Kim Stanley Robinson's description of a Martian space elevator falling and wrapping twice around the entire planet convinced me that they aren't a good idea.
A fictional representation of a thing exaggerated for dramatic effect and to create plot tension shouldn't really convince you of many things at all. They're rarely accurate portrayals.
I’ll give apparently a controversial take. The show is great. If you’re going into it expecting the books to be the guiding source material you’ll be severely disappointed. If you go into it assuming you’re watching a show that roughly takes high level concepts from the books but is its own thing and let it stand on its own, I think it’s worth watching.
I'm fine with series not following the books. But the show bugs me because it has great production values -- particularly the third season -- and great actors. But the writing and plotting is all over the place ranging to very bad. It is a bit dumb and always pretentious. It's the 70's version of Battlestar Galactica of our age.
This is the issue that I have with many Apple TV+ shows. The production value is always very high, but it has no correlation with whether the writing is actually good.
This is just the state of American video media production right now.
Projects are massively expensive, including a lot spent on "looking expensive", but the writing cannot be as expertly crafted because the high expense means upper management craves purpose and control and meddles with things, and the giant "target" audience means you can't do anything interesting.
Honestly the Cleons story line has been the only storyline I consistently enjoyed. All other ones suffered from both pacing and idiot plot issues at various times.
Not the OP, but that show is a severely dumbed down adaptation of the books.
For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally), as befits a saga that spans centuries. No producer was willing to run with that (as they didn't believe the audience smart enough to follow it would be big enough for the show to make a profit), so they introduced cryonics, clones, sorta-AIs (including robots out of their original context) to have some sort of continuing cast.
Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere, with excitement about "atomic" energy (changed to "nuclear" in the 1950s publication), distant descendents of the slide rule, and generally weird-sounding math and science, that the show totally drops in favor of a "contemporary" feel.
And btw, the space elevator scene is lifted from Brin's Foundation's Triumph where it is described as a "future" event, part of Trantor's fall, predicted by Seldon's early team and trickled down to the general population.
It's definitely got problems as an adaptation of the Foundation series where it turns one of it's biggest themes on it's head by making a few people like Gail super special and having the answer to the crises where the books were more about setting up groups and organizations so that they as a whole had an advantage or edge that would be the answer to the crises he forsaw. I think it's mainly due to them wanting to have the same people across multiple seasons where the books were free to throw away the whole cast each time. Setting up new characters is much more expensive in shows/movies than books where you can just say what someone's 'deal' is and give them internal monologues to setup their internality where shows can't usually get away with that.
I think separated from that there's a good enough show in there.
> Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere ...
The next day’s hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry.
If you've got a copy of the ebook, search for "cigar". The use of tobacco as a way to demonstrate luxuries beyond the regular is there.
In a recent re-reading of the series, I started having difficult with it in Second Foundation... and forced myself to finish Foundation's Edge. The amount of psionic ability and the... for lack of a better word "preaching" with the monologues was very much a science fiction of a different time.
Foundation (the TV series) had to do updates for modern audiences and media. I'm not sure if trying to remain perfectly faithful to the books would represent them well.
Foundation is a soft sci-fi about interactions between individuals and history and society. Trying to maintain the incidental harder parts of the written works that modern audiences expect to be somewhat consistent of far future technology with the 1950s lens on them would be quaint and a bit off-putting to people expecting future tech.
He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.
They took the major points, and wrote to follow the general path from one point to another given the expectations of an audience consuming it often for the first time - 80 years after the original was written... and given constraints of the format and continuity of actors (60 minute episodes rather than as a chapter of a short story in Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction).
I long for a level of posthumanism that you can do things like smoke and drink for fun without any worry for long term health effects.
What at joy it'd be to fully experience life, not just a sanitized productized version, and have the safety net of perfect medicine to cure what ails ya.
> For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally)
I wish directors were brave enough to kill off characters if it serves the plot. I get that there's IRL reasons that make it difficult (like contracts, scheduling, etc) but each new season accumulates more subplots to the point it's like a 30 minute episode is really a compilation of 3x 10-minute shows.
This bugs me in multiple-protagonist books too. Just feels like an excuse to pad the page count with introductions and cliff hangers every POV switch.
It's pretty and scratches that scifi itch. I've only read a little of the books but it's supposedly an entirely different story that coincidentally shares character names.
In terms of hardness, it probably on par with Expanse, so mostly technobabble with the magical tech only used when it's convenient for the plot. The abuse of "psychohistory" is particularly egregious. There's so many scenes where it's visualized a hologram of scribbles and they zoom in on more squiggles while divining the future.
But again it's pretty, so if you're okay with drama in space, it's maybe a 8/10.
It's about 45 years since I read the books, but the whole idea of being able to predict the future of human societies accurately with maths seems rather silly. Especially since chaos theory became mainstream.
It's the best possible adaptation of the books as possible. They made some changes to allow for having main characters. In my opinion they also lighten the down side of the Mule story line and how the world works.
If you go into it looking for interesting sci-fi, especially the story of the Cleons, you’ll enjoy it. If you go into it looking for Asimov’s Foundation you’ll be disappointed
In adition to being fictional, what would happen on Mars does not reflect what would happen on Earth as the Martian atmosphere is so much thinner than ours.
I think Library Science has contributed much more to modern computing than we ever realize.
For example, I often bring up images of card catalogs when explaining database indexing. As soon as people see the index card, and then see that there is a wooden case for looking up by Author, a separate case for looking up by Dewey Decimal et. cet. the light goes on.
I’m old enough to have used (book) dictionaries and wooden case card catalogues in the local library. So when I learned about hashmaps/IDictonary a quarter century ago, that’s indeed the image that helped me grok the concept.
However, the metaphor isn’t that educationally helpful anymore. On more than one occasion I found myself explaining how card catalogues or even (book) dictionaries work, only to be met with the reply: “oh, so they’re basically analogue hashmaps”.
A few months ago I was asking myself, why is the "standard" width of a terminal 80 characters? I assumed it had to do with the screen size of some early PCs.
But nope, its because a punch card was 80 characters wide. And the first punch cards were basically just index cards. Another hat tip to the librarians.
I guess this is the computing equivalent of a car being the width of two horse's asses...
And the use of punch cards in computing is (arguably) inspired by the textile industry. Punched cards were used to configure looms starting way back in the 1700s.
For those who aren't already familiar, James Burke in Connections has a great summary/rundown of this technological progression from Jacquard loom to census tabulator to computer punchcard, starting around the 36 minute mark here (though the whole video is worth watching).
One of the teachers at my high school (40 years ago) somehow got permission to offer an entire class revolving around Connections. Several of my friends were taking it, so I decided to as well, and I had to drop band to make it fit.
Both band directors showed up at one of my classes the first day of school, dragged me to an empty room, and browbeat me into returning to band. It was the right choice for my social life, but I did hear great things about that class.
I always think of the indexes in the back of books as the origin of the term in computing. The relationship to "index cards" never even occurred to me!
Yeah, I've got the vocab, I just never associated index cards with that use case because growing up we only ever used index cards for labeling, note-taking, arts and crafts, and flash cards.
Absolutely! I confess I assumed this was explicitly part of how things were taught. With the "projected" attributes in the index being what you would fit on a card. I'm surprised that so many seem to not have any mental model for how this stuff works.
Young people may not have seen a card catalog these days.
I just explain that hard disks are just a continuous list of 1s and 0s, and then ask what we need to do if people want to find anything. People are able to infer the idea of needing some sort of structure.
Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past" - William Faulkner
Visual code is all over the place if you look; Any time something advertises itself as "low code" or "no code" it's a drag-and-drop flow based UI like this one. Most (if not all) ETL systems work this way, and all kinds of low-code AI Agent frameworks are cropping up.
I do agree that there very high prices to be paid for this stuff, and worst of all most of those costs are hard to see, and only crop up late in the project, when, as you point out, the more complex algorithms and processes crop up.
"No one wants to write ifs, fors and whiles as connected nodes"
For what it's worth LabVIEW presents those structures as container boxes, which IMO works well enough. To put it another way, visual coding has many problems, but when programming LabVIEW I didn't find the representation of control flow to be one of them.
Exactly! Several different sorts of folks have an interest in product architecture, and each group needs the story told at a different level of abstraction. So inevitably one has to maintain a few different flavours of the diagram and associated story.
One way I think of it is that the architect needs to market the architecture, at least a little bit. If you ask a marketing team to deliver a message they immediately start crafting multiple delivery methods to meet people where they are at. Architects shouldn't think they can somehow escape that basic requirement of effective communication.
It was a fun echo, because when I was a kid I watched it with my parents, and my Mom had to explain to me who Ethel Merman was.