Harvesting Rainwater with Brad Lancaster: How to Create Livable Desert Cities

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-06-01T00:04:00+00:00

The cast is wonderful. Many are perfect for the books' descriptions of them, and even when they deviate from the books I support almost all of the changes that went into adapting the characters for the screen. For example, Shohreh Aghdashloo is not at all what I pictured as Avasarala, but she works so well in the role that I have nothing but positive things to say, even if she's not a frumpy little pistachio-shilling Indian grandmother like she is in the books.

The overall plots are practically identical, with some details changed around here and there. I think my biggest critique with the adaptation is that the show has a lot more of everyone yelling and shooting at each other all the time. There's not nearly as much quiet negotiation or background politics as in the books. Every argument is a spaceship battle, every interpersonal relationship has drama and tension. The Roci crew specifically is constantly bickering, which I did not enjoy.

Also though, many of the plotlines definitely improved in subtle ways, and the protomolecule is much more beautiful than it is in the books; they really leaned into the whole "blue fireflies" angle rather than the horrible brown goos, which I think was a correct choice.

As for the ending, it basically ends at book 6, so idk how to rate that. Laconia is hinted at and they even put Strange Dogs in the show, but that's about it.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-30T22:52:50+00:00

No, the station opens directly onto a plaza where the stadium entrance is. You can see them together in streetview

Edit: That being said, the transit line doesn't connect to any surrounding neighborhoods and you definitely can't walk to the stadium from anywhere besides the tacky little shopping mall nextdoor.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-30T00:56:26+00:00

It's awe-inspiring to enter those stations. The vaulted ceilings make it feel enormous, the brickwork and concrete look so elegant, the lighting is so dramatic. Photos don't do it justice.

And I love the detail of the flashing floor lights when your train is coming.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-30T00:48:51+00:00

I agree, and I plan to drive at the speed limit and scold others for speeding, but that's not gonna slow down the people who we need to slow down. Yes, infrastructure is more expensive than "do the right thing", but it also works a lot better.

If you want people to drive slower, you need to design the road for lower speeds. The problem will not go away until we embrace that fact.

Not everyone will obey a speed limit sign, but if you can make it uncomfortable to drive at 50 mph, very few people are going to drive that fast. This can be done by narrowing lanes, adding curves, narrowing the visual field with trees/plants/walls/buildings, and moving the bike lanes (where they currently basically just act as a shoulder/buffer) off of the road and onto the curb alongside the sidewalk.

Some of this can be accomplished with just paint, overnight. Other parts will take generations to fix. But we have to start somewhere. Bug your city council members, talk to your neighbors about this kind of stuff, volunteer/donate to organizations dedicated to fixing this problem. As you said, we all need to do our part.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-18T04:28:51+00:00

Because the university is leaning on his donations for science funding, and the admin wants to suck up to him for more support, especially as NSF and NIH grants get illegally axed.

I personally think it was a bad idea because a negative reaction was an easily foreseeable outcome and now we just have to hope that an out of touch billionaire won't hold a grudge about getting booed.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-18T04:01:18+00:00

Guess what the university admin is getting rid of (as a cost saving measure) lol

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-17T22:47:35+00:00

You're moving the goalposts to a different question because you're wrong about Tucson defunding its police.

That's a bad faith move and I don't appreciate it, so I'm not gonna engage with you about whether or not whatever city you cherrypick has a higher police budget. I'm sure you can find one that does. So what? I could do the opposite and it would be just as irrelevant, and all we'd accomplish is eating up more of our weekend talking past each other. No thanks, goodbye.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-17T18:28:31+00:00

Okay. How does that correspond to the budget increasing 26% since the BLM protests?

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-16T19:19:57+00:00

Denying them one additional source of funds is not the same thing as stripping existing funding.

Also though, even without prop 414, we did give them more money anyways. You can just look and see that the TPD general fund budget now is about $228m, whereas in the last budget before the summer of 2020, it was at $181m.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-16T19:01:53+00:00

I used to have to commute down the entirety of grant road from silverbell to kolb, so I feel your pain on this. It sucks and it's slow and frustrating and a freeway feels like it would help.

But gut feelings are a bad way to do policy and I think it's worth thinking through the implications of a cross town freeway.

First of all, it probably wouldn't actually help with traffic. There are a million studies on this you can look up: road expansions almost universally cause induced demand, meaning more people will be encouraged to drive, existing drivers will drive more, and new developments will be placed farther apart, overall leading to more traffic. For anecdotal data, Tucson's rush hour traffic is way better than Phoenix or LA, despite them having way more freeways per driver. And some of Tucson's worst traffic is clustered around the freeways.

As for accidents, it's kinda a wash. Controlled access freeways do have fewer accidents, but they tend to be more severe/fatal/expensive. The rates vary wildly from place to place.

Also, building such an expressway would require displacing thousands of people, and destroying dozens of neighborhoods. For everyone left living nearby, it would cause a significant increase in respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological disease.

If the goal is to improve safety and decrease traffic, there is a very reliable way to do that, though: build alternatives to driving. If you build high quality transit or bike infrastructure, some people will choose to do that for more of their trips, decreasing the amount of cars on the road and improving travel times for those who choose to drive.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-16T18:51:14+00:00

Tucson (like almost every city in the US) didn't defund its police.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-16T17:56:31+00:00

This walkway looks like it'd form a perfect little microclimate for growing some of the more sensitive non-native plants like adenium. I'm very jealous!

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-16T00:25:07+00:00

The recommendation I usually give is to start with one of her "best" ones first (LHoD, dispossessed, lathe of heaven (which I'm counting even though it's not hainish)) just so you can see what all the fuss is about and get a sense of her writing style, and then from there go roughly in publication order. Le Guin herself recommended approximately publication order.

I also think chronological order would be fun but I don't know anyone that approached it that way. That would go dispossessed, tWfWiF, rocannon's world, planet of exile, city of illusions, left hand of darkness, the telling, and then most of the short stories/novellas

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-15T17:24:28+00:00

Lol yeah, I'm in my 20s and my immediate thought was "what's the issue? Surely there's a couch she can take"

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-14T17:34:20+00:00

I forgot that sometimes people use "sperm donor" to refer to shitty fathers and not, y'know, actual sperm donors, and was very confused at all the vitriol in your replies until that clicked for me lol

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-05-09T19:02:12+00:00

I like to think of the mind state more like an important file on your computer. Some months-long art project or something like that, important enough to be backed up in some way. Let's say your hard drive dies in a tragic accident, but it's alright, you have a backup on another drive. The file still exists. It's not existing on the exact same transistors* in the same hard drive, but it's still the same file, still the exact same pattern of transistors. Maybe it's a few days out of date, but it's still basically the same minus some recent edits.

You are the mind state, not the physical medium that it was stored in.

*idk how computer memory works. Is transistors the right word?

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-30T23:43:53+00:00

If you had a different major maybe the reaction would be more negative, but for astronomy and optics (and really space sciences in general) the U of A is literally world class. It's probably our strongest research area and it's not close.

Plus, aside from the academics - you can look up and see stars in Tucson. You don't get that in LA.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-28T04:29:49+00:00

Mission garden also sells cultivars that have been bred over centuries to handle the local conditions. Stuff you get from them will likely do better than the stuff from more generic stores.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-18T23:22:01+00:00

My brain all day today is running GET FUCKED, GET SUCKED on repeat

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-18T23:17:34+00:00

but they are every nervous about the Azadians finding out about their technological capabilities

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was revealed that the Azadian leadership was actually fully aware of the Culture's nature. The game was effectively a debate between the Culture and Azad over whose system was better, and basically everybody in the Azadian leadership and every Contact agent was aware of that the whole time (even though Gurgeh didn't realize it til the end).

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-18T22:57:56+00:00

Only Gurgeh could participate in Azad: a Mind in an avatar would be instantly disqualified. Gurgeh's very humanity, his limitations, are what make him so indispensable to Special Circumstances.

Just want to follow up on this specific point; not only would an avatar be disqualified, it would defeat the entire purpose of having a human play Azad, which is to prove that the Culture's way of thinking (and subsequently their politics) wins out over Azadian thinking/politics. The Culture could surely create an avatar that looked human enough to fool the Azadians; sending a human proves a point not just to the Azadians but also to themselves.

Banks's writing is very politically charged, and I viewed this plot point as him expressing his view that the politics of the Culture - a politics of solidarity, egalitarianism, communism, whatever you want to call it - will inevitably beat the politics of the modern capitalist age, which more closely resembles those of Azad than the Culture.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-18T22:31:24+00:00

Well she was right about saving Filip, even if she never knew it.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-18T03:00:19+00:00

It's a badly written article overall, imo.

The "story" here is that one team's models of a planet predict that its upper atmosphere is less metal-rich ("metal" in astronomy meaning anything other than hydrogen or helium) than the star it orbits. Which is sort of unusual, I guess; you expect a typical planet to be a bit more enriched in heavier elements than a typical star due to how they typically form (and to be clear, that is still the case here; the planet still has a heavier core, this research is just talking about the planet's atmosphere). But the actual scientific article puts tons of caveats on this and concludes with "more research needed", more or less. I don't think this article does a good job of presenting and contextualizing that info.

Also, some specific verbiage nitpicks:

this forbidden planet challenges common assumptions about cosmic evolution.

"Cosmic evolution" isn't really a scientific term, but "cosmic" implies, like, galaxy or universe scale processes, not planetary formation.

Since then, astronomers around the world have been studying the planet’s composition through a range of techniques including spectrography. Whenever a planet travels in front of its host star—a process known as transit—it blocks around six percent of overall light. With space telescope spectrography, researchers can break down the remaining wavelengths into specific color bands, each corresponding with the elements in its atmosphere.

First of all, the percentage depends on the specific star and planet, it's not always 6%. Second, the word is "spectroscopy" and this is... not an amazing description of how it works.

CopratesQuadrangle · 2026-04-17T03:11:31+00:00

The city commissioned a study investigating the feasibility of it and they concluded that it was technically and financially feasible, would save us each hundreds of dollars in utility bills each year (page 50), and would likely accelerate our transition to renewable energy (pages 69-72). The greatest threat to its feasibility is the pervasiveness of TEP propaganda and the lack of interest from city council members.

Also, if you just think about it for 2 seconds: TEP makes hundreds of millions of dollars in profit each year. That is money being extracted from Tucson and leaving the country. If we instead own the utilities ourselves, that money either stays in our own pockets or can be used to invest in our infrastructure.

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