Years ago in Argentina, a corrupt politician forced a small community to vote for them using a clever trick. They instructed the voters to fold their ballots into a specific shape or figure. Since the paper wasn't torn or damaged, the votes remained legally valid. This allowed the politician to ensure the exact number of promised votes were in the ballot box during the count
But votes aren't counted by how the paper is folded. Any one of the voters could stamp/mark another name (or no name at all) and still fold the paper as instructed. So, how does that work?
Also, the USA is not the only big country in the world... I live in a small city in Patagonia. The nearest towns are 60 km, 90 km, and 480 km away. But you can still live without a car in the city.
What a nice surprise to find this on HN! I live in Puerto Madryn, the city celebrates its anniversary in honor of the arrival of the first Welsh settlers. Around Chubut, it’s pretty common to see road and tourist signage in Spanish, Welsh, Aoniken and English — especially along Provincial Route 25, which connects the coast to the mountains in the west. It more or less follows the path the welsh took from the Chubut river valley to Esquel and Trevelin.
If i remember right, according to one of Asimov's Foundation sequels, the Earth was unique due to its high level natural radioactivity, which allowed it to develop an ecosystem more vibrant than any other planet in the galaxy.
Was just rereading - it was the radioactivity and the large natural satellite that was unique in his universe. Tides are interesting because once you have life in the oceans, it's a kind of forcing function to adapt to land conditions
Forcing function + making a stretch of land which is neither dry nor enterily wet. A gradient. If there are no tides the leap life has to make is much bigger.
"Nucleotide formation and polymerization are both more favored thermodynamically when subunit and nucleotide concentrations increase and the water concentration decreases (i.e., at low water activity)" [1].
Tide pools provide a regularly-cycling low-water and high-water environment. (And you get thermocycling, nutrient refreshment, and a path to the oceans, too.)
They're not a forcing function, generally, because we don't know how life formed. But I believe they're close to one in a RNA-first or metabolism-first origin-of-life universe.
There was a mention of something like that in Starship Troopers as well.
Heinlein describes life on an earth-like planet with low radiation as being "like a kid who takes ten years to learn to wave bye-bye and never does manage to master patty-cake".
He was a popular writer of both fiction and nonfiction, had a PhD in chemistry, and wrote on numerous topics, including science, history, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
He and Arthur C. Clarke had a (tongue-in-cheek) agreement:
The feelings of friendship and respect between Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were demonstrated by the so-called "Clarke–Asimov Treaty of Park Avenue", negotiated as they shared a cab in New York. This stated that Asimov was required to insist that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself). Thus, the dedication in Clarke's book Report on Planet Three (1972) reads: "In accordance with the terms of the Clarke–Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer."
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