"'...hydrogen gives less energy per mole than oxygen...'" (p. 95)
I never knew that meaning of "mole" and still do not understand it.
"They flew over wine darkness, streaked with foam, until the mainland hove into sight." (ibid.)
A Homeric reference.
On Staurn, industrial civilization destroyed itself so the Staurni reverted to ancestral patriarchal households which however retained nuclear weapons that could never originally have been developed by such isolated social units.
The Staurni are flying carnivores like the Ythrians in the Technic History but hydrogen-breathers. Usually, carnivores fight rather than think but the Staurni possibly developed intelligence because they had to resist a larger, related species invading their continent. More fictional evolution.
8 comments:
Generally speaking, carnivores and omnivores are smarter than herbivores.
As a kzin says: "How much intelligence does it take to creep up on a leaf?"
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Hence we get exclamations like "You stupid cow!"
Ad astra! Sean
According to Isaac Asimov:
Ask a person what a mole is:
An engineer will say 'a breakwater'
A biologist will say 'a small burrowing mammal'
A dermatologist will say 'a dark spot on the skin'
A chemist will say 'well it's like this...' and try to explain for half an hour.
I would say the chemist's concept of 'mole' has made sense to me since taking chemistry in high school. I'm not sure how to explain it to someone who doesn't understand the Wikipedia article.
I'll understand it if I read it better.
Kaor, Jim!
Asimov could be amusing, even if I was getting tired of how he wrote novels by 1975.
Ad astra! Sean
I've handled cattle. It's not so much that they're stupid -- they are, of course -- it's that they have a deeply strange instinctual structure, by human standards.
For example, we had two cows on a place we lived for a few years. They would move heaven and earth to get over the dairy farm next door so they could 'herd' with the cattle there.
I saw one of them getting through a barbed wire fence; it put its hoof on the wire at the point it was attached to the post, pushed it down and sort of eeled through.
When we were driving them back we laid the fence flat... and the cows stopped and wouldn't cross it.
"Why, that's a -fence-! We can't cross a -fence-!" their body language said.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Bovines can be both amusingly and frustratingly stupid!
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment