As most of you probably already know, many of the credulous and superstitious have their panties all in a wad today because it's June 6, 2006, which can be written as 6/6/6. OH NOES!!!1! The Number of the Beast!!! Maybe something really bad is going to happen. Or maybe it's a sign of the End Times.
Unless, of course, you follow the Julian calendar, in which case it's May 24. Or the Celtic, or Jewish, or Islamic, or Mayan, or Chinese, or .... Well, enough of that silliness.
Now, wait a minute. Back up a step. What was that about the Number of the Beast? Robert Anson Heinlein's protagonist in The Number of the Beast, both an engineer and an n-dimensional geometer, proposed that the transcribers of the Bible had misunderstood, and the number being cited was not six hundred, threescore and six, but rather an attempt to represent six to the power six to the power six (a rather larger number, some 36,306 digits in length). This, he suggested, was the number of possible continua accessible if one postulated that space-time actually possessed six dimensions, which we can refer to as x, y, z, t, tau, teh, and that one could select any four of these six to use as three spatial dimensions and one temporal, and then step along the remaining two axes incrementally, one new continuum per integer quantum step.
Based on this theory he built what he referred to as a continua craft, the unforgettable Gay Deceiver, whereupon the whole group went haring off exploring the continua and stumbling into various other universes, including that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith's Lensman universe.
OK, now we're starting to get somewhere. So, here we go:
Picture this. By chance, mysterious provenance, the honest sweat of your genius brow, or the benificence of some n-dimensional geometer from who knows where, you have possession for a while of a continua craft much like Gay Deceiver. You can make three, but ONLY three, trips to other continua -- any continua you like. If you've ever read about it in fiction or in scientific speculation, assume that somewhere, at some point along some chosen combination of axes, it exists.
So....
Where would you go? Would you stay there?
Who, or what, would you take there?
If you didn't stay, then who or what would you bring back?
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They're a collection of SF short stories, set for the most part on Pendor, a paired ring world, with sufficently advanced technology. The author,
He was also one of the leading voices of alt.sex in it's early days, and the stories are more then a little pornographic in nature. But it would still be a cool place to live. Short reasons include motorcycles that you can keep in your coat pocket, nanchine that lets you fly, and never ending glasses of iced tea. And, when you get sick of advanced life, there is always BackWater, an area of a few dozen thousand square miles that is basically everquest.
Yeah, I could live there.
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That concept exists below the Mason-Dixon line.
I really need to get another gallon glass jug with spigot. Or barring that, BAE needs to hire me so I can quit Intel and take a week's vacation and head south to pick up my old gallon glass jugs with spigot.