@HDE226868 I though it applied to comments too. Apparently not. Well, very popular questions attract a lot of people...
@HDE226868 it's not too bad. I would just go with : "'This answer does not satisfy the requirements of the hard-science tag" With the links but without the hesitation.
@HDE226868 I don't know about HSM but is it unique enough to have it's own site apart form History SE? Stat wise, it would be a good thing since neither are doing very well.
@Vincent I've always felt that the questions asked on HSM are asked and answered differently than the ones on History - and we have an enormous emphasis on sources, more so than History - but that could just be bias.
@HDE226868 Maybe it's because it attract different kind of people or maybe your claim is false. Historians also use tons of references, I mean real historians.
@Vincent Case in point here, the most upvoted question on History. Most answer use 5 sources. Maximum. There's a lot of interpretation there.
Working down the list, this has 57 votes for an unsourced answer.
We have an answer here with 20 votes and no sources, admittedly. Same here. But those were extremely early on, when we were still figuring this kind of thing out.
Answers on questions from mid-November onwards had better references.
In late October, we were only days in and had no idea what to do.
@Vincent Oh, I know. The community at large doesn't necessarily endorse the lack of references; high votes can skew things.
I was just randomly grabbing some answers to demonstrate. I've based that claim off of a larger sample.
There's almost certainly some bias in there, but I'm not trying to say that History's answers are worse. They simply go for more interpretation and trust of the knowledge of users, which can be excellent in some cases and detrimental in others.
I'm most likely looking at things the wrong way, somewhere. There must be some bias.
If somebody is wondering about a declined comment flag: the flag was helpful, but for comments our choices are to delete the comment or to dismiss the flag. (Belatedly I realized I could have deleted and then undeleted the comment so you wouldn't see confusing results.) I did appreciate the flag.
Assumptions
Chemical explosives probably aren't going to deliver the energy density to achieve ghosting on walls. Perhaps a very large fuel-air explosion may satisfy the energy requirements but this would need to be a controlled detonation, not an accident. And if controlled, why follow up with...
@HDE226868 ... and inaccuracies. Actually the French have a military base in Djibouti, so the first part of the plan is flawed. As for the French surrendering, I understand it's a stereotype that was promoted, especially in 2003, but it does not, IMHO, reflect on the whole the French history. Heck against Syria, it was the US that backed away ;-)
So I'm going to be writing this type of post for the blog each month - "The Best of Worldbuilding". It'll have a look at some questions and answers from the last month, and make a few awards of "badges".
What should those badges be? We can't actually award them on-site, because custom badges are...
A question I asked has 3 close votes, what should I change about it before it's closed?
The question is
Cargo of a supernatural smuggler
Is removing the "Bonus question" enough to prevent it from being closed?
If not should I add other information about the settings or the question itself?
P...
@HDE226868 beats me; mods don't see who flags comments. But if you had a recent comment flag declined, it was probably that one. If so, thanks for the help.
I put up this answer yesterday: Is it a foregone conclusion that religion will always be a product of developing a civilisation?
However, the question was then marked duplicate. Would it be kosher to re-post that answer in the original, still open question? Can civilization development occur co...
Suppose we have a rocky planet (somewhere between Earth- and Super-Earth- sized) orbiting a star far enough away that it would be around Pluto's temperature if sunlight was the only heat source. If we give it a thick molten core and large amounts of volcanic activity that bring its surface temper...
In a world where travel is limited to the speed of light, reaching a different star, while not necessarily impossible, would be very time consuming. For an empire stretching across several solar systems, which has a centralized source of political power, this would pose a huge problem.
So here i...
Relaunch the blog
This answer is a compendium of other answers. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
To celebrate our first year, we will re-launch the blog and make several posts during the month of September to kick it off. We'd like to see posts from lots of people. The new blog site should make...
(I didn't link every single post about the blog, e.g. I didn't include the one about the name. The focus here is on content.)
@HDE226868 True, we've got it off the ground - but I've only got WB to compare it to (being the only other beta I've really been active on), so it seems very slow
@ArtOfCode feel free to add that in; I didn't want to "voluntell" you. :-)
@ArtOfCode think about how (or whether) you want to track the initial round of articles. Do you want to just post everything as it comes in, or try to stage it somehow, or what?
I think we shouldn't post more than about 3-4 times a week, so if we get masses then I'll stack them back
@MonicaCellio Ideas always welcome. Let's remember this isn't my blog, it's a community blog, and I though I have the admin access to it I want to run it as the community wants it run.
@ArtOfCode right, one of the things I like about Medium is that it's much easier (AFAIK) for it to be a community blog -- any editor can invite/approve submissions, etc.
@Green I'm hoping that some people will think about writing serieses of posts, so they can kick off now and follow with more later, over the course of the next year or whatever.
@ArtOfCode agreed. Let's get it up, open the doors, see what happens early, and if we need to make any adjustments we can.
@ArtOfCode/@MonicaCellio What should those of us interested in helping out do at the moment? The launch won't be for a while, but is there any prep we could do?
> You own the rights to the content you post on Medium.
That said,
> However, by posting or transferring content to Medium, you give us permission to use your content solely to do the things we need to do to provide Medium Services, including, without limitation, storing, displaying, reproducing, and distributing your content.
@ArtOfCode Okay, the latter two are done. I'm "HDE226868" for consistency (no space allowed, apparently).
> You’re doing great, Dear Reader of these Terms. Let’s rest a moment, shall we? You’ve earned it. So far, so good, right? Everything pretty clear? Well, don’t get too comfortable. Now’s the time to activate the full Galactic Armada of your legal vocabulary comprehension and ALL CAPS READING SKILLS.
This is a proposal for solicitation for entries for the WB blog:
Worldbuilding has been home to your questions and answers for a year now. However, what we don't ever see are the results of these questions, the stories, art, and games that you create. The Magrathean Forges is a place to displa...
@Green good point on copyright. @ALL - @HDE226868, @MonicaCellio - ideas for licensing? Obviously the license to Medium is non-negotiable. I'd suggest we leave it up for negotiation between the author and the publisher (i.e. any blog admin) and simply note it at the bottom of each post.
@ArtOfCode I don't think we need to do anything at all. Contributors own their content, Medium makes that clear, we're just a "distributor" with no particular claim... why get involved?
@MonicaCellio They need to license us to distribute. Also, however it's licensed (and I do appreciate that point, it removes a lot of effort) it's worth putting a license note at the bottom (i.e. (c) all rights reserved [author]).
@ArtOfCode the content only gets to the blog if the writer submits it. Isn't that an implicit license-grant? Is there something in the Medium setup that's telling us to deal with this? For that matter, the Medium TOS grant Medium a license and we're just a collection of posts on Medium. Our blog doesn't have independent legal identity AFAIK.
@MonicaCellio You forget which site I mod :) Implicit licenses are legally iffy. It's true we're just a collection of posts on Medium, but we're also all separate individual entities and if a writer decided they wanted to sue for copyright infringement, they could win.
Have you found any other collection on Medium that says anything about licensing? If so, that'd be something to base an approach on. If not...that seems like signal to me.
@ArtOfCode I can sue you because the purple in your gravatar offends my sense of aesthetics. Doesn't mean I'd win. (Also, for the record, that's a counterfactual.)
> However, by posting or transferring content to Medium, you give us permission to use your content solely to do the things we need to do to provide Medium Services, including, without limitation, storing, displaying, reproducing, and distributing your content.
@MonicaCellio Aye, Medium are protected. However, I don't think the button-presser is - if a writer gets annoyed and tries to sue, they can quite happily say the button-presser copied their original work without license
@ArtOfCode which the transmission logs on Medium will easily debunk. As I said, the author had to open up a textbox on Medium (or some equivalent) and submit that content to this blog. I really don't see the problem, and I'm pretty cautious about IP.
I can't sue you, as moderator, over something I post on Open Source. Or if i can, you should be way more worried about disgruntled SE users than blog contributors.
(For "I can't sue" read "I can't stand a snowball's chance in hell of successfully suing", of course.)
Ah, I see. It depends on the submission mechanism.
If they have to put the content in themselves and send it to us as part of their account on Medium, we're fine. If they send us the content outside of Medium and we put it in the box and publish, we're not.
Got any thoughts on artwork for the blog's main page? They have some recommendations about sizes in the (wait for it) documentation. Maybe you can reuse from the other blog?
@MonicaCellio No can do. Well, possibly can do. The art from the other blog came as part of a Wordpress theme, which while free is probably still copyrighted
It'll be a google search for some free (gratis AND libre, hopefully) images I can use.
@ArtOfCode oh, I hadn't realized. Never mind, then.
@ArtOfCode sounds good. Find something that works now (that's available, etc) to fill up that big blank space, and then later you (or someone else, if you ask for help) can try to improve it. I'm all about the incremental approach here.
@MonicaCellio Well, they got in Maxwell's equations (light), the Einstein field equation(s) (general relativistic theory of gravity) and Newton's law of universal gravitation (classical/Newtonian theory of gravity), Bernoulli's equation (lift),
the Schrödinger equation (quantum mechanics), what appears to be a form of the Navier-Stokes equations (fluid mechanics), nuclear fusion, photosynthesis, respiration, the general formula for a Fourier series, particle interactions, and some odd math at the lower right.
Yes, that is a form of the Navier-Stokes equations on the river. I wasn't sure for a second.
The Barnsley Fern is a fractal named after the British mathematician Michael Barnsley who first described it in his book Fractals Everywhere. He made it to resemble the Black Spleenwort, Asplenium adiantum-nigrum.
== History ==
The fern is one of the basic examples of self-similar sets, i.e. it is a mathematically generated pattern that can be reproducible at any magnification or reduction. Like the Sierpinski triangle, the Barnsley fern shows how graphically beautiful structures can be built from repetitive uses of mathematical formulas with computers. Barnsley's book about fractals is based on...
Here's an open question that might interest folks. Do we want a question like this one, about books that are good for worldbuilding? I meant more of a list of books, though, not of links to other questions.
Every once in a while, we get a question asking for a book or other educational reference on a particular topic at a particular level. This is a meta-question that collects all those links together. If you're looking for book recommendations, this is probably the place to start.
All the question...
@HDE226868 We have one tag for worldbuilding-resources and another for software-recommendations. Therefore, i don't see a problem with book recommendation.
I missed something or is the blog opened already ?
@HDE226868 it would be extra non-constructive coming from him hahaha...
The rhetoric coming out of washington over the Iran deal is driving me insane...especially when you consider the majority of scientific evaluations I have seen say this is a good deal.
"No deal is better than a bad deal" (which ignores that fact that European allies are tired of the sanctions as they are more directly impacted and have implied a failure to negotiate would see the sanctions regime start to fall apart)
I've been hearing about this nuclear deal that was reached with Iran today. It seems to restrict what Iran can do with a nuclear program, and allows international inspectors to perform inspections when there is a suspicion that Iran is doing something against the deal. President Obama has said "E...
what else, oh yeah "It paves the way to the bomb" which is only true if you are an Israeli that wandered in a desert for 40 years...except in this case its about a 20 year paved road instead...which is still way better than a few months
On the launch: I think we should definitely do something special on our actual birthday, but if we have material queued up before then, we don't necessarily need to wait to launch. Maybe we can aim for some posts about the site on the birthday (favorite questions, retrospectives, what I learned from WB, etc)? Starting the blog earlier means more chance of an audience for those posts on that day, right?
Great. I'd treat the blog intro as outward-facing -- readers from elsewhere on Medium, people on the Internet in general, etc. You can use a meta post to introduce it to the community; write the blog as if people haven't already been active here.
Google has robots, self-driving cars, email, and more. What next?
@HDE226868 Well, if they took down or severely censored the internet in US (think China's great firewall.) (I would join Larry Page in the Google militia.) — PyRulez1 min ago