Charlie Stross

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• Commented on Ask me anything!
  It was like that in my elder sister's time. Mid-1970s, basically. (She wanted to go to university. At a careers evening, one of her teachers told my parents, "oh, many of our girls have good careers at [supermarket check-out] until...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  I'm guessing, gendered conversational modes? Women are trained to pay attention to their fellow conversationalists, cue them for responses, and to keep the conversational torch circulating. Men are not trained to do so, and mostly just bull ahead, talking over...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  Yours is, I think, a regrettably common experience. (I wish it wasn't.)...
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  YELLOW CARD for egregious sexism. If you intend to be snarky, flag your comments as such. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog /s...
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  As far as you know, has anyone looked at the NHS database information for vampiric activity? No, but an NHS medical statistician of my acquaintance said I nailed that sequence in "The Rhesus Chart" well enough that she didn't lose...
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  Was that an intentional shout-out to the SCP universe I read in the Labyrinth Index? Well spotted! As for the Pentagon basement, I've never been there … but I've worked in a fair number of British government buildings of similar...
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  The term you are looking for is intersectionality (originally, intersectional feminism, but it spread out a bit). Briefly: it's possible for the same person to be privileged in some contexts and subject to discrimination in others. For example, consider a...
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  Turns out that after huge investments of R&D and money, SewBot now exists and will soon be churning out tee shirts in a factory near you, if you live in a depressed American mid-western town. But tee shirts are easy....
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  So gypsies are honorary non-whites "Whiteness" isn't about skin colour. Ask me! (Jewish, by ethnicity if not belief.) Ask, oh, SF author Tobias Buckell, whose skin colour is white enough to "pass" but who's Caribbean and rather paler than the...
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  I have noticed that since #MeToo the lack of pockets on (gendered) women's apparel (i.e. not stuff like jeans that are more-or-less similar, aside from tailoring/sizing, for men and women) has been a big topic. And a lot of skirts/dresses...
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  You missed the Finnish Waffen SS units? (AIUI they weren't run by the Finnish government, but consistend of volunteers who went to fight for the Third Reich. But the Finnish military had form when it came to war crimes against...
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  In the Laundryverse is Scorpion Stare a non local weapon? I ran some numbers through a BOTE calculation a while back. Shorter version: there's not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make atmospheric attenuation of the effect significant (otherwise you'd...
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  Is there anything that would make it more likely to get more female commentators to the blog? Or commentators under the age of 50? Yes: shut down the blog and open an entirely new one, then spend a decade or...
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  how do you think that velodrome riders got themselves and what was often their only bicycle to the track in the 1950s? Seventy years ago there were roughly a tenth as many motor vehicles on the UK roads, acceleration and...
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  For example, why the hell should British posters on a British blog be forced to pander to USA conventions? If you want to communicate with somebody, it behooves you to avoid ambiguity and trivial misunderstandings. Americans are handicapped by their...
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  (Back home at last …) Armbands are not specifically required: it just needs to be some sort of visual identifier so that the authoritarians can see and be seen. Armbands with swastikas are one option. So are red baseball caps...
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  CONTEXTUAL NOTE FOR NON-BRITS Of the two candidates for next leader of the conservative party—hence Prime Minister of the UK—one of them, Jeremy Hunt MP, is mispronounced as “Jeremy Cunt” with unfortunate regularity. This isn’t just a thing on the...
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  MODERATION NOTE I have been AFK due to (a) travelling overseas without a laptop and (b) a dose of con crud. I gather there’s been a slight excess of scatological abuse here lately. I’d like to remind everyone to keep...
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  That would be a spoiler for the book I am slaving over the fourth rewrite of this month. (But: the .de authorities are not amused, and the Colonel finds that things do not go entirely his way thereafter.)...
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  Ahem: factory reset on a late model iPhone takes about 30 seconds, after you tap through the various warning dialogues (“do you REALLY mean to destroy your online existence? Y/N”). Internal storage is encrypted and the key is held in...
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  There is the disturbing rumour about a former Foreign Secretary who showed a disturbing fascination with giraffe sex, and requested a private trip to a safari park ......
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  I have to work out how to travel with tech. I probably have a US trip (business) coming up (first in nearly 3 years, thanks to Trump) and a Chinese trip as well (public speaking). My solution to this question...
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  Apropos the hitching-a-ride-on-a-Starfighter story, there’s a similar anecdote I heard that (a) happened to a friend, not a friend-of-a-friend, and (b) is plausible … Friend was in New York and flying home to London on British Airways, business class. (Computer...
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  The F-104's ferry range is quoted as 1630 miles, but it couldn't do anything like that supersonic—in general, fuel consumption quadruples at Mach 2 relative to Mach 0.85-0.9, and the F-104's combat range was a mere 420 miles. It's possible...
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  "Weirder than fiction" is indeed the flavour of the current decade. But … Nazis have always been among us, doing funny-handshake stuff and nod-and-wink to identify like-minded evil, because they're aware they're unpopular. At least, they were unpopular until 2016,...
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  How would the Moomins fit into the Laundryverse (if at all)? Badly, except for the Groke. She'd be right at home....
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  It's been scrapped, or rather parted out: the haunted house itself shows up in "Dead Lies Dreaming", and the other stuff from that project is earmarked for "Prime Cuts" (assuming that title survives—it's the second in series after "Dead Lies...
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  As I noted, an SR-71 could carry a back-seat passenger and could and did go Los Angeles—New York at an average speed of upwards of 2100 mph during the 1970s, according to the record books (which implies it didn't slow...
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  I've been thinking for a while what would happen if processing power of humanity's toys will increase in next 30 years, not by a factor of 1000 times, or million time, but much more - billions, and then trillion times...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  (1) No, because it's encouraging highly immoral behaviour. (2) I'd probably stop writing altogether if I seriously believed there was a risk of something like this happening....