Alan Robson

Comment Threads

• Ian Bertram commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  Doesn't sound like there's cosy to be a cosy wrap up to the story, but then I can't imagine how there could be. The idea of US Customs and Border combineing with DHS is enough for several nightmares, before you add in all the other non-attributable agencies......
• ewanmcnay commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  The bit that caused me to lose immersion in this series was likely just because IRL I'm a neuroscientist: the apparently-unquestioned leap by the US from 'poke a cell this way and it vanishes' to 'therefore it is vanishing TO THE EXACT TARGET UNIVERSE we want.' Which is quite plausibly another example of assuming that if you only know of two worlds, there are only two worlds, but I would have thought/hoped that one of the science guys would have noted that sticking in some cAMP is NOT close to the downstream effects of a specific stimulus to the optic...
• Charlie Stross commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  There's stuff I couldn't shoe-horn into books 5 or 6 -- basically, the researchers don't understand what they're messing around with, and get critical aspects of it wrong, but not too wrong to have an effect. By book 7, they've figured a lot of it out. And I'm now trying to shoe-horn the extra stuff into the narrative just to satisfy people who worry about that kind of thing .......
• Sean Eric Fagan commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  Remember that they weren't experimenting with the cells initially: they had subjects, and a known pattern, and could subject them to the pattern while studying the brain in real-time. They weren't randomly poking a cell and having it vanish; they were poking it in a way duplicating what was done in a living brain. (That said, I couldn't read them, too much evil. I had to stop when they were mentioning using slices taken from living brains.)...
• ewanmcnay commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  Sean Eric: Naah :). The manipulations required are very explicitly on the subcellular level; there's no technique (and certainly not in the books' timeframe) that would permit looking at that in vivo. [There are things that might perhaps have been possible to measure in a living human brain - I dunno, say rhythmic fluctuations of calcium at a frequency half of theta, or excretion of a slightly-modified neurotransmitter, or some such - but nothing subcellular without post-mortem analysis, and they don't have enough subjects for that.] [Let's skip over how they honed in on the LGN in the first place...