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This planet, being essentially of the terrestrial type, had produced a race that was essentially human, though, so to speak, human in a different key from the terrestrial. These continents were as variegated as ours, and inhabited by a race as diversified as Homo sapiens. All the modes and facets of the spirit…
Generally I don't watch the nightly network news. Experimentally I've tuned in. It lives in a parallel universe, very weakly connected to reality. One has to invest many hours in its fictional narrative to make any sense of it, much like you don't tune into episode 50 of a pop culture TV show and understand any of it…
A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers, and the last chapter of "Year 501"). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing…
English spelling, owing to the conditions that gov- ernd the growth of the English language, now presents many anomalies. The same letter, or combination of letters, often represents many different sounds; while the same sound is often represented by many different letters, or combinations of letters. The combination…
PETWHAC stands for Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental. Population may seem an odd word, but it is the correct statistical term. I won't keep using capital letters because they stand so unattractively on the page. Somebody's watch stopping within ten seconds of the psychic's incantation…
The designers of our species set out to produce a being that might be capable of an order of mentality higher than their own. The only possibility of doing so lay in planning a great increase in brain organisation. But they knew that the brain of an individual human being could not safely be allowed to exceed a…
am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form…
Prior to the advent of practical electrical communication, human beings had been signaling over a distance in all kinds of ways. The bell in the church tower called people to religious services or “for whom the bell tolls”—the announcement of a death. We knew a priori several things about church bells. We knew…
No known theory can be distorted so as to provide even an approximate explanation [of wave-particle duality]. There must be some fact of which we are entirely ignorant and whose discovery may revolutionize our views of the relations between waves and ether and matter. For the present we have to work on both theories…
Who ... is not familiar with Maxwell's memoirs on his dynamical theory of gases? ... from one side enter the equations of state; from the other side, the equations of motion in a central field. Ever higher soars the chaos of formulae. Suddenly we hear, as from kettle drums, the four beats 'put n=5.' The evil spirit v…
Cyko_01: does it make your voice go higher or lower when inhaled? Menkhaf: I guess it was a joke, but it should be rather simple to determine: if the gas if lighter than the atmosphere you're breathing, your voice will be lighter if you inhale this. sploxx: To be more specific, the molecular weight of normal He to He…