Zompist Bboard Again

For those unaware, the conworld I am (/have been) working on is called Mto. It's a world slightly smaller than Earth with slightly shorter days and a slightly longer year. Astronomy things aside, I've primarily been working on doing the surface of the planet from a mapping perspective. However, I wo...

The lyrics includes:

I said, "Mr. Purple People Eater, what's your line?"
He said, "Eatin' purple people and it sure is fine

Which would heavily imply that it's a creature that eats purple people, and has one eye, one horn, and flies.

Why do Asimov's stories not reflect his own predictions? Well, it may be in part because they came a long time before this speech, but I don't think that's it. I've just read a collection of his, and back in Hostess in the very early '50s he was writing about career women and the social problems th...

My favourite prediction error in social issues is that Heinlein story where someone's cellphone rings, he apologises to his friends, and turns it off without answering. I'm not sure how this is a failure; I was in a meeting today where this very thing happened. I have also been in social situations...

mèþru wrote: ↑Mon Sep 03, 2018 7:52 pm

Axiem wrote:That's also a weird year to pick; 82 years ago? What's the logic there?

2100-2018=82

Ah. That makes sense.

look backwards to 1936, and see what 2018 technology depends on basic principles discovered since then Claude Shannon's paper on Information Theory was published in 1948. This underpins basically the entire field of computer science in one way or another. Heck, the Turing Machine wasn't discovered ...

our hypothetical time-traveller from 1936 wouldn't find any of our technology truly incomprehensible I find this utterly risible on its face. We have living adults now who find the Internet—and all the many, many things it's fomented (e.g. 4chan)—utterly incomprehensible. Some of those adults were ...

This is why I'm totally behind Space Force. NASA gets defense budget spending? Yes, please. :lol: My understanding is that NASA is not a military organization. And the military already had several sub-organizations (I think primarily in the Air Force, unsurprisingly) that were involved in the whole...

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Tue Aug 28, 2018 5:32 pm what are the military applications?

If my studies of the history of technology have taught me anything, this is the first and foremost question to ask when thinking about any fictional/futuristic technology. Sometimes there aren't any, but when there are, the military will be there.

Before you get to extrapolating out minutiae like GWP and such, you really ought to read Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist.

Any projection on what the world looks like in 2100 is going to have to grapple with climate change, and make decisions regarding just how much warming has happened by then (/how acidic the oceans have gotten/etc), and what the world looks like ecologically as a result. Potential crises regarding dr...