Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site security.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!security!wdr From: wdr@security.UUCP (William D Ricker) Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: Re: Alien Aliens Message-ID: <341@security.UUCP> Date: Wed, 22-Jun-83 13:00:48 EDT Article-I.D.: security.341 Posted: Wed Jun 22 13:00:48 1983 Date-Received: Wed, 22-Jun-83 23:19:20 EDT References: <64@umcp-cs.UUCP> Organization: MITRE Corp., Bedford MA Lines: 23 In responce to the article asking for good aliens: An acquantance of mine, Bob Butler, wrote in the current issue of The Wild Hunt [the FRP Gaming magazine published by Mark Swanson (Hi Mark!)] about alien mind-sets. He described an encounter he had had with a being which thought and argued in entirely different patterns than he did, and thus they could not communicate. The entity in question was a philosophy professor who treated all discourse as syllogism and would attack any discourse not in the form of a valid syllogism as UNTRUE. He graded students not on how well the chose positions or how convincing they could be but on how well they could argue a position using oral formal login. Bob, being interested in xenosociology, views this episode as a model Alien Encounter, and apparently uses it to build alien mindsets for fantastic and SF-ish entities in his role playing games. Bill Ricker (617)271-3725 MS k203, The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA, 01730 wdr@security.UUCP (Internet) {allegra,genrad,ihnp4,utzoo,philabs,uw-beaver}!linus!security!wdr (UUCP) wdr@mitre-bedford (ARPA)