It's the premise of science, sure. But not of, say, contemporary Islamistic thinking, which tends to gloss over this fairly important fact. Note that I said "Islamistic" here, and not "Muslims in general".

But certain shades of overly politically correct Western thinking tend to do likewise anyway - "OMG, the primitive Christian reconquista in the Iberian peninsula destroyed a scientifically vastly superior Muslim culture". All the while omitting the facts that the Iberian peninsula only came to be ruled by Arabs through an equally bloody war of conquest earlier, and that the "superior science" was only partly indigenously Arab: partly it was in-place left-overs from Antiquity that had been taken over, and partly it was the spoils of the semi-global wars of conquest that Islam had been conducting.

Note that I am not taking sides here, these are just intended as comments on the selective historical blindness which is causing so many problems in contemporary discourse.

You have a point there. Up to a point, that is.

What you write is, by and large, the currently accepted mainstream narrative in Western culture. Two extremely important issues with this are frequently overlooked, though:

a) The scientifically advanced Islamic world of the early middle ages was the result of rapid military conquest of a sizeable chunk of places that were amongst the most advanced regions on the planet: the Hellenistic states, other left-overs from the Roman Empire, as well as various cultures on the Indian sub-continent. All these were conquered by force, and absorbed into the early Islamic states. And for some time, the new Muslim rulers presided over empires that were very technologically and scientifically advanced - because the regions they had conquered had already been very advanced before being absorbed into the new Islamic states.

And crucially, in the first few centuries, the ruling classes, and the clerics, did nothing much to impede the existing culture of science and letters in their new dominions - quite the contrary, they encouraged the spreading of technologies. Point in case: the "arabic numerals" you mention were brought to Europe from India by returning Arab conquerors. The scientific and cultural riches the Muslim rulers presided over were mostly not the product of Islamic culture per se, but they did not hinder the further development of what was there. And in some cases, considerable progress was actually made - there are a number of notable Muslim scholars from this era.

However, at some point, Islamic culture ossified (for reasons that are very complex, and not entirely understood even today), became increasingly hostile towards science, and created the backwards mess that we see today. It is crucial, though, to always bear in mind that the "golden age of Islamic culture" was never entirely a product of the Islamic world to begin with. Far from it, actually. Like everyone else, they heavily built on the foundations their predecessors had built.

b) The second point, that Europe only started to catch up once the influence of religion (read: Christianity) started to wane is simply not tenable, either. Not in a narrow reading, anyway. What happened from the Age of Enlightenment onwards was that the focus of society *and religion* changed in ways that made scientific endeavour possible and fruitful - crucially, without removing Christianity per se from public life, or the culture at large. Far too many scientists over time were Christian clerics for the narrow reading to be true: there are science-averse interpretations of Christian doctrine, but these are by no means exclusive, or dominant.

Where are mod points when you need them. "Damnatio memoriae", the ancient Romans called this sort of procedure. With all we know about him by now, it would actually be most appropriate for someone like Nixon.

What you are saying there is what the Real Time / High Performance Ray Tracing crowd have been claiming since, what, 2001? Unfortunately for them, the stuff the "normal" graphics community has been able to come up with on graphics cards is always at least several notches better than what RTRT has been offering, ever since then. This is a chase that has been going on for a decade now, and the gap does not seem to be closing anytime soon. So the discussion you are trying to start here has been over for several years now - and it seems like no-one is listening to the RTRT crowd anymore. And with good reason.

This is not to say that the research conducted by the RTRT crowd was and is useless - far from it. The new high performance algorithms they came up with were instrumental in the resurgence of path tracing and such, i.e. modern highly realistic offline rendering techniques. But for gaming purposes, the party seems to be over. Remember: hacks are not hacks if they are capable of powering a well-selling game in a stable, repeatable fashion.

And indisputably true facts, like the bit about RTRT scaling so much better, can be true for all they like, but that does not automatically mean that they are also relevant for practical engineering in settings where people are trying to earn Real Money by writing games people end up buying.

This is not a dispute between left and right, at least not in the sense that we are used to in the so-called "West". The two antagonistic parties here are secularists on the one hand, and islamistic religious fundamentalists on the other. These two groups are not even in a very roundabout way related to the old left-right dichotomy we are used to. Except perhaps the fact that Western leftists also generally seem to weigh in on the secular side of things, but that is about the point where any similarities end.

This guy, who wrote an extremely useful and powerful piece of OSS software that is widely used in the graphics community, said it very well in his blog:

http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com/2010/03/assessing-open-source-software-as.html/

Basically, you are an idiot if you invest any time at all in such things. Papers are all that count. OSS software? You wrote something that hundreds of other researchers depend on for their daily work? Get lost, that professorship goes to someone else. Someone else who was a Real Man, and wrote Papers! Lots of them!

Maybe. But if that really is the case, you arguably don't belong here in the first place. :-)

Call me cynical, but this is pretty much a case of "Look, ma! We got some fancy 3D graphics now!". But it's not particularly interesting or novel from a technical viewpoint - even bad Hollywood movies have more professional graphics than this.

I mean, all he did was slap some Blue Marble textures onto a Martian height field globe. Wo-hoo, score one for physical simulation, and all that. As someone else has said, score one for the realisation that the planet would have been blue, if there had been large amounts of surface water. Wo-hoo! :-)

Now if he had done some actual simulation on where large bodies of surface water have likely existed: seas are sort of obvious, but what about rivers and lakes - these are extremely important for life, due to being sources of fresh water, as opposed to the inevitable salt water in the oceans. That, coupled with a simulation how life could have spread. Parameterised by how advanced the lifeforms are - move a slider from "basically just slime in the ocean" to "higher plants", and watch the green spread into those regions that could sustain it... that would be news. But this? They cover texture mapping and in-painting in computer graphics 101 these days.

That having said, the images *are* pretty, so it's not all bad. :-) Just not that much of news for nerds.

It probably would not outperform one of those, if something like that existed. But I'm not aware of any such vehicle that is currently operational (or even under active development), in the size/lifting capacity bracket that this company is aiming for?

In my opinion, the main selling point of their ships would be the lifting capacity of 66 tons. The largest helicopter out there, the Mi-26, can lift 20 tons at most, and has fairly atrocious operating costs per hour. And as stuff increases in weight, so do its chances of not fitting on a truck any longer - think outsized pieces of machinery, and such. In some specialised cases, it can make a big difference for economical assembly of factories, powerplants and such if you can ship in some bulky pieces of machinery that weigh up to 66 tons apiece without having to assemble them on-site. So a couple of such ships might find steady employment all over the country for odd jobs like that.

Whether they will sell enough of them to break even is anyone's guess. But as I said - if they are sensible, and keep the ball low, they just might pull it off. Just build a unsophisticated big lifter that gets stuff done, avoid the temptation to re-invent the wheel and to add fancy gizmos or revolutionary tech, and they should be fine.

For niche markets, that is. Such as point-to-point delivery of oversized and/or very heavy loads that are simply not transportable by road. A rugged and dependable vehicle of this kind could probably sell some dozen copies across the U.S., and even more world-wide. If these guys are sensible about their corporate cost structure, and do not base their expenditure on expectations of selling thousands of the things, they could be just fine, and be in this for the long run.

If their basic airship design is sound, of course. But it probably is - getting that sort of thing right is not *that* hard. They could do fairly nicely working examples in the 1920ies (provided they did not fill them with Hydrogen, but fire protection should be a no-brainer these days).

And the worst enemy of airships, the weather, is now firmly under control from an operational viewpoint - something it was absolutely not back then. Weather forecasts are so accurate nowadays that such vehicles can just reliably avoid those areas where they could get into trouble. One would not be operating scheduled services that have to be at some point at a given time with them anyway. With these specialised heavy lifters, you would rather be delivering oversized pieces of machinery and such in a one-off fashion. And if one of these things arrives two days late because of a thunderstorm front, it is usually not that much of a problem.

I don't speak Polish, but am bilingual in English and German. And the German translations of Lem are apparently very, very good. They are certainly full of the kind of very innovative wordplay you mention, which is pretty much absent from the English version. I've been told that the person who did the German translation was a bi-lingual person for whom the whole thing was a labour of love, in that they went the extra mile to make sure as many of the little jokes and puns were translated properly.

He was a bit of a special case, since he basically only wrote that one full-length book (the "sequel" doesn't really count, since it was mostly written by someone else after his death). But the original Canticle is, IMHO at least, a highly interesting book.

However, it might not be everyone's cup of tea, since it is essentially Roman Catholic Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi (talk about niches within sub-genres). It is a story about a monastery in a post-apocalyptic world, after all. And from a theological viewpoint, it is, in spite of the futuristic setting, pretty much spot on with respect to Catholic doctrine. So if you are into that sort of thing, it makes an even more fascinating read than it does otherwise. You can of course read and enjoy it even if you are not Catholic, but I'm not sure how much sense the actions and inner monologues of the protagonists make if you don't have a background in that particular religion. And you would probably miss a lot of the little allusions and Catholic easter eggs (cough) that are strewn throughout the text.

Allegedly, the main reason he wrote the book in the first place was that as a young man, he was on one of the U.S. bomber crews that reduced Monte Cassino abbey to rubble. He later visited the abbey while it was being re-built, and was reputedly awed by the spirit and lifestyle of the monks in charge of the reconstruction effort. Which makes it a fascinating book for that reason alone.

Don't be unfair. I never said I believed Mr. Watts. But I do find the way how everyone here has an automated negative response worthy of Pavlov's dogs to non peer reviewed work worrying.

Especially if you factor in the systemic problem that if an amateur attempts to do science, he or she will in all likelihood not be very good at communicating their results in the "proper", dispassionate lingo of the professionals. Or in other words: regardless of whether they are right or not (!), chances are high that even at the best of times, the amateur will not come across in a way that is particularly reassuring to professionals.

The only way to deal with something like the stuff that Mr. Watts is claiming is to dissect it, and, if his theory is found wanting, to calmly say something like "it's crap because of $foo and $bar" (with $foo and $bar being rational arguments that can be readily verified by a reasonably competent person). Discrediting it because it has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal is actively dangerous, since that sort of dismissal just fans the fire of "alternate science", and the stupid sort of AGW deniers.

It's a close thing, though. If he had said something like "after we could not find a strong signal that, based on our hypothesis, we had reason to assume to be there", it would be a description of a reasonably scientific approach. Maybe, just maybe, being the amateur that he is, he just got the formulation badly wrong, and actually did it reasonably right.

After all, assuming, for the sake of argument, that something is the case, and then testing for it, is a way how it can be legitimately done. You develop a hypothesis, try to figure out what the implications of said hypothesis would be if it were true, and then go looking for signs that match these implications. While making very, very sure that you are not falling victim to some sort of confirmation bias on the way (i.e. seeing stuff you are looking for because you want it to be there, and not because it is actually there).

Personally, I have no reason to defend Mr. Watts, nor am I convinced he is right. But being a professional scientist, I am both fairly shocked by the (almost) blind trust which is placed in the peer review process by the users of this forum (once you have seen it from the inside, you typically no longer trust it that much), and also how most people seem to assume that only the professionals can ever be right.

Is Mr. Watts wrong? Perhaps. Probably. But please don't judge people by paper form alone, lest you be unpleasantly surprised at some point.