Just read the CNN article, which is actually from Space.com. I didn't see anything up there that Hoagland didn't open himself up for by attacking NASA's credibility. The assault on his credentials is not even by by Plait, but by Ralph Greenberg from the University of Washington, and Hoagland's rebuttal is included. So, basically, both sides of the issue got airtime, which, from where I'm sitting, is more than Hoagland's claims warrant.
Did you read more than the Introduction? Plait has individual pages for each claim, which get into the actual science of why Hoagland's ideas are misguided at best.
Oh, and Hoagland's website design is painful. Ow, my eyes.
I'm inclinded to think that it's women who are the most vocal about games being "anti-social"... at least, that's how it's been in my life.
This is a conversation I have actually had (paraphrased).
Me: Let's have sex.
Him: Can't. Diablo 2. *click click click*
Me:...I'm going home.
Him: Okay, 'bye. *click click click*
How much more anti-social can you get?;)
Seriously, though, video games are anti-social. So are television, books, meditation, jogging, and about eight zillion other things. There's nothing wrong with solitary pastimes. The problem comes when you let them eat your life.
Or when my boyfriend (no longer the same guy as above...of course) makes us late because he hasn't found a friggin' save point yet.
Isn't it much too pessimistic to believe that we'll be totally defenseless for centuries?
I don't really think so, unless something sets off another space race. We're really not too effectual outside of LEO.
If we had a warning time of a few days, that would be sufficient to calculate targeting information to launch a few ICBMs to intercept an incoming rock. The intercept would take place above the atmosphere (some ICBMs are suborbital, and some of them are able to put payloads in orbit).
This would only work on a little bitty rock, and in that case you might as well play the odds that it's going to hit somewhere sparsely-populated rather than risk an atmospheric nuclear detonation. Sure, the rock will hit really hard, but at least it will be a clean explosion with no fallout.
Then there's also the political worry of ICBM launches triggering retaliation. You have more faith in human nature than I if you think the governments of the world can get it together within a couple of days.
With a bit longer warning time (a few months), we could fit a more powerful launch vehicle (say, a Titan IV) with a nuclear warhead. This would allow the intercept to take place well away from the earth (reducing the magnitude of the angular deflection needed to make the object miss Earth entirely).
This is certainly within the realm of possibility, but I think you may have seen Armageddon once too often (and once is too often.;) This is much more likely to fail than it is too succeed...but I would definitely want to try if faced with the choice. Because really, what else are you going to do?
And with a few years' warning time (and a few billion dollars), more sophisticated approaches than a brute-force nuclear attack could be implemented. (I.e., attaching ion engines to the asteroid in order to change its orbit, or painting it white in order to make the increased reflection of sunlight subtly change its orbit.)
The ion engines suggestion is entirely untenable, unless you were planning on having a few hundred of them and a handful of nuclear reactors to power them. I like the solar pressure idea; it's elegant, but we'd need lots of warning. Really, we lack the precision of observation necessary to tell if a rock is going to be a threat in a few years, and if we freaked out about every asteroid that looked as though it and the Earth might be on intersecting trajectories in the next decade, we wouldn't have the energy left to freak out about anything else.
We are the Aztecs, and an extinction-event asteroid is Cortez. No real point in worrying about it, since it's got us so outclassed there's not much we can do about it.
I have an acquaintance. Call him...Jack. (Name changed to protect the obsessed.) Jack has picked two goddamn things about which we can do absolutely nothing to freak him out: near-Earth asteroids and megavolcanoes. He was my friend's boss for a while, and we ended up at a lot of the same parties and restaurants and such. He would always corner me, because I was usually the only aerospace engineer there, and talk for hours about how life as we know it was shortly going to be wiped out by a really big rock, and how this was the greatest threat ever to face humanity.
After this happened a couple of times, I told him that I was comfortable playing the odds that an extinction-level event would hold off for the couple of centuries it would take us to actually be able to deal with it, given the scale of geologic time time to human achievement. He nearly spit his beer across the room.
In conclusion: Space is really big, really empty, and some people just need things to worry about.
My only excuse is that I had just finished reading something like 50 posts that explained with great certainty that women's brains were just not capable of analytical thinking on a par with men.
Yeah, the level of sexism on Slashdot is depressing. Every single time there's an article even tangentially about something that might conceivably at one time have been touched by a woman, there's a string of "+5, Funny" posts about how it stops working once a month, demands expensive upgrades, and won't let you buy other equipment. Try that with a racial reference and see how long it takes you to get modded Troll. Likewise, if I posted something that boiled down to "Men are simply incapable of forming the deep and nuanced emotional bonds that women are," I'd be modded into oblivion so fast I'd think the time-stamping on the post was wrong.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoy Slashdot and the pros far outweigh the cons. But some Slashdotters make my punchin' knuckles itch.
This may be true. I was certainly never interested in dolls, and my brother made pretend guns out of sticks until my pacifist mother relented and bought him toy guns. But, as I said in an earlier post, there's nothing about women that keeps us from making smart consumer decisions when provided with the correct information to do so, which is why this "printer for women" thing is insulting. Look at the iPod. It's not "for men" or "for women." It just has a simple, intuitive UI, attractive styling, and rock-solid design (okay, there's that battery thing...oops), and it's beating the living daylights out of competing products because of it.
But...the stigma of not fitting into your preordained niche is strong, as the former high-school outcasts of Slashdot ought to know. I honestly don't care if I'm a 3-sigma outlier from the rest of my gender, but I want to be taken seriously in my profession and my hobbies, and every single stupid "women don't get technology, tee hee!" product that comes out makes it that much harder, both for me and for women who want to be judged competent in any field. I don't want hand-holding and I don't need to be encouraged. I would just like to see the absence of discouragement.
There is no significant barrier in contributing to opensource projects. Where are the females?
I'd love to, but ya'll don't want my code. "Whaddya mean I can't write it in FORTRAN?"
I don't know if they have any designs on Lord of Light yet, but last I heard, Sci-Fi was planning on an Amber miniseries, written by Richard Christian Matheson, whose past writing credits include such tours de force as The A-Team, Knight Rider, and The Incredible Hulk.
P.S. You're not a Cassandra if people believe you.;)
Why do car sellers behave this way? I'll tell you why. Because that is how they sell more cars. They're trying to establish a rapport with the customer, and women tend to care more about car color than features. Don't believe me? Well, buying a new car is an exciting experience, and of course my wife told everyone she knew about it. She told her parents. Grandparents. Friends. Pretty much anyone who would listen (hey, she has to have some stereotypical female traits, right?) Without fail, the conversations with the women (her mother, grandmother, female friends, coworkers) went something like:
Wife: I bought a new car yesterday! Female: Oh, that's so exciting! What color is it?
And as I'm sure you've already guessed, the men all asked "What kind" instead of "What color". So what does that tell me? That you are an anomoly. So is my wife. But most women care more about color/style/looks than they care about specs/features/durability.
I am well aware that this is the state of things. However, the point is that men and women are socialized all their lives to fit into their gender roles. If given half a chance, would there be more overlap in the reactions? I'd hope so, but I can't say; we don't have a control group. What burns me is not women who want to be incredibly social or men who want to be extremely technical, but the immense societal disapproval of women who want to be technical and men who want to be social (which is arguably a worse pressure than on "masculine" women). And the assumption that it's simply the Way Things Are. Of which "The Printer for Women" is simply an absurd example.
Oh, I wasn't taking umbrage at your observation, since it's accurate.
The question is whether the inclination comes from nature, nurture, or a combination of the two. (Of course it's the last, but what's the spread? 80/20? Vice versa?) Given equal opportunity, pay, and praise, how many women would choose to be teachers over engineers? How many men? Don't ask me; I just do math. The nature/nurture debate is far outside my area of expertise, and fraught with ugly politics.
But we agree that the printer is insanely stupid.;)
Also look at how many women there are in "hardcore" tech positions...
I'm an aerospace engineer, and I do finite element analysis on jet engines for a living. It's not computers, but does it count for your purposes?
One of the things I've had to face up to is that women really are less than one in twenty or so (wild guess based on observation) in my profession. Things like the printer for women, or the car for women with the hood welded shut that featured in a recent article, makes me want to simply scream in frustration.
The issue I have with your point is that there's nothing about a woman's innate information processing capabilities that prevents her from looking at a list of features for two printers and picking the one that better meets her needs. The problem is learned helplessness. Being told not to worry her pretty little head, sometimes in so many words. It's rampant in sales and marketing of any kind--those horror stories you hear about women trying to buy cars or computers and being treated like 6 year-olds? They're all true. It's happened to me every time I've gone to make a big-ticket technical or mechanical purchase and it's positively disheartening. (The opposite problem exists in some men, who get talked into buying way more computer/car/grill/whatever than they actually need.)
The political issue of women in science and technology (and the flip side of men in caregiving positions) is way offtopic, and not something I really feel like discussing, because it makes me all ranty.
Oh, I agree with you. I should perhaps have said "debates are not won on formal logic alone." Just because something can't be formulated into a Boolean proposition doesn't mean it's wrong. (I would have had just as many replies from people saying "Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy!" if I hadn't included the caveat, though.;)
Still, it is better to frame objections to a course of action in terms of principles. "Trusted" computing is not odious because it may be put to bad uses. It is odious because I object on principle to ceding control of my computer to anyone, especially a paternalistic government or corporation.
Thank you. It was a perfectly valid question, and I see you got many good responses. I'm glad the first moderator didn't mod you Troll, so that the question made it up to where it could spark a discussion.
Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. *runs off to make an after school special*
First, I think it's partly the fear of being poised at the top of a slippery slope. (Granted, the "slippery slope" argument is a logical fallacy--but debates are not won on logic alone.)
So it's completely peachy and great that there's a backup copy of your OS partitioned off on your drive, and tech support can just walk you through a reinstall unless you somehow managed to hose the partition.
Then, they start shipping computers that do an automatic OS reinstall when certain conditions are met. Maybe annoying for power users, but it will serve most people well.
Then a third-party vendor asks, "Hey, can we get in on this? Have our software phone home telling how the owner uses it. Then we can improve future versions." Annoying, but for a good cause, right?
Then the data this third-party is getting shows that people are jumping ship on their application for one that costs less, and they cripple cross-functionality...and keep sending updates to your computer even if you patch it back the way you want it to be. But you don't get to say anything, because you clicked Yes on the EULA.
Then, seeing the success, a bunch of other vendors jump on the "trusted" bandwagon, and suddenly your computer is about as much yours as if it were part of a bot net. Incremental steps toward a worst-case DRM-everything, your-PC-is-controlled-by-vendors future is what the worry is about.
Is it a justified worry? Given the tendency of, well, humanity to take a mile when given an inch, and the disturbingly long and broad reach of corporations, I'd say yes.
Second, I think the furor over trusted computing is a matter of principle. Allowing control of one's computer to be placed in the hands of one or many corporations, or the government, is something many people, me included, find abhorrent. It's a thread of libertarianism (little "l," moderators, not the political party) that, as far as I can tell, runs through a great many of the more common Slashdot opinions....which is not precisely an answer to the question you asked, but does explain why the question you asked is not precisely the right one.;)
Well, oxygen is Group VI, so it wants 2 electrons, I think (ahgahd...chemistry...so long ago), and the hydrogens both have one valence electron to share, so they form a covalent bond where everybody fakes having a full valence shell. Nobody's donating anything because it's not an ionic compound. But chemistry naming conventions are screwy when it comes to both hydrogen and oxygen, so maybe I'll just sit back and wait for a chemist to set me straight.
The 40's and 50's (with the late 30's, somewhat) were the so-called Golden Age of SF, when most of the familiar conventions of the genre were established. The terms that came into common usage to describe staples of SF are quite likely to have their roots then, and that's born out by the hump in the graph. I'd think the earliest examples of terms would appear a few years before they really entered into the general SF vocabulary.
Why was it the Golden Age? Well, with the atom bomb and the space program, it was a very Science! (with a capital letter and exclamation point, doncha know) era, and the genre literature of the time captured the sense of optimism about the eventual, inevitable future in which technology improved the human condition. Cynicism kicked in later, and there was a dropoff in the Terra-uber-alles school of SF.
I'd also expect to see a chunk of cyberpunk words appearing starting in the 70's and getting a lot of citations in the 80's, when that particular new area of SF took off, which somehow doesn't seem to be the case, but hell, I'm just guessing based on the shape of the graph.
Slashdot Mirror
Just read the CNN article, which is actually from Space.com. I didn't see anything up there that Hoagland didn't open himself up for by attacking NASA's credibility. The assault on his credentials is not even by by Plait, but by Ralph Greenberg from the University of Washington, and Hoagland's rebuttal is included. So, basically, both sides of the issue got airtime, which, from where I'm sitting, is more than Hoagland's claims warrant.
-Carolyn
Ooh, I suppose I had that one coming. But I'm one of those 15-minutes-early people, so I clearly have the moral high ground. ;)
-Carolyn
Did you read more than the Introduction? Plait has individual pages for each claim, which get into the actual science of why Hoagland's ideas are misguided at best.
Oh, and Hoagland's website design is painful. Ow, my eyes.
-Carolyn
I'm glad this made the front page. Phil Plait is a force for Good...or at least Sense, and deserves all the recognition he can get.
If you're going to pound his server, at least click through his advertisers and think about buying his book, huh?
-Carolyn
I'm inclinded to think that it's women who are the most vocal about games being "anti-social"... at least, that's how it's been in my life.
...I'm going home.
;)
This is a conversation I have actually had (paraphrased).
Me: Let's have sex.
Him: Can't. Diablo 2. *click click click*
Me:
Him: Okay, 'bye. *click click click*
How much more anti-social can you get?
Seriously, though, video games are anti-social. So are television, books, meditation, jogging, and about eight zillion other things. There's nothing wrong with solitary pastimes. The problem comes when you let them eat your life.
Or when my boyfriend (no longer the same guy as above...of course) makes us late because he hasn't found a friggin' save point yet.
-Carolyn
Isn't it much too pessimistic to believe that we'll be totally defenseless for centuries?
;) This is much more likely to fail than it is too succeed...but I would definitely want to try if faced with the choice. Because really, what else are you going to do?
I don't really think so, unless something sets off another space race. We're really not too effectual outside of LEO.
If we had a warning time of a few days, that would be sufficient to calculate targeting information to launch a few ICBMs to intercept an incoming rock. The intercept would take place above the atmosphere (some ICBMs are suborbital, and some of them are able to put payloads in orbit).
This would only work on a little bitty rock, and in that case you might as well play the odds that it's going to hit somewhere sparsely-populated rather than risk an atmospheric nuclear detonation. Sure, the rock will hit really hard, but at least it will be a clean explosion with no fallout.
Then there's also the political worry of ICBM launches triggering retaliation. You have more faith in human nature than I if you think the governments of the world can get it together within a couple of days.
With a bit longer warning time (a few months), we could fit a more powerful launch vehicle (say, a Titan IV) with a nuclear warhead. This would allow the intercept to take place well away from the earth (reducing the magnitude of the angular deflection needed to make the object miss Earth entirely).
This is certainly within the realm of possibility, but I think you may have seen Armageddon once too often (and once is too often.
And with a few years' warning time (and a few billion dollars), more sophisticated approaches than a brute-force nuclear attack could be implemented. (I.e., attaching ion engines to the asteroid in order to change its orbit, or painting it white in order to make the increased reflection of sunlight subtly change its orbit.)
The ion engines suggestion is entirely untenable, unless you were planning on having a few hundred of them and a handful of nuclear reactors to power them. I like the solar pressure idea; it's elegant, but we'd need lots of warning. Really, we lack the precision of observation necessary to tell if a rock is going to be a threat in a few years, and if we freaked out about every asteroid that looked as though it and the Earth might be on intersecting trajectories in the next decade, we wouldn't have the energy left to freak out about anything else.
We are the Aztecs, and an extinction-event asteroid is Cortez. No real point in worrying about it, since it's got us so outclassed there's not much we can do about it.
-Carolyn
Yeah, pretty much.
But he's a cool guy outside his flaming-death-of-all-humanity fixation.
-Carolyn
I have an acquaintance. Call him...Jack. (Name changed to protect the obsessed.) Jack has picked two goddamn things about which we can do absolutely nothing to freak him out: near-Earth asteroids and megavolcanoes. He was my friend's boss for a while, and we ended up at a lot of the same parties and restaurants and such. He would always corner me, because I was usually the only aerospace engineer there, and talk for hours about how life as we know it was shortly going to be wiped out by a really big rock, and how this was the greatest threat ever to face humanity.
After this happened a couple of times, I told him that I was comfortable playing the odds that an extinction-level event would hold off for the couple of centuries it would take us to actually be able to deal with it, given the scale of geologic time time to human achievement. He nearly spit his beer across the room.
In conclusion: Space is really big, really empty, and some people just need things to worry about.
-Carolyn
Oh, and because I like you, and not because I am fundamentally a Grammar Nazi... *shifty eyes*
In your sig, "it's" should be "its." The apostrophe only appears in the contracted form of "it is," not in the possessive. Ain't English great?
-Carolyn
Wait, we're believing this guy now?
Then why did we go to all of the trouble of getting this giant wooden horse in here?
Oh, no reason.
*sets horse on fire*
-Carolyn
My only excuse is that I had just finished reading something like 50 posts that explained with great certainty that women's brains were just not capable of analytical thinking on a par with men.
Yeah, the level of sexism on Slashdot is depressing. Every single time there's an article even tangentially about something that might conceivably at one time have been touched by a woman, there's a string of "+5, Funny" posts about how it stops working once a month, demands expensive upgrades, and won't let you buy other equipment. Try that with a racial reference and see how long it takes you to get modded Troll. Likewise, if I posted something that boiled down to "Men are simply incapable of forming the deep and nuanced emotional bonds that women are," I'd be modded into oblivion so fast I'd think the time-stamping on the post was wrong.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoy Slashdot and the pros far outweigh the cons. But some Slashdotters make my punchin' knuckles itch.
-Carolyn
This may be true. I was certainly never interested in dolls, and my brother made pretend guns out of sticks until my pacifist mother relented and bought him toy guns. But, as I said in an earlier post, there's nothing about women that keeps us from making smart consumer decisions when provided with the correct information to do so, which is why this "printer for women" thing is insulting. Look at the iPod. It's not "for men" or "for women." It just has a simple, intuitive UI, attractive styling, and rock-solid design (okay, there's that battery thing...oops), and it's beating the living daylights out of competing products because of it.
But...the stigma of not fitting into your preordained niche is strong, as the former high-school outcasts of Slashdot ought to know. I honestly don't care if I'm a 3-sigma outlier from the rest of my gender, but I want to be taken seriously in my profession and my hobbies, and every single stupid "women don't get technology, tee hee!" product that comes out makes it that much harder, both for me and for women who want to be judged competent in any field. I don't want hand-holding and I don't need to be encouraged. I would just like to see the absence of discouragement.
There is no significant barrier in contributing to opensource projects. Where are the females?
I'd love to, but ya'll don't want my code. "Whaddya mean I can't write it in FORTRAN?"
-Carolyn
I think R. C. Matheson is that guy's son.
-Carolyn
I don't know if they have any designs on Lord of Light yet, but last I heard, Sci-Fi was planning on an Amber miniseries, written by Richard Christian Matheson, whose past writing credits include such tours de force as The A-Team, Knight Rider, and The Incredible Hulk.
;)
P.S. You're not a Cassandra if people believe you.
-Carolyn
Why do car sellers behave this way? I'll tell you why. Because that is how they sell more cars. They're trying to establish a rapport with the customer, and women tend to care more about car color than features. Don't believe me? Well, buying a new car is an exciting experience, and of course my wife told everyone she knew about it. She told her parents. Grandparents. Friends. Pretty much anyone who would listen (hey, she has to have some stereotypical female traits, right?) Without fail, the conversations with the women (her mother, grandmother, female friends, coworkers) went something like:
;)
Wife: I bought a new car yesterday!
Female: Oh, that's so exciting! What color is it?
And as I'm sure you've already guessed, the men all asked "What kind" instead of "What color". So what does that tell me? That you are an anomoly. So is my wife. But most women care more about color/style/looks than they care about specs/features/durability.
I am well aware that this is the state of things. However, the point is that men and women are socialized all their lives to fit into their gender roles. If given half a chance, would there be more overlap in the reactions? I'd hope so, but I can't say; we don't have a control group. What burns me is not women who want to be incredibly social or men who want to be extremely technical, but the immense societal disapproval of women who want to be technical and men who want to be social (which is arguably a worse pressure than on "masculine" women). And the assumption that it's simply the Way Things Are. Of which "The Printer for Women" is simply an absurd example.
So...I blame Society.
-Carolyn
Oh, I wasn't taking umbrage at your observation, since it's accurate.
;)
The question is whether the inclination comes from nature, nurture, or a combination of the two. (Of course it's the last, but what's the spread? 80/20? Vice versa?) Given equal opportunity, pay, and praise, how many women would choose to be teachers over engineers? How many men? Don't ask me; I just do math. The nature/nurture debate is far outside my area of expertise, and fraught with ugly politics.
But we agree that the printer is insanely stupid.
-Carolyn
Also look at how many women there are in "hardcore" tech positions...
I'm an aerospace engineer, and I do finite element analysis on jet engines for a living. It's not computers, but does it count for your purposes?
One of the things I've had to face up to is that women really are less than one in twenty or so (wild guess based on observation) in my profession. Things like the printer for women, or the car for women with the hood welded shut that featured in a recent article, makes me want to simply scream in frustration.
The issue I have with your point is that there's nothing about a woman's innate information processing capabilities that prevents her from looking at a list of features for two printers and picking the one that better meets her needs. The problem is learned helplessness. Being told not to worry her pretty little head, sometimes in so many words. It's rampant in sales and marketing of any kind--those horror stories you hear about women trying to buy cars or computers and being treated like 6 year-olds? They're all true. It's happened to me every time I've gone to make a big-ticket technical or mechanical purchase and it's positively disheartening. (The opposite problem exists in some men, who get talked into buying way more computer/car/grill/whatever than they actually need.)
The political issue of women in science and technology (and the flip side of men in caregiving positions) is way offtopic, and not something I really feel like discussing, because it makes me all ranty.
-Carolyn
Oh, I agree with you. I should perhaps have said "debates are not won on formal logic alone." Just because something can't be formulated into a Boolean proposition doesn't mean it's wrong. (I would have had just as many replies from people saying "Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy!" if I hadn't included the caveat, though. ;)
Still, it is better to frame objections to a course of action in terms of principles. "Trusted" computing is not odious because it may be put to bad uses. It is odious because I object on principle to ceding control of my computer to anyone, especially a paternalistic government or corporation.
-Carolyn
Your first point is true, but I used the bit you're objecting to as an example.
As for your second point, I agree with you on an ethical level, but contract law is a weird, gray area best left to lawyers and black magicians.
-Carolyn
Thank you. It was a perfectly valid question, and I see you got many good responses. I'm glad the first moderator didn't mod you Troll, so that the question made it up to where it could spark a discussion.
Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. *runs off to make an after school special*
-Carolyn
First, I think it's partly the fear of being poised at the top of a slippery slope. (Granted, the "slippery slope" argument is a logical fallacy--but debates are not won on logic alone.)
...which is not precisely an answer to the question you asked, but does explain why the question you asked is not precisely the right one. ;)
So it's completely peachy and great that there's a backup copy of your OS partitioned off on your drive, and tech support can just walk you through a reinstall unless you somehow managed to hose the partition.
Then, they start shipping computers that do an automatic OS reinstall when certain conditions are met. Maybe annoying for power users, but it will serve most people well.
Then a third-party vendor asks, "Hey, can we get in on this? Have our software phone home telling how the owner uses it. Then we can improve future versions." Annoying, but for a good cause, right?
Then the data this third-party is getting shows that people are jumping ship on their application for one that costs less, and they cripple cross-functionality...and keep sending updates to your computer even if you patch it back the way you want it to be. But you don't get to say anything, because you clicked Yes on the EULA.
Then, seeing the success, a bunch of other vendors jump on the "trusted" bandwagon, and suddenly your computer is about as much yours as if it were part of a bot net. Incremental steps toward a worst-case DRM-everything, your-PC-is-controlled-by-vendors future is what the worry is about.
Is it a justified worry? Given the tendency of, well, humanity to take a mile when given an inch, and the disturbingly long and broad reach of corporations, I'd say yes.
Second, I think the furor over trusted computing is a matter of principle. Allowing control of one's computer to be placed in the hands of one or many corporations, or the government, is something many people, me included, find abhorrent. It's a thread of libertarianism (little "l," moderators, not the political party) that, as far as I can tell, runs through a great many of the more common Slashdot opinions.
-Carolyn
Well, oxygen is Group VI, so it wants 2 electrons, I think (ahgahd...chemistry...so long ago), and the hydrogens both have one valence electron to share, so they form a covalent bond where everybody fakes having a full valence shell. Nobody's donating anything because it's not an ionic compound. But chemistry naming conventions are screwy when it comes to both hydrogen and oxygen, so maybe I'll just sit back and wait for a chemist to set me straight.
-Carolyn
Wouldn't it be oxygen dihydride, since the oxygen atom is central? Analogous to carbon dioxide?
This bugs me every time I see the joke. I am such a dork.
-Carolyn
Focus groups will say anything for sweet, sweet candy.
And finding one kind of intrusive web add less annoying than another is like finding Gallagher less annoying than Pauly Shore.
-Carolyn
The 40's and 50's (with the late 30's, somewhat) were the so-called Golden Age of SF, when most of the familiar conventions of the genre were established. The terms that came into common usage to describe staples of SF are quite likely to have their roots then, and that's born out by the hump in the graph. I'd think the earliest examples of terms would appear a few years before they really entered into the general SF vocabulary.
Why was it the Golden Age? Well, with the atom bomb and the space program, it was a very Science! (with a capital letter and exclamation point, doncha know) era, and the genre literature of the time captured the sense of optimism about the eventual, inevitable future in which technology improved the human condition. Cynicism kicked in later, and there was a dropoff in the Terra-uber-alles school of SF.
I'd also expect to see a chunk of cyberpunk words appearing starting in the 70's and getting a lot of citations in the 80's, when that particular new area of SF took off, which somehow doesn't seem to be the case, but hell, I'm just guessing based on the shape of the graph.
-Carolyn