Hopefully Interesting

I'm going to be starting to collect links and post them every month.  I've only been collecting these for a couple of weeks, so there'll probably be more next month. Calvin and Muad'Dib , quotes from Dune as illustrated by Calvin and Hobbs.  It's pretty hilarious. Guardians of the Galaxy as a short tabletop campaign .  I just discovered Max Gladstone's blog (thanks Brian) and I've been enjoying it.  He also wrote a book that was very good.   Oh, and apparently Gostbusters is the best comedy ever made about the limits of the Lovecraftian worldview. I've always thought that augmented reality is a much cooler idea than virtual reality, and it looks like people are continuing to work on making the dream a reality . India's Mar's mission arrived  and is in a stable orbit.  This was impressive both because they managed to succeed on the first try unlike certain other space agencies and also because it cost of the movie Gravity.  I ...

I'd sort of been meaning to write about Red Plenty  at some point, a book about the dream and reality of the Soviet economic planning system.  It was very well done and actually made me more sympathetic to the people who believed in Communism back in the day.   Well, it looks like Scott at Slate Star Codex has put together an excellent  review  that said everything I was going to say and more so just go read that. One of the things I reconsidered after having read the book was the precise role of incentives in explaining the later problems with Soviet planning.  In certain cases, Russians were  very  well-incentivized by things like “We will kill you unless you meet the production target”. Later, when the state became less murder-happy, the threat of death faded to threats of demotions, ruined careers, and transfer to backwater provinces. And there were equal incentives, in the form of promotion or transfer to a desirable location such as Mos...

I recently heard someone talk on Facebook about the old " duck and cover " drills that school children used to do in the cold war and how obviously that wouldn't protect you from a nuclear bomb.  I've actually heard that same thing several times, so I thought it would be good to chime in in support of the civil defense planners of yesteryear.  Duck and cover was actually a pretty reasonable way to reduce one's risk of dying in the event of a nuclear explosion. To simplify a bit, there are basically four ways an atomic bomb can kill you.  When it goes off there's a flash of heat and light that can cause burns and fires.  There's a shock wave that can crush you directly, or which can collapse buildings and throw things into you.  There's a wave of ionizing radiation that can kill you through radiation poisoning.  And then there's any radioactive fallout that might kill you much later. Someone who is standing directly under a big atomic explosion ...