Please Learn to Think About Abstractions

TannerLD · 7 days

Personal experience suggests you're wrong. People do vary greatly in their ability to acquire a skill. Cases in point: (1) over the years I've but something close to the supposedly-requisite 10K hours into trying to play the guitar and have never, ever gotten close to playing like any number of musicians could at age 16, seemingly without effort. (2) I can carry a tune but I can't identify a note by listening to it; however there are people who can not only say, "that's an A, and it's a little sharp," while there are rather more people who literally can't sing a melody no matter how many times they've heard it and practiced it. (3) I have put several times 10K hours from age 6 on riding a bike and have never, ever gotten close to being able to do a track-stand or even ride hands-off. But there are 9yo kids who can do either without thinking. (4) As a programmer I was pretty good but I worked with people who were just insanely smarter and quicker than I at perceiving solutions to problems, or holding huge webs of abstraction in their heads. I could program for a lifetime (and did) and would never, ever be as quick or creative as they.

leton98609 · 14 days

Sorry for the slow reply. I don't check for responses often enough! I was thinking later, also, that this is 200 years in the future (wasn't it?) and so the 105 as designation for a gun is kind of like saying they'd mount 24-pound cannon. I mean, wouldn't a 105 be at best a display in a military museum?

I have done both writing and editing, tho only a small amount of it fiction.

BeBenNova · 14 days

Almost anything by Guy Clark but especially anything of the South Coast of Texas album: New Cut Road, She's Crazy for Leaving, all wonderful stories. If you only know him from Desperados Waiting for a Train you're missing a whole lot of story-songs.

SomeArabGuy · 14 days

Odd that nobody has mentioned the genetic imperative: the only identifiable teleological purpose of you is to deliver your genetic inheritance to another generation.

This "purpose" (in quotes because it isn't a purpose as we usually mean the word) is not unique, quite the contrary; it is the only identifiable purpose of every living thing: to deliver its genes to another generation. Humans are unique only in that they and no other, are propagating the human species.

Your only hope of completing this mission (of delivering your genes to another generation which will succeed in its mission and so on) is to have the cooperation of other humans. Not just the one other human you need for a breeding partner, but lots of other humans, now and in the future. You can't live, and your children certainly can't live, without lots of other humans to maintain and support the human environment.

So other humans are essential to the success of your only possible purpose, passing your genes on successfully. That's why they are important.

EliphasLevi · 15 days

MRSA, the only specific bug mentioned, is dangerous because it haunts hospitals, but for the scariest combination of lethality and epidemiological potential, you gotta go for XDR Tuberculosis. Frighten yourself with science at Wikipedia, the CDC, the WHO (largely repeating the CDC).

60 years ago my father was employed for some years at the local Tuberculosis Sanitarium. That was a board-and-care facility where, if you were infected with TB, you went for periods of months to years, until you died or your TB seemed cured. Like jail, but an open-ended sentence.

Because, you see, people with active TB are infectious and can't be allowed to just walk around freely. And there wasn't a cure. So if XDR becomes widespread, the Sanitarium could come back...

leton98609 · 18 days

Agree with cepheus42: you have a ton of back-story (the tactics manual, all the footnoted details) but you cannot present it like this. It impedes and distracts the reader. Yes, exposition is hard, and especially hard for SF, even for the experienced pros. But you have to relegate it to appendices and/or work it into the flow of the narrative.

Your format (iwork?) does not allow copy/paste, so I can't easily quote here. But just reading the first paras I see lots of places where I don't believe you actually think about what you are saying. Words need to be used with precision, especially when introducing a story in an unfamiliar setting. Examples.

"although mostly non-functional" can't be true, it's obviously flying and making noise. if you mean it is dilapidated or such, find specific words for it.

"every conceivable weapon" -- can't be true, they could "conceive" of all sorts of weapons that don't exist or they don't have. "available"? "possible"?

"sincerely hoped the thing would work" -- rather feeble given they are under noisy attack. is that all he really thinks in this environment? no impatience, rage?

"sound of orbital bombardment..." -- from other mil.s.f. works (all the way back to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) we have some notion what orbital bombardment means: immense kinetic energy. You don't "hear" those strikes. You're vaporized.

"...and shelling" -- from orbit? OK, let's drop "orbital" and just ask, what allows them to have a working hangar(?) after weeks of shelling? Even in WWI, weeks of shelling created a complete wasteland, only troops well entrenched survived. If they are underground or somehow shielded, that's key info.

FYI a "hanger" is what your shirts go on.

"he began randomly pushing buttons" -- is not a credible image. Is this guy supposed to be experienced? trained? competent? Such troops do not do things randomly. "rapidly" maybe, but not so rapidly that they can't evaluate the effect and the aim.

"figuring out the controls" - shit have these people had no time to plan? Not been coordinating with the ground crews at all? I don't believe it.

"several 105s" -- there's only one. "several 105 rounds" maybe.

OK, I am finding this unrewarding. You need to work on honing your ability to, one, clearly and completely visualize for yourself what is going on, and two, more precisely and accurately convey that vision to us. Best of luck.

nickfromredcliff · 18 days

An interesting aesthetic hypothesis with an air of monolithic macro-mega-meaning leaving me melancholic if not monomaniacal.

Totally cheating of course

Moneo · 19 days

Personal anecdote, recalled from childhood ~50 years ago -- so, before effective cancer treatment but not before proper diagnosis could be made. A well-liked neighbor lady, mother of my playmate, was increasingly sick over months with what was said to be cancer. I remember seeing her briefly on a couch, wasted and emaciated and clearly extremely badly off. Then, she got better. Slowly, regaining pretty much her original health. Spontaneous remission? Or, as my devout parents thought, the result of prayer.

OK, here's the kicker. Several years later she was alone in the house and a fire started and she died in the flames. So if prayer cured the cancer, it was only to deliver her to as bad a death not long after.

The_Oregano_Man · 19 days

read about St. Albert the Great...

here, quote:

Albertus Magnus, O.P. (1193/1206 – November 15, 1280), also known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, is a Catholic saint. He was a German Dominican friar and a bishop who achieved fame for his comprehensive knowledge of and advocacy for the peaceful coexistence of science and religion.

sharat87 · 25 days

Well, the unicode problem extends further than you say. There's the general problem of, how do you stream unicode data into a subprocess and how receive it back?

From the shell side, is there any shell that accepts an encoding other than latin-1 on its input stream? I'd love to hear so, but I think not. So even if you could specify the encoding of the stdin stream (which you can't) there's no way to feed UTF8 to stdin.

From the Python side, is there any way to specify an encoding for the data coming from stdout? No. So even if you thought the subprocess command was generating UTF8, you couldn't get Python to know that. You can't even say it is bytes, and encode it afterward.

Love to be told this is wrong, and how to work around it.

davidreiss666 · 28 days

2.03x1090 equations being worked on at the same time.

Not. It stores 300 bits each of which can be in two simultaneous states, so the whole entire complete 300-bit crystal could in principle be in that many states at once. Representing that many 300-bit integers, of which one is the answer you want, but which one? Big whoop. Not equations, not algorithms, not computations.

NoleLife · 1 month

"Artificial trees" are not a new idea. From Columbia U, from The UK, and a survey in Wikipedia. All different, AFAICT.

jread · 1 month

The original post seems to say the fever was the first symptom, preceding the Hodgkin's diagnosis, and not consequent to chemo.

MySky · 1 month

I call BS on this. They've got a clever "muscle" design based on shape-memory metal, and a clever way of warming the muscle with a flow of hydrogen and oxygen catalyzed to recombine.

What they definitely do NOT have is any way of extracting hydrogen and oxygen from sea water, as all the popular articles suggest. They have a fixed test rig with bottles of gases. It doesn't swim free and it definitely does NOT get its fuel from the sea around it.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0964-1726/21/4/045013/article

Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen has to take at least as much (practically speaking, always more) energy than you recover by recombining the gases. So if this thing could split water, it should just direct that energy to its muscles and skip the middleman.

doctorbravado · 1 month

And the tricky thing about "targeting" the immune system is that, ten years down the road, you might find out your immune system is quietly "ablating" some other population of cells, something you need, like myelin, oh hey, no cancer but now you've got multiple sclerosis.

Fedfan · 1 month

Irrelevant to the content, but: WTF is that cover illustration supposed to be?

fernly · 1 month

As to tone, I urge you to try reading your prose aloud. Really aloud, so you need a private place to do it. First-person must sound like a person talking. Nobody, even talking to themselves, says things like "She's just quiet, overflowing with secrets, maybe." If you read it aloud, actually voice-act the part, these things will stand out.

Now think about format. How exactly are we the readers supposed to have gotten access to this person's thoughts? Is he (he?) telling it, over a beer perhaps? Or writing it? You have to frame this for the reader: are we eavesdropping on a monologue, did we hack his computer or pick up an abandoned notebook? How does it come about that we have this access?

One possibility is that we are browsing through somebody's notebook, sketchbook, journal. In which case you could break it up with lists, sketches, irrelevant items (shopping list?). The list "I mean I have something..." could be an actual list, "Things I have:

A home (of sorts)
A room!

etc.

arthur_sc_king · 1 month

One of the first surprises, travelling in NZ last year. Grocery store, everything rounded to 10c. Cool! We should definitely do that. It makes nothing but sense.

horpses · 1 month

they still make carbon paper?

BareJew · 1 month

You know, I hope, that that is the correct answer to the casual question, "What's it about?" As in, "Oh, about 73 thousand words."

altometer · 2 months

Don't give up on this. You could drive 1/2 way, to e.g. a park and ride lot. Or in some places, you can get part way with the bike on train or bus. Multi-modal commuting, that's called.

Or, you could keep the bike at work and go for a ride every day at noon?

ruzkin · 2 months

I didn't expect much -- so many self-pub writers are also self-deluded -- and I do see a few clumsy turns of phrase, but... damn. That's tight, economical prose, and your descriptions have a meaty tangibility that sucks the reader in. This one, anyway. I think I could read this.

Well, I could if I had a kindle, or a pda with a kindle app, but I don't. Any way to get it in PDF?

justanotherhonky · 2 months

Couple comments.

Brain chemistry is simply DNA which is passed on to us from our parents...

Far too simple a dismissal of a highly dynamic structure. Aside from the obvious point that many available drugs change brain chemistry in many ways, brains change constantly in multiple ways on their own, from food intake (more, less, or what kind), exercise, and those experiences you mention.

So really, your brain and your life experience constitute one dynamic, co-evolving system, not two things. For example, PTSD is a long-term physical change in the brain from traumatic experience. For another example, some people's lives change as a result of an LSD experience, a short-term tweak to chemistry causing a long-term change of attitude that persists after the chemistry presumably returns to baseline.

...all subsequent experiences are made from choices which have been derived from the initial experience and therefore all choices are outside of our control.

I don't think you are properly appreciating that the choices at each step are not random, but incorporate the past (not a Markov process). If this weren't so, training would be impossible. You do get better at things by practicing them; the very idea of practice wouldn't be possible if past events had no effect on future choices.

When you choose and things go wrong, you are likely to make a more optimal choice in a similar situation in the future. And when that's not the case, you have the classic definition of neurosis, "doing the same thing and expecting a different result."

the choices I make in my life as, for want of a better word, worthless.

Possibly, on some absolute scale, they are. But they are not indifferent in their outcomes. Approaching a stop sign; stop or not? The outcomes can be vastly different. A choice has to be made (and not choosing is a choice also) and your experience tells you which outcome is likely to be better, for whichever definition of "better" you like. And if you say "there is no such thing as 'better'" -- you are just being petulant.

justanotherhonky · 2 months

The experience of the will as immediate and crucial have survived. To pretend that the will is a leftover that evolution forgot about is quite close to being unintelligible...

True, but: that says nothing about the "experience of the will" being a true reflection of reality. It may be evolutionarily important that we feel that experience regardless. Similar to how we all feel more optimistic about our skills and prospects than reality justifies.

fernly

TROPHY CASE

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