Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • 7 Posts
  • 231 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Humanitarian crisis for sure.

    Tangent. If I was a mad genetic scientist with no ethics, there are a few things I’d do – engineering a virus to deliver a few “software patches” to our DNA. One of those things would be to engineer the production of cellulase as an enzyme in our digestive system – so we can get energy from grass and such in an emergency. Probably the Law of Unintended Consequences will make this worse for humanity somehow (Begun the Grass Wars have!). Mosquitos also get blood sucking removed, in an attempt to make them purely pollinating insects. Vote for Troy as mad scientist!

    Won’t help the hungry in Sudan now, though. So I’m open to better ideas. Sadly, I largely have bad ideas. If I’m on the side of full external military intervention, it would be considered “colonial”. It’s hard to propose any solution that isn’t just “send aid” – and you don’t want to do that because it gets seized by the parties involved to support their conflict. Do we just watch it play out and accept refugees? That’s lame – how many millions will die in each of the above scenarios. Fuck.



  • Early computer aided art and programs I’ve written, dating back decades.

    In the mid 1990s I used ImpulseTracker to create music. The music sucks. But losing the original source .IT files would be heartbreaking.

    Likewise, my first programs, written as a child in MS DOS batch files circa 1991 – basic menu driven interfaces that facilitated launching my installed sharware… I don’t have the games the program points to anymore, but that isn’t the point ;)



  • All people who think porn is bad are bad. They are projecting their own unhealthy suppressed sexualities onto others because of the shame they associate with their own sexuality

    – DancingBear, 7 days ago

    Thus I am concluding you are pro Russian and taking all opportunities to block all porn starring Ukranians. Which will be basically every site on the internet. A pity, since you seem to like it a lot.








  • That reminds me…

    In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

    Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

    Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.








  • Hopefully not too depressing of a take, but:

    On the scale of the planet as a whole system (looking at the forest, and not the trees): humans are commodity – there are billions upon billions of humans. But there is only one planet, with one atmosphere. If we wait for every human life to have unlimited value in every jurisdiction on earth – we will wait forever. And then it will be too late and we’re all going to fry in our utopian hell on earth.

    In whatever jurisdiction you’re in, you should be pushing for large scale planet-affecting changes to how the civilization behaves with regard to our stewardship of the planet.

    And yes, you can do both at the same time.

    (I’m a huge fan of Iain M Banks’s Culture series. There is a Utopian future that is possible, where everything is simultaneously carefully managed, but individual freedom and prosperity coexists.)