scott-sanford

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• Commented on The language of alienation
  ...the Indians dig through the Himalayan Plateau when their country gets uninhabitable. Since they use fusion demo charges for a lot of it, you get lots of dust in the high atmosphere, which buys the world a couple of years...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  I had the impression, Cthulu wasn't, like, a bad guy. Just he wakes up and kills us all. In much the same way bulldozers aren't evil. This may be little condolence when one is bearing down on you, your anthill,...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Apparently I need to read The Atrocity Archives again! Bob's more gadget-obsessed roomies are the obvious ones to want such a souvenir, of course. (Why? Because it's there!) It had not occurred to me that the collector and the tinkerer...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  However, in this world poetry, and not math, provides direct access to magic. And since the 1910-30 years have been an unprecedented time for Russian poetry, known in the schoolbooks as The Silver Age, the authors had a big pool...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  How did parts from the Kettenkrad end up in Bob's apartment? It seemed obvious to me that they were brought back from the dead world by someone who (a) had access to that world, (b) had access to Bob's house,...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  I hope to eventually have enough material to bolt together a Laundry Files short story collection. But I don't write the short stories very fast. I am delighted to read this. There are interesting moments in the Laundry that don't...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Um, there may be bigger reasons why a Klemperer rosette was not set up. They don't seem to be terribly stable even when properly set up with planets of equal weight. Indeed. I was behind the times on orbital dynamics;...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Presumably the Library can't be built in the deep past because that era lacks the storage capacity of a planet-crust full of memory diamond. There seems no reason why it couldn't be put in the deep past; parking a library...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  This reminds me of an old joke. I don't remember the source, but it sounds like Pratchett. The idea was that oysters were the most evil creatures in existence, pure malevolence incarnate. Fortunately, they were also completely ineffective. The Doom...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Having read Iron Sunrise again recently I understand that you broke this universe… but I like to think that Herman is a unreliable narrator. Which of course just breaks things more, because if you can't trust the Being with it's...
• Commented on The Fumes of Mordor & Other World Building Models
  Hawaiian climate varies a lot more than many people appreciate, but it's fixed more to location than time of year. Wet or dry, hot or cold, is a matter of finding a place that suits you. James Nicoll recently posted...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Moreover, if AAMs weren't effective against crude piston-engined biplanes or monoplanes, every air force in the third world would be tooled-up with An-2's and Cessna 172's. And to be a much tougher nut to crack than has proven to be...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  As I said, Okinawa had a disproportionately large proportion of military personel to civilian population. I do not think that it can be taken as representative of Japan. It was the best representation that the Allies had. You can quibble...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  @fatal.error: "game theory would state that you do not negotiate with people if there is nothing to gain for you from the negotiation": if you believe that this applies to the end of the Second World War, then your starting...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  There is an even more obvious example: The USAF failed to intercept any of the hijacked airliners on September 11, 2001. No, that's not a very good example, for a historical point that some may miss. They didn't fail. They...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  So my money is on lasers showing up first for point defense on warships, then maybe on aircraft (but it's pushing the envelope). Ground-based lasers are relatively impractical and I'm not sure we'll ever see them used for anything more...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Two thoughts; firstly, no-one has taken on a properly-worked-up first world air defence network in a long time - it's all been conscripts running export versions. You think? Now, I've got no knowledge of who was guarding Moscow airspace on...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I see that the film of the Davy Crockett test is still on youtube; it's an entertaining piece of history. Along with your observations about reliability - I don't know anything about the Davy Crockett's projected shelf life - there...
• Commented on Forthcoming UK Audio Books
  Charlie has addressed the 'rights by region' thing before (and can explain it much better than I if he's not tired of repeating himself). The short answer is that you pretty much guessed right. Old dead-tree distribution channels were worked...
• Commented on Forthcoming UK Audio Books
  ...and then Charlie pointed it out in post #14. It may be that there are enough lawyers in the way that making two audio files is the less difficult solution. *sigh*...
• Commented on Forthcoming UK Audio Books
  However, American narrative accents are just plain wrong for my books -- with the exception of the Merchant Princes series -- in the UK. I agree. If there is some reason not to record, frex, The Apocalypse Codex once with...
• Commented on Forthcoming UK Audio Books
  Charlie, this may be a foolish question, but are there operational reasons for not using the American audio versions in the UK? As said above, American accents seem reasonable for the Merchant Princes novels. Proper British accents should be used...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  Update: there are now stills and video of backpack carrying men who the FBI would like to talk to....
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  Boston has seen its first post-marathon hate crime; the only good part of this is the reaction of the sane majority....
• Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
  (I have no idea how we've mutated onto this. But since we have...) Remember too that Rommel's battles were not being lost in Africa, they were being lost in the Mediterranean. The Axis never properly controlled that sea, never took...
• Commented on Obituaries
  I see there was an excellent turnout for the funeral's big-screen livecast in Edinburgh....
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  Whatever happened to that good old word "bomb"? At what point, exactly, is a bomb no longer "improvised"? Jargon marches on. The implication seems to be that 'improvised explosive devices' are used by Those Naughty People while Our Heroic Armed...
• Commented on The Fumes of Mordor & Other World Building Models
  I don't know what the local convention scene is like in Hawaii these days, but I remember being tickled at the Honolulu bid for Westercon 53. (I see that my wall of convention tchotchkes still bears a Hawaiian flag keychain...
• Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
  We can only hope that the Russians never based their fleet tactics on a half-baked time travel scheme....
• Commented on Why I Do Self-Publish
  Can you self-publish and still get books on the shelves of public libraries? I don't know about prose fiction, but my local library system does have dead-tree artifacts from web comic artists who've gone that route (such as Jennie Breeden),...