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• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  One research direction that was a casualty of the funding wars, that I personally think should have been given much more consideration was the work of Douglas Hofstadter‘s Fluid Analogies Research Group (Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies). [[ link fixed,...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  So much of the arc of “Artificial Intelligence” research (at least in the US, where I’ve followed the general flow since the 1970’s and have known some of the players) has to do with dueling grant proposals. In the late...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  I lived for several years in a stone-walled sawmill with a wood frame house and office building built over it. The mill is over 2 centuries old, but the walls are 3 feet thick, it’s likely they’ll survive mostly intact...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Oh, wonderful. My semi regular reminder that William S. Burroughs was a remittance man living off the income of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company which eventually labored and brought forth the Stack Machine architecture, IMHO a very elegant and probably...
• Commented on The ends of education
  I retired from professional software development 14 years ago, but I still get a laugh out of the monthly news articles about which computer languages a dev should know to make the most money. In my experience the answer is...
• Commented on The ends of education
  Rishi Sunak (the richest MP in parliament, a former Goldman Sachs employee and hedge-fund manager who married a billionaire) Seems like overkill to me. But then as we all know, money goes to money....
• Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
  Holy shit, what a string of disasters! I hope to hell thats the end of it and you can put your life back together now. With luck, in a couple of years you’ll be back on schedule and able to...
• Commented on Book day!
  "Vapire" is an interesting typo. So would that be someone who steals hits off everyone else's e-cigs, or a real nasty who inhales life force from their victims?...
• Commented on Book day!
  Well, crap, it's still Monday here, and Barnes and Nobbled won't even ship my pre-ordered hardback until Tuesday. After that it will take a week to get to me. All that being true, I will take any spoilers as a...
• Commented on Empire Games
  Link to my 5-star review of Empire Games on Amazon....
• Commented on Empire Games
  I reread the first 3 books in the omnibus form last fall, so I'm ready for Empire Games. UPS tracking shows it's arrived on this side of the continent; I'm hoping to have it in my hands by Thursday. Coincidentally,...
• Commented on Gratuitous Self-Promotion: the US West Coast Remix
  If you've not been to the Green Dragon before, I highly recommend it. A very good selection of local beers & ales, & the food is good. I'll try to be there Tuesday night....
• Commented on Upcoming appearances, Amsterdam, Seattle and Spokane
  No Portland this year? sob oh, well, have fun in Spokane & Seattle....
• Commented on Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Cthulhu
  Yep, this is another aspect of the categorization problem: any set of categories imposed on a universe of discourse is not useful in describing the real world beyond a certain level of precision, and it becomes less useful more quickly...
• Commented on Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Cthulhu
  Sounds like grad school....
• Commented on Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Cthulhu
  The fundamental problem for humans in a universe very much bigger and more complex than ourselves is that we don't understand it now, and don't know for sure that we can. So if we meet near-godlike beings, we can't tell...
• Commented on Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Cthulhu
  This sounds similar to a principle I came up with some years ago while working in the computer industry:Any sufficiently unreliable technology is indistinguishable from superstition.This principle supports the well-known Tech Support MaximsTo restore proper operation to a complex device,...
• Commented on Second childhood?
  Hmm ... a couple of comics I hadn't heard of; need to go check them out. Here are a few that haven't been mentioned yet. Dicebox by Jenn Manley Lee. A story about 2 itinerant workers in an interstellar post-scarcity...