What Would Stun the Aliens
Charles Talleyrand
thing about us would suprise them the most.
I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
first.
I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
equally stun them.
Finally, lawns a a mystery to them. Every house gets a bit of grass
that actually isn't that attactive, totally messes up the city population
density and therefore the transport network, more than doubles the
cost of land, and and the owners have to maintain them. Yet most
houses have lawns. What the heck!
P.S. No Earth politics. The aliens are not interested in Earth politics.
They just don't care.
Chad Irby
"Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote:
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
Cartoons.
Both technology and plot.
--
cirby at cfl.rr.com
Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.
Ethan Merritt
>thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
>I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
>a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
>first.
>
>I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
>equally stun them.
Aren't these two things contradictory? First you say they're amazed
we can do all that calculus in our head while running down the court,
then you say they're amazed we can't do math in our heads.
Anyhow, many of us can do the mental math but not the basketball.
They can stay at my place if it makes feel more at home :-)
--
Ethan A Merritt
Dorothy J Heydt
Ethan Merritt <emer...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>In article <vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com>,
>Charles Talleyrand <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote:
>>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>>thing about us would suprise them the most.
>>
>>I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
>>a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
>>first.
>>
>>I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
>>equally stun them.
>
>Aren't these two things contradictory? First you say they're amazed
>we can do all that calculus in our head while running down the court,
>then you say they're amazed we can't do math in our heads.
We can do the seat-of-the-pants trajectories* because we used to
be arboreal primates whose lives depended on leaping from branch
to branch. Manipulating symbols came much later.**
------
*Some of us can, anyway.
**For some of us, never.
------
In _The Rolling Stones,_the Luna-born sons are telling their
Earth-born father why they don't want to go to Earth.
"Take baseball," Castor continued. "It's not practical. How can
you figure a one-g trajectory and place your hand at the point of
contact in the free-flight time between bases? We're not
miracle men."
"*I* played it."
"But you grew up in a one-g field; you've got a distorted notion
of physics."
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Mike Williams
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
> a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
> first.
I think the math of jumping to conclusions like that would be more
mystifying.
Keith Morrison
>>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>>thing about us would suprise them the most.
>>
>>I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
>>a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
>>first.
>>
>>I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
>>equally stun them.
>
> Aren't these two things contradictory? First you say they're amazed
> we can do all that calculus in our head while running down the court,
> then you say they're amazed we can't do math in our heads.
No, he used an example of doing something *without* doing math.
Which is true. When I was playing infield (softball, so only
60 feet from the plate down the third base line) I'd often be
able to place my glove in place to intercept a line drive before
being consciously capable of doing any calculation at all.
On a hard-hit line drive, I'd have about .75 seconds to observe
the hit, the direction of the oncoming ball, move my body and
my arm to place my glove in its path.
--
Keith
Ethan Merritt
Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>In article <btiot0$6vo$1...@lascaux.attbi.com>,
>Ethan Merritt <emer...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>In article <vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com>,
>>Charles Talleyrand <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote:
>>>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>>>thing about us would suprise them the most.
>>>
>>>I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
>>>a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
>>>first.
>>>
>>>I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
>>>equally stun them.
>>
>>Aren't these two things contradictory? First you say they're amazed
>>we can do all that calculus in our head while running down the court,
>>then you say they're amazed we can't do math in our heads.
>
>We can do the seat-of-the-pants trajectories* because we used to
>be arboreal primates whose lives depended on leaping from branch
>to branch. Manipulating symbols came much later.**
Yeah, yeah. _You_ know that, and _I_ know that, but do the
_aliens_ know that? The question was what the non-terrestrial
observer would think was going on.
>In _The Rolling Stones,_the Luna-born sons are telling their
>Earth-born father why they don't want to go to Earth.
>
>"Take baseball," Castor continued. "It's not practical. How can
>you figure a one-g trajectory and place your hand at the point of
>contact in the free-flight time between bases? We're not
>miracle men."
Heh. I've had that passage in the back of my head for decades,
but had forgotten where it came from.
--
Ethan A Merritt
Mike Schilling
"Keith Morrison" <kei...@polarnet.ca> wrote in message
news:btis4...@enews1.newsguy.com...
Ever skip a stone across a lake? Just think how complex the mathematics
describing its path is, depending as it does on mass, velocity, spin, and
precisely which surface touches the water. I defy the most sophisticated
computer program to predict with any accuracy where the stone will go, or
even how many times it will skip.
But the stone does the right thing every time!
Dorothy J Heydt
Except when I throw it, when it goes "plop" once and sinks.
Damien Neil
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
Photocopiers.
"Hey, neat, an image duplicator. We've got those."
"Whoa, you can just drop a whole stack of stuff in to copy?"
"It does *both sides*? Without me touching the paper?"
"It *binds* the output?"
People complain about paper jams. Me, I'm amazed the things work at
all.
- Damien
Justin Bacon
>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>thing about us would suprise them the most.
This would depend rather strongly on the aliens.
JB
Mark Jason Dominus
>thing about us would suprise them the most.
I've always imagined that Earth would do a pretty good business
playing host to aliens who have come to observe total solar eclipses.
Lots of planets will have majestic mountains and sunny beaches, but
very few have total eclipses.
I also have a fantasy that they'll be totally mystified by our
obsessive interest in NP-completeness, and they'll wonder why we spent
so much time investigating this particaulr pimple on the bloated belly
of the mathematics of computation.
Mark Jason Dominus
>be arboreal primates whose lives depended on leaping from branch
>to branch.
Or maybe because we used to be plains-dwelling primates whose lives
depended on being able to hit a rabbit with a rock.
Hard to say for sure.
Peter Bruells
> I've always imagined that Earth would do a pretty good business
> playing host to aliens who have come to observe total solar
> eclipses. Lots of planets will have majestic mountains and sunny
> beaches, but very few have total eclipses.
That's certainly a nice curiosity, but easily achived by parking your
space ship in an appropriate orbit, isn't it?
Mark Jason Dominus
I haven't tried your suggestion, but it seems clear to me that it
wouldn't be the same kind of experience at all.
But hey, don't let me stop you from parking your spaceship wherever
you like.
Peter Bruells
> In article <m2zncyw...@rogue.ecce-terram.de>,
> Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de.de> wrote:
> >m...@plover.com (Mark Jason Dominus) writes:
> >
> >> I've always imagined that Earth would do a pretty good business
> >> playing host to aliens who have come to observe total solar
> >> eclipses. Lots of planets will have majestic mountains and sunny
> >> beaches, but very few have total eclipses.
> >
> >
> >That's certainly a nice curiosity, but easily achived by parking your
> >space ship in an appropriate orbit, isn't it?
>
> I haven't tried your suggestion, but it seems clear to me that it
> wouldn't be the same kind of experience at all.
From human point of view, sure. Humans know about the rarity of full
eclipses (rare even when you a free to hop araound the planet at your
leisure) and have a religious feeling about their sun.
Tell me, would you travel 50 lighyears just to see the three moons of
H'kj'sd, with a guarantee that your local guide smells of foul eggs
and an 75% chance that it's a cloudy night?
Michael S. Schiffer
news:070120042347406624%ne...@misago.org:
You may already know this, but in Elliot S. Maggin's novel
_Superman: Last Son of Krypton_, there's a thriving industry
stealing Xerox machines and shipping them throughout this galactic
arm because no one else makes a comparable product. (They steal
them only because, at the time, Xerox would only lease the machines
rather than selling them, and that wasn't deemed practical by
extraterrestrial customers.)
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
Mark Jason Dominus
Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de.de> wrote:
>m...@plover.com (Mark Jason Dominus) writes:
>
>> In article <m2zncyw...@rogue.ecce-terram.de>,
>> Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de.de> wrote:
>> >m...@plover.com (Mark Jason Dominus) writes:
>> >
>> >> I've always imagined that Earth would do a pretty good business
>> >> playing host to aliens who have come to observe total solar
>> >> eclipses. Lots of planets will have majestic mountains and sunny
>> >> beaches, but very few have total eclipses.
>> >
>> >
>> >That's certainly a nice curiosity, but easily achived by parking your
>> >space ship in an appropriate orbit, isn't it?
>>
>> I haven't tried your suggestion, but it seems clear to me that it
>> wouldn't be the same kind of experience at all.
>
>From human point of view, sure.
Any possible thread in this discussion could end with that remark,
which means it is boring and obvious. If you are going to go that
route there is no point in having this discussion. And you are
wasting your effort, since if you are going to say that, you may as
well forget about the total eclipse stuff, and make the simpler
argument that there is no reason to believe that the aliens will be
interested in tourism of any kind.
>Humans know about the rarity of full eclipses
The aliens will know even better than we do, since none of them will
ever have seen one.
If the aliens dwell in deep space or at the bottom of a gold mine or
some other place without a unique sun, perhaps they will be
uninterested by total solar eclipses. But if they live on a planet
with a visible sun, I think they are as likely to be interested by a
total solar eclipse as in anything.
>Tell me, would you travel 50 lighyears just to see the three moons of
>H'kj'sd,
A solar eclipse is not just an arbitrary geometric or religious
phenomenon. The thing you seem to be missing is that it *looks*
different. I am not suggesting that the aliens will have a religious
or mathematical interest in the eclipse. I think they will come to
*see* it. There is a reason why tourists go to see things in person,
rather than simply staying home and looking at pictures.
However, I will answer your question anyway. Yes, I might travel 50
light years to stand on the surface of H'kj'sd and see the three moons
blazing in the gray and pink sky as they line up in a perfect
equilateral triangle. Yes indeed.
I would be much less interested in flying my space ship to the point
in space from which they would be arranged in an equilateral triangle.
That would be silly. It not be the same as standing on H'kj'sd
looking up at the blazing moons.
I would also be willing to travel 50 light years to see the highest
waterfall in the known universe, even if a certain German person were
to point out that I could see the same thing just by flushing my
spaceship's waste tank while in orbit.
David Goldfarb
Damien Neil <ne...@misago.org> wrote:
>Photocopiers.
>
>"Hey, neat, an image duplicator. We've got those."
>"Whoa, you can just drop a whole stack of stuff in to copy?"
>"It does *both sides*? Without me touching the paper?"
>"It *binds* the output?"
>
>People complain about paper jams. Me, I'm amazed the things work at
>all.
A lot of the time, they don't. High-volume photocopiers take a *lot*
of maintenance.
--
David Goldfarb <*>|From the fortune cookie file:
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |"You think that is a secret, but it never has
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | been one."
Gary R. Schmidt
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> I believe it's basketball.
It would be Cricket. In particular, Test Match Cricket.
Who could believe that people would spend five days plus a rest day
watching a match that ends in a draw!!!
And I missed the Boxing Day Test last year!!!
Cheers,
Gary B-)
--
______________________________________________________________________________
Armful of chairs: Something some people would not know
whether you were up them with or not
- Barry Humphries
Peter Bruells
> In article <m2u136w...@rogue.ecce-terram.de>,
> Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de.de> wrote:
> >
> >From human point of view, sure.
>
> Any possible thread in this discussion could end with that remark,
> which means it is boring and obvious. If you are going to go that
> route there is no point in having this discussion. And you are
> wasting your effort, since if you are going to say that, you may as
> well forget about the total eclipse stuff, and make the simpler
> argument that there is no reason to believe that the aliens will be
> interested in tourism of any kind.
Tourists - esp. the kind of tourists that bring money - want easily
availble, exotic, but not too exotic, experiences.
>> Humans know about the rarity of full eclipses
> The aliens will know even better than we do, since none of them will
> ever have seen one.
Most Humans have never seen one, too.
> If the aliens dwell in deep space or at the bottom of a gold mine or
> some other place without a unique sun, perhaps they will be
> uninterested by total solar eclipses. But if they live on a planet
> with a visible sun, I think they are as likely to be interested by a
> total solar eclipse as in anything.
Why? They have no relation to that concept.
>> Tell me, would you travel 50 lighyears just to see the three moons of
>> H'kj'sd,
>
> A solar eclipse is not just an arbitrary geometric or religious
> phenomenon.
A solar exclipse IS an arbritary geometric phenomenon. It's pure
geometry, after all, and it's significance too us is deeply linked to
our relation with the sun. If we'd be nocturnals, it would probably
mean much less to us.
> The thing you seem to be missing is that it *looks* different.
So you're not sitting in a starship but in a environmental suit,
filtering out the deadly nitrogen from the athmosphere, perhaps aching
in all "bones" because of the high gravity.
> I am not suggesting that the aliens will have a religious or
> mathematical interest in the eclipse. I think they will come to
> *see* it. There is a reason why tourists go to see things in
> person, rather than simply staying home and looking at pictures.
The majority of tourists do not come JUST to look at things, they also
want comfort, food, perceived romance. And they want relate to it.
> However, I will answer your question anyway. Yes, I might travel 50
> light years to stand on the surface of H'kj'sd and see the three moons
> blazing in the gray and pink sky as they line up in a perfect
> equilateral triangle. Yes indeed.
You left out the egg-stink. That's was point.
Human tourism happens in human environments - apart from a few quirks,
they can easily eat the human foot and need only minor adjustments in
clothing for account different climates.
Even then they spend quite a lot of money of having food prepared in
their way, being greeted in their language, a getting the waters from
sealed bottles, and after visiting the Grand Canyon or the Beaches of
Vietnam, they want to relax in a comforting environment. And thesere
are things who are THERE, all year round.
I don't see hordes of aliens (unless of the boring, Star Trek kind)
spending their hard earned two weeks vacation, planning months ahead
just to visit Earth - an alien environment - on the chance that it's
not rainy.
And you'll have to reach Otto Normalverbraucher and Joe Sixpack
aliens, not a few individual backpackers, carrying their towels and
copy of the HHGTTG, if you want a good business in tourism.
Though I suppose that "see the outer Rim in 14 days" tours will offer
day tours to the Rings of Saturn, Mount Olympus and Earth if it's one
of the 2 or 4 days in the year when there's actually an eclipse.
nwsy
In Hitchiker's Guide, it mentions the instructions on a pack of toothpicks
as being the final evidence that Humanity had gone insane. I'd go along with
that.
--
Somebody sneaked in here and committed a neatness!
----------------------------------------
>> http://hedgewitch.blogspot.com <<
----------------------------------------
Michael Grosberg
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
Having carnivorous animals with sharp teeth and claws as pets. What
are cats for?
And music, of course.
> I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
> a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
> first.
They do have evolution on their planet, right? we evolved to do that
sort of thing, throwing stuff. there's no reason why their planet
won't have some equivalent.
No, it's those people in the crowd who come to watch the thing that
will leave them completely mystified, just like all of us
non-americans.
artyw
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
Anchovies on Pizza (Actually, I am convinced that anchovies are aliens)
Peter Meilinger
I was gonna say. To be fair, though, the rock is doing its
part. We're the ones who mess it up.
Pete
Justin Bacon
>> If the aliens dwell in deep space or at the bottom of a gold mine or
>> some other place without a unique sun, perhaps they will be
>> uninterested by total solar eclipses. But if they live on a planet
>> with a visible sun, I think they are as likely to be interested by a
>> total solar eclipse as in anything.
>
>Why? They have no relation to that concept.
Are you postulating:
(a) Really stupid aliens,
(b) Aliens without any imagination,
(c) Aliens without any appreciation of natural wonder, or
(d) All of the above?
>A solar exclipse IS an arbritary geometric phenomenon. It's pure
>geometry, after all, and it's significance too us is deeply linked to
>our relation with the sun. If we'd be nocturnals, it would probably
>mean much less to us.
That seems doubtful. We'd be pretty surprised if the sun suddenly appeared in
the night sky. I think nocturnals would be pretty surprised if the sun suddenly
disappeared in the middle of the day.
>I don't see hordes of aliens (unless of the boring, Star Trek kind)
>spending their hard earned two weeks vacation, planning months ahead
>just to visit Earth - an alien environment - on the chance that it's
>not rainy.
You're postulating aliens who are a lot less interesting than humans.
Hands up everybody who wants to take an affordable two week vacation on Mars.
Justin Bacon
tria...@aol.com
Peter Bruells
> Peter Bruells wrote:
>>> If the aliens dwell in deep space or at the bottom of a gold mine
>>> or some other place without a unique sun, perhaps they will be
>>> uninterested by total solar eclipses. But if they live on a
>>> planet with a visible sun, I think they are as likely to be
>>> interested by a total solar eclipse as in anything.
>>Why? They have no relation to that concept.
>
> Are you postulating:
>
> (a) Really stupid aliens,
> (b) Aliens without any imagination,
> (c) Aliens without any appreciation of natural wonder, or
> (d) All of the above?
None of the above. They might appreciate natural wonder, but they
have different expectations.
>> A solar exclipse IS an arbritary geometric phenomenon. It's pure
>> geometry, after all, and it's significance too us is deeply linked
>> to our relation with the sun. If we'd be nocturnals, it would
>> probably mean much less to us.
> That seems doubtful. We'd be pretty surprised if the sun suddenly
> appeared in the night sky. I think nocturnals would be pretty
> surprised if the sun suddenly disappeared in the middle of the day.
I'm not talking about surprise, I'm talking about emotional impact.
>> I don't see hordes of aliens (unless of the boring, Star Trek kind)
>> spending their hard earned two weeks vacation, planning months
>> ahead just to visit Earth - an alien environment - on the chance
>> that it's not rainy.
> You're postulating aliens who are a lot less interesting than
> humans.
If you want a thriving business, you need such aliens.
> Hands up everybody who wants to take an affordable two week vacation
> on Mars.
The single, big speciality of Mars is not being able to go there. Once
it's cheap to visit Mars, the 1/3 of gravity might make it attractive
for obese Earthers, but Lunarians may simply not see the point.
But lets say, that Mars is about the way it's right now, but totally
known to science. We know were the great seas were, have extracted
mars fossils up to the skeleton of its hightest lifeform, the Mars
worm, one of the colonists even climbed Mout Olympus.
What are you going to do for these two weeks?
Michael S. Schiffer
news:m2lloi3...@rogue.ecce-terram.de:
> The single, big speciality of Mars is not being able to go
> there. Once it's cheap to visit Mars, the 1/3 of gravity might
> make it attractive for obese Earthers, but Lunarians may simply
> not see the point.
"Sure, but *everyone* goes to Luna these days. It's all grotty and
touristy, and how many times can you listen to the same spiel about
Neil Armstrong on the Tranquillity Tour anyway? Can't we go
someplace *different* this year?"
> But lets say, that Mars is about the way it's right now, but
> totally known to science. We know were the great seas were, have
> extracted mars fossils up to the skeleton of its hightest
> lifeform, the Mars worm, one of the colonists even climbed Mout
> Olympus.
> What are you going to do for these two weeks?
The Grand Canyon's been known for a long time, yet people still
seem to go there. Ditto various national parks and campgrounds,
even though there are presumably trees and animals where the
visitors live. I'd guess that Olympus Mons and the Valles
Marineris and the simple chance to see red deserts with 1/3 G under
a sky utterly different from Earth's would be an attraction for
many.
By the time Mars is thoroughly explored and tamed (assuming that it
turns out to be economic to do this-- but if not, then by the same
token going there won't be mundane), it seems likely enough that
there'd also the same sorts of things that draw countless tourists
to the middle of the western North American desert, or to central
Florida, or for that matter to a formerly uninteresting island
called Manhattan. It took several hundred years for the Americas
to more or less cease to be romantic and unknown (except insofar as
anyplace you haven't been can be), and by that point there were
other reasons to go there, with transportation technology having
gotten much better and cheaper in the interim. Certainly, the
necessary time to "totally know" an entire planet offers a lot of
opportunity for learning how to fly in space efficiently.
Dorothy J Heydt
Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de.de> wrote:
>
>But lets say, that Mars is about the way it's right now, but totally
>known to science. We know were the great seas were, have extracted
>mars fossils up to the skeleton of its hightest lifeform, the Mars
>worm, one of the colonists even climbed Mout Olympus.
>
>What are you going to do for these two weeks?
Go skiing?
EdLincoln
Grass is God.
Think about it. We evolved intelligence when we descended from the trees to
the Grass infested Savana. Civilization began when we domesticated forms of
grass like wheat and corn.
Modern civilization is frantically replacing trees with grass. We plant fields
of wheat, rye, oats, and corn. We create pasture for graising animals. we
surround our houses with lawns for no obvious reasons.
Should we develop interstellar travel, we will certainly bring grass to other
planets.
Humanity is merely a tool to allow grass to spread to more environments.
Also, what did Christ break and call his body? Bread. What plant is bread
made from?
<< Finally, lawns a a mystery to them. Every house gets a bit of grass
that actually isn't that attactive, totally messes up the city population
density and therefore the transport network, more than doubles the
cost of land, and and the owners have to maintain them. Yet most
houses have lawns. What the heck! >><BR><BR>
Ken Walton
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
Rush hour traffic. Only an insane species would drive so fast, so close
together, singly in large vehicles, when they could use a safe and
efficient mass transit system. They'd probably gather in crowds at
cloverleaf intersections and lay bets.
--
Ken Walton
Michael S. Schiffer
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty
> small thing about us would suprise them the most.
The extent to which many humans assume that they'll be amazed by the
same things that the human him- or herself finds frustrating or
annoying. :-)
Dorothy J Heydt
OTOH there's the LeGuin story whose title I can never remember,
about the alien who visits Washington DC and strolls along
through the downtown rush-hour traffic murmuring, "The quiet!
The solitude!"
Matthias Warkus
Charles Talleyrand <rapp...@nmu.edu>:
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
Gangsta Rap. I can't even think where to start with this. IMHO, it's
the most absurd and perverted socio-economical phenomenon in Western
culture.
mawa
--
Q: How many 17-year-old Germans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Thirty. One of them holds the bulb, twenty-eight of them drink till
the room starts turning, and one of them gets screwed.
Steinn Sigurdsson
> Ethan Merritt wrote:
> >>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> >>thing about us would suprise them the most.
> >>I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
> >>a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
> >>first.
> >>I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
> >>equally stun them.
> > Aren't these two things contradictory? First you say they're amazed
> > we can do all that calculus in our head while running down the court,
> > then you say they're amazed we can't do math in our heads.
> No, he used an example of doing something *without* doing math.
> Which is true. When I was playing infield (softball, so only
> 60 feet from the plate down the third base line) I'd often be
> able to place my glove in place to intercept a line drive before
> being consciously capable of doing any calculation at all.
> On a hard-hit line drive, I'd have about .75 seconds to observe
> the hit, the direction of the oncoming ball, move my body and
> my arm to place my glove in its path.
To be fair, catching a ball does not require solving the
full 2nd order ODE describing its 3-D trajectory,
it is usually done by solving a first order ODE describing
its projected trajectory, and for many classes of trajectories
there are strongly convergent iterative solutions that do not
require explicit Cauchy boundary conditions to solve.
However, I have noticed for myself that if I have time to
think about the solution, the catch/shot fails; if it is calculated
"reflexively" there is a finite probability of a successful solution.
So, much easier problem than the naive brute force solution would suggest...
Dreamer
"Steinn Sigurdsson" <ste...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu> wrote in message
news:m2wu82x...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu...
> To be fair, catching a ball does not require solving the
> full 2nd order ODE describing its 3-D trajectory,
> it is usually done by solving a first order ODE describing
> its projected trajectory, and for many classes of trajectories
> there are strongly convergent iterative solutions that do not
> require explicit Cauchy boundary conditions to solve.
>
> However, I have noticed for myself that if I have time to
> think about the solution, the catch/shot fails; if it is calculated
> "reflexively" there is a finite probability of a successful solution.
This goes for a lot of things, interestingly enough. The most dramatic, yet
simple, example is walking along a narrow beam. If you start to tilt to one
side, the correct solution - which your body knows and will "reflexively"
perform - is to heave your upper body in the direction of the tilt. If you
allow yourself to think about it, you will try to move *opposite* the tilt,
which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
> So, much easier problem than the naive brute force solution would
suggest...
In Douglas Adams' non-fiction book _Last Chance to See,_ he refers to a bird
of prey (I think it's a falcon) "instantly solving a fiendishly difficult
piece of differential geometry" or something like that when it catches a
piece of food thrown into the air.
Perhaps that mythical 95% of our brains we don't use is really a massive
integrator/differentiator that allows us to do things "reflexively." :)
D
Dreamer
"Michael S. Schiffer" <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote in message
news:Xns946A6D0F7FFE...@130.133.1.4...
> > Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty
> > small thing about us would suprise them the most.
The willingness of the vast majority of humans to believe things which can't
be proved, have no observable manifestation, and which are logically
inconsistent. It still surprises ME, and I are one.
D
Mike Schilling
"Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote in message
news:vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com...
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
There are how many beings of your species in this grouping? More than 2**28?
And you chose *that* to be leader?
Mike Schilling
"Mark Jason Dominus" <m...@plover.com> wrote in message
news:btjdtp$bta$1...@plover.com...
> >thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> playing host to aliens who have come to observe total solar eclipses.
> Lots of planets will have majestic mountains and sunny beaches, but
> very few have total eclipses.
There's a Connie Wills story about this.
Dreamer
"artyw" <art...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:fcd1f4e4.0401...@posting.google.com...
> "Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote in message
news:<vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com>...
> > Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> > thing about us would suprise them the most.
> >
> Tractor Pulls (why?)
It makes exactly as much, or as little, sense as any other form of
recreational competition when examined logically and has the same basic
purpose.
> Anchovies on Pizza (Actually, I am convinced that anchovies are aliens)
You know, I've never had an anchovy on pizza. I don't think I've ever even
seen an anchovy ready for consumption. So on this I have no opinion.
D
Chad Irby
Steinn Sigurdsson <ste...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu> wrote:
> To be fair, catching a ball does not require solving the
> full 2nd order ODE describing its 3-D trajectory,
> it is usually done by solving a first order ODE describing
> its projected trajectory, and for many classes of trajectories
> there are strongly convergent iterative solutions that do not
> require explicit Cauchy boundary conditions to solve.
However, it *does* also include a running recalculation with observed
corrections for wind velocity and air friction. Some of the more
talented outfielders also correct for observed ball rotation...
--
cirby at cfl.rr.com
Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.
Dreamer
> >Humans know about the rarity of full eclipses
>
> The aliens will know even better than we do, since none of them will
> ever have seen one.
>
> If the aliens dwell in deep space or at the bottom of a gold mine or
> some other place without a unique sun, perhaps they will be
> uninterested by total solar eclipses. But if they live on a planet
> with a visible sun, I think they are as likely to be interested by a
> total solar eclipse as in anything.
Then you get into all sorts of fruitless but interesting anthropic
questioning of whether a planet that's going to sustain life needs a moon,
and how big it needs to be, and so forth. Even if the aliens' planet has a
moon or moons, there's no guarantee the moon or moons' orbits would cause
them to eclipse the sun (though it seems likely) and more importantly,
there's no guarantee that the moon would have the same apparent diameter as
the sun, which is the really awe-inspiring part of solar eclipses as far as
I'm concerned. I mean, what are the odds they'd have almost exactly the same
arc sectional coverage in the sky? How cool is that? And what are the odds
that the aliens' astronomers have ever really considered the implications of
such a (to them) theoretical system?
D
Steinn Sigurdsson
> "Steinn Sigurdsson" <ste...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu> wrote in message
> news:m2wu82x...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu...
> > To be fair, catching a ball does not require solving the
> > full 2nd order ODE describing its 3-D trajectory,
> > it is usually done by solving a first order ODE describing
> > its projected trajectory, and for many classes of trajectories
> > there are strongly convergent iterative solutions that do not
> > require explicit Cauchy boundary conditions to solve.
> > However, I have noticed for myself that if I have time to
> > think about the solution, the catch/shot fails; if it is calculated
> > "reflexively" there is a finite probability of a successful solution.
> This goes for a lot of things, interestingly enough. The most dramatic, yet
> simple, example is walking along a narrow beam. If you start to tilt to one
> side, the correct solution - which your body knows and will "reflexively"
> perform - is to heave your upper body in the direction of the tilt. If you
> allow yourself to think about it, you will try to move *opposite* the tilt,
> which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Yup, which is why training at sports and other activities
is so important, even for people who are naturall well suited to it.
ObRealLife: tall athletic friend of mine who tried to play US basketball
and got extremely frustrated that unathletic short guys who'd played it
LOTS more could literally run in circles around him
> > So, much easier problem than the naive brute force solution would
> suggest...
> In Douglas Adams' non-fiction book _Last Chance to See,_ he refers to a bird
> of prey (I think it's a falcon) "instantly solving a fiendishly difficult
> piece of differential geometry" or something like that when it catches a
> piece of food thrown into the air.
> Perhaps that mythical 95% of our brains we don't use is really a massive
> integrator/differentiator that allows us to do things "reflexively." :)
Nah, as I understand it, the process is generally fairly well understood
and involves a lot of pre-processing in the detectors and iterative
algorithms and "learned" linear solvers;
in some sense those are literally integrators and differentiators,
but in the true sense of summing and differencing linear inputs
and iterating.
Be fun to design a game where behaviour of the pieces was not
susceptible to linear iterative neural networks...
ObSF: Quidditch
OSF^2: "space cadet" novel where a sub-plot involves "advanced american
football" - the ball has a interior ball with liquid mercury in it
making its behaviour much more functionally random; IIRC the hero has
a lot of trouble accepting that the "bad guy" is better than he at
the game while they're cadets (bad guy reforms; hero and sidekick
crash on Venus at the end) YASID?
Steinn Sigurdsson
YASID: short story where the aliens are testing human rationality
by deliberately setting up inconclusive UFO encounters and then polling
for belief in UFOs.
Somewhat spoiled by the UFOs being real, and therefore "belief" in them
actually being rational - in the context of the story of course.
Michael Alan Chary
Michael S. Schiffer <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
>"Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote in
>news:vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com:
>
>> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty
>> small thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
>The extent to which many humans assume that they'll be amazed by the
>same things that the human him- or herself finds frustrating or
>annoying. :-)
The lottery.
--
In memoriam Paul Owens and Tug McGraw of your World Champion
1980 Philadelphia Phillies. "Ya Gotta Believe."
Kenneth Rapp
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
Millions of people claiming to have been abducted, anally probed, and given
the Secrets of the Universe by them. Assuming said aliens weren't actually
doing it to begin with.
Liz Broadwell
>In article <Xns946A6D0F7FFE...@130.133.1.4>,
>Michael S. Schiffer <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
>>"Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote in
>>news:vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com:
>>
>>> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty
>>> small thing about us would suprise them the most.
>>
>>The extent to which many humans assume that they'll be amazed by the
>>same things that the human him- or herself finds frustrating or
>>annoying. :-)
>
>The lottery.
But only by the fact that the winner isn't taken out and stoned to
death.
Peace,
Liz "familiarity with Shirley Jackson gives 'Powerball' a whole
new meaning" B.
--
Elizabeth Broadwell (ebroadwe at dept dot english dot upenn dot edu) at
the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
"The whole film has been marked by a sort of, 'This can't be done, you
guys are crazy, it's too big a risk, you're all going to *die*.'"
-- Mark Ordesky, co-producer, _The Lord of the Rings_
Matthias Warkus
Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de.de>:
> But lets say, that Mars is about the way it's right now, but totally
> known to science. We know were the great seas were, have extracted
> mars fossils up to the skeleton of its hightest lifeform, the Mars
> worm, one of the colonists even climbed Mout Olympus.
>
> What are you going to do for these two weeks?
What about having a look at the fucking landscape? It's not like
everyone's as shallow as you seem to be.
I suppose you could spend a year on Mars just looking at the
landscape, two years taking photos, perhaps ten years painting it.
Hell, people still do that on Earth.
mawa
--
"Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence
properly reached".
-- Supreme Court Justice Antonin "Benito" Scalia
Keith Morrison
>>This goes for a lot of things, interestingly enough. The most dramatic, yet
>>simple, example is walking along a narrow beam. If you start to tilt to one
>>side, the correct solution - which your body knows and will "reflexively"
>>perform - is to heave your upper body in the direction of the tilt. If you
>>allow yourself to think about it, you will try to move *opposite* the tilt,
>>which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
>
> Yup, which is why training at sports and other activities
> is so important, even for people who are naturall well suited to it.
>
> ObRealLife: tall athletic friend of mine who tried to play US basketball
> and got extremely frustrated that unathletic short guys who'd played it
> LOTS more could literally run in circles around him
A lot of the ability of people fielding a ball or a stopping a hockey
puck depend on observing the object in question over and over again
and learning how it normally behaves in certain situations.
While it allows awe-inspiring things like the right fielder diving
to catch a ball coming in over his shoulder, it's also the reason for
so many sports bloopers.
I've seen more than one baseball or softball player confidently jog
over underneath a fly ball, casually raise their glove for the easy
catch and then look stupid when the ball lands three metres behind
them because something odd happened this time.
--
Keith
Richard Todd
Other ObSF: _First Lensman_, where Virgil Samms discovers that
Rigellian traffic makes Earth rush hour traffic look tame. The
Rigellians would probably look at Earth rush hour traffic and be
amazed at the excessively large distances between cars. (They
wouldn't say "The quiet!", however, since they don't have ears.)
Mark Blunden
> "Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote:
>>> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty
>>> small thing about us would suprise them the most.
That would entirely depend upon the aliens. Could be anything from religious
persecution to the trouble some people have parallel parking.
> The willingness of the vast majority of humans to believe things
> which can't be proved, have no observable manifestation, and which
> are logically inconsistent. It still surprises ME, and I are one.
Don't put yourself down like that. Surely you at least have an observable
manifestation.
--
Mark.
* Note to self: shoot first, quip later
Dreamer
"Mark Blunden" <m.blunde...@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:btkgb5$8bc7t$1...@ID-36588.news.uni-berlin.de...
Of course I do. You're looking at it.
D
David Cowie
> The willingness of the vast majority of humans to believe things which
> can't be proved, have no observable manifestation, and which are
> logically inconsistent. It still surprises ME, and I are one.
>
"Captain, these heathens don't believe in the great mother
Hacebabhaprnoyr. Shall I hatch some more missionaries?"
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
Containment Failure + 1325:23
John Schilling
>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>thing about us would suprise them the most.
>I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
>a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
>first.
>I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
>equally stun them.
Only if these are the cliched old "superevolved brains, vestigial
bodies" aliens, *and* if they don't have any room in those big
brains for an understanding of the way evolutionary biology works
on "primitive" sapients.
>Finally, lawns a a mystery to them. Every house gets a bit of grass
>that actually isn't that attactive, totally messes up the city population
>density...
yada, yada, yada, and recaptures a sense of the landscape that is the
evolutionary background of the very territorial beings in question.
Frankly, I think the whole "the aliens would be Shocked!!!" form of
thinly-disguised SFnal social criticism was rarely anything more than
a way for the author to assert his superiority to the masses of humanity
and has probably outlived its usefulness to the genre.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
John Schilling
>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>thing about us would suprise them the most.
Three-phase alternating current.
Most technologies, well, come Steam Engine Time you find a whole lot
of people inventing steam engines independantly. AC, however obviously
useful it is in hindsight, only one guy figured that one and he was
pretty far out on several axes of the bell curve.
And his timing was absolutely perfect, because even a decade or so
later there would have been a Good Enough DC infrastructure deeply
enough entrenched that AC would have been relegated to the same
realms of crankdom as everything else Nikolai Tesla ever invented
and three-phase probably never would have been explored.
Good chance that the aliens didn't have a Tesla in the same niche of
their technological development, made do with DC and quickly got good
enough at it that there was no reason to work on alternatives.
Anyone got the address of the Pan-Galactic Patent Office?
Yeechang Lee
> _Superman: Last Son of Krypton_, there's a thriving industry
> stealing Xerox machines and shipping them throughout this galactic
> arm because no one else makes a comparable product. (They steal
> them only because, at the time, Xerox would only lease the machines
> rather than selling them, and that wasn't deemed practical by
> extraterrestrial customers.)
From <URL:http://superman.ws/Maggin/interview.php>: "The Xerox
Corporation.s response, by the way, was to buy fifty-thousand copies
of _Last Son_ for their employee book club."
--
Read my Deep Thoughts @ <URL:http://www.ylee.org/blog/> PERTH ----> *
14:15:02 up 16 days, 14:37, 19 users, load average: 2.65, 2.75, 2.67
181 processes: 177 sleeping, 4 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 48.1% user 8.0% system 43.8% nice 0.0% iowait 0.0% idle
EdLincoln
humanity. I also love fantasy novels where people from an alternate world
where magic works are stunned by some feature of modern 20th century
civilization.
Ultimately, they turn out to be the same as "Humans are Unique because of X"
stories. For every trait you think aliens must be stunned by, you must assume
is rare among intelligent species. Since in real life we are extrapolating from
an statistical sample of one, we have no idea what is unique. Any feature
universal among human civilzations that we can come up with might be a unique
accident of our evolution, are a universal, inevitable consequence of
intelligence.
<< Subject: Re: What Would Stun the Aliens
From: "Mike Williams" mike@nospam4me
Date: Thu, Jan 8, 2004 1:00 AM
Message-id: <3ffcf1f3$0$18690$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au>
Charles Talleyrand wrote:
> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> I believe it's basketball. They would be amazed that anyone can pass
> a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
> first.
I think the math of jumping to conclusions like that would be more
mystifying.
>><BR><BR>
Kylinn
>I've always imagined that Earth would do a pretty good business
>playing host to aliens who have come to observe total solar eclipses.
>Lots of planets will have majestic mountains and sunny beaches, but
>very few have total eclipses.
ObSF: "And Come from Miles Around" by Connie Willis
Ky
--
Life is complex; it's partly real and partly imaginary.
Kylinn
>YASID: short story where the aliens are testing human rationality
>by deliberately setting up inconclusive UFO encounters and then polling
>for belief in UFOs.
>Somewhat spoiled by the UFOs being real, and therefore "belief" in them
>actually being rational - in the context of the story of course.
Yes, IIRC the point of the story (I don't
remember the author or title either, I'm
afraid) was that humanity wasn't mature
because so many people answered
_either_ "yes" or "no" on the test rather
than keeping an open mind.
David Silberstein
Charles Talleyrand <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote:
>Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
Popsicles.
ObSF: Buck Godot. "Aaaah! It's the frozen-water eaters!"
John M. Gamble
nwsy <real...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>In Hitchiker's Guide, it mentions the instructions on a pack of toothpicks
>as being the final evidence that Humanity had gone insane. I'd go along with
>that.
>
In yesterday's paper, there was a list of astonishly stupid cautions,
compiled by one of the univerities in Michigan. The one that remains
in my memory was on a fishing lure: "Caution: do not swallow."
--
-john
February 28 1997: Last day libraries could order catalogue cards
from the Library of Congress.
Craig Richardson
<kei...@polarnet.ca> wrote:
>Steinn Sigurdsson wrote:
>> ObRealLife: tall athletic friend of mine who tried to play US basketball
>> and got extremely frustrated that unathletic short guys who'd played it
>> LOTS more could literally run in circles around him
>
>A lot of the ability of people fielding a ball or a stopping a hockey
>puck depend on observing the object in question over and over again
>and learning how it normally behaves in certain situations.
One reason for the success of knuckleball pitchers and free-kick
artists like Roberto Carlos. Their offerings really don't act like
anyone else's, so you don't have the information bank to fall back on.
>While it allows awe-inspiring things like the right fielder diving
>to catch a ball coming in over his shoulder, it's also the reason for
>so many sports bloopers.
And why even the best pros often look like Sunday leaguers in really
bad weather conditions. A bladder filled with air just doesn't react
the same way it usually does when its flight is influenced by a
thirty-MPH wind.
--Craig
--
I start to wish Bob Melvin would walk out to the mound, ask Freddy if he
was injured, and then kick him in the balls so he can call in an
emergency replacement from the bullpen --Derek Zumsteg in BP, 5/13/2003
Craig Richardson
<ste...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu> wrote:
>Keith Morrison <kei...@polarnet.ca> writes:
>> Which is true. When I was playing infield (softball, so only
>> 60 feet from the plate down the third base line) I'd often be
>> able to place my glove in place to intercept a line drive before
>> being consciously capable of doing any calculation at all.
>
>> On a hard-hit line drive, I'd have about .75 seconds to observe
>> the hit, the direction of the oncoming ball, move my body and
>> my arm to place my glove in its path.
>
>To be fair, catching a ball does not require solving the
>full 2nd order ODE describing its 3-D trajectory,
>it is usually done by solving a first order ODE describing
>its projected trajectory, and for many classes of trajectories
>there are strongly convergent iterative solutions that do not
>require explicit Cauchy boundary conditions to solve.
Humans are good at picking up on cues, even down to the subliminal,
and using them to ruthlessly prune the tree of possible solutions.
Many major league hitters can, from the briefest view of a minimal
change in a pitcher's arm angle, re-tune their interpretation facility
from "fastball" to "changeup", and correctly calculate the position
and timing of the pitch from the few data points they get as it
travels the first ten feet. If they attempt to interpret the same
data points as a "fastball", they'll extrapolate a completely
different flight path - and if they do it often enough, they'll be
back in the minors.
>However, I have noticed for myself that if I have time to
>think about the solution, the catch/shot fails; if it is calculated
>"reflexively" there is a finite probability of a successful solution.
Naw, that's just sports psychology. The calculating part of your
brain is a control freak, and if it's sitting idle, it'll go of its
own accord and try to get involved in the physical action you're
taking, and inevitably screw it up /even if it also had (a) correct
solution/.
Which is why you tell people to act as if they have less time for a
catch/shot than they actually do - only the elite are calm enough to
"not think" for a multi-second period.
>So, much easier problem than the naive brute force solution would suggest...
See also: Questec pitch location calculations.
Craig Richardson
Grosberg) wrote:
>No, it's those people in the crowd who come to watch the thing that
>will leave them completely mystified, just like all of us
>non-americans.
In Spain, the "ACB League is also the top competition in Europe in
attendance, as there is an average of about 5,700 people per game".
So you're suggesting that, every week, 51,000 people fly from the US
to Spain alone, just to watch basketball?
John M. Gamble
I think that's a different story, because i recognize that one.
It can be found in one of the Analog [number] athologies. Protagonist
is an Ethically Complete (or some equivalent term) from Earth, the
first one. Also an unusual one, since everyone else has mind-reading,
and he doesn't.
Bill Snyder
wrote:
>On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 17:37:40 +0000, Dreamer wrote:
>
>
>> The willingness of the vast majority of humans to believe things which
>> can't be proved, have no observable manifestation, and which are
>> logically inconsistent. It still surprises ME, and I are one.
>>
>"Captain, these heathens don't believe in the great mother
>Hacebabhaprnoyr. Shall I hatch some more missionaries?"
"These stupid aliens never expect the Vrongish Inquisition."
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
Mike Schilling
"John M. Gamble" <jga...@ripco.com> wrote in message
news:btkmko$dsi$1...@e250.ripco.com...
> In article <btjjvi$7uktv$1...@ID-195293.news.uni-berlin.de>,
> nwsy <real...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >In Hitchiker's Guide, it mentions the instructions on a pack of
toothpicks
> >as being the final evidence that Humanity had gone insane. I'd go along
with
> >that.
> >
>
> In yesterday's paper, there was a list of astonishly stupid cautions,
> compiled by one of the univerities in Michigan. The one that remains
> in my memory was on a fishing lure: "Caution: do not swallow."
>
My favorite was in the Simpsons version of Hamlet:
"Ear poison. Caution: do not get in eyes."
Mike Schilling
"Craig Richardson" <crichar...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:d5lrvv49gu68cvsuv...@4ax.com...
> On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 15:06:00 -0500, Keith Morrison
> And why even the best pros often look like Sunday leaguers in really
> bad weather conditions. A bladder filled with air just doesn't react
> the same way it usually does when its flight is influenced by a
> thirty-MPH wind.
ESPN recently dicovered the disadvantges of employing a bladder filled with
air as a commentator .
Steve Coltrin
> In yesterday's paper, there was a list of astonishly stupid cautions,
> compiled by one of the univerities in Michigan. The one that remains
> in my memory was on a fishing lure: "Caution: do not swallow."
That wouldn't be so bad if it said "...unless you are a fish". The
manufacturer's land sharks probably would have choked at that, though.
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org WWVBF?
"Even special children need to be beaten sometimes." - Brian Bruns
David Tate
> Charles Talleyrand wrote:
>
> > Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> > thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> together, singly in large vehicles, when they could use a safe and
> efficient mass transit system. They'd probably gather in crowds at
> cloverleaf intersections and lay bets.
That's not what Niven and Pournelle said. The Browns in THE MOTE IN
GOD'S EYE drove even faster, closer together, and utterly
independently.
David Tate
Craig Richardson
Gamble) wrote:
>In article <btjjvi$7uktv$1...@ID-195293.news.uni-berlin.de>,
>nwsy <real...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>In Hitchiker's Guide, it mentions the instructions on a pack of toothpicks
>>as being the final evidence that Humanity had gone insane. I'd go along with
>>that.
>>
>In yesterday's paper, there was a list of astonishly stupid cautions,
>compiled by one of the univerities in Michigan. The one that remains
>in my memory was on a fishing lure: "Caution: do not swallow."
In baseball, practically every rule in the book was put there to stop
some player (often 19th century star King Kelly) from taking advantage
of a gap or loophole.
In life, practically every product warning is there because no matter
how dumb an idea may seem at the time, it's a big country, and there's
someone out there just dumb enough to have tried it. Once. Per
person.
Steve Coltrin
> "Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote in message news:<vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com>...
>> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>>
> Tractor Pulls (why?)
Tractor pulls are for those who can't understand the rules of professional
wrestling.
David Tate
> In article <3ffd8...@news.arcor-ip.de>,
> Ken Walton <ken.w...@freenet.de> wrote:
> >Charles Talleyrand wrote:
> >
> >> thing about us would suprise them the most.
> >
> >together, singly in large vehicles, when they could use a safe and
> >efficient mass transit system. They'd probably gather in crowds at
> >cloverleaf intersections and lay bets.
>
> about the alien who visits Washington DC and strolls along
> through the downtown rush-hour traffic murmuring, "The quiet!
> The solitude!"
There's an extreme take on this, I think in one of the stories
("Guesting Time"?) in Lafferty's NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS.
David Tate
David Tate
>
> OSF^2: "space cadet" novel where a sub-plot involves "advanced american
> football" - the ball has a interior ball with liquid mercury in it
> making its behaviour much more functionally random; IIRC the hero has
> a lot of trouble accepting that the "bad guy" is better than he at
> the game while they're cadets (bad guy reforms; hero and sidekick
> crash on Venus at the end) YASID?
Sounds like the "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" novels, ostensibly by
"Carey Rockwell", from the mid 1950's. I can't remember the name of
the game, but it may have been "mercuryball". If you're correct about
the name "advanced american football", then some borrowing seems to
have occurred.
David Tate
peter wezeman
>
> > Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> > thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> Rush hour traffic. Only an insane species would drive so fast, so close
> together, singly in large vehicles, when they could use a safe and
> efficient mass transit system. They'd probably gather in crowds at
> cloverleaf intersections and lay bets.
OBSF: _First Lensman_ by E. E. Smith. Virgil Samms travels to
a planet of Rigel and gets a ride from the spaceport to the city
in a groundcar driven by one of the incredibly rugged, telepathic,
clairvoyant natives. The Rigelians are accoustically deaf and
do not even have a concept for "noise". The car is made of
armor steel and is covered with big dents.
Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist
Robert Carnegie
<mell...@bu.edu> writes
>Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>>In article <Gg7Lb.7176$sx3....@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com>,
>>Mike Schilling <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>Ever skip a stone across a lake? Just think how complex the
>mathematics
>>>describing its path is, depending as it does on mass, velocity, spin,
>and
>>>precisely which surface touches the water. I defy the most
>sophisticated
>>>computer program to predict with any accuracy where the stone will go,
>or
>>>even how many times it will skip.
>>>
>>>But the stone does the right thing every time!
>
>>Except when I throw it, when it goes "plop" once and sinks.
>
>I was gonna say. To be fair, though, the rock is doing its
>part. We're the ones who mess it up.
And then Linus van Pelt comes along and points out it took the
poor stone millions of years to make it to the shore and then you
pick it up and throw it back, is that fair?
Robert Carnegie at home, rja.ca...@excite.com at large
--
"Are you sure you want to post?" - my software, every time
Robert Carnegie
R. Schmidt <grsc...@acm.org> writes
>Charles Talleyrand wrote:
>> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>>
>
>It would be Cricket. In particular, Test Match Cricket.
Goodness, this thread is /full/ of Douglas Adams references.
Astral spectacle by choosing to park y0ur spaceship in the right
place is another, if you let me stretch a point... just an orbital
dawn, IIRC, but an orbital dawn of /two/ suns. Either "lovely" or
"freaky", and I can't decide.
As for the question of how big an inhabited planet's moon needs
to be: I know was just saying I think that's a good question. They
tell me that we got our moon in an unusual way, probably
therefore a rare way, and it's argued that in several ways it's made
things easier for life-kind on this planet. So maybe few other
worlds are so lucky... but maybe the aliens necessarily will come
from one of those few.
As for lawns: they cover the ground cheaply, and the kids can play
there without getting hurt too bad when they fall over, is my theory.
But nowadays you can have Astroturf, or that rubbery stuff they use
underfoot in play-parks.
As for what would really stun the aliens: our economy. And the
roles that individuals "choose" to play in it. Really, can we /all/
work in the service sector?
Justin Bacon
>The single, big speciality of Mars is not being able to go there. Once
>it's cheap to visit Mars, the 1/3 of gravity might make it attractive
>for obese Earthers, but Lunarians may simply not see the point.
Oh, c'mon. People go on vacations to see natural marvels all the time. Your
claim that nobody goes to the Grand Canyon or Mt. Everest because they'd rather
be home watching TV and sipping cocoa is *bizarre*.
Justin Bacon
tria...@aol.com
Justin Bacon
>Gangsta Rap. I can't even think where to start with this. IMHO, it's
>the most absurd and perverted socio-economical phenomenon in Western
>culture.
Not all that different than the romanticization of, for example, pirates.
Justin Bacon
tria...@aol.com
Medievalbk
>thing about us would suprise them the most.
Most programming on the Fox Network.
Vilyehm Teighlore
Raymond Ford
> of maintenance.
Even some mid-volume machines require a fair amount of work, depending on
the brand and design. Customers are constantly amazed at the time and effort
it take just to do preventative maintenance on certain beasts.
Low volume boxes are either bulletproof or boat anchors. It depends on the
model.
Of course, operator error is always a factor.
I'd be amazed if aliens showed up with a true "easy to operate" and
"technician friendly" copier. "What, you have to call how often for someone
to do corrective maintenance on your copier? It takes how long just to get
the panels off?"
Errol Cavit
news:m2oetex...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu...
>
> Be fun to design a game where behaviour of the pieces was not
> susceptible to linear iterative neural networks...
>
ObRealLife
Rugby balls behave in unpredictable ways when they bounce. This is part of
what makes the game interesting.
--
Errol Cavit | errol...@hotmail.com "It is the opinion of every one that
this cursed trade will breed so many pirates that, when peace comes, we
shall be in more danger from them than we are now from the enemy." Comment
on privateering during the War of Spanish Succession, Edmund Drummer.
Craig Richardson
wrote:
>"Steinn Sigurdsson" <ste...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu> wrote in message
>news:m2oetex...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu...
><snip>
>>
>> Be fun to design a game where behaviour of the pieces was not
>> susceptible to linear iterative neural networks...
>>
>ObRealLife
>
>Rugby balls behave in unpredictable ways when they bounce. This is part of
>what makes the game interesting.
And, typically, USan football took what was already present in Rugby
to its logical extreme. A USan football basically /can't/ bounce in a
predictable way - drop kicks, though still legal, are long gone from
the USan game, while they are front and center in Rugby right now.
Chad Irby
tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon) wrote:
> Matthias Warkus wrote:
> >Gangsta Rap. I can't even think where to start with this. IMHO, it's
> >the most absurd and perverted socio-economical phenomenon in Western
> >culture.
>
> Not all that different than the romanticization of, for example,
> pirates.
Wanna have some fun? Get an older person (adult during the 1950s) going
about this horrible rap music, then mention the great old song "Mack the
Knife." Many older folks *love* that song. That wonderful old song
about, well, a Mob hitman who stabs people to death...
--
cirby at cfl.rr.com
Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.
Dorothy J Heydt
Chad Irby <ci...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>In article <20040108214313...@mb-m11.aol.com>,
> tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon) wrote:
>
>> Matthias Warkus wrote:
>> >Gangsta Rap. I can't even think where to start with this. IMHO, it's
>> >the most absurd and perverted socio-economical phenomenon in Western
>> >culture.
>>
>> Not all that different than the romanticization of, for example,
>> pirates.
>
>Wanna have some fun? Get an older person (adult during the 1950s) going
>about this horrible rap music, then mention the great old song "Mack the
>Knife." Many older folks *love* that song. That wonderful old song
>about, well, a Mob hitman who stabs people to death...
And gets respectable widows pregnant...
and I forget what-all else.
When I was taking German I at a respectable junior college in
that hotbed of conservatism, Orange County California, someone
asked the teacher if she could find us the German words to
"Maeckie Messer" so we could learn them. She said, sure.
Next day she said, "Well, I looked the words up and I'm afraid
I'd better not let you learn them, the local authorities would
object."
I do have somewhere an old tape of Ernie Kovacs shows having the
song as background music.
"Oh, der Haifisch, der hat Zaehne,
Und die traegt er im Gesicht;
Doch Macheath, der hat ein Messer,
Und den Messer sieht man nicht...."
Or something like that, it's been a LONG time since I studied
German. Late 1950s, in fact.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Charles Talleyrand
"Dreamer" <dre...@dreamstrike.com> wrote in message news:EzgLb.33185$IM3....@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>
> "Michael S. Schiffer" <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote in message
> news:Xns946A6D0F7FFE...@130.133.1.4...
>
> > > Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty
> > > small thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> be proved, have no observable manifestation, and which are logically
> inconsistent. It still surprises ME, and I are one.
Nah.
In any complex enviornment it will be necessary to make assumptions
based on incomplete data. Further, any suffeciently complex belief system
is very likely to be logically inconsistent.
I dunno. Maybe the aliens will be amazed by this. But these things
are useful and functional when done right.
And yes, there are pleanty of idiots in the world who use these
things the wrong way. Maybe the aliens will simply be amazed at the
number of idiots in the world.
Charles Talleyrand
"John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote in message news:btkji0$1fq$1...@spock.usc.edu...
> "Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> writes:
>
> >Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> >thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
> >a ball on a crowded court without dropping and doing a bit of calculus
> >first.
>
> >I also believe our inability to do complex math in our head would
> >equally stun them.
>
> Only if these are the cliched old "superevolved brains, vestigial
> bodies" aliens, *and* if they don't have any room in those big
> brains for an understanding of the way evolutionary biology works
> on "primitive" sapients.
Or, if these aliens evolved from some very slow moving animals or plants.
Elephants are not "vestigial bodies" but also seem unlikely to evolve
into the type of creature that enjoys elephant-basketball. I can easily
picture elephant-chess, elephant-track-and-field and even the very
popular elepant-sumo-wrestling, but not elephant-basketball.
Of course, I've never met an actual elephant alien.
Heck, maybe it's our lack of a hive mind, or sex without
procreation.
I do welcome our new Alien Overlords, however.
Steve Coltrin
> "Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> wrote in
> news:vvpn3m1...@corp.supernews.com:
>
>> Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
>> thing about us would suprise them the most.
>>
> Millions of people claiming to have been abducted, anally probed, and given
> the Secrets of the Universe by them. Assuming said aliens weren't actually
> doing it to begin with.
Being named in a class action lawsuit for same.
David Silberstein
> tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon) wrote:
>
>> Matthias Warkus wrote:
>> >Gangsta Rap. I can't even think where to start with this. IMHO, it's
>> >the most absurd and perverted socio-economical phenomenon in Western
>> >culture.
>>
>> Not all that different than the romanticization of, for example,
>> pirates.
>
>Wanna have some fun? Get an older person (adult during the 1950s) going
>about this horrible rap music, then mention the great old song "Mack the
>Knife." Many older folks *love* that song. That wonderful old song
>about, well, a Mob hitman who stabs people to death...
>
Hmm. And now I am reminded that more than a few old folk songs are
quite literally murder ballads, what with stabbings with penknives,
killings with swords over trees (?), sisters pushing sisters into
rivers or oceans, etc, etc...
Charles Talleyrand
"John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote in message news:btkji0$1fq$1...@spock.usc.edu...
> "Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> writes:
>
> thinly-disguised SFnal social criticism was rarely anything more than
> a way for the author to assert his superiority to the masses of humanity
> and has probably outlived its usefulness to the genre.
I started this thread. I hope it doesn't degenerate into social critiscm, which
is off-topic and probably boring.
I don't feel superior to the masses of humanity.
At least in my case, I think you're wrong.
Charles Talleyrand
"John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote in message news:btkk48$1k1$1...@spock.usc.edu...
> "Charles Talleyrand" <rapp...@nmu.edu> writes:
>
> >Aliens come to Earth. They get to know the place. What petty small
> >thing about us would suprise them the most.
>
>
>
> And his timing was absolutely perfect, because even a decade or so
> later there would have been a Good Enough DC infrastructure deeply
> enough entrenched that AC would have been relegated to the same
> realms of crankdom as everything else Nikolai Tesla ever invented
> and three-phase probably never would have been explored.
I see what you are saying. However, if they are like us then they will
have several other chances to develop different type of electrical systems.
For example, on very modern jets they use variable frequency power,
since the generators for this are of minimum possible weight compared
to any other type of generator. Just about no one else in the entire
world uses variable frequency to send power, yet airplane electrical
systems can do this because they don't need to be dependent on
anything else.
Consider the auto. It uses only one wire to send power, and no wires
to return it (return via metal frame). That's also pretty weird.
Damien Neil
Schiffer <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
> You may already know this, but in Elliot S. Maggin's novel
> _Superman: Last Son of Krypton_, there's a thriving industry
> stealing Xerox machines and shipping them throughout this galactic
> arm because no one else makes a comparable product. (They steal
> them only because, at the time, Xerox would only lease the machines
> rather than selling them, and that wasn't deemed practical by
> extraterrestrial customers.)
I've never read the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if I got the idea
from someone describing it to me.
- Damien
Matthias Warkus
Mike Schilling <mscotts...@hotmail.com>:
> Ever skip a stone across a lake? Just think how complex the mathematics
> describing its path is, depending as it does on mass, velocity, spin, and
> precisely which surface touches the water. I defy the most sophisticated
> computer program to predict with any accuracy where the stone will go, or
> even how many times it will skip.
Um, this is something mathematicians and physicians are working on
right now. A comprehensive theory of stone-skipping has been
established last year, and now they're working on breaking the
stone-skipping world record with a computer-controlled stone catapult.
mawa
--
Morgan's Corollary to Godwin's Law: As soon as such a comparison
occurs, someone will start a Nazi-discussion spinoff thread on
alt.censorship.
Chad Irby
> Chad Irby <ci...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> >Wanna have some fun? Get an older person (adult during the 1950s) going
> >about this horrible rap music, then mention the great old song "Mack the
> >Knife." Many older folks *love* that song. That wonderful old song
> >about, well, a Mob hitman who stabs people to death...
>
> Hmm. And now I am reminded that more than a few old folk songs are
> quite literally murder ballads, what with stabbings with penknives,
> killings with swords over trees (?), sisters pushing sisters into
> rivers or oceans, etc, etc...
Heck, look at the nice, hippie, flower-child 1960s. One of the most
cheerful-sounding songs the Beatles ever performed was about a serial
killer who beat people to death with a hammer.
The Beach Boys. Nice, happy California surf-rock. About illegal and
highly dangerous street racing ("Little Deuce Coupe," "409," "Little Old
Lady from Pasadena").
Or the Swing Era. One of Glenn Miller's greatest hits was about the
pleasures of drinking bootleg liquor ("Little Brown Jug").
Even the 1950s early rock scene had some scary stuff. Songs about dead
girls ("Teen Angel"), songs about motorcycle gangs ("Leader of the
Pack"), et cetera.
Nancy Lebovitz
Steinn Sigurdsson <ste...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu> wrote:
>
>However, I have noticed for myself that if I have time to
>think about the solution, the catch/shot fails; if it is calculated
>"reflexively" there is a finite probability of a successful solution.
>
>So, much easier problem than the naive brute force solution would suggest...
Maybe studying human brains will lead to improved algorithms.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Now, with bumper stickers
Using your turn signal is not "giving information to the enemy"
Robert Carnegie
Liz Broadwell <ebro...@see-below-in.sig.thanks> writes
>"The whole film has been marked by a sort of, 'This can't be done, you
>guys are crazy, it's too big a risk, you're all going to *die*.'"
>-- Mark Ordesky, co-producer, _The Lord of the Rings_
That's the /plot/, as I recall. Or was that what you meant?
Robert Carnegie
<spco...@omcl.org> writes
>begin jga...@ripco.com (John M. Gamble) writes:
>
>> In yesterday's paper, there was a list of astonishly stupid cautions,
>> compiled by one of the univerities in Michigan. The one that remains
>> in my memory was on a fishing lure: "Caution: do not swallow."
>
>That wouldn't be so bad if it said "...unless you are a fish". The
>manufacturer's land sharks probably would have choked at that, though.
If they put that in, they'd get complaints from fish. Well, from fish
owners. Fish lures and fish hooks are not more safe for fish than
for you and me. (I'm presuming you're not a fish, or you'd have
said so.
Nancy Lebovitz
Keith Morrison <kei...@polarnet.ca> wrote:
>
>A lot of the ability of people fielding a ball or a stopping a hockey
>puck depend on observing the object in question over and over again
>and learning how it normally behaves in certain situations.
I assume it's not just observing the object--it's also building a
database about what other players are likely to do, including tiny
cues that give good information about what they're going to do in
the near future.
Leif Magnar Kj|nn|y
Matthias Warkus <mawa...@gnome.org> wrote:
>
>Um, this is something mathematicians and physicians are working on
>right now. A comprehensive theory of stone-skipping has been
>established last year, and now they're working on breaking the
>stone-skipping world record with a computer-controlled stone catapult.
For Science!
--
Leif Kjønnøy, Geek of a Few Trades. http://www.pvv.org/~leifmk
Disclaimer: Do not try this at home.
Void where prohibited by law.
Batteries not included.
Matthias Warkus
Justin Bacon <tria...@aol.com>:
> Matthias Warkus wrote:
> >Gangsta Rap. I can't even think where to start with this. IMHO, it's
> >the most absurd and perverted socio-economical phenomenon in Western
> >culture.
>
> Not all that different than the romanticization of, for example, pirates.
With rap, the industry involved is much larger (though relations might
have changed with "Pirates of the Caribbean"), and the way women are
treated is much worse, at least in my perception. I'm hard-pressed to
remember any other subculture where women are flat-out equated with
whores.
mawa
--
Around the corner lives a hacker with a terminal
And on his Web page is a PNG of RMS
He likes to keep his Sun workstation clean
It's a clean machine...