hugo.fisher

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• Commented on Books I've written
  Something I don't think you've blogged about IIRC: Crossovers (not collaboration). Have you ever thought about trying it with a couple of your settings? Have agents or editors suggested it to you? Any general thoughts?...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Charlie, your icebreaker with a Russian MLRS may not do as well as you think. To the dismay of many a government purchasing official, you have to build expensive warship gun turrets rather than plonking an existing army gun on...
• Commented on Books I've written
  I don't visit this blog expecting entries to have any relation to the previous or be consistent in themes or subjects. On a meta level I find this idea of a writer asking the audience what to write a little...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  cahtk3iK @ 328, no problem about the misunderstanding "total agreement with the official stance of the US government and officials according to which, basically, the nuclear bombs were dropped to save Japanese lives. " Yes I am. It was a...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  For $DEITYs sake, can we not have the nuclear weapons and Japan discussion all over again please? Grand Guignol ... a large number of elderly and wealthy males are dying from internal bleeding and perforations of the lower intestine. It...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  cahth3iK @ 305 To nuke Japan or not in 1945 has been well covered over the years. A good accessible book is "The Decision to Drop the Bomb" by Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed. It's from 1967, so doesn't have...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Charlie @234 wrote with respect to Iran Colonialism: the ideology that keeps of shambling in search of brains to chow down on a century after it should have died. It's the fault of the west that the government of Iran...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Charlie @238 and 244 Sanctions don't affect the dictator at the top of the pyramid or their immediate family. But they do affect the army, the secret police, and the mid level bureaucrats. And for the most part the effect...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Did some re-reading of key passages in "The Age of Airpower" by Martin van Creveld. He makes a strong case for nuclear proliferation, not disarmament, on the grounds that nuclear powers can't fight destructive conventional wars. Two examples are Israel...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Charlie @88 Irrational opponents are inefficient, but that doesn't stop them doing a hell of a lot of damage to everyone else. Hitler is the obvious example. cepetit @115 The insane cannot be deterred. Individually, maybe not. But we don't...
• Commented on Off the Map: Women in Science and Science Fiction
  There's a web site devoted to helping you overcome ingrained biases and non-rational thinking: lesswrong.com (Oddly enough, I discovered this via the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfic.)...
• Commented on The permanent revolution
  For a slightly different take on this argument, David Brin is worth reading if you haven't already done so. He's fond of comparing how Star Wars and Star Trek represent different views of progress and societal change and structure. Lawrence...
• Commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  Movies and TV shows are increasingly being sold in original release version, then the special edition with making of extras and commentaries, and often finishing up with the special special director's cut edition. Could this work with ebooks?...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Charlie @258, I really don't see how the EU could have avoided eastwards expansion in the 1990s. And I think you're being very much Anglo-centric in thinking that the US state department was the driving force. Czechoslovakia (then), Hungary, Poland,...
• Commented on The jet lag game
  Lovely though it would be to see airships flying the skies again, the economics just don't work out, according to "The Simple Science of Flight" by Henk Tennekes. Air travel economics are dominated by the number of primates moved in...
• Commented on Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship
  My thoughts? White male complaining that the government isn't doing what he thinks it should? "The news cycle is dominated by large media organizations and the interests of the corporate sector." Yeah, you'd never see a science fiction writer with...
• Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
  You ask "Is it possible that, if we disappeared tomorrow, new species could evolve in the post-human biosphere that lacked the language faculty but were brighter than, for example, today's primates, corvids, or cetaceans?" I'm going to say no. Not...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Charlie, why do you think our (Western) major media outlets are overlooking important stories? For example, of the seven items you've listed, five of them are receiving coverage here in Australia. Pharmaceutical trials aren't, and that would be important. But...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  Another similarity between Osama bin Laden and Jesus Chris is that both owed their early success in life to the Western power they went on to oppose. Before Westerners started using oil in industrial quantities Saudi Arabia was the arse...
• Commented on Context is everything
  Does our response change if there's another box with a biological environment? Suppose we found an exosolar planet with absolutely convincing evidence of life, not necessarily intelligent life, but complex multicellular things. Would that make our own planet more or...