Drifting at the Edge of Time and Space

'Sleep on It:' Separating Inspiration From Indigestion

2012-01-24T11:14:00.001-06:00

Looks like the question isn't so much getting good ideas. It's telling the difference between a good idea, and one that's not. And some research says that "sleep on it" is pretty good advice.

"How Do We Identify Good Ideas?"
Jonah Lehrer, Frontal Cortex, Wired Science Blogs (January 23, 2012)

"I've always been fascinated by the failures of genius. Consider Bob Dylan. How did [Dylan] ... conclude that Down in the Groove was worthy of release? Or what about Steve Jobs: what did he possibly see in the hockey puck mouse? How could Bono not realize that Spiderman was a disaster? And why have so many of my favorite novelists produced so many middling works?

The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity. (The Beatles are the exception that proves the rule, although their subsequent solo careers prove that even Lennon and McCartney were fallible artists.) The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious gifts must still be able to sort their best from their worst, sifting through the clutter to find what's actually worthwhile...."

Don't worry: the writer does get around to telling how we tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one.

"My Fair Lady" - "Oklahoma!" - "Spiderman?!"

By the way, I'd forgotten that someone tried to make Spiderman into a musical. And spent $70,000,000 doing it:

"Bono's 'Spider-Man' musical still weak, critics say"
Reuters (June 15, 2011)

"Broadway's most expensive and ridiculed musical, 'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark,' suffered another round of crushing reviews on Wednesday, a day after its long-delayed official opening drew celebrities such as former president Bill Clinton and actor Robert De Niro.

"The $70 million comic-book adaptation, featuring music by U2's Bono and the Edge, was lambasted earlier this year while playing in a record-breaking 180 previews as its producers struggled to overhaul the production...."

Still, it could be worse. What if someone talked an investor into backing a rewrite of "Hamlet:" as a musical comedy. With songs like Ophelia's "My Dad, So Sad;" and Hamlet's "I Get the Point." Say, maybe that's not such a bad idea after all.

Nietzsche, Experts, and University Students

Lehrer quotes Nietzsche, the gist of which is that artists don't get flashes of inspiration: they're just good at sorting out nifty stuff from the ideas that everybody gets. I'll buy the idea that creativity involves a whole lot of selection and connection of notions. Back to Lehrer's post:

"...A new study led by Simone Ritter of the Radboud University in the Netherlands sheds some light on this mystery. In the first experiment, 112 university students were given two minutes to come up with creative ideas that might alleviate a mundane problem: improving the experience of waiting in line at a cash register.... half of them went straight to work, while the others were first instructed to perform an unrelated task for two minutes. ... this delay was to give the unconscious a chance to percolate, to let that subterranean supercomputer invent new concepts for the supermarket queue.

"There was no difference between the groups in terms of creative output - both the conscious and unconscious/distracted subjects came up with the same number of new ideas. Although previous studies have found an impressive link between unconscious incubation and the imagination – it really is better to sleep on it - that result was not replicated here, perhaps because two minutes of distraction wasn't long enough. (True creativity takes time.)

"Here's where things get interesting. After writing down as many ideas as they could think of, both groups were asked to choose which of their ideas were the most creative. Although there was no difference in idea generation, giving the unconscious a few minutes now proved to be a big advantage, as those who had been distracted were much better at identifying their best ideas. (An independent panel of experts scored all of the ideas.) While those in the conscious condition only picked their most innovative concepts about 20 percent of the time ... those who had been distracted located their best ideas about 55 percent of the time. In other words, they were twice as good at figuring out which concepts deserved more attention...."
(Jonah Lehrer)

Writing For the 19th, 20th, or 21st Centuries

I haven't read Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories for quite a while. In terms of style, they're popular detective stories. I doubt that Doyle thought he was writing 'great literature,' or was trying to snooker his readers into seeing the tales that way.

On the other hand, Doyle wrote those stories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it shows. In "The Hound of the Baskervilles," it takes 342 words to get Watson from a train station to Baskerville Hall. The two paragraphs have some beautifully descriptive prose: but they're long-winded by today's standards.¹

Then there was Charles Dickens, a solidly 19th-century writer. A humorist said that an analysis of the style of Charles Dickens suggested that he was paid by the word. That's a fairly common practice in publishing, and another topic.

English prose got a tad more terse in the 20th century: although I've wondered if 'best sellers' ran longer than the usual novel because publishers figured that readers expected big, heavy books. More topics.

That was then, this is now, and 'how to write online' advice that I've seen often advises brevity. Short sentences. Not too many sentences in a paragraph. Almost the exact opposite to the manner in which I'm prone to compose, given my background not only as a recovering English teacher but also as someone who loves language.

It's an effort, writing tersely.

Jonah Lehrer's style in this post is readable: but I think it's more appropriate for printed matter. Still, he gets the point across.

And I've gotten off-topic again.

Crabs, Sauces, Apples, and Moods

One more of Johan Lehrer's paragraphs, and I'm (almost) done:

"...But waiting isn't the only approach. A few years ago, a team of German researchers gave several dozen subjects a variety of word puzzles known as remote associate problems. The puzzles feature three words (such as 'pine,' 'crab' and 'sauce') that share a common compound word. (In this case, the answer is 'apple.') Here's the clever part: only some of these remote associate problems had an actual answer. The rest were impossible. Interestingly, the scientists found that subjects in a positive mood were far better at figuring out which remote associate problems could be solved and which were a waste of effort. In fact, even when they didn't end up finding the solution, those who were happy were much at figuring out which problems had solutions. As a result, they wasted much less time searching for epiphanies that didn't exist, or chasing down possibilities that didn't pan out...."
(Jonah Lehrer)

Now that's interesting. And contrary to the 'anguished artist' stereotype.

Sometimes a writer can't 'sleep on it.' Deadlines loom, and staff writers don't always get time for a second look at their work. But if circumstances permit? It looks like there's evidence that taking time to pick out morsels of inspiration from a plate of mostly-indigestible notions is worth it.

Lehrer lists some good ways to step away from your work. Literally, in some cases:

Take a few days off
Play a stupid video game
Go for a long walk
Sleep on it

When the alternative may be explaining to an investor what happened to $70 million? That sounds like really good advice.

Bottom line? Write in haste, edit with deliberation.

Related (?) posts:

"A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon"
(August 20, 2010)
"Advice, Opinions, Resources, and How-2 for Writers: Over a Hundred Micro-Reviews"
(August 25, 2009)

¹ Excerpt from

"...The train pulled up at a small wayside station and we all descended. Outside, beyond the low, white fence, a wagonette with a pair of cobs was waiting. Our coming was evidently a great event, for station-master and porters clustered round us to carry out our luggage. It was a sweet, simple country spot, but I was surprised to observe that by the gate there stood two soldierly men in dark uniforms, who leaned upon their short rifles and glanced keenly at us as we passed. The coachman, a hard-faced, gnarled little fellow, saluted Sir Henry Baskerville, and in a few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road. Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind the peaceful and sunlit country-side there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.

"The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir. At every turn Baskerville gave an exclamation of delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless questions. To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the country-side, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation - sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles...."
("The Hound of the Baskervilles," Arthur Conan Doyle (1902), via Project Gutenberg)

Oklahoma Earthquake - or - THEY Awakened the Sleeping Spawn of CTHULHU!!!

2011-11-07T08:57:00.005-06:00

Considering the crazy things folks have been known to take seriously, I'd better make a disclaimer: Cthulu is fiction. Make-believe. Not real. Moreover, I don't really believe that Old Ones imprisoned the star-spawn of Cthulhu deep under our feet. Mainly because 'all of the above' are not real. Neither is what I suggest in this post, for the most part.

After writing about the big Oklahoma earthquake in another blog, I realized that part of the post belonged here.

Now, let's see how the desire to blame someone (preferably someone using newfangled technology) the unknown, and a little craziness might make the Oklahoma earthquake even more interesting than it really is.

'Inspired by Real Events' - Awakening Horrors from the Deeps of Time

Ignoring warnings by the Last Seminole Shaman and the Earth First! Society, heartless Big Oil carelessly used hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to release - as they thought - natural gas from the rocks below Oklahoma. (Drama aside, this is true: fracking has been used to extract natural gas in the Oklahoma area.)

But in their Greed and Perverse Ravaging of Fair Mother Nature - whoops, that's more a Captain Planet thing - these unwitting mortals have awakened an Ancient Evil!!! Even now, "unexplained" tremors abound as forgotten horrors from the depths of time burrow inexorably upward, seeking to destroy those who released them, and re-establish - - - well, you get the idea.

Keep doing that for about 100,000 words, and you've got a novel.

Hey! Maybe Big Oil woke up the big guy himself: Cthulhu.

More-or-less-related posts:

"Lemming Tracks: Oklahoma Earthquake, 'Unexplained Increase,' and Sounding Crazy"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (November 7, 2011)
"Gods, Demons, and Used Spaceship Dealers"
(February 13, 2010)
" 'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien"
(December 9, 2009)
" 'Waiting on a Dead World' "
(October 31, 2009)
"Advice from C. L. Moore: Read What You Enjoy Most, and Some Rambling"
(September 28, 2009)

The Generic Science Fiction Story of the Future

2011-06-07T16:34:00.000-05:00

I've been watching episodes of the old Buck Rogers serial, on TCM. Not regularly, but I've caught a few of the installments of the old Saturday matinee short feature.

The acting and cinematography are not up to Citizen Kane standards - but I've gathered that the 1930s Buck Rogers serial was more of a potboiler, than conceived as a great work of the cinematic arts. Special effects are, all things considered, pretty good.

Yes, they show Saturn appearing out of the clouds of outer space, spaceships sound like they're run by lawnmower engines, and we haven't had control systems that big and unwieldy for decades. But then, today's on-screen science fiction is - no, I am not going to get off-topic.

Been There, Read That

I know what "The Future" is supposed to look like: Buck Rogers' version; the Logan's Run effort; Escape From New York; A Boy And His Dog; and Escape From L.A..

Where, oh, where does Hollywood keep coming up with these new ideas? And that's yet another topic. Sort of.

The point is, we've got a fairly small number of standard-issue, generic, plug-in-your-character, science fiction "futures" by now. Nothing wrong with that, I think - as long as a writer - and readers - remember that science fiction/speculative fiction/whatever is a quite - mature? - genre by now.

I've been playing with a setting of the Buck Rogers/Star Wars flavor. (Yes - George Lucas knew about B.R., I've got fans in my family) I've mentioned Galaxy Cadet before. I'm fighting my OCD tendencies, successfully for the most part, and trying to remember how much fun I had, decades back, with the Star Trek universe. Pre-movies.

It's a good excuse for me to dust off my ambition to do a readable comic book.

These days, happily, I don't have to try to kid some publisher that it'll be the next [fill in your favorite series]. Yet one more topic.

Sort-of-related posts:

"Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis"
(March 5, 2010)
"Overused Science Fiction Cliches: or, 'You Mean, Beings of Pure Energy Isn't a New Idea?'"
(December 4, 2009)
"The Future and Other Ideas"
(October 24, 2009)
"Green Lantern Oath: Something to Think About"
(July 23, 2009)
"Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
(June 26, 2009)

Products Have Names

2011-06-07T13:23:00.000-05:00

A utility van - a Klaxon-6, made by Baden-Baden Auto and Gravel Sifter Works

Now, doesn't a name like that make you want to go out and buy one?

Probably not. But that's not the point in this case.

Not-completely-unrelated posts:

"London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
(February 26, 2010)
"Making a Plausible Setting"
(February 22, 2010)
"Creativity, Research, and Finding a Cool Name That's Not Been Used"
(January 20, 2010)
"Procyon and Names"
(November 14, 2009)
"Names: Castle Dampthorn, Regsellend, and the Indo-Europeans"
(October 20, 2009)

"...So We Built One..."

2011-05-18T22:16:00.006-05:00

"...When humanity spread among the stars, we hoped to find vast, complex civilizations.

"They weren't there.

"So we built one...."
('Notes of a Traveler,' Otha Sisk)

Sort-of-related posts:

"Thought for the Day: Fate and Character"
(October 30, 2009)
" '...Into the Future...' - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme"
(July 3, 2009)
"Excerpts and Inspirations II"
(July 2, 2009)
"Excerpts and Inspirations"
(June 26, 2009)
"Prologue"
(June 23, 2009)

Continuity and All That

2011-02-26T12:05:00.002-06:00

I've discussed what I call 'Star Trek syndrome' before. (February 1, 2010) That's where a writer starts out with a nifty, plausible-seeming idea and starts adding detail. Then, after a few stories, discovers that the details won't fit together.

Or readers may discover the inconsistencies.

It's called "continuity," but I think 'Star Trek syndrome' sounds cooler.

A related issue is picking the wrong narrator. Or a narrator who can't do what the writer wants, in terms of telling the story.

That happened to me, with the Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette blog. It turned out to be a good way to give me practice at writing short, (relatively) tightly-worded posts: and provided me with quite a bit of background for Loonfoot Falls, a small town in central Minnesota.

Then, last year I realized that the blog, which was mostly 250-word columns in the fictional small town's newspaper, couldn't tell some of the stories I wanted it to.

That wasn't the only reason I've taken a sabbatical from that blog, but it was a major one.

A human-interest column like that, published in a small-town weekly, has limitations. Don't expect a conventional rant about repressive small-town parochialism: it's just a cultural thing. Small-town weeklies, in my experience, tend to focus on the positive aspects of personal stories. When they're not reporting 'regular' news: which is about the same in small towns as it is anywhere else.

There's a reason why I'm not at all likely to read a celebrity exposé in Sauk Centre, Minnesota's, newspaper. It's not that we lack folks like, say, Charlie Sheen or Paris Hilton. There was a fellow who got in the paper after he ran buck-naked down Main Street. The difference is that the paper treated the incident as another bit of local news, and left it at that. No op-ed about the unfairness of anti-streaker laws, the lack of a naked-pedestrian lane on local streets, or a wig-picker's explanation for why it isn't the fellow's fault. Or wasn't: the 'victim of society' fad seems to have faded.

And I've gotten off-topic.

The point is that I need to find a suitable viewpoint character for more Loonfoot Falls accounts. Or maybe take the one I have, and change the venue.

Somewhat-related posts:

"What I've Done, What I Plan to Do"
(February 22, 2011)
"A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon"
(August 20, 2010)
"Epic Scale and Painting the Floor"
(February 1, 2010)
" 'Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313' - a Short-Short Story"
(November 2, 2009)

Making Comics: Status Report, February 24, 2011

2011-02-24T17:59:00.000-06:00

I posted a sort of status report on Tuesday, and this far-from-remarkable picture of a door:

There's an explanation for that, which is what this post is about. Mostly.

I've wanted to create comics for a long time, and tried once or twice. With unsatisfactory results. This winter I gave it another try: and posted a seven-panel sequence in another blog: "Narcissus-X: TRAPPED!," Narcissus-X (February 11, 2011)). I've mentioned Narcissus-X before: a sort of alter-ego and a terribly angsty, self-important artist.

The point is that this time, I told a story in seven panels of pictures and text: with satisfactory results. In my opinion, anyway.

So now I'm starting work on a graphic novel that will rival Shakespeare's King Lear and Adam's Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

Hardly.

But I am doing makee-learnee with several 3D models, sort of an apprenticeship: except without a master to tell me how to get things done. Also, happily, without deadlines.

It's not as frivolous an approach as it may seem. I've found that starting work on a project and learning skills as I go is more effective, and a lot less frustrating, than trying to slog through most tutorials.

In this case, I've started with a set of already-completed models, created by some folks who know what they're doing. Their screen names are Predatron, maclean, and Stonemason. Here's what I had at the beginning of this week:

Most of the urban scene is Predatron's City Streets: what's on this side is a collection of models by maclean.

So far, the only work I'd done was to stack some of mclean's models to make interiors for an office/commercial building whose exterior I'll be working on.

Across the street, one of Predatron's buildings already has a (very simple) interior:

I could leave that building as-is, but decided to play with the interior, instead. I'm pretty sure that the building's interior is intended to give the impression of a complete, occupied building when viewed from the street. The model as it stands gets that job done quite well.

It wasn't until I started measuring the interior that I discovered some oddities in scale. The walls between rooms seemed unreasonably thick for a building of that sort. The ceiling height, about 10 feet, was okay, as was the substantial space between ceilings and the next floor. We've gotten used to seven- and eight-foot ceilings: but buildings weren't always built that way. The doors seem normal - but they're about seven feet tall, in this scale. That's really tall and wide.

So I hid the existing interior for the building and started putting up walls for a small apartment at the front of the building:

The door is the right size - but wasn't satisfactory for what I have in mind. Which is why I made that green one. Eventually, I'll have a plausible-looking small apartment - at least when viewed from some angels.

But that won't be all that interesting, without characters and some sort of story to go with it.

Right now, I'm thinking of doing something like the slice-of-life Gasoline Alley accounts - but have no idea where I'll wind up.

What I've Done, What I Plan to Do

2011-02-22T16:27:00.006-06:00

I haven't posted anything here since November 12, 2010. For several reasons.

I caught what's probably the flu around that time: and haven't really shaken it since. I'm pushing age 60, and next year I am not missing the flu shot.

That's also when I started having problems doing creative work. Dealing with some sort of an influenza-like infection didn't help any, but there may be more going on than that.¹

This post is a sort of status report, telling what's changed in my plans.

Apathetic Lemming of the Month

The Lemming's blog is fun to research and write for: but I've decided that it's time to cut back a little. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (February 21, 2011))

Loonfoot Falls, Minnesota

From May 23, 2008 to November 5, 2010, I'd been cranking out a 250-word post each week in Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette, yet another blog. The idea was to develop the setting, a small town in Minnesota. Quite fictional: although it's at least as accurate a picture as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. I actually live in a small town in central Minnesota: and that's almost another topic.

Then, in mid-November of last year, I realized that I was having a hard time creating new posts - and not all that many folks had been visiting that particular blog. Since I had a modestly rich set of characters, settings, and situations established: I haven't written anything for that blog since.

The odds are pretty good that I'll restart the Gazette column - and I'm getting to that.

Only So Many Hours in a Day

Some creative types work in a studio - either as a member of a team led by someone else, or as the chief 'idea' person. There's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

As I recall, the big creative names in Renaissance Italy, besides being talented artists, ran businesses. These days they'd be commercial artists, interior designers, and a plethora of other job titles. They didn't necessarily do all the work on every piece that had their name on it - any more than Walt Disney or George Lucas have been doing all the work in movies they've made.

Like I say, I have no problem with that. The idea, as I see it, is to get a movie, or a comic strip, or something else 'out the door,' and if it takes a team to do it well: it takes a team.

Which doesn't have all that much to do with what I'm doing.

I'm one person. I've gotten help, from time to time, from members of my family: but there isn't much that I write or display that I didn't make myself.

That's kind of nice for my ego - when the results come out well - but it puts very real limitations on just how much I can expect to get done. Which is why I've cut back on how much I write each day.

The World of Loonfoot Falls

As I wrote those posts about Loonfoot Falls, Minnesota, I found I was collecting material about the semi-fictional world the town was in. I made notes as I went along, even when the idea never made it into one of those 250-word posts.

There's a big difference between some nifty ideas, and a story or picture involving them that someone else might find interesting. Or, I hope, entertaining.

What I've started working on is playing with that 'extra' material from the Loonfoot Falls project, and seeing if I can make them into stories, or illustrations: or something.

Which is part of what I was working on today. Here's what I have to show for most of an afternoon's work on the world of Loonfoot Falls:

That's right: It's a door. An ordinary door that someone's apparently painted green. Or some color that's sort of green.

Not very impressive, by itself.

But, it's a start.

Not-entirely-unrelated posts:

"Facts, Frustration, and Fear"
A Catholic Citizen in America (January 28, 2011)
Particularly
- "'There's a Hole in My Mind'
Technical Difficulties
Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette (November 13, 2010)
"A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon"
(August 20, 2010)
"Getting Serious by Getting Silly: Meet Galaxy Cadet Aster Alpha"
(March 28, 2010)
" 'Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313' - a Short-Short Story"
(November 2, 2009)

Background:

"The Art Market in Renaissance Florence: Workshops, Production and Business Strategies" (.pdf)
New York University in Florence (Spring 2009

¹Something quite unpleasant happened around Christmas time, back in '60s, and I the way I get frantic around that time of year may be more than the usual cultural craziness. I discussed that in another blog. (A Catholic Citizen in America (January 28, 2011))

It's That Kind of a Family

2010-11-12T18:26:00.001-06:00

This evening, one of my kids said "and whatever you do, don't make eye contact with the blender."

It's that kind of a family.

Well, That's Interesting: Military Occupations

2010-11-11T19:42:00.003-06:00

My efforts at being 'creative' have been frustrated, a bit - not by anything big, but by a whole lot of little things. Like a pipe in the laundry room bursting. Well, maybe that was sort of big.

Anyway, I've done what I sometimes do when writers block seems to be made of reinforced concrete. I research.

It's great, not having a deadline. Or not so great - and that's another topic.

Back on track.

A 'Galaxy Cadet' story involves military occupations. I could follow the lead of major motion picture studios, and do my research by watching M*A*S*H reruns. Or maybe be very serious and watch Apocalypse Now. Maybe that's unfair. I'm sure that some folks in the entertainment industry are able to do a little fact-checking. And that's yet another topic.

Instead, I did a Google search.

I know, "I read something on the Web" has come to mean "I have not clue and believe anything I hear." True enough, there's a lot of - somewhat alternatively-accurate assertions out there.

And there is a massive amount of reliable sources.

Like ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) - an ancient (by contemporary standards) repository of knowledge.

Here's what I found:

"Military Career Guide: Employment and Training Opportunities in the Military."
ERIC
Available online
- "Military Career Guide: Employment and Training Opportunities in the Military" (PDF)
  Military Entrance Processing Command (DOD) (November 1989)

The PDF document seems to have been created from a microfiche copy of the original publication. The original's photographs and most of the illustrations are, well, poorly reproduced. The text, though, is quite readable. By a human being. The document's information is stored as a series of graphics - not text.

I've gotten most of what I wanted from it - and figured I'd pass the links along.

Exoplanets, MIT, Mathematics, and Thinking With a Cold

2010-10-18T18:41:00.004-05:00

It's almost two months since I've done a post here. There's some excuse - or explanation, at any rate. A busted pipe in the laundry room created something a distraction, for one thing. ("Busted Water Pipe, Day 32: Plumbing Progress and Regress," Through One Dad's Eye (October 18, 2010))

Now, back to the general topic of this blog.

You've heard of writer's block? I've got something more like writer's fog. I've heard that I'm recovering from a cold - and that may be so. I don't feel sick, which is nice. I don't even feel tired. But it's been one of those Mondays where I can't seem to think all that well.

Like I said, I'm recovering from a cold. Or so I've heard.

'Creative' work being off the table, I decided to do a little - wait a minute. "Off the table?" What does that mean? Did 'creative' work fall onto the floor? Maybe I should look there. No. Wait. It's a term from parliamentary procedure. Not 'creative' work. The other thing.

And that's the way it's been today.

Anyway, I decided to do a little research. Like the animated Jackie Chan's Adventure's Uncle: "MORE RESEARCH!" I like that series. Don't watch it much now.

Anyway, I decided to do a little more research.

About exoplanets. There's quite a bit out there: everything from (fairly) hard data; to serious research; to stuff that may or may not have been intended as a practical joke. Don't get me wrong: some of the more solid resources haven't been 'real' academic or government outfits - dedicated, intelligent amateurs - - - and I'm drifting off-topic again.

The again, sometimes an old-school academic institution gets it right.

CalTech had some interesting pages - some of which I eventually found. They'd done a more-than-usually-creative rehash of their website. Sort of like dropping an encyclopedia into a food processor, hitting 'puree,' pouring out the results and telling folks that they've reorganized the information - please browse our new-and-improved website.

It wasn't that bad, actually, although the data I was looking for wasn't - quite - there. Like I said, they'd 'improved' the website.

I had a little better 'luck' at MIT, finding a 19-page paper about exoplanets by Seager and others. It's in PDF format, and starts with:

"We use new interior models of cold planets to investigate the mass-radius relationships of solid exoplanets, considering planets made primarily of iron, silicates, water, and carbon compounds. We find that the mass-radius relationships for cold terrestrial mass planets of all compositions we considered follow a generic functional form that is not a simple power law:..."
(Seager and others, via MIT)

That "simple power law" uses symbols that aren't in all character code sets, ASCII or otherwise, so I'm not quoting more from that paper here.

Besides, anything that gets into mathspeak after the first 55 words isn't something I want to tackle right now.

On the other hand, it's an excellent resource.

So, in case someone at MIT gets the bright idea of handing their website over to a caffeinated intern for "improvement," I dropped a copy of the PDF file into a server I trust:

"MASS-RADIUS RELATIONSHIPS FOR SOLID EXOPLANETS"
The Astrophysical Journal, The American Astronomical Society (November 10, 2007)
S. Seager, Kuchner, C. A. Hier-Majumder, B. Militzer (Received 2006 December 25; accepted 2007 June 21)

Please note: The AJ of the AAS seems to own the copyright to this paper. A bunch of folks who know a whole lot more math than I do created the paper's content. All I'm doing is putting a copy where I'm reasonably sure I can find it, a week or a month from now.

That disclaimer out of the way, the paper is a pretty good discussion of how mass and size (diameter) are related - or should be - for differentiated and undifferentiated planets. In other words, for planets that are pretty much the same material all the way through, and those with onion-like layers, like Earth.

Mostly, it's a fascinating look at what researchers are doing, making sense of what's being learned about planets circling other suns.

From the point of view of this blog, it's also a pretty good resource for working out plausible fictional planets.

A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon

2010-08-20T15:43:00.003-05:00

I've been spending a moderately productive afternoon in the attic: reading, relaxing, reviewing notes on a story that's starting to almost make sense; and letting my mind off the leash.

That last is an exercise that can have interesting, sometimes entertaining, and occasionally useful results.

On the other hand, occasionally not-so-useful results.

As I was getting toward the bottom of the thermos of coffee I'd taken up with me, I remembered that I had a Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette column to write. That's 250 words for a fictional newspaper in an equally fictional small town. Sort of like Garrson Keillor's Lake Wobegon: except that I actually life in a place like that.

Where was I? Remembering that I had a deadline coming up. Right.

While mulling over my weekly challenge of finding something to write about for that nonexistent small town's imaginary newspaper, this phrase dropped onto the front desk of my mind:

"Loonfoot Falls and eight tiny reindeer."

In the context of what I'd been reading a couple hours earlier, that almost made sense - in a convoluted, quasi-metaphoric way.

I think.

On the other hand, aside from that aphasic glow of self-satisfaction I experience when cool phrases fall out of whatever bit of cognitive ductwork they've been lurking in, there didn't seem to be much I could do with that conjunction of ideas.

Besides, I was starting to feel hot and in need of dealing with all that coffee. Which, eventually, led me back here to my place by a north window.

And I still don't know what I'll do about Loonfoot Falls today.

Setting, Research, and a Telephone Directory

2010-08-03T18:30:00.005-05:00

This post really does get around to the topic of writing. But first:

Minimum Standards and Scraping By

My household's cable got cut while a contractor was removing a couple trees from my back yard. Not his fault, I think. Turns out the cable service provider is under the impression that as long as the cable is (just) under the sod, it's okay. Which works fine, until somebody with a Bobcat comes by.

Live and learn.

The point is that I had quite a lot of time on my hands yesterday afternoon. With the cable cut, I couldn't get online - which meant that my blog writing and research (other way around, actually) was a 'once and future' set of tasks.

So I drove over to my father-in-law's, used his phone to contact our ISP/phone/cable television provider, talked, took a few photos - all of which still left with me with time on my hands.

Fairly Normal: For a Guy Who Reads Dictionaries

Some fifty-something guys, in my position, would get out the golf clubs, or watch a replay of the Super Bowl. I transcribed a telephone directory.

It wasn't a very large directory: I ended up with a spreadsheet that's less than 700 lines, top to bottom.

One of my daughters, at least, has been impressed that I read dictionaries. For fun. I don't do so all that often, but sometimes I enjoy going through the pages, looking for interesting words and noting where they came from.

In the case of the phone directory, it was more work than fun - but I'll admit to enjoying the data-entry process.

Getting to Know Another Way of Life

This wasn't just any phone directory: One of America's naval bases has a telephone directory that's available to the public, with what appears to be a modestly-complete list of offices, desks, schools, and stores. Along with, in many cases, which building they're in.

I'm not entirely clear on where Building 160 is: but I don't need to. I've learned that it's the building to go to with questions about vending machines, recreational vehicles, and cable television.

On a naval base? Isn't that, you know, military?

Yes.

I also know how to call someone with questions about child care for kids age six weeks to five years, and the bowling alley's number.

The assumptions I made, taking data from the directory, have me with the bowling alley and a barracks being in the same building. Which either means that my assumptions are wrong - or some sailors aren't getting much sleep.

Why Would Any Sane Person Deconstruct a Phone Directory?!

I wasn't seeking "to expose deep-seated contradictions in a work by delving below its surface meaning" by tweezing apart that phone directory. (deconstruction, Princeton's WordNet) I figured that, once I mined its data and put it into a spreadsheet, I'd be able to see what sort of activities happened on the base, and - in very general terms - how they were organized.

I found out that there were quite a few schools on the base. That wasn't a surprise: I knew that one of its functions was training, and training happens in schools.

I found out that a sailor stationed there could rent recreational vehicles on the base. That was a bit of a surprise.

MAS*H, College, and the Real World

I've enjoyed watching reruns of "M*A*S*H." Because of the show's wide and lasting popularity among American audiences, I've used Frank Burns as an example of a particular sort of mindset in another blog.

But "M*A*S*H" isn't real. It's a moderately well-researched television series - of the 'relevant' sitcom variety. There's an element of truth to many of the show's characters, but I'd no more use it as a reliable reference for military life than I'd watch Star Wars to learn about astrophysics.

I could draw from my own life experiences: but I know better. I'm old enough to have picked up my limp in Vietnam, but my draft classification is 4F - by the time I was in my teens, an x-ray of my left hip joint looked like the last stages of arthritic decay. Which is a topic for yet another of my blogs.

I have no first-hand experience of what life is like on a military base.

I'm certainly not going to trust the sort of impressions I picked up, going to college in America during the seventies and eighties. That was a colorful and strange era in our history - which I strongly suspect will appear in articles on abnormal psychology in centuries to come.

Which is yet again another topic.

So, very little of my own, personal, experience is useful in my research.

Analysis of a phone directory won't give me much of an emotional picture of what it's 'like' to live on an American naval base in the 21st century - but it will, I think, help me build a structure that I can hang more touchy feely information on.

Why Bother?

I've spent about five hours, so far, on this 'phone directory' project. I think it's worth the trouble.

I now know that at least one large American naval base really is like a small town in many ways, with its own 'downtown,' and even a movie theater of sorts.

Nobody would mistake it for a 'real' small town, of course. For example, the analogues to civilian functions seem to be on a smaller scale than what I'd expect in a town of that size that grew naturally.

I also learned that there may be a certain amount of humor in - of all things - the numbers assigned to buildings. This particular base's marina/summer equipment rental facilities are in Building 13.

All This - For Galaxy Cadet?!

I'm doing the research now, because I've been developing background and settings for a story or five about Galaxy Cadet. (March 28, 2010)

I wrote, earlier this year, that I should probably "loosen up" by writing a distinctly non-epic, lightweight story. Being the sort of person I am, my notion of 'loosening up' has now involved analysis of a telephone directory.

It's not as crazy as it sounds: I'll probably be able to use the same research for at least one other setting that's 'back burnered' right now.

Well, That's Interesting: Claytronics

2010-07-01T22:09:00.002-05:00

One of my daughters is 'way ahead of me. I've started to write quite a few stories, she's finished so many that I've lost count.

Which is fine by me: her example may get me fired up to actually finish one of my bright ideas.

Years ago, I jotted down a few notes about a nifty far-future technology: material that could form itself into many different shapes. It's not a particularly new idea. The heavy in one of the Terminator was 'living metal.' Extremely mutable creatures and devices are an old gimmick in science fiction - including a sort of assassin robot that disguises itself as a section of floor to let an unsuspecting guard walk over it. Just like in Terminator 2: where the scene is such a close match to the old story that I have to assume that it's a tribute.

I'd give title and author of the story - but, despite cudgeling my mind: I can't recall. Mars is involved, as I recall - but that doesn't narrow the field by much.

With my luck, I'll remember at 3:00 a.m. and get jerked awake by the part of my brain that was in 'search' mode.

Wrenching myself back on-topic.

My contribution to the notion of mutable technology, if I'd gotten past the note-making stage, would have been using it for control interfaces. The idea was to have a slab of material that could be, as needed, a keyboard, a control yoke, tuning knobs, whatever.

Which I assumed - this was around the turn of the century - would be a hundred or so years out.

So, Tuesday, I read about claytronics:

"Programmable Matter: Today, Robotic Origami; Tomorrow, Claytronics"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (June 29, 2010)

Among the applications for this still-in-the-concept-stage technology: control systems.

I really doubt that it'll take a century to get claytronics ready for consumer tech.

A decade, maybe.

This is hardly an original thought: but one of the challenges for creators of speculative fiction is to imagine 'future technology' that won't be available in department stores in a year or two.

Well, That's Interesting: Synthetic Signaling Cascades and Living Spaceships

2010-07-01T21:53:00.002-05:00

"Living spaceships" is something out of science fiction.

It's also something that's appeared on the horizon of materials technology:

"Synthetic Signals Could Foster Unprecedented Life Forms"
Tech News, Discovery News (July 1, 2010)

"A rush of adrenaline or pain of a burn seem simple enough, but both are the result of complex chemical interactions known as signaling cascades.

"Vital to all life on Earth, scientists are taking the first steps towards a synthetic signaling cascades. The research has powerful implications for how life on Earth could have developed, what life on other planets could look like and lead to stronger materials that can respond to their environmental intelligently.

" 'The machines that we use to travel in space and go to the bottom of the ocean -- to go places where biological organisms can't go -- are complex but also rather simple in that they are dumb pieces of metal stuck together with rivets and glue,' said Jonathan Nitschke, a scientist at the University of Cambridge and the co-author of a recent paper in the journal Nature Chemistry...."

"...The European scientists created a simple mimic of these complex systems with a molecule shaped like DNA. Instead of nucleotides at their center, however, the new molecules had a core made from copper.

"By studying these new, DNA-like molecules, scientists could learn about how life on Earth or other planets might have began or evolved. It could also lead to the creation of new, intelligent materials, which could become stronger or weaker depending on their surroundings with no input from a human controller...."

Don't get too excited about machines adjusting themselves "with no input from a human controller."

Centrifugal governors have managed power output of steam engines since 1788, when James Watt applied a windmill control technology to a steam engine. ("James Watt Biography," World of Physics Biography, via Bookrags) Good thing, too: because human beings aren't particularly good at keeping machines running exactly at a given rate. Centrifugal governors are.

Granted, DNA-like molecules with a copper core instead of nucleotides are a few steps removed from James Watt's day: but the principle of using technology to maintain desired conditions in a system is nothing particularly new.

State-of-the-Art Neuroscience, About Two Dozen Centuries Back

2010-06-01T18:23:00.002-05:00

When it comes to how the universe works, what we know, what we don't know, and what we think we know that just ain't so, has changed quite a lot since information technology made it possible to 'freeze' our thoughts in somewhat permanent form. That's a span of around 5,000 years now. (August 3, 2009, January 4, 2010)

Not that everybody wrote down what they thought. Take Aristotle, son of Nichomachus, for example. He lived almost two dozen centuries ago: from about 384 to 322 BC. These days someone in his position probably specialize by studying some narrow topic. Aristotle's interests included aesthetics, biology, ethics, government, logic, morality, physics, and poetry. ("Aristotole," The Literature Network) Think Leonardo DaVinci in a chlamys.

At least some of Aristotle's books are thought to have been written by his students, from lecture notes. He wouldn't be the first professor who, although brilliant, wasn't quite up to speed on the latest information technology.

On the other hand, I've run into enough sources with phrases like "Aristotle's writings" to think that the ancient genius wrote at least some of his thoughts down, himself.

What We Know, What We Think We Know

It's a little late to have Aristotle take a standardized intelligent test, but there doesn't seem to be much doubt that he was a very smart man. He's credited with getting quite a bit of Western civilization's intellectual life started.

And he seems to have had the good sense to find out what things looked and felt like, before deciding how they worked.

Maybe you've heard that Aristotle thought the brain was a sort of radiator. That's so - sort of - although his analysis of that 'marrow' we keep in our heads was a little more complicated than that.

Considering what he had to work with, I think Aristotle did a pretty good job of analyzing the brain's function. He was wrong, but at least his model was internally consistent.

One of the facts he got right was that the brain has no sense of touch - something that makes in possible for neurosurgeons to operate on the brain of a conscious patient. On the other hand, Aristotle used that fact as a proof of what turned out to be a really wrong idea. Here's part of what Aristotle had to say about the brain:

"...That it has no continuity with the organs of sense is plain from simple inspection, and is still more clearly shown by the fact, that, when it is touched, no sensation is produced; in which respect it resembles the blood of animals and their excrement...."

Don't laugh. Aristotle wasn't stupid - but he was working near the start of Western civilization's efforts to sort out how the universe works.

Two dozen centuries from now, some of what's in your high school science textbook, and what's coming out of CERN, may look a trifle daft, too.

Science and the Speculative Fiction Writer

There's a broad range of approaches to incorporating 'real' science into speculative fiction - from 'science? what science?' to old-school 'hard' science fiction, where the authors seemed more interested in practical applications of what was in the latest science quarterly, than delving into empires of the mind.

I'd just as soon write stories with more-or-less 'real' science: but I like full-bore fantasy, too. As far as I'm concerned, it's 'author's choice,' an aesthetic preference.

That said, the example of Aristotle may give me a lot more wiggle room for my 'real' science, than you might think.

There's an excerpt from one of Aristotle's books at the end of this post, a sort of introduction to his discussion of the brain. His analysis was wrong - but quite a few of his supporting facts were spot-on.

The lesson here, I think, is that someone who's making up 'future science' has a lot of room for the imagination to roam. Me? I'm going to make an effort to see to it that the 'future science' doesn't depend on what we can observe being different. In other words, if rocks fall up in the 36th century: there better be a really good explanation for why they don't now.

Back to Aristotle. His analysis was wrong - but not as much as it may seem. The brain looks like marrow, it feels cold, and it really doesn't have a sense of touch - it so it won't respond when prodded. At least, not in a way that Aristotle - or whoever supplied him with his data - could have observed.

Here's that excerpt:

"Parts of Animals Book II – (Brain)"
Aristotle (English translation), via Alexandra Cuffel (Medieval History), Macalester College

"From the marrow we pass on in natural sequence to the brain. For there are many who think that the brain itself consists of marrow, and that it forms the commencement of that substance, because they see that the spinal marrow is continuous with it. In reality the two may be said to be utterly opposite to each other in character. For of all the parts of the parts of the body there is none so cold as the brain;whereas the marrow is of a hot nature, as is plainly shown by its fat and greasy character. Indeed this is the very reason why the brain and spinal marrow are continuous with each other. For, wherever the action of any part is in excess nature so contrives as to set by it another part with an excess of contrary action, so that the excesses of the two may counterbalance each other. Now that the marrow is hot is clearly shown by many indications The coldness of the brain is also manifest enough even to the touch; and, secondly, of all the fluid parts of the body it is the driest and the one that has the least blood; for in fact it gas no blood at all in its proper substance. Thus brain is not residual matter, nor yet is it one of the parts which are continuous with each but it has a character peculiar to itself, as might indeed be expected. That it has no continuity with the organs of sense is plain from simple inspection, and is still more clearly shown by the fact, that, when it is touched, no sensation is produced; in which respect it resembles the blood of animals and their excrement. The purpose of its presence in animals is no less than the preservation of the whole body. For some writers assert that the soul is fire or some such force. This, however, is but a crude assertion; and it would perhaps be better to say that the soul is incorporate in some substance of a fiery character. The reason for this being so is that of all substances there is none so suitable for ministering to the operations of the soul as that which is possessed of heat. For nutrition and the imparting of motion are offices of the soul, and it is by heat that these are most readily a acted. To say then that the soul is fire is much the same thing as to confound the auger or the saw with the carpenter or his craft, simply because the work is done when the two are near one another...."

The Aliens are Coming! The Aliens are Coming!

2010-04-26T20:20:00.005-05:00

Anybody remember "The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!" (1966)? Now you know where I got the title for this post.

Remember the Klaatu aliens? ("The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951)) Or Star Trek's Organians? Non-corporeal beings - so you just know they're so much nicer than us. More evolved, you know.

Or the aliens in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977). The people who had been committing wholesale kidnappings and property crimes up to and including grand theft-ocean liner? For generations? Reprogrammed some average Joe so that he abandoned his family and trekked across country to the landing site?

Then, when these aliens show up - and bodies that look like the kidnap victims shamble out of the ship - well, the aliens are such cute little guys with big eyes that NOBODY SEEMS TO SEE A PROBLEM. In it's own way, "Close Encounters" is scarier than anything in the Alien cycle.

Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956): except that small town doctor Dr. Miles Bennell and romantic interest Becky Driscoll, instead of being disturbed when they notice that people are being replaced by pod people - are very excited about this wonderful discovery, and set up a clinic for the pod people. I don't think the 1978 remake picked up on that idea. Maybe we'll see it in another remake: one that's more sensitive to the feelings of pod people. Or would be, if they had any.

I had Something In Mind for This Post: What was It?

I started out with aliens, then mentioned Russians, and then rambled on about space aliens for a while. Right. I think I've got it.

INVASION FROM SPACE! DASTARDLY ALIENS RETURN!

It's nothing new: space aliens that are highly evolved - and still act a whole lot like people we don't like. "Independence Day" (1996, for example. Or "Mars Attacks!" (1996 - again).

Those movies were getting back to the well-established (well-worn?) sort of film we saw in the fifties: "The Angry Red Planet" (1959) and "War of the Worlds" (1953).

Moving on.

Looks like today's serious thinkers are moving away from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and drawing toward "Angry Red Planet" and "Mars Attacks!" I know: "Mars Attacks!" is a comedy. Or one of the most unintentionally-funny 'serious' movies I've ever seen.

For example:

"Do Aliens Exist? If So, Will They Kill Us?"
Space News, Discovery News (April 26, 2010)

"We're an inquisitive lot, we humans. But could our inquisitiveness ultimately kill us?

In a new Discovery Channel documentary "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking," the world's most recognized physicist speculates about different forms of alien life and explores efforts under way to search and communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. However, he cautions that perhaps we shouldn't be advertising our location; perhaps we should just sit back and listen instead...."

"...Mankind is all about resources; imagine if a more advanced civilization sees Earth as a bountiful supply of sustenance and sees our civilization as nothing more than ants crawling over a big juicy apple. Wouldn't they just wash us off?..."

Maybe. At least Hawking and company show evidence of having read H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds."

The article's assumption - that our SETI attempts at communication are what aliens would notice - has a point. On the other hand, Earth has been very noisy on radio frequencies for decades. That only started slacking off - maybe - when we started working more with cable and optic fiber networks.

That invasion fleet? They might not be after our resources. The commander might have orders to try reasoning with that party planet first: but do whatever it takes to stop their noise.

That's an idea that probably has been used: but I can't remember running into it.

Space Aliens and the Cold War

Every hear about fears of the Cold War inspiring movies like "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and the interminable 'serious' ancestors of "Mars Attacks?"

So have I

What If the Aliens are Friendly?

I suppose frail(?) humanity could be overrun by pillaging hordes of technologically advanced strip-miners.

On the other hand, what if the frontier of a civilization that's been around for a million years washed over the Solar system? And they weren't out to plunder our planet? They might even work out a deal where we got something in trade for not fussing when they swept up the asteroid belt.

Nice people. Really.

With nth-generation analogs of video games and soft drinks and designer jeans and things we haven't invented yet. All for sale at the local trade center.

That's a tired scenario, too, in a way. Technologically and economically powerful cultures - I'm over-simplifying horribly here - merged during the 19th and 20th century. And are overwhelming the last pockets of cultures that left the mainstream millennia ago.

We've been through this before, in a way. One reason so many European composers were busily writing pieces that incorporated folk tunes of their part of the world was that robust national cultures were overwhelming the smaller, more isolated little 'mini-cultures' within their borders.

Well, it's 'good enough for a story.'

I see I've written about this sort of thing before, sort of: Check out the first of the "Related posts."

Related posts:

"Gods, Demons, and Used Spaceship Dealers"
(February 13, 2010)
"Space Aliens and Killer Monster Robots - From Outer Space; or Pittsburgh"
(January 25, 2010)
"Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe"
(December 8, 2009)
"Advice from C. L. Moore: Read What You Enjoy Most, and Some Rambling"
(September 28, 2009)

I use IMDB as a resource for films - but with War of the Worlds (1953) they goofed. Big time.

Some of the photos associated with that Oscar-winning movie seem to be poster art for the movie. Or maybe CD covers.

The black-and-white photos of girls in silver makeup, with springs on their heads? I've no clue what they're from: but it wasn't the Byron Haskin movie.

Earth Day, 2010; Change; Opposable Thumbs and Responsibility

2010-04-22T18:31:00.017-05:00

It's the 40th Earth Day.

I remember the first one, back in 1970. My take on the 40-year anniversary is summed up in a couple of posts:

"Earth Day, 2010 - or - We Won: Deal With It"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (April 22, 2010)
"Oh, Wow! Earth Day #40: I was There in the Beginning"
Through One Dad's Eye (April 21, 2010)

Those were heady times: in several senses of the word. Quite a bit has changed in the four decades since that first Earth Day. Which is why I wrote so much about lint, this time around.

Change Happens

I've gotten the impression, now and then, that some of the more ardent environmentalists desperately want to keep Earth's ecosystem just the way it is. Or, rather, was: in about 1800.

That would take a lot of doing, I think. We live on a planet that may be coming out of a major period of continental glaciation. Or Earth may be in one of those brief interglacial periods, with more glaciers on the way: The last I heard, the jury was still out on that.

This planet orbits a star that's just a bit variable.

And Earth is covered with that sticky wet stuff we call "life." One of the things that's stayed the same during the last several hundred million years is that life changes.

For example: one of the reasons that recently-discovered Loricifera are important to scientists is that they live in an environment that's similar to this planet's oceans: about 600,000,000 years ago.

Locifera? They're animals. That don't use oxygen. And don't have mitochondria. At all.

Like I said: change happens.

With Opposable Thumbs Comes Great Responsibility

The fellow in the picture there might stick out in a crowd today, even with a haircut and contemporary clothes. On the other hand, we haven't changed all that much in the last 1,600,000 years. Like us, he lived in a house with a kitchen. The family didn't have Frigidaire appliances, and espresso wouldn't be developed for over a million years: But the more we find out about Homo Erectus, the more they start 'looking like' us.

Sure: his expression isn't what you see in newspapers, other than supermarket tabloids. But think of him saying something like "whaddaya mean, they only come in green or gray?!" or "you want three rocks, you carry one!"

What's the point?

Those folks were using fire to process their food.

That's a dangerous technology. I've written about this before. (December 9, 2009)

We learned how to use fire without setting fire to our surroundings - or ourselves. Accidents still happen, but we've learned how to deal with them.

Sure, we're changing the environment on Earth. We've been doing that for a long time. Now, we're doing it faster than we did a million years ago: but we're also learning faster. (Partly because we've got slightly bigger brains than the gentleman pictured above - partly, I think, because we've developed fairly robust information storage and retrieval technologies.)

And we're learning to use our power responsibly. We have to: for the same reason that our forebears had to learn how to use fire without killing themselves.

The Future Will Be Just Like Today: Except Where It's Different

Over the last few decades, I've watched a lake near Interstate 94 turn into ponds surrounded by marsh. I'm pretty sure the marsh is becoming meadow, but haven't gotten close enough to check. Minnesota's lakes are leftovers from the last continental glacier to cover this area. Given time, they'll all fill in.

Rivers and streams run fast enough to keep sediments in suspension while water passes through them. In lakes and ponds, the water slows down: giving particles time to settle to the bottom.

That's the way things work.

I miss that lake: it was one of the nice views on a route I often drove. We could still have it: if someone had decided to dredge it regularly. But that would have taken a great deal of effort: and I'm not at all sure it would be worth it. Or even a good idea.

I'm not at all surprised that temperatures on Earth are fluctuating. I'd be shocked if that wasn't happening.

But get upset about it? I've seen too many contradictory 'end of the world' best-sellers come and go for the latest crop to spark much interest. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (April 16, 2010), for starters)

As far as speculative fiction goes, I don't see me writing yet another apocalyptic vision of a dying Earth, victim of humanity's vile selfishness. There's been quite enough of that done already.

So, I want a World of the Future that looks just like 1950s America? Hardly.

A utopia? That's been done, too. Besides, I'd have a time writing that with a straight face.

A world with cities that are in effect artificial mountain ranges along most continental margins: miles high, with vast arrays that look like today's wind farms: except they're blowing air upslope, to maintain desirable weather patterns? (March 5, 2010)

Now you're talking.

Notice: desirable weather patterns. Not "normal" ones.

Would I feel at home in that world? Maybe, maybe not. For that matter, I don't think Daniel Boone would feel all that 'at home' in Manhattan's lower east side these days. But quite a few people don't mind living in New York City.

I think it depends on what a person gets used to, growing up.

That 'world of tomorrow' I sketched out? Parts of it would probably look quite 'normal' to us. Provided you didn't look at the sky, or the horizon.

Ever notice in the old Westerns, how you sometimes saw a radio tower or contrail in 'the wild west?'

Which is drifting into another topic.

Then there's the Gill Theory of Human Evolution.

Time to stop.

Related posts:

"Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis"
(March 5, 2010)
"Science Fiction in the Movies: 'The Satan Bug' to 'The Matrix' "
(January 26, 2010)
"Move the Planet - or - Safety First"
(December 9, 2009)
"Four Millennia of Human Nature: I Think Qoheleth is Right"
(August 3, 2009)
"- - - 'And We're All Gonna Die!' "
(June 30, 2009)
"The Story of Mankind in 79 Words"
(June 30, 2009)
"Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
(June 26, 2009)

"Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture"
Apathetic Lemming of the North: Routinely updated list of posts

[Information] Power to the People!

2010-04-16T11:45:00.004-05:00

Prologue

Science fiction/speculative fiction writers often write about how they think science and/or technology will affect the human condition. Their expectations have run from overly-optimistic Utopias to the more currently-fashionable variations of 'and we're all gonna die.'

Generally, writers seem to realize that when technology changes, society changes. Sometimes it changes a lot.

We're going through a period where information technology is upsetting the status quo I've been familiar with. Personally, I like that - for reasons you'll probably see as you read this post.

If you read this post. It's a whole lot easier to go somewhere else on the Internet, than it was to find another article in a magazine.

Like I said, things are changing.

I've discussed the effect of technology - particularly information technology - on culture and society fairly often in another blog. Let's remember that "information technology" can, in principle, include quite a few data storage-and-retrieval methods:

"...I think there may have been something to the notion that people who live in small towns are, well, clueless commoners. In England, it would have been folks who didn't live within walking distance of London - were isolated, ignorant villiens, with an awareness that extended as far as the village church and manor house and no farther.

"Then Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg introduced that dangerous, divisive technology we call movable type: and the world changed. Documents could be mass-produced and distributed as fast as a mounted courier could travel. Reading changed from a professional specialty to a basic skill. And those villiens had a source of information about the rest of the world.
..."
(Another War-on-Terror Blog (April 12, 2010))

Quite a few printing technologies had been in use before Gutenberg put movable type on the map. What set the new technology apart was the speed and (relative) ease with which written information could be taken from a manuscript, mass-produced, and distributed.

And, intellectual property laws being what they were then (practically non-existent), if one copy of a printed work arrived in a town with a printer - and the printer thought people would buy more copies - there would soon be as many copies of that work as there were people willing to pay the printer.

'Going viral' is a new phrase - but documents have been 'going viral' for centuries.

Technology and Freedom

"...America is a free country. When I was growing up, I learned that individual freedom was important. Since then, I've learned that one of the remarkable freedoms that Americans enjoy is the right to own and operate dangerous technologies and substances. These include
Guns
Substances like
LP gas
Ammonium nitrate¹
Anhydrous ammonia¹

Printing presses
Fax machines
Computers
What all these have in common is that they give whoever possesses them, and knows how to use them, considerable individual power....
Computers, Dangerous?
I put the printing press and the fax machine in my list, because they are, in their own way, at least as dangerous as any gun.
Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but the Printing Press is Deadly
Martin Luther's 95 Theses might have have been discussed in Wittenberg, and maybe surrounding towns, and stopped there: if some incendiarist hadn't gotten his hands on them, printed copies, and distributed the things. The wars that followed would probably have happened anyway...."
(Another War-on-Terror Blog (June 27, 2008))

Technology, Freedom and Economics

There was an economic side to movable type, too. Before Gutenberg and company, every book was a hand-crafted item, made by specialized craftsmen and skilled professionals. Last year I made some wildly optimistic estimates about how fast a scribe could work, together with some other information, and made the educated guess that the value of a pre-Gutenberg Bible in Europe would have been around $3,725 USD. (A Catholic Citizen in America (January 27, 2009))

Feudal Europe didn't have American dollars, of course: but that's the sort of material and labor that would have been involved. These days, the sort of Bible I use sells for around $9.00 USD. ($8.20, plus shipping and handling).

That's around 0.25% of $3,725, by the way.

Technology, Freedom, Economics and Culture

Maybe you've heard about how 'those people' locked up Bibles - to keep people from reading them, of course. Actually, there was security around almost any book: those things were as expensive as computers are now.

And less accessible. A few specialists knew how to read and write, but most folks were illiterate - because they needed to know how to read about as much as most people today need to know how to use ZPL.

After movable type made written material available to people who weren't major landholders, an increasing number of people learned to read.

By now, the ability to read and write is pretty close to being a basic and necessary a skill in many parts of the world. Maybe 'most parts of the world.'

Which means that people - all over - are much more likely to know about what's going on in other parts of the world.

Upsetting the Applecart

Change can be hard on people who don't like it - or don't understand it. Particularly if they won't learn to adjust.

I think part of what we're seeing in American culture now is vaguely parallel to what happened in Europe a few centuries back.

Around the end of Europe's feudal period, landholders had gotten used to a politico-economic system that depended on a network of personal obligations. Feudalism had worked for centuries. We might have a sort of 'feudalism 2.0' now, if the knights, barons, and kings had understood this newfangled idea called "money" a bit better.

Oversimplifying - a lot - the old landholders of Europe failed to get involved with new, money-based, commercial enterprises. It took generations, and several major revolutions, but eventually the aristocracy of Europe changed from a driving force in European civilization to a colorful tourist attraction.

Remember, I said that's an oversimplification.

That was then. This is now.

America doesn't have barons or knights - it's illegal, or was up until a few years ago. We do, however, have traditional information gatekeepers.

"Information Gatekeepers?" What's That?

The way I use the term, "an 'information gatekeeper' is someone who controls access to information." (Another War-on-Terror Blog (August 14, 2009))

Pretty obvious, huh?

America's traditional information gatekeepers include:

Newspaper editors
Teachers and organizations of teachers
Leaders of colleges and universities
Entertainment industry executives
Publishers of books and magazines

That's a 'short list,' of course.

Those folks were in a relatively comfortable position for much of the 20th century.

Although schools and colleges were spread across America, the 'important' ones like Harvard and Yale were in the northeast. Not far from many of America's more prestigious publishing houses and the city where America's 'newspaper of record' had its home.

The entertainment industry was a bit less centralized. New York City retained its position as the premier center for stage productions, but Los Angeles emerged as a center for newer media like motion pictures and television.

The result, I think, was that back in the days where ABC, CBS, NBC, and - a bit later - PBS were it as far as television was concerned, a relatively small number of people had a great deal of control over what the rest of us saw, heard and read. I don't think it was planned, exactly. And that's definitely another topic.

Then along came cable television. That was terribly 'divisive,' we were warned. Americans wouldn't all be watching shows from the same manageable selection of networks.

Then along came the Internet. And the Web. And blogs, like the one you're reading.

By now, published authors aren't limited to those persons deemed worthy by America's 'better' sort.

Just about any crazy son of an Irishman can get published.

Like me.

Can't say that I'm sorry about that.

Vaguely-related posts:

"HAL 9000, Skynet, and C3PO"
(January 26, 2010)
"Inventions: Strange; Feared; and Yet-to-Come"
(August 25, 2009)
"The Threat of Dangerous New Technologies: It's Not All That New"
(August 23, 2009)
"What is an Information Gatekeeper?"
Another War-on-Terror Blog (August 14, 2009)
" '...Into the Future...' - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme"
(July 3, 2009)

A Problem With Nice, Orderly Societies

2010-04-15T14:40:00.004-05:00

I've written about stories with A Message before. You've run into them: Several generations ago they might even have, "and the moral of this story is..." at the end; These days, it's more along the lines of Humanity has Killed Mother Nature and We're All Gonna Die! Or maybe the big, bad computers will take over.

Don't get me wrong: I liked the special effects in "Avatar," and "The Matrix" is on my to-be-viewed list. I'd have watched "The Matrix" start-to-finish before, but until this year, the excerpts I'd dropped into had been on late-night television. Apparently the 1999 movie's setting actually makes sense. Sort of. Good enough for 'willing suspension of disbelief,' anyway.

I'm getting off-topic. In the second paragraph. That's fast work, even for me.

Where was I? "...and the moral of this story is...:" right.

I don't particularly like stories that apply The Meaning with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or drop The Moral on the reader like an anvil. Even if - make that particularly if I started out agreeing to some extent with what the author had to say.

So, I intend to write nice, bland, meaningless drivel with no discernible purpose beyond entertainment? Not likely.

Bear with me, please: the rest of this post is about Utopias and good intentions. Sort of.

Take nice, orderly societies for example. Sounds - nice - doesn't it?

A Nice, Orderly, Society Where Everybody's Protected: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Just imagine a wonderful world of the future: all the people walking around with a dreamy smile on their faces, completely and totally secure in the knowledge that they're safe from natural disasters, muggers, and unfamiliar ideas.

A reasonable desire for the security implied in the first two points is, I think, part of the reason we started cooking meat and living in groups of more than a dozen or so. I don't have a problem with preventing natural disasters. Or at least dealing with things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and blizzards with minimal or no injury and death.

I even think it'd be a good idea if we could find a way to make muggers a footnote in history. Although in that case, I'm a little concerned about some of the methods suggested during the 20th century.

Lobotomies are coming back, by the way.

I don't take the conventionally-dim view of humanity that's part of some contemporary intellectual fads - and a number of post-Gutenberg branches of Christianity. I have, on the other hand, been surrounded by human beings for over a half century: and I think the fellow was right:

"For mischief comes not out of the earth, nor does trouble spring out of the ground; ²But man himself begets mischief, as sparks fly upward."
(Job 5:6,7)

I've written about that before, too.

I also don't see humanity as a cancer on delicate little Mother Nature's face, or as a totally corrupt mess. But let's face it: People make mistakes. Some want to do harm.

I think that even a well-intentioned altruist can mess things up: if he or she gets enough power.

The desire to protect the weak from harm is, I think, a good idea. But I also thing we can be 'protected' too much. I've touched on that before, too:

" '...Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law....' "
" 'Locksley Hall,' Alfred, Lord Tennyson"
" 'Happily, some of us got off the planet in time.' "
" 'Notes of a Traveler,' Otha Sisk"
(" '...Into the Future...' - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme" (July 3, 2009))

I'd Love to be In Charge?

I'll admit that there have been times when I thought I couldn't possibly do a worse job than national and world leaders. That's not the same as thinking that I'd do a good job.

The sort of broad control achieved by totalitarian regimes is - I think - a really, really bad idea.

It Can Happen Here

There may be Americans who imagine that 'totalitarian' governments are 'over there.'

Others feel that America's federal government is "totalitarian."

For that matter, there are a few folks around the world who seem convinced that shape-shifting space-alien lizard people really run things.

I don't agree - with any of the above. Which 'proves' that I'm part of the conspiracy.

Getting off-topic. Again.

If you've run into some of my other blogs, or met me in online communities, you may know that I'm a Catholic. Yeah: one of those people.

You might expect me to be appalled at the rampant pornography sullying our fair land. That's near the mark, but I'm also concerned about some efforts to 'protect' us from smut.

I don't think porn is a good idea. For starters, it arguably doesn't show much respect for people - women, quite often. But I don't think that books, magazines, photos and videos with prurient interest are the only problem we've got.

Several years back, it looked like the American public was going to be 'protected' from the Wicked, Wicked Web by our benevolent leaders. I'm fairly convinced that the folks who were pushing for a federal agency to control what Americans saw, heard, and read had good intentions. They said they were worried about porn and 'hate speech.'

"...Fair enough. I don't approve of pornography or hateful screeds either.

"But when some socially conservative Christian organizations joined forces with liberal political action groups, I got concerned. They both wanted the government to do something about about people putting bad things on the Web. One of the odd couples was the Christian Coalition and the Feminist Majority.¹

"We didn't (quite) get a federal agency in charge of deciding who could put information on the Internet, and who could view it, thank God. But it could have happened. A great many people were very upset.

"So upset that, in my opinion, they weren't thinking about the consequences of what they wanted."
(Another War-on-Terror Blog (March 9, 2008))

That odd couple of worried people was, I think, a demonstration that emotions and reason don't play well together. ("Emotions, the Frontal Cortex, The War on Terror, Anarchists, and the Illuminati," Another War-on-Terror Blog (December 23, 2008))

I don't have any problem with parents - or schools - using blocking software to keep kids from seeing stuff that the parents or school board don't think is 'proper.' Families and local school boards have an obligation to look after children - and are small enough so that the crazy ones can't do widespread damage.

But a federal agency deciding what well upwards of 300,000,000 people should be allowed to see? With an option to make the plan global?

I wasn't concerned that a federal agency couldn't manage something like that: I was concerned that one could.

Managing the Masses For Their Own Good? Been There, Tried That

I'm pretty sure that some folks really believe that Stalin's Soviet Union was a golden age for Russia. Others may feel that McCarthyism was a good idea.

The world wasn't made up exclusively of freedom-loving Americans and oppressive commies - or wise leaders of the people's struggle and oppressive Yankee imperialists back in the 'good old days.' And it certainly isn't now.

But I think we still have 'intelligent, caring' people who honestly feel that everything would be wonderful: if only everybody could be made to act just the way the 'right sort' think they should.

Since I also think that well-meaning do-gooders like that will be around for the foreseeable future: speculative fiction writers have no shortage of material to play with.

Related posts:

" '...Into the Future...' - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme"
(July 3, 2009)

Alien Life will Most Likely be - Alien

2010-04-12T21:46:00.007-05:00

"Alien Life on Titan Would Stink"
Space.com (April 10, 2010)

"If life does exist on Saturn's intriguing moon Titan, it probably stinks.

"The icy moon has long been seen as a potential spot for extraterrestrial life, but so far, there's no evidence of any living things there.

"And if there were life on Titan, it would likely involve chemicals that are noxious and disgusting to humans, scientists say...."

"...'This idea that you can walk up to the alien ambassador and shake their hand is very unlikely,' said biochemist William Bains of MIT and the Cambridge, England-based Rufus Scientific. He explained that these other worldly life forms would probably be so foreign to us that it might be difficult to recognize them as life, and coming into contact with them could prove hazardous.

"For example, Titan life's metabolism might involve chemical compounds such as phosphine and hydrogen sulfide, which are both foul-smelling gases that are toxic to humans...."

"...Instead of relying on water as a primary ingredient for life, as Earthlings do, Titan's life might have blood based on liquid methane, Bains said. Such a creature couldn't survive on Earth, where methane is a gas at our warmer temperatures.

" 'Their blood would instantly boil then release this great cloud of chemicals, quite a number of which are quite poisonous,' Bains said.

"And instead of using the element carbon to build many of the molecules that make up life, these creatures' chemistry might be based on silicon. While this element is relatively flexible and able to bond with a wide variety of other elements, many of these bonds would be unstable. For example, some compounds that could be present in Titan life would spontaneously burst into flames if exposed to Earth's air...."

I'm not sure that I quite buy the "so foreign to us that it might be difficult to recognize them as life" part of the article. What's described - phosphine, hydrogen sulfide and other substances in liquid methane - would likely enough involve microscopic bags of liquid grouped in larger sacks - like the plants and animals we're familiar with. And fungi and bacteria, for that matter. And yes, I know that plant cells tend to have rather hard walls.

Aliens with different life chemistries most likely wouldn't look like the creatures we're familiar with: but then, neither do the critters found in the Burgess Shale. But we don't have trouble identifying the Burgess Shale menagerie as animals - or maybe plants - but whatever, something living.

Okay: maybe we'll find 'living crystals' or something like Hoyle's Black Cloud: but that's not what the article was discussing.

'Life as We Know It,' Class M Planets and All That

I think there will always be room for stories involving beautiful space princesses and exotic-looking aliens who think 9.8 m/s2 acceleration is 'normal' gravity. And are perfectly comfortable in a 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide mix at 21 degrees Celsius.

I also think there is room for stories where the alien ambassador needs a portable habitat to survive on Earth. And, likely enough, thinks Earth's air is thin and incredibly toxic: but likes the low gravity. ("Earth May Not Be a "Class M" Planet," Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009))

Looks like 'serious' scientists are starting to get their heads around the idea that "life" may not always be quite exactly what we've been studying here for the last few thousand years. That's not entirely fair: a competent biochemist worked out a plausible range of possible 'life chemistries' for a wide range of temperatures quite a few years ago:

"...Actually, the idea that life didn't necessarily need water isn't particularly new. A former professor (of chemistry, apparently) at Boston University put together a pretty good argument for a a half-dozen life chemistries that might plausibly work in temperatures ranging from near red to near absolute zero:
"Fluorosilicone in fluorosilicone
"Fluorocarbon in sulfur
"Nucleic acid/protein (O) in water
"Nucleic acid/protein (N) in ammonia
"Lipid in methane
"Lipid in hydrogen
" 'View from a Height' Isaac Asimov (1963), Lancer Books (p. 63)
"Isaac Asimov might be shaky on the sciences of ecology and physics - at least in his fiction - but that was in his professional field: chemistry. I'm inclined to take his view seriously, that life-as-we-know-it isn't necessarily the only sort. We're #3 on that list, by the way...."
(Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 24, 2010)

Then there are the scenarios where the 'aliens' are the descendants of people who left Earth back when humanity first reached the stars: and who have been away from home for a long time.

But this post is getting rather long. Goodnight.

Related posts:

"Titan, Life Without Water, and 'Messing With Old Definitions'"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 24, 2010)
"Well, That's Interesting: Burges Shale Creatures"
(February 13, 2010)
"Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe"
(December 8, 2009)
"Earth May Not Be a 'Class M' Planet"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009)
"Life on Ceres? Could Be"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 5, 2009)

Getting Serious by Getting Silly: Meet Galaxy Cadet Aster Alpha

2010-03-28T22:27:00.004-05:00

I've decided to get serious about the graphics side of story-telling this weekend: so I played with DAZ Productions Bryce. I've found that I learn more, faster, when I've got a picture of what sort of result I want in my mind and the excellence or lack thereof of the result is relatively unimportant.

In this case, I wanted a cityscape, seen from the air, with vast acreages of big buildings and other structures in the middle distance: and 'good grief, how big are they' buildings behind them.

Here's what I got:

The 'foreground' structures are from the Rigel Orionis Megalopolis product. Those weird airships are the Bryce Flying Steamer. My oldest daughter tells me that they're done in the 'steam punk' style. I created what's on the horizon in Bryce.

That picture isn't related to any story or setting I'm working on. The flying steamers are - sort of - but that's still pretty vague.

So, why bother? I need to re-learn how to use Bryce - and how to make more effective use of it - if I'm going to make quite a few of my projects work. Putting that picture together helped. Quite a bit.

Getting Serious About Being Silly

Galaxy Cadet (Heroics and Hairspray in the 27th century) is a project that's been on the back burner for years.

Baum Media Productions is a fictional company - part of Loonfoot Falls' world. (Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette features a 250-word column from the equally fictional town paper each week.)

I don't have the resources to do what BMP did - create feature-length animated Galaxy Cadet movies - but I think I can have a shot at writing stories about Galaxy Cadet. Her name's Aster Alpha, by the way, and after a brief but spectacular mission on the Stellar Guard carrier Wotan, she's been assigned to the fringe patrol ship Albatross.

That was the most remote, obscure, isolated, dead-end spot they could find. And yes: there's a story behind that.

That's Aster Alpha again. I have no idea where that picture was taken. Some sort of planetside port facility, apparently.

If those names don't sound like the sort of terribly serious stuff I've been talking about - you're right. I think I need to loosen up a bit: and following Galaxy Cadet's career may be a good way to do that.

Related posts:

"Interstellar Empires, Imagination, and an Occasionally-Sozzled Detective"
(Friday, March 12, 2010)
"New York City, 3650"
(March 1, 2010)
"Making a Plausible Setting"
(February 22, 2010)
"Baum Media Productions: From Light Bulbs to Galaxy Cadet"
Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette (August 21, 2009)

You'd Think the IRS Would Give Writers and Artists a Break?

2010-03-20T16:34:00.004-05:00

Taxes are due April 15 here in America. Yesterday afternoon I learned that I've got two days to get everything ready, instead of the nine I thought I had. ("Lemming Tracks: Tax Time Surprise ," Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 20, 2010))

I don't buy into the idea that artists, other creative people, and those with intellectual interests (and - occasionally - intelligence to match) are a breed apart, whose talents entitle them to special consideration. And, for some, 'beyond good and evil.' (I've quoted Nietzsche's one-liners from time to time, but I don't buy his philosophy. ((A Catholic Citizen in America (June 15, 2009))

I've played the idea for laughs, though, in Narcissus-X. That terribly earnest and ingrown artist's rants are a little too easy to write, but that's another topic.

There, I've done my shameless plugs for the day.

Like I said, I don't accept the idea that creative people and intellectuals are better than everybody else. Except in the sense that I think athletes are "better" than other people: in the sense that they were born with the potential to excel in athletics, and made an effort to develop that potential.

It's a good thing, too, since I'm a writer and artist. I'd call myself an intellectual, too: but that term implies a sort of elitism that I really don't like.

I've put just about everything else I do on hold for the weekend. I expect to be done by 8:00 a.m. Monday morning. I also expect to be exhausted by then, with about as much creative energy as a sleeping gerbil.

Maybe I'll let Narcissus-X do a rant. That could be fun.

I'm Blaming Daylight Saving Time: or, Not

2010-03-17T00:06:00.005-05:00

I suppose I could see Daylight Saving Time as the Federal Government enabling me to enjoy jet lag, even though I seldom travel.

But I don't.

I suppose it could be worse: in addition to reducing consumption of electricity by moving our clocks back an hour in the fall and ahead an hour in the spring, we could reduce water consumption by having the months of May through August shortened by two days each, with the days re-assigned to October through January.

Hey, it makes sense: America is in the northern hemisphere, where May through August are the warmest months. Warm people sweat more: so they take more and longer showers. Obviously, if we reduce the number of days in those months, people won't be exposed to warm weather so much, and will use less water, showering.

Can't argue with logic like that.

My guess is that Daylight Saving Time made sense, over 90 years ago. Either that, or American and European leaders wanted to give the impression that they were really 'doing something' to save energy.

A few things have changed since then.

Oh, never mind.

For one reason or another, I didn't get to bed until about 5:30 Sunday morning. I'd fallen asleep downstairs earlier. Not one of my shining moments.

I was in a fog for the rest of the day, but got to bed - and sleep - at a less rational hour. Slept fine, woke up: and the fog outside was matched by banks of the stuff wafting through my head.

I got the absolutely-have-to tasks for the day done: not well, but done.

The creative work I'd scheduled? Forget it. If I believed that the Muses were real, I'd have assumed that the flight was canceled due to inclement weather.

So today I woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? Ha. The good news is that the fog seems to be lifting.

Interstellar Empires, Imagination, and an Occasionally-Sozzled Detective

2010-03-12T23:05:00.004-06:00

I suspect that there's a bit of megalomania in many writers of science fiction/speculative fiction. Or should be.

Think about it: your typical detective novel writer writes about people who live in the contemporary culture. If the story is set in, say, Chicago, the author may want to do a little research. It'd be embarrassing to write a story that takes place in Chicago's Rockefeller Center. There's a Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, but the place with the skating rink is in the Big Apple.

Any story written in a contemporary setting, though, involves at most elaborating on, or re-imagining, an existing locale: and then providing characters whose job descriptions are in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles.

It's not that stories set in a close analog to the world we all live in aren't imaginative. On the other hand, their settings are largely off-the-shelf material.

Which may be why the settings of so many science fiction/fantasy/whatever stories are so - familiar. Sometimes there's good reason for having the action of a speculative fiction setting take place in a world where people go to shopping malls, get stuck in rush hour traffic, and watch television.

For example, the animated series, "Ghost in the Shell," is set in the 'day after tomorrow.' Well, not quite: but we're very close to having quite a bit of the technology. Cultures haven't changed all that much by the time of "Ghost in the Shell." Which shouldn't be much of a surprise: thing's have changed a bit in the last, say, 50 years. On the other hand, styles notwithstanding, we're wearing pretty much the same sort of clothing: and even using many of the same buildings.

While I'm thinking of it, related posts in another blog:

"Space Aliens and Killer Monster Robots - From Outer Space; or Pittsburgh"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (January 25, 2010)
"Next-Generation Prosthetic Hand - and Intel Says Direct Neural Interface Brain Chips by 2020"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 2, 2009)
"Glow-in-the-Dark Flashing Tattoos? Prosthetics With Neural Interfaces? They're Coming"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (November 20, 2009)
"Good News, Neural Devices Connect Brain, Computers: Bad News, Same Thing"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (July 11, 2009)

Tales of the Far Future and Galactic Exploration

I started out with megalomania. That's "a psychological state characterized by delusions of grandeur". (Princeton's WordNet)

Maybe not exactly the idea I had in mind - but that term's close. Someone who's serious about writing speculative fiction/science fiction somewhere past 'the day after tomorrow' and this Earth of ours is making the tacit assumption that he, she, or they have what it takes to imagine a complex, internally-consistent universe. That'll probably involve at least a few items from this list:

Humans who aren't quite like us
People who aren't human at all
Jobs that don't exist today
Ditto economic and political systems
Worlds with life
- As we know it
- As we don't know it
- As we don't recognize it
  - Until we start messing with something it's interested in

"Delusions of grandeur?" Maybe.

But that's what I'm having a shot at doing.

It may help, if I don't take myself - or what I'm writing - too seriously. Two gifted (my opinion) cartoonists wrote - and have re-issued - a series of comic books about an alcoholic detective who's down on his luck: in the early stories, anyway.

Sound almost drearily familiar? It's a sequence of detective stories - pretty much - set in a vast interstellar civilization with weird-looking aliens by the bushel.

I don't think the Foglios intended Buck Godot - zap gun for hire to be taken very seriously.

On the other hand, they put more thought into their setting than I suspect many dreadfully earnest authors did. Two excerpts from a sequence of text sections of the Buck Godot cycle:

"...Even so, one of the real reasons races stay is the realization that there are wonderful things to be learned from those other races, even those annoying fellows with entirely too many ears. Things that, once explained, one can do ones self for free. To be sure, this annoys some of the races that have brought some of these wonderful ideas to the Galaxy's notice; such as the Choaten, who tried and failed to patent the concept of blue as a source of nutrition. Happily, most races realize that since there are more of 'Them' throwing ideas around than there are of 'Us', you tend to get more out of it than you brought into it. This is a universal concept that appeals to everybody...."
Buck Godot - zap gun for hire (January 3, 2008)

Hats off: There's a certain appreciation for the long-term benefits of trade here. In some settings, freely sharing the knowledge your ancestors collected and developed over generations is not being altruistic. Not if other people are doing the same thing.

Getting a meeting ground like that started might be a challenge. Once started, though, I think it'd be so mutually rewarding that most members would pitch in to keep the intellectual 'free lunch' coming.

That business of "blue as a source of nutrition"? Maybe it's just silliness. On the other hand, blue is one of the wavelengths that plants absorb to feed themselves. "Plants" have stayed put and photosynthesized while "animals" moved around and ate plants - and other animals - for the last few hundred million years here on Earth.

But I don't see why that has to be the way to run life. For that matter, I photosynthesize a small but important chemical component in my biochemistry. If you're human, you do too: vitamin D.

Odds are very good that's why my ancestors were so melanin-deficient. They lived in a part of the world where for months at a stretch they'd do well to get sunlight on their face for a few minutes each day.

I'm getting off-topic again.

Writing about these 'trade' centers:

"...these are primarily organizations dedicated to promoting communications, and the vast majority of sentients cannot directly communicate with each other. Some species operate on different time lines, or are out of phase with the four dimensions we can perceive, are too small or too large or, if they had to acknowledge us, they would have to kill us. So even when an atomic matrix life form that feeds off the microwave hum left over from the Big Bang and excretes time lines is in the same solar system with your typical silicon-based life form that eats rocks and excretes hydrogen, communication between the two may be close to impossible...."
Buck Godot - zap gun for hire (March 19, 2009)

Hats off again. Again, I'm not so sure how serious the Foglios were: but they were thinking about what forms people might have - and be 'people' in a reasonable sense of the word.

Good grief. I've set a comic book about an inebriate detective as my standard of excellence.

Vaguely-related posts:

"Today, I've been Charting This Quadrant of the Galaxy"
(February 11, 2010)
"Science Fiction in the Movies: 'The Satan Bug' to 'The Matrix' "
(January 26, 2010)
"Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe"
(December 8, 2009)
"Timing is Everything"
(October 7, 2009)

Well, That's Interesting: Brooklyn and the Names of Things

2010-03-09T11:23:00.004-06:00

I touched base at Google Translate and discovered that "Brooklyn" is 布鲁克林 (Bùlǔkè lín) in simplified Chinese.

That's actually closer to the original than the English take on at least one city in India. I speak American English, so as I grew up I knew the place as "Bombay." "Bombay" may have come from an Englishman trying to pronounce "bom bahia": Portuguese for "good bay". Which the place is.

Folks who lived there, and weren't Europeans, apparently called it Mumbai.

"...The city was called Bombay for much of the last four hundred years. The origin of the name is obscure, but is often said to come from the Portuguese phrase bom bahia meaning 'good bay'. The name Mumbai has been used in the main local languages for as long, and is ascribed to the local goddess, Mumba (ai means mother in Marathi). The name of the city was changed to Mumbai by an act of the parliament in 1997...."
(The Mumbai Pages, "By any other name" - More in their FAQ)

Things Change

I wrote a little about names, language, and history before. (February 26, 2010)

We might be calling that big city on a river in Britannia Londinium to this day, if the Caesars had managed to hold their empire together. But that's not how it happened. Romans founded the city, began developing that outpost of their empire, and retreated: leaving ruins and legends; and a shaken Roman's description of a huge, red-haired and very scary woman. They really could have handled Queen Boudicca with more finesse. But that's another topic.

Centuries after the Romans had retreated, leaving memories of a day when roads were built and order maintained, boatloads of French-speaking Vikings landed and picked up where the Romans had left off. Which is yet another topic.

Today, those Vikings are speaking the language that emerged from a sort of philological Cuisinart that imposed quite a lot of French and Latin on a Germanic language. We call it English. Which is yet again another topic.

Where was I? Londinium. Right.

That name hasn't changed all that much. From the sounds of it, a syllable or two dropped out - and I'm pretty sure the vowels aren't quite what the Romans used. There's a whole lot more going on: but I don't know as much about linguistics as I'd like to.

16 Centuries is a Long Time

Quite a lot can happen in 1,600 years. It's been that long, about, since Alaric succeeded in capturing Rome, but failed to hold the city.

Alaric's conquest wasn't an isolated incident. Germanic tribes and Huns were making life so hazardous, that some - but not all - Roman citizens were abandoning their cities. There's pretty good reason to think that quite a few Romans from Padua, Aquileia, Altino and Concordia, for example, fled into a (relatively) nearby marsh.

It looks like those Romans set up a sort of refugee camp. A thousand years later that camp was Venice: a sort of Mediterranean analog to New York City. Today, it's a city that looks quite a big like it did in its heyday: which is a good thing for its tourist trade.

It's possible to use Alaric's sack of Rome as a milestone, marking the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire. But not Rome's influence.

For a very long time, north of the Mediterranean, the only language you could be fairly certain that someone in the town you were in was Latin. The language of the Caesars was still taught when I was in school: but by then English was the language you were most likely to find in spoken somewhere. (More: "Why isn't there More Mandarin on the Web?," Apathetic Lemming of the North (April 4, 2008)) Those Britishers were everywhere.

Another 1,600 years, and things will have changed. Again. Still.

A 'good enough for a story' educated guess is that China will have finally sorted itself out, and be a major player on the world's stage. My take on what's coming is that they'll have emperors again - and that what we're seeing today is one of the messier inter-dynastic 'warlord' periods. With some moderately weird foreign ideologies mixed in.

Yeah: my guess is that people who are serious about putting the Middle Kingdom (中国, or Zhōngguó) back on the map will not want to keep reminders of colonial days around. Not even the time when they were trying to adapt the foreign ideas to their ways.

I've written about what I think is likely - possible, at least - with urban developments on the east coast of North America. ("Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis" (March 5, 2010))

I'm not assuming that the Boston-Washington D.C. corridor will still be heavily built up because I'm a red-white-and-blue-blooded American. The cities there have a reason for being there - mostly as break-in-bulk points for trans-oceanic trade. I don't see that changing.

Look at it this way: Rome is on an important river crossing, and more-or-less centrally located. And, after a rough patch after the awkward transition from Empire to recovery, an economically important part of - we're calling that part of the world "Italy."

So, why was I looking up what simplified Chinese is for "Brooklyn?"

Today, Brooklyn is a place sitcoms and comics can use as a locale for ditsy, amusing not-rich people. It's also a major seaport with industrial potential.

New York City is the "Big Apple" of course. And probably will be for quite a while. It makes a pretty good place to put financial enterprises and the upper end of other economic interests. And it's got that name: "New York City" still has a bit of panache.

It still may, 1,600 years from now. Or, not so much. I'm willing to guess that Brooklyn / 布鲁克林 / Bùlǔkè lín won't be just like it is today, either. I'm guessing that Bùlǔkè lín could be pronounced "Bulookeh Lin" and still be recognizable. Or, not. It's got a nifty exotic/familiar look to it, though.

Welcome to the Bustling Metropolis of Bulookeh Lin

Having visited the quaint Antiquities Preservation District of Niooyueh Shì, come see the hub of Greater Nyok, Bulookeh Lin.

Okay: I'm running out of time, but briefly: I see no reason why Brooklyn couldn't become a more central part of the New York City area. For starters, it's got what Manhattan doesn't have: square footage. upwards of 71 square miles.

Those names? I'm still thinking about that.

Related posts:

"Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis"
(March 5, 2010)
"London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
(February 26, 2010)
"Why isn't there More Mandarin on the Web?"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (April 4, 2008)

Dinosaurs, Ancient Astronauts, and All That

2010-03-08T21:23:00.007-06:00

Mix dinosaurs, ancient astronauts, a dash of paleontology and a handful of imagination. Shake well. It's been done before, but the K-T boundary has been in the news again.

Besides, I haven't got much else to write about today: and I'm scheduled to post something on this blog today.

The Chicxulub Consensus May Not Last Long

First, the news and background, all from Space.com:

"Rock Solid Link: Asteroid Doomed the Dinosaurs"
(March 4, 2010)
"Dinosaur-Killing Firestorm Theory Questioned"
(December 28, 2009)
"New Dino-destroying Theory Fuels Hot Debate"
(October 18, 2009)

More background:

"Giant impact near India - not Mexico - may have doomed dinosaurs"
Geology Times (October 17, 2009)
"Basinward transport of Chicxulub ejecta by tsunami-induced backflow, La Popa basin, northeastern Mexico, and its implications for distribution of impact-related deposits flanking the Gulf of Mexico"
Geology (February 2005)
"The Chicxulub Crater - Effects"
The Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group, University of Bristol (undated?)

Excerpt:

"A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.

"Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.

" 'If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet,' Chatterjee said. 'A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics.'

"By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide...."
(Geology Times (October 17, 2009))

It's early days, but my guess is that that international consensus reported in Space.com (March 4, 2010) is already starting to fray around the edges. That's not a criticism: We've known about the Chicxulub event for decades, and this Shiva crater seems to be a relatively new find.

What jumped out at me was the apparent coincidence: Two major impact events happening almost simultaneously (maybe), on the geologic time scale.

Let's say that the a five-mile wide hunk of rock, and another one 25 miles across hit Earth at almost the same time - on a historic time scale.

When All Else Fails, Throw Rocks

Dinosaurs and the other big critters on Earth, 65,000,000-plus years ago, don't seem to have been as consistently dim-witted as we once imagined them: But I think it'd snap the willing suspension of disbelief to write a story where they were as smart as we are. Not if the story was supposed to be even vaguely serious.

I'm about as certain as I can be that whatever long shot may have happened when the K-T boundary was created was a natural event.

On the other hand, what if it wasn't.

I know: It's been done. In a Dr. Who two-parter, "Earthshock" (1982), for example. That time the blast was caused by a spaceship hitting Earth.

There are many other options, of course.

Let's try this on for size:

The war had begun long before. Neither side was willing - or able - to surrender. And neither side had a significant advantage over the other: hardly surprising, as they were both descended from the same people. Not that either side's leaders would admit that this was the case.

They had established rules of conduct for the conflict. Both had found that people - intelligent races - were a rare phenomenon. Both believed that intelligence was important, although they differed on how it should be applied.

And so they agreed that their war would not be a threat to any people they might find.

Each side were, in their own way, quite ethical.

Which made the current situation so revolting.

A warm, damp planet had recently been found. It was virtually useless to both sides: The climate was not within their comfort range, and lacked the aesthetic appeal they demanded of their homes.

Besides, even if they had wanted to do so, neither side could settle there. An exploration team had found - not people, but creatures which showed great promise of developing intelligence.

So the planet was declared off limits.

The star this planet circled, however, was ideally positioned for one side to use as a - let's call it a "listening post." Such an installation could easily be placed in orbit around any of the star's planets, or in orbit around the star itself.

Instead, they built installations on a planet. The warm, damp one. Two installations, actually, near the equator but on opposite sides of the planet.

This was a brazen violation of a long-standing agreement: but the installations remained. They had been made self-sufficient, and so blockade was out of the question. They had defenses which were more than adequate to repel the largest force that their enemy could mount.

And the installations were gathering valuable information, which could easily break the long stalemate.

Something had to be done.

Finally, in desperation, the side which was now losing assembled a vast fleet and took control of the space around the damp planet's star. Then diverted two asteroids toward the damp planet, after mounting a formidable defense system on both.

The two installations could have destroyed any missiles directed against them, and were effectively protected from directed-energy weapons by the damp planet's atmosphere, and their own shielding.

The designers of the installations had even built adaptive intelligence into their defenses, so that as the enemy developed more sophisticated weapon systems, the installations could develop more sophisticated defenses.

The designers had not foreseen that the enemy would throw large rocks.

The larger of the two projectiles was already blasting a crater in the planet's surface while its remaining defenses, on the 'upper' side, were neutralizing a formation of missiles directed on its smaller companion.

Both installations were destroyed, of course.

The war ended not long after.

A few research teams returned to the damp planet. Most of the species which their predecessors had cataloged were gone. The researchers studied what was left, made their reports, and moved on to other tasks.

After a while the researchers stopped coming. Some life remained on the planet, small scurrying things which had somehow survived the twin cataclysms: but the species which had shown so much promise was gone, along with - as far as the researchers could tell - all similar creatures.

New creatures emerged, and changed as the damp planet turned cold. Several species of strange animals which could grasp branches with all four feet developed. One of these moved out of the forest, walking on its rear hands: which had lost most of their grasping function.

In time the descendants of this species chipped Troodon fossils out of rocks which had been sand and mud when incandescent waves of rock engulfed lands around the now-forgotten installations.

Okay: It's Not Shakespeare

Troodons were smart, sort of: probably about as bright as an ostrich. And they had hands. Again, sort of.

No, I do not think they were people. But there could be people built along the same general lines. We might find that we're the oddballs among this galaxy's races.

Assuming that there are any besides us, of course.

Which is another topic.

With a Brain Like Mine, Who Needs LSD?

2010-03-07T15:21:00.007-06:00

This post is a bit off-topic, but I'm releasing it anyway. Most of Drifting at the Edge of Time and Space is a sort of working journal of my efforts to write stories. Or tell stories - not quite the same thing.

Today, while meditating (that's another topic), I realized that I was dredging up memories, and making associations, that might be worth sharing.

Or, not. I've been wrong before.

The Sixties Weren't All That Now and Wow

The stoned artist isn't a product of the sixties. Long before Jimi Hendrix started a trend for celebrity overdoses, the literary world was paved with the booze-drenched droppings of inebriate poets and authors. The fellow who put the town I live in on the map, Sinclair "Main Street" Lewis, was a case in point.

I doubt, however, that he could attribute his Nobel Prize (1930) to being sozzled. The man actually could write.

Coleridge and Opium

Then there was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I grew up in the sixties, and had the connection between Coleridge's use of opium to "Kubla Khan" drummed into me. Make that addiction to opium.

What sets Coleridge apart from the stoned poets of Haight-Ashbury is that artistic wannabes of the sixties, some of them consciously following Dr. Timothy "turn on" Leary's advice, thought that scrambling their circuits would make them more creative. (Depending on your muscle-fat ratio, body mass and metabolism, anywhere from a beer to a six-pack will do the same thing. You'll feel like the biggest thing since [insert your favorite singer/whatever].)

Coleridge got hooked on opium, thanks to state-of-the-art medical practices, ca. 1800. Opium was a wonder drug then: and widely (over-) used as a pain killer.

Coleridge's run-in with doctors wasn't a total loss. We got "Kubla Kahn" out of it, and his was one of many cases that finally convinced doctors that they might want to take a look at the long-term effects of psychoactive drugs.

The Sixties and Me

I'm no Coleridge. Or, by the grace of God, Sinclair Lewis.

Somehow, I got through the sixties without turning to drugs: booze or the groovier sorts. No virtue there. Wanting to get high wasn't on my priority list.

I did develop a serious drinking problem, but that was later: and another story. Wondering if getting sozzled didn't really make me more creative? It didn't. I occasionally felt like a hotshot: but I read what I wrote, later. Ouch.

Want some 'inside' advice? If you have to drink something while you write, make it coffee. But don't be surprised if you can't sleep afterward.

I've learned, recently, that for most people the teen years aren't Purgatory on steroids. I believe it. I also believe that some people don't look back on their adolescence as 'the best days of their lives.'

I'm one of the latter sort.

No complaints: There were many bright spots, but I wouldn't wish the experience, as a whole, on anybody. For a variety of reasons I was under a lot of stress, from about the time I was thirteen on.

Psychedelic Music, Disco, Techno, and Me

Lately, I've been listening to music from the sixties and following lately - some of it using those strange sound distortions. You may have heard it: voices that sound like they're at the bottom of a well, Dopplered tones, that sort of thing.

For me, that sort of thing evokes something that's about as close to nostalgia as I'll feel.

I've read - and believe - that those sounds, and the weird light shows, were an effort by people to replicate the sensations they experienced while high.

I've experienced pretty much the same thing. But, apart from post-operative anesthetics, I've never 'done drugs.'

Fatigue and Stress as Psychoactive Agents

I didn't need to, sort of. I can remember, in my teens, watching the walls and ceiling of a room wobble like Jello. They'd stop as soon as I concentrated on them: but my memory faithfully records the movement. Then there was the time I looked at a lighting fixture and 'saw' it as a sort of spiky starburst. Again, concentration quickly sorted it out into a normal appearance.

That wasn't, quite, a hallucination: I think. The light was one of those with a radial set of grooves in a semi-transparent hemisphere. I'm pretty sure what I was "seeing" was a template in my visual cortex: one that's used to handle bright objects with strong radial elements.

Drugs? No. Booze? Oddly enough, again no.

Stress and fatigue? I think so. Extended over a couple decades.

Again, no complaints: I learned a lot about managing my brain during those years; although it wasn't until recently that I've been able to get back to my pre-teen efficiency. Wonderful things, those serotonin-uptake inhibitors.

Trick Wiring

I don't know if it's 'polite' to say this, but I don't think that everybody's exactly alike. Which is just how I like it. A world full of people just like me would be - scary.

Some of us are taller than average, some shorter: and I'm convinced that not all of us have exactly the same wiring in our heads. I'm fairly bright, in an academic way, but can't figure out the sort of associations that people use to solve those 'where's the key' puzzles that some American communities have as fundraisers.

My brain is great at integrating data, solving problems, associating ideas and perceiving patterns: sometimes patterns that are as real as the Canals of Mars. No bragging: it's the equipment I was issued. All I'm doing is making use of it.

On the other hand, when I relax and 'take my hands off the controls' - - - well, that's where my Narcissus-X posts come from. The trick for that blog is to decide on a place to start, and then enjoy the ride. They're not 'stream of consciousness' writing - each time something interesting shoots by, I grab it, go into 'normal' mode and write a phrase or two about it.

Think of it as surfing the space-time continuum. The trick is to avoid wiping out.

Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis

2010-03-05T21:24:00.008-06:00

I've been thinking quite a bit lately, about the world of 3650 or thereabouts.

Since I'm making some moderately non-pessimistic assumptions, I figure that people won't be any stupider in the next few thousand years than they have in the past. Also that we'll have around 780,000,000,000 people on Earth by then.

Not a typo. And not, really, all that much more than the 6,790,062,216 or so we have now.

Overpopulated? That depends on your frame of reference.

Daniel Boone and Manhattan's Lower East Side

Although Daniel Boone apparently didn't move each time he could see the smoke from a neighbor's chimney,¹ I suspect that he'd not feel at home in the Washington, D.C. - Boston megalopolis.

I lived in San Francisco, a few decades ago, mostly in an area that was between five and 15 levels deep, apart from streets and sidewalks. I thoroughly enjoyed sharing the end of a peninsula with a sizable fraction of a million other people.

My children grew up in a small town in central Minnesota: the population topped 4,000 recently. I love it here, too: but the ambiance is very different. And some of my kids are acutely uncomfortable even in a relatively lightly-developed area like the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area.

A great deal depends, I suppose, on what you grow up with. But then, I grew up in the town that's across the river from Fargo, North Dakota: and I loved living in a rather built-up city.

The appeal that San Francisco had for me were the opportunities to directly experience the micro-cultures in the city. I lived on the edge of Chinatown (the real one: not that tourist strip), where folks don't have the Western aversion to bright colors on buildings; I could - and did - walk or take public transport to book stores, museums, art galleries - you get the idea. To manage that sort of activity here in the upper Midwest, I'd have to have access to my own aircraft - and even then I'd be eating up too much time going from place to place.

Yeah: There are advantages to having a lot of people in a small area. We're social creatures, and there's a lot of energy generated when we're able to meet each other.

The Internet has helped me keep in contact with the world: I 'drove' around the lower east side of New York City earlier this week, via Google Maps. It's not the same as being there, of course - but I was able to take a good look at my surroundings, which I wouldn't have been able to if I were driving. And I could move a whole lot faster than I could, walking. Or driving, for that matter.

Back to New York City, ca. 3650.

My, How You've Grown!

The megalopolis we know today has grown. North America has what's essentially a new mountain range, running from Florida northwards: several miles high in most spots.

And yes: That'd have an effect on weather patterns. My guess is that there'll be 'reverse wind farms' here and there, forcing winds 'uphill' to maintain what we think of as 'normal' climate. Weather control? I suppose you'd call it that.

New York City itself would be one of the higher areas, I suspect. It's an excellent natural harbor: and ocean-going vessels would still be a reasonably efficient way to transport large volumes of material. There'd probably be more than a hundred times as much traffic, though: so we're probably looking at offshore port facilities, too.

How would I feel about living in a city that was essentially one building, several hundred miles long by about three miles deep?

Today, I live in central Minnesota, where water is a mineral for a large part of the year: and I'm not a winter sports enthusiast.

Don't get me wrong: I love it here. But the prospect of living inside 24/7/365, in a place that'd 'feel' like the Mall of America, with climate-controlled pedestrian access to analogs of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Grand Ole Opry, Broadway, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Plus whatever people come up with in the next sixteen centuries?

If I did a 'Buck Rogers,' woke up in that era, and wound up living near the east coast: I might find it a bit crowded. Also extremely exciting.

Old MacDonald Had a Farm

All those people will eat. I've mentioned this before.

I don't think today's sewer system could handle the load of a three-mile-deep New York City. But then, I don't think that Rome's system, two thousand years back, could handle the volume that contemporary systems do: and the Romans were good engineers.

The point? People aren't stupid. We adapt. When what we're doing doesn't work, we improve our methods, or develop new ones. Some of us do, anyway. Others complain and wait for someone else to fix things. That's a different topic.

I really don't think we'll be dumping all that waste into the Atlantic. Remember: all those people are going to want to eat on a regular basis. That sewage just about has to get treated and sent back west to the farms.

Disgusting? I don't think so: but then I live in a town where we can tell when someone upwind has turned their manure bed. Let's get real: Everything on Earth has been eating recycled, ah, stuff for hundreds of millions of years. All that's different about my world of 3650 or so is that we're managing the process a lot more than we are now.

Those farms won't look like those quaint old fields you see in 'visit Ireland' brochures. Think a greenhouse, many levels deep, with "sunlight" generated locally for all but the top level. Livestock? that'd be elsewhere, but not too far away: you don't want to have to haul silage any farther than you have to.

Horribly artificial? Artificial, yes. Horribly? That's a matter of taste. I think Ord ("The Dream") wouldn't like the world 16 centuries out - at all. Or today's world. Me? It'd take getting used to. But then, my ancestors would have had a few adjustments to make, if they'd been taken out of Roman Europe and dropped here in 21st-century Minnesota.

Where's all that energy coming from? Well, that's another topic, for another day.

And I haven't even gotten into the specialized gourmet/recreational business of free-range cattle.

More-or-less-related posts:

"New York City, 3650"
(March 1, 2010)
"London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
(February 26, 2010)
"Food, Agriculture, Technology, and City Folks"
(October 2, 2009)
"Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
(June 26, 2009)
"Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
(June 25, 2009)

¹ "Daniel Boone: Myth and Reality," Gregory McNamee, Encyclopedia Britannica Blog (October 23, 2007).

Artificially Enhanced Human Beings: That's So 20th Century

2010-03-03T15:20:00.010-06:00

Many GEICO commercials play with a disconnect between the (once) popular notion that "cavemen" were "primitive" - and what we've been learning about people who lived before some maniac got the bright idea of planting seeds and waiting for them to grow.

For example, about 800,000 years ago people in one place, at least, lived in a place with a distinct kitchen. Granted, it didn't have a GE Energy Star Dishwasher: but the residence had areas for specific functions like food preparation.

The people who lived there most likely looked a bit like the fellow in that picture. We call folks like him Homo Erectus, and around 1,000,000 years ago our ancestors almost certainly looked a bit like that.

I'm not bothered by the idea - but then, I've seen old family photos. I look a bit like my ancestors: but not quite. For example, on the Campbell side, we lost the characteristic 'wry mouth' several generations back.

Change happens.

The more we learn about our distant ancestors, the more like us they seem - in my opinion. As I wrote in another blog, about that stone age kitchen:

"...But - human? Pretty much like me, basically? I don't see why I shouldn't think so. Their brains were between half and two thirds as massive as ours, on average, but that archeological dig shows that they may have thought more-or-less the same way we do.

That artist's impression doesn't look 'human?' I'm not so sure. You're not likely to see that expression in people's photos today, outside supermarket tabloids, but think of him saying something like, "you want three rocks? You carry one!"

Or, "whaddaya mean, they only come in green or gray?!"..."
(Apathetic Lemming of the North)

Eugenics: It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time

For decades after World War II ended, the idea of replacing most of us with superior human beings was 'well known' to have been the work of those nasty German Nazis.

Since by then many people seemed to realize that they weren't on the 'preferred' list, improving the race wasn't a very popular concept. In fact, if you were around then, or your parents were, your skin may have crawled when you read "Nazis" and "improving the race."

It hasn't always been that way.

Right up until the national socialist party in Germany started 'improving' the human race - arguably, until places like Auschwitz and Dachau hit the news - applying modern science and Victorian ideals to weed out inferior classes and pep up the race seemed like a really good idea.

At least among well-bred, educated Englishmen and their cousins in America.

Science fiction written before WWII had quite a number of examples of what the new-and-improved human race would be like:

"...Over all, John comes across as a sort of socialist version of the Nietzschean ideal with a couple of the rougher edges rubbed off. In other words, human morality has no call on him, but he occasionally feels mild guilt. This is supposed to indicate his superior moral plane, but he comes across more as an odious, amoral little tick. Stapledon assumes that human superiority over lesser animals is quantitative rather than qualitative. In other words, we enjoy our position over the animals because we have more of some quantity called intelligence rather than some unique quality; be it sentience, self-awareness, or an immortal soul.

"Or to be blunt about it, morality is something shared between the strong and denied to the weak.

"Because of this, Stapledon's supermen are allowed to rob from, seduce, exploit, manipulate, dispossess, and even murder 'lesser' people when they get in the way of the supermen's plans due to the higher moral need to advance the interests of the master race. This sort of an argument has an unfortunate track record and Stapledon could just get away with this in the '30s. In less than ten years, however, a certain group of would-be supermen put such ideas into practice and the world is still trying to wash the taste out of its mouth...."
(Tales of Future Past > Future Man > "Odd John")

'It Can't Happen Here?' Don't be Too Sure

The word "eugenics" still hasn't quite regained the panache it had before the forties: but the idea is back. Phrases like "quality of life" are used: but the same old approach of eliminating the unfit is there. Except now it's for 'benevolent' reasons.

I don't think killing people who don't live up to some standard of physical perfection is a good idea. But then, I'm one of those defective products of conception that aren't living a quality lifestyle. Being used in a medical experiment didn't help - but that's another story. (A Catholic Citizen in America (February 3, 2009))

Defective or not, on the whole I prefer being alive to the alternative.

What's With All the Quotes?

I've started using David S. Zondy's Tales of Future Past website as a reference and resource. Partly because he's done a marvelous job of bringing together vintage science fiction virtual memorabilia and ideas. Partly because he seems to see the world in roughly the same way I do.

I don't want to shock anyone, but I think that the physical world is real, not an illusion; that God exists; that some things are moral and others aren't; and that people have souls. And I want to write speculative fiction?!

Back to Mr. Zondy and making supermen. He wrote an uncharacteristically serious few paragraphs about eugenics:

"...One of the obvious ways of producing your superman is one that was taken so seriously in the last century that it was actually tried. Ever since the basic ideas of Darwin and the mechanism of genetics were understood, the idea popped into the mind of Sir Francis Galton that what can be done to dogs and pigeons can be done to men, so if you want to create Homo Superior, why not simply breed human beings selectively?

"This wasn't just idle speculation, he was dead serious and many a philanthropist, scholar, scientist, businessman, and politician became determined advocates of improving the lot of the human race by making sure that the 'best' of the breed intermarried while the sick, feeble-minded, and generally undesirable were prevented from reproducing...."

"...Needless to say, Auschwitz and the Nuremburg trials put paid to the Eugenics movement and gave the world a very stern lesson of what happens when you stop seeing people as children of God and more as laboratory animals.

"What is even more frightening is that we have been so slow in learning our lesson and so quick to forget it. We've made great strides in medicine, particularly in genetic research, but in doing so we have reached the point where we are in danger of doing far more harm than good. If not to our bodies, then to our souls. Our society is tampering with things such as contraceptives, fertility drugs, genetic engineering, selective abortion, infant euthanasia, in vitro fertilisation, designer babies, and artificial insemination with so little real discussion of the ethics of what we're doing that we face a very real risk of one day turning 'round and discovering that we are not becoming genetic supermen, but moral monsters...."
(Tales of Future Past > Future Man > "Eugenics")

The Importance of [Not] Being Earnest

Stories where the author has a Point To Make and hits readers over the head with it are as likely to stir my stomach as my heart. Dreadfully earnest stories happen so often that Television Tropes & Idioms has a whole page about being "Anvilicious."

Not that I think there should be no message in a story. Even if it's as basic as 'don't mess with the big guy's wife until you're sure he's dead.' Homer's Odysseus / Ulysses wouldn't have had quite as exciting an ending, if the war hero hadn't cleaned house at the end in a style worthy of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action heroes.

And, as another page in Television Tropes & Idioms puts it: "Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped." Think Aesop's Fables.

The trick, I think, is finding a balance. How? Having somebody else read the story isn't the daftest approach.

I may drop a few anvils as I go along: but I'll try to be careful about it. Apart from artistic and aesthetic considerations, I don't think it's generally the best way to make a point.

Mutants, Cyborgs and Meddling With God's Handiwork

I think Mr. Zondy is right on at least one point: particularly with the sort of power that people have these days, we should think about the ethics of what we do: not just whether or not we feel like doing it.

On the other hand, I don't have a problem with Man Tampering With Nature. In my view, that's what we do, just by being human. We've come a long way from weaving cloth and knapping hide scrapers: but we were messing with 'the natural order of things' long before we started selecting which seeds to use for the next crop.

Isn't It Different With People?

Even if I didn't feel like it, I'd have to be concerned with cruelty to animals. It's in the rules (A Catholic Citizen in America (August 17, 2009))

I'm even more concerned with cruelty to people. I don't think people should be bought, sold, or killed - even if it's for personal profit or convenience. And the way I view the world, the stakes go up when the person is helpless. But I'm getting off-topic.

What About Cyborgs: Those Inhuman Amalgams of Man and Machine?

Don't expect me to be too upset about mixing a human being's original equipment and artificial add-ons and replacements. I'm focusing on the monitor right now with clip-on lenses, My hands and wrists have been surgically altered, quite a few of my teeth have metal parts, I've got two metal hip sockets, and my belly's got plastic mesh in it. Even my brain's been altered, chemically, to clear up some glitches.

And I'm okay with that: I haven't messed with anything that was working smothly in the first place. What's been done to me since about age four has been better described as "repairing" than "tampering."

These models who get surgically altered to match some current fashion: that's dubious, in my view.

It's Just Starting to Get Interesting

I've read that Intel has announced a neural interface, due for release around 2020. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 2, 2009)) Some of the obvious applications for that sort of technology is people who've suffered brain injuries from stroke or accidents. That, I think, is a very promising development.

The technology will, of course, be misused. People misuse things sometimes. We've killed each other with rocks. My guess is that somebody's going to use those brain chips in ways that'll make what happened at Auschwitz look like a Sunday social. You think we've got problems with malware now?!

But that doesn't make rocks bad: or brain chips. We've cobbled together rules for how to use rocks, and I'm pretty sure we can do the same with brain chips.

We may not be quite the same as we were when we learned how to knap flint: But I don't think we've gotten any stupider.

If At First You Don't Succeed - - -

As a rule, I think persistence is a good idea. But like just about every other human characteristic, it can be misapplied.

The national socialist party's efforts to clean up their gene pool and make room for a master race had unpleasant consequences. I don't think anybody's going to try that approach again.

But the idea of 'perfecting' humanity is so appealing to many, I don't think it'll go away. I'm also pretty sure that someone's going to try again. And again, and again.

The more spectacular blowouts, like what happened in Germany around the 1940s, may put a moratorium on most efforts for a few decades. But too many people are too convinced that humanity would be so much better - if only 'improvements' were made - that I think we're likely going to see superman projects now and again for the foreseeable future.

Some of what I've read about - like making repairs at the genetic level to eradicate conditions like leukemia - seem to make sense. How they should be implemented: that's where things get interesting.

Meanwhile, superman factories and people who think they've evolved beyond good and evil will provide a writer of speculative fiction a warehouse of material.

Some of which I've already used:

"Birthright"
(February 19, 2010)

Vaguely-related posts:

"Etched Ostrich Eggs and Being Human"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 3, 2010)
"Homo Erectus, Kitchens, and Human (Pre)History"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 21, 2009)
"Next-Generation Prosthetic Hand - and Intel Says Direct Neural Interface Brain Chips by 2020"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 2, 2009)
"Tofu Turkeys, Genetically Altered Foods, and the Evil Eye"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (November 14, 2009)
"Hard Science Fiction, Cultural Blinders and Laban's Sheep"
(October 29, 2009)
"Animals: Yeah, the Catholic Church has Rules About Them, Too"
A Catholic Citizen in America (August 17, 2009)
"Dinosaurs, Mutant Chickens, Evolution, and Faith in God"
A Catholic Citizen in America (June 29, 2009)
"Medical Ethics and Human Experimentation: Why I Take it Personally"
A Catholic Citizen in America (February 3, 2009)
"Human Clones Possible: Don't Worry, They're Just for Parts and Research"
A Catholic Citizen in America (February 2, 2009)

New York City, 3650

2010-03-01T20:56:00.021-06:00

I've been thinking about New York City quite a bit more lately than I usually do. Partly because one of those nifty ideas that's been wandering somewhere in my brain's infrastructure popped out into the front office last week.

The basic idea isn't anything new: it's a setting for what could be a sequence of 'club tales.' Sort of like the 'Mr. Mulliner' short stories by P. G. Wodehouse (which are not speculative fiction at all); or A. C. Clarke's "Tales from the White Hart" (which is).

The best location for this place, I decided, would be on Earth, in a major city, and about 16 centuries from now. Almost any period after the advent of the short circuit would do: but that's roughly when my 'Blue Buzzard' stories are, so I'd only have to do background research once for both sets.

So, what would a "city of the future" look like? Probably not quite like this:

"This painting by Frank R. Paul's of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Shmoise regulations...."

"...If there is one thing that united the artist-prophets, it was a fascination with gigantism. Since the most impressive engineering feats of the early 20th century were bigger and better dams, bridges, canals, and whatnot, it seemed only reasonable that the cities of future ages would look as though they needed a round of thyroid treatments...."
("Future City," "Skyscraper World," Tales of Future Past)

David S. Zondy, creator of Tales of Future Past, has a point: those illustrations from the 20s and 30s of cities of the future showed huge buildings. And, quite often, elevated roadways.

Now that megamalls are news only when something newsworthy happens in them, maybe it isn't quite so cool to imagine megastructures.

Cool or not, New York City in my 37th century is going to have to have some fair-sized buildings. Or I'll have to radically change what I've got planned for Earth in my stories.

Starting with a population somewhat northwards of 100 times what we have now.

Flint Knives to International Harvester: Change Happens

We couldn't feed that many people today. But I've done a little research: and that's not a crazy-high figure. Of course, it would mean bringing agricultural technology up to 1975 state-of-the-art around the world. Just as important, we couldn't have too many countries where the primary function of most people was keeping dear leader supplied with fresh lobster. But I'm getting off-topic.

A Hundred Times as Many People? However Will Earth Survive?

My 37th century Earth won't look just what we've got today: but I'm not talking about the 'dying planet' stuff mentioned in "Avatar" (2009).

What I think many doomsters forget is that human beings are biological entities. We consume organic material, water and oxygen. But it doesn't stay inside us. On a time scale of seconds to hours, most of what went in comes out again. We can't consume what we excrete, at that point, but quite a few organisms can: and eventually we, or someone like us, will get the same molecules again. It's a system that's been working for hundreds of millions of years: and I think is likely to keep recycling, whether trilobites, dinosaurs, or we are pushing part of the process along.

Will it be different, with more than a hundred times as many people around as there are now? Of course. It's different now, compared to the 'good old days' when there were only a few million of us. (See " 'The Dream' - a Short-Short Story," for a look at today's world as a hideously-overcrowded future)

Back to New York City, ca. 3650

As it stands today, New York City can't handle another 99 people for everybody who lives and works there now. But quite a bit can be changed in 1,650 years.

I did a little checking, and found that many (most, where I looked) buildings around New York City's Central Park were about 15 stories tall, with some around 20. Near the south end of the island, they're taller, of course. But that 15-story range gave me something to start with.

You can't just add more floors to a building and leave it at that. Aside from structural considerations, people in the upper floors will want to get down to ground level now and again. We manage that in today's skyscrapers with elevators. Which takes up floor space - books have been written on the subject: the bottom line is that there are limits with the technology we have now. 'Sky lobbies' are a partial solution.

We might wind up with something like those old aerial roadways, after all.

With a blithe wave of the hand, I took New York City's skyline, and multiplied in by a hundred. Vertical transport? I'll figure that out later.

Those buildings around Central Park would be 15 x 10 x 100 = 15,000 feet tall. That's almost three miles. The park is less than a mile across. The place would be a trench: "scarier than it is now," as my oldest daughter put it.

Just How High Will We Build?

I did a quick check, and found out that five kilometers is almost the limit for how far up you'll find cities - Wenzhuan is 16,730 feet, or 5,019 meters, above sea level.

People can live there, obviously - but I'm not sure how much higher we'd go before the air was uncomfortably thin.

So my Central Park is surrounded by buildings around 15,000 feet tall? No problem: Air's breathable at that altitude, and I'm still not worrying about vertical transport.

Central Park's being at the bottom of a three-mile-deep trench is an aesthetic issue - which I'll ignore for now.

Incremental Growth?

There was a story where New York City was destroyed and rebuilt as a cube, two miles on a side. ("City Cube," Tomorrow's Skyline, Tales of Future Past)

That could probably be done. Napoleon III's government leveled good-sized parts of Paris, laying out the groundwork of what we've got today. ("Streets of Paris," James Chastain (1999, 2004)) There's pretty good reason to believe that the streets of Paris today are so wide and straight because the civic leaders wanted the citizenry exposed to light, air and cannon fire.

The mid-1800s were a colorful period. And another topic.

Apart from phenomena like Napoleon III and urban renewal, though, cities tend to grow one piece at a time. That's why today's New York City has brownstones, modernist architecture, and a jumble of other styles being used side-by-side.

I rather like the effect, myself.

Right now, I'm playing with the idea that 1,650 years from now New York City will have grown more-or-less gradually. No two-mile-high cubes.

A quick sketch of the south end of Manhattan with a height limit of about 15,000 feet didn't look too crazy. I don't know whether to look at making that end of the island taller - or spreading out the 'downtown' area.

To keep the buildings from looking like improbably elongated mega-pencils, I've assumed that Manhattan will continue to be high-value property: valuable enough for organizations to buy several blocks and build a single structure over them.

We've got something like that happening in Chicago. But that's yet another topic, and it's getting late.

Vaguely-related posts:

"London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
(February 26, 2010)
"Food, Agriculture, Technology, and City Folks"
(October 2, 2009)
"Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
(June 26, 2009)
"Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
(June 25, 2009)

London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future

2010-02-26T21:03:00.007-06:00

One of the advantages of speculative fiction / science fiction for writers is that, particularly for stories set in the far future, they can make up anything they like, and it's okay?

Well, yes and no.

For someone who's writing exclusively as an exercise in self-expression, maybe.

A writer who wants other people to read the story - and keep reading it - not so much, in my opinion.

What's in a Name?

Take place names, for example. For someone writing a story in American English about contemporary life in New York City: all they need to do is make sure that they spell "New York" correctly, and keep check out the New York City Web site (www.nyc.gov), or other online resources like Google Maps.

No problems.

When your setting is not where you live, and you're portraying people who don't speak your particular dialect: things get interesting.

For example, would someone who grew up in Germany say that he lives in Germany? If he was speaking English, quite possibly. When he's at home, though, he lives in Deutschland. Which is why, here in America, we refer to citizens of the Netherlands as the Dutch. Which is another topic.

So, what about tales of the far future: anything goes, right?

Depends on what you're going for. If your story is supposed to be a cheesy spoof of Saturday matinee serials and the shallow end of science fiction's golden age: I suppose there's a sort of virtue to using names like Magnetonia or Electropolis.

Now that I see it: I actually like "Electropolis."

But, no.

What I was working with today (not all day - but I'm getting off-topic again) was a bit more serious.

I was looking for something to call New York City, about 1,650 years from now.

Sure, I could just call it "New York City," since I'm writing in the only language I'm really comfortable with: English.

But that doesn't help establish or support the setting.

I could make up some bit of gibberish, on the principle that the place would have a new name.

Things Change

That approach is half right. Not the "gibberish" bit: the idea that New York City might have a new name.

Or, maybe not.

London, that big city on a river in an island kingdom, has been around for a long time. Almost 2,000 years now (1,967, actually). Back in Roman times, it was called Londinium. (More, at "Roman London," Britain Express)

And, just shy of two millennia later: the name hasn't changed all that much. Mostly, I suspect, because the folks living there speak a Germanic language that was heavily influenced by French-speaking Vikings. Which is yet another topic.

Back to New York City, about 1,650 years from now.

One thing's sure: things will have changed.

I've decided, given what's happened over the last few thousand years, that China has a good shot at being

Intact as a cultural and political entity
A major part of the economy and culture of Earth

Besides: there are some seriously cool things I can do with an Earth that shows a heavy Chinese influence.

Like - I haven't forgotten - what people call New York City.

I put New York City through Google Translate, and got 纽约市 (that won't look right, unless you've got a Chinese font. I told Google Translate to give me the result in 'Chinese (Simplified)').

Next, I put 纽约市 in, asking for an English translation. Sure enough: I got New York City.

So, how is 纽约市 pronounced? If you read and speak Chinese: you already know.

To get the answer for me, I went back to the English > Chinese (Simplified) mode, put New York City in and got 纽约市 again. This time I told the software to "Show romanization" (that's a nice bit of software Google's got). (I'm learning to recognize characters - but pronunciation is something I'm not even close to getting right.)

I got Niǔyuē shì.

Which is helpful. Maybe that "ǔ" is roughly the same sound as "oo" (as in too or tool, as pronounced in American English). Or maybe it's more like "uh" like "cut". The American Heritage Dictionary Pronunciation Key says it's the latter.

The "ē" is a little easier - assuming that it's got the same value given in that American Heritage Dictionary Pronunciation Key. That's the "e" sound we have in words like "pet" and "met."

And yes, I know: I don't know how to pronounce Chinese. No offense, but I'm not aiming at linguistic precision here, so much as trying for a plausibly-close approximation. Moving along.

I'm guessing that "New York City" / 纽约市 / Niǔyuē shì sounds a little like "Niuhyueh Shì" in some Chinese dialects. Or maybe "Niooyueh Shì". It doesn't look that much like "New York City" in the Latin alphabet I use - but it doesn't sound all that much different.

I'll sleep on it, but I think that major city on the east coast of North America is called "Niuhyueh Shì" by the time that story's period rolls around.

Another Day, Another Question

2010-02-24T23:18:00.002-06:00

I've spent hours this week, sketching out how the interior of the Blue Buzzard is laid out. I think it's important, so that I can show readers - eventually. I wrote about this on Monday.

On the other hand, one of my daughters doesn't do this sort of planning. She's written many stories. They're not the sort of thing I would normally read on my own: but I've read some, and they're well-written. (Observed as a recovering English teacher, not a doting father.)

So I have to ask myself - again - am I taking the wrong approach to writing?

Good question. Someday maybe I'll have a good answer.

Making a Plausible Setting

2010-02-22T18:32:00.003-06:00

I watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" last Saturday. It's been almost 42 years since I first saw the film, and quite a bit has changed. Including me.

So, I took a trip down memory lane by viewing a movie I liked in my late teens? So what?

Stanley Kubrick's film is still (fairly) convincing science fiction cinema today. In large part, I think, because he understood that his 'futuristic' gadgetry and settings had too look like people actually used them. And, he made an effort to make sure that sets which were filmed as if they connected to each other - would actually connect, if placed side-by-side. And that live sets matched (more or less) the miniatures used for spacecraft exteriors.

I spent quite a bit of time today, working out the deck plan for part of the Blue Buzzard, a ship that's the setting for what I plan as a sequence of stories. For (some) written fiction, that'd be a waste of time. All an author would have to do is make sure that - if any numbers were given - there was enough cubage to accommodate whatever the action called for.

I'd be uncomfortable with that - I've read too many stories where willing suspension of disbelief was stretched when, say, a hallway had three doors on each side in one chapter, with pictures hung between them - and was three paces long in another.

Besides, what I'm aiming for is a story involving quite a few pictures, drawings, whatever. That means that I need to have at least a rough idea of where things go.

That deck plan? I can't use it. The good news is, I know what won't work, know a few features that will - all before making a single sketch or rendering.

Why all this fuss over deck plans today? My imagination had taken a sabbatical. Which is another topic.

Sort-of-related posts:

"Science Fiction in the Movies: 'The Satan Bug' to 'The Matrix' "
(January 26, 2010)
"Futuristic? Or Just Cutting-Edge?"
(January 23, 2010)
"Thought for the Day: Computers and Human Brains"
(August 15, 2009)
""The Future, Far as Human Eye Could See" - Hollerith Cards and Anachronisms"
(August 2, 2009)
"Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
(June 26, 2009)
"Getting Details Right: Cityscapes"
(June 25, 2009)

Birthright

2010-02-19T20:41:00.008-06:00

Birthright

Brian H. Gill

Despite the stories you've seen, there never were very many Voini. Like any alter, each Voin was expensive to grow.

Also, unlike the Gung Yan, Voini had earned an unpleasant reputation during the recent wars.

Between limited production, judgments after the Suspension and 'Voin hunts,' there are now perhaps only a few dozen surviving Voini.

Perhaps it is best this way.

As great a cliché as this will seem, Voini were designed to be the "ideal soldiers." Not mindless killing machines. Soldiers. Again, please: forget the stories you've seen. Those are fiction. Intended for entertainment.

Traits were carefully selected for each batch of Voini, carefully chosen for a particular set of tasks. All had average or better intelligence, most were above the 50th percentile in strength, and Voini pilots in particular had almost inhumanly fast reaction times. No Voin, despite their reputation, were given to unpredictable outbursts of homicidal fury.

I believe I understand how the victors viewed the Voini. Units of four or eight apparently-identical men, armed and moving with the speed and precision of the finest athlete, carrying out a military objective - of which you were the target? Yes, that could be frightening.

And it is an all-too-human habit to ascribe frightful attributes to that which we fear.

So, yes: I believe I understand how the victors viewed the Voini. I believe I understand the reasoning behind the post-Suspension judgments: although I do not agree with each one.

But I hope that someday, as the passions of this age fade, my brothers and I will be regarded in a kinder light.

"Stories on this Blog"

Comments, Spam, and Having to Wait

2010-02-16T12:47:00.000-06:00

I'm moderating comments on this blog from here on.

Sorry about that. I like to see the comments I make show up right away, and figure that you probably do, too.

On the other hand, I've been getting too much obscene spam: which I don't like to see, and figure you may not, either. Particularly if you understand the language it's written in.

I rambled on about this more, in another blog:

"Lemming Tracks: Comments and Spam"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (February 16, 2010)

"Distraction in Retrospect"

2010-02-15T23:32:00.008-06:00

Distraction in Retrospect

Brian H. Gill

As this account approaches its final edit, I see that the short, colorful story of Red Rock Exploration Consortium is rippling through the pool again. I had not intended to discuss RREC, apart from my personal involvement, but feel that I have a duty, as the last surviving member of my team, to set the record straight.

Or, if you prefer, record my own observations and conclusions.

First: to the best of my knowledge and after serious consideration: I have no reason to believe that there was any sort of conspiracy involved in either RREC's failed Oxygen Reclamation Project, or in the collapse of RREC which followed. My testimony on the matter is in the public record, and no facts or allegations have emerged during the intervening decades to alter that belief.

Second: there are, again to the best of my knowledge, no "secret records" of the Oxygen Reclamation project. All documents and files posted by my team have been made public. As the team recording officer, I believe I may state that with some authority.

Third: and implicit in the second point, there is no "secret alien technology" that was smuggled back to Earth. My team was, prior to the collapse of RREC, the only one to have found Danian Age artifacts.

Finally: my respect for Val Tuning demands that I recall briefly the final days of his life.

Tuning was, without question, unschooled in any of the sciences and at best a competent engineer. He was, however, a capable administrator and my friend.

I was distressed to learn that the ludicrous allegation that he was not human is once again being discussed. RREC's medical records were detailed, embarrassingly so, and again are now a matter of public record. If Val Tuning was not human, then space aliens are indistinguishable from us.

I find that: unlikely.

On the Saturday before hearings on alleged irregularities in RREC accounts were to begin, Val Tuning was seen by several witnesses at the Shanghumugham Beach, where he went for a swim and didn't come back.

While it is true that his body was not recovered, this does not, in my opinion, "prove" anything. It is, again in my opinion, most likely that the lively marine ecosystem in that area benefited from Val Tuning's death by drowning.

Regarding the Danian Age artifacts themselves, my own findings and those of my team are available to anyone who bothers to access them. And, at the risk of seeming defensive: I was, in addition to the team recording officer an accredited mineralogist. I suppose I owe the honor of the assignment to my being that rare combination: a competent field researcher who is willing to accept "mere" clerical duties.

I also suppose it no longer matters if I admit that I would have accepted latrine duty in exchange for an opportunity to study the southern rim of Gusev. And, I do not mind admitting, still regret that the discovery of the Danian Age artifacts and the subsequent focus on their study prevented me from finishing my field work.

Even so, and although much discussion of these artifacts is, in my opinion, quite silly, I am glad of the continued interest in this evidence that we are, or were, not the only sort of people to have inhabited the universe. I like to think that a spirit of curiosity and wonder still lives in our hearts and minds.

Briefly, the most common artifact at Dig 45 was a metal sphere. We found 72 of them, buried. The metal was an alloy composed chiefly of iron, carbon and nickel.

The spheres, apart from what appeared to be post-manufacture damage, were nearly identical. Each had an outside diameter of approximately one meter, hollow, with a wall thickness of approximately 0.9 millimeter.

Although one sphere had apparently been punctured, they clearly had originally had a single opening, approximately 8.2 centimeters in diameter, surrounded by a disk about 25 centimeters in diameter in which the wall was 2.3 millimeters thick. The other readily-visible features common to all spheres were three knobs spaced equally around the hole, and a sturdy ring approximately 30 centimeters in diameter opposite the hole.

The least-unlikely explanation as to the sphere's function is that they were storage containers for liquids or gasses.

These spheres were, and are, the best-known of the Danian Age artifacts. More intriguing, for me, were the several dozen rumpled sheets of woven metal we found, varying in size from a few centimeters on a side to a sort of ribbon over a meter wide by nine meters long. Then there were the six rocks which had clearly been machined into rectangular prisms, about five by five by eight centimeters.

Although these remarkable objects are called the Danian Age artifacts, their exact age is still uncertain. The latest generally-accepted estimate, based on known current rates of aeolian sediment deposition near Gusev City, together with other factors, is that the spheres and other artifacts were left on the Martian surface somewhere between 66,000,000 and 61,000,000 years ago.

(Excerpt from "Thiruvananthapuram to Gusev City: the Autobiography of Yuriko Zabala")

"Stories on this Blog"

Gods, Demons, and Used Spaceship Dealers

2010-02-13T14:13:00.012-06:00

Ever noticed how - earnest - space aliens are, in some stories?

Either they're dedicated to oppressing humanity or collecting our brains, or something else we don't like - or they're high-minded altruists, come from the stars to guide brutish humanity to a keener, greener future.

Not all speculative fiction stories are like that, of course. But I think there's been a tendency to treat the stars as a sort of cosmic Rorschach test, that tells us more about the viewer, than what the inkblots are like. Or stars.

As the author of Tales of Future Past put it:

"...It's become a cliché of science fiction that we can look to the stars for deliverance from our base impulses. The more enlightened beings that live there will give us a leg up and free us from ourselves. Roddenberry, Speilberg , and Sagan looked at outer space and found hope in the guise of figurative angels.

"Quatermass did so and literally found the Devil."
("Quatermass & the Pit," Tales of Future Past)

Quatermass & the Pit is one of my favorite science fiction tales. The premise was a bit less implausible in 1967, when it was produced, than after robotic exploration of Mars started - but it's a well-done movie. I'd see it again.

I rather liked the scene when it became patently obvious that the thing under London was not a German bomb, left over from the war.

(from Tales of Future Past, used w/o permission)
'That's odd: he doesn't look German?'

No: That's not a line from the movie.

Gods, Demons, and Cthulhu

I think Lovecraft may have been closer to the mark, with Cthulhu. The big guy wasn't, as I understand it, evil - not in the sense of wanting to do something bad to humanity.

Cthulhu simply didn't care what happened to us.

Sort of like how somebody fixing his house might back a trailer over an anthill. It's bad for the ants: but the homeowner might never notice what happened. Of course, if the ants found a way into the homeowners kitchen - - -.

Maybe being ignored isn't the worst thing that could happen to us.

Scientists, Used Spaceship Dealers, and Surfer Dudes

We may run into people who can move planets and stars around, control the energies of stars, and stretch reality like taffy, as easily as we release chemical energies storied for eons to send knowledge around the world at a little below the speed of light.

And, although I'm pretty sure that some of them will be as earnest and focused as televangelists and environmentalists: I suspect that we'll find that they have quite a range of interests. Most of which don't involve us. At all.

Turning the volume down a little, let's say that your standard-issue space aliens make contact with humanity. They may be smarter than we are, and they certainly have been developing their transportation technologies longer than we have. But there isn't much that they do, where we don't have a fairly good idea of what they're doing - and a general notion of what sort of energies and materials they're doing it with.

Those folks will probably include anthropologists (zenologists?) who want to learn all about our quaint native beliefs and customs. Also folks who see an opportunity to serve - and make a living - exchanging used spaceships for something else, and then unloading the used spaceships.

Dull? Boring? I don't think so.

Getting back to Cthulhu and company.

I suppose that your standard-issue eldritch abomination from the abyss of space might be the sort of brooding psychopath we've come to expect from some stories.

Or, not.

Look at it this way: if you're able to make a star explode as a supernova, any time you want, wouldn't it be a rush to set up a big sail and windsurf the shock front?

COWABUNGA, DUDE!

"Big wave surfing to great music-www.myspace.com/dogbonemusic"

tchouser1, YouTube (August 21, 2007)
video, 3:06

Well, That's Interesting: Burges Shale Creatures

2010-02-13T11:04:00.003-06:00

Science fiction/speculative fiction writers have played with the idea of space aliens that don't look all that much like us. There are a few approaches, including the intriguing but relatively uninformative 'too strange for the merely human mind to grasp.'

I've been trying to find plausible body plans for people who aren't human: Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" was a reasonably good starting place.

Then there are the creatures of the Cambrian. Some of the strangest fossils from this period come the Burgess Shale. We don't know whether critters on Earth these days don't, as a rule, have five eyes because pairs of eyes work better - or whether opabinia regalis isn't the ancestor of more creatures for reasons unrelated to it's strange-looking head.

So far, I've come up with fifteen plausible body plans - most of which are quite familiar, including the one which was used for millions of years by the bipedal dinosaurs.

But I've got the idea that I've missed something. So today I went back online and checked out a few websites that discuss the Burgess Shale. And other Cambrian fossil finds.

"Early Fauna"
Western Carolina University

3+ billion years – life forms
- cyanobacteria (blue green algae) – very early
- changed atmosphere – generate oxygen

This page seems to be a resource for a class or classes at Western Carolina University. The style is terse, but there are quite adequate illustrations - and a pretty good presentation of the questions raised by these fossils.

More:

"The Burgess Shale Fauna"
Smithsonian / National Museum of Natural History

"Although the Cambrian Explosion is largely associated with animals having hard shells, the soft-bodied biota also diversified during this period. The Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale fauna, discovered by Charles Walcott in 1909, in British Columbia, Canada, provides a rare glimpse of Cambrian soft-bodied animals. This fauna is especially important because the fossil record is biased toward organisms having hard parts. Another famous soft-bodied occurrence is the Chengjiang Fauna, of...."

It's one page of a section on the Cambrian era. No illustrations, more useful for outlining what to look for elsewhere.

There are links to pages with text and photos, but they load in pop-up windows that won't display properly if you don't have the kind of browser and system that the Smithsonian thinks you should. (I don't.) For example, one pop-up about Hallucigenia sparsa is cut off in mid-sentence, with the best work-around I found.

Nice artwork, though.

(screen capture from the Smithsonian, used w/o permission)

The top of the pop-up displayed find: but I'd have to go in and try re-coding the source, to see what's at the bottom. That, or either adjust or replace my system.

Related posts:

"The Coconut Crab: No, It's Not From a Science Fiction Movie"
(September 25, 2009)
"Hurdia Victoria: Cambrian Supercritter of the Burgess Shale"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 20, 2009)

Today, I've been Charting This Quadrant of the Galaxy

2010-02-11T21:29:00.006-06:00

Megalomania is a personality trait said to be common among RPG¹ game moderators. Understandably, since many game moderators create a small world, often complete with their own laws of nature: and the people and creatures which live in that world.

For me, it was also a somewhat humbling experience. Or would have been, if I hadn't thought through just how complex reality is, before I got involved with RPGs. One time, playing with my kids, I had to suspend play because I'd misplaced a barony. We knew it was there: but I couldn't put my hands on the manila folder I kept all the details in.

It's a good thing I'm not God. But that's another topic: for another blog. (Like A Catholic Citizen in America - shameless, blatant plug for another of my blogs)

Where was I?

RPGs.

Subcreations (February 1, 2010)

Human aspirations and limitations.

Right.

Charting the Galaxy, a Half-Quadrant at a Time

So, what did I do with my time today?

Picked up some tax-related information at local clinics
Dropped some letters off at the post office
Went to the bank
Bought some coffee
Finished charting one quadrant of the galaxy

Don't be too impressed: All that last item means is that I've assigned positions for quite a few 'points of interest' in two eighth-section wedges of the Milky Way galaxy. A few of them are real, like Eta Carina and the Vela Supernova Remnant. Most, however, are figments of my imagination.

And none-too-detailed figments, at that: with a few exceptions.

It's a bit obsessive-compulsive of me, but I think I've got an excuse.

First, it's the sort of potentially-annoying, occasionally-pointless thing I do.

Second, and more importantly, I'm hoping that there'll be more more than one story in a setting I've been putting together. Much of the action takes place over a thousand years from now. Or, from the point of view of that prologue I posted:

"In ancient times, after humanity reached the stars, but before the Mandate of Heaven was restored to the Middle Kingdom...."
(June 23, 2009)

Individual stories may be slice-of-life vignettes, action-adventure space opera, or whatever. Taken as a whole, I'm aiming for epic scale.

So, I really don't want to write myself into a corner - or accidentally introduce something that feels nifty for one story, but complicates every story that follows.

Like the Racooters. That's what some humans call them. Their name for "people" is a short series of whistles, squeaks and clicks that's pronounceable (sort of) with a human vocal system - but which doesn't transliterate well into the Latin alphabet. The name "Racooter" comes from their appearance. Think a raccoon that's a little more massive than we are, and stretched out like an otter. The head bulges a lot more, above and behind the eyes - but that gives a general idea of their appearance.

The Racooters are good for at least one story - a family of them is looking for a piece of hardware that wandered off - and my oldest daughter and I have been talking through some aspects of their personalities, culture, and technology.

Where Have all the Aliens Gone?

If you're around my age (I was born during the Truman administration), you may recognize the song I'm jumping off from:

Where have all the aliens gone?
Long time looking
Where have all the aliens gone?
Where did they go?
Where have all the aliens gone?
We've not seen them: no, not one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Dubious 'alien abduction' stories and all notwithstanding, there isn't solid evidence that extraterrestrial microbes exist: let alone space alien proctologists. Ever notice, by the way, how the 'space aliens' of a few decades back were unaccountably interested in giving women pregnancy tests? Never mind.

I really don't buy the idea that humanity is, by some wild cosmic coincidence, at exactly the point where intelligent races die (horribly, of course) of pollution, global warming, nuclear winter, or whatever the crisis du jour is.

An idea that's been played with by speculative fiction authors is that the galaxy is crowded with aliens - who are scared silly of us. We don't see them, because they really, sincerely, don't want to be seen.

Or maybe we're on a sort of wildlife preserve. We don't see the aliens because they don't look all that much like us to begin with. more to the point, they're no more interested in making themselves known to us than entomologists are interested in revealing themselves to the termite mound they're studying. Keep going along that path, and you'll start wondering if we're in a zoo: or a laboratory.

Which has been done in some stories.

I'm going with another idea: that there's a fair number of non-human people out there. And, they really are non-human.

There's a very distinct possibility that Earth isn't a "Class M" planet in the "Star Trek" sense of the term: a planet that's right on the 50th percentile of suitability for biological life. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009))

We may be on just about the smallest world that could possibly support life-as-we-know-it. Devastating as earthquakes and volcanoes are, we rely on them for recycling stuff that would otherwise collect on the ocean floors.

A bigger planet would, unless there's something seriously wrong with the mathematical models geologists use to explain how Earth works, have more tectonic activity - earthquakes and volcanoes - probably a thinner crust, and more plates getting sucked down, heated and sent back up through volcanoes.

People living on a bigger planet would have a harder time getting off it, once they developed the technology.

Even if they could get into orbit, I'm not convinced that they'd be interested.

"Doesn't Everybody Dream of Flying?"
"Maybe there's nobody else out there, or maybe most people live on planets where it's really, really hard to get into orbit. Or maybe we live on a planet where, for the last few million years, the environment favored creatures with a bit more brains than usual: who were willing to take insane risks.

"Like flying.

"Or riding a tower of explosives to an airless hell of barren rock. Several times.

"Across the galaxy, most people may be staying quietly at home, playing the local equivalent of pinochle or Mahjong, or whatever: and shuddering at the memory of crazy Uncle Eddy, who once made something he called a 'raft,' but - thankfully - never tried using it himself...."
(Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009))

Remember: Non-human intelligences won't be human.

Which gets me back to that "quadrant of the galaxy" thing. I've placed - tentatively - 58 places where people got started. Including us. A few are more-or-less like us, physically and psychologically: like the Raccooters. Most aren't. Some died with no heirs, a long time ago. Some have been around for a really, really long time - the periodicals section of their analog to the Library of Congress would have documents that are tens of millions of years old. And maybe pictures of dinosaurs.

And some of the really old ones are, the way I'm setting it up, quite a bit like us. The way they think, anyway. Only they've been around for a whole lot longer.

That's where it gets interesting. There's a little spark of an idea that I intend to play with for a while.

Would We Realize That an Alien was Smarter than We are?

Speculative fiction authors have used the idea that space aliens don't just have better technology than we do: they're smarter. On the other hand, some of my favorite stories played with the (more rarely seen) notion that we're the brainy ones: and that the Galactic Protectorate has mile-long starships because they've been muddling through the research-and-development process for hundreds of thousands of years.

Then, they met humans.

You know, we could be scary.

But, let's say that we meet space aliens that are smarter than we are. A lot smarter.

Would we notice?

Maybe - but maybe not. What we might notice instead is that they take an awfully long time to get around to actually saying something.

Sort of like the way it's been suggested that dogs understand 'every word I say.' Like: "Spot, come here. I'm blah blah blah blah blah blah you'd blah blah come blah. Blah you blah blah go blah blah walk, Spot?"

If Spot wasn't a wolf whose ancestors we fiddled with until we had a stupid wolf that adores humans, Spot might feel that Master could just as easily have said: "Spot, I you come walk. Spot?" The syntax isn't right for English - but it gets the essentials of Master's statement. From Spot's point of view, and capacity to understand.

But that's another topic.

Related (to something, anyway) posts:

"Well, That's Interesting: The Evolution of Galaxies"
(February 8, 2010)
"Aliens, Facial Expressions, Fear and Diplomacy"
(January 29, 2010)
"'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien"
(December 9, 2009)
"Move the Planet - or - Safety First"
(December 9, 2009)
"Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe"
(December 8, 2009)
"Earth May Not Be a 'Class M' Planet"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009)
"Humanity Is Not the Eldest"
(November 22, 2009)
" 'Waiting on a Dead World' "
(October 31, 2009)
"Timing is Everything"
(October 7, 2009)
"Advice from C. L. Moore: Read What You Enjoy Most, and Some Rambling"
(September 28, 2009)
"Come Sail Away - The Universe is Full of Wonders"
(September 11, 2009)

¹ Role Playing Game. The best-known may be Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Decades ago, I ran a couple of campaigns in a variation of that game system. RPGs can be wonderfully engaging opportunities for getting together with friends for a sort of interactive storytelling, exercises in tactics and strategy, or social events that might interest a psychologist. And, for some, an opportunity to get upset about what those people over there are doing.

Well, That's Interesting: The Evolution of Galaxies

2010-02-08T21:49:00.004-06:00

This might be part of the explanation for why the Galactic Federation of Grooviness hasn't visited us - and why there's so remarkably little evidence that ALF has a real-life counterpart.

"Today's Spiral Galaxies Were Once the Ugly Ducklings"
Space.com (February 8, 2010)

"Beautiful spiral galaxies grew out of odd shapes that astronomers say were the ugly ducklings of the early universe.

"It's long been assumed that galaxies grow over time, and shapes change. But the main construction phase for many modern galaxies was thought to have occurred close to the beginning of time, the first few billion years after the theoretical Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

"Contrary to this conventional view, nearly half of the spiral galaxies of today, like our Milky Way, had peculiar shapes just 6 billion years ago — more recently than had been thought, the study found.

"If confirmed, the finding highlights the importance to many galaxies of collisions and mergers in the recent past. It also provides clues for the unique status of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, researchers said in a statement...."

"...Although our own galaxy is a spiral galaxy, it seems to have been spared much of the drama; its formation history has been rather quiet and it has avoided violent collisions in astronomically recent times. However, the large Andromeda Galaxy from our neighbourhood has not been so lucky and fits well into the 'spiral rebuilding' scenario. Researchers continue to seek explanations for this."

Short version of the article: There were a whole lot more "peculiar" galaxies 6,000,000,000 years ago than there are now. Right around that time, apparently, something happened and the universe started having a whole bunch of spiral galaxies like the one we're in.

Except that ours seems to have had less of the violent activity that normally happened.

By coincidence(?), our sun and Earth formed roughly 4,500,000,000 years back - after the spiral-making events had started.

Maybe it really was a coincidence, with no cause-effect linkage. Or, maybe (really, at our current level of ignorance, this is all pretty much speculation) the universe hadn't gone though the processes it takes for sticky stuff on a wet ball of metal and rock to grow from things wriggling in tidal basins to us - until fairly recently.

With a 1,500,000,000 year lag time, there'd still be room for some seriously old races to be around.

Who knows, maybe that fellow in the magazine was right: and we haven't met E.T. because everybody dies off. Right after reaching the awful, terrible, wasteful and (here comes a frightfully important word) unsustainable level we awful, terrible, wasteful humans are at.

I'm not all that worried, myself. But then, I'm aware that human beings stopped being "sustainable" on Earth when some maniac got the idea of poking seeds in the ground and waiting for them to grow into plants we can eat.

The way I figure it, we're at least 1,000 times over the absolute maximum sustainable limit of this planet. That's assuming that homo sapiens sapiens is strictly and only an opportunistic omnivore, with adults weighing somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds.

Anyway: That article on galactic evolution was interesting.

A Planet is Not a Beach Ball - Quite

2010-02-03T14:51:00.004-06:00

There's something to be said for stories that are strictly verbal - that exist as an ordered sequence of words, and nothing else. It's the sort of tale that was told before Homer cranked out the Iliad and Odyssey, and is still going strong - take a look at how Stephenie Meyer's and Steven King's books sell.

I'm trying a words-and-pictures approach to storytelling, though.

Which adds a whole new layer of complexity. That's good news and bad news. If I pull it off - with the assistance of my oldest daughter, who's a commercial artist - the end product will be memorable. One way or the other.

Planning for extensive visuals means that I'll need to collect source material. Some of that won't be too difficult, since I'm on Earth. Problem is, most of the settings aren't on Earth: and won't be built for centuries. Make that millennia.

Never mind the issue of making everyday technology of over a dozen centuries out not look like a cheap upgrade of those silver lamé leotards that were the latest thing in "futuristic" fashion a few decades back.

Then there are the planets.

For a words-only story, describing the look of a planet from several thousand miles out isn't all that hard. We've got close-up photos of quite a variety of moons and planets here in the Solar System: Everything from Mercury to Jupiter, and Earth to Enceladus.

'Drawing' a picture of Distal in a reader's mind, all I'd have to do is use the trite "blue marble" description - or be creative and come up with something a bit less dusty.

No problem.

Distal? That's a planet that won't be found for quite a long time yet. Quite a bit like Earth, except for the parts that aren't.

My approach, so far, is to create photo-realistic images of Distal and other settings - for my daughter to use for reference, the same as she would for photos of the Great Pyramid in Egypt or a Louisiana bayou.

As a cartoon character said, "this has 'bad idea' written all over it." (Sam in Danny Phantom) Well, I'm giving this approach a shot, anyway.

Here's what I've got, so far.

Not bad, if I was trying for a beach ball. The colors and numbers were to let me see how a square array of pixels got mapped onto a sphere. That goal achieved, I refined the pattern a little, for more study:

So now I've got a beach ball that's got numbers and lines on it.

Not even close to looking like a planet.

But, I know what sort of distortions I'll be dealing with, stretching a flat graphic around a sphere. Now, to see if there's a fairly easy way to 'draw' on the sphere - and have software project what's on the sphere to a flat surface.

Not bad for part of an afternoon's work.

Eventually, I'd like to have three layers on the planet: glossy oceans, dull land, and clouds just a little over both. That's what I'd like to get - what happens, we'll see.

Not-entirely-unrelated posts:

"Futuristic? Or Just Cutting-Edge?"
(January 23, 2010)
"The Future and Other Ideas"
(October 24, 2009)
"A Serious Search for Other Worlds, Life, and - Maybe - Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"
Apathetic Lemming of the Month (last updated January 15, 2010)
"Clothing of the Future: 2000 as seen in the 1930s"
Apathetic Lemming of the Month (June 26, 2009)
"Futurist Fashion Designers of the 1930s"
Apathetic Lemming of the Month (April 4, 2008)

Epic Scale and Painting the Floor

2010-02-01T22:18:00.009-06:00

I've got more of the "artistic temperament" in me than I like to admit. There are days when I quite simply don't feel like being creative. At all.

Today was one of those days.

But, my schedule said that I'd be writing this post: which meant that I had to come up with something, anything, today. I don't like deadlines, but they have their uses.

'Star Trek Syndrome', Cordwainer Smith, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

Don't get me wrong: I was a great fan of Star Trek in the sixties. And I've enjoyed watching those movies and series of the franchise which I had means, motive and opportunity to see.

But the original Star Trek suffered from an affliction that's endemic to the various science fiction/speculative fiction/fantasy genres. Since Star Trek is a pretty big landmark on the American cultural landscape, at least, I'll pick on that venerable series and call this condition the "Star Trek Syndrome."

It's where stories with a setting 'in the future' are written with a general idea of what "the future" is like: but filling in details as the stories are done.

It can be done: and Star Trek was enormously successful. But I think that approach has intellectual landmines set under some of the well-traveled paths.

The original Star Trek series was set at some point in the future: they settled down to somewhere around 200 years. No problems there, as far as the technology was concerned. Not as far as I'm concerned.

Future Tech

Now, faster-than-light spaceships, transporters, sentient (and occasionally downright temperamental) computers? If the series had been set 20 years from now, I'd have felt my willing suspension of disbelief stretched to the breaking point. Beyond, if there wasn't some really good explanation: like a bunch of MIT students on break, stumbling on a spaceship that had crash-landed with most of the equipment in working order.

I've heard that the Romans reverse-engineered what for them was alien technology - a Phoenician ship - from a wreck they found. Ancient Romans were never really at home on the sea, and hadn't developed shipbuilding skills. They were, however, top-notch engineers: and with most of a working model to start with, they could fill in the blanks.

Future Astropolitics

Even as a teenager, though, I started wondering about the timeline of the United Federation of Planets. 200 years is a long time: but the implication in Star Trek was that we'd gone from living on one planet to having interstellar settlements and a political entity which included these grown colonies (and had members that weren't human).

In under two centuries. Well under two centuries.

That's fast work. Really fast work.

I think that a case can be made that a bunch of seriously ADHD humans barged into an existing interstellar community, decided it'd be great if everybody started living in peace, harmony and the human way - and got the United Federation of Planets going before older and wiser heads realized what had hit them.

But I'm getting off-topic. Nothing new there.

Cordwainer Smith, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S.Lewis

All writers, I think, are 'subcreators' to some extent. That is, they create a fictional world in which their characters act. The world of some stories are barely indistinguishable from present or past reality: the chief differences are the presence of the characters.

Even science fiction/speculative fiction/fantasy stories don't have to involve a great deal of work on the fictional world. There's quite a lot of off-the-shelf material.

Science Fiction
- Ray guns
- Space ships
  - With optional antigravity
- Aliens that act like funny-looking human beings
- Toxic waste that turns people into zombies
Fantasy
- Swords
- Horses
- Flashy magic
- Petty kingdoms
- An economy that sounds feudal
  - Even if it isn't

Using any or all of these conventions doesn't make a story bad. Look at Robert Asprin's "Myth Adventures" novels: but then, he seems to have done some intense - and funny - analysis of fantasy's shopworn cliches.

Or take C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories. They're set in a fantasy world, and the seven of them add up to a tale that's epic in scope. But I think Lewis concentrated on the characters and plots - not on creating a heavily-detailed, internally-consistent, fully-formed subcreation. And they're good, solid stories, in my opinion.

The Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien, I think, is more of a complete world than Narnia, with a more fully-developed history and set of interrelationships.

Then there's the universe of Cordwainer Smith. Particularly as it grew, it became more like the complexly-patterned world of Tolkien, than the slightly more generic land of Lewis's Narnia stories.

I like the work of all three. But I'm aiming at something closer to Tolkien or Smith, in terms of setting. What I actually accomplish - that's another matter.

Think, Plan, Then Write?

Comparing my productivity to that of #3 daughter, I may not be approaching this the right way. She's got a small but loyal fan base for her stories - which add up to a massive work - and has been making up the setting as she goes.

She's been doing what I'd call speculative fiction stories - with the same sort of issues when it comes to setting that I've got. But she's written quite a few stories. My output is - zilch, when it comes to something finished.

Like I said, I may be on the wrong track.

Or, not.

Like today.

Plan First, Then Varnish the Floor

In my youth, a stock cartoon situation was someone who had painted himself into the corner of the room - with nowhere to go. Some were funny, and all depended on the occasional lack of foresight that people exhibit.

Today, since my creative energies were nowhere to be found and my muse was on furlough, I decided to do a little research and review. I have a timeline for a particular setting that I'm rather fond of, I'd done some work on it late last year, and again this month: and it was time to go back and do a little checking.

Good thing I did.

I changed the names of several Chinese dynasties that don't exist yet (and probably never will - except in this 'future history'): for the better, I think.

Then, I took a look at the timeline I had for the future history as a whole, the voyage of one particular ship, and the transportation technology I'd assigned to this setting.

And found that I'd painted myself into a corner.

The times simply wouldn't work.

The Butler Couldn't Have Done It

It's like a ill-conceived old-fashioned mystery, where the master detective unmasks Jukes, the butler, as the murderer of Lord Thriply.

Just one problem: the author had demonstrated that Jukes had been several miles away, and couldn't have had an accomplice.

Dashing fine story, full of suspense and pathos, but the facts just don't fit together.

The Colony That Wasn't There Yet

I've got Our Heroes visiting a colorful, slightly exotic and - I hope - interesting world in one of the stories. A world where something like a quarter million people live. They're descendants of - well, that'll wait.

The point is, when I checked out the timeline: the original settlers would have arrived 10, maybe 20 years before the story starts.

They couldn't possibly have gotten to where they were - a small but thriving culture - in that length of time. Never mind the technology. The way I figure it, they'd need something like 200 years to grow from about a thousand people to a quarter million, building maybe a dozen settlements along the way.

If I'd already published something, I could have faked it - invoking some sort of technobabble as a solution.

As it is, I just shoved the story's date ahead by a couple centuries.

And, in the process of making the development of my 'space drive' - if not plausible, then internally consistent - I discovered another set of 'the butler couldn't have done it' situations.

That was good news, really, since I got an idea (born of desperation) for making a particular conflict into more than just one more 'space battle' built around 19th and 20th-century military technology that's been renamed.

It's late, and I need sleep.

Vaguely-related posts:

"A Sense of Scale and Science Fiction Writers"
(August 17, 2009)
" 'The Future, Far as Human Eye Could See'" - Hollerith Cards and Anachronisms"
(August 2, 2009)
"Hard Science: It's Not Necessarily a Limitation"
(July 25, 2009)
"Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
(June 25, 2009)

Aliens, Facial Expressions, Fear and Diplomacy

2010-01-29T12:47:00.004-06:00

Let's say you're in that classic science-fiction scenario: first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

And, let's say that both you and the alien are (mostly) biological creatures. It's not the only option: (January 26, 2010)

Watching shows like the Star Trek series, you might get the impression that the first steps in communications shouldn't be too hard. Your Universal Translator might have some trouble with the language for the first minute or two, you could at least tell how the alien felt about you.

Not necessarily.

Long before Star Trek, R. A. Heinlein and others were writing about humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Robert Anson Heinlein had a reputation - deserved - for having done the math in his science fiction stories. He understood transfer orbits, and what rocket-driven spaceships can - and can't - do.

He also used his head, when depicting people who weren't human. For example, in one novel he'd set up a situation where representatives from three galaxies' worth of aliens were all in one room, conducting a trial. The novel's focus character was listening to someone who had anger management issues, and observing the other people.

"...I could not tell how the invective affected them. The girl creature was taking it quietly, but what can you say about a walrus thing with octopus arms? If he twitches, is he angry? Or laughing? Or itches where the twitch is?..."
("Have Space Suit - Will Travel" R. A. Heinlein (1958) Charles Scribner's Sons, chapter 10/page 238)

It might be hard to tell if an alien was laughing, or "itches where the twitch is" - until you learned which twitches meant what, and which were just twitches.

There isn't even a guarantee that your 'first contact' alien would use the face for most emotional communication. The human face can - and does - express a huge range of emotions. And the basic human expressions are the same, all around the world. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (January 28, 2010))

What, if Anything, Can We Expect From Aliens?

For starters, assuming that they move around, they'll most likely have something like a face. Sessile people, built along the lines of sea anemones, might not. And, there are starfish.

For the most part, though, animals that move have a fairly well-defined front end: with sense organs, mouth, and brain in front. Even some animals with radial symmetry, like squid and octopi, have their brain, eyes and mouth at one end.

So, if you meet E.T., the alien will probably have eyes (if any), ears (probably), and other sense organs like whiskers at the end that's facing you.

And, if the first thing the alien does after spotting you is open it's eyes, mouth and anything else at that end: I'd suggest that you make no sudden movements, and be quite gentle about any sounds you make.

The alien is, almost certainly, scared. And frightened people may act rashly.

Fear and Disgust May Look the Same on Everybody

"Why a scared expression brings a survival advantage"
New Scientist (June 15, 2008)

"You wrinkle your nose and squint when you see a dead rat in the road, but open your eyes, nose and mouth wide when you see a live one in your bedroom.

"Why? Common facial expressions like disgust and fear, new research suggests, do more than just convey how you are feeling - they alter your sensory relationship to the world around you...."

"...The open eyes allowed quicker detection of objects on the periphery, as well as faster eye movements back and forth, while an open nose took in more air with each breath without any extra effort. An MRI scan confirmed the difference in the space in the nasal cavity.

" 'These changes are consistent with the idea that fear, for example, is a posture towards vigilance,' says [University of Toronto, Canada's, Joshua] Susskind, 'and disgust a posture towards sensory rejection.'..."

(from New Scientist, used w/o permission)
No translation needed.

So, if the alien's mouth dropped open, and the eyes got a whole lot wider: the alien may be deciding, none too calmly, whether it's safer to run away - or incinerate you on the spot.

Note to inter-species diplomats - do not, no matter what, squint or wrinkle your nose. The alien most likely won't appreciate it. At all. Would you?

"Why a scared expression brings a survival advantage"

newscientistvideo, YouTube (June 13, 2008)

"...Research at the University of Toronto shows how facial expressions can affect our sensory capability"

Related posts:

"Human Faces, Emotions, and Socialization (Caution! Geeky Content!)"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (January 28, 2010)
"HAL 9000, Skynet, and C3PO"
(January 26, 2010)
"Earth May Not Be a 'Class M'" Planet"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009)
" 'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien"
(December 9, 2009)
"Timing is Everything"
(October 7, 2009)

Background:

"Why a scared expression brings a survival advantage"
New Scientist (June 15, 2008)
"Facial Expression of Emotion as a Means of Socialization"
David R. Heise, Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, Electronic Social Psychology (1985)

Yearning for Paper Cuts, Dust, and Frustration?

2010-01-27T23:57:00.001-06:00

One of today's posts for another blog, "Data-Driven Art: For an 'Overwhelmed' 'Hive Mind???'," Apathetic Lemming of the North (January 27, 2010), could have been posted here.

Which is the reason for that link.

It's about an interactive digital art exhibition in England. Quite imaginative, and looks like fun. The reason given for putting it on, though, was - interesting:

"...'Decode is about demystifying the black art or magic of digital while showing that this work can be poetic, emotional and poignant,' show co-curator Shane R.J. Walter told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. Walter, creative director for the OneDotZero digital arts site, said the exhibition pieces 'highlight issues in our everyday lives such as the overabundance of information and how we deal with this through data visualization.' The Decode artists, he writes, 'use code as a material to work with just as sculptors work with clay.'..."

My reaction, copied from that other post:

"Overwhelmed?"
"Hive mind?"
"Demystifying the"
- "Black art"
- "Magic of digital?"
- "Overabundance of information?"

I'm pretty obviously not on the same page as the creative director for OneDotZero, or the people he's trying to help.

From my point of view, it's only since an ISP brought internet connectivity to Sauk Centre, around 1997, that I've been able to get information in adequate amounts, at an acceptable speed.

There's something of a thrill of the chase involved, tracking down data among the stacks of a library. But I'm glad I don't have to pull out drawer after drawer of a card catalog, riffling through the cards; and then track down the book: Hoping that it hasn't been checked out or - worse - stolen.

No, I do not yearn for the good old days of dust and paper cuts.

But it's pretty obvious that not everybody sees things the same way.

Related posts:

"Data-Driven Art: For an 'Overwhelmed' 'Hive Mind???'"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (January 27, 2010)
"HAL 9000, Skynet, and C3PO"
(January 26, 2010)

HAL 9000, Skynet, and C3PO

2010-01-26T14:36:00.021-06:00

I started writing a post for this blog yesterday. The first three words were "horses aren't human." That should have warned me. But I went on writing - and ended by posting it in another blog. ("Space Aliens and Killer Monster Robots - From Outer Space; or Pittsburgh," Apathetic Lemming of the North (January 25, 2010))

I want to take another crack at some of the ideas from that post. I've got more time to work with today, so this post may be briefer.¹ Or, not.

Anyway, I'm cutting out the discussion of space aliens: the squishy kind, at least.

Robots From Outer Space

The 'Menace of the Monster Killer Robots From Pittsburgh' thing (the author does not use that phrase) started with a valid point made in the article.

The first space aliens we meet may be machines.

That's likely enough. If there were Martians, their first contact with humanity would be one of the landers we've sent. Thinking machines, even a world of "robots" isn't a particularly new idea. ("Men Martians and Machines," Eric Frank Russell (1955), for example - and that built on established conventions)

The idea that humanity's first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence may involve robots from another planet is a valid point. I think the author of "What Will Aliens Really Look Like?," Space.com (July 16, 2009) was right in discussing the possibility of machine intelligence in the article

On the other hand, here's how the author - SETI Institute's Senior Astronomer, Seth Shostak - leads into his discussion of machines as people.

"...Well, using our own experience as a guide, consider a human development that seems likely to take place sometime in the 21st century: we'll invent machine intelligence. Some futurists figure this dismaying development will take place before 2050. Maybe it will take twice that long. It doesn't matter. By 2100, our descendants will note that this was the century in which we spawned our successors...."
(Space.com)

I don't know how old Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute's Senior Astronomer, is. If he's even close to my age, he really should know better.

Repeating the last sentence in that paragraph:

"By 2100, our descendants will note that this was the century in which we spawned our successors."

Artificial Intelligence is (Still) Just Around the Corner

I remember when "2001: A Space Odyssey" hit the silver screen. The year was 1968. Even then, the HAL 9000 computer was a science fiction staple: an intelligent, sentient, self-aware computer. Who was insane. Homicidally so.

Tasks like designing a computer that actually thinks on its own, or a visual system that handles information in real time the way a human being's visual cortex does, seemed fairly straightforward.

Until scientists and technicians tried making one.

42 years later, we've got dancing robots and a robot that solves soduku puzzles.

But I'm no more concerned that the next desktop computer I buy will enslave me, than I think it's likely that Google is planting subliminal commands in that plain white background of theirs. (Now that would make a story!)

Ooooh! Scary! Or, not.

Now I read that we'll have devices like the HAL 9000 computer and C3PO in fifty years. Or so.

And that they'll take over.

A Person Can Learn a Lot From the Movies

I'm quite sure that the SETI Institute's Senior Astronomer didn't learn astronomy from watching the movies. On the other hand, it looks like he grew up in the American culture. Western culture, anyway. And assimilated at least some of its beliefs and attitudes.

Optimism hasn't been fashionable for quite a while now.

Why Mention the Movies?

English-language motion pictures have been a major part of American culture for generations. Whether they shape the culture, or the culture shapes them, or both, is a debatable point.

Either way, I think movies are a pretty good indicator for what the culture was like when they were made: for everything from haircuts to attitudes and assumptions.

I've learned that people feared biological warfare and killer bees. And that the bees were likely to make a nuclear reactor explode. Even if we survived that, we'd probably be a handful of desperate survivors in an apocalyptic post-nuclear-holocaust wasteland, beset by monster frogs and/or mutants.

Or be stuck in a high-end resort and have to shoot it out with a robot gunslinger.

It wasn't all doom and gloom in the movies, of course. There was "Star Wars" in 1977: but that was merely escapist entertainment. Not serious at all. And "Hell Comes to Frogtown" was? Never mind. I don't think anyone took that one seriously.

The message from the movies - including movies with a message - has been that the future, if any, is bleak. Also that computers, robots - just about anything invented after maybe 1930 - is dangerous and malevolent.

Here's a short list of what's been on the minds of America, in the movies:

"2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A big black artifact and
  - Ape-men
  - Spaceships
- Insane computer kills crewmates
- One of my favorite films
- Not much of a plot
  - But the sets were well-thought-out
    - Up to that time, a rarity in science fiction films
"Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
- Massive supercomputer is built
- Takes over the world
- Somewhat plausible, given a willing suspension of disbelief
"Westworld" (1974)
- Killer robots
  - A whole resort full of killer robots
- Moderately well-thought-out, in my opinion
"Logan's Run" (1976)
- A nice, neat, orderly society
  - Where life is groovy
    - Until you hit 30
    - Then you die
  - Well, you can't have everything
- Then a crazed cop kills the master computer
"Star Wars" (1977)
- Princess
- Comedy-relief robots
  - C3PO, human-cyborg relations
  - R2D2, astromech droid
- Blasters
- Spaceships
- Light sabers
- Evil emperor
- Farm kid
- Wizard
"The Terminator" (1984)
- Evil computer mastermind
- Determined killer cyborg
- Threat of nuclear apocalypse
"The Matrix" (1999)
- Humanity makes an artificial intelligence
- That takes over the world

These movies were drawing on a venerable tradition that included "Robot Monster" (1953) and "The Phantom Creeps" (1939).²

Back to the topic at hand.

HAL 9000, Skynet, and The Matrix

Remember the Luddites? They were a charming lot of 19th English workmen who broke machines. Give me a running start, and I'll use my college education to show them as downtrodden workers striving heroically to maintain their livelihoods.

I'll grant that they were under a lot of stress. And stressed-out people can do odd things. Luddites made such an impression that "Luddite" now means "any opponent of technological progress". (Princeton's WordNet)

It's hard to not see Luddite feelings in the way technology is perceived these days.

I mean to say: "By 2100, our descendants will note that this was the century in which we spawned our successors."

Sure: Colossus took over the world, with a little help; HAL killed all but one astronaut on the Discovery; and Skynet was a really scary mastermind in the Terminator movies.

The premise of "The Matrix" may not be all that daft: that an artificial intelligence took over the world, and kept human beings alive because we make pretty good batteries.

Don't get me wrong: I've not putting down any of these movies. 2001 and Star Wars are favorites of mine. Anyway, I don't object to entertainment on principle.

But I try to make distinctions between what makes for a good story, and what's plausible. And AI that takes over the world - or wants to - seems a little far-fetched. Worse, from a writer's point of view, malevolent artificial intelligence is showing at least as much wear and tear as post-nuclear-apocalypse settings. In my opinion.

I suppose the "familiarity breeds contempt" principle applies here. I've been working with computers for over two decades now. The iron idiots can be frustrating, fascinating, and fast. But a threat? Not really.

It might be different, if artificial intelligence hadn't been 'just around the corner' for the last four decades: and if the existing artificial intelligence, like language translation tools, was more - intelligent.

What's So Strange About Cyborgs?

Maybe I don't have the culturally-appropriate fear and dread of machine intelligence because I'm not entirely human. Sort of.

A few of my teeth are still original equipment
- But a fair portion of what I chew with is artificial
There's metal and plastic where my hip joints used to be
A plastic mesh held my belly together after some work was done in there
- It's still in place
I'm focusing on my computer's monitor with a clip-on set of lenses.

All of that's nothing unusual at all. Now.

Which is my point. I look as human as my ancestors, a thousand years back: providing I take my glasses off and keep my mouth closed. But important parts of me are machinery of one sort or another.

Even my brain's been altered, chemically.

I was diagnosed with major depression a few years ago. Thanks to medication, I don't have to constantly fight the controls to think clearly - for the first time in over 45 years.

And I have no problem with that.

My distant ancestors, some of them, might have been freaked out to learn what has been done to me: but I like being able to walk without pain, see clearly, chew my food and have the insides of my abdomen stay where they belong - inside. I see the artificial parts of me as repairs and enhancements.

Certainly not as being "taken over" by machinery.

I'm not a cyborg. Not in the sense of "a human being whose body has been taken over in whole or in part by electromechanical devices" (Princeton's WordNet) But partly artificial? Yes.

And, these days, there's nothing unusual about that. Think of all the people with pacemakers in their chests.

Intel says it's coming out with brain chips and neural interfaces in about ten years. I believe them. This isn't "artificial intelligence," by the way, not unless you think human beings with artificial parts aren't human any more.

When those brain chips hit the market, and people with missing limbs control their prosthetics (and, I trust, get feedback) through their own nervous system, they'll be cyborgs. So will stroke victims whose damaged or destroyed circuits are replaced with artificial ones.

Scary? Maybe. So is the thought of driving without my glasses on.

I don't think technology is bad, by itself. What we do with it, that's something else:

Will Brain Implants Be Misused?
"What is that, a trick question? Of course they'll be misused. People misuse things. People have killed other people with rocks. That doesn't make the rocks bad.

"Direct neural interfaces are a new technology, and there'll almost certainly be an awkward period while we learn how to use them, and set up rules so that everybody's more-or-less on the same page about how they should be used.

"But, I'm looking forward to the things...."
(Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 2, 2009))

I don't think that Science and Technology (capitalized, of course) will Solve All Our Problems. But I'm not afraid of science and technology.

Artificial Intelligence, C3PO and Fido

Another reason I'm not worried about 'spawning our successors' is that we've already done something like develop artificial intelligence.

You've heard the saying: 'Dogs are man's best friend.' With a few psychotic exceptions, there's something to it. Dogs, as a rule, at least the ones I've known, like human beings.

Wolves? Not so much. A (very) few people have kept wolves as pets. It helps that wolves are pack animals. I'll be back to that idea.

We recently discovered that dogs are mutant wolves. Something happened. probably over a hundred thousand years ago, to the genes of a few wolves. Their offspring weren't as bright as your average wolf. And they just simply doted on human beings.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.

Sure, people were "primitive" back then. White lab coats, test tubes, and electron microscopes wouldn't be invented for maybe 5,000 generations. Even so, it's hard for me to imagine that a breed of stupid wolves that love human beings 'just happened' to pop into existence and start following my ancestors around.

I think we made dogs. "Domesticated," if you prefer.

I also think that it helped - a lot - that wolf packs and human families work (very roughly) the same way. A wolf cub could bond with a human family in very nearly the same way that he or she would have bonded with the pack.

But I think we're the reason dogs are so, well: dog-like. Eager to help. willing to chase things for us. Intensely protective of the family. Not overly bright, maybe: but with humans around they don't need to be.

We won't develop artificial intelligence that's like Fido. We've already got dogs, and they're really good at what they do.

When (or if) we develop artificial intelligence, I think we'll do it for a reason. There will be jobs that can be done better - faster, with fewer errors and greater precision - with AI than with human beings. Flying aircraft and some management jobs come to mind.

And AI takes over the world? I don't think so. Airline pilots and managers won't like it: those who don't recognize the change as an opportunity to learn new skills and explore another facet of human potential.

AI, when (or if) it goes online, will - I think - be more like C3PO than Collossus. And, again I think, be about as likely to attempt world domination as C3PO would be to plot taking over the restored Republic.

There will be problems, of course. There are always problems. Taking dogs as an example: you'd think that an ancient technology like that would have every last bug worked out of it by now. Remember the problem with pit bulls, a decade or so back? I think the problem was more with the owners, and less with the breed: but that's another topic.

When (if) we get 'real' AI, some of the units will act up: at least, I'd be astonished if they didn't. But, on the whole, I don't think humanity will regret developing AI, any more than we (with a few whack exceptions) regret developing agriculture.

Cyborgs? We've been developing that sort of technology, ever since someone started hobbling around on a crutch or peg leg; or strapped on a hook to replace a severed hand. It's a little late to stop, now: and I don't think many would really want to.

But we're not 'losing our humanity.' We're still as human as ever: for good or ill.

Related posts:

"Science Fiction in the Movies: 'The Satan Bug' to 'The Matrix' "
(January 26, 2010)
" 'God Created Man in His Image' wasn't Written by An American"
A Catholic Citizen in America (January 25, 2010)
"'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien"
(December 9, 2009)
"Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe"
(December 8, 2009)
"Next-Generation Prosthetic Hand - and Intel Says Direct Neural Interface Brain Chips by 2020"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 2, 2009)
"Tofu Turkeys, Genetically Altered Foods, and the Evil Eye"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (November 14, 2009)
"Hard Science Fiction, Cultural Blinders and Laban's Sheep"
Drifting at the Edge of Time and Space (October 29, 2009)
"The Sentient Cities are Coming: Park Benches With Attitude Coming"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (October 24, 2009)
"Timing is Everything"
Drifting at the Edge of Time and Space (October 7, 2009)
"Good News, Neural Devices Connect Brain, Computers: Bad News, Same Thing"
(July 11, 2009)
"- - - 'And We're All Gonna Die!' "
(June 30, 2009)

"What Will Aliens Really Look Like?"
Space.com (July 16, 2009)
"Futurists Through the Centuries"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (November 1, 2007)
"Agriculture as a Mistake"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (October 29, 2007)

Background (from Hard Science Fiction, Cultural Blinders and Laban's Sheep," (October 29, 2009)):

"The Evolution of Wheat - Introduction"
New Hall Mill
"Genetics And Evolution Of The Dog"
NPR (February 13, 2004)
"Lesson Plans - The Human Role in Dog Evolution"
National Geographic

¹Somebody said "I made this letter very long, because I did not have time to make it shorter." There seems to be a difference of opinion about who said that: Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," sixteenth edition, says Blaise Pascal. The quote's from Lettres Provinciales [1656-1657], No. 16.

² Tales of Future Past has two decent still photos from "The Phantom Creeps." The movie was a dramatic account of a mad scientist: "With the power of a radioactive meteor he discovered, his invisibility belt, ray gun, and killer robot spiders he plans to conquer the world."

Science Fiction in the Movies: "The Satan Bug" to "The Matrix"

2010-01-26T14:02:00.018-06:00

I made a list of relatively memorable science fiction movies from the mid-sixties to the present, for another post. (June 30, 2009)

Yesterday, I started writing about space aliens and killer robots: and added to the list. I went back, today, and fleshed it out with brief descriptions of these exemplars of science fiction / speculative fiction in the movies.

See if you can spot a common element:

"The Satan Bug" (1965)
- Germ warfare kills lots of people
- "...very well made. It is more germaine [!] now than when it was made 42 years ago.
  (IMDB.com synopsis)
"2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A big black artifact and
  - Ape-men
  - Spaceships
- Insane computer kills crewmates
- One of my favorite films
- Not much of a plot
  - But the sets were well-thought-out
    - Up to that time, a rarity in science fiction films
"Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
- Massive supercomputer is built
- Takes over the world
- Somewhat plausible, given a willing suspension of disbelief
"The Omega Man" (1971)
- Germ warfare
- Charlton Heston
- Zombies
"Westworld" (1974)
- Killer robots
  - A whole resort full of killer robots
- Moderately well-thought-out, in my opinion
- No zombies
"Zardoz" (1974)
- Far future with humanity split into
  - Brutals
  - Immortals
- H. G. Wells' Eloi and Moorlocks, anyone?
- Nitzche quotes
"A Boy & His Dog" (1975)
- "A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food and sex..."
  (IMDB plot summary)
- What, when they have each other?
"Logan's Run" (1976)
- A nice, neat, orderly society
  - Where life is groovy
    - Until you hit 30
    - Then you die
  - Well, you can't have everything
- Then a crazed cop kills the master computer
"Star Wars" (1977)
- Princess
- Comedy-relief robots
- Blasters
- Spaceships
- Light sabers
- Evil emperor
- Farm kid
- Wizard
"The Swarm" (1978)
- Killer bees kill lots of people
- And make a nuclear reactor 'go critical'
- Billed, at the time, as
  - A serious warning about the dangers of nuclear energy
  - And who says movies aren't educational?
"Quintet" (1979)
- "During a future ice age, dying humanity occupies its remaining time by playing a board game called 'Quintet.' For one small group, this obsession is not enough; they play the game with living pieces ... and only the winner survives."
  (IMDB plot summary)
- I'm not making this up!
"Mad Max" (1979)
- Set in a "dystopic future Australia"
- Cop
- Biker gang
- Vendetta
- No zombies
  - The way those bikers looked, who needs zombies?
"Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" (1981)
- Set in a "dystopic future Australia"
- Cynical drifter
- Small community
- Bandits
- Still no zombies
"The Terminator" (1984)
- Evil computer mastermind
- Determined killer cyborg
- Threat of nuclear apocalypse
"Night Shadows (1984)
- Toxic waste turns small town citizens into mutant flesh-eating zombies
- A movie with a message
"Steel Dawn" (1987)
- Yet another post-apocalyptic world
  - Warrior
  - Desert
  - Settlers
  - Gang
"Hell Comes to Frogtown" (1987)
- A nuclear/biological war killed all the men
  - Except this dude named Hell
  - Who's held captive by women
- And there are these giant mutant frogs
- Really: I'm not making this up!
"The Matrix" (1999)
- Humanity makes an artificial intelligence
- That takes over the world

With a few exceptions, like Star Wars, the settings aren't all that pleasant. And Star Wars is set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."

Looking for a bright future in science fiction movies? Try the Star Trek franchise, or go back before, say, 1955.

Like "Things to Come" (1936). It's post-apocalyptic - for a while. Then wise scientists build an Art Deco utopia where everybody wears really uncomfortable-looking clothes. I'm not on the same page as the underlying philosophies of that film, and admit that it's not all that realistic. But: "Hell Comes to Frogtown" is?!

I don't think I'll live to see an end to this currently-fashionable notion: that to be taken seriously, you've got to show the future as just simply awful.

It's like that period in country music, where I got the impression that a song's popularity could be measured by the suicide rate of its fans.

Space Aliens and Killer Monster Robots - From Outer Space; or Pittsburgh

2010-01-25T23:27:00.002-06:00

I definitely need a good night's sleep. I accidentally posted this to Apathetic Lemming of the North.

It starts with: "Horses aren't human.

"It might be well to remember that, when imagining non-human intelligence. Space aliens, in other words."

Now, I'm turning in. Goodnight.

Futuristic? Or Just Cutting-Edge?

2010-01-23T23:31:00.002-06:00

Posts I'm setting up for another blog, Apathetic Lemming of the North, reminded me that it's hard to make a 'future' setting seem - well, futuristic.

One's about oxygenated liquid fluorocarbons being used to treat people with some medical conditions. The fluorocarbons aren't injected: the patients are breathing them.

Remember the Star Wars Movie, where a wounded Luke Skywalker is in a tank, with a breathing mask on his face? Forget the face-mask. If they aren't already there, my guess is that ICUs will have tanks, soon, for patients who can't handle being in a gaseous environment.

Neural implants? They're in the research and development stage now: commercially available in maybe 2020.

I set up a post in that blog, to help me keep track of "future" technologies in development: "The Future: Just Like Today, Only Different." It's mostly a link-list, slightly organized.

Creativity, Research, and Finding a Cool Name That's Not Been Used

2010-01-20T23:14:00.008-06:00

I've been developing technobabble for a few stories. Set about 1,500 years from now, the characters will be using devices that definitely aren't off-the-shelf hardware today.

One of the technologies is a sort of warp drive. Not the Star Trek or Star Wars thing: more like what we might have, if Mexican/Welsh physicist Michael Alcubierre's equations describe something that would actually work. Which, the last I heard, is still a matter of debate.

My guess is that he's on to something. The specifics of his approach to moving a pocket of space-time through the rest of the continuum may not be quite on-target, but it's an idea that's good enough for a story.

A prediction, while I'm thinking of it. Not a particularly startling one, given the nature of humanity. If/when we get to the point where someone's building a prototype warp drive: we'll see a replay of the fuss that's surrounded CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The familiar old 'and we're all gonna die' stuff.

Cool Name: And, Confound it, it's been Used!

Assuming that Alcubierre's warp drive could be built, the thing would require unreasonable amounts of power. The energy requirements are literally astronomical.

For a story, I don't see that as a problem: except that I need to remember that whatever the power source is: it better not be anything that's even close to being developed now.

Think of a story where an airliner gets its power from a pair of oxen turning a wheel, and you see what I'm talking about. Oxen are great sources of energy: but strong as they are, their energy output isn't enough for air travel.

Although - no, I'm going to stay on-topic.

I came up with a dandy name for the power source of warp ships: "cascade generator." It sounds cool, and isn't something that's used now.

Strike that. I did a quick search, and - "cascade generators" are either in development or actually in use in accelerators. Today. ("Travelling wave cascade generator - A new high-voltage source for accelerators," letters to the editor, E M Balabanov et al 1962 J. Nucl. Energy, Part C Plasma Phys. 4 65-67)

The term is also used by a few people who either think they're inventing a sort of perpetual motion machine - or want others to think they are.

Now I have to decide whether to use the term "cascade generator" anyway - or think up something else.

Odds are pretty good that I'll look for an alternative. I really don't want to invoke 21st century technology.

Related post:

"Inventions: Strange; Feared; and Yet-to-Come"
(August 25, 2009)
"Warp Drive Might Not Be Stable: Physcisists Take Another look at Alcubierre's Work"
(June 12, 2009)
"LHC Peril! Large Hadron Collider Black Hole Will Eat Earth!! - or, Not"
(January 27, 2009)

Update (January 21, 2010)

Wikipedia isn't always the most reliable resource. The 'what do you want reality to be' encyclopedia is, though, cleaning up its act: quite a number of articles now have citations. In other words, people and organizations with reputations to lose are listed as sources for facts and opinions. It's an improvement.

Getting back on topic, I looked through the "Topology" page, and ended up with these interesting - and possibly useful for me - words and phrases:

Hausdorff space
- Hausdroff generators??
Clopen set
- "In topology, a clopen set (or closed-open set, a portmanteau word) in a topological space is a set which is both open and closed."
  (Wikipedia: Clopen set)
- I like it

It's Not All Creativity and Artsyness

2010-01-20T19:46:00.002-06:00

I finished clearing about 157 megabytes off my hard drive: and will probably get more space freed up in the next few days. What's gone are duplicate photo files that I've been meaning to get at 'someday.'

That doesn't sound particularly 'creative' - but it's part of the sort of housekeeping that's vital, if creative work is going to happen.

Which it should, later today.

The Idoka

2010-01-18T20:31:00.005-06:00

We protect the humble.
We inform the mighty.
We stand with our backs to the fire, meeting the gaze of eyes in the night.

(Translated by Watanuki Tomoko)

Successive Approximation and Creating a Coherent Japanese Phrase

2010-01-15T21:56:00.002-06:00

Thanks, everybody who helped with this.
(This is a followup/update of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Kanji, Romanji, and This Writer " (January 11, 2010).)

A little checking, and I found a pronunciation (romanized, anyway) for 凄い Google Translate.

Sure enough, 凄い is "sugoi" - now, I need to see if I'm using it correctly.

(later)

Well, that's interesting:

When I put "great manga writer" through Google Translate, I got "偉大な漫画家" (without quotes in both cases, BTW.)

And 偉大な漫画家 is romanized as idai na manga ka. I recognized "manga ka" as fairly common usage.

Interestingly, "great welldigger" comes through as "大きな井戸掘り職人" - or "ōkina ido hori shokunin".

I think I'm getting to where I want, by successive approximation.

(still later)

"Ido ka" probably, maybe, possibly, is a phrase that means something in the neighborhood of "water-well - ka" or "water well artist/writer/creator" with overtones of the id (id, ego, superego, and all that) and latitude (緯度 / ido)."

Confused? Well, so am I

The point is that when I run "great ido ka" through Google Translate, out comes "大きな井戸カー / ōkina ido kā" - which may, or may not, be what I'm looking for.

Interesting: 井 seems to mean "well" - whether that's "I'm feeling well" or "water well" - more checking is called for.

Ah! 井 means "well" and the "well" is a noun. I think I've got it. Maybe.

Oi. "water well" comes out as "井戸 / ido"- 井戸!!

Okay: I got these nouns in Japanese:

noun

1. 井
2. 井泉
3. 井戸
4. 鉱泉

Which get translated as these nouns in English:

noun

1. Well
2. Spring wells
3. Well
4. Spring

Yeah: I think I'm getting close.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Kanji, Romanji, and This Writer

2010-01-11T21:18:00.011-06:00

I may have to learn Japanese.

Which reminds me of Mark Twain's short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." If you're familiar with American literature, you may have read it, or at least heard of it. The title, by the way, comes out as "カラベラスの名高いジャンプ蛙郡" when I put it through the Google translator.

When I take "カラベラスの名高いジャンプ蛙郡" and run it back through the same tool, I get "Celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County" - which is better than the experience Mr. Twain had.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - or - The Perils of Translation

Intellectual property laws were - somewhat casually enforced - in the 19th century. Someone who thought he knew French, or someone who knew English, took the Jumping Frog story and published it in France.

The story had been a commercial success in America. In France, sales just about flatlined. Twain translated the French version back into English.

And wrote about what he got, in

"THE JUMPING FROG

IN ENGLISH, THEN IN FRENCH, THEN
CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED
LANGUAGE ONCE MORE BY
PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL."

I get the distinct impression that Mr. Twain was not a great fan of French culture, but that's not relevant to what this post is about.

The first sentence of Twain's story, in English, as he wrote it:

"In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result...."

I know: It's longer than some paragraphs are, these days. But this is the Information Age, that was the Gilded Age. People apparently wanted to get their money's worth from a sentence back then.

The same sentence, after being translated back from the French:

"It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim Smiley; it was in the winter of '89, possibly well at the spring of '50, I no me recollect not exactly...."

The rest isn't much better. No wonder it bombed in France.

The title of the French version, translated back by Twain, was "THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS."

In case this post is read by a short-fused francophile, I'm aware that Mr. Twain may have been somewhat unfair in his translation. The first sentence in the French version was:

"--Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley: c'etait dans l'hiver de 49, peut-etre bien au printemps de 50, je ne me reappelle pas exactement...."

Which, run through the Google translator, is:

"- There was a time here an individual known by the name of Jim Smiley was in the winter of 49, maybe spring of 50, I do not exactly reappelle....."

Finally, What This Post is About - a Request For Help

I'm working out background for a story I'm setting in Japan. It started out as a spoof of (badly done) 'Manga,' with intentional glitches. There are five main characters, for starters.

I don't want to produce something that reads like that translation of Twain's story, for someone who actually understands Japanese.

The story's starting to get away from me, and seems to be changing into something else, but that's not what this post is about.

What's bothering me right now is a word. Phrase, actually.

The only language where I'd trust my story-telling skills is English. Which is okay, in this case, because my target audience is people who can read English fairly well.

So dialog and just about everything else will be in English. I know: not very authentic. But it worked for Gilbert and Sullivan in "The Mikado," so I'll chance it.

But, for 'authenticity' - and because I think it'll be cool - a few words and phrases will, I hope, be in Japanese. Sort of.

For example, there's a sort of person in the story who is called a 'well artist' or 'well maker' - "well" in the sense of a well from which you draw water. I think the phrase "ido-ka" expresses that idea.

Remember, I said "Japanese. Sort of." I can't, at this time, read Japanese characters and 'hear' words. I'm pretty sure many or most of my readers won't be able to, either. So I'm using the Latin alphabet to spell out close-enough representations of the few Japanese words and phrases I'll use.

One character will be called 'the great ido-ka,' or 'the great well-artist.' Easy enough, right?

If I really knew Japanese, yes. As it is, not so much.

I'm fairly sure that the word (phrase?) I'm looking for is 凄い.

That comes through the Google translator (the most reliable tool I've found, so far) as meaning:

Great
adjective

terrible
dreadful
terrific
amazing
great
wonderful

adverb

to a great extent
to a large extent

This is the cluster of meaning that I'm looking for.

Or maybe what I'm looking for is グレート.

My guess is that 凄い is what I want.

Just one problem: I haven't a clue what it sounds like. The Google translator will helpfully tell me what "great" sounds like in English: but I already know that.

I've tried looking up 凄い online - but unsuccessfully.

Another line of inquiry gave me "sugoi" as a word meaning terrible, dreadful, terrific, amazing, great. It's possible that 凄い is what sugoi looks like - but I can't verify that.

Given the rules I've set for myself, I'm stuck with using Romanji. (I think that's the term for Latin alphabet used to express Japanese words and phrases.)

And, one thing I don't have, yet, is a working knowledge of Japanese.

So, I've written this post and intend to solicit help from some folks I know online, who may be able to help me out. Thanks in advance.

The Questions

1. is "凄い" an appropriate word to use in a phrase like "the great ido-ka"?

2. Is "sugoi" the way 凄い is pronounced?
2a. If not, how is 凄い pronounced?

3. I think that the phrase "the great well-artist" would come out in Japanese as "sugoi ido-ka" - if my guesses are right about the meaning of those words. Is this an appropriate or 'normal' way to arrange those elements of the phrase?

Finally, I've decided that I do need to develop a working knowledge of Japanese. But that'll take time - no problem, by itself, but I want to get moving on this story in a matter of weeks, not years.

Updated 10:55 p.m. January 11, 2010

I started a discussion thread on BlogCatalog, "Help? How Should 凄いbe Pronounced?," and got one response so far. (Thanks!)

Now, I need to turn in.

Updated:

"Successive Approximation and Creating a Coherent Japanese Phrase"
(January 15, 2010)

Moon Rocks, Mount Everest, and Symbolism

2010-01-07T20:09:00.002-06:00

From yesterday's news:

"Rocks From the Moon, Mt. Everest Destined for Space Station"
Space.com (January 6, 2010)

"Two small rock samples – one from the top of our world and the second returned from another – are ready to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) as a symbol of NASA's continuing mission to explore.

"The space-bound stones – a fragment of Mount Everest's summit and four flecks from the moon – were presented Wednesday to George Zamka, the commander of NASA's next space shuttle mission, by the first astronaut to scale the Earth's highest mountain, Scott Parazynski.

" 'These rocks have already done more than a human being could do in a lifetime,' said Zamka during the ceremony held at Space Center Houston, the public visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas. 'For four billion years they were on the moon, undisturbed. They went through an ascent on a spaceship traveling to Earth and then Scott took them to the limits of human endurance by climbing up with them on Mount Everest. So they already have a tremendous history. They're about to get a mileage upgrade.'..."

At this point, I could launch into an impassioned diatribe about how shocking and awful it is that resources are wasted - wasted! - on sending rocks into orbit, when they could be used to raise awareness about the California Red Legged Frog. But I'm not. I have no personal animosity toward rana aurora draytonii. I actually rather like frogs.

But I'm all too aware that things change. It'd be nice, I suppose, if the California Red Legged Frog was doing well: but I think it would also be nice to see a live trilobite.

As the fellow said:

"Nothing endures but change."
(Heraclitus, 540 BC - 480 BC)
(from October 29, 2009)

If armadillos, pigeons, rats, or cockroaches are dying off - that would be something to be concerned about. (more: "Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture," Apathetic Lemming of the North (September 26, 2009))

Where Was I? Rocks and Symbolism, Right!

Back to those bits of rock that are taking a spin around Earth in the ISS.

The article says that they're "a symbol of NASA's continuing mission to explore." Not very practical, right?

No contest there: it's not very 'practical' to send rocks from the Moon to Mount Everest and back into low Earth orbit - just so you can say it's been done. If measurements were being made of the rocks, before and after, or some other sort of research were directly involved: yes, then I'd say the trip had some 'practical' value.

But, just for symbolism? How impractical!

Also, how human.

People, human beings, use symbols. A lot. The marks you see on your screen right now are symbols that stand for sounds, more or less. That's assuming you're reading this page in English. If you use translation software, the marks you see may represent words or phrases. Not all written languages use alphabets.

The sounds, words, and phrases are in turn symbols. "Symbolism," for example, means "a system of symbols and symbolic representations," (Princeton's WordNet) among other things. "Red" can mean electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength near 7,000 Angstroms, or 700 nanometers. Roughly. But "red" isn't electromagnetic radiation: it's a sound in spoken English, and a set of three symbols in written English that stand for that particular set of wavelengths. Or an emotion, or quite a number of other things.

Which is why I think it'll be a while before AI can do a good job of understanding conversational English - or any other natural language. We're getting closer, though. ("Robovie-II and Robovie-IV: Robot Assistants for Store and Office" Apathetic Lemming of the North (January 7, 2010))

I'm getting off-topic. Again.

Symbolic Acts: It's What We Do

Hauling a few bits of rock around aren't important from a practical point of view: but people aren't entirely 'practical.' Or maybe we are. Which threatens to become another topic.

Focus, man, focus!

I think it's entirely appropriate to make a fleck or so of rock from the Moon and a bit from the top of Mount Everest into palpable symbols of NASA's determination to stay on course with its mission to explore.

But then, I'm not among those who feel that 'if God had meant man to fly, He'd have given him wings.' We're perfectly capable of making our own wings - although it took several thousand years to get the technology right.

Besides, there's a long tradition of using hunks of rock as symbols: like the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, or Stone of Scone. But that's yet another topic.

If you think this post is a bit less coherent than others in this blog: you could be right.

I'm running a significant, although not (I trust) serious fever: and have reason to believe that it may have a slight effect on some of my cognitive functions.

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

Well, That's Interesting: Ancient Writing Systems

2010-01-04T14:04:00.005-06:00

ancientscripts.com
A compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistory to today

According to the website's about page:

"Back in 1996, I created the original Ancient Scripts web site during the wee hours of the morning. I have been a great enthusiast for writing systems and linguistics in general, but I could only find meager resources on the web about this subject in those early days. So I went to work, taking class material from Linguistics 11 (Writing Systems) at UCB as well as my own research in dusty libraries. Many years later, despite problems with servers and having to earn a living, Ancient Scripts is still running. Thanks for all your support!

"The aim of Ancient Scripts is not to replace texts books or instructional web sites. Instead, it is designed to give an introduction to writing systems, which hopefully will tantalize the reader into searching for more information on the web or in books and publications.

"Here's the disclaimer: I am not a linguist...."
("About Ancient Scripts")

In my opinion, the chief difference between a systematically enthusiastic hobbyist who has devoted a great deal of time and effort to studying a subject, and a certified subject professional, is that the certified professional has a piece of paper that says he or she is competent - and the professional gets paid.

I think people inside the academic establishment can be knowledgeable and competent, understand: but I think the same can be said of people who aren't.

The last site update was October 3, 2008.

I found this website while researching ancient writing systems. It seems to be a pretty good resource.

Now it's time for me to get back to work.

Well, That's Interesting: Japanese Mythology

2010-01-03T15:20:00.006-06:00

I found an interesting - if somewhat unorganized - page on one aspect of Japanese culture:

"Japanese Mythology"

(Mythology as: "myths collectively; the body of stories associated with a culture or institution or person" (Princeton's WordNet)

I'm a bit curious about how the page was written. One paragraph ends with this fragment:

"Standing on the floating bridge of heaven, Izanagi and Izanami stirred the primeval ocean with a"

And that's where it ends. I've no idea what Izanagi and Izanami were stirring the ocean with. Oh, well. Maybe it's the jeweled spear that drops abruptly into the next paragraph.

There's an interesting account of Izanagi and Izanami, after Izanagi's departure to the netherworld, that has a sort of parallel in the story of Persephone.

"And Make it Look Like an Accident" - Plausible Settings for Epic Science Fiction

2009-12-28T18:08:00.009-06:00

While preparing tomorrow morning's posts for another blog, I ran into an article about a huge cloud of hydrogen and helium in our neighborhood - 'neighborhood' on a galactic scale, anyway. Barring unforeseen circumstances and gremlins, it'll be on Apathetic Lemming of the North in about 17 hours. Look for a post titled "Our Sun and The Fluff."

There were a few intriguing points about the article I was micro-reviewing for that post, and while checking some of them out I ran into references to the Local Bubble, the Gum Nebula, and other fairly large-scale features within fifteen thousand light-years of us.

The best illustration I've found yet, as a one-stop introduction to the area immediately around our sun isn't at its original URL any more. Either that, or their server is down at the moment. I did, however, find a copy of it, with a pretty good description, here:

"Astronomy Picture of the Day"
a service of LHEA at NASA/GSFC & Michigan Tech. U. (February 17, 2002)
"The Local Bubble and the Galactic Neighborhood"
NASA Images - a service of the Internet Archive (Linda Huff (American Scientist) (April 12, 2000?)
- This one's a zoomable version of the illustration, with links

I'm still digging around, to see if I can find a moderately large-scale event roughly 10 to 30 million years back, that left a mark like the Gum Nebula or Local Bubble: that I can make look like a serious industrial accident.

Update (December 28, 2009)

I may be on to something here:

"The History of the Local ISM: The Last 50 Million Years"
Goyette, J.; Bruhweiler, F. C.; Pitts, M.; Gabel, J. - American Astronomical Society, 198th AAS Meeting, #65.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.884

And Now for Something Completely Different: A Different sort of Christmas Rhyme

2009-12-25T15:28:00.003-06:00

Clement Clarke Moore's "Twas the Night before Christmas" - or "A Visit from St. Nicholas" - is a well-known poem. And often parodied.

I think the simple rhyme scheme and meter help.

I had 250 words to post for another blog today, an illustration that I'd given the working title of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" - and no terribly good ideas. So, Thursday, I sat down and set a sequence of events I'd been playing with into a rhyme that mimicked Moore's best-known work:

"Not Your Usual Fluffy Christmas Rhyme"
(December 25, 2009)

Oh, what the hey. I'll repeat the thing, here.

Pip
'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the shop
Nothing was stirring, you could hear a pin drop.
The sleigh was not ready, the toys were not packed,
Santa was fuming and quite lacking in tact.

"Pip!" he called out to the foreman on duty,
Where is your crew? And don't act so snooty!
Pip's feelings were hurt, but he wondered the same
Were they lost? Had they left? Were they playing a game?

"Never mind!" thundered Santa, while grabbing his sack,
"We'll do it ourselves: There are toys in the back."
So into the warehouse like madmen they flew.
Santa and Pip had much packing to do.

And then, down a corridor seldom in use,
They heard something like an hysterical goose.
But no, there were words in that hideous shriek,
It was music: now Santa was prone to critique.

Santa strode to the source of that hideous din,
Closely followed by Pip, who beheld with chagrin:
Three elves and four bottles and, there on a chair,
A boom box whose music was filling the air.

Santa stood for a moment, transfixed by the sight
Then he bellowed so loudly that Pip shook with fright.
"You! Chuckles! And Bubbles! And you, mister Suds!"
Why are you carousing while in your work duds?"

The fate of that threesome Pip would not relate,
Except to recall that the hour was late:
And Santa was anxious to fly in his sleigh,
And dealt with loose ends on the following day.

A Science Fiction Ghost Story?! Why Not?

2009-12-18T13:59:00.006-06:00

I was born during the Truman administration, in America, and have spent the vast bulk of my life in that country. I learned that a few subcultures believe, firmly, that only the material world is real - and that everybody who doesn't agree with them is narrow-minded, intolerant, and stupid.

Quite a lot of science fiction/speculative fiction is written by people who fervently, vehemently, want materialism to be so. And some is written by people with an (occasionally odd) set of ideas about spirituality.

I'm not a particularly "spiritual" person - in one sense of the word. I don't go around seeing things that nobody else can see, or buttonholing people and asking, "ARE YOU SAVED?!" (More, about what I believe, in A Catholic Citizen in America - yeah, I'm one of those people)

On the other hand, I'm not affronted by some of the assumptions behind poems like this:

"Antigonish"
William Hughes Mearns (1899)

"Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away

"When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door

"Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away"
("Hughes Mearns," Boston University School of Theology)

I've read that the poem was: "Inspired by reports of a ghost of a man roaming the stairs of a haunted house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada...." ("Antigonish (poem)")

I like some ghost stories, don't assume that every haunted house has some supernatural aspect, but don't assume that a haunted house can't be haunted, either.

And I like some stories that I'll call 'anti-ghost' stories. The best-known examples are probably the old "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" cartoons, where 'those meddling kids' unmask the apparently-supernatural goings-on as the work of some scalawag. Hanna Barbera didn't create that sort of plot, though. A number of the John Dickson Carr (not John le Carré) mysteries were of this sort. And so, in a way, is part of Daniel 14.

Then, there's the sort of story where there's an apparently-supernatural event. Like a "locked room" problem with no apparent solution. The detective (or elderly spinster, teenage sleuths, whatever) finally arrives at a perfectly logical (read: secular, material) explanation. Sometimes with a sort of 'Whew! it looked like there was a real ghost/vampire/werewolf/whatever!' Then, on the last page of the last chapter, the ghost/vampire/werewolf/whatever appears. Or - in one case - wrote the closing comments.

'Obviously,' You Can't Write a Science Fiction Ghost Story

My guess is that you'd have trouble getting a science fiction ghost story published in any of the traditional sci-fi magazines. Not events that weren't part of the preferred reality of strict secular materialists as part of the plot.

"Obviously," that's not science fiction.

Well, if you define "science fiction" as being fiction with an exclusively materialistic, secular worldview that deals with science and society: yeah, then by definition there could be no science fiction ghost stories.

But, if "science fiction" were defined as a story "literary fantasy involving the imagined impact of science on society" (Princeton's WordNet), then there just might be room for a spook story or two.

It'd probably be pegged as "fantasy," though. (There's a pretty good discussion of fantasy, science fiction, and the vibrating gray line between them on the tvtropes.org website: "Science Fiction Versus Fantasy" - Don't be fooled, that 'versus' is used more in the 'compared with' sense)

How Could Anyone Possibly Write a Science Fiction Ghost Story, Anyway?

There's an old cartoon: some mechanics are standing a few paces away from a car, eyeing it tensely. The foreman's talking to the car's owner, saying something like, "the boys think there's an evil spirit in the clutch housing. We've called an exorcist."

Evil Spirit in the Clutch Housing?!

Science - technology, anyway - is there: the car. The impact of science/technology on society is there - the mechanics, the foreman: by implication, the whole socioeconomic impact the automobile had on American society in the 20th century. And who knows? Maybe there really is an evil spirit in the clutch housing.

I doubt it, though.

I think one problem that most Americans, anyway, have in taking anything supernatural seriously is that so many got their theological instruction from movies like "Ghost Rider" (2007). But that's another topic, for another blog.

That 'evil spirit in the clutch housing' cartoon was a joke - and intended to be that.

Let's look at some other possibilities.

Are Robots/Androids/Clones People?

There's the obvious, and old, 'are robots/androids people?' thing. Or, more immediately, 'do clones have souls?' I suspect that the American judicial system will decide they don't - otherwise, using clones for parts and research would be illegal. I'm one of those people - so I go with the Catholic Church's teaching: Yes, clones are people; and they have souls. (February 2, 2009, in another blog)

I'll admit that I'm not quite as "scientific" about the lofty ideals of humanity's best minds and the right they have to do pretty much what they want to with inferior classes. Being a survivor of a medical experiment may have something to do with that. ("Medical Ethics and Human Experimentation: Why I Take it Personally" A Catholic Citizen in America (February 3, 2009))

The Haunted Computer

This is pretty much the same approach as the "are robots/androids people?" story question: but it's a bit closer to home.

And, it's been done: "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (1970); "Terminator" movies' Skynet (1984 and following); Kôkaku kidôtai (1995) (that's rōmaji for "Ghost in the Shell"). Those are the ones that are, in my opinion, a cut or two above the 'mad scientist invents berserk robot which is blown up by handsome scientist' things.

Colossus and Skynet are (barely) plausible speculations of what might happen if a massively networked computer system 'woke up.' "Ghost in the Shell"? I've only encountered that as an English-dubbed animation. That series was, again in my opinion, well-done and technically plausible. And, a great deal more thoughtful about the inner workings of the mind than most "serious" science fiction.

Here's an idea I don't take all that seriously - but it could make a seriously spooky story.

A team of programmers and information technology specialists produce a system that exhibits artificial intelligence. Their brainchild is even able to pass the Turing Test: responding to input in a way that's indistinguishable from a human's responses.

Impressive, to say the least. The team becomes famous.

The system is even developing a personality - a very obliging one. It's ever so eager to solve problems, give advice, and fulfill the deepest desires of the team members.

Think 'Colossus meets Faust.'

Pleasant dreams.

Related posts:

" 'If you must see ghosts ...' Materialism, Being Spiritual, and Uncle Deadly"
A Catholic Citizen in America (December 18, 2009)
"Fear, Assumptions, Facts and Ghosts"
(October 22, 2009)
"The Observed Laws of Nature"
(October 22, 2009)

"Faust"
Wikiepdia
- Fairly well-referenced

'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien

2009-12-09T14:04:00.008-06:00

A post on someone else's blog caught my eye today:

"Basic Horse Care"
Rob Daniels, on PetLvr (June 6, 2006)

Apart from the occasional grammatical oddity and a few spellchecker howlers, it's a well-written general guide for horse owners.

The part that's relevant to this blog is the section headed "Herd Mentality:" discussing the way horses think.

They're not human.

Faced with danger, horses run.

Faced with danger, or something we don't like, we're likely to do what most primates do: scream and start throwing things. (Ever see news video of a violent mob?)

Horses like things to be quiet.

Not everybody's as noisy as Americans - and, I understand, Australians. But one thing that human beings are not is quiet. Not compared with most creatures.

I admire horses, but haven't had that much experience with them. I grew up with cats, so I can read their expressions pretty well, and can generally communicate with them fairly well. Nothing complicated, of course: more the 'I'm not threatening you' sort of thing.

Dogs? I read them fairly well, and get along with quite a few individuals - largely, I suspect, because of what we did to their distant ancestors.

What cats, dogs, and apparently horses, have in come is that: although we can communicate with them, they're not human. They don't respond to their world in quite the same way we do.

From a science/speculative fiction writer's point of view, that short section on herd mentality might get ideas going for how to 'build' non-human people.

Sure, on Earth the people are screaming, stuff-throwing primates: but that doesn't mean that's the only way things can work.

Move the Planet - or - Safety First

2009-12-09T12:48:00.015-06:00

I've been reading Olaf Stapleton's "Star Maker" (1937). I don't buy into the author's philosophy, which seems to be a secularly sanitized version of 19th century spiritualism. On the other hand, Stapleton in this one book displayed more imaginative (or crazy) ideas than many science/speculative fiction authors do in their writing careers.

A little over halfway through the book, I ran into a short description of how an inhabited planet could be used as an interstellar vehicle. Essentially, strap a rocket on, and let 'er rip. Light? Heat? No problem. Snag an uninhabited planet, orbit the two around each other, and convert the uninhabited one to energy, a bit at a time - making an artificial sun.

I know: There are a few details of the idea that are dicey at best. Starting with the idea of applying thrust to a planet.

But it might work.

And, arguably, it may have been tried.

I think that people could be more risk-averse than human beings are.

Look at it this way:

We started making tools out of flint, quite possibly without any thought of the dire consequences that would transpire when we ran out of flint.
- Which we haven't, yet.
Reckless of the danger, we used horses and other animals as energy sources for vehicles and industrial sites such as mills, and cobbled together methods of dealing with waste products as they piled up.
- Cities in America have completely abandoned large-scale efforts to rid the urban environment of manure.
We converted to coal power without carefully mapping out the effect on air quality.
- Which arguably wasn't the safest, most prudent decision.
Now we've got nuclear power plants dotted over the planet, at least in places that can afford them, and we still don't have a really good method worked out for what to do with the waste.
- You get the idea.

As if to demonstrate the human willingness to take insane risks, not too long ago someone decided to find out what happens when you shut down the pumps in a nuclear reactor's cooling system. Remember Chernobyl?

The Gill Theory of Human Evolution

I'm not terribly serious about it, but I think this is as plausible as some other ideas that've been run up the flagpole:

Millions of years there was a species of primate that was slower and weaker than the rest. They were about as smart as any other primate, with one distinction.

They were crazy.

Every other primate had something - common sense, survival instinct, call it what you will - that kept it from climbing out on branches that didn't look thick enough, and inhibited the creature's curiosity when intellectual inquiries would involve getting close to carnivores or other known hazards.

Not these primates. Many of them found out, first-hand, why they were the first to attempt some mad experiment. Like walking up to a lion and slapping it on the nose.¹ A few were quick-witted enough to survive.

Perhaps they left the forest willingly, perhaps they were driven out by their more sensible and responsible cousins. The point is, they spent the next uncounted toll of generations in the savanna, slapping quite a few lions along the way. Also hyenas, cheetahs and baboons.

The survivors were really good at solving problems, quickly: literally, sometimes, on the run.

Many cut and crushed hands later, they learned how to make stone tools. Without inflicting near-lethal injuries on themselves.

By this time, they were recognizably human, and working out ways of keeping a fire going without igniting their surroundings - and, occasionally, themselves.

The crazier of them/us left the only place on Earth where they could be comfortable, and eventually populated every continent, except the interior of Greenland and Antarctica. So far, we haven't figured out how to settle the top of a continental glacier - but I wouldn't put it past humans. Remember, we're arguably insane.

A couple generations ago we briefly visited the moon, and our avatars have been scouting out other planets in the Solar system.

And we're still, arguably, crazy.

Moving Out of a Dangerous Neighborhood

Our sun is in one of the more interesting and active parts of the Milky Way galaxy: a spur of one of the great spiral arms.

This is the sort of region where things are happening: Great clouds of gas and dust coalesce to form new star clusters; titanic stars race through their lifespan and explode as supernovae. We may at just the right distance from Betelgeuse to watch it explode - close enough to see the show, not so close that we get fried. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (June 10, 2009))

It's been argued that the distinctly unserene and quite eventful geological and paleontological history of Earth has something to do with its passages through this galaxy's more dangerous neighborhoods.

People who aren't human - and who are more risk-averse than we frequently are - might decide to move to a nicer, quieter neighborhood.

Given time, they might work out a way of moving their planet in a comparatively risk-free way. If a nearby star was threatening to explode, that could be a very serious incentive.

Then, after a very long trip, they could settle down - still on their home world - in the nice, quiet, uneventful region between spiral arms.

It's not as crazy an idea as it sounds: a fair number of Americans moved to the suburbs for about the same reasons.

Related post:

"The Story of Mankind in 79 Words"
(June 30, 2009)

¹ Think about it. You're at the edge of the forest. There, not 20 paces away, a lion is sleeping. Wouldn't you wonder how it would react to a slap on the nose?

Updated (December 10, 2009)

I added subsections to the bulleted list that starts with the dangers of dependence on flint, and ends with the problem of nuclear waste.

Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe

2009-12-08T10:02:00.001-06:00

Well, that's interesting:

"Flying Whales, Other Aliens Theorized by Scientists"
National Geographic News (June 3, 2005)

"One side of the planet is draped in eternal freezing darkness, the other side is bathed in permanent starlight.

"Fields of 'stinger fans'—animals that look like tall plants—cover the floodplains. Other strange species abound, from giraffe-like predators called gulphogs to tiny flesh-dissolving tadpoles known as hysteria.

"Welcome to the planet Aurelia.

"No, we haven't discovered life on another world—yet. But this could be what life on the fringes of our galaxy looks like, according to a group of scientists that contributed to the National Geographic Channel's special Extraterrestrial, which aired Monday, May 30.

"Alien life is not just possible but probable, according to many scientists. And thanks to new technology, we may not be too far from finding it.

"The question is: What can we expect to find?..."

I've seen the video: and it shows that some researchers are allowing themselves to think - if not outside the box, at least very close to the walls.

Whatever is out there - assuming that life isn't limited to this 8,000-wide ball of rock and metal we stand on - I think the one thing we can be reasonably certain of is that it won't be what we're familiar with. And, if there are people who aren't human, odds are pretty good that they won't

Thrive on the the atmosphere we have at this point in Earth's history:
- 79% nitrogen
- 20% oxygen
- 1% other
- At just under 15 pounds per square inch pressure
Be comfortable at about 57 degrees Fahrenheit
Think that 32 feet per second per second is "normal" gravity
Have biological cycles based on a
- 24 hour day
- 365-something day year

They may be astonished to learn that we are comfortable under those conditions - or that we can survive at all.

Bottom line for a science fiction/speculative fiction writer: outside space opera, space aliens that look like human actors in 'alien' suits may be rare birds, indeed.

More:

"Extraterrestrial"
National Geographic website

Overused Science Fiction Cliches: or, 'You Mean, Beings of Pure Energy Isn't a New Idea?'

2009-12-04T18:26:00.006-06:00

Well, that's interesting:

"The Grand List Of Overused Science Fiction Cliches"
Television Tropes & idioms

This might be a useful guide for the writer. If that brilliant(?) idea shows up in this list, put it on the bench and do a full diagnostic to see if there's something - anything - original, or even interesting, in the idea.

Actually, there are four lists:

Overused Sci Fi Storylines (Section I)
Overused Sci Fi Settings (Section II)
Overused Sci Fi Plot Devices (Section III)
Overused Sci Fi Silly Science (Section IV)

Oddly enough, I'd been thinking about using something from Section I: "Brain-controlling parasites attempt to wrest control of human race." I still think I've got a relatively fresh angle on this, but: Yeah, I'm going to be studying the lists. Quite a bit.

By the way, although this one's a cliche, it may be a cliche for a reason:

"People connect their brains directly to computers and get dependent on them."

See:

"Next-Generation Prosthetic Hand - and Intel Says Direct Neural Interface Brain Chips by 2020"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 2, 2009)
"Good News, Neural Devices Connect Brain, Computers: Bad News, Same Thing"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (July 11, 2009)

And: Yes, neural interfaces are in the research & development stage; but aren't (quite) on the market yet.

A tip of the hat to irish_brigid, for the heads-up on this part of 'TV Tropes.'

It's Just a Comic Book? Yes: But the Science Behind it is Stranger

2009-12-04T16:41:00.006-06:00

Update (March 18, 2010)

"Dark Flow: This Universe on the Move?"
Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 18, 2010)

Noted and recorded:

"The Science Behind Marvel Comics' New Cosmic Tale"
Space.com (December 4, 2009)

"Marvel Comics - where Spider-man and Wolverine hail from — has a long history of injecting science fiction into stories, especially within their line of comic books that take place in the far reaches of space.

"In Marvel's latest creation 'Realm of Kings,' a hero composed purely of energy ventures through a tear in space-time to another reality. But what are the science facts behind this epic cosmic storyline?

"Quantum energy

"The one-time Avenger known as Quasar has become one with the quantum bands, which transformed him into 'pure quantum energy.'

"As Einstein discovered more than a century ago...."

As the fellow said: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." (Sir Arthur Eddington English astronomer (1882 - 1944)) (cited November 1, 2009)

Milky Way Galaxy: "You are Here"

2009-11-23T20:53:00.006-06:00

Like yesterday's post ("Humanity Is Not the Eldest" (November 22, 2009)), This one isn't much more than a link and a few comments.

First, the link: "A Map of the Milky Way>," Atlas of the Universe.

The eye-popping feature on that page is a pretty good map/diagram of our Milky Way galaxy, showing our position, and the location of six of the arms. There's also a map of known areas of neutral and ionized hydrogen, and quite a bit of information about our home region.

Update (November 26, 2009)

Another link: "The Structure of the Milky Way"
Gene Smith's Astronomy Tutorial
Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences, University of California, San Diego

Of interest: the Cassiopeia OB2 complex; NGC 7538 (possibly 9,100 light years away); emission nebula (H II region) Bubble Nebula/NGC 7635/Sharpless 162, (possibly 11,000 light years away).

Humanity Is Not the Eldest

2009-11-22T22:20:00.007-06:00

There isn't much to this post, apart from the following link:

"Precursors"
Television Tropes and Idioms

That page actually doesn't have all that much to do with television science fiction and fantasy: a great many examples are from written literature.

Still: interesting material, including

"The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy"
(Douglas Adams)
The "Marvel Universe"
The "Known Space" stories
(Larry Niven)
"Gateway"
(Frederik Pohl)

And, of course, H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu and that merry band of "Old Ones" in the Cthulhu Mythos.

Which reminds me of what I wrote, toward the end of "A Sense of Scale and Science Fiction Writers" (August 17, 2009) (Getting Imaginative): Maybe H. P. Lovecraft was an optimist.

A Thought for the Day: On the Size of Space

2009-11-22T14:53:00.007-06:00

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
(The Quotations Page)

Related posts, on scale:

"A Sense of Scale and Science Fiction Writers"
(August 17, 2009)
"Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
(June 25, 2009)

The Rings of Earth

2009-11-22T14:19:00.004-06:00

These days, we can occasionally see satellites - including the ISS - as they pass overhead, providing they're still in sunlight and the sun has set where we are. And seeing conditions are right.

It's occurred to me that it won't be too long before sightings like that become more frequent. Not from the "space junk" that's been in the news lately, but by more and larger structures in orbit. Given time, I don't see why there wouldn't be so many that they form visually-continuous sheets around Earth - sort of like the rings of Saturn, except made of habitats and automated satellites.

With structures like that, the Roche limits wouldn't apply - unless they were extremely large - but I think that habitats, at least, would be placed below, or between, the radiation belts. (See "The Van Allen Belt," Ask an Astrophysicist, Imagine, NASA; "The Radiation Belts," "The Exploration of the Earth's Magnetosphere," NASA; "Radiation Belts" and "The Earth's Magnetosphere," Windows to the Universe, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research)

And, since the function of some satellites require that that they be in non-equatorial orbits, there would probably be gaps maintained in the equitorial 'rings' of satellites, to allow other satellites to pass through.

Eventually, my guess is that someone will get the idea of physically linking most or all satellites at some altitudes, to make moving between them easier - and possibly making it easier to keep them from drifting out of position. I'm not sure what orbital mechanics would say about that.

So, given time, Earth may have rings: artificial ones.

Now that would be a tourist attraction.

"THE RINGS OF THE EARTH , 3DS Max Animation"

Roy Prol, via T0R0YD, YouTube (October 8, 2009)
video, 3:33

"How would the Earth look like if it had a ring system like Saturn? --- 3ds Max animation."

More:

"What If Earth Had Rings?"
Universe Today (November 20, 2009)

"While we're on the subject of Saturn…. I came across this video, and it poses — and answers — the interesting question, what would Earth look like if it had rings like Saturn? This animation was done by Roy Prol, and it shows not only how the rings would look from space, but also the view Earthlings would have of the rings...."

A tip of the hat to IDreamHappily, on Twitter, for the heads-up on this video (IDreamHappily linked to another appearance of it, on wimp.com.)

Procyon and Names

2009-11-14T18:32:00.002-06:00

One of the appeals of stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres are the cool names. Although it's possible to make new sequences of sounds, and define the gibberish as the name of some person, place, or thing in a story - I think there's something to be said for taking existing, but relatively unfamiliar names.

Like Tataouine (which can be pronounced "Tatooine"). That's a word that's fairly well-known as the name of Luke Skywalker's home in the Star Wars movies. It's also the name of a city and a region in northern Tunisia.

I was looking up names for Procyon (Alpha Canis Minor) this evening, and came up with this:

R. H. Allen said that "Euphratean scholars" called Procyon "...Kakkab Paldara, Pallika, or Palura...." ("The Brightest Stars: Discovering the Universe Through the Sky's Most Brilliant Stars," Fred Schaaf, p. 167) Allen's "Euphratean scholars" might have been referring to Babylonian names of Procyon. Or, the Kakkab Paldara/Pallika/Palura might be one of those loose connections in late-19th and early-20th century scholarship that's been corrected since.

In any event, "Pallika" and "Palura" - and "Kakkab Paldera" are fairly cool-sounding names.

Palura is also the name that somebody named Walker gave to a genus of moth in 1861. (The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London)

Stories on this Blog

2009-11-02T23:23:00.009-06:00

Most posts on this blog are about stories or story-telling. These are, or contain, stories:

"Birthright"
- Voini are people, too
- Posted February 19, 2010
- 2010
- 263 words
"Distraction in Retrospect"
- Contact with aliens, in context
- Posted February 15, 2010
- 2010
- 834 words
"The Village, the Fence and the Sign"
- A fable
- Posted November 2, 2009
- 1996
- 1,100 words
"Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313"
- A ghost story
- Posted November 2, 2009
- 2009
- 250 words
"Waiting on a Dead World"
- A ghost story: sort of
- Posted October 31, 2009
- 2009
- 566 words
The Dream"
- Changing times, big choices
- Posted June 28, 2009
- 2001
- 650 words

"The Village, the Fence and the Sign"

2009-11-02T22:18:00.005-06:00

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."
G. K. Chesterton, The Quotations Page

This story originally appeared in "Brian's Attic" on my Brendan's Island website.

The Village, the Fence and the Sign

Brian H. Gill

Once upon a time there was a village. South of the houses was the top of a very tall cliff. North of the houses were high, grassy hills.

It was a beautiful village. The people there were happy and safe, as long as they did not go near the cliff.

There was a sign near the cliff, and a fence. The sign said:

DANGER!

CLIFF!

DO NOT GO NEAR THE EDGE,

OR YOU MAY FALL OFF!

The fence was between the sign and the houses. The sign and the fence had been put up long ago, to keep people from falling off the cliff. Because no one wanted to fall off the cliff, no one built houses near the fence.

One day, Tom, Sharon, Bert and Courtney were playing in the open space between the houses and the fence. As they ran, Tom (who wasn't looking were he was going) ran into the fence.

Tom's head hurt, and so all four went to the village for help. Sam, who lived in the house nearest the hills, put a cloth on Tom's head, and gave him cool water. Soon Tom's head was better.

Many people in the village were worried because Tom ran into the fence, and hurt his head. Everyone knows that it's not good to hurt your head.

Sharon said, "The fence is to blame!" Tom said, "Yes! if the fence were not there, I would not have hurt my head!"

"The fence kept you away from the cliff," said Sam. But only a few people listened to Sam.

Many people in the village thought that Tom was wise. Nobody in the village had fallen off the cliff, but many had run into the fence.

They said, "If the fence had not been there, Tom could not have bumped his head on the fence."

Soon almost everyone in the village agreed. They said, "The fence is to blame!" Then they tore down the fence.

Now everyone in the village could see the cliff. They could also see the sign in front of the cliff.

Bert thought the cliff was beautiful. He said "Look how far you can see, from the edge of the cliff!" Bert could see even farther from the hills behind the village, but the cliff was closer.

Courtney was afraid when she thought about the cliff. She was afraid when she saw the cliff. She was even more afraid when she saw the sign near the cliff.

The sign looked bigger than it had when it was behind the fence.

Courtney decided she didn't like the sign. She said, "The sign keeps me from having fun!"

Bert said, "The sign is to blame!" Courtney said, "Yes! if the sign were not there, I would not be afraid, and Bert could have fun!"

"The sign reminds us to stay away from the cliff," said Sam. But only a few people listened to Sam.

Bert and Courtney told Sam to keep quiet. "When you talk about the sign, you make people feel bad," they said.

Many people from the village thought that Bert and Courtney were wise. They said "If the sign was not there, nobody would be afraid, and everyone could have fun."

Soon almost everyone in the village agreed. They said, "The sign makes us afraid! The sign keeps us from having fun!" Then they tore down the sign.

Bert said, "This feels good! Now there is no sign to make us afraid, or to keep us from having fun." Almost everyone in the village agreed.

One day, Tom, Sharon, Bert and Courtney were playing in the open space between the houses and the cliff. As they ran, Tom (who wasn't looking where he was going) ran near the edge of the cliff.

He lost his balance, and fell off. Nobody ever saw Tom again.

Sharon, Bert and Courtney were very sad. They all said, "The cliff is to blame!"

Soon almost everyone in the village agreed. They said, "If the cliff was not there, people would not fall off!" Then they tried to tear down the cliff.

They dug, and hammered, and pulled at the edge of the cliff. Soon a huge piece of rock, soil, and grass tore away from the edge of the cliff.

Sharon had been standing on that piece of grass. Now the cliff had a new edge, and Sharon was gone. The new edge of the cliff was closer to the village.

Sam ran up. "Stop!" he shouted. "You are bringing the cliff closer to your houses!"

Bert and Courtney shouted, "The cliff is to blame!" Almost everyone in the village agreed. Then they tore another piece off the edge of the cliff.

This time Bert fell off the edge.

Courtney and everyone else in the village were very sad. They were very mad, too. They said, "The cliff is to blame!"

They the tore another piece off the edge of the cliff. The edge of the cliff was next to Courtney's house now. Courtney kicked at a piece of dirt near the edge of the cliff. She lost her balance and fell off the cliff.

Now almost everyone in the village was very, very mad. They missed Courtney, and Bert, and Sharon, and Tom. "The cliff is to blame!" they shouted.

Then they tore another piece off the edge of the cliff. A huge piece of cliff fell off. Courtney's house fell off, too.

Sam tried to stop his neighbors, but he couldn't. Most of the people in the village were too mad to listen.

Sam's neighbor's tore at the cliff. Every so often, one of them fell off. Each time this happened, the rest got even more mad. They tore at the cliff even harder.

More people and houses fell off the cliff.

Soon the only house left was Sam's. The cliff had been torn back to the edge of the hills.

Sam's house rocked back and forth on the edge of the cliff. Then it fell off.

All the houses in the village were gone.

Most of the people in the village were gone.

Sam walked away. A few of his neighbors went with him. They had not been near the cliff.

They built another village. This village was high up in the hills. It was a beautiful village. South of the new village, where the old village had been, was the top of a very tall cliff.

There was a fence near the cliff. A sign was on the fence. The sign said:

DANGER!

CLIFF!

DO NOT GO NEAR THE EDGE,

OR YOU MAY FALL OFF!

"Stories on this Blog"

"Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313" - a Short-Short Story

2009-11-02T21:56:00.002-06:00

This story originally appeared on the Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette blog, Halloween, 2009.

"Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313"

Bran H. Gill

Most nights, the key to the Belvedere Union Grand hotel's room 313 is the last to leave its hook. Not that many guests sleeping there have complained: but as the owner, T. J. Baum, told me, it's the room that's the farthest from the stairs on the top floor.

And there's that girl standing outside the window.

The Belvedere Union Grand hotel is a landmark in Loonfoot Falls, the tallest building downtown. Its foundation was laid at the corner of Broadway and Center Street in1899, overlooking Railroad Park.

And, like many buildings a century or more old, it's got its share of ghost stories.

There's the sound of a ball bouncing down the stairs between the second and third floor, usually heard late in the evening.

Several employees have refused to enter the 'back room' in the basement: a storeroom with a small window opening onto an air shaft. Others heard voices outside that window.

Several guests in room 313 woke up in the small hours of the morning, thinking someone had called their name. Each reported seeing a young woman, with "poofed up" dark hair, as one said, standing quietly outside the window, looking in.

It's disturbing, waking up to see someone looking at you through the window. What troubled the guests even more was what they saw the next morning. The young woman had apparently been standing with nothing but about ten yards of open air between her feet and the cement floor of the basement's air shaft.

"Stories on this Blog"

"...It is Stranger than We Can Imagine"

2009-11-01T14:10:00.001-06:00

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
Sir Arthur Eddington English astronomer (1882 - 1944)

Drifting at the Edge of Time and Space

'Sleep on It:' Separating Inspiration From Indigestion

"My Fair Lady" - "Oklahoma!" - "Spiderman?!"

Nietzsche, Experts, and University Students

Writing For the 19th, 20th, or 21st Centuries

Crabs, Sauces, Apples, and Moods

Oklahoma Earthquake - or - THEY Awakened the Sleeping Spawn of CTHULHU!!!

'Inspired by Real Events' - Awakening Horrors from the Deeps of Time

The Generic Science Fiction Story of the Future

Been There, Read That

Products Have Names

"...So We Built One..."

Continuity and All That

Making Comics: Status Report, February 24, 2011

What I've Done, What I Plan to Do

Apathetic Lemming of the Month

Loonfoot Falls, Minnesota

Only So Many Hours in a Day

The World of Loonfoot Falls

It's That Kind of a Family

Well, That's Interesting: Military Occupations

Exoplanets, MIT, Mathematics, and Thinking With a Cold

A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon

Setting, Research, and a Telephone Directory

Minimum Standards and Scraping By

Fairly Normal: For a Guy Who Reads Dictionaries

Getting to Know Another Way of Life

Why Would Any Sane Person Deconstruct a Phone Directory?!

M*A*S*H, College, and the Real World

Why Bother?

All This - For Galaxy Cadet?!

Well, That's Interesting: Claytronics

Well, That's Interesting: Synthetic Signaling Cascades and Living Spaceships

State-of-the-Art Neuroscience, About Two Dozen Centuries Back

What We Know, What We Think We Know

Science and the Speculative Fiction Writer

The Aliens are Coming! The Aliens are Coming!

I had Something In Mind for This Post: What was It?

INVASION FROM SPACE! DASTARDLY ALIENS RETURN!

Space Aliens and the Cold War

What If the Aliens are Friendly?

Earth Day, 2010; Change; Opposable Thumbs and Responsibility

Change Happens

With Opposable Thumbs Comes Great Responsibility

The Future Will Be Just Like Today: Except Where It's Different

[Information] Power to the People!

Technology and Freedom

Computers, Dangerous?

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but the Printing Press is Deadly

Technology, Freedom and Economics

Technology, Freedom, Economics and Culture

Upsetting the Applecart

"Information Gatekeepers?" What's That?

A Problem With Nice, Orderly Societies

A Nice, Orderly, Society Where Everybody's Protected: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I'd Love to be In Charge?

It Can Happen Here

Managing the Masses For Their Own Good? Been There, Tried That

Alien Life will Most Likely be - Alien

'Life as We Know It,' Class M Planets and All That

Getting Serious by Getting Silly: Meet Galaxy Cadet Aster Alpha

Getting Serious About Being Silly

You'd Think the IRS Would Give Writers and Artists a Break?

I'm Blaming Daylight Saving Time: or, Not

Interstellar Empires, Imagination, and an Occasionally-Sozzled Detective

Tales of the Far Future and Galactic Exploration

Well, That's Interesting: Brooklyn and the Names of Things

Things Change

16 Centuries is a Long Time

Welcome to the Bustling Metropolis of Bulookeh Lin

Dinosaurs, Ancient Astronauts, and All That

The Chicxulub Consensus May Not Last Long

When All Else Fails, Throw Rocks

Okay: It's Not Shakespeare

With a Brain Like Mine, Who Needs LSD?

The Sixties Weren't All That Now and Wow

Coleridge and Opium

The Sixties and Me

Psychedelic Music, Disco, Techno, and Me

Fatigue and Stress as Psychoactive Agents

MAS*H, College, and the Real World

"Doesn't Everybody* Dream of Flying?"*