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I know, I shouldn't expect reasonable discussion of guns here. I'm going to post this anyway to get some things off my chest.

Late last night, I was awakened by the fire alarm in my apartment building. In all the time I've lived here, since I was a Ph.D. student a decade ago, that's never happened. I found out that someone disconnected a hose from a washing machine on the third floor, water leaked down to the lower floors, and it somehow tripped the alarm.

It was no accident. Someone vandalized the laundry room, an issue that's apparently been ongoing in the building. I'm not sure if it constitutes a lease violation, but the landlord locked the laundry rooms this morning. Again, this is unprecedented since I've lived here. It's also very frustrating because it means I need to visit a laundromat to do my laundry.

I generally keep to myself, but I talked to some residents after last night's incident. Two women I talked to speculated that a resident on one of the lower levels is responsible for the vandalism. They said he's ripped down blinds from windows and he's been verbally and physically aggressive toward them. I haven't encountered him, but they said he's a large man whose aggression may be driven by mental illness. Apparently he was also aggressive toward the property manager. I don't feel safe with him in the building. Maybe he only goes after women, but I have no way of knowing that for sure.

I live on the third floor. If someone's breaking into my apartment, I could escape by jumping off the balcony, probably sustaining significant injuries when I collide with the ground. Otherwise, I need to hope that the police arrive in time to protect me. Sure, I have non-lethal force like a stun gun and pepper spray, but there's no guarantee that would halt an attack. I'm horrified at the thought of shooting someone with a gun, but if my life is in danger, I want the lethal force of a gun to improve my chances of surviving and not being seriously injured. I've never owned a gun, but this has been a wake up call that it's not safe here, and that I need to protect myself.

In my state, I have to apply to the sheriff to obtain a permit to purchase a gun. The website for the county sheriff's office says this could take up to three weeks to complete. That's three weeks that I have limited protection from someone who could be dangerous toward me. Maybe he'd never try to attack me, but I just don't know. I have no criminal record, have never been arrested, and would have a really boring background check.

I'm all for keeping guns away from dangerous people. If this individual is as crazy as residents speculate, I wouldn't want him to have access to guns. I understand the need for brief waiting periods to prevent suicides and to check the necessary databases. Still, three weeks is a long time. Surely there's a better way to keep guns away from people who are at high risk of using them to commit crimes while making it simple for law-abiding people to buy guns for self defense or sport.

Is this likely to take three weeks, or am I likely to get a permit sooner? I'm also interested in any suggestions on guns that would allow me to protect myself while minimizing the risk of harm to other residents. Maybe I should have applied sooner, but I really hate the idea of lethal force and never wanted to own a gun. Still, this process seems onerous, and there has to be a better way to do gun control.

[Pav:] You don't seem to want to realise no mainstream source will ever give you a reason to believe anything that would make you less willing to pay taxes to defence companies. Perhaps you own some shares, or feel you benefit in some other way? I suppose it IS within the realm of possibility, though only by cosmic accident. It IS strangely fascinating and amusing talking to someone who is a true believer in the broken window fallacy (probably in the form of post WWII parables).

If you look at Pav's other postings on this, it's a remarkable dysfunctional chain of this crap. Even when he cites links, not a one supports his claims. For example:

[Pav:] Right.

This post contains Pav's defective arguments in a nutshell. It's just a story about the Ukrainian Prime Minister whining about his allies' statements with counterwhining from sources associated with the allies. What we actually had been speaking about at that point in the thread was violence, psychopaths, and corrupt oligarchs, none of which found their way into Pav's source.

Here's another example. MSNBC gets photobombed (they showed uncritically neo-nazi symbols on the uniforms of the soldiers involved in the video) by the Azov Battallion, which a genuine neo-nazi military unit in the Ukrainian military. So what? This is far from the first time covert product placement has been a thing in military news.

Another example is a blogger link from this post. It's just a few pages of pulling stuff out of the author's ass confidently. For example:

Ukraine’s President Zelensky told visiting US Senators in early June that the country’s military defense against Russia and the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline are inextricably intertwined.

Once the project is completed, Ukraine will be deprived of the funds required to fund defense spending and defend Europe’s eastern border.

“Nord Stream 2 will cut Ukraine off from gas supplies, which will cost us at least USD 3 billion per year.”

Zelensky, always the joker, wants Russia to pay $3 billion per year so he personally can defend Europe from Russia who is paying him.

Notice how the author smoothly transitions from a fact - that Zelensky stated that closing a particular pipeline would cost the Ukraine a lot of money - to the unsubstantiated claim that Zelensky then wants Russia to pay for it. This is then further logically mangled into the idea that it somehow explains the Ukraine-Russian friction we're seeing now.

Zelensky’s Ukraine is shuffling Europe, NATO, and the US closer and closer to the line where one mistake in diplomacy, one stupid move by any of Ukraine’s infamous Neanderthal nationalist volunteers, and bang!

Let us further note that such infamy is only on the Russian supporters side. Somehow everyone else has come to grips with the reality that there's a small number of fascists/neo-nazis in the Ukraine military. My favorite quote of this batch:

In response to this, Ukraine mobilized over ½ its army or over 170,000 troops to the frontline with all the heavy weapons at its disposal accompanying them.

This force was a supposed counter to the Russian invasion army, which again, was just over the border.

In reality, the Russian army staged planned war games near the city of Yelnya, 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the Ukrainian border. You read that right, the Russian army was160 miles away from the Ukrainian border even though every major western publication made it sound like they were already in Kiev.

As I noted at the time, now those "war games" are inside the borders of the Ukraine. Looks like the Ukraine was right on that one!

While I didn't say it at the time, if the author is so horribly wrong about the "war games" and the infamy of Ukrainian troops what else is he horribly wrong about? This isn't the alternate media source I'm looking for.

Then there's the king of one liner putdowns:

[fustakrakich:] "Your" take is just mass media propaganda. Nobody wants war but the US

And yet we see Russia making those aggressive moves towards war. It also furthers the propaganda narrative that this is merely a showdown between Russia and US with Ukraine interests being completely irrelevant.

Also that Runaway journal was about some academic blaming the US or possibly the Western world for the conflict. At one point Runaway claimed:

[Runaway1956:] You didn't listen to the man, did ya? The "west" engineered that coup. Mearsheimer doesn't say so, but I'm aware that the Koch brothers were prime movers in the coup. We quite literally backed fascists and neo-Nazis in the coup.

In other words, there was no support for Runaway's assertion there from his source. In fact, I've googled this subject a bit and never found Runaway linking to a source for the Koch brothers accusation - though if he had, I would have stated that it shows good taste in revolutions on their part.

Anyway, I think this illustrates some of the weirder failures of the pro-Russian side in this conflict. Namely, obsessing over sources of evidence rather than the evidence itself. But given how unflattering that evidence is, maybe this is the best they can do?

All I can say is that it's probably a lot safer to complain about media bias than to defend Putin only to have him stab you in the back a few weeks later. But it begs the question: why is imaginary CIA/MIC involvement enough to completely torpedo a media source, but not being horribly wrong and/or irrelevant?

Using powers granted under the Emergencies Act, the federal government has directed banks and other financial institutions to stop doing business with people associated with the anti-vaccine mandate convoy occupying the nation's capital.

According to the regulations published late Tuesday, financial institutions are required to monitor and halt all transactions that funnel money to demonstrators — a measure designed to cut off funding to a well-financed protest that has taken over large swaths of Ottawa's downtown core.

"Financial institutions" aren't just banks.

The government is also ordering insurance companies to suspend policies on vehicles that are part of an unlawful "public assembly."

These financial institutions can't handle cash, issue a loan, extend a mortgage or more generally facilitate "any transaction" of a "designated person" while the Emergencies Act is in place.

The regulations define a "designated person" who can be cut off from financial services as someone who is "directly or indirectly" participating in a "public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace," or a person engaging in "serious interference with trade" or "critical infrastructure."

So basically, the Canadian government chickened out and mandated instead that the banks and insurance companies to do everything. Then rat out their customers to the government once they're done.

Banks also are required to "disclose without delay" the "existence of property in their possession or control" or "any information about a transaction or proposed transaction" related to a "designated person" to both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

"Those authorities are now in force and they're being used," said Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. "It's incredibly important that we follow the money."

It's not "incredibly important" for anyone interested in rule of law, due process, or proportionality of punishment. And the final part:

The Emergencies Act and its associated regulations are in effect for only 30 days; that period could be shorter if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet revoke it or if Parliament scuttles it after a vote. But a senior government official said there could be long-term implications.

"For the most part, financial institutions can decide who they do business with and they may decide to cease offering financial services," the official said.

Mark Blumberg is a lawyer at Blumberg Segal LLP who specializes in non-profit and charity law. In an interview, he said that while the Emergencies Act gives banks time-limited powers, these institutions "may just decide to shut the person's account down" because there could be "huge risks" for banks servicing these customers in the future.

So rather than deal with the protest in a sensible manner (they're breaking the law, right?), the Canadian government has put forward this ridiculous "emergency" and deputized a bunch of businesses to go crazy with legal immunity (but only if they toe the government line). In the meantime, the protesters can lose their insurance and freeze finances. So what's going to happen to protesters of any sort in the future, if banks and insurance companies see them as liabilities due to this emergency?

Now imagine if Trump and US financial institutions had this kind of power over BLM protesters. Wouldn't be a problem, right?

Hopefully, this will get reversed in the Canadian courts, because otherwise it's a huge move towards tyranny, particularly of the fascist sort.

I intend this journal as an Ask Soylent prompt. I'm trying to understand how to implement collision detection in 2D and 3D games. It seems like a complicated topic, so I'm hoping that maybe some people here have experience or could at least point me in the right direction.

Detecting that a collision has occurred actually seems very simple. It's just testing if there's an intersection between two shapes. I'm old enough to remember that collision detection was done in hardware on some old computers. As I recall, the VIC-II chip detected collisions between sprites. Now it's done in software, but it's still simple enough.

It seems much more confusing how to handle a collision once it's occurred. In order for there to be a collision, shape A (e.g., a player) must overlap shape B (e.g., a wall or a platform) by some amount. One approach is continuous collision detection, which sounds like it's computationally intensive and isn't practical for real-time use with large numbers of objects. Otherwise, it seems like the position of shape A has to be moved back to a point where it no longer intersects with shape B. I'm sure there has to be a way to do this efficiently because it was done on hardware that was orders of magnitude less powerful than current computers. How was this implemented in 2D games like platformers and in 3D games like Doom?

Let's say I have a number of balls that are bouncing around inside a box. The balls can collide with the walls of the box and with other balls. if a ball collides with a wall, its direction should change, but its position also needs to be updated so it no longer intersects with the wall. However, the act of updating its position could also cause it to collide with another object like another wall or perhaps a different ball inside the box. Within a single time step in the loop, it's definitely possible to have multiple collisions, and the act of resolving a collision could also cause the object to collide with another object. Aside from doing continuous collision detection, how would this be handled in an orderly manner?

Maybe I'm totally missing something, but handling collisions appears to be a topic that sounds very simple in principle but is actually rather complex. I'd like to learn how this was done in old games that were designed for hardware where continuous collision detection simply wasn't practical to implement.

I saw some comments in the article about the quad-state tornado that were dismissive about a possible climate change link. Just five days later, we're looking at another very unusual high impact severe thunderstorms event, this time in the central Plains.

First, I want to give a bit of meteorological background. If you know there's going to be a thunderstorm, there are three main factors that modulate its strength and severity: moisture, instability, and vertical wind shear.

Moisture is linked with instability in that, all other things equal, more low-level moisture will make the atmosphere more unstable. It's also an important factor in tornado potential, with most strong tornadoes (EF2+) occurring with dewpoints in the 60s or greater.

Instability causes rising air in thunderstorms to accelerate upwards. With strong instability, air inside thunderstorms can rise at speeds of 100+ mph. Generally speaking, more instability will produce stronger storms.

Vertical wind shear is the change in wind speed and direction with height. We often talk about the bulk wind differential, which is the vector difference between the winds at two levels in the atmosphere. Strong low-level vertical wind shear is favorable for tornadoes if the conditions are favorable. There tends to be much less instability in the cool season, but vertical wind shear tends to be much stronger during that part of the year. The strong shear can somewhat compensate for the lack of instability, also accelerating air upward in thunderstorms.

In the warm season, most tornado outbreaks occur with high moisture and instability, but the vertical wind shear tends to be weaker than during the cool season. The opposite happens in the cool season, with tornado outbreaks generally having less moisture and instability, but really strong vertical wind shear. In either case, you need sufficient amounts of all of the ingredients to get a tornado outbreak.

During the cool season, it's extremely rare to get enough moisture and instability in northern states to get tornado outbreaks. The shear is really strong, but there's almost never sufficient moisture and instability to get severe thunderstorms. Today is different... very different.

Temperatures over parts of Nebraska and Iowa are close to record highs for the entire month of December. Those records are generally in the low to mid 70s. More surprising is the amount of moisture, with dewpoints around 60 in Iowa and in the upper 50s in eastern Nebraska. This is about as much moisture as you'll ever see in these states in mid-December, if not completely unprecedented. The instability forecast this afternoon is also on the very high end of what's possible this time of year. The vertical wind shear isn't unprecedented, but it's strong, even for this time of year.

Put these together and you have the recipe for a tornado outbreak over the central Plains today. From one of the Storm Prediction Center's convective outlooks issued this morning:

This should result in potential for at least a few tornadoes, mainly after sunset. One or two of these may be strong, particularly across western to northern IA and southeast MN. This threat appears unprecedented for this region this late in the year.

Because of climate change, we expect moisture and instability to increase during the cool season. We expect that extremely rare events like this will become more frequent as the climate changes. These are weather conditions I'd expect in March or April, not December. I used to chase storms and I've seen plenty of tornadoes. The strong winds, the warmth, and the moisture make this feel like what I would expect on a chase day in March or April. I don't expect this in the middle of December.

To be clear, this isn't a repeat of Friday's tornado outbreak. There still isn't enough moisture and instability to get the type of storms that caused those tornadoes. But there's still a threat of tornadoes, some strong. Storm motions may get close to 80 mph, so tornadoes won't need to be on the ground particularly long to have long tracks. The winds just above the surface are extremely strong, and it won't take a very strong thunderstorm to bring those winds down to the surface. There are high wind warnings up over most of the central US. It's very possible there will be widespread 75+ mph wind gusts, enough to cause a lot of damage over a wide area.

Cool season outbreaks are particularly dangerous when they happen. Storm motions tend to be really fast, like today. Much of the severe weather is expected to happen after dark. It's a time of year when people aren't expecting a severe weather outbreak.

Again, this type of event just does not happen in December in the central Plains. How many "unprecedented" events have to occur before we accept that there's a link to climate change, and that these events are no longer so unprecedented?

[AC:] It is simple. Everyone gets a clean environment (free from lead, etc.) with safe clean drinking water.

The standards for what counts as safe have already been established. Here are water regulations for the US. Similar standards exist for other known toxins. Our issue is that you only get a safe clean environment if you can afford it. And, even then, the multi-million dollar houses in West LA turned out to be sitting on toxic waste that seeped over from the 'other' side of town / the toxic dumping predated turning formerly industrial areas into residential areas.

In other words, we want X so make a right to have X. Doesn't sound like the poster even cares how to do it or whether it'll even work because of course, it'll just work out of the box like all our other rights do. [Edit: cooler prose]

While I discussed that a bunch there, here's a summary of why I think just creating a right to something won't work.

In turgid's journal, we have an even sillier example:

[AC:] We have scarcity because right wingers like you desperately want the scarcity to exist. Your only objective is to exploit the working class as much as possible. To use the OP's analogy, you right wingers are the Ferengi.

Just like the Ferengi, you're not interested in scientific and technological progress that would raise the quality of life, reduce scarcity, and improve environmental conditions. Instead, you defend rent-seeking parasites who actively oppose scientific and technological advancements. A fine example is the fossil fuel industry, which should become obsolete as new technology develops and matures. Instead of allowing scientific progress to proceed, the fossil fuel industry engages in misinformation to protect a dying business model and oppose newer and better technologies.

We need less right wing rent-seeking parasites. We need to move past the lie that people are poor because they haven't worked hard enough, when the wealthiest members of our society tend to either inherit their wealth or build it through the exploitation of others. Left to your own devices, right wing psychopaths like you will cut corners with things like safety in factories, all the while demanding workers put in more labor for less pay. You right wingers are sick individuals, happy to let others languish in scarcity and work in dangerous conditions, all so you can line your pockets with more money.

There's a reason that Starfleet officers are warned about the Ferengi when they're at the Academy.

If only we could do something about the rightwingers, then we'd have post-scarcity right now.

What's missed in that verbiage is that you don't live in a society capable of either delivering a nebulous right to "access" to something nor supporting a post-scarcity economy. The cart is before the horse.

It's not rich people or failwingers holding you back. It's reality. That's why you didn't get your lollipop.

I think it's time to dispute such magic thinking. Our world didn't come easily. Just since civilization started, there have been hundreds of generations toiling - making our world what it is. But now, it's supposed to be simple. Just deliver the lollipops.

Well, just like those hundreds of other generations, you'll have to work for it. Maybe someday we'll never have to work to make our world a better place, but that hasn't happened yet.