What did Schuler know?

anwi wrote:

Tonto Silerheels wrote:What we have here is a conditional statement: IF P THEN Q. What you've concluded is that therefore Q. (You went on to claim IF Q THEN R, and ask what is R?)

Congrats, you're in tune with the spirit of the forum. And what could be more inspiring than a discussion of formal binary logic? Thus:
(R --> Q) -/-> (-R --> -Q)
-/-> {-R, Q} = {0}
Moreover, I never claimed Q --> R.
In deed, by petitio principii and argumentum ad consequentiam the writ has every reason to warn against demons preaching sedition. Finally, the original statement is from RFC, he demonstrably likes to mislead by inducing us to -R --> -Q, it follows that my assertion must hold.
So, why would there be a "very questionable assumption"?

(Edit to clarify notation.)

I think this is more of a case of RFC attempting to show that P is not true by stating that if P then Q where Q is known to be false. So -Q --> -P and R is a non-issue. The writ does NOT warn against demons in the manner that would be specific to a PICA, so that is proof the command crew didn't know about any PICA waiting in a cave to foil their dastardly plans. And we don't have to wonder what would happen in they did write the writ that way, because they didn't. At least that's how I read the post.

You stated that 1, 2 & 3 are indisputable. I'm disputing them. Ergo, your statement is disproven. That Himself also disputes 1) is simply icing on the cake

You also seem to have rather seriously misunderstood much of what I wrote. It isn't clear who 'they' is, but if, as it appears, you mean the command crew, I most emphatically am not assuming that they don't have access to the full panoply of Federation tech. Quite the opposite, in fact: they demonstrably had the ability to _create_ technology that wasn't even on the expedition's equipment list. OBSes, for example. That is a pretty clear indication that they had access to whatever they wanted to access. OK, within some, unknown, but probably pretty wide, limits. I'm not arguing that they had the ability to build more starships with their off-the-shelf equipment. They most certainly would have been able to build the machines to build the machines, however.

It is also unnecessary to _assume_ that the Nimues do not have that access. They clearly, for example, have no access to a starship's sensor suite, because they have no access to a starship That the capabilities of such a system exceed the capabilities of the equipment they do have is, indeed, an assumption, but one that is trivially easy to defend: one unchanging characteristic of technology over the 10,000 or so years whose history I have reasonably detailed knowledge of is that portable systems are significantly less capable than fixed-mount systems. Compare the jerry can to the aqueduct, for a farcical example. BTW, Merlin has always _had_ the ability to eavesdrop on the Temple even with the kit list on hand. He has not done so out of concern for the potential consequences of the attempt being detected - again, a case of fixed sensors vs portable stealth systems.

Your belief that the search would be constrained by fear of detection at interstellar distances is, I fear, unfounded. I can think of ways of doing it, using Hamilcar's resources, that would probably succeed in finding the Cave within a decade or so. And one of the most effective, seismic tomography, could probably be conducted without even disturbing the colonists, never mind being detectable outside Safehold's atmosphere. Sound just doesn't carry over the gaps between stars.

OTOH, it turns out that we don't know that Langhorne's colony lists were hacked. That _was_ a result of a mistaken assumption about the timing of the reeducation and movement of the sleepers on my part.

Thurgrak wrote:

Louis R wrote:Your 1) is highly disputable: Jerry Knowles learned of Nimue by accident, he wasn't _given_ the information. There's no reason to think that any others among those who were shifted out of Alexandria knew about her. We don't know that none of them did, of course, but there's reason to think they weren't supposed to.

It doesn't say he learned by accident, only mostly by accident which would imply some information was actually given to him deliberately but less than he had in total. It does say Shan-wei didn't want them to know but we know so little about this time period. Commodore Pei could have told them after Shan-wei's death for all we know.

And that isn't the only possible route for the information to have reached Schuler. I can think of at least a couple of others.

Louis R wrote:3), I fear, is laden with assumptions. The most egregious of them is that the Cave could be hidden from anyone with access to the full TF tech base and the certainty that there was something to find. Remember the saying 'half of a secret is the fact that it exists'.

Agreed - there are assumptions. However there are assumptions in your answer which are equally problematic. first that there is no way they have effective access to the complete federation tech base (nothing that would potentially give away their position to the Gbaba like active scanners would be even considered IMO) and second that there is precisely no evidence of any scanner tech capable of doing it being deployed or even mentioned even when its use would be obvious like peering inside the temple.

Unless there is a complete technological avenue that would be of massive use to Merlin that he's completely ignoring I can't see this one being wrong. I'm basing what I'm saying on the displayed scanner tech (SNARCs are line of sight
and are presumably latest stealth scanning tech for the Federation). If there's any suggestion anywhere that there is something that can be built that can scan through a mile of rock on passives please point out my mistake.

Can anyone else who wants to handwave federation technology as a reason this is impossible actually check what tech we've seen and give me some idea of what they are expecting this tech to actually do. It's pretty hard to discuss about "some highly superior tech that no-one has seen or referred to" being able to do anything.

Louis R wrote:One of your starting assumptions is also debatable. We know that Langhorn's records were hacked to insert the colonists moved out of Alexandria. Removing all traces of a _dead_ TFN officer would have been no more difficult. Editing her personal baggage list would have been even simpler. And a fairly obvious precaution, come to think of it.

Hey that's fun. You've just dismissed the whole premise for Nimue needing to die in the first place since if that's right Nimue could simply have had the PICA removed from the list. Where does it say his computers were hacked? His list differs from Shan-wei's but that doesn't mean his list was hacked, it just means the two lists were different and I can think of a bunch of reasons for that.

The point of this is IF Schuler did know what could he do?

Is there anything in the text somewhere which suggests he could have found the cave even if he did know about it that I've missed?

Could he have left a message? Who would he leave it for and what would it say?

Nick wrote:I think this is more of a case of RFC attempting to show that P is not true by stating that if P then Q where Q is known to be false.

Lest anyone starts to look for trolls under bridges, I refer the interested reader to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies.

Moreover, a short peak at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire might be helpful.

anwi wrote:

Tonto Silerheels wrote:What we have here is a conditional statement: IF P THEN Q. What you've concluded is that therefore Q. (You went on to claim IF Q THEN R, and ask what is R?)

Congrats, you're in tune with the spirit of the forum. And what could be more inspiring than a discussion of formal binary logic? Thus:
(R --> Q) -/-> (-R --> -Q)
-/-> {-R, Q} = {0}
Moreover, I never claimed Q --> R.
In deed, by petitio principii and argumentum ad consequentiam the writ has every reason to warn against demons preaching sedition. Finally, the original statement is from RFC, he demonstrably likes to mislead by inducing us to -R --> -Q, it follows that my assertion must hold.
So, why would there be a "very questionable assumption"?

(Edit to clarify notation.)

I think the focus of my eyeballs went soft. This is just like those guys who think that it looks sophisticated to write theology with long, indecipherable Latin terms rather than just using plain English.

By the way, is this what is known as "chop logic?"

Don

n7axw wrote:

This is just like those guys who think that it looks sophisticated to write theology with long, indecipherable Latin terms rather than just using plain English.

Oh, no! What anwi wrote is just a highly unambiguous way to write things. It's like if I were to say, "I shall waste no time reading this." Do I mean that it's so good that I shall start immediately? Or do I mean that it's so bad that reading it would be a waste of time? Ambiguities like that are avoided by writing as anwi has. Now, ambiguities still creep in despite the greatest efforts to avoid them. For example, I never explicitly stated what R was. I intended for it to mean a statement of the form R1 and R2 and R3, etc. Where each Rn is a consequence of there being a warning in the writ of demons teaching sedition. So, R1 might be Rayno is promoted to Grand Inquisitor, and R2 might be twice as many Safeholdians oppose Charis than otherwise would, and R3 might be Cayleb is killed in August, and R4 might be Earl High Mount marries Sharleyan, and R5 might be Lewis discovers fusion, and so on.

Therefore anwi's statement (R --> Q) -/-> (-R --> -Q) in English might mean something like: if the consequences of a warning in the writ imply that there is a warning in the writ then it doesn't necessary follow that the lack of such consequences implies that there is a lack of such warning. And he's right. What anwi's said is indisputable.

Now, I'm having a little more trouble with his conclusion, but it's a problem with the notation. There is a specific notation for set theory, and it doesn't translate well to ascii and this forum. As best I can tell, what he's saying is that the former implies the latter except when there is a warning in the writ and there are no consequences. He's right about that, too. I would delight in saying, "anwi, you're wrong because of ay and bee and cee" but I can't because his logic is unassailable.

~Tonto

n7axw wrote:

This is just like those guys who think that it looks sophisticated to write theology with long, indecipherable Latin terms rather than just using plain English.

p.s. anwi also wrote, "Moreover, I never claimed Q --> R," and he's sort-of-right about that, too. In English, "I never claimed Q --> R" means ,"I never claimed that a warning in the writ implied there were consequences," and he's sort-of-right about that, too. There are logics wherein forall x, P implies exists x, P, and anwi would be wrong if he were using one of those logics. However, he never stated which logic he was using, so it's entirely possible that he's using a logic where that's false. If he is, then he's right when he said he never claimed that a warning in the write implied that there were consequences, so I'm foiled again from claiming anwi is wrong.

~Tonto

n7axw wrote:

This is just like those guys who think that it looks sophisticated to write theology with long, indecipherable Latin terms rather than just using plain English.

Moreover, anwi wrote something like, "In deed, by petitio principii and argumentum ad consequentiam the writ has every reason to warn against demons preaching sedition." Petitio principii means, "I'm right because I'm right" and argumentum ad consequentiam means something like "I'm right because it's too horrible to think about what if I'm wrong." So, once again, anwi is right because of ex falso quadlibet. Sorry, "anything follows from a contradiction." I conclude that anwi means that even if he's wrong then the writ might include an injunction against demons preaching sedition, and he's right again. I'm stymied at every turn. I feel like a chess neophyte playing against Boris Spassky.

~Tonto

I just tuned out.
Forget the Q, R, as well as S, T, U, V...

Reminds be of irritating discussions of various competing theories on the travel.
i.e.: Just say No.



.

from my reading of the various stories, what I got was several things.

1 Organic Nimue was part of a conspiracy initiated on earth to coincide with the Intended Plan (By TPTB)

2 Nimue arranged to get her PICA into the mission equipment as a minor and insignificant violation of the intended tech base the Colonists were intended to have, and the administrators and planners likely didn't consider it significant enough to care about.

3 Nimue then transferred to the Military "decoy fleet" in order to cause confusion of the records (and drop her PICA off the official list of what went to the colony. )

4 Shan-We, and Admirial Pe (sp) made arrangements to build and outfit Nimue's "cave" in secret while Langhorn and the other "traitors" were busy sabotaging the mission (and arranging to make themselves one step short of "god" )

5 The cave was hidden in such a way as to defeat the best sensors the Terraforming team (and I believe the active military) had access to it would have required longhorn and his traitors to "know" exactly what the threat was, and /or be paranoid enough to search for low probability issues that they likely NEVER thought of, (as they were busy congratulating themselves for pulling a fast one on the government, and planned colony intents. )

6 there has yet to be released anything indicating that Schuler had any concerns and or reason to be worried about a hidden PICA.

7 while Langhorn and his group had access to a lot of material and at least some manufacturing capabilities the things I remember them doing was: building a new temple as a monument to themselves, covering said temple with armorplast to protect it, outfitting said new temple with ac and other "wonders" and "magic" that did violate the letter and spirit of the lowtech plan, but didn't violate the "common sense" prohibitions that would generate footprints that the Gbaba could home in on, (it was noted that the aircars had a MUCH higher signature than Alexandria had.

8 the other thing we don't know is how many layers of precautions did shan-we make, such as records caches, deep buried bunkers and such. We do know that she had gotten a number of people out of Alexandria as Moles and other deep cover agents (to preserve the knowledge) and that her "basic" plans and facilities were not up to surviving the orbital bombardment pasting that they got.

Guardiandashi wrote:from my reading of the various stories, what I got was several things.

1 Organic Nimue was part of a conspiracy initiated on earth to coincide with the Intended Plan (By TPTB)

2 Nimue arranged to get her PICA into the mission equipment as a minor and insignificant violation of the intended tech base the Colonists were intended to have, and the administrators and planners likely didn't consider it significant enough to care about.

3 Nimue then transferred to the Military "decoy fleet" in order to cause confusion of the records (and drop her PICA off the official list of what went to the colony. )

4 Shan-We, and Admirial Pe (sp) made arrangements to build and outfit Nimue's "cave" in secret while Langhorn and the other "traitors" were busy sabotaging the mission (and arranging to make themselves one step short of "god" )

5 The cave was hidden in such a way as to defeat the best sensors the Terraforming team (and I believe the active military) had access to it would have required longhorn and his traitors to "know" exactly what the threat was, and /or be paranoid enough to search for low probability issues that they likely NEVER thought of, (as they were busy congratulating themselves for pulling a fast one on the government, and planned colony intents. )

6 there has yet to be released anything indicating that Schuler had any concerns and or reason to be worried about a hidden PICA.

7 while Langhorn and his group had access to a lot of material and at least some manufacturing capabilities the things I remember them doing was: building a new temple as a monument to themselves, covering said temple with armorplast to protect it, outfitting said new temple with ac and other "wonders" and "magic" that did violate the letter and spirit of the lowtech plan, but didn't violate the "common sense" prohibitions that would generate footprints that the Gbaba could home in on, (it was noted that the aircars had a MUCH higher signature than Alexandria had.

8 the other thing we don't know is how many layers of precautions did shan-we make, such as records caches, deep buried bunkers and such. We do know that she had gotten a number of people out of Alexandria as Moles and other deep cover agents (to preserve the knowledge) and that her "basic" plans and facilities were not up to surviving the orbital bombardment pasting that they got.

Phew! Finally someone who writes in plain English! I hope that whatever the rest of you guys have caught isn't contagios... gonna have to make sure my cacinations are up to date!