Re: OT: Wildepad

Tim Little wrote:
> On 2008-02-25, Wildepad <noreplies> wrote:
>> I think it is obvious that if they have the amount of information
>> about our culture necessary to do that, their procedure would be far
>> different from the original premise.
> 
> It's so closely identical with their own past that even the lottery
> numbers are the same, and they have ample information about many
> different drawings in arbitrary weeks from the time period they're
> examining.  Yet they have no idea about anything else in that same
> period?

The future-people appear to be quite confident that by getting the 
lottery winnings into a particular person's hands they'll set in motion 
a chain of events that saves the world. This indicates that they have 
done extensive research into the butterflies involved in this particular 
hurricane, so they pretty much _have_ to have a lot of information about 
present-people culture. It's really easy to get, if nothing else you can 
just snatch some past-people to interview at leisure back in the future. 
Maybe steal a library if the time machine's got a big enough capacity.

IMO Wildepad's just carrying on his pattern of using any justification 
that comes to mind to preserve the original scenario, no matter how 
illogical or implausible. And doing so in a thread that was started to 
discuss that very pattern, aptly enough.