phil.edwards

phil.edwards

  • Commented on Down tools
    I knew it was going to be Constable Savage! OK, so... how did I know it was going to be Constable Savage? Those gloves look rather good. I've been writing 2-3,000 words a day and playing concertina in the evening...
  • Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
    I'm not going to invoke the Bonhoeffer quote or anything, but my personal racist-tolerance-o-meter has recently ticked over from "They're wrong and seem a bit unpleasant, but you kind of understand where they might be coming from (and let's face...
  • Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
    I think it's probably just as well 'devo max' isn't on the ballot - it'd be only too easy for the vote to be split 40/39/21, and the status quo would have won by -20%; it'd be 1979 all over...
  • Commented on A footnote about the publishing industry
    See also "Daisy Meadows", under whose name not-quite-interchangeable 'fairy' books appear every few weeks. The last time I checked, most of them were written by one person (Narinder Dhami) but to begin with it was certainly a many-handed operation....
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    Is Usenet archived properly anywhere? I know Google Groups bought out Deja, but every time I look there for old stuff I remember posting there are huge holes. Me, I first got online in 1996 & gravitated fairly rapidly to...
  • Commented on The cult of justice
    Religion is a human invention. Justice is a human invention. Laws are human inventions. The idea of doing justice through laws is a human invention. Moreover, shoes are a human invention, and the idea of wearing shoes out of doors...
  • Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
    I didn't delve very deeply into the idea of the Singularity, what with being creeped out, so all of this may be more about my idea of the idea of the Singularity than anything else. Also, this was happening at...
  • Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
    How scared was Lovecraft, though? I ask because, when I first bumped into the idea of the Singularity, I quite literally wanted to run and hide. It scared the crap out of me. Partly the thought that it might actually...
  • Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
    What am I missing? The intense humming of capitalism, which will use these technologies to immiserate countless thousands of already impoverished people? IOW, are you discussing a looming disaster as if it were a cool new gadget? I'm not saying...
  • Commented on Making history personal
    I was at Jesus College, Cambridge, and lived in a Tudor building during my first year. Last year I went back - my son had an interview - and stayed overnight in a (the?) college guest room, which is in...
  • Commented on The regular holy war ...
    Curious about the DEC thing. I've never used VMS, but I've worked on MS/DOS, various Windowses, a couple of Unices, OS X, some mainframes and a 5280, and I can't smell a philosophical difference between them. I could rank them...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Character-level styles? That's either crazy or brilliant, and considering present company it's probably the latter. But if you've got embedded-code formatting, complete with keyboard shortcuts and toolbar icons, who is going to use character-level styles - unless they work in...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Ctrl+Spacebar = remove all manual character-level formatting How do people indicate book titles, or for that matter convey emphasis, in your world?...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. Word says: Order of words. Consider revising. (Should that be "consider revising word order"?) Some really enlightening...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    Yes - instead of producing conventionally lifelike paintings for upper class clients, artists were free to innovate wildly in all directions and hope to find favour with the super-rich. Meanwhile, those upper class clients might not have beautifully-painted pictures on...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    Photography left a pretty big hole in painting. In fact you could say it destroyed "painting" and created "Art". I hope printed books survive - as bounded as a picture, as immersive as a film, more capacious than either, as...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    I think the most important part of this post is the slight stumble over indexing. The "in principle" futurologist line on indexing is that it can be automated. What's actually happening is that indexing (= producing an alphabetised list of...
  • Commented on A deceptively simple question
    There's a short story from the late 60s or early 70s - told, I think, in the form of a series of inter-office memos - describing the development of automated safety features in cars, which somehow morphs from centralised locking...
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