cool book

Quite a lot pf Patchett's appeal is as a satirist, and he does send up a lot of British and American institutions.

John Larkin has odd tastes. I've never been attracted to Stanisław Lem. The other three are definitely classic. Neal Stephenson is in the same class. I happen to like Ken MacLeod, partly because he grew up in Glasgow, and knows about left-wing poiitics (which is rare in Western science-fiction writers, many of whom are rabidly right-wing) but he does write well and creates plausible characters.

Thick-eared rubbish.

I know he is hugely popular, I just don't go for directly satirical works, I suppose I start feeling agenda or something but I discarded him.

Lem's "Solaris" (1961 I think) is one of the finest pieces of literature I have read. I once tried the English translation but either my English was not good enough at the time (30 years ago, and it was good enough for Asimov, Raymond Chandler, Poe and others) or it had lost some of its appeal. The Bulgarian translation is a superb reading (I can't read Polish). I had not heard about Neal Stephenson, might give him a try, may be not just because of the drought :-). Other great works of Lem are the stories about Pirx, "Ananke" being a masterpiece IMO. But if you opt to give him a try don't just start with that one, make it second or third so you can get a feeling about him and enjoy it in full. And of course keep in mind that my impressions here are these of me being about 40 years younger than I am now...

Well I won't say it is great literature but it was very entertaining to me, there just aren't enough masterpieces to keep you busy and entertained. I had a terrible flu - I think it was the winter of

Dimiter

Berlinski's book fabricates nothing. He asks some really challenging questions of people who do make essentially faith-based hand-wavy claims to understand everything. I'm almost done, and he has just discussed the "RNA World" idea about the origin of life.

Since you won't read it, feel free to keep making things up. Both of you.

Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie were both good writers.

Raymond Chandler wrote great, gritty detective novels, not so much elegant complex mysteries but tough-guy LA life.

Hammet doesn't work for me somehow, but the movies were good.

The Cadfeil and Sister Frevisse medieval mysteries are good.

Nothing that you have noticed. You aren't the most sceptical person to post here, and you don't know much.

That may be what he claims to be doing, but you haven't posted any of them here.

So you have finally found out that while DNA might have been the last word, RNA is more likely to have been in at the start.

Actually, they aren't "making things up". Intelligent design is merely creation science in a slightly less obvious guise. The fact that you don't know enough to realise it may allow you to claim that this is "made up" but in doing so you merely confirm your status as a gullible twit.

I suspect that while Mr. Larkin considers himself (rightly) an intelligent designer, he can't explain the universe. Therefore he requires a smarter intelligent designer for the universe to be able to live in this godforsaken place.

If there was a God, then Trump could never have been president...yet he was, therefore, god doesn't exist. The Monty Python proof in other words.

My philosophy is if there ever was a god, she left us (and anyone else out there) to make the best of things - her being a believer in true free will.

Otherwise the whole charade is pointless.

John

It is slight progress that he has now finally heard of RNA world from a source he trusts I suppose.

He merely pushes back the problem one level further. It solves nothing! Who designed the designer(s)? Why were they so bad at doing human eyes?

He/She/It did that to "test" us. "Ineffable ways" etc...

The intelligent designer must certainly have been on the razzle when they "designed" the amoeba. They forgot to include anything to tidy up its nuclear DNA so that it accumulates ever more junk DNA.

They got it more nearly right when they did the fruit fly.

We could even be inside a very good computer simulation or be one of many island universes in some higher dimensional spacetime. The apparent fine tuning of our universe merely reflects the constraints on those universes that will develop complexity. Most combinations of the possible constants of nature don't do anything interesting.

Much like with Conway's cellular automata "life" but with a somewhat larger parameter space to play with. Martin Rees did a nice book on it called "Just Six Numbers" which explores how it could have been.

Followers of the God of the gaps are keen to prevent science from ever explaining anything. They want to live with their superstitions intact.

But it is unlikely to register with him. He doesn't seem to be a quick study, or to retain much of what he has been exposed to.

No. I know very little about this stuff. The HOH thing I provided is something I read in an Isaac Asimov article where he was arguing against those people who insisted that it would be impossible to assemble RNA or DNA or genes by chance because the probability would be infinitesimal. He was pointing out that there were 3 ways O and H2 could attach to each other yet were always found as HOH. In other words, he was pointing out that you can't blindly apply probability to everything.

I am not superstitious anti-science. I am a secular agnostic. I believe in science. How would you describe yourself?

On 2021-03-19 12:48, John S wrote: [Snip!]

It's a poor argument. Amino acids *can* be strung together more or less randomly to form peptides. Polypeptides, however, do like to snuggle up to complementary versions of themselves, again, because it's a minimum energy configuration, albeit a weak one. It's enough to warm them up a bit to pry them apart. Enzymes can do it too. Under the right circumstances, when cooled again, they make new complementary polypeptides to mate up with. Once a polypeptide learned that trick, their number quickly exploded. I imagine they were reproducing even before becoming 'alive'. Then they got better at it, made little containers for themselves to preserve optimal conditions, then formed organized colonies, and now they're everywhere. Some of these colonies learned to move around, and one kind even learned to think! It did take a while to get that far though, about 4e9 years.

Jeroen Belleman

And not all them can think all that well. even now.

Ha! Having seen the guy, I'm not surprised!

Jeroen Belleman

If you like hard sci-fi. Try Robert L. Forward. "The Dragons Egg" is a classic. I don't know about translations.

George H.

You mostly suspect wrong. I have questions and require nothing.

But godforsaken place? I think it's pretty cool and I'm happy to be here.

I was walking over my freeway crossover after work on Wednesday. Behind me were the coast range hills, fog, clouds, Sutro Tower and the setting sun. It struck me as amazing that behind me was a million-mile-diameter ball of fusing hydrogen shining through a crystal-clear atmosphere onto a beautiful planet.

And you sound bummed.

Yup, bummed.

Oh, the RNA soup thing has been around for ages. It always seemed impossible-level unlikely to me as a path to a DNA-based cell. More of the "well, Darwin did it somehow" hand-waving.

Somebody should demonstrate it in a lab, then estimate the probablity of it happening naturally, without a staff of chemists.

Human eyes work pretty well. The retina is incredibly sophisticated.

Some people just don't believe in evolution.

I designed a color graphics controller, a PDP-11 board, in the early

Snark is no substitute for smart.

I grew up in that world, so, seriously, spare me the lecture. Kids in the big city were learning about evolution while I learned that Jesus rode a dinosaur to work. Nobody claims to "understand everything," including these guys. What they're really trying to sell you isn't facts, either true or false ones, but a faulty method of inquiry.

If you want to join a church with a scholastic tradition, fine, whatever, get Phil H. to hook you up with the Jesuits. But please steer clear of these people. Remember that unless you're already well-versed in evolutionary biology -- in which case, why'd you even pick up the book? -- you have no way to know when this guy is lying to you by omission, cherry-picking the facts, leaving entire subfields of literature out of his bibliography, or improperly weighting arguments among people who work in the field. Rest assured, he's doing all of the above, you just aren't flagging it.

Would you read a physics book called "The Deniable Newton," written by someone who had a beef with classical mechanics and had never even heard of relativity?

-- john, KE5FX