Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

For those of you who have been wondering why I’ve not been writing as well as I used to, and why I’ve not had the energy to reply to comments as much — I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnoea. It turns out that I wake up an average of ten times an hour while I’m asleep, and I haven’t actually had what anyone else would call a proper night’s sleep in two or three years.

Luckily, I am getting a CPAP machine in August, and I sincerely hope that I’ll be able to go back to my old standard of writing on here then. Bear with me — the end is in sight. Soon I’ll have the energy to go into imaginative flights of fancy, and to write about politics, and to read comics when they come out rather than months later and write about them, and all the other stuff I’ve done too little of. I can’t wait.

Seriously, expect August to be the rebirth of this blog, in terms of my personality. I’ve missed me, and I’m looking forward to being him again.

For now, though, have some links:

Relative Dimension on Marco Polo and dying of thirst.

Mark Thompson on the lessons from the coalition negotiations

Social problems as a disconnect between iterated and one-shot prisoners dilemmas

Josh Marsfelder has started a new blog, looking at Star Trek from an anarcho-feminist viewpoint as a critical history of utopian futurism. Those who read Phil Sandifer’s blog will find the general style familiar, but this is worth reading in its own right.

Leonard Pierce on Orson Welles’ Mr Arkadin

Vitamin C kills drug-resistant tuberculosis. Exactly as orthomolecular medicine predicts.

Creating quantum entanglement between particles that never exist at the same time — “Using entanglement swapping between two temporally separated photon pairs we entangle one photon from the first pair with another photon from the second pair. The first photon was detected even before the other was created. “

John Scalzi on Kindle’s new legal, commercial, fanfic move.

The day that hell was abolished in Britain

Millennium on The Name Of The Doctor

And Alex Wilcock on John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor

I’ve got some limited connectivity again, but unfortunately I’ve been made so ill from the stress of the last few weeks that I’m not able to write. I’m hoping to be well enough tomorrow to travel to London to see Van Dyke Parks (I’d better be — I already bought the ticket for the show and for the bus down there) and if I do you can expect a review on Monday. If I *don’t* then I’ll try to get a 50 Stories Who post up on Mindless Ones tomorrow — I can’t watch any more of the current series until I get my own network connection back — and the post on Pacific Ocean Blue up for Monday. I’ll also, if I stay home, be putting out a little ebook-only release I think will be quite fun to write (it’ll only be 10,000 or so words at most, so I should be able to do it over the long weekend).

Meanwhile, links:

Paul Magrs takes a transphobic Doctor Who fan to task
Lee Griffin explains the new orphan works provisions in UK copyright law
Iain Coleman is looking at each TV Doctor Who story, from the beginning, from a scientific point of view
Alex Wilcock remembers the Labour party in government and discusses a book by Conrad Russell.
Sean Carrol on bad science reporting
The person who killed the snooper’s charter
The Heresiarch on Richard Dawkins once again criticising something he doesn’t understand
And Scott Aaronson on the US Congress’ attack on science

I was hoping to have a new Who post up today, but I got hit with a short story idea last night and I’m busy writing that (I think it may well be saleable to a magazine — if it isn’t, it’ll end up on here as usual) so you get some links instead.

Also, someone poke me when I have a little time to review Against Nature by Lawrence Burton, Senor 105: Horizon by Philip Purser-Hallard and TARDIS Eruditorum Vol 3 by Phil Sandifer. The very short version is that they’re all excellent and you should buy loads of copies of them all and make them all rich, but I do have things to say about them too, when I’ve finally got some time.

Is electoral reform coming sooner than we think?

Your lifestyle has already been designed

Gavin Robinson describes Cromwell’s funeral

“Do you use boy words or girl words?”

The Aporetic on the bitcoin bubble

Andrew Rilstone on the Doctor

Where Are All The Right-Wing Standups? Asks (and answers) Stewart Lee

Lies, Damned Lies, And Facebook

I did try recording one of my stories for podcasting today, but I need to redo it with a pop-shield, as every plosive makes it sound like the speakers are exploding. Expect something in the next week or so.
I’m hoping to have a post on politics up tomorrow, but in the meantime, links:

2000AD have expanded their range of DRM-free digital comic collections to include lots more of the Judge Dredd Case Files.

Calamity Jon Morris is making the collection of his great webcomic, Jeremy, available for free download

Andrew Rilstone has been doing some great posts on the different styles of criticism of Doctor Who. The most recent one talks about… well, about me. They’re all worth reading, though.

Dorian Wright shares my opinion on the most recent Doctor Who.

Millennium partially disagrees

Jae Kay on why he’s just renewed his Lib Dem membership, despite everything

And The first sale doctrine has been held not to apply to MP3s in the US. You might think I’d be angry about this, but actually it’s probably a good thing, as it will stop (for a time) predatory monopolists like Amazon ‘re-selling’ copies of ebooks and not paying the authors.

Paul Magrs thinks that if we want more women writing Doctor Who (and we do) we should start with Jacqueline Rayner and Kate Orman. I agree.

Tim O’Neill on Factory Showdown by They Might Be Giants

For autism awareness month, be aware of those poor people who have to suffer from a lack of autism, and tone it down taupe

Millennium on the budget

Requisite Variety on antioxidants and cancer

And Alex explains his “What the Liberal Democrats stand for” in detail. (I will get round to doing mine one of these days).