Posted from 2 addresses as Jeff Wilson, Jeffery Wilson clueland.com, Jeffery Wilson
-
That's exactly how any number of people are judged world wide every day, and we have every reason to think such moral judgments have been going on for almost 100,000 years. If hi…
14 Mar 2012, 09:03
-
Look at it as the unlikelihood of negative accomplishments: Earth has had several 8 figure atrocities in the last 150 years, and the extinction of the human race is still do-able…
14 Mar 2012, 03:29
-
The ancient Greeks (among others) saw themselves as metaphorically looking backward in time as they moved toward the unseen future, or perhaps standing in a river forever looking…
13 Mar 2012, 01:38
-
ambiguity, the devil's volleyball I'm somewhat guilty of this myself. I run fantasy roleplaying games, and after a while it becomes second nature to couch prophecies and oracles …
12 Mar 2012, 19:42
-
Urth is certainly the repository of things and personages past, and the name is appropriate, but that doesn't make it literally in our past. At the end of history, everything is …
12 Mar 2012, 18:55
-
I think it was during the writing of *all* the volumes I-IV and URTH, with the past iteration idea coming post-URTH.…
12 Mar 2012, 18:44
-
I believe it was originally written that way, but the drowning of Urth makes it seem as if the G-d of Noah has broken His promise to never again destroy the earth by water. Narra…
12 Mar 2012, 05:39
-
I suppose Urth could be post-Rapture, but really, nothing he describes in BotNS is as bad as has happened on our post-Crucifixion earth. 19th and 20th century Asia in particular …
12 Mar 2012, 05:24
-
Land of Virgins = Virginia…
11 Mar 2012, 23:24
-
Couldn't the Christian Church cultural elements have sprung from a church following a different khristos, like John the Baptist?…
11 Mar 2012, 23:11
-
I don't see that it's that hard. Allah was one of the gods of the Kaaba, whom Mohammed's father served in a debased, idolatrous form of Judaism. Mohammed sought to reform this, a…
11 Mar 2012, 14:55
-
Severian does remark on how the lore of the other guilds is largely the same, and I don't think the guilds can be entirely secular, as they serve the head of the church, the Auta…
11 Mar 2012, 04:40
-
Fat-bottomed girls make the rockin' world go 'round, laddie!…
06 Mar 2012, 16:42
-
Bread and salt, perhaps.…
20 Jan 2012, 04:46
-
The US media often makes a special issue of covering a new president's first 100 days in office. Maybe there's a media convergence on this period that catches on, the way the arb…
16 Jan 2012, 22:22
-
Why would Tzadkiel and his Ship be immune from Sev's subconscious powers? He's at least familiar with them firsthand, unlike Lune. By centuries I refer to the apparent subjective…
11 Jan 2012, 06:39
-
The mirror sails ("continents of silver") may actually be of a scale similar to the moon, but they can be microscopically thin so that they mass less than a walnut per square mile …
10 Jan 2012, 21:40
-
So you are of the opinion that none of the improbable occurrences that happen around Sev are connected to him? Despite his own, cosmically-enhanced perception that they are? Why d…
10 Jan 2012, 21:03
-
The way Sev and his emotions have nothing to do with the flying cathedral? Tzad already gives him legitimate godhood as the New Sun by connecting him to the White Fountain. Tzad …
10 Jan 2012, 04:32
-
I don't recall seeing anyone suggest the black hole is delivered during this time. It is likely to be Tzadkiel's Ship because: * it is big enough. * it is equipped with reflecti…
07 Jan 2012, 18:04
-
No. Yes, though this is apparently the first occasion. The sequence is: * Sev barricades the door and windows of the sickroom, which becomes dark. * Sev notices the room is to…
01 Jan 2012, 18:38
-
In the quote you just snipped, Sev says he checks the Claw to see if it is glowing. It is several moments and paragraphs later (also snipped) that he does the healing and feels t…
01 Jan 2012, 17:44
-
CH L "Darkness in the House of Day" is when he writes: "The injured and the ill were brought to me for healing; some I cured as I had cured Declan, or as we of the guild had been…
01 Jan 2012, 13:54
-
I think Rudesind is tall because he has big body parts and when he sits atop a stepladder he makes it look like it is merely a high stool. Perhaps we can both post photos of peop…
28 Dec 2011, 04:17
-
Because sitting allows an old man to work longer at a stretch, and there is nowhere else to sit within reach of paintings high on a wall. It seems to me that you are uniquely sui…
27 Dec 2011, 18:58
-
Perhaps. When diagramming the sentence, it is evident that the parentetical could modify either of the previous "sitting" or the subsequent "upon a high stool", and the following…
27 Dec 2011, 06:23
-
O I C…
25 Dec 2011, 10:53
-
Sunlight comes from the luminous gas that makes up the solar photosphere. And from what part of an atom of that luminous gas does that luminosity emanate? The electrons. When y…
25 Dec 2011, 06:14
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_extrasolar_planets#Direct_imaging Do you believe any images that you see on television are truly representative? They also requi…
24 Dec 2011, 08:45
-
I think I was speaking about how credibility aids suspension of disbelief in a given work of science fiction. Demonstated scientific accuracy greatly aids credibility, but it's t…
24 Dec 2011, 08:34
-
How are the sun and other luminous objects photographed then, sans refelction?…
24 Dec 2011, 08:29
-
Happy Mithras' Birthday to everyone.…
24 Dec 2011, 08:25
-
The scientific method and mathematical rigor are human behaviors that are used to discover and refine knowledge of abstract and objective concepts, many of which are found in ana…
23 Dec 2011, 21:13
-
You're overlooking reproducible results. Preindustrial crop hexings are not reproducible by witches, while electrons are tamed well enough that we can reproduce Zeus-strength lig…
23 Dec 2011, 05:42
-
Except that it only seems to work when the White Fountain is above the horizion.…
23 Dec 2011, 04:59
-
Doubtless it serves several purposes, like keeping the subject's attention on the coercer, coordinating different parts of the coercer's brain, keeping the other sorcerers inform…
23 Dec 2011, 04:42
-
Severian perceives that he is being zapped by the twin hemispheres of Decuman's brain in a way that illuminates him but also imposes a particular depressive emotion that saps his…
22 Dec 2011, 20:25
-
You speak as if it's necessary to have actual science behind one's appeal to its authority. "Ever" is overstated, IIRC Wheeler conjectured at length that micrtubules within brai…
22 Dec 2011, 20:07
-
As you note, this very broad definition of magia envelops science and technology and medicine and 2-3 other chunks of the Dewey Decimal System within "magic." In this sense, almo…
22 Dec 2011, 19:57
-
It may have, but there's never any mention of bad blood mixing, Sev speaks as if he's observed several people with artificial limbs before, and Jonah's crew apparently had access…
22 Dec 2011, 19:28
-
Outside the context of speculative fiction, perhaps. It was intended to mean a physical process that could occasionally be mistaken for the magic of myth and legend but could be …
22 Dec 2011, 04:22
-
legerdemain + psi…
21 Dec 2011, 16:57
-
The leech and the old autarch mention that brains work best, but the extremely well informed Ultan says that hands are sufficient. I think that the memory RNA hypothesis of the t…
21 Dec 2011, 04:03
-
I don;t follow you here. Scienceless science fiction? Good luck with that. An unreliable narrator is a start, but he has to be shown to be unreliable in certain ways that allow …
16 Dec 2011, 17:33
-
However, it is possible for an educated person to stay abreast of general established science, available popular science literature, and the abstracts of past and new development…
16 Dec 2011, 16:43
-
Sorry, I meant that I'm on LinkedIn without being subjected to the stream of allegedly-amusing pictures and other media like I am on Facebook.…
14 Dec 2011, 05:51
-
Apparently Tim opted to allow LinkedIn to rifle his address book and send invites to each entry. It's sort of a gameless, pictureless Facebook for introducing your professional a…
13 Dec 2011, 22:02
-
Totally, Lem uses it in THE CYBERIAD. in the 1990's, Forward's TIMEMASTER showed how negative mass has all kinds implications besides just floating ships (time travel, stargates,…
06 Dec 2011, 13:58
-
That's correct, but Sev affirmitively writes that he was sitting. the revision is in what he is sitting on, but not that he is sitting at all. Stepladders are mostly higher than …
04 Dec 2011, 00:41
-
By opposite outcome, I mean the opposite of what you propose. Mimir loses his head, but the head endures and becomes guardian of the well. Odin is missing an eye because he succe…
03 Dec 2011, 02:13
Urth Net