I had the same problem, then I started mixing cottage cheese in the oatmeal and that fixed it.

Back when I read about people claiming a RepRap can reproduce itself, I felt like the claim implied it would build the electronics of the new RepRap from scratch as well and was confused since obviously a 3D printer can't double as a chip fab. The gold standard for a self-replicating machine for me is something like plants, which can turn high-entropy raw materials like soil and ores into itself given a source of energy. I guess you could talk about autotrophic self-reproducing machines that can do their thing given a barren planet and sunlight, and heterotrophic self-reproducing machines that have selling machined components over the internet and using the income to buy CPU chips and hire workers to assemble the skeleton of a new automated workshop as a valid strategy.

It's testing for conformity to folk values, not mythic values.

Great post. I've been trying to find SF reviews that aren't just blurbs to get an idea about what's going on with the scene currently. With the exception of Tchaikovsky, most authors whose names keep popping up seem to still be ones who started publishing back in the 20th century. Unfortunately, I already know about most of the books on this list. So I'm going to write a wishlist of books I've heard of but don't know that much about and would like to see reviews of,

• Radix series by AA Attanasio
• Starfishers series by Glen Cook
• The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson
• David's Sling by Marc Stiegler
• The Truth Machine by James Halperin
• Appleseed by John Clute
• Light and Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
• Gridlinked by Neal Asher
• The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
• Silo series by Hugh Howey
• Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie
• Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts
• Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
• Crystal trilogy by Max Harms
• Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
• Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone
• The Last Astronaut by David Welligton
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
• XX by Rian Hughes
• Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
• Virtua by Karl Olsberg

James Gleick's Genius cites a transcript of "Address to Far Rockaway High School" from 1965 (or 1966 according to this from California Institute of Technology archives for Feynman talking about how he got a not-exceptionally-high 125 for his IQ score. Couldn't find an online version of the transcript anywhere with a quick search.

How many users you can point to who started out making posts that regularly got downvoted to negative karma and later became good contributors? Or, alternatively, specific ideas that were initially only presented by users who got regularly downvoted that were later recognized as correct and valuable? My starting assumption is that it's basically wishful thinking that this would happen much under any community circumstances, people who write badly will mostly keep writing badly and people who end up writing outstanding stuff mostly start out writing better than average stuff.

On the exponentially self-improving part, No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices.

Please do not vote without an explanatory comment (votes are convenient for moderators, but are poor intellectual etiquette, sans information that would permit the “updating” of beliefs).

This post has terrible writing style, based on your posting history you've been here for a year, writing similarly badly styled posts, people have commented on the style, and you have neither engaged the comments nor tried to improve your writing style. Why shouldn't people just downvote and move on at this point?