The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Outdated SF as alternate-history


One John Cowan has retrofitted a 1946 sci-fi tale, Omnilingual by H Beam Piper. He boosted the date (1996->2049); and he made the planet "Mars", which we now know is dead, into a more human-survivable planet "Ares".

The basic laws of physics have held up well since the Second World War. It's the application of these physics ("technology"), and the knowledge of our solar system (and not just ours), which have paved over the 1940s consensus. History has marched on in its own way too of course (1984, 2001,...).

These classic works of SF cannot be updated, without rewriting them. And rewriting them means writing a new book, with only the plots and maybe some characters left over. Cowan seems to have done about as well as anyone can do, by setting the story in an alternate universe.

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posted by Zimri on 20:56 | link |

The weblog as extended memory


I don't use this blog, primarily, as a means for influencing people. I don't like people enough to do that.

I use this blog as a memory dump. It stores what I know at any given time. (Even if that "knowledge" was false: c.f., the Torah's opinion on unborn life.) If I read an article and disagree with it, I can search through the archive and dig up what I'd said on that subject in the past.

It's nice not to have to keep this clutter in my head.

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posted by Zimri on 00:28 | link |

Monday, November 16, 2009

i a constant?


I'm back from a merry weekend. I recently purchased a book entitled Gamma. It has to do with Euler's constant γ - it is presumed "transcendental", like π and e. (That means that no finite polynomial function can define it.) This book mentioned that γ was almost as famous as π and e - which I'll concede, given that I've barely started the thing.

What's weird about it is that it is claiming also that i, the square root of -1, is a constant.

I'm not buying that. i has the same magnitude as 1; it's just in an axis orthogonal to the real numbers. The correct analogy to i is -1: which is also "imaginary", in that you cannot have -1 cups of tea any more than you can have i teacups.

i as a number should be written as 1i, and the letter itself should be treated as a signifier along the lines of the negative signifier -.

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posted by Zimri on 19:30 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Forms of creationism


Conservatives propose that intelligent-design is a scientific alternative to the dominant biological paradigm (evolution via natural selection, mainly). It would help their case if they could define that alternative.

Intelligent-design proponents these days prefer to claim that they are "raising questions" about "Darwin". Evolution proponents counter that ID is a big obscurantist nothing which does not offer a testable counter-proposal.

In this country intelligent-design is a mutation which has evolved over eight decades under the restrictions of the American court system (Scopes, 1925 - Dover, 2005). The evolution of the intelligent-design argument tracks closely the evolution of creationism under the strictures of Greek philosophy 600-300 BCE. Creationism has a storied philosophical pedigree.

While I was at the Other Green-Themed Site, I discovered David Sedley's Creationism And Its Critics In Antiquity and recommended it in just about every creationism thread over there. On the weekend 16-18 October I started this essay (and several others, which I'm in the process of editing) but I'd mislaid the book, and found other topics to do, so I put all of that aside. Now that I've found the book, and also some free time...

Sedley's book describes the Greek attempts to explain life on Earth, and Earth itself, up to Galen in the 200s AD.

Greek creationism isn't taught in school, but that's not wholly the fault of the school. Sedley was the first to gather the references together and to assign them to strains of creationism (and, in two cases, anti-creationism). He also benefitted from modern papyri discoveries in Egypt. Now that we know the history, it's time to teach it.

Sedley found more advanced forms of Near Eastern creationism in the pre-Socratics. Anaxagoras figured the Creator as a cosmic Mind which separated order from primal chaos. Empedocles had the Creator stumbling upon a more ordered universe and building life from those blocks He found. Anaxagoras strikes me as a Genesis-1 Priestly sort concerned with the universe and Empedocles as a Genesis-2 Yahwist concerned with nature; both strains of thought were available to the Phoenicians as of 600 BCE. Anaxagoras and Empedocles extended these ideas and made them available to the Greek world.

Sedley found the first challenge to a theological worldview in the atomists, who proposed an arbitrarily-large cosmos of worlds - applicable also to parallel universes - of which this one happens to be the world we live in (pp. 136-7). This removes the need for any God hypothesis to explain our world.

Sedley then found in Xenophon's Memorabilia I.4 and IV.3 that Socrates was an "anti-scientific creationist" (p. 78). Socrates accepted that the world was naturalistic, but defended the gods from the atheist model by proposing a counter-model: disassociating science from theology. He assumed that if scientists wanted to, they could find out the rules by which the universe works. The universe (from a human perspective) contains an ends-based or "teleological" subset, with (e.g.) a whole class of "barnyard animals" who could never survive in the wild. Socrates concluded that gods did exist, and that some helped in creating the whole world as support for humanity; and by extension that they likely exist today, and are still the friends of humanity. Socrates asserted that scientists shouldn't bother making further discoveries, because these discoveries would do nothing to help humans live the good life. Humans should instead study their own lives to improve them, and thereby to deduce what the gods want.

Plato in the Timaeus, developed the notion of a creator god, the Demiurge, further stating that God was a pure theoretician. Aristotle fused this god with the universe, thus removing his ability to act from outside the universe; there was no act of creation, and God's thoughts and deeds were simply the actions of the universe itself.

Modern creationists from Paley to Behe base their stance on the Argument From Design / Watchmaker / "irreducible complexity" argument. That makes them Socratics.

Modern atheists (as opposed to agnostics) base their stance on the Anthropic Principle. That makes then Atomists.

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posted by Zimri on 12:23 | link |

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

And Another Thing


Actually that's the title of a new book. It's by Eoin Colfer. "PART SIX OF THREE", it announces; the "three" being a reference to the funny byline to "Mostly Harmless" ("increasingly inaccurately titled trilogy").

A lot of the features of this book are like that. They are references to the original that aren't played for more than fanservice. "Goosnargh", etc. It kind of reads like the fanfic I wrote in seventh grade which, I suspect, I burned.

His ear isn't entirely tinny. There's good stuff alloyed over it. Bronzy, one might say.

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posted by Zimri on 16:43 | link |

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