aldiboronti - 18 April 2008 01:41 AM

Here we are. (The pencil and paper way).

I recall using a slide rule at school. (Ingenious devices, I have a real fondness for them still).

Thanks for that, Aldi.  I dimly remember being taught how to extract square roots at school, but I think it was an method of iterative approximation. I was taught how to use a slide rule and still have mine somewhere, though minus its cursor, which rather reduces its ease of use.  The brain has one great advantage over a mobile ‘phone (with calculator function), a solar-powered calculator or even a slide rule - it can’t be forgotten or left behind. Of course, if you want to extract square roots, it helps to remember to have a pencil to hand.....

bayard - 18 April 2008 02:59 AM

The brain has one great advantage over a mobile ‘phone (with calculator function), a solar-powered calculator or even a slide rule - it can’t be forgotten or left behind.

On the other hand, your calculator is unlikely to wake up with a hangover . . . ; )

Thanks, aldi!  In case anyone got tripped up by “If there were a comma (e.g. 2830,24)..” that comma is the European equivalent of the period we use for decimals (we’d write 2830.24).

Another saver of slide rules here.  We should form a club.

Dr. Techie - 17 April 2008 12:56 PM

I think maybe you’re mixing up one of Heinlein’s (or George O. Smith’s) stories with Clarke’s prediction.

It’s possible.  I went through a phase of reading a lot of Clarke, but that was a long time ago.  I distinctly recall a short story involving a construction crew in orbit, building a communications satellite.  Maybe it was by someone else, or maybe I dreamed (or even dreamt) it.

A quick google brought up this this page which shows that Verne and Wells have by far the best record for accurately predicting technological innovations.

I don’t think that this question can be answered with any specificity or conclusiveness. What authors do you survey? What counts as a prediction? What counts as correct? Do you weight predictions in some manner? (John Brunner’s 1975 Shockwave Rider is about a future society interlinked by a vast computer network and populated by hackers and worms (he coined the term computer worm in the novel). Should that count more than a passing reference to President Reagan?) Do you count predictions that are partially fulfilled at the time of writing? (Arpanet, the forerunner of the internet, existed in 1975, although it was little more than a research experiment. The fundamental technology was there, but not the societal effects.)

And do you count wrong predictions? You really should if you’re trying to measure how good at predicting the author is. Example: astrologer Jeanne Dixon gained fame for making in 1956 a vague, but correct, prediction that the winner of the 1960 presidential election would be assassinated. But that single correct prediction is dwarfed by the staggering number of times she was wrong.

Dave Wilton - 18 April 2008 06:08 AM

I don’t think that this question can be answered with any specificity or conclusiveness. What authors do you survey? What counts as a prediction? What counts as correct? Do you weight predictions in some manner? (John Brunner’s 1975 Shockwave Rider is about a future society interlinked by a vast computer network and populated by hackers and worms (he coined the term computer worm in the novel). Should that count more than a passing reference to President Reagan?) Do you count predictions that are partially fulfilled at the time of writing? (Arpanet, the forerunner of the internet, existed in 1975, although it was little more than a research experiment. The fundamental technology was there, but not the societal effects.)

As predictions of the internet go, “A Logic Named Joe” (Murray Leinster, 1946) is far more impressive.

I am the only one who was taught to find out square roots by factorisation?

ElizaD - 18 April 2008 07:18 AM

I am the only one who was taught to find out square roots by factorisation?

I’d completely forgotten that method! That was the one we were first taught at school.

aldiboronti - 17 April 2008 11:12 PM

As for the Reagan prediction I’d say it’s unremarkable.  As a prominent Republican and governor of one of the richest states in the Union a shot at the presidency was in the cards. Now if the book had been published in 1951 that would have been impressive!

I’d agree it’s a trivial prediction, but it was another 10 years before Reagan DID become president, and I’d bet you’d have got good odds in 1971 against hiom ever doing so, despite his previous political record: the whole point of including “President Reagan” in a book devoted to sarcastioc social commentary lightly disguised as science fiction was to give its readers a laugh.

But my point was to say that it’s remarkable how few other successful predictions of any sort there have been in SF, how much has been wrong - PamAm flights to doughnut-shaped space stations in 2001, for example - and how much has been missed.

As Richard Hershberger said, it’s not really the business of sf writers to make predictions.  Sf is more about “What if ...?” than “I predict ....”.  Evaluating sf writers on the basis of the number of correct “predictions” they make is about like judging a baseball team on the basis of how many triple plays off left-handed batters they make per season.  It’s not entirely irrelevant, perhaps, but it’s not what the game is about.

Eliza, how does finding square roots by factorization work?  (Please don’t say, “Very well, thank you.")

This is an example of the factorization method that we first used at school.

Example: Find the square root of 144.

1. Factorize 144.
2. 144 = 12 x 12
3. 12 can be written as 4 x 3.
4. 4 can be written as 2x2.
5. Hence 144 is 2x2x3x2x2x3.
6. Therefore the square root of 144 is 2x2x3 = 12

http://www.kwiznet.com/p/takeQuiz.php?ChapterID=11021&CurriculumID=48&Num=2.49

Dr. Techie - 21 April 2008 07:36 AM

Sf is more about “What if ...?”

Oh, absolutely - and indeed, all fiction is about “what if ...”, ultimately. What if a man and a woman fall in love, but the man has a mad wife locked in the attic? What if an upper-class woman whose husband is paralysed turns to a gamekeeper for physical affection? The success of The Time Traveler’s Wife was down to its author taking a very “SF” theme - an involuntary time traveller, something one could imagine Alfred Bester writing about - and making the “what if” a more “mainstream” concern, “what if you were in love with such a man?”, which (no disrespect to book clubs) made it a favourite with the book club crowd.

Zythophile -

Oh, absolutely - and indeed, all fiction is about “what if ...”, ultimately.

A pet peeve of mine is “alternate history” being lumped into science fiction.  Sometimes it is science fiction… what if aliens helped the Axis win WWII?… for example.  But more often than not, it’s just fiction.  I used to subscribe to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and they would have one issue a year devoted to alternate history and they were usually 90% the “just fiction” type.  I read one story all the way through as the title and the opening part suggested there might be a giant snake or even the ghost of a giant snake, but it ended up being “What if Teddy Roosevelt had gone on a safari in Africa and nothing even slightly out of the ordinary happened?” It wasn’t a bad story, but I didn’t feel like it was what I paid my money for when buying Asimov’s Science Fiction.  When you order a cola and they give you a root beer, no matter how good the root beer is, it’s the worst cola you’ve ever tasted. (^_^)

Zythophile - 21 April 2008 08:46 AM

Dr. Techie - 21 April 2008 07:36 AM

Sf is more about “What if ...?”

Oh, absolutely - and indeed, all fiction is about “what if ...”, ultimately. What if a man and a woman fall in love, but the man has a mad wife locked in the attic? What if an upper-class woman whose husband is paralysed turns to a gamekeeper for physical affection? The success of The Time Traveler’s Wife was down to its author taking a very “SF” theme - an involuntary time traveller, something one could imagine Alfred Bester writing about - and making the “what if” a more “mainstream” concern, “what if you were in love with such a man?”, which (no disrespect to book clubs) made it a favourite with the book club crowd.

Ah, Bester! An sf titan and one of my early heroes. Wrote two of the greatest science fiction novels ever, married Lois Lane, and ended up leaving all his worldly goods to his bartender (who didn’t even recall him). A dream life!

Myridon - 21 April 2008 09:25 AM

A pet peeve of mine is “alternate history” being lumped into science fiction.  Sometimes it is science fiction… what if aliens helped the Axis win WWII?… for example.  But more often than not, it’s just fiction.  I used to subscribe to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and they would have one issue a year devoted to alternate history and they were usually 90% the “just fiction” type.  I read one story all the way through as the title and the opening part suggested there might be a giant snake or even the ghost of a giant snake, but it ended up being “What if Teddy Roosevelt had gone on a safari in Africa and nothing even slightly out of the ordinary happened?” It wasn’t a bad story, but I didn’t feel like it was what I paid my money for when buying Asimov’s Science Fiction.  When you order a cola and they give you a root beer, no matter how good the root beer is, it’s the worst cola you’ve ever tasted. (^_^)

I am not unsympathetic, but I subscribe to the market definition of science fiction (to paraphrase John Campbell, science fiction is what science fiction editors buy).  To put it another way, science fiction is what you find in the science fiction section of the bookstore.  The contents of the books, both in that section and outside it, are only loosely connected to this.

As an example, consider “Between the Rivers” by Harry Turtledove (and surprisingly good, for late-1990s Turtledove).  It is set in ancient Mesopotamia, and it assumes that Julian Jaynes’ theory of consciousness and the bicameral mind is true.  Once we take that into account, there is absolutely no science fiction or fantasy elements in the story.  So do I classify it as science fiction?  Absolutely:  had Turtledove intended it to be shelved elsewhere, he would have used his non-SF pseudonym. 

As for most alternate history, of the “what if Carthage had won the Punic Wars?” variety, if it is done well, there is absolutely nothing in the content that would make it science fiction or fantasy.  But for historical reasons the SF genre adopted alternate history as a sub-genre.  SF writers going back to de Camp enjoy playing with such ideas, in much the way they enjoy playing with more straightforwardly SFnal ideas.