heteromeles

heteromeles

  • Commented on The Ferguson Question
    well, yes and no. The "talking to the community" tactic works even when there's not an interconnected community of people. I went to Berkeley awhile ago, just after the Berkeley Campus cops learned the hard way that violently suppressing protests...
  • Commented on The Ferguson Question
    I have to disagree with the idea that cops get scared when they deal with an armed populance. In California, at least, the cops who deal with the most routinely, heavily armed populance are the game wardens. Since they deal...
  • Commented on The Ferguson Question
    Beat me to it. Thanks, Barry. In general, the idea that different people get treated differently is considered one of the traits of an empire, not a nation-state. In theory, nation-state is considered to be a single people (the nation)...
  • Commented on The Ferguson Question
    Since this is an SFF community, we really do have to throw in the availability of guns as part of the problem. I'm one of those people, incidentally, who think that the current insanity with the NRA et al. isn't...
  • Commented on So ...
    Congratulations! I still wonder whether your cats ever hold your awards shelf hostage when negotiating their demands......
  • Commented on Hiatus
    Congratulations on getting a nice sparkly pointy award for a story that sort-of involved the same! I can't honestly regret that you didn't get the twofer, since I think you were a witness to history this year, with Ancillary Justice....
  • Commented on Hiatus
    Hmmm. Not to rain on your theory, but Papua New Guinea seems to be the High Tech Graveyard, although people are getting better at having their stuff survive field seasons. I love reading about PNG because it's about as close...
  • Commented on Hiatus
    Hi Arnold, There's a rather nice book about the Great Game called Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia by Karl Ernest Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, and it's one of my main...
  • Commented on Hiatus
    Not quite, hugo. I'd been doing a bit of reading about the Ottomans and separately about the Great Game between Britain and Russia. Since I didn't see Iran coming up repeatedly, I figured it was relatively peaceful. Thanks for clarifying...
  • Commented on Hiatus
    I wasn't making that assumption, exactly. What I was thinking was that I've been reading a bit about the Ottomans and about Afghanistan, and Persia didn't keep coming up in the material I was reading (which included Tournament of Shadows,...
  • Commented on Hiatus
    If you're in Persia, you get the capital from the Persians and Ottomans. Remember, while they were pretty corrupt in the 19th Century, the Ottomans had been a major trading power for centuries by that point, and the Persians were...
  • Commented on Hiatus
    I'd disagree. Basically (so far as I can tell), no one was paying much attention to the Persian Gulf before Churchill decided to upgrade the British Navy to oil in the 1920s, using Iranian oil. If some strange people showed...
  • Commented on Hiatus
    That's a modern way to do it, Dirk. A more Bezosian way to take over Victorian Britain is to land an invading force in Saudi Arabia, make peace with the Ottoman Empire, set up a well-protected oil operation with which...
  • Commented on Hiatus
    If your schedule permits, you might want to go to some of the speculative evolution talks at LonCon....
  • Commented on Message for GISHWHES participants
    Looks like Random Acts actually is based somewhere in North Carolina, as the PO Box suggests. Therefore, I'd suggest contacting the Better Business Bureau of Charlotte North Carolina at http://www.bbb.org/charlotte/ if you want to make a complaint about Random Acts...
  • Commented on Holding pattern
    At least you're not singing along with Word Crimes. That would be your editor's song just now? Oh well, just go find some Tom Lehrer to retro out with. I'd suggest, perhaps, "The Wild West is Where I want to...
  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    There's a comment, I think from a Hopi, that people make songs about the things that are limited or lacking in their lives. The Hopi songs are about water, and this Hopi was amused that Anglo songs are all about...
  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    Piling on the homosexuality thing, I'd point out that Bruce Bagemihl does a pretty decent job of documenting the range of "alternative sexual behavior" among both animals and different groups of people. "Alternative" includes everything from using tools as masturbatory...
  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    Interesting that Hild, like say, oh, Clan of the Cave Bear, isn't regarded as hard science fiction. After all, if you spend the effort to get the science right in the setting, why does it matter that it doesn't contain...
  • Commented on Gods and genre
    To me, human history is about 80,000 years long (that's very approximately the time modern Homo sapiens sapiens). During most of that time, climate was unstable, and you can see a simple illustration of that in this graph from Wikipedia...
  • Commented on Gods and genre
    I've got to point out that, by historical standards (read the last 80,000 years of modern human history), we're pretty WEIRD (both the word and the acronym). We live(d) in a time that was fairly climatically stable, but socially and...
  • Commented on Gods and genre
    So hard SF includes Terry Pratchett (Discworld has lots of the consequences of sex, but relatively little bumping and grinding), but not Peter Watts (who talks a lot about how personal issues and biology intersect). Yeah. Right. Let's turn this...
  • Commented on Gods and genre
    Interesting juxtaposition between the comics code, Jon Stewart, and the interview he did with Hillary Clinton on Monday. What's interesting is that Sec. Clinton wanted America to do a better job at communicating all the good things it was doing...
  • Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
    I'd also point out that biomass is problematic for a couple of reasons. It's about the math. We're currently blowing something like 8.5 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) per year into the air from fossil fuels, and blowing another 2 GtC...
  • Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
    Ah yes, the giggle factor. Because I read an article on metals recycling right before I read this, I have a different take on it. Here's the problem: a lot of rare earths are recycled at <1%. Indium is the...
  • Commented on Crass commercial interlude
    Oops. Let's see if this works: http://dangerousminds.net/comments/dying_vets_fuck_you_letter_to_george_bush_dick_cheney_needs_to_be_read...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Having tea with Cthulhu is not a reimbursable expense, especially under the rubric of recruiting new vendors. Claim denied....
  • Commented on Crass commercial interlude
    Personally, I don't think it's worth medicalizing Dubya's mental condition. Here's another take on it, with a side commentary on Cheney to boot....
  • Commented on Crass commercial interlude
    It's worth remembering that those close to Bush II at the time didn't remember a massive personality change after the event. While I'm not saying it didn't happen, I will say that biographies normally change quite substantially when a person...
  • Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
    Ah yes, how climate change will end history in Scotland. It will be a sad, sad story, what with heat wave after heat wave rendering the thick-walled old buildings increasingly uninhabitable. There will be a huge boom in new, cooler...
Subscribe to feed Recent Actions from heteromeles

Following

Not following anyone

Specials

Merchandise

About This Page

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Propaganda