damerell

I think I've asked this elsewhere, but does anyone have a Raspberry Pi 3 I could borrow for a week or so, please? (Not immediately; I'm off to Germany today). I have a project I think one might be good for but I don't want to drop 50 quid on one without seeing if it actually _is_ useful first.

I've just been plugging through Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion, and while it's quite well written, my God, is everything awful all the time. This isn't specifically about Hurley, although AFAICT all her stuff is like that, but about this vexing (to me) narrative device of having everything be uniformly dreadful.

I just finished Raven Stratagem (sequel to Ninefox Gambit, not appreciably a happier book), so my benchmark for "awful" is set quite high... but people tell jokes in that universe (albeit mostly gallows humour), they eat pastries (even if that does provide a vector for assassination attempts), they had happy childhoods until something ghastly happened to their parents, etc.

When everything's awful it loses any force. I got to the bit in the Hurley where it turns out someone routinely eats her own mutated newborn, and, well, of course she does. No-one in this world ever tucks into a ham sandwich.

It reminds me of the transition between early Warhammer 40,000 (yeah, never a pinnacle of fine writing) where everything was slightly tongue-in-cheek and modern editions which are entirely po-faced ghastliness. (I think, given modern Blizzard, this sort of thing may be correlated with thinking an excellent design for armour is looking like you covered yourself in glue and rolled around an ironmonger. One reason I usually play Sgt. Hammer in HOTS is she's one of about 2 characters who ever says anything remotely lighthearted, and that game's got more enormous shoulder pads than 80s power dressing. But I digress).

Ghastliness is more effective, I think, when there's some kind of contrast with non-ghastliness. Hope must exist, if only so it can be brutally crushed.

In fairness, I have to mention that there's a bit of a problem here with my contention that unremitting awfulness makes for bad reading; that problem is Edgar Allan Poe. I'm not sure what to say about that. :-/

I just reread The Martian.

On Sol 37 he realises the Hab's atmosphere is 64% hydrogen and 9% oxygen, so a single spark might blow it up.

But what was he doing last? He produced this state of affairs by (imperfectly) burning hydrogen with a naked flame. So, why hasn't he blown it up already?

One of the questions that vexes NetHack players (you don't have to be one to follow this) is whether the character is wearing pants and/or trousers.

The argument that they are is firstly that the game doesn't represent objects with no game function; junk on the dungeon floor doesn't show up, the knapsack you keep your belongings in isn't an item in and of itself, etc. Sure, you have ordinary clothes - who would go spelunking naked - but they don't need to be modelled. Secondly, you can sit on a cockatrice corpse - ordinarily, touching one with your bare flesh turns you to stone - without anything bad happening. Plainly there is fabric in the way.

The argument that they are not is simple; in the game one has encounters with incubi and succubi, who remove your armour, piece by piece, sometimes asking [1] about each one; but they never ask about your pants, even if your stats are so high that they ask about each armour piece every time. Plainly there is no fabric in the way.

The answer came to me yesterday; the character is wearing a frock. All NetHack characters wear frocks (with no underwear, but we know they're adventurous). When sitting, they scoot the hem up under their bottom, and so aren't petrified when sitting unwisely.

[1] yeees, it's a bit dubious when one thinks about it.

It's my birthday on Monday, the 27th. I'll be in the Devonshire (the Cambridge one) from about 1930. I know it's a school night but perhaps one or two of you might be there...

Note: food eaten between supper and breakfast is incorrectly referred to as a midnight snack. The correct term is "dark lunch".

Today, I got an email from LJ to the effect that my LJ account had been logged into from 212.129.2.227, which is J. Random IP Address in France. Mysteriously, although this was some hours ago, I don't seem to have embarked on a spree of Viagra posts/comments or anything. Hence I've ended the unknown login session, changed password, deleted account (weirdly, all of which I could do without agreeing to the evil new T&Cs).

I imagine this is a manifestation of the downfall of LJ, but:
worth checking yourself (www.livejournal.com/manage/logins.bml ) if you ain't already deleted your account?
let me know, please, if I suddenly go spammy anywhere else...

I've been meaning to write this for a while, but I just got blocked on Twitter by the editor of Rail magazine for pointing it out (!), so now seems like a good time. If there is some reason I am laughably wrong, now's the time to point it out.

Fairly often, when renationalisation of the railways is discussed, a neat little pie chart turns up showing some small percentage of income goes on TOC profits (here is an example: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/images/structure/css/fact-about-fare-2014.jpg - this one discusses fare income, but as far as I can make out from http://www.orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/24149/uk-rail-industry-financial-information-2015-16.pdf today's figure of 1.9% does reflect the distribution of all income. I don't know why Network Rail can't replace their pie chart with one based on more recent figures...)

As far as I know this is true, but what pops up next is the assertion that only that small percentage is to be saved by renationalising the railways. That seems to be totally untrue, as a bit of a peek at the other slices of the pie chart will reveal.

First of all, there's a much bigger chunk (11% in 2014, 7% now) marked "leasing trains". Do the rolling stock companies (ROSCOs), which were of course created out of British Rail, make a profit? You bet they do. Their surplus is about 20%, so there's another 1.4% right there.

Secondly, there's "interest payments and other costs". There was a bit here about how the TOCs are probably hiding some profits via (say) borrowing money from associated companies in countries with less corporation tax, but as far as I can make out all the interest payments are made by Network Rail. There is a pretence that Network Rail is not just a bit of the government, and that compels it to borrow money at a higher interest rate than the government would.

(However, the ROSCOs may well be posting an artificially low surplus, either through such tax avoidance or via the private equity practice of buying an asset with a loan secured on that asset. That would represent yet more profit that doesn't show up on the pie chart.)

Then we have staffing costs (25% of the pie chart). Fragmenting the railway has added untold layers of bureaucracy; the ROSCOs have staff to deal with leasing the trains to the TOCs and the TOCs have staff to deal with leasing the trains from the ROSCOs. The TOCs have staff to deal with Network Rail and Network Rail has staff to deal with the TOCs - a lot, because a train cannot simply be delayed now without a careful apportioning of the costs arising from that delay. A vast management tree is essentially duplicated across 20-odd TOCs (yes, it would be a bit bigger in a company the size of BR, but there wouldn't be 20 of it). It's hard to obtain any decent estimate of this (I would be intrigued to see figures on the relative number of officebound staff employed by BR and the current system, but I suspect they are well hidden) but it's hard to suppose it's too small a proportion of that 25% to show up.

So I think two things are true; the proportion of the railways' income that is lost to the structures of privatisation certainly is not 1.9% - it must be at least as high as 3.3% if we add the ROSCOs' profits in - and there is every reason to suppose it is considerably higher, even if it is hard to know exactly how much.

I've finally got around to looking at travel for the Worldcon. What I wrote here before is moot because it turns out the Travemünde-Helsinki ferry is much cheaper than I expected (you can get a berth in a cabin with 3 strangers), so I'm taking that.

This seems to be a theme at the moment, so here's H. Rider Haggard, "Dawn", 1884:

"But his glance did not stop at the raven, for a yard or two beyond it he caught sight of a white skirt, and his eyes, travelling upwards, saw first a rounded waist, and then a bust and pair of shoulders such as few women can boast, and at last, another pair of eyes; and he then and there fell utterly and irretrievably in love."

All else aside, is her face just an otherwise featureless mask, or do her eyes protrude on stalks from her neck-stump? That would put me off falling utterly and irretrievably in love at first sight.

(Also, I had to read it twice to realise it's "another pair of eyes" in addition to his well-travelled ones, not in addition to a spare pair she keeps on her shoulders or something, but I think that's just me.)