Guy Rixon

Recent Actions

• Commented on I can't even
  Super-heavy ordnance dropped vertically is doing it the hard way. In the Korean war, an American FB squadron doomed a tunnel full of enemy by "skipping" light bombs into the portals at each end; a kind of lofting attack. They...
• Commented on I can't even
  Agreed that this is entirely wrong. But what is to be done? Drax is one of the few base-load generators that can be carbon-neutral right now, if fed with pellets from a proper source. It's not a facility we can...
• Commented on I can't even
  "Danged - his PhD thesis is under lock & key. Might be that there are a few folks here who might be able to access this via the channels mentioned below." Looking at the repository from the University VPN, I...
• Commented on London Bridge
  Clearly it's not enough, or sufficient, to tip the balance in making industrialization feasible. And there's also no sharp point where we can say "industrialization started here". If the revolution had a starting event, I suggest that it was Abraham...
• Commented on Someone please cancel 2019 already?
  Your argument that "CO2 matters in climate because Venus" has a hole: Venus has a lot more atmosphere than Earth and the ground level pressure is 92 Earth atmospheres. Even if Venus had the same atmospheric concentration as Earth, the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Delirium Brief
  As of this blog entry it seems to be canon that the Bob-the-narrator is EoS-- rather than Bob++. At some point his dream will end and there will be an awesome reveal of the underlying Preta. I've been assuming that...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Delirium Brief
  It feels to me that the old Laundry worked like a university department. The tenured faculty have nominal power and actual, fiat authority via infrequent committee meetings, but the day-to-day control is exerted by the departmental secretary and his/her staff....
• Commented on The Labyrinth Index: sneak preview!
  We seem to be missing a monster. The cultists, back in The Fuller Memorandum, described the elder entities as a hierarchy: bind the Eater of Souls to get to the Sleeper; awaken the Sleeper to get to the Gatekeeper; subvert...
• Commented on Sitrep
  I'm not implying that. I make no comment about the quality of the coding or application design. I was talking about the system-administration part of (what is now called) devops. Back in the day, the arrangements for managing a cluster...
• Commented on Sitrep
  Pinky and Brains feel to me very much like the devops types loose in academica back in the 1990s - before it was called devops and before academic HPC scaled up and out and started to demand real discipline. I...
• Commented on Sitrep
  "To frame it differently: was "The Atrocity Archive" (no 's') at 76,000 words twice as satisfying as "The Concrete Jungle" (30,000 words)? (Note that it was the latter component of the book that won a Hugo in 2005.)" Yes, actually....
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  It makes more sense if the rule was established later, when cavalrymen fought with sabres and without shields....
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  Agreed, motors are incredibly reliable by the standards of almost all other engineering, but that leads us into the far tail of the failure distribution where intuitive decisions often go wrong. Two war stories by way of example. In my...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  Reliability isn't the issue, but repairability is. If an electric motor fails, it has to be replaced or sent away to be rewound; very few farms have the skills and equipment to rewind an armature. But a set of push-rods...
• Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
  "...And, of course, you'd drop your colonists to decel, while you swung around the first destination star, and either go to another, or go home. ..." That makes a lot of economic sense for the civilisation dispatching the ship, but...
• Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
  OK, so perhaps the magnetosphere is there and helps somewhat. But we agree that the radiation is a major issue anyway. What, I wonder, is the margin between "stellar flares kill humans who don't take cover" and "stellar flares prevented...
• Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
  From the article: "the planet almost certainly has no moon(s)...you'd better be wearing a dosimeter when you're casting a shadow." Yes, that's your number-one problem. Most (all?) M stars flare, so the hard-radiation levels are worse than they would be...