Thread: When does an action exist?

  1. #16
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sebastiani View Post
    I won't rule out the possible effects of both being raised within the hippy counter-culture and being strongly influenced by Heinlen's "Stranger in a Strange Land").
    You should see "Solaris", either the original Russian movie (contemporaneous to 2001) or the remake from a few years ago with George Clooney. Stanislaw Lem, the Russian sci-fi writer who wrote the original novel, has written a few neat things that are in translation (besides Solaris): His Master's Voice, in which a mysterious repeating neutrino signal (or whatever) is discovered in background radiation and eventually discovered to pre-date the big bang, or be symptomatic of something which does, and A Perfect Vacuum, which is a collection of "reviews" of fake books, most of them philosophical or scientific, past, present, and future.

    His style is old fashioned, kind of, (high->post modern) and he likes protagonists who are scientists, specifically physicists, and with the ways in which they embrace or (more usually) reject the spiritual, mystical, or extra-dimensional and alien implications of their work. Solaris is a great mind game.
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  2. #17
    Guest Sebastiani's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MK27 View Post
    You should see "Solaris", either the original Russian movie (contemporaneous to 2001) or the remake from a few years ago with George Clooney. Stanislaw Lem, the Russian sci-fi writer who wrote the original novel, has written a few neat things that are in translation (besides Solaris): His Master's Voice, in which a mysterious repeating neutrino signal (or whatever) is discovered in background radiation and eventually discovered to pre-date the big bang, or be symptomatic of something which does, and A Perfect Vacuum, which is a collection of "reviews" of fake books, most of them philosophical or scientific, past, present, and future.

    His style is old fashioned, kind of, (high->post modern) and he likes protagonists who are scientists, specifically physicists, and with the ways in which they embrace or (more usually) reject the spiritual, mystical, or extra-dimensional and alien implications of their work. Solaris is a great mind game.
    Well, I haven't read any science fiction in a long while (since high school, at least), but the plot does sound pretty intriguing, so I just might check it out anyway (probably start with the book, though). I once had a fairly complete collection of the Hugo Award's Sci-Fi shorts, as well as a good number of books by various authors (Ray Bradbury being one of my favorites), but for some reason I just lost interest in fiction of all kinds at some point. Who knows though, maybe a good book will help break that spell.

    Thanks for the suggestion. =)

  3. #18
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sebastiani View Post
    Well, I haven't read any science fiction in a long while (since high school, at least),
    For pure entertainment I gotta recommend Iain M. Banks -- eg, Feersum Enjinn or anything in that series (they are like far far far future). His non sci-fi stuff (Iain "no M." Banks) is great too; his first book is The Wasp Factory, which is about a kid who grows up home schooled with a (reclusive) oddball hippie parent in remote Scotland and ends up a sort of sociopath because of the strange lies told him.
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  4. #19
    "The Oldest Member Here" Xterria's Avatar
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    Action is happening 100% of the time in 100% of time and space. There are constant sub-molecular actions going on all the time even in inanimate objects, so no matter what everyone and everything is constantly in action. Most determinations of "action" are above this sub-molecular level, such as when an apple falls from a tree, and since everything was in action prior to that, that definition of action is "action within action"? So when you define something as an action, it was already in action, so that definition of action was meaningless. It's just that the action changed, the things that were in action changed their action, etc.

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