ohwilleke

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• Commented on 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script
  Voluntary Guardian Angel devices are quite popular with back country skiers who fear being lost in an avalanche. And, lots of active safety devices (e.g. airbags, anti-rollover software, all wheel drive, automatic braking systems) are basically guardian angel prevention bots....
• Commented on Nom de Teleport
  I have always thought (since age 6 or 7 when I started consuming science fiction, I'm almost 45 years old now) that such devises were pretty much always called "teleporters" and was stunned to see so many alternatives. Where there...
• Commented on Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths
  My newspaper this morning reported that: "A heavily armed U.S. gunship designed to provide added firepower to special operations forces was responsible for killing 22 people at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, over the weekend, Pentagon officials...
• Commented on Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths
  "Lastly, Dick Waving is an important part of warfare today, always has been." This is an important point. War is diplomacy by other means, and often a visible threat of force is valuable. But, by definition, stealth aircraft and special...
• Commented on Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths
  "Take, for instance, the A-10; can't operate in anything other than a benign environment (hence it being scrapped)." The A-10 is the most heavily armored and robust in the face of hostile fire aircraft in military service anywhere in the...
• Commented on Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths
  I was hoping to see the story of tanks continued to post-WWII, because I find that to be the interesting part. In the Cold War, the West and the East built up huge collections of thousands of ever heavier tanks...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  The PLOS paper doesn't really mean that we found agriculture and lost it again. What they were doing on the banks of the Sea of Galilee was what is called "proto-farming" which has been known to exist for a long...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  One distinction I like to make is between moral and ammoral magic, which fits with my rather atypical definition of a God as (basically) something supernatural that acts with moral purpose in the universe. Moral magical systems seek to fulfill...
• Commented on CMAP: "Why can't I find audio editions of your books in the UK?"
  For what it is worth, the $10,000 or so involved in making an audiobook version of a book that appears in print (adding dollars for audiobook specific marketing, the studio, and administrative overhead to the amount paid to the voice...
• Commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  "Faster-than-light travel may be presumed to need some form of machine to happen. Psi, by contrast, is an organic phenomenon." There are several series in which ftl was faciliated by psi. The most famous, of course, is Frank Herbert's Dune,...
• Commented on More obligatory author shilling
  Unlike NYC, Boston got the real deal. For example, most of the playgrounds in the city almost a week later, are still filled with snow up to the top of the fences surrounding them....
• Commented on My Country Tis of Thee
  My daughter is doing a history project on Bent's Fort in Colorado (near modern day La Junta) which was a world very much like the one in your story. It was on boundary between Old Mexico and the Louisiana purchase,...
• Commented on Things I would make if I had a 3D printer ...
  "* Cell phone protectors with a secret compartment. The problem with this idea is, what do you want to conceal in the vicinity of your cellphone that's more valuable than the cellphone itself?" First, it's just cool. Second, keys, drugs...
• Commented on Things I would make if I had a 3D printer ...
  3D skylines of "minor" cities and small towns to put on the hearth or living room table. Scale replicas of skeletons of extinct species. Floating hot tub drink holders in the designs of historical and fictional ships. A car...