Nojay

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  What are the possibilities of CNc Events on a neutron star, like in Forward's Dragon's Egg? Very fast overclocked Elder Gods might be able to harvest brain activity from such creatures but would the many ancient Gods, vast and slow...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  As many commentators here ob this blog have pointed out, energy has to be cheap so no nukes, or at least that's their reasoning for saying no nukes. Fossil fuels including coal are cheap to extract, process and distribute, all...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Regarding fossil fuels... "What were they thinking?" "the fuck" is a strongly encouraged, but optional, insertion. What "they" were thinking was "We like civilisation". Civilisation is energy, lack of energy leads to nasty, brutish and short outcomes. Fossil fuels are...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  during the Late Heavy Bombardment, a nameless planetismal smacked Venus upside the pole, blowing off a goodly amount of her atmosphere and laying her out flat on her side. The Venus belt, by L. Neil Smith. A Libertarian conglomerate straps...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  A lot of British spyfic and movies from the 1970s involve paper-shuffling and answering telephones rather than dangling from a rope over a web of laser beams to get at Ze Sekret Documents. Even TV shows like Callan had twenty...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  Out Of Placers -- https://www.valsalia.com/ A crapsack world with humans (possibly from a failed colony ship, no explicit history is given in the comics) and aliens and possibly some kind of magic. The humans are very human, the aliens very...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  I actually wrote an SF story about "containers In Spaace!" It was unfinished and bit rot got to it unless it's still lurking on a dead backup somewhere. The protagonist was a privateer "lighterman" operating a patched-up ground-to-orbit cargo shuttle...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Modern steam turbines that can handle very high temperature steam are used in stationary plants, not on board ships for a lot of good engineering reasons which I won't bother going into here. They move the efficiency needle of a...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Carnot Cycle efficiency -- the temperature difference between the hot and cold gases determines the amount of work you can get out of fuel in a gas engine. For steam it's a couple of hundred degrees difference in a piston...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Which is why 60-70% of the population of Scotland lives in the Central Belt (a strip about 60 miles wide and 30 miles north-to-south, running from west of Glasgow to east of Edinburgh, It's also worth noting that the population...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Born in New Orleans, and you don't get much more Southern (USian). Puerto Rico has entered the chat. If you restrict it to the States, Hawaii is the furthest south part of the US....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I don't recall where I saw the picture, it may have been in a telecoms journal but it showed the size of various consumer-line termination equipment for exchanges from the mid-1960s onwards. It started off with a rack to deal...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  In the film the newspads on Discovery were always flat on a table or desk because the screen content was coming from a film projector underneath. That would have been difficult to do unobtrusively with Heywood Floyd sitting in an...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  As a friend of mine - a geology professor - once said: "never buy a house on Dry Creek Road". Or in a development called "The Water Meadows"....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  There was someone (I think it was featured on Youtube, might have been another platform) who embedded the guts of a rollerball mouse into the underside of a conventional keyboard. He could slide it around on his desk for mouse...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Australia is covered in little solar powered phone stations ... although many people in remote areas would disagree because they experience low/no phone reception every day. That reminded me of a proposal for a military battlefield communications system that involved...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  There was one of THOSE physics papers published a few days ago, with about a hundred authors with the first three names staking a claim for a Nobel down the line, that addressed the LIGO data with regards to the...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I solved the Spanish Barber paradox pretty much immediately when I first heard it back in school. The Spanish Barber (male) is shaved by his ten-year-old apprentice (male). We had been reading history at school about the medieval-period apprentice system...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  I was referring to the last series of six French test shots in the Pacific in 1995-96 which caused a lot of anger and protests and led to the DGSE topping a Greenpeace activist in NZ. They were all underground...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  It was probably Canadian-sourced uranium used in the British nuclear weapons program but we went the plutonium weapons route quite early -- the Windscale Piles breeder reactors were used to make Pu-239 starting in 1952....
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  Don't forget the Yanks, with Hawaii, Midway, Guam, Puerto Rico etc. which are all American. They also used some of their overseas possessions to test nukes, the big fusion weapons. I calculated that they fired off something like 150 megatonnes...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  My desktop wot I am typing on right now has 64GB of RAM. I built it initially with two sticks of 16GB memory = 32GB leaving two slots on the motherboard open for future upgrades. About a year ago the...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I paid ten quid for a 1 kilobyte (not megabyte) upgrade to one of my first computers (Acorn Atom). Each 1kx4 SRAM chip cost a fiver and I needed two for a kilobyte. A megabyte would have cost me 10,000...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  The British ambassador to the US is always a long-service experienced Foreign Office staffer. We get in return a friend or donor of whoever is elected President in any given leap year. They are told to smile, keep their mouth...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I'm sure I have read some story about health and safety ninnyism being unavoidably enforced in all aspects of life by omnipresent three-laws robots going overboard on the second part of the First Law. I think the viewpoint character was...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Every proposed high speed rail proposal tends to get bogged down as the local governments that the rail line will go THROUGH want a stop for economic reasons. And a stop every 5 to 20 miles makes it a NOT...
• Commented on Minor updates
  There's an enjoyable Japanese manga I'm following (The Apothecary Diaries) about Mao Mao, an autistic pharmacologist who works as a food taster and consulting detective for the head eunuch in an empire's Closed City. She has been bribed on at...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  A youkai is a spirit, usually evil but not always. The usual plot of youkai stories is that you mustn't engage with the youkai which can at first encounter appear human and even alluring. Refuse their attention, run away and...
• Commented on Place your bets
  There's probably a few dozen bucks worth of gold, palladium, copper etc. in such a rangefinder. If people think they can make money ripping out catalytic converters from under cars for the scrap value then junking out the shiny bits...
• Commented on Place your bets
  A remarkable amount of oil and gas infrastructure technology around the world is mired in the 1980s for various reasons, including investment, engineering best practices, regulations, legislation etc. Sure it looks like a good idea to rig your oil refinery...