cobrabay
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Commented on Books I will not write #3: No plan survives contact with the editor
Frak! I think I need a sit down and a cup of tea after reading that....
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Charlie Stross commented on
Books I will not write #3: No plan survives contact with the editor
(This may come as a surprise to you, but I don't necessarily agree 100% with John Clute :) Firstly, let's be clear: today, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror are not unitary stylistic forms -- they are, rather, marketing tools that are applied to books and tell store staff which shelves to put them on, the better for the buying public to find what they want. However, fantasy out-sells SF by 2:1. Thus, lots of items are mis-categorized for commercial reasons -- if you can plausibly disguise an author's work as being part of a more lucrative field, you can up-sell....
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Charlie Stross commented on
Books I will not write #3: No plan survives contact with the editor
JvP: piss off. (Crawling does not earn you course credits.) (Neither does continuing the derailing -- and annoying -- discussion of Tolkein.)...
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Brett Dunbar commented on
Books I will not write #3: No plan survives contact with the editor
Actually Benoit Mandlebrot (as in mandlebrot set) makes a fairly strong case in his book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets that the stock market does not follow a normal or Gaussian distribution but rather follows a power-law distribution. One technique he used was to show three graphs two of random data, one following a normal distribution and one following a power law distribution. The third graph showed actual stock market data. The normal distribution data was obviously different while the other two were virtually indistinguishable....
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asuffield.myopenid.com commented on
Books I will not write #3: No plan survives contact with the editor
It's not hard, if you have a CS degree, a willingness to tinker with a UNIX command line, and no scruples. That sounds like a tagline for one of your books. (I definitely want to read that one)...
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Charlie Stross commented on
Books I will not write #3: No plan survives contact with the editor
Brian, there's a whole bunch of the world-walking mechanism that isn't explained in the novels; it's not a mitochondrial mechanism at all, it's just a synthetic self-replicating organelle-like structure that resembles a mitochondrion because, hey, outer membrane and inner reticulated surface with large surface area and extra structures embedded in it, designed to survive in the intracellular environment. The cytologists looking at it point and say "looks like mitochondria" because that's their point of reference -- sort of like 1830s engineers looking at a modern diesel engine and saying, "well, it's got pistons, so we're missing the boiler and condenser...
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