montedavis49

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• Commented on Spoiler Thread
  "if not, then book 7 will ram the point home with a sledgehammer." Oh, good -- because I've no patience for Stross series that fade out gently with, e.g. carpet-nuking the US eastern seaboard....
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  (And while in Canada, those Tories intermarried with Scots and Irish immigrants to Prince Edward Island -- so it's Bad Attitude all the way round that helix of the genome.)...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  I was just being snide. Of course there were multiple causes -- and yes, Lord North's ministry distinguished itself for for inept crisis management. My grandmother came from a New Brunswick line of Tory loyalists who'd left Massachusetts in 1783,...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  Greg@62: How dare you slander the Founding Fathers?! It wasn't slavery/emancipation that motivated them; it was not paying the tab for redcoat services in the French & Indian War....
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  @52: "So, if Android is equivalent to the church of the Latter-Day Saints, what does that make Cyanogen?" Jack Mormons....
• Commented on A man walks into a bar
  Remarkable. If it had been me, the motivation would have included a large component of chuckling, nihilist, punkish glee at the thought of injecting equoids into the long, moribund tradition of Thibaut / William Morris / My Little Rainbow SparkleToon...
• Commented on 2512
  Charlie@576, Jay@585, David@599: My high school and college were late 60s, but I've continued to read a lot of history all along, surely with some 60s-contrarian edge. So I know the ugly stuff, and (judging by my sons' curricula in...
• Commented on 2512
  Charlie (and @366, @367): I couldn't agree more on the continuum of applications for progressively stronger/longer CNT materials -- and should they come along in bulk at reasonable cost, they'd enable a revolution in terrestrial engineering that would dwarf the...
• Commented on 2512
  Warning: almost-OT, connecting only to @271 "beanstalk" and OGH's passing reference to space elevators. In 2001, Brad Edwards' "The Space Elevator" (http://www.amazon.com/Space-Elevator-Earth-Space-Transportation/dp/0974651710) renewed interest in an old idea -- in my case, so much that for a while I forgot/ignored...
• Commented on 2512
  I didn't mean that we can't or won't come up with nifty nitrogen fixation techniques. I was reflecting on my own earlier naivete in thinking that we could just pluck that enzyme out of its evolved settings and use it...
• Commented on 2512
  Spaghetti code -- I've been hammering at this point since the 1970s, and wish you more luck than I've had. Metaphors of genetic "code" and "blueprint" are extraordinarily powerful in encouraging a tinkering/engineering mindset... with about as much success as...