May video poll:
Should be back on schedule for May. Thanks for voting!
Poll ends Monday night so I have time to write it.
Comments (19)
I really need some Angela ranting about Astrology to take my mind off the fascist bullshit going on! I was to late to vote!
Forever voting thorium (I mean, until it gets picked), because I want to hear (from a physicist) why we aren't just building those now.
So I was thinking: would it make sense to remove "Angela's choice" from future polls with the assumption that this is *always* a valid alternative to whatever was leading in the poll? This way it should be easier to gauge what people are interested in. But if that topic can't be covered for whatever reason, there's always a fallback. 'Cause I'm guessing all of us are always OK with Angela's choice.
I never vote Angela's Choice because I remember her saying she likes the polls because it removes the stress of coming up with video ideas and Angela's Choice just brings that back.
If you should ever plan a roadshow, going city to city to rant, know that I would buy VIP tickets to the event in at least two cities. No one rants better than AC!
I have an uncanny ability to select the least popular topic every month.😅 I voted mentoring. I'm an IT director in higher ed. Students and staff who have a mentor have a huge advantage.
I don't know, if I hear about mentoring I immediately think about something like Hunger Games. It's probably just my general disillusion in the techno-industrial society and while I think its very important for youngsters (in the same way Hunger Games is very important those youngsters), it would be nice to have something else than corporate dystopia ...
Video games! You doing the one video while playing Binding of Isaac was so impressive and is what got me hooked here in the first place, haha
I understand that a schedule can be helpful for planning and execution, but we will be here whenever you have something ready to share.
Angela's choice!
I'm waiting for a thoughtful talk on astrology as a proto-science. That would really be an interesting breath of fresh air in comparison to the constant disparagement.
It might be hard to out-rant Carl Sagan on astrology, so thorium reactors is my choice
IDK if this is relevant but my favorite astrology rant is imagining a world where astrology is real, and completely predictable/predictive. Imagining the chinese zodiac is the one. Then imagining what it would be like being a teacher and knowing that every single student in the next years class is going to be a headstrong jerk who wants to be the leader. Or knowing that the next years class is going to be entirely composed of empathetic students. (You know, plus the few students who got pushed into the next year or the previous who are a bit different). A war that requires a draft is going to destroy specific and important subsets of your society, and the same subset of every society. (the dating/marriage compatibility stuff can get extremely weird there too, so try not to think about that stuff too much). Interesting world building maybe though.
One of my favorite Science Fiction authors is P.K. Dick. He's not a "hard science" author, he read history and philosophy not math and science but he was great at themes such as what does it mean to be human or using just a little science to show bigger themes. One of my favorite novels has a very boring title: "Eye in the Sky". A small group of non technical people are getting a tour of a new particle accelerator and an accident creates a bunch of new realities based on the mind set of each person. The funniest was the one based on the one true religious believer in the group. To start your car you have to say a prayer. Science is done by monks who pray for divine guidance, etc. It was really a great way to show how absurd the world would be if the things that religious people believed were literally true.
let's have Planetary Defence, we may need that.
Right now it's more important to defend the planet from Greedy ignorant a-holes than aliens. We are facing a catastrophe (Climate Change) the likes of which we've never seen since the beginning of modern culture and in America we not only ignore the problem but we vote for people who want to actually make it worse.
I trust your judgement. It's not that I don't care what you talk about, but you haven't disappointed yet. What I favor in nuclear plants is whatever small modular can be rolled out soon. I feel like thorium is not as far along. OTOH, thorium is an interesting technology that I don't know much about. But truly, you've talked about many things & what you said has always been worth hearing.
I chose an astrology rant because I have always thought that if there was any basis at all to it, one could blindfold a thousand astrologists, read a prediction of a random star sign, and have the astrologist guess which star sign it was about to see if there was any correlation. I’m guessing there would be a few adjustments due to biases like word choices used for one star sign over another (eg Taurus and stubborn), but I just bet the result wouldn’t be much better than random. So my vote is for a classic astrology Angierant!
I discovered you in that playing The Binding of Isaac video!