For me:

The Dead Past by Isaac Asimov: My reaction was "Ehn. We'll get used to
it.". Just as we got used to surveillance cameras and having our
internet activity monitored.

Triple Detente by Piers Anthony: Sorry no. I don't buy that a
tyrannical oligarchy killing the slackers would produce utopia.

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein: Nope. Can't buy that they
could keep the civilians as second class citizens without cultivating
contempt for them.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: Nope. That's not humanity
ascending to the heavens. The discontinuity is too drastic. It's just
humanity dying out and leaving behind god food to be harvested.

The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
They'd be dying all the time

On Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 4:03:31 AM UTC-4, David Johnston wrote:
[snip-snip]
> Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein: Nope. Can't buy that they
> could keep the civilians as second class citizens without cultivating
> contempt for them.

I would argue that we do see contempt in the book:

"There were some young fellows there, too, about our age, the right age
to serve a term, only they weren’t -- long-haired and sloppy and kind of
dirty looking. Well, say about the way I looked, I suppose, before I joined
up."

> Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: Nope. That's not humanity
> ascending to the heavens. The discontinuity is too drastic. It's just
> humanity dying out and leaving behind god food to be harvested.

It depends on how we define "what the author is selling". There is
"I can't suspend my disbelief to accept the events as described by
the author" and then there is "I don't agree with the author's value
judgment as I understand it."
> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
> They'd be dying all the time

I think I remember thinking the same thing when I first read the story,
but I was willing to suspend my disbelief. The notion that, as I wrote
here the last time we discussed the story:

"When a person who is used to the margin of error being fat and
comforting finds himself or herself in an environment where the
margin is very slim, Bad Things Happen (tm)."

is reasonable even though the implementation may not have been
all that it could be.

Let's see what I can come up with on my end...

In _Tau Zero_ I didn't really buy the last chapter. It changed the tone
of the novel from hard SF to "very soft SF" in order to create a happy
ending. It was understandable, but there was a certain disconnect
there.

In _Worm_, the author had to create a complex secret history which
relied on a number of very low probability events in order to have
a monistic explanation for his "comic book universe". I could
suspend my disbelief in most cases, but the core conceit behind
the happenings in Brockton Bay made no sense upon closer
examination. Still, it was a valiant effort and there was so much
else that was going on that the problem was successfully
obfuscated.

The Three-Body Problem. How this computer "game" (which consisted
of people standing around in VR and talking) was supposed to entice
any human to actively work towards the extermination of humanity
was beyond me.

On 4/23/2022 3:03 AM, David Johnston wrote:
> For me:
....
> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin:  The margins can't be that tight.
> They'd be dying all the time

All of the Apollo flights going around the Moon and landing on the Moon
had incredibly tight tolerances. There were contingencies at every
stage where NASA was prepared to announce to the public that one or more
of the astronauts were dead.

Neil Armstrong had to manually land the Lunar Lander since the custom
CDC 6600 (cut down to 37 bit from 60 bit !) was continuously rebooting
on the way down due to division by zero caused by a sensor. I would
have hit the Moon at 100 meters/second (220 mph) and died, Armstrong had
over 2,000 Navy carrier landings in an A4 jet at 175 miles/hour (280
kph) to help him to work the problem.

A stowaway on any of the Apollo missions would have caused a failure
since there were not enough supplies for a fourth person.

Lynn

On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 1:31:23 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> On 4/23/2022 3:03 AM, David Johnston wrote:
> > For me:
> ...
> > The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
> > They'd be dying all the time
> [snip]
> A stowaway on any of the Apollo missions would have caused a failure
> since there were not enough supplies for a fourth person.

Typically, there is a link between "safety margin", "adoption" and "security".
When safety margins are razor thin, it usually means:

1. Experimental or otherwise rare design
2. Tight security

A runaway who gets on a bus is not a significant danger to herself or
others, so security is limited. A runaway who gets on a plane is more
of a problem, so security is tighter. A stowaway on an *Apollo* mission
would have been a disaster, so security was very tight.

"The Cold Equations" tried to combine "razor thin safety margins", "in
widespread use" and "relatively lax security", which made it harder to
suspend disbelief. It didn't ruin the story for me, but I can see how
other readers may not have been able to buy it.

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> schrieb:
> On 4/23/2022 3:03 AM, David Johnston wrote:
>> For me:
> ...
>> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin:  The margins can't be that tight.
>> They'd be dying all the time
>
> All of the Apollo flights going around the Moon and landing on the Moon
> had incredibly tight tolerances. There were contingencies at every
> stage where NASA was prepared to announce to the public that one or more
> of the astronauts were dead.

Quite a few speeches were prepared for that eventuality, see
https://xkcd.com/1484/

And yet, as Apollo 13 showed, there were enough tolerances to
allow survival in a scenario which nobody had envisaged.

There were _extremely_ capable people on the ground there.

On Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 2:03:31 AM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:

> The Dead Past by Isaac Asimov: My reaction was "Ehn. We'll get used to
> it.". Just as we got used to surveillance cameras and having our
> internet activity monitored.

Since what Asimov was talking about meant no privacy at all for anyone
ever, I didn't see _this_ as the objection. That they would have found another
way - like controlling the distribution of some critical substance or component,
instead of radically altering how academe works so as to inhibit further
technical progress, though is where I objected.

> Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein: Nope. Can't buy that they
> could keep the civilians as second class citizens without cultivating
> contempt for them.

I never really thought too much about that aspect of it. Apparently,
democracy failed, and so they tried to preserve something as close
to democracy as possible.

> Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: Nope. That's not humanity
> ascending to the heavens. The discontinuity is too drastic. It's just
> humanity dying out and leaving behind god food to be harvested.

I didn't relate well to much of that book, unlike most Clarke, but
that wasn't the flaw I percieved.

> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
> They'd be dying all the time

Others have already pointed out that it's really the juxtaposition of
lax security and tight margins that's odd. But, yes, the margins were
ridiculously tight in themselves.
I think, though, that here and in "The Dead Past", the author set up a
contrived situation in order to allow the plot he envisaged to happen.
I can't blame authors for that, a lot of science fiction is that way.

John Savard

On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 12:53:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
<jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:

>On Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 2:03:31 AM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:
>
>> The Dead Past by Isaac Asimov: My reaction was "Ehn. We'll get used to
>> it.". Just as we got used to surveillance cameras and having our
>> internet activity monitored.
>
>Since what Asimov was talking about meant no privacy at all for anyone
>ever, I didn't see _this_ as the objection. That they would have found another
>way - like controlling the distribution of some critical substance or component,
>instead of radically altering how academe works so as to inhibit further
>technical progress, though is where I objected.
>
>> Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein: Nope. Can't buy that they
>> could keep the civilians as second class citizens without cultivating
>> contempt for them.
>
>I never really thought too much about that aspect of it. Apparently,
>democracy failed, and so they tried to preserve something as close
>to democracy as possible.

It's a democracy. _Anybody_ can get the vote. They just have to (a)
want it badly enough, (b) be able to understand the rules, (c) show
that they are capable of following them, and (d) be lucky enough to
not die in the process.

>> Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: Nope. That's not humanity
>> ascending to the heavens. The discontinuity is too drastic. It's just
>> humanity dying out and leaving behind god food to be harvested.
>
>I didn't relate well to much of that book, unlike most Clarke, but
>that wasn't the flaw I percieved.
>
>> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
>> They'd be dying all the time
>
>Others have already pointed out that it's really the juxtaposition of
>lax security and tight margins that's odd. But, yes, the margins were
>ridiculously tight in themselves.
>I think, though, that here and in "The Dead Past", the author set up a
>contrived situation in order to allow the plot he envisaged to happen.
>I can't blame authors for that, a lot of science fiction is that way.

And the margins in spaceflight are generally on the acceleration end.
Aerobraking doesn't really require that much onboard resource.

J Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> schrieb:
> On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 12:53:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc

>>I never really thought too much about that aspect of it. Apparently,
>>democracy failed, and so they tried to preserve something as close
>>to democracy as possible.
>
> It's a democracy. _Anybody_ can get the vote. They just have to (a)
> want it badly enough, (b) be able to understand the rules, (c) show
> that they are capable of following them, and (d) be lucky enough to
> not die in the process.

and (e) be lucky enough not to be cashiered. There is a bit of an
inconsistency in the novel - on the one hand, it is stated that
everybody who cares can join the service and vote, and there's
at least one member thrown out of the MI with a remark "another
civilian who will hate us for the rest of his life".

On Sunday, 24 April 2022 at 19:05:49 UTC+1, Ahasuerus wrote:
> On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 1:31:23 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > On 4/23/2022 3:03 AM, David Johnston wrote:
> > > For me:
> > ...
> > > The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
> > > They'd be dying all the time
> > [snip]
> > A stowaway on any of the Apollo missions would have caused a failure
> > since there were not enough supplies for a fourth person.
> Typically, there is a link between "safety margin", "adoption" and "security".
> When safety margins are razor thin, it usually means:
>
> 1. Experimental or otherwise rare design
> 2. Tight security
>
> A runaway who gets on a bus is not a significant danger to herself or
> others, so security is limited. A runaway who gets on a plane is more
> of a problem, so security is tighter. A stowaway on an *Apollo* mission
> would have been a disaster, so security was very tight.
>
> "The Cold Equations" tried to combine "razor thin safety margins", "in
> widespread use" and "relatively lax security", which made it harder to
> suspend disbelief. It didn't ruin the story for me, but I can see how
> other readers may not have been able to buy it.

First time, it worked for me as a horror story.
I may have been unperceptive; upon re-reading, the
flimsy construction of an Emergency Dispatch Ship
is attention-getting. On the other hand, if giving
skills to young women is permitted, Marilyn easily
could be a talented lock-picker.

Wikipedia's article has a list of critics of the story
who I feel just didn't like the ending. I think that not
liking the ending was the point of the story. You don't
like the ending, but you can't stop it from happening.
David Drake alleges that it's swiped from a
"Weird Science" comic with a different outcome.
I may have heard that Tom Godwin originally pitched
the story with the stowaway saved, and John Campbell
said, no, don't (and gets accused in Wikipedia of misogyny):
Wikipedia cites from "Our Five Days With John W. Campbell",
"In the first two re-writes, Godwin kept coming up with
ingenious ways to save the girl", which, as I say, wasn't
the point.

Regarding perception, I'm not the only person to be fooled
by - as it were - Rudyard Kipling's heroine Helen Turrell
in "The Gardener",
<https://greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html>
and I was surprised that some more thoughtful
readers apparently stayed fooled. Perhaps I shouldn't
say how, or perhaps it's obvious.

There's a short Spider-Man story where his aunt goes to
a cancer clinic appointment and Peter Parker is - busy
heroing as Spider-Man, I suppose. Sometimes she knows
that, sometimes she doesn't, I think here she doesn't.
As you know, Peter was raised by his deceased uncle
and frequently sickly aunt. So, at the clinic they tell her,
"Your son is waiting." Peter made it.

On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 11:05:47 -0700, Ahasuerus wrote:

> On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 1:31:23 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> On 4/23/2022 3:03 AM, David Johnston wrote:
>> > For me:
>> ...
>> > The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
>> > They'd be dying all the time
>> [snip]
>> A stowaway on any of the Apollo missions would have caused a failure
>> since there were not enough supplies for a fourth person.
>
> Typically, there is a link between "safety margin", "adoption" and
> "security".
> When safety margins are razor thin, it usually means:
>
> 1. Experimental or otherwise rare design 2. Tight security
>
> A runaway who gets on a bus is not a significant danger to herself or
> others, so security is limited. A runaway who gets on a plane is more of
> a problem, so security is tighter. A stowaway on an *Apollo* mission
> would have been a disaster, so security was very tight.
>
> "The Cold Equations" tried to combine "razor thin safety margins", "in
> widespread use" and "relatively lax security", which made it harder to
> suspend disbelief. It didn't ruin the story for me, but I can see how
> other readers may not have been able to buy it.

From how I remember it the problem was that the rescue mission was right
at the edge of the envelope to start off with leaving no room for error
or stowaways.

In article <1ac42207-836e-430b-a595-75ecdcf23327n@googlegroups.com>,
Robert Carnegie <rja.carnegie@excite.com> wrote:
>
>Regarding perception, I'm not the only person to be fooled
>by - as it were - Rudyard Kipling's heroine Helen Turrell
>in "The Gardener",
><https://greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html>

Oh, that's a zinger of an ending. One wants to read another half
page and see how it came out ... but Kipling knew what he was
doing.

>and I was surprised that some more thoughtful
>readers apparently stayed fooled. Perhaps I shouldn't
>say how, or perhaps it's obvious.
>
>There's a short Spider-Man story where his aunt goes to
>a cancer clinic appointment and Peter Parker is - busy
>heroing as Spider-Man, I suppose. Sometimes she knows
>that, sometimes she doesn't, I think here she doesn't.
>As you know, Peter was raised by his deceased uncle
>and frequently sickly aunt. So, at the clinic they tell her,
>"Your son is waiting." Peter made it.

Awwwww. I don't do Spider-Man much, but that's a fine ending
line, rather unlike, but very like, the other.

Hal is only seven years younger than I am, and he has this long
grey bushy beard, like Karl Marx or Santa Claus. Twice now (once
some fifteen years ago, once last week) a medical assistant has
taken me for his mother. I don't have a mirror to hand, so I
don't know what I look like these days.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

On Monday, 25 April 2022 at 00:26:59 UTC+1, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> In article <1ac42207-836e-430b...@googlegroups.com>,
> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
> >
> >Regarding perception, I'm not the only person to be fooled
> >by - as it were - Rudyard Kipling's heroine Helen Turrell
> >in "The Gardener",
> ><https://greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html>
>
> Oh, that's a zinger of an ending. One wants to read another half
> page and see how it came out ... but Kipling knew what he was
> doing.

Well, I take it that she was directed to the place that
she was trying to find, and that page is missing in the
story because Kipling didn't write it out. And then
she goes home.

In article <287f57a1-a19d-44f2-89d5-6c5ba625bf46n@googlegroups.com>,
Robert Carnegie <rja.carnegie@excite.com> wrote:
>On Monday, 25 April 2022 at 00:26:59 UTC+1, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> In article <1ac42207-836e-430b...@googlegroups.com>,
>> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >Regarding perception, I'm not the only person to be fooled
>> >by - as it were - Rudyard Kipling's heroine Helen Turrell
>> >in "The Gardener",
>> ><https://greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html>
>>
>> Oh, that's a zinger of an ending. One wants to read another half
>> page and see how it came out ... but Kipling knew what he was
>> doing.
>
>Well, I take it that she was directed to the place that
>she was trying to find, and that page is missing in the
>story because Kipling didn't write it out. And then
>she goes home.

He didn't need to write it out. She wouldn't have left without
having found the grave. And he didn't need to hit the reader
over the head with who the gardener was.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

On 4/24/2022 12:31 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> On 4/23/2022 3:03 AM, David Johnston wrote:
>> For me:
> ...
>> The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin:  The margins can't be that tight.
>> They'd be dying all the time
>
> All of the Apollo flights going around the Moon and landing on the Moon
> had incredibly tight tolerances.  There were contingencies at every
> stage where NASA was prepared to announce to the public that one or more
> of the astronauts were dead.
>
> Neil Armstrong had to manually land the Lunar Lander since the custom
> CDC 6600 (cut down to 37 bit from 60 bit !) was continuously rebooting
> on the way down due to division by zero caused by a sensor.  I would
> have hit the Moon at 100 meters/second (220 mph) and died, Armstrong had
> over 2,000 Navy carrier landings in an A4 jet at 175 miles/hour (280
> kph) to help him to work the problem.
>
> A stowaway on any of the Apollo missions would have caused a failure
> since there were not enough supplies for a fourth person.
>
> Lynn

Here is The Cold Equations story:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations/

Lynn

On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 7:31:59 PM UTC-6, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> In article <287f57a1-a19d-44f2...@googlegroups.com>,
> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
> >On Monday, 25 April 2022 at 00:26:59 UTC+1, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> >> In article <1ac42207-836e-430b...@googlegroups.com>,
> >> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:

> >> >Regarding perception, I'm not the only person to be fooled
> >> >by - as it were - Rudyard Kipling's heroine Helen Turrell
> >> >in "The Gardener",
> >> ><https://greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html>

> >> Oh, that's a zinger of an ending. One wants to read another half
> >> page and see how it came out ... but Kipling knew what he was
> >> doing.

> >Well, I take it that she was directed to the place that
> >she was trying to find, and that page is missing in the
> >story because Kipling didn't write it out. And then
> >she goes home.

> He didn't need to write it out. She wouldn't have left without
> having found the grave. And he didn't need to hit the reader
> over the head with who the gardener was.

I wasn't expecting anything more to happen after the ending...
I presume the gardener was actually the gravedigger, and the
story was about how much sadness is endured because of war.

John Savard

On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 3:37:21 PM UTC-5, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Sunday, 24 April 2022 at 19:05:49 UTC+1, Ahasuerus wrote:
> > On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 1:31:23 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > > On 4/23/2022 3:03 AM, David Johnston wrote:
> > > > For me:
> > > ...
> > > > The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin: The margins can't be that tight.
> > > > They'd be dying all the time
> > > [snip]
> > > A stowaway on any of the Apollo missions would have caused a failure
> > > since there were not enough supplies for a fourth person.
> > Typically, there is a link between "safety margin", "adoption" and "security".
> > When safety margins are razor thin, it usually means:
> >
> > 1. Experimental or otherwise rare design
> > 2. Tight security
> >
> > A runaway who gets on a bus is not a significant danger to herself or
> > others, so security is limited. A runaway who gets on a plane is more
> > of a problem, so security is tighter. A stowaway on an *Apollo* mission
> > would have been a disaster, so security was very tight.
> >
> > "The Cold Equations" tried to combine "razor thin safety margins", "in
> > widespread use" and "relatively lax security", which made it harder to
> > suspend disbelief. It didn't ruin the story for me, but I can see how
> > other readers may not have been able to buy it.
> First time, it worked for me as a horror story.
> I may have been unperceptive; upon re-reading, the
> flimsy construction of an Emergency Dispatch Ship
> is attention-getting. On the other hand, if giving
> skills to young women is permitted, Marilyn easily
> could be a talented lock-picker.
>
> Wikipedia's article has a list of critics of the story
> who I feel just didn't like the ending. I think that not
> liking the ending was the point of the story. You don't
> like the ending, but you can't stop it from happening.
> David Drake alleges that it's swiped from a
> "Weird Science" comic with a different outcome.
> I may have heard that Tom Godwin originally pitched
> the story with the stowaway saved, and John Campbell
> said, no, don't (and gets accused in Wikipedia of misogyny):
> Wikipedia cites from "Our Five Days With John W. Campbell",
> "In the first two re-writes, Godwin kept coming up with
> ingenious ways to save the girl", which, as I say, wasn't
> the point.

I don't know about any "Weird Science" story. I thought the
precedent for "The Cold Equations" was the 1952 story
"Precedent" by E. C. Tubb (two years earlier), which you
can read at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_015v05_1952-05/page/n29/mode/2up

It seems that every fool and his brother can tell us what's
wrong with Tom Godwin's attempt to write a stowaway-must-die
story, but they never bother to tell us how they would have
done it better. Doesn't seem very constructive to me.

On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 12:30:14 AM UTC-5, Butch Malahide wrote:

> I don't know about any "Weird Science" story. I thought the
> precedent for "The Cold Equations" was the 1952 story
> "Precedent" by E. C. Tubb (two years earlier)

Apparently "A Weighty Decision" by Al Feldstein in Weird Science, 1952.

The topic is discussed here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations#Similar_concept_in_earlier_stories>

Brian

On 24/04/2022 12.31, Lynn McGuire wrote:

> Neil Armstrong had to manually land the Lunar Lander since the custom CDC 6600 (cut down to 37 bit from 60 bit !) was continuously rebooting on the way down due to division by zero caused by a sensor.

I am extremely skeptical of the idea of word-length being a
prime number. The CDC 6xxx series had a byte length of six,
which in the original incarnation would yield 10 six-bit bytes
in a word.

Cutting that down from 60 bits to 37 bits would give six and
one-sixth six-bit bytes, which doesn't sound too likely.

One could postulate that it was six six-bit bytes and one
sign byte, if not for the facts that:
1. CDC 6xxx used one's complement arithmetic.
2. Nobody used signed-magnitude arithmetic because it's too
bloody complicated.

--
Michael F. Stemper
Why doesn't anybody care about apathy?

"Michael F. Stemper" <michael.stemper@gmail.com> writes:
>On 24/04/2022 12.31, Lynn McGuire wrote:

>2. Nobody used signed-magnitude arithmetic because it's too
>bloody complicated.

Except Burroughs Medium Systems. First four bits was the
sign, and each successive four bits were the magnitude (up
to 100 digits worth).

On 25/04/2022 08.40, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> "Michael F. Stemper" <michael.stemper@gmail.com> writes:
>> On 24/04/2022 12.31, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>
>> 2. Nobody used signed-magnitude arithmetic because it's too
>> bloody complicated.
>
> Except Burroughs Medium Systems. First four bits was the
> sign, and each successive four bits were the magnitude (up
> to 100 digits worth).

Four bits for sign? Well, my saying "Nobody used [it]" was
obviously wrong, but this only supports "too bloody complicated."

--
Michael F. Stemper
Why doesn't anybody care about apathy?

In article <619b07b1-6a8c-4027-aeca-361d187e7ddan@googlegroups.com>,
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 7:31:59 PM UTC-6, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> In article <287f57a1-a19d-44f2...@googlegroups.com>,
>> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
>> >On Monday, 25 April 2022 at 00:26:59 UTC+1, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> >> In article <1ac42207-836e-430b...@googlegroups.com>,
>> >> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
>
>> >> >Regarding perception, I'm not the only person to be fooled
>> >> >by - as it were - Rudyard Kipling's heroine Helen Turrell
>> >> >in "The Gardener",
>> >> ><https://greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html>
>
>> >> Oh, that's a zinger of an ending. One wants to read another half
>> >> page and see how it came out ... but Kipling knew what he was
>> >> doing.
>
>> >Well, I take it that she was directed to the place that
>> >she was trying to find, and that page is missing in the
>> >story because Kipling didn't write it out. And then
>> >she goes home.
>
>> He didn't need to write it out. She wouldn't have left without
>> having found the grave. And he didn't need to hit the reader
>> over the head with who the gardener was.
>
>I wasn't expecting anything more to happen after the ending...
>I presume the gardener was actually the gravedigger, and the
>story was about how much sadness is endured because of war.

That, too. If you can lay hand on a Bible, read chapter 20 of
the Gospel of John, in which Mary Magdalene finds the tomb of
Jesus open and empty. He appears to her, but she doesn't
recognize him; she thinks he is the gardener and asks him, if he
has taken away the body of Jesus, to tell her where it is so that
she may take it away. He calls her by name, and she recognizes
him.

Now, you may believe that never happened. I don't know if
Kipling did either. But every reader of the story at the time of
publication would have heard it read out at least once a year.
"She's looking for a grave, someone finds it for her, she thinks
he's the gardener."

I have just hit you over the head with who the gardener is.

OfSFF: Manly Wade Wellman's "Go Tell It on the Mountain," in
which two neighbors fall out and one of them digs a deep ditch
along the property line. But that isn't enough for him. An
itinerant carpenter comes by, and the angry neighbor commissions
him to build a spite fence so he can't even see the other man's
property.

But the carpenter builds a bridge.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

"Michael F. Stemper" <michael.stemper@gmail.com> writes:
>On 25/04/2022 08.40, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>> "Michael F. Stemper" <michael.stemper@gmail.com> writes:
>>> On 24/04/2022 12.31, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>
>>> 2. Nobody used signed-magnitude arithmetic because it's too
>>> bloody complicated.
>>
>> Except Burroughs Medium Systems. First four bits was the
>> sign, and each successive four bits were the magnitude (up
>> to 100 digits worth).
>
>Four bits for sign? Well, my saying "Nobody used [it]" was
>obviously wrong, but this only supports "too bloody complicated."

I'd argue that it was simpler in almost every respect than
either ones or twos-complement (at the expense of requiring
slightly more storage).

The first digit (for signed numeric data) was either bit pattern 1100
or bit pattern 1101 (C or D - although the processor treated any bit
pattern other than 1100 as negative).

Because the remaining digits were BCD, it was easy to use and
memory dumps were easy to interpret and the processor could perform
addition and subtraction digit at a time from MSD to LSD
(the lowest addressed digit was MSD - starting from the MSD made it
easy to bail early on overflow without disturbing the receiving
field thereby not requiring a 100 digit accumulator; rather all
operands were memory operands).

The architecture was designed to run COBOL well.

begin fnord
Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:

> The Three-Body Problem. How this computer "game" (which consisted
> of people standing around in VR and talking) was supposed to entice
> any human to actively work towards the extermination of humanity
> was beyond me.

No doubt the author thinks his own hatred of humanity is universal.

There were so very many things about that book that I hated, but the
real "you don't know what the fuck you're writing about, do you?" point
for me was the bit about how if you aim a radio signal at the sun,
there's some inner layer that will bounce it back magnified. Sophomore
students in astrophysics learn why that's not remotely possible.

--
Steve Coltrin spcoltri@omcl.org Google Groups killfiled here
"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
- Associated Press

Michael F. Stemper <michael.stemper@gmail.com> schrieb:

> 2. Nobody used signed-magnitude arithmetic because it's too
> bloody complicated.

The IBM 701 did, plus its successors like the IBM 704. The first
FORTRAN compiler was written for a sign-magnitude machine!