I concede Eagal's criticism was part-right, but this should really go to a YMMV, as our respective M's really did V. It came as a surprise that this was cut! (no mood or apetite for a flame-war by reinstating it to the page, though.)
** In The Holographic Excitation, there is a blatant (well, fairly subtle) shout-out to Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. Specifically, the The Science of Discworld series, co-authored with prominent British scientists, in which Pratchett's fantasy world is used to mirror and illustrate developing scientific thought. In the books, the wizards of Unseen University (among them a rather nerdy type with glasses who affects a big baggy parka) accidentally create a bizarre pocket universe centered on a spherical world which orbits its sun. Stuck for what to do with it, it ends up gathering dust inside a protective glass sphere on somebody's desk. Meanwhile a geeky glasses-wearing scientist in a parka fires up holograms of Earth, planets and solar system to please his girlfriend. Leonard speculates that everything might just be one giant information-gathering hologram, being read by intelligences an unguessable distance away...
The creation of the pocket universe in the Discworld - including Planet Earth - was done with the specific intention of averting a seriously Big Bang, by diverting a lot of dangerously destructive energy down a harmless path...
One of the authors of The Science of Discworld, Professor Jack Cohen, is well-known in US academic circles. In one of the books he explains the torrid time he had trying to convince a hostile audience of the truth of evolutionary theory. He was in East Texas at the time getting heckled by Creationists.
Edited by 89.242.243.136Male, early sixties, Cranky old fart, at least two decades behind. So you have been warned. Functionally illiterate in several languages.
I concede Eagal's criticism was part-right, but this should really go to a YMMV, as our respective M's really did V. It came as a surprise that this was cut! (no mood or apetite for a flame-war by reinstating it to the page, though.)
Shout-Out:
- ** In The Holographic Excitation, there is a blatant (well, fairly subtle) shout-out to Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. Specifically, the The Science of Discworld series, co-authored with prominent British scientists, in which Pratchett's fantasy world is used to mirror and illustrate developing scientific thought. In the books, the wizards of Unseen University (among them a rather nerdy type with glasses who affects a big baggy parka) accidentally create a bizarre pocket universe centered on a spherical world which orbits its sun. Stuck for what to do with it, it ends up gathering dust inside a protective glass sphere on somebody's desk. Meanwhile a geeky glasses-wearing scientist in a parka fires up holograms of Earth, planets and solar system to please his girlfriend. Leonard speculates that everything might just be one giant information-gathering hologram, being read by intelligences an unguessable distance away...
- The creation of the pocket universe in the Discworld - including Planet Earth - was done with the specific intention of averting a seriously Big Bang, by diverting a lot of dangerously destructive energy down a harmless path...
- One of the authors of The Science of Discworld, Professor Jack Cohen, is well-known in US academic circles. In one of the books he explains the torrid time he had trying to convince a hostile audience of the truth of evolutionary theory. He was in East Texas at the time getting heckled by Creationists.
Edited by 89.242.243.136 Male, early sixties, Cranky old fart, at least two decades behind. So you have been warned. Functionally illiterate in several languages.