I was in the used book section of the bookstore and there was this anthology of stories about settling various solar system destinations and I noticed one of the story titles mentioned Belters, undoubtedly meaning people who live in asteroid belt colonies. Belters has been kind of the Official Designated Space-Action Science Fiction name for such residents for a generation now (I suspect Larry Niven's to blame for this, but I dunno really).
It struck me that if humans ever do colonize the asteroid belt then whatever society they build is not going to look like the Official Designated Space-Action Science Fiction scenario, no matter what. But there's surely going to be some Old Irreconcilable who grew up on crumbly old stories of Belters and their peskiness, and who moves to the Asteroid Belt and can't do anything without getting severely annoyed at how everybody out there is Space!ing wrong and they should Space! like the glorious visionary prophets of 1970s ``hard sf'' said they should Space! and finds ways that they don't even seem to be trying to Space! correctly in any way. And that seems like it could be a great story if it could avoid being a terribly self-indulgent paean to a particular streak of obsolete science fiction writing. Or has someone already done that story?
Meanwhile, my mathematics blog has had a bunch of articles come up. Posted since the last roundup have been:
- Advanced November 2014 Statistics, looking more closely at some of what the blog did last month.
- Reading the Comics, December 5, 2014: Good Questions Edition, but you'll notice I don't say what the good questions are before you go looking at the whole page.
- What Do I Need To Pass This Class? (December 2014 Edition), refreshing my little guide to how to calculate what you need on the final in case you can't do it already.
- The Short, Unhappy Life Of A Doomed Conjecture, describing roughly my thoughts as I tried following up on that inscribed circle business from November.
- Reading the Comics, December 14, 2014: Pictures Gone Again? Edition, since King Features Syndicate comics didn't give me anything to talk about.
- Gaussian distribution of NBA scores, passing on some simple raw data of what kinds of scores you see in professional basketball, both in the 1950s, the 2010s, and all-time.
- Reading The Comics, December 22, 2015: National Mathematics Day Edition as it turns out the 22nd was National Mathematics Day, if you were in India, which I hadn't heard about ahead of time enough to do something for.
Trivia: Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show put on 318 performances during the Colombian Exposition of 1893; each show got an audience of about 12,000. Source: The Devil In The White City, Erik Larson.
Currently Reading: Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986 - 2011, Rick Houston.