I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.[1] Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.

If a physician make a large incision with an operating knife and cure it, or if he open a tumor (over the eye) with an operating knife, and saves the eye, he shall receive ten shekels in money. …

If a physician make a large incision with an operating knife, and kill him, or open a tumor with an operating knife, and cut out the eye, his hands shall be cut off. ...

If a physician heal the broken bone or diseased soft part of a man, the patient shall pay the physician five shekels in money.

Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.

The laws of nature, as we understand them, are the foundation of our knowledge in natural things. So much as we know of them has been developed by the successive energies of the highest intellects, exerted through many ages. After a most rigid and scrutinizing examination upon principle and trial, a definite expression has been given to them; they have become, as it were, our belief or trust. From day to day we still examine and test our expressions of them. We have no interest in their retention if erroneous. On the contrary, the greatest discovery a man could make would be to prove that one of these accepted laws was erroneous, and his greatest honour would be the discovery.

In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton’s laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction.

It's easy to see that predators (animals that kill and then eat other animals) are working for the downfall of their prey. But it's also true that prey are working for the downfall of their .fedators. They work hard to escape bei and it they all succeeded the predators would starve to death. The same thing holds between parasites and their hosts. It also holds between members of the same species, all of whom are actually or potentially competing with on another. If the living is easy, natural selection will favour the evolution of improvements in enemies, whether predators, prey, parasites, hosts or competitors: improvements that wilvill make life hard again. Earthquakes and tornadoes art unpleasant and might even be called enemies. but they are not out to get you' in the same 'Sod's Law' kind of way that predators and parasites are.

liis has consequences for the sort t of mental attitude that any wild animal, such as an antelope, might be expected to have. If you are an antelope and you see the long grass ri tling, it could be just the wind. Ihat's nothing to worry about, for the wind is not out to get you: it is completely indifferent to antelopes and their well-being. But that rustle in the long grass could be a stalking leopard, and a leopard is most definitely out to get you: you taste good to a leopard and natural selection favoured ancestral leopards that were good at catching antelopes. So antelopes and rabbits and minnows, and most other animals, have to be constantly on the alert. The world is full of dangerous predators and it is safest to assume that sometl a bit like Sod's Law is true. Let's put that in in the nguage of Charles Darwin, the languagige e of natural selection: those individual animals tha act as though Sod's Law were true are more likely to survive and reproduce than those individual animals that follow Pollyanna's Law.

Our ancestors spent much of their time in mortal danger from lions and crocodiles, pythons and sabretooths. So it probably made sense for each person to take a suspicious - some might even say paranoid - view of the world, > to see a likely threat in every rustle of the grass. every snap of a twig, and to assume that something was out to get him, a deliberate agent scheming to kill him. 'Scheming' is the wrong way to look at it if you think of it as deliberate plotting, but it is easy to put the idea into the language of natural selection: 'There are enemies out there, shaped by natural selection to behave as though they were scheming to kill me. The world is not neutral and indifferent to my welfare. The world is out to get me. Sod's Law may or may not be true, but behaving as if it is true is safer than behaving as Pollyanna's Law is true.'

But where, says some, is the King of America? I'll tell you. Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law OUGHT to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony, be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.

Every point mass attracts every single other point mass by a force pointing along the line intersecting both points. The force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them

The relative interattractiveness invisibly operative between any two remote-from-one-another cosmic bodies, as compared to any other pair of cosmic bodies, equally distanced from one another, is proportional to the multiplicative product of the respective couple's masses, and the interattractiveness of any pair of celestial bodies varies inversely as the second power of the distance between them. Halve the intervening distance and the interattractiveness increases fourfold.