Paul Drye
@pauldrye@spacey.space : Unbuilt crewed space projects, phantom islands, alternate history, Muppets, Atomic Age design, weird-looking galaxies, temporary moons of Earth, languages, cartography, the Ediacaran biota, old cutaway diagrams. Canadian with malice aforethought. Baggage Books on DriveThruRPG.
Worst. Cryptid. Ever.
He’s written some “Notes” on the story when it was printed in his first short story collection and said that it has the same theme but that he wasn’t inspired by it directly. The roots were Paul Linke’s play “Time Flies When You’re Alive” and the principle of least time in optics – if you treat light as a ray, it has to know its future destination in order to know the path with the shortest time it will take to get there (though not if it’s a wave). Then there’s a bunch of diagrams and discussions about the principle’s implications for free will that will stretch your brain. It’s pretty fun.
Naw, it’s got to be Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”. Or maybe the Beatles with “Twist and Shout”. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”?
It sometimes is, but the word is already taken for “a young pig”!
Turned into a slurry and then administered as an enema.
Depends on the compressive strength of the material. Sooner or later the weight of the pyramid above the base exceeds the base’s ability to support it. Considering that a mountain is basically a stone pyramid, Everest has to be in the neighbourhood of how tall you could go – call it 10-12 kilometers high. Other materials would do better.
According to the UK’s Department For International Trade it’s overwhelmingly “Non-ferrous metal products” at $8.5 billion in 2019. Financial services (credit and “miscellaneous financial services”) are 2 & 3 on the list by value, but only a bit more than $200 million in total for both of them.
It would probably be faster to list the things he doesn’t have a negative view about.
It’s based on a short story called “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. He’s published only eighteen stories in his career (starting in 1990), nothing longer than a novella and mostly short stories. Despite that they’ve won him four Hugos, four Nebulas, and six Locus Awards. He’s worth reading, is what I’m trying to say.