But wait... there's more... so much more! I give you DOOFAAS (Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronym Site). Examples such as CASA-BLANCA
(Chicago Air Shower Array - Broad LAteral Non-imaging Cerenkov Array) abound, but for mine you can't go past HIS/HERS
(High Intensity Spectrograph / High Energy Range Spectrometer).
Sorry but the parent post is NOT Insightful; it's utterly confused. Firstly, Vulcan was a hypothetical planet in between the Sun and Mercury, proposed in the 19th century order to explain the advance of Mercury's perihelion (which was later accomplished by general relativity). Some observations were claimed in the 19th century but never verified and we know now that it was bogus.
The thing you seem to be thinking of is the unseen antichthon or counter-Earth; this dates from classical Greece where it was an element of Pythagorean cosmology. It was however not on the other side of the Sun but permanently hidden by the "central fire" which the Pythagoreans also believed in. To my knowledge it has never been taken seriously by scientists since that time - certainly not by a majority of them, anyway.
And finally, there was no universal law of gravitation to fit the Earth's orbit into prior to Kepler, or even for a few decades after his death. That had to await Isaac Newton. Sounds like you are thinking of Kepler's famous attempt to fit the planetary orbits into a nested series of perfect solids (pyramid, cube, etc).
Obviously it's matter of personal taste, but while I have a lot of time for Kurt Russell (especially his work for John Carpenter) and liked him in the Stargate film, Richard Dean Anderson in SG-1 just kills me - he's the single best thing in an excellent show.
I call it Planet Zeist Syndrome - meaning an explanation which is both unnecessary and unsatisfying.
Re:Same with Arthur C Clarke
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Singularity Sky
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(1) The novel of 2001 was not written after the movie; it was written while the movie was being scripted and shot - and Clarke co-authored the screenplay with Kubrick anyway.
(2) The original source for 2001 was written by - wait for it - Clarke himself.
It's a bit rich to claim that Clarke is as lacking in originality in the 2001 creative process as Anthony was with the Total Recall, given that Clarke was involved in every single step of 2001 and Anthony was only called in to write a film tie-in of Philip K. Dick's short story.
A thousand times yes - Egan is the most brilliant ideas man in current sf, IMHO. But it worries me that after churning out a great novel every year or two for most of the last decade, according to his website he doesn't have anything at all coming out. Unless he has stopped listing them in advance for some reason, but he always used to have a page about the book he was currently working on. I hope he hasn't stopped writing...
For all that people would have you believe, sex hasn't changed in thousands of years. Prostitutes, orgies, polygamy, etc. are all written down in history.
And yet you seem to have a big hang-up about sex in SF.
No, sex hasn't changed that much, but you cannot deny that attitudes towards sex have changed a lot over the course of time, and they will change - one way or the other - in the future. So if people do want to have weird nude love-fests, they can feel happy about doing so... One thing I do have a slight concern with, though, is that most of the changes posited in SF do seem to be towards greater permissiveness; there's no inherent reason why the future might not become less permissive, and this might be interesting to explore.
Oh, and I reiterate what others have said, the Mars series are really not about sex... I don't even remember that scene (though I'm not doubting it was there). I do remember all the great technical stuff about colonising and terraforming Mars, and the politics of colonisation. It's well worth revisiting.
Re:Sorta agree with both points of view
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Singularity Sky
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That military tactics then as in the book were based on "ships of the wall"
Do you perhaps mean "That naval tactics then as in the book were based on 'ships of the line'"?
and that you could travel faster than you could communicate.
To be even more needlessly pedantic, unless you are very much out of breath by the time you arrived, surely you can always communicate at at least the same speed at which you travel.
Re:Play nice with Piers Anthony
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Singularity Sky
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· Score: 1
Don't feel too bad, kid - we've all been there:) The only cure seems to be to keep reading Anthony until you get sickened by the sameness and the, well, creepiness, throw up, and move on, and you seem to have done that, so congratulations!
Some of his books I still remember with fondness, but I still can't get over how long I kept reading him after I realised how trashy most of his stuff was. I mean, I eventually got sick of Terry Pratchett's repetitiveness in the Discworld series, but it's still several orders of magnitude better than that Xanth crap. I mean, The Color of Her Panties, fer crying out loud...
I know the film is deliberately lacking in certain details, but I've never understood the need people have to read anything more into it.
Yeah, what's up with that? Maybe it's because I read the book (*and* The Lost Worlds of 2001) before I saw the movie, but I never understood why even reasonably SF-literate people seemed to think the plot was bizarrely hard to understand. Is the stargate sequence, or the surreal bit at the end, or what? Otherwise, in sfnal terms it's pretty straightforward.
Puh-LEASE, Rendezvous with Rama was brilliant, Rama II was quite good, the other two sucked greatly and made one wonder why they had been written.
Good Science Fiction is about character interactions that happen to be in a SF environment.
I only half agree with you here. It doesn't just happen to be in an SF environment; if the SF is merely window-dressing, why bother with it at all? Why not just read something in a more conventional setting? If it doesn't open your mind to possible futures, etc. then to me it's not good SF. OTOH, it definitely does need good characterisation and so forth - otherwise known as "good writing". I stopped reading Robert Forward for precisely this reason - great ideas, terrible writing.
WTF has (eg) US environmental policy got to do with the war? And you know, maybe Nobel laureates are just smart enough to figure out that they have more chance of influencing political debate if they release this report before the election, not after. Is that a crime?
If you don't deny the "facts", then what's your problem? They're still facts and they still have to be faced, regardless of the timing.
Oh, sorry... some people got confused with acronyms in this post - I guess I'm one of them - and then an AC corrected someone else saying the problem was with NFS. Should have read your post more carefully, sorry!
Any more info on this Illustrator+NFS problem? I use NFS in my OS X lab, but haven't seen any such issues with Illustrator here. Maybe just lucky I guess...
In the same vein, nuclear physics is a rather boring backwater these days, but in the public mind it's still got this aura of godlike intelligence associated with it (well, that's not quite it, but I think you know what I mean) as though we were still living in the 1950s.
RTFA. The research has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, one of the top four or so peer-reviewed astrophysics journals. Doesn't mean it's right of course, but neither is it just a beat-up on the part of the Economist.
You can read a preprint here, or check out MNRAS vol. 347 (2004),issue 4, pp. L67-L72. I know Shanks by reputation (he was - I guess still is - an important figure in a field I briefly studied in years ago: observational cosmology) and he's no nutter.
The Economist isn't just - or even mostly - about economics. It's about 60% global politics and current affairs, 25% business and finance, 15% science, technology and culture. In fact I skip over most of the "economics" articles, because they bore me, and yet I still get withdrawal symptoms if I get the current issue a day late!
It's a good argument, but on the other hand wormhole theories of time travel (such as they are) suggest that you need a wormhole opened in the past first before you can travel back there... so time travellers from the future will only be able to travel back to the date that the first wormhole was opened. And since we haven't done that yet...
Well, since the resemblance comes down to them both being a telescope shaped object with two solar panels stuck on the side, I'm not overly impressed... more evidence please!
Slashdot Mirror
But wait ... there's more ... so much more! I give you DOOFAAS (Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronym Site). Examples such as CASA-BLANCA
(Chicago Air Shower Array - Broad LAteral Non-imaging Cerenkov Array) abound, but for mine you can't go past HIS/HERS
(High Intensity Spectrograph / High Energy Range Spectrometer).
The thing you seem to be thinking of is the unseen antichthon or counter-Earth; this dates from classical Greece where it was an element of Pythagorean cosmology. It was however not on the other side of the Sun but permanently hidden by the "central fire" which the Pythagoreans also believed in. To my knowledge it has never been taken seriously by scientists since that time - certainly not by a majority of them, anyway.
And finally, there was no universal law of gravitation to fit the Earth's orbit into prior to Kepler, or even for a few decades after his death. That had to await Isaac Newton. Sounds like you are thinking of Kepler's famous attempt to fit the planetary orbits into a nested series of perfect solids (pyramid, cube, etc).
Obviously it's matter of personal taste, but while I have a lot of time for Kurt Russell (especially his work for John Carpenter) and liked him in the Stargate film, Richard Dean Anderson in SG-1 just kills me - he's the single best thing in an excellent show.
I call it Planet Zeist Syndrome - meaning an explanation which is both unnecessary and unsatisfying.
(2) The original source for 2001 was written by - wait for it - Clarke himself.
It's a bit rich to claim that Clarke is as lacking in originality in the 2001 creative process as Anthony was with the Total Recall, given that Clarke was involved in every single step of 2001 and Anthony was only called in to write a film tie-in of Philip K. Dick's short story.
A thousand times yes - Egan is the most brilliant ideas man in current sf, IMHO. But it worries me that after churning out a great novel every year or two for most of the last decade, according to his website he doesn't have anything at all coming out. Unless he has stopped listing them in advance for some reason, but he always used to have a page about the book he was currently working on. I hope he hasn't stopped writing ...
And yet you seem to have a big hang-up about sex in SF. No, sex hasn't changed that much, but you cannot deny that attitudes towards sex have changed a lot over the course of time, and they will change - one way or the other - in the future. So if people do want to have weird nude love-fests, they can feel happy about doing so ... One thing I do have a slight concern with, though, is that most of the changes posited in SF do seem to be towards greater permissiveness; there's no inherent reason why the future might not become less permissive, and this might be interesting to explore.
Oh, and I reiterate what others have said, the Mars series are really not about sex ... I don't even remember that scene (though I'm not doubting it was there). I do remember all the great technical stuff about colonising and terraforming Mars, and the politics of colonisation. It's well worth revisiting.
Do you perhaps mean "That naval tactics then as in the book were based on 'ships of the line'"?
and that you could travel faster than you could communicate.
To be even more needlessly pedantic, unless you are very much out of breath by the time you arrived, surely you can always communicate at at least the same speed at which you travel.
Some of his books I still remember with fondness, but I still can't get over how long I kept reading him after I realised how trashy most of his stuff was. I mean, I eventually got sick of Terry Pratchett's repetitiveness in the Discworld series, but it's still several orders of magnitude better than that Xanth crap. I mean, The Color of Her Panties, fer crying out loud ...
Yeah, what's up with that? Maybe it's because I read the book (*and* The Lost Worlds of 2001) before I saw the movie, but I never understood why even reasonably SF-literate people seemed to think the plot was bizarrely hard to understand. Is the stargate sequence, or the surreal bit at the end, or what? Otherwise, in sfnal terms it's pretty straightforward.
Puh-LEASE, Rendezvous with Rama was brilliant, Rama II was quite good, the other two sucked greatly and made one wonder why they had been written.
Good Science Fiction is about character interactions that happen to be in a SF environment.
I only half agree with you here. It doesn't just happen to be in an SF environment; if the SF is merely window-dressing, why bother with it at all? Why not just read something in a more conventional setting? If it doesn't open your mind to possible futures, etc. then to me it's not good SF. OTOH, it definitely does need good characterisation and so forth - otherwise known as "good writing". I stopped reading Robert Forward for precisely this reason - great ideas, terrible writing.
Ahh, my favourite was always The Lair of Great Cthulhu. Toe-tappin', marrow-suckin' fun!
If you don't deny the "facts", then what's your problem? They're still facts and they still have to be faced, regardless of the timing.
Oh, sorry ... some people got confused with acronyms in this post - I guess I'm one of them - and then an AC corrected someone else saying the problem was with NFS. Should have read your post more carefully, sorry!
Any more info on this Illustrator+NFS problem? I use NFS in my OS X lab, but haven't seen any such issues with Illustrator here. Maybe just lucky I guess ...
Well, if we're talking biology, I think the Kama Sutra would be a better text ... for some areas of the curriculum, anyway!
In the same vein, nuclear physics is a rather boring backwater these days, but in the public mind it's still got this aura of godlike intelligence associated with it (well, that's not quite it, but I think you know what I mean) as though we were still living in the 1950s.
MY point was that rules seem to be situation dependent in every other human endeavor. Why would the laws of the Universe be any different?
Because the Universe is not a human endeavour.
You can read a preprint here, or check out MNRAS vol. 347 (2004),issue 4, pp. L67-L72. I know Shanks by reputation (he was - I guess still is - an important figure in a field I briefly studied in years ago: observational cosmology) and he's no nutter.
The Economist isn't just - or even mostly - about economics. It's about 60% global politics and current affairs, 25% business and finance, 15% science, technology and culture. In fact I skip over most of the "economics" articles, because they bore me, and yet I still get withdrawal symptoms if I get the current issue a day late!
It's a good argument, but on the other hand wormhole theories of time travel (such as they are) suggest that you need a wormhole opened in the past first before you can travel back there ... so time travellers from the future will only be able to travel back to the date that the first wormhole was opened. And since we haven't done that yet ...
Most of those links are just using Hubble as a familar point of reference, but the astronautix one is indeed suggestive. Thanks.
Would that be because the lunakhods went to the Moon, not Mars???
Yes, I'm sure many people do. Does that mean we're not allowed to hear about anyone else's space acheivments?
Well, since the resemblance comes down to them both being a telescope shaped object with two solar panels stuck on the side, I'm not overly impressed ... more evidence please!