h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A610561

This is my second entry to the guide. I believe that when the major categories are Life, The
Universe, and Everything, at least one of these topics should go into more detail. I have done my
best to define Life. Please consider this and decide if it is worthy of being entered.

airdemon

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Sorry, someone had to say it...

H.

Hi, airdemon!
I think you may find that the reason there is no general entry on 'Life' is that this is trickier than it looks at first sight. When you are dealing with 'what is life' you are dealing with scientific definitions, which really need more detail than you have given here. (e.g. what about anaerobic organisms that don't need oxygen? where do you draw the line with viruses, which hijack living cells but have no cell machinery of their own? etc. etc.)

When you deal with the meaning of life and the question of an afterlife, you have subjects on which enormous towers of philosophy and religion have been built. Mixing this with a scientific first section is very tricky.

I think you might be better off taking a narrower subject to work on for your first attempt at an edited entry. I think if you apply the same care to writing on a narrower topic than this, you could produce something well worthwhile.

Azara

Airdemon,

I notice that you only arrived here in h2g2 two days ago. Welcome! Relax and take some time to look around. You can write Guide Entries any time you like and they will immediately become part of the Guide, as soon as you push the Add Entry to Guide button. They are then available for everyone to see.

Peer Review is for really good entries that the Editors want to pick as being "the best". They are then known as Edited Guide Entries. You should probably write a few normal entries before you start submitting them to Peer Review. Look at some of the entries that appear each day on the Front Page under Editor's selection. See the way they are written, the amount of information in them and the style. When you can produce something just as good, that's when you start submitting to Peer Review.

You could try the Writer's Workshop as well. You will get lots of advice there on improving the style of your entries.

Well done. I hope to see lots of stuff from you in the near future.

Hi airdemon, and welcome to H2G2.

Don't take either of the above as being negative: I think I speak for both Azara and Gnomon when I say we'd all like to see your stuff get in. (I've "met" both before, i.e. had some sort of correspondence). I'm interested in the subject you've brought up, and I think it's one of those entries which sounds really simple at first and then develops into a whole mess of stuff once you really start thinking about it.

I had a similar experience when I saw an Edited Entry on gravity which said that satellites were held up by centrifugal force, and that rockets worked by pushing against their exhausts (actually, it didn't say exactly that, but I was new then and I got annoyed from a physics point of view). Anyway, I ended up writing an article on Centrifugal Force, and one on Rockets and Jets, which led onto an entry on Bussard Ramjets, which required an entry on different types of jet engine, and there was also one on Coriolis force as an adjunct to centrifugal force.

It was only AFTER I'd knocked all that stuff out, lots of arguments had been had and some sort of consensus had been reached and one of the things had been recommended that someone suggested that the whole thing could be covered by a University project. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me, because the entries were already in the system, but if you're quick, you can get this made into a project rather than an entry.

The University is basically a way (I think) of generating a number of linked entries all at once, with expert input from a number of collaborators, and the really cool thing is if your project get accepted and finished, it stays on the front page for a WEEK, not just a day.

Have a look at the University of Life pages, because if ever there was a subject that the University of Life should cover, this is it!

Best of luck

H

ok ok, i guess i am pushing it a bit. i'll clam down . thanks for the advice. perhaps some people could get some ideas from this and we can come up with a really good entry for Life.
the reason i wrote this is because i searched for Life, and saw nothing. i was shocked. like i said in the article, whith main topics of Life, The Universe, And Everything, you expect there to at least be an ATTEMPT! . i'll start calming down and not suggesting my articles for peer review unless i think they're REALLY good. i'll let other's judge em for me .

thanks again.

robert

Actually I\m working on a "Life (and the meaning of)" entry with another researcher, it still isn't on h2g2 but it is in the writeing.
I'll use your stuff, and also tell you when it's online and you can help with it's progress then, before it goes on PR

It IS a much much bigger entry, and we are thinking of maybe making it a University project, because of it's size. It is kind of a trickey task though


Dancer

So, is this thread ready to move on and out of Peer Review? Should we move the thread to the entry?


Mikey

I Think so... though my Life entry seems to be going nowhere soon


Dancer

Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'Peer Review' to 'Life'.