Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"

Mark · 01 Jan 2006, 15:25 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2006.mbox

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: "Mark" <mtiedemann at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"
Date: 1 Jan 2006 07:25:45 -0800
Message-ID: <1136129145.702577.146290 at g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <1135781723.546189.19520 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1136128612.366330.128000 at f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>

How many children did Einstein have? Two? How
> many children per typical welfare mom?

Two. (Less, really, but I've never quite figured out how to feel about
half a child :>)  That's a myth about welfare moms, an exaggeration
based on very local stats and media attention.  In countries where the
term 'welfare mom' has no meaning, birth rates tend to fall within
similar limits top to bottom.  It has much more to do with infant
mortality rates and available resources.  When the infant mortality
rate drops, the birth rate drops.

The decline of Western birth rates seems more tied to environmental
factors than anything else.  Fertility rates are demonstrably lower,
even among people who desperately want children (hence the geometric
growth of the medical fertility industry, centered in the very
countries that can afford it--which is the industrialized West).

Mark
author of:
THE SECANTIS SEQUENCE
REMAINS
www.marktiedemann.com

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net