Posts by Petrea Mitchell

Economic sense isn't enough

"But as a rough guide, a UK yearly household gas and 'leccy bill is some £1,400. So, if anyone comes along with a piece of kit that works for 10 years and costs, say, £5,000, then people will buy and install it."

Having learned a fair amount of situational psychology, I feel confident asserting that far fewer people than you expect will rush out and buy it. The slow adoption of more-efficient light bulbs may be instructive here.

Thumbs-up anyway because I'm always happy to hear about new advances in cheap energy.

Zero-g brewing?

It is obligatory at this point to mention Duane Elms's song "The Terrific Centrifugal Still".

So what...

I want The App That Says "Ni".

NA-Asia link

Proposing a rail link across the Bering Strait gives me two knee-jerk reactions:

1) The person who thinks this would ever actually get built is insane.

2) THAT WOULD BE SO COOL

Speaking of the law...

I've seen a lot of assertions about what should or shouldn't be allowed, but this, the one commentary I've seen referencing actual California employment law, hasn't gotten nearly enough attention:

http://www.vtzlawblog.com/2014/04/articles/discrimination/termination-of-mozilla-ceo-likely-violated-california-law/

Goon Show moment

This makes me think of the Goon Show, with the characters' habit of paying each other in pictures of money.

Naming patent trolls

Great article, but I have a nit to pick with: "When I was first involved in this sort of thing, it didn’t have a name."

I recently read a book from 1934* which makes reference to "the special vehicle for exploiting patent monopolies", which seems to be about the same thing as a patent troll. Only briefly, though, apparently expecting the contemporary reader to be fully aware of the issues involved.

The same book also bewails what's now called a patent thicket (they don't seem to have had a specific term for it at the time), mentioning for instance a mechanical loom which had to license 80 different patents.

*Technics and Civilization, by Lewis Mumford

That's nothing...

...here's a report that HMRC is blocked:

http://sf-encyclopedia.co.uk/?p=blocked

Montreal, eh?

I'd've thought he'd fit right in in Toronto.

Robots of renown

"No robot in TV history has enjoyed such renown as K-9"

I dunno, if you can remember K-9's heyday then you can also remember KITT, and there were way more people watching Knight Rider back in the day.

K-9 is probably more recognizable to today's young 'uns, though...

The Claws of Axos

Simply because it contains my favorite Delgado bit ever: Having finally schemed his way into capturing the Doctor's TARDIS for his own use, the Master looks over the decrepit equipment and the state of the Doctor's haphazard attempts to get it working again, and finally mutters, "Might as well try flying a secondhand gas stove!"

Fandom was not so nascent

I can't tell if the "nascent" fandom is supposed to mean DW fandom specifically or Australian science fiction fandom in general. If the latter, Australia had hosted its first World Science Fiction Convention, which requires a well-established and organized local fan community, in 1975.

Not the way you were expecting

"Technology is supposed to be destroying the traditional media, but tech gurus can't seem to keep their mitts off the sector."

I for one am willing to believe that this is much more likely to be the death of traditional media than any other mechanism yet proposed.

Closing scene of "The Hand of Fear"

IIRC, Sarah Jane's remarks in that scene made it pretty clear at the time that it wasn't Croydon. (Though the information about exactly where it was did come much later.)

Don't forget the book

The reporter on the scene later wrote his autobiography and gave the whale top billing:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781558687431

And if you think the state of Oregon learned its lesson about trying to get rid of large beach debris by blowing it up, look up the tale of the New Carissa.

But what about...

Totally with you on "Inferno"; that's the first thing I thought of when reading the introduction. It's also got one of the best commentaries of any of the classic Who DVD releases.

But some days I'd say "Warriors' Gate" is the best Doctor Who story ever. (Other days, I think it isn't possible to pick one.) The depiction of the slavers, some of whom might even be decent guys in other contexts but who have completely lost all sight of the fact that their cargo consists of sentient beings... the chief villain done in entirely by his own actions... the glimpse of the Tharil empire and the turnabout it's suffered. And sure, you can tell the effects were done on a '70s TV budget but IMHO they still hold up surprisingly well.

I think I'd put that in place of "The Pyramids of Mars" or "Robots of Death" and replace the other with "Mawdryn Undead". Partly that's because I'm a sucker for any story where they bring back an old favorite like the Brigadier, but partly also the sleight-of-hand involved in setting up the mystery of how two groups of people can be in the same place but can't find each other.

Biting the hand that feeds IT

Indeed! The strongest of all human emotions is the urge to *not make a fuss*. It's a useful one-- human civilization couldn't exist without it-- but it can be used against you. One of the basics of resisting any form of social control is being able to be the jerk sometimes.

What about the TARDIS itself?

I mean, in "The Edge of Destruction", a stuck switch has it hurtling back to the Big Bang to be obliterated, and the only way it's able to communicate this error condition is to show cryptic images on the video screen and induce psychosis in the passengers. What Gallifreyan BOFH came up with that interface??

From great pain comes great art

Without the Morris Worm, we'd never have had _A Fire Upon the Deep_, easily one of the best books ever to win the Hugo Award.

Party venue?

Four floors full of drunk people, surrounded in all directions by water... gosh, I can't think of any liability concerns there, especially at US levels of litigiousness.

That many?

"Pretty much one in one, we'd say, given a police force using simple four-figure numbers and with 1337 or more constables in it."

Given that it's a common practice to skip everything with leading 0s, I'd think the minimum force size in many cases is 338.

Never trust a single-subject study...

...especially with fMRI. Sadly, the brilliant Science News article on fMRI a few years ago has vanished behind a paywall.

The next step...

"That power can, according to the Google Blog, answer questions such as ... 'what are my plans for tomorrow?'"

The next step, I presume, is a function that decides for you what your plans for tomorrow should be.

Causal test?

But what were their chocolate habits before winning? Did they eat more than was typical for their cohort then? Or is chocoholism a side effect of winning a major scientific prize?