How did he?

Cartoons have an equivalent to cyberspace known as hammerspace. It is the place where cartoon characters store and retrieve that stuff (often a hammer or other blunt instrument) they use to comic effect.

Strange days

Many women in the Balkans pretend to be men and live as such to avoid repressive laws. Okay.

Sick puppy

A frankly bizarre tale about how unrealistic expectations heaped upon Japan's youth is causing an outbreak of mental illness. My sympathy is with the sufferers but there was also part of me that wondered how that could be used in a story. I've been kicking around an idea for a cruel story that uses (in the right sense of that word) sufferers of OCD as cleaners. Could the folks who obsessively stay in their rooms be used for anything?

The view from the west

The Californian Ideology is the name of a paper about the philosophy (neo-liberalism) that powered the dotcom boom. I'm slightly ashamed to say that I had never heard of it before now but recognise the traits it describes very well. Technology will save us all. Then again...

Aye, eye

A curious post on Ptak about the eyes of John Dee - probably the most famous English magus who was court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I and zealous proponent of mathematics. The article looks at copies of copies of a painting and how that affected one of the details in the image. 

Pow! Right in the kisser

Again a good series of thoughts about how to depict fights - this time of the hand-to-hand variety not ship-to-ship. I can think of only a handful of authors that do this well. John Sandford is about the best I've read and his trick is to join everything with "and". It gives it a real sense of pace and I've copied it shamelessly. His other virtue is that he has the knack of keeping the details of who is doing what clear. In books that do a bad job of portraying violence I've had to go back and read who did what to whom just to be sure who came out on top.

There's a good point too about how visceral and physical combat is. I have precious little experience of that but often combat as depicted on the page seems more about thoughts and minds that it does a fists and bruises.

Pew pew lasers

More for reference than anything else but this is a great consideration of the problems of space warfare. It's useful as it strives to be realistic and consider techs, particularly for engines, that are plausible rather than fantastical.

Brain shapes

If you were to draw a picture of consciousness, what would it look like? A deep dark pool, a mirror, Futurama's hypnotoad? Benjamin Betts got there before anyone and drew geometrical images of consciousness in a book first published in 1887.

Who is that?

A great write-up of why names are important and why some names are more name-ish than others.

Eat me

Why soul cake Tuesday? This is why soul cake Tuesday. You've got to love any baked good that can wring condemnation from a 16th century English pamphleteer.

Fiction v reality

In Lucifer's Dragon, Jon Courtenay Grimwood imagined the consequences (social, technical and political) of re-creating Venice in the middle of the Pacific using old ships as its foundations and biotech to fill in the rest. With the passing of the Lord of Sealand I wondered what would happen to that idea. Satisfyingly, the idea has not died but been resurrected in a different form - now lots of rich folks are going to build it off the San Fran coastline. Even more satisfying, the main mover behind this particular island dream is Patri Friedman, the son of monetarism guru Milton Friedman. This stuff writes itself.

Zero sum game

A strange story of how mathematics was used in the service of anti-semitism in the Soviet Union and which almost put a stop to Edward Frenkel's career before it got started.

Stuck on three

There's one more reason why it might prove tricky to travel the spaceways at relativistic speeds. As spaceships approach the speed of light, or so this paper claims, interstellar hydrogen turns into intense radiation that fries the electronics in a spacecraft and kills everyone inside. The easy way to get round this is to go slower, but that kind of defeats the object of travelling at close-to-light speeds in the first place.

What he said

It's everywhere but I feel I need to log the location of the paper that explains what Gustaf Johansen saw when he encountered dread Ryleh.

Fix this

A crazy story of what junkies do when natural disasters strike. Essentially, ignore all the warnings, deal with withdrawal then go steal the drugs that will keep you stable until the dealers return.

Va bene

A strange story about the weird additions to Italian that emerged after one of Mussolini's edicts banned all use of Foreign words either spoken or written. That edict posed a particular problem for actors who dubbed movies who had to come up with equivalents for phrases and words that had no real analogue in Italian. Called Doppiaggese (translationese) it led to the coining of lots of new words and phrases. There's more here and here. One of my favourites is 'Grande Giove' for 'Great Scott'.

Samarkand or bust

A great resource here for those who need to know what the western half of the Silk Road was like in the early 15th century. It was written by Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo who travelled to Samarkand as an ambassador by King Henry III of Castile and Leon.

Pre-steampunk

This suggests that some of the first mechanical devices capable of performing calculation appeared in the 18th century. It was done for very specific ends, to help a man blind from a young age carry out mathematical research. The first engines that used steam to do work date from the late 17th and early 18th century so that steampunk might have happened a lot quicker if more people had known about these. 

Matchbox menace

Specifications have been written up that allow you to send data using carrier pigeons. Some people have tried sending data this way and it worked (kind of) though was very slow. It took almost two hours to send 64 bytes of data.

What it does show is that, if you get the rules right, they can be instantiated in almost any form you like. AI troublemaker John Searle proposed building a machine out of empty beer cans which would be noisy, spectacular and slow too.

A few years ago James Bridle built a machine to play noughts and crosses out of matchboxes. He can't claim credit for the original idea (that belongs to Donald Michie) but he did make one that works.  The name of this fabulous beast? Menace (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine).

No choice

This is all about HPL so I am obliged to post it here. It's HPL talking about himself in suitably recondite style.