This is not valid C, though. The characters allowed for identifiers are defined in Unicode Standard Annex #31, and those easily understood as operators, like arrows, are not included.
> More than 20 years ago, I corresponded with famous UFO researcher Stanton T. Friedman. His central claim was that “the evidence is overwhelming that some UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft”.
I don't believe in UFOs. But if I had to believe in UFOs, this would be my position:
We have had modern humans for 500 000 years [1]. If it takes 10 000 years to make it from stone age to space age, we have theoretically had time to make that 50 times over. Maybe there was a previous version of a human civilization [2], then wiped out by ice ages or something, but a small number of highly advanced humans have survived and keep hiding from us. I think this could be somewhat more plausible than interstellar travel.
The largest obstacle to this theory being taken seriously is the lack of evidence in long term records, such as ice cores.
Our current age will show up in future ice cores as a massive spike; we affect CO2, Methane, Sulfates, and probably a lot more. Additionally we produce and have produced various synthetic compounds that will remain detectable in the environment for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.
In order to circumvent this lack of evidence such a society would have had to had a very small footprint, taken very specific industrial steps, and had a focus on research that wasn't exploited. This is highly unlikely - most of our lessons have actually been learned from exploitation, and most of our research facilities require astounding amounts of labour to construct. This isn't even touching on the social improbability of maintaining such a society.
Sorry, I was overly polite. It should have read "this is a bloody stupid position to take".
Visitors from other star systems are significantly more likely (on the order of dice roll vs impossible) than a secret highly advanced human society developing and remaining present and hidden.
> If India can have voters vote and tally all the votes in one day, then so can everyone else.
In most countries, in the elections you vote or the member of parliament you want. Presidential elections, and city council elections are held separately, but are also equally simple. But in one election you cast your vote for one person, and that's it.
With this kind of elections, many countries manage to hold the elections on paper ballots, count them all by hand, and publish results by midnight.
But on an American ballot, you vote for, for example:
- US president
- US senator
- US member of congress
- state governor
- state senator
- state member of congress
- several votes for several different state judge positions
- several other state officer positions
- several votes for several local county officers
- local sheriff
- local school board member
- several yes/no votes for several proposed laws, whether they should be passed or not
I don't think it would be possible to calculate all these 20 or 40 votes, if calculated by hand. That's why they use voting machines in America.
How is it not possible? It's just additional votes, there isn't anything actually stopping counting by hand, is there? How was it counted historically without voting machines?
Say, how many voting stations are there in a typical city/county in the US?
Here in Indonesia, in a city of 2 million people there are over 7000 voting stations. While we vote for 5 ballots (President, Legislative (National, Province, and City/Regency), we still use paper ballots and count them by hand.
Wikipedia page doesn't have any estimates on when the contamination event might have started (so products processed before that would be safe). It only tells that the food recall in the US started 2 months ago.
> Radiation scans revealed at least 22 plants in the industrial zone were contaminated. The Indonesian taskforce did not name the 21 other production facilities, but said they would immediately undergo decontamination procedures conducted by Indonesia’s nuclear agency.
As of past 1.5 years, the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation in China seems to have reached a plateau. They are building new coal plants, more new plants than they are retiring old plants. But even with new coal plants, they have not been burning more coal.
Not related to the article, but related to Frank Herbert's Dune:
The Dune ecosystem is much less thought out than it appears to be. Herbert drops bits and pieces about the Dune ecology here and there so getting an overall picture is difficult, so we don't realize how silly it is.
* We don't know where sand plankton comes from.
* Sand plankton lives in the top layers of desert sand, eats spice.
* Some of the tiny sand plankton individuals grow larger, migrate deeper down, and become sand trout.
* Sand trout excrement combines with water pockets deep below, is biologically active, grows, releases gases and explodes, transporting it back to surface, becomes spice.
* We don't know what sand trout eats, but it should eat something in order to produce excrement.
* Some sand trouts grow larger, become sand worms.
* Sand worms eat sand plankton.
So the thole ecosystem consists only one species, with 3 life stages: (1) sand plankton, (2) sand trout, (3) sand worm. And stage 1 lives by eating the excrement of stage 2, and stage 3 lives by eating stage 1.
Ecologically and energetically this is silly. The species just eats itself and its own excrement, and there appears to be no energy input to the system.
>So we have to pump 150 + 22 = 172 watts of heat up a thermal gradient of 10C — more if it's hotter. If I assume a slightly pessimistic factor of 2 for the heat pump, that's an electrical input of about 85 watts to the heat pump, plus some to run fans and coolant pumps in the suit — my guess is that you need a minimum of around 250 watts to power the suit.
>Sounds distinctly unpleasant to wear.
>Edit:: and if the cooling stops, get out of the suit quickly, before you roast.
I dunno, they have interstellar spaceships. Sun on earth is 1kW/m^2 at equator, not sure what it would be on Dune, but doesn't seem that unreasonable that they could have it powered by some advanced solar cells integrated in the suit.
there is a lot of silly stuff in Dune, but my understanding is that the still suit recycles the body's water. It's not just that you pee in a tube, it absorbs the sweat and recycles that too
Sweating works by phase change. Water going from liquid to gas takes lot of energy. Thus removing it from body. On other hand if you then collect that steam and make it liquid again well you have to dump that energy back to the body. Or conduct or radiate it away... But those are inefficient thus we sweat.
Yeah, it's been many years, but my impression was that things could be explained as an invasive and engineered all-in-one species that terraforms (arrakiforms?) the environment, partly as a way to eliminate competition.
One phase photosynthesizes, one phase sequesters excess water, and one phase... Stirs the lithosphere and eliminates large animals or trespassers?
In the last Herbert Dune book, Chapterhouse, Arrakis is destroyed to eliminate the source of spice, but at least one worm is transported to another planet to begin to turn that into desert, thus ensuring a continued supply.
there are also many species on the ocean floor that do not get their energy from the sun, but from vents of heat from the earth. maybe they dont photosynthesise, they use heat instead
iirc folding spacetime was a separate (and unexplained) piece of magic; what the spice did was to let you navigate a ship through folded space, which unenhanced human perception could not do.
but specifics apart, the main point is just because readers accept hyperspace and extrasensory perception as part of your fictional universe, doesn't mean they will not expect the laws of thermodynamics, or planetary ecology, or other related fields, to also be suspended.
One of the points in the first book is that after several hundred years, they still don't understand how the ecology of Dune works.
There are hints that Dune was once a thriving jungle world, before the sand trout encapsulated all the water deep below the surface. So there's plenty of organic matter, and water, and sunlight, to support the sandworm lifecycle.
Could it be that they go deep enough to get heat from a hot core?
I never thought about it like this, but it is a little strange that such an eco-centric author/book had a relatively shallow description of one of the main components of the ecosystem. Then again, the mystery may have been intentional. After all, we still don't understand perfectly well how many ecosystems functions, especially in the since of having a causal model sufficient to to predict responses to perturbations. I imagine at the time of writing ecosystems at large seemed even more indiscernible, so it wasn't a stretch to have some part of the many cycles involved that didn't make sense. But overall I lean toward it being kind of silly, as you say.
Frank himself, you can get a clear picture of the ecosystem as outlined here by the end of Children of Dune.
One (possible) omission here - the sand trout traps water underground by linking and forming dams around water pockets - that’s the cause of Arrakis’ ultra arid environment, but maybe it’s also the source of nutrition?
Anyway, it is a bit silly indeed but in the novel’s context it feels grounded.
I put together the pieces mentioned in various places in the first Dune book. Every step sounds good and plausibly science(-fiction)-esque when presented separately, like the book does. Only when you put all the steps together, the picture starts to look like an M.C. Escher drawing.
Or, as suggested here, use language macros:
https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2023/01/5485.php