gravelbelly22

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
  Ouch... A friend at university had Bell's Palsy; when the medical students found out, he had a stream of people coming up to him at the bar, and asking him to say "aaahhhh" so that they could watch his uvula...
• Commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
  Brother-in-law is an engineer at Jaguar Land Rover; your analysis cuts bits out. Why should JLR succeed when much if the rest of the former British Leyland fail? BAe bought it too cheaply, and learned from the Honda partnership (Triumph...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Jennifer Morgue
  OTOH, an "Independant" Scotland will be a flat-broke & total-surveillance Calvinist society. Look at Glasgow and Edinburgh by way of comparison. Glasgow: allegedly pragmatic; attempts the hard line on alcohol and prostitution. Still has problems with both. Edinburgh: allegedly Calvinist,...
• Commented on In the pulp
  I think Edinburgh is doing OK at the moment, from the development PoV... Developers like the boring non-central bread-and-butter stuff, not just the city centre gap sites. Yes, the Missoni is boring, but as you say the old council building...
• Commented on In the pulp
  I'm trying to think about which ones you mean. The fire that took out the AI department archives about a decade ago is growing like topsy; bit modernist, but South Bridge is hardly a paragon of beauty. In the meanwhile,...
• Commented on In the pulp
  To do a mail-out competition I basically need to find a locally-based minion with a good back and willingness to do beast of burden services. Well, if it's only occasional ;)...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Like you, I'm a convinced long-time reader of Private Eye. I suspect I'm not entirely unquestioning of its emphasis - it varies by contributor (note to the Transatlantic types - regular columnists operate under pseudonyms, although some of these are...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  ...as the UK tends to keep a lot more things secret... Does it? This might be one of those cultural things. "Secret" in UK terms normally means that people don't talk about it; yes, there are the occasional attention-seeking "I...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  and you can buy 20 of them for the price of a single F-35A. And given the typical opponents developed nations seem to be fighting these days, they'd be much more useful. Not necessarily. The expensive bits are the useful...
• Commented on Books I've written
  ...a black farce about the metastatic security state and the corruption of democracy... IMHO, you shouldn't turn the paranoia up too far... :) If you compare Ken Macleod's most recent books, "The Execution Channel" (for me) painted a more extreme...
• Commented on Books I've written
  I believe that the USian equivalent to "Glasshouse" is "Stockade" (Army and Air Force) or "Brig" (Navy and Marine Corps)......
• Commented on Books I've written
  IMHO... Some authors use the genre as a backdrop to explore things. Le Carre uses spying to play with trust and betrayal, Deighton similar (but I thought the final third-person perspective for the first-person Game/Set/Match series was wonderful). Gerald Seymour...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  In 1943-1944 they scarcely changed tactics, and pressed on... First Chechen War. According to different sources, the Russians suffered between 5000 and 14,000 deaths, and between 17,000 and 50,000 casualties. Needless to say, the Chechens suffered more....
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  ...with just a hint of Poul Anderson's "The High Crusade"......
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Given that theatres have largely been replaced as the primary delivery mechanism of mass entertainment: It is discovered that strong exposure over hours to very bright light sources flickering at exactly 48Hz triggers a gradual and irreversible loss of neural...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  But if we look at the course of the war we may be impressed the swift efficiency of the German army, the competence and ability of its military planners and generals in the field, but that's all at the operational...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Muhahaha, the strange attractors have taken effect... Funny fact -- nearly all of the aircraft had names derived from the children's TV series "The Magic Roundabout". Nope, all of them by the end. As a young air cadet, I spent...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  PS I had considered riffing on "lies that militaries tell themselves", but it would have been a distraction; extending the German Army's "they didn't really beat us in 1918" into the US Army's "we'd have won in Vietnam if the...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  As I said, Okinawa had a disproportionately large proportion of military personel to civilian population. I do not think that it can be taken as representative of Japan Of course you will believe that, because that's the only way your...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Found it. "The Lucky Strike", by Kim Stanley Robinson. Enola Gay, not Bock's Car; Hiroshima, not Nagasaki... (Published in the UK in "Vinland the Dream")....
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Japan was doomed since Pearl Harbour, intelligent people knew it, and as the war unfolded this knowledge infused in more and more people; there is no reason why Japan would not have surrendered eventually. I admire your optimism and humanity,...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Nope, but I remember a short story about "what if Bock's Car crashed in a checkout flight, and the bombardier on the backup deliberately dropped the weapon so that it missed". (The Bombardier gets executed for treason, and after death...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I'll shut up after this, I promise :) A blockade on munitions would be a good idea, but throttling the supply of medicines and baby milk is just punishing the victims. Apart from the problem of dual use (fertilisers and...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I don't disagree with you ref our recent ugly past, and please don't think I'm dismissing our treatment of minorities - I'm just suggesting that British Muslims don't need to fear the 2am knock on the door. Yes, there are...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  For all that it was a despicable act, My Lai wasn't a commonplace act. Yes, Ernest Medina and William Calley should be remembered forever as murdering scum. But remember Hugh Thompson, Glenn Andreotta, and Lawrence Colburn - who turned their...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  When I say "we", I mean that we can be happy that in a UK (where there are demonstrably murderous people attempting to kill the greatest number of people in support of Al Qaeda's confused and insane perversion of religion),...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I see a resurgence of barbaric behaviour that I though confined to History books, or to present-time backwater dictatorships. To understand the reason why, it is necessary to examin the origins of that myth of Western purity. Nope, it's simpler...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  There's always the "Lynx Effect" (apologies to those unsullied by the UK advertising industry, just think Monty Python's Meaning of Life)... A pheromone based aftershave, advertised to create utter desirability in a young male. Make him innocent victim or manipulative...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The nuclear strikes against Japan are war crimes as defined by the Hague convention ("usage of wanton desctruction on civilians"). In an ideal world, of course you're correct. But by this point in a World War, I suspect that pragmatism...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Personally, I'd say the capability to make, understand, optimise, model/predict and incorporate into a doctrine of operations a weapon would tend to count as a warfighting 'capability'. Whether a squaddie might know it is pretty unimportant - if someone felt...