david.given

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Commented on Down tools
Oh, absolutely! Scrivener's a pro tool for pros, while WordGrinder's a toy I wrote in my spare time. I'm not suggesting you use it, because that might interfere with your workflow and none of us want that, but merely that...
Commented on Down tools
I don't know Scrivener or Emacs org mode, but my text entry tool of choice is WordGrinder (binaries for Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, plus it'll build on other things): http://wordgrinder.sourceforge.net/ It does plain text with a little style --- italics, bold,...
Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
I was actually somewhat flabberghasted to discover an article on football which was actually interesting: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/06/meet-the-england-team-that-could-win-it-all-in-brazil/ Oddly enough it turned up in my RSS feed next to this one. But I will be so glad when it's all over. (We...
Commented on Interstitial note
Don't forget the bit from the Lensman books where they go to a universe with a different speed of light, find a planet going at trans-c velocities, and bring it back to ours... without changing the velocity. They weren't quite...
Commented on Heartbleed note
Ada. Fast, robust, secure, provably verifiable, designed for writing software that really, really needs to work, and it's been around since 1980. Turns out that people don't really want languages which are fast, robust, secure, etc, so it never really...
Commented on Catching a Blighty
...I went to a traditional English boarding school (in Scotland, but that's another story). The school chapel --- a lot bigger than the local church --- had wooden panelling all round one end. This was the WW1 war memorial. There...
Commented on Spook Century
Hmm. If Charlie's near-future science fiction keeps coming true, I wonder if there's any mileage in a Kickstarter to get him to write a thoroughly dull piece of optimistic utopian SF set five years from now......
Commented on (Flash fiction) A message from the Laundry public relations office
What, you think it's a coincidence that tin foil has largely been replaced by aluminium foil? Research has shown that aluminium foil hats can actually amplify commonly used frequencies produced by the orbital mind control lasers: http://web.archive.org/web/20130228182846/http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/ (Note that like...
Commented on Upcoming appearance: Frankfurt Book Fair
Please let them not use the word 'interactive'. Please let them not use the word 'interactive'......
Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
c.f. Toolmaker Koan, John MacLoughlin. Hmm. ICBMs are stunningly expensive, so much so that the amount of resources required to maintain them in working order requires some degree of rationality. How much of this cost is in the warhead, and...

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TRX commented on Down tools
same waypoints That's the USAF's version of "working to rule." When the Pentagon doesn't like the orders they get from the Oval Office, they interpret them in such as way as to increase casualties. That's why they flew the same paths and altitudes hitting North Vietnam when they were ordered to make sorties to facilitate bringing the NV back to the negotiating table. When Nixon saw the rise in casualty figures he went ballistic; he talks about it in "The White House Years." It wasn't politically feasible to have the officers responsible executed, but I'm sure Tricky Dick thought...
Nojay commented on Down tools
A CVN doesn't have "spare reactor juice" to make fuel from seawater and CO2. You can run the numbers yourself if you wish but to fuel up a two-plane flight for CAP purely from the reactors of a Ford class CVN would take a couple of hours of 100% of its 300MW maximum capacity, assuming an electricity-to-fuel efficiency of maybe 10%. To do that the ship would have to sit dead in the water (emphasis on the word "dead") with all internal systems switched off. Said recumbent Scipidae would soon be inducted into the Silent Service in a shooting war....
existentialistjoy commented on Down tools
The plan isn't spare juice - the plan is to replace tankers which have to come and go from the group, with a dedicated jetfuel-manufacturing ship, which is basically a hull stuffed to the gills with chemical plant and reactors. Propulsion system? The water intake and outflow from the cooling system is what moves it through the water. Point being that it never leaves the aegis of the carrier group. That isn't the selling point for having a reactor in a carrier though. The point of having carriers be nuclear is that it gets you strategic mobility. A nuclear carrier...
gravelbelly22 commented on Down tools
Sorry - your strategic mobility argument fails as soon as the escorts in your CVBG can't keep up. The carrier can't steam around on its own without AAW and ASW escorts, and the SSN that apparently escorts USN CVBG will lose all of its advantages....
gravelbelly22 commented on Down tools
That's the USAF's version of "working to rule." When the Pentagon doesn't like the orders they get from the Oval Office, they interpret them in such as way as to increase casualties. Sorry, that's using conspiracy theories when plain old incompetence or complacency will do. There are some reasonable and detailed articles on how the Serbian cloudpuncher brought down the F-117; essentially, the lowered observability is aimed at the most effective guidance radar frequencies. The Serb, like the RN's Type 42 destroyers, had a lower-than-typical-frequency search radar (in both cases, rather old). This let them detect the aircraft; but not...

Responses to Comments from david.given

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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