Not quite a YASID

[Raymond Daley]

There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
becomes more like religion.

The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.

What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?

I'm working on an idea myself at the moment but it'd be interesting to see
what else if anything exists already in the genre.

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

On 4/17/12 7:24 AM, Raymond Daley wrote:
> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
> items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
> becomes more like religion.
>
> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>
> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?
>

You mean, ones where people on Earth have forgotten the technology and
language and gone primitive? Hundreds. Possibly thousands.




--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog:
http://seawasp.livejournal.com

[Robert Carnegie]

In _The White Mountains_, technology is banned
by our alien masters, and by popular consensus.
In Peter Dickinson's "The Changes", it's done
by (spoiler in ROT13 code) Zreyva. In the
"Sword of the Spirits" series, technology is
hated after an ecological catastrophe, but
"Scientists" still work in secret. The protagonist
of _Telempath_ is puzzled by some of the sights of
deserted New York City, such as an "rko", and
it's only been one generation - I guess some things
you just don't talk about. :-) And,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Planet

Also in _The Patterns of Chaos_, spoiler again:
cynargf bs bhe tnynkl ner nggnpxrq ol zvffvyrf
sebz nyvraf ybat ntb gung ghea bhg gb unir
sberfrra gung jr qvfthfgvat ncr-perngherf jbhyq
gerfcnff va gurve cynprf; gur nyvraf' qrfpraqnagf
ner havagryyvtrag navznyf xrcg nyvir ol gurve
naprfgbef' ebobgvp sbbq znpuvarf.

[William F. Adams]

On Apr 17, 7:24 am, "Raymond Daley" <raymond.da...@ntlworld.com>
wrote:

_The Last Man_, Mary Shelley, 1826

``By the Waters of Babylon'', Stephen Vincent Benét, _Saturday Evening
Post_ 1937.

Lots more since then.

William

[Raymond Daley]

"William F. Adams" wrote...
Lots more since then.

Not a new idea then?
Arse.

Never mind. I like it enough to finish it.
It can go on the "to be published" pile then.

I've already had to do a quick rewrite after contradicting myself.
Which was annoying.
But ended up working out better than the first version.

I hate rewrites. Normally.

[Bill Gill]

I have no idea what it was, but I recall reading a story where
a group of apocalypse survivors were living in the dark in an extensive
cavern system. They didn't even know about light. They didn't know
any more than was necessary for their survival. Eventually
people from the surface found them.

Bill

[David Dyer-Bennet]

There are a lot of after-the-fall-of-civilization stories from the 60s
and a bit earlier that feature some of that as a sidebar, at least;
funny names for things, bits of history obscure to the characters but
clear to the readers. You see it *developing* in _Earth Abides_, which
is an interesting touch (especially given that that's a 1949 book).
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

[Robert Carnegie]

_After London_, and _Idiocracy_...

[Dan Goodman]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:29:56 +0100, Raymond Daley wrote:

> Not a new idea then?

The answer to "Is this a new idea?" is almost always "No; and the first
use was probably 20 to 2,000 years before you think it possibly could
have been."

Places check:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpeculativeFictionTropes
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/



--
Dan Goodman
http://dsgood.blog.com
http://tcsfdirectory.blog.com

[Dan Goodman]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:24:29 +0100, Raymond Daley wrote:

> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses
> of items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled. Signs
> and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
> becomes more like religion.
>
> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>
> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on
> Earth?

Besides those mentioned, two in which human civilization keeps rising and
falling and rising and falling, and... And we aren't in the first cycle.

Fredric Brown, "Letter to a Phoenix."
Vernor Vinge and Joan Vinge, "The Peddler's Apprentice."

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> writes:

> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:29:56 +0100, Raymond Daley wrote:
>
>> Not a new idea then?
>
> The answer to "Is this a new idea?" is almost always "No; and the first
> use was probably 20 to 2,000 years before you think it possibly could
> have been."

And the corollary to that is that it's not the idea that's important for
most SF, it's how well you use it. Heinlein wasn't so much an inventor
of new story ideas as somebody who followed the consequences further out
into society than his competitors.

[lal_truckee]

On 4/17/12 4:24 AM, Raymond Daley wrote:
> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?

If you're looking for a subset of humanity isolated but still on earth
try Dark Universe - Daniel F. Galouye 1961

Nonstop (AKA Starship) Brian Aldis 1958 has all the features of a
generation ship that's lost its meaning while on the voyage, except the
novel takes place completely in earth orbit. That might or might not
meet your criteria.

[Kurt Busiek]

On 2012-04-17 14:49:31 +0000, Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> said:

> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:29:56 +0100, Raymond Daley wrote:
>
>> Not a new idea then?
>
> The answer to "Is this a new idea?" is almost always "No; and the first
> use was probably 20 to 2,000 years before you think it possibly could
> have been."

And the next bit it, "It doesn't matter that it's not a new idea, it
matters what you do with it."

In this case, the idea is so broad as to constitute a happy subgenre;
it's a little like wondering if you should abandon your idea about a
character who gets superpowers and fights crime because it's been done
before.

kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!

[Dorothy J Heydt]

That's Galouye's _Dark Universe_. Very well done.

They used "light" as a synonym for God, and you got a religious
experience by gently pressing on your eyeballs.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the gmail edress.
Kithrup's all spammy and hotmail's been hacked.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <Opdjr.288376$yJ4.1...@fx07.am4>,

Raymond Daley <raymon...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>"William F. Adams" wrote...
>Lots more since then.
>
>Not a new idea then?
>Arse.
>
>Never mind. I like it enough to finish it.
>It can go on the "to be published" pile then.

Doesn't matter; it's not what you write about, but how you write
it. Give it a try.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <14293478.2102.1334664186128.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@vbdn7>,

Now, that one reminds me (though it's not an answer to the OP's
question, I don't think) of F. L. Wallace's "Big Ancestor,"

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?45810

in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to
undo it, I'll leave some space ...

















humans exploring space have found many different humanoid species
on different planets, in various stages of "development": e.g.,
at one end of the spectrum they look like apes, and at the other
end like typical big-domed mid-20th-C _Homo Superior._ They
search for the home-world from which their stock presumably
sprang.

They find the planet, but there's no intelligent life there; it
seems to have died off, leaving impressive ruins. And they find
a recording explaining (through their handy universal translator)
that the inhabitants of this planet had explored space and some
of the local vermin had got aboard and were mutated by
interstellar radiation, had got loose on every planet the
spacefarers visited, and had become allergenic to them so that
they could barely move and were dying out. It ended with an
apology: "Beware of landing on any planet where we may have left
it behind. We don't suppose it will ever get into space on its
own; it's too stupid."

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <rscjr.36961$m91....@fx24.am4>,

Van Vogt's _The Empire of the Atom_ is like that, and a favorite of mine.
I read the Baen re-issue a while back, which just reprints the original
novellettes rather than the fixup novel Van Vogt did later, and it's
head and shoulders better that way. The whole thing is full of bon-mots
and sharp observations.
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <M2MtI...@kithrup.com>,

Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>In article <jmjq8s$sqk$1...@dont-email.me>, Bill Gill <bill...@cox.net> wrote:
>>On 4/17/2012 6:24 AM, Raymond Daley wrote:
>>> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
>>> items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
>>> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
>>> becomes more like religion.
>>>
>>> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>>>
>>> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?
>>>
>>> I'm working on an idea myself at the moment but it'd be interesting to see
>>> what else if anything exists already in the genre.
>>>
>>>
>>I have no idea what it was, but I recall reading a story where
>>a group of apocalypse survivors were living in the dark in an extensive
>>cavern system. They didn't even know about light. They didn't know
>>any more than was necessary for their survival. Eventually
>>people from the surface found them.
>
>That's Galouye's _Dark Universe_. Very well done.
>
>They used "light" as a synonym for God, and you got a religious
>experience by gently pressing on your eyeballs.
>
>--
>Dorothy J. Heydt

Which I think actually was a pretty big deal in the Byzantine Empire
at one time.

[ErictheTolle]

On Apr 17, 9:23 am, djhe...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:

The novel "City of Ember" has a similar premise; they have lights and
power, but they've forgotten how to make modern equipment and are
surviving on dwindling supplies. They have no idea about how to
survive outside the cave, or even any conception of "outside".

Eric Tolle

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <9v5lp2...@mid.individual.net>,

"Light" meaning "God"? Or pressing on the eyeballs? If the
latter, do please see if you can find a cite.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <69159a49-e4e6-48b2...@t2g2000pbl.googlegroups.com>,

Oh, there are lots of variations on that theme, from "The Machine
Stops" to "THX-1138."

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <M2Myy...@kithrup.com>,

The later. I'm guessing I read it in Norwich's Byzantine history books,
but I could be wrong. IIRC it was one of those odd religious fads that
kept popping up there (I don't think it was a top tier dispute like
iconoclasm, the single presession of the Holy Spirit or "how many
persons" though).

[lal_truckee]

On 4/17/12 9:21 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?45810
>
> in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to
> undo it, I'll leave some space ...

I recall that one well; good companion piece to William Tenn's 1968 "Of
Men and Monsters."

Also related is the [YASID] one where humans meet on the other side of
the galaxy, having explored and colonized (and evolved) moving in
opposite directions around the galactic spiral plane over millions of
years (presumably the direct route across the lens is too deadly?)

[lal_truckee]

On 4/17/12 9:18 AM, Kurt Busiek wrote:

> it's a little like wondering if you should abandon your idea about a
> character who gets superpowers and fights crime because it's been done
> before.

[for variations of "crime" to include "generic bad guys."]

Followup - who was the first such exact character to find his way into
the actual written literature?
Nietzsche' Übermensch?
Beowulf?
Achilles?
Gilgamesh?

Anyone earlier than Gilgamesh?

[Wayne Throop]

: djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
: in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to undo

: it, I'll leave some space ...

OK, now *that*'s comedy. Or maybe I mean irony.

( I assume you mean something like you don't know the incantation for
rot13 in whatever you use for composing messages, only in whatever
(presumably different) thing you use for reading them, which is
pretty much sensible, but still, the way it's phrased is funny. )

[Bill Snyder]

Harry Harrison, "Final Encounter."

--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank]

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <jmkfn0$4ad$1...@dont-email.me>,

Well, it does have a black hole in its middle. If someone can
identify the YASID, we can estimate whether that fact was known
before or after the story was written.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <13346...@sheol.org>, Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org> wrote:
>: djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
>: in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to undo
>: it, I'll leave some space ...
>
>OK, now *that*'s comedy. Or maybe I mean irony.
>
>( I assume you mean something like you don't know the incantation for
> rot13 in whatever you use for composing messages,

Just so.

> only in whatever
> (presumably different) thing you use for reading them,

Well, I am using trn to read and vi to compose in, on a UNIX
system running 4.2 BSD. If you are sufficiently erudite in the
various aspects of such things (I'm not), you can figure it out.

which is
> pretty much sensible, but still, the way it's phrased is funny. )

I think you have just complimented me on my ability to turn a
phrase. Thank you. It's nice to know I haven't completely lost
it.

[Steve Coltrin]

begin fnord

djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) writes:

> in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to
> undo it, I'll leave some space ...

You could, if you wanted, cut&paste your text into http://www.rot13.com/ ,
rot it there, then cut&paste it back.

--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org Google Groups killfiled here
"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

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <m2bomqk...@kelutral.omcl.org>,

Steve Coltrin <spco...@omcl.org> wrote:
>begin fnord
>djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) writes:
>
>> in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to
>> undo it, I'll leave some space ...
>
>You could, if you wanted, cut&paste your text into http://www.rot13.com/ ,
>rot it there, then cut&paste it back.

Hm. Thanks for the info. Though copying'n'pasting is fairly
difficult in my system, since I have to select text by mousing over
it, ONE line at a time. I have trouble enough just copying a URL
posted by someone else.

[Dan Goodman]

Of course, it helps if you can do something reasonably new with the idea.

[Dan Goodman]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:08:24 -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

> Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> writes:
>
>> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:29:56 +0100, Raymond Daley wrote:
>>
>>> Not a new idea then?
>>
>> The answer to "Is this a new idea?" is almost always "No; and the first
>> use was probably 20 to 2,000 years before you think it possibly could
>> have been."
>
> And the corollary to that is that it's not the idea that's important for
> most SF, it's how well you use it. Heinlein wasn't so much an inventor
> of new story ideas as somebody who followed the consequences further out
> into society than his competitors.

And in many cases, it would've been quite possible to go farther than
Heinlein did.

[Dan Goodman]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:27:28 -0700, lal_truckee wrote:

> On 4/17/12 9:18 AM, Kurt Busiek wrote:
>
>> it's a little like wondering if you should abandon your idea about a
>> character who gets superpowers and fights crime because it's been done
>> before.
>
> [for variations of "crime" to include "generic bad guys."]
>
> Followup - who was the first such exact character to find his way into
> the actual written literature?
> Nietzsche' Übermensch?

No. The superman was supposed to be beyond good and evil.

> Beowulf?
> Achilles?
> Gilgamesh?
>
> Anyone earlier than Gilgamesh?

A case could be made for the snake in the Garden of Eden.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <4f8ddfa9$0$74664$8046...@auth.newsreader.iphouse.com>,

Though perhaps inadvisable.

(I am inclined to think that even Heinlein took some ideas TOO
far.)

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <4f8de04b$0$74664$8046...@auth.newsreader.iphouse.com>,

The snake didn't fight crime; he commited it. Let's see: fraud,
misrepresentation, false advertising....

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> writes:

> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:08:24 -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>
>> Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:29:56 +0100, Raymond Daley wrote:
>>>
>>>> Not a new idea then?
>>>
>>> The answer to "Is this a new idea?" is almost always "No; and the first
>>> use was probably 20 to 2,000 years before you think it possibly could
>>> have been."
>>
>> And the corollary to that is that it's not the idea that's important for
>> most SF, it's how well you use it. Heinlein wasn't so much an inventor
>> of new story ideas as somebody who followed the consequences further out
>> into society than his competitors.
>
> And in many cases, it would've been quite possible to go farther than
> Heinlein did.

Sure.

It's easier afterwards, too; we're building on him now. Too big a step
is harder both to think of yourself, AND to sell to the editor and the
audience.

[William George Ferguson]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:24:29 +0100, "Raymond Daley"
<raymon...@ntlworld.com> wrote:

>There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
>items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
>Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
>becomes more like religion.
>
>The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>
>What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?
>
>I'm working on an idea myself at the moment but it'd be interesting to see
>what else if anything exists already in the genre.

Moderatly near future dystopia where 'science' and 'technology' are banned
would be The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett.

--
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
(Bene Gesserit)

[Howard Brazee]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:21:24 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
Heydt) wrote:

>in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to
>undo it, I'll leave some space ...

If it's not easy with your reader, it is possible to do so enter your
text on a web page such as this http://rot13.com/index.php, then cut
and paste the result back.

--
"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,
than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace
to the legislature, and not to the executive department."

- James Madison

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <dhqro7ldcrsnr6ejh...@4ax.com>,

Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:21:24 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
>Heydt) wrote:
>
>>in which ... since I don't know how to do rot-13, only how to
>>undo it, I'll leave some space ...
>
>
>If it's not easy with your reader, it is possible to do so enter your
>text on a web page such as this http://rot13.com/index.php, then cut
>and paste the result back.

Thanks, but as I said earlier, cutting (or rather, copying) and
pasting are not trivial tasks over here. Cutting can be done
easily -- there are various vi commands for deleting -- but
there's no way to paste what's been deleted into some other
system.

[Wayne Throop]

: djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
: Thanks, but as I said earlier, cutting (or rather, copying) and

: pasting are not trivial tasks over here. Cutting can be done easily
: -- there are various vi commands for deleting -- but there's no way to
: paste what's been deleted into some other system.

Indeed, it gets complicated. It's likely possible, and maybe even easy
(in some sense) to copy and paste between vi and a web browser, because
the vi (and the trn) are most likely running inside a virtual terminal,
which itself can introspect its own text and apply various GUI operations
to them, which are then visible to the PC you're running on, yada yada.
I can't say for sure, but it's likely what's going on, if your immediate
system is a PC running windows. But by now you're talking about a fairly
complicated layered set of applications running, and sorting out just
what you need to do is by no means simple. I mean, who's going to just
naturally know that if you want to "copy text from vi" to paste into
a web browser, you actually need to talk to a virtual terminal app?
It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!

( I mean... *I* know how to do it for my system, even if I were running
vi in a virtual terminal ... and even if there are several redirections
via vnc and X clients, and it *seems* simple to me via familiarity...
even when I'm running on a windows client instead of a linux client...
but it's by no means truely simple. )

[Brenda Clough]

On 4/17/2012 8:29 AM, Raymond Daley wrote:
> "William F. Adams" wrote...
> Lots more since then.

>
> Not a new idea then?

> Arse.
>
> Never mind. I like it enough to finish it.
> It can go on the "to be published" pile then.
>
> I've already had to do a quick rewrite after contradicting myself.
> Which was annoying.
> But ended up working out better than the first version.
>
> I hate rewrites. Normally.
>
>

It's a pointless worry. There are no new ideas. What is new (or had
better be) is your take on them.
A great example of this, which I just read, is CONFESSION, a graphic
novel by our own Kurt Busiek. There is not a new idea in it; every
single concept has had many iterations in both comics and fiction.
Nevertheless it is a fire-new work, ringing solid on the counter of the
imagination like a silver dollar. The recycling isn't a bug, it's
thematic. Superb.

Brenda

--
My latest novel SPEAK TO OUR DESIRES is available exclusively from Book
View Cafe.
http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Brenda-Clough/Novels/Speak-to-Our-Desires-Chapter-01

[Wayne Throop]

: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
: I mean, who's going to just naturally know that if you want to "copy

: text from vi" to paste into a web browser, you actually need to talk
: to a virtual terminal app? It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!

Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and

-3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

(There are guaranteed to be better ways to do it, but that one works.)
(Well, assuming the unix you're running vi in has "tr", which
is a very good assumption.)
(And yes, vi commands *do* resemble line noise a bit.)
(for those people who remember what "line noise" is)

[David Johnston]

On 4/17/2012 5:24 AM, Raymond Daley wrote:
> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
> items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
> becomes more like religion.
>
> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>
> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?
>

Well yes, quite a lot. It's the standard post-holocaust setting. It
was also the consequence of creeping socialism in Ayn Rand's Anthem.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

Uh-huh. You can see why it's easier, for me, just to do a lot of
Returns and a ctrl-L before posting whatever someone might
consider a spoiler.

The way we did back in the old days, when rocks were soft and the
ADM3A ruled the Internet.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <13347...@sheol.org>, Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org> wrote:

>: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
>: I mean, who's going to just naturally know that if you want to "copy
>: text from vi" to paste into a web browser, you actually need to talk
>: to a virtual terminal app? It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!
>
>Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
>to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and
>
> -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

Go wash your mouth out with soap.

>
>(There are guaranteed to be better ways to do it, but that one works.)
>(Well, assuming the unix you're running vi in has "tr", which
> is a very good assumption.)

It's trn, which is probably approximately, but not exactly, the
same thing.

[Wayne Throop]

:: (Well, assuming the unix you're running vi in has "tr", which is a
:: very good assumption.)

: djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
: It's trn, which is probably approximately, but not exactly, the same
: thing.

Not quite. Trn is almost the same thing as rn, but not remotely
the same thing as tr. From "man tr":

NAME
tr - translate or delete characters

SYNOPSIS
tr [OPTION]... SET1 [SET2]

DESCRIPTION
Translate, squeeze, and/or delete characters from standard input,
writing to standard output.


Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw

[Dan Tilque]

Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> In article <jmkfn0$4ad$1...@dont-email.me>,
> lal_truckee <lal_t...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On 4/17/12 9:21 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>
>> Also related is the [YASID] one where humans meet on the other side of
>> the galaxy, having explored and colonized (and evolved) moving in
>> opposite directions around the galactic spiral plane over millions of
>> years (presumably the direct route across the lens is too deadly?)
>
> Well, it does have a black hole in its middle. If someone can
> identify the YASID, we can estimate whether that fact was known
> before or after the story was written.

Bill Snyder indentified it as Harrison's "Final Encounter". Googling
shows it was published in 1964. I don't remember exactly when they found
the central black hole, but some time in the 70s.

However, I think it was known in the 60s that the stars in the center of
the galaxy are mostly very old with low metalicities. Which means they
are unlikely to have Earth-type planets. I have no idea whether Harrison
was aware of this or not.


--
Dan Tilque

[Howard Brazee]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 22:25:08 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
Heydt) wrote:

>>If it's not easy with your reader, it is possible to do so enter your
>>text on a web page such as this http://rot13.com/index.php, then cut
>>and paste the result back.
>
>Thanks, but as I said earlier, cutting (or rather, copying) and
>pasting are not trivial tasks over here. Cutting can be done
>easily -- there are various vi commands for deleting -- but
>there's no way to paste what's been deleted into some other
>system.

I guess that depends on what version of Unix one uses. I'm
surprised that one with a web browser won't let you paste in an
e-mail. But I haven't tried all flavors of Unix.

[Dan Tilque]

Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

> Well, I am using trn to read and vi to compose in, on a UNIX
> system running 4.2 BSD. If you are sufficiently erudite in the
> various aspects of such things (I'm not), you can figure it out.

Now that takes me back. Or it would if I hadn't just read Cliff Stoll's
_The Cuckoo's Egg_ for the first time. He probably had 4.3 BSD on his
machine way back then.

--
Dan Tilque

Laerta Liyazaki: "I have evidence [Greenhilt] is plotting the violent
overthrow of the current government."
Ocelia: "What?? What evidence is that?"
LL: "He has managed to maneuver himself to be direct heir to the
throne."
Ocelia: "...Yes, I know. He's the prince. He was born heir to the
throne."
LL: "Then his schemes go back further than even I suspected."
-- Rich Burlew, "Greenhilt, Prince of Denmark"

[Dan Tilque]

Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> In article <13347...@sheol.org>, Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org> wrote:
>> : thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)

>> (Well, assuming the unix you're running vi in has "tr", which
>> is a very good assumption.)
>
> It's trn, which is probably approximately, but not exactly, the
> same thing.
>

No it isn't. tr is TRanslate; trn is Threaded Read News. Much different
commands.


--
Dan Tilque

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <jml5d8$tkg$1...@dont-email.me>,

Dan Tilque <dti...@frontier.com> wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>
>> Well, I am using trn to read and vi to compose in, on a UNIX
>> system running 4.2 BSD. If you are sufficiently erudite in the
>> various aspects of such things (I'm not), you can figure it out.
>
>Now that takes me back. Or it would if I hadn't just read Cliff Stoll's
>_The Cuckoo's Egg_ for the first time. He probably had 4.3 BSD on his
>machine way back then.

Or some other flavor of BSD. I'd have to find the book and see
if he says, and since we have about five thousand books in our
flat and _TCE_ could be in at least two different places therein,
I'm not going to search.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <l04so7h7rqrjnjudr...@4ax.com>,

Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 22:25:08 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
>Heydt) wrote:
>
>>>If it's not easy with your reader, it is possible to do so enter your
>>>text on a web page such as this http://rot13.com/index.php, then cut
>>>and paste the result back.
>>
>>Thanks, but as I said earlier, cutting (or rather, copying) and
>>pasting are not trivial tasks over here. Cutting can be done
>>easily -- there are various vi commands for deleting -- but
>>there's no way to paste what's been deleted into some other
>>system.
>
>I guess that depends on what version of Unix one uses. I'm
>surprised that one with a web browser won't let you paste in an
>e-mail. But I haven't tried all flavors of Unix.

Nor have I. But anyway, I can copy something *inside vi* by
highlighting it and paste it by going to either another text,
or elsewhere in the same text, and going into append mode with a
or A or o or O or ... and right-clicking.

And a right pain in the tail it is, too.

[David DeLaney]

Raymond Daley <raymon...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
>items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
>Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
>becomes more like religion.
>
>The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>
>What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?
>

>I'm working on an idea myself at the moment but it'd be interesting to see
>what else if anything exists already in the genre.

Does A Canticle for Liebowitz count, at least partially? Or Planet of the Apes?

(And there's any number of stories, ranging back to pulp days, of "we are
setting this adventure in The Future, and they don't have all the details
about our time right". Plus at least one webcomic, Starslip...)

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[Kurt Busiek]

On 2012-04-18 03:04:48 +0000, d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) said:

> Raymond Daley <raymon...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
>> items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
>> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
>> becomes more like religion.
>>
>> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>>
>> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?
>>
>> I'm working on an idea myself at the moment but it'd be interesting to see
>> what else if anything exists already in the genre.
>
> Does A Canticle for Liebowitz count, at least partially? Or Planet of the Apes?
>
> (And there's any number of stories, ranging back to pulp days, of "we are
> setting this adventure in The Future, and they don't have all the details
> about our time right". Plus at least one webcomic, Starslip...)

There's always the great RIDDLEY WALKER.

kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!

[Dan Tilque]

Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> In article <jml5d8$tkg$1...@dont-email.me>,
> Dan Tilque <dti...@frontier.com> wrote:
>> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>
>>> Well, I am using trn to read and vi to compose in, on a UNIX
>>> system running 4.2 BSD. If you are sufficiently erudite in the
>>> various aspects of such things (I'm not), you can figure it out.
>> Now that takes me back. Or it would if I hadn't just read Cliff Stoll's
>> _The Cuckoo's Egg_ for the first time. He probably had 4.3 BSD on his
>> machine way back then.
>
> Or some other flavor of BSD. I'd have to find the book and see
> if he says, and since we have about five thousand books in our
> flat and _TCE_ could be in at least two different places therein,
> I'm not going to search.

He doesn't say. I'd have noticed.

It was unimportant exactly which release he was using, anyway. The fact
that the hacker knew ATT Unix but was unfamiliar with BSD was a minor
point, but that's as far as that kind of thing went.


--
Dan Tilque

[Dan Tilque]

Dan Tilque wrote:
> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> In article <jml5d8$tkg$1...@dont-email.me>,
>> Dan Tilque <dti...@frontier.com> wrote:
>>> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>>
>>>> Well, I am using trn to read and vi to compose in, on a UNIX
>>>> system running 4.2 BSD. If you are sufficiently erudite in the
>>>> various aspects of such things (I'm not), you can figure it out.
>>> Now that takes me back. Or it would if I hadn't just read Cliff
>>> Stoll's _The Cuckoo's Egg_ for the first time. He probably had 4.3
>>> BSD on his machine way back then.
>>
>> Or some other flavor of BSD. I'd have to find the book and see
>> if he says, and since we have about five thousand books in our
>> flat and _TCE_ could be in at least two different places therein,
>> I'm not going to search.
>
> He doesn't say. I'd have noticed.

Let me amend that. He doesn't discuss versions of BSD in the text. But
I'd forgotten that he also listed some computer sessions of the hacker.
In one of those, it says it was 4.2 BSD.


--
Dan Tilque

[David Goldfarb]

In article <13347...@sheol.org>, Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org> wrote:

>: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
>: I mean, who's going to just naturally know that if you want to "copy
>: text from vi" to paste into a web browser, you actually need to talk
>: to a virtual terminal app? It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!
>
>Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
>to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and
>
> -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M
>
>(There are guaranteed to be better ways to do it, but that one works.)
>(Well, assuming the unix you're running vi in has "tr", which
> is a very good assumption.)

I just tested the command, and it did work.

(Dorothy, you could copy the above into a Notepad file and save it.
To enter command mode, just hit escape then : .)

--
David Goldfarb |"My society worries about people getting their
goldf...@gmail.com | hands on illegal drugs but they'll sell any
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | idiot a bag of concrete."
| -- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

[Bo Lindbergh]

In article <rscjr.36961$m91....@fx24.am4>,

"Raymond Daley" <raymon...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
> items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
> becomes more like religion.
>
> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>
> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?

Gene Wolfe's _The Book of the Long Sun_ has bits of this.


/Bo Lindbergh

[Mike Dworetsky]

ISTR that stars close to the galactic plane increase in metallicity the
closer they are to the Galactic Centre. This is related to the much higher
density of stars and the number of stars that have gone through their life
cycle. You may be thinking of stars in the bulge, but even there I'm not
sure they are low metallicity objects.

--
Mike Dworetsky

(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)

[Mike Dworetsky]

Raymond Daley wrote:
> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct
> uses of items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and
> science becomes more like religion.
>
> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The
> Sky.
> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on
> Earth?

> I'm working on an idea myself at the moment but it'd be interesting
> to see what else if anything exists already in the genre.

Most of the ones set on Earth are post-nuclear-holocaust stories. From
recall of a few:

"Star Man's Son" by Andre Norton

"A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M Miller, Jr in which an illustrated
manuscript of a 20th century circuit diagram plays an important part.

"Vault of the Ages" by Poul Anderson (IIRC)

"Deathworld 2" = "The Ethical Engineer" by Harry Harrison; a technologically
savvy spacefarer crash-lands on a lost colony planet on which some remnants
of technology survive but with religious flummery in an otherwise medieval
society.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 1:56:49 AM UTC+1, Dan Tilque wrote:
> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> > In article <jmkfn0$4ad$1...@dont-email.me>,
> > lal_truckee <lal_t...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> On 4/17/12 9:21 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> >>
> >> Also related is the [YASID] one where humans meet on the other side of
> >> the galaxy, having explored and colonized (and evolved) moving in
> >> opposite directions around the galactic spiral plane over millions of
> >> years (presumably the direct route across the lens is too deadly?)
> >
> > Well, it does have a black hole in its middle. If someone can
> > identify the YASID, we can estimate whether that fact was known
> > before or after the story was written.
>
> Bill Snyder indentified it as Harrison's "Final Encounter". Googling
> shows it was published in 1964. I don't remember exactly when they found
> the central black hole, but some time in the 70s.

AIUI it took a long time for astronomers to become
confident that true black holes exist at all.
But now stars at the centre of the galaxy have
been filmed swooping round and round nothing
apparently there, which should be good enough
for most folks.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Tuesday, April 17, 2012 8:27:28 PM UTC+1, lal_truckee wrote:
> On 4/17/12 9:18 AM, Kurt Busiek wrote:
>
> > it's a little like wondering if you should abandon your idea about a
> > character who gets superpowers and fights crime because it's been done
> > before.
>
> [for variations of "crime" to include "generic bad guys."]
>
> Followup - who was the first such exact character to find his way into
> the actual written literature?
> Nietzsche' Übermensch?
> Beowulf?
> Achilles?
> Gilgamesh?
>
> Anyone earlier than Gilgamesh?

Isn't Gilgamesh an anti-hero at best, or on a
bad day, a plain villain? At least by modern
standards.

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

Achilles is the prototype super-soldier, that's for sure. Underwent a
special process that made him better than other men.

If you want to narrow it down to "fights crime", though, instead of
just "fights something his society opposes" like any soldier, I think
you have to come a lot farther forward, perhaps to the "Cloud Men's
Minds" version of The Shadow (the original version didn't have
superpowers).


--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog:
http://seawasp.livejournal.com

[Michael Stemper]

In article <13347...@sheol.org>, thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) writes:
>: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)

>: I mean, who's going to just naturally know that if you want to "copy
>: text from vi" to paste into a web browser, you actually need to talk
>: to a virtual terminal app? It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!
>
>Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
>to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and
>
> -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

Cool. I always use a command-line script to rot-13 stuff. I never knew
that it could be done directly in vi. Although I guess that, since there's
a bang in there, it's not really *in* vi, it's shelled out.

For that matter, I never knew about the
:-3,.
syntax, either. I knew about absolute line numbers, and "$", but not
relative or current.


--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce,
they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 12:34:11 PM UTC+1, Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
> Achilles is the prototype super-soldier, that's for sure. Underwent a
> special process that made him better than other men.
>
> If you want to narrow it down to "fights crime", though, instead of
> just "fights something his society opposes" like any soldier, I think
> you have to come a lot farther forward, perhaps to the "Cloud Men's
> Minds" version of The Shadow (the original version didn't have
> superpowers).

If you accept "natural high intelligence",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Auguste_Dupin

Dupin and Sherlock Holmes (who apparently
stimulated thought with tobacco) sometimes
were in it for the money, sometimes for
personal curiosity and the fun of it, and
sometimes indeed altruistically.

[Bill Gill]

On 4/17/2012 11:23 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> In article<jmjq8s$sqk$1...@dont-email.me>, Bill Gill<bill...@cox.net> wrote:

>> On 4/17/2012 6:24 AM, Raymond Daley wrote:
>>> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
>>> items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
>>> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
>>> becomes more like religion.
>>>
>>> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>>>
>>> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?
>>>
>>> I'm working on an idea myself at the moment but it'd be interesting to see
>>> what else if anything exists already in the genre.
>>>
>>>

>> I have no idea what it was, but I recall reading a story where
>> a group of apocalypse survivors were living in the dark in an extensive
>> cavern system. They didn't even know about light. They didn't know
>> any more than was necessary for their survival. Eventually
>> people from the surface found them.
>
> That's Galouye's _Dark Universe_. Very well done.
>
> They used "light" as a synonym for God, and you got a religious
> experience by gently pressing on your eyeballs.
>
That's it. I remember the priest pressing the eyeballs. The hero
recognized the light carried by the surface dwellers from that.

Bill

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <M2ny7...@kithrup.com>,

David Goldfarb <goldf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>In article <13347...@sheol.org>, Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org> wrote:
>>: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
>>: I mean, who's going to just naturally know that if you want to "copy
>>: text from vi" to paste into a web browser, you actually need to talk
>>: to a virtual terminal app? It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!
>>
>>Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
>>to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and
>>
>> -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M
>>
>>(There are guaranteed to be better ways to do it, but that one works.)
>>(Well, assuming the unix you're running vi in has "tr", which
>> is a very good assumption.)
>
>I just tested the command, and it did work.
>
>(Dorothy, you could copy the above into a Notepad file and save it.
>To enter command mode, just hit escape then : .)

I am sure my machine has Notepad. (It's a horrid little HP box
running horrid little Vista, which came with the machine.) But I
don't know where it is. My computer-fu is, to put it mildly,
spotty. (Hal insists I know more about computers than most
people who don't understand computers. But I think this comes
merely from living with him for so long.)

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <jmlnfc$5j7$1...@dont-email.me>,

So there we are. Or I am, anyway. :)

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <3578674.985.1334746451504.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@vbbdy9>,

By modern standards most or all of the ancients were bad guys.

Which is why we groan when we see (on the tube, e.g.) someone
from a previous era portrayed as having absolutely modern
up-to-date politically correct sensibilities. Particularly
medieval women who are twenty-first-century feminist radicals in
hennins.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

Yup. And called it "silent sound."

[Wayne Throop]

:: -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

: mste...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper)
: Cool. I always use a command-line script to rot-13 stuff. I never

: knew that it could be done directly in vi. Although I guess that,
: since there's a bang in there, it's not really *in* vi, it's shelled
: out.

I expect there's probably a "y" command that can do it directly in vi.
But I don't use vi on a daily basis, so I'm clumsy with it.
Escaping to the good old familiar shell is... easier.
In some sense.

I mean... when I'm in a really minimal environment and my favorite
tools aren't available, my fallback editor is ed, not vi.
Go figure, but ed is just... easier... in some sense, than vi.

Mind you, not even ex. Just ed.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <13347...@sheol.org>, Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org> wrote:

I don't think my system even has ed. It certainly doesn't have
ed's predecessor, e.

(Pause to bring up another kithrup window and check...)

Well, it opened a file ... but the commands seem to be way
different. Everything I type is answered by a ?. How do you
quit ed? (Rhetorical question; I'm about to kill the PuTTY
session, that'll kill it I bet.)

[Derek Lyons]

Dan Tilque <dti...@frontier.com> wrote:

>Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

>> In article <jmkfn0$4ad$1...@dont-email.me>,
>> lal_truckee <lal_t...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> On 4/17/12 9:21 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>>
>>> Also related is the [YASID] one where humans meet on the other side of
>>> the galaxy, having explored and colonized (and evolved) moving in
>>> opposite directions around the galactic spiral plane over millions of
>>> years (presumably the direct route across the lens is too deadly?)
>>
>> Well, it does have a black hole in its middle. If someone can
>> identify the YASID, we can estimate whether that fact was known
>> before or after the story was written.
>
>Bill Snyder indentified it as Harrison's "Final Encounter". Googling
>shows it was published in 1964. I don't remember exactly when they found
>the central black hole, but some time in the 70s.

Keep in mind that Milky Way's central black hole is like the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch - much, *much* more impressive in the media's
and public's imagination than it is in reality.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

[Robert Carnegie]

On Tuesday, April 17, 2012 7:55:13 PM UTC+1, Ted Nolan &lt;tednolan&gt; wrote:
> In article <M2Myy...@kithrup.com>,
> Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
> >In article <9v5lp2...@mid.individual.net>,
> >Ted Nolan <tednolan> <tednolan> wrote:
> >>In article <M2MtI...@kithrup.com>,

> >>Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
> >>>That's Galouye's _Dark Universe_. Very well done.
> >>>
> >>>They used "light" as a synonym for God, and you got a religious
> >>>experience by gently pressing on your eyeballs.
> >>>

> >>>--
> >>>Dorothy J. Heydt
> >>
> >>Which I think actually was a pretty big deal in the Byzantine Empire
> >>at one time.
> >
> >"Light" meaning "God"? Or pressing on the eyeballs? If the
> >latter, do please see if you can find a cite.
> >
> >--
> >Dorothy J. Heydt
>
> The later. I'm guessing I read it in Norwich's Byzantine history books,
> but I could be wrong. IIRC it was one of those odd religious fads that
> kept popping up there (I don't think it was a top tier dispute like
> iconoclasm, the single presession of the Holy Spirit or "how many
> persons" though).

...uh huh, thank god I'm apostate nowadays!

I did not encounter this particular whimsy,
with the eyeballs, as far as I remember.
But I was with Elim Pentecostalists for
a while. They aren't crazy stuff per se
(if you don't regard speaking-in-tongues
randomly as crazy - I mean there weren't
any snakes), but they're open to crazy.

These days, I suspect that all religions
and sub-religions are not far away from
crazy stuff.

[Christian Weisgerber]

Michael Stemper <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M
>
> Cool. I always use a command-line script to rot-13 stuff. I never knew
> that it could be done directly in vi. Although I guess that, since there's
> a bang in there, it's not really *in* vi, it's shelled out.

You don't need to drop to ex. Inside vi you can use ! <movement
command> to filter lines through an external command, e.g. !}fmt
to run a paragraph through fmt(1).

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de

[Christian Weisgerber]

Mike Dworetsky <plati...@pants.btinternet.com> wrote:

> Most of the ones set on Earth are post-nuclear-holocaust stories. From
> recall of a few:
>
> "Star Man's Son" by Andre Norton

"No Night Without Stars", idem

The Pelbar Cycle, Paul O. Williams

[Derek Lyons]

djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:

>By modern standards most or all of the ancients were bad guys.

By moderen standards pretty much anyone from before the turn of the
century are bad guys to some degree.

>Which is why we groan when we see (on the tube, e.g.) someone
>from a previous era portrayed as having absolutely modern
>up-to-date politically correct sensibilities. Particularly
>medieval women who are twenty-first-century feminist radicals in
>hennins.

Not just the tube - it's damm near universal in all fiction.

But the one that makes me see red is the modern habit of taking people
from the past to task for not being modern people. This has been
especially annoying over the last couple of weeks on FB and LJ with a
significant number of my friends expending great energy on castigating
the designers/builders/operators of Titanic for not performing to
current standards.

[Michael Stemper]

In article <13347...@sheol.org>, thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) writes:

>: mste...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper)

>:: -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

>
>: Cool. I always use a command-line script to rot-13 stuff. I never
>: knew that it could be done directly in vi. Although I guess that,
>: since there's a bang in there, it's not really *in* vi, it's shelled
>: out.
>
>I expect there's probably a "y" command that can do it directly in vi.
>But I don't use vi on a daily basis, so I'm clumsy with it.
>Escaping to the good old familiar shell is... easier.
>In some sense.
>
>I mean... when I'm in a really minimal environment and my favorite
>tools aren't available, my fallback editor is ed, not vi.
>Go figure, but ed is just... easier... in some sense, than vi.
>
>Mind you, not even ex. Just ed.

For simple tasks, "cat > filename" works quite well as an editor. There are
people who take other approaches: <http://xkcd.com/378/>, but I'm not going
to attempt to one-up them.

--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>

Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.

[Michael Stemper]

In article <4f8fe7a4....@news.supernews.com>, fair...@gmail.com (Derek Lyons) writes:
>djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:

>>By modern standards most or all of the ancients were bad guys.
>
>By moderen standards pretty much anyone from before the turn of the
>century are bad guys to some degree.

Which century? 'cuz most of us 'round hearbouts are from the most
recent turn of the century.

t just occured to me that the transition from 1999 to 2001 would have
seemed much more exotic if we'd called it "fin de siecle" instead of "Y2k".

[David Dyer-Bennet]

That's the other one I know the number of by heart :-).
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

[Cryptoengineer]

On Apr 18, 1:09 pm, mstem...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper)
wrote:
> In article <4f8fe7a4.4120426...@news.supernews.com>, fairwa...@gmail.com (Derek Lyons) writes:

> >djhe...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
> >>By modern standards most or all of the ancients were bad guys.
>
> >By moderen standards pretty much anyone from before the turn of the
> >century are bad guys to some degree.
>
> Which century? 'cuz most of us 'round hearbouts are from the most
> recent turn of the century.
>
> t just occured to me that the transition from 1999 to 2001 would have
> seemed much more exotic if we'd called it "fin de siecle" instead of "Y2k".

You don't have to go to far back to find a world were things almost
everyone now regards as utterly, blatantly evil were the law of the
land.

Take marital rape. When do you think that was outlawed in England?

1991.

pt

[Michael Stemper]

In article <ylfk1unl...@dd-b.net>, David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> writes:
>mste...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper) writes:
>> In article <13347...@sheol.org>, thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) writes:

>>>I mean... when I'm in a really minimal environment and my favorite
>>>tools aren't available, my fallback editor is ed, not vi.
>>>Go figure, but ed is just... easier... in some sense, than vi.
>>>
>>>Mind you, not even ex. Just ed.
>>
>> For simple tasks, "cat > filename" works quite well as an editor. There are
>> people who take other approaches: <http://xkcd.com/378/>, but I'm not going
>> to attempt to one-up them.
>
>That's the other one I know the number of by heart :-).

I had to look that one up. The other one that I know by heart is 327.

--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>

If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made from meat?

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <jmms7m$hao$4...@dont-email.me>,

Heh. I never did learn emacs. Of course, I learned vi from Bill
Tuthill, so that gives you an idea how long ago it was.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <4f8fe7a4....@news.supernews.com>,

Derek Lyons <fair...@gmail.com> wrote:
>djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
>
>>By modern standards most or all of the ancients were bad guys.
>
>By moderen standards pretty much anyone from before the turn of the
>century are bad guys to some degree.
>
>>Which is why we groan when we see (on the tube, e.g.) someone
>>from a previous era portrayed as having absolutely modern
>>up-to-date politically correct sensibilities. Particularly
>>medieval women who are twenty-first-century feminist radicals in
>>hennins.
>
>Not just the tube - it's damm near universal in all fiction.
>
>But the one that makes me see red is the modern habit of taking people
>from the past to task for not being modern people. This has been
>especially annoying over the last couple of weeks on FB and LJ with a
>significant number of my friends expending great energy on castigating
>the designers/builders/operators of Titanic for not performing to
>current standards.
>

The sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy. So was the battle of
Bosworth. So was the fall of Rome. But they're *over* and we
have to deal with the results as best we can.

Talking of xkcd, as we were a few posts ago, I assume you've all
seen this one?

http://xkcd.com/1040/

[David Dyer-Bennet]

mste...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper) writes:

> In article <ylfk1unl...@dd-b.net>, David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> writes:
>>mste...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper) writes:
>>> In article <13347...@sheol.org>, thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) writes:
>
>>>>I mean... when I'm in a really minimal environment and my favorite
>>>>tools aren't available, my fallback editor is ed, not vi.
>>>>Go figure, but ed is just... easier... in some sense, than vi.
>>>>
>>>>Mind you, not even ex. Just ed.
>>>
>>> For simple tasks, "cat > filename" works quite well as an editor. There are
>>> people who take other approaches: <http://xkcd.com/378/>, but I'm not going
>>> to attempt to one-up them.
>>
>>That's the other one I know the number of by heart :-).
>
> I had to look that one up. The other one that I know by heart is 327.

And the other one I know is 386.

Ah, 327. Maybe I'll remember the number now :-). I was complimenting
our DBA on having that one up on his wall yesterday evening.

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <jmmsg4$hao$5...@dont-email.me>,

Michael Stemper <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
>In article <4f8fe7a4....@news.supernews.com>, fair...@gmail.com
>(Derek Lyons) writes:
>>djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
>
>>>By modern standards most or all of the ancients were bad guys.
>>
>>By moderen standards pretty much anyone from before the turn of the
>>century are bad guys to some degree.
>
>Which century? 'cuz most of us 'round hearbouts are from the most
>recent turn of the century.
>
>t just occured to me that the transition from 1999 to 2001 would have
>seemed much more exotic if we'd called it "fin de siecle" instead of "Y2k".

Autres temps, autres moeurs.

In any case, just saying "turn of the century" usually makes you
have to specify *which* century.

I recommend, btw, a book by Hillel Schwarz called _Century's
End,_ which analyzes the whole world-will-end-on-an-even-date
thing, which started sometime during the Renaissance. No, the
court of Otto III did NOT panic at the approach of the year M.

[lal_truckee]

On 4/18/12 10:58 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

> In article<4f8fe7a4....@news.supernews.com>,
> Derek Lyons<fair...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> expending great energy on castigating
>> >the designers/builders/operators of Titanic for not performing to
>> >current standards.
>> >
> The sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy. So was the battle of

> Bosworth. So was the fall of Rome. But they're*over* and we

> have to deal with the results as best we can.

Not so - historic episodes are examined and reexamined ad naseum for
what they can teach us.

They're never *over.*
Battles are studied by the military colleges.
Rome by historians.
And the Titanic by navel engineers and ship's masters.

Each generation will learn more from reexamining the past as they filter
through evolving current knowledge and apply to the possible futures.
Except apparently political parties, the electorate, and Italian ship's
captains.

[art...@yahoo.com]

On Apr 17, 7:24 am, "Raymond Daley" <raymond.da...@ntlworld.com>

wrote:
> There are tons of stories about generation ships where the correct uses of
> items are forgotten, the ability to read is lost or mangled.
> Signs and notices are misunderstood from their original meanings and science
> becomes more like religion.
>
> The best example on a ship I can recall is probably Orphans Of The Sky.
>
> What I am wondering is, are there any stories like that but set on Earth?

The Feeling of Power by Asimov

[Raymond Daley]

"Dan Goodman" wrote
> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:29:56 +0100, Raymond Daley wrote:
>> Not a new idea then?
> The answer to "Is this a new idea?" is almost always "No; and the first
> use was probably 20 to 2,000 years before you think it possibly could
> have been."

Come off it.
My idea for Tranvestite Death (thats Death AS a Transvestite) wasn't
original?

http://sf-encyclopedia.com/

Entry Search > "transvestite death"
Your search didn't return any results.

Woohoo! I created a new idea!

[Joseph Nebus]

In <13347...@sheol.org> thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) writes:

>: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
>: I mean, who's going to just naturally know that if you want to "copy
>: text from vi" to paste into a web browser, you actually need to talk
>: to a virtual terminal app? It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!

>Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
>to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and

> -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

Wait a minute, I recognize that. That's that 'Dritok' language
Don Boozer invented for his chipmunk aliens to speak.

http://podcast.conlang.org/2009/02/dritok-the-sound-of-no-voice-speaking/

(Actual language sample:

h:qs:.p*. D5Q5=Q1=D3Q3 Q1=ql.px:n.k*. D5Q5=tr'.z*w. Q1=D2&=zn.tx:.hr:. B5=tr'.z*w. Q5-Q5=o.s'. o.hs.p't. D5Q5=s'.s'.t*.k'.

which is also a legitimate vi command, although nobody knows what it does.)

--
http://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/ Joseph Nebus
Current Entry: Everything I Know About Trapezoids http://wp.me/p1RYhY-bF
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[David DeLaney]

Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:

>David Goldfarb <goldf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
>>>to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and
>>>
>>> -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M
>>

>>I just tested the command, and it did work.
>>
>>(Dorothy, you could copy the above into a Notepad file and save it.
>>To enter command mode, just hit escape then : .)
>
>I am sure my machine has Notepad. (It's a horrid little HP box
>running horrid little Vista, which came with the machine.) But I
>don't know where it is. My computer-fu is, to put it mildly,
>spotty. (Hal insists I know more about computers than most
>people who don't understand computers. But I think this comes
>merely from living with him for so long.)

I'm almost _certain_ that, even with Vista's oddnesses, it would be under
Start menu (or Vista's equivalent) / Programs / Accessories / Notepad.

I could check really quickly if I had a Vista PC in front of me, but I
don't. Wordpad might be there too?

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[David DeLaney]

Michael Stemper <mste...@walkabout.empros.com> wrote:

>In article <13347...@sheol.org>, thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) writes:
>>: thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
>
>>: I mean, who's going to just naturally know that if you want to "copy
>>: text from vi" to paste into a web browser, you actually need to talk
>>: to a virtual terminal app? It ain't *nachural* I tells ya!
>>

>>Oh, and of course, if all you want to do is rot13 from 3 lines ago
>>to the current line in vi, you just go to command mode and
>>
>> -3,.!tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

>

>Cool. I always use a command-line script to rot-13 stuff. I never knew
>that it could be done directly in vi. Although I guess that, since there's
>a bang in there, it's not really *in* vi, it's shelled out.

Yes, though since Wayne's talking about "command mode" he's not actually in
vi anymore, he's in its one-line-at-a-time sub-editor, "ed".

>For that matter, I never knew about the
> :-3,.
>syntax, either. I knew about absolute line numbers, and "$", but not
>relative or current.

I often do
:.,$s/ ^//
to get rid of the space on the end of every line that some mail programs seem
to insist on adding. It parses as
: - drop into 'ed' mode
. - from this line/here
, - to
$ - the end of the file
s - substitute
/ - delimiter, telling where each end of what to substitute is
" ^" - (look for) space, then end of line
// - (substitute for it) nothing at all
and presto, the rest of the file gets spaces stripped off the ends of the
lines. The ed-mode stuff, if you know even a bit of regular expressions, is
pretty powerful and condensed.

[David DeLaney]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:16:47 GMT, Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>>I mean... when I'm in a really minimal environment and my favorite
>>tools aren't available, my fallback editor is ed, not vi.
>>Go figure, but ed is just... easier... in some sense, than vi.
>>
>>Mind you, not even ex. Just ed.
>
>I don't think my system even has ed. It certainly doesn't have
>ed's predecessor, e.

If it has vi, it has access to ed...

>(Pause to bring up another kithrup window and check...)
>
>Well, it opened a file ... but the commands seem to be way
>different. Everything I type is answered by a ?. How do you
>quit ed? (Rhetorical question; I'm about to kill the PuTTY
>session, that'll kill it I bet.)

If you do it again sometime, q! ought to do it (quit, and without-saving-
changes). wq saves and quits, as far as I know.

[David DeLaney]

Derek Lyons <fair...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Dan Tilque <dti...@frontier.com> wrote:
>>> Well, it does have a black hole in its middle. If someone can
>>> identify the YASID, we can estimate whether that fact was known
>>> before or after the story was written.
>>
>>Bill Snyder indentified it as Harrison's "Final Encounter". Googling
>>shows it was published in 1964. I don't remember exactly when they found
>>the central black hole, but some time in the 70s.
>
>Keep in mind that Milky Way's central black hole is like the Great
>Pacific Garbage Patch - much, *much* more impressive in the media's
>and public's imagination than it is in reality.

Wikipedia's info that it's thought to be around 4 million+ solar masses
means it's about 12 million km in radius (or, since radius doesn't make
that much sense for one, 75 million km around).

About 20% the size of Mercury's orbit, so larger than the Sun by a factor of
17 or so but small on the scale of the Solar System.

ObSF: Which means the measurements for Uran s'Varek, the Inquestor's homeworld
(an odd version of Dyson Sphere) at the center of the galaxy, around the
central black hole, aren't out of line - 446 million km ("hokh'klomets")
around, easily enough to contain the black hole.
I'm thinking the other constants mentioned - it seems to be 1g at the
surface, they live on the outside of it, and an atmosphere "thousands of
klomets deep" is mentioned several times to blur the radiation from the press
of stars in the core but the surface seems to be at 1 atmosphere also _and_
the sky doesn't seem to be burning-hot - are still rather wacky.
But then there's massive telekinetic telepathic computer banks
("thinkhives") that direct the infalling stars every several decades through
the openings at the poles, so presumably, as well as making sure the black
hole stays spinless and getting rid of any accretion disk it tries to form,
they're holding off the pressure from the atmosphere and the heat from the
radiance...

Anyway, the dyson sphere around it is rather more spectacular than the hole
itself, yes, in that series.

[Joseph Nebus]

In <slrnjou85...@gatekeeper.vic.com> d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) writes:

>Derek Lyons <fair...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>Keep in mind that Milky Way's central black hole is like the Great
>>Pacific Garbage Patch - much, *much* more impressive in the media's
>>and public's imagination than it is in reality.

>Wikipedia's info that it's thought to be around 4 million+ solar masses
>means it's about 12 million km in radius (or, since radius doesn't make
>that much sense for one, 75 million km around).

I didn't think the Garbage Patch was even *half* that big!


(Thank you for leaving that straight line dangling, when I'm
sure you considered editing it out of existence.)

[Dorothy J Heydt]

In article <slrnjou7i...@gatekeeper.vic.com>,

David DeLaney <d...@vic.com> wrote:
>On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:16:47 GMT, Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>>>I mean... when I'm in a really minimal environment and my favorite
>>>tools aren't available, my fallback editor is ed, not vi.
>>>Go figure, but ed is just... easier... in some sense, than vi.
>>>
>>>Mind you, not even ex. Just ed.
>>
>>I don't think my system even has ed. It certainly doesn't have
>>ed's predecessor, e.
>
>If it has vi, it has access to ed...
>
>>(Pause to bring up another kithrup window and check...)
>>
>>Well, it opened a file ... but the commands seem to be way
>>different. Everything I type is answered by a ?. How do you
>>quit ed? (Rhetorical question; I'm about to kill the PuTTY
>>session, that'll kill it I bet.)
>
>If you do it again sometime, q! ought to do it (quit, and without-saving-
>changes). wq saves and quits, as far as I know.

I was not able to use either one. They went into text.
Wotthehell.

[Wayne Throop]

: d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney)
: ObSF: Which means the measurements for Uran s'Varek, the Inquestor's

: homeworld (an odd version of Dyson Sphere) at the center of the
: galaxy, around the central black hole, aren't out of line - 446
: million km ("hokh'klomets") around, easily enough to contain the black
: hole. I'm thinking the other constants mentioned - it seems to be 1g
: at the surface, they live on the outside of it, and an atmosphere
: "thousands of klomets deep" is mentioned several times

So... the atmosphere at the surface is many thousands of times
as dense as earth's? Hm. What's it composed of, besides presumably
a bit of oxygen? Helium maybe? Even so, seems like it'd be like
trying to breathe pea soup...

[Derek Lyons]

d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) wrote:

>Derek Lyons <fair...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Keep in mind that Milky Way's central black hole is like the Great
>>Pacific Garbage Patch - much, *much* more impressive in the media's
>>and public's imagination than it is in reality.
>
>Wikipedia's info that it's thought to be around 4 million+ solar masses
>means it's about 12 million km in radius (or, since radius doesn't make
>that much sense for one, 75 million km around).
>
>About 20% the size of Mercury's orbit, so larger than the Sun by a factor of
>17 or so but small on the scale of the Solar System.

And thus on the scale of the galaxy itself - beyond infinitesimal.

[Derek Lyons]

lal_truckee <lal_t...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On 4/18/12 10:58 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>
> > In article<4f8fe7a4....@news.supernews.com>,
> > Derek Lyons<fair...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> expending great energy on castigating
>>> >the designers/builders/operators of Titanic for not performing to
>>> >current standards.
>>> >
>> The sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy. So was the battle of
>> Bosworth. So was the fall of Rome. But they're*over* and we
>> have to deal with the results as best we can.
>
>Not so - historic episodes are examined and reexamined ad naseum for
>what they can teach us.
>
>They're never *over.*
>Battles are studied by the military colleges.
>Rome by historians.
>And the Titanic by navel engineers and ship's masters.

I.E. they're studied by *professionals*. Not even remotely the same
thing as J. Random Public as was cited in my original post.

[Bill Snyder]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:10:35 GMT, fair...@gmail.com (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

>lal_truckee <lal_t...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>

>>And the Titanic by navel engineers and ship's masters.
>
>I.E. they're studied by *professionals*. Not even remotely the same
>thing as J. Random Public as was cited in my original post.

And why would plastic surgeons be studying the Titanic anyway?

--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank]