@JohnRennie The later books have their points to make, sure. But ... the points are made in the form of engaging narrative so they don't come across as polemics and he varies the particular nature of the point to be made from book to book so you don't feel like you are reading the same polemic over and over again.

Some of the points are very much of the time, but others are—perhaps—destined to be more enduring.

@dmckee maybe it sounds as if I'm being critical of the later books, and I certainly don't mean to be. There are no bad Terry Pratchett books. It's just that my own personal preference is for the more slapstick (as ACM put it) end of his range.

There aren't many books that will make me laugh out loud. Comedy is a very hard thing to get right in SFF and the genre is replete with authors who almost get it right. But Pratchett managed that feat with his early books.

@JMac I was going to mention that next time I bumped into you here. Don't you just love the subtle diplomatic approach of the xkcd mods? :D But now that pittsburghjoe's been banned on xkcd, he's come back to Physics.SE: physics.stackexchange.com/q/485407/123208

@JMac Well, The Light Fantastic does follow straight on from The Colour of Magic, but it has a slightly different feel. It's more of a single united story, rather than a collection of fairly separate episodes, like the CoM. It's not totally necessary to read them back to back, but they do have a strong linkage. And you definitely should read The Light Fantastic before any other Rincewind books.

But I agree that Mort is a good next choice. The character of Death is different from the glimpse we get of him in the CoM. But that applies a fair bit to the first 2 books, they have a lot of Early installment weirdness.

mornig

Greetings

@JMac Another option is Pyramids, which isn't part of a sub-series, but it's a good idea to read it fairly soon because of its info about a slightly more modern Ankh-Morpork than its depiction in the 1st 2 books. It's quite funny, but some of the humour is rather dark, and it doesn't quite have the slapstick feel of the 1st 2 books, but there's still a fair bit of parody, unlike the later Discworld books, where Pratchett tends to use satire rather than direct parody.

For the record, I'm a hard-core Discworld addict. I started reading them before the 3rd book was published. I had a bit of a break for a few years, somewhere in the middle of the series, but in the last decade or so I got back into it. I've read all the older Discworld books at least 3 or 4 times, and the last half-dozen or so at least twice. Except for the final novel, The Shepherd's Crown, which I've only read once, so far.

Too bad he's deaaaad

@Slereah it happens to us all

Not me

haven't died even once

At least you can be sure that you'll never hear anyone telling you see, I told you you'd die one day.

Unless of course you get reincarnated as yourself

Haven't died in 30 years

what are the odds that I'd die now

About 1 in 1215 per year

Wow, it's increased to 1 in 112 for me. That's a sobering thought.

Chilling!

Argh! The strobing is too much!

such is the sinister specter of death

Hmm, if time was to slow down for me, would my thoughts also be slower?

@NovaliumCompany assuming you mean in GR then your own personal time always flows at one second per second.

of course, different parts of your body can go at different speeds

So actually time slows down for everyone else, and I just stay "normal"?

which can be unfortunate

Other observers may observe your time to be different from theirs, but you'll never experience any change in your own time.

@NovaliumCompany yes

So everyone experiences their time as normal, and other's as faster or slower?

@NovaliumCompany yes

I was just thinking about Peter Parker's spidey senses and started thinking about slowing down time :D

Technically your own four-velocity is always $(1, 0, 0, 0)$.

As there is no absolute measure of time you always only measure time wrt the frequency of a process

Hence time cannot go faster or slower for yourself, because how would you notice it

If your atomic clock goes slower, you still have to count a certain number of oscillations to measure one second

@Slereah Exactly my thoughts :D

How do we know the Earth isn't moving and we actually aren't stationary?

of course as mentionned, the human body is large enough for different parts to go at different speeds in a gravitational field

which may have consequences

@NovaliumCompany Define "stationary" :p

you can define a frame of reference where we are stationary

but of course it would have various fictitious forces

Donno I just thought space has like Vector3.new(0, 0, 0)

(which of course, it doesn't)

So everything is relative (except light), that's weird.

How do we know we are conscious, when we have nothing to compare our consciousness with? Hmmm :D

Maybe the whole idea of relativity is relative :D

MY MIND.....................IS BLOOWNNNN

My boy Keanu Reeves killed it in E3

In Avengers Endgame at the beginning when half the population is gone, who manufactuers all the parts for tony's tech etc...

Trying to write an email to Earman

Not easy to ask questions without Latex

Don’t a lot of people use latex extensions when looking at email? A number of my professors would put latex in emails at least

shrug

not gonna assume and make it unreadable

$\Subset$ looks awful

what would you suggest?

$\subset\subset$ isn't ideal either

but somehow better

going to be tough to go against an established symbol

@skullpatrol Why not let the Man stomp on your face sure

why not?

perhaps, it's not that well established

Hello

hmm, I found the fundamental aspects of these quite interesting, but I cannot think of good examples of objects where firing these torus knot pulses at it will e.g. cause them to be twisted in certain ways, thus e.g. making unusual photo driven molecular motors

I can see that with so much extra angular degrees of freedom, the spectrocopy community may find it useful in structure elucidation, since it should be expected that different topological angular momentum will cause the object to be imaged to respond differently, thus prodviding richer information to e.g. resolve complex structures like proteins

The only thing I don't quite understand is, since a trefoil torus cannot be embeded in 3D space, which means it should self intersect (fig.1 showed the self intersection clearly), yet the experiment plots of the polarisation does not seemed to indicate the presence of these intersections. Where does the electric field point to at those locations of the beam?

@EmilioPisanty

lol

Doesn't even include his response, how cheap

@Secret the 3D plots in the paper are not in real space

the coordinates are (Ex,Ey) away from the center of the torus, and azimuthal real-space angle as the torus's azimuthal coordinate

self-intersection (to me -- this is a personal view) is ultimately fairly bogus, it depends on the embedding and how you draw tangent-space vectors on the (real-space) manifold itself, which isn't a thing

the knot lives in a four-dimensional space (2D real space + its 2D tangent space)

@Slereah And after the steam roller incident he requested no chance of posthumous publications, either.

Though I have mixed feelings about posthumous releases.

@dmckee what about Go Set A Watchman?

@EmilioPisanty I actually haven't read that.

@dmckee fun as it is to wade into contentious issues, I wasn't all that impressed tbh

To Kill a Mockingbord didn't click for me in school. I have it on my list to do again with my new more grown-up sensibilities, but it hasn't happened yet. Then I'll think about it.

I found it largely skippable

@dmckee if you do revisit it, after you're done, go look for a New Yorker piece on Atticus Finch from some five years ago

As it turns out, a fair fraction of the high regard we hold him in is just wishful thinking

(it can be argued)

@EmilioPisanty I think I read that at the time (I sometimes buy the magazine for plane flight).

@dmckee ask, there you go

But does the man being a fallible person tell you anything about the work?

@dmckee the argument isn't about the man but about the work

Anyway, lunch break's over and I have to hit the salt^Wcode mines again.

@EmilioPisanty Congrats!

Based on the Contributions section, it's a really well-deserved first authorship; Virtually everything's done by E.P. ;)

@Mo_ thanks =)

@Mo_ that project is indeed my baby =)

though the actual building and operating of the experiment was in the hands of people who are much more qualified than me

I have a long-standing practice, since I left undergrad mandatory labs, to keep my hands in my pockets whenever I visit labs

it has served me extremely well

(during undergrad labs, on the other hand, is another story, I'm afraid.)