Robert Metzger, CUSP
Peter D. Tillman
seeing Paul Di Filippo's enthusiastic review (he gave it an "A"):
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue403/books.html
"Metzger scores points in the current competition in SF to make the
Singularity comprehensible and utilize it as a trope without rendering
narrative coherence null and void."
Umm. Well, it's been a slog from the start (though a fine sleep-aid!).
Metzger manages to make Big SF Events! boring, and his characters are
only slightly more realistic than Bob Forward's. Plus I don't care a
rat's ass for any of 'em.
The book isn't truly awful -- just dull and pointless. I don't recall
ever being put to sleep by the End of Civilization as We Know It, with
all sorts of what should be cool space-opera gimmickry, just about all
of which falls flat, AL for me.
Anyway, I'm currently stalled at p. 450 (of 516), after skimming the
last hundred pp. or so, hoping to get the thing done with. But you know
what? I don't care if I know how the book comes out, or not. Not a good
sign, and may be a personal record for Book Abandoned Furthest In. Sigh.
I read PICOVERSE, his first, earlier this year, and found it pretty
poorly-written, but energetic and (mostly) entertaining: "B". Three
months later, I've basically forgotten all of it. Looking through the
reviews I saved, I find this one, by Randy Meek at Amazon: "Well, I'm
not going to be all coy and stuff. Robert Metzger's science fiction
novel Picoverse is wretched and vile... Various folks are almost
literally ripping off masks and saying, "Ah, you thought I was Werner
von Braun, but really I am a death-droid from the Conquernaut Galaxy!"
Heh. Which, ims, was pretty much J. Nicoll's opinion here.
Pity, since decent hard-SF isn't easy to find. I'm usually pretty
tolerant of wooden writing to get my hard-SF fix, but CUSP is just too
slow and dumb to work. YMMV.
Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
--
"A moronic young man goes on a quest for a ten-year-old girl's lost
panties, and meets a man who's been transformed into a big-breasted
nymphomaniac, and is wearing the panties. He enslaves her, and they
live perversely ever after. The audience dies. Oh, the embarassment!"
--Rachel Brown, re Piers Anthony's _The Color of Her Panties_:
James Nicoll
Peter D. Tillman <Til...@toast.net_DIESPAMMERSDIE> wrote:
>This is Metzger's second novel (Ace hb, 1-05). I picked it up after
>seeing Paul Di Filippo's enthusiastic review (he gave it an "A"):
> http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue403/books.html
>
>"Metzger scores points in the current competition in SF to make the
>Singularity comprehensible and utilize it as a trope without rendering
>narrative coherence null and void."
I keep meaning to check out Di Filippo but I have to say
that judging from the occasional snippets you post of his reviews,
he and I are about 180 degrees off from each other.
>Umm. Well, it's been a slog from the start (though a fine sleep-aid!).
>Metzger manages to make Big SF Events! boring, and his characters are
>only slightly more realistic than Bob Forward's. Plus I don't care a
>rat's ass for any of 'em.
>
>The book isn't truly awful -- just dull and pointless. I don't recall
>ever being put to sleep by the End of Civilization as We Know It, with
>all sorts of what should be cool space-opera gimmickry, just about all
>of which falls flat, AL for me.
>
>Anyway, I'm currently stalled at p. 450 (of 516), after skimming the
>last hundred pp. or so, hoping to get the thing done with. But you know
>what? I don't care if I know how the book comes out, or not. Not a good
>sign, and may be a personal record for Book Abandoned Furthest In. Sigh.
>
>I read PICOVERSE, his first, earlier this year, and found it pretty
>poorly-written, but energetic and (mostly) entertaining: "B". Three
>months later, I've basically forgotten all of it. Looking through the
>reviews I saved, I find this one, by Randy Meek at Amazon: "Well, I'm
>not going to be all coy and stuff. Robert Metzger's science fiction
>novel Picoverse is wretched and vile... Various folks are almost
>literally ripping off masks and saying, "Ah, you thought I was Werner
>von Braun, but really I am a death-droid from the Conquernaut Galaxy!"
>Heh. Which, ims, was pretty much J. Nicoll's opinion here.
Is this in reference to CUSP or PICOVERSE? Because I never
read PICOVERSE.
CUSP, OTOH, is the book that provoked the STARS MOVE rant
and the one that led to my coining of the phrase backswing novel,
from a comment by Andrew about novels where the majority of humans
are slaughtered to give the heros more room to swing their swords.
I think it also led to the coversation about how you'd
find more empathy for people in a crowd of daleks than you would
from a group of SF writers.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
Peter D. Tillman
> Peter D. Tillman <Til...@toast.net_DIESPAMMERSDIE> wrote:
In article <di8qh4$ojv$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
> >This is Metzger's second novel (Ace hb, 1-05). I picked it up after
> >seeing Paul Di Filippo's enthusiastic review (he gave it an "A"):
> > http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue403/books.html
> >
> >"Metzger scores points in the current competition in SF to make the
> >Singularity comprehensible and utilize it as a trope without rendering
> >narrative coherence null and void."
>
> I keep meaning to check out Di Filippo but I have to say
> that judging from the occasional snippets you post of his reviews,
> he and I are about 180 degrees off from each other.
I find him ordinarily pretty reliable, though not in this case. I like
his enthusiastic reviewing style. Plus I ususally like his stories.
> >
> >I read PICOVERSE, his first, earlier this year, and found it pretty
> >poorly-written, but energetic and (mostly) entertaining: "B". Three
> >months later, I've basically forgotten all of it. Looking through the
> >reviews I saved, I find this one, by Randy Meek at Amazon: "Well, I'm
> >not going to be all coy and stuff. Robert Metzger's science fiction
> >novel Picoverse is wretched and vile... Various folks are almost
> >literally ripping off masks and saying, "Ah, you thought I was Werner
> >von Braun, but really I am a death-droid from the Conquernaut Galaxy!"
> >Heh. Which, ims, was pretty much J. Nicoll's opinion here.
>
> Is this in reference to CUSP or PICOVERSE? Because I never
> read PICOVERSE.
>
I was thinking you were dissing PICOVERSE. Aging memory fails again. I
wish I'd been paying more attention....
PICOVERSE was clearly the better book. But Metzger's got a long way to
go, to become a competent writer.
> CUSP, OTOH, is the book that provoked the STARS MOVE rant
> and the one that led to my coining of the phrase backswing novel,
> from a comment by Andrew about novels where the majority of humans
> are slaughtered to give the heros more room to swing their swords.
>
Heh. Will have to go back to that thread.
Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
James Nicoll
Actually, my memory seems to have lied to me.
The book that prompted "A Public service announcement"
was a James P. Hogan novel but I refer to having read CUSP
(Which requires that Alpha C and Sol have been in the same
region of space for about four galactic revolutions) in
passing, because it happened that I read both of them almost
back to back.
The plum was that although the Hogan and CUSP were
both very, very bad, the manuscript at the bottom of the stack
was a Westlake.
The discussion of CUSP and Andrew's comments that led
to "back-swing novels" is in "Crowded Futures".
By the way, I note that I forgot my favourite part of
CUSP: cyborgs are called Tools and particularly spiffy cyborgs
are called Major Tools. In the future, there will be no marketing
departments.
Peter D. Tillman
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
> The book that prompted "A Public service announcement"
> was a James P. Hogan novel but I refer to having read CUSP
> (Which requires that Alpha C and Sol have been in the same
> region of space for about four galactic revolutions)...
[Dumb looks are always Free dept] Huh. So there really is that much
proper motion between us & Alpha-C.... Metzger gets a pass from me on
that one, since I would have likely made the same mistake. Must sign up
for Remedial Galactic Rotation Mechanics....[1]
> in
> passing, because it happened that I read both of them almost
> back to back.
[snip]
> By the way, I note that I forgot my favourite part of
> CUSP: cyborgs are called Tools and particularly spiffy cyborgs
> are called Major Tools. In the future, there will be no marketing
> departments.
Heh. AL there were no Rigid Tools... Altho Dromo the Dino definitely had
an attitude problem.
I liked the part where the Realpolitik General's daughter dies in a
failed sky-dive from an (alien nanotech-built, natch) orbital tower -- a
deliberate 'death', so her brains could be scooped out & supercharged
with Magic BrainBoost neurostuff, and she could become a posthuman CUSP
[2] goddess-figure, indistinguishable from (but more poorly-written
than) your generic Big Magic fantasy superheroine....
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
[1] the last three words of which, Dave Barry would be quick to point
out, wouldn't be a bad name for a garage [henh, henh] band.
[2] --acronym for something like Controllable Ultimate Sentience Plasma.
The 'controllable' didn't quite work out, did it, and I have no idea
where the plasma came in (if, indeed, it did).
James Nicoll
Peter D. Tillman <Til...@toast.net_DIESPAMMERSDIE> wrote:
> jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
>
>> The book that prompted "A Public service announcement"
>> was a James P. Hogan novel but I refer to having read CUSP
>> (Which requires that Alpha C and Sol have been in the same
>> region of space for about four galactic revolutions)...
>
>[Dumb looks are always Free dept] Huh. So there really is that much
>proper motion between us & Alpha-C.... Metzger gets a pass from me on
>that one, since I would have likely made the same mistake. Must sign up
>for Remedial Galactic Rotation Mechanics....[1]
If you lived thousands of years, you'd have to continually
update your maps. An esp zippy star (like the one reported to be
falling out of the galaxy) might cover an entire light year in
less than three centuries. Most move a lot slower than that
relative to each other, of course, but even over historical
periods the change in relative position between nearer stars
can be detectable.
ObTang: EMF made up a nice table for me of close encounters
between the Sun and nearer stars:
D [pc] T [yr] STAR NAME
2.68e-01 4.60e+05 Gl 822.2
3.75e-01 4.31e+05 Gl 474
3.83e-01 -8.18e+04 L 390-5
4.31e-01 -3.76e+05 Gl 329
5.12e-01 -1.36e+06 Gl 355.2
5.18e-01 1.56e+05 GJ 1111
5.50e-01 4.60e+04 AC+79:3888
6.24e-01 9.27e+04 GJ 1116 A
6.61e-01 9.75e+05 Gl 710
7.33e-01 -5.17e+05 BS 8935
7.47e-01 9.05e+04 ADS 15972 Kr 60
7.68e-01 3.33e+04 GJ 2005
7.76e-01 9.39e+04 DO Cep
9.06e-01 9.25e+05 DEL Gem BS 2777 ADS 5983
9.18e-01 2.75e+04 ALF Cen
9.56e-01 1.19e+06 ADS 7044
9.58e-01 4.34e+05 AG+58: 157
9.69e-01 -2.14e+05 LTT 16093 L 1576-43 LP 284-13
9.77e-01 3.64e+04 Ross 248
1.05e+00 -9.38e+05 THE Ant
Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
half a light year of us.
Unfortunately, I don't know which star L 390-5 is. I am guessing
"nameless red dwarf", since that is what the odds favour.
Gene Ward Smith
James Nicoll wrote:
> Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
> half a light year of us.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't know which star L 390-5 is. I am guessing
> "nameless red dwarf", since that is what the odds favour.
According to this, an M3 dwarf:
http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/aricns/cnspages/4c00750.htm
Actually, a picture can be found next to the entry for "boring,
nameless red dwarf" in the Dictionary of Snide Astronomy. Of course,
you may not find emitting lethal radiation to be boring:
http://www.hs.uni-hamburg.de/~st1h314/starpage.cgi?identifier=0538
James Nicoll
don't think I would care to visit any flare star close up.
Must suck to be an alien from a red dwarf system. You master
space flight, get up above the thick protective atmosphere and then
your star cooks like an egg.
Nix
> I liked the part where the Realpolitik General's daughter dies in a
> failed sky-dive from an (alien nanotech-built, natch) orbital tower -- a
> deliberate 'death', so her brains could be scooped out & supercharged
> with Magic BrainBoost neurostuff, and she could become a posthuman CUSP
> [2] goddess-figure, indistinguishable from (but more poorly-written
> than) your generic Big Magic fantasy superheroine....
Yes, that was profoundly senseless, since as far as I could tell there
was nothing stopping the general (apparently unconstrained by such
things as superiors) from simply pulling his daughter in and souping her
up. Why have her zap herself in a ridiculously public way first? Is
anyone going to notice if a random general's daughter disappears?
--
`Next: FEMA neglects to take into account the possibility of
fire in Old Balsawood Town (currently in its fifth year of drought
and home of the General Grant Home for Compulsive Arsonists).'
--- James Nicoll
Peter D. Tillman
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
> If you lived thousands of years, you'd have to continually
> update your maps. An esp zippy star (like the one reported to be
> falling out of the galaxy) might cover an entire light year in
> less than three centuries. Most move a lot slower than that
> relative to each other, of course, but even over historical
> periods the change in relative position between nearer stars
> can be detectable.
>
> ObTang: EMF made up a nice table for me of close encounters
> between the Sun and nearer stars:
>
> D [pc] T [yr] STAR NAME
pc = parsecs?? --and one parsec = ?ly ?
> 2.68e-01 4.60e+05 Gl 822.2
> 3.75e-01 4.31e+05 Gl 474
> 3.83e-01 -8.18e+04 L 390-5
[snip]
> 1.05e+00 -9.38e+05 THE Ant
-------- !!
> Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
> half a light year of us.
Cool. Thanks!
There must be online time-lapse simulations of the 'boiling' motion of
nearby stars? [xposted to rasfs]
Anyone got an ObSF using moving stars as a plot device (or even a
throwaway)?
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
--
Dept of Vacuum Physics dept.: "The pilot fired a bright beam from the
shuttle's laser. The appalling flare of light and energy snatched the
words from his mouth." (Brian Herbert & Kevin J.Anderson,
Legends of Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, 2002)
Erik Max Francis
> pc = parsecs?? --and one parsec = ?ly ?
Yes. 1 pc = 3.262 ly.
> Cool. Thanks!
Note that that table of stellar close encounters was computed based on
raw data from the Gliese catalog. It's likely that some of the entries
are anomalous. You'd need to do a careful survey, correlating proper
motion and radial velocity
> There must be online time-lapse simulations of the 'boiling' motion of
> nearby stars? [xposted to rasfs]
Not sure what you mean by "boiling" motion. Do you mean long-term
animations of the interactions of stars? The direct data we have for
the realspace motion of stars -- proper motion and radial velocity --
only shows their instantaneous motion. You'd need a much more
complicated simulation to get their interactions, and that probably
wouldn't be feasible to begin with simply because there are plenty of
red dwarfs (and maybe even brown dwarfs) which would contribute to the
motions but which we haven't yet detected.
However, when I did the computation to get the table above, that
entailed getting the realspace positions and velocities, of course, so I
just plotted each star in three-dimensional space relative to the Sun,
along with a line connecting it to its extrapolated position in 10 000
yr (the Sun is at the center, though not displayed):
http://www.alcyone.com/tmp/gliese.gif
--
Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year as
Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War. -- Robert S. McNamara
William December Starr
"Peter D. Tillman" <Til...@toast.net_DIESPAMMERSDIE> said:
> This is Metzger's second novel (Ace hb, 1-05). I picked it up
> after seeing Paul Di Filippo's enthusiastic review (he gave it an
> "A"):
So, how many people saw the subject line and thought that "CUSP"
was some abbreviated title or honor that Mr. Metzger held, like
MD or OBE?
Sigh, it's just me, isn't it?
(Trivia note: <www.acronymfinder.com> actually returns one valid
possibility, if Metzger was a U.S. Navy admiral anyway: "Commander
Undersea Systems Pacific.")
--
William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
William December Starr
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) said:
> Must suck to be an alien from a red dwarf system. You master space
> flight, get up above the thick protective atmosphere and then your
> star cooks like an egg.
(You meant "cooks you like an egg," right?)
Shrug. You just spend a while longer (1) developing significantly
heavier boost technology (to lift heavy, life-protecting shielding)
and (2) doing unmanned space exploration. And/or (3) inventing
working Star Trek-like force fields at about the point in your
development where normal civilizations are mastering ablative
shielding.
William December Starr
"Peter D. Tillman" <Til...@toast.net_DIESPAMMERSDIE> said:
> Heh. AL there were no Rigid Tools... Altho Dromo the Dino
> definitely had an attitude problem.
You keep using the abbreviation "AL." What does it mean?
Garrett Wollman
William December Starr <wds...@panix.com> wrote:
>So, how many people saw the subject line and thought that "CUSP"
>was some abbreviated title or honor that Mr. Metzger held, like
>MD or OBE?
No, I thought it was one of those silly computer-industry
certifications like MCP or CISSP.
Hmmm. "Certified U______ Service Provider"? What word that begins
with U would make sense there? Aha! "Certified Unix Security
Professional" does it. Where's my Buzzword Bingo card?
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every
wol...@csail.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own
Opinions not those | search for greater freedom.
of MIT or CSAIL. | - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)
James Nicoll
>"Peter D. Tillman" <Til...@toast.net_DIESPAMMERSDIE> said:
>
>> Heh. AL there were no Rigid Tools... Altho Dromo the Dino
>> definitely had an attitude problem.
>
>You keep using the abbreviation "AL." What does it mean?
>
James Nicoll
>jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) said:
>
>> Must suck to be an alien from a red dwarf system. You master space
>> flight, get up above the thick protective atmosphere and then your
>> star cooks like an egg.
>
>(You meant "cooks you like an egg," right?)
Yes.
>Shrug. You just spend a while longer (1) developing significantly
>heavier boost technology (to lift heavy, life-protecting shielding)
>and (2) doing unmanned space exploration.
One of many possible contributors to the Fermi Paradox:
none of the red dwarfers can leave their planet (except by emailing
themselves).
> And/or (3) inventing
>working Star Trek-like force fields at about the point in your
>development where normal civilizations are mastering ablative
>shielding.
Funny, but I seem to view force fields as transparent. I
wonder why?
Mark Atwood
> James Nicoll wrote:
> > Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
> > half a light year of us.
>
> http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/aricns/cnspages/4c00750.htm
How bright would it have been from here back then?
--
Mark Atwood When you do things right, people won't be sure
m...@mark.atwood.name you've done anything at all.
http://mark.atwood.name/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/fallenpegasus
Wayne Throop
: Funny, but I seem to view force fields as transparent. I
: wonder why?
Hm. Non-transparent force fields occur in EESmith's Skylark stuff,
and in Niven/Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye, and transparent ones in
Asimov's "Not Final" and Poul Anderson's "Shield", and translucent
ones in... in... well, the Dune movie and some places I'm forgetting.
So I'd guess it's justs selective memory. Or maybe... well, the
non-transparent ones tend to have names other than "force field", maybe?
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
James Nicoll
Mark Atwood <m...@mark.atwood.name> wrote:
>"Gene Ward Smith" <gws...@svpal.org> writes:
>> James Nicoll wrote:
>> > Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
>> > half a light year of us.
>>
>> According to this, an M3 dwarf:
>> http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/aricns/cnspages/4c00750.htm
>
>How bright would it have been from here back then?
>
appear to be about 9.1 orders of magnitude brighter (because AbMag
is the magnitude at 10 pc. It would be 65x65 times brighter than at
10 pc and magnitude is based on the intuitively obvious base of the
fifth root of 100 or ~2.51). Huh, it would actually be fairly bright.
Greg Johnson
wrote:
Like 'bobble', perhaps. Not transparent, but as protective as you could
possibly ask for, while it lasts.
--
Greg Johnson
Gene Ward Smith
Mark Atwood wrote:
> "Gene Ward Smith" <gws...@svpal.org> writes:
> > James Nicoll wrote:
> > > Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
> > > half a light year of us.
> >
> > According to this, an M3 dwarf:
> > http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/aricns/cnspages/4c00750.htm
>
> How bright would it have been from here back then?
>From the above link, MV = 10.69. If it was 1/10 of a parsec away, it
would be 5 magnitudes brigther, or 5.69. Since apparently it never got
that close, it was at best only faintly visible.
Gene Ward Smith
Whups, the standard distance for this stuff is 10 parsecs, not one
parsec, and a factor of 100 is 5 magnitudes, not a factor of 10 (the
latter seems to be mistakenly given on Wikipedia.) The result is the
errors cancel out. I guess the Wikipedia page needs fixing, though.
Bradford Holden
You would be wrong by about 5 magnitudes here.
The absolute magnitude, as James says in his post, is the apparent
magnitude a star would have if it were at 10 parsecs. If the star
were to move to 1/10 of a parsec, that change in distnace is a factor
of 100, which is 10000 in flux because of the inverse square law. A
factor of 10 is 2.5 magnitudes, so 10000 is 10 magnitudes.
For a MV =10.69 star, the apparent magnitude at 1/10 of a parsec is
0.69 mag, which is pretty bright. Vega is 0 (by definition) and
Sirius is, like, -1.4 and is the brightest thing in the northern
hemisphere.
At half a light year, I get mV=1.6 mag, which is slightly less bright than
the brightest star in the little dipper. So, yea, you would see it and
you have given it a real name, some good Arabic one, instead of just
a phone number like it currently has.
--
Bradford Holden
"Rugged individualism in America means never joining a car pool"
- Joel Achenbach
Gene Ward Smith
Bradford Holden wrote:
> The absolute magnitude, as James says in his post, is the apparent
> magnitude a star would have if it were at 10 parsecs.
Yeah, that just occurred to me as well.
> At half a light year, I get mV=1.6 mag, which is slightly less bright than
> the brightest star in the little dipper. So, yea, you would see it and
> you have given it a real name, some good Arabic one, instead of just
> a phone number like it currently has.
It would appear to be moving at a hell of a clip too.
Mark Atwood
> In article <m23bnay...@amsu.fallenpegasus.com>,
> Mark Atwood <m...@mark.atwood.name> wrote:
> >> James Nicoll wrote:
> >> > Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
> >> > half a light year of us.
> >
> >
Neat.
Next question, more of a supposition than an answerable question.
Would this thing blowing thru Sol's Oort cloud disrupt the orbits of
any of the iceballs out there? And how long would it be before we
find out the hard way...
James Nicoll
Mark Atwood <m...@mark.atwood.name> wrote:
>jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:
>> In article <m23bnay...@amsu.fallenpegasus.com>,
>> Mark Atwood <m...@mark.atwood.name> wrote:
>> >> James Nicoll wrote:
>> >> > Just think, only 82 thousand years ago there was a star within
>> >> > half a light year of us.
>> >
>> >How bright would it have been from here back then?
>> >
>> fifth root of 100 or ~2.51). Huh, it would actually be fairly bright.
>
>Neat.
>
>Next question, more of a supposition than an answerable question.
>
>Would this thing blowing thru Sol's Oort cloud disrupt the orbits of
>any of the iceballs out there? And how long would it be before we
>find out the hard way...
New comets typically come in from about 44,000 AU and the
period of an object with a semi-major axis of 22,000 AU [(44K + 0)/2]
is about three million years. Call it a million and a half years, since
we're only interested how long it takes to get here?
Of course, we could get lucky before that. There's a young crater
comparable in size to the one associated with the death of the dinosaurs
and I do mean young: 870,000 years. It happened to land in a spot where
the damage to the world's ecosystems was minimal, Antarctica. As I recall,
it was responsible for a sudden one meter rise in ocean levels, from the
run-off of melt-water.
Peter D. Tillman
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
> In article <dici1q$bo9$1...@panix2.panix.com>,
> William December Starr <wds...@panix.com> wrote:
> >In article <Tillman-68F475...@corp-radius.supernews.com>,
> >"Peter D. Tillman" <Til...@toast.net_DIESPAMMERSDIE> said:
> >
> >> Heh. AL there were no Rigid Tools... Altho Dromo the Dino
> >> definitely had an attitude problem.
> >
> >You keep using the abbreviation "AL." What does it mean?
> >
> I'd guess "at least".
Yup. Halfway keep meaning to plug it into the auto-expander.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Peter D. Tillman
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
> New comets typically come in from about 44,000 AU and the
> period of an object with a semi-major axis of 22,000 AU [(44K + 0)/2]
> is about three million years. Call it a million and a half years, since
> we're only interested how long it takes to get here?
>
> Of course, we could get lucky before that. There's a young crater
> comparable in size to the one associated with the death of the dinosaurs
> and I do mean young: 870,000 years. It happened to land in a spot where
> the damage to the world's ecosystems was minimal, Antarctica. As I recall,
> it was responsible for a sudden one meter rise in ocean levels, from the
> run-off of melt-water.
Huh. URL for details, please?
I'm pretty sure the "comparable in size to the one associated with the
death of the dinosaurs" can't be right -- or, if so, would do further
damage to the "dino-killer from SPACE!" hypothesis. See
<http://www.sfsite.com/05a/ec80.htm> for a discussion of impact vs
flood-basalts in the long-running mass-extinction debate.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
[xpost to SGG for info & enlightenment?]
Bradford Holden
> Its absolute magnitude is 10.8 and at 1/2 a ly it would
> appear to be about 9.1 orders of magnitude brighter (because AbMag
> is the magnitude at 10 pc. It would be 65x65 times brighter than at
> 10 pc and magnitude is based on the intuitively obvious base of the
> fifth root of 100 or ~2.51). Huh, it would actually be fairly bright.
James, as an FYI, since I have magnitudes on the brain, the useful
magnitude forumula is
m - M = 5 log(d/10)
where m is the apparent magitude, M is the absolute magnitude and d
is the distance in parsecs. To change to lightyears, change the 10
into 32.6 and Bob is your uncle.
The apparent magnitude of the sun is 4.83 in the V band.
The following webpage contains the absolute magnitude of the sun in
a huge range of filters. This is in case you want to convert things
from, say, the R band or the K band, common bands used for sky surveys for
piddly dwarf stars, space rocks and the like.
http://www.ucolick.org/~cnaw/sun.html
Ross Presser
> But Metzger's got a long way to go, to become a competent writer.
Hasn't he been writing for a long time already? I remember reading his
columns and occasional shorts in Aboriginal SF in the mid-80s.
Thomas Womack
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
> Of course, we could get lucky before that. There's a young crater
>comparable in size to the one associated with the death of the dinosaurs
>and I do mean young: 870,000 years. It happened to land in a spot where
>the damage to the world's ecosystems was minimal, Antarctica.
This is an oddly hard event to google, but
http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,14493,1286033,00.html is a
reasonable reference. Something like that was expected for some time
since there was a rich field of recent tektites covering Australia and
south-east Asia with no known associated crater.
The object was 5-12km in diameter; the largest single strike made a
300km diameter hole in the ice cap, which would have been worth the
travel to visit. The most accessible gravity anomalies (presumably
associated with the crater) are in the Ross and Weddell seas; 'most
accessible' doesn't mean 'accessible'.
Tom
Stewart Robert Hinsley
<jdni...@panix.com> writes
>
>>Shrug. You just spend a while longer (1) developing significantly
>>heavier boost technology (to lift heavy, life-protecting shielding)
>>and (2) doing unmanned space exploration.
>
> One of many possible contributors to the Fermi Paradox:
>none of the red dwarfers can leave their planet (except by emailing
>themselves).
>
relatively young red dwarf stars.
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley
Steve Coltrin
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:
> Funny, but I seem to view force fields as transparent. I
> wonder why?
Because TOS didn't have the FX budget to make them visible?
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org Fox can't take the sky from me
"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
- Associated Press