Aye. Evolution doesn't produce perfect. It produces good enough.
There's some subtlety here. I suspect PitaBred is saying that evolution produces "good enough" in one trait but doesn't push for perfection in that trait at the expense of other traits. Which is true.
In whole-of-organism terms, though, PitaBred's statement is almost exactly untrue. Evolution does produce locally "perfect", in the sense that if it finds itself on the slope of a hill it will climb that hill to the top. On the other hand evolution doesn't produce "good enough": if there's no continuously rising path to survival it will go extinct rather than follow an initially downward one.
Assuming longer memory is an advantage someone does need to explain why rats don't have it.
The sequels will very likely be stupid but harmless. At worst they will waste the time and money of the gullible and the completists. It seems a strange idea to use someone who's only written fantasy to follow on from hard SF, though.
The use of the Cthulhu mythos by other writers too numerous to mention (recently, Charles Stross) is an example where this sort of thing is considered by many to have turned out well. Others have mentioned The Seven Percent Solution. Any other examples?
For what it's worth I thought the movie's core idea was entirely in the spirit of the stories. It revolved around an unanticipated interpretation of the three laws, which is exactly the formula of the originals. There were some stupid bits in the action scenes but I don't think it deserves the bagging it gets.
[...] like fixing an automobile that was designed with square wheels by manually sawing off the corners to make them octagonal instead. You could create a recursive software routine to continue sawing until the wheels were a good approximation of round [...]
Would you call this a workaround? Or correction of a rounding error?
I apologise for a use of the word "some" that you apparently think inappropriate. Please substitute "many" for "some" in my question.
Now, can anyone tell me the answer to my question, as modified? OK, there's 200 of Shakespeare's phrases. Can we be confident that is because Shakespeare is the author? How can we reject alternate explanations like plagiarism or homage?
Your assumption I hadn't read the article is I know inaccurate and I think unwarranted. More importantly it's pointless because it isn't relevant to the issue I raised. Sniping like this is rarely helpful.
So they've found a play that has some of Shakespeare's pet phrases in it. How do we know Shakespeare wrote it? We need to be able to reject alternatives like someone plagiarising those phrases from Shakespeare, or someone writing a deliberate homage of Shakespeare.
Something similar happens in linguistics, where you're trying to tell if two languages are related but you can't tell if a pair of words are cognates or borrowed.
Anyone who was in Canberra around 2003 is going to find this spookily familiar. The Mount Stromlo Observatory was pretty much destroyed by a bush fire in that year. It was especially sad because it could have been saved except that the firefighters were focused on Canberra suburbs and towns like Tharwa. Also, a CCD they were building for an international telescope got left behind in the panic. Stromlo was historically important but past its best as an observational sight by that time.
I don't know the details of the laws affecting BM but most jurisdictions recognise more levels than "public" and "private". A shopping mall, for example, is kind of in-between, a privately-owned public space. I can have a policy of not letting black people into my home and I'm legally in the clear. If I had the same policy in my night club I'd be more likely to be in trouble, if I tried it in a shopping mall I owned even more so. Even though all these places belong to or are leased by me.
The only way to sustain any interest in space exploration is what you call "stunts".
On the whole I don't think the record of stunts has been all that good.
I would describe the international space station as a stunt, i.e. something done because it's perceived to be cool rather than because it's useful. It's cost a fortune and doesn't seem to have ignited much excitement.
The space shuttle could be seen as a stunt: persisted with because reusable is cool even if it costs more. It's attracted some attention I guess so call it a partially successful stunt.
Apollo was a stunt that ran out of excitement in the early seventies and led to no follow-on.
I see the Hubble Space Telescope as the best of the stunt and non-stunt worlds: cool and useful.
Spirit and Opportunity have both a useful and a stunty element to them.
What's more, a goodly chunk of the air fatalities in that table happened on a single day in September 2001. So the air fatality rate is arguably inflated.
The moral seems to be that if you want your internet to reliably stay up, but can't be bothered to protect the infrastructure (and fair enough to some extent, since it would be a tough job) then you need a wireless backup for every community. Something that can bypass the cut and provide a trickle of internet.
Assuming we only think we'll have this problem occasionally in one place at a time, maybe a mobile solution would be appropriate. A pair of vehicles, wirelessly linked, that hook up to either side of the cut and bridge it seamlessly.
In other words, our only problem is that the internet isn't a truck.
And about every 10-20 years we could cut down the trees and build something with them as an added bonus.
In other words, you're talking about running a plantation that could produce lumber, but instead storing the lumber to sequester carbon dioxide. So we can calculate the cost of this program fairly easily: it's the cost of running our cars on lumber. Unfortunately I understand that's kind of high.
Let's put is this way: taxes are never fair. They are an unavoidable evil. Robert Heinlein said it best, "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys." ("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Heinlein wrote those words in character: they're what Bernardo de la Paz believes, not necessarily what Heinlein believes.
And we can't assume Heinlein stands by his characters: Bernardo de la Paz would have been horrified by the government of Starship Troopers.
Bernardo de la Paz also believed taxes to be an avoidable, rather than unavoidable, evil. Though the epilogue of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress may imply he was wrong.
The show stopper is that every sub-geosynchronous satellite would sooner or later collide with the elevator.
A space elevator would be nice, but lower-orbit
satellites are way more important.
our descendants would be pretty glad if we'd shipped out bugs that had quietly been transforming methane into oxygen (for example) over the centuries...
Probably about as glad as we are that our ancestors left goats on remote islands they discovered. i.e. not at all.
If we invented bugs that could transmute elements (which is what you need to do to transform methane into oxygen) then it would be time for the "I, for one," overlord jokes.
gnore the Prequels for a moment... let's take the universe deployed in the original piece. [...] The inefficient Republic couldn't really do much, and it clearly lacked a massive military so that the Jedi were keepers of the peace and generally given free range.
Are we still ignoring the prequels? I don't see this information in the original trilogy.
Under the Republic, he was governed by a nobleman, probably a King or Queen
Maybe. We can't really be sure without seeing more worlds. Perhaps there's a wide variety of governments.
who wants to bet that Princess Leia's election to the Senate, as daughter of the King, was about as competitive of Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin's elections
Possibly. Or maybe she's a politician who got her start through family connections. Like Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Pitt the Younger, George III when he was playing politician, etc., etc..
We just don't know enough to draw these conclusions. The movies don't go into enough detail.
Surely that would be down to the brilliant leadership of Servalan
Except:
1. she wasn't in charge. The high council got restored. She was just a bureaucrat in charge of drugging rebellious colonies.
2. That never made sense either. What, every single person who'd ever seen her was killed? Every photograph, every painting? Ridiculous. It's like Adolf Hitler coming back to be a senior bureaucrat in West Germany.
A major turning point had to be the episode "Moloch" where she acquired replication technology to rebuild the fleet
And yet we never hear of it again.
There are lots of good reasons to like Blake's 7, but continuity isn't one of them.
My dream third season has Servalan captured and locked up on the Liberator, being used by Avon to help him build a replacement state for the federation. I guess this got made later and called Andromeda, except it didn't have enough Servalan in it.
Describing the effects as 'average' is a bit of an exaggeration - they were absolutely terrible.
They were cheap. They had to get rid of the Liberator set because it creaked audibly when the actors walked on it.
Some of the acting was pretty dire too.
And some was superb. Darrow and Keating in particular, with support from Thomas and Pierce.
It had other problems as well. The arc plotting was awful, though that was standard in its day: gadgets would be introduced and then never used again; ORAC was absurdly powerful and underused; the brilliant ending of Season Two (the destruction of the Federation) was undercut by a pathetic reversion to business-as-usual in Season Three (oh look, the Federation's back).
more aggressive characters tended to die off quite quickly.
Not really. The only crewperson to die on camera before the final episode was Gan.
Blake was on a mission to save everyone, but everyone else was out for themselves.
Again, not really. Even Avon stuck around when he could have run. In some ways a weakness: why did Vila stay, for instance?
For a long time this was the best SF there'd ever been on television. By comparison we're spoilt for choice these days. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much.
Slashdot Mirror
There's some subtlety here. I suspect PitaBred is saying that evolution produces "good enough" in one trait but doesn't push for perfection in that trait at the expense of other traits. Which is true.
In whole-of-organism terms, though, PitaBred's statement is almost exactly untrue. Evolution does produce locally "perfect", in the sense that if it finds itself on the slope of a hill it will climb that hill to the top. On the other hand evolution doesn't produce "good enough": if there's no continuously rising path to survival it will go extinct rather than follow an initially downward one.
Assuming longer memory is an advantage someone does need to explain why rats don't have it.
The sequels will very likely be stupid but harmless. At worst they will waste the time and money of the gullible and the completists. It seems a strange idea to use someone who's only written fantasy to follow on from hard SF, though.
The use of the Cthulhu mythos by other writers too numerous to mention (recently, Charles Stross) is an example where this sort of thing is considered by many to have turned out well. Others have mentioned The Seven Percent Solution. Any other examples?
For what it's worth I thought the movie's core idea was entirely in the spirit of the stories. It revolved around an unanticipated interpretation of the three laws, which is exactly the formula of the originals. There were some stupid bits in the action scenes but I don't think it deserves the bagging it gets.
Would you call this a workaround? Or correction of a rounding error?
I apologise for a use of the word "some" that you apparently think inappropriate. Please substitute "many" for "some" in my question.
Now, can anyone tell me the answer to my question, as modified? OK, there's 200 of Shakespeare's phrases. Can we be confident that is because Shakespeare is the author? How can we reject alternate explanations like plagiarism or homage?
Your assumption I hadn't read the article is I know inaccurate and I think unwarranted. More importantly it's pointless because it isn't relevant to the issue I raised. Sniping like this is rarely helpful.
So they've found a play that has some of Shakespeare's pet phrases in it. How do we know Shakespeare wrote it? We need to be able to reject alternatives like someone plagiarising those phrases from Shakespeare, or someone writing a deliberate homage of Shakespeare. Something similar happens in linguistics, where you're trying to tell if two languages are related but you can't tell if a pair of words are cognates or borrowed.
Anyone who was in Canberra around 2003 is going to find this spookily familiar. The Mount Stromlo Observatory was pretty much destroyed by a bush fire in that year. It was especially sad because it could have been saved except that the firefighters were focused on Canberra suburbs and towns like Tharwa. Also, a CCD they were building for an international telescope got left behind in the panic. Stromlo was historically important but past its best as an observational sight by that time.
I don't know the details of the laws affecting BM but most jurisdictions recognise more levels than "public" and "private". A shopping mall, for example, is kind of in-between, a privately-owned public space. I can have a policy of not letting black people into my home and I'm legally in the clear. If I had the same policy in my night club I'd be more likely to be in trouble, if I tried it in a shopping mall I owned even more so. Even though all these places belong to or are leased by me.
On the whole I don't think the record of stunts has been all that good.
I would describe the international space station as a stunt, i.e. something done because it's perceived to be cool rather than because it's useful. It's cost a fortune and doesn't seem to have ignited much excitement.
The space shuttle could be seen as a stunt: persisted with because reusable is cool even if it costs more. It's attracted some attention I guess so call it a partially successful stunt.
Apollo was a stunt that ran out of excitement in the early seventies and led to no follow-on.
I see the Hubble Space Telescope as the best of the stunt and non-stunt worlds: cool and useful.
Spirit and Opportunity have both a useful and a stunty element to them.
What's more, a goodly chunk of the air fatalities in that table happened on a single day in September 2001. So the air fatality rate is arguably inflated.
In capitalist America, porcupine stick it to you.
The moral seems to be that if you want your internet to reliably stay up, but can't be bothered to protect the infrastructure (and fair enough to some extent, since it would be a tough job) then you need a wireless backup for every community. Something that can bypass the cut and provide a trickle of internet.
Assuming we only think we'll have this problem occasionally in one place at a time, maybe a mobile solution would be appropriate. A pair of vehicles, wirelessly linked, that hook up to either side of the cut and bridge it seamlessly.
In other words, our only problem is that the internet isn't a truck.
Technically that's deflagration, not detonation.
In the days before socialism, men lived in trees.
And about every 10-20 years we could cut down the trees and build something with them as an added bonus.
In other words, you're talking about running a plantation that could produce lumber, but instead storing the lumber to sequester carbon dioxide. So we can calculate the cost of this program fairly easily: it's the cost of running our cars on lumber. Unfortunately I understand that's kind of high.
If we don't limit ourselves to sky then it's the fifth brightest in any direction: sun, earth, moon, Venus, ISS.
This is the tip of the iceberg. If IBM ever invents a method of stopping people reading slashdot then we're screwed.
Let's put is this way: taxes are never fair. They are an unavoidable evil. Robert Heinlein said it best, "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys." ("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Heinlein wrote those words in character: they're what Bernardo de la Paz believes, not necessarily what Heinlein believes.
And we can't assume Heinlein stands by his characters: Bernardo de la Paz would have been horrified by the government of Starship Troopers.
Bernardo de la Paz also believed taxes to be an avoidable, rather than unavoidable, evil. Though the epilogue of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress may imply he was wrong.
The show stopper is that every sub-geosynchronous satellite would sooner or later collide with the elevator. A space elevator would be nice, but lower-orbit satellites are way more important.
our descendants would be pretty glad if we'd shipped out bugs that had quietly been transforming methane into oxygen (for example) over the centuries...
Probably about as glad as we are that our ancestors left goats on remote islands they discovered. i.e. not at all.
If we invented bugs that could transmute elements (which is what you need to do to transform methane into oxygen) then it would be time for the "I, for one," overlord jokes.
Robert Silverberg's novel Invaders From Earth is about Earth invading Ganymede with similar excuses. There were lakes of ethane on the surface.
Repeated addition is inefficient. It would be faster to find the prime factors of a and b, sum the exponents and multiply the powers together.
Are we still ignoring the prequels? I don't see this information in the original trilogy.
Maybe. We can't really be sure without seeing more worlds. Perhaps there's a wide variety of governments.
Possibly. Or maybe she's a politician who got her start through family connections. Like Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Pitt the Younger, George III when he was playing politician, etc., etc..
We just don't know enough to draw these conclusions. The movies don't go into enough detail.
Ignore D-Cypell. He's just another of Jonathon Swift's sock puppets.
Except:
-
1. she wasn't in charge. The high council got restored. She was just a bureaucrat in charge of drugging rebellious colonies.
-
2. That never made sense either. What, every single person who'd ever seen her was killed? Every photograph, every painting? Ridiculous. It's like Adolf Hitler coming back to be a senior bureaucrat in West Germany.
A major turning point had to be the episode "Moloch" where she acquired replication technology to rebuild the fleetAnd yet we never hear of it again.
There are lots of good reasons to like Blake's 7, but continuity isn't one of them.
My dream third season has Servalan captured and locked up on the Liberator, being used by Avon to help him build a replacement state for the federation. I guess this got made later and called Andromeda, except it didn't have enough Servalan in it.
They were cheap. They had to get rid of the Liberator set because it creaked audibly when the actors walked on it.
Some of the acting was pretty dire too.And some was superb. Darrow and Keating in particular, with support from Thomas and Pierce.
It had other problems as well. The arc plotting was awful, though that was standard in its day: gadgets would be introduced and then never used again; ORAC was absurdly powerful and underused; the brilliant ending of Season Two (the destruction of the Federation) was undercut by a pathetic reversion to business-as-usual in Season Three (oh look, the Federation's back).
more aggressive characters tended to die off quite quickly.Not really. The only crewperson to die on camera before the final episode was Gan.
Blake was on a mission to save everyone, but everyone else was out for themselves.Again, not really. Even Avon stuck around when he could have run. In some ways a weakness: why did Vila stay, for instance?
For a long time this was the best SF there'd ever been on television. By comparison we're spoilt for choice these days. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much.