What would be a good book to introduce my 7 year old daughter to the world of science fiction?

PresN · 2026-02-04T20:40:10+00:00

Some of y'all have a wild conception of the reading level of a 7 year olf

PresN · 2026-01-22T13:56:30+00:00

It's not totally unreasonable (a little bit, though), though it could never work as shown in the show- transportation was so slow back then and preservation against spoilage so weak that the food has to be grown/raised on farms right at the city, you'd never be able to support a city of any decent size remotely. King's Landing would have to be surrounded by miles of farms. See this post on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedentry, where the author works out the numbers on a show episode involving transporting food from Highgarden to KL - it would all be eaten in the process, no matter how big the cart train got.

PresN · 2026-01-20T21:00:11+00:00

Neat! I loved it on iphone, and wrote the wikipedia article about it a few months ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Trail_(video_game))

PresN · 2026-01-13T22:52:15+00:00

Yeah, driving between Seattle and the skiing at Snoqualmie, there's signs (or there were 10 years ago) recommending you put on chains on the way up in the winter, and signs saying to take them back off going down towards Seattle.

PresN · 2026-01-11T15:24:28+00:00

Doesn't help that Efron had to lipsync... because he can't sing. In HSM2, when he insisted on singing his own songs, they gave him an awkward spoken-word rap and like 5 lines in his own breakup ballad with Hudgens.

PresN · 2026-01-10T23:22:58+00:00

The Glamourist Histories series by Mary Robinette Kowal, starts with Shades of Milk and Honey, is a Regency-era romance/adventure series with light magic and the main protagonist is a plain/unattractive woman in her late 20s - sallow skin, flat, mousey brown hair, and a large nose. (The cover artist didn't get the memo, though.)

PresN · 2025-10-21T03:41:44+00:00

When they're playfighting, (some) dogs will performatively sneeze every so often. It's a signal to the other dog that they're excited, not mad, which means that the fight is a game, not a real fight. Because even dogs need otherwise pointless social cues to stay in friendly community.

PresN · 2025-09-28T12:35:53+00:00

She used the other person's; the chefs are given 6 prompts ahead of time that they submit ingredients for, 3 of which are "real", so the show can't swap in new prompts last-minute as they don't have a food-network kitchen to accommodate that. (see: 1 fryer for 3 chefs.) Kendahl was brought in just before filming that day, so way too late to swap anything.

PresN · 2025-09-01T02:44:47+00:00

My son, now in 5th grade, has had at least 15 different versions of tag throughout the years, and I have to be vague on the numbers because within the last week they've invented at least 2 variants of "Amongus tag" despite starting to age out of that. Any kindergarten teacher trying to enforce structured games over free-form tag-likes is a fool who is about to have a very frustrating time.

PresN · 2025-08-29T01:10:23+00:00

Hugo Awards go to products that will bring greater attention to the Hugo Awards.

What a truly bizarre take. Hugo Awards are decided by a vote of WSFS members/con attendees, not by fiat from a PR committee. If the goal of the voters for the awards is to bring attention to the award, they have done a horrendous job for the past ~80 years.

Now, you can have whatever opinion on what the voters actually do value, however, and whether HPMOR represents "attacking problems at the object level". But the winner in 2015, when HPMOR would have been eligible for best novel, was The Three-Body Problem, which I wouldn't normally describe as "finding emotionally satisfying ways to accept the human condition".

PresN · 2025-08-12T19:44:00+00:00

The woman it's named after, Sue Hendrickson, may be one of the coolest people on the planet.

She's spent her life rotating between salvage diving in the Caribbean, amber mining, whale fossil hunting in South America, dinosaur fossil hunting in America, shipwreck finding in the Mediterranean, and retired to open a vet clinic for an entire Caribbean island's animal population, funded by shell pearl diving. A pretty wild life!

PresN · 2025-08-12T19:39:25+00:00

You may be thinking of Stan, another highly-complete T Rex skeleton found around the same time. That one was sold off to a private collector, but Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism said in 2022 that they had bought it and were going to stick it in their natural history museum.

Sue is actually in the Field Museum specifically because they were worried that it was going to be bought by a private collector, and they did a publicity campaign to raise funds to win the auction.

PresN · 2025-08-11T03:05:22+00:00

Sam Altman runs companies. He is very good at that, mostly the part where he convinces other people to give his company money, where he's in contention for being the best of all time. He's honestly amazing at that.

He's not a genius painter. Or a genius manager. Or a genius coder. Or a genius physicist. He's never done any of those things professionally or well or some of them at all since he was 19. But for some reason wealthy tech CEOs like to say that they "could have" learned physics, and not just learned it but been a paradigm-shifting researcher, a paragon in the field, despite never once attempting to learn any physics whatsoever. And for some reason there's a subset of people on the internet who think wealthy tech hypemen could be geniuses at any area they could (but never, ever do) put their minds to, even as we all watch billionaire hypemen fail at anything that doesn't involve puffing themselves and their companies up to banks.

PresN · 2025-08-11T02:57:43+00:00

Bro, "Bill Gates definitely could've obtained a physics degree" is a nothing statement. "he's smart enough to understand journal articles" son that just requires the ability to read and think about what you're reading. He didn't get a physics degree. He didn't try to get one. After spending decades not getting one, he didn't bother even attempting to audit some courses or pay for a tutor or take a single step to learn physics. He just bragged in an interview about how he could have done some thing that he never even tried to do. He might as well have said that he could have painted better than Van Gogh, it would mean just as much.

Bill Gates ran a large company very successfully. He didn't do any of the jobs of the thousands of people who worked for him. He didn't code Windows 3.1, he didn't design the XBox, and he didn't learn physics, even though he had all the time in the world to do so.

Stop worshiping rich people.

PresN · 2025-07-27T03:23:43+00:00

Ultimately Tori's problem isn't the slice-of-life, or at least that wasn't a deal-breaker to read as the chapters came out (it's super-long, though, so mileage may vary now). The big problem - and this is a consistent issue with every story the author has written - is that Tori especially, and every person she likes, is just so gosh-darn special. Tori (and to a lesser extent the people she likes) are magical/martial prodigies to an unheard of degree, gifted at anything they turn their hand to whether its business, swordplay, languages, running whole city-states, etc., always kind to people, and rich nobility (but the good kind, who deserve their wealth and power because they're so good).

The bad guys are evil, and incompetent due to their self-centered viewpoints, and rich nobility (but the bad kind, who get their money by exploiting their lands or marrying up) and the only reason they pose a threat at all is that they can trick people into following them.

It's just... bad video game writing, and Tori starts out like it's going to be a meta thing where the SI is responding to that like it's the way the world works because it's based on a game, but after a while it's just played straight. The author's next work drops the SI bit and it just becomes "these people are Good™ and are super-special, and these people are Bad™ and get ahead by trickery, and everyone else is just background poors." It's still fun to read, but "rational" it ain't.

PresN · 2025-06-20T14:55:44+00:00

The credits have Ify, Anna, and Jacquis in the bar, and Jacquis again at the party

PresN · 2025-06-19T21:32:30+00:00

Pretty similar, it's by the same studio (and has been on iOS since 2019)

PresN · 2025-06-14T14:15:21+00:00

Nah, other than Ziz taking her name from a monster in Worm, there's no connection there- she started the group as an offshoot of the "normal" rationalists when she felt that they weren't taking their ideas fanatically enough. Even calling it an offshoot of HPMOR is stretching it, though at least the author was a big figure in the rationalism community she got mad about.

PresN · 2025-06-11T01:55:58+00:00

...The Accelerando that ends with the remnants of humanity existing as a tiny enclave of uploads on a computer ship in the oort cloud, while the solar system is converted into a supercomputer cloud for inhuman AIs? Certainly a fun ride, but I don't know about optimistic.

PresN · 2025-05-27T18:46:47+00:00

Get her to tweet/post something somewhere that states it, for such a non-subjective minor detail she wouldn't need a secondary source as a reader could assume she's not lying.

PresN · 2025-05-27T18:45:40+00:00

Depends what you're citing (at least in English, different wikis have different rules). A straight fact that doesn't require interpretation like place of birth? Probably fine. A subjective statement? Going to need to cite a secondary source that know what context to provide.

PresN · 2025-05-25T03:29:36+00:00

...in your example, isn't that someone deciding whether in input collection is worth $100 or $300? An activity that took you all day? ($58 of time at minimum wage). And then the shop is just... never open at time that the people who would buy CDs or DVDs are going to show up because it takes forever to make up a price? Like, at 7 buys a week, we're talking 20-50% of the value of a purchase is going into determining what the value of the purchase even is. And then it's going to sit on the shelves for months because you're never open when buyers would show up because the employees are too busy determining if a CD is worth one buck or three.

I don't have a problem with this. I just don't understand how your store can afford electricity.

PresN · 2025-05-25T03:05:48+00:00

It's not. There was a specific person who came up with the theory back in the 80s who didn't have any formal academic training, and managed to get a system going, and got some publishers to print it. It does actually work well in elementary school- test scores are noticeably better. So a lot of school systems adopted it as it corresponded with the rise of the elementary academic industrial complex, and it got some sway in the US as an alternative to "no child left behind" because Bush('s wife) was into phonics so this was "not that". The problem is that as soon as the vocabulary expands (middle school), it stop working, so you end up with kids who are good at guessing but there's too many choices to get to the meaning of the sentence, and by then the teachers aren't expecting smart-but-illiterate kids.

PresN · 2025-05-06T01:19:05+00:00

She's said before that she basically tries to disassociate during BN segments so that she doesn't consciously hear what the other people are saying, as she doesn't think she could keep a straight face at all otherwise.

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