>and the best microbrew pubs in Manhattan? >(Hint: the former is a red herring...)
Did you know that The Red Herring is in fact Plastic Man's arch-nemesis these days? His M.O. is to turn up in the middle of cases that are nothing to do with him.
I'm convinced. He *is* a bigger dick than his old man.
A formulation I read somewhere or other that I quite like goes: atheism is a religious belief in the same way that absolute zero is a temperature. To me, the notion that there's this all-knowing, all-seeing being who cares about what we do on this insignigficant speck we live on is self-evidently absurd in the same way that, say, the contention that the Earth is surrounded by an intangible and invisible field of cheese is. Both are equally impervious to scientific testing and my 'faith' in believing each to be nonsense is about the same. I suppose that makes me an 'acheesist' too. I'm kind of irritated that my opinion on the particular preposterous assertion that is God is considered somehow different in kind to that I might hold on any other preposterous assertion. Because it's so important *to them* theists seem unable to comprehend that it could possibly be this level of unimportant to others but, trust me, it is.
Mere decades after WWII, Alberto Fujimori was
running Peru. Coincidence? You decide.
Mark Kleiman: "Who's lecturing? I was hoping, and found my hopes justified." "It's good news that the European governments aren't playing."
If you ever thought there was the slightest possibility we would, then you don't know us at all.
Dave Bell: Regarding the door-to-door religion salesmen, we have a printed sign on our front
door that clearly and politely states they should not bother us because we are not interested. This hasn't stopped the occasional such person ringing our bell. My first response is always: "Can't you read?". They inevitably seem affronted that the sign could possibly apply to them. It's a matter of deep comfort and pride to me that I live in a country which, despite having a state religion, is one of the most secular on the planet, with one of the world's lowest levels of religious observance, but I suppose one inevitable consequence of this is going to be an increase of 'missionaries' trying to convert us. Now, if only they'd learn to read.
Returning late to this thread:
First, me:
Totally agree about Nancy Kress. Wonderful SF riter, obviously knows her science, too. I always assumed she wasn't considered a hard SF writer because she's, y'know, a *girl* and you've got to be able to *get* hard to write that manly, hairy-chested hard SF. And the older I get, the more thoroughly repulsive I find the 'hard-mindedness' of Heinlein. It strikes me as the same sort of attitude that Dickhead-in-Chief Dubya adopted when he told those attacking US forces to "bring it on", and my tolerance for it has just about bottomed out.
From Patrick Nielsen Hayden,
Sorry I can't sign on to that last. Heinlein wasn't a perfect human being, nor was his work free of moral obtuseness, but everything I know about him indicates that he was a person of far more substance, grit, and (yes) sympathy for others than George W. Bush has displayed on the best day of his life.
New me:
I know little about RAH's personal life and so have no reason to suppose he was anything other than how you describe him. I'm puzzled as to what exactly this has to do with what I wrote, though. My comment (reprinted above) ran from Nancy Kress through RAH to Bush and was clearly, I thought, about machismo and macho posturing. None of the positive qualities you list preclude macho posturing, in my experience, and that's certainly how I've always perceived Heinlein's 'hard-mindedness'. The difference in Bush's case is that that posturing gets people killed. This is a non-trivial difference, but the basic impulse seems the same to me.
Brad de Long: Reading 'Small Gods' first. Ouch. Yeah, of all the Discworld books that's the one I think is best, too. However, I read them all in sequence and of the - what, 27 or so by this point? - there are only three or four I'd say weren't very good. Not a bad hit rate.
PNH: Totally agree about Nancy Kress. Wonderful SF writer, obviously knows her science, too. I always assumed she wasn't considered a hard SF writer because she's, y'know, a *girl* and you've got to be able to *get* hard to write that manly, hairy-chested hard SF. And the older I get, the more thoroughly repulsive I find the 'hard-mindedness' of Heinlein. It strikes me as the same sort of attitude that Dickhead-in-Chief Dubya adopted when he told those attacking US forces to "bring it on", and my tolerance for it has just about bottomed out.
Oh yeah, forgot something:
Mitch Wagner: "This whole discussion is illustrative of a split in the sf community: Rob Hansen and others say that "The Roads Must Roll" is bad because the engineering is ridiculous, but I (and I suspect others too) don't see bad engineering as a fatal flaw in an sf story. Indeed, I see bad engineering in an sf story as being trivial. We're willing to postulate FTL travel, time travel and antigravity, why not also be willing to postulate rolling roads if they help us tell a good story?"
Oh, I'm perfectly happy to read stories that postulate technologies that don't yet exist, and even stories that ignore known science (I read comics, and they routinely ignore even the most
basic stuff such as Newton's Laws), but when someone lauded for writing 'hard SF' gets
basic stuff wrong I feel kinda cheated.
CHip wrote: "And Rob -- you answer your own question about relative wind when you discuss the "glassite roofs"; the roads are enclosed, so air is carried along with the strips -- the only issue is the differences along with each of the strips."
Not so. The air may be carried along with the strips, but air is a fluid not a solid. Yes, the strips would carry along any solid on them at the same speed as they were travelling for the full height of that solid. The same is not true of a fluid for what would have to be the full heightup to the glassite roof (which is presumably solid and so would also impart drag on the top layer of air). This is why I wrote at some length about the fans and/or level of
compartmentalization necessary so that using the belts didn't feel like standing in a wind tunnel.
Heinlein may not have been stupid but, for the reasons Erik and I pointed out, the rolling roads in his story were certainly were. The real problem for me in this is that we're always told how Heinlein was a hard science man, but this is real basic, nuts'n'bolts barely-more-than high school level science stuff that was as well known in the 1940s as it is now. Even with the free energy hand-waves, there was too much really basic stuff he got wrong. 'Roads' is just a terrible, terrible piece of work.
Mitch wagner wrote:
>I think the central gimmick -- the rolling >roads -- is deeply wonderful, and who cares >whether they're practical or not? Ever driven >for hundreds or thousands of miles on flat,
>featureless highway? Wouldn't it be nicer to >have a whole STREET along with you, sit in a >pub or restaurant for a little while,
>go out for a little stroll -- all while moving >at 100 mph -- and then arrive at your >destination?
I've done this. The thing I did it on is called a train. Ok, so it wasn't open to the elements but neither were Heinlein'sroads. Travelling at 100 mph, the winds would have knocked you over. Heinlein recognizes this problem, but his solution doesn't make a lot of sense. He has wind
break partitions on the strips at ever 20mph increase in belt speed, explaining:
"If we didn't have some way of separating the air currents over the strips of different speeds, the wind would tear our clothes off on the 100 mph strip."
Heinlein clearly envisions the air over each strip moving at the speed of the strip itself, but gives no indication of how this could be achieved. The reason the air moves at the same speed as us in a train or a car is because
it's contained in that box with us. Try driving in a convertible with the top down to see what happens when it isn't. Huge fans would be required to move the air, and there would need to be lots of them along the length of the road to keep it accelerated. Unless, of course,
there are other partitions front and back breaking the space on the roads into smaller compartments. Only then you're back to what are essentially railway carriages, so what's the point?
>So what's wrong with the engineering of the >rolling roads, aside from the points that >Heinlein addressed in the story? I'm not an >engineer, myself.
What's wrong with the rolling roads is that they violate perhaps the most basic engineering
principle of all, namely:
"The correct solution to any properly-defined engineering problem is the one that solves it in the simplest and most cost-effective manner."
(My wording, incidentally, since I'm not sure I've ever seen it distilled in quite that form.)
The rolling roads are not simple or cost-effective, and neither of these considerations can really be hand-waved away. Simplicity is important because the more things you have that can go wrong, the greater the odds that one or
more of them *will* go wrong. Consider a highway with cars on it. If one of them breaks down then, so long as it can get to the side of the road, this is an inconvenience for the car's passengers rather than for the system as a whole. Now consider the rolling roads. If any stretch breaks down - and I guarantee some would - thousands are stranded. And the cost of running and maintaining the system would be astronomical. Twenty years ago over here, I remember reading the cost of a six-lane motorway (our equivalent of your highways) was about a million pounds a mile. That's for blacktop and all the associated earthworks, drain-laying etc.
The cost if that static surface was instead a huge conveyor belt, driven by who knows how many enormous motors would be staggering. The motors, unlike blacktop, also require a lot of power to run, so factor in that cost, too. It's also a more expensive and skilled task to maintain them, so add in that, too. Then there's the amount of steel needed to construct them. I'm not sure exactly how much money the US economy generates, or how much steel you produce, but I think this system could well exhaust both.
Heinlein says the roads have come into existence because of the squandering of fossil fuels, yet the partitions and roof of the roads are made of "glassite", by which, since it can't be a plastic due to all those fossil fuels having
ben used up, he presumably has to mean glass. Do you have any idea how much all that glass would weigh? That's a whole shitload more steel needed to support it right there.
I could go on but, really, any angle you care to come at this angle from it's a cast iron, 100% stinker. Yet back in the 1960s, SFWA voted this into their 'Hall of Fame' collection. What were they smoking?
>Are trade unions any different from other kinds >of labor unions?
It's what we call labour unions over here.
Actually, 'The Roads Must Roll' is an attack on trade unions, and appears to be a comment on events that happened in the US the year before it was written (I researched and wrote about this for a fanzine article some years ago but don't seem to have it to hand at the moment, alas). Politics aside, I've been deeply puzzled by why this story ever got into the SF hall of fame since it's not particularly well written - RAH has done much better - and rolling roads as laid out in the story are one of the most monumentally stupid ideas in all of Science Fiction. I once described these to some fellow engineers who were not SF readers, and they fell about laughing.
Well, I've just reread my post a couple of time, trying to see it as you obviously did, Patrick, and I *still* can't find anything in it that suggests a "superiority dance". From my pov, the 'tone' you saw is something you brought to it rather than something I put there. Far from feeling in any way "superior", I'm actually pretty worried since, as history as shown, there's no American idea so awful that a British government won't eventually copy it.
And I wish I thought I was being overly pessimistic. I was hoping there would be a response from someone over there pointing out a way in which this would, of course, be stopped, something obvious which I - looking in from the outside - had failed to appreciate. I still want to see that response, because this situation really does look that grim to me. (I'm particularly disturbed by the alleged theocratic beliefs of major Diebold execs, too.)
If Dubya becomes a liability they'll find a new front man, but it'll still be the same guys in control.
Well, now we know how democracy dies in America. It dies not with a bang but a whimper. As Florida proved, it's not voting that counts but who counts the votes. Very soon now all of America will be Florida. Looked at from the outside, I don't see any way you can halt this process either; it's almost a done deal. With your press not even reporting what is the most important story in the US today (not surprising -the US press was bought and neutered a long time ago), the public won't know it's happening, not even after it's complete. Seriously expecting Dubya to be defeated at the next election can now be seen to be absurd. He won't be *allowed* to lose.
In November next year the fat lady sings.
I'd like to believe there's some possibility I'm wrong, that it won't happen this way, but if there's something that can or will stop it, it appears entirely invisible from over here.
Cornelius van Lunt (aka Taurus of the Scorpio crime syndicate) first appeared in AVENGERS #77
circa 1970, and was later killed in an issue of WEST COAST AVENGERS. In between these he did indeed commit the crime Doc recounts. Quite what this has to do with the topic of Hillary's memoir I seem to have missed, however
I think it might have been useful to give the original context for that that bit by Ken you quoted, namely the jingoistic piece of drivel from Heinlein he turned on its head to produce this.
Oh, I'm sure it happened as reported, Mary Kay. It rings true and is in keeping with a long tradition of such wit. When, after the Battle of Britain, Churchill praised the fighter pilots who had saved us with the words "never in the history of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few" one of them commented "uh oh, looks like he's heard about our bar bills".
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 12 |
| 2003 | 7 |
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