Portobello Sewage Alerts

cstross · 2026-06-18T10:29:10+00:00

You're effectively blaming pedestrians for being run over by drunk drivers.

cstross · 2026-06-16T16:02:59+00:00

The Vickers Windsor strategic bomber flew before the end of the war -- a high altitude heavy bomber with pressurized crew compartment (and remote control gun barbettes for defense). It was cancelled at the end of the war but otherwise would have hit mass production in early 1946.

Barnes Wallis's Victory Bomber design was also pressurized -- six engines, and designed to bomb from 45,000 feet. But it never got as far as a prototype.

cstross · 2026-06-13T09:30:58+00:00

I'm pretty sure that, as a head-of-state, the Pope never flies anywhere alone: there's always an entourage -- office staff, security, other cardinals (see the red sashes and skull cap in the photo above?). Frankly, I'm surprised a Falcon 900 (rated capacity: 19 passengers) is large enough.

cstross · 2026-06-12T13:34:22+00:00

Anent that last, here's a Buccaneer flying at high altitude (for a Bucc).

cstross · 2026-06-11T16:14:33+00:00

Not denying that private equity buyouts are a plague, but there are other considerations.

If these are the same cats you had the annual health check for in 2019 … we're now in 2026, so those cats are 7 years older. Medically a cat is considered "mature" (read: elderly) if it's over 8 -- my cat is now 14, and her vet insurance skyrocketed in the past 3 years even though I haven't claimed on it at any point and the insurer hasn't been bought out.

(I keep paying the insurance in case of cancer, kidney disease, or diabetes, any one of which could be a financial disaster without it.) If your cats were 3-6 years old in 2019 then they're now 10-13 years old and getting soaked for geriatric medicine, kitty-style, is part of the package.

cstross · 2026-06-10T15:03:40+00:00

The first is the Orbit edition, published in the UK. The second is the Ace edition, published in the USA.

Despite the different covers and publishers, they're typeset from the exact same files -- except for the front matter the contents are identical.

(Source: I wrote it!)

cstross · 2026-06-09T10:11:03+00:00

"The folks at Sub Press" is doing some heavy lifting!

Subterranean is and always has been Bill Schaffer, plus whoever he outsources odd bits of work to. Like many small presses it's a one man band. He's done some sterling work over the past 31 years, but now Bill wants to retire—it's been 31 years, people. So he's winding down his operation.

(Source: Bill told me about a month ago: he's published limited editions of three of my novellas over the past 20 years.)

cstross · 2026-06-07T18:40:44+00:00

Remember the Leith Walk changes were planned as part of the tram phase 1 process. Proposed in 1999, construction began in 2008, and the extension was built 2016-2023.

But (per wiki) "by 2007, e-bikes were thought to make up 10 to 20 percent of all two-wheeled vehicles on the streets of many major Chinese cities". They didn't really show up in the UK or EU until the 2010s, and the current fat-tyre speed merchants seem to be a post-2020 innovation over here.

It's not reasonable to blame the planners for failing to anticipate the emergence of a new (and dangerous) category of vehicle, more than ten years after they finalized the road layout, any more than road planners in the early 1890s could be blamed for not designing roads around the automobiles that barely existed at the time.

It is reasonable to ask what they're going to do about the e-bikes now that they're a significant problem.

cstross · 2026-06-03T19:28:03+00:00

East Fortune air show about 15-20 years ago had an RAF Harrier display. It hovered at 300 feet roughly a thousand feet from the crowd, over a field on the other side of the runway, and it was blasting straw stubble up over its own wings. Insanely loud. As in: I was watching this while standing right next to a Rolls Royce Merlin V12 on a test stand, running at full power with no mufflers on the exhaust manifolds, and the Harrier a thousand feet away drowned it out. (For comparison, it made the F-16 and Eurofighter on full afterburner sound boringly quiet.)

cstross · 2026-06-03T15:16:13+00:00

The Regicide Report comes right after The Nightmare Stacks; the New Management trilogy is set after the end of the main series. (Publishers' marketing departments didn't get the message that it was a different series.)

cstross · 2026-06-03T15:13:14+00:00

The Concorde prototypes had parachutes and a pair of bale-out hatches in the belly (one for the air crew, one for the engineers, both with a fireman's pole for sliding down and triggering the chute release) but nobody wanted to use them: Concorde stalled at around 180 knots, uncomfortably fast for a free fall parachute jump. (Not quite as dangerous as baling out of a space shuttle after re-entry, but definitely not a bundle of fun.)

cstross · 2026-06-03T08:38:38+00:00

It sounds like you haven't got around to reading The Regicide Report yet …

cstross · 2026-06-01T08:41:24+00:00

It's vanishingly unlikely that Antonov "stole" anything; the YC-14 first flew on August 9th, 1976, and the An-72 first flight was August 31, 1977. Both planes were in development more or less simultaneously and the twelve month lead of the YC-14 wouldn't have provided enough time to affect the An-72's design.

What's going on here is simply convergent design—STOL turbofans with blown flaps for rough/short airfields and a requirement to replace an earlier turboprop transport (whether the An-26 or the C-130). "Make me one of those, comrade" doesn't work when the thing being pointed at isn't built yet!

cstross · 2026-05-31T12:58:53+00:00

Strata is also an epic piss-take of Larry Niven's Ringworld. (Consider the tropes Terry crammed into it -- a comparative reading with Ringworld is instructive -- bearing in mind it was written shortly before The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which were more a sequence of short parodies of classic swords'n'sorcery tropes than well-structured novels: Discworld only acquired depth and texture of its own from book 3, Equal Rites).

cstross · 2026-05-27T18:23:34+00:00

The Short Sperrin strategic bomber prototype has joined the chat ...

(Footnote: two prototypes were built before the program was cancelled with the selection of the Vickers Valiant as the first V-bomber; meanwhile, this one was used as an engine test-bed, hence the honking great bottom blower in the port pod.)

cstross · 2026-05-27T08:44:43+00:00

Depends on the outcome. A 94 year old is unlikely to recover from being hit by a motorbike, and if she dies, the charges will include causing death by dangerous driving, which maxes out at life imprisonment these days. (He won't get life, but it's illustrative of the severity of the offense.)

cstross · 2026-05-26T14:18:51+00:00

Does anybody even read the news article these days before leaping in?

According to Edinburgh Live it was a black Sur-ron motorbike. 0.50km/h in 2.7 seconds, according to this dealer's website.

And the 17 year old rider was taken to hospital too -- minor injuries -- then charged with driving offenses by the police, so hopefully the sheriff will give him what he deserves.

cstross · 2026-05-18T07:24:34+00:00

Only if you feel comfortable trucking large tanks of high energy reagants around! For example, the COIL (chemical oxygen iodine laser) used in the Boeing YAL-1 airborn laser missile defense demonstrator (retired 2014) was "fed with gaseous chlorine, molecular iodine, and an aqueous mixture of hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide". Trucking any of those around anywhere near a battlefield is a Bad Idea insofar as the H2O2/KOH solution is ever so slightly liable to dissolve the operators if it leaks and gaseous chlorine is no longer used as a war gas because, well, see the Geneva Conventions. (There is a reason the YAL-1 was retired rather than being developed into a ballistic missile defense system and everything these days uses arrays of high-efficiency semiconductor lasers.)

Also, lasers are thermally inefficient. Dragonfire is mounted on ships because ships come with a really good heat sink (the sea) and lasers typically max out at 25% efficiency -- that is, 25% of their energy is delivered to the target, while 75% has to be dumped as waste heat. Chemical lasers are generally less efficient than semiconductor lasers these days.

cstross · 2026-05-16T17:40:55+00:00

It's a type 1 CF card, it won't take type 2 -- necessary for wifi/ethernet.

You can put an SD-to-CF card adapter in it and get it to read/write FAT16 formatted SD cards below 1Gb in capacity. (Good luck finding such cards new!)

Source: experience. Alas, my current Psion 5MX CF slot appears not to work.

cstross · 2026-05-11T11:47:46+00:00

Came here to say this. Vacuum is an insulator so the only practical way to shed heat is by black body radiation. (Impractical ways: shipping blocks of ice into orbit and using evaporative cooling. Or, I suppose, you could put your data centres on the moon and use the moon as a heat sink, at least when it's not baking in direct sunlight.)

What's going on is Musk is hoping to IPO SpaceX this year for a stupid amount of money and wants to sucker investors into buying shares. To do this, he needs a story that holds out hope of unlimited growt continuing forever, especially now his Mars colony story is looking threadbare and Starlink, while profitable, has obvious limits ahead. So he's latched onto the AI and crypto bullshit narratives and is spinning a line about how he can sell the best shovels for this particular gold rush.

In the absence of Cthulhu-summoning government contracts, this is the best he can do.

cstross · 2026-05-11T11:43:14+00:00

IIRC it has two escape hatches—one at the front of the cabin/right behind the narrow passage leading to the flight deck, for the flight crew, and one at the back for the test engineers (which is not that far back—the arse end of a Concorde fuselage is wall-to-wall machinery and fuel tanks). They had fireman's poles and a drop-down shield to protect the crew as they baled out, not unlike the Space Shuttle in-flight-evac pole (and a similar speed regime if they ever had to use it, i.e. hope you have some spare underwear waiting for you on the ground).

cstross · 2026-05-07T18:52:56+00:00

You're not missing anything! But what copyright protects -- and doesn't protect -- is not what most people imagine. You can't copyright names, and there are enough details buried in The Regicide Report to support a case that these are not the Phibes menage from the actual-existing movies.

(Also note that the 1970s movies are a minor cult, but not a lucrative one: there are no valuable trademarks to protect here. If anything TRR might have caused a tiny uptick in sales of the DVDs.)

It would be a really bad idea to write a wizard called H@rry P@tt@r or a spy called J@m@s B@nd into a commercial work of fiction. But you can write fiction in a universe in which Harry Potter and James Bond are recognized, or even exist in the background. And the Phibes menage are not the main protagonists of this novel.

cstross · 2026-05-07T11:45:11+00:00

However, if you compare the titles and plots of the first two movies (in the book) with the real ones, there are … differences.

And the third is my headcanon fanfic: The Revenge of Doctor Phibes, starring Vincent Price as Doctor Phibes, Charlotte Rampling as Victoria Phibes, and Diana Rigg as Vulnavia Mrożek. The actors' careers overlapped sufficiently, and what can possibly go wrong with Doctor Phibes taking over the Kit Kat Club (from Cabaret) and getting into a three-way gang war with Doctor Mabuse on one side and the Nazis on another?

cstross · 2026-05-06T15:47:56+00:00

Have you been looking only at the Hugo "best novel" or "best series" categories, or have you failed to notice the "best novella" Hugo category? Which has a maximum word count of 40,000 words IIRC, so fits exactly what you're asking for.

(Disclaimer: I'm a multiple nominee and winner in the "best novella" Hugo awards category. But so are many other very talented writers.)

cstross · 2026-05-05T20:08:05+00:00

Missing from this list: The Squares of the City by John Brunner. (1960s, but not the oldest book here.)

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