Hump day hilarity – missing in action

At 10:20 PM on 10 May, don penman had written:

Issac Asimov wrote a book on basic mathematics which I read therefore I don’t think he was a mathematical illiterate .I don’t think those with advanced mathematical training look to science fiction to understand mathematics.

The impression to be gotten in reading I, Asimov: A Memoir (1994, Bantam paperback edition 1995) – “Chapter 30, Graduate School,” page 90 – was that he considered himself so:

With zoology eliminated, I had to choose either chemistry or physics. Physics was quickly eliminated, for it was far too mathematical. After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that that was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way.

I remembered that line because pretty much the same thing had happened to me in high school; straight A’s in algebra, plane geometry, trig and suchlike, and then – wham! – the calculus of infinitesimals, which subject I was nonetheless required to take and pass in college in order to graduate with my baccalaureate in Biology.
Why calculus? Who the hell knows? Forty-odd years ago, the only area of study in which you needed to know how to integrate under the curve was – I’d been told – neurophysiology, and that sure wasn’t a required course to get yourself a bachelor’s degree and thence into medical school. Indeed, it was never required in either medical school or clinical training. It would’ve been a whole helluva lot better instead to set the pre-med math requirement to encompass statistical analysis, which is massively useful both in biological research generally and in the assessment of clinical diagnostic and therapeutic validity.
I don’t think that “those with advanced mathematical training” were even remotely induced to think about such effort by way of reading science fiction. Insofar as I recall, the only guy who persistently endorsed mathematics qua mathematics was Heinlein…

(Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.)

…and much as I have long delighted in the old guy’s writings, I can’t forget the fact that his devotion to the concept of calculability led him to years of political support for Upton Sinclair and his embarrassing econometric assertions appearing as a plot device in Beyond This Horizon (1942).

In reaction to my earlier post founded upon education and experience beyond David Ball‘s capacity either to attain or to recognize, at 9:23 PM on 15 May, Mr. Ball unsupportedly (rather gormlessly, in fact) whined:

If this was a “debate” Tucci failed in the resolution that I started with.

Tsk. Not even a recapitulation of the alleged “resolution,” much less any simulacrum of a lucid response to what I’d posted in this thread.
Well, heck. What else is to be expected from someone who demands that “reason” not be applied to the consideration of work in the genre of science fiction? He takes my regard of the subject – SF – as “How To Remove All Pleasure From A Genre” when it’s merely obvious that reading what I write here messes with Mr. Ball‘s subjective sense of satisfaction in his drunkard’s walk through scientifiction.
That’s a pity, but then it is a self-inflicted wound from which Mr. Ball is suffering, isn’t it? He whimpers:

Sci-fi is riddled with scientific inaccuracies. Do you even read the stuff? It has opened minds to the possibilities. Open doors to new ideas. Star Trek (the original series) is shlock, but what an influence on the general public and scientific endeavour. Once again, you fail to grasp the impact and influence, but put earth bound constraints to a genre that should have no rules. Fiction is the term being ignored by Tucci, fatally.

Actually, the original Star Trek television series was a remarkable advance on precedent media SF, particularly as a reasoned and conscientious effort to foster viewers’ willing suspension of disbelief by hewing to the recommendations made by Heinlein and his fellow thoughtful professional writers and editors in the genre. In retrospect – from our present perspective as movie and television dramatic presentations in the genre have “stood on the shoulders” of Roddenberry and his collaborators – it can be lightly dismissed only by the illiterate and unthinking as “shlock,” for such an opinion is blatantly unsupported and worth less than nothing in any discussion of the show particularly or the subject at hand generally.
Failing even to follow the link to Wikipedia’s “Definitions of science fiction” Web page (and thus demonstrating that his ignorance is willful and stubbornly impervious to opportunities for amelioration), Mr. Ball even hilariously tries to claim counterfactually that my address of his faults is somehow a “violent reaction.”
This seems to go beyond fallacy in reasoning (Straw Man, perhaps?) and all the way to some sort of persecution reaction.
That “scientific inaccuracies” are commonplace in even “hard” science fiction is not denied, and nobody is more sensitive to this potential for error than are the authors themselves. On the few occasions when I’ve been solicited for error-checking by professional SF writers, I’ve taken note of these “inaccuracies” and helped with corrections. Authors I’ve known have related to me (and others have published) their experiences with the people they’ve accumulated as their “bullsh-t detectors” on subjects technical, much as us primary care grunts accumulate the contact information of clinical specialists upon whom we can call when we’re not quite sure what we ought to do about a particular patient’s medical problems.
Egregious examples of such “inaccuracies” draw fire vigorously from scientifically literate readers, and have done so since – at least! – the 1920s. Mr. Ball gives great reason to doubt that he’s ever so much as glanced through the letters column in an edition of any commercially published science fiction magazine, where such expert critiques are routinely printed, and an author who shows a persistent tendency toward “scientific inaccuracies” does well to avoid SF conventions and even general-access signings in bookstores.
Real science fiction fen are scrupulous and persistent, as Mr. Ball is finding out to his extreme distress.
To aver that science fiction is – or could ever be – “a genre that should have no rules” proves that Mr. Ball is as the beasts that perish when one considers the real roots and nature of the genre, which exerts its “influence on the general public and scientific endeavour” precisely because its writers, editors, publishers, and conscientious readers demand and abide by the “rules.”
As one of the most influential figures in modern SF – arguably the single person most responsible for the genre in its present form – editor John W. Campbell once put it:

Scientific methodology involves the proposition that a well-constructed theory will not only explain away known phenomena, but will also predict new and still undiscovered phenomena. Science fiction tries to do much the same — and write up, in story form, what the results look like when applied not only to machines, but to human society as well.

Let Mr. Ball read and enjoy science fiction as his limitations give him capacity to do so, but by no means let anyone succumb to the notion that he qualifies in any way as able to perceive and value the qualities that make such writings different from any other work of fiction.
It seems all to be the same to Mr. Ball, and I would not have him better educated for all the pearls one might fling before him.