Thank you! I'm always looking for books in this specific sub-genre and have a hard time pinpointing exactly what it is. Something like "nonficiton history of a specific scientific or mathematical idea".
Another example is "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, which compiles various historical stories related to codes, cyphers, and cryptography.
I'll preface this by saying I've only watched season 1 of Severance so far.
I have never heard anyone involved with the show suggest this, but I feel pretty strongly that it's based off or at least inspired by Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me".
>In children’s books, including my own, there are many orphans – largely because adults get in the way of adventure
>I would never wish to do without the power of the orphan story, however. It has a burning warmth and clarity to it. It matters to us all, because we all become orphans in the end. The orphan story has traditionally offered a way for both children and adults to imagine their fundamental aloneness. Francis Spufford writes that, among the Hopi people of the American South-West, it is impossible to be an orphan. No child could slip through the net of family bond: if parents die, a grandparent, aunt, third cousin, someone will step in to fulfil that role. But many Hopi stories centre on an orphan abandoned in the harsh wilderness: abandonment must be imagined for certain elements of human experience – our ultimate solitude and our interconnectedness – to be understood.
>The orphan story points to another possible version of heroism offered by children’s books: it opens the space for surrogacy. Think of E. Nesbit’s 1905 novel The Railway Children. The three siblings aren’t orphans, but the removal of their father and the absence of their working mother allows for other figures – Mr Perks the railway porter, the Old Gentleman on the train – to take on the role of protector and fairy godmother. To read The Railway Children is to be told: despite the spinning and chaos of the world, there will be adults who will fight for you.
> The way to win against Russia is not via sanctions but rather via destabilizing the regime through guerrilla propaganda. The Russians, the Chinese, and the Soviets before them have always known this. The West is just too slow to catch on.
This is a totally uninformed vibes-based opinion, but I can't help but feel like the sort of "guerilla propaganda" you're talking about must be a major factor in the current fracturing of cultural and political discourse in the US.
You know what's by definition uninformed and vibes-based? You claiming my opinion is uninformed and vibes-based. I'm not only not American to be subject to "the current fracturing of cultural and political discourse in the US" but I also have a degree in International Relations, so I think my opinion is pretty informed.
I would delete this comment if I could, as I totally misinterpreted your prior comment. I am sorry.
Yes, the guerrilla propaganda is real and has been practiced for decades now...and one of its pervasive traits is that it focuses not only on media but also in changing the minds of students while they are in university, when they are particularly susceptible to influence. It's textbook Gramsci stuff.
Again, sorry for my knee-jerk reaction. I probably had too much or too little coffee, and I'd buy you one to make up for it if I could.
FYI for the input "Graph a cartoid and explain it" I get a correct definition and some interesting facts/properties (in spite of the fact that I mis-remembered the name of the object I had in mind; it should have been "cardioid"). But then it tries to provide a plot, and the plot has an error:
```
Error
Please check your input:
Undefined variable
heta
```
Looks like there's a "theta" that's being incorrectly truncated, or something to that effect.
I refreshed a few times and found that I consistently saw this same error.
I was able to replicate your error and pushed a fix, it should be working pretty reliably now for equations that include theta. Let me know if it works for you!
> Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks with modern physics/science
Maybe it's not productive to quibble about definitions like this, but FWIW I don't agree with this criteria. I would argue Greg Egan's work, for example, is just about the "hardest" sci-fi there is, and yet much of that work takes place in universes that are entirely unlike our own.
Personally, I think what makes for "hard" sci-fi is that the rules of the universe are well-laid-out and consistent, and that the story springs (at least in some significant part) out of the consequences of those rules. That may mean a story set in the "future", where we have new technology or discover new physics, or "alternate universe" sci-fi like Egan's.
If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter. It’s one of those definitions that allows anything and ultimately only feels fine because you’re adding some other criteria.
In defense of hard science fiction, it’s a meaningful category to talk about even if it’s not something you personally care about. People often want to weaken it but that just opens a door for a new category say “scientific science fiction” and we are back to square one.
Asking questions like what does AGI look like when they can’t just magically solve all issues can be fun. Hand waving the singularly as some religious event can also make interesting stories but so is considering how chaos theory limits what computation can actually achieve.
> If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter.
Greg Egan's law changes are on the level of "I consulted with a bunch of theoretical physics professors and asked them what the implication of tweaking this one fundamental constant would be, then I spent years meticulously crafting a world that takes into account those implications, and I had others physics professors check over my work to make sure it was within the bounds of actuality, and then I wrote a story about characters in this new world."
> Asking questions like what does AGI look like when they can’t just magically solve all issues can be fun.
Greg Egan actually has a great book about this! Permutation City. CPU cycles aren't unlimited, and there are tons of ethical problems being confronted with the entire "simulate a person" thing.
Harry Potter isnt typically considered scifi because it doesn't critically examine its own premise and because the rules of the universe are yoked to the needs of the plot.
> the rules of the universe are yoked to the needs of the plot
It’s common for the rules of the universe to be adapted to fit the plot of random Star Trek episodes.
HP is not considered science fiction because of the trappings of the story. People use spells and enchanted objects for telekinesis, teleportation, and time travel not psychic abilities and technology to do the same things.
> critically examine its own premise
A great deal of science fiction doesn’t do that while plenty of fantasy does.
> If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter
the laws of the universe in Harry Potter are so fickle and ever changing with the plot line that to me, it can only be considered soft. compare with Egan who takes a given cosmology and then works 100% within that world. that's hard.
That’s not a question about the underlying rules of a fictional work but your perception of how they are created. It’s possible to have a completely well defined fantasy setting with exact rules without the reader being aware of what those rules are or even knowing it’s using well defined rules.
Consider The Martian, early versions where posted online and the author changed what resources the character had to work with at the beginning. So what feels like a creative solution to limited resources was really giving the character exactly what they needed after a solution was found. Only examining a work we can’t distinguish ‘soft’ physics updated as the plot demands from a story based around fixed rules.
You seem to confuse the creative process with the final product. The rules can change during the creative process. It's the final product that I judge as a reader - I won't bother going over the inconsistencies in Harry Potter here, it's been done ad nauseam elsewhere. The physics doesn't change over the course of the story of the Martian.
What you view as inconsistencies are based around assumptions for how the underlying rules work and what happened that don’t necessarily apply.
One of the more interesting science fiction short stories I read seemed to have very inconsistent time travel, but on closer reading you find the two different methods involved had two different sets of rules. It’s easy to say something is inconsistent, but any possible story has a corresponding set of rules that work.
It’s rather similar to considering what characters may have been lying in a story.
Every new generation reinvents slang. "Politically correct" became "woke". "Hip" became "cool" became "fire" or whatever the kids are saying these days.
I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but it bears repeating: that's the whole point of this program.
Parents are playing the prisoners' dilemma here. Many (most) feel like cell phones (social media in particular) are a net negative for younger kids. But they don't want their kids to be left out / socially isolated. So it's really easy to get into a situation where we all defect because "I don't really like this but everyone else is doing it". This "wait until 8th" thing provides a framework for parent to agree to cooperate on this issue.
TBD if it actually works. I certainly like the idea that we have some control over our culture/community and don't just need to passively accept a "tragedy of the commons" on an issue like this.
> Today, a kid might be alienated without a phone.
That's really the point of a program like this. A lot of parents think smartphones (mainly social media, really) are a net negative for their kids, but we have this tragedy of the commons situation where no one wants their kid to be left out / socially isolated. Having this "wait until 8th" thing is basically parents playing the prisoner's dilemma getting together and agreeing that it we'd be much happier if everyone cooperates rather than defect on this issue.
Another example is "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, which compiles various historical stories related to codes, cyphers, and cryptography.
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