Green is Urth Redux

Jeff Wilson · 12 Jan 2011, 15:16 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:16:14 -0600
Subject: (urth) Green is Urth Redux
In-Reply-To: <30CF4729AB0C46F99B3FAE6583F087B8@jill>
References: <SNT123-W2518E8420D6FCC3EAA593ACFF10 at phx.gbl>
	<30CF4729AB0C46F99B3FAE6583F087B8@jill>
Message-ID: <4D2DC5BE.7040309 at io.com>

On 1/12/2011 7:56 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>>> David Stockhoff: But we could just as well posit that in Severian's
>>> "parallel" universe the moon is bigger.
>>
>> Given Rudesind's words, this seems like the best interpretation of the
>> text to me, with the fewest reader
>> additions.
>
> The most probable explanation, I think, is that Wolfe has got his
> orbital mechanics wrong and assumed the Moon will come closer to Earth
> over time. (In fact it will drain energy from the rotation of the Earth
> and get farther away.)

I think this is likely as well, but it's easy to put it off on the 
misrembering Rudesind. Too bad there's no intercessor for the similar 
bad figures given for the Wall and the Ship's Sails.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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