Daydream Notes

and it shows. For those who can't be bothered to click, it's a story on Musk getting up in front of an audience some place and doing some philosophy, badly: that we're all living in a video game in the future. "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale. So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?" Thanks, Elon, I'll t...

I assume that most people reading this blog are like me; history nerds and people who like scale model things.  I bring this up because I've always more or less assumed the broad historical context is understood, be it about Zeppelins or B-36s. This blog features a lot of stuff that assumes the background of strategic bombing is understood. Now, if you are someone who does not understand strategic bombing, the Second World War must be filled with inexplicable, horrific events. Not that World War 2 in particular isn't chock full of those anyway, but Nazis murdering people is at least understandable because the Nazis are understood to be nasty, nasty people. Strategic bombing by the Allies, in contrast, must seem just as horrific but without any rhyme or reason behind it. Take the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example. They're the topic of many a university undergrad discussion/shouting match, where they are often treated as unique events. Truth be tol...