JReynolds
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Commented on A Wonky Experience
the occasional hijacked cruise ship The Queen Mary was built to carry 2038 passengers and 1174 crew when it was launched in 1934. During WWII, it carried 16,000 people when used as a troop transport. Which suggests Allure of the...
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Commented on A Wonky Experience
In one of her recent books, Jo Walton has a character muse that the main reason that Canada's immigration system is complex and expensive is to keep Americans looking for single-payer healthcare from getting in. Not sure how true that...
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Commented on A Wonky Experience
Lest Darkness Fall, as Howard NYC noted. Protagonist drops back in time from Rome in 1938-39 to Rome in 535. Just in time for Justinian's Gothic Wars. Harry Turtledove offered to write a sequel, but LSdC wouldn't authorize one. A...
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Commented on A Wonky Experience
Even if the Romans had had the optical technology, the Principate was very short on money. They could pay for the legions, but didn't have the tax revenue (or the accounting / forecasting technology) to pay for that kind of...
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Commented on A Wonky Experience
I'm not going to repeat what Roald Dahl said - during his lifetime, he went on record (in the New Statesman, among other places) to say some disgusting stuff. A simple google search will let you know some of his...
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Commented on A Wonky Experience
Looked Ellen Wood (1814-1887) up. Amazing how someone writing fiction set in the quotidian reality can become an author of historical fiction - just by having their work survive long enough....
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Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
Looking forward to the book. There was a good comment on the ReactorMag (formerly tor.com) site: "I sometimes wonder if in Stross' Laundry universe, Time Team got as far as a full season before digging up something best left buried."...
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Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
a disaster relief planning exercise for the federal government in the 60s or 70s My dad, when he was a young lieutenant in the early 1960s, participated in a 'support the civilian authorities' exercise regarding possibly evacuating part of Montreal...
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Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
JohnS @68: I'm fine with disestablishing the name from that of the Confederate General Braxton Bragg did a lot more to ensure the South's defeat than many Union generals! Mikko @ 89: I have the impression that unless you are...
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Commented on The coming storm
MSB @486: The translations from the original Biblical Hebrew often are made according to the translators' theological understanding and/or the desired way they might affect the readers. A good example of this is translations of Nerval's poem "El Desdichado". The...
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Commented on The coming storm
whether JT is smart enough to make a graceful exit before next Christmas I live in hope that JT will take a page from his father's playbook and announce his departure on 29 February - the 40th anniversary of Pierre...
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Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
Netflix! How about an updated version of the infamous Donner Settlers Disaster could be set at O'Hare Airport in Chicago or maybe LAX or best of all Newark Intl... during a climate change shitstorm dumping three feet of snow in...
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Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
The most recent Tom the Dancing Bug is right on target for this blog post....
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Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
The school I went to for Grades 3-4 had its 100th anniversary in 2016. It's a well-kept old building, and was interesting to walk around. Although I couldn't remember where any of my classes had been. Who knew that 35+...
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Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
Bard isn't supported in Canada, so I can't ask it the question I wanted. Like Charlie, 15 'facts' about the Hundred Years War. Have to wait....
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Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
What's left is going to resemble the West Bank Hard agree. With Russian 'settlements' periodically going in and taking the best Ukrainian land, while the rest of the world says "you really shouldn't do that" while doing nothing to stop...
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Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
There's a really good article about a real-life meeting between Angela Merkel, Dr. Ruth and Dr. Kissinger in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/dr-ruth-dr-kissinger-and-trumps-cruelty-to-families Dr. K was talking about the necessity of keeping refugees out of the US. Dr. Ruth talked about...
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Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
there's fuck-all the UK could do about it Perhaps the UK would invoke Article 5 of NATO - "An attack on one is an attack on all". I can't imagine that the USA would like to go to war against...
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Commented on I should blog more, but ...
You were compiling (d/b and our code) on a dual floppy system? Luxury! I used to dream of having things that easy. I had to do all of the compiling by hand, with a pencil....
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Commented on I should blog more, but ...
Aargh. All these YouTube links, just as YT chooses to crack down on viewing with adblockers. No, YouTube, I don't want to watch your durned ads. No YT for me. Sigh....
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Commented on I should blog more, but ...
Robert Prior @ 1083: Aliens come to Earth, aghast at our savagery. A brave volunteer spreads a substance that causes those inflicting harm to experience the same harm (psychosomatically, IIRC) I read and enjoyed that too, back in the day....
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Commented on I should blog more, but ...
Greg Tingey @587: Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a REFORMER True. However, did he have the political skill to get the needed reforms through Austria-Hungary's dysfunctional government? (More realistically, did he have the skill to pick the team that would do...
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Commented on Pushing it back
You may be referring to the Younger Dryas, which did cause a rapid temperature decline and further glacial advance, around 12.9 kyr. However, before the Younger Dryas kicked off, what would eventually become the UK was still a periglacial area...
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Commented on Do my Laundry
How about: (1) there is an augur on staff, but (2) bad things happen (including the death of said augur) because there is no path that leads to a happy ending. I think that this might be what is happening...
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Commented on A fistful of tropes
Scott Sanford @492: If I were Putin I'd be sleeping somewhere secret, secure, and distant from Moscow for the next few weeks, just in case. Not sleeping in the same place twice in a row is always a good precaution....
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Commented on A fistful of tropes
That tends to happen only after the conquest is over, and the savages are conveniently dead or confined to reservations. Harry Turtledove published Vilcabamba in 2010. Aliens landed 50 years ago, conquered the bits of Earth they wanted, left the...
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Commented on A fistful of tropes
"what is actually wrong with our habitat's life support?" (it's tenths of percents right now, but the voyage (or the mortgage) has some time to run, and the implications are stark) via actual doing of science. Moz and Heteromeles have...
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Commented on A fistful of tropes
Had the crazy insight the other day that a kid born today that made it to the age of 77 would see the 22nd century....
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Commented on A fistful of tropes
The Bad Guy has already won in the Laundry-verse (I imagine that by Dec 31, 2015, all countries have been taken over by some Elder God). No sign of them getting bored, of course....
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Commented on A fistful of tropes
A couple of tropes spring to mind: Island in the Sea of Time (ISOT), where an area and everybody in it are switched with the same area in some previous time. The original S.M. Sterling Island in the Sea of...