He imagined that satellite broadcasting might help a hundred Indian villages save two cows a year and understood what an impact that might have. Says a commenter at PZ Myers’ place, on the occasion of Arthur C. Clarke’s death. Two cows a year; now that’s genius. I can’t presume to say whether this came true;…
Read More Two cowsThere’s something about this, that I’m not sure if I find intensely cool or deeply disturbing; that is, of course, a neat definition of anything worth writing about. (It’s certainly the sci-fi project; thrilling wonder and uncanny menace.) So, a ski resort is short of snow due to the gradually warming winters; they make snow,…
Read More Making electricity to make snow and not make more CO2A prerequisite for good alternate-history is good history; as Ken MacLeod says, the trade secret of sci-fi is history. So I wasn’t too impressed by this, of James Nicoll’s, who really ought to know better. Would it be funny to do an AH where WWI never happened and the old order never fell, one in…
Read More Bad British History, AgainSays Terry Eagleton, in a Guardian Content..sorry..Comment is Free screed: For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne…
Read More Eagleton: Intellectual SnobCognitive neuroscientists staged an experiment in which subjects were asked to make decisions on whether or not to invest money. It was the classic set-up that demonstrates risk-aversion bias: on each round, the subject could choose between keeping $1 and taking a 50 per cent chance of getting $2.50. Theoretically, you should always take the…
Read More I am the message centre and I am in controlThis Grauniad essay on Robert Byron raises an interesting question. Y’know the chap – wrote The Road to Oxiana, very typical Eton’n’Oxford gay aesthete, pretty much a standard template for 1890s-1950s British travel writing, obsessed by foreign architecture but didn’t care for the people over much. Consider this: Byron wrote that the catalyst for his…
Read More Alternate OxianaThis comment of Dave Bell’s at Charlie Stross’s left me thinking of something. Bell refers to a pocket handbook of crop yields and other agricultural data. I’ve always liked this kind of thing – having the data on hand for anything, however weird. Somewhere around I have a copy of Every Boy’s Handbook as given…
Read More Every boy’s handbookCharlie Stross’s space-colony überthread brings a couple of things to mind. First up, the best thought-through space elevator project is costed at $40bn, not far off £21-22bn. The Al-Yamamah contract was £43 billion – two space elevators. The degree of corruption involved is, literally, mindblowing. Perhaps the BAE managers and Tory bagmen I regularly insult…
Read More Your circuit’s dead – there’s something wrong!Charlie Stross is apparently thinking of using the huge GEC Marconi/BAE cost overruns as a plot device for one of his books – the idea being that some sort of really cool (and evil) skunkworks project was being funded off the books through the vast sums of money wasted on NimWACS, Astute, Eurofighter, Nimrod MRA4,…
Read More UniqueThis is very bad news from Baghdad, via perfect.co.uk, but note some details. For a start, a neat primer on modern urban warfare: On Saturday, the Web site displayed a recipe for civil war. It recommended protecting Sunni neighborhoods by “spreading snipers on the roof of buildings,” planting roadside bombs at neighborhood entrances and distributing…
Read More 1239. 7018. 4766. Now start a war