Justin Boden

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• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  If he hasn't been mentioned yet, Mike Cannon-Brookes makes a case for "good use of billionaire discretionary fund" in Australia. The leading energy retailer, AGL, was attempting to spin off its coal fired power stations into its own company, which...
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  This is just starting to heat up as an issue in Australia, now over 20 years since the last referendum on a republic was conducted, and the Australian Republic Movement released their model late last year. Essentially, the state and...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  I'm amused that anyone thinks Verhoeven could've made power armour work in 1997 if the man himself thinks he couldn't have done it. Say what you will about the director, Robocop is testament to the fact that he knew his...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  16GB limit seems ridiculous to me as well, but the "I'm a video editor and I used the M1 Macbook Air as my production machine for two weeks" write-ups have been strangely positive, even when they're effectively running all their...
• Commented on What happens now?
  My prediction is that Republicans will head up a clean slate in 2024. Considering GOP and Trump was always a shotgun wedding, it was probably enough that Trump had already lost the lower house, the presidential election, and then the...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  That's when I knew that Trump was going to win. I think it pays to be wary of this sort of confirmation bias. As you point out, millions more voted for Hilary, so it wasn't that people didn't turn out...
• Commented on I ain't dead
  It's horses for courses, really. I became closely acquainted with CMoS during my undergrad because its citation style is favoured by history faculties and journals. In that context it's indispensable. But otherwise, I haven't found myself referring to it that...
• Commented on Evolver
  The point that plants don't seem interesting is, I think, kindof the point. The biota we live amongst is weird, but we're used to it so we call it normal. We think of fungus as just plants, because plants are...
• Commented on Evolver
  One more thing, as I still make this mistake a lot. The surviving creatures in evolution are the lucky ones with the "right" adaptions when the environment changes, and then live long enough to reproduce. Creatures don't adapt after the...
• Commented on Mendel Acquisition Squares : A Game of Futures
  Is anyone listening to Benjamin Walker's podcast Theory of Everything? He runs a loose series of Borgesian dialogues with "special correspondent Chris", the latest of which concerns Trump's secret plans for ISIS (hint: they involve The Apprentice). There's an older...
• Commented on Nightmare Stacks competition results ...
  Congrats to Susan: a deserved win....
• Commented on Today is officially cancelled
  I was thinking of something you wrote, many months ago, about Iain Banks, and the fact that you would much rather have the man alive again, just to spend a few more moments with him, than have the library of...
• Commented on The paranoid style in 2016
  And of course male millennial bloggers will stridently defend their feminist credentials...and be strong Bernie supporters anyway Because Hillary. Is there really any mystery there, though? Millennials became politically aware about the time the towers were falling: everything that happened...
• Commented on A world-building puzzler
  You're definitely speaking to a gap in my knowledge, here. Caral looks fairly flat in comparison to Giza – is that weathering? Wikipedia tells me they were being built at the same time as Giza, but were they always as...
• Commented on A world-building puzzler
  How possible is it to build the Great Pyramids of Giza with this set-up? The methods in terms of craft are certainly possible. Using sand for grit and a copper saw it is possible to cut blocks of limestone and...
• Commented on Clickbait spasm: 14 gizmos I used in 2015
  My gizmo of the year is the Moto G 3rd Gen. I bought it because it was the cheapest phone on the market that still stands up well against the high-end models, and I wanted to break out of the...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  News to me! I thought us Australians were all meant to be ashamed of that class of subs. Curious if you have further info. Not skeptical, honestly I just tend to avoid all knowledge of military hardware. Mostly because I...
• Commented on Bombing Syria Considered Stupid
  Thanks for the quick response. I personally find that motivation difficult to fathom. Which I don't say to mean I doubt your explanation, so much as it boggles my mind that Turkey would back such an ill-conceived hedge. There are...
• Commented on Bombing Syria Considered Stupid
  As someone who is not well versed in this conflict, what does Turkey want in all this? They have seemingly distanced themselves from Assad in recent years, and want him to fall, but aren't interested in alienating Assad's allies by...
• Commented on Introducing new guest blogger: Madeline Ashby
  You're shifting the goalposts on your own claim. And even in shifting them, you're not capturing the reality of the situation. At this point, I'm honestly begging you to consider that 'the British only respected those who gave them a...
• Commented on Introducing new guest blogger: Madeline Ashby
  That's not true. The British were never blind to the ethics of their empire building, and we have smoking-gun evidence that they directed their governors in Australia to treat Aboriginal and TSI peoples with legitimacy. It was never a simple...
• Commented on Introducing new guest blogger: Madeline Ashby
  "I assume that's like right-wing, white-supremey types in the US calling themselves Native Americans without a hint of irony?" Slightly worse than that. There was a point in time, in the 19th C, where the British were telling the Australian...
• Commented on Introducing new guest blogger: Madeline Ashby
  I stumbled across that post as well, and had it in mind when I went to witness and counter-protest the Reclaim Australia rally (a.k.a. the fledgling Australian Golden Dawn movement). When your ideological opponents are quoting anti-Semites and, quite literally,...
• Commented on <i>Hot Earth Dreams</i>
  On the matter of scientific notation, I think Bill Bryson has the idea of it when he points out that it's not great for readers who are unused to the notation. Though I salute the principle, it remains an amazement...
• Commented on 21st Century: a complaint
  Fairly sure CatinaDiamond has heavily hinted at, if not explicitly stated, that she is a woman. But even if she didn't I'm fairly certain that Charlie would prefer to ban your assumption that a random poster would take male pronouns...
• Commented on 21st Century: a complaint
  I think you're being unfair to the program, there. For the past fifty or so seasons the show has done its best to portray the sort of positivists that spout that crap as a gaggle of pseudo-religious freaks who imprinted...
• Commented on It could be worse
  That per-capita figure doesn't tell you much with China's wealth disparity, though. With a ballpark figure of maybe around 10% of the population living in poverty, and slowing economic growth, it seems optimistic to imagine that even 80% of the...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  I hope that plot element didn't come across as intimidation, because it wasn't meant as such. I imagine cats that exist inside diamonds are impervious to garden shears, anyway. You are on the forum of a sci-fi author. I thought...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  That's a legitimate reading, sure, but it's inconsistent with the logic that is set out by the film. If we're going into fantasy counter readings, we have to ask how Sandra got to the station to get her space-embryo scene...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  And here I thought Kepler predated Sputnik. I meant human space-exploration, where getting to Mars and back is currently a fairly silly exercice when probes can get the data for fewer resources....