I was thinking this would either be a cruder version of his earlier work, or a polemic. The fact that he hung on to it suggests it was important to him, so I'd suspected it involved his prevailing themes (sexual freedom, personal responsibility, etc.)
Heinlein hated the direction he foresaw the world taking, and it came out more and more in his later works, when he could write pretty much anything and his publisher would print it. I confess to liking Number of the Beast, but lord Bob almighty, it certainly can't compare to Stranger or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I'm glad Heinlein took the time to refine his craft.
That said, I'm kinda looking forward to reading what sounds like a Mary Sue story that neither he nor Ginny would ever have let see the light of day during their lives.
...being susceptible to slickly-packaged and heavily-marketed entertainment makes one a nerd (geek/dork/preferred label)? Nothing against, say, The Matrix or Lord of the Rings (Wednesday, precioussss...), but you don't have to be part of any culture but Western to appreciate those.
Mr. Journalist Man, come back to me when you have computer parts scattered across your living room, and have forgotten to eat or shower because you've almost got that code working, dammit, or when you have more genre fiction books and and comic titles than square feet in your house stacked up in your bedroom, or when you have just roleplayed for 12 hours straight because you couldn't bear to let the session end, or when you finally resolve Saturn as a disc through the telescope you built yourself. It's not about the trappings...it's about the passions.
Hmm...apparently I take my counterculture identity more seriously than I had thought.
Is it so difficult to just do a spacewalk and a visual inspection?
Yes, yes it is. It's very expensive and dangerous, and they have to cover the entire underside of the shuttle, the leading edge of both wings, and the nose. It's hard enough getting cameras and 3D sensors to all those areas. Getting an EVA there would be very difficult.
Also, astronauts train for EVA's by repetition. They practice the same procedure, whether it's screwing in a single bolt on a malfunctioning satellite or replacing the Hubble's lenses, hundreds of times. Everything is choreographed to leave as little room for screwups as possible. If astronauts have to start doing unplanned or more "freeform" EVA's on a regular basis, we'll be seeing a lot more mistakes made.
I've been known to lead with that one from time to time...but I always use |mouse|*|elephant|*sin(theta). Sometimes I even use cos to see if they call me on it.
Here's another math one:
A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are sitting in an outdoor cafe. They watch two people go into a building across the street. Shortly thereafter, three people come out.
"Hmm," says the biologist. "It looks like they reproduced."
"Nah," says the physicist. "There was obviously error in our initial measurement."
The mathematician looks up from his coffee. "Who cares? If another person goes in, it'll be empty."
I'm not sure why modern data would be a must for any non trans/supersonic vehicle...
Seconded. The request for "precision data" makes me wonder, too. The NACA figures are plenty precise and comprehensive...exhaustively, headache-inducingly so. Since the submitter hasn't told us anything about his project, aside from the fact that it seems to involve aerodynamics, we're all whistling in the dark, anyway.
So, anonymous reader: What flight regime? What neighborhood are we talking about for aspect ratio? What data are you looking to gather? If you can't get at a wind tunnel, is a water table an option? Is this purely mathematical work, or are you planning on building a prototype? Is this a fixed-wing project, or are you going to get into *shudder* rotorcraft? I'm sure we'd all love to help a fellow aero geek, but you haven't given us much to work with.
...and I can see why your wife doesn't like FPS. I played some Quake and Doom, but now I'm completely over the genre. Also, she might have a perceptual problem with 3D, which would make a lot of these harder for her. Some of the camera angle switches in 3D games can be frustrating until you learn to adapt, which will take longer for your wife if her spatial perception isn't as good as yours. If that's the case, you might want to stick to 2D games to keep her from beating you to death with the mouse.
You might try some of the classics of RTS, like Command and Conquer or Warcraft II. If she doesn't like them, you're not out much money, and I know that even when WCII was kicking my ass, I would keep going so I could build new units and find out what they said when I annoyed them.
Sounds like adventure games work for both of you (I love 'em myself), so the Monkey Island games are a place to start. There's also an insanely addictive two-player version of Tetris called Battle Tetris floating around out there somewhere--I guess that qualifies as a puzzle game, but only commie mutant traitors don't like Tetris.
Or buy a console. I switched from PC gaming to console gaming ages ago. It's much better for the casual gamer. PSX and GC both have great games and are cheap, but I'd avoid the XBox if you're looking for games you'll both like. Get her hooked on classic non-twitch side-scrollers like Castlevania (can't get me enough Symphony of the Night!) and you'll never run out of games.
Console titles I love, off the top of my head...Bomber Man (best party game evar!!!!!!1), Tetrisphere, anything Castlevania, Super Metroid, anything Zelda, most of the Marios, including Mario Sunshine, the Blood Omen and Legacy of Kain games, the Gauntlet port for PS2, Eternal Darkness, and DDR. (All women like DDR. I think it's some kind of strange XX thing.) A bunch of the older stuff can be emulated, but bear in mind what I said about 3D when choosing console games. Soul Reaver has a lousy algorithm for camera angle, Mario Sunsine is particularly bad if you just can't get the hang of 3D.
Oh, almost forgot...one genre a lot of women (like my roommates) seem to like but I Can. Not. Stand. is RPGs. (If I hear the end boss from Lunar: Silver Star Story say "Time to die!" or hear that Final Fantasy "you beat the random encounter!" music one...more...time...*twitch*) Don't let my biases get in the way--you could give those a try, especially if you're willing to handle the leveling.
Word of advice...if you're substantially better than she is, *don't* completely school her in competitive games. Not only is it demoralizing, but she'll also never get any better, which means she'll get frustrated and not want to play anymore.
...is tomorrow's rock-solid reality. Prominent scientists once thought supersonic flight was impossible, too, but tell that to Chuck Yeager. Hell, my job involves building a jet engine that has a cruising speed faster than Mach 1.
Applied science is a big mountain, and we're still mucking about in the foothills.
>> the perfect weapon would literally stop an enemy in his tracks, >> yet harm neither hide nor hair.
>Nope. The perfect weapon kills all of your enemies
Double-nope. The perfect weapon injures your enemies just enough to incapacitate or cripple them, requiring resources and manpower to nurse them back to health. This damages the enemy army's warfighting capabilities, and demoralizes its troops. That's the reason the bayonet is a great weapon--triangular puncture wounds will not close by themselves and are likely to get infected.
(The *other* lesson the U.S. should have learned from Vietnam, hell, from the Revolutionary War, is: Don't let yourself get dragged into a guerrilla war unless you're the guerrillas.)
Hmm...a clarification for the humor-impaired seems to be in order.
1. I do not have a strong visceral reaction to the thought of Apple using DRM or other restrictive tactics.
2. I suspect this is because they sell really good products, which means my reaction is pragmatic rather than ethical.
(2a. I can't afford Panther yet. Please send me money.)
When I first read this, I was thinking "big fat deal. Everyone knows Apple does proprietary stuff." Then I read some of the comments about how people would be attempting to storm the gates of Redmond if Microsoft pulled something like this, and realized that my attitude is hypocritical.
And I still don't care.
Apparently, my principles don't come into play when the software works seamlessly and efficiently and the UI is so pretty.
This would bother me, but OSX is shiny and it's distracting me....
Certainly our concept of the universe is incomplete. I allowed as to that in my original post, though I phrased it poorly. The theories you refer to are, at this time, a lot of really pretty math and little else. The two men I mentioned, Newton and Galileo[1], corrected fundamental misapprehensions about the nature of the universe, allowing progress in science and engineering. When membrane theory or fractal dimensionality or theory x lead to an application that lets you step into your Dimensional Teleporter in New York and step out on the Unknown Kadath Memorial Dyson Sphere[2] in Andromeda, then the impact will be similar and our map of the universe fundamentally changed.
The latter questions you mention are an interesting area. I would like to think science could one day explore more philosophical subjects--a thorough understanding of the brain would be lovely. But I'm of a materialist bent, so until you offer me some evidence that we are more than a local phenomenon of highly complex self-organizing molecules, I can't see most of your later questions as anything but fun subjects to discuss while drunk. (I would tend to trust Descartes more in geometry than philosophy, for what it's worth.)
[1] Nods to Aristotle, Liebniz, Kepler, Copernicus...but this is a/. post, not an essay.
[2] Now accepting donations.
P.S. [pet peeve] The man's name is Hawking. [/pet peeve]
As for the decline in achievement post 1800... that's probably because all the low-hanging fruit are gone. The remaining problems tend to be "hard" in some non-trivial sense.
I think new advances are going, for the large part, to less dramatic. Our view of the universe doesn't need substantial, fundamental corrections anymore (well, I could be wrong--pre-1904 physicists thought that, too), and our advancements have largely been in applied science.
Also, the dropoff could be partly because we haven't recognized the significance of certain achievements yet. We've had centuries to realize that Newton or Galileo were geniuses, and for their discoveries to pervade our society. But who will be the giants of 500 years hence? Einstein? Turing? That undergrad toiling in obscurity?
I think most of us saw this coming. It's gotten to the point that when my boyfriend wants to talk about NASA's latest shortcoming, I just don't have the heart. Does it hurt anyone else that the United States is turning its back on space? I cannot understand those people who could watch the footage of the Apollo landings or see the photographs from the Viking missions, who were alive and could experience the breathless awe of the American space program at its peak, yet decide that the risks are too great and step back from the challenge.
I do not doubt that humanity will inherit the stars, one day...but it could have been within my lifetime. Thinking otherwise makes me want to cry.
(Before anyone jumps on me about US-centrism, I'm talking about the 60's and 70's, when the US won the space sprint and then decided to walk the marathon--and now it looks like we're dropping out of the race altogether.)
But where's the math? What's the coefficient of drag on the Enterprise? What's the viscosity of spacetime? How compressible is it? Where are the tables so I can calculate the warp drag on *my* spacecraft? How can I reproduce their results!?
Stupid ivory tower academics. Us *real* engineers have starship design to do while they're messing around.
Fair enough. I was just wondering if there was "value-add," to use Marketingese. Doesn't sound like there would be for me, but I can see how others would like it. I'm curmudgeonly enough that I miss 80 character monospace displays, anyway, so I don't think I'm really part of their target market.
I'm curious as to what you get out of it that you can't get out of IRC or AIM and flash games like Bejeweled. I guess what I want to know is...why pay for what (to me) looks like feature creep on text chat and a bunch of fairly simple games?
So it's only okay to use the court system in defense of a monopoly or proprietary information?
The FSF's attempts to enforce their licensing is fair, not knee-breaking or Communism, as the writer implies. You used the code, you're bound by the license--which is not kind to closed-source business models. Cry me a fuckin' river.
Really? Excellent! Are you industry or government? It's been almost 8 months since I came by the ~22% figure, and it might reflect NASA's innate conservatism--that is, they're only willing to deploy technologies with a certain degree of history for things like planetary missions in order to minimize risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Why didn't you preface that with "I am making a huge fucking generalization?" You'd come off as less of an ass that way.
-Carolyn
I was thinking this would either be a cruder version of his earlier work, or a polemic. The fact that he hung on to it suggests it was important to him, so I'd suspected it involved his prevailing themes (sexual freedom, personal responsibility, etc.)
Heinlein hated the direction he foresaw the world taking, and it came out more and more in his later works, when he could write pretty much anything and his publisher would print it. I confess to liking Number of the Beast, but lord Bob almighty, it certainly can't compare to Stranger or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I'm glad Heinlein took the time to refine his craft.
That said, I'm kinda looking forward to reading what sounds like a Mary Sue story that neither he nor Ginny would ever have let see the light of day during their lives.
-Carolyn
...being susceptible to slickly-packaged and heavily-marketed entertainment makes one a nerd (geek/dork/preferred label)? Nothing against, say, The Matrix or Lord of the Rings (Wednesday, precioussss...), but you don't have to be part of any culture but Western to appreciate those.
Mr. Journalist Man, come back to me when you have computer parts scattered across your living room, and have forgotten to eat or shower because you've almost got that code working, dammit, or when you have more genre fiction books and and comic titles than square feet in your house stacked up in your bedroom, or when you have just roleplayed for 12 hours straight because you couldn't bear to let the session end, or when you finally resolve Saturn as a disc through the telescope you built yourself. It's not about the trappings...it's about the passions.
Hmm...apparently I take my counterculture identity more seriously than I had thought.
-Carolyn
Is it so difficult to just do a spacewalk and a visual inspection?
Yes, yes it is. It's very expensive and dangerous, and they have to cover the entire underside of the shuttle, the leading edge of both wings, and the nose. It's hard enough getting cameras and 3D sensors to all those areas. Getting an EVA there would be very difficult.
Also, astronauts train for EVA's by repetition. They practice the same procedure, whether it's screwing in a single bolt on a malfunctioning satellite or replacing the Hubble's lenses, hundreds of times. Everything is choreographed to leave as little room for screwups as possible. If astronauts have to start doing unplanned or more "freeform" EVA's on a regular basis, we'll be seeing a lot more mistakes made.
-Carolyn
It would be |turkey|*|chicken|*sin(theta).
I've been known to lead with that one from time to time...but I always use |mouse|*|elephant|*sin(theta). Sometimes I even use cos to see if they call me on it.
Here's another math one:
A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are sitting in an outdoor cafe. They watch two people go into a building across the street. Shortly thereafter, three people come out.
"Hmm," says the biologist. "It looks like they reproduced."
"Nah," says the physicist. "There was obviously error in our initial measurement."
The mathematician looks up from his coffee. "Who cares? If another person goes in, it'll be empty."
-Carolyn
...and they mostly look at me funny.
Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
A: You can't cross a vector with a scaler.
-Carolyn
Too bad "collectible" is secret gaming industry code language for "this is going to suck like a Hoover in overdrive."
-Carolyn
I'm not sure why modern data would be a must for any non trans/supersonic vehicle...
Seconded. The request for "precision data" makes me wonder, too. The NACA figures are plenty precise and comprehensive...exhaustively, headache-inducingly so. Since the submitter hasn't told us anything about his project, aside from the fact that it seems to involve aerodynamics, we're all whistling in the dark, anyway.
So, anonymous reader: What flight regime? What neighborhood are we talking about for aspect ratio? What data are you looking to gather? If you can't get at a wind tunnel, is a water table an option? Is this purely mathematical work, or are you planning on building a prototype? Is this a fixed-wing project, or are you going to get into *shudder* rotorcraft? I'm sure we'd all love to help a fellow aero geek, but you haven't given us much to work with.
-Carolyn
...and I can see why your wife doesn't like FPS. I played some Quake and Doom, but now I'm completely over the genre. Also, she might have a perceptual problem with 3D, which would make a lot of these harder for her. Some of the camera angle switches in 3D games can be frustrating until you learn to adapt, which will take longer for your wife if her spatial perception isn't as good as yours. If that's the case, you might want to stick to 2D games to keep her from beating you to death with the mouse.
You might try some of the classics of RTS, like Command and Conquer or Warcraft II. If she doesn't like them, you're not out much money, and I know that even when WCII was kicking my ass, I would keep going so I could build new units and find out what they said when I annoyed them.
Sounds like adventure games work for both of you (I love 'em myself), so the Monkey Island games are a place to start. There's also an insanely addictive two-player version of Tetris called Battle Tetris floating around out there somewhere--I guess that qualifies as a puzzle game, but only commie mutant traitors don't like Tetris.
Or buy a console. I switched from PC gaming to console gaming ages ago. It's much better for the casual gamer. PSX and GC both have great games and are cheap, but I'd avoid the XBox if you're looking for games you'll both like. Get her hooked on classic non-twitch side-scrollers like Castlevania (can't get me enough Symphony of the Night!) and you'll never run out of games.
Console titles I love, off the top of my head...Bomber Man (best party game evar!!!!!!1), Tetrisphere, anything Castlevania, Super Metroid, anything Zelda, most of the Marios, including Mario Sunshine, the Blood Omen and Legacy of Kain games, the Gauntlet port for PS2, Eternal Darkness, and DDR. (All women like DDR. I think it's some kind of strange XX thing.) A bunch of the older stuff can be emulated, but bear in mind what I said about 3D when choosing console games. Soul Reaver has a lousy algorithm for camera angle, Mario Sunsine is particularly bad if you just can't get the hang of 3D.
Oh, almost forgot...one genre a lot of women (like my roommates) seem to like but I Can. Not. Stand. is RPGs. (If I hear the end boss from Lunar: Silver Star Story say "Time to die!" or hear that Final Fantasy "you beat the random encounter!" music one...more...time...*twitch*) Don't let my biases get in the way--you could give those a try, especially if you're willing to handle the leveling.
Word of advice...if you're substantially better than she is, *don't* completely school her in competitive games. Not only is it demoralizing, but she'll also never get any better, which means she'll get frustrated and not want to play anymore.
-Carolyn
...is tomorrow's rock-solid reality. Prominent scientists once thought supersonic flight was impossible, too, but tell that to Chuck Yeager. Hell, my job involves building a jet engine that has a cruising speed faster than Mach 1.
Applied science is a big mountain, and we're still mucking about in the foothills.
-Carolyn
>> the perfect weapon would literally stop an enemy in his tracks,
>> yet harm neither hide nor hair.
>Nope. The perfect weapon kills all of your enemies
Double-nope. The perfect weapon injures your enemies just enough to incapacitate or cripple them, requiring resources and manpower to nurse them back to health. This damages the enemy army's warfighting capabilities, and demoralizes its troops. That's the reason the bayonet is a great weapon--triangular puncture wounds will not close by themselves and are likely to get infected.
(The *other* lesson the U.S. should have learned from Vietnam, hell, from the Revolutionary War, is: Don't let yourself get dragged into a guerrilla war unless you're the guerrillas.)
-Carolyn
Hmm...a clarification for the humor-impaired seems to be in order.
1. I do not have a strong visceral reaction to the thought of Apple using DRM or other restrictive tactics.
2. I suspect this is because they sell really good products, which means my reaction is pragmatic rather than ethical.
(2a. I can't afford Panther yet. Please send me money.)
3. This disturbs me.
-Carolyn
When I first read this, I was thinking "big fat deal. Everyone knows Apple does proprietary stuff." Then I read some of the comments about how people would be attempting to storm the gates of Redmond if Microsoft pulled something like this, and realized that my attitude is hypocritical.
And I still don't care.
Apparently, my principles don't come into play when the software works seamlessly and efficiently and the UI is so pretty.
This would bother me, but OSX is shiny and it's distracting me....
-Carolyn
That was very scattershot....
/. post, not an essay.
Certainly our concept of the universe is incomplete. I allowed as to that in my original post, though I phrased it poorly. The theories you refer to are, at this time, a lot of really pretty math and little else. The two men I mentioned, Newton and Galileo[1], corrected fundamental misapprehensions about the nature of the universe, allowing progress in science and engineering. When membrane theory or fractal dimensionality or theory x lead to an application that lets you step into your Dimensional Teleporter in New York and step out on the Unknown Kadath Memorial Dyson Sphere[2] in Andromeda, then the impact will be similar and our map of the universe fundamentally changed.
The latter questions you mention are an interesting area. I would like to think science could one day explore more philosophical subjects--a thorough understanding of the brain would be lovely. But I'm of a materialist bent, so until you offer me some evidence that we are more than a local phenomenon of highly complex self-organizing molecules, I can't see most of your later questions as anything but fun subjects to discuss while drunk. (I would tend to trust Descartes more in geometry than philosophy, for what it's worth.)
[1] Nods to Aristotle, Liebniz, Kepler, Copernicus...but this is a
[2] Now accepting donations.
P.S. [pet peeve] The man's name is Hawking. [/pet peeve]
-Carolyn
As for the decline in achievement post 1800... that's probably because all the low-hanging fruit are gone. The remaining problems tend to be "hard" in some non-trivial sense.
I think new advances are going, for the large part, to less dramatic. Our view of the universe doesn't need substantial, fundamental corrections anymore (well, I could be wrong--pre-1904 physicists thought that, too), and our advancements have largely been in applied science.
Also, the dropoff could be partly because we haven't recognized the significance of certain achievements yet. We've had centuries to realize that Newton or Galileo were geniuses, and for their discoveries to pervade our society. But who will be the giants of 500 years hence? Einstein? Turing? That undergrad toiling in obscurity?
-Carolyn
I think most of us saw this coming. It's gotten to the point that when my boyfriend wants to talk about NASA's latest shortcoming, I just don't have the heart. Does it hurt anyone else that the United States is turning its back on space? I cannot understand those people who could watch the footage of the Apollo landings or see the photographs from the Viking missions, who were alive and could experience the breathless awe of the American space program at its peak, yet decide that the risks are too great and step back from the challenge.
I do not doubt that humanity will inherit the stars, one day...but it could have been within my lifetime. Thinking otherwise makes me want to cry.
(Before anyone jumps on me about US-centrism, I'm talking about the 60's and 70's, when the US won the space sprint and then decided to walk the marathon--and now it looks like we're dropping out of the race altogether.)
-Carolyn
But where's the math? What's the coefficient of drag on the Enterprise? What's the viscosity of spacetime? How compressible is it? Where are the tables so I can calculate the warp drag on *my* spacecraft? How can I reproduce their results!?
Stupid ivory tower academics. Us *real* engineers have starship design to do while they're messing around.
-Carolyn
Fair enough. I was just wondering if there was "value-add," to use Marketingese. Doesn't sound like there would be for me, but I can see how others would like it. I'm curmudgeonly enough that I miss 80 character monospace displays, anyway, so I don't think I'm really part of their target market.
-Carolyn
I'm curious as to what you get out of it that you can't get out of IRC or AIM and flash games like Bejeweled. I guess what I want to know is...why pay for what (to me) looks like feature creep on text chat and a bunch of fairly simple games?
-Carolyn
The main character's name is *Leon*.
"Leon Belmont...tax accountant by day, vampire hunter by night."
-Carolyn
13.699 billion years, then. That's still eight orders of magnitude off from 200 years, no matter how many nits you pick. ;)
Thanks for the astrophysics lesson, though.
-Carolyn
200? I could have sworn atoms were around 13.7 billion years old, give or take.
-Carolyn
So it's only okay to use the court system in defense of a monopoly or proprietary information?
The FSF's attempts to enforce their licensing is fair, not knee-breaking or Communism, as the writer implies. You used the code, you're bound by the license--which is not kind to closed-source business models. Cry me a fuckin' river.
-Carolyn
I give up! I'll buy a GameCube!
Now I just need a TV....
-Carolyn
Really? Excellent! Are you industry or government? It's been almost 8 months since I came by the ~22% figure, and it might reflect NASA's innate conservatism--that is, they're only willing to deploy technologies with a certain degree of history for things like planetary missions in order to minimize risk.
-Carolyn