Charlie Stross

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• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Covers the publication of Mary Wolestonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (published 1790) to the execution by guillotine of Olympe de Gouges in 1793 and about a generation thereafter -- the original post-Revolutionary Republic granted a lot of...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Interesting that as the cost of manufacturing cloth & clothing fell the AMOUNT of clothing people wear decreased as well. Oh no it didn't! The dress reform movement -- reducing the complexity and layers in womens' clothing -- only really...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Yup. But those prices are for the whole plane. While a small bizjet might have as few as four seats, a large one such as a Gulfstream G650 or a Boeing Business Jet (or an ACJ -- the Airbus equivalent)...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Or the bullseye left over from a sheet of crown glass. They could be used for small windows used for illumination only -- too warped to see through -- but if you put it in a circular mount on a...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  he threw out his socks after wear while travelling because the saved space was literally worth more to him. Imagine telling an 1800s-era Lancastrian that one! Go back to the 1700-1800 era when male fashion was for knee breeches and...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  It's a long time since I fenced, but the actual moves, when you are facing someone else, also carrying something long & pointy are nothing at all like the movies/TV etc Yup. Just find some HEMA martial arts folks and...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Is there going to be a spoiler thread for Season of Skulls? Eventually. Maybe the week after next. (Not right now, off to an SF convention tomorrow: not another convention the following weekend.)...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  The rise of the super-rich class simply flying private planes The cost per hour of running a bizjet, per seat, is comparable to the cost per hour of a first class seat (this is long haul first class, not US...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Yep. But for folks like me who work in tech but rarely rarely rarely ever need to dress up, shit is OK. Hard same. I own a suit, but mostly because I'm too ashamed to take it to a charity...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  The change Guy Rixon commented on was almost certainly due to the relative wealth of people in 1900 versus 1800. Don't forget changes in both fashion and the cost of cloth! During the period 1800-1900 the production of yarn moved...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  ... Also, the design life of a jet airliner is 30 years, so they get replaced regularly -- because newer airliners are more fuel-efficient the older ones tend to be relegated to freight carriers or developing world carriers; European passenger...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Then there is that totally misreading the future US thing called the "Pony Express". Which failed only because it came along just too late, and was pipped to the post by the telegraph (as you noted). A few centuries earlier...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  A first-class rail ticket cost about the same as a cheap stagecoach one Yeah, a generation after the period I was researching and talking about. Remember the first steam engines were stationary engines in coal mines, which made mining more...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  An issue I didn't mention was the season. We're a long way north here, and around the summer solstice Edinburgh gets 18 hours of daylight and the night sky stays light in the south. One limit on stage coaches was...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  Blame it on a misplaced search/replace (that the editors and proofreaders didn't notice). She was originally Fiona but was supposed to be Flora throughout -- I missed a couple of instances when I was changing her name....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  The sweaty arse as the explanation of human endurance? Yes. Your thighs are where most of the muscles actively involved in walking are contracting. That's where the extra waste heat is generated. Being able to very efficiently dump heat through...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Question: if one were fleeing from (or to) deadly peril, how far might one go in such a vehicle? The problem with horses and speed is heat rejection. Simply put, they're big, so the square-cube law means that there's a...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  Stage coaches in the early 19th century typically averaged 8mph, including stops: but they changed out teams of horses regularly throughout the day. I suspect a team would pull for about 90 minutes from one coaching inn to the next,...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  I don’t know what they are like now but in Italy in 1982 there were definitely trains with similar toilet facilities. Modern Italian trains are a lot different. (Hint: think where Pendolinos come from.) In general, dumping raw sewage on...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Nowadays, even at 2 days, you wouldn't find any takers. There was a Top Gear episode a couple of decades ago in which Jeremy Clarkson flew from London to Auckland and then back to London the long way round (circling...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Typo: 19th century not 18th! But, otherwise, as you say. No, I meant 18th century. Travel time for a stage coach from London to Edinburgh roughly halved during the 18th century due to road improvements; prior to the 1700s the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Yep. My metaphor is: stage coaches were the airliners of the day (seats on the roof = economy; seats indoors = business/first class), while the private carriages of the aristocracy and rich merchants were equivalent to bizjets, with luxuries like...
• Posted Shrinking the world to Charlie's Diary
  (This was originally a comment on the preceding thread. I decided to promote it to blog entry, just because.) If you've read Season of Skulls you probably guessed I did some research on travel in England in 1816 (plus before...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  I wrote a long answer to your comment, and it was good enough I turned it into a whole new new blog entry. Enjoy!...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  To riff on the late Stephen Jay Gould, languages seem to evolve via punctuated equilibrium, rather than continuous gradual change....
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  For me, the most difficult accents to understand have been from Dublin and Glasgow, but I think it's mostly because I haven't been exposed to them that much. Scots is halfway to being a different language -- a lot of...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  I can witness that Londoners couldn't understand even Wiltshire farm-workers in the 1960s. I know for a fact that southerners, including Londoners, couldn't understand folks from Huddersfield as recently as the late 1980s. Source: I had to act as an...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  I can remember someone being charged with it back in the 80s, with the papers making a big fuss about the treason charge And then there's this: Windsor Castle intruder pleads guilty to threatening to kill Her late Majesty Queen...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  English in 1816 probably sounded very different from the way it does in the 21st century. My understanding based on current research is that English-English circa 1816 would be comprehensible, although the accents would be a bit odd. Working class...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  Instead of grabbing the flamethrower, the Laundry surrendered to the darkness. The whole premise of the setting leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Oversimplification. First, the Laundry broke the Masquerade (or rather, failed to prevent an elven army destroying...