Jamie123

Looks like I was wrong about there being no missionaries in North Korea! (Seriously though, I do hope and pray the guy is OK!)

What is the weirdest thing you can remember: something so ridiculous that it almost scares you. Here are mine: Runner Up: When I was a kid, one of my friends had a model railway in his bedroom. It was mounted on a board that was hinged to the wall, so that it could be swung up out of the way when it wasn't in use. It was quite impressive, having scenery and even a few tiny trackside buildings. But... ...these trackside buildings included a row of houses which FACED ONTO the track, so that the trains ran past the front doors. I was always asking him why he did this, because that would NEVER happen in real life. I would say "Why not have the houses facing away from the track, and make a road run along their fronts." His reply was always something along the lines of "Well it's a model railway, not a model roadway" or else "Well it's not real is it?" Well if realism isn't the object of railway modelling why stop there? Why not have giant bananas as road bridges, or trackside sausages and paper-clip farms? A model (just as a fantasy story) should have a consistent internal logic to it - and his didn't! Winner: When I was about 6 or 7 we went on a family day out to Weston-Super-Mare. On the beach there were a number of donkeys and horse-drawn vehicles that children could have rides on/in for a small fee. (Donkey rides on the beach are still very common in England.) But... One of these vehicles was very futuristic-looking. It was painted a mixture of silver and Air Force blue, had swept-back wings covered with RAF roundels and imitation jet-engines, a tail fin and a spinning set of gleaming helicopter blades on the roof. On each side, in a racy-looking font was printed "Joe 90 Supercraft". (If you don't know who "Joe 90" was check out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_90.) And the whole space-age looking contraption was propelled by....a horse? Dali and Magritte I can handle because they are supposed to be weird; it's the fact that no weirdness (or so I suppose) was intended in either of these cases that makes them so unsettling.

There's also the Kingston Cougars!

It's a while since I read it, but wasn't there some disagreement between the characters about which solar system the human species originated from? They mentioned several possibilities, of which "Sol" was one. Maybe Earth itself no longer exists, or maybe its orbit has shifted so it is no longer obvious that this was originally the definition of a year. (On second thoughts ignore that last speculation - I'm picking for spoilers here!)

Never actually saw or read The Martian. I'll give it a try sometime and let you know.

I've tried the first Foundation book, but for "hard" science fiction it was too full of problems to take seriously. For example, how can a society which possesses interstellar spaceflight not have nuclear energy - and be envious of other planets that do? Also why do Seldon's "crises" seem to come up in conveniently round numbers of years? In fact the unquestioned assumption that the "year" should be a universal measure of time crops up a lot in science fiction. This is one reason I could never get into Star Trek Voyager: Kes (whose people, the Ocampa, only live about 9 years) sometimes talked about what would happen to her body in "the second year" or "the third year"; why would she enumerate time in multiples of the orbital period of a planet the other side of the galaxy which her people have never heard of? For a while I comforted myself with the idea that perhaps she was talking about her own planet's "years" (which may be about 10 Earth years) but it's made clear eventually that her years are the same as those understood by the Voyager crew. The only solution left is that "years" is actually an artefact of the ship's universal translator - which it now seems translates complex ideas as well as words. Well OK - I could just about buy this but... ...in the episode where we saw people in the delta quadrant using seven segment LED displays, the final threads of credibility were gone for good!

Or when you really need to go but all the toilets you can find are either locked or out of order....and you go on searching and searching in vain. I have the "back to school" dreams too: I usually have to do a geography exam. (Why is it always geography?) I try to do the exam but I can't remember anything. And sometimes I am at school/work naked from the waist down, or in my pyjamas, or else wearing women's clothes. The night before last I dreamed I was a kid again, and there were two very large boys who had a third much smaller bespectacled boy in a choke-hold. They had nasty cruel half-grinning pig-like faces. (They reminded me a bit of Crabbe and Goyle - Malfoy's two henchmen in the Harry Potter movies.) I tried punching the taller of them in the face, but it made no difference - his face was like hard rubber and it only made him grin more. Perhaps a psychiatrist would make something of this...

I love the original trilogy (Lord Foul's Bane, The Illearth War and The Power that Preserves). They are true classics - I could go on re-reading them all my life. The Second Chronicles are OK. It is the Last Chronicles I have trouble with: I thought The Runes of the Earth was good (though not up to the standard of the original 3 books) and Fatal Revenant ends on an almighty cliff-hanger. You can imagine how excited I was to get my hands on Book 3. What a disappointment. Against All Things Ending was slow and turgid and boooooooring! All anyone does for the first 100 pages is stand about and talk, and it's not "The Council of Elrond" either; it's more like one of those dreary interminable arguments about car insurance people insist on having over lunch or at the pub. It picks up after a while, but whenever the pace slows he characters huddle together again to discuss car insurance. The ending, I must say, is rather nice, and Donaldson improvises another doozy of a cliff-hanger. Well the final book The Last Dark is on my bookshelf now. I've tried, but I've not yet managed to get past Chapter 2. I fully intend to finish it before I die, but right now I'm content to re-read Treasure Island instead. (I've just got to where Jim Hawkins has taken command of the Hispaniola but Israel Hands is planning treachery!) P.S. This guy does some great tongue-in-cheek Stephen R. Donaldson illustrations http://zorm.deviantart.com/art/TCTC-Rimehilde-493331752.

According to Cinderella's Fairy Godmother... Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo is obviously the "active ingredient". So why waste your money on salagadoola and mechickaboola? Adding them to the recipe just leaves bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! But it gets stranger... So salagadoola and mechickaboola mutate the regular bibbidi-bobbidi-boo into triple-strength bibbidi-bobbidi bibbidi-bobbidi bibbidi-bobbidi-boo? Why didn't she just say that in the first stanza? Fairy Godmothers should learn to be less confusing! (The heat's getting to me.)

It certainly sounds like sleep paralysis. I've experienced it quite a few times - very similar to what Anatess and Pam describe - not with "demons" per se, but with a feeling of panic and inability to move - sometimes a powerful force holding me back against the bed. My wife tells me I make "wimpering" noises when it happens - when she hears me she gives me a nudge and I come fully awake. Sleeping with your eyes open can produce strange effects: a few years ago I was admitted to hospital with acute asthma, and I was lying on one of their trolley-bed things. I was dead-tired but unable to sleep properly because of the effort needed to keep breathing. I went into a kind of miserable doze during which which I clearly saw a woman with a round face looking at me. She was quite beautiful, with long dark hair; a bit like Anna Ford in her younger days. As I gradually woke up the face changed until it became the rivet in the side of the bed, and I realized that was what I had been looking at all along. I can only suppose is that the dream-state does strange things to the information we receive from our senses. I also once read an article* which suggest that Fuseli's painting "The Nightmare" is a representation of sleep paralysis: the ugly fella on the sleeper's chest is the force holding her down. (The most scary part of the painting for me is the nasty-looking horse in the background - some suggest is the steed the demon arrived on - probably combined with the pun of "mare" in "nightmare"). *I don't know if this is the same article but it says much the same as the one I'm referring to: http://www.thesleepparalysisproject.org/about-sleep-paralysis/culture-and-history/

Not just for officers. All soldiers, from the privates right up to the generals were forbidden to shave their upper lip.

No one ever gave me a trophy - not even for "partithipating" *sob*

Alternatively you can work for a soft drinks manufacturer:

Closed System: Technically you are right - since we do receive a few photons from stars in (for example) the Andromeda galaxy, we are bound to them in a common closed system, but the connection is only slight, and the increase in entropy associated with our receiving them is dwarfed immeasurably by that associated with the sun. That is the heat engine which drives our planet and makes life possible. If the sun were somehow magically removed while the Earth's energy were somehow magically maintained, then we would have some claim to being a "closed system" - or at least a good approximation of one: in that case all the retained energy would transform itself into evenly distributed heat - which has the highest entropy possible. And yes, the emergence of life in such a situation would be virtually impossible. Star Motion: The proper motion of stars was first proven by Edmund Halley (the comet guy) nearly 300 years ago, and with modern instruments can now be measured with some accuracy. However, detecting the gravitational effects of stars on each other across interstellar distances is another matter*: what we mostly see is the aggregated gravity of the entire galaxy (including stars, nebulae and supposed dark matter) on individual stars. Perhaps as the Voyager probes continue to penetrate interstellar space we will learn more about how gravity really behaves out there (though I daresay that other things out there like the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt objects will distort the measurements). Supermassive Black Holes: We certainly know there is one in the centre of the galaxy (called Sagittarius A*), since we can observe the rapid orbits of stars in its immediate vicinity. However it contains only a very small fraction of the mass of the entire galaxy, and cannot possibly account for its high speed of rotation. Furthermore, the stars in the galaxy do not follow Keplerian orbits (stars close to the hub travelling much faster than those near the rim) quite unlike planets in our solar system orbiting the sun. In fact the angular speed of stars does not vary much between the core and the rim, showing that the bulk of the mass is not concentrated at the centre but more evenly spread out. Though I suppose its possible that there are many other supermassive black holes spread out across the galaxy, which account for the extra mass now attributed to "dark matter"... *Afterthought: Having said that, I suppose the stars orbiting Sagittarius A* (the alleged black hole the centre of the galaxy) could be said to be responding to its gravity over something approaching interstellar distances (a few hundred light-hours) but I don't believe those orbits are mapped accurately enough to be certain, nor do we (as far as I know - correct me if I am wrong) have an independent estimate of the mass of the central body.

Another very thought-provoking book is "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton. It starts as a spy thriller, but it soon goes....well, into very strange territory indeed. I shan't say any more, otherwise it will spoil it for you.

What the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually says is that in a closed system, entropy can never decrease. Entropy is not necessarily the same as lack of complexity, but it does coincide with disorder. (Everyone knows this: if you don't tidy up your desk every now and then, it will keep getting more and more disorderly until it reaches a state of "maximum entropy".) The thing everyone forgets is that this applies to a closed system. The Earth is not a closed system: we are slap-bang in the middle of an enormous heat engine. On one side of us we have the sun, which is incredibly hot, and on the other side we have outer space, which is incredibly cold. Energy confined in atoms within the sun (order) is being dispersed into interstellar space (disorder) and it passes through us as it goes. Compared to that massive increase in entropy, what's the piffling decrease associated with the emergence of life?

As I understand it, it's not that we know there is exactly 95% more stuff to discover (and after that nothing else) but that theory requires the existence of another 19 times what we already know about, in order to explain what we do already know about. For example, given its speed of rotation, the centrifugal force* on the stars should be far greater than the collective gravitational force binding them together, and the whole structure ought to fly apart. There therefore must be more mass than can be accounted for by all the objects (stars, nebulae etc.) that we can physically see. Therefore: dark matter. I have always been very suspicious about extending the inverse-square law of gravity - which we only really know to be valid within our own solar system - across interstellar distances. We cannot very easily observe the gravitational effects of stars upon each other (except of course binary stars, which are physically close together and not separated by many light-years). Perhaps the law of gravity as we know it is a regional approximation which breaks down at galactic and intergalactic scales. A few years ago we had a visitor giving a talk on general relativity, and I questioned him on just this point. Another physicist in the audience pooh-pooh'd**, me saying that the evidence for general relativity was concrete, including gravitational lensing effects, but that is exactly a case in point: we know that Einstein's theory is correct at the millions-of-miles scale from the lensing effect of the sun on stars observed during a solar eclipse, but those data are only meaningful because you can compare them with the apparent positions of the same stars when the sun is not in front of them. On a cosmic scale we see images of galaxies distorted by the presence of much nearer massive bodies, but we cannot compare them with what those same galaxies would have looked like otherwise. The existence of dark matter and dark energy are proposed to make the universe conform to what we think we know (just as a flat-earther makes the sun much closer and smaller to make it conform to his assumptions of reality). But until we send probes deep into interstellar space, will we really know? * If anyone is about to tell me that "centrifugal force doesn't exist", you're only right in an inertial frame of reference. The rotating galaxy is not an inertial frame of reference. And neither was the roundabout in a kiddies' playground that I got thrown off when I was seven. ** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeF1JO7Ki8E

The book is called "Flatland" and it is by Edwin Abbott. And yes it is a great book!

I don't think it "mocks" the Trinity either. In fact I first learned about this channel from our vicar who used the "trinity" one in his sermon on the Trinity. (He is quite good at doing an Irish accent!) The Dawkins video mirrors much of what I have always felt about rationalism, and how it leads to a circular argument. (Miracles cannot happen because they defy the general rule, and the general rule is never broken because we find no exceptions to it and any exceptions that are reported cannot be true because they defy the general rule...etc...etc.) On the other hand the lds videos in this series are definitely anti lds so maybe that is reason enough to remove this post. Anyway I'll go with whatever the moderator thinks about this.

These guys always make me laugh: Arguing with St. Patrick about the Trinity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d4FHHf00pY Debunking atheism with Richard Dawkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d4FHHf00pY Hymn tune plagiarism (not!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWnIsvWv-3w

A book I cannot believe I didn't mention before is "The Shack" by William P. Young. It's the story of a man mourning for his murdered daughter who receives a mysterious message - supposedly from God - which sends him to ... but I won't give the plot away. Just read it! Suffice to say that if "Left Behind" is the nadir of religious fantasy, "The Shack" is close to the zenith*. Though I'd warn you that if you are "horribly offended" by the idea of God being female, then you will be "horribly offended". *C.S. Lewis' novels are close to the zenith too - especially "The Great Divorce" and the "Ransom" trilogy.

The books I would advise you to avoid like the plague are the "Left Behind" series by LaHaye and Jenkins. I have read most of them and I cannot believe how bad they are. The worst thing about them is that although they are so bad, and although you KNOW they are so bad, you can't help being sucked along. When you finish one book you won't be able to rest until you have bought the next...and you'll be dragged along for volume after ridiculous volume, gazing in disbelief at the plot-holes and glaring technical errors - and hating every minute of it!

Oh....don't forget John Wyndham! Novels like The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes. And all the short stories too!

I love Asterix and Obelix too. Obelix is so delightfully dumb. I remember one story where they are (as usual) fighting, and Obelix says: "I wish I knew why we're fighting. I hope Asterix explains it to me later."

Be sure to read the "Hornblower" books by C.S. Forester. Set during the Napoleonic wars, they follow the adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower - a very human naval hero of humble origins (his father was a doctor) who is tone deaf, can't dance and has few social graces. Don't feel you need to read them in fictional chronological order. A great one to start with is "The Happy Return" which takes place in the middle of Hornblower's career, and was in fact the first Hornblower book Forester wrote. Here are my comments on the canon: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower: describes how Hornblower first joined the navy. (Has some good bits in it, but is rather turgid in places. Reads more like a series of short stories than a true novel.) Lieutenant Hornblower: describes how Hornblower meets his long-time sidekick Bush, and how the two are forced to commit mutiny against their captain. (Great stuff - though the last few chapters are rather slow.) Hornblower and the Hotspur: as the least senior captain in the Channel squadron, Hornblower is frequently sat upon by his more "jerkish" superiors - but ends up having the last laugh! (Slow start, but gets better all the way through!) The Happy Return: Hornblower is forced to make an alliance with a dangerous madman, on the basis of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle. No good comes of it! (Roaringly good cover to cover) A Ship of the Line: having fallen in love with a beautiful lady, Hornblower finds himself under the command of her husband, who is unfortunately an admiral. (Totally nail-biting at the end!) Flying Colours: following the events in A Ship of the Line, Hornblower and Bush are prisoners of the French. However, they plot a daring escape! (Totally brilliant!) The Commodore: now knighted and promoted to Commodore, Hornblower is sent to the Baltic to aid the Tsar of Russia. Unfortunately he has an assassin aboard! (Not as good as the two before it, but a worthy read nonetheless.) Lord Hornblower: Baron Hornblower (as he now is) is sent to put down a mutiny which threatens to destroy England's slender advantage in the war - despite the fact that he sympathizes with the mutineers! These are in chronological order, not necessarily reading order. I believe there are others in the series, but I do not have them.