This is exactly what was done by the space aliens in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959).
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Controlling water in various ways has been a feature of numerous SF stories for a long time. My favorite is Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “Shifting Seas” (1936), which imagines destroying the isthmus of Panama to shift the course of the Gulf Stream and freeze Europe. Raising the sea level by melting the ice caps is the alien weapon in John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953). The most notable modern use is the undersea civilization’s threat of destruction with tsunamis in the movie The Abyss (1989).
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It’s not so much that but recognising that forecasts can give false comfort and so intentionally considering the impact of (maybe quite low probability) alternatives is also useful.
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Sure, that I can agree with. That’s the so-called Black Swans from Taleb’s writing.
Humans are sometimes bad at interpreting even accurate forecasts when it relates to very unlikely events.
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If the determinism assumption is correct, then perhaps predicting a dice throw, up to X minutes in advance, would require no more than complete information of only the part of the universe that is within roughly X light-minutes of the planned site of the dice throw.
However, the determinism assumption is a contentious one. Interpreting quantum phenomena as fundamentally probabilistic, one could never predict with absolute certainty the outcome of dice throws, as there is the possibility of quantum fluctuations that may impact the roll (albeit, it would be extremely unlikely, but not impossible, for these fluctuations to impact such macroscopic events).
Of course, famously, Einstein expressed skepticism to the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, using dice throws as an analogy for randomness:
Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt.
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Even within classical mechanics, and assuming you just drop the dice on a table in a constant gravity field, it is far from certain that we have enough computing power to carry out the calculation in reasonable time.
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Unless you are Laplace’s Demon
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Probabilities are useful when N is high. A percentage may not be much use if you only plan to invest in one stock, but they are critical if you make thousands of transactions in a day.
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It’s not really a bit… this asteroid made news because for a time it was estimated to be about 10,000 times more likely to hit than almost all other tracked asteroids.
2% or 3% may sound small, but most objects we track are more like 0.00002%
That’s why everyone devoted resources to tracking it, to get better data.
So yeah, the asteroid returning to close to that level of unlikeliness IS reassuring.
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Just watch “The Expanse” … fun to watch, quite sure a horror to experience.
Or watch Paradise (2025).
I don’t want to spoil anything, but it’s kinda relevant (if you have patience for the bad writing, overall it’s entertaining).
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Why criticism? Rickrolling is awesome!
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NGL this is the most based thing any government has ever done 
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Originally I gave you a 
for this, b/c I also love Rickrolling.
But after reading the article I took it away again because I totally agree with this last paragraph:
However, the House Judiciary GOP’s use of the prank in connection with the Epstein files, a case involving serious crimes and ongoing legal scrutiny, was widely seen as tone-deaf and inappropriate. Critics argue that the meme’s use in this context trivializes the gravity of the situation and raises concerns about the committee’s professionalism in handling sensitive matters.
Sorry, Sam, I’m sure there will be another opportunity for hearting one of your posts 
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I was surprised by this
When Harrison was 14, he got sick and had to have one of his lungs removed.
The grueling process involved a three-month hospital stay, 100 stitches and nearly two gallons of donated blood, he told NPR. It inspired him to donate his own later — despite his aversion to needles.
After I got a blood transfusion about 2 years ago I wanted to do the same: donate my blood to “repay” to the community what I received. It turned out that it’s not allowed in France to give blood if you have received blood in the past.
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This is a very timely reminder for me to go and donate blood again!
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I was (if I remember right) sorry to find that I was not allowed to donate blood in Germany because of the amount of time I had spent in England during the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) crisis! Understandable, even if I thought I was very unlikely to have encountered BSE.
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Perhaps prudent given this sort of thing: What is the infected blood scandal and how much compensation will victims get?. Big story in the UK, and the government has set aside £12bn for compensation, similar scale as support for Ukraine.
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