If you don’t remember George Carlin’s speech that contains the phrase “six sins for one feel”, go ahead and look it up.
When I first heard it, the phrase “feel her up” was new to me, but its meaning was obvious. Thirty-some years later, I reckon I must have known some synonymous expression, but cannot recall what it was!
I had assumed that Pixar did not use ray-tracing because it could not provide certain desired lighting effects. Now Dad tells me that Monsters University is Pixar’s first ray-traced feature, which implies that the speed wasn’t available until now.
I’m re-reading To Your Scattered Bodies Go and, of course, pondering the arrangements.
The premise is that all humans who ever died (for some convenient definitions of ‘human’ and ‘ever’) are simultaneously resurrected (for purposes unknown to them) on an artificial planet whose surface is one long and twisty river valley. In each neighborhood along the river there’s initially a majority of people from one region (spatial and temporal), but also a large minority of random others. Why?
How would I arrange them? Perhaps by date of birth. Arranging by date of death would be more likely to bring enemies together.
Alternately, having fallen in love with topological coordinates, I’d use a kinship graph: each person is directly linked to parents and children. I’d be interested to see the overall shape of this graph, as embedded in ℝⁿ. If enough generations are involved, the longest axis of this embedding is close to the birthdate axis: your parents might have no common ancestors within a thousand years, but they can’t have been born a thousand years apart. But what are the other axes like?
Turning away from mathematical nerdery now — One minor character says he’s especially pleased to regain the leg he lost in a road accident at age 50. That’s consistent with the apparent policy of restoring adults to age ~25 (and children to their age at death). But what is the Revivers’ policy on birth defects, genetic and otherwise? If you grow up with a damaged brain, can your mind be installed in a normal brain? If you live to adulthood without legs and are then revived in an adult body with legs, how easily can you learn to use them? How many limbs do Brittany and Abigail Hensel get?
2022 Nov 04: I made a more stable page collecting thoughts from this thread.
I posted this, which is mostly a condensation and paraphrase of part of Roderick Long’s zaxlebax speech.
Except for the chicken part.
Each month shall have 30 days, except within a lune spanning 157°15′57″ (5.242199 × 30°) of longitude, wherein the month shall be extended by one day which shall not affect the cycle of the week. The lune so affected shall shift westward(?) each month by its own width. The phase of the lune shall be such that, in every longitude, the northward equinox shall fall on the last day of March. (During a transition of roughly two years, each month shall have 30 days without leaps, to shift the equinox from March 21 to March 30/31.)
If I didn’t have to worry about such mundanities as weather and fatigue — if, say, I had a synthetic antimatter-powered body with some of the traditional flaws ironed out — I think I might like to spend eternity walking around the world, stopping only for conversation.
In “It Happened in Juneau”, near the end of the third season of Northern Exposure (one of very few TV series of which I’ve seen every episode twice), Maggie flies Joel to Juneau for a conference; they both get lonely, and drunkenly seduce each other. But Maggie falls asleep and cannot be roused, so Joel puts her to bed alone.
In the morning they return to Cicely. Maggie believes that they did copulate, and partly regrets it. Some time goes by before Joel succeeds in telling Maggie what really happened. She is insulted: “Why didn’t you? I had consented!”
Maggie later invites Joel to her house to try again. She asks him to say his desire for her is so strong that he’ll let nothing get in its way. She then finds (or reveals) that that expression of desire, rather than the execution, was what she really wanted from Joel, and dismisses him.
This affair bugs me on two points. First: I can accept that Maggie is insulted by Joel’s inaction, but wouldn’t the insult be outweighed by relief? (Well, the people of Cicely are quirky, and Maggie more so than some.)
Second: what Maggie asks of Joel in the end, taken literally, includes a commitment to rape her. Am I sick for noticing that? On reflection, I guess it’s in character – and suitable for prime time – that Joel is too startled (and perhaps deflated!) by the dismissal to respond with more than a bewildered verbal protest; but I’m still disappointed that the script didn’t explore that point at all.