KineticLensman

(Brit here)

My first and middle names are John and Richard. A couple of times on trips to the US people have read my initials as 'Jr'. Very surprising the first time! Has never happened to me in the UK.

Yes. I can’t drive for medical reasons and I live in a rural area with poor public transport. If my wife had to stop driving we would have to use grocery delivery or move

> Then they move to the "back seat" and consult or assist from far away

Probably not. The article mentions two active bomb disposal soldiers whose rank is Major or higher, and a colonel who oversees operations. This seems like a standard military career progression, not specific to the EOD regiment. In the armoured infantry, for example, a company commander (i.e. a Major) might still fight as a dismount, delegating a sergeant to stay in their vehicle to command it.

Also note that in the British Army, soldiers of all trades often move jobs every couple of years, sometime returning to a particular organisation but now with a higher rank.

> think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away

Indeed. But achieving escape velocity for their host star is something else.

I'm 30% of the way through and really enjoying it.

It's definitely Miéville, but the weird doesn't cut in immediately.

The first 100 or so pages is about a young single British woman (Maur) in the 1970s/1980s. She brings up a son who becomes increasingly remote, joins the army, and then something happens to him, which is when the weird elements begin to appear (involving the disturbingly unpleasant lingering spirits of the dead). The second plot strand concerns a Brit soldier (Allardyce) whose unit participates in various weird events (also somewhat disturbing) set against British-empire post-colonial / cold war shenanigans in the 50s and 60s, although the two plot strands eventually connect.

One reviewer I saw described the first bit (which is 'mundane', in the non-fantasy sense) as a masterclass in how to present a character's interiority, and I'm inclined to agree. As with any Miéville, it helps to have access to a good dictionary. I'm a Brit who grew up at approximately the same time as Maur, which helped me understand some of the allusions (e.g. to 'the election', which is Thatcher's). But I had to read into the darker sides of British colonial disengagement to fully understand Allardyce's experiences. E.g. the so-called Malayan Emergency, a particularly brutal little war of independence in the 1950s.

In a way, it reminded me of Kraken, where Miéville throws in lots of references to real-world weirdness to better sneak his own inventions into the story world.

Seven bullet points squeezed into five pages of text

Yes. My in-laws in East Anglia lived near Ramsey Heights, which (just checked my OS map) is almost entirely below the 10m contour. The nearby Ramsey Forty Foot mostly exceeds the 10m contour. They are great places for lazy cyclists but the downside side is the relatively high winds that are uninterrupted by terrain, and which always seem to orient themselves to be a local headwind.

Lots of armchair experts incorrecting each other

Can confirm. Per the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]: 'barm' is The froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors, which is used to leaven bread, and to cause fermentation in other liquors; yeast, leaven. OR The froth or foam on the surface of beer OR English regional (chiefly Lancashire). A soft round bread roll, a barm cake.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/barm_n2?tab=meaning_and_use#2...

I enjoyed The Diamond Age but the 'AI' is nothing like today's. The stories in Nell's primer are actually mediated by a human actor (not an AI), who becomes a mother figure for her.

I’ve been at a locals’ restaurant in Italy where the chef had sourced some truffles from a nearby wood. They were better than anything he could have got from a store

"The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at."

Software can be checked for being 'written well' by compilers / linters etc. There is no equivalent for well-written natural prose. Spelling and grammar checkers haven't a clue about prose semantics.

"How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" - awesome title for an Astronomy book

I looked 'squeeze' up in the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]. The are numerous variant forms including 'squoze' and 'squozen':

"Also 1600s squeez, squeaze, squease, squese, 1600s–1700s squeese. Also with dialect preterite and past participle 1800s– squoze, past participle 1800s squozen."

The OED cites quotations from the 1930s, 1870s, and 1860s that include 'squoze' and 'squozen', for example ‘Orange?’ repeated Waitress No. 1. ‘Do you want it squoze?’ in the Baltimore Sun, 1 Sep 1931.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/squeeze_v?tab=forms#21076314

> It has gone from being a major producer of oil and gas

Given that North sea oil is a finite resource that has already peaked, it cannot form the basis of a long term energy strategy.

Fair enough.

In my defence, I was coming at it etymologically, where (according to the OED), a perambulator is 'A person who walks or travels through or about a place' (hence 'walker') OR 'A carriage for a baby or young child, which may be pushed along by a person on foot. Now usually shortened to pram [...] a cradle mounted on four wheels'.

So 'mobile bed' is a perfect description

I think the cherry-picked examples at the beginning completely ignore the massive number of examples throughout history where groups of people pushed back against mainstream society. A lot of them were hurt or died in the process but societies throughout history have been changed by people who refused to fit in.

Yes, as slang for ‘perambulator’, which is basically ‘stroller’

My 'quick scan' involved reading the essay "On thinking for yourself" which was quoted from above. I specifically disagree with his general point here, essentially that you should avoid reading until your own ideas are fully developed. I do not believe this is universally true, especially in the context of this discussion, which is about becoming a better writer.

To get a feel for his other work, I read his essay "On Women", which is derogatory and sexist. Female philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft had already responded to similar patriarchal sexism (50 years before in her case) and as a philosopher one might have expected Schopenhauer to be familiar with similar intelligent women, and to have acknowledged their existence. His denigration of the capabilities of half the human race does not give me confidence in his other speculations.

[Edit] I also observe that Tolstoy stated "at present I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among men. ... It is the whole world in an incomparably beautiful and clear reflection" [0]. As someone who has slogged through the 27 chapters of philosophy in War and Peace, which are a case study of how to fail to understand how human society actually works, I am reluctant to uncritically accept claims from famous people that someone else is a genius.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Influence_...

I can see his point that it is worth learning to think for yourself, but if you then try to publish your thoughts without understanding what else is out there (e.g. by reading about it), the results could be very embarrassing. This would seem to apply in both philosophy (which I'm assuming Schopenhauer was discussing) and (say) genre fiction.

Incidentally, having quickly scanned some of Schopenhauer's actual writing [0], I found statements such as "women are suited to being nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted" and women "are inferior to men in respect of justice, honesty and conscientiousness". If I'd come across these first I'd be very reluctant, rightly or wrongly, to uncritically accept his views on other subjects.

[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/509571816/Schopenhauer-Arthu...

Sydney Padua's awesome, mostly true, steampunk graphic novel "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" jokes about the error messages that might have produced by the difference engine. One example occurs when a character tries to stop a sequence that may or may not destroy a precious manuscript:

Annulation lever activated!

Do you wish to continue?

Engage STOP lever to continue. Engage CONTINUE lever to stop.

Time remaining 5..4..3...

You'd also have things like bus doors now being on the wrong side (traffic-side), road curvature being wrong (e.g. motorway junctions and entry/exit ramps), let alone car mirrors and driver positioning.

Thiss is a very good example. Consider the difference between "he's hard working" and "he's hard work". My wife ran into this when some German co-workers were describing a colleague.

It's on the same site but there is some institutional nonsense that means getting onto the Bletchley site doesn't guarantee access to the NMoC, which is only open on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

Don't ask me how I know...

Used in WW2 to refer to radar engineers, bouncing bomb designers etc

Yes. Especially for owls like the Great Grey, it shows how small the bird is inside all of those feathers.

What isn't mentioned is that owl feathers are generally less oily than many other birds. This makes them softer and thus quieter, but the penalty is that that they get water-logged faster. As a result, owls find it harder to hunt in wet weather, and extended rainy periods can cause real problems, especially in the breeding season, when youngsters need continual feeding.

(source: I used to volunteer at a Raptor conservancy).

No, that was "Foot heads arms body", when Michael Foot became the chair of CND.

Birds have all sorts of optimizations that improve efficiency, some of which make them very different from mammals. Their lungs are different from ours in two respects. Firstly, they are relatively rigid and the pumping is done primarily by separate air sacs. Secondly, they have an outlet pipe so can take in new air while also expelling the old. The result is continuous oxygen exchange rather than a breathing-in/breathing-out cycle like mammals.

You can see the effect in how prey is eaten after a hunt. A mammalian sprint-predator like a cheetah has to catch its breath before eating what it has just caught. Its avian equivalent, like a Peregrine falcon, can immediately start eating.

> If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less!

(source - worked at a raptor conservancy). It depends on which bird. Some are really smart and can learn tricks (e.g. retrieving specific objects) for food rewards. They can work out simple puzzles, such as finding food hidden under sliding blocks. Crested Caracaras are examples in my experience.

Others are much less intelligent, in particular owls, who aren't particularly wise. They have great instinctive behaviours but can't solve puzzles. This is partly because, for their vision, a lot of their skull is filled with eye rather than brain - owl eyes are tubular rather than eyeballs and can't move in their sockets, hence the 270 degree neck turning.