hairyears

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• Commented on The language of alienation
  Newsflash, 2033: "Moon-landing denialists are under Data Sanction". It is clearly stated in Foxipedia and the published key stage 4 XinHua NewsCorp curriculum for London schools that Wu Fei was the first human being to set foot on the...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Given the conditions that Bengali factory serfs work in - and they know that Western consumers happily pay for that - it is only a matter of time before unpleasant little surprises start turning up in our imported consumer goods....
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  My work here is done. Well, almost. There is much amusement to be had in killer bogbrushes, but it'll all sound a bit tasteless when China gets hit by a really lurid environmental emergency....
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Picture a Grand Guignol for the Plastic Age... The Killer Bogbrushes. Our story starts, appropriately enough, with waste disposal: but not the waste you were expecting, and there is a journey halfway 'round the World and back. Amidst the affluent...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  Yes, that. And the big thing that nobody seems to be discussing, that actually allows you to understand if your personal threat level has gone up is: "How bad will the security response be?" TSA goons are already unpleasant, and...
• Commented on The permanent revolution
  The reduced rate of innovation may well be a consequence of the increasing concentration of wealth and a shift away from production towards rent-seeking. Monopolists, rent-seekers, hereditary aristocrats, hoarders and slave-holders are primarily concerned with defending their positions and the...
• Commented on Wow
  We're talking about different things: you're discussing the steady-state or hydrological-cycling state of the natural reactor; I'm discussing the detonation of a prompt criticality. Hence the reference to the explosive 'disassembly' of small man-made warheads, and my assertion that a...
• Commented on Wow
  We have a few posters here talking about disassembly: wrong order of magnitude. Kilograms of fissionables fly apart; tons are a little more reluctant, and a hundred-thousand ton mass of (say) 70% fissile and fissionable fuel is going to *stay...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  What if the precursor intelligence to the Roko Batshitilisk is a successful self-improving simulation of a cat? Given the dominant organism of Internet imagery is KITTEN PICTURES this isn't *quite* as ridiculous as it sounds. (Actually, porn dominates the internet....
• Commented on New Guest Blogger: Ian Tregillis
  I've read Bitter Seeds and Coldest War, and I recommend them to anyone who enjoyed Declare... I didn't pick up any hint of a foreign accent in the English protagonists, so I'd call that a success. A note for those...
• Commented on This explains everything
  Years ago, I trolled some fundies about The Next Step: evilution is defeated, done and dusted, and the next target is the Revolutionary Theory of the Solar System. The Good Book says that the Earth is the Center of Creation,...
• Commented on Tapeworm Logic
  Nearly all of the intelligent (or most intelligent) species on Earth evolved as social species. This is encouraging in terms of empathy's existence - but I hasten to add that we observe extreme violence, in all cooperative species, against out-of...
• Commented on Tapeworm Logic
  Interesting metaphor: tapeworms have fragile bodies but surprisingly resilient eggs (and cysts, in species transmitted in infected meat). And, as their eggs are disposable - unlike our own larvae - tapeworms will have a very different attitude to 'arsestronaut' survival...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Actually, global warming is a major problem for mineral extraction in the high Arctic: they are heavily dependent on 'ice bridges' - trucking routes overland across the lakes and swamps of the Northern wastes which are closing down earlier and...
• Commented on Things that keep me awake at night #1: The end of telephony
  The trick with being verbally abusive is to never raise your voice: aim for the measured tones of the BBC World Service Explaining Things To Foreigners. Also: have a system, and a script which you can return to, calmly but...
• Commented on THE END.
  Yes, I enjoyed reading that - and have a copy of the latter-day Tales From the White Hart that includes it. We've both read 'Ignition', and we both know that someone actually asked John Clark to test the other (ahem)...
• Commented on THE END.
  Seriously? You've used FOOF in a story? Go the last mile: use Chlorine TriFlouride. CF3 is the worst of them all: Google for "Sand won' t save you this time" "Things I won't work with" and "Hypergolic …In contact with...
• Commented on THE END.
  Congratulations! I believe that the very height of bad taste is to congratulate a new mum with "We knew you had it in you". Nevertheless, it does seem to fit, and I look forward to reading a story that seems...
• Commented on Sitrep
  "A surprisingly accurate guess…" Rule 34 meets Mammoths? As far as I can tell, there is nothing out there for Mastodon fanciers, and Google returns a curt 'no matching pages were found' for the abominable mammoth search term: Shaved Mastodon...
• Commented on 2512
  Going to an archivist... Interesting. The scientific knowledge in settled certainty in most engineering problems: but we still have engineers, and engineering is still a challenging discipline. Mostly. I can, however, foresee a century where the materials technology and off-the-peg...
• Commented on Existential threats
  Pathogens don't really cut it as a species-killer: there's always a resistant population. Plant pathogens, doubly so: I can see one major crop collapsing, maybe two - but there is sufficient diversity across the grass family to ensure the survival...
• Commented on Interdependency
  The consensus (or perhaps the loudest) view is that there have been many instances of 'point failure' in our globalised supply-chain economy, and that all of them have been limited in their effects, so that we can safely conclude that...