Kevin Marks

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• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  There was also the infamous Samsung moon inserting camera, which looked for blurry moon pictures and swapped in a previously taken crisp one. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds-fake-detail-to-moon-photos-via-reference-photos/...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  I wonder if it could be reenacted for Glasgow WorldCon. Karen Gillan has said she wants to be in any film version....
• Commented on The coming storm
  The storage problem has been solved with pumped hydropower. Dinorwic was designed for a daily fill/empty cycle to arbitrage day/night energy. Conventional hydropower works on an annual cycle, relying on rain or snowfall to fill it up. Daily solar fits...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  LLM's work rather like Boris Johnson anyway - bloviate at length, dipping into things that are loosely correlated and half remembered clichés from years ago reading, and agreeing with the last person they spoke to....
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Did that last one come from associating you with Edinburgh and Festival (from the Eschaton books) and assuming that you were a punter in August rather than someone who hides from it indoors?...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  Half remembered is spot on. Musk named his new chatbot Grok and said that it was based on Hitchhikers Guide. If he remembered HHGG he'd have called it ChatGPP...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  The Festival in Singularity Sky was based on the Edinburgh Fringe?...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  My grandparents would cycle from North West London to the Isle of Wight for the weekend leaving after work on Saturday and returning in time for work again on Monday....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  We have energy storage technology capable of grid scale load averaging and backup - pumped hydropower. The UK uses it on a daily basis, but scaling up to a weekly basis would be the perfect complement to variable wind and...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  I've been rewatching Westworld (the TV series) the last couple of weeks as there's a new season out, and they do quite a lot with the topic of who is human, uploadability and the different worldview when you are revivable....
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Maybe you can cowrite it with the new Google LaMDA fiction generator....
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  The Queen can and regularly does appoint members of her family to various peerages, though I don't think they come with a legislative role (could Harry stand in the next hereditary peers by election?)....
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  This map of current generation for various European countries by type and carbon fraction is very illuminating https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB The better answer to intermittency of solar and wind is huge amounts of pumper hydro eg https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/worlds-biggest-ever-pumped-storage-hydro-scheme-for-scotland/...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  the US life insurance industry had noticed that mortality in 2020 was up 40% over 2019. How much of this is more that the life insurance paying classes are dying sooner, rather than the great excluded in the US? On...
• Commented on Outage report
  I have munged an oldschool MT install into a Hugo one for a friend, but Hugo may not suit your post composition style. Hosting and moderating comments is always a fairly complex job too. If you want to talk to...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  While re-reading the previous books in the series, I noticed that there was a Supreme Court Justice Bork, which was a chilling detail....
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  The internet troll libertarians would be out the airlock as soon as they tried their PUA crap on women in Luna City....
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  There's a bit in Starship Troopers where they go on shore leave in Seattle, and the cops are wearing veteran ribbons, and when they get into a fight with some locals described as: There were some young fellows there, too,...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  The history of Starship Troopers is laid out in Expanded Universe (which admittedly he wrote 20 years laters so may be embellished a with hindsight, but Astounding agrees). He was worried by the Test Ban proposal and wrote a reds...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  Alec Nevala-Lee in Astounding (the group biography of Heinlein, Campbell, Asimov and Hubbard) suggests that the 'typical white SF reader' Heinlein was addressing Farnham's Freehold was Campbell, who was an out an out racist and pro-slavery. He also says that...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  Indeed, the plutocrats buying up the state is far more common and there are warnings from history there, like Sparta for example. A more interesting Heinlein book on government is Tunnel in the Sky, which warns you to look out...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  I reread it a couple of years ago and this time the ending came across as almost like 1984, with Rico finally loving the army and even his father joining his unit. That said, in 1984's Expanded Universe Heinlein says...
• Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
  The Merchant Princes series seems more TV-friendly than most of your work, as it starts out as a journalist investigating crimes and introduces magical travel soon after, and has a lot of interpersonal interaction, and a good excuse for some...
• Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
  I bought an edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens from Folio, and then realised that my young sons might not appreciate it (they had just been in a musical production of Peter Pan). I assume that is in the...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  With cruise ships doomed and airlines also in deep trouble, is it time for Zeppelins to make their comeback? A hybrid fuel cell/ hydrogen envelope combined with solar panels to top it up, and its a climate fighting alternative again....
• Commented on Someone please cancel 2019 already?
  In the absence of the Mandate, how do we get a government that will revoke article 50? What narrative do we need to make, say, David Lammy the national unity Prime Minister to revoke article 50 and what other policy...
• Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
  Rereading Starship Troopers last year, the part where Rico decides that his home is now the army really reminded me of the end of 1984...
• Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
  Also, Manny - the protagonist of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - has multiple prosthetic arms, some customised for different engineering uses....
• Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
  He wanted to make the protagonist in one of his juveniles a person of color, for example, but his publisher said no. Under the circumstances, you get a little Aesopian, and work around censorship by telling stories that seem to...
• Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
  Has anyone done a tribute/pastiche of the very early socialist, Universal Basic Income advocating Heinlein of Beyond This Horizon and For Us The Living?...