Stimulus, part two

Reloading dies for 6.5mm Grendel.

just the anime

Barbaloot and I catch SciFi network mostly for the anime, though I'd like to get her into BSG. We'd have to start at the very beginning too, cuz I've probably seen fewer whole episodes than I own 10mm pistols. She sees BSG ads and thinks it's just soap opera.

But as we watch SciFi and see what non-anime programs it offers, it reminds me of Aaron Magruder's observations of Black Entertainment Television. Few blacks, very little entertainment. BSG looks like the only real SF that SciFi has to offer. They'll need a hell of a lot more SF to offset the ghost hunting and crossing over and yeti junk they carry.

Recluse RIP

We regret to note the passing of our oldest cat, Feathers. Renal failure, over the last few months. Only last week was it visible in her behavior. We euthanized her before any indications of pain or suffering.

What we've done with the stimulus rebate, part one

Since Uncle Sugar has borrowed money for all of us bitter God-fearing masses to piss away:


6.5mm Grendel, Wolf Gold, 123gr soft points, 20 rds per carton, 25 cartons. Exactly fifty cents per round delivered. This is about all the money that will go for anything manufactured outside the US.

IJ will be getting some help, as well as some legal funds for folks trying to get or stay out of jail because of ATF abuses.

If a red giant bursts in gamma rays, and there's no sentient life to observe it, is it a Great Filter event?

Instapundit points to an article whose author hopes, almost wishes, that there's no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. If there were, it would somehow mean to him that a cataclysmic event, of sufficient scale to eradicate humanity, hasn't happened yet, which for him is a cause for concern.

I apologize for failing to follow the logic. It seems that a man holding the directorship of something called the Future of Humanity Institute should be more optimistic about humanity and its future, but this fellow is a downer:

For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some tech­nology--perhaps some very powerful weapons tech­nology--that causes its extinction.

The Universe abounds with so-called Great Filter events that have utterly nothing to do with the inevitable self-destruction of sentience, fashionable though that assertion may be. Gamma-ray bursting stars, asteroid impacts, ice ages for crissakes, any of which would roll back the calendar on our species if not obliterate it outright.

It isn't a Great Filter, it's thousands of calamities, randomly scattered across space and time, and we haven't been whacked by one yet but we still can be. Only microseconds ago in geologic time have we become aware of the potential for these calamities. It will take real geologic time for us to move a significant number of ourselves sufficiently far away to be spared the greatest of these calamities.

It may be that there are hundreds or even thousands of other spacefaring civilizations out there, dead before they got out of reach of the nearest GRB. For each of them, there are millions of other extinct civilizations buried under kilometers of ice, then ground to silt when the glaciers retreated, through a hundred cycles of glaciation and thaw.

I'd be surprised to find there are more than 3 interstellar races anywhere in the Universe at any one time, but then I haven't done the math.

Arguing that we're doomed for, or safely past, some single inevitable culminating point in the development of sentience is itself a form of observation selection effect.