It is Kefkaʼs Tower, according to “Final Fantasy Ultimania Archive, Volume 1” (2018). Dark Horse Books. Page 259 of 335. ISBN: 978-1-50670-644-3. OCLC: 1043915833.

Utah: Monticello (Italian, but locally pronounced “monta sell-oh”)

You’re telling me there is no Walla Walla, England?

Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.

After reading The Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson, I wish there were stories about races that went the other way, lifespan-wise: extremely small people who lived only 1 year, even smaller people who lived only 1 month, some very extremely small but very powerful ones that lived only a day, etc. The idea is that artificial people (emulated people, or Ems) could have subjectively similar characteristics and experiences to the larger physical entities (e.g. humans, but perhaps even dwarves, elves, and etc., since theyʼre just emulated minds), but their artificial emulated substrate allows their minds to develop and age orders of magnitude faster; they also could solve certain problems orders of magnitude faster but practical limitations on delays between thought and physical interactions (your mind would waste away if you had to wait a whole subjective hour between each physical step during a walk with a standard 1.5 meter body) require their bodies to be very small.

To ems that are smaller and faster, sunlight seems dimmer and shows more noticeable diffraction patterns. Magnets, waveguides, and electrostatic motors are less useful. Surface tension makes it harder to escape from water. Friction is more often an obstacle, lubrication is harder to achieve, and random thermal disruptions to the speed of objects become more noticeable. It becomes easier to dissipate excess body heat, but harder to insulate against nearby heat or cold (Haldane 1926; Drexler 1992).

A crude calculation using a simple conservative nano-computer design suggests that a matching faster-em brain might plausibly fit inside an android body 256 times smaller and faster than an ordinary human body (Hanson 1995).

Compared with ordinary humans, to a fast em with a small body the Earth seems much larger, and takes much longer to travel around. To a kilo-em, for example, the Earth’s surface area seems a million times larger, a subway ride that takes 15 minutes in real time takes 10 subjective days, an 8-hour plane ride takes a subjective year, and a 1-month flight to Mars takes a subjective century. Sending a radio signal to the planet Saturn and back takes a subjective 4 months. Even super-sonic missiles seem slow. However, over modest distances lasers and directed energy weapons continue to seem very fast to a kilo-em.

Call them speedlings, or some variant of sprite, but I think its an interesting world-building concept.

“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”

The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2

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“That all life beyond this planet never existed, no matter how irrationally improbable that may be.”

don’t let them slowly re-consolidate in the following 20 years

I too remember how AT&T was broken up only for most of its Baby Bells to remerge back into Ma Bell.

To prevent this for future breakups, I say the content and services sold by big tech should be made competitively compatible and interoperable via nullification of DRM laws; people buy music and movies and cloud storage; let them legally move their purchases to any competitor and big tech companies will break up naturally as local competitors emerge from people who dislike big tech for their own reasons. Monopolies cannot be trusted to lower prices for content and services. Legally nullifying DRM is like the FCC telling customers in 1968 that it was finally okay to ignore the “Bell equipment only” legal warning that had kept them locked into leasing their telephone sets for usurious amounts from AT&T for decades. A few years later, in 1982, AT&T was broken up. AT&T is almost a total monopoly again, but phones remain interoperable.

Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don’t believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.

Can’t wait for the day when Uncle Sam to turns brown.

Imagine if a lost Spanish armada finally arrived at Florida, centuries late, musket-wielding conquistadors raiding a coastal naval academy while a prominent political VIP was giving a speech, taking them hostage like Hernán Cortés did with Moctezuma II (Aztec Empire) or Francisco Pizarro with Atahualpa (Inca Empire).

I think it involved a planet called …

In fact, electric vehicles have been common once before. In the early years of the twentieth century, there were three fundamentally different automobile technologies battling for supremacy, and electric cars held their own against competition from steam-and gasoline-powered alternatives, as they are mechanically much simpler and more reliable, as well as quiet and smokeless. In Chicago they even dominated the automobile market. At the peak of production of electric vehicles in 1912, 30,000 glided silently along the streets of the USA, and another 4,000 throughout Europe; in 1918 a fifth of Berlin’s motor taxis were electric.

The drawback of electric cars with their own onboard batteries (rather than trains or trolleys taking a continuous feed from a power line over the track) is that even a large, heavy set cannot store a great deal of energy, and once depleted the battery takes a long time to recharge. The maximum range of these early electric vehicles was around a hundred miles, (Ironically, about 100 miles is still the maximum range for modern electric cars: technological improvements in battery storage and electric motors have been perfectly offset by an increase in car size and weight, and drivers of electric vehicles suffer from “charge anxiety.”) but this is farther than a horse and in an urban setting is more than adequate. The solution is, rather than waiting for the battery to be recharged, you can simply pull into a station for a quick battery pack exchange: Manhattan successfully operated a fleet of electric cabs in 1900, with a central station that rapidly swapped depleted batteries for a fresh tray.

From The Knowledge (2014) by Lewis Dartnell, chapter 9 “Transport”. Cited works for the history of electric cars are:

• Crump, Thomas. 2001. A Brief History of Science: As Seen through the Development of Scientific Instruments. London: Constable & Robinson.
• Edgerton, David. 2007. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Brooks, Michael. 2009. “Electric Cars: Juiced Up and Ready to Go.” New Scientist, July 20: 42–45
• De Decker, Kris. 2010. “The Status Quo of Electric Cars: Better Batteries, Same Range.” Lowtech Magazine, May 3.
• Madrigal, Alexis. 2011. Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

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So, you’re telling me my plan to measure atmospheric oxygen isotope trends over geologic time by grinding up sharks is bust?

Just, buy a new iPhone and Mac every two years.

Termux, rsync and SSH.

Worked okay until I got overzealous and killed my battery from leaving Termux on for convenience.

The USB Type-C is useful for sharing files offline between smartphones while the USB Type-A is useful when you want to backup files to a PC at some point.

We could probably spin it around and give a tiny tax break for those who vote.

Now you’re talking!

Make tax refunds and all tax write-offs contingent on proving you voted. >:D