Talk:Somebody Else's Problem field

Untitled
I tried to clean up the grammar a bit, and clarify some of the main points. I also removed the bit about how the spaceship's drive was powered and who owned it. It detracted a bit from the main points of the article, but it would be great to have a link to that information. Do we have a page on the ship itself? This would be the perfect place to put the info, and then just link to it from this page. I couldn't remember the name of the ship, so I didn't write one. :) --Micah Hainline 01:32, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't recall reading about Jim Moran in the hitchhiker books. I'll have to double check to make sure. However, if Mr. Moran is in fact fictional, then perhaps we should make that clearer. --Misfit 02:16 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Moved from article pending fact-checking:


 * The SEP field was discovered by American philosopher Jim Moran, who went to a cocktail party with a small length of string with one end looped around his ear and the other held in the corner of his mouth. He did not explain or mention the string, and found that nobody else at the party did either.

-- Tim Starling 02:25 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I still need to find my copy of Life, the Universe, and Everything so I can make sure that the above passage is not part of a fictional history concocted by Douglas Adams. However, I am 90% certain that it is not. I did, however find the following passage at http://www.sniggle.net/perfart.php


 * In one example, Jim Moran went to a cocktail party, dressed for the occasion except for one anomalous accessory: a small length of string looped around his ear and extending into one corner of his mouth. Moran didn't explain the string to anyone. He didn't even mention it... and nobody else did either! And thusly the Somebody Else's Problem Field was discovered.

As you can see, it is very similar to the Wikipedia entry. Since this was found on a webpage that documents hoaxes and deceptions, I think it's safe to leave this passage out of the article. (Interestingly enough, the text on sniggle.net links back to wikipedia.) --Misfit 22:11 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The article seems somewhat inaccurate in that in the Hitchhiker books, the SEP field is actually something that must be 'run', not something generated by an unusual or bizarre situation:


 * The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.  If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there. -- Life, The Universe and Everything

This seems to suggest that an SEP field does have to be erected, so it might be a good idea to edit this article to reflect this, but I'm not sure how it'd be best to do this. -- Alexwatson 20:15 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Cf. Garrett's Tarnhelm Effect
The SEP Field is also very close to Randall Garrett's Tarnhelm effect in Too Many Magicians, one of the earliest sorcery/detective novels, serialized in Analog in the early 1970s or late 1960s. One viewing an object covered by the Effect assumes it to be of no importance and looks elsewhere; a plot point turns on how a nonmagician negates the Effect in a swordfight. "This is very close to the idea suggested by Terry Pratchett"


 * There are similarities, but also differences. The main one is that if an area is affected by the Tarnhelm Effect you can't look directly at it; rather than being influenced to filter it out, you subconciously look away. (In the book they deduce a Tarnhelm Effect can't have been used by the murderer to hide in the bath, because one of the detectives looked straight into it.) It still may be close enough to be worth mentioning though. Daibhid C 23:22, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Doctor Who?
Is the "chameleon" capability of a working TARDIS (not the Doctor's beat-up TARDIS) in the same family? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 05:09, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't really think so. "Cloaking" and "Chameleon" capabilities are standard sci-fi fare, but this is a humorous version that is fairly unique to Douglas Adam's universe. --Micah Hainline 23:47, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Remove Real life example area?
It seems to me this section is rather out of place, and as such should be somewhere else. Not necessarily somewhere else, perhaps nowhere at all, but most definitely not here. The idea of static filtering bears resemblance to the idea behind the Somebody Else's Problem field, but they are not so much so. It's a lot like cereal and soup. At first, they seem similar, they're both in a bowl, you use spoons to eat both, they're both very liquid, but they are most certainly different. So? (Frazz 00:29, 20 March 2007 (UTC))

Candace Pert
According to the What the bleep do we know article, Candace Pert wrote something similar in her book Molecules Of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine:
 * For example, when the tall European ships first approached the early Native Americans, it was such an "impossible" vision in their reality that their highly filtered perceptions couldn't register what was happening, and they literally failed to "see" the ships.

Maybe this deserves a mention too? 87.64.205.127 15:47, 9 June 2007 (UTC)


 * if anyone honestly believes that the native americans could not see the spanish ships then I have a bridge to sell you --Ceas webmaster 18:53, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

= Consolidating all SEP-like technology references? = When reading this article, I see a lot of links referring to 'fictional mechanisms' that do the same thing as the SEP. I'd really like to put up an article about the usefulness of SEP-like technologies and the alternatives, and all the situations and shows it occurs in. It would be a good starting point for discussing fictional technology like SEP from a narrative (story/script writer's) standpoint. After all, most of the use of this tech is to prevent mass panic among the general public when the characters are interacting with the world (the same reason the SGC in Stargate SG-1 is covered up) Stoney3K 23:05, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

I think this is better off on it's own myself. The other stuff that does the same thing as an SEP really doesn't seem like it fits. I mean, we shouldn't put Star Trek stuff in the same category, even if both of them make a spaceship invisible. The SEP is mostly just a unique bit of Douglas Adams dark humor about how people are sheep-like and only see what they want to see. There really aren't many science fiction underpinnings here. It's not really about the technology, nor the plot device (it could have been omitted, and the "plot" of Hitchhiker's Guide would have remained unchanged), it's just commentary on the human condition. --Micah Hainline 23:55, 10 September 2007 (UTC)