Harry Jones: When I see the word “savant” I think “idiot savant” with the “idiot” part de-emphasized. It’s a mistake to be over-specialized. You get blindsided by what you weren’t trained to see coming. But more to the point: you won’t see opportunities that you weren’t trained to look for and recognize. The only way to be excellent at something is to be so obsessed with it that you neglect all else. At that price, excellence is not necessarily...
David Foster: “No savant has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator,” who changed their field.” This is a weird sentence structure. It *could* be read as saying that people who change from one field to another never become “Big-C creators”, whatever those are. Or it could be read to mean that “savants” never become Big-C creators.
Harry Jones: The universe being capricious will do nicely as a null hypothesis. As a philosophical stance, it leaves much to be desired. At first, second and third glance, deterministic chaos is indistinguishable from true randomness. The only distinction that matters is: can you figure out how to predict a thing if you try hard enough? Because if you can, you can perhaps get off the treadmill of repeated single loop retraining.
Graham: More seriously, I can see both points. The universe or its localized manifestations are always testing us and its worthwhile being prepared. A training regimen of frequent change with that goal in mind is worthwhile. A society of people infatuated with Change for its own sake and doing it daily for moral uplift is just tiresome. Of course, the uplift is a cover story for self-interest, but still. I had a colleague once whom I called the Agent of Change. Wonderful woman. But wow. Really loved...
Graham: Ooh! Schrodinger’s Cheese. Bet it tastes sour.
Kirk: Ah, but I have to point out to you, Harry, that it’s not some nefarious arsehole of ill intent going around moving the cheese on us all–It’s the universe itself, which is capricious, unpredictable, and entirely malevolent. A lot of this goes into the root problem for a lot of us: We’re taught and trained in imperfect ways to evaluate a lot of what we experience in life. The “Crisis of Reproducibility” isn’t coming out of nowhere, it’s a feature of the...
Harry Jones: It’s all well and good until they move your cheese. The trouble with learning is it takes time and effort, and usually a lot of money, too. You pay all that cost up front and then you think you’ve bought your meal ticket. No one tells you you’ve only rented it. Why shouldn’t they be brittle? Somebody moved their cheese on them for no discernable reason, and now they have to start from scratch. “Who moved my cheese” should not be a rhetorical question....
Kirk: For those of you arguing for the “vast open spaces” in habitat design, I would submit to you that you’re thinking about this in terms of a planet-bound mentality. Our descendants living in man-made constructed habitats are going to have an entirely different set of sensibilities and values. Vast open spaces they can get simply by going outside the habitats wearing pressure suits. The life support areas? They’re gonna have to be paranoid as hell, by necessity. Nobody is going...
Graham: Was that exchange about extrahuman sexuality part of an interrogation of some kind? It follows the established structural form of “when did you stop beating your wife?”
Sam J.: You don’t understand what I’m referencing when I say “habitat”. It is spun for artificial gravity and has massive shielding of dirt. https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Space_habitat#Conc eptual_studies
CVLR: “Do you enjoy sex with animals, Mr. Tighe?” “What? No.” “Do you not enjoy the sex you have with animals?” “I don’t have sex with animals.” “But if you did, would you enjoy it?” This pretty much sums up this book for me.
CVLR: Sam, The advantage to living in Mars is protection from millions and millions of tiny Universe-bullets speeding around at unimaginable velocity. Plus, you get 37% gravity, which is infinitely better than microgravity. An enormous mass of highly stable rock fit for architecture is a big win also. What we need is interstellar travel, but that won’t happen with an average IQ of 100. Genetic engineering or artificial superintelligence are prerequisite. “Was that where they used big thick...
CVLR: Yeah, I love motorcycles, the problem is everyone in everything else.
lucklucky: “I’m not benefiting from this.” Why should you benefit from other people’s money?
Neovictorian: Glad you took a look at it! I remember finding it on Grandma’s book shelf, and I was a young kid, and it was an amazing, adult story to my 10-year-old self.
Buckethead: It wasn’t that bad. But I’d say that Suarez peaked early with Daemon, Freedom™ and Kill Decision. I enjoyed those a lot, his more recent work less so. Apparently Delta-V is the first installment in a trilogy.
Sam J.: I can’t see any advantage to living on Mars at all. If we’re going to space the only reasonable and lowest cost solution is rotating space habitats. The only problem with this is it will take more time and a long dedication. Most likely the first two or three will be a big bust. Become completely covered in fungus or some other sort of disaster. The materials could come from the Moon and if you’re really adventurous the asteroid belt. I think the key would be remote mining with...
Sam J.: “…When the nylon was exposed to air, it absorbed and repelled water as it stiffened, giving the aircraft its shape and rigidity…” I’m fairly sure this is nonsense and it makes understanding the operation super confusing. Someone must have made a mistake as there’s not supposed to be water inside the wing. What I read before was that the skin had nylon threads embedded internally from the bottom of the internal surface of the wing to the top internal surface of...
CVLR: Yes, Kirk, that’s why you put everything under the surface. How much air will you lose by a failed seal if the seal in question is in a smallish hallway hundreds of feet above the main living areas, there are many redundant seals, and the intervening cubic feet are mainly solid rock? Not much, I suspect. I’m picturing smallish living spaces vaguely resembling a cross between the interior of that ship in the movie Passengers and some of the environments depicted in The Expanse, punctuated by vast...
