Useful links for worldbuilders

[stevebowers]

I thought I'd add a few links that might be useful for contributors wanting to add political or social details to their worlds and clades;

Here is a list of 'Human Universals' by Donald E. Brown
http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
Humans all over the world have certain things in common, no matter what their culture is. Any human-derived clade might be expected to share some or most of these characteristics, unless they have been deliberately altered or suppressed in some way. Conversely, an alien species, or a species derived from some non-human provolve or neogen, need not have all these characteristics, and if they do share any of them, it might be instructive to discuss why that is the case.

[stevebowers]

This worldbuilding school has some interesting tutorials on how to make your world detailed.
http://worldbuildingschool.com/category/world-building/

Another useful page is here; although it is targeted at fantasy worldbuilders, many of these questions can be asked about a hard SF world, too.
http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worl...questions/

[stevebowers]

Here's Wiki on the idea of a Political Compass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass
The basic one is here


here's Jerry Pournelle's modified version


and the Nolan Chart


here is Anders Sandberg's AI political compass for OA


We could think about creating more of these for use in OA. There could be several types; charts showing the relationships between terraforming and pantropy, and/or bioism and artificial intelligence, or real-life and virtuality, or between individual transcendence and group minds. The three-cornered relationship between virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology might be a bit tricky to do, but instructive.

[selden]

Are there any plans to update the Web page
http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...ding_links
with these?

I discovered that quite a few of the links there are no longer functional.

[stevebowers]

I'll do it this week, and add a few more like Space Engine and other links from this section. One problem is that some of the links do to the Wayback Machine, and that doesn't always work. But I'll do my best.

Are there any links you would like to include, Selden?

[stevebowers]

The Worldbuilding links page is now updated, and as far as I can tell every link now works
http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...ding_links
if anyone has any suggestions or amendments, please let me know.

[selden]

Steve,

Thanks!
It looks fine.

s.

[sandcastles]

I'd like ask about a site I found several years ago, but it no longer exists. The main page was at savage-garden.org

The site had lists of astronomical events which happened thousands of years in the past and in the future.
Transits of Mercury and Venus, occultations of one planet with another, occultations of one planet as seen from another planet, the moon occulting one or more planets, solar eclipses during transits, for 50 000 BC - 50 000 AD.

Now I don't remember which program he was using--Stellarium, maybe. I hadn't had Stellarium downloaded at the time. But I checked a few of his entries Stellarium doesn't agree with his entries at all!

(Not to criticize at all, but I wonder, who but alternate historians and SF writers would ever use any of this? Archaologists too, sometimes, yes.)

I wonder if any of you had ever seen this site, and know anything about it or who was behind it. Did you verify any of his entries with Stellarium?

[Drashner1]

I've never heard of this, but this also isn't within my area of interest/expertise. Someone else might know more on it.

Regarding the disagreement between the website numbers and Stellarium - without knowing how the creator of the site derived his numbers it's hard to speculate what the cause of the discrepancy might be. It could be different assumptions in the calculations, a basic error on his part, or he could have simply pulled some or all of the numbers out of the air.

Todd

[terrafamilia]

I'd like ask about a site I found several years ago, but it no longer exists. The main page was at savage-garden.org

I can't speak to its content but anyone wanting to look it over can find it here -
https://web.archive.org/web/201203061522...index.html

Ciao,

Terrafamilia