Elyse

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• Commented on Laundry summer madness sale!
  I will be VERY disappointed if Charlie Jane Anders' book picks up a lot of awards. I got about a hundred pages into "All the Birds in the Sky" and gave it up as an annoying slog about people I...
• Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
  One main character in Becky Chambers' recent "A Closed and Common Orbit" is an escaped downlifted slave. Sterile and marked by hairlessness, driven to be useful. A gifted mechanic because that was related to the functions she was created for....
• Commented on And the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth
  When I was 9, several years before the first Earth Day, my family moved to a town that had two paper mills. They closed some years later because it was too expensive to clean up their processes or the mess...
• Commented on And the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth
  Moving people to the jobs is not necessarily any easier (or cheaper, if you account for secondary effects) than moving jobs to the people. Most people of employable age will have some combination of: spouses/significant others, children, parents, other relatives,...
• Commented on The dog ate my homework
  I have never had an Android phone upgraded to any noticeable extent, but my Samsung WIFI-only tablet is on at least its 3rd version of android. The user interface and icon changes were a bit disorienting each time. So it...
• Commented on Empire Games
  Drat. I could swear I typed 'there' not 'their'....
• Commented on Empire Games
  Evasions seems to be present in the Nook epub in the Nook for Android app. Makes me wonder what View source looks like for people using the Google version in a browser... maybe their is some weird broken html that...
• Commented on "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" 2017 continued.
  Did people in old times complain about gold coins with teeth marks? (wasn't that why people supposedly bit coins?) If that was really a way people tested purported gold coins, I suspect some counterfeit coins were made with fake teeth...
• Commented on Busy busy busy
  I was following your twitter stream with interest, but got blocked, apparently for being a insufficiently active on twitter (I average about 10 followers and have tweeted 138 times. Not 138K, 138). Still follow @fluffcthulu and @antipope_cats. You can block...
• Commented on Busy busy busy
  Regarding the Chinese and Egyptian treatment of history as culturally continuous vs, European accounts of transitions... I have encountered a book that claimed that many of the accounts of migrations in late classical/early Medieval times are not borne out by...
• Commented on Ever Young?
  I'm 62 and both my parents have been dead for 35 years (cancer and a heart attack, not an accident or anything like that). It doesn't really affect the adult status thing, if your life style diverges enough. On the...
• Commented on Evolver
  On pyrogenesis: making sparks is easier with flint and steel (though it still takes a certain amount of practice to get it right) but it also works with two flints. And we know that there have been a lot of...
• Commented on Evolver
  SFReader: According to Darren Naish (@tetzoo) there is no such thing as a pure herbivore. He retweeted a photo of a cow eating a bunny just a couple of days ago as an example. Opportunistic supplementation of protein and minerals...
• Commented on Writer, Interrupted
  The problem ( As I see it, & I could easily be wrong ) is ... "bandwidth". CD is taking up vast amounts of it on these threads. YMMV The bandwidth she takes up is frequently entertaining and/or informative. The...
• Commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  Mithridates -- ancient King, toxicologist, and anti-Roman insurgent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_VI_of_Pontus or https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003V5WKPE/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1#nav-subnav He started out with BOTH his conception and his birth marked by comets, and pretty well lived up to it. Gave the Romans fits during a lifetime of politics...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  Have you tried your old Word files in LibreOffice? I've had good luck salvaging text that way -- sometimes you lose some of the original formatting from some of Microsoft's more perverse stuff, but you may be able to get...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  According to my doctors, actual rickets is the acute end of vitamin D deficiency. Deficinecy levels that don't present visual symptoms still have all kinds of nasty effects. Apparently vitamin D turns out to be active in all sorts of...
• Commented on The iron law of development
  Maine is not southern New England. It's as north as you can get without being in Canada. My home was much closer to Long Island Sound than to the St Lawrence: we were a few hundred miles south of most...
• Commented on The iron law of development
  I grew up in a glacial moraine in southern New England where the winter freeze line was not very deep. The fields and second growth woods were full of dry stone walls and many of the fields contained large piles...
• Commented on The iron law of development
  Regarding Roman numerals, it has been suggested that in many contexts they were not used for direct calculation, but for recording the results of what was essentially abacus work. (Though I wonder if that was lost in many places during...
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  sure. I'm not that taken with the usual steampunk tropes, but I trust you to do something interesting and less historically questionable with it....
• Commented on Three Unexpectedly Good Things VR Will Probably Cause
  How do the goggles adapt for people whose eyes just don't converge? My right eye is moderately near-sighted, while my left eye just needs adjustment for reading (since I reached that age range). As far as I can tell, I've...
• Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  Regarding languages, just because I think this will make sense to some people here: two languages in which I have had formal courses are Spanish and Japanese. I once told my Japanese instructor that Japanese grammar was like Spanish in...
• Commented on The Rules of Magic
  About four decades ago I took two college philosophy courses, "Language as Cosmos" and "Cosmos as Language". (The professor was very annoyed that we could never remember which was which: I suspect I have the order switched.) They surveyed the...
• Commented on Silence this week ...
  Related to the moving goalposts of AI (possibly sort of inversely?)... there was a joke years ago (probably 20 or 25 by now) that if you wanted a concise definition of 'the real core features that define actual language' that...
• Commented on Silence this week ...
  Humans being slower than apes and monkeys may be beside the point. From what I've read, the two physical things that humans do spectacularly well compared to other species are 1) throwing things at targets and 2) travelling long distances...
• Commented on Silence this week ...
  The BBC today has a story about a young man who saved 8 pounds by flying home by way of Berlin (with a 4 hour layover spent visiting various tourist attractions) instead of taking the train between Sheffield and Essex....
• Commented on The paranoid style in 2016
  There's also the "Thirteenth Warrior" approach: "... neither grape nor grain." "No problem! This is made from honey." I have wondered how those inclined toward rules lawyering deal with hard cider....
• Commented on Excuses, excuses
  Agreed. One advantage of git (etc.) over older tools like rcs and sccs is that it has an active user and development community: if you run into problems or need to do something unusual, you are more likely to be...
• Commented on Excuses, excuses
  I had a hard drive die last spring and was saved by automated nightly backups in my home network, and as a Software Configuration Management professional I needed to play with a recent version of Perforce... My NaNoWriMo setup included...