Here's the blurb from a 1970 film, with some names changed, which follows up the earlier story of an evil super villain who tried to conquer the world but was defeated by a suitable hero overcoming all odds. As he does again in the sequel (oops, spoiler alert ( Read more... )

We're just back from an SF Con in Northampton, unwisely held in an open-plan space called the Fishmarket, which has the acoustic properties of a fishmarket, but otherwise mostly good. The highlight was the flash fiction competition (meaning stories shorter than some people's sentences, rather than ones necessarily about flashing), in which Pogodragon won ( Read more... )

I don't usually post about the fascinating hobby of financial engineering, but last week's astonishing antics have pushed me beyond my ranting elastic limit - Bad People Need Chastising.

( a tale told by an idiot, full of government intervention, signifying a worrying lack of background in mathematical game theory )

When you have a broken motorbike, someone comes around with a truck and takes it away. I sort of assumed it was the same with cars.

( enter the twilight zone )

I tend to think of the malleable nature of history and pre-history as just something that happens to other people's pasts, but now someone has written a book about my best friend in secondary school, putting me into a parallel universe which Looks Different.

( enter the Twilight Zone )

I've rashly watched the latest television show by Prof Dawkins, despite it being described as "a defence of the theory of evolution by natural selection", and am now considering him a heretic, which is one of the reasons why. (Rewind, reparse and reinterpet, it does make sense in a recursively self-referential way.)

( the case for burning the witch )

Unusually, television seems to have overtaken the web in reporting results from the Neanderthal Genome Project, which revolutionise my view of the world, again. See Sex and the Neanderthals if it's still around for download when you read this.

( What did you do in Genesis, Daddy? )

Considering the significance of relationships such as romance and friendship to most people, it's odd they don't make more use of all the conflict analysis paid for by the US government during the Cold War. Admittedly that analysis produced the worrying strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, but even that relationship pattern works well for some ( Read more... )

The previous post from Pixie World ended with the hope that we may not be doomed to the low efficiency fate of carnivorous pixies because we can control the expansion of our biomass (and hence food/energy gathering needs) with contraception. What happens if we give this solution to the pixies too?

( Look away now if you don't want to know the result )

A previous post on the software-emulated biology of Pixie World covered the way plants reduce their own efficiency to avoid being nutritious enough to fuel a herbivore boom and bust cycle that would exterminate them. This might seem a desperate defensive strategy of last resort, but adding carnivorous pixies shows they do the same thing even as top ( Read more... )