Notices by Dan Neuman 🇨🇦 (dan613@ottawa.place)

@steter How tedious!

I just finished "Foundation", the first book of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (though several more books were added on later). I hadn't read it since the first time in high school, so I wanted to see how it differed from the excellent Foundation series on Apple TV.

The first thing that stood out was Asimov's assumption of a male-dominated pan-galactic society. That was disappointing, but I recall Asimov expressing discomfort writing female characters adequately. Fortunately, the series updated the world so that a woman, a re-imagined Gaal Dornick, could be the greatest mathematician of her generation, and the greatest general of the Empire, Bel Riose, is married to a man. I don't recall skin colour being mentioned in the book, but the series is replete with people of all shapes, sizes, and colours.

The books span several centuries and are essentially anthologies of stories from the same universe, with a hologram of Seldon Harding and his psychohistory uniting them. Of course, the writers had to come up with story devices to keep the audience interested by providing continuity with the main characters rather than just Harding. So Dornick is in suspended animation between episodes, and the Emperor (who didn't play much of a role in the first book) is three clones* advised by a wise, timeless android.

Anyway, I enjoyed the show more than the book, which seemed dated. Asimov had great ideas, but his writing struck me as just okay. Though his stories do move along, and I'm never tempted to give up.

* I'm just starting Foundation and Empire, but I don't recall the emperor being so uniquely characterized.

I found the treatment of The Mule in the series completely unnecessary. The twist at the end could have been left out, and it raised so many questions. It's the biggest failing of the series, though it occupies maybe 20 minutes. It does make you think back to previous scenes and make you wonder what was going on.

Walking through the Billings Bridge Mall in Ottawa to pickup a few things was a bit depressing today. I counted 12 storefronts papered up, maybe 1/3 of the mall. Most of them in the last few weeks. #Ottawa

@hellomiakoda @minego I'm now wondering what % of NDs would be up at 5 am. Unless that's the time they finally go to sleep.

❝A state will never announce that it is fascist. It will just announce that anti-fascists are enemies of the state.❞
— unknown

@ColinTheMathmo 0 mod 2 is 0, therefore 0 is even

@juglugs @toxy Ok, that was a funny situation. *However*, the entire military officer core is predicated on being able to teach leadership to people with the right aptitudes. You would be better served taking a course (perhaps more local) than a conference, but a conference is handy for making connections *in other companies* should the need arise.

@Fife4Europe @steter We CAN stop warming, just by not emitting CO₂. It already sucks for a lot of people, so we should have done this a couple of decades ago, but the sooner we stop, the fewer lives destroyed by our bad decisions. #ClimateAction

@sudo200 @RickiTarr And firefighters

@RollingStone @steter @politics-news-RollingStone Oh great, they asked ChatGPT if they should bomb Iran.

I want to normalize saying "community spending" instead of "government spending".

Canada's new speaker of the House of Commons, Montréal-area Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia is dragged against his will to the Speaker's chair. #CanPoli #CdnPoli

When you fire your graphics design department:

@yogthos It's the business cycle. Governments can, if they so choose, do much to diminish the impacts of the cycle. But too many people believe that businesses should be free to cause complete chaos in our lives every decade or so.

@jessew @fcktheworld587 I get those at McDonald's all the time.

The audacity.

*artist unknown, from r/Europe without attribution, reverse image search was unsuccessful

@feld @SrRochardBunson @redstateinsurgents Oh, maybe I was taking this post too literally. https://delta.chat/en/2025-01-23-webxdc-no-billionaires

@SrRochardBunson @feld @redstateinsurgents This is interesting. Using PGP to send .zip files via email in the background, but make it look like chat. Presumably the client takes care of all the encryption key management in the background so it is invisible to the user.

@aral I (an engineer) learned this the hard way with climate science. It seemed counterintuitive (wrong) because I didn't have all the facts. Fortunately I trust experts and was willing to learn. I ran across too many people who were the opposite.