On Sun, 17 Jan 2021 09:04:23 +0100, Tosspot wrote:

On 17/01/2021 01:39, Ralph Barone wrote:
John B. wrote:
On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 15:00:41 -0800 (PST), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Friday, January 15, 2021 at 8:06:06 PM UTC-8, Joy Beeson wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jan 2021 20:34:41 -0800, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jan 2021 18:58:23 -0500, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 1/14/2021 6:04 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

I suspect that the next translation of the bible will be into text
message abbreviations and acronyms, which is the common language of
todays youth:
https://www.webopedia.com/reference/text-message-abbreviations/

Long ago I read a science fiction novel (probably by Heinlein) that
featured some sort of secret society. As I recall, to be inducted one
needed a high degree of intelligence; but once inducted, trainees
learned a new language, one that was heavily abbreviated. The claim was
that we think by internal use of language, so learning a language whose
information was very dense (in terms of ideas per syllable) allowed much
faster processing of data - i.e. faster and more efficient thinking.

I read the same story, but can't recall the name or author. I did
some random Googling for clues, but can't recall enough of the story
to construct a working key word search. As I vaguely recall, my first
thoughts were that high speed thinking was of marginal value because
it also accelerates one's rate of making mistakes and reduces the
available time to consider side effects and "what can go wrong"
thoughts after the high speed decisions are reached. While one can
probably learn to communicate at high speeds, there's no guarantee
that they will also think at high speeds.
Found it! It's _Gulf_ by Robert A. Heinlein.

Wikipedia says that the story was written after the table of contents
for the magazine was composed, which explains why it fits its title
very loosely.

I was never able to understand why do many writers visualized a race
superior to humans when the ultimate thing made by the hand of God
himself with all of his foibles is the human being.

No Tommy God did not make humans he made Adam and Eve who in turn made
the rest of humanity. And, quite obviously the blight set in very
early in the game. After all, One of their sons murdered the other
one.

If humanity is the pinnacle of all of God’s creations, it casts serious
doubt on the concept of a perfect, infallible God.


Octopuses, anyone that can come up with octopuses gets my vote for
Supreme Being. Anyone that came up with spoonbills needs serious help,
and jellyfish inventors can suffer the nth circle of Tommie's Fantasies.

Well, I read that spoon billed birds exist on every continent, except
for Antarctica so they must be considered as at least marginally
efficient :-)
--
Cheers,

John B.