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• Commented on Making history personal
  Been inside: Skara Brae, Maeshowe, and another Neolithic chambered tomb whose name I forget on Orkney, all dating to circa 3000 BC. Slept in: probably 17th century, either an old farmhouse B&B in the Lake District or one of the...
• Commented on Upcoming appearance: Frankfurt Book Fair
  I live about 2.5° south of Edinburgh, and one of the problems we often set our first-year astronomy students is "find the maximum altitude of the Sun at midwinter in Sheffield". The answer (which they usually regard with a certain...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  I don't know where you live, but that's a completely inaccurate, indeed libellous, comment in my neck of the woods (Sheffield, UK). I've been commuting by tram (usually) or bus (at the moment, because they're re-laying the tram rails) for...
• Commented on Parasites
  Since Charlie included symbionts in his original post, there's Hal Clement's Needle, featuring a symbiotic alien which protects its host from injury. Also symbionts rather than parasites, but I rather like figs and fig wasps, which are so closely connected...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Depends on both the nature of the crime and the nature of the democracy. If you have a non-political judiciary, non-political serious crimes can be dealt with through normal channels, cf. Silvio Berlusconi. Many democracies have mechanisms for impeaching heads...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  I note that in both my local bookshop and my local library, Gabaldon's books are filed under general fiction rather than SF/fantasy; presumably they're regarded as being essentially historical novels with the time-travel element simply an excuse to have a...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Apocalypse Codex
  Don't know how the audiobook rendered it, but 'geas' is pronounced roughly 'gaysh' (and was sometimes spelt that way by 19th-century writers)....
• Commented on Blogging for Orbit
  I agree completely with the comments at 3 and 6: we are not yet in any position to suggest that our system is "weird". There is definitely a selection bias in our current sample - if you look at how...