Interesting Links for 19-02-2018

[andrewducker]

In Defence of Wallpaper Science Fiction

(tags: scifi writing science )

The school with no rules in the playground

(tags: rules school safety responsibility video )

Scotland ranks third in world for women in politics

(tags: women politics scotland )

Russian “troll” describes interview for meddling in elections

(tags: election Russia fraud usa )

The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets

(tags: cars Tesla space thefuture )

Student Stops Church Shooting - Is Shot by Cops

(tags: police guns usa )

Speeches at the UKIP emergency meeting are basically satires of themselves

(tags: UKIP politics )

I really do weep for American children. They should not have to think like this

(tags: children guns usa )

In Defense Of Erik Killmonger And The Forgotten Children Of Wakanda

(tags: marvel movies race )

The Gluten Project: A Search Engine for 35K Certified Gluten-Free Products

(tags: gluten food )

Calculate the Taylor expansion… OR DIE

(tags: mathematics death history )

The 1700 ton telco building that was relocated while running, in 1950

(tags: building history communication impressive )

The duties of John von Neumann's assistant

(tags: Technology computers history )

'I took my wife's name - and then the hassle began'

(tags: names patriarchy )

World's first human-sheep hybrids pave way for diabetes cure and mass organ transplants

(tags: organs sheep diabetes )

The Shannon Matthews kidnapping hoax - what _really_ happened?

(tags: hoax fraud children )

Average person is eating 50% more calories than they realise

(tags: food estimating uk )

Comments

Calculate the Taylor expansion… OR DIE

[jack]

Yeah, this reads like a dream by someone forced to drop out of university got into the real world and nearly turned very tragic.

[calimac]

The "wallpaper sf" rant seems to me part good and part off. The biggest problem is the defense of stories that seem to use SF only as trappings. Writer says it wouldn't be the same story in a different setting, e.g. you couldn't set a story of a gay romance in WW2 without incorporating massive homophobia. Well: 1) most 'wallpaper' stories are not about something that couldn't happen in some other setting, that's what makes the sf trappings wallpaper; 2) You don't have to pick a homophobic era to set a historical gay romance; 3) you can get around the homophobia, it's been done; 4) the kind of bad author we're postulating here can just ignore it. I've read far too many historical fictions about improbably perfect 20/21C liberals living in far past centuries. The 1986 movie Lady Jane is an example that comes to mind.

Writer talks a lot about ignoring plausibility for the sake of the story. I'm willing to do that if the story's author is, but sometimes they're not. The one that burns me is wormholes for quick distance transport. In the 40s stories used hyperspace, which was completely imaginary. Now they use wormholes because those have a veneer of scientific plausibility. But as a means of easy transport they're utterly and totally ludicrous. It's pretending that they're not that bugs me. At least hyperspace came with clever handwaving (folding 3-dimensional space the way you'd fold a 2-dimensional one).

Interviews with men who've changed their surnames on marrying is interesting, partly because I regret I didn't do that. One factual quibble. One man says:

"I had to do a Life in the UK Test to get my citizenship in 2000 and one of the questions was about Elizabeth II keeping her surname, Windsor, while Prince Philip dropped his paternal name and changed it to his mother's, Mountbatten."

This is accurate except for one little thing. Prince Philip didn't drop a paternal name. He took his mother's family's surname on becoming a UK citizen because his father's family, being descended from Danish royalty back into the mists of time, didn't have an ascertainable surname.

In Defence of Wallpaper Science Fiction

[jack]

Huh. I really empathise with both halves. Buhlert's article seems to give many really persuasive examples of Stross' point, that works usually crib lots of stuff from other works, and it's too easy to do that lazily and give up the opportunity to have a world that actually reflects the future we're supposedly talking about.

And that "economics" is a prime example of that (it's really hard to image from first principles what jobs will exist).

But I think she's also right, that everyone cribs quite a lot of stuff, the really interesting books typically world-build some stuff, writing the kind of society, but glossing over the military tactics, or vice versa, etc.

I also want to underline that often the most interesting worldbuilding often isn't when the book blatantly makes a point of it, but when it's just the pervasive background to an engaging story.

For instance, if you have artificial intelligence of any form, one of the most provocative questions you might ask is, "can you copy yourself?" "can you back yourself up?" "do you?" But that's really hard to answer, so it often gets a lot more play in humour-type stories than ostensibly serious stories.

[skington]

The “average person is eating 50% more calories than they realise” story seems to me to just be “people don't know how much a calorie is”. Because why would you? It's not something that you can easily measure, like weight or volume.

Average person is eating 50% more calories than they realise

[jack]

Trying hard to avoid being distracted by the phrasing in the headline, I'm still confused what they actually found. Presumably everyone in the 50s didn't calorie count and was just better at it? I guess they used the same methodology as was used in collecting the "national statistics"? But I'm not sure if they just asked people to guess, I guess not? Or asked people to add up all the calories in a systematic way, but people still consistently underestimated? Is the problem really people not guesstimating the calories in something, or in leaving out snacks or similar? I know, the paper probably answers all this, but reading papers is hard, I'm annoyed there's a supposed summary that doesn't summarise :(

[boxofdelights]

Here's a good article on another free range playground: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/

The school with no rules in the playground

[jack]

I think in general allowing children a lot more autonomy to develop their own judgement is good, and society has got overprotective. But I also think *some* changes are good: e.g. stepping in to prevent chronic bullying is a good thing, and having play areas on ground with some give instead of concrete is good -- people are going to fall *sometimes*. I get the impression these examples are not a total free for all (at least, in passing articles about them, I've not heard anyone complain about any of the likely problems if they were, only worry that there might be problems).