https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkes5lMr7ALyuGlMEHhiOEubGJZGNKCykA

Recent Actions

• Commented on "Write me something fresh and new, but make it just like the last one"
  How did we not mention Little, Big as an architectural novel? Which it is in half a dozen ways, including having architects in it and the layout of streets and buildings supplying plot points and one of the main characters...
• Commented on "Write me something fresh and new, but make it just like the last one"
  Probably better for the author than getting typecast into writing the same book again and again. I think that may have happened to Tom Holt, who is a nice bloke, a decent writer with lots of ideas, and great to...
• Commented on "Write me something fresh and new, but make it just like the last one"
  Mary Gentle and China Mieville have written what might be called architectural novels Ken Brown...
• Commented on A nation of slaves
  Its not green belt that makes land for housing so expensive. And its certainly not planning laws. Its the way everything is mortgaged, so banks and previous owners take huge cuts out of every transaction. Fifty years ago council houses...
• Commented on Because people keep asking me ...
  The repackaged Merchant Princes novels may not be eligible for Hugos, but I have still seen no evidence that the second volume is other than mythical. At least in central London bookshops. I go I to such a place at...
• Commented on Implications
  Almost all of Britain was wooded after the last ice retreated. Maybe not the sort of total treecover they used to imagine a century ago, as if a squirrel could go from Dover to Cape Wrath without setting foot on...
• Commented on Implications
  And also by making so much rubisco that its probably the most abundant enzyme on the planet. The form of photosynthesis used by green plants and cyanobacteria (there are others) is wonderfully complicated. Two photosystems, each with a different light-harvesting...
• Commented on Implications
  You beat me to it with the chameleons! We think they are cute because they are small and weird. But imagine meeting a big one.... (I thought of mentioning them and then ended up spending a happy hour or two...
• Commented on Implications
  Treelines in Britain are not primarily caused by low temperatures. Wind is more important. There are also effects from high rainfall, waterlogging, soil erosion, and overgrazing. And in some places burning to develop grouse moors. The treeline has been getting...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  Henry is a very clever bloke. And has made serious (if slightly slipstream) contributions to science and to science fiction as an editor and journalist. Someone I'd love to see at a con. But not at all uncontroversial if you...
• Commented on The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
  There is continuity in sleep though. Your mind - well my mind - doesn't stop working, there is no sudden blackout, just a sort of dislocation of short-term working memory from medium-term memory, so no or few new permanent memories...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  On Radio 4 just now, a news item about some lawyers in Derby who noticed a bad smell coming from bricked-up chimney in their office. And when it was broken into they found a dead man in the chimney, perhaps...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  No-one would have believed, in the first years of the twenty-first century, that the cumulative effect of decades of drinking Starbucks coffee would have such a dramatic effect on human physiology. Nor that the grey squirrels - intellects cool, determined,...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  Message from Ken Brown: Apologies for my two apparently unsigned messages above. (one saying the comments on Christianity weren't very inflamatory, the other linking to Language Log) The Google account I am signed in to on this machine to read...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  As for what the word "militia" might have meant to the people who wrote the bit of the US constitution about rightly arming bears, there is an interesting discussion about the wording on Language Log here: The New Yorker finds...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  Where's the flame-bait? I guess I must be one of the very few evangelical Christians who regularly reads this blog, and nothing particularly controversial has been said about Christianity yet. Well, no worse than I can hear down the pub...