- #211
Hornbein
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Schnellmann said:Listing favourite books
I'd bet you would like CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength.' I think it's up there with 1984. Deserving of wider recognition and all that.
Schnellmann said:Listing favourite books
With Vonnegut you can't really go wrong no matter which you choose, Cats cradle, Slaughterhouse five, Sirens of Titan, His best in my opinion is "Timequake" it ties all his older writing together so well you just have to laugh all the way through.Schnellmann said:I really liked Kurt Vonnegut and read a bunch of his novels about 30 years back but can't remember which one I liked best!
Sci-fi or not that's one of the best books I've ever read.Hornbein said:Does Catch-22 count?
1oldman2 said:With Vonnegut you can't really go wrong no matter which you choose, Cats cradle, Slaughterhouse five, Sirens of Titan, His best in my opinion is "Timequake" it ties all his older writing together so well you just have to laugh all the way through.
Hornbein said:Does Catch-22 count?
I'm not sure I've ever read a book written post-movie.
I think Hornbein meant HE hadn't read a book written post-movie.sappho.poiesis said:There's 2001: Space Odyssey
And I bet you'll enjoy the sequel as well. "The descent of man"Dredge said:The best science fiction book ever written was "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin...
And in its detail, which I have suspected, it explainshttp://angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/faq/antimatter-to-create-energyWhen antimatter comes into contact with matter it annihilates: ...the mass of the particle and its antiparticle are converted into pure energy. ...
For fuel is okay, but energy source? No, you can't fool me Mr. Brown. Waiting for your seventh...The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back.
Yeah, the science are all there, the only matter is the engineering problem.Noisy Rhysling said:How about a matter/anti-matter reaction system?
But, that applies to fusion power. I think matter/anti matter reaction system would have the same engineering problem, too.http://mappingignorance.org/2013/10...llenges-of-putting-the-sun-into-a-box-part-1/
Nobel-laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes allegedly once said of nuclear fusion: “We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don’t know how to make the box“.
Stephanus said:Today I learned,
that IF On the Origin of Species was a great science fiction then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate was the best publicity ploy ever conducted. Surpassed Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code
Talking about sci fi...
Digital Fortress is nonsense. There's no way you can crack a virus. A virus is a computer program not a document. And for a computer to run a program, it has to understand its original OS. You have to know which kernel/library it calls. Much less the machine code.
Angels and Demons is okay. But in one respect. Anti matter is an energy source. I think this is a gross blunder, even for a non scientist like myself. To produce anti matter for, say 1 tera joules you need 1 tera joules!
Even CERN has post an issue about Angels and Demons, wait googling...
http://angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/faq
You see even in this link, the very first FAQ is
And in its detail, which I have suspected, it explains
For fuel is okay, but energy source? No, you can't fool me Mr. Brown. Waiting for your seventh...
Jenab2 said:Is that supposed to be
Time Enough For Love
by Robert Heinlein?
It was pretty good. I've read it. I think my favorites from Heinlein are The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and The Rolling Stones. In the latter book, Heinlein actually did the celestial mechanics for a transfer orbit to Mars, using the real positions of the Earth and Mars at the times of departure and arrival. And he got it right.
However, for the later trip from Mars to "The Hallelujah Node" (near Ceres), Heinlein made a math error and got the ecliptic longitude of Ceres off by π radians.
And for the subsequent interplanetary trips of the intrepid Stone family, Heinlein just faked the celestial mechanics. He didn't bother trying to do the math after the asteroid belt arrival.
I also liked Starship Troopers (the book) a lot, especially the chapter where the main character is taking a class on military ethics. I could only nod in agreement with a lot of the philosophy there.
Paul Verhoeven? Yeah, from what I remember from SST is only Denise Richards.Noisy Rhysling said:Hissssssss. verHooven read the back of a paperback edition of SST and decided to make a movie about that paragraph.
Noisy Rhysling said:You're aiming well over the heads of the crowd, enorbet.