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Accuracy in Fiction
Apr. 27th, 2012 06:21 amDear SF authors:
First note: when stating numerical facts about the real world, please check for plausibility with, oh, Wikipedia at least.
“The visual resolution is better than my ability to test. The hearing, too, is off the scale, but I noticed several peaks in acuity.” She handed him a sheet. “The largest was at three thousand hertz, well out of the human range of hearing. The second-largest peak was at one hundred twenty hertz, the average frequency of human speech.”
Human have excellent hearing at three thousand Hertz. In fact, we are most sensitive to sounds from 2000 to 5000 Hz. The top six keys on a normally tuned piano are 2960 Hz through 4100Hz.
Second note: when making up technologies, please do us the favor of either basing it on something plausible or leaving it a mystery.
“Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of research on it over the past several months, and the Brannin isn’t just the latest thing in computer tech. It’s a long step sideways in a direction nobody had ever thought to look before. I don’t think the Brannin should really even be called a computer. There’s very little to it that you can reach out and touch with your hand. Most of it exists in deep VR, and because of that, it’s not limited by physical size. Inside itself, it can be infinitely large or small. Instead of bytes made of zeros and ones, the Brannin uses light, on or off, and that’s the speed at which it computes. Something like six trillion floating-point operations per second, give or take.”
VR is not a place, a dimension, or a universe. Context makes it clear we are not dealing with an Eganesque out-of-order computational universe or anything else.
Context makes it clear that the author thought that watching SyFy flicks constituted research.
The current record of unclassified supercomputer performance is public information. The current record is 10.51 petaflops... that's ten and a half quadrillion floating point operations per second. So this book, set in a nearish future where genetic engineering is responsible for creating Olympic gladiatorial combat animals... has a computer so advanced that running it for five minutes constitutes a major economic strain on a group that has been shown to spend tens of millions of dollars on lab equipment... yet is a thousand times slower than the 2011 state of the art.
Also, I'm waiting for the tentacles to pop out of Lil' Cthulhu's face.
First note: when stating numerical facts about the real world, please check for plausibility with, oh, Wikipedia at least.
“The visual resolution is better than my ability to test. The hearing, too, is off the scale, but I noticed several peaks in acuity.” She handed him a sheet. “The largest was at three thousand hertz, well out of the human range of hearing. The second-largest peak was at one hundred twenty hertz, the average frequency of human speech.”
Human have excellent hearing at three thousand Hertz. In fact, we are most sensitive to sounds from 2000 to 5000 Hz. The top six keys on a normally tuned piano are 2960 Hz through 4100Hz.
Second note: when making up technologies, please do us the favor of either basing it on something plausible or leaving it a mystery.
“Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of research on it over the past several months, and the Brannin isn’t just the latest thing in computer tech. It’s a long step sideways in a direction nobody had ever thought to look before. I don’t think the Brannin should really even be called a computer. There’s very little to it that you can reach out and touch with your hand. Most of it exists in deep VR, and because of that, it’s not limited by physical size. Inside itself, it can be infinitely large or small. Instead of bytes made of zeros and ones, the Brannin uses light, on or off, and that’s the speed at which it computes. Something like six trillion floating-point operations per second, give or take.”
VR is not a place, a dimension, or a universe. Context makes it clear we are not dealing with an Eganesque out-of-order computational universe or anything else.
Context makes it clear that the author thought that watching SyFy flicks constituted research.
The current record of unclassified supercomputer performance is public information. The current record is 10.51 petaflops... that's ten and a half quadrillion floating point operations per second. So this book, set in a nearish future where genetic engineering is responsible for creating Olympic gladiatorial combat animals... has a computer so advanced that running it for five minutes constitutes a major economic strain on a group that has been shown to spend tens of millions of dollars on lab equipment... yet is a thousand times slower than the 2011 state of the art.
Also, I'm waiting for the tentacles to pop out of Lil' Cthulhu's face.
