game between Othercat and Doofus taking top spot. Occasionally Nastycat and Neighborcat join in, making it a free for all across the whole of the upstairs and through the library. I had to install door springs so that Othercat’s weight wouldn’t slam a doorknob through the plaster, as he threatened to do when he was a bit smaller. Thus when they bounce off doors, the doors spring right back.

    Naastycat managed to do a three count bounce from door to door to door without ever hitting the floor today on his way back from the upstairs bedroom. Made of dumpster fuzz and stubborn springs, that cat. Doofus has gotten more in the swing of things with encouragement from the fuzzy brothers from different mothers. The orange streak is still the slowest of the four, but that’s mostly because Neighborcat is a bioengineered murder machine in kitteh form, Othercat is a freak among fuzzmonsters, and Nastycat has no setting between snooze with the pink dino, fight the sticks, and ZOOM.

    By and all accounts, the zoomies of late have been successful in wearing down the supercharged energy batteries of the fu zi crew. Life in the frozen landscape of Speck shuffles on with its winter clothes on. Scrape the driveways, lay the salt, scrape the windows, and keep on truckin’. The mad rush of folks for milk and eggs died down yesterday. Fewer cars on the road, mostly four wheel drives and folks what know what snow is and ain’t scared of it.

    The train goes by late in the night, shakes the windows and keeps on rolling through. It hardly bothers the locals, used to such things for a long time now. A few of the newer residents complain, but that’s just foolishness. Power plant needs that coal. You like heated homes, don’t you? Lights and internet? That’s where the electricity comes from.

    In any case, they’ll settle in or they’ll move on. No great shakes either way. Things will abide, frost or sun, rain or dark. There’ll still be work to be done. Still be fathers teaching sons, mothers leading daughters in the way women do, animals to be fed at early before the sun rises and things to be fixed at all hours of the day. Be like the fu zi and worry naught about what might be. What is, that’s what matters. Today. Now. The work in front of us, the finished job when its done, and the feeling of satisfaction that comes with the completion. Throw yourself into the challenge like Othercat into the snow drift. Take care of your needs like Doofus washing his fur that he got chicken juice on. Sleep the sleep of the just like Neighborcat lightly dozing between hunts. And do what you like with no fear of criticism like Nastycat and his beloved pink dino. The opinions of others rarely matters as much as you think. Confidence and competence, like Neighborcat and his prideful hunts, are always in need.

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