Graham

Recent Actions

• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  The irony for something like this is that in the hands of people who have a clue, a show like this could actually be good and worth at least £35 a ticket - if it was done properly. A few...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Netanyahu, and Sharon before him, are the best (worst) examples of "what would happen if Trump/Johnson/Orban were competent?"...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  I don't think that's going to be the problem you think it is. The reason divers need to care about partial pressures of any given gas is because 10m depth equals one extra atmosphere of pressure, and that extra pressure...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Re "indestructible" phones, I had a similar thing recently. I needed to upgrade from my very elderly Samsung S5 Neo, mainly due to Samsung refusing to upgrade the version of Android for it, but also the GPS had started to...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  assassination invariably seems to make politics worse I'm not sure that's true for dictatorships (or wannabe-dictators like Trump). Part of the playbook for every dictator is that once they're at the top, their next step is making sure none of...
• Commented on The coming storm
  But a train driven by a real living body is emotionally considered safer than a robot train. No matter the stats. And one less-frequently-mentioned stat is how safe that real living body in the cab is. When the local feral...
• Commented on The coming storm
  The "Ich bin ein Berliner" thing is long since debunked, but people forget to JFGI like every other urban legend. With the way he phrased it, it doesn't actually mean "I am a Berliner" - that would be "Ich bin...
• Commented on The coming storm
  It's definitely not BS for anywhere further south. Nor for anywhere the gets hotter, and has air-con. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60602 Sure this isn't the case for northern Europe, but northern Europe != world. Also (sorry Charlie), midnight in winter isn't peak power....
• Commented on The coming storm
  You're clearly working from the privilege of being somewhere that doesn't get too hot. Almost every house in the US has air-con, and it uses 10% of the US's power supply capacity. On average. Make it hotter, and it uses...
• Commented on The coming storm
  Ironically enough, I doubt Sunak does that much in the way of corruption. He doesn't need to - so long as you don't threaten Infosys, he and his wife are rich enough that it doesn't really matter. He's not Donald...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  PTerry wasn't sufficiently scary with his tree octupus. As someone who plays on the Worldbuilding StackExchange page, there was once a question based on Sharknado that asked what flying aquatic creatures would be plausible. I had a particularly nasty idea,...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  That's fine, but I honestly can't find a polite way to say that if you failed to read even the very first paragraph of that report, then any opinions you have are based purely on your pre-existing bias. I've no...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  I would be much more confident in their evidence if they also included analysis of human rights violations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad & Hezbollah. With respect, if you're saying that then you don't know enough about it to form a...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  And they took their cues from the previous president who was a Reality TV show star. Who was not actually a successful businessman, but merely cosplayed one for a TV show. But was a very good grifter. Which in turn...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  Cities are dense, sure. But a decent chunk of the population lives in towns which are a bit less so, or has land on the edge of town which is not exactly in use. When I moved to where I...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  Ah, the Scunthorpe Problem rides again. Those who cannot remember the past, etc......
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  The problem is that science doesn't have any "woke ideology". That's a label slapped across it from conservatives who simply don't like what the evidence tells them, because it doesn't fit with their pre-digested viewpoints. The specific current case is...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Which raises an even more interesting question. Could humanity then recruit Dave "Cinzano Bianco" Lister to solve Case Nightmare Green with a trick shot?...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  From Charlie's comments under the Laundry Files reading order list (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/laundry-reading-order.html), "Pimpf" isn't totally canon. I guess whether PFY exists in the main Laundry sequence is up to Charlie; but since he didn't display high competence, he'd likely be one...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  As for writing or portraying women, I would suggest that all of the common female archetypes in media (...) aren't real women at all. They are men's stereotypes of women. That's kind of interesting, because I'm not sure that's generally...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  Sex is not even necessarily a component for loving a partner, never mind before we get onto love-for-friends/children/parents. For starters, asexual and aromantic people exist, and the two groups are orthogonal. You can be asexual but still have people that...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  That combined with better management tools for networked computers meant Java became a thing and by ~2000 Java made it reasonable to do distributed computing in normal offices. I was engineering not compsci, but I don't remember Java making an...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Getting back to rules, Lewis Carroll just made a pink bunny in a Victorian girl’s frock pop out of my watch to remind everyone that good fantasy literature doesn’t need magic rules. Go ask Alice. "Wonderland" is actually a...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Your definition of "magic" gives you basically two stories. "I wanted this, so magic happened and I got it"; or as tragedy, "I wanted this, but magic happened and every I did was pointless". Once you've disconnected cause and effect,...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "The whole point of magic is that it breaks the laws and rules of physical reality. But then to claim that magic itself requires laws and rules that have to be followed would be internally inconsistent." All fiction breaks the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "one phrase of arms is generally very short indeed" One of my jiu jitsu instructors posted some WWII knife and stick fighting tutorial films to our group recently. There was a question from one of the guys about why there...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  My favourite fact about Glasgow English is that the comedy series "Rab C Nesbitt", set in Glasgow and with characters speaking in a fairly strong Glasgow accent, was originally shown on the BBC with subtitles as if it was a...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  My first guess too, considering the bang looked less significant than your average supermarket firework, and pictures the day afterwards showed no damage at all. Any state actor should be assumed to have access to military-grade explosives and to be...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  One point on phones in cars. I go to some events where mobile phones have always been banned because cameras. In the last couple of years though, a number of medical monitoring devices have moved to using your phone as...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Just since my earlier comment is being referenced by Greg, I wanted to make it traceable. David Lammy's comments are at 39:00 in this link. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001l9j8 David Lammy's claim is that after the Tottenham riots, he had one-off visits from...