Zhu's feed of DOOOOM!

Danger Mouse

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 22:10:56 +0000

Three episodes in I'm really liking Danger Mouse, they have the tone dead right. Not 100% happy with the CGI they occasionally use, but that's just me being old-fashioned. The first two stories were OK but nothing special, but tonight's episode got up to the peaks of silliness that is classic DM, with giant Welsh singing plants and Penfold's jam-making obsession vital to the plot. Recommended!

I've made a page for the series on fanlore.org, if anyone knows of any good fanfic or fan art please let me know.

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Danger_Mouse

September Cycling

Steve Gilham — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 20:48:00 +0000

Despite a few wet days, and stubbing a toe badly (fortunately coinciding), it wasn't so bad a month for cycling -- 12453.6 and 2407.8, for 142.8 + 282.8 or 425.6 miles total for the month (way more than August), and 3185 year to date, so on target for 4200 in the year. A number of fine early mornings that were too good not to take the long way around to work helped, compensating for weekends where I didn't manage to get many miles in (and a summer in general without much in the way of long leisure rides).

The long way around to work also has the advantage that there are next to no other cyclists going the same way, except for on the busway from Oakington down, so I don't have to negotiate past people going along at barely more than walking pace on bikes with wheelbarrows for the kids attached, or who come to a stop blocking paths while waiting for pelican crossings; and there's no need for guessing whether the guy in front has tried to indicate or is just a limp-wristed wossname flouncing along.

Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths

M Harold Page — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 10:09:11 +0000

Me again! M Harold Page, but you can call me "Martin" (I use my very fine middle name to differentiate myself from the folk singer and the French YA writer).

I've just published Swords Versus Tanks 1: "Armoured heroes clash across the centuries". It even has a cover quote from Charlie ("Holy ####!"). So now I'm here to shamelessly plug my new book (click through and take a look at the cover... Go on! You know you want to!).

However, you're a sophisticated lot, so call the above "A word from our sponsor" and let me tell you why I think tank stories make great tech myths.

First some examples...

We all know the one about the Panther and the T34. The Panther is the better tank, when the Russian mud hasn't knocked it out, when it doesn't need shipping to Czechoslovakia for repair, when it's not being spammed by cheap and cheerful T34s.

That's a story that ought to be taught to engineers and software developers. Sometimes perfect means "delivered now". It's reputedly the Duke Nukem Forever story, but that's just the most anecdotal example of chasing perfection at the expense of practicality. I'm sure you guys have others.

Then there's the farce of under-gunned early WWII tanks on all sides unable to actually harm each other except by ramming - though, in North Africa, a driver did dismount mid battle and single-handedly capture a squadron of Italian tanks. They had no radios and communicated by runner, so all he had to do was rap on the hatch of each, then point his revolver at the commander... (We'll come to tanks and radios).

The example of the under-gunned tanks is a rich one.

It's a good example of how, when like competes with like, it's all down to strategy and resources. Note how MS Word gradually displaced its very similar rivals.

It also highlights the need to consider a good range of use cases - do you really expect your tanks not to face other similar tanks? I don't know about you, but I've worked on software that was fine only as long as you adopted the workflow envisaged by the developers. The old RoboHelp, for example, forced you to plan everything top down and didn't leave much room for second thoughts.

One reason that the tanks were undergunned is that they were shoehorned into old paradigms - the eternal curse of the AFVs, e.g. modern being armour optimized for set piece battles and evolving painfully in contact with asymmetric war.

In 1939, the issue seems to have been twofold:

First, the one we all know. Allied tank doctrine was based around the infantry attack, with the heaviest tanks designed to be deployed in penny packets to support infantry but not fight each other. "We" knew this was a bad idea as far back as the dawn of tank warfare. However, the institutional momentum was on the side of the older arms.

Second, and less well known, tanks were specialised -- Light, Medium (Cruiser), Heavy -- according to a WWI paradigm. This quickly turned out to make no sense on the modern battlefield where the artillery had such a long reach, and where in the chaos, tanks would blunder into situations for which they were not designed, e.g. fighting other tanks.

The lesson is not only that old paradigms have their own momentum due to vested interests, but also that it's hard to see outside the box. It reminds me of what that happened when computers appeared in organisations. The PCs went first to the secretaries, because, after all, computers were just glorified electric type writers. Job conscious secretaries resisted handing over the resulting files, while middle ranking staff resisted aquiring computers, because typing was what secretaries did. In other parts of the same organisation, databases sat on special computers, as did Internet access when it arrived, all because, historically, different activities required different physical spaces - the card index, the mail room... it just made intuitive sense.

Finally, we come to the radios.

Even in 1939, it was common to have only one radio per armoured unit, then communicate by semaphore or runner. This is the military equivalent of the funny little chappy with the red flag scurrying along in front of your automobile. Why so few radios? Perhaps it was hierarchical thinking - radios are for the unit commanders. Perhaps it was a failure of vision - the older heads could not conceive of a fluid warfare where tanks, even if initially massed, could end up operating independently.

The price for the French might well have been their nation. Supposedly, there was a moment when a French tank unit stumbled on a weak flank and the Nazi blitzkrieg could - perhaps - have been brought to an abrupt halt.

Not equipping all your tanks with radios is like letting your teenager go to a party but have to be home at 2230! You might as well save yourself the parental taxi trip (or is that the point? Hmm...).

The obvious Aesop here is "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost..." The less obvious one is that it's rarely enough to tick the boxes. Remember the Dotcom Boom when everybody was putting up flashy Flash-laden websites and nailing "e" to their business name? I'm sure you tech-savvy denizens of the comment thread have better examples...

So.

I think tanks stories make great tech myths because they are *not* IT stories. You can't dive into the detail to justify people's actions. Nor do they hit hot buttons about operating systems and open source. Better yet, the outcomes are usually both photographable or at least easy to visualise and memorable because, in hindsight, ignoring the tragedies, they are darkly funny.

Of course, there's plenty of dark humour in Swords Versus Tanks 1: "Armoured heroes clash across the centuries". 1930s-style quasi-communists have invaded their own past, not realizing that the magic works. It follows that a knight with a rune-etched sword can take on a tank. (There's more to it than that, of course. The moderns are not necessarily the bad guys.)

You can download my book from Amazon (UK, US, CA, AU). You can also get Swords Versus Tanks merchandise, including mugs and - I jest you not - shower curtains. (Somebody has already bought pillow slips. Really.)

Chaosium at The Kraken

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 04:43:17 +0000

This weekend Chaosium's Sandy Petersen, Jeff Richard, Michael O'Brien ("MOB") and Neil Robinson will be heading to The Kraken, "the baroque gathering of international gamers" taking place at Schloss Neuhausen, a Prussian Château. Other special guests include the Rune Czar himself Ken Rolston, Jason Durall and Chris Klug.

Jeff, MOB and Neil will be hosting the seminars "What's up Chaosium?" and a "A Gloranthan New Age", while Ken and Sandy will be discussing "The Big Ones That Got Away: Dream Games We Never Made" and "Chaosium Tales". It promises to be a fun weekend of gaming, fine food and drinks (and German beer!)

Today's Gumtree bargain...

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:03:22 +0000

...was quite a nice flashgun for the Nikon for £15. It's a Jessops 360AFD which is fully synched to the camera's electronics, and even changes its angle of coverage automatically if you're using a lens in the range it covers. But what I really want it for is to reduce red-eye and for indirect lighting (bouncing light off the ceiling etc. so that lighting is less harsh) which it also does reasonably well.

The sky's gone dark

Charlie Stross — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 18:27:25 +0000

Here's a technological question with philosophical side-effects that's been bugging me for the past few days ...

Today, the commercial exploitation of outer space appears to be a growth area. Barely a week goes by without a satellite launch somewhere on the planet. SpaceX has a gigantic order book and a contract to ferry astronauts to the ISS, probably starting in 2018; United Launch Alliance have a similar manned space taxi under development, and there are multiple competing projects under way to fill low earth orbit with constellations of hundreds of small data relay satellites to bring internet connectivity to the entire planet. For the first time since the 1960s it's beginning to look as if human activity beyond low earth orbit is a distinct possibility within the next decade.

But there's a fly in the ointment.

Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading, is a nightmare scenario for space activity. Proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, it proposes that at a certain critical density, orbiting debris shed by satellites and launch vehicles will begin to impact on and shatter other satellites, producing a cascade of more debris, so that the probability of any given satellite being hit rises, leading to a chain reaction that effectively renders access to low earth orbit unacceptably hazardous.

This isn't just fantasy. There are an estimated 300,000 pieces of debris already in orbit; a satellite is destroyed every year by an impact event. Even a fleck of shed paint a tenth of a millimeter across carries as much kinetic energy as a rifle bullet when it's traveling at orbital velocity, and the majority of this crud is clustered in low orbit, with a secondary belt of bits in geosychronous orbit as well. The ISS carries patch kits in case of a micro-particle impact and periodically has to expend fuel to dodge dead satellites drifting into its orbit; on occasion the US space shuttles suffered windscreen impacts that necessitated ground repairs.

If a Kessler cascade erupts in low earth orbit, launching new satellites or manned spacecraft will become very hazardous, equivalent to running across a field under beaten fire from a machine gun with an infinite ammunition supply. Sooner or later you'll be hit. And the debris stays in orbit for a very long time, typically years to decades (centuries or millennia for the particles in higher orbits). Solar flares might mitigate the worst of the effect by causing the earth's ionosphere to bulge—it was added drag resulting from a solar event that took down Skylab prematurely in the 1970s—but it could still deny access to low orbit for long enough to kill the viability of any commercial launch business. And then there's the nightmare scenario: a Kessler cascade in geosynchronous orbit. The crud up there will take centuries to disperse, mostly due to radiation degradation and the solar wind gradually blowing it into higher orbits.

So here's my question.

Postulate a runaway Kessler syndrome kicks off around 2030, at a point when there are thousands of small comsats (and a couple of big space stations), ranging from very low orbits to a couple of thousand kilometers up. Human access to space is completely restricted; any launch at all becomes a game of Russian roulette. (You can't carry enough armor plating to protect a manned capsule against a Kesseler cascade—larger bits of debris, and by "large" I mean with masses in the 0.1-10 gram range—carry as much kinetic energy as an armor-piercing anti-tank projectile.) Unmanned satellites are possible, but risk adding to the cascade. So basically we completely lose access to orbit.

There are some proposals to mitigate the risk of Kessler Syndrome by using microsats to recover and deorbit larger bits of debris, and lasers to evaporate smaller particles, but let's ignore these for now: whether or not they work, they don't work unless we start using them before Kessler syndrome kicks in.

So, suppose that with the exception of already-on-orbit GPS clusters and high altitude comsats, we can't launch anything else for a century. What effect does it have on society and geopolitics when the sky goes dark?

Some Q&A about what's happening with BRP...

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 21:36:22 +0000

What is Basic Roleplaying?

The first Basic Role-Playing (BRP) book was created to introduce brand new players to the world of Fantasy Roleplaying. Lynn Willis and Greg Stafford's iconic 16 page booklet was included in most early Chaosium boxed games to help a GM with first time players in their gaming group. Over time BRP became the term used to describe the basic core system behind all of Chaosium's RPGs. It might be more accurate to speak of a BRP "family of games" that includes Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Mythic Iceland, the Laundry, and others.

What happened to the big gold rulebook?

After Chaosium lost the rights to RuneQuest, a version of BRP (the BRP Gold Book) was developed to fill the vacuum. Now that RuneQuest has returned to Chaosium, the Gold Book is no longer necessary and will remain out of print. For those of you who still want a copy of it, Chaosium will continue selling the PDF of the BRP Gold Book on our website, and start selling it as a print on demand book on Lulu and DrivethruRPG.

So is BRP dead?

No! In fact, we are in the process of finishing up a new edition of the BRP core rules, called BRP Essentials. This is a 32 page booklet containing the core elements of the BRP system. Future publications will build upon those core rules and tailor them for their needs. We have several such books in development, including a hardboiled detective book (which is emphatically not Call of Cthulhu in terms of style or needed rules) and an updated version of Mythic Iceland (with a campaign pack in the works).

But what if I don't like RuneQuest or Call of Cthulhu?

Chaosium will be producing new products based on the new core BRP rules that are neither RuneQuest nor Call of Cthulhu. Of course, we will be producing a lot of Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest products, and we think they are worth checking out, but if they don't scratch your itch, maybe Mythic Iceland will!

In addition to Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and other BRP products, Chaosium also publishes HeroQuest, 13th Age in Glorantha, and a line of board games. We have a lot of new material in the pipeline, with more on that soon!

Things you might not expect to see in a London park...

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 19:38:48 +0000

A photo I took on Friday evening - this is at the extreme zoom of the Fuji, and it shows a little, there's some fringing around things. The first picture is reduced in size, the second is a crop from the middle.

It's one of the red-necked parakeets that have have become a naturalised British species, of course, the first time I've managed to get a photo. I saw three more or less simultaneously, this was the only one that landed where I could get a picture, the others vanished into the leaves. Since I could only see it as a blob in the viewfinder I wasn't able to get a better picture; this is the clearest, and none of the others show its head any better.

Brief hiatus

Charlie Stross — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 10:23:33 +0000

I've fallen silent because I'm drinking my way around Amsterdam this weekend. Tomorrow (Monday) I'm flying out to Portland, Oregon, for the H. P. Lovecraft film festival and Cthulhucon, where I'm one of the guests of honor. And on Monday evening I aim to be eating and drinking in Deschutes Brewery in Portland from about 7pm in a desperate attempt to stave off jet lag. If you're in town, why not come along and help keep me awake until local evening?

gothicpunk: Panthera

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 10:07:13 +0000

gothicpunk:

Panthera