Rindis's comments (member since Dec 23, 2008)

Rindis's comments from the Atheists and Skeptics group.

Well... it depends on your meaning of 'quality'. It sounds like Stephen is thinking more in terms of 'hard' SF = 'quality', something with which I heartily disagree.

A lot of the drop-off of the 'harder' aspects of SF have to deal with the fact that the audience has moved on to worrying more about the story than the background. Which is also to say the audience has gotten broader.

Don't get me wrong, I like authors who can spin the intricacies of real-world physics into the warp and woof of their creations. But, I am first concerned that they can tell a good story. The physics can't save a poorly plotted story, but a well crafted one will leave you not worrying about the physics.

So, the number of people who can write good hard SF has always been limited, and with the broadening of the market and the dilution of fan culture (which is as much a result of forces completely outside the fanbase as anything else), it has gone from center stage to a small subgenre. It's hardly a unique circumstance, sadly.

Some good SF with a 'hard' undercurrent that you're probably not aware of: Freefall (it helps that the author is an engineer...).

RGB pretty much has it. I disagree with a few of his recommendations, but only a few. Lois McMaster Bujold is, for my money, the best thing happening in SF right now.

On Niven, I would warn that I consider Ringworld a pretty poor novel. It's well worth reading for the big ideas, but the plot and characters aren't really there. The Integral Trees is good, but my favorite novel by him (alone) would be A World Out of Time. The Niven/Pournelle collaborations are pretty universally worth reading, and The Mote in God's Eye is probably the best one. I will note that their Footfall is probably the best 'alien invasion of the Earth' stories done, if you have any interest in that genre. (Whoops, didn't notice RGB's prior recommendation at first.)

I also recommend James P. Hogan, or at least his earlier works, he's gotten shrill and curmudgeonly since. The really good ones:
Inherit the Stars
The Two Faces Of Tomorrow
The Proteus Operation
Code of the Lifemaker

For a lesser-known past master, I heartily recommend H. Beam Piper:
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
Little Fuzzy

I notice that the early threads seem to be created by "Deleted Member" -- which is probably all the answer we'll get.

Their eyes probably exploded from reading his posts. *cough*essays*cough*

I really need the "RGB Channel", his posts are always a great read. (And, I suppose, 'colorful'. ^_^)

and what church is there but the Catholic Church -- no self-respecting secret society goes around murdering Baptists or Born Again Preachers

A good point, and one that seems to be so ingrained into the culture that it takes a little stepping back from things like this to realize it. I suppose it's an attractive meme for things like this because it's a much larger and more monolithic organization than any other brand of Christianity.

On the other hand, it's also a sign of just how deep Catholicism has seeped into parts of American culture. Kind of a sad legacy for a country that grew from a bunch of religious malcontents.

This seems to have come up because some overexcited faithful believe the Bible describes a spherical Earth before the Greeks or Indians came up with it.

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/e...

The circle on the face of the waters is one of the proofs that the Greeks used for a spherical earth. Yet here it is recorded in Job, ages before the Greeks discovered it. (Middle of 4th paragraph)

Without looking into the other bits given, I find their insistence on translating Job 26:10 with 'circle' instead of 'boundary' suspect.

I've been watching. And too busy reading to comment. ~_^ ...and this is the first time something I can speak to hasn't been well covered by everyone else first.

This may have been religious thought, but it is not biblical. Job speaks of the circle of the earth in the OT.

Are you sure he doesn't mean an actual circle (flat) as opposed to a sphere? Early antiquity played around with a number of models of how the Earth worked, including flat disks (I've been searching, but can't find an image of the Greek-antiquity-based map with the land divided into Europe, Asia, and Africa with the circular world-ocean around them.)

Though looking over at the Paralel Bible, I have to wonder if it says 'circle' at all, or just 'boundary' (or 'limit' per Young's Literal Translation). Translating it as 'circle' and then exploding that phrase to indicate an understanding of a spherical earth seems overly ambitious to me. The Geneva Study Bible commentary seem a much more likely interpretation to me.

I would say that our own society has had some success, and our legal system is based on the Bible.

Please study your history. English (and American) legal practice is a mix of Roman (dating back to pre-Republican times) and Anglo-Saxon practices. A lot of modern law theory dates back to the re-emergence of important urban centers in the Middle Ages, which then turned to the excruciatingly well-documented Roman law codes as a 'working model' for their own. (The Day the Universe Changed goes into some of this—though as I recall the TV series actually gives it more attention.)

...Any bridge hand is infinitely unlikely. The existence of a deck of cards -- try predicting that from the laws of physics, or looking for one to have emerged from the rocks on the surface of Ganymede! The existence of a set of utterly artificial rules for a game that is completely irrelevant to volutionary esurvival and that exists only in the improbable minds of improbable beings in an improbable society that could easily have developed in an entirely different way (or not at all) if a dragonfly had beaten its wings slightly differently back in the pre-cambrian (or whenever it was that dragonflies first emerged) -- that's what we are talking about, right?

I'm fond of saying (whenever some amazingly unlikely thing comes up), "Given a large enough statistical universe, anything that can happen will happen."

So, while a deck of cards existing at any particular point in space/time may be mind-numbingly unlikely, the Universe is also mind-numbingly huge. It may not be large enough to guarantee a deck of cards, but is more than large enough to make it and all the other attributes of the situation much more likely to exist inside the totality of space/time somewhere.

We start from the assumption that god knows everything (he’s not much of a god if he doesn’t).
Only true from a Christian point of view. Ancient Greeks (and a bevy of other peoples) seem to have been quite fine with much more limited divinity.

Well... the last time I tried to look up "DDR3 RAM" in the Bible, I didn't get very far.

Okay, sticking with things where the Bible might actually be of some use, I'd generally stick with Wikipedia. It at least has a mission statement of being from a neutral point of view. While not perfect, it does not see itself as such either, and has a dedicated community that works towards the particular and overall improvement of the content.

"My problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it ought to be a complete mess."