Because I care

From Martha Adams of rec.arts.sf.fandom

I'm afraid this line of reasoning, or something very like it, takes
us somewhere. Of all the species here on Terra, only us homo sapiens
came to technology; and even among us, you see from National Geographic
and from reading your local news, very few did.

(there's more fun Martha stuff in that article)

Dear Worst Cooks in America: You're doing it wrong

The way [Nation]'s Worst [Occupation or Avocation] works is you boot out the people who have become good enough not to rank in the very worst of the worst, unleashing them in a long suffering world with a skill set that is not abominably awful. You're kicking the worst out first, the people who need instruction the most, which means as the end of your first episode the title was inaccurate.

Meanwhile, in Utah

Newt's cheque bounced.

I couldn't not embed that Bowie song

Abstract: The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

This surprised me a little

Where's the bump for arcologies coming from?

The Tragedy of the Moon question

Asimov ever write about stuff east of, oh, Persia?