If I would just “suck it up or leave” how would the blogger know that he may be right on somethings and wrong on others ? What is the usefulness of an article if there’s no criticism over it ?

For another sci-fi author worth checking out I’d recommend Peter F Hamilton. His stuff is a pretty good mix of both hard and soft sci-fi and the trilogies are truly massive tomes. If you can handle warp travel and the occasional ghost in your sci-fi you’ll probably love his work.

And Anderson: Good luck convincing a blogger they should stick to the topics you want them to. It’s a losing battle, and if he really makes you that uncomfortable you’d be better off to just suck it up or leave.

Depends on the preferred sub-genre. For instance, HARD SF (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Robert Sawyer), more ‘SOFT” SF(McCaffrey, Bradbury, LeGuin) or TIME TRAVEL/ALTERNATE UNIVERSE (Turtledove, John Barnes “Timeline Wars” series). Of course, some writers cross subgenres in different works.
Also Philip K. Dick (whose Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep led to the movie Blade Runner), Harry Harrison (movie: Soylent Green from Make Room, Make Room!), and more that I can’t read titles from the other end of the house (one full six-foot bookshelf JUST of the hardcover collections).
Oh, and Douglas Adams!

J/P=?

@Jeff: you said “…I would first sort out the fake from the real evidence ; apply the principles of logic and scientific method; and come up with a tentative conclusion; try to draw predictions and then keep circling this around to get closer to the “truth”…”

The current skeptical movement, and most people who call themselves “skeptics” these days, try to do just that. I recommend checking out some of Phil’s blog rolls, and sites like The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, to see what we’re about.

OMG, Phil, you’re not the TALL MAN, are you? Come from another dimension to terrorise us??!!

Eeeks!!! Phil’s flying and drilling steel balls will soon be invading us in our sleeps!!!

“That’s skepticism, and everyone should have a healthy dose of it. Your cautions are all well-noted.”

you seem to understand my point. I guess my main point are the cautions. I really fear that people get so much into a “skeptical” frame of mind that they go at every disparate subject with “skepticism”. People have a tendency to “special plead” their case and going into everything with skepticism, in my opinion, just exaggerates that tendency. My preference would be to be neither skeptical nor believing. I would first sort out the fake from the real evidence ; apply the principles of logic and scientific method; and come up with a tentative conclusion; try to draw predictions and then keep circling this around to get closer to the “truth”

That’s skepticism, and everyone should have a healthy dose of it. Your cautions are all well-noted.

I’m very uncomfortable with this whole idea of skepticism. I believe it is a faux version of what is legitimately called critical thinking and scientific method. Skepticism is a tool, true, but I think it has shades of bias toward particular points of view, where true thinking shouldn’t have a bias but let the chips fall where they do.

One logical fallacy that can occur is the guilt by association fallacy. Another is “lumping” throwing disparate groups of thought under cute umbrella labels. Another is conscious or unconscious use of euphemisms: you must be very on guard for this in today’s politically charged societies.

Yes, I am preaching from a soapbox, but I’ve earned it having taught for 30 years

IVAN3MAN: Please don’t shout louder than your name already. My eyelock will take hours to recover from. :-/

Just as well that I did not use red font, then!

All science and no play makes a skeptic a dull boy!

your relative time will slow down and allow you to catch up on all that reading.

Are you sure?

As I remember it (not being conversant with GR itself), there’s a finite time until an object hit the singularity. It’s the fall time an outside observer sees that will go towards infinity, isn’t it? (Which, I think, is at the same time concealed by a concomitant drop in the number of transmitted photons until the falling object is unobservable.)

But surely your reading situation will resolve itself anyway, as the pile of reading material will be gobbled up and their information transfered back with a more measured rate into the universe, with the entropy of black hole radiation.

Otherwise the model with calender singularities explain much. Those new year hick-ups must be expressions of a global symmetry of some form or other, explaining the regular frequency of them. Birthdays may be an oscillating system counting time from some form of singular “birth” of objects into the system. (Wonder which btw? I feel like a baby playing with new toys in front of these possibilities.)

And so on and so forth. But nothing explains why surely uncorrelated projects tend to cluster into a distribution with a dense set. That’s not a set of deadlines, it’s the calender calling out a “drop dead” line.

Dune is pretty good too, but it’s not as much science fiction as it is… political fiction. It’s convoluted.

As for those 200 blogs, wow. I thought I was pushing it with 15. :-\

and, Mr. Bad Astronomer, I am filled with glee at your neutron star & blackhole metaphor. brilliant!

But, ehrm, what about Don’t Fear, hearT Space (or whatever) – not “little” or supposed to be already read? I note a glaring lack in that skepbook list too …

@ IVAN3MAN: Please don’t shout louder than your name already. My eyelock will take hours to recover from. :-/