Charles Stross's Blog, page 128

More news from the Tom Clancy Dimension

Regular readers may recall my question on August 13th about the whys and wherefores of the disappearance of the Arctic Sea, which subsequently reappeared off the coast of Africa in the middle of a full-dress Russian Navy panic, with rumours of piracy in the Baltic and stolen secret cargoes ...

Today an Asia Times in-depth report asserts:

[ex-Russian military officer:] Filin said the crates (loaded on board in Kaliningrad) could have contained four X-55 strategic cruise missiles (without front sect

System Updates

Some of you may have had problems posting comments yesterday. That's because we're in the process of upgrading the blog to handle threaded commenting, and there was a template screw-up. We've reverted to the system default template for now; this means you must preview your comment at least once before you hit the post button. Otherwise you may get an error message.

We now return you to your regular featured programming, sort-of. (I'm off on Friday to Copenhagen for an SF convention, and will prob

Merciless

This blog is not only my personal soapbox, it's my public face. Folks who read what I post here may or may not thereafter buy my books. Consequently, these days I try to avoid writing about stuff that is likely to be controversial. Call it the chilling effect of capitalism; I can say what I want if and only if I'm willing to do without that portion of my book royalties that comes from the folks I piss off.

There are some folks I can do without, mind you. (If you're a BNP member or voter you can f

Doing it wrong

Three tenuously-related pieces of news have caught my eye recently.

Firstly: NDNAD, the UK's National DNA Database, run by the Forensic Science Service under contract to the Home Office contains DNA "fingerprints" for lots of folk — 5.2% of the population as of 2005, or 3.1 million people. Some of them are criminals; some of them are clearly innocent, but were either charged with a crime and subsequently found not guilty, or had the misfortune to be detained but not subsequently charged (that is:

An oldie but a goodie

This happens every year: Beloit College issues this heads-up to their staff, to try and remind them of the mind set of the incoming college year. Here's what the fresh graduates of 2013 know about the world ...

(Feeling old, now.)

Convention diary

I'm really going to have to add a public events sidebar to this blog, just as soon as I have time to poke around in search of Movable Type widgets designed for the job ...

Meanwhile, I'm very happy to announce two engagements for 2010:

Firstly, I'm due to be the English-language guest of honour at HAL-Con in Tokyo, Japan, from April 10th to 11th, 2010. HAL-Con is a bilingual English/Japanese SF convention (run by the team of SF fans who are hoping to host the next Japanese world science fiction c

Forever Summer

I'm back home, recovering from jet lag. And it's summer.

Summer in Edinburgh means: I have my office window open, overlooking the rumbling traffic and the street chatter and the occasional raucous discussion outside the pub on the other side of the street twelve metres below me. It's pleasantly warm, with a daytime temperature in the range 17-20 degrees, dipping to 12-14 degrees at night. (Anything over 24 degrees is a heat wave.) Humidity is 60-70%.

Last week, in Montreal, summer meant keeping th

On hold

I'm still in Montreal, doing touristy things; flying home overnight tomorrow night, probably won't be fully recovered until Monday.

Meanwhile, can any of you tell me what this is all about? (Other than real life emulating a Ken Follett novel.)

A fireside chat

You can listen to my Thursday evening chat with Paul Krugman here. (Warning: 13Mb of juicy mp3 download goodness; this is not a podcast, it's a raw file to stuff up the guts of your media player of hoice.)

Worldcon observations ...

Not much to report so far, nor much time in which to report it, but: man, keeping up a conversation with Paul Krugman is hard work.

(Yes, I have an mp3 of our talk. It's also been video'd. Unfortunately the mp3 runs to 54Mb, so I'm not going to host it directly on my own server. Anyone know of any reasonably sane streaming audio hosting sites I should be looking at?)